Max Forte's List: Activist Anthropology

• Ted Downing, former Society for Applied Anthropology President (1985-87), experienced this and more. In 1995, Downing wrote an evaluation report describing the s evere social and environmental impacts likely to be suffered by Chile’s Pehuenche Indians from a proposed dam project underwritten by the World Bank. After his report was censored Downing demanded that the World Bank publicly disclose his findings. The Bank responded by threatening “a lawsuit garnering Downing’s assets, income and future salary if he disclosed the contents, findings and recommendations of his independent evaluation.” (Johnson and Garcia Downing). As a result of his whistleblowing, Downing was blacklisted from the World Bank after 13 years of consulting service.
   
   “Personally, I was blackballed for 10 years for filing, what turned out to be 3 human rights violations charges against the IFC (private sector arm of The World Bank),” said Downing in an interview. “The experience left me only the devil’s alternative, to get involved in politics.” Literally.
• Some years back Harvard anthropologist Kris Heggenhougen argued that the strength of anthropology in collaborating with other disciplines lies in saying, "yes, but. . .and to critically examine the decisive factors affecting peoples' health including power, dominance and exploitation." (Heggenhougen 1993)
• First of all, we spend much more time saying “yes, sir” than “yes, but” in paid employment. This is necessary if we wish to stay employed. The workplace is a not a democracy but a hierarchy in which academic freedom does not apply. As Downing evinces, there are penalties for speaking one’s mind. Workers have to gauge the cultural politics in any given context so as to not unnecessarily risk censure, reprimand or worse.
• Dr. Downing has the right attitude. He retains that probing, cantankerous spirit today. "I have no idea what ‘yes, but’ means having not read Heggenhougen,” he said. “The reference to ‘collaboration to other disciplines’ makes no sense to me – as I work on problems and am Undisciplined. I don’t think anyone would consider me a “yes man – which has helped and cursed me . . . . .But, I insist, fighting within a bureaucracy is part of being a good applied anything.”
• resisting censorship is, as Downing says, “good applied” anthropology
• Robert Lynd
• Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture
• In it he wrote that “[T]he role of the social sciences to be troublesome, to disconcert the habitual arrangements by which we manage to live along, and to demonstrate the possibility of change in more adequate directions . . . like that of a skilled surgeon, [social scientists need to] get us into immediate trouble in order to prevent our present troubles from becoming even more dangerous. In a culture in which power is normally held by the few and used offensively and defensively to bolster their instant adv antage within the status quo, the role of such a constructive troublemaker is scarcely inviting.”
• “When environmental justice work involves advocacy and action – confrontational politics – a number of professional bridges are burned. . . .’Cause-oriented’ anthropology suggests people who make trouble. Troublemakers are celebrated in this discipline when t heir cause succeeds and justice prevails. But often ‘justice’ is elusive, success is hard to gauge, and action results in unforeseen adverse consequences. (Johnston: 2001, 8).
• Anthropologist Noa Davenport knows this very well. In 1999 she coauthored a book with two other professionals called, “Mobbing, Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace, (1999). In the book’s forward Davenport and her colleagues noted, “This book came about because all three of us, in different organizations, experienced a workplace phenomenon that had profound effects on our well-being. Through humiliation, harassment, and unjustified accusations, we experienced emotional abuse that forced us out of the workplace.” Often the mobbing begins soon after the professional challenged a superior in some area.
• critical ethnographers need to critically analyze how larger domains of power, including global and local capital, define one’s job and inhibit the possibilities of social science practice
• Like Downing, applied anthropologists have to be prepared to travel the road from “yes, but,” to “no, sir” in order to better serve the public interest.
• David Price continues to catalogue the perils of activist applied anthropologists, demonstrating how, in the 1930s through 1970s, they were subject to surveillance, marginalization and worse for their work. Anthropologist Mich ael Blim, in summarizing the Price book concludes, “Emerson’s adage that all it takes for evil to triumph is th at good people do nothing is here confirmed. Based on Price’s book, one might also add: ‘if you try to change your society, trust not your state, your university, or your profession.’”
• Johnston said that anthropology faculty, in general, do not have the “seasoned understanding of power and backlash,” as it occurs in the non-academic world. This is so, she said, because they are still immersed in the “generic disciplinary reality of the ivory tower cocoon.” She argues that “ political naïveté is built into the dependency relationship between the discipline and the university structures that sustain the discipline.”
• As Henry Giroux discusses in his writings, universities are turning into military-academic-industrial complexes where hierarchy is more entrenched and emboldened. Academics need to model “good applied” anthropology in their own workplaces (the knowledge factories of higher education) to be more convincing to their students.
• the “ever-expanding continuum of engagement,” that is currently underway in anthropology will likely result in more censorship and backlash against applied anthropologists
• Academic Culture Trivializes Activist Work
• Giroux, Henry
    2007 The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. Boulder:Paradigm

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• Between 2007 and 2008, more than 1,000 anthropologists agreed to boycott the program, signing a pledge of non-participation in counterinsurgency as part of a campaign organized by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists (I am a member of the steering committee).
• Supporters of the Human Terrain program have often claimed that those opposed to working in the wars are advocating total academic disengagement from the military and a retreat to the ivory tower. This could not be further from the truth.
• Most opponents of the Human Terrain program, myself included, are not categorically opposed to work and engagement with the military. To the contrary, many believe that anthropologists can ethically teach soldiers in classrooms, train peacekeepers, or consult with military and other government officials about cultural, social, historical, and political-economic issues.
• Far from calling for a retreat to the ivory tower, a growing number of anthropologists are actively involved in research both with and about the U.S. and other militaries, foreign policymaking and policymakers, war, conflict, and militarization.
• Most importantly, the interdisciplinary group of scholars dedicated itself not just to conducting research on military issues, but also to attempting to influence national conversations and public opinion about military and foreign policy.
• For too long in the past anthropologists and other social scientists have indeed isolated themselves in the ivory tower, ceding policy debates to international relations and security scholars, to think tanks generally invested (intellectually or literally) in war, to arms manufacturers’ lobbyists, to pundits, politicians, and the Pentagon.
• And yet, while slowly trying to extricate the nation from a deadly, illegal war in Iraq, we appear ready to repeat the same mistakes of that war, and Vietnam before it, in pursuing an increasingly violent war of occupation in Afghanistan — a nation where the British and Soviet empires failed before us in their attempts to impose foreign rule.
• Rather than learning from these past mistakes, from the lesson that there can be no military solution to the challenge posed by the Taliban and others resisting occupation, the escalation of U.S. troops and bombing in both Afghanistan and Pakistan is an increasingly bloody diversion from the political, economic, and diplomatic initiatives that must be at the heart of any solution to violent conflict.
• Given the growing crisis in Afghanistan, which threatens to derail Obama’s agenda abroad and at home, the skills and original perspectives of anthropologists and other social scientists are desperately needed to build a new direction for U.S. military and foreign policy.
• This will mean conducting research of direct relevance to the U.S. military, to the State Department, and to the dynamics of U.S. global relations.
• This will mean shedding anthropologists’ traditional hesitancy about proposing proscriptive solutions to identified problems (the bread and butter of many international relations scholars). This will mean writing not primarily for academic audiences but instead for policymakers, politicians, and the wider public.
• It will mean doing so not in the pages of (generally obscure) academic journals, but in the op-ed pages of newspapers, for blogs and major web outlets, and for the likes of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy
• The Pentagon’s efforts to recruit anthropologists for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan represent the failure of U.S. foreign policy rather than innovation. They are a return to the sad beginnings of anthropology — the “handmaiden of empires” — when the discipline was born as a tool to assist in the rule and control of colonized peoples in Africa, Asia, and North America.
• The recruitment of anthropologists represents the misguided belief that victory in Iraq and Afghanistan can be achieved through better tactics — if only we could fight smarter, know more about their cultures, and embed anthropologists with the troops, then we would “win”! — rather than realizing that the real lesson these wars is that wars of invasion and occupation should not be waged at all.
• The nation must use this moment to embrace a permanent and fundamental change in our military and foreign policy. We must finally reject a foreign policy of invasion and occupation and embrace a new kind of foreign policy based around non-aggression, diplomacy, international cooperation, and the protection of human needs and human lives as the best way to ensure the security of the country and the world. With members of the military and an engaged citizenry as our partners and allies, anthropologists and other social scientists have a critical role to play in this process.

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• November 24, 2008
• At the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting, which ended Sunday, the official theme was “Inclusion, Collaboration and Engagement.” That final word – “engagement” – inspired lively and at times prickly debates and discussions, with sessions and meetings focused on the Human Terrain System and other controversial forms of collaboration with the U.S. military, secret research, and a planned comprehensive review of the association’s decade-old Code of Ethics.

• The Human Terrain System

  One panel Friday afternoon featured two scholars who work with the Human Terrain System, a controversial initiative, opposed by the AAA’s executive board last year, in which social scientists are embedded with the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to help units understand the local population. The program has raised questions about issues of voluntary informed consent and potential uses, or misuses, of anthropological information for targeting purposes.
• When asked why she joined HTS, Kathleen Roedy, a Virginia-based analyst with the program who has a Ph.D. in social anthropology, said she wanted to apply her anthropological knowledge.
• “You can actually see the results of your work in a day-to-day environment.”
• Her colleague at HTS on the panel, Marcia Hartwell, added:
• “It’s a chance to change the military; it’s a chance to change the Army. It’s a challenge. When I say that to soldiers they laugh, but they get it.
• “In many ways the Army’s ready to do things in a different way, for different reasons. And we’ll see how this all works out.”
• Yet, during a generally civil but at times pointed and consistently unorthodox question and answer session (during which the moderator, Rob Borofsky of Hawaii Pacific University, cut off follow-up questions and at one point barked at an audience member “That’s, it! Down!” as if addressing a dog), many questioners grew unsettled with the panelists’ answers.
• Roedy, in particular, seemed genuinely ready and willing to “engage” with her audience -- and even in good faith shared her salary, which, at $70,000, was $11,000 higher than that of the assistant professor who raised the question.
• But the panelists deferred to unspecified superiors on a number of questions, including inquiries about programmatic matters like the budget and about allegations of unethical behavior by HTS team members in the field. (Neither panelist has been deployed, and Roedy has no plans to go overseas with HTS.) Hartwell stressed several times that the intention of the HTS program is that the information gathered should not be used for targeting purposes.
• “The moment of truth is they were asked twice why anthropologists had concerns about [HTS], and they didn’t know the answer,” said Hugh Gusterson, a professor at George Mason University and founding member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which opposes anthropologists’ participation in counterinsurgency efforts. Gusterson pointed out that, in their answers, the panelists cited misinterpretations of what they do, and concerns about militarization of the discipline, but didn't reference the AAA executive board’s short statement, and, specifically, concerns about potential dangers to the populations being studied.
• “I’m really concerned that you didn’t understand the reason for our concern,” Gusterson told the panelists.
• Roberto J. Gonzales, an associate professor at San Jose State University who has written a forthcoming book on HTS (University of Chicago Press), added that, given the AAA’s official opposition to the project, “My immediate impression was, ‘Why are they even here?’ ”
• Another panel was notable in part for the conspicuous absence of the senior social scientist for HTS, Montgomery McFate, who was scheduled to present a paper but recently canceled because of obligations overseas, according to the session organizer. The conversation at this particular session, "Anthropology, the Military and War," moved beyond HTS to focus on anthropologists' engagement with the military more generally.
• “I do not work for HTS, nor is that the approach that I have advocated in my little corner of the world," said Kerry B. Fosher, who works at the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity writing classified and unclassified analyses on cultural matters for Marine Corps commanders and intelligence agencies (Fosher stressed in her comments that she was not speaking on behalf of the MCIA)
• If anthropologists weren't so "tight-fisted" with their knowledge for fear of its misuse, she suggested, "Maybe the world would look a lot different than it does."
• “More fundamentally, I accept that causing unintentional harm is possible, and that’s a very difficult pill to swallow," said Brian R. Selmeski, who teaches anthropology at Air University, an Air Force-run university in Alabama. "How do I counterbalance that -- by putting in the balance the possibility of doing good."
• In a formal response, David H. Price, of St. Martin's University, criticized what he described as an "unjustified innocence," especially given anthropology's sorry past in this domain. “There is a belief that their own agency can break through historical forces that they admit have abused anthropology in past conflicts," he said.
• “In these contexts, intentions matter little beyond functioning as a sort of gateway drug."
• Asked whether any forms of engagement with the military would be acceptable to him, Price said sure. “Personally I’m not working for the military for a number of reasons, one of which is the larger mission as it’s being carried out is unacceptable to me. For myself, that’s my answer.”

• On the other hand, an earlier conference session on “The Academy and the Publics” focused largely on the barriers to engaged and public scholarship faced by anthropologists in academe. The three pillars of the faculty rewards system are research, teaching and service -- service as narrowly defined. “Service usually means service to the academy rather than service to the publics. That is, people are awarded for service to the discipline or university more so than [to] the publics,” said Paula L.W. Sabloff, a museum administrator and adjunct associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

  "The political economy of academia demands that people’s value depends on their production. How do we judge that production? With numbers, numbers of scholarly productions only?
• Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley whose research interests include the trafficking of human organs, offered some advice for young scholars interested in public anthropology.
• “You do double time, keeping up on the expected home front duties… that is, keep on publishing those scholarly articles… while you’re simultaneously doing your international human rights work or serving on international panels or giving speeches at places that don’t matter a hoot to the academy,” Scheper-Hughes said. “If you want to be a public anthropologist, then do it, I always did. But don’t expect to be rewarded for it.
• “Be grateful… that we still live in a democratic enough society that we can do it and get away with it.”
• Lastly, she advised, “Don’t wait to jump into the public fray until you’re safely tenured. If you do so, you’ll find you’ve lost the habit of courage.”

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• Niels Barmeyer's new work, Developing Zapatista Autonomy: Conflict and NGO Involvement in Rebel Chiapas
• the perspective of a militant anthropologist, an embedded solidarity activist investigating— from below—the inner workings of the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) and the solidarity and NGO organizations surrounding it.
• It also distinguishes itself by being more critical than most, certainly of those ostensibly coming from a sympathetic position.
• The German anthropologist went to Chiapas in the 1990s, “drawn, like most other internationals, by notions of egalitarianism, communal living and independence from globalized economies.”Barmeyer relates how he was originally captivated by the dynamic Zapatista movement through his involvement in the left/autonomous scene in Berlin which exposed him to ideas about participatory democracy and horizontal forms of social organization. He put these theories into practice through working in solidarity with the Zapatistas in Chiapas , first as a human rights activist in peace camps, and later as a volunteer installing water systems in indigenous rebel villages.
• But as he methodically dissects his extensive research and experience in Zapatista communities over the years, Barmeyer's gaze moves from that of a bright-eyed solidarity activist to that of a cold and critical anthropological student, thus ensuring a rigid, unsparing and often scathing appraisal of his subjects.
  
• "Even fifteen years after the uprising [of 1994]," writes Barmeyer, "there is a great gap between the impression that the rebels have managed to create among a worldwide sympathetic audience and the realities on the ground."
• But Barmeyer's experience is not simply the familiar narrative of a white European going to a foreign land in search of the exotic other, and finding only disillusionment and disenchantment with the reality there. His is a careful study of a revolutionary initiative and its repercussions, specifically the problem of reconciling the language and posture of the actors (local, national and international) and the actual situation.
  
• “It struck me that in its portrayal of social organization in the communities under its control,” writes Barmeyer, “the EZLN readily catered for utopian visions so cherished by their sympathizers around the globe. Accounts from rebel villages were rather vague, leaving it up to readers to fill in the gaps with their own favored images; poetic fiction characteristic for Marcos communiques has usually prevailed over concrete and self-critical assessments of the situation on the ground.”
• It is this proliferation of idealized images that Barmeyer deconstructs in this work. His focus is on the space between the actual Zapatista communities and the indigenous culture as he experiences and sees them, and the imagined and illusionary notion of the rebel movement. These idealized images are, he posits, forged in the writings of Zapatista spokesperson Subcommander Marcos, and reproduced by solidarity groups and NGO organizations working in the region. The result is "rosy portrayals" that are "stunningly uncritical" in their analysis, presenting an image that reflects more what the people outside want to hear than the reality on the ground.
  
• Barmeyer describes how decision-making structures are, in practice, less a model of grassroots participatory democracy than a process often dominated by men, older community members and those who can dispense patronage.
• "Autonomous administrative structures and the way today's rebel municipalities are run have little to do with Mayan heritage but are actually a hodgepodge of practices ranging from the Catholic cult of village saints imposed by the Spanish crown to the ejidal administration structures laid down in Mexico's Agrarian Law and organizational elements introduced by cataquistas (lay preachers) and Maoist students in the 1970's," writes Barmeyer.
• On the contrary, the EZLN and its base of support are composed of a small, hardcore base of adherents with a larger fluctuating support base among the widerChiapas population. Barmeyer dwells a lot on the problem of shifting allegiances within the indigenous communities, suggesting that there is a fundamental lack of political or ideological commitment among the base. Ultimately, it is an economic imperative that draws impoverishedcampesinos to the rebel organization and the same motive that cause them to leave and assume a pro-government position.
• “Frequent shifts of affiliation among the inhabitants of the Selva Lacandona and Las Canadas [Zapatista strongholds] confirm that they are pragmatic planners of their fate, willing to throw their lot with whomever they trust to help them along the way to fulfilling their aspirations.”
  
  Coincidentally, Barmeyer's observations call to mind Lenin's infamous words - 'never trust a peasant' - questioning the revolutionary potential of the rural proletariat.
• Academic texts are often turgid to read, and laborious to decipher. Barmeyer's work (conducted in the context of a Ph.D. course) is salvaged by a lively, informative and often witty tone of narration. Caught between his activist and academic caps, he is mischievous in his descriptions, as his friends become 'informants' (informers some would say), while his home in San Cristobal where he invites Zapatistas to stay, his 'center of research.' He befriends one local Zapatista—Cipriano, a self-described wild rover—and he and his extended family become the ongoing object of Barmeyer's research. Therein lies the dubious academic practice of befriending people on the ground to study them.
• Early in the book, Barmeyer describes how one local NGO operative refused to allow him to participate in their particular solidarity project because he was an anthropologist. How could this kind of anthropological research benefit the communities, asks the solidarity worker, arguing that a publication ofBarmeyer's findings could only help the Zapatista's enemies. Indeed, in the midst of ongoing low-intensity warfare, it doesn't seem overtly paranoid to think that military intelligence and other counter-insurgency elements are not using this kind of insider information for their own ends. It is a moot point, never fully answered byBarmeyer. Perhaps by replacing one´s activist cap with an academic cap, one can distance oneself sufficiently from such moral dilemma's.
• Despite its' stinging critique, Developing Zapatista Autonomy is a work that portends not so much to undermine the validity of the rebel project, but, at its base, to dispense with idealized or imagined images. Instead of harboring untenable illusions or offering unconditional solidarity for revolutionary groups, Barmeyer's work allows Zapatista supporters an opportunity for reflection on the development of the Zapatista project for autonomy so far.

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• By MARK LAVIE, Associated Press
• JERUSALEM – Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.
• The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.
• Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, "We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."
• The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.
• In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.
• However, he also said that military surgeons removed a thin layer of skin from bodies as early as 1987 to treat burn victims. Hiss said he believed that was done with family consent. The harvesting ended in 2000, he said.
• there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs
• The academic, Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy, which raised diplomatic tensions between Israel and Sweden and prompted Sweden's foreign minister to call off a visit to the Jewish state.
• Sheppard-Hughes said that while Palestinians were "by a long shot" not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because "the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered."

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  Anthropologists in the Public Sphere
   Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power

   

  Edited by Roberto J. González
• Introduction. Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power
• A common thread links the individual articles and interviews: they may be read as cultural critiques of American Empire. The emergence and extension of this empire and the corporatization of government are among the most important historical facts of our time and have inspired recent studies by social scientists, economists, and other scholars. Some of the contributors to this book directly address aspects of U.S. governmental foreign policy and its effects in Latin America, the Balkans, Central Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Others focus on the role of social scientists in U.S. imperialist projects. Still others examine connections between "free" trade, corporate power, and the role of military regimes in establishing and maintaining a "New World Order" in the service of multinational corporations.
• The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon inspired a great many responses from academics, and the section "Anthropological Interpretations of September 11"presents some of the most thoughtful and well articulated. Catherine Lutz, who has recently focused her career on the relationship between society and the military in the United States, writes that our country has been in "a permanent state of war" since the late 1930s but that for many Americans this has not been visible because conflict has been "outsourced to the global south." David Harvey, Talal Asad and colleagues from the CUNY Graduate Center strongly condemn the attacks and then make an impassioned appeal for the United States to refrain from the "intensification of erroneous policies and practices" overseas. William O. Beeman's article focuses on the dangers of engaging bin Laden and his allies in a shortsighted war of revenge. In separate articles, Janet McIntosh and Wade Davis critique the inability or unwillingness of our leaders to come to terms with the role of the United States in creating the conditions that led to the attacks of September 11.
• The next section is "On Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the Middle East." Robert Canfield's piece emphasizes the complexity of Afghanistan and painstakingly outlines the relationships between the Taliban, mujahedeen, "Arab-Afghans" (including bin Laden), and different ethnic groups within Afghanistan. Ashraf Ghani's contribution examines the complexity of the political situation in Afghanistan and the possible risks of quick military action there by our armed forces. Nazif Shahrani counsels the eventual formation of a new Afghanistan based on the stability of past models: "The international community should encourage the creation of a government that recognizes the crucial role of the local and regional communities in self-governance, as existed in earlier eras in Afghanistan." The next selection is an interview with Zieba Shorish-Shamley at meetings in Brussels, Belgium, in which Afghan women's groups were creating a common set of demands. She emphasizes the need for women to be fairly represented in Afghanistan's new government. David Edwards and Shahmahmood Miakhel stress the importance of enlisting the aid of ordinary Afghans in confronting the Taliban regime. Kamran Asdar Ali focuses on the dilemmas faced by Pakistan following the events of September 11, specifically the tensions faced by its leaders in the face of mounting domestic criticism for cooperation with the United States.
• In the next section, "Examining Militarism and the War on Terror,"' anthropologists explore several pressing issues after September 11. William O. Beeman's commentary challenges the assumptions of U.S. leaders proclaiming anti-terrorist messages by delving into the centuries-old patterns of Western exploitation of societies in the Middle East. David Price notes that the vague definition and use of the word "terrorism" as a catchall phrase has led to its rapid adoption by Russian leaders to describe Chechnya's separatists, by Chinese leaders to describe Uighur separatists, and by others. Consequently, the "war on terror" poses a threat to native peoples and ethnic minorities throughout the world. In separate commentaries, John Burdick and Roberto J. González argue that U.S. bombing raids over Afghanistan—and the resulting civilian casualties—are making future terrorist attacks on the United States more, not less, likely to occur.
• Mahmood Mamdani makes an impassioned plea for U.S. policy makers not to allow the "war on terror" to allow U.S.-African relations to slide back to the Cold War era.
• Laura Nader's article, published two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, is about "coercive harmony"—imposed social harmony—and its consequences. The concept's relevance in the post-September 11 period is clear, as many Americans feel pressure to fall into line with the dictates of the Bush administration's policies. She writes: "Coercive harmony can stifle dissent for a while. But if dissent is too tightly bottled up, it will explode... Academics should not be party to establishing an ideology of consensus on our increasingly corporatized campuses. Instead, we have a duty to investigate the dangers of coercive harmony and to expose repression when it poses as consensus."

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• In a new book, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (Duke University Press), Lee Baker explores how anthropological study of American Indians helped to shape academic and popular ideas about race and culture -- and how those same concepts informed the discipline's very different treatment of African American culture in the 20th century. Baker, who is associate professor of cultural anthropology, sociology, and African and African American studies and dean of academic affairs in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University, responded via e-mail to questions about the book.
• Q: How did "the role anthropology played in shaping popular conceptions of the culture for Native Americans" differ from "the role it played in shaping popular conceptions of culture for African Americans," and why was this difference so pronounced?
• Q: What are some of the key ways in which "anthropological concepts have been used in the service of political projects"?
• A: In an effort to better fight the war in Afghanistan, the military has developed the Human Terrain System (HTS), in which social scientists give on-the-ground advice to military units. Many anthropologists are rightly concerned that basic anthropological ethics, like securing informed consent and being able to publish findings within the scientific community, are being violated with this program. Moreover, the program has not been adequately assessed and there are not good metrics in place to demonstrate how well it works. The program is hotly debated, and it is a very contemporary example of how anthropology and other social sciences become appropriated and used for projects other than traditional knowledge production. Although I am deeply committed to using knowledge in the service of society, this book provides examples of the unintended consequences and the tricky relationships that emerge when knowledge is used within the frame of specific political projects. I don’t think scientists or theorists should pull back in any way; I just hope that scholars realize that when they enter into the public sphere, they may lose control of how their work is employed, and scholars should not be surprised when the work they produce is used in a way that is inimical to their values.

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• • Arena Magazine Feature
   
  • features
  
   
  Sep 2010
   

  Embedded Anthropology and the Intervention

      

  Barry Morris and Andrew Lattas on cultural determinism and neo-liberal forms of racial governance
• In June 2007, the Federal government staged a dramatic military-like take over of Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, which was orchestrated around a moral panic concerning allegations of pedophile rings and the sexual abuse of children. Exploiting a growing public awareness of serious social problems in remote Indigenous communities, the subsequent measures known as the Northern Territory Intervention were exempted from the Racial Discrimination Act.
• Many of the measures had little to do with violence and the protection of children from sexual abuse. Along with increased numbers of police, they included: the appointment of managers to oversee seventy-three prescribed communities; additional restrictions on alcohol and kava; quarantining of a proportion of welfare income; the introduction of an electronic card to monitor and restrict everyday purchases to licensed stores; suspension of the need for permits for entry to prescribed Indigenous areas; the abolition of the Community Development
   Employment Projects (CDEP); the compulsory acquisition of townships through five year leases; and the removal of traditional cultural considerations from judicial-criminal proceedings.
• As it unfolds, the Intervention has become a new form of racial governance, which seeks to assimilate and re-discipline Aboriginal families by transforming their everyday practices and cultural dispositions. It is especially the culture of remote Indigenous communities that has been focused on as dysfunctional and this has pushed anthropologists to the forefront to offer advice on how to care for and transform people through culture.
• In Australian history the protection of Indigenous women and children has often provided the humanitarian language that has legitimised extraordinary interventions seeking greater control of Indigenous people’s lives. There is nothing unusual about Indigenous people being governed through exceptional regimes of power that would be difficult or impossible to apply to non-Indigenous citizens. Whether it be the ‘murderous activities of the frontier’ or Indigenous people’s incarceration onto reserves that functioned almost as total institutions, Indigenous Australians have regularly been governed through extraordinary interventions that promise to be temporary until people have been normalised and transformed into self-governing disciplined subjects. As the ex-army officer and government minister who initiated the NT Intervention, Mal Brough, put it: ‘Stabilise, normalise, exit’.
• It was Carl Schmitt who noted that sovereignty lies in the legal power to create exemptions to the norm. Developing this point, Giorgio Agamben argues that exceptional measures have been made into a modern-day technique of government. The current Intervention justifies its extraordinary necessity through moral critiques of the welfare state, the pathologies and dysfunctions of Indigenous culture, and the policies and institutions of self-determination. There is a collective pretence that it has not been inadequate funding, high staff turnover, poor planning, constantly changing policies and ineffective management which have led to poor health, education, housing, employment and material living standards for Indigenous people. Instead, Aboriginal culture and self-determination are blamed even though there is good reason to question the token and limited forms of self-management given to Indigenous citizens. Today, many politicians, academics and journalists justify the Intervention as a movement away from the abstract, wishy-washy, idealist, political objectives of Indigenous self-determination and towards realising practical, measurable goals that will truly benefit Indigenous communities.
   Conveniently, this discourse shifts mainstream government failures onto Indigenous people—onto their assumed inability to govern themselves both at a collective and personal level.
• Helping to legitimise the Intervention as the rational implementation of humanitarian objectives has been the creation of a huge statistical web around remote Indigenous people. Statistics dominates discussions about the Intervention’s legitimacy. Those statistics measure deviations from the norm and promise to adjust and calibrate interventions to produce social and cultural progress. Statistics serve to create for officials and Indigenous people a state of anxiety about the future health, education, employment and safety of loved ones, which allows the Intervention to offer itself as a practical solution. The Intervention could not exist without the production of this heightened sense of risk—without this statistically mediated and managed moral panic which exploits genuine public concern about child neglect and abuse. This rational web of humanitarian surveillance highlights Indigenous people’s collective and personal failures; it measures supposedly their collective preparedness and individual willingness to care for themselves and their children. Statistics have become part of a governmental apparatus that confronts Indigenous people, that interpellates and problematises them by
   mirroring them back in ways that reinforce mainstream critiques and judgements that nowadays focus not on race but on poor cultural practices.
• Contributing to the rationalisation and normalisation of the Intervention has been a widespread use of ethnographic data and anthropological theory by politicians, public servants, journalists and the wider public. Some anthropologists have actively embraced the public limelight to articulate cultural determinist arguments which criticize both customary and contemporary Indigenous culture as the true, hidden source of Indigenous problems. Whereas culture, especially ‘traditional’ culture, was previously seen as the salvation of Indigenous remote communities, the focus now is on uncovering and eliminating the dysfunctional aspects of Indigenous culture. Under the Intervention, the rise of cultural determinist arguments has operated as a form of psychological reductionism that allows for the internalisation of moral fault. Cultural determinism has worked to relocate the internalised sources of racial dysfunctionality from the realm of inherited biology to the realm of inherited culture. In terms of the history of anthropology, this is paradoxical for cultural analyses were once embraced and used to escape the reductionisms of biology and psychoanalysis, which posited their own internalised forms of dysfunctionality.
• In public debate, a certain amount of ventriloquism has been involved on the part of senior anthropologists and other non-Indigenous commentators who invariably quote and hide behind leading Aboriginal intellectual brokers, such as Noel Pearson and his critiques of the welfare state as producing a culture of passivity and dysfunctionality in Indigenous communities. Pearson occupies a prominent place in conservative newspapers like The Australian which present his views as compatible with their own neo-liberal
   desires to wind back the welfare state or at least create a more tightly policed version of welfare that will continually monitor and refer subjects back to themselves. There is an ongoing desire to reshape welfare into a system of surveillance and tutelage that can transform subjects and subjectivities.
• Professors of anthropology Peter Sutton and Francesca Merlan in particular have supported the current attempt to govern Indigenous people through instilling into them mainstream cultural dispositions. They accuse the welfare state of reinforcing aspects of Aboriginal culture which normalise and emphasise dependent states of being that are unsuited and dysfunctional in a modern world. Sutton calls for ‘a deep rather than superficial cultural redevelopment’. In her analysis of the school nutrition program re-introduced and expanded by the Intervention in ‘prescribed’ communities, Merlan warns against continuing it for too long because this might ‘make capacity for independent action a casualty’. Merlan here echoes neoliberal
   claims that welfare state interventions do not emancipate individuals, but imprison them in forms of passive dependency. The Intervention’s initiatives ‘must only be temporary’ and deployed for ‘the shaping of human capacity’.
• What is anthropology, here, if not an ideological advocate for new pedagogic disciplinary technologies premised on an assumption that people do not shoulder fully their everyday, moral, domestic responsibilities. The fact that many Indigenous people choose not to cook in overcrowded houses with many visitors is treated as a learnt, dysfunctional, cultural trait rather than a strategic choice made in a situation where people cannot control access to the resources in a refrigerator or pantry. Buying ready-made store food and giving it directly to particular individuals ensures that they, at least, are looked after.
• Instead of looking for the causes of people’s everyday practices in the specificity of their current living conditions, there is a paternalistic assumption that people need to be taught how to realise their basic social responsibilities.
• Professor Jon Altman is one of the few anthropologists who has consistently publicly opposed the Intervention. In an important article he documents how anthropologists and public servants have re-contextualised and pathologised different Indigenous obligations to give. Lumping them together, they have homogenised different relations of reciprocity under the pejorative label of ‘demand sharing’. This treatment of Indigenous people as victims of a customary kinship system, which is deemed inappropriate and dysfunctional in a modern world, assumes that they are prisoners of a faulty cultural logic.
• It is perhaps no accident that two major supporters of the Intervention, Sutton and Merlan, come out of a linguistic tradition, for their model of culture is of a fixed and, in this case, deficient cultural grammar. Both selectively use ethnography to claim that welfare dependency has deep cultural roots in Indigenous people’s ritual, ceremonial and kinship obligations, such as between a mother’s brother and his nephew. It is absurd to assume that Indigenous people do not make distinctions between modern and customary forms of dependency, let alone to assume analytically that they are similar phenomena.
• This cultural reductionist argument of an inherent cultural tendency to dependency ignores the different historical periods when Indigenous people were employed in rural areas. It also ignores the scholarly anthropological work on northern Australia that has focused on cultural autonomy and creativity within Indigenous communities. Berndt, Tonkinson, Kolig, Mackinolty and Wainburranga, and Rose have documented the complex world of creative borrowings through which Indigenous people have resisted by reformulating dominant hegemonic structures. Whereas the Intervention posits dysfunctional passivity to be a consequence of welfare, there have been many creative local responses and resistance to welfare policing, including the Intervention.
• Current justifications for the Intervention include claims that it protects women, children and families from the demands of relatives by ensuring that half of welfare income is quarantined. We do not question the sincerity of the motives of government or its academic supporters but we do question the selectivity of the forms of governmentality that are being deployed around Indigenous people. What right does the state have to manage people’s gifts to each other or even the persistent demands of certain relatives? Currently, Indigenous people’s quarantined welfare income (that is, half their payments) must be spent at certain approved stores using an electronic card, which monitors and prohibits expenditure on alcohol, tobacco, pornography and gambling. If families wish to purchase larger items, such as whitegoods, then they must submit a quote and a special request to Centrelink, which will directly pay the supplier. A huge, administrative, electronic panopticon has been established to watch over everyday purchases to ensure that they are spent on family-oriented goods.
• This disciplining of Indigenous forms of consumption seeks to disseminate mainstream models of family life and to internalise ‘more rational’ forms of subjectivity that use a mainstream calculus in allocating scarce resources and affective care
• The Australian Council of Social Services estimates that income management in the Northern Territory will affect approximately 20,000 individuals and cost $4100 per person per annum to administer. Revealingly, the government has moved Indigenous people off community development work programs and onto welfare payments so they can become ‘income managed’. When faced with a choice and a conflict between its own moral priorities, today’s state, via its policies and practices, affirms the priority and transformative powers not of work but of keeping people in dependent tutelary states of surveillance.
• As a social engineering project, the Intervention uses a massive surveillance system to realise not just health, education, food and welfare goals, for it also seeks to transform the desire and need for these forms of bio-security into mechanisms for reorganising Aboriginal forms of sociality.
• Diverse institutions for realising everyday needs such as health, education, food and welfare are used to create a carceral state around Indigenous people, where the systems of surveillance, discipline and pastoral care that belong to total institutions are diffused into the social body.
• It is not just in the Northern Territory that the carceral state is being expanded around Indigenous Australians but also in Western Australia and Queensland. There, schools have become a means of monitoring and disciplining parents, whose welfare payments are reduced if their children fail to attend school regularly. Justified as reducing future forms of welfare dependency by improving children’s education, such measures use Indigenous people’s dependence on government funds and services to create surveillance and disciplinary regimes that also promise to integrate Indigenous people into mainstream society. We are dealing with significant shifts in the political rationality of how to govern. In particular, the rationality of governance ultimately seeks to transfer and implant the management of the social risk of poverty, health and education within individuals and their communities, making both into self-governing moral units.
• For its supporters, the Intervention is not repressive but ‘positive’ and ‘productive’ in advancing a distinct way of life. ‘Evidence-based policy’ is the government’s euphemism for its new transformative practices and technologies. Their aim is to incorporate empirical and practical versions of the social sciences into the design of more effective microtechnologies of social governance
• In his philosophical analyses of European history, Michel Foucault related the emergence and development of the social sciences to the emergence and development of modern technologies of power
• Foucault argued that power never exists independently of knowledge; instead structures of power create and deploy bodies of knowledge around the kinds of subjects they posit and seek to bring into being
• As anthropologists, we are interested in why outdated and discredited bodies of anthropological knowledge have been revived in Australia under the Intervention. Concerns with social pathologies and cultural dysfunctions that featured in functionalist approaches in the 1940s were a form of anthropology suited to colonial concerns with the scientific administration of native subjects
• In their contemporary teaching, many anthropologists will emphasise the importance of social functions, but they also point to functionalism as a morally laden approach that ignores how wider structures generate the socio-cultural practices labeled as dysfunctional. In Australia, it has not just been politicians, public servants and journalists who have rushed in to revive such problematic social science analyses, which internalise and subjectify the causes of social problems as moral problems, but also leading professors of anthropology, such as Peter Sutton, Francesca Merlan and Marcia Langton.
• Currently, we are witnessing the emergence of a new form of compromised, conservative anthropology aligned with Australian government policies.
• Despite strong public disavowals of having a racial character, these are above all policies that deploy and experiment with new forms of racial governance.
• This ideological re-alignment of Australian anthropology dealing with Indigenous communities has been facilitated by three factors: 1) the transformation of many academics into part-time or full-time consultants who celebrate and feel morally empowered by their ‘practical’ concerns; 2) the corporatisation of Australian universities and their desire to demonstrate the practical relevance of academic disciplines to government, students and the wider public; and 3) the imposition of national interest agendas on all Australian Research Council grants.
• Despite their highly lucrative private remunerations, many contemporary consultant anthropologists keep a foothold in the university system which adds academic status to their practical advice
• Authorised by government concerns and a popular moral panic, which they have helped to create, these anthropologists have used books, academic journals, newspapers, television and the internet to propagate ideas which until very recently would be regarded as outdated ideological nonsense.
• Both Merlan and Sutton have justified the initial military-like entry into Indigenous communities as a theatre of power necessary to notify paedophiles, bullies, drug addicts and corrupt oligarchs that their time is over. Both use ethnographic familiarity with Indigenous communities to personalise the need for exceptional forms of state power, which lump together diverse social problems and ignore other, more effective solutions.
• Merlan and Sutton believe race has been overemphasised in explaining Indigenous people’s social problems and they especially reject seeing the Intervention as having a racial character. As Merlan puts it: ‘we should move away from the centrality of objection to the intervention as “racially discriminatory”’. Continuing a long tradition of conservative Australian anthropology, which often simplifies and marginalises ‘race’ as an analytic category, she argues, ‘Race does not, and never has, offered a full account of the burdens of marginalisation and dependency that these communities have come to face, nor of the social and cultural specificity with which they do so. Other factors, in combination with race, lie behind the plausibility of intervention that the government seized upon’. We do not dispute the existence of other factors but what needs to be noted is how some Australian anthropologists will in a token way acknowledge that race cannot be dismissed from explanations of subordination and marginalisation. However, the other factors that they evoke in their supposedly more complicated picture invariably work to edit out and minimise race and especially cultures of racial resistance.
• Highly problematic is Merlan’s use of anthropology to argue that the historical and socio-cultural specificity of Indigenous groups makes it often inappropriate to apply universal human rights. Such arguments prop up the Intervention in the face of international criticism that it breaches international human rights treaties
• Drawing on the ethnographic specificity of Indigenous communities, Merlan argues that ‘universalist understandings of rights can be problematic in their application to people whose social lives differ from the mainstream’.
• Yet the whole point of universal human rights was to protect marginal groups from being created by their national governments into a legal state of exception.
• Here, it is anthropology’s cultural relativism, its celebration of cultural pluralism, which is mobilised to claim that ‘the universality of equal rights’ does not fit in with the culture of Australia’s Indigenous people.
• Such sweeping ahistorical cultural claims raise questions about anthropological ventriloquism, which involves anthropologists revoicing their own political position as the cultural voice of informants. It is scandalous to use anthropology’s familiarity with the alterity of Indigenous cultures to legitimise their legal alterity, their transformation into a modern state of exception.
• For Merlan, an emphasis on rights is based on a notion of the separate and distinct individual and that Aborigines have alternative ways of thinking about obligations. ‘It is illusory to think of an individualistic and oppositional notion of rights as less coercive than other kinds of possibilities that might be developed.’ Philosophers such as Hannah Arendt are called in to question our commitment to the ‘right to have rights’ and instead what is asserted is the importance of our concern to assist effectively ‘rather than doggedly assume the applicability of a single, allegedly universalist system of rights’
• Currently, parts of Australian anthropology have become a means of realigning Indigenous people’s voices and needs with a government position that manufactures the practical as being in opposition to Indigenous political rights. Claiming to be engaged in capacity-building, this new humanitarian ideology rearticulates neo-liberal views that Indigenous people and their culture are harmed by the ‘free’ care and rights that we give them and will be improved by more intrusive, controlling forms of care and conditional rights.
• These micro forms of everyday governance seek to problematise Indigenous people by implying, for example, that if parents do not cook regular meals or cannot ensure their children attend school regularly that these parents do not love or care for their children, that they are morally dysfunctional.
• Nikolas Rose argues perceptively that modern ways of assembling risk are intimately related to the valorisation of community as a site of policing. Increasingly replacing the previous space of the ‘social’, ‘community’ emerges as the new space of governance, as the territory for new interventions. Along these lines, the Intervention needs to be seen in the wider context of other government measures introduced throughout Australia where Indigenous communities have been pushed into mutual obligation agreements, which seek to transform them into self-policing and self-disciplining communities.We disagree to some extent with Altman and Hinkson’s argument that the ‘individual’ has replaced the ‘community’ as the focus of neo-liberal welfare concerns.
• Both inform contemporary state practices, with technologies of individuation existing alongside a renewed emphasis and demand for communities to be self-policing. In Western Australia, on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, the small Aboriginal community of Mulan signed up to what has been called a ‘Hygiene Pact’. In return for government financial aid to install a petrol bowser, the community undertook to implement a program to ensure their children showered everyday and washed their faces twice a day, and rubbish bins were emptied twice a week. Such neo-liberal policies are not directly aimed at minimising welfare costs, but more at maximising the welfare system’s transformative efficacy. They are framed as part of a long-term goal to reduce welfare costs though first training people in the disciplinary social habits that will facilitate them joining the workforce. Here hygiene and health join job training and education to create a disciplinary carceral state around remote Indigenous people.
• Merlan and Sutton’s emphasis that it is not poverty but culture that leads Aborigines to seek out dependencies is part of what has been called the Queensland school of anthropology. Apart from playing down race, it has also systematically played down and criticised anthropologists who have focused on contemporary Aboriginal forms of resistance. Other anthropologists, like Jeff Collmann and Barry Morris, who were part of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide, have documented the opposite, namely, Indigenous people seeking autonomy and seeking to evade capture and control by the welfare state. Today, it is not the essentialisms and determinisms of biology that serve to racialise Indigenous people but certain psycho-cultural essentialisms and determinisms that treat Indigenous people as prisoners of embedded cultural logics or grammars. Culture has replaced race as the new way of producing internalised essentialisms. Social problems are reduced to cultural problems and, indeed, to moral problems, to the inappropriate or dysfunctional use of Indigenous moral schemes.
• The NT Intervention is a huge experiment in tightening up this carceral state through increased forms of surveillance that use not just more police and non-Indigenous administrators but also schools, health, housing, welfare payments and even licensed shops. The aim is to instill a moral watchfulness and discipline in Indigenous people which will normalise and transform them into mainstream citizens who use an alternative calculus in their social relations. It is mainstream forms of the economic which are being disseminated as a way of grounding and forming subjectivity and social life.
• The scandal of contemporary Australian anthropology is that it bends its ethnography and twists its theory to legitimise these new forms of racial hegemony, which claim that the securing of modern forms of bio-security requires the suspension of Indigenous people’s civil rights and their hopes for self-determination.

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