Anthro in the news 1/13/14

UN Headquarters Haiti after 2010 Earthquake. UN Photo. Wikicommons.

Where did the money for Haiti go?

A Montreal group is blasting Ottawa’s earthquake relief in Haiti for its lack of transparency and poor results. The Coalition for Haiti, citing a report by Paul Cliche, an anthropologist and researcher on development issues with the Université de Montréal, notes that conditions remain dire in Haiti following the devastating earthquake on January 12, 2010. In addition to the lack of transparency, Cliché concludes in his study that Canada’s approach to humanitarian aid in Haiti is flawed on several fronts. For example, too much Canadian aid money has been spent on Band-Aid-type fixes, including offering rental subsidies to persuade Haitians to move from emergency camps to substandard temporary housing rather than building permanent homes or repairing damaged homes. Cliche says that it is impossible to determine who received over two thirds of the $554.8 million reconstruction money Canada sent to Haiti.

Four years later: Too bitter, too little, too late

The Haitian Times published an article by cultural anthropologist and professor at Northern Illinois University, Mark Schuller, in which he comments on the situation in Port-au-Prince four years after the earthquake:

“On the surface, things are calm. Port-au-Prince appears to be in security. Kidnapping stats are way down from the end of the year. Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe presented a list of accomplishments four years on, which include the construction of 5,000 houses. The protests that engulfed the streets almost daily in November and early December, including thousands recently for an increase in Haiti’s minimum wage to 500 gourdes a day (about $11.35, or $1.42 per hour), have dissipated for the holiday season.”

Schuller then describes a fire in one of the camps that destroyed the entire camp. And, “Today a large march is scheduled to advocate for housing rights. Word is that other larger, more politically motivated, protests will resume in the week.”

Link between U.S. soldiers’ suicide and toxic leaders

Forbes Magazine carried an article about a National Public Radio news investigation aired this week covering the topic of toxic leadership in the military. It focuses on research by David Matsuda, an anthropology professor, who was working with the U.S. army in Iraq to help understand local cultures. While there, a general asked him to investigate the high suicide rate among U.S. soldiers, which prompted Matsuda to study the culture of the Army. The standard investigation of a suicide in the Army is to ask what was wrong with the individual soldier, such as a history of mental illness or a marital breakup. Matsuda pursued a different angle and discovered that soldiers who took their own lives usually did have personal problems, but they also had leaders who were pushing them over the edge by making their lives a living hell. The NPR link provides access to the audio. Continue reading “Anthro in the news 1/13/14” →

Anthro in the news 12/2/13

• Breast cancer screening in Israel: opportunity or not?

In Israel, a push to screen for a breast cancer gene leaves many women conflicted, according to an article in The New York Times. Israel has one of the highest rates of breast cancer in the world, and many scientists are advocating what may be the first national screening campaign to test women for cancer-causing genetic mutations that are common among Jews. But the tests mean that women have to choose between what they want to know, when they want to know it, and what to do with the information.

Komen Race Jerusalem 2012 — Komen Race for the Cure (for breast cancer) in Jerusalem 2012. Flickr/U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv

Jews of Ashkenazi, or central and eastern European, backgrounds, make up about half of the Jewish population in Israel and the vast majority of those in the U.S. They are much more likely to carry mutations that pose risks for breast and ovarian cancers, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The debate about screening is economic — will the state cover the costs of testing — and ethnic — will only Ashkenazi Jews be routinely tested? Israel is a melting pot of both Arab citizens and Jews from all over the world, and only half of the country’s six million Jews are of Ashkenazi ancestry.

Moreover, even though the testing would be voluntary, women could feel pressured to participate, said Barbara A. Koenig, a professor of medical anthropology and bioethics at the University of California, San Francisco. “When you institute mass screening, you’re making a collective decision that this is a good thing.”

• Sharing amidst poverty in the U.S.

An article in The Los Angeles times described how L.A.’s close-knit Tongan community struggles with poverty while maintaining their strong cultural tradition of sharing. Statistics show half of Tongan Angelenos live in poverty. But, they say, a culture of sharing means “no Tongan is here to get rich”—because even the smallest thing is given.

Scholars believe the numbers of people in the Tongan diaspora is larger than the population of Tongans on the islands. The article quotes Cathy A. Small, a Northern Arizona University anthropology professor who has long studied Tongan communities. When visiting a classroom in Tonga a few years ago, children were told to write letters to their mothers in New Zealand, saying what they wanted for their birthdays. “Nobody found the assignment strange.”

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 12/2/13” →

Anthro in the news 11/11/13

• Peanuts! For health and prosperity

ABC News reported on the opening in Haiti of a new plant in Haiti’s Central Plateau that is making Nourimanba, a peanut-based food used to treat children for severe malnutrition. The peanuts are grown by Haitian farmers, and the project was launched by Paul Farmer’s non-profit, Partners In Health. The first shipments produced at the facility have been distributed to clinics run by Partners In Health. A pilot program will provide support for about 300 farmers to improve the quality and quantity of the peanut supply. The project will improve child health and increase farmers’ incomes.

• On Obamacare

Cultural anthropologist Paul Stoller writes in The Huffington Post about his experience with being diagnosed with cancer in 2001 and the risks of living in the U.S. without Obamacare (the Affordable Health Care Act):

“If I hadn’t had superior health insurance, I would have died many years ago — a life cut short by a lack of access to health care. It makes me angry that millions of Americans cannot not share my good fortune. For any number of reasons — a work-related accident, a sudden debilitating illness, an unexpected job loss — a hardworking person can be rapidly thrown into poverty, which usually means living without health insurance.”

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 11/11/13” →

Washington, D.C. event: Book launch of Fault Lines – Views across Haiti’s Divide

Author Beverly Bell will conduct a reading, Q&A session, and book signing.

When: Sunday, October 20, 5:30 pm,

Where: The Coupe
3415 11th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20010

Fault Lines is a searing account of life in Haiti since the earthquake of 2010. The book combines street journals, interviews, and investigative journalism to impart perspectives rarely seen outside the country. It studies the strong communities, age-old gift culture, and work of grassroots movements for a more just nation.

Beverly Bell is an award-winning author who has worked and lived in and out of Haiti for 35 years. She runs the economic and social justice group, Other Worlds, and is associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Books will be for sale. (To order a copy from afar, or for more info on the book, visit www.faultlinesbook.org.)

Hosted by Beyond Borders and Just Haiti

GW event: Humanitarian Aid Accountability – Expectations and Realities in Haiti

Panelists will discuss the politics of humanitarian aid in the United States in the context of Haiti:

Mark Schuller, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and NGO Leadership Development, Northern Illinois University

Michael N. Barnett, University Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University

Thomas C. Adams, Haiti Special Coordinator, U.S. Department of State

When: Monday, September 9, 2013, 6:30-8:00 pm

Where: The Elliott School of International Affairs, 1957 E Street, NW, Lindner Commons, 6th floor

TO RSVP: go.gwu.edu/haitiaid

Sponsored by the Elliott School’s Institute for Global and International Studies and its Western Hemisphere Working Group and Culture in Global Affairs Program as well as the Latin American and Hemispheric Studies Program at the George Washington University.
This event is part of the IGIS Global Policy Forum Series and the Culture in Global Affairs Seminar Series.

Anthro in the news 7/8/13

• What’s going on in Haiti?

Mark Schuller, assistant professor of anthropology and NGO development leadership at Northern Illinois University, contributed an article in The Haitian Times in response to the question: What’s going on in Haiti? How is the progress, after three and a half years and billions of dollars?

Haiti Marriott — One thing going on in Haiti: rendering of Port-Au-Prince Marriott, scheduled to open in 2014/NY Times

After a recent trip there, he comments that it’s particularly difficult to respond: “…when you get off the plane, there are signs of progress. The airport has been renovated. The roads around Port-au-Prince are being repaired. For those in bright t-shirts on their way to the provinces, travel times have been considerably reduced. Stopping en route in a guarded, air conditioned restaurant or supermarket offers the appearance of relative affluence with customers stopping to inspect shelves full of packaged imported food. If one has the funds, a private vehicle and the inclination to go to a night club or restaurant in the affluent Pétion-ville, the trip home is safer…”

Schuller considers the president of Haiti, Michel Martelly, who as a popular musical performer was known as “Sweet Micky,” and says that “…as head of state, he is performing progress (as noted anthropologist and artist Gina Athena Ulysse puts it)”..and: “The performance appears to be working..” given positive reviews from development agencies, NGOS, foreign governments, and some members of Haiti’s poor majority who have gotten jobs.

• Life after civil war and genocide

The Daily Mail (UK) and many media reported on recent findings about genocide among the Ixil Maya of Guatemala that have been largely ignored by authorities for centuries.

An unidentified Ixil Mayan in a mass grave. Photo/AP, Daily Mail

The Ixil came under the spotlight after a Guatemalan court found former dictator Efrain Rios Montt guilty of genocide on May 10 for the scorched-earth policies used against them during his rule in the 1980s. The conviction was annulled 10 days later following a trial that did nothing to change their lives of the Ixil people.

Byron Garcia, a social anthropologist who has worked in the area for a decade and who now lives in the Guatemalan capital, said Ixil Maya live in the same poverty as always: “People have been relegated to less productive places, places where you can’t grow food, to the mountains made of stone…The young people who can, sow plots of land. And when they can’t, they migrate.”

And, further, he said that victims feel a need to tell their stories, to be heard, to be indemnified, to find the bodies of their loved ones and be able to bury them. [Blogger’s note: the Daily Mail article includes some amazing photographs].
Continue reading “Anthro in the news 7/8/13” →

Anthro in the news 3/4/13

• Economic anthropologists sought to enrich poor numbers

According to a book review in The Financial Times, “A tendency to issue doubtful data is rooted in colonial days and still creates problems for the [African] continent, according to an important study: Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled By African Development Statistics and What To Do About It, by Morten Jerven. The review goes on: “There are lies, damned lies and then there are African statistics. If economic figures everywhere are a work in progress — regularly rebased and updated to take into account fresh data — those from Africa are the most open to question and the most unreliable in their revision.”

Morten Jerven Poor Numbers — Credit: Cornell University Press

The reviewer considers Poor Numbers to be an important contribution to the subject. Morten Jerven, an assistant professor at the school for international studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, builds the case for renewed scrutiny. Pointing to “huge discrepancies and alarming gaps” in African figures, he writes: “Datasets are like guns. Someone will use them if they are left lying around.”

And, further [and now we are getting to the connection with anthropology], Jerven calls for a focus on strengthened national statistical capacity, the use of “economic anthropologists,” and greater transparency on the underlying assumptions and weaknesses of existing data.

As Jerven rightly concludes: “Numbers are too important to be ignored, and the problems surrounding the production and dissemination of numbers are too serious to be dismissed.”

• The real news in anthropology is not about Chagnon

In the Huffington Post, Paul Stoller, professor of anthropology at West Chester University, comments on the latest “flare up” in the news surrounding Napoleon Chagnon‘s memoir, Noble Savages (and see below in this aitn). He states: “In the sweep of time, though, Chagnon’s work is but a blip on the screen. In the nanosecond reality of the media universe, Chagnon’s ideas and struggles will quickly revert back to what they are: ‘very old news.’ The real news…is the ongoing work on structures of poverty and social inequality, work that exposes how contemporary economic practices trigger widespread real world suffering. That scholarship produces results that are politically threatening to men like Rick Scott, Scott Walker and Rick Perry. That’s why they’re slashing higher education budgets. What better way to undermine anthropology, sociology, and the humanities and protect their economic and political interests?”

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 3/4/13” →

Anthro in the news 2/25/13

• Human Terrain System update

According to an article in USA Today, a $250 million U.S. Army program designed to aid troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has been riddled by serious problems that include payroll padding, sexual harassment and racism. The article cites Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University who has studied the program.

U.S. soldiers pass out toys during a Human Terrain Team site survey mission in Iraq, 2009. (Photo: Spc. Benjamin Boren) — U.S. soldiers pass out toys on a Human Terrain Team mission in Iraq, 2009/Spc. Benjamin Boren

In an email to USA Today, he said: “It’s another example of a military program that makes money for a contractor while greatly exaggerating its military utility … The program recruited the human flotsam and jetsam of the discipline and pretended it was recruiting the best. Treating taxpayer money as if it were water, it paid under-qualified 20-something anthropologists more than even Harvard professors. And it treated our [AAA] ethics code as a nuisance to be ignored.”

In Afghanistan, the Human Terrain teams feed information to military intelligence centers called Stability Operations Information Centers. The reports are designed to help determine potential targets and adversaries. “We don’t know how that information is useful in identifying a group or individual,” said R. Brian Ferguson, a Rutgers University cultural anthropologist who has studied the program. USA Today has obtained a soon-to-be published report by the National Defense University, a Pentagon-affiliated think tank, noting that Human Terrain System efforts “collectively were unable to make a major contribution to the counterinsurgency effort.”

• Follow the vodka

An article in The Atlantic described the growing role of sociocultural anthropology in marketing studies. It highlights the work of Min Lieskovsky, a 31-year-old straight New Yorker who mingled freely and occasionally ducked into a bathroom to scribble notes about a lesbian party in Austin, Texas, that was heavily infused with vodka.

Liekovsky had recently left a Ph.D. program in sociocultural anthropology at Yale University, impatient with academia but eager to use ethnographic research methods. The consulting firm she worked for, ReD Associates, is at the forefront of a movement to deploy social scientists on field research for corporate clients. The vodka giant Absolut contracted with ReD to infiltrate American drinking cultures and report on the elusive phenomenon known as the “home party.”

The corporate anthropology that ReD and a few others are pioneering is the most intense form of market research yet devised. ReD is one of a handful of consultancies that treat everyday life — and everyday consumerism — as a subject worthy of the scrutiny. According to the article, many of the consultants have trained at the graduate level in anthropology but have forsaken academia—and some of its ethical strictures—for work that frees them to do field research more or less full-time, with huge budgets. And agendas driven by corporate interests.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 2/25/13” →

From the perspective of the poor: An analytical review of selected works of Paul Farmer

Guest post by Megan Hogikyan

To label Paul Farmer as a practitioner or theorist of any one field would be a disservice to the multi-faceted nature of his commentary and points of view. A self-described physician and medical anthropologist by training (Farmer 2001 [1999], 2005), Farmer’s career experiences highlight his other important roles as an academic, humanitarian activist, diplomat, and voice of the poor. Evidence of each can be found when tracing the development of Farmer’s theories through analysis of selected works published since the 1990s. Depending on the function and audience of the work, and its place in his timeline of experience, each book highlights different concepts, practices, and forms of theory.

The categorization of Farmer’s writings into early, middle, and late periods helps to demonstrate the development and evolution of his core theories, how they build on each other, and how their progression is affected by each of his varied perspectives and audiences.

Analysis of selected works by Farmer traces the development of his main theories and arguments as they build on each other over time. Over the last two decades, Farmer’s central theories have evolved from studies of social suffering to practical analysis of political, social, and economic inequality and structural violence, and to pragmatic solidarity and the provision of tools of agency and targeted solutions to suffering stemming from tuberculosis (TB), HIV/AIDS, and poverty. The use of ethnography, local and international history, and the practice of actively bearing witness to violations of health as a human right facilitate what has become a collective, comprehensive approach and body of theory associated with Farmer. Consideration of his central concepts, writing style, and practical experiences serves to demonstrate how his unique approach came to be associated with the household name he is today.

Continue reading “From the perspective of the poor: An analytical review of selected works of Paul Farmer” →

Anthro in the news 1/28/13

• “Invisible cultural anthropologist” Jim Kim in the news

Anthro in the news picked up on two mentions of Jim Kim, medical anthropologist, physician, humanitarian development expert, and current president of the World Bank.

Jim Yong Kim, president of The World Bank — World Bank President Jim Yong Kim/Moritz Hager, Wikipedia

First, his op-ed, “Make Climate Change a Priority,” appeared in the Washington Post opinion section in which he wrote: “As economic leaders gathered in Davos this week for the World Economic Forum, much of the conversation was about finances. But climate change should also be at the top of our agendas, because global warming imperils all of the development gains we have made. If there is no action soon, the future will become bleak. The World Bank Group released a report in November that concluded that the world could warm by 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) by the end of this century if concerted action is not taken now.”

Second, an article in an economic/trade-focused forum discussed Kim’s visit to Tunisia to promote private sector development: “World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim today concluded a two-day visit to Tunisia during which the Group’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, announced a $48 million investment to support the growth of private entrepreneurs. Kim met the country’s leadership and civil society to discuss the reform agenda and Tunisia’s progress two years after its popular uprising. ‘We are here as strong supporters of the Tunisian revolution,’ said Kim. ‘[The people of Tunisia] went through some very difficult times, but in doing what you’ve done, you’ve inspired the entire world. [Now] we’ve got to make sure that Tunisia is successful in showing that Islam and democracy go together, that you can have economic development that includes everyone.'”

Kim emphasized ongoing World Bank Group support for Tunisia’s aspirations through programs that address improved governance and accountability, opportunities for women and youth, private sector job-creation and investments in interior regions.
Continue reading “Anthro in the news 1/28/13” →