Support the Chagossians

The following is a message from David Vine, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University:

You can immediately assist the Chagossians by signing the petition by Friday, February 12, to support the rights of the Chagossians and protect the environment in the Chagos Archipelago. Click here for the petition: http://www.marineeducationtrust.org/petition/protect-chagos

The British Government is currently considering the establishment of a “Marine Protected Area” in Chagos. While the idea of protecting the environment in Chagos sounds like a good one, the British Government is using “environmental protection” as a way to further cement the ban on Chagossians returning to their homeland. They are using the name of environmentalism to compound and cover up a grave human rights abuse.

The creation of a protected area in Chagos is a good idea, but it should be done in consultation with the Chagossians. To now, the Chagossians have been completely excluded from the planning process. Elsewhere around the, communities coexist with environmental protection areas. As the Chagossians have long said, if they would be allowed to return to their homeland, they could serve as the best protectors of the local environment, helping to monitor and enforce a Marine Protected Area.

Please sign the petition organized by the Marine Education Trust and supported by the Chagossians (and the UK Green Party, among others) calling on the British Government “to protect both the marine ecosystem of the Chagos archipelago and the rights of its exiled community.”

For more information, go to http://www.chagossupport.org.uk/

Please encourage others to sign and thanks for supporting the Chagossians’ struggle!

Image: “Sunset at Turtle Cove”, from flickr user Drew Avery, licensed with Creative Commons.

With new spotlight on masculinity, please don’t bypass the women

Guest post by Laura Wilson

Some development and humanitarian aid experts now argue that focusing on masculinity and emasculation during a complex emergency, rather than on women and girls, may be more effective at preventing or reducing gender-based violence. On January 15th, the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) held a panel discussion titled “The Other Side of Gender: Masculinity Issues in Violent Conflict” to address the role that gender-sensitive programming can play in ameliorating violence against both men and women during conflict.

The panel’s three speakers all called for a greater focus on masculinity in addressing a variety of issues, but panelist Marc Sommers (USIP, Fletcher School), who has conducted research comparing the needs and aspirations of young people in Rwanda and Burundi, was particularly emphatic in calling for an increase in male-oriented programming.

Sommers’ comments focused on education, and he drew on survey data from interviews conducted with youth in both countries about how they prioritize higher education within their future goals. His findings, somewhat surprisingly, reveal that the majority of young people in Burundi, which is less stable and less developed than Rwanda, expressed strong desires and intentions to pursue higher education despite a severe lack of schools and opportunities for learning. In Rwanda, however, which has been held up of late as a beacon of African development and democracy, the young people interviewed expressed much less interest in finishing high school or attending college.

Part of this difference may lie in the specifics of Rwandan culture. In Rwanda, boys are expected to build a house before they can marry. Without a house, a Rwandan boy cannot achieve manhood and start a family. So, pressure is great for young men to succeed economically. As a result, many drop out of school at a young age to work and save for this major investment. Sommers argues that these Rwandan cultural expectations effectively emasculate young men, leading to frustration and increased risk of GBV.

At the same time, Rwandan girls achieve womanhood through marriage. If young men are constrained in being able to contract a marriage, girls’ attainment of maturity is also put on hold. Other scholars writing on similar situations in other African contexts refer to this bottleneck as a “marriage crisis,” which appears to be particularly acute in Rwanda.

The solution, according to Sommers: development practitioners should focus on helping young men achieve adulthood through economic development, jobs, housing and land reform. The empowerment of women and girls and social stability in general will follow.

But, experts in academia and in the field continue to debate the degree to which masculinity should be incorporated into conflict prevention. For another perspective, we now turn to Naomi Cahn, professor of law at George Washington University and co-author of the upcoming book On the Front Lines: Gender, War and the Post Conflict Process.

Laura Wilson: Where and when have you studied gender-based violence in Africa?

Naomi: I lived in Kinshasa, Congo, from 2002-2004. Since 2002, I have conducted legal research on issues of gender and post-conflict reconstruction. Before joining the GW faculty in 1993, I worked in a law school clinic on domestic violence, and I also co-taught one of the first International Women’s Rights courses in the country. I am currently co-authoring a book, On the Frontlines: Gender, War and the Post-Conflict Process, which examines related issues.

Laura Wilson: What are your major findings about the best ways to reduce/prevent GBV?

Naomi: Promoting women’s independence and status, providing them with economic livelihoods and health care, promoting literacy, enacting laws, establishing shelters, and demilitarizing societies are some of the proven ways of helping women who face threats of GBV. GBV is one aspect of women’s subordinate status. It has also received a great deal of attention, but women face numerous other issues that are as seriously discriminatory in promoting their status.

Laura Wilson: Do you think focusing on the challenges that boys/men face will drain resources to support programs for women and therefore be counterproductive for women?

Naomi: In our book project, although we definitely pay attention to masculinities and recognize their centrality to the issues we think about, we also recognize the danger in such a focus. We worry about what will happen to women if donors and policy makers start to think about men. There is an obvious risk that this will replicate other biases that we know too well exists.

Laura Wilson: While masculinity is an important factor in conflict prevention, I agree with Naomi that the focus should not stray too far from women’s needs. Gender programming is a two-sided coin. On one side, development experts must acknowledge the special issues and challenges that men and boys face within different contexts, and especially during conflict. On the other side, to achieve gender equity in most places, projects must continue to put the needs of girls and women first, because the cultural, political, and economic barriers preventing them from independent action and self-determination are far taller than those facing men. Only when gender equity is realized should programming equally target men and women.

Laura Wilson is a candidate for an M.A. degree in international development studies at The George Washington University with a focus on gender, human rights and development. She received a B.S. degree in foreign service from Georgetown University in 2007. She is currently the program assistant for the International Development Studies program.

Image: Women in Action Cameroon, November 25 – December 10, 2008. Creative commons licensed Flickr content by user CWGL.

Call for participants in a panel on public anthropology for a world in crisis

From the Anthropology in Action network: Call for participants in a panel on public anthropology for a world in Crisis. Sarah Pink (Loughborough University), Simone Abram (Leeds Metropolitan University) and Halvard Vike (University of Oslo) have proposed a panel on Public Anthropology for a World in Crisis for the EASA 2010 Conference in Maynooth, August 24 – 27, 2010. Use this link to go to the online submission system for abstracts or to email questions.

Short Abstract: This panel explores how a contemporary public anthropology might be imagined, is emerging, and is capable of making interventions outside academic contexts. We are interested in theoretically and methodologically informed case studies, position papers, critical and historical considerations.

Long Abstract: The idea that anthropologists can and should play a role as public intellectuals and activists has long-since been (and been debated as) part of the history of the discipline. Recently attention has been applied to this area of anthropological practice in a growing literature on the topic (as is also happening in a parallel way for Sociology). In this panel we explore how a contemporary public anthropology might be imagined, is already emerging, and is capable of making interventions outside academic contexts. We are interested in theoretically and methodologically informed case studies, position papers, critical and historical considerations. Contributions to this panel should examine questions of: how a public anthropology (or anthropologies) can operate in contemporary political, policy, cultural, social, (new) media and mobile contexts; and the implications of this.

A tale of two op-eds

They are both about Haiti. They are both worth reading. In my view, one is the best of op-eds and one is the worst. Please read them and say what you think and why.

Op-ed #1: In the February 7 New York Times, Ben Fountain takes us to rural Haiti in 1999. After driving for a few hours away from Port-au-Prince, he saw sprawling mansions in the hillsides. “Had oil been discovered in Haiti”? His Haitian friend shook his head: “Drogue. Drugs.” Fountain talks about how Haiti, 10 years ago, had become a major transshipment point for cocaine from South America to the United States. It still is. The Haitian military helps keep this billion-dollar-a-year trade going. Fountain concludes: “So it’s come to this: the richest country in the hemisphere and the poorest, the first republic and the second, trapped together in the New World’s most glaring modern failure: the war on drugs.”

Op-ed #2: In the February 5 Wall Street Journal, Lawrence Harrison writes from Boston about how the Haitian people’s widespread devotion to voodoo is its “curse.” He states that although Haiti has received billions of dollars in foreign aid over the past half-century, its progress indicators are more like those of Africa than Latin America. The reason: the powerful influence of voodoo, which, he explains came from Africa and continues to be an “obstacle to development” there. Harrison avers that that all Haitians feel its influence. His sources of data? A son-in-law of his “who is Haitian and holds a graduate degree from Harvard.” And an American missionary who lived in Haiti for 20 years. Shaky grounds? Not for Harrison, who sums it all up for us: “Haiti’s predicament is caused by a set of values, beliefs, and attitudes…”

Image: “Members of the Jordanian Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) take position during a drug seizure exercise. 22/Dec/2008. UN Photo/Marco Dormino.” Link. Creative commons licensed Flickr content.

Anthro in the news 2/8/10

• Son of an anthropologist, President Obama also a yuppie
According to an article in the New Republic, one factor contributing to President Barack Obama’s inability to connect with the working class is that he comes from a family of professionals, including his mother who was a cultural anthropologist. So is the Bush family one of the working or unemployed poor?

• Death in the Andamans
Boa Sr, who was around 85 years old, died last week in the Andaman Islands, India. Many media sources have noted her death. She was one of the few remaining members of the so-called “Great Andaman” tribes, or those groups of foragers who occupied the island of Great Andaman at the time of the British colonial occupation. Due to the British presence, the Great Andamanese were decimated and only a few dozen descendants remain today. They are sequestered on a reservation. CNN World has a video clip showing Boa Sr when she was still alive. The CNN site also offers a string of mostly insulting commentary from over 700 people. In a BBC piece, Anvita Abbi, professor of linguistics at Jawaharlal University in New Delhi, says that India has lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage because one of the world’s oldest languages, called Bo, has come to an end.

This blogger raises three points: the Andaman Islands belong to India as an accident of British imperialist history and so Bo is not really part of “India’s heritage”; India has done little to protect the remaining indigenous islanders but instead allows rampant “development” including the ongoing take-over of traditional territory of the foragers and road construction; a language with only one speaker is not a language at all–the death bell tolled for the Bo language around the time when anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown was on Great Andaman doing “salvage anthropology” in the early 20th century. The story of Boa Sr’s death, like that of so many other indigenous peoples whose livelihoods have been destroyed by rapacious outsiders, is more than just about the end of the Bo language. It’s about a whole way of life that is gone. The only remaining Andaman peoples with any hope for cultural survival are those who live on North Sentinel Island. They are protected, to some degree, by rough waters that make it difficult to land, and to their practice of shooting arrows with high accuracy at anyone who tries to land. The Indian government should cease efforts to “contact” the so-called Sentinelese by boat and lure them with “gifts” sent ashore, and should stop flying over the island for surveillance as such actions undoubtedly cause stress to the people. Let them be. Their undisturbed survival would be a true triumph for Andamanese “heritage.” See an upcoming post on this blog for a profile on the people of the Andamans.

• Death and restless spirits in Haiti
The death toll from the January earthquake is said to be around 200,000. About 150,000 bodies have been found and buried, many in mass graves around Port-au-Prince. USA Today quotes Karen Richman, professor of anthropology at Notre Dame University, as saying that the spiritual and psychological effects of these graves will linger given the cultural importance that Haitians attach to a proper funeral: In Haiti, “You need to communicate with the ancestors to reach these spirits…You need to know they have been respected.” If they are not respected the spirits will return to trouble the living. Mass graves are disrepectful. Richman predicts, however, that Haitians will find “creative, adaptive new rituals in a drive to make meaning” even if just by constructing a monument over a mass grave.

• The taming of the turkey
DNA analysis of turkey bones and coprolites reveal that turkeys were domesticated in two areas: Mesoamerica and the Southwestern United States. Both strains are now extinct and turkeys eaten today are descended from the Mesoamerican domesticates via Europe thanks to Spanish conquerors and then back to North America. Archaeologist Jonathan C. Driver of Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada, comments that the findings “have really helped clarify some of the questions archaeologists have been wondering about for a long time.” For details see the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• We have found a shrubbery
A detailed archaeological survey of the Stonehenge landscape reveals the presence about 4,000 years ago of two circular hedges surrounding the monument. Of course, no one knows why the hedges might have been constructed but that doesn’t prevent guesswork: to serve as screens to prevent the crowds from elite ceremonies.

Steps toward rebalancing Haiti

In the late 1970s, Haiti’s rural population was 80 percent of the total population, while today it is 55 percent. This rapid shift has led to Haiti being “terribly out-of-balance” as Robert Maguire testified (PDF transcript) before the Subcommittee on International Development, Foreign Assistance, Economic Affairs and International Environmental Protection of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on Feb. 4.

Robert Maguire is associate professor of international affairs and director of the Haiti Program at Trinity College in Washington, D.C., and Jennings Randolph senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. He first went to Haiti in 1974. His most recent visit ended on January 10, 2010, two days before the earthquake occurred.

In his testimony, Maguire laid out five points:

Decentralization: help people displaced from Port-au-Prince to stay in rural areas
Create a National Civic Service Corps
Strengthen state institutions through partnership
Get money into the hands of poor people
Support institutions, businesses, and leaders who work toward inclusion, less social inequality, and socially responsible investment strategies

Image: “Rural life is hard work,” a scene of rural Haiti. Creative commons licensed content by Flickr user danboarder.

Follow the aid

Despite an abundance of aid materials and the good intentions of relief agencies, relief efforts in Thailand following the December 2004 earthquake/tsunami were afflicted by skewed distribution.

Jin Sato, associate professor in the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo, analyzes the factors that skewed relief good distribution in an article in Development in Practice. He discusses how the political and economic turmoil caused by relief efforts themselves constitute an additional risk for victims.

Sato also notes that while the social ramifications of relief efforts are substantial, yet they are often overlooked for three reasons:

most “disaster management” experts are engineers
social analysis requires time
relief organizations are poorly coordinated which prevents the generation of lessons for the future

His recommendations for more effective responses, based on lessons from the 2004-2005 tsunami relief efforts, are:

the selection of goods and distribution mechanisms are of paramount importance
aid efforts should not only supply goods but should focus on strengthening institutional resources that allow recipient communities to more effectively absorb the goods and distribute them fairly
relief agencies should co-ordinate with each other after the emergency stage to develop ways to reduce pre-existing inequalities or dominance

After reading his article, I decided to contact Professor Sato to learn more about him and his involvement in disaster response work. Here is my email interview with him:

Q: What is your background in terms of academic training?

A: My B.A. from the University of Tokyo was in anthropology, and I have a master’s degree in both international relations and public policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard University. My Ph.D. was in international studies (interdisciplinary) at the University of Tokyo, and my dissertation topic was on natural resource governance and politics in Thailand. I did a post-doc at the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University under Jim Scott in 1998-1999.

Since my student years, I have been interested in natural resource governance and foreign aid. The article is a spin off from my interest in the latter.

Q: When you worked as a policy advisor to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of Thailand, what were your major responsibilities?

A: I was there to advise on the formulation (and prioritization) of the Environmental Policy 5-year plan, particularly about citizen participation and the role of international assistance (especially that of the Japanese government).

Q: Where were you when the tsunami hit, and what role if any did you play in responding to the tragedy?

A: As you might remember, the Tsunami hit on Dec. 25. I was taking a vacation in Samui Island in Thailand. Since my duty was to advise on environmental policy, I was not sure what to do, but I contacted the JICA office to offer assistance since I could speak the language. They put me on the first assistance survey team to develop livelihood assistance strategy from Japan. But Japanese assistance was too slow, and I don’t think we had any impact at all.

Q: Can you comment on the current situation in Haiti, in terms of how your findings about Thailand might relate to that context?

A: Since I have not been to the field, it is hard to comment. But judging from the news, there was more order and discipline in Thailand where people could wait in lines to receive aid goods. The tsunami hit only the coastal zone and other parts remain intact (unlike the earthquake). This is a huge difference in terms of the availability of assistance and speed of recovery. I suspect that there will be some structural concentration in either damage or assistance due to pre-existing resource inequity.

Image courtesy of Jin Sato.

Heads up re: U.S. Human Terrain program

Despite the American Anthropological Association’s condemnation of the Human Terrain program, in which anthropologists have been recruited to assist with counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon wants to expand the program. Congress is currently considering the Pentagon’s request for increased funding for the program.

Please join us in expressing our firm opposition to this abuse of anthropology by agreeing to add your signature to the “Anthropologists’ Statement on the Human Terrain System Program.” Modeled after a well-publicized 2008 statement written by economists to oppose the Bush administration’s first TARP program, this statement aims to clearly and concisely state the factual grounds for our opposition.

We want to collect the signatures of as many professional anthropologists as possible before Congress takes up the issue in a hearing scheduled for as early as February. To add your name to the statement, please email your name, title and affiliation to nohumanterrain@gmail.com. Please forward this appeal widely.

You can access the AAA Commission’s report on the Human Terrain Program (PDF) here.

The Network of Concerned Anthropologists Steering Committee: Catherine Besteman, Andrew Bickford, Greg Feldman, Gustaaf Houtman, Roberto Gonzalez, Hugh Gusterson, Jean Jackson, Kanhong Lin, Catherine Lutz, David Price and David Vine

Image: “Human Terrain Team Anthropologist Alex Metz: A native of the Pacific Northwest, social scientist Alec Metz is part of the Human Terrain Team that advises the ADT on Afghan tribal culture and interactions,” creative commons licensed Flickr content by user wfiupublicradio.

Go with the flow

Guest post by Laura Wilson

By focusing attention on a single but critical resource, Jessica Barnes sheds light on the complexities of social, economic, and political change in rural Egypt. The resource is water.

Barnes is currently completing her doctorate in Columbia University’s new multidisciplinary Ph.D. program in Sustainable Development. She combines training and perspectives in cultural anthropology, geography, and environmental science to understand the multifaceted world of water in a context where rainfall is extremely scarce and farmers depend on the flow of one river and its tributaries. Her mantra is: follow the water.

In a presentation at the Elliott School of International Affairs on January 27, Barnes described the findings from her research in Egypt on land reclamation from the desert for farming (she focused on the areas around Fayoum). The Egyptian government promotes land reclamation in order to help the country achieve food self-sufficiency and to create agricultural jobs for college graduates who cannot be absorbed by the civil service.

Barnes finds that the new farmers are successful in the “greening” of desert land, and much desert land is now producing food. But such expansion of farming requires water. Reclamation projects are located further from the Nile and its tributaries than the plots of longstanding farmers. Gaining access to irrigation water is difficult, so many new farmers resort to illegal means to obtain water for their farms. Barnes showed a photograph of one farmer’s illegal pipeline.

Long-term farmers said that their lands are no longer productive because the water they normally depend on is being diverted to the reclamation areas. Barnes links this pattern to what David Harvey refers to as “accumulation by dispossession.” The new farmers reclaim land from the desert and earn profits, but they simultaneously deprive long-term farmers of their livelihood. The long-term farmers are forced to abandon their nonproductive land.

Barnes’ ethnographic focus on water, augmented by her use of GIS mapping and long-term multi-level fieldwork, is an excellent example of how a resource-centered approach can yield rich insights of value to international development and environmental policy and programs.

Laura Wilson is a candidate for an M.A. degree in International Development Studies at George Washington University with a focus on gender, human rights, and development. She received a B.S. degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 2007. She is currently the program assistant for the International Development Studies program.

Image: “Egyptian stuff BW” from flickr user Richard Messenger, licensed with Creative Commons.

Anthro in the news 2/1/10

• Paul Farmer on U.S.-Haiti relations
Last Thursday, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing to explore how U.S. foreign aid can best help Haiti. Senator Christopher Dodd (Democrat, Connecticut) suggested that “some sort of receivership,” at least temporarily is in order. Senator Bob Corker (Republican, Tennessee) agreed. One of the three witnesses at the hearing was anthropologist/doctor/health activist Paul Farmer, now also the deputy United Nations envoy to Haiti. He disagreed with such an idea, pointing to the long history of Washington overthrowing and blockading Haitian governments which has contributed to the currently dysfunctional government.

• Let freedom ring
Tristam Riley-Smith first worked as a journalist and then earned a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University. He later began working for the British civil service and was posted for several years to the British Embassy in Washington, DC. As reviewed in the Economist, his book The Cracked Bell: America and the Afflictions of Liberty, draws on all three strands of his training and experience to provide an “engaging and ambitious” commentary on contemporary America and its use and abuse of the concept of “liberty.”

• Neolithic surgery
A discovery in France of an apparent warrior male with an amputated limb joins two other archaeological findings of evidence that surgery was practiced in the early Neolithic in Europe. Limb amputations have also been found in what is now Germany and the Czech Republic.

• Smart chimpanzees and slow bonobos?
It is well known that substantial social differences exist between two closely related great ape species: chimpanzees and bonobos (the latter are less well-known and often lumped under the former). Notably, bonobos are typified as a peaceful species whose members use sexual interactions to prevent conflict. Chimpanzees are typified as more prone to conflict and competition, and thus, sadly, more like modern humans. The question of why such differences exist between chimpanzees and bonobos prompts biological anthropologists to look for answers in biology. Recent research led by Victoria Wobber of Harvard University’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, suggests that the reason lies in differences in the pace of cognitive development over the life cycle. She and her team compared skills of semi-free-ranging infants, juveniles, and adults in three feeding competition tasks. The findings show that chimpanzee infants and juveniles are more likely to share food than adult chimpanzees who advance to a stage of “sharing intolerance.” In contrast, bonobo adults retain juvenile levels of “sharing tolerance.” The upshot, per Wobber and colleagues, is that adult bonobos are less cognitively advanced than adult chimpanzees because they retain a juvenile tendency to share. The study was published online in Current Biology. This blogger asks readers to check out the article and ponder the argument, evidence, findings, and implications for understanding cognitive development in humans, variations in selfishness/generosity across cultures, and the cultural shaping of researchers’ categories and values (ie, selfish/successful chimpanzees and sharing/loser bonobos).

• Altruistic chimpanzees adopt orphans
Behavioral variation across chimpanzee groups throws into question any attempt, such as the above study, to lump all chimps into one category. Adoptive behavior of chimpanzee caregivers, both male and females, has been discovered in the Taï Forest of the Ivory Coast. The adopters devote substantial time and care to juveniles not biologically related to them. The research leader, Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig comments: “I don’t know of any other cases of unrelated orphans being adopted.” This discovery, he goes on to argue, requires a major shift in discussions about what makes humans human since altruistic behavior has been long argued to make us special. It also requires attention to variation within species and avoidance of broad generalizations at the species level.