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APLA in Anthropology News
Volume 50, Issue 5 (May 2009) (download PDF from AnthroSource, requires login)
Elizabeth Krause and Mona Bhan, Contributing Editors
Writing as Politics
By Elizabeth L Krause (U Massachusetts-Amherst)
What does writing have to do with politics?
Some years ago, when I first became active in
APLA, then-president John Bowen stirred up
a vision to put the political back in the association.
One way to be political—to enact
one's concern with power—is through strategic
writing.
Many of us are concerned with doing social
science that matters. A good deal of the followthrough
involves breaking
free from our disciplinary
shackles so as to write
effectively for a broader
public. Disciplines cultivate
certain lingo that
outsiders cannot easily
grasp and result in specialized
writing sapped of its
soul. Says writing guru Peter Elbow, effective
writing entails writing with power.
This sounds easy, but my sense is that the
task of writing for a non-specialist audience is
quite difficult for most anthropologists. Our
training has disciplined us to problematize
and critique. We are invested in seeing the
nuances in political, legal and social situations.
We are trained to use our toolkit of highfalutin
concepts and terms. We scorn at simple analyses.
We shudder at the thought of "dumbing
down" our work. And why shouldn't we? After
all, we trade in intellectual capital. Boiling
down our ideas can feel like aiming for the
lowest common denominator.
This taken-for-granted opposition between
simple and smart is ultimately self-defeating.
When we write in convoluted styles, we
construct disciplinary walls around our ideas
and render ourselves irrelevant to political
movements and discussions unfolding around
us. Writing for a wider public does not have to
mean simplifying one's ideas. What is needed
is clarity of purpose. A 750-word column
cannot tackle the same issues as a 7,500-word
academic essay. The scope must be narrowed,
the purpose refined, the writing streamlined.
Simple prose does not have to be simplistic.
When done well, it can be eloquent and
straightforward.
Anthropologists are trained in interpretation.
Much of what we do is translate experiences
and struggles from one context to
another. We have cultivated and refined our
sense of empathy. Those same skills of empathetic
understanding can be drawn upon when
writing for broader, unspecialized audiences.
Writing with clarity can heighten the dignity
and humanity of our work. It can also put us
on the radar of politics and policymakers.
National Public Radio host Terry Gross once
asked poet laureate Grace Paley how political
activism entered her poems and stories. Paley
offered this insight: "When you write, what
you do is you illuminate what's hidden, and
that's a political act."
Truth be told, some writing illuminates what
is hidden better than other writing. Some
writing resonates more than other writing. A
key element of powerful writing is voice. And
yet as social scientists, each and every one
of us has been disciplined. At one or probably
numerous points along our long educational
and academic journeys, we became
puppets and ventriloquists, by force or through
assimilation.
To rise to the rank of professional anthropologist
we have had to foster an ear for the
theoretical canon. When we do our fieldwork,
most of us must cultivate an ear for the vernacular
in whatever setting we find ourselves. Our
fieldnotes reflect those voices. But all too often
something happens in the process of translation
and conversion. When we come home
and write our dissertations, our journal articles
and our books, the voices of theory end up
trumping the voices of the vernacular.
Beyond the tired critique of inaccessibility, I
would like to suggest that our writing strategies
undermine the trustworthiness of our voice.
Our rapid-fire sideward glances stir up confusion.
Only the similarly trained can possibly
keep up with us. For many, our professional
ventriloquism raises suspicion. It distorts the
resonance of our voice. Those readers whom
we might persuade sense gaps in our sincerity.
Our audiences shrink. Our public profile
withers. Recovering voice and nurturing it
in our writing, ethnographic or otherwise, is
not merely a necessary literary technique but,
more important, a methodological strategy for
doing meaningful social science and making
it matter.
Elizabeth Krause thanks the APLA membership
for the pleasure of having co-edited the column for
the past three years and, with this column, passes
the baton to Noelle Mole, who will work with
continuing co-editor Mona Bhan.
Volume 50, Issue 4 (April 2009) (download PDF from AnthroSource, requires login)
Elizabeth Krause and Mona Bhan, Contributing Editors
"Birth Pangs" in Palestine and Iraq
By Julie Peteet (U Louisville)
My first ethnographic fieldwork was in Shatila
refugee camp in Beirut, site of the infamous 1982
massacre of Palestinians. As I write this column,
Gaza is emerging from a brutal Israeli assault that
resulted in the deaths of 1,300 people, injured
around 5,000 and caused massive infrastructural
damage. In the West Bank, where I work now,
Israel continues a 60-year-long pattern of dispossessing
the Palestinians of their land and confining
them in small, bounded enclaves. As anthropologists
in pursuit of greater understanding, we
endeavor to embed the local in larger contexts,
spatial and temporal. This is certainly an instance
in which the concepts of region and history come
sharply into focus. People in the region discern
parallels between violent socio-spatial strategies in
Palestine and Iraq. I argue that the Israeli assault on
Gaza was an attempt to remove Gaza and Hamas
from any future Israeli-Palestinian negotiations,
further fragment a future Palestinian entity, and
make Gaza a humanitarian problem rather than
a political one. The fragmentation, enclavization
and isolation of Palestinians are compelling a turn
to primordial social groups such as the clan and
tribe, problematic categories at best.
Events in Gaza and the West Bank fit into a
regional pattern of fragmentation, conflict, demographic
upheavals and the crushing of resistance
to US-Israeli domination. In the past decade,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon were
sites of intense conflict. With the 2006 Israeli
assault on Lebanon, then US Secretary of State
Rice stated baldly: "these are the birth pangs of the
new Middle East." This vision entailed a violent
re-mapping and miniaturizing of space, with
serious consequences for demography, mobility
and human rights. A new colonial cartography
seemed to be taking shape in which dismemberment
and staggering demographic upheavals
figured prominently. To deliver the new region,
a body of knowledge has to be drawn upon. Is
a re-Orientalization process discernable? Raphael
Patai's The Arab Mind is in a new printing and is
read by US military personnel. Philip Salzman's
new book casts the region as essentially tribal,
which correlates well with US practices of arming
and funding "Sunni tribes," thus reifying a once
rather fluid social category.
Research on the Israeli practice of closure has
made dramatically clear the impulse to re-territorialize
space, extend Israeli sovereignty, and
render the Palestinians politically impotent and
spatially incarcerated. Closure includes the erection
of a wall, land confiscation, checkpoints
and a byzantine system of permits governing
mobility, all of which are re-landscaping Palestine
and confining its population to small, geographically
dispersed enclaves. In Israel, there is a degree
of consensus that unilateral separation from the
Palestinians is vital for maintaining Jewish security
and demographic supremacy. Indeed, separation
has replaced "peace" as a goal in much public
discourse, and closure is its physical manifestation.
Closure's goal is to remove the land from the
Palestinians and reduce their numbers—to make
Palestinian places into empty spaces that can then
be, through Jewish settlement and the extension
of sovereignty, re-populated and re-landscaped as
exclusively Jewish places.
Significant areas of the West Bank are being
incorporated into Israel by an eight-meter high
concrete wall that snakes deep into Palestinian
territory, drawing a unilateral border that includes
blocks of Jewish settlements on the Israeli side,
prevents a territorially contiguous Palestinian
state, and separates Palestinian villages from their
agricultural lands and from each other. In Israel-
Palestine, space, mobility, juridical status and
human rights are allocated along ethnic/national/
sectarian lines. Closure crafts spaces where a
particular form of power is wielded and a vision
of the ethnic, sectarian and national composition
of space is enacted.
A regional perspective brings into focus the
similarities of spatial practices engaged in by
the Israelis and those of US forces in Iraq,
particularly Baghdad. Brutal campaigns of
sectarian violence following the US occupation
have imposed deadly new boundaries across
Baghdad. Checkpoints control movement in
Baghdad and concrete walls carve out sectarian
enclaves, which, along with sectarian cleansings,
are transforming once mixed neighborhoods
into sectarian compartments. The occupation
opened Iraq's once subterranean social
fault lines; sectarian violence propelled millions
of people to seek refuge abroad or in other parts
of Iraq.
US policy toward the region has been consistent
for the past 60 years: unfettered access to cheap
oil, unconditional support for Israel, support for
repressive Arab regimes and the violent crushing
of resistance. In pursuit of this policy, fragmentation
of the region and the break-up of states
along ethnic-sectarian lines, conforming to an
Orientalist imagery of the region as a mosaic
of "peoples and cultures" and "tribes," may be
materializing through invasions and prolonged
occupations.
Volume 50, Issue 3 (March 2009) (download PDF from Anthrosource, requires login)
Elizabeth Krause and Mona Bhan, Contributing Editors
To reflect our commitment to fostering a critical
anthropology of law and politics, this month's
column features the winner of the 2008 APLA
Student Paper Prize, Karine Vanthuyne of
Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les
enjeux sociaux at l'École des hautes études en
sciences sociales. The full paper will appear in
a forthcoming issue of PoLAR: The Political and
Legal Anthropology Review.
The Pragmatics of Ethnicity in a Globally Racialized World
By Karine Vanthuyne (EHESS)
The first time I met Tomás, this 36-year-old
survivor of one of the 415 massacres the
Guatemalan Army committed between 1981
and 1983 shared the story of his regular trips
to Cancún, a Mexican tourist town where
he travels to do construction work on hotel
building sites. To get there, he explained, Tomás
did not ride in the luxury buses "for gringos" that
I traveled in every three months, in order to get
my Guatemalan tourist visa renewed; instead,
he traveled on those "for indígenas" because, he
explained, tickets on the latter buses never cost
more than 270 pesos, thanks to the absence of
air-conditioning and toilets.
Tomás hastened to explain, however, that
it is not the physical discomfort of traveling
up to 30 hours in these conditions that is the
most difficult aspect of the journey; far worse
is the fear of being discovered by the Mexican
authorities as an illegal migrant during one of
the increasingly frequent identity checks en
route. So, to avoid being arrested, Tomás not
only memorized the minutiae of the forfeited
Mexican birth certificate he had bought to
facilitate his travels, he also studied the "ways
and customs of the Chiapan peasants," along
with their "particular dialect" and an ensemble
of gestures and expression "typically Southern
Mexican" that he takes care to adopt once he
crosses the border into Mexico.
Since the end of Guatemala's internal armed
conflict (1960–96), an increasing number of
human rights non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) have joined the Mayan movement
in its efforts to heal the wounds of
Conquest, and the more recent "acts of genocide,"
through the "Mayan re-ethnicization"
of Guatemala indigenous people. Historically,
Indios/Indígenas have been characterized
as "traditional," "anti-modern," and "backward,"
while Criollos (Spaniards born on the
American continent), and later on Ladinos
(Guatemala's meztizos), have been defined as
"Western," "modern" and "civilized." To challenge
this racial ideology, the Mayan movement
has sought to convert these differences
into sources of pride, connotative of
the rights of a people.
As other anthropologists' and my
own research demonstrates, Mayan
activists have encountered a lot of resistance
from the very indigenous peasants they seek to
"desindigenizar." During my seven months of
fieldwork in Guaisná, municipio of San Mateo
Ixtatán, department of Huehuetenango, I did
notice moments of pride in "being indigenous,"
and of identification as "being Maya." In these
moments, people like Tomás consciously appreciated
and valorized those qualities that were
once the object of Ladino and Criollo scorn,
even speaking with pride of their ancestral
customs. However, because they live in a social
universe that continues to be, according to
them, arranged according to a socio-racial hierarchy,
the multiculturalist ideology of equality
between the Criollos, Ladinos and Indígenas
that the Mayan movement is promoting is
fundamentally undermined in their day-today
experience of (1) the severe socioeconomic
inequalities that continue to mainly
affect Guatemala's indigenous people and (2)
the sustained racial prejudice encountered by
Indígenas.
One area where the respective identity
discourses of inhabitants of Guaisná and
Mayan activists' align is in their shared vision
of a flexible identity as being the key to their
survival. In opposition to some Ladino intellectuals,
who have long argued that the Maya
have not survived the Conquest and are now
extinct, Mayan intellectuals have put forward
a counter-history. This counter-history stresses
Guatemalan indigenous peoples' historical
capacity to adapt themselves to the Spanish-
Catholic dominant order "on the surface"
(through their "ladinoization" or, nowadays,
through their "chiapanization") while
remaining Maya in "essence."
What my conversations with Tomás point
to, however, is that such flexibility has always
been socio-racially determined. While this
strategy was made necessary in the past by
the need of Tomás' ancestors to be heard by
municipal authorities, today, such a flexibility
is made necessary by a socioeconomic
conjuncture that practically forces Guatemalan
peasants to take the road for el Norte in
order to survive. And en route to Mexico,
the United-States or Canada, the "choice"
to be identified as Mateano or Chipaneco is
not theirs: the success of their "incarnation"
of another ethno-national identity is rather
marked by the extremely arbitrary nature of
police interventions, which can change the
destiny of those "borrowing" another identity
in an instant. This situation in turn exposes
Guatemalan indigenous migrants to more and
greater dangers, since they are likely to take
any and all risks in order to reach places they
perceive as their only lifeboat.
Volume 50, Issue 2 (February 2009) (download PDF from Anthrosource, requires login)
Elizabeth Krause and Mona Bhan, Contributing Editors
Teaching the Political in a Time of "Hope," "Change" and "Country First"
By William R Schumann (Arkansas Tech U)
Current political events, no doubt, occasionally
enter into discussions in anthropology
classrooms, even if only to add a little context
to course readings and
themes. Given the significance
the US elections
held last fall, however, I
decided to fully integrate
a semester-long analysis of
the presidential campaigns
into my survey course in
political anthropology. It
was a perfect moment to rethink the boundaries
between teaching culture and teaching
politics. Not only did a myriad of cultural
issues shape the election process (eg, race,
gender, discrimination and a defining "real"
America), but so too were questions of culture
integral to policy debates ranging from immigration
to reproductive rights to foreign policy.
The following is my account and assessment
of a teaching experiment intended to bring
ethnographic research into conversation with
US politics.
At the start of the fall 2008
semester, I asked my students to
develop term papers that analyzed
candidates' policies through
discourse analysis and cross-cultural research.
Writing on topics as varied as education, religion
in politics, and environmental/energy/
security policy, I encouraged my students to
identify the cultural meanings and associations
inherent to presidential campaign rhetoric.
The primary objective was not to prove
or disprove what candidates said, I explained,
but to observe how politicians utilize cultural
knowledge to promote "logical" national interests,
including the rights and obligations of
membership in a US political community. I
first focused students' attention on critiquing
how political speech defines the boundaries
of inclusion and exclusion in reference to
discourses of citizenship, national identity,
race, gender and class. By utilizing web-based
media and speech transcripts in the classroom,
for example, I brought to my students' attention
how candidates used indexical shifts (eg,
"we" versus "they" versus "that one") and
historical events (eg, Senator Clinton situating
her campaign in the context of the Civil
Rights movement at the Democratic National
Convention) to forward their claims to represent
the public interest.
The second goal was to bring the elections
into conversation with cross-cultural readings
in political anthropology. Part of this
comparison was done through writing assignments,
but more importantly it was done
through almost daily classroom discussions. A
particularly productive example comes from a
classroom analysis of Senator John McCain's
"Country First" rhetoric in reference to classic
and contemporary writings on Nuer identity
politics. Though acknowledging key differences
between these cases, my students ably
drew parallels between the essentialization of
Nuer ethnicity under the circumstance of war
in the Sudan and McCain's reification of militarist
American archetypes in his pursuit of the
presidency. To paraphrase one student's analysis:
both strictly defined political inclusion
and demanded particular beliefs and actions as
a consequence of membership.
Later, I administered an anonymous questionnaire
to my students (six women and five men,
including two minority students) to get a sense
of how the course shaped their understanding
of the presidential campaign. Encouragingly,
a majority reported that analyzing politics
through anthropology led them to follow US
politics "a lot" more than before and foreign/
international politics "a little bit" more. More
informative were the written responses, which
were sometimes humorous (eg, "the debates
were similar to an Inuit song duel but instead
of slinging actual blubber it was metaphorical
mud") and sometimes more pointed. In
general, several students wrote that analyzing
campaign discourse through the lens of culture
revealed to them the social and economic
entanglements inherent to US politics.
One of the things I learned from this process
is that we must give equal care and preparation
to teaching about extracurricular events
as we do ethnographic materials if we are to
adequately educate our students about how
state power is culturally mediated. Another
important lesson I took from this teaching
experiment is that bringing anthropology and
politics into conversation encourages a critical
citizenship in students: by the semester's midpoint,
for instance, my students were actively
introducing and analyzing election news in
the classroom in reaction to the course readings.
Even if politics does not feature as prominently
in my future anthropology classes, my
experience suggests that doing at least some of
this work helps to drive home to students our
discipline's relevance in contemporary policy
issues. Indirectly, this just may add to anthropology's
commitment to contributing to more
just and equitable societies.
Volume 50, Issue 1 (January 2009) (download PDF from Anthrosource, requires login)
Elizabeth Krause and Mona Bhan, Contributing Editors
The Promise of Higher Education
By Boone Shear (U Massachusetts-Amherst)
In June 2008, a couple hundred politicos, educators
and foundation and business representatives
from across the United States
gathered in Kalamazoo,
MI for PromiseNet.2008,
a conference intended
to exchange information
and ideas about the
growing trend of localities
providing scholarships to
local students to encourage
them to stay in-state for post-secondary education
and to discourage "brain drain." As the
conference revealed, the emancipatory potential
of these initiatives is compromised by discourses
of economic growth that mobilize public efforts
toward the goal of assisting private capital.
Just in the past few years, a dozen or so communities
have made plans to implement programs
that provide college tuition for local high school
graduates. The surge in community-driven scholarship
initiatives is spurred in part by Kalamazoo's
own plan, the Kalamazoo Promise, which Vin
Lyon-Callo and I have studied for the past five
years as part of a larger research project investigating
social and economic restructuring in
Kalamazoo. Created in 2005 through the largess
of eight anonymous donors, the program pays
college tuition for Kalamazoo Public School graduates
provided they stay in-state. For Kalamazoo
residents who have in recent years suffered thousands
of lost jobs, increasing poverty and homelessness,
racism and racialized inequalities, and
population loss, the "Promise" is a much-welcome
counterweight of optimism and possibility. It's
not surprising that it is inspiring similar initiatives
in other struggling communities.
What is interesting, however, is that "promisetype"
programs are developing within a context
in which education is imagined primarily as
an economic development strategy essential to
competing successfully in the global economy. For
example, during a session at the PromiseNet.2008
conference, presenters from the Brookings
Institution discussed a developing policy paper that
advocates federal support for community scholarship
initiatives. In the Q&A, one man suggested
that if the federal government wanted to improve
access to higher education, it should just increase
funding for Pell Grants. A brief, awkward silence
followed before the presenters countered that this
type of funding at the federal level wouldn't help
with community economic development.
Likewise, for city officials in Kalamazoo, excitement
over the program is not so much the
potential opportunity for marginalized and lowincome
groups—33% of Kalamazooans live in
poverty, a disproportionate number of whom
are non-white—but how the "Promise" might
help to attract and retain private investment
and corporate patronage. The thinking is that
community-based scholarships provide amenities
to individuals and corporations who might
wish to locate in the area while producing highly
educated workers who are coveted by corporations
in the new "knowledge-economy."
We can see a similar dynamic at the state
level. In 2004 Michigan's Governor Granholm
created the Commission on Higher Education and
Economic Growth, which proposed an ambitious,
comprehensive education plan. The plan looks
to improve public schools and increase access to
higher education, and even calls for universal postsecondary
education. These laudable goals are
folded into a comprehensive education plan that
calls for creating a culture of entrepreneurialism,
developing more public-private partnerships and
producing educated workers that can, once again,
attract and retain corporations. In other words, the
goal is to create an educational system that is fully
submerged within and responsive to the desires of
global capital, a project that would build upon and
coordinate processes of university corporatization
that have been underway for several decades.
Much of the renewed emphasis on access to
higher education is wedded to a belief that neoliberal
capitalism is both natural and inevitable.
Thus, the commonsensical role for communities,
cities and states is to provide resources for
private capital and to produce citizen subjects
that will enable localities to better "compete"
(against each other) in the global economy. In
this context, policies and practices that might
provide alternatives to neoliberal growth can be
more easily scuttled. Indeed, it's interesting to note
that four years before the implementation of the
Kalamazoo Promise a modest living wage proposal
was defeated by a coalition of local elites—some
of the same business leaders and politicians who
now revere the "promise"—who argued that a
living wage policy would drive away businesses.
If new local and state-level programs do
improve access to education for individuals,
particularly those from marginalized groups,
they seemingly warrant support. At the same
time, however, it is essential that we pay attention
to the ways in which education policies and
practices are materially and discursiv
Please send ideas for future columns to the contributing
editors, Noelle Mole (nmole@princeton.edu) and Mona Bhan (monabhan@depauw.edu).
Copyright: American Anthropological Association
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