2011

• The trauma of war and rape
In the first of a two-part story, CNN highlights the work of cultural anthropologist Victoria Sanford, whose research has involved listening to victim narratives of Maya women in Guatemala since her doctoral studies at Stanford University in the early 1990s. A Spanish speaker who had worked with Central American refugees, she befriended the few Maya in the area. “I was moved by their stories, but even more so because they were intent on someone hearing them,” she said, “And no one was listening.” She joined the nonprofit Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology investigative team and went to Guatemala. Sanford talked to the women, who told other women about her, and soon she was recording their stories. Over time, and after hearing many stories, Sanford suffered from a kind of “secondary trauma” including paralysis.

• Conflict in Uganda and a possible love complication
The New York Times quoted Mahmood Mamdani, professor anthropology and government at Columbia university, in an article about an ongoing bitter personal rivalry in Uganda that involves President Musaveni and his rival and former friend, Kizza Besigye. Things may be complicated, the article suggests, by a woman, Winnie Byanyima, who is married to the president’s rival but who may have had a romantic involvement earlier with the president. Other matters are likely part of the story as well. Mamdani comments that the government is “clueless” about how to deal with Besigye’s opposition movement. He didn’t comment on the love factor.

• Culture and asthma
Cultural context and behavior shape the diagnosis and treatment of asthma according to David Van Sickle, medical anthropologist and asthma epidemiologist of Reciprocal Labs in Madison, Wisc. Van Sickle’s fieldwork in India revealed that physicians were hesitant to diagnose patients with asthma because of social stigma.

• Treating autism: two cases in Croatia
Drug Week covered findings from a study conducted in Osijek, Croatia, which discusses the treatment of autism in a boy and a girl with risperidone. K. Dodigcurkovic and colleagues published their study in Collegium Antropologicum.

• Profile of a forensic anthropologist
The Gainesville Sun carried a profile of Michael Warren, an associate professor of anthropology and director of the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida. He has conducted hundreds of forensic skeletal examinations for the state’s medical examiners and has participated in the identification of victims of mass disasters and ethnic cleansing, including the attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina and the recovery and identification of the victims found within the mass graves of the Balkans. He recently testified in the Casey Anthony murder trial.

• Medieval persecution
The remains of 17 bodies found at the bottom of a medieval well in England could have been victims of persecution, new evidence suggests. DNA analysis indicates that the victims were Jewish. They were likely murdered or forced to commit suicide. The skeletons date to the 12th-13th centuries, a time of persecution of Jewish people in Europe. Professor Sue Black leads the research team. She is a forensic anthropologist in the University of Dundee’s Centre for Anthropology and Human Identification.
Continue reading “Anthro in the news 6/27/2011” →

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” →

Unknown unknowns in our nuclear world

Barbara Rose Johnston, an environmental anthropologist at the Center for Political Ecology at the University of California in Santa Cruz, prompts us to consider what we mean by “safe” when it comes to radiation and the nuclear industry.

She says:

As the world’s nations reassess nuclear power operations and refine energy development plans, now — more than ever — we need to aggressively tackle this question: How do we define the word “safe”?

Here is a link to her full article, “In this nuclear world, what is the meaning of ‘safe’?“

Anthro in the news 3/14/11

• Bedouin warriors not motley
Not just a “motley army of poorly armed civilian volunteers,” most of the Libyan opposition fighters are descendants of a long line of warriors. Philip Carl Salzman, professor of cultural anthropology at McGill University, makes this point in a letter to Canada’s National Post: “In the current uprising against the Gaddafi regime, we see a resurgence of the tribes and the reactivation of traditional Bedouin mobilization and martial values.”

• Rethinking tribal power in Libya
Another view, from Khalil Ali Al-Musmari, a retired professor of anthropology, says that foreign media have misrepresented tribal power in Libya. Educated, urban Libyans make their own decisions. In the desert outposts, however, tribes play an important role as villagers decide whom to fight.

• Another big drug from the San
Cultural anthropologist Sean Carey of Roehampton University published an article in the March issue of African Business about an anti-depressant herb known to the San people of southern Africa. The San prozac herb could be more financially successful than diet drug made from hoodia. Follow the money and hope the San get major financial rights and do a good job using the money for their own welfare.

• Last Neanderthals in Greece
Two sites in the Pindos Mountains, dated to between 50,000-35,000 years ago, contain hundreds of stone tools that may have been used by the last Neanderthals in Greece and perhaps Europe.

• Our southern African roots
An extensive genetic study of foraging populations of southern Africa supports the view that modern human origins lie in southern Africa. BBC news cites a co-author of the new study, Brenna Henn of Stanford University and Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London (not involved in the study). The paper appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• Basques in Boise, Idaho
A DNA study published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology reports on the loss of genetic diversity among Basques in Boise due to the founder effect (being descended from a small number of individuals).

• Bonobos: give peace a chance
More on our hippie relatives from Brian Hare of Duke University and Vanessa Woods. Hare and Woods report on our peaceful ancestors who now, sadly, live in the war-torn Congo. We humans should give them a chance.

• Darwin on the hand
Charles Darwin’s assertion that the human hand evolved as a result of tool is supported by experimental research. Stephen Lycett, senior lecturer in human evolution at Kent University, and Alastair Key, of the department of anthropology at Kent University, published their findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

• In memoriam
Mahmoud Rouh Alamini, a leading figure in establishing cultural anthropology in Iran, died on March 8 at the age of 82 years. He is the author of several books including Old Rites and Fests in Today Iran, Quest with a Lamp, Roots of Culture Studies, On Culture and Swear by Your Shakhe Nabat. He received a B.A. in social sciences in 1960 from the University of Tehran. He received a Ph.D. degree in 1968 from Sorbonne University.

Nuclear news, nuclear fears and the role of science

Guest post by Barbara Rose Johnston

I received last week copies of two very different publications reporting on outcomes from the scientific assessment of life in a nuclear warzone. These studies consider, first, the health experience of resident populations living in areas contaminated by nuclear weapons fallout, and, second, the health of people as affected by the low-level radiation that accompanies modern warfare.

The first is a set of eight papers published in the August 2010 issue of the journal Health Physics and reflects conclusions from US-government sponsored science about radiation and cancer risks.

The second, a study conducted by an international and independent team of scientists published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, is about the health effects of war on the local population of Fallujah, Iraq.

Appropriate reading, since much news in the past few days has focused on the ceremonies surrounding the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the human suffering associated with nuclear war.

Nuclear worries and concerns have been a major feature in world news for years, but especially so in this first decade of a new century.

A review of today’s global headlines finds reports of fear and accusations over the development of a nuclear weapon in Iran, as well as fears of nuclear war on the Korean peninsula and in Kashmir, the Himalayan territory that lies between Pakistan and India. Fidel Castro’s first address in four years to the Cuban Parliament warns of an imminent nuclear war if the US follows through on its threat of retaliation against Iran for not abiding nuclear-arms sanctions.

There are also hopeful reports on political promises and the potential progress in the struggle to further abolish nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, there are also reports on the lack of progress – for example, the news that the US Senate has again delayed its hearing on a new START Treaty.

The nuclear news also includes “peaceful uses” of atomic energy. The US is reportedly finalizing a nuclear cooperation agreement with Vietnam that would allow enrichment. There are reports of numerous proposals or approved plans for new nuclear power plants in Germany, Egypt, the US, Canada, the Philippines, India, Serbia, Bulgaria, and the UK.

Continue reading “Nuclear news, nuclear fears and the role of science” →

To thee I sing: sweet land of oil spill

European colonists came to North America seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity. They destroyed the very same for those who had lived here for centuries.

One person’s liberty often means someone else’s shackles. One group’s success often means another group is in ruins.

The boom and crackle of Independence Day fireworks in the United States are echoed in the gunfire in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan as outside forces vie for control of these strategic lands. Let freedom ring.

Allow me one more bit of gut gashing irony. In the 18th century, the American patriots fought hard to gain independence from the British. They succeeded.

What would those freedom fighters say about British Petroleum’s oil spill in the Gulf?

Image: “An American Flag on top of a fake oil derrick in Sapulpa, Oklahoma.” The derrick may be fake, but the questions the image raises are surely very real. Creative commons licensed Flickr content.

What lies beneath

Possibly trillions of dollars worth of mineral deposits lie untouched beneath the surface in Afghanistan. A recent New York Times report generated a flurry of discussion about whether this subterranean wealth would help Afghanistan and its people or prove to be a “resource curse” that instead brings more violence.

One thing is certain, if the minerals are to be mined, there will have to be substantial infrastructure development (asphalted roads) and security for the mining companies. I can just see Halliburton written all over this, and taxpayer dollars supporting the US military to protect business interests.

A less gloomy and much more informed view than mine comes from long-term expert on Afghanistan, Thomas Barfield, professor of cultural anthropology at Boston University.

Don’t let the sun catch you crying

Journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger says that he wanted to make you feel like you are actually there in a remote combat outpost in Afghanistan in Restrepo. He and his partner Tim Hetherington, succeeded. After the documentary’s powerful 90 minutes, people in the packed AFI theater in Silver Spring, Md., on Friday June 28 were in shock and awe and tears.

Junger (right) and Tim Hetherington (left). Creative Commons Licensed

Restrepo will remain embedded in my heart and mind for the rest of my life.

The film chronicles the daily lives, and sometimes deaths, of a small platoon of American soldiers tasked with pushing against Taliban control of the Korangal Valley. The soldiers, all men, are very young — 19 years old, many of them, pimply some of them, and proud to be serving their country in fighting “the enemy.” Also, over time, bored, thrilled, scared and sad.

Occasionally, the film provides footage of local villagers. They appear to be mostly scared by what is happening in their valley as they experience the counter-pressures of the Americans and the Taliban. But sometimes proud and dignified as male elders attempt to gain compensation for a cow who died as a result of entanglement with wire fencing surrounding the outpost.

The film brilliantly and effectively interweaves footage from the combat zone with tight-shot interviews with eight soldiers conducted in Italy four months after they had left Afghanistan. So one minute you are in the outpost Restrepo, named after a fallen comrade, with all the noise and smoke from artillery and helicopters. The next minute you are up close and personal listening as a young soldier quietly talks about what it was like to be in the combat zone and what it is like to be dealing with not being there. One says that he doesn’t want to go to sleep because of the nightmares. He has tried five different kinds of sleeping pills, but none works to allow him a peaceful night’s sleep.

Each of the eight men gets very close to tears.

An excellent panel discussion following the film was skillfully moderated by Lara Logan, chief foreign correspondent with CBS News, and included Sebastian Junger as well as one of the film participants, Major Dan Kearney, who made it possible for the film team to work with his combat team.

In the discussion, Sebastian Junger commented that the interviews really “make” the film. What you don’t see, he pointed out, is that the person interviewing the soldiers — Junger — is also fighting back the tears. Junger noted that soldiers cannot show emotion, especially in a combat zone. Instead, when death happens, especially the death of your buddy, you mourn for a minute or two and then get back out there and kill the enemy who took his life.

Once they leave combat, the men have to try to process all that they have been through in the previous 15 months. Many do not succeed in readjusting to civilian life. Junger hopes that the film will help with the re-integration process by promoting understanding of the challenges they face. He said that many of the men will end up going back into combat, leaving behind their wives who feel rejected. They go back, he thinks, because for many 19-year-old men in the United States civilian life does not offer a satisfying role, identity or sense of belonging. The combat zone does that in spades. Many soldiers, he says, become addicted to the male bonding, the brotherhood that is forged in the daily routine of a harsh life and possible death. It is an intoxicating form of solidarity, stronger than friendship, that trumps all differences and disagreements and provides an emotional security that overrides concerns about physical security.

Combat, says Junger, is a small, closed, male world. His film offers a peek through a keyhole into that world. Restrepo is an ethnographic film of the highest order. (Junger has a B.A. in cultural anthropology and it shows). Although Junger wasn’t with the troop for the entire 15 months — he visited five times — he and his camera were not obviously intrusive. But they must have created an extra layer of life and death?

In the question and answer period, no one asked Junger how he is dealing with re-entry to the civilian world. It can’t be easy for him, either. I believe I saw tears in his eyes at several points during the panel discussion.

Update: Tim Hetherington tragically was killed April 20th, 2011 while on assignment in Libia.

President Obama: What would your mother say?

Guest post by Eben Kirksey

President Obama turned his back on Indonesia recently — canceling his visit there for the second time this year. His mother, Ann Soetoro, was a cultural anthropologist who spent much of her adult life helping economically-marginalized people of Indonesia. If she were still alive, she might well be disappointed in her son.

As President Obama turns his attention to the oil spill in the Gulf, the U.S. Congress is reminding him of other important issues in a seemingly remote corner of Indonesia. A resolution introduced by Rep. Patrick Kennedy (H.Res. 1355) calls attention to the human rights problems in West Papua [Google map], the half of New Guinea that was invaded by Indonesia in 1962.

Image: West Papua has idyllic scenes like this one, but also significant human rights problems. “Asmat boat.” Creative commons licensed content on Flickr.

In the President’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he recalls a conversation with Lolo Soetoro, his step-father who had just returned home after a tour of duty with the Indonesian military in West Papua. Obama asked his step-father: “Have you ever seen a man killed?” Lolo responded affirmatively, recounting the bloody death of “weak” men.

Ann Soetoro never spoke out publicly about Indonesian atrocities in West Papua, but she divorced her husband shortly after he came back from the frontlines of this war.

Papuan intellectuals and political activists, kin of the “weak” men killed by Lolo Soetoro, have read Obama’s autobiography with keen interest. They still embrace the message of hope from the Presidential campaign and the slogan, “Yes We Can.”

At a moment when many Americans are questioning whether Obama will be able to fulfill his campaign promises, when everyone is wondering if he can reign in the hubris of the corporate executives who produced the disaster in the Gulf, it is worth considering these enduring hopes in West Papua.

Perhaps it is time for those of us who were drawn in by the slogan “Yes We Can” to remind the President that grassroots political movements still have power.

Many people, including some anthropologists, do not know the difference between West Papua* and Papua New Guinea. The subject of several classic anthropology books — from Margaret Mead’s Growing Up in New Guinea to Marilyn Strathern’s Gender of the Gift — the independent nation of Papua New Guinea is familiar to almost anyone who has taken an introductory anthropology class. Indonesia is also well known among academics who study culture or politics. Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz told us tales of Balinese cockfights and Javanese religious systems, and political scientist Benedict Anderson famously wrote about imagined communities and power in Indonesia.

At the edge of national and scholarly boundaries, West Papua, in contrast, falls through the cracks.

Anthropologists and scholars in allied disciplines should join human rights advocates and others in noticing West Papua. Amnesty International is currently working with Representative Kennedy’s office to pass his Resolution which calls attention to many pressing problems:

“Whereas a Human Rights Watch report on June 5, 2009, noted ‘‘torture and abuse of prisoners in jails in Papua is rampant’’;

“and Whereas prominent Indonesian leaders have called for a national dialogue and Papuan leaders have called for an internationally-mediated dialogue to address long-standing grievances in Papua and West Papua.”
If passed, this Resolution would give President Obama some issues of substance to talk about with Indonesian leaders once he does make a return trip to Southeast Asia. Resolutions are non-binding acts that convey the sentiments of Congress.

Amnesty International, and the other human rights groups advocating for this resolution, are up against powerful forces. Transnational companies have been lobbying for stronger military ties with Indonesia. The same company that brought us the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, BP, has a huge natural gas field in West Papua called Tangguh. Starting this year, BP is scheduled to start shipping super-cooled gas from this site (liquid natural gas or LNG) to North America where it will be piped into the homes of millions in California, Oregon and other westerns states.

BP has been a major donor to the U.S.-Indonesia Society, an organization committed to educating congressional staff and administration officials about the “importance of the United States-Indonesia relationship.” The U.S.-Indonesia Society is also supported by Freeport McMoRan, a company that operates one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines in West Papua.

The American public is starting to reign in the irresponsible behavior of companies like BP that have created domestic disasters. American must also reckon with the foreign entanglements of the companies supplying the U.S. natural resources and should question the politicians who have led the United States into a series of environmental catastrophes and debacles on foreign soil.
Continue reading “President Obama: What would your mother say?” →

Memorial Day: It’s okay to wear white shoes now

While out running errands this morning on Connecticut Avenue in the far northwest part of Washington, D.C., I was struck by how quiet it was — even compared to other Sundays — in terms of low traffic density. And quietness.

Then I heard it: the noise of several Harleys in unison moving south on the avenue.

Memorial Day in the United States was established to remember the service of Americans who died while serving in the military. It started after the Civil War. It is one of those “eggwhite” rituals, to use the term of British cultural anthropologist Tristram Riley-Smith, that pulls together many people in this diverse country. (See my “Must Read” review of his book, The Cracked Bell.)

“Whites.” Creative commons licensed photo from Flickr user Niklas Hellerstedt.

I emailed Riley-Smith this morning about Memorial Day, commenting to him that D.C. seems to be marked by a mass exodus of many people to the beach and in influx of Harley-riding bikers at the same time. Responding from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, where he has been launching his book, he sent me the following material which is similar to his writing about “Rolling Thunder ” in his book:

This is a nation all too often disappointed when those it seeks to liberate fail to show their appreciation, but with Vietnam the American people blamed returning draftees for the disastrous conduct of the war. They blamed draftees who had been sent into a battle they neither wanted nor approved of, all too often being pushed into the front line to protect the regulars.

The “Ride to the Wall” on Memorial Day, also known as Rolling Thunder, was initiated by these unhappy outcasts who felt the government wasn’t doing enough to recover the POWs and the remains of the dead abandoned in Indo-China. This protest has now been absorbed into the mainstream. On the Sunday before Memorial Day, the highways into D.C. become choked with convoys of Harley-Davidsons, with silencers removed, heading for the Mall and the Vietnam Memorial, where one is likely to encounter a huge, wild-eyed vet in grey pony-tail, studs, tattoos and leather biker’s gear being embraced by a young, uniformed, close-shaven Marine.

The Gold Star Mums are there to heal the wounds as well, “to give these poor outcasts the hugs they never had,” as one put it, “when they returned home.”

The Vietnam-American war (as it is called in Vietnam) took many, many lives, both American and Vietnamese. It irreparably damaged many more lives, here and there. Following the war, a new term appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) that lists and classifies Western psychiatric diagnoses. The new term was Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

It also created deep rupture lines in anthropology; cultural anthropologists doing fieldwork in Southeast Asia often had knowledge of which villagers were sympathizers with the U.S. enemy. Some anthropologists took it as their duty, as American citizens supporting their country’s war efforts, to submit the names of such people to the U.S. military. Those people were killed.

Other anthropologists decried this complicity of anthropologists with the military and the abuse of people’s trust in someone who was supposedly a scholar seeking only to learn about their lives in order to write a book about it someday.

Out of this painful rupture grew the Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, likely the first such code in any social science discipline anywhere that put as its first research commandment: do no harm. That means, among the people with whom you are doing research, do the very best you can to make sure that your research does not harm them, and if you have any concern that you might do them harm, stop doing your research immediately and find another topic or population to study. Do no harm to their lives or else get out of their lives.

Back to Memorial Day. Riley-Smith is right when he says, in his book, that more than Veterans Day, Memorial Day “is wired into America’s martial traditions” (p 195). It will likely be celebrated for a long time to come since we seem to keep waging war.

Riley-Smith also rightly notes the secular importance of the holiday: public swimming pools open, people go on picnics, and — something from my era — women can now wear white, especially as in shoes which you just couldn’t do before Memorial Day (The New York Times acknowledged the enduring nature of the white clothing rule in its style section today).

Under blue skies as brilliant as those on 9/11, here in Washington, we have a perfect day for a picnic, for remembering the pain of war and for a fervent wish for a rule that there can be no war after Memorial Day, or before it. Every year, on end.