Call for papers: Special issue of Behemoth on Epidemic Orders

In the past few years, epidemic events, both actual and virtual, have made a spectacular comeback. Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases such as avian and swine flu have generated great anxiety the world over, resulting in a pervasive sense of vulnerability, insecurity, and uncertainty. A powerful spirit of urgency, based on a genuine concern for human health and well-being, overdetermined by a variety of scientific, political, and economic interests, engendered a real flurry of action. In the epic battle against germs, the biopolitical state mobilized material and symbolic resources at an unprecedented scale.

In the shadow of the emerging infectious disease threat, significant shifts in public health, medical care, and scientific research have occurred. The aim of this special issue of Behemoth is to offer an initial set of diagnostic accounts. What are the domains in which fundamental shifts have occurred over the past few years? Who are the actors involved and what are the underlying logics animating these shifts in public health, medical care, and scientific research? The key aim of this issue is to draw analytic attention to recent reconfigurations and to identify the kind of epidemic orders that are taking shape today at the heart of the biopolitical state.

Please send abstracts for this special issue of Behemoth to the editor, Carlo Caduff (carlocaduff@access.uzh.ch) and to Kathrin Franke (behemoth@rz.uni-leipzig.de).

Deadline for abstracts: 30 January 2010.

Carlo Caduff is in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Zurich.

Behemoth is a peer-reviewed journal published by the Akademie Verlag, Berlin

Accountability lost

by Barbara Miller

A category of local conflict in Peru is called conflictos mineros, mining conflicts. The existence of this specific term reflects the frequency of such conflicts in Peru following neoliberal economic reforms in the early 1990s. Fabiana Li, now a Newton International Fellow based at the University of Manchester, conducted research for her doctoral dissertation in anthropology at the University of California at Davis on mining accountability and conflicts in Cajamarca, Peru. In an article in PoLAR, she shows how the EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) documents and its approval process skew the outcome in favor of the mining companies.

Public mechanisms of evaluation and record-keeping are supposed to hold corporations accountable to local people. Li describes and analyzes the proceedings of a public workshop and a public hearing about the expansion of the country’s largest gold mine. The EIA is intended to serve as an instrument through which risks are made visible to the public. The risks that are shared with the public, however, are those that engineers can manage with mitigation plans. Furthermore, the EIA entrusts companies to carry out background studies on the landscape and the “social component,” to establish the “baseline” characteristics of the site, and to conduct monitoring as the project progresses.

Such company-sponsored studies, not surprisingly, provide a carefully constructed partial picture, erasing or framing out problematic issues. In spite of its claims to public accountability and transparency, the EIA works in non-transparent ways to serve the interests of the mining companies and the neo-liberal state.

Popular participation is emphasized as part of the process. Company representatives listen to the people who appear at the meetings. They take notes for hours on end. A critique of such participation is that it is in fact disempowering because it provides the appearance of public approval. As Li notes, contesting the approval of an EIA is difficult, and only one mining project has ever been halted at the EIA stage.

Nonetheless, many people in Cajamarca and elsewhere in Peru are pursuing creative forms of activism including seeking other scientific opinions to produce “counter-information.” The playing field in terms of scientific expertise, however, is extremely uneven. EIAs, including baseline studies and environmental monitoring, “increasingly rely on the language and tools of large-scale, capital-intensive science.” The need for scientific counter-arguments places a heavy financial burden on NGOs and campesino groups.

The EIA documents and so-called “popular participation” transform “participants” into unwitting or unwilling collaborators who had their chance to speak up during the EIA process. The companies are protecting their interests, using legalized, scientific, and performative means. But even such encircling power doesn’t mean there will never be another Bougainville.

Photo, “Yanacocha Gold Mine”, from Flickr, Creative Commons.

Anthro in the news 12/14/09

• Anthropologists to help the US military in war?
Two cultural anthropologists who have been critics of the Human Terrain System since its beginning hold firm to their conviction that anthropologists should not participate in war efforts. Furthermore, Hugh Gusterson, professor of anthropology at George Mason University, and David Price, professor of anthropology at St. Martin’s University, are unconvinced that HTS works. Gusterson comments: “I wish I could say I’ve seen something that made me feel better [about HTS], but I haven’t.” Price, in noting that it is impossible for anyone to objectively measure the merit of HTS, says “I want to see some external results here and they’re not doing it. It’s a boondoggle.” The article presenting their views mentions that social scientists working in the HTS provide anecdotal support for its success. In one case, the social scientists “spent nearly a week” talking with urban residents in preparation for US withdrawal from the area. Compared to the soldiers who typically have only very short conversations with the “locals,” the HTS social scientists spent 30 minutes to an hour speaking with an individual.

• Akwesasne Mohawk women’s health
SUNY Albany’s Center for the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities is working with tribal Health Services on a study that will monitor Akwesasne women’s reproductive health and the possible effects of PCBs and lead. Center director and biological anthropologist Lawrence Schell is directing the project under funding from the NIH. The study will monitor approximately 180 women between 20 and 35 years old for four years. The tribe is concerned that elevated levels of PCBs and lead in their environment may be affecting women’s reproductive health. This study will shed light on the issue. Mia Gallo, co-investigator and biological anthropologist, commented that “The study is very important to the community.”

• Microsoft’s Ethnographer
Danah Boyd is making waves with her pioneering research on social networking, especially how US teenagers engage with technology to enter and use the digital world: “The social world around them today has mediated technologies, thus in order to learn about the social world they’re learning about the mediated technologies. And they’re leveraging that to work out the shit that kids have always worked out: peer sociality, status, their first crush.” She has found that control–and who has it– is all-important. In social networking, control is related to attention–and who gets it. All of which connects to issues she has been researching for several years: the class and race divides that exist between users of MySpace and Facebook.

Here’s how she introduces herself, lowercasing her name, on her blog, apophenia:
“My name is danah boyd and I’m a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. I received my PhD from the School of Information at UC-Berkeley. I live in Boston, MA. Buzzwords in my world include: public/private, identity, context, youth culture, social network sites, social media.”

• Stress revealed in ancient hair
Stress has apparently been around a long time. A new study reports on the detection of the stress hormone cortisol in the hair of ancient Peruvians who lived between 550 and 1532 CE. Emily Webb, the lead author of the study, is a PhD candidate in Archaeological Science at the University of Western Ontario. The researchers selected hair samples from ten individuals from five different archaeological sites in Peru and analyzed them in segments to determine cortisol levels. Many of the individuals showed high stress levels right before death. A majority, however, experienced multiple levels of stress throughout the final years of their life, indicating that stress was prevalent in ancient Peruvians’ everyday lives.

Upcoming anthro student conference at University of Maryland-College Park

The Practicing Anthropologist Student Association at the University of Maryland, College Park is excited to present an upcoming conference!

“Anthroplus: Collaborative Endeavors and Emerging Trends” will be held Saturday, March 06, 2010 at the Adele H. Stamp Student Union at the University of Maryland-College Park.

Anthroplus is a conference by graduate students for students in the field of anthropology and kin disciplines. Submissions of paper and poster abstracts about original research, ideas and projects are now welcome, through January 15, 2010. Preference will be given to graduate students, but all are welcome to submit! Please limit abstracts to 250 words and include a title, three keywords and your email address.

This event will be open to the public.

Must read: The Maintenance of Life by Frances Norwood

by Barbara Miller

Rumors about end-of-life policies in the US health care reform debate of 2009 loomed large, enflaming talk about “death panels” that would “pull the plug on grandma.”Anyone who seeks to be informed about alternatives to the current US system (or non-system) for end-of-life care should read Frances Norwood’s book, The Maintenance of Life: Preventing Social Death through Euthanasia Talk and End-of-Life Care–Lessons from the Netherlands.

Dr. Norwood has a PhD from the joint medical anthropology program at the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco. For her dissertation, she chose an unusual and challenging topic: the day to day experience of dying and death. She decided to carry out fieldwork in The Netherlands because it has the longest legal practice of euthanasia and assisted suicide and is known for its end-of-life policy. She studied Dutch and then spent 15 months in and around Amsterdam accompanying huisartsen (physicians of the home) on their visits to terminally ill people. She interviewed patients, family members, physicians, home care employees, advocates, and researchers. The core of her research is intensive observation and discussions with 10 huisartsen and 25 of their end-of-life patients and their families.

In The Maintenance of Life, Norwood provides poignant narratives of home visits, including those that resulted in the voluntary death of the patient. She laces the narratives together with a convincing analysis of how “euthanasia talk” is a critical component of end-of-life care in The Netherlands.

What is euthanasia talk? According to Norwood, it is a “discourse,” or culturally shaped way of discussing one’s preferred death. Euthanasia itself, while an option in The Netherlands, is rarely resorted to. But euthanasia talk is widespread and has five steps. It begins with an initial request by a patient with the huisarts. Of Dr. Norwood’s 25 participants who were facing the end of life, 14 had made the initial verbal request. No doctor, however, would grant the request immediately. It must be repeated over time, and family members must be involved in the discussion and agree to the choice. All of this makes for an orchestrated pause in the discussions. The second step requires a written statement. A third step involves setting a date for a second opinion. In the fourth step, the patient repeats the request for a euthanasia date and their reason. The fifth step is a euthanasia death. All along the way, euthanasia discourse is happening.

In The Netherlands, the percentage of euthanasia deaths has been around 2 percent of all deaths since 1990; the percentage of assisted suicides is even lower, around .1 percent. In 2005, fewer than 1 in 10 people who initiated requests died by euthanasia or assisted suicide. Of those who made concrete requests, one in three did so.

Euthanasia policy in The Netherlands, far from pulling the plug on grandma, gives grandma some sense of agency as she faces death, according to Norwood. It helps reduce, to some degree, the pain of “social death” in which a dying person is no longer considered by family members and others to be the whole person they were before becoming terminally ill. Euthanasia discourse thus serves as a kind of therapeutic narrative which helps to retain a person’s social self, identity, and sense of orderliness. Orderliness and control are, according to Norwood, key features of Dutch culture.

At the end of her book, Norwood offers insights for US health end-of-life policies. She advises that policies and practices that work in The Netherlands are not easily transferrable to the United States for many reasons, both structural and cultural. The US does not have universal health care and a tradition of home-visiting physicians. The emphasis in the US on individualism means that patients, families, and physicians do not typically work together as a collective. The medicalization of death in the US does not allow sufficient attention to non-medical and cost-effective options that can improve the end of life: home care, nursing and personal care, respite for family members, and coordinated case management.

While humane end-of-life options in the US as a whole seem far from those available in The Netherlands, Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act of 1997, which allows Physician Assisted Suicide, is a positive step forward. Clearly, there is a need for a much more comprehensive look at end-of-life options than is provided for through the initiative called National Healthcare Decisions Day (NHDD) — one day a year! And what about provisions in the health care reform package for Medicare to cover the cost of conversations with a physician about end of life choices. A recent request for Medicare coverage for a conversation with a physician about end-of-life options once every five years (!) has met with outraged opposition from Republicans.

Read Fannie Norwood’s book. It’s important, well-written, and will give you much to think about. I hope more cultural anthropologists take up the challenge to study the end of life, social death, and non-medical therapies.

Dr. Frances Norwood spoke about her research on euthanasia in The Netherlands as part of the Culture in Global Affairs series at the Elliott School of International Affairs, October 30, 2009.

Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual book event December 13

Come join members of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists Steering Committee as they discuss their new book The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual: Or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society next Sunday at the Shirlington Library, with a signing to follow at Busboys and Poets Cafe down the street. Please help spread the word. The event is free and open to all.

The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual: Or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society
with Hugh Gusterson, Andrew Bickford, and David Vine

Sunday, December 13, 3:00 p.m.
Shirlington Library
4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington, VA 22206
(703) 228-6545

Book signing and conversation to follow at Busboys and Poets–Shirlington
4251 South Campbell Ave
Arlington, VA 22206
(703) 379-9757

At a moment when the U.S. military decided it needed cultural expertise as much as smart bombs to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual offered a blueprint for mobilizing anthropologists for war. The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual critiques that strategy and offers a blueprint for resistance. Written by the founders of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, the Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual explores the ethical and intellectual conflicts of the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Team program; argues that there are flaws in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual (ranging from plagiarism to a misunderstanding of anthropology); probes the increasing militarization of academic knowledge since World War II; suggests strategies for resisting the deformation of anthropological knowledge; and proposes alternative visions for U.S. foreign policy. This is compulsory reading for anyone concerned that the human sciences are losing their way in an age of empire. Book discussion will take place at the Shirlington Library followed by a signing at Busboys and Poets.

Anthro in the news 12/7/09

• Bolivian anthropologist quoted on indigenous politics

In an article about the popularity of Evo Morales in Bolivia, the New York Times points to evidence of growing rivalries and dissatisfaction with him from other indigenous political leaders. Riccardo Calla, an anthropologist and the minister of indigenous affairs in a previous administration, comments that indigenous politicians span an ideological spectrum and are more varied than presented in the US media. Interestingly: the article later quotes an economist, Gonzalo Chávez, who says that even the IMF is happy with the Bolivian economy. Calla is identified as an “anthropologist.” Chávez is identified as a “Harvard-educated economist.” Obviously Calla earned his PhD somewhere. But apparently not from Harvard.

• Report on anthropology and the Human Terrain System unveiled at the AAA meetings

Several media sources mentioned the release of a report on the Human Terrain System at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia. The report was prepared by a panel of anthropologists who were charged by the AAA in 2007 to review the HTS. The report is strongly critical of anthropological involvement in HTS on the grounds that anthropological ethics cannot be maintained in a situation of war “where coercion and offensive tactics are always potentially present.” An article in the Chronicle for Higher Education provides extensive commentary from Robert Albro, cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of international communication at American University, who led the 11-person committee. Albro notes that anthropologists might be able to productively cooperate with the military in other ways, but the human-terrain program is probably best kept at arm’s-length.

• Anthropology in HTS an “abomination”

In an article in the political newsletter counterpunch, cultural anthropologist David Price sends a strong message that ethics-abiding anthropologists should stay clear of involvement with the HTS: “HTS cannot claim the sort of neutrality claimed by groups like Doctors Without Borders, or the International Committee of the Red Cross…Pretending that the military is a humanitarian organization does not make it so, and pretending that HTS is anything other than an arm of the military engaging in a specific form of conquest is sheer dishonesty.”

• Catching Fire a “best book of 2009”

Biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human made it to the Economist’s list of best books of 2009. It is praised as a “startling and persuasive analysis of the evolutionary role of cookery…” It did not, however, appear on the New York Times Book Review list, nor did any other book by an anthropologist.

• Richard Antoun, cultural anthropologist of the Middle East

Professor Richard Antoun died at the age of 77, stabbed to death in his office at Binghamton University. A graduate student at the University, who was Antoun’s dissertation advisee, is being held without bail.

Decolonizing African-American cuisine

by Barbara Miller

Food is a hot and rising topic in cultural anthropology, related fields from literature to political science, and in popular culture as well. Besides the wealth of publications about food in recent years and a spike in interest from my students, I know this to be true for another reason: For decades, the short article on food (with a couple of recipes) in the weekly New York Times Magazine recently moved up near the front of the magazine, no longer relegated to its traditional placement way at the end near the crossword puzzle.

This post highlights an intriguing article by Stephan Palmié, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, published in a special edition of the journal African Arts devoted to the topic of “hybrid heritage.”

He draws on the longstanding theme in the anthropology of food and cuisine that specific foods and ways of preparing them serve as emblematic markers of cultural identities. He builds on this foundation to examine how particular culinary “recipes” demarcate social boundaries especially when they become objectified and of value as intellectual property or intangible cultural heritage.

Palmié draws on a variety of secondary sources to reveal the links in the United States between African food and racism. Over time and in different ways, it has either erased the importance of African foodways through de-authentication or appropriated it through identity theft or culinary colonialism. On the upside, he recommends to us a “fascinating monograph of culinary history that doubles (or triples!) as cookbook and gastropolitical manifesto”: Diane Spivey’s The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook. Spivey turns the table and provides an Africentric view of human food from our prehistoric origins in Africa to how African foodways have shaped French and Chinese cuisine. Her book is definitely on my holiday reading list!

Image from SUNY Press.

Daily life of ordinary people in ancient Maya murals

The prehistory tends to favor elites. Ancient Maya iconography, writing, and artifacts reveal much about the ruling class, warfare, and elite rituals in Mesoamerica. A recent discovery of extensive mural paintings at Calakmul, located in southern Mexico near the Guatemalan border, sheds light on the majority of the population, those of lower social classes around AD 620-700. Scenes show people eating, cooking, and carrying goods. The murals have hieroglyphic captions naming the actors such as “maize-gruel person,” “maize-grain person,””salt person,” “tobacco person,” and “clay vessel person.” It’s almost as if the murals were painted by an ethnographer who set out to document everyday life of ordinary people.

Photo, “Estela 50 de Iztapa”, from Flickr and Creative Commons.

Guess who’s coming to dinner

by Barbara Miller

Whoever was in charge of protecting the Obamas at their first state dinner made several mistakes, including what might be called reverse profiling. A striking blond, white woman in a glittering red and gold lehenga-style sari, along with her appropriately dressed male escort, sashayed her way into the White House on November 25th. She vamped for a photo with some Marines and got up close and smiley with Rahm Emanuel and Vice President Biden. A photo of her in the receiving line with President Obama shows her holding his outstretched hand in both of hers.

Michaele Salahi looked and acted the part of someone who might be invited to the event. But she and her husband are frauds, opportunists, aspiring reality tv stars, and…trespassers.

Cultural anthropologists and other social scientists have expressed concerns about racial and ethnic profiling, especially since the 9/11 events in the US. The Henry Louis Gates incident in July brought a flare-up of commentary.

Racial/ethnic profiling seeks to pinpoint people who are dangerous to society, who have evil intent, who plan to violate the law. It is crude and its effectiveness is debatable. One problem with racial/ethnic profiling is that it steers the gaze of security people toward certain types of people and, thus, necessarily away from other types of people who are deemed of less concern.

So an attractive, glittering blond woman gets to shake the president’s hand. It is totally improbable to think that a similarly attractive blond woman wearing a burqa could have crashed the state dinner party. No way. She would have been profiled, questioned, and perhaps detained at the first checkpoint.

What’s the lesson here? Attractive, appropriately dressed white people who aspire to be on reality tv should be carefully watched as they could have bad intentions.

Picture adapted from a photo from the CBC.