Chagos conference report

Guest post by Sean Carey

The Chagos Regagne conference at the Royal Geographical Society in London on May 19 focused on the possibility of establishing an eco-village and research station on one of the outer islands of the Chagos Archipelago, part of the disputed British Indian Ocean Territory. It turned out to be extremely interesting.

Source: Chagos International Support. This is an historic image. The MPA was officially recognized in April 2010.

The event was the brainchild of bestselling novelist, Philippa Gregory, and conservationist and adventurer, Ben Fogle.

But this wasn’t just a “scientific” conference for marine and other scientists. Instead, there were conservationists, lawyers, development geographers, cultural anthropologists and a good number of former U.K. Foreign Office personnel, including David Snoxell, the former British high commissioner to Mauritius, as well as John MacManus, the newly appointed administrator of the British Indian Ocean Territory.

Mauritius High Commissioner Abhimanyu Kundasamy attended. Mauritius is host to the largest group of Chagossian exiles and their descendants, around 3,000 people, who live in the capital, Port Louis, and surrounding areas. Mauritius wants the return of the archipelago. In 1965, under international law, the archipelago was illegally excised from its territory by the U.K. in order to provide the U.S. with a military base on Diego Garcia.

Also in attendance were around 150 Chagossians. They had travelled from Crawley and Manchester where they have settled since leaving Mauritius and the Seychelles and becoming British passport holders in 2002.

I met David Vine, of American University in Washington, D.C., who gave an excellent and impassioned summary of his book, Island of Shame, as well as sharing his more recent thoughts on why the U.S. prefers isolated, unpopulated islands for its military bases. Put simply, it’s all a question of “no people, no problems.”

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Must Read: Memorial Mania by Erika Doss

Guest post by Tristram Riley-Smith

Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America
by Erika Doss, University of Chicago Press (2010)

At the end of William Faulkner’s masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, the castrated idiot, Benjy Compson, weeps when his black carer walks him the wrong way past the memorial to the Confederate soldier in Oxford, Miss. Honor-rites have been flouted, and through Benjy’s tears we sense the pent-up emotions of a defeated yet defiant, impotent yet proud, South.

This vignette points to a wider truth. Memorials carry enormous emotional and symbolic freight, providing clues as to how people feel about their society. This is the subject of Erika Doss’s scholarly and readable book, Memorial Mania.

In responding enthusiastically to this work, I must admit to sitting in the center of its target audience “sweet spot.” As an anthropologist of art (having conducted doctoral research among the Buddhist “god-makers” of the Kathmandu Valley), I am partial to books that focus on the place of material culture in society. And in my recent incarnation as an anthropologist of America, I relish work that reveals new aspects of this complex and fascinating society.

But I believe Memorial Mania will appeal to a wide audience – both inside and outside academia – given the quality of the writing and the presentation of the material. The book is packed with information and insight as it documents the growing phenomenon of memorialization in America; and 160 illustrations can only enhance the reader’s understanding and appreciation of the subject. Doss also has an ear for the well-turned phrase: she describes memorials, for instance, as “archives of public affect” and “repositories of feelings and emotions.”

The author adds depth and structure to her work by examining her subject in relation to different feelings. Under “fear,” for instance, Doss explores the proliferation of terrorism memorials, linked to security narratives (with an interesting digression into the narrative of national innocence). Under “shame,” she describes memorials recalling racism, slavery and war relocation; she focusses this chapter on Duluth’s Lynching Memorial in Minnesota, that recollects a horrific act of mob violence from the 1920s that was new to me. Continue reading “Must Read: Memorial Mania by Erika Doss” →

Welling Professorship Lecture by Lawrence Bobo

The Welling Professorship Lecture by Lawrence D. Bobo, Ph.D.
“Post Racialism: The Racial Divide in the Age of Obama”

Lawrence D. Bobo is the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He holds appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Department of African and African American Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of social inequality, politics, and race. He is a founding editor of the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race and co-author of the award winning book Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations. His most recent book, Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute, was a finalist for the 2007 C. Wright Mills Award. Professor Bobo is an elected member of the National Academy of Science as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, an Alphonse M. Fletcher Sr. Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar.

When: Thursday, April 28^th, 7:00 pm
Where: The George Washington University
Jack Morton Auditorium
805 21^st Street, NW

This event is organized by the Department of Sociology in GWU’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. The event is free and open to the public.

Roma: Not all alike

*Roma beggar in Paris. Credit: Seb Ruiz, Creative Commons licensed on Flickr*

Guest post by Sam Beck

The European Union must be held accountable if European states continue to expel Roma from member countries. The expulsions are taking place because Roma have created settlements not only in designated campgrounds but also within urban boundaries. This is not new. However, the scale and density of such settlements disturbs the sensibilities of Europeans. This is not only a West European phenomenon. Events of intolerable discrimination are also taking place in East Central Europe and the Balkans from which many of these Roma originate. The history of anti-Roma sentiments in both East and West Europe is torturous and long-standing.

A rather unusual situation emerged in Romania where Roma have lived for hundreds of years, where to this day they appear in abundant variation, from people who have resumed migratory lives to people who have been settled at the margins of villages, towns, and cities for as long as anyone can remember. In Romania, Roma were enslaved and indentured for centuries. They played important roles as musicians, miners, and in producing objects necessary for an agrarian society, crafting metals and wood objects. Today, those that we call Roma, were involved in all sorts of labor, agricultural workers and house servants.

Some may no longer speak their Sanskrit based language, or if they do they speak it with lexical-items borrowed from Turkish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Russian, and so on. In Romania, many no longer speak Romani. In Romania, Roma may identify themselves with this “national” identity, or they may identify as “tsigani,” how others have named them. This is a term of derision. Some Roma have integrated themselves into the mainstream of Romanian society and melted into the Romanian ethnic identity. Some Roma sustain their identity and have experienced upward mobility in many different fields.

Roma were persecuted in the Nazi era, large numbers of whom lost their lives; their population decimated in great proportions to their total numbers, referred to as Prajmos. Oddly enough, when mentioned at all as a persecuted population in Germany’s ethnic cleansing effort they are lumped in with Jews, rather than being mentioned outright as a population. No museums exist for them and if there are memorials for them, I do not know of them. They have no homeland with which they can identify. There is no Israel that was created for them as it was for Jews. Their identities are claimed as citizens of their countries of origin.

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Dishonorable killings

So-called honor killings take the wind out of a form of cultural relativism that I refer to as absolute cultural relativism. According to absolute cultural relativism, anything that goes on in a particular culture, and is justified within that culture, cannot be questioned or changed by insiders or outsiders. For insiders, such questioning is cultural heresy; for outsiders it is ethnocentrism.

An antidote to absolute cultural relativism is critical cultural relativism, which promotes the posing of questions about practices and beliefs by insiders and outsiders in terms of who accepts them and why, and who they might be harming or helping. In other words: Who benefits, who loses? [Note: I present these terms in my cultural anthropology texts as a way to get students to think more analytically about the very important concept of cultural relativism.]

Image: Flickr creative commons licensed content. If only India, and indeed the whole world, was a domestic violence free zone.

When death, torture and structural violence are involved, it’s time to relegate absolute cultural relativism to the sidelines and bring to the fore critical analysis and discussion among insiders and outsiders. As far as I know, murder is not legal in any country in the world, including murder of one’s own kin for purposes of protecting family honor.

An article in The New York Times describes an alleged honor killing of a young unmarried Hindu woman in her family home in Jharkhand state, eastern India.

The article links the possible murder to Hindu caste values, which forbid marriage of woman to a man of a lower caste category — in this instance, the woman was of a Brahmin family and was engaged to a man of the Kayastha category, which is lower. Not only that, she had apparently engaged in premarital sex, another serious problem from the point of view of family honor.

What the article doesn’t say is that honor killings of daughters and wives by family members occur among people of other religions as well, including Christianity, that are not driven by caste purity. More deeply than particular religious values is the widespread existence of lethal patriarchy: male dominance in all domains of life — economic, political, social, sexual — that it justifies, even actively supports, murder of women and girls.

There can be no way, in this world, that anyone can get away with murder by saying that “it’s part of our culture” to kill a daughter or wife who breaks cultural rules. As if it’s their right and duty to kill.

Unfortunately, local police and the judicial system are often on the side of the killers.

Amnesty International now keeps track of so-called honor killings, but it’s likely that cases are severely under-counted. Nevertheless, any and all efforts to keep shining a very bright light on the problem of honor killings and related forms of patriarchy are essential.

See also this post on the blog Women Against Shariah.

To profile or not to profile?

The attempt on Christmas day of the so-called underwear bomber to blow up a plane on its way to Detroit has raised worldwide concern about passenger no-fly lists, increased airport security checks, and civil liberties. Two recent survey-based studies conducted in the United States before the Christmas day event shed light on Americans’ attitudes toward racial/ethnic profiling in airports.

Airport racial/ethnic profiling is defined as the targeting of certain people, based on perceptions of their race/ethnicity, for additional scrutiny by criminal justice officials.

Using 2004 Gallup poll data, researchers asked whether Blacks, Latinos (referred to in the study as Hispanics), and Whites feel that racial/ethnic profiling is widespread in airports and whether or not it is justified. Blacks were significantly more likely than Whites and Latinos to state that they believe that such profiling is widespread in airports. There were no differences between Whites and Latinos on this question. Two other significant variables appeared: older people are less likely to perceive widespread profiling in airports and liberals are more likely to do so.

Whites are significantly more likely to believe that airport ethnic/racial profiling is justified. Other variables appeared as significant: males, people with children in school, and more religious people are more likely to believe that profiling is justified. Liberals and people who live in suburbs are less likely to feel profiling is justified.

The second study first compares support for ethnic profiling in the U.S. as a counter-terrorism tactic with support for profiling Black motorists. The researcher uses the 21st Century Americanism Survey, a national, random telephone survey conducted in 2004.

Results show that support for counterterrorism profiling is higher than support for profiling Black motorists. Another finding is that people are more supportive of profiling immigrants than of U.S. citizens. The most powerful predictor for profiling was being a White American Christian. Other important variables are lower levels of education, being a Republican, fearing being a victim of an attack, and being proud to be an American.

Both studies demonstrate that those who are least likely to experience airport profiling are most supportive of it. Clearly, racial/ethnic profiling exists in U.S. airports and disproportionately causes discomfort to many non-white passengers who for one reason or another “fit” the profile. Has it worked to deter any potential terrorists? We don’t have an answer to that question. Should all passengers be subject to equal scrutiny? Yes.

Otherwise, you risk letting the Salahis into the White House, metaphorically speaking.

Image: “DIA Security Line” by Flickr user michanne5, licensed by Creative Commons.

Sexism, racism, and death in Second Life

Virtual worlds research can provide insights into important social questions such as racism and ethnic discrimination. An exploratory study of a “Muslim” avatar in Second Life provides intriguing findings that beg for more in-depth research.

Methal Mohammed teaches English as a second language in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture at Texas A&M University. She first came to the US as a Fulbright Scholar from Baghdad, Iraq. As part of a class in visual culture, she created a Second Life (SL) personal avatar, “noorelhuda Beb”. “Noorelhuda” first dressed in long trousers, a long sleeved shirt and white shoes. She had “basic” features and long brown hair. She teleported to several sites to make friends but spent most of her time sitting alone.

The researcher decided to add a hijab (headscarf) to her avatar. Noorelhuda with her hijab then set out to a variety of sites to meet other avatars using the question, “I am new here, can you please help me?” Avatars she met either commented briefly or turned away and kept going.

A handful of vignettes from noorelhuda’s visits reveal that she was making some progress establishing contacts and engaging in constructive conversations related to her hijab and its cultural meaning. Things were going well until noorelhuda decided to revisit an earlier site: a beach resort where other avatars were sunbathing or dancing. She was approached by a male avatar policeman who pushed her into the sea where she drowned. She was “killed.”

This brief study connects to many questions about what SL interactions reveal about Real Life (RL) including racism, sexism, exclusion, appearance-based judgments, and aggression. It also raises the issue of research ethics: in cultural anthropology, it is unethical to carry out undercover research. One has to inform research participants about the goals of the research and protect their anonymity. “Informed consent” is thus an important guideline, but it has the downside of preventing anthropologists from doing research in “natural” situations where actors are not influenced by knowing that their words, thoughts, and behaviors are being observed and recorded.

Research in SL necessarily protects the anonymity of “research participants.” So is it okay for someone like “noorelhuda” to conduct “under cover” research in SL? If she had told people that she was visiting sites and trying to meet people as part of a research project, would her experiences have been different? Would people have been more interested in talking with her, or the opposite? Would people displayed less racism? Would the policeman have “killed” her?

Photo, “A Muslim lady in SL”, from Flickr and Creative Commons.