In Focus - Wiley Online Library

29 downloads 106127 Views 7MB Size Report
Mar 13, 2014 - based on the policyholders' age, mortality for former claim rates, and other variables. ...... billboard on the busy Delhi- Gurgaon Highway that called on India .... through highly charged images, advertising and political oratory.
Essays published exclusively on anthropology-news.org in

In Focus

For the most current In Focus essays, visit www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/category/in-focus.

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

CRISIS

Crisis, Risk, Control Casey Golomski

Anthropologies of Insurance

Mall clothing store cash register promoting a family funeral insurance plan, South Africa 2011. Photo courtesy of Casey Golomski

Insurance is a nascent area of study for anthropology, but is productive for current scholarship on finance, credit and debt, economic development, public health and medicine, and crisis. Janet Roitman characterizes crisis as an “enabling blind spot for the production of knowledge,” in that certain historical events uncritically become junctures for political assessments of morality, normality and progress. As a point of reflection happenings in the past, events turned crises generate anticipation and speculative practices. Comparatively, anthropology has found diviners, prophets, and other experts to be cultural brokers who traffic in speculation by mediating present conditions and uncertain futures, and insurance operates as one such medium to control conditions of crisis. This brief essay considers how the global circulation of insurance in market expansion and development projects presents new landscapes for research. Anthropology is well poised to document the consumption, commercialism, and capillaries of structural power (in states’ social policies, market regulation or lack thereof) that inform local insurance cultures. Insurance has been less an object of study than a familiar analytic to describe social action and formations that mitigate potential harm. In Risk and Blame, Mary Douglas wrote that non-industrialized culture groups

obligate processes like gift giving and extensive support networks to avoid neglect and transgression. Difficult situations are routinely circumvented and these processes operate as a kind of social insurance, in Douglas’ words. Gifts and social support remain standard means for harm reduction, and are more often bound up with money: there is a price for protection and prevention. Formal insurance is a pricey engagement, built up in sequenced premium payments (“consideration” in insurance industry terms) over the long term or even a lifetime for credit against risk. Insurance itself is a complex technology of risk management that conceptualizes and operationalizes risk with technical precision. Economic understandings of risk express the randomness facing an economic agent in terms of numerical probability. Agents who cannot or do not assign or assess probabilities to possible occurrences exemplify uncertainty. Risk, in the insurance context, is the mathematically derived probability of loss, and actuarial sciences calculate loss potential based on the policyholders’ age, mortality for former claim rates, and other variables. Douglas and Wildavsky noted the persistent conceptual divide between actuarially informed experts and lay-consumers about risk and its accommodations, a divide that has not collapsed despite experts’ efforts to ingrain their own ideas about potential harm. Insurers contractually agree to pay a designated amount to the insured when potential risk becomes material reality: the risk of disease is realized in illness, and the price of illness and recovery are re-claimed; the risk of death is realized in one’s passing, and the price of a human life is re-claimed, however incommensurate cash may be with life itself. Insurance reveal differing hierarchies of value, and the strategies to re-produce or undo that valuation, and I show a few ethnographic examples of how this plays in one small place in Southern Africa.

The Macabre Market: Life Insurance in Swaziland Researching ritual and the life course amid demographic shift from the HIV/AIDS crisis in Swaziland led me beyond conventional domains of household events and churches and into the suit-and-tie world of insurance sales. Indeed, many funerals are today produced through the money claimed from insurance policies. I visited corporate insurance companies and state market regulators, collected product specs and technical reports, and followed contracted insurance brokers on the road as they went on sales pitches and made product presentations to prospective policyholders. I also worked with burial co-ops, often-informal groups of women, kin or workers’ unions that also pool money and other funerary resources. Following national neoliberal economic development initiatives, the government of the Kingdom of Swaziland de-monopolized its financial services sector in the mid-2000s, and the market expanded with an influx of South African life insurance corporations. Citing concerns for foreign financial predation and http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/crisis-risk-control/

1/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

accountability, the Government established a large regulatory body and legislation to assure ethical business practice. The legislation also aimed to formally incorporate many burial co-ops, but many co-ops have resisted market inclusion. Some insurance industry personnel quietly noted that high mortality associated with HIV/AIDS made Swaziland an attractive market. Because “whole life” insurance required a medical test, obviating many Swazis who are living with HIV (32% prevalence) from coverage, the policies sold were by and large term life, the industry term for burial insurance. Companies and brokers were ethnopreneurial (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) in their marketing by using language and symbols of ethnic identity. The stated prospects of families’ financial wherewithal made policies very attractive. Industry personnel perceived consumers to struggle with saving responsibly or gauging future needs, but felt unable to translate their key term risk into siSwati. The contractual logics and monetary aspect of insurance also made some consumers suspicious. For some consumers, insurance had an uncanny resemblance to witchcraft as an individuated, intangible and invisible form of accumulation that produces value from death. Like witches and sorcerers draw out productive capacity and spiritual vitality from humans for their own gain, so do policyholders reap benefits of cash from deceased beneficiaries. Some policyholders greedily filed multiple contracts on multiple people. Despite these underlying fears, both consumers and industry personnel saw insurance as a means for future vitality as money, even if the truth of long-term private accumulation emerged at moments of crisis in death. Insurance policies have also reshaped kinship and the redistribution of value. The dying off of able-bodied adults from HIV/AIDS has left a generation of orphaned and vulnerable children, some of whom are often entrusted across households in customary fostering and caregiving. When guardians of entrusted children wish to include them as policy beneficiaries, they are encouraged to take them through state social services for legal adoption to qualify children as heirs and show legal relatedness as a birth certificate would show for biological descendents. Who to insure and who not to insure become prescient questions and play out politically along inter-generational and –household axes.

New Research and Prospects for Applied Anthropology Like biomedicine or finance, insurance tends to travel globally as a culture-free form of knowledge, but recent ethnographic research shows how insurance is consumed, reworked or rejected in novel ways. Recent anthropological approaches include Erik Bähre on South African commercial life insurance, and a 2012 roundtable I organized with Robert Benjamin Frey for the American Ethnological Society titled “Making Claims: Anthropological Engagements with Insurance.” This roundtable featured works in progress on insurance cultures. Rebecca Adkins Fletcher explored the role of insurance and unemployment for Appalachian households, and Sohini Kar detailed the attachment of insurance policies to micro-finance projects in India. Robert Frey documented wounded US military contractors’ medical and burial claims going unfulfilled by the US Department of Labor’s Defense Base Act, and I presented research from the Swaziland case. At that conference, in his keynote talk, Arjun Appadurai noted that insurance is key for research on futurity, a site where “visible and invisible” worlds of finance can meet. Insurance in its many forms has come to the fore in national and international policy debates. In July 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the DoddFrank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which established the Federal Insurance Office within the Department of the Treasury. The Office monitors aspects of the insurance industry including companies’ attempts to generate “access to affordable insurance by traditionally underserved communities and consumers, minorities, and low- and moderate-income persons.” The International Labour Organization’s Micro-insurance Innovation Facility aims to “develop an “insurance culture among the [working] poor,” and assure that economically disadvantaged peoples can access risk management technologies like crop, livestock and community-based insurance. More recognizable has been the discussion of national health insurance in the United States and worldwide. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) notes “culture” or “culturally and linguistically appropriate” practices at least 45 times, evidencing provisional commitments to insurance communications and operations that are inclusive and accessible to diverse social groups. New grant opportunities, as outlined in PPACA, that seek to address healthcare and access disparities for women and the elderly also warrant nuanced anthropological intervention in the forms of program development, research and long term monitoring. In December 2012, the United Nations adopted a resolution on affordable universal healthcare. A select number of nations currently have or are developing coverage for all citizens, and questions of financing quickly turn to questions of a nationalized system and whether or not this should operate on investment or mutual risk pooling. Finally, the interest group Critical Anthropology of Global Health has charted a promising rubric, STAND on Health Insurance Reform, for health insurance studies and intervention on PPACA in a comparative and global perspective. If crisis has become a word to characterize facets of the world—in finance, housing, and health—attention has to be paid to how experiences and indices of crisis are produced and distributed. Insurance matters to the study of crisis, as its industry searches for signs in risk assessment and offers technologies for managing that risk. Insurance should also matter for anthropology as a domain of expert knowledge production that comes to affect national policy and peoples’ social and economic livelihoods. Anthropology’s professional code of ethics states, “do no harm” to our interlocutors, and we might benefit from understanding how potential harm is otherwise manufactured and controlled in cultural and politico-economic context. Casey Golomski is a cultural anthropologist (PhD, Brandeis U, 2013) and a Lecturer at U Mass Boston. His research explores ritual and religion, life course, work, labor and power in Africa.

Share this:

Facebook 67

Twitter 8

Google

LinkedIn

Email

This entry was posted in In Focus, June and tagged Crisis. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/crisis-risk-control/

2/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News © 2013 American Anthropological Association • 2300 Clarendon Blvd., Suite 1301 • Arlington, VA • 22201 • TEL (703) 528-1902 • FAX (703) 528-3546

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/crisis-risk-control/

3/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

CRISIS

Your Money or Your Life Daniel M Knight

Misunderstandings of Greek Austerity Come my Pasha, come my Agha slaughter me to become a Saint, because of what is happening I want to be sick. Now they vote for laws for us to go to prison, and they want us to cover them in gold even if we cry and starve. And more money they snatch and they become richer, and us the black sheep they sell to the foreigners. Éla Pashiá m’, éla Agá m’ sfákse me gia n’ agiáso, giatí m’ autá pou gínontai mou ’rxetai na kseráso. Nómous tóra psifízoune sti filakí na páme, ki autoús na tous xrisósoume ki as klaíme ki as peináme. Ki álla leftá n’ arpáksoune ki állo gia na ploutísoun, ki emás ta mávra próvata stous ksénous na poulísoun. —Excerpt from poem by Nikos Kotsalis, Cabinetmaker, Trikala, April 2013, translation by author Greece has received 240 billion euros of bailout money, with another 32 billion on the horizon. In 2012 government debt hit 170% of GDP and is expected to surpass 190% in 2014. Although economists insist that some of their graphs indicate improving fiscal circumstances (see The Economist, May 4, 2013), many continue to complain that Greeks have not embraced austerity. The government is portrayed as dragging its feet over the Troika (European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) reforms and bureaucrats grumble that people are resisting “logical” lifestyle changes.

Informal shrine after a public suicide

On the ground, early 2013 witnessed a marked escalation in material poverty and social suffering. Increased hunger, homelessness and suicide are now part of everyday life in all sectors of Greek society and offer sobering critiques of the future. Unemployment has surpassed 27%, youth unemployment is at 60%, and soup kitchens are common in the urban centers. As Greece enters a fifth year of severe economic crisis there is little light at the end of the tunnel.

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/your-money-or-your-life/

1/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

in Syntagma Square, Athens. Photo courtesy Daniel M Knight

Troika austerity measures are based solely on criteria of Eurozone membership, disregarding cultural and historical difference. Nevertheless, bureaucrats and economists alike remain perplexed as to why austerity policy is failing in the face of hostile local resistance. Austerity measures are based on the notion that European fiscal unity implies social, economic, and historical cohesion, systematically ignoring local modes of political and economic relations. In western Thessaly, central Greece, where I have conducted ethnographic research since 2003, 30 years of uneven neoliberal penetration operates alongside, yet not interchangeably with, traditional modes of relations such as patronage and clientelism. Likewise, economic policy devised in the corridors of Brussels and Berlin overlooks the complex historical consciousness that informs economic behavior in times of crisis. Historically-endorsed accounts of famine, suicide and colonization are the three most prominent means to discuss contemporary life in western Thessaly. Informants regularly frame Troika intervention as neocolonialism and occupation, emphasizing the temporal proximity of specific moments of the past, giving meaning to their own crisis experience (Knight 2012). Austerity is discussed in terms of Ottoman and Axis occupations, the Great Famine of 1941–43 and the 1967–74 dictatorship. For this short piece, one could present the impact of any number of measures—privatization, public sector restructuring, replacement of civil servants, education, health, tax and pension reforms, or attempts to dismantle the infamous patronage culture (cf Campbell 1964). I have chosen to focus on energy initiatives.

Occupation: Energy Colonialism

Photovoltaic panels stand on arable land near Kalampaka, western Thessaly. Photo courtesy Daniel M Knight

Known as the Bread Basket of Greece, the vast plains of Thessaly were once ruled by powerful landlords, the infamous tsiflikádes. The great estates (tsiflíkia) were only divided into private property during the agrarian reforms of the early 1900s. Today, people in western Thessaly temporally condense the period of the tsiflikádes with the Axis occupation of World War Two, producing a combined narrative of occupation which they compare to the suppression experienced in Troika-occupied Greece. Notions of neo-colonialism are exacerbated by recent European Union advocated land diversification programs towards renewable energy. Photovoltaic parks are now abundant on the fertile agricultural plains as farmers feel there is no alternative but to use their land for energy generation in return for a (supposedly) stable monthly income (Knight 2013). Although the renewable energy initiative is not a direct Troika measure, the reasons for changes in livelihood strategy are deeply entwined with consequences of austerity. With the breakdown of agricultural markets due to the bankruptcy of wholesalers, increased fuel prices for haulage and low consumer spending, the diversification is justified by the need to put food on the table for tomorrow. There is a tangible fear of returning to times of famine, last experienced in Greece in 1941–43 when 500,000 people died in Athens alone (cf Hionidou 2006), and “growing photovoltaics” (fitrónoun fotovoltaiká) is

considered undesirable but necessary. Since the solar program was introduced in 2006 there has been a dramatic rise in the number of farmers taking major loans and signing 25-year contracts to install photovoltaics, only curtailed by the recent announcement that the initiative has been frozen until the end of 2013. The energy generated by the parks rarely contributes to the local network. Producing energy for international export has been heralded by Europe as a means to repay government debt and decrease national deficit in accordance with Troika demands. Often the panels are produced in Germany or China and German investors have shown significant interest in recent plans to privatize the Greek energy sector. Industry experts are cynical about the long-term sustainability of photovoltaics in Greece and admit that the solar drive is little more than a fad to make quick and easy money for foreign private investment companies. The bubble has already begun to burst with the Greek Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change (YPEKA) announcing a 40 to 50% cut in feed-in tariffs, with the possibility for further retrospective reductions. Due to the endemic inefficiency of European policy dissemination, locals often act upon a deadly cocktail of misinformation and desperation. I am constantly told that “These people are the new tsiflikádes, the new occupying forces.” Despite the significant uptake of the solar program, winter 2012–13 witnessed a return en-masse to wood-burning open-fires (tzákia) and stoves (ksilósompes) last popular during the 1960s and 1970s. With the price of fuel for petrol-generated central heating beyond the reach of the majority of families, people burn whatever they have to hand in order to keep warm—with disastrous consequences for the environment and public health. Two seemingly contrasting energy sources—high-tech photovoltaic panels and open wood-burning fires—have become highly visible material symbols of the economic crisis and the consequences of Troika austerity. Photovoltaics are associated with clean-green energy, futuristic sustainability, ground-breaking technology, ultra-modernity and international political energy consensus. Nonetheless, in western Thessaly they conjure up notions of occupation, dispossession and hunger. For local people, open-fires invoke images of pre-modern unsustainability, pollution, poverty, a return to village life and peasantry status. Both energy solutions are symptomatic of how people negotiate the Troika-enforced fiscal austerity. Furthermore, both solar panels and open-fires have raised questions of future environmental impact and food sustainability and represent the paradoxes initiated by socioeconomic turmoil. The manner people talk about energy, as with most aspects of crisis experience, represents complex historical consciousness and perceptions of time and temporality that do not conform to northern European models (Stewart 2012, Hirschon 2013) and reignite questions about modern European belonging (cf Herzfeld 1987).

Crisis of Communication Anthropologists have the potential to bridge the communication chasm between European policy makers, economists and local people. In the Greek case this challenge is complicated due to cultural miscommunication between all parties involved and an overt intolerance of different socioeconomic perspectives. The often impenetrably narrow focus of international media rhetoric poses another barrier. Images of rioting on the streets of Athens and the prominence of the neohttp://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/your-money-or-your-life/

2/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

Nazi Golden Dawn are highly essentialized. Both Troika and the international media continuously seek to make clear cuts in opaque global flows and discuss accountability on the basis of well-defined units, which are attributed a particular cultural character that essentializes the complexity of crisis experience. More subtle, more nuanced and more intricate examples of crisis experience are fundamentally important. In the schoolyard opposite an informant’s house in Trikala, a prefabricated monstrosity is taking shape. With the closure of seven local schools as part of Troika reforms, a new schoolhouse is being built to accommodate the displaced students. Most of the teachers from the closed schools have lost their jobs; one has since committed suicide. There is a strong feeling that a gun is being held to the heads of everyday Greeks: money will be repaid or they will perish. This lack of humanitarian concern does not induce positive attitudes towards reform. Working in an interdisciplinary context, it is a complex and often infuriating task to communicate people’s experiences of crisis to those that work with numbers and graphs. Occasionally I have been told that such research is nonsense, unhelpful, irrelevant—or stronger unpublishable words to that effect. The appropriate dissemination of research is therefore imperative. I advocate a combination of scholarly journals, online blogs and forums, newspaper and magazine entries, public lectures, direct meetings and official reports. Through enhanced communication between fellow professionals and diverse publics we can slowly move towards a middle ground between policy and practice. Five years of failing economic policy may actually begin to make a tangible difference and people will not be faced with the direct choice between “your money or your life.” Daniel M Knight is the National Bank of Greece postdoctoral research fellow at the Hellenic Observatory, London School of Economics and Political Science. He holds a PhD in anthropology from Durham University and has conducted ethnographic research in Greece on history and economy, crisis, temporality and renewable energy initiatives. [email protected]

Share this:

Facebook 26

Twitter 5

Google

LinkedIn 1

Email

This entry was posted in Featured Posts, In Focus, June and tagged Crisis. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

© 2013 American Anthropological Association • 2300 Clarendon Blvd., Suite 1301 • Arlington, VA • 22201 • TEL (703) 528-1902 • FAX (703) 528-3546

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/your-money-or-your-life/

3/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

CRISIS

Japanese Organic Farmers Nancy Rosenberger

Strategies of Uncertainty after the Radiation Crisis

Organic farmer harvesting daikon a year after the Fukushima explosion. Photo courtesy Nancy Rosenberger

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear explosion showered the fields of Japanese organic farmers with radiation, but from northeast Japan down to Tokyo, they were swept into further crisis by the government’s pronouncement that plants and animals fed by local materials were more at risk than conventionally-produced or imported products. Suddenly, these organic farmers’ formula of organic production and distribution outside of the market collapsed; they could not provide safety for themselves and their consumers to cope with the health and environmental risks caused by Japan’s focus on economic growth since the 70s. While the validity of their oppositional worldview was reaffirmed, their lifestyle entered the incalculability of uncertainty.

In 2012 I interviewed 43 organic farmers, listening to embodied experiences and strategies of crisis. An older couple, organic farmers from coastal Fukushima, lost their land and will never retrieve the same level of livelihood. An elderly couple and their son in central Fukushima felt they had to keep cultivating their 300-year-old farm to maintain the meaning in their lives, yet he had decided not to marry and his mother joked with black humor: “Last spring there were more birds than usual and the greens came up really well; they liked the radiation.” A woman farmer from western Fukushima took her two children to her southern natal home and wanted her husband to follow, but he insisted on clinging to his farm in Fukushima. She said, “I feel a huge contradiction as a mother and as a farmer; as a consumer and as a producer.” In irreversible crises anthropologists can clarify the creative assemblage of strategies that lay people produce. Since the explosion organic farmers have reclaimed some agency through what I call localized, relational uncertainty: a coping strategy that accepts incalculable risk by focusing on the local geography of their farm and relations of trust between farmers and consumers. Altogether their strategies constitute a continuum varying from risk management via neoliberal institutions, to precautions as lay experts, to what I term agency of uncertainty.

Techniques of Agency At one end of the continuum, organic farmers utilized what Mitchell Dean calls techniques of agency in which people take individual responsibility to deal with risk as manageable just as neoliberal governance expects. For example, the elderly couple and their son in central Fukushima applied to Tokyo Electric Company for compensation. They had to produce myriad records of production and sales from previous years as proof for the company monitors. They also faced the difficult task of reporting on their actions during the chaotic period after the explosion. Although complete compensation was impossible and accepting corporate money was a compromise of their ideals to live outside the market, farmers accepted this limited method of managing risk. In another example of entrepreneurial responsibility, a 40-year-old farmer living in Ibaragi Prefecture south of the explosion, faced with consumer decline in his membership group, adjusted by selling his produce to restaurants delicious and seasonal, rather than as organic.

Techniques of Uncertainty In the middle of the continuum organic farmers practiced what Patrick O’Malley has called techniques of uncertainty in which lay experts combine science and experience (guesswork, rules of thumb) to produce precautions in the face of irreversible uncertainty. Prevention was no longer possible, but organic farmers, mistrusting government and company experts, appropriated science to minimize harm for themselves and their consumers and allied with non-government organizations (NGOs). For example, the organic farmers used gamma spectrometers, machines that would measure the bequerels (bq) (the rate of radioactive decay over a period of time) of cesium in their crops. The machines were expensive and necessitated allying with NGOs that bought them; each test cost farmers time and money. A http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/japanese-organic-farmers/

1/2

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

farmer in Ibaragi Prefecture took ash and leaves for compost to a Seikyo (Coop) store that bought organic products from local farmers; their count was low and he decided to use them. As of April 2012 the government standard for food was 100 bq per kilogram, but organic consumers were demanding non-detectable. In central Fukushima, where the soil had been 1000 bq after the explosion, the farmers decided not to sell rice and soybeans at 100 bq, but with the help of NGOs selling on the web, they sold cucumbers and carrot juice measuring 2 bq. The farmers felt profound responsibility for the judgment calls they made in relation to protecting their consumers. However, they coped through localized uncertainty which focused on a certain area and limited crops. Lay experts emerged to defend organic farming and offer scenarios of possibilities. An older organic farmer in Ibaragi Prefecture argued publicly that organic farming reduced the radiation that went into crops because soil rich with humus locked up the cesium. He was unsure, but used knowledge from agricultural university and would experiment in the future. Both measuring by machine and lay theories utilize science, but represent organic farmers acting beyond government and companies, allied with third sector NGOs in order to save their livelihood. The machines minimized uncertainty and the lay expert theories promised stabilization of uncertainty in the future. Neither however dismissed uncertainty or assumed risk avoidance.

Agency of Uncertainty At the far end of the continuum, organic farmers reasserted their agency as a marginal group, embracing the post-explosion uncertainty of radiation and expressing a rationale that refutes the dominant logic of risk avoidance based on renewed economic growth. They built their identities and communities by living on the edge. First, organic farmers actively accepted localized uncertainty. Although most had come to their communities as adults and were renting land, organic farmers threw ultimate caution to the wind in favor of their local farms and communities. Deciding the undecidable, one couple with three children living north of the explosion in Iwate Prefecture cited a new commitment to place: “We have decided to bury our bones here.” In Ibaragi Prefecture, a young couple said, “It comes down to taking the radiation or taking away this way of life. We have been here 10 years and we will stay. For the kids we have decided this too. Most of what the kids have eaten is what we have grown. Before it was good and now we aren’t sure. Maybe they are pitiful, but the kids have to stay with us.” Second, organic farmers used relational uncertainty, urging their consumers to share an agency of uncertainty with them. A farmer of 43 in Ibaragi Prefecture laughed ruefully, “My friend had a party and invited people to eat ‘cesium beef’. We are all in it together.” Unlike most grocers, organic farmers told consumers the number of bequerels of radiation in the food they delivered. The couple in Iwate said, “We finally said to consumers, if it is okay, please buy it. This is a nuclear society so we eat the cesium. We should accept it because we are all victims of damage. It’s only a question of where the boundary is.” These strategies of relational uncertainty, linked with localized uncertainty, extended into specific invitations to consumers to ally with organic farmers. The husband from western Fukushima suffered from rumor damage as much as from low levels of radiation. He urged a group of volunteers from Tokyo who came yearly to help clean the water channels for the rice fields to expand their commitment by buying rice from the village. He argued passionately that this crisis was a sign that there had to be a much deeper trust established between farmers and their consumers. Furthermore, he and other farmers argued that the experience of nuclear uncertainty was a chance to think beyond economic growth and its dangerous underpinnings. A young organic farmer from southern Iwate gave lectures urging people to maintain their distrust of authorities and risk management. They should raise alarm about radiation levels in local areas; school lunches; and claims of safety at nuclear power plants. Organic farmers used uncertainty as productive of new kinds of relationship, new relations with their locality, and renewed logic protesting economic growth. Although their strategies also included cooperation with neoliberal institutions, they negotiated this contradiction by banking their identities uncertainty experienced in localities with allies as well as on precautionary use of lay science. As Japan turns to economic growth and reactivated nuclear plants, organic farmers’ commitment to uncertainty constitutes a new form of subversiveness within the nation. Nancy Rosenberger is a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University, with her PhD from University of Michigan. She has written about changes in women’s lives in Japan and food insecurity in Central Asia and Oregon. She is presently researching changes in organic agriculture in in Japan’s society of risk.

Share this:

Facebook 28

Twitter 5

Google

LinkedIn 1

Email

This entry was posted in Featured Posts, In Focus, June and tagged Crisis. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

© 2013 American Anthropological Association • 2300 Clarendon Blvd., Suite 1301 • Arlington, VA • 22201 • TEL (703) 528-1902 • FAX (703) 528-3546

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/japanese-organic-farmers/

2/2

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

CRISIS

A Humanitarian Crisis Ventura R Pérez Ashley E Sherry

Violence, Secrecy, and Hope in México Silence appears to be México’s answer to the ongoing humanitarian crisis brought about by organized crime. On December 1, 2012, Enrique Peña Nieto started his six-year term as president of México. He immediately set about shifting the focus from national security to education, immigration and the economy. During the former administration, national Mexican media outlets focused less on political strategies and more on results; images of captured drug traffickers (narcos) and tortured bodies hung with narco-mensajes made their way into newspapers, articles, books and social media sites. Prominent news channels featured captured narcos, handcuffed and standing with masked officers before tables full of money, drugs, and weapons. The public saw results. However, targeting important figures from Mexican drug cartels resulted in the murders and disappearances of thousands of people across México. President Peña Nieto is initiating an important change from former President Calderon’s public focus on organized Forensic Sciences Laboratory in Ciudad Juárez, crime and kingpin strategy. The kingpin strategy was characterized by unparalleled collaboration between Chihuahua, México. Photo courtesy Ventura Pérez security forces from the US and México. President Peña Nieto has been very public about his intention to change this relationship. In this commentary, we explore the ways in which political strategies and media blitzes inform how the public experiences, remembers, and, at times, engages with violence through projects of hope.

Language of Organized Crime Violence is instructive; it informs us about our society. Bodies evidencing trauma become the parchment upon which the literal writing of violence codifies meaning and structure to the objective world they occupy. Politicians, activists and survivors explain and exploit violent events within and outside of México by reproducing this literal language of violence in written and oral forms. How someone died becomes infinitely more important than the fact that he is dead. Individuals lose their identity but continue to circulate through the language of violence in the media and politics. Similar to the shift in administrative approaches to organized crime, the media has made undeniable changes to its coverage of violence. Systemic forms of quiet violence (hunger, poverty, neglect, abuse) go unnoticed and ignored. A media blitz on education reform, immigration and the economy replaced the heavy media focus on organized crime. The current administration argues improving these aspects of the country will alleviate the impacts of organized crime. These strategies are arguably recycled approaches to counternarcotics and public relations from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to lessening dissidence and cultivating an appearance of success by diverting public attention from the war on drugs to equally significant concerns. A recent InSight Crime report argues a new reality for México will not be won with a public relations blitz but with a coherent national security strategy.

Violence of Silence The administration’s public relations efforts to downplay the continued violence are unsurprising. More surprising is that this strategy extends to national media sources. A report from the Media Agreement Observatory revealed the Mexican media decreased its coverage of organized crime since President Peña Nieto took office in December. The media coverage of organized crime was replaced with coverage of the Pact for México, universal teacher evaluations, and the federal budget. Words like murder, organized crime and narcotrafficking appeared 50% less in México City’s media. Tierra del Narco, a news source started in 2010 to document the drug war, recently reported on the undeniable “zone of informational silence” across northern México. A recent report by Agora Guerrero, a news source that documents organized crime in the state of Guerrero, on a simultaneous protest across the country for the protection and justice for news reporters declared, “The worst crime that can exist today, is to contribute to the Silence.” According to the Mexican National Human Rights Commission, since 2000, 84 journalists have been murdered in México. Regional news reporters struggle to cover the drug war and are frequently targets of organized crime while current http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/a-humanitarian-crisis/

1/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

Mexican political strategies tout silence as the solution to rising violence.

Banner thanking President Calderon on the Costera Miguel Alemán in Acapulco, Guerrero, México. Photo courtesy Ashley Sherry

In early April 2013, the Mexican government announced drug related murders dropped 17% compared with the same period a year earlier. The murder rates have not decreased. Harary Security Consulting International, a top private security and intelligence-gathering firm in México that serves corporate and wealthy clients, indicates murder rates during President Peña Nieto’s first four months in office exceeded the monthly murder tallies for ten of the past eleven months of the previous administration. Milenio, one of México’s largest news sources, reported there have been nearly 4,000 drug related murders since President Peña Nieto took office. La Jornada, a smaller leftist newspaper, estimated there were 2,800 murders and indicated executions were on the rise. Violence does not define México, and it should not be ignored. The national media and administration should discuss it publically as part of broader development plans along with education, immigration, and the economy.

Spillover Violence and Immigration Positive press on education and immigration are central to politicians’ focus from México and the US. This focus appears to circumvent discussions of organized crime and the highly publicized alleged spillover violence and resource “stealing” attributed to immigrants to the US. President Barack Obama delivered a speech to students at the Museum of Anthropology in México City in April 2013. A CNN report on President Obama’s speech noted students were far more interested in discussing the drug war. This is because violence in México is often seen as an episodic event tied to the universal assumption that the victim must be “dirty” and got what he had coming to him. A focus on physical violence ignores the complexity of structural systems, culture and history of the communities in which they are produced. Acts of performance violence perpetrated by drug cartels are often referenced or exploited by politicians, activists, and survivors. At times, it conveys a specific message or agenda at the expense of the victim. This is epitomized by the public testimony of Bill Stewart, Deputy Chief of Staff for the Florida Attorney General, regarding House Bill 287g Immigration Legislation on April 8, 2008. Stewart testified, “It is impossible to separate national security issues from illegal immigration, and one of the most important illegal immigration issues in Florida is the issue of human trafficking.” Stewart goes on tell a story of a group of girls trafficked in from México who were raped; his testimony emphasized one of the girls was beheaded. The beheading cited in this public testimony never happened. Stewart received a threat assessment report from the Florida Fusion Center (FFC), a post 9/11 intelligence agency, prior to giving his testimony. That report cited a story that was published by the Bradenton Herald on March 11, 2008 entitled, “Task force to fight human trafficking” in which the reporter provides the aforementioned story of the beheading. The FFC failed to notice that, on March 19, 2008, the Bradenton Herald printed a retraction, because its reporter made the story up. Dr. Pérez, one of the authors, confronted Stewart and he admitted the mistake, but his office made no public retraction of the testimony. The story continued to gain traction and received a new dose of validity in 2010 when it was referenced in Bunker et al.’s paper “Torture, Beheadings, and Narcocultos,” which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Small Wars and Insurgencies. Invented stories of cartel violence in México, like this one, circulate widely throughout the world. They instill fear, support negative stereotypes, and inform policy. Political strategies of silence and positive media blitzes are unsurprising when confronted with the public and, at times, false circulation of a language of violence. México’s security situation has not fundamentally changed, yet public engagement with the language of violence has. In critically discussing political strategies and the significance of cartel violence, we lay the foundation to explore and understand the social structures of violence and their intersections with projects of hope.

Responding to Violence with Hope Hope derives its meaning from engagement, possibility, and action. The subject of hope has been widely discussed in popular literature, theology, philosophy, education, the social sciences, nursing, and psychology. Hope has been theorized as something we do and can learn to do better; a way to build community and envision possibilities; the recognition of suffering and pursuit of “positive radical visions of tomorrow” (Wu 1972: 134); a part of collective action central to building community; a subjective attitude that cannot be studied empirically; and as something that emerges to transform despair into positive action. From our literary exploration of and personal experiences with hope, we argue the existence of violence is not a negation of hope and possibilities. A critical engagement with the violence that marks society opens up the possibility for the collective transformation of society. Figure Three: Bumper sticker on a vehicle in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México. Photo courtesy Ventura Pérez

What makes change possible is that positive change, like violence, can be studied and engaged with critically as individuals and groups respond from their unique spaces of struggle. Glittenberg (2007) argues positive social change, like violence, is patterned and transformable. Violence is rooted in and reinforced by societal structures and cultural beliefs that can be changed. In the face of increasing physical, cultural, and symbolic forms of violence, some communities, e.g., women’s organizations in Juárez and teachers unions in Guerrero, recognize the fluidity of violence and respond with hope. At their core, these protests and projects challenge dominant political strategies and are motivated by the belief that something can be other http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/a-humanitarian-crisis/

2/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

than what it is. Hope is an engagement with the past and present as well as a commitment to realizing something new. Those working to counter the violence of silence in the context of México’s humanitarian crisis challenge political strategies and media blitzes to generate a new vision for tomorrow. Ventura R Pérez ([email protected]) is assistant professor of biological anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose research focuses on interpersonal and institutional forms of violence and cultural representations of violence through inquiry of skeletal trauma. He currently researches performance violence in Ciudad Juárez and in the archaeological past in México. Ashley E Sherry ([email protected]) is an anthropology PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose interests include interpersonal and institutional forms of violence, with a focus on hope and public education. Currently she is researching the impacts of social movements driven by educators and community members in Guerrero, México.

Share this:

Facebook 16

Twitter

Google

LinkedIn

Email

This entry was posted in Featured Posts, In Focus, June and tagged Crisis. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

© 2013 American Anthropological Association • 2300 Clarendon Blvd., Suite 1301 • Arlington, VA • 22201 • TEL (703) 528-1902 • FAX (703) 528-3546

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/a-humanitarian-crisis/

3/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

CRISIS

Rape as National Crisis in India Pinky Hota

On December 16, 2012, a 23-year old woman boarded a bus to return home in New Delhi, India. It was late at night and she was with a male friend; in light of the infrequent public transportation available at that hour, the pair decided to board a private bus. On board, five men began to verbally harass her. When she and her friend protested, these men attacked them. He was beaten with a steel rod; she was gang raped and disemboweled as a result of the rod being repeatedly pushed inside of her. The attackers threw them off the bus and attempted to run over them. The two lay by the side of the road pleading for help while people passed them by. When police finally turned up at the scene, several hours were spent deciding under whose jurisdiction the case fell. So “sullied” was the young woman’s body that local police refused to touch her; it was, in fact, the young woman’s companion who placed her in the back of the ambulance. Amid growing protests and a scrutiny of the current government’s ability to guarantee safety for women in urban India Our Crisis, Ourselves: Hailing a National Public. and its failure to secure law and order, the Indian government airlifted her to Singapore for medical Photo courtesy Pinky Hota treatment. Thirteen days after she had boarded that late night bus, the young woman died in this hospital, far from home. As the issue gained national and international attention, it became clear that this young woman’s rape was a site where India had to confront itself as unmodern and deficient as well as answer to an international community that had, only months ago, admiringly and even enviously hailed its economic boom and technological advancement. Less than a week after this young woman’s death, I spotted a billboard on the busy Delhi- Gurgaon Highway that called on India to “wake up”—a call to the nation to rouse itself from a stupor to acknowledge the contours of rape-as-national crisis.

Gender Gender, obviously, was the starting point of the crisis. While Indian women have gained acceptance, even recognition, as workers in the nation’s neoliberal market economy, women fear for their safety in the urban centers where they provide labor and are trained to remain hyper vigilant about their own safety. Jyoti Singh Pandey’s vulnerability in the urban public sphere and the needless explanations issued about her male companion and their late night outing revealed the partial occupation of India’s public sphere by its women and the inevitable moralizing discourse that accompanies it. Moreover, it emphasized the extent to which women remain less than fully formed political citizens and are still identified as reservoirs of familial and even national honor. The young woman, later identified as Jyoti Singh Pandey, was never referred to by name in the media. Instead, she was variously referred to by a series of euphemistic monikers such as Nirbhaya (Fearless) or Amaanat (a “thing” to be kept secure or protected). Even as her father revealed her name in an effort to break the silence and social shame around rape in India, the state and Indian media outlets insisted that releasing her identity would have long-term consequences for the victim and her family, reinscribing stigma as well as invoking patronizing language to depict women as wards of either the state or their families. As much as this was a crisis for women, the event also presented a crisis of masculinity in which Indian men were told by their female colleagues, male peers and the media, both national and international, that their masculinity was, in fact, deficient. Publications such as the Times of India ran campaigns that emphatically accused male readers via statements such as “If you do not respect a woman, you are only half a man.” Few would deny that these conversations around masculinity were needed and in fact, ought to be constantly revisited. However, these critical discussions also provided a platform for international commentators to indict Indian culture as problematic and not yet fully modern. Few drew attention to the perils of making rape appear to be a solely Indian problem. Much in the same way that colonial powers had once identified brown women as needing to be saved from brown men, to paraphrase Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s famous formulation, the rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey seemed to alert international civil society to the continued need for human rights debates around the maltreatment of women in India and the limits to cultural frameworks over universal rights and protections.

Political Economy of Violence towards Women When rapes are reported in settings such as the US, they are cast within highly individualized narratives of exceptional circumstances or as products of circumscribed subcultures of hypermasculinity. Jyoti Singh Pandey’s rape, however, reflected the extent to which violence towards women in the Global South http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/rape-as-national-crisis-in-india/

1/2

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

almost always raises questions about the larger political economy of developing nations, where violence towards women quickly becomes entangled with debates about countries’ enactments of neoliberal success. The rapists were identified as poor migrants to New Delhi, alienated from the economic success of neoliberal India and contaminating Indian cities with their coarse, barbaric masculinity. Unsurprisingly, these discussions stopped short of laying out how the Indian state had created the urban-rural disparities in development and failed to address the needs of such migrants. Instead, they allowed city dwellers to displace the problem onto the so- called uncivilized rural masses. Seemingly disrupting the nation state’s widely promulgated narratives of progress, the incident then laid bare the struggle between “two Indias” in the nation’s tryst with neoliberal developmenta growing urban sector as a self-congratulatory recipient of the fruits of the economic boom and a marginalized rural populace that bears the brunt of such neoliberal development. Unable to sustain agrarian lifestyles, rural citizens turn to cities to partake of the new Indian dream, where not only do they remain poorly integrated into circuits of capital but are also cast as containers of disavowed savagery and violence that impede India’s realization of liberal modernity.

Politics and Protest Publics Urvashi Butalia, a prominent Indian feminist, emphasized the importance of the role of political protests soon after the incident, reiterating the ways in which political consciousness was being awakened and consolidated through protests that were making “people feel like they were a part of change”. These protests then birthed specific kinds of protest publics as anthropologists such as Francis Cody have suggested—political collectives that came to know themselves and their political agency through the consumption of mass-mediated publicity. In the highly fragmented, plural and stratified context of India, Indian feminists and political commentators agreed that it was indeed hopeful that these new protest publics seemed to cut across class, gender and caste profiles. These national protest publics also sought to make connections to larger supranational publics, such as in the case of the One Billion Rising campaign. These connections were crucial in reminding international civil society that violence against women is not just a South Asian problem, but one with patterns in common the world over. These protest publics also appeared to have the potential to speak back to democratic practice and legislative change through altered voting practices, sparking hope that for the first time in India, women’s issues could form an active part of the electoral vote. And it was these publics that exerted enough pressure that led the Indian government to create the Justice Verma Committee, which sought to eke out a list of legislative reforms, including widening definitions of rape and assault as well as changes in police and legal process that would improve the documentation and prosecution of sexual assaults. Yet, as much as these protest publics seemed pregnant with possibilities, a perceived crisis of political action soon became manifest. It was clear that these publics relied perhaps too heavily on the mediations of public affect through highly charged images, advertising and political oratory. Even as protests led people to experience unification around a political cause, the limits of such highly mediated forms of politics were revealed in the ebb and flow of political action. Activists such as Ruchira Gupta underscored the positive ripple effect that these protests had across other domains of women’s rights in which reforms were being sought, such as prostitution and sex trafficking. Yet Indian citizens, including some vociferous participants in protests, began to engage in political self-doubt, questioning the efficacy of such highly mediated modes of political action and prematurely diagnose themselves as politically impotent. Affect-laden protest then appeared to them as an untenable form of politics, one whose power was ephemeral and ultimately unable to secure trenchant political change. This incident of rape was not unique, though several puzzled over why it had come to invite such fervor, going as far as to suggest that Jyoti Singh Pandey was somehow perversely lucky to have become “immortal” in a context where so many cases of violence went unnoticed and unprotested. Merely four months later, in April 2013, a five year old was raped and succumbed to her injuries. Protests broke out, this time enfeebled and truncated. The Indian public spoke of these protests as “going nowhere” and bemoaned their “fatigue of feeling”, unable to experience the horror of this child’s death, much less engage in political protest. Jyoti Singh Pandey’s rape then became a moment at which India came to understand how much further it had to walk towards the ideal of liberal modernity, but also perhaps, it came to realize that it was too fatigued to make that journey. Pinky Hota is assistant professor of anthropology at Smith College. Her manuscript examines how the Indian state’s constitutional mandates for affirmative action and religious conversion laws open up hostilities between ethno-religious minority groups. She recently organized a Five College panel on violence against women and political change in South Asia.

Share this:

Facebook 50

Twitter 1

Google

LinkedIn 3

Email

This entry was posted in Featured Posts, In Focus, June and tagged Crisis. Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

© 2013 American Anthropological Association • 2300 Clarendon Blvd., Suite 1301 • Arlington, VA • 22201 • TEL (703) 528-1902 • FAX (703) 528-3546

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/rape-as-national-crisis-in-india/

2/2

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

CRISIS

Afghanistan is a Mess and Other Lies that You Have Been Told Noah Coburn

Manipulating Narratives of Crisis and International Intervention Pick up any newspaper over the past 12 months, and there are fairly good odds it will include an editorial about “the crisis in Afghanistan.” With US troops set to pull out by the end of 2014, many are busy writing the obituary for the international intervention in Afghanistan. Yet in many of the busy market streets in Kabul, the bustle of daily life continues unabated. Since I began doing research in Afghanistan in 2005, walls around the various embassies have grown higher, but life has not stopped in Afghanistan to the extent portrayed in the international media. In part this has to do with the way that the media attempts to frame the situation in Afghanistan (something written about extensively elsewhere), but this also comes from the way in which both international and Afghans, particularly the ruling elite, have developed a political system that benefits from the perception of crisis, meaning a wide array of actors work steadily to portray the situation as unstable, unsettled and dangerous.

Kabul potters. Photo courtesy Gregory Thielker

While this might sound like structural-functionalism turned on its head (ie, there is stability in instability and the constant state of crisis), what is more striking is the way the term crisis has been used to shape the various narratives and frames for understanding the current state of Afghan politics. To a large extent the industry of international intervention is driven by narratives of crisis: international security firms get contracts only when there is a certain amount of insecurity and development NGOs get funds based upon the assumption that Afghanistan is underdeveloped. It is useful for these groups that Afghanistan is “insecure” and “underdeveloped.” Interventions like the current international presence in Afghanistan are James Ferguson’s anti-politics machine to the extreme: the state of crisis justifies a range of actions from drone strikes by the US military to corrupt, ineffective local government officials. Yet with President Hamid Karzai set to leave office next year and the number of international troops and the amount of donor funding declining rapidly, these narratives about crisis are no longer just justifications for international policy; they have taken on a life of their own in shaping local Afghan politics.

Potters in Crisis The current state of crisis, for example, helps explain why Afghan potters have embraced certain pottery innovations and not others. Istalif, a beautiful picnic spot in the foothills of the Hindu Kush, is well-known for its distinctive blue pottery. The district has received a relatively high amount of international attention, both in the form of international visitors and NGOs working in the area. While a number NGOs that deal with crafts generally or ceramics in http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/afghanistan-is-a-mess-and-other-lies-that-you-have-been-told/

1/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

particular, have all, in some way worked to improve Istalifi pottery, most have reported frustration with their attempts despite the willingness of the potters to work with them.

Kabul pottery. Photo courtesy Gregory Thielker

Attempts by NGOs to convince potters to switch to lead-free glazes, use more efficient gas kilns and grind clay more finely have all had limited impact. Yet, at other moments the group demonstrates a remarkable ability to cater to the language and desires of these outsiders. (After one NGO suggested they imprint Made in Istalif on the bottom of pots, this practice was quickly taken up by a number of workshops.) Elders have also been more than willing to help NGOs set up training sessions, but at other moments balk at international proposals. A closer look suggests that the willingness of the potters to embrace certain techniques and programs but not others has little to do with their feelings about outsiders. In fact, these decisions make good economic sense. Istalifi potters sell to local merchants, Kabuli elite picnicking in the area and a trickle of NGO workers, diplomats and other members of the international community, which tends to rise and fall depending upon security. These foreigners, and to a lesser extent, richer Kabuli visitors make up a large proportion of the potters’ profits. As security in the country worsened starting in 2006, the number of foreigners coming to Istalif dropped, but the demand among an increasing number of military and civilians assigned to Afghanistan for pots and other mementos increased as well (one man who made imitation 19th century British rifles did very well at this time). Merchants with access to bazaars on military bases benefited the most, but the potters also found they could charge the few foreigners making it to Istalif more and more. Despite merchants being more reliable sources of consistent income, even more enticing is the money made off of foreigners purchasing pots. As the potters are aware, foreigners are not interested in purchasing pots because of their quality. They are interested in purchasing them because of the stories they tell. They demonstrate to those at home that the owner had traveled to a distant, exotic and dangerous local. Many pots, in fact come with wire attached so that they can be displayed immediately. This idea of marketing authenticity is not a new one, but the type of authenticity that is being marketed in Istalif relies on a certain level of crisis. If Afghanistan were suddenly to become safe and stable, these pots would become mundane. As it is, the rustic pots, with their glazes often crazed, with small chips, usually a melancholy blue, fit the somber mood of the country well. The idea of a fragile, primitive pot coming from the war-torn country appeals to internationals, as do highly valued war rugs woven with motifs celebrating the jihad against the Soviets. Istalifi potters have in this way adapted their economic practices to fit the demands of internationals to purchase souvenirs from the crisis.

Political Economy of Winning Hearts and Minds These narratives of crisis are even more important when greater amounts of political and economic capital are at stake. In the communities twenty miles to the east around Bagram Airbase, the international military, with limited knowledge of local political structures, relies on a series of contactors to manage local labor contracts and community relations. These contractors in turn rely on a small group of local elders and former commanders. The result is that, particularly early on, a very small group of local elite were able to collude on bidding for contracts on the base for supplying labor, performing construction projects and leasing land. These leaders also supervise local development projects that are a part of the counterinsurgency approach, aimed at “winning hearts and minds.” Instead of distributing these resources evenly, however, they tend to go to a small group of families closely attached to exclusive patronage networks. In the meantime, these community leaders have become so wealthy that few of them actually live in the community anymore, and have instead they have purchased property in Kabul and, in many instances, abroad. The result is that local communities increasingly resent both these distant leaders and the international groups who they see supporting them and are gradually more willing to help insurgence conduct small scale attacks in the area. Those on the airbase, observing this increase in attacks, have responded by pumping more funds into local projects dominated by this small group of elders, solidifying local patronage structures that exclude most community members. In turn, the local elders continue to reinforce the narrative of an area in crisis, threatened by the Taliban and in need to international funds. http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/afghanistan-is-a-mess-and-other-lies-that-you-have-been-told/

2/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

At higher political levels, Atta Mohammad Noor, governor of Balkh, has similarly taken advantage of perceptions of instability in the north to solidify his grip on this quasi-autonomous region. A former member of the Northern Alliance who fought against the Taliban, he was appointed by Karzai, but has developed his own patronage networks and is considered by most locals to have power independent from the national government. Particularly during the parliamentary elections of 2010, many local voters claimed that Atta encouraged local instability, in some cases, apparently facilitating Taliban attacks, despite his long opposition to the group. Concerned by these attacks the Election Commission backed by the United Nations shut down polling stations in Pashtun areas populated by Atta’s opponents. The result was that districts that support Atta were disproportionately represented, meaning that most of the current parliamentarians from Balkh are now firm Atta supporters. The result of the instability in the area is that the national government really has little ability to influence Atta’s political decisions. In the meantime, because local government structures have been poorly developed, international donors, have few options other than working directly through Atta’s office and his clients as long as the ‘crisis’ continues.

Politics, Anti-Politics and Withdrawal Anthropology has begun to develop a critique of the discourse of international intervention and the way in which the language of development helps create what James Ferguson has called an anti-politics machine, which expands the reach of the state, even while claiming a type of political atheism. In the case of Afghanistan, local groups are taking the language of international intervention and using it to further their own political and economic agendas. It may be argued that this type of approach looks like typical weapon of the weak, but this misses many of the ways in which local elites (who are only weak in comparison with international powers that fund them) are using intervention to expand their own power. Particularly, as the drawdown of funding and international troops continue, anthropology can help us be more aware of the ways in which narratives about crisis and misleading glosses can be manipulated. As 2014 approaches, the real crisis may be the ways in which the international intervention has helped the further disenfranchisement of many ordinary Afghans. Noah Coburn is a political anthropologist at Bennington College and has a PhD in anthropology from Boston University. He has conducted research in Afghanistan since 2005. His book Bazaar Politics (Stanford 2011) focuses politics in a community of potters and his study of elections in Afghanistan, Derailing Democracy, is forthcoming.

Share this:

Facebook 25

Twitter 1

Google

LinkedIn

Email

This entry was posted in Featured Posts, In Focus, June and tagged Crisis. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

© 2013 American Anthropological Association • 2300 Clarendon Blvd., Suite 1301 • Arlington, VA • 22201 • TEL (703) 528-1902 • FAX (703) 528-3546

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/afghanistan-is-a-mess-and-other-lies-that-you-have-been-told/

3/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

CRISIS

Toxic Talk Christianne V Stephens

Power of Discourse Analysis for Understanding the Impacts of Environmental Crises on Native American Communities Anatomy of an Environmental Crisis

Walpole Island First Nation or Bkejwanong, which means “where the waters divide” in the Ojibwe language, is located on the north shores of Lake St Clair. The community sits upon one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world and supports a rich mosaic of natural areas including some of the most biologically diverse areas in Canada. It is home to the Anishnaabe people (Potawatomi, Ojibwe and Odawa tribes). Image courtesy Clint Jacobs, Nin Da Waab Jig Walpole Island Heritage Centre

On Thursday August 14, 2003 cessation of power to the cooling system of Royal Polymers Industries in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada led to the accidental discharge of 300 pounds of vinyl chloride—a highly toxic and carcinogenic industrial chemical—into the St Clair River. Public fear turned into outrage when it was discovered that neither the Canadian government nor the general public were informed until five days after the chemical spill had occurred. One locality directly affected by the spill was Walpole Island First Nation (WIFN), an ecologically diverse Native American reserve community downstream from Royal Polymers and the petrochemical and refining complex known as Chemical Valley. Walpole Island’s reliance on the St Clair River as its primary source of drinking water made it especially vulnerable to the threat of chemical exposure. My presence in the community at the time of the spill allowed me to witness first-hand the fear, stress and social upheaval that arose from this environmental crisis. The chief aired her frustrations over the lack of communication from the region’s environmental health officer; a new mother expressed her fear that the mysterious skin rash that had suddenly appeared on her infant daughter’s body was the result of exposure to contaminated water; and an elder spoke of cultural genocide: “I guess they couldn’t kill us off in the Indian residential schools and the reserves they made for us so they’re trying to get rid of us by polluting our water, fish and wildlife. In my mind, it’s all the same thing,” she explained to me matter-of-factly.

I also became aware of a series of discourses disseminated by the popular media and the scientific community. The fears vocalized by concerned citizens were being labeled as chemophobia—a term that refers to an “irrational fear of chemicals” and which experts used to dismiss anxieties as uncritical, emotional and subjective responses arising from a general lack of scientific knowledge. This rhetoric was a stark example of the processes by which homogenized and reductionist meta-narratives of risk are funneled through scientific and bureaucratic structures to ascribe their own politically-informed packages of meanings on the perceptions and experiences of those occupying the lower echelons in systems of power (Briggs 2007, 2008). I found the term’s indiscriminate use particularly disconcerting. This compelled me to engage in a critical analysis of the terminology and conceptual frameworks that are used to describe public responses to environmental threats. At issue was whether a term like chemophobia was an accurate cross-cultural descriptor of individual and collective responses to environmental risks and crises. Was there a better way of talking about peoples’ perceptions of risk, one that was more sensitive to the lived experiences of those directly affected by such threats? Was there an alternative way of knowing that fostered a more nuanced, historicized and humanized understanding of the diverse political, social and cultural contexts within which these events unfold? The Royal Polymers spill was my entry into the study of risk communication and set the stage for close to a decade of intensive collaborative research on environmental health issues in the Walpole Island community. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my semiotic critique of chemophobia and cursory analysis of the risk narratives revolving around the water crisis of 2003 served as a useful discursive medium for exploring the striking differences between scientific and media contaminants discourses and the “little narratives” or local legitimacies (Lyotard 1979) that are generated within communities. It was becoming clear to me that those who wield the power to name also have the capacity to shape perceptions and by extension, influence human thoughts, behaviors and actions. However, this was more than a theoretical exercise for it allowed me to identify a unique genre of contaminants discourses specific to the Walpole Island community—a discourse that I’ve termed toxic talk (Stephens 2009). The narrative ethnography that eventually became my dissertation is a good example of the important role of discourse analysis as a methodological tool for critically examining the impacts of environmental crises on vulnerable, at-risk populations and its potential for refining the conventional interpretive frameworks and language(s) of risk employed by biomedicine, the social sciences, regulatory agencies and industries. http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/toxic-talk/

1/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

Deconstructing Chemophobia and Exploring Toxic Talk

Canada’s “Chemical Valley” is a large complex of refining and chemical companies located upstream from Walpole Island First Nation, just east of the St Clair River in southern Sarnia, Ontario. Photo courtesy P199 via Wikimedia

At its most basic level, the term chemophobia is narrow and exclusionary, and serves primarily to describe generic fears associated with human exposure to man-made chemicals. It offers a restrictive and limiting semiotic and interpretive framework for acknowledging and examining other equally destructive dangers to the environment. Walpole Island residents have observed and recorded significant changes to the health of their native plants and animals through several generations. Community members use specific criteria to gauge these changes, such as propagation rates, population numbers, physiological changes in plant and animal species, ecological biodiversity, and specific indicators such as the potency and effectiveness of medicinal plants. Water, air and sediment pollution are seen as contributing to environmental degradation and ecological change at Walpole Island.

However, residents also identify inappropriate land use practices, the erosion of cultural values and loss of traditional teachings that sustain and reinforce the physical and spiritual connection between human beings and the natural world as equally detrimental to the lands and waters of the Walpole Island traditional territory. Similarly, chemophobia permits a very limited range of substances (namely, industrial chemicals) that can be viewed or labelled as toxic or dangerous to one’s health and well-being. This contrasts directly with the views expressed by members of the community who classify alcohol and drugs as environmental toxins. Both industrial contaminants and recreational controlled substances are perceived as foreign intrusions into Native society that are part and parcel of the colonial process. Risk perception research is exclusively anthropocentric in nature. Chemophobia is applied to describing the perceptions, behaviors and experiences of human beings, to the exclusion of all other beings. As such, the term reflects the Western world’s Linnean propensity to pigeon-hole and treat as separate and unrelated human health and the health of other species. The anthropocentric, ethnocentric individualistic biases that are embedded in Western language and concepts are diametrically opposed to that of the Anishinaabeg who recognize the interconnectedness of all living things. This belief is eloquently expressed by the Ojibwe phrase kina enwemgig meaning “all my relations” which is commonly used by Anishinaabe when referring to their familial connection to both plant and animal life. One of the biggest problems with the term chemophobia is that it fails to situate environmental crises within their dynamic historical, political and biosocial contexts, which precludes the politicization and serious examination of important issues in the areas of environmental protection, the regulation of risk, sustainable development, and environmental justice. In contrast to the thin description or superficial details of anthropogenic changes that are the focus of scientific inquiry, Walpole Island residents use “thick description” (Geertz 1973) to build “thick interpretations” of social and cultural phenomena, including those that affect the environment. Hence, environmental issues are not viewed as evolving within a vacuum or in isolation of wider historical and sociopolitical processes. On the contrary, these environmental threats and crisis events are framed and interpreted as concrete examples of structural violence. Like the reserve system, Indian Act legislation, land appropriation, Indian residential schooling and outlawing of Aboriginal languages, cultures and spiritual practices, the problem of pollution or “chemical genocide” (as it is referred to by one WIFN resident) is understood by residents as yet another manifestation of colonization and imperialism. The community toxic talk also revealed the presence of syndemic suffering (Mendenhall 2012) in the community (Stephens and Herring, forthcoming). Just like a death from a thousand cuts, the cumulative personal and collective traumas amassed from decades of abuse, marginalization, disenfranchisement, disempowerment and despair shape the ways that residents experience, embody and respond to environmental risks and crisis events. For Walpole Island elders, a chemical spill amplifies stress responses because the event acts as mnemonic triggers that resurrect painful recollections of past social injustices and historical abuses.

Benefit of Looking Upstream Theorizing a crisis tends not to be at the top of one’s to-do list, especially if you are the hapless victim in peril and facing imminent danger. McKinlay (1979) and Goodman and Leatherman (1998) present a parable that powerfully illustrates the practical benefits that can be gained from engaging in this type of reflection. It’s the story of a physician who saves a series of drowning men, one after the other from a nearby river. Although his deeds are honorable, the physician slowly comes to the sad realization that his efforts are futile. He has been so busy rescuing victims that he’s had no time to look upstream to see what (or who) is causing the men to fall into the river in the first place. As a medical anthropologist, I appreciate the simple wisdom conveyed by this story—that is, the importance of “looking upstream” at the ultimate rather than the proximate causes of poor health and social suffering. Adopting a discourse-centred approach allowed me to look upstream in a very different way—one that does not focus exclusively on chemicals or pollution as the only sources of Walpole Island’s concerns, but which views environmental degradation as a symptom of a much larger problem; one that has evolved from long-term historical and political processes and social injustices. As such, looking upstream means engaging in a more thorough analysis of structural violence in all of its forms, and analyzing these phenomena and the clues that they hold to the ultimate causes that have both literally and figuratively become toxic to the lives of Walpole Island residents. Christianne V Stephens is a sessional assistant professor in the department of anthropology at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her areas of expertise include: indigenous health, environmental health, risk perception and risk communication. She may be reached at [email protected].

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/toxic-talk/

2/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

Christianne V Stephens

Share this:

Facebook 58

Twitter 4

Google

LinkedIn

Email

This entry was posted in Featured Posts, In Focus, June and tagged Crisis. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

© 2013 American Anthropological Association • 2300 Clarendon Blvd., Suite 1301 • Arlington, VA • 22201 • TEL (703) 528-1902 • FAX (703) 528-3546

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/toxic-talk/

3/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

CRISIS

The Order of Crisis Olga Demetriou

Crisis as a Political Tool in Cyprus Contextualizing the Politics of Crisis Even though the Cyprus financial crisis exploded onto global newsfeeds during the last two weeks of March, problems in the Cypriot economy had been the fodder of daily local media discussions since the summer of 2011. Viewed alongside problems recognized as systemic to Cypriot public and financial governance, these discussions suggest that the crisis should have been expected. Indeed, most social science studies of the global financial crisis emerging at the moment seek to explain such systemic factors that should have been recognized prior to 2008. If the term crisis is taken as a misnomer, what does the employment of the concept enable in the sphere of governance and public action? What are the means through which crisis becomes a political tool? The discussions of crisis in Cyprus had in large part been sparked by the 2011 accidental explosion of a large munitions’ pile, confiscated from a Russian vessel travelling from Iran to Syria in 2009 and temporarily placed in a naval base next to the main Paralimni Collage. Photo electricity power plant while negotiations between the Cypriot government, the UN, the US and other global players were courtesy Berkaysnklf on-going. The explosion claimed the lives of 13 soldiers and fire-fighters and destroyed the greater part of the electricity Wikimedia Commons facility. With the cost of the explosion estimated at around 2bn (prices throughout in Euro), the economy (of a magnitude around 20bn in GDP) appeared to have been knocked off the Stability and Growth Pact criteria (set by the EU to ensure financial cohesion). In the days that followed the explosion, crowds of protesters converged on the presidential palace and called on the communist president to resign on the double count of responsibility for the explosion and pursuing bad economic policies. The explosion had heralded a crisis discourse more than it did crisis per se by introducing a geopolitical vocabulary of victimization to allocate responsibility to some actors (government, global powers), while allowing others, such as the military, to abdicate it. In financial terms, the debt to GDP ratio had in fact been hovering on the 60% threshold set by the EU in the previous years too (rising from 8bn in 2008 to 13bn in 2011). In February 2012, the decision of Greece’s lenders to write-off half of its debt, left banks in Cyprus, exposed to about 22bn of Greek private debt, at the brink of default. The government recapitalized one of these banks (Laiki, the second largest bank on the island) in May 2012 in an effort to keep afloat the main driver of the economy. The size of the Cypriot banking sector, estimated at five to eight times that of the island’s GDP, has been approached as a problem by the EU and IMF chiefly because of its reliance in the last decade on Russian offshore investors and a property bubble. In December 2011, the government had secured an emergency 2.5bn loan from Russia, in order to avoid applying for assistance to the European Stability Mechanism, which in its previous forms had bailed out Greece and Portugal. By June 2012, however, the application proved unavoidable. In short, the financial breakdown resulted as much from accidents (Greek “hair-cut,” bursting of the property bubble, explosion) as it was prefigured in recent Cypriot financial history (debt ratio balancing, the property bubble, banking malpractice). This double source of the crisis (in exogenous and endemic factors) is recognized in the preamble of the document that has since become a staple part of political discussion in Cyprus. The Memorandum of Understanding on Specific Economic Policy Conditionality (“the Memorandum,” mnimónio in Greek) was initially drafted in November 2012 and eventually adopted in April 2013. It has since become a term of identification in daily parlance: “Memorandumean” (mninomiakó) refers to austerity laws and other measures adopted to fulfil Cyprus’ obligations to its lenders (EU, European Central Bank and IMF, collectively known as the Troika), as well as to the political stance of being pro-Memorandum (in contradistinction to those who are anti-mnimoniakí and advocate a variety of alternatives). In such discussions, crisis is unequivocally spoken of in terms of shock: break is emphasized over continuity, surprise over expectation, aberration over order. The significance of this discourse is that it is increasingly framing political conduct within the parameters of emergency, whereby the deterioration of social welfare and rights is considered inevitable and thus naturalized, while ‘the economic condition’ is used to explain away policies and decisions, whose financial benefit is not always obvious. http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/the-order-of-crisis/

1/2

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

The discourse of crisis, in short, is being used as a political tool to highlight some aspects of the problem (especially those relating to an outside, variously defined), while obscuring others. This consolidates a sense of injustice against a national self that appears as unified and victimized. The subject of the crisis may thus be pluralized, as shown below, but the moral evaluation of victimhood remains rooted in nationalist premises. In this context, class difference is effaced, racial difference is vilified, and gender difference is de-prioritized.

Subjects of the Crisis One of the major challenges of the declining economy is widely recognized as being the spiralling unemployment, which officially stood at 14% in March 2013, 3.5 percentage points higher than the previous year and double in size from the 7% figure for 2011. Lowering salaries to allow more people to work at the same cost to companies is now held to be an intuitive expectation in the management of the crisis. The lowering of living standards is presented as inevitable. This then enables corrective policies to be approached from the bottom up rather than top down. Another aspect of this approach is the emphasis on ensuring that jobs go to Cypriots, backed by government incentive schemes giving preference to Cypriots over EU citizen applicants, who should otherwise have enjoyed equal labour rights, but who are instead the target of public stigmatization under the label kinotikí ([European] community workers). Below them, third country nationals from the global south, many of whom having worked irregularly and often under exploitative conditions in previous years are now facing voluntary return or deportation. As the terms of the debate are racialized, the gains to be had from such universal lowering of labour costs become muffled. Under this prism, the crisis in Cyprus, perhaps more than elsewhere, seems to hinge on a disjuncture between the primary targets of intervention policy (‘the rich’, represented in the figure of bank share-holders) and its ultimate trickle-down victims (who are racialized, classed, and, considering the multiple effects of welfare cuts, gendered). In its final form, the memorandum provides for a severe cut (in the 40-60% range) in deposits above a 100,000 Euro threshold held at the remaining major failing bank in Cyprus, after Laiki was effectively closed down. Some of these depositors were reportedly returning retirees from the diaspora and adherents to a Protestant ethic of work and saving; others were companies, institutions or corporations (including the Orthodox Church, which is known to control vast assets, and provident and pension funds, for which part exemptions were being planned). All of them were projected as the inadvertent victims of a policy devised by the Troika to target Russian depositors. Conspicuously absent in this register are the higher classes (Cypriot, Russian and otherwise) with accounts abroad, who had shifted their capital out of the country upon reading the signs of the failing economy well in time. Despite much public and morally charged condemnation of such actions, and the set-up of investigations to determine wrong-doing through proof of access to privileged information, concrete policies aiming at the repatriation of capital are yet to be discussed. In the meantime, the repressive apparatus is instead targeting protesters, who are calling for enforced contributions from the biggest capital holders and for cutting back on expenses other than welfare (including, for example, on defence). Anti-austerity demonstrations, Cypriots were informed in February by the government spokesman shortly before he took office, would henceforth be seen as an obstruction to important governmental work and should not take place. So far, from the thousands of jobs being shed in the public sector, the most worrying to the government seem to be those in the police, where civil servants from elsewhere have been enlisted to desk duties to make up for posts vacated due to early retirement (spurred by fear of shrinkage to pension-linked benefits). In May, increased patrols to combat a rise in burglaries were cited as the context in which a robbery at a bakery was thwarted but the suspected thief left with a police bullet through the forehead. While large demonstrations of the magnitude seen in Madrid and Athens are yet to take place in Nicosia, a brutal police raid on the local Occupy movement a year ago (April 2012) remains a reminder of the capability for violence against fringe political movements that might gain strength. It is also a reminder of how far reconciliation discourse vis-à-vis the Cyprus conflict, has shrank since then. The upper and middle classes then, along with migrants, political activists, and radicalized individuals and groups from across the political and economic spectrum (including bond-holders’ groups, bank employees, humanitarian organisations, and a strengthened extreme right-wing movement), are all subjects of the crisis in different ways. The extraordinariness of the crisis serves to blanket disparate goals, conditions, and aims under a sense of victimization, which, however, is likely in the aftermath to cloud the distinction between those who stand to gain and those who are placed in social positions from which they can only lose. Olga Demetriou is a social anthropologist based at the Cyprus Centre of the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). Her research focuses on marginality and subjectivity in Greece and Cyprus. She has recently published Capricious Borders: Minority, Population and Counter-Conduct between Greece and Turkey with Berghahn.

Share this:

Facebook

Twitter 1

Google

LinkedIn

Email

This entry was posted in Featured Posts, In Focus, June and tagged Crisis. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

© 2013 American Anthropological Association • 2300 Clarendon Blvd., Suite 1301 • Arlington, VA • 22201 • TEL (703) 528-1902 • FAX (703) 528-3546

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/the-order-of-crisis/

2/2

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

CRISIS

“A Multiply Wounded Country” Caitlin Fouratt

The Legacies of Crisis in Nicaraguan Migration Over the course of more than 17 months of fieldwork with Nicaraguan migrants in Costa Rica and their families in Nicaragua, Nicaraguans consistently told me that they or their loved ones had migrated because of the economic situation in their country. But when I probed deeper, it became clear that they were not talking about the recent global recession or even about the Nicaraguan economic crisis of the 1990s. Rather, they traced the history of crises as far back as the 1972 earthquake in Managua, the civil war in the 1970s to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship, the Contra War in the 1980s, and Hurricane Mitch in 1998. In short, the recent history of Nicaragua has been An afternoon shower in Achuapa. Photo courtesy Caitlin plagued by crisis after crisis. Indeed, in a 2002 article in Envio Magazine, Martha Cabrera, a Fouratt Nicaraguan psychologist, called Nicaragua “a multiply wounded country.” Such wounds include decades of dictatorship, war, economic embargo, economic restructuring and natural disasters that have left Nicaragua one of the poorest countries in the region. The people of Nicaragua have experienced these wounds as widespread unemployment, skyrocketing levels of crime, violence and domestic abuse. What does it mean when crisis and instability become such a part of everyday life? How does such insecurity alter family strategies and configurations? Nicaragua’s chronic state of crisis has contributed to both large-scale emigration and the formation of transnational families. Moreover, this history complicates distinctions between political and economic migration, between forced and voluntary migration, and between the acute, emergency nature of crisis or disaster and generalized, chronic conditions of poverty that serve as catalysts for migration. My fieldwork with Nicaraguan transnational families living between and across Nicaragua and Costa Rica has made clear that migration, kinship configurations, and the circulation of care in these families can only be understood in this context of prolonged crisis. Migration to Costa Rica, in particular, represents an important response to this perpetual state of crisis. Nicaraguan migrants work actively against and through instances of crisis as they attempt to stabilize tenuous ties to home and create possibilities for families to thrive on both sides of the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border.

Hurricane Mitch: Symptoms of a Chronic Crisis Hurricane Mitch, which devastated Nicaragua just as the country began to recover from decades of war, represents a key moment of crisis that continues to haunt Nicaraguan migrants. In November 1998, Mitch swept through Central America, causing millions of dollars of damage to Nicaraguan agricultural crops, telecommunications, and road infrastructure, and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. In a matter of days, the little economic stabilization that Nicaragua had gained in the 1990s was reversed. In summer 2009, during preliminary fieldwork in Achuapa, a small, rural migrant community in northwestern Nicaragua, my host, Juanita, described days of rain of biblical proportions: a river with cows, dogs, pigs and chickens bobbing along as people desperately pulled out yams, yucca, potatoes—anything that had not been swept away. Juanita says that if it had rained one more day, Achuapa, which is situated Looking out from Linda Vista. Photo courtesy between two rivers, would have been lost. By the time the rains subsided, the river was less than 200 Caitlin Fouratt meters from the central plaza. Achuapans dried whatever was left of household goods on the roofs of houses that were still intact. Those working on farms in nearby hills gathered on one summit to escape the floods, hoping that the saturated hillsides would not slide into the river. Nearly everyone lost all or most of their harvest, had damage to their house, and lost any food stores and livestock they had. The devastation left by Mitch was both ecological—soils washed away, harvests lost—and economic—the income from those lost harvests was needed to feed http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/a-multiply-wounded-country/

1/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

children, invest in farms, and ensure family survival. Without enough time to replant and without seeds, other inputs and labor needed to do so, those who had borrowed in order to plant were stuck with debt, and those who depended on that harvest to pay their expenses for the next year went into debt to feed their families. Many Achuapans left for Costa Rica for the first time between 1999 and 2001 because of debts tied to Mitch. Many are still working off debt cycles that date back as far as Mitch. But the devastation left by Mitch is just one more symptom of the chronic state of crisis that has plagued Nicaragua in recent history. The complicated history of crisis in Nicaragua points to how Nicaraguan migration is not easily categorized into distinct economic or political streams, but rather reflects the confluence of multiple, intersecting political, economic, social, environmental, and personal factors. For example, the devastation caused by the 1972 Managua earthquake was deepened by the mismanagement of international relief funds by the Somoza regime. This response to the earthquake galvanized support for the Sandinistas and propelled the country into a civil war that ended with the overthrow of the Somoza regime. Two decades later, under the administration of Violeta Chamorro, economic crisis in the wake of structural adjustment programs was intensified by the legacies of the 1980s Contra War, especially by the US led economic embargo. Mitch was just one more event piled on decades of dictatorship, war, declining government care for the community —in the form of structural adjustment, the declining value of the Cordoba, declining value of agricultural exports—and rising unemployment.

Migration as a Response to Chronic Crisis In this context, hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans have sought economic relief and the lure of new possibilities by migrating to Costa Rica and other countries. According to a 2005 national household survey, more than 12% of Nicaragua’s population lives abroad, and at least 20% of Nicaraguan households receive remittances. Although much public discourse in Nicaragua figures migration as caused new problems, such as family breakdown and abandonment, the Nicaraguan migrants I worked with, as well as their loved ones, see it differently. They claim that migration is a response to the crises that frame their lives and that families have had to develop strategies for dealing with public crises such as overburdened healthcare systems and unemployment, as well as natural disasters like Mitch. Recent scholarship on neoliberal reforms in Latin America has emphasized the privatization of care as Latin American governments cut costs and social programs, intensifying pressures and burdens on families to provide Family members of migrants in Esteli, Nicaragua. informal practices of care for one another in the absence of state policies and programs. In Nicaragua, where Photo courtesy Christopher Mayorga state institutions have long been unable to effectively provide comprehensive services to a large proportion of the population, the state has long relied on the family to carry the burden of support. Thus, both migrant men and women envision their migration—and the financial and emotional support they provide from afar—as part of their responsibilities to families back home. Not only unemployment and poverty send Nicaraguans abroad to places like Costa Rica, but the pressures to care for family members in this context. Countering a discourse of abandonment with one of care and responsibility shifts the analytical focus from the irresponsibility of individual Nicaraguan migrants to the history of crisis and the failure of economic reforms, the legacy of political instability, and the pervasiveness of economic precariousness in the lives of most Nicaraguans.

Conclusion The layering of recurrent natural disaster on economic crisis on political instability makes it difficult to pinpoint a single event as the crisis in Nicaragua. Instead, the chronic state of crisis points to the ways in which multiple crises intersect to generate a pervasive sense of precariousness in people’s everyday lives. If migration represents one response to this chronic state of crisis, it also generates further uncertainties. Transnational attempts to care for loved ones in Nicaragua are conditioned by the social and economic contingencies of everyday life in Costa Rica, where migrants face repressive immigration policies and xenophobia. Their concentration in unstable, low-paying jobs compounds their vulnerability. And the poor living conditions they face—often paying high rents in squatter settlements around the San Jose metropolitan area—make life in Costa Rica just as precarious as in Nicaragua. Meeting with family members of migrants in Esteli, Nicaragua. Photo courtesy Christopher Mayorga

Further, the burdens of transnational family-life are shouldered unevenly. Both abroad and in Nicaragua, the provision of care has relied on the unpaid labor of women, as mothers and wives. Women take primary responsibility for caring for the children and elderly left behind by migrants, and migrant women remit higher percentages of their salaries than migrant men. Women envision their remittance sending as an extension of their mothering. As one migrant mother and activist in San Jose explained to me, “the expression of a mother’s love is to wait in line for hours to take out and send this little bit of money. To endure the sun, the rain, the lines.” Thus, transnational family formation is not just another in the list of crises that Nicaragua has faced. Instead, practices of transnational family-making are embedded in patterns of impoverishment and inequality, state and subject formation, as well as intimacy, affect, and migration. Nicaraguans whose families stretch into Costa Rica face a number of tensions between various forms of security and insecurity in both countries. They must maneuver between Nicaragua’s policies for economic restructuring and family members’ trying to re-make their lives in Costa Rica. And they must develop family strategies to ensure security for loved ones amidst legal regimes in Costa Rica that enforce the insecurity of undocumented migrants. Nicaraguan migrants leave to create a better life for their loved ones—especially children—but these very attempts to care generate new forms of uncertainty and instability for both them and family members back home. http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/a-multiply-wounded-country/

2/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

Caitlin Fouratt is a doctoral candidate in the department of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation research on Nicaraguan transnational families living between Nicaragua and Costa Rica was funded by a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and an IIE Graduate Fellowship for International Study.

View of migrant community in Rio Azul, Costa Rica. Photo courtesy Caitlin Fouratt

Share this:

Facebook 109

Twitter 5

Google

LinkedIn

Email

This entry was posted in Featured Posts, In Focus, June and tagged Crisis. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

© 2013 American Anthropological Association • 2300 Clarendon Blvd., Suite 1301 • Arlington, VA • 22201 • TEL (703) 528-1902 • FAX (703) 528-3546

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/a-multiply-wounded-country/

3/3

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

CRISIS

Pastoralism’s Crisis in East Africa Luke Glowacki

Anthropology has a long history in East Africa. Well-known works by Dyson-Hudson and EvansPritchard have introduced generations of undergraduate students to the richness of pastoralist cultures and the complexity of generation and age-sets. Popular accounts of similar groups have riveted the public imagination and featured prominently in well-known films and novels such as Out of Africa and West with the Night. But the 21st century reality is decidedly less cinematic for those pastoralists living along a huge swath of land on either side of the Kenyan, Ethiopian, Ugandan and South Sudanese borders. Pastoralist life here today is perhaps best characterized by immense transitions and challenges that threaten its future. Foreign investment in infrastructure, markets, and large-scale agricultural Lower Valley of the Omo River, UNESCO World Heritage projects are driving rapid, pronounced change. Dams threaten to end seasonal floods on which Site, and inhabitants of Southern Ethiopia. Photo courtesy pastoralists depend for small-scale planting. Rangeland is being consumed by agricultural projects AnnaMaria Donnoli, Wikicommons. totaling hundreds of thousands of hectares, leaving local populations with few alternatives for subsistence. The commercialization of livestock trade is escalating violent intergroup conflict, resulting in myriad downstream effects such as habitat loss and the erosion of cultural traditions. Anthropology is situated at the nexus of these issues. Much of our knowledge about external pressures and their effects on local populations are the result of detailed ethnographic and cultural studies. We are in a unique position: our research can tell us how these changes may affect local communities. Will they be deleterious, such as by reducing their self-sufficiency or weakening traditional structures? Or beneficial, by creating much-needed sources of income, or providing health and educational opportunities? The challenge anthropologists face is how to best convey the practical findings of our research to a broader community. These changes began in the 1970s when automatic weapons flooded the region. Communities initially responded to the abundance of AK-47s with local arms races, contributing to a dramatic increase in violent conflict. Anthropologists David Turton and Serge Tornay estimate that when automatic weapons first appeared in the Lower Omo Valley of Ethiopia, between 5 and 10% of the Mursi and Nyangatom peoples were killed in raids. Contemporary research among the Turkana of northern Kenya show that even today up to 60% of male deaths during reproductively active years are caused by violent conflict. These are staggering numbers, but beyond immediate deaths there are numerous unforeseen downstream effects that can be equally harmful. Careful scholarship by Terrance McCabe on livestock subsistence among Turkana pastoralists showed that many decisions such as herd division and migration patterns are affected by the possibility of conflict. This frequently results in large underused border zones anywhere from 15–50 km deep that are an all-too-common feature throughout the region. These unused buffer areas often contain valuable rangeland. This results in decreased availability of nutritional resources and may have pronounced consequences for mothers and children including reduced immune functioning, increased parasite load, and malnutrition. Scholarship by University of Kansas anthropologist Sandra Gray and colleagues showed that in northwest Uganda, Karimojong children had reduced anthropometric indices (height and weight) when compared to the same population two decades prior. Startlingly they found that by age five Karimojong children had measurements comparable to other groups. This equality is likely not due to differential growth patterns but rather results from an increased death rate among smaller children. Among the Karimojong nearly a quarter of children die before age five, and 10% of deaths above age five are due directly to famine exacerbated by conflict. Changes brought by the introduction of the automatic rifle have also affected basic social structures. Michael Bollig’s long-term fieldwork among the Pokot shows that firearms have created a situation that encourages cattle raiding. Individuals feel compelled to obtain firearms because their neighbors may have them. However, rifles are frequently extremely expensive, costing up to 60 cattle for a single weapon. This expense reduces the livestock available for a family to use for bridewealth. As a result young men are faced with a decision to delay marriage or to engage in cattle-raiding as a means to overcome their lack of cattle for bridewealth. http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/pastoralisms-crisis-in-east-africa/

1/2

3/13/2014

Anthropology News

Through a series of thoughtful publications, Dutch anthropologist Jon Abbink has documented the slow fragmentation of traditional institutions among the Suri of southwest Ethiopia. These changes typify the challenges faced by many East African pastoralist societies. The glut of guns has increased the internal tensions present in any society, most significantly between elders who may want to restrain the impulses of youth striving for notoriety and status through violent conflict. This has resulted in the deterioration of social traditions in a number of domains. Exchange relations through the establishment of bond friendships with individuals from other groups has all but ceased due to conflict. Conflict resolution mechanisms are also eroding. A few years ago, traditional compensation for killing members of differing descent-groups required the payment of livestock. Now blood revenge is more frequently sought, leading to escalating feuds. The power of traditional ritual leaders is waning along with many other elements of ritual life. This is partly because of intra-group feuds and the rising independence of youth armed with guns, leading some anthropologists to argue that the future of pastoralism is in danger. Against this backdrop a new series of challenges is emerging due to globalizing forces. Significant investment in infrastructure is providing much needed access to economic engagement as well as educational and health opportunities. This change, however, also threatens to bring potentially destabilizing forces. The increased prevalence of markets creates conditions for the commercialization of livestock theft. Stolen cattle are not only used for bridewealth but sold to traders and quickly shipped to urban centers giving rise to what some scholars call “Traiders.” The investment in infrastructure is also facilitating rapid commercial development of pastoralist lands. In the South Omo Valley of Ethiopia over 300,000 hectares are slated for agricultural development, much of it on precious grazing lands in Omo National Park. It is not clear how pastoralists such as the Nyangatom, Mursi, and Bodi who rely on these areas will meet their basic subsistence needs. Their displacement threatens to escalate violent intergroup conflict as they search out new pasture likely to be already inhabited. Perhaps to prevent this the government is instituting widespread resettlement or “villagization,” which will eliminate their livelihoods by denying them access to the mobility cattle production requires and forcing them to live in permanent state-supported settlements. While local governments and their donor agencies claim this will improve pastoralist conditions, a significant amount of anthropological work such as that done by Elliot Fratkin and colleagues has shown that settlement of nomadic populations usually leads to negative health outcomes. This is especially acute for children, likely due to decreased diet breadth through the loss of access to cattle products such as milk. Less saliently, local traditions and values are also under external assault, further marginalizing traditional communities. Discussion of “harmful traditional practices” is rife among state and NGO actors. While NGOs such as Save the Children may increase access to health care and education and work to end harmful practices, in some instances their outreach advances a state agenda that threatens to erode important cultural traditions. These can include seemingly innocuous traditions such as ritual scarification, marriage rites, and simple ornamentation including traditional beadwork. North of the Omo Valley, the Gibe 3 Dam nears completion, threatening to end the seasonal floods of the Omo River and the food production cycles on which a quarter of a million agro-pastoralists depend. At the Omo’s mouth, the Turkana warily wonder if this presages the desiccation of Lake Turkana on whose waters they and the Dassanech depend for their livelihoods. Anthropologists such as Richard Leakey have been vocal about the impending crisis, but yet foreign-funded construction continues. Where my own research occurs in southwest Ethiopia, agricultural projects are planned on important reserve grasslands. This will not only reduce the survivability of pastoralists here but also block traditional migration routes, effectively ending transhumance in this region. From the perspective of policy makers in Addis Ababa who may be under-informed about pastoralist land use, the entire area may appear uninhabited or underused when in fact certain areas are crucial. Nearby there are large unused border areas and buffer zones providing alternative locations for agricultural development. Pastoralism in much of East Africa is in crisis. Development projects plunge ahead while basic subsistence needs are barely met and violent conflict is common. Policy makers justify plans by stating that the consequences of changes are unknown or will only bring benefits. However, decades of anthropological studies give us a good idea of what the future holds and can answer crucial questions. How will local populations respond to changes? Will the loss of grazing land for agricultural projects create famine, or can development target non-crucial areas and thus coexist with pastoralist populations? Will resettlement increase access to health care and nutritional resources, or result in overcrowded villages where people have no means to provide for themselves? How can economic opportunities be increased without introducing destabilizing or harmful pressures? Anthropologists are uniquely situated to anticipate how modernization and development may affect populations. But often there is a disconnect between academic discourse and policy decisions. There are no easy fixes, but if anthropologists are to have a role in informing these decisions, we should seek out forums in which our work can be applied and shared among a broader community. Luke Glowacki is a PhD candidate in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. His research combines the quantitative methods of evolutionary anthropology with ethnographic and cultural studies. His fieldwork is primarily with nomadic pastoralists in the South Omo Valley of Ethiopia focusing on conflict, cooperation and demographic transitions.

Share this:

Facebook 48

Twitter 12

Google

LinkedIn

Email

This entry was posted in Featured Posts, In Focus, June and tagged Crisis. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

© 2013 American Anthropological Association • 2300 Clarendon Blvd., Suite 1301 • Arlington, VA • 22201 • TEL (703) 528-1902 • FAX (703) 528-3546

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/11/pastoralisms-crisis-in-east-africa/

2/2