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The loss of “proximity” senses

Ruth Finnegan in her Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human Interconnection (2002) explains that human face-to-face communication is characterized by multimodality, that is, by the fact that we always communicate using a variety of interdependent channels at the same time. The tone of voice, the effectiveness of the gaze, facial expressions, body posture, hand and arm gestures, the regulated use of touch, the evocative sense of smell, the symbolic power of clothing – all of these are elements of human interconnectedness.

Communicating is thus a highly polysemic process that is difficult to define and describe as it involves an extraordinary quantity of interdependent elements, in which the participants form an active and creative relationship.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the consequent lockdown have caused an unexpected restriction of the multiple modalities of human interconnection, reducing both our extraordinary and our daily social relationship to what can be communicated to the two dimensions of a screen.

As a consequence, the sense of sight is enhanced compared with others, leading to a persistent visual overexposure that tires and depresses us, causing, in the long run, the sensation of a loss of energy. As a secondary schoolteacher confided to me during an in-depth interview on remote teaching:

… the particular thing that we have all noticed: you put energy in there but it does not return, whereas in a direct relationship energies return; whenever you enter a classroom you feel that the energies do arrive, what you give comes back to you somehow, you feel tired but emotionally fortified; in there it is pure exhaustion, total alienation.

Furthermore, in digital communication, sight and hearing no longer work in synergy but produce a kind of continuous cognitive dissonance since, online, there is always a time lapse, more or less accentuated, between what I see (the speaker’s face) and what I listen to (the words that come to me a little later, sometimes slowed down, sometimes accelerated); the sense of touch, then, locked up in our homes, is reduced to typing on a keyboard, clicking, scrolling or even to frantic washing and disinfecting for fear of infection.

There is an even more direct relationship between Covid-19 and our senses: the symptomatology of the disease manifests itself in several cases with ageusia, the loss of taste, and anosmia, the loss of smell.

Much has been said about the obligation, imposed by the need to contain the spread of the disease, to maintain a physical distance and not to touch each other, and much has also been said about the social suffering caused by these prohibitions. However, less attention has been paid to the loss of smell and taste. Yet smell and taste are the most intimate senses, anthropologically defined as “proximity senses”. We do not have a standardized system of coding and verbalization for them as is the case for the “remote senses” – sight and hearing –- though they operate, more widely than the other senses, at the emotional and affective levels of experience.

A person’s smell is part of their uniqueness – it suggests mutual intimacy and can form a special, close bond with another person; the smells of the places we frequent represent a particularly emotive basis for the sense of belonging to a community, for social inclusion and exclusion (commonly, the foreigner “stinks”). Moreover, the sense of smell comes into play  during ceremonial and therapeutic moments, those most linked to the symbolic and even ritual dimensions of culture. It is able to stimulate the deeply moving memory of places, people, situations.

Taste is the sense that most subtly and unconsciously binds us to our tradition and cultural memory. As Le Breton writes in Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses, our favourite flavours constitute a secret and timeless bond that reminds us of the table of our childhood and, even further, to our feeding mother. Taste metaphorically defines pleasure – expressions such as “to savour life” or “to taste the beauty of a landscape” are frequently used – and besides, a beloved food or drink produces instant, intense, satisfying well-being.

Symbolically, the pandemic, just as it takes our breath away, takes away not only the most emotional and intimate parts of our senses, but also the most mysterious side of human relationality. As it temporarily makes these senses dormant in the infected, so it hides them from social life, since taste and smell are precisely the senses that cannot be experienced and communicated through the digital channel, which now characterizes most of our daily communications. If we can share our ideas through remote meetings, view a photo or listen to good music on our social networks, we cannot share aromas, perfumes, fragrances, flavours on a digital platform.

Therefore, the symptomatology of Covid-19 involves the loss of the sense of proximity and leaves some open questions: does it foreshadow the future of a humanity without smell or taste, senses to be considered as superfluous for digital humans? Or does it urge us to pay attention to that irreducible background of physicality, which we have rediscovered as an important component of human interconnection? Or, finally, does it remind us that communication, and therefore sociality, implies not only a cognitive level but also affective and emotional processes that we are unwilling to give up?

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Originally published in Italian as La perdita dei “sensi di prossimità”

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NO NATURAL DISASTERS!

Review of “Cooked: Survival by Zip Code” (by Judith Helfand, distributed by Bullfrog Films, 2018).

The film “Cooked: Survival by Zip Code” is based on the book – “Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago”.[1] The title of the film is a powerful depiction of the heatwave that ravaged across the city of Chicago in 1995.

The opening lines by Judith Helfand – “what is the best way to prepare for a disaster” – sets the tone well for what to expect in the film. The film begins with Helfand’s own experience during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Helfand explains that possessing a disaster preparedness kit can be a luxury for millions of people. During Sandy, Helfand uses her social capital (family) to move to safety and highlights that millions of others do not have the same social capital and safety nets. Further, the majority of the people do not have access to basic disaster preparedness kits. Later, the focus in the film shifts to the devastating heat wave in Chicago in 1995. The film shows the disproportionate impacts of the heatwave on the elderly and the Black and African American communities in poor neighborhoods. These impacts are clearly linked to poverty and the systemic construction of risk and vulnerability. Although the film effectively discusses “unnatural disasters”, it reiterates the use of the term “natural” disasters. Social science disaster research has provided ample evidence for decades that disasters are not natural. Hazards are natural.[2] A natural hazard becomes a disaster when it interacts with factors of risk, vulnerability, and exposure. The factors of vulnerability are rooted in historical systems of power and injustice, access to resources (financial, social, political). The various factors of vulnerability determine the level of disproportionate impacts different communities might face during disasters. By using the term “natural” disasters, we give an easy escape route to governments and corporations to blame nature or the climate instead of addressing issues of risk and vulnerability.

Disasters reveal layers of societal inequalities[3] in the form of disproportionate impacts. The COVID-19 pandemic has further unfolded this story across the world.[4] In the film, taking a deeper analysis of the Chicago heatwave of 1995, it is made clear how root causes of vulnerabilities such as systemic racism[5] play a central and significant role in disaster impacts.[6] The interviews and powerful accounts of many individuals in the film are examples to show the real causes of these disproportionate impacts on certain groups of people. For example, poverty and lack of access to resources make it almost impossible for some groups to prepare for disasters. Yet, after every disaster, governments and other actors continue to rebuild status quo and sometimes create new risk in this process of disaster recovery. Briefly, the film also highlights the impact of the Hurricane Katrina of 2005 showing similar patterns of disproportionate disaster effects on different communities. Although Katrina occurred a decade after the Chicago heatwave, it appears that not much has changed with regard to vulnerability of some groups of people. Disaster related memories seem to be short and learnings from disasters seem to be minimal. The film highlights an interesting conversation on the need to redefine disasters. Helfand raises the question – why isn’t poverty termed as a disaster? As Tierney highlights, “the patterns of differential vulnerability and differential impacts in the Katrina disaster mirrored those documented by social scientists in other hazard and disaster contexts, particularly those who conduct research within the vulnerability science paradigm” (p. 208).[7]

In response to the Chicago heatwave, Helfand shows different interventions being taken in under privileged neighborhoods. However, these interventions are fragmented and do not address issues of risk, vulnerability, and discrimination which are the underlying causes of disasters that need to be solved to reduce devastating impacts. The film challenges the need to spend big money on disaster simulations and trainings. Here, the critique against the system should be that disaster risk management is primarily response oriented. In a changing world, we need to be prepared for disasters while we continue to address root causes. The film also shows some of the mitigation related efforts taken by the city (for example, green roofs) in the aftermath of the heatwave. While mitigation activities are important, they are not sufficient. We need to continue investing in planning and preparing to ensure that hazards do not turn into disasters and societies need to be prepared at all times to respond. The core message must be – leave no one behind!

Overall, the film highlights many important questions that need to be addressed both at higher policy levels and at an operational level. Indeed, political decisions have a huge impact on how risks and vulnerabilities are transferred over  different generations. This aspect could have been better discussed in the film so to build a narrative on why some communities are historically disproportionately affected. Disasters are political and are related “to an amalgam of household and neighborhood level activities and networks for disaster response that happen outside of the gaze of the formalized governance arrangements but underlie and affect such arrangements and practices nonetheless” (p.215).[8] These invisible forms of governance very much shape the everyday life of people, i.e. the construction of risk and vulnerability. Further, given the context of climate change and extreme weather events, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) must be kept in mind. Disasters often set back years of development and complicate efforts to achieve the SDGs. A strong concerted effort to address the SDGs is needed with a strong focus on dynamics of risk and how to enhance societal resilience. The film does a good job in highlighting the real causes of disasters and the need for policy makers to pay attention to risk reduction and development.

[1] Klinenberg, E. (2015). Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. University of Chicago Press.

[2] O’Keefe, P., Westgate, K., and Wisner, B. (1976). Taking the Naturalness out of Natural Disasters. Nature 260(5552):566–567.

[3] Raju, E., and van Niekerk, D. (2020). Why Do the Impacts of Coronavirus Disease 2019 and the Response Surprise the World? Jàmbá – Journal of Disaster Risk Studies, 12(1).

[4] Raju, E., and Ayeb-Karlsson, S. (2020). COVID-19: How Do You Self-isolate in a Refugee Camp? International Journal of Public Health.

[5] Bolin B., and Kurtz L.C. (2018). Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Disaster Vulnerability. In: Rodríguez H., Donner W., Trainor J. (eds) Handbook of Disaster Research. Springer, pp 181-203.

[6] Wisner, B. et al. (2004) At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters. Routledge.

[7] Tierney K. (2006). Foreshadowing Katrina: Recent Sociological Contributions to Vulnerability Science. Contemporary Sociology, 35(3):207-212.

[8] Hilhorst, D., Boersma, K., and Raju, E. (2020). Research on Politics of Disaster Risk Governance: Where Are We Headed? Politics and Governance, 8(4):214–219.

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Winner of the Public Anthropologist Award 2021

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Public Anthropologist Award 2021 is Ather Zia for her book Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir, University of Washington Press (2019) and Zubaan Publishing (2020).

Ather Zia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Gender Studies Program at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. She holds a doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. Her research examines the Indian military occupation, settler colonialism, and women’s collective political and social challenges in the disputed Indian-administered Kashmir.
Resisting Disappearance is a powerful narration of the effects of oppression and political disputes on people’s everyday life. The book is engaging and shrewdly written. It effectively summarizes the broad and committed scholarship behind it. An excellent example of anthropology’s capacity to both inform and inspire.

Read below to learn more about Ather Zia’s work.


Antonio: What’s Resisting Disappearance about?

Ather: The political resistance in Kashmir predates the formation of India and Pakistan. In the last 40 years or so, from an international dispute involving Kashmiri people, the Kashmir issue has been relegated to being a bilateral dispute or a “border issue.” An issue that India from time to time even undermines as an internal problem or labels it as “terrorism,” negating the genuine political demands of the Kashmiri which are on the UN agenda and mandated by its resolutions. This book focuses on tracing the neo-imperial project that India has had in Kashmir effectively starting in 1947. My analysis deploys enforced disappearances that have been effected by the Indian army and other government militia and vigilantes as a way of tracing the project and policies of the Indian occupation. The ethnography centralizes the voices of Kashmiri activist women from the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) who have been searching for the 10,000 + Kashmiri men subjected to enforced disappearance by the Indian forces. As a Kashmiri myself it becomes supremely important to center and amplify Kashmiri voices. Even though Kashmiris have been vocal and active in every decade since 1947, they have been increasingly invisibilized and their resistance criminalized by India. The power of ethnography lies in storytelling and this book tells the story of Kashmir through the voices of Kashmiri women, activists offering a critical feminist and political analysis of Indian occupation in Kashmir.

Antonio: Enforced disappearances disrupt families and society. What is the current state of the military occupation in Kashmir? 

Ather: Kashmir is one of the most densely militarized zones in the world. There are more than 700,000 Indian soldiers on Kashmir soil at the moment. As the world fights the Covid-19 pandemic, Kashmir, without a break, continues to reel under the brutal Indian occupation. In early 2020, Kashmiris were hobbling back to life from a long military siege and communication lockdown that had been imposed by India on August 5, 2019 when it unilaterally and militarily removed Kashmir’s autonomy. During the pandemic, India has not stopped any of its counterinsurgency operations. The cordon and search operations (CASO) are going on. During CASO the Indian forces enter neighborhoods and communities under the pretext of searching for militants. It is an operation filled with soldiers creating mayhem in people homes; arresting, beating, humiliating, physically and sexually harassing civilians. Armed encounters with militants are also continuing during the lockdown. Routine surveillance, patrolling, frisking at checkpoints and convoy movement have not ceased and they are even growing. All this despite the United Nations calling for cessation of violence in conflict zones across the globe. The India government followed the removal of Kashmir’s territorial sovereignty and autonomy with a brazen amendment in Kashmir’s own domicile act, which marks the manifest beginning of Indian settler colonialism. Thousands of Kashmiris are illegally arrested, raided and detained and media is fully gagged by imposition of new statutes. The Indian necropolitical policies are growing; never the ones to sit silent, India has enforced silence in Kashmir and the fear of state terrorism, dispossession, incarceration, and ecocide is growing.

Antonio: How does mourning become not simply a coping strategy but an active form of engagement with political violence? 

Ather: In the brutal political repression that exists in Kashmir, the simple act of remembrance is a marker of resistance and can invoke the wrath of the Indian nation state. Thus, to embark on public mourning is to invite danger and death. Yet, the APDP activists have been doing it since the late 1980s and formally since 1994. Mourning in the context of military occupation ceases to just be only a mode of coping, it becomes a revolutionary act of resistance. In the book, I propose the analytic lens of “affective law,” which is in contrast to the sovereign’s law that prevails over Kashmir and that has caused the enforced disappearances in the first place. I urge readers to see affective law as a paradigm, which manifests the quest for justice by the activists, as not just accidental but a deliberate effort to reclaim some power to get justice, despite the dangers to life and scarce legal options. This law is born of mourning, which is effectively a mode of politics and not just routine commemoration. APDP’s mission manifests creation of counter-memory, practices of remembering and forgetting that become crucial for resisting oppression and oppressive dominant ideologies. These counter memories as subjugated knowledges which are produced by a deeply brutalized people will often remain hidden behind dominant statist versions. So they need to be scrupulously traced and told. My analysis makes manifest in how they appear both in archival and performative modes, in documentation and in public mourning. APDP’s activism becomes a resistant memory against amnesia forced by a repressive occupation. By highlighting these subjugated knowledges, my ethnography illustrates how the APDP activists expose the Indian governments’ policies to control Kashmiri dissent and its genuine demand for self-determination as mandated by the UN.

Antonio: Poetry is a key component of your work. Can you tell us more about how you see your work at the intersection of ethnography and poetry?

Ather: Anthropology has a generous heart in allowing creative genres to become part of our analysis. For me, the poems written while doing ethnographic work acted as a moment of surfeit, where reason sought the logic of surplus and escaped measured words. As a poet who could not stop writing poetry while doing fieldwork, the poetic process to be part of research journey enabled greater empathy, an experiencing, and a witnessing which otherwise was not possible as part of my methodological toolkit. As a mode of contemporary ethnopoetics, the poetic aspect becomes part of the movement for strengthening the turn towards what Renato Rosaldo describes as “antropoesia,” bridging the cultural and social scientific fields of poetry and anthropology.

Antonio: What are your future plans?

Ather: I am working on a collection of ethnographic poetry based on my work in Kashmir. It is tentatively titled, Field-in-Verse: Writing under Occupation; and also a set of short stories; a novella if time permits. I am also co-editing a volume titled Dreams Under Occupation. My current research interest is the increasing Indian settler colonial project and that is where I am ethnographically parked at the moment.

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Building a school in the ‘dark hell’ of the Moria camp: A conversation about hope, politics and humanity with refugee entrepreneur Zekria Farzad

The interview was conducted in January 2021, but this text also incorporates some extracts from previous and later conversations. The text has been edited and amended for clarity by Heidi Mogstad and Zekria Farzad.

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Introduction: In humanitarian (and some scholarly) discourses, refugees are often portrayed as passive and powerless victims stripped of political agency and opinions. However, those of us who have worked in refugee camps, or with refugee communities, know that this is very seldom the case. On Lesvos, where I conducted fieldwork intermittently between August 2018 and December 2019, there was a plethora of state- and non-state actors seeking to assist the asylum seekers stuck in limbo on the Greek island. Yet, the refugees they sought to help were not passive and helpless recipients. Nor were they reduced to the conditions Agamben famously described as ‘bare life’: life confined to mere bodily existence or a physical struggle for survival (Agamben, 1998). To the contrary, many of the refugees on Lesvos protested or spoke out against European asylum policies, the EU-Turkey deal and the unsafe and undignified conditions in the former Moria camp. They demanded that their rights as refugees and asylum seekers should be respected, attention and responsibility from European leaders and publics and, more than anything, to be recognised and treated as human beings. While living in a place notorious for its extreme overcrowding, violence and abjection, residents of the Moria camp also acted ingeniously and collectively, creating pockets of community and normalcy inside and outside of the fences of the former military base. Some built makeshift businesses including mini-markets, barbershops, religious spaces, food stalls and bakeries selling tasty falafels or bread made in home-made clay ovens (reputedly the best on the island!). Others volunteered for NGOs or formed their own teams and organisations to fill crucial gaps in service provision including cleaning, security, education and recreational activities. These refugee-led initiatives have been particularly important during the last year, after new government regulations, threats from local fascist groups and Covid-19 pushed many foreign NGOs to leave Lesvos. What follows is an interview with the Afghan-born journalist, father-of-five and humanitarian entrepreneur Zekria Farzad. After arriving with his family in what he describes as the ‘dark hell’ of Moria, Zekria decided to start a school for the children living in the camp. He later founded Wave of Hope for the Future (hereafter Wave of Hope), a refugee-led humanitarian organisation with a mission to support education for refugee children on Lesvos and elsewhere. In this interview, Zekria describes his family’s hazardous journey to Europe and the birth and trajectory of his school and humanitarian organisation. Zekria also shares views on European asylum policies and reflects on the dehumanisation and devaluation of non-white bodies on the move. The interview ends with Zekria reinstating his belief in a radical humanism.

Heidi: Can you start by telling us a bit about yourself and your background?

Zekria: I was born in Kabul in 1979 in a family of nine children. My father worked for several international organisations, while my mother was a housewife. I grew up mostly in Kabul, but my family lived some years in exile in Rawalpindi in Pakistan during the Taliban regime. After I graduated from Ansari High School in Kabul, I started to study journalism at a private university while working as a contractor of the US army. I loved my studies and dreamed about becoming a professional journalist or diplomat for my country, but the threat of the Taliban made this impossible. But I used my education and experience to start my own magazine: ‘Farda eZeba’ (‘Beautiful tomorrow’ in Farsi). The magazine writes about cultural, historical and political issues and is distributed in rural Afghanistan to inform and awaken the younger generation, and encourage them to be part of the resistance against the Taliban and other terrorist groups. I also established an educational project for children in Pakistan and was part of several civil society and activist groups mobilising for social justice in Kabul. In 2005, I met my beloved wife at a wedding party. She was a midwife, and I went to see her several times in her clinic before we decided to get married. We now have five children between the age of 4 and 12. My oldest boy and girl are very eager and talented students but regrettably, we had to flee from Afghanistan before they were able to graduate.

Heidi: When did you arrive on Lesvos? If you like, could you tell us a bit about your family’s journey to Europe?

Zekria: I left my beloved homeland in March 2018 with my wife and five children. The journey was extremely tough, especially for my children. The smugglers made us change vehicles many times, from small pick-up cars to motorbikes. We also had to cross some of the borders by foot. I was constantly afraid that we would be ambushed by the Taliban or thieves hiding in the desert. However, we did not face any problems before we reached the border between Turkey and Iran. There, we were kidnapped and held us hostage under a bridge for two nights. It was snowing, and my children were sick, so I ended up paying the kidnappers 5000 US dollars to let us go. After walking for ten straight days, we finally arrived in Turkey. However, our asylum applications were denied, so we had no choice but to continue our journey towards Europe. During the next eight months, we participated in ‘the smuggler’s game’ about ten times. We first tried to get on a large ship to Italy, but we were exploited and deceived by the smugglers on multiple occasions. During one of our attempts, we were kidnapped again and held hostage in a remote house in a forest along with several other refugee families. The kidnappers were armed and tied the hands of all the men. They told us that each family had to pay 40 000 euro, otherwise they would keep us here until we died. Of course, neither of us had that kind of money. However, in the middle of the night, I was able to help one of the other men in the group –a young single refugee from Afghanistan– to escape. I told him that he must run to the police and get help. I was so afraid that he would not keep his promise, or that the kidnappers would find out what we had done and hurt my wife or children or the other beautiful women and children that were held hostage with us. But thanks to the brave young man, the police showed up and arrested the kidnappers. After 12 days in police custody, they transferred us to refugee camps. I was placed in a closed camp for only men, while my family was sent to another camp far away. The authorities tried to convince me to sign a paper agreeing to be deported back to Afghanistan, but I refused. After 25 days of continuous refusals and negotiations, I was finally released and reunited with my family. The young man who saved us was deported back to Afghanistan, but has fled again, I wish him the best. We were all exhausted and scared, and my children had started to develop mental health problems, but we could not stay in Turkey. After three more failed ‘games’, we were finally able to get on a dinghy to Lesvos in February 2019. The hours we spent in that flimsy boat on the cold Aegean Sea was the worst night of my life. There were perhaps 50 people in the dinghy, and very few of us knew how to swim. My brave wife and I held our five terrified children as close as we could and prayed that we would arrive safely. Not long before we reached the North coast of Lesvos, the boat crashed into some rocks and started to sink. At that time, I was sure that we were all going to die and started to visualise our dead bodies floating in the sea. However, thank God, we were able to get out of the boat before it sank and got onshore. It was a very distressing moment: I remember I frantically counted all my children –1-2-3-4-5 – before I could finally breathe again. All of us had survived, and we were standing on European soil. But not everyone was as lucky as we were; a ten-year-old girl from another family drowned. We also lost all our documents and belongings including our passports, money, mobile phone and diplomas.

Heidi: You arrived on Lesvos in February 2019, nearly three years after EU’s deal with Turkey in March 2016 which intended to curb so-called irregular migration to Europe. The deal, combined with Greece’s overburdened asylum system and policy of geographical containment, made thousands of asylum seekers trapped on the Aegean islands under appalling conditions while awaiting decisions on their applications. You and your family had to live in the notorious Moria camp: Lesvos’s official Registration and Identification Centre (RIC) and the far biggest camp on the island. Before it burned to the ground in September 2020, the Moria camp was described as the worst refugee camp in Europe due to its severe overcrowding, lack of police protection and sanitation facilities, and high rates of untreated mental health problems (for a more detailed discussion of the history and structure of Moria, see Rozakou, 2019). The mayor of Lesvos and Pope Francis both likened the Moria camp to a concentration camp, while residents typically described it as a prison or living hell. In response to the permanence of the Moria camp, its worsening conditions and spillover-effects on the local community, both refugees and Greek islanders organised demonstrations and strikes, calling for immediate evacuations or ‘decongestion’ of the island. Yet despite this, and despite repeated warnings and appeals by UNCHR, MSF and other humanitarian organisations, the situation for asylum seekers on Lesvos only further deteriorated after you arrived in February 2019. In fact, the subsequent summer, Lesvos saw the biggest increase in boat arrivals since 2016, putting additional pressure on the scarce and inadequate facilities.
What was your experience of arriving and living in the former Moria camp with your family, and what made you decide to build a school for the children in the camp?

Zekria: When we first arrived in Moria, I was still in shock and just grateful that my family had survived. But I soon realised that, while we were still alive, this was not a proper life. The conditions were far worse than I had ever imagined. The official camp was full, so we were first allocated a flimsy tent in the ‘jungle’ [the informal spillover tent camp in the olive grove outside of the official structure of the Moria camp]. Apart from the obvious lack of proper shelter, food and sanitation, I also discovered another fundamental problem: there were children everywhere, but they had no access to education! When I asked the camp authorities about this, they said children must wait for at least 3 to 6 months to be enrolled in a school. I was shocked and dismayed. But I am not the kind of person who just sits back and watch when something is missing in my community –even if the community is only a temporary refugee camp– so I decided to do something about it. The next morning, I went to the city and bought a whiteboard and some markers. When I returned to the camp, I found a space outside under an olive tree and started providing basic lessons for my children and other children in the camp. This was the beginning of Wave of Hope.

Heidi: That’s such an inspirational story and I know it does not end there. Could you please tell us about the development of the school and your organisation?  I am also curious: why did you choose that particular name?

Zekria: The name has an important philosophy. Those of us who crossed the sea in one of those small dinghies knew with 100 per cent certainty that it was not a good choice. But we had to try. The waves were dangerous and frightening, but they also symbolised hope, because they could bring us forward, to safety. Personally, I believe it was God’s hand that saved us, but the point is that we survived and are now in a position to help others. Now we can bring others hope like the waves that nearly swallowed us.  

The school expanded very quickly. In the beginning, people walking around the camp saw me teaching under the olive tree, got interested, and started to bring their children. The parents were very supportive. Some of them let me use their private tents so we could have a quiet space and protect the children from the sun. After only a few weeks, I had seven classes and decided that I needed more help and structure. At the beginning of May, I thus gathered a team of refugee volunteers and together we started the Wave of Hope. We used our own money to buy materials in town and built three classrooms with wood frames, tarpaulin roofs and rugs on the floor. Rumours about our work spread quickly. We received more and more students and many refugees volunteered to be teachers. Before the old Moria camp burned down in September 2020, we had more than 2700 students and 44 teachers!

We worked really hard to fill the gaps in education, although we knew that it was not a substitute for formal schooling. While focusing primarily on providing education to children, we also offered various language classes, including Greek, Arabic, Farsi and English. We also opened a library and a community centre providing recreational activities like arts and music. As you know, many children and adults in the camp have mental health problems, so we tried to create a safe and positive space where they could learn, be stimulated and think about something else. I am very proud of our accomplishments. After only a few months, the simple school I started under the olive tree had become a humanitarian institution by refugees for refugees!

Heidi: What has been the best and most challenging part of running Wave of Hope? As far as I know, the school is run entirely by refugees on Lesvos, but can you also say something about your relationship to Greek authorities and other organisations?

Zekria: As a human being, I consider it to be my obligation to do something good in this world. But helping people also makes me feel joyful and relaxed. Being a teacher is a luxury and a gift in my life. When I stand in front of the class, I feel very happy. But starting a school and organisation as a refugee in a foreign land has also been challenging. In the beginning, we received many warnings from the Greek police and camp authorities; they told us we do not have the right to start a school in their country and asked us to stop our work before they did it. However, after several months of discussions and negotiations, where I explained the purpose and importance of the school for our children and community, they finally accepted it. While the majority of the people in Moria was very supportive, there were also bad people and bullies in the camp who threatened and attacked me, interrupted our classes and broke our whiteboards.

From the very beginning until this day, Wave of Hope has been an independent and refugee-led organisation. Eventually, we also started to receive some international volunteers, however about 80 per cent of my colleagues are still from our own refugee communities. I have never asked anyone outside of our community for help, but words about our organisation travelled fast. Many people have come to visit our school and subsequently offered to help or collaborate with us. We also have individual donors across the world. I am very proud of our independence, but I also happy that Wave of Hope has become a global family. And our organisation continues to grow. After some of our teachers were moved from Lesvos to camps on the Greek mainland, we started new schools there. With help from some of my dear friends and family in Afghanistan, I am also building a school for 800 children in one of the country’s rural area.

Regarding other organisations, I have mixed opinions. Some organisations, like Doctors Without Borders, are doing good work, but I do not like the UNCHR’s policies on Lesvos. I think most of the volunteer organisations act better than the UNHCR and provide good services for refugees, but some exploit the situation to make money.

Heidi: During the last few years, people from Afghanistan have made up the largest portion of asylum seekers on Lesvos. This is partly a result of the fact that Syrians have been prioritised: both by the Greek registration system and by the asylum policies of other European states – and in some cases, also by humanitarian actors and activists. The lack of attention and priority to non-Syrian refugees demonstrates how hierarchies of worth and deservingness in European refugee politics are not only based on factors such as gender and age but also nationality. In the case of Syrian refugees, nationality is also linked with racial- and class-based biases and assumptions (Cabot, 2015; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016; Rozakou, 2017). What do you think is the largest misconception people in Europe have about Afghanistan or Afghan refugees?

Zekria: It’s a good question, actually. I cannot generalise about all Europeans, but I think many European politicians believe that Afghan people are terrorists, or that we are not eligible for asylum because Afghanistan is a safe country. Neither of this is true. The majority of Afghan people do not support the Taliban, but are innocent people stuck in a war zone. And Afghanistan is a very dangerous country. Every day we are just waiting for news that our loved ones have died. But most governments in Europe do not realise how dangerous Afghanistan is, and therefore place Afghan refugees at the bottom of their lists.

Heidi: That’s very true. And this includes my own country Norway, which officially prioritises Syrian families, while frequently deporting Afghan refugees, including families with children who have been raised and schooled in Norway and speak fluent Norwegian. And which does this, I must add, without addressing the country’s own role or complicity as an active member of the NATO-led invasion in Afghanistan (Bangstad, 2019). Regarding misconceptions, I also think many Europeans are largely unaware of the rich Afghan and Persian culture. For instance, the poet Rumi has become very popular in the US and Europe, but I suspect that many are unaware that he came from Afghanistan.

Zekria: There are so many good poets from our region. I love Rumi, but also Sadhi, Hafez, Khaiam, Rodaki, Jami, Sanee, Bedil Dehlevi, Eqbbal, Ghaleb, Aasi, Parvern, Etesami, Shamlo and Khalili. We also have many talented singers and musicians like the famous Ahmad Zaher. Most refugees bring with them lots of talent and value from their countries, including music, food and entrepreneurship, however, for some reason this is hardly ever talked about.  

Heidi: You are right. Refugees are very often described as either burdens and problems or pure and abstract victims without personal histories and resources. I want to return briefly to your personal story. Contrary to popular perception, about 3/4 of Afghan refugees in Greece is in fact granted refugee status and some form of asylum protection. Nevertheless, your family’s application was rejected. Why do you think it got rejected, and what did you do when you learned about this? 

Zekria: I do not know why, but I sometimes think the rejection had to do with my work in Greece. We appealed once, but when our lawyer informed us that we would receive a second rejection, we were advised to leave Lesvos to avoid being deported back to Turkey and Afghanistan. We managed to get to Athens, where we had to live illegally without any identity documents. This was not a safe and good life for my family, so I decided to once again ‘play with my life’ to reach Northern-Europe. The journey was too dangerous for my children, so I left alone, hiding under a truck to Italy. From Italy, I managed to get to Switzerland, where I was granted a temporary asylum visa. I have now been alone in Switzerland for over a year.  Life here is better, but I really miss my family. I have been told I have to wait three years before I can bring them here. When my dear father died in Afghanistan a few weeks ago, I could not even go to his funeral. It was hard to accept, but it is part of life when you are a refugee in this world. On the bright side, I can do some work from here and I have friends who help to support my family in Athens so my children can go to school.

Heidi: I want to ask you about the current situation on Lesvos, and how it has impacted the work of your school and organisation. For the asylum seekers stuck in limbo on Lesvos, the last year has been characterized by a several overlapping crises that have exacerbated existing vulnerabilities and rights violations. Crudely summarised, we might start with the Greek government’s announcement to establish closed camps on Lesvos and four other Greek islands in November 2019. The announcement exacerbated local tensions on Lesvos and led to a series of strikes and protests by refugees as well as Greek islanders. During February and early March, law and order collapsed on the island: locals fought riot police sent by the central government, police teargassed protesting locals and refugees (including young children) and local fascist groups threatened and violently attacked refugees, NGO-workers, volunteers and journalists, prompting neo-Nazis from other European countries to come to Lesvos (Fallon, 2020). Shortly after, Covid-2019 started to spread across Europe, leading Greek authorities to restrict the freedom of movement for the island’s refugee population (on the biopolitics of Covid-19 on Lesvos, see Jauhiainen, 2020) and issue further barriers and regulations for foreign NGOs operating in the country. As a result of these developments, most international NGOs either left Lesvos or scaled down their operations significantly during the spring of 2020. In my understanding, this made Wave of Hope’s work even more important. It also led to the establishment of other refugee-led organisations seeking to protect the refugee population from the virus including Moria Corona Awareness Team and Moria White Helmet. Despite these laudable efforts, managing social distancing in the overcrowded camp was impossible and the first cases of Covid-19 in the camp were detected in early September 2020. And then came the fire. During the night of 8th of September, the Moria camp –at that time filled over four times capacity– burst into flames, causing residents to flee in panic. It should be said that several smaller fires had broken out in Moria previously, causing deaths of both adults and children. Yet, this time, the entire camp burned to the ground. The Greek prime minister announced a four-month state of emergency on the island, while a new tent camp was built to re-house the residents of Moria. The new camp, which came to be known as Moria 2.0, is located at a former military shooting range and commonly said to have even worse conditions than the previous site. Not only is the new camp located right by the sea and thus more exposed to wind and flooding. There is also no drainage and sewing system, no showers, electricity and heating, and even less access to medical and legal assistance. Many humanitarian actors have complained that they have greater difficulties accessing Moria 2.0, and that a new ‘confidentiality law’ prevents them from publicly sharing information about the camp’s conditions and potential abuse. Can you say something about how Covid-19 and the fire that burned down Moria camp in September 2020 has affected the work of Wave of Hope?

Zekria: Part of what happened during this period was that our schools became important support platforms for community organisation and emergency aid. For instance, when Covid-19 started to spread across Europe, we established an awareness team to inform refugees about the virus and distribute life-saving protection equipment like face masks, disinfection gel, gloves and hand soap to the refugee community. After the old Moria camp burned down in September 2020, we also organised emergency food distributions. However, gaining access to the new camp has been very difficult. We have tried to negotiate with the camp authorities to get a space inside the new camp, and attended many joint meetings with UNHCR and other organisations, but we are still waiting for a positive response. While waiting, we built a new school outside the camp, at the premises of another organisation (One Happy Family), but because of the lockdown, the school had to close. At the moment, we are running some children activities and classes inside the private tents of people in Moria 2.0 and at the premises of the old Kara Tepe refugee camp. When the lockdown was lifted, we also managed to open an art exhibition and run some classes and an office in town with support from other organisations. It has been very frustrating to lose, not only our physical structures but also our access and independence. It seems to me as the Greek authorities are using the Coronavirus as an excuse to further restrict the work of NGOs like ours as well as the rights and movements of refugees on the island. Another problem we face on Lesvos is the local fascist groups which remain active on the ground and very intimidating.  

Heidi: The people of Lesvos was celebrated for their hospitality during the beginning of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, but many local residents are growing increasingly frustrated and angry with the situation. Regardless of their politics and attitudes towards refugees, many locals say they want ‘their island back’. Have you had many interactions with Greek people on Lesvos and do you understand their grievances? 

Zekria: Yes, I have lots of good Greek friends, and I understand why the local people are angry about the presence of refugee camps on their beautiful island. The problem is not the refugees or the locals, but the authorities and politicians who make life hard for both sides. It should be a piece of cake to relocate all refugees from Lesvos but for the politicians, our lives are just a political game. 

Heidi: Whose authorities and politicians are you referring to? Or, to put it differently: who do you blame for the current predicaments of refugees in Greece?

Zekria: EU and European politicians carry the heaviest responsibility; it is they who have closed their borders and criminalised refugees seeking asylum. After them, I think the Greek government is responsible for the lack of security in the camps. I believe Greek authorities are deliberately trying to make Moria a bad and dangerous place to attract financial support from other European countries. As a result, refugees are living worse than animals in Western countries. There are no human rights for us; refugees are treated as pieces in a game played by Turkey and European countries.

Heidi: That brings me to the next question: What ideas and hopes did you have about Europe before you came to Lesvos, and what are your thoughts and opinions about the EU and European countries today?

Zekria: Before coming to Europe, I always read about the continent’s development, stable economic growth, democratic system and human rights. Therefore, seeing what I saw in Moria was a big shock to me. I still cannot believe that from 2015 until this day, the big and powerful EU has not been able to improve Moria or assist the refugees in Greece. But I have come to realise that Europe is unable to bring change around the world and that all their human rights slogans are nothing but commercial advertisement.

Heidi: When you spoke earlier about the symbolism of the name of your organisation, it reminded me about the poem Home by the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire. In this poem, she writes: ‘No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than land.’

Zekria: I agree with her 100 per cent. We were all trying to find safe land, and if we had a better option, we would never have risked our lives and the lives of our children getting in that boat.

Heidi: It is a brilliant poem. But what it does not address is why refugees like yourself and your family are forced to take this enormous risk in the first place. And the reason is, as you know, that European countries do not offer safe and legal routes for refugees to reach EU and apply for asylum (apart from family reunification which is an extremely slow and demanding process). As Mbembe (2018) puts it, this illustrates a central contradiction in liberal thought and politics: that some people’s movements are configured as freedom, while others are deemed improper and conceived as a threat. Rather than a contradiction, we can of course also call it European falsehood or hypocrisy as indeed you did earlier. Staying on this topic, I thought I should end the interview by asking you about some of the posts I have read on your Facebook page. In one of the posts, you wrote: ‘globalisation is a dream, not a reality’. In another post, you reflected on the hundreds of refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean earlier that week when attempting to reach Europe. You suggested that, if the people in the boats had been white, they would have been immediately rescued. You also asked why people –including those on the Left and those who have rightfully protested against the murder of George Floyd– were so quiet when hundreds of black refugees were let drowned while seeking refuge in Europe. You asked, very appropriately in my opinion: ‘do these black lives not matter?’ and said that you hoped your criticism would hurt.

Zekria: Yes, and I stand by what I said. As long as some people do not have access to human rights, and are not treated as human beings, we cannot speak about the world as a global village. The problem is not at the level of discourse or ideas, but rather that some people and countries do not practice what they preach: it is a discrepancy between people’s ideals and actions. Black lives, Afghan lives, Syrian lives, Yemenis lives, all lives matter –but politics, racism and discrimination divide us, and deny some people full equality and humanity. The result is what we see are seeing today, in Moria and the Mediterranean and many other places.

Heidi: In the introduction to his book, The Displaced (2018), writer and former refugee Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that for refugees, ‘the past is not only marked by the passage of time, but by loss – the loss of loved ones, or countries, of identities, of selves.’ On the one hand, your story challenges this narrative of loss, as you have overcome multiple hurdles and reconstituted yourself as a teacher, political critic, and leader of a humanitarian organisation. In Arendt’s words, you have demonstrated that ‘refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples’ (Arendt, 2007:274[1943]; see also Horst and Lysaker, 2019). However, when we spoke earlier, you partly contested this reading, emphasising that your story is not simply ‘incredible’, but also ‘very tough’. It is not only that traumas endure, but also the fact your life is still on hold: so far you have only received temporary asylum in Switzerland and you have been told you have to wait three years before you can reunite with your family. What are your thoughts and dreams about the future, for yourself and your family? Do you think you will be able to return to Afghanistan, or do you prefer to build a new life in Europe? And how do you imagine the future of Wave of Hope?

Zekria: I’m very worried about Afghanistan and our people; the current situation is more critical and dangerous than ever before. About a year ago, the American government signed a peace agreement with the Taliban, but this was not a peace agreement with the Afghan government or people. If real peace comes, and the world wants Afghanistan to be a peaceful place, we will return to our beloved homeland Afghanistan/Khorasan. But until that day, I will work hard to create a future for my children in Europe. But my dreams are not only about my own family. In fact, I consider all of humanity to be my family, and contributing to the happiness of people as the true meaning of life. Regarding my organisation, I hope that the organisation will continue to grow and that my colleagues from different countries can be waves spreading hope across the word. As an organisation, we also hope that the politicians in this world will see our work as a symbol of peace and unity and take lesson.

Heidi: Despite all the inhumane practices you have witnessed and experienced, you don’t seem to have lost your faith in humanity? At the very least, you still say you work in the service of humanity, which you refer to as your larger family. This language resonates with that of many humanitarian workers and volunteers in Europe, including those I have worked with and researched. Yet I think there is a crucial difference. Contra the European citizens who seek to assist their ‘fellow human beings’, you and other refugees seeking asylum in today’s Europe cannot take your status as human beings for granted. Moreover, as you and other refugees on Lesvos have made very clear, your demands for change and recognition arise, not simply ‘in the name of humanity’, but in response to the violent denial of your humanity. As such, you expose the contradictions and limits of European liberalism and human rights talk as well the violent exclusions of political communities organised on the basis of xenophobic nationalism (see also Gilroy, 2005; 2019). Perhaps a parallel can be drawn to the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon, whose humanism was radical and insurgent, yet still profoundly optimistic? 

Zekria: Yes. We know that political games, racism and discrimination divide humanity, treating some people, like refugees, like animals. But by taking matters in our own hands, we reclaim our humanity, while also fighting for others. I wish for a peaceful world for all: not just for the west, the east, the north or the south.

Heidi: As far as I know, the Quran also emphasises the unity or oneness of humanity, and the idea that it is human societies who have violated that principle by created divisions amongst ourselves. To what extent are your thoughts and values of humanity shaped by your religious beliefs?

Zekria: I am a Muslim, and Islam is the foundation of my thoughts and beliefs. However, the prophet Muhammad is not my only role model. I am also inspired by other people like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, Ahmad Shah Masoud, Napoleon Hill and Charlie Chaplin. What Islam has taught me is to work for humanity and see no borders between people. I say, with Rumi, that I am ‘Not a Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi or Zen’, ‘not from the East or the West’, but first and foremost a ‘breath-breathing human being’. 

Heidi: Thank you so much Zekria for sharing your time and insight.

References:

Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Arendt, H. (2007). ‘We refugees.’ In Kohn, J and Feldman, R. (Eds). The Jewish Writings. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 264-274

Bangstad, S. (2019). Norway: the forced deportation machine. Public Anthropologist, 27 June 2019. Available at: https://publicanthropologist.cmi.no/2019/06/27/norway-the-forced-deportation-machine/

Cabot, H. (2015). Crisis and continuity: A critical look at the ‘European refugee crisis. Allegra Laboratory Net, 10 November. Available at: http://allegralaboratory.net/crisis-and-continuity-a-critical-look-at-the-european-refugee-crisis

Fallon, K. (2020). ‘How the Greek island Lesbos became a stage for Europe’s far right’. Al Jazeera. 5 May 2020. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/5/6/how-the-greek-island-lesbos-became-a-stage-for-europes-far-right

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2016). Repressentations of Displacement in the Middle East’, Public Culture 28(3): 457-473

Gilroy, P. (2005). Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gilroy, P. (2019). Holberg lecture: ‘Never again: Refusing Race and Salvaging the Human’. Available at: https://holbergprisen.no/en/news/holberg-prize/2019-holberg-lecture-laureate-paul-gilroy

Horst, C. & Lysaker, O. (2019) Miracles in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt and Refugees as ‘Vanguard’. Journal of Refugee Studies, 7.

Mbembe, A. (2015). ‘The idea of a Borderless World.’ Africa is a country. Available at: https://africasacountry.com/2018/11/the-idea-of-a-borderless-world

Nguyen, V. (2018). The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. Abram Press: London

Jauhiainen, JS. (2020). Biogeopolitics of COVID-19: Asylum-Related Migrants at the European Union Borderlands. Tijdschr Econ Soc Geogr. 111(3):260-274.

Rozakou, K. (2017). Nonrecording the “European refugee crisis” in Greece: Navigating through irregular bureaucracy. Focaal, 77:36-49

Rozakou, K. (2019). ‘How did you get in?’ Research access and sovereign power during the ‘migration crisis’ in Greece. Social Anthropology, 27(1):68-83.

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La situazione attuale in Myanmar

Dopo il colpo di stato militare del 1 febbraio 2021 da parte del Tatmadaw (le forze armate del Myanmar), il 2 febbraio e’ stato nominato lo State Administrative Council, ovvero un nuovo esecutivo di governo formato in parte dai militari stessi e in parte da politici di varie fazioni.

Gli esponenti del partito risultato vincitore alle elezioni dell’8 novembre 2020, il Nation League for Democracy (NLD), sono stati incarcerati e tra loro la stessa Aung San Suu Kyi, leader de facto del governo eletto.

Le forze militari hanno colto l’occasione per reclamare il potere e destituire il governo a seguito della compromessa validita’ delle elezioni stesse allorche’ nell’ottobre 2020 la Union Election Commission nego’ la possibilita’ di voto ad oltre un milione di cittadini limitandosi a dichiarare che, a causa dei violenti conflitti interni, non vi erano le necessarie condizioni di sicurezza per recarsi alle urne, senza fornire ulteriori spiegazioni, senza impegnarsi nel trovare soluzioni alternative e nascondendosi dietro ipotetiche raccomandazioni ricevute direttamente dal governo, dalla Defense and Home Affairs Ministries, dai militari e dalla polizia.

Una cospicua parte delle minoranze etniche del paese non ha potuto esprimere la propria preferenza elettorale e tutto cio’ ha ulteriormente inasprito il rapporto estremamente teso tra le minoranze etniche del Myanmar e il governo in carica dal 2015 sotto la leadership del NLD. Le forze militari hanno dichiarato lo stato di emergenza per un anno affermando di dover prendere il controllo del paese per indagare i brogli elettorali del novembre 2020 e preparare la strada per nuove elezioni democratiche.

Questo governo non godeva del sostegno delle minoranze etniche in quanto ritenuto fare gli interessi della maggioranza etnica Bamar e dei militari stessi. Dal 2015 non sono inoltre stati fatti concreti sviluppi nel processo di pacificazione del paese. La popolazione che non si e’ sentita rappresentata ha perso fiducia nelle istituzioni governative e ha iniziato a guardare ai vari gruppi militari armati quale via percorribile per le proprie rivendicazioni.

Il governo eletto a novembre avrebbe dovuto insediarsi in aprile, quindi i tempi erano probabilmente maturi per una offensiva delle forze militari impegnate non solo nella sistematica repressione dei numerosi gruppi armati, ma pronte ora ad un colpo di mano a fronte di un neo eletto governo non in grado di rappresentare le incalzanti istanze delle minoranze.

L’incertezza prodotta dall’attuale situazione complica la condizione umanitaria. La popolazione civile e’ sottoposta da anni alle violenze dello scontro tra esercito e gruppi armati: arresti arbitrari, torture, esecuzioni da parte dell’esercito e sequestri, lavori forzati, e reclutamento di bambini soldato da parte dei gruppi armati. Le vie d’accesso per gli interventi umanitari erano gia’ estremamente complicate prima di questo colpo di stato per via dell’instabilita’ politica del territorio e per le condizioni di abbandono delle minoranze, non solo Royingha, di cui il governo sembra non essersi occupato a sufficienza. Per esempio, dall’inizio del 2019 l’escalation del conflitto tra i militari e l’Arakan Army, che rivendica la rappresentanza della popolazione etnica Rakhine, ha incrementato drammaticamente il numero di profughi e ridotto in parallelo l’accesso agli aiuti umanitari.

Non e’ ancora possibile quantificare l’impatto che l’attuale crisi politica in Myanmar avra’ sulle possibilita’ di intervenire a livello umanitario per sostenere la popolazione stremata da anni di conflitti etnici armati e violazioni dei diritti umani. Intanto, nelle principali citta’ sono iniziate manifestazioni di protesta contro il colpo di stato militare e per la comunita’ internazionale sara’ presto ora di definire una linea politica rispetto alla dittatura instauratasi che pero’ non rappresenti una ingerenza e non comprometta interventi di aiuto umanitario.

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Migration, Labour and Violence in Northeast India: An interview with Dr. Dolly Kikon

Saumya Pandey (SP): Shall we start with your research journey? How did you come to write about the lives of migrant workers from Northeast India?

Dolly Kikon (DK): My work that we are speaking about relates to the second book I wrote with Bengt G. Karlsson, Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India. If I have to contextualise this book, the idea started during the time of my PhD, which became my first monograph, Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India. In many ways the work that we do, the books and articles we write are always connected. That comes with the training as researchers, thinkers, and as people who are engaged with a very diverse and complex country like India. During my PhD research I found out that many young people did not want to get into cultivation and mining. They aspired to leave their home and become migrants. The topic of land and displacement kept coming up. In the extractive landscapes (coal and oil), the story of land is central for the indigenous/Adivasi people in India. After I finished my thesis, I wanted to work on indigenous migration and migration. I am not a migration scholar in the sense that this is not something that had set out to do. I was looking at the political economy of resource extraction and land, that was the source of my research puzzle. Also, I graduated with a law degree and then worked as an activist associated with the civil rights movements including the Naga People’s Movement for Human Rights in Northeast India. This meant that I had a very different set of political frames to adopt. It was a learning experience.

When I started doing fieldwork for the second book, I followed migrants from Northeast India to locations across the country. For instance, I was in Kerala, and engaging with newspaper reports and stories from Chennai, Delhi, and Mumbai. During my field visits I was often confused as a worker at the hospitality sector because I am also from the northeast. These were reflective moments for me. As a young adult I became a tribal migrant in Delhi in the mid 1990s but I never saw myself using words like ‘migrants” to describe myself. I was still grappling with terms like citizenship, ‘chinky,’ and tribal people. So many memories from my Delhi days came back to me during my fieldwork. Writing the second book was almost autobiographical in some way. Not in a sense of looking at my own experiences or grounding it, but autobiographical in a sense of a collective autobiography, and what we go through as indigenous migrants in India. That became very central. The issues about racism, violence, discrimination, and militarization, comes up in the book.

I could have, as an anthropologist with the skills of articulation, having read ‘theory’ and done fieldwork, written in a particular way. Maybe either pity them or patronize them? The world of hospitality is quite exploitative as I saw it through the eyes of indigenous migrants. But everyone I spoke to – from the server, housekeeping staff, to the employee at the beauty salon – had aspirations and dreams; to be upwardly mobile; to have a salary; to have a better income; to be able to send more money home; and to have a good life. Yet there was always a block, a ceiling determining the nature of the work they could take up. They were struggling. And one of the things many young migrants that I spoke to would do was that if they found a place that was horrible, they would leave the job and go somewhere else in the hope that the new experience would be better. Sometimes it was worse. They landed up in more difficult situations. This kind of aspiration was founded on precarity. As we have seen during the pandemic (in 2020), the first industry that was hit in India and around the globe was the hospitality sector. The hotels closed down, and the first batch of migrants from mainland India who returned to Northeast India taught us new lessons. Whether it was Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya, or Assam, the return of migrants not only brought the fear of the virus with them, but also the anxiety of an uncertain future with them.

The state governments across Northeast India have played a very important role in promoting entrepreneurship and skills. However, the focus on soft skills have been detrimental given the precarity in the hospitality industry. Soft skills were something that grooming agencies and government bodies were providing young people. In my book I urge both the reader and the government bodies to reflect on training prospective migrants with skills to make them employable. Especially, for vulnerable groups  like indigenous/Adivasi communities, we need to realize that one of the things about soft skills is the gendered aspect, and the exotic and sexual element of it. In my book I examine how it was easier for indigenous women in the hospitality sector to find employment.  Men either work as security guards or gatekeepers. If they are cute or smart, they find work as servers.

I am often questioned what is different about migrants from Northeast India. Everyone migrates! That is the general feeling. I always say that what is exceptional as migrants from Northeast India is the history of militarization and armed conflict. Migration from the region escalated after 1997 – when the Naga armed groups signed a ceasefire agreement with the government of India – leading to a series of similar ceasefire deals with other armed groups in the region. Very quickly young migrants from the region – from towns and villages that had witnessed extreme violence – were being asked to look pretty and presentable and serve drinks, sell designer shoes, or provide massage across metropolitan Indian cities.

The psycho-social trauma and inter-generational trauma were not addressed. Imagine the kind of violence that children from armed conflict villages experience as they grow up. And consider how they move to cities such as Mumbai and Kolkata, and serve ice-creams or provide pedicure with a smile on their faces. Indigenous migrants from Northeast India carry experiences and memories of militarization and violence with them; many of them suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the structural violence they encounter though racism and discrimination across metropolitan India makes it brutal for them. So, yes. Definitely, these realities need to be considered when we study and write about migration from Northeast India and similar militarized regions in the subcontinent and beyond.

This is a cycle of violence needs to be acknowledged. Across South Asia — especially Sri Lanka and Nepal with a history of armed conflict — the respective governments have worked on social rehabilitation of the communities that have been affected by the violence. I know there is much left to be done, but at least there is an acknowledgment. In India, the story is different. Government refuses to acknowledge the scale of conflict and violence on its own citizens. For instance, the Indo-Naga conflict is one of the world’s longest armed conflict, but there is a refusal to accept how communities have been affected across generations by militarization and violence. We have to connect this bit of the story to the surge in outmigration from Northeast India. The consumer world in neoliberal India consists of as global fashion beauty and food. As consumers crave and desire for a world class lifestyle, the story of the labour force that drives this economy, the experiences of the most vulnerable of citizens are erased. And along with that, the histories of the region and their homelands are erased. An important story of migration from Northeast India is also this. It is not just the racism and violence, but the rejection and erasure of an entire history that takes place in the moment of exchange services and material goods. There is a pretension that it is all normal. This is how we in turn normalize violence and militarization while consuming that service.

Writing this book was challenging because I wanted to write respecting the lives of migrants and in solidarity with the young people who are migrants, at the same time make it clear about the exploitative nature of soft skills and the hospitality sector.

SP: Leaving home or one’s place of belonging is deeply linked with questions of state reclamation of resources and indigenous lands. What are some of the historical and political disturbances within which indigenous migrations occur?

DK: The migration experiences I trace in my book is a post-1997 development as I noted before. I am not saying that there was no migration before that, but my co-author and I were making a specific point about indigenous migration in the hospitality sector and affective labour. We were writing about the scale that we are witnessing now. 1997 is important because on the one hand, we see political negotiations starting after 1997, and on the other hand a rhetoric of remoteness and development that the state agencies and the development agencies adopt. When you see an Assam rifles camp in Manipur and see a board which says, ‘Assam Rifles Friends of the Hill People,’ that is a post-1997 campaign. Here, civility, development, and militarization are all normalized in a single moment. When you hear the governments across the northeast region say that ‘we need development, and for development we need peace,’ it captures a moment where a regime of extractive projects are being envisioned on the foundations of violence, but without acknowledge the trauma and the need for reconciliation. These are all post-1997 stories from Northeast India.

For instance, in my 2015 article, Making Pickles during Ceasefire: Livelihood, Sustainability, and Development in Nagaland, I wrote about the development programs that were emerging during the time of ceasefire in Naga society. I was asking: how is it that the villagers who were in the interrogation rooms pre 1997 shifted to livelihood workshop rooms post 1997? What did it mean to teach them livelihood skills  like making pickles, without addressing the political and psycho social rehabilitation? For the Naga people, the long decades of armed conflict meant experiencing militarization across all social and cultural spaces. Especially, the experiences of violence within us — fratricidal killings between rival groups, among warring clans, along tribal lines – these were tragic and heartbreaking violent histories we have inherited as part of Naga history today. However, what Naga people have gone through is  nothing extraordinary because we share this experiences with many militarized communities across the Indian subcontinent and beyond. As a human rights activist and an engaged anthropologist I see that members from traumatized and violent societies begin to devour one another by inflecting violence on one another. Often, in many instances, the only way members are able to relate to any violent situation is through violence.

If you look at Mahmood Mamdani’swork, or ethnographic research on militarized societies, it shows that at the height of militarization and violence in human societies, we also start taking it out on each other. Post-1997 as development initiatives were rolled out, as armed forces adopted the language of ‘peace and development,’ there was a whole section of population — mostly young people — who were trying to escape the militarized environment. That is when they started leaving the land. It was also the time when the rhetoric of development began to romanticize agriculture and encouraged young people to that go back to the land and work. The larger question in India and across the Global South is about how do indigenous people/Adivasis connect with the land? What is the emerging story? Being connected to the land does not mean working on the land. If land is the custodian of indigenous identity and history, how do we make sense of this respect and connection that emerging indigenous youths and communities establish with the land the younger generations like indigenous migrants are giving up working on the land? Many migrants said that they did not want to become farmers and preferred to educate their children and make them peruse professional jobs. During interviews I found out that no subsistence cultivator, no Adivasi who was living off the land would tell their children to work on lands, because they saw that being subsistence cultivators was often humiliating and equated with a life of poverty. The story of being displaced as a result of various development programs also emerged.

This is linked with other developments across the Himalayan region. There is constant conversation about how we need to create jobs in the mountains, or how we create jobs for indigenous communities, etc. But all these sounds strange for me.  It is not like the mountain communities don’t have jobs, Many households work on the land, they work in the field or tend cattle. It takes enormous labour force and time in the mountains to farm and eat from the land. It takes up their entire day. Think about the life of a farmer or a cattle-rearer in the hills in Uttarakhand, Sikkim, or in Arunachal Pradesh. Or Across the hills of Manipur and Nagaland. People work continuously. The idea is not about creating jobs but about reflecting what exactly what we are telling these communities and the future generation to do. On the one hand, there is talk about the creation of jobs but on the other hand their traditional knowledge and work remains unrecognized, or their connection with the land is erased and disrespected. Their practices and connections with the forests, rivers, and their idea of medicinal plants is considered ‘savage’ and ‘primitive.’

Instead, the younger generations are given soft skills to become servers, shop assistants, sweepers, maids, and janitors. Some of them are also in the construction sector. Connecting and working on the land is not a job, it is unemployment. Connecting and living off the forest continues to categorize many indigenous/Adivasi communities as thieves and encroachers in India. therefore, this conversation about soft skills and migration takes us back to issues of land, dispossession, and humiliation that is taking place. This is something that really moved me. It deeply disturbed me. In 2018, I was invited to Azim Premji University in Bengaluru to talk about my work on indigenous migration and the hospitality sector in India. When I arrived at the hotel, the security guard who carried my bag from the cab to the reception was Boro, the receptionist was a Khasi, the janitor was from the Hajong community — all were tribal migrants from Northeast India. I learnt that the janitor who came to clear the bathroom was an intern. If he succeeded at his task, he would be made a full-time employee. It was a 6 month internship and his job was to clean toilets. On his hand and knees picking hair from the shower cubicle, he told me he was paid Rs 5000 a month for his internship. It made me think about how the hospitality sector was framing the language of service in a caste and class ridden country like India. How was it that indigenous migrants were being made to enter a highly exploitative world that reproduced caste and class privileges in neoliberal India? When I share these stories people often say ‘what’s the big deal about it? That’s how things function.’ My point as an anthropologist is that that’s not how it’s supposed to be. That you take the most vulnerable indigenous people and give the tag of ‘employment’ by exploiting them. 

SP: You have drawn attention towards the way in which workers from Nagaland are thought of as loyal, hardworking and ‘exotic’ in an ‘un-Indian’ way — racial attribute which is used to mark them as ‘different’ yet desirable for the booming hospitality sector. This is in sharp contrast to the earlier image forged by the colonial and post-colonial state that used labels such as barbarous, unruly, and savage to define indigenous communities (although both the references build upon this idea of ‘otherness’). When and how did this image transition take place?

DK: That is an excellent question. Let me put it this way. It is the dictionary of imperial disposition that the postcolonial Indian state inherited without interrogating it That is what happened to the resource extraction regime like tea and oil in Northeast India. There was a mere transfer of power from white colonization to colored neo-colonization. That is what happened to other privileges as well. Royal families still enjoy their royalty across India. As citizens, we continue to be enamored with titles like rajas, nawabs, and the erstwhile princely classes.  India is a strange country. In scholarly writings, we talk about postcolonialism as a moment of citizenship. During this period of democracy in India that many are calling it a crisis of governance and the surge of the right wing in the country, citizens and commentators are referring to the Indian Constitution as a revolutionary text. But the Constitution and the everyday lived reality of ordinary people remains deeply fractured. The entitlements of the postcolonial Indian state went to a handful upper caste privileged collectives. For many tribal communities from Northeast India, Dalits, and Adivasi communities from central and Eastern India, the fact that the privileged intellectuals and well-meaning liberals from the heart of the country are scrambling towards the Constitution speaks volumes about their good intentions to make the country accountable and keep it together. But at the same time, the level of violence and the brutality is nothing new for many of us. Throughout the 1990s across India, and even before that, or in case of Naga people since 1947, the unspeakable brutality and violence was often cast aside as a “marginal” thing. Well, the Frankenstein democracy we are witnessing now was designed in the so called geographical “margins” like Kashmir, Northeast India, Chhattisgarh, and Punjab. This monster was created in the houses of poor Dalits and vulnerable Muslims since India’s independence.

Returning to the dictionary of imperial disposition in relation to indigenous migrants, it is extremely colonial. The Naga migrants are both suspicious and hard working. They can switch between the “lazy native” and the “loyal employee” seamlessly. It is quite common in India to see how employees are accepted as family members, and therefore we often come across stories that ‘loyal servants’ are didis (elder sisters) and just like family. But the moment there is a disagreement, these employees/family members become ungrateful and wretched people. The definition of loyalty/unloyalty is dictated by the exploiter and the oppressor. Thus, tribal migrants are hardworking, lazy people, simple people, and also buddhu (dumb). We are all of that. This mentality is reflected in the captions that follow pictures of indigenous people across Northeast India. For instance, some of the twitter feeds and Ingram texts of indigenous people selling produce on highways selling from the region have captions like, ‘such innocent people, they should stay that way.’ But the reality is that life is very hard. They are selling the produce to feed the family and not because they are innocent. It is hardship and poverty. Of course, it is another story how many consumers demonstrate their hypocrisy by bargaining for the produce. It is right there, in that encounter, that the practice of labelling indigenous people and migrants as loyal/savages/unruly takes place. This is what I refer to as the dictionary of imperial disposition in postcolonial India. The power to use and abuse labels and terms in a way to benefit the entitled and privileged. 

SP: This also brings me to your conceptualization of affective labour, and how that can sometimes be more exploitative than physical labour as it runs the risk of alienating the labourer from their own feelings. What are some of the ways of understanding the notion of ‘affective labour’?

DK: Raymond William, Purnima Mankekar, and Sarah Ahmed are scholars who had laid the ground for affective labour. Our work was in conversation with them both conceptually and theoretically to extend it. In our work, the notion of affective labour was something that was everywhere. For instance, once you enter a restaurant the waiter or waitress will come up to you a dozen times asking about the service. As a consumer one is overwhelmed. Or the salesperson seem too eager to please you. One wonders why they are doing that. This is part of soft skills and the manner of speaking and offering “good service” is taken as always being at the service of the customer. This is why they try so hard to please you. During my fieldwork I found out that many employees in the hospitality sector are trained with a target to please customers. Their mood, feelings, including the body language, are directed towards offering ‘good’ service. This kind of training stays on. Some of them start having nightmares too; bad dreams that affect their mood and create anxieties. The kind of labour/service they perform begins to seep into their system and shape their personality. Even if the employees are exhausted, when a customer comes to them, they have to smile. In big hotels, there are secrets in frontline desks: some senior employees from the hospitality sector told me how it is rare to find a woman who is above 35 at the reception desk. Front desk employees have to be pretty and presentable. So many of these subtle practices became clear. References to “shelf life” which means the age of front desk employees etc became clear to me.

Airlines are a very good example. Female flight attendants of Air India, the national airline company of India, fought in the Supreme of Court of India to retain their jobs after marriage in a landmark case in 1981, but the practice of agism, gender discrimination and inequality remains entrenched in the hospitality sector. As feminist anthropologist and scholars we should be going back to those cases in the to look at what is affective labour, and thinking about interrogating the arbitrariness of how ‘good’ service and customer ‘satisfaction’ are assessed. Imagine how we have made it normal to think that airline customers expect beautiful faces, straight teeth, perfect skin in an altitude that can make one nauseous, fart, burp, and throw up. How did we get to that level of sexualizing labour?  Another example is the expectation that the person who is serving food should bow, smile, and make direct eye contact but in a non-threatening way. What are we consuming? Is it the food or that effectiveness of servitude? Instead of normalizing it we need to ask what is it in the name of service that we make each other? Why do such services make customers feel good?

In the book on indigenous migration, my co-author and I traced the world of indigenous migrants and affective labour. In a sense, we extended and developed the idea of affective labour to include the indigenous experiences as well. It may be connected to moods, and to feelings but for many indigenous migrants, the history of violence, land, and dispossession was central to it. Thus, affective labour in our book became a lens to examine structural violence, capitalist violence, and gender violence besides aspiration and exploitative labour. Affective labour in India is so heightened because of the caste, communal, and class foundations. In the book we write about indigenous servers from Northeast India in high diners and their experiences with rude Indian customers who are suspicious about the service. For instance, when certain customers enquire about vegetarian/organic/halal food, they demand  ‘real Indian’ servers to explain the menu and refuse to let indigenous migrants who look “non-Indian” to serve them food. Caste violence is so embedded in the hospitality sector in India.

SP: The migrant ‘crisis’ in India is often narrated in mainstream media and policy discourse as an interstate mobility issue. It creates an impression that development is the key issue that compels people to migrate from ‘backward’ regions to urban landscapes for better opportunities. While what gets sidetracked in the process, a point which you drive home through your remarkable work, is the problem of corporate exploitation in urban markets, unequal capital-labour relations, and the economic hardships and racial vulnerabilities that it creates for the indigenous migrants. How do we move out of this impasse?

DK: People have always migrated. Our ancestors migrated. The point is not about keeping people in certain places. But how do we understand this deadlock?

We hardly recognize migrant workers as employees. I am referring to the server from Manipur making your juice in a beach town like Varkala, or that migrant from Nagaland who is a masseur in Goa. They should be given holidays, medical benefits, provision for families. There are also other problems. Do they have a bank account? And what about pension? Where do they register their grievances? It is a country that makes it almost impossible for migrant workers in new cities to get a connection of LPG cylinder without heaps of paper work. Even as the state is obsessed with paperwork and documents to provide a basic gas connection, majority of the hospitality sector work on sub-contracting and erasing traces of paper works to continue with highly exploitative practices. These systems make migrants – indigenous and those from marginalized communities – extremely vulnerable under the present circumstances.

As long as we let capitalism and free markets define the terms of labour, service, and customer satisfaction, it will not work. Instead, encouraging laws and policies to safeguard employment, call out harassment, and all kinds of discrimination is key. Adding the experiences of indigenous migrants in India forces us to engage with land and loss of land not solely as an economic matter, but as an issue of justice and citizenship right. So many indigenous migrants from Northeast India work without an employment contact, without being paid for months, being sexually and physically abused. As an anthropologist that is the reason why I feel that our work must connect with policy makers and advocacy works. The ability to move out of this impasse is to keep engaging – by this I mean write/speak/share/practice what you write and work on. The trouble with academics is the world of text we inhabit. Are lawyers, policy makers, activists, poets, writers, and journalists about to connect with our work?

SP: What are your suggestions for early career researchers who want to contribute to the study of labour, exploitation, capital and development?

DK: Don’t play it safe, be courageous. Know the power of your voice, but learn to listen and engage. And Don’t go to the field with a set of smart methodology and questions to prove yourself as an expert, but be ready to unlearn, to critically reflect on your entitlements and privileges. And find/create a community of mentors and peers who will nurture and reach out to you. As a first generation anthropologist, I cannot stress the nurturing and care I receive from my amazing friends. And as a result, I also am conscious to call, write, or reach out to early career researchers and encourage them and read their work, or connect.  

We come from a region like South Asia, a country like India, where labour, capital and development are so steeped in political movements, and in people’s struggles. The fact that thinkers, poets, and activists are often sent to prison because they support people’s movements, and are against corporations speaks volumes about the task at hand. Being an engaged scholar comes with a price. The academy is filled with entitled and ruthless scholars who mock and ridicule engaged scholarship. They will pay lip service but if you look at their lives, the boundary they create between the “field” and their “real” life is astounding. It is a fake world. Remember, scholarship – irrespective of how smart/neat/articulate it is – ultimately comes across as shallow and meaningless if it is all about analysis, argument, soulless theories, and reiterating star academics and trendy theories. Be bold to refer to poems, songs, find meaning in texts and authors who are relegated to and are from the “margins”. Practice solidarity and politics with humility.

The task of being an engaged scholar as early career academics is hard, but my request is to engage and learn to listen. Take your time. Don’t be in a rush to become a star because your greatest moments are those when your peers and readers witness your work. When the community you work with accepts and recognizes you as an alley. That takes time. It takes a long time.

Second, write in a language that is accessible. Let the story from people and the field you are writing about have a life. Ethically and morally if you write about difficult and complex subjects you must ask yourself why you are writing about it. Who are you writing it for? I increasingly find it difficult to engage with smart abstract conversations which are removed from ground reality. That’s who I am. If people you write about cannot relate to your work, what is the point. Do you have the courage to take back the work to the community you work with? The life that we live is greater than the research project. It is about how we connect our life and with all our engagements. We leave a piece of our soul in all that we engage with.

Be grounded. Be joyful. Don’t be afraid.

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Las protestas en Perú

El 2020 no fue un año fácil para el Perú. Este país, considerado hasta antes de la pandemia de COVID-19, como una como una estrella en ascenso por su desempeño macroeconómico, es una de los países con mayor incidencia y mortalidad por COVID-19 de Latinoamérica el mundo. La pandemia ha afectado profundamente la economía del país, de hecho, Perú es uno de los países más afectados del mundo, con una contracción en el Producto Bruto Interno (PBI) de -12%, en el 2020 según proyecciones de Banco Mundial. Como si esto fuera poco, el Presidente de la república, Marín Vizcarra, enfrentó dos procesos de destitución, vacancia por incapacidad moral organizados desde el Congreso. El segundo proceso, terminó con la destitución del Presidente Vizcarra el 9 de noviembre 2020. Este fue el cuarto proceso de vacancia impulsado desde el Congreso Peruano desde 2016 (los dos primeros fueron contra el Pedro Pablo Kuczynski quién terminó renunciando al cargo en marzo de 2018).

La destitución de Vizcarra, y la toma de poder de un nuevo Ejecutivo, presidido por Manuel Merino, generaron una impresionante ola de protestas a nivel nacional (sobre todo entre el 9 y 15 de noviembre). Estas marchas, sobre todo las organizadas en el centro histórico de Lima, fueron reprimidas utilizando un innecesario y excesivo nivel de violencia por parte de las fuerzas de seguridad tal y como lo ha documentado la Oficina de la Alta Comisionada de la ONU para los Derechos Humanos en un informe publicado en el 2021.

En noviembre, unas semanas después de las marchas me “reuní”, por Zoom (estamos en pandemia) con Carlos León Moya, politólogo, analista político, para conversar sobre sus impresiones de lo que acabábamos de vivir. A continuación les presentó algunos extractos de esta conversación. 

Una de las primeras cosas que hablamos fue sobre cómo se llegó a esta situación, y si bien es posible identificar hechos en los últimos años que han contribuido a la crisis, para Carlos hay elementos más recientes que crearon las condiciones para esta tormenta:

Yo me remontaría como para entender esto hasta el año pasado, hasta setiembre del año pasado cuando Vizcarra cierra el Congreso, convoca nuevas elecciones complementarias para el Congreso y comete esta decisión semi suicida de no mandar a su propia bancada (grupo parlamentario), no mandar una lista al Congreso (elecciones de Enero del 2020), pero no manda una lista al Congreso no solamente por un error de cálculo sino también ese es un indicador de la precariedad de la lista política peruana, Vizcarra no tenía partido, su partido PPK no era su partido, era el partido de Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, cuando Pedro Pablo Kuczynski queda vacado se vuelve el partido de Gilbert Violeta, de Salvador Heresi y de Juan Sheput, que era un partido que termina rompiendo con el propio presidente, o sea, el presidente, su partido que son 4 personas termina rompiendo con él, entonces, Vizcarra no tiene partido, Vizcarra no tiene inscripción. Tienes que el presidente más popular en los últimos 20 años no tenía partido y quizás por eso sea tan popular.

Y luego van a nuevas elecciones, tienes un Congreso bastante fragmentado, pero en el cual el propio presidente no tiene una bancada propia, tú podrías decir que el Partido Morado era lo más parecido a una bancada propia, pero no tiene una bancada, entonces ahí institucionalmente lo que te dice la teoría es que esa parte tenía que pagar pato (irle mal), entonces, por angas o por mangas le podía ir mal.

Algo que hay que entender del contexto peruano es que los congresistas actuales, elegido en enero del 2020, a diferencia de sus antecesores, no van a poder ser reelegido, como consecuencia de una reforma constitucional, promovida por el propio Martin Vizcarra, para Carlos esta no reelección, sumada a la crisis del sistema de partidos fueron piezas claves en la destitución de Vizcarra

Me parece que hay otro elemento que es que su comportamiento no tiene  sanción inmediata, ellos pueden hacer lo que le dé la gana y no hay problema, ¿por qué?, porque nadie los va a reelegir porque Vizcarra prohibió la reelección, digamos, no la prohibió, hizo un referéndum para que se prohíba la reelección inmediata y esa fue una de las cosas que se prohibió, su intención no era evidentemente ello, su intención era cancelar al cúmulo de personas que salen del Congreso anterior, y era una medida popular, el 80% del país estuvo de acuerdo, quizás más, decir que la reelección estaba bien era una afrenta casi en ese momento, pero varios señalaron con razón que el no permitir la reelección podía ser muy costoso, me parece que este es un ejemplo. Son congresistas que tienen año y 4 meses solamente y tienen casi que aprovechar el poco tiempo que tienen de la mejor manera y una de esas mejores maneras era para algunos intentando vacar al presidente.

Por otra parte, es cierto que en el Perú creo que hasta la mañana del lunes nadie pensaba que iban a vacar a Vizcarra, en buena cuenta porque no tenían los votos y eso se debe a que César Acuña, líder de Alianza para el Progreso había dicho que no iban a votar por la vacancia y a lo largo del día va cambiando esto, va cambiando y al final se voltea. Esa también es otra prueba de la precariedad, por una parte un presidente que no tiene partido y que no tiene bancada logra el acuerdo como un actor político importante como César Acuña, van a Palacio (Palacio de Gobierno, sede del ejecutivo peruano), se reúnen en palacio, logran una pequeña alianza y a las dos semanas la alianza se rompe, según Acuña porque sus congresistas se le sublevaron y le dijeron, “yo voy a votar como quiero, yo quiero votar por la vacancia”, y Acuña ya no pudo hacer más y se sumó, es ridículo, o sea, pero eso te muestra, ese último acto, centrándose en Alianza para el Progreso, tu institucionalidad dependía de un partido cuyo líder no puede sostener su palabra porque ni si quiera puede manejar a su propia bancada, o sea, así de precaria es la situación política, el aire político en el Perú.

Así como muchos no imaginábamos en la mañana del 9 de noviembre la vacancia, tampoco imaginábamos protestas tan grandes a nivel nacional. Esto no estaba en los cálculos del nuevo ejecutivo, presidido por Manuel Merino, que como señala Carlos, no contaba con apoyo ni dentro ni fuera del país.

Creo que si el lunes (9 de noviembre) alguien te preguntaba  qué venía, o sea, qué iba a pasar, tu decías,  sí, la gente va a salir a las calles y ya está, pero yo creo que nadie se esperaba tal avalancha de gente en las calles a nivel nacional con tantos jóvenes, con tanta fuerza, … la cantidad de gente que ha habido en las calles es la más grande en los últimos 20 años y con componentes especiales, muy joven, por fuera de los partidos, por fuera de los sindicatos, por fuera de las estructuras de antes….

En general, creo que ellos no esperaban un rechazo público de esta magnitud, creo que muchos esperaban, lo que suele pasar en el Perú, que es que la gente rechaza al Congreso y ya está, ¿no?, y no salen a las calles, o sea, las encuestas de opinión de los últimos 20 años son, no quieres al presidente, no quieres al Congreso, pero sigues en tu casa.  Lo que ha pasado en esa semana fue, “no quiero al Congreso que tiene ahora el Ejecutivo y salgo a marchar todo el tiempo que pueda y salimos en todo el país”.

Además,  era tan débil también este gobierno, digamos, fue tan burdo en su intento de vacancia que Manuel Merino no tenía el apoyo de nadie afuera del Perú y adentro tampoco tenía mucho apoyo, no te apoya la Iglesia Católica, no te apoyan los organismos, entre comillas, independientes, Defensoría del Pueblo sí te apoya, pero luego dice, “bueno, no lo sé”, el único respaldo fuerte que tuvo en su momento fue la policía.

Y es que, como describe Carlos, el ejecutivo de Merino se vio rápidamente aislado, con casi que un único aliado, y es está alianza y la desesperación por mantener el poder, y nuestra herencia autoritaria las que terminan alimentando y permitiendo una represión brutal, y con ello el aumento del rechazo hacia el ejecutivo que termina renunciando.  La violenta represión policial acabó con la vida de dos jóvenes protestantes, dejó cientos de heridos, muchos de ellos con lesiones muy serias y permanentes.

Los elementos que a mí me parece que hacen que la furia (de la población) aumente por decirlo de alguna forma son, primero, el nivel de represión, o sea, ellos (el gobierno de Manuel Merino) podrían haberse mantenido sin tanto nivel de represión, han podido hacer que la policía salga y no ataque, si eso hubiese pasado, no habrían sido tan costosas para ellos las marchas… Qué hubiese pasado si estos señores hubiesen decidido no reprimir con esa fuerza, si hubiesen dicho, “no reprimas, contén nomás”?, posiblemente su caída no hubiese sido tan rápida, quizás ni si quiera hubiesen caído porque lo que genera eso )la represión), me parece es más furia, es cierto que temor, genera temor, pero también genera en algunos más decisión, o sea, la gente igual siguió saliendo, la marcha el sábado fue más masiva incluso que la del jueves. Y aparte ese nivel de represión les genera costos hacia adentro, por ejemplo, con las Fuerzas Armadas.  Las Fuerzas Armadas no se quisieron plegar a esas represiones policiales y se mantuvieron al margen hasta el final.

Movilizaciones ciudadanas, tan grandes como las ocurridas en el Perú en noviembre del 2020, llevan a preguntarse, y ahora qué. ¿Se ganó? ¿Qué se ganó? Perú sigue siendo uno de los países más afectados por la pandemía de la COVID-19, tenemos elecciones generales en abril del 2021, y los actores políticos que van a participar son los mismos que tenemos en el actual Legislativo, y que tanto rechazo generan a la población. Como le dije a Carlos, vengo de una generación que salió a marcha a finales del los 90´s y el 2000, y sentimos que recuperamos algo valioso, “la democracia”, “las instituciones”. 20 años después, las cosas no están bien, y como señala Carlos, algo importante de estas protestas es que son mucho más críticos a esta idea de democracia liberal

Hay una diferencia clave entre una y otra (por las movilizaciones del 2000 y 2020) que es la insatisfacción con la democracia, ahora no hay esperanza con la democracia, la recuperas, pero es con lo que te quedas, pero no hay esperanza, hay insatisfacción fuerte y que en los 2000 no era así. Recuerdo en el 2003-2004 en la Católica (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) el rechazo que se le daba a Velasco porque era una dictadura. Y cuando ya han ido pasando los años he visto,  en los últimos 15 años,  cómo esa generación ha cambiado y en la generación de mi hermana que es 10 años menor que yo, todos sus amigos le tienen como mucho cariño a Velasco, ¿por qué?, porque fue el único que hizo cambios, pero fue dictadura, bueno, pero hizo cambios, eso era impensable en la Católica en el 2003, eso era impensable y eso era como mi indicador Velasco de la insatisfacción con la democracia. La insatisfacción tras 20 años de democracia,  es un elemento que no había antes, creo que en el 2000 había más esperanza , es que “bueno ya hemos estado 10 años sin democracia, la hemos recuperado”, o sea, hay libertad de expresión, hay independencia de poderes, en sí no me van a desaparecer si digo algo pues ya está, ¿no?, en cambio ahora es como ¿hay otro tipo de…? ya tengo libertad de prensa, ya tengo independencia de poderes, pero no me basta pues, no me sirve pues porque igual elijo y no me hacen caso, igual roban, igual hacen lo mismo que en los 90 pero con independencia de poderes.

Perú conmemora 200 años de independencia este 2021, en medio de una crisis sanitaria, económica, y política, pero como dice Carlos, las protestas de noviembre nos dan un rayito de esperanza, que tenemos una generación una generación políticamente activa, y con otros valores, que es crítica y exige reformas.  

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L’antropologia umanitaria: ripensare il ruolo dell’apolitico e del privato nello spazio umanitario

Questo articolo riesamina brevemente l’attuale critica all’umanitarismo occupandosi di approcci alternativi allo spazio umanitario pubblico, alla figura dell’antropologo-umanitario, alla politica dell’umanitarismo e all’antropologia della sofferenza. Il caso studio qui riportato riguarda l’accoglienza terapeutica dei bambini di Chernobyl presso famiglie ospitanti italiane(1).

Dallo spazio umanitario pubblico a quello privato

Uno spazio umanitario è generalmente inteso come un campo per rifugiati o un centro di accoglienza. Gli abitanti di questo spazio sono sia rifugiati o richiedenti asilo (soggetti bisognosi di aiuto) sia organizzazioni internazionali, nazionali o locali (soggetti soccorritori). Questa visione è stata criticata in quanto genera involontarie conseguenze negative di un umanitarismo che produce la miseria di vite prive di senso (Ticktin, 2014: 278). Può una famiglia ospitante, ovvero uno spazio privato piuttosto che pubblico, diventare una soluzione migliore per i problemi umanitari?

Una famiglia ospitante  è costituita da una famiglia (soggetti soccorritori) e dai suoi ospiti (soggetti bisognosi). Gli ospiti possono soggiornare per un periodo di tempo limitato, nell’arco di più anni. Mentre i rifugiati nei campi profughi sono isolati dalla popolazione locale, i bambini invitati nelle famiglie sono accolti dalla società. In seguito al disastro nucleare di Chernobyl, i bambini provenienti dalle aree piu’ afflitte hanno potuto soggiornare in Italia ogni anno per uno/due mesi fino all’età di 18 anni. Le famiglie ospitanti hanno fornito ai bambini cibi non radioattivi, vestiti, materiale scolastico, medicine e denaro contante.

L’accoglienza all’interno di una società influisce sulle conseguenze dell’umanitarismo. Per alcuni bambini di Chernobyl, l’esperienza in una famiglia ospitante ha significato una successiva migrazione in Italia per motivi educativi, lavorativi o matrimoniali. Alcuni ragazzi hanno scelto professioni riconducibili all’esperienza italiana (ad es. interpreti), altri hanno deciso di ricevere il battesimo cattolico, mentre altri continuano semplicemente a tornare in visita in Italia anche in età adulta. Una famiglia ospitante rappresenta uno spazio che parte con un obiettivo a breve termine di sollievo dal disagio, ma che può successivamente trasformarsi in un progetto a lungo termine di supporto alle relazioni umane e di impatto sulle scelte di vita.

Oltre l’antropologo-umanitario

Ticktin chiede: che posizione morale si occupa allorche’ si intenda criticare un movimento moralmente ispirato come l’umanitarismo? (2014: 277). Ticktin sostiene la posizione dell’antropologo-pragmatico che svela le conseguenze non intenzionali o impreviste degli interventi umanitari (2014: 278). Tuttavia questa visione non salva gli antropologi dal privilegio di essere accademici di istituti occidentali, che viaggiano in luoghi meno privilegiati, studiando persone meno privilegiate.

Esistono ancora nell’antropologia delle categorie che sono sottorappresentate, come ad esempio quelle dell’antropologo sopravvissuto, dell’antropologo auto-etnografo o dell’antropologo-subalterno. Nel mio lavoro, l’essere un’antropologa sopravvissuta al disastro nucleare di Chernobyl emerge dalla mia personale esperienza di soggiorno in Italia durante l’infanzia. Tuttavia, non tutti i sopravvissuti a disastri o guerre possono diventare antropologi. Come possiamo sostenere la possibilità di diventare antropologi per le persone che hanno vissuto una catastrofe e, in particolare, per le persone che hanno un passato meno privilegiato?

L’apoliticismo nell’umanitarismo

Il rifiuto verso l’uso della politica, all’interno dell’umanitarismo, è dettato dai principi di neutralità e imparzialità. L’umanitarismo viene tuttavia criticato per i suoi legami con il capitalismo, il militarismo e per i suoi interessi personalistici di governance neoliberale.

Recenti ricerche hanno evidenziato come sia possibile migliorare l’umanitarismo piuttosto che rinnegarlo. La questione non riguarda la struttura che l’umanitarismo può riprodurre (ad esempio il capitalismo, il militarismo), ma come l’umanitarismo può mettere in discussione questa struttura.

L’aiuto fornito ai bambini bielorussi di Chernobyl ospitati in Italia era un’iniziativa apolitica. Ė stato di fondamentale importanza portare avanti questo progetto, nonostante i disordini politici legati alla transizione post-comunista, in cui sia la Russia sia le potenze occidentali hanno cercato di influenzare le scelte della Bielorussia. Il paese ha scelto di mantenere stretti legami con la Russia e ciò ha provocato un conflitto geopolitico con l’Occidente a partire dalla metà degli anni ’90.

Mentre la cooperazione tra stati a livello europeo era bloccata, i legami personali tra Bielorussia e Italia crescevano. Per anni, la distanza dalla politica, ha permesso alle organizzazioni benefiche italiane (e ad altre occidentali) di promuovere interazioni interpersonali.

La lingua italiana è diventata la terza lingua straniera più studiata in Bielorussia, dopo inglese e tedesco. Nelle aree contaminate i giovani parlano meglio l’italiano che l’inglese. Ciò ha contribuito a sviluppare la cooperazione tra l’Italia e la Bielorussia a livello statale, in particolare in campo economico e culturale. Rimane la questione di come queste iniziative possano aiutare a risolvere il conflitto geopolitico tra la Bielorussia e l’UE e se le relazioni stabilite in campo economico e culturale possano trasformare le relazioni in ambito politico (cioè la cittadinanza partecipativa).

Verso l’antropologia del bene?

L’antropologia umanitaria è stata letta attraverso le lenti dell’antropologia della sofferenza (Robbins, 2013). Ticktin (2014) sostiene che l’umanitarismo può essere indirizzato verso l’antropologia del bene e diventare un nuovo tipo di antropologia morale. Mentre Ticktin si concentra principalmente sulla moralità e il benessere, Robbins (2013) considera anche l’empatia, la cura, la speranza e il cambiamento. In che modo i temi sollevati in questo blog post –  famiglia ospitante, categorie di antropologi sottorappresentate e apoliticismo – possono essere compresi attraverso l’antropologia del bene?

L’empatia e la cura sono legate a come le persone agiscono per creare del bene nelle relazioni sociali (Robbins, 2013: 457). Una famiglia ospitante è uno spazio umanitario privato in cui le relazioni sociali vengono create, mantenute e trasformate. Teorie dell’antropologia dell’umanitarismo quali il biopotere (Foucault, 1978) e la “nuda vita” (Agamben, 1998) risultano poco rilevanti per comprendere le dinamiche di una famiglia ospitante. Si rendono necessarie altre teorie per studiare questo fenomeno.

L’antropologia del bene dà attenzione anche a tempo, cambiamento e speranza (Robbins, 2013: 458). Collocare l’antropologia dell’umanitarismo nell’antropologia del bene significa accettare che le conseguenze inattese dell’umanitarismo non siano sempre negative. Il compito dell’antropologo diventa quindi il ricercare la costituzione del bene e del male nei progetti umanitari, piuttosto che la contraddizione tra loro. Riconoscere la vulnerabilità umana e l’interdipendenza di tutti gli attori dell’umanitarismo può, sul lungo periodo, trasformare le politiche, la geopolitica e la cittadinanza partecipativa.

Note

(1) Il disastro nucleare di Chernobyl si è verificato nel 1986 in Unione Sovietica. Il paese più colpito fu la Bielorussia (con il 35% della sua popolazione). In Bielorussia furono 500.000 i bambini sopravvissuti al disastro nucleare di Chernobyl. L’Italia ha ospitato oltre 460.000 bambini bielorussi tra il 1990 e il 2015.

Bibliografia

Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage.

Robbins, J. (2013) ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 447–462.

Ticktin, M. (2014) ‘Transnational Humanitarianism’, Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 273–289.

(Traduzione di Donata Balzarotti)

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The Helpers and the Helped: Troubling Ideas of Human Worth in Humanitarianism

Article 3

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

(b) Taking of hostages;

(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;

(d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples. (Emphases added, Fourth Geneva Convention/Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, 1949)

———–

One of the founding documents of international humanitarian law, the Fourth Geneva Convention, makes mention in its third article of certain givens that build upon ideas of human worth. These givens imply that human beings, merely by reason of being born into the human race, are considered to be more valuable and worthy than any other creation, entity or species. This is an essential concept behind the traditional understanding of humanitarianism, where human value requires protection at times of emergency, conflict and need.

            In this article, I discuss the idea of human worth in relation to humanitarianism by reflecting on the works of three scholars from three different time periods. I depart from an argument that humanitarianism does not exist separately from the non-humanitarian world and contend, rather, that it is a product of that world. By exploring the thoughts of John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and Martha Nussbaum (1947–), I provide my own reflections on the origins, implications and reality of human worth in humanitarianism. In examining these thoughts, I will pay close attention to John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism (1861), Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Martha Nussbaum’s The Cosmopolitan Tradition (2019). I will begin by discussing each thinker in their own right, before concluding with my own empirical reflections on human worth and the subtle differences between the terms ‘refugee’, ‘migrant’ and ‘expat’.

John Stuart Mill: “Need I obey my conscience?” (1861, p. 30)


The humanitarian principles of humanity, independence, neutrality and impartiality can be directed towards helping those whose human dignity is being threatened or violated. In various humanitarian contexts, people can be divided into two categories: those who are being helped and those who help. A humanitarian emergency—an intriguing label and political category of its own kind—locates and identifies those in need of help. In considering this latter category, one idea worthy of exploration is utilitarianism: “a theory that the aim of action should be the largest possible balance of pleasure over pain or the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (Merriam-Webster 1).

John Stuart Mill is known as one of the most influential figures in utilitarian thought. The utilitarian principle captures the idea that human action should strive towards the maximization of overall happiness. This mission creates also a foundation for morality in which humans seek for guidance on how judgement should be passed upon wrongful deeds. Mill argues that acts that generate a high volume of happiness are probably morally correct, and acts that result in or encourage unhappiness are often founded upon immorality and should be appropriately punished. In this vein, utilitarian thought is intriguing in relation to humanitarianism. As we live in a divided, polarized and unequal world, how should we, as relatively fortunate and prosperous members of society, deal with others’ misery and misfortune? If accepting Mill’s view of individuals as cognizant seekers of utilitarian goods, what kind of behavior does this translate into, and does it have implications for humanitarianism?

On a general level, Mill considers human beings as special and clearly separated from animals. This distinction, according to Mill, is owing to human beings having a higher degree of cognitive thinking, resulting in a higher appetite for knowledge and happiness. This gratification is out of reach for animals. The often quoted “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (p. 10) captures the essence of this approach. This differentiation is furthered through a human’s capability to sympathize with all sentient beings: through human intelligence, humans are “capable of apprehending a community of interest between himself and the human society of which he forms a part” (p. 51). This “collective idea of his tribe, his country, or mankind” (pp. 51–52) also serves as a basis of humanitarian imagination and the collective idea of human worth: by virtue of being alive as a human, we have the ability to recognize and identify human behavior, which is entirely separate from the behavior between humans and animals or between two animals.

            Moving on from this general approach, Mill refers to certain disparities that might contribute to differing qualities of human beings or ways of living, indicative of the differences in perceived worth among humans. For Mill, utilitarian principles seem the most applicable for “the inheritance of everyone born in a civilized country”, or to “every rightly brought up human being” (p. 14; these are similar ideas to the Fourth Geneva Convention on “judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples”, see above). A typical child of his own time, Mill makes several references to the relationships between and perspectives of master and slave. These definitions leave ample room for defining “a civilized country” or what constitutes rightful upbringing, despite considerations of the time of writing and Mill’s own life. These notions are, of course, highly political and problematic considerations in the humanitarianism of our time, which historically builds upon Western imperialism and international interventionism. Moreover, according to Mill, the maximization of overall happiness does not translate into equal distribution; rather, it is essentially worthy in its own right, representing another problematic statement given the deep discrepancies between the world’s rich and poor.

The “ultimate sacrifice” of pursuing the greatest happiness of others exists in an imperfect world, but Mill takes a more moderate approach: a world in which some have more and some have less can be morally sound. For Mill, “the great positive evils of the world [such as poverty] are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits” (p. 15). Against these charged arguments, worryingly, utilitarianism represents a godly doctrine. If God desires the happiness of His creatures, then the pursuit of happiness is a religious act whether or not that happiness is evenly distributed. Individual actions are not directed for the good of the world, but rather for the good of the individuals of which the world is composed.

The origins of progressive universalism—the idea that those who are furthest behind should receive the most radical attention, such as people in humanitarian need—may been seen in Mill’s thinking: “The justice of giving equal protection to the rights of all is maintained by those who support the most outrageous inequality in the rights themselves” (p. 46). Regrettably, these approaches would require a high level of selflessness and sacrifice from those of good fortune, sacrifices that are rarely found in the realities of today—instead, financial inequality is increasing across the world. In a humanitarian context, this inequality gains importance through the prolonged duration of (hu)man-made conflicts and the prognosis of increased humanitarian need in natural disasters due to climate change. In other words, ongoing disasters and conflicts deepen and stretch, whereas “the Long Peace”, the absence of wars between major powers after World War II, generates peacefulness and stability mostly for the prosperous.

Perhaps at the root of ongoing insufficient humanitarian efforts—as well as wealth and health inequality—lies the fact that good intentions, selflessness and sacrifice do not marry awareness, acknowledgement and accountability, particularly in a historical sense. One of the reasons for this is that humans love power, money and fame. For Mill, as human beings socialize and grow into society they are unable to have a “total disregard of other people’s interests” (p. 32). However, these interests are in a continuum of power and fame: Mill suggests these interests as being a vehicle for fulfilling our wishes. Equally gratifying is our love of money:

Yet, the love of money is not only one of the strongest moving forces of human life, but money is, in many cases, desired in and for itself; the desire to possess it is often stronger than the desire to use it, and goes on increasing when all the desires which point to ends beyond it, to be compassed by it, are falling off. (p. 37)

Humanitarianism action and intervention require money and funding, and to date these have been chronically lacking. Those who have money are able to choose whether or not to allocate money to humanitarian efforts, be they individuals, governments or other organizations, an option which a poor individual, government or organization does not have. If our love of money is ultimately a manifestation of human selfishness, as stated above, the prognosis for adequately funded humanitarian efforts seems unattainable. Moreover, in respect of state funding, when a state’s own nationals are in need, what motivation is there to give to distant strangers?

            The concept of justice is central to Mill’s utilitarian thinking. Mill itemizes five elements of justice and injustice (pp. 44–45). First, depriving a person of liberty and property, which they have lawful possession of, is unjust. Second, these legal rights can include corrupt laws which may be unjust and so calls for an understanding of moral rights. Third, each person should obtain what they deserve according to their right and wrong deeds. Fourth, expressed or implied engagement becomes an unjust act should the person violate that act. Fifth, impartiality may in general be unjust, but, and responding to the previous considerations of governments’ national interests overweighing international needs, under certain circumstances favoring one’s own family and friends may be justified.

Intriguingly, Mill claims that nothing can be called ‘wrong’ unless we imply a need for the action to be punished. The power of labeling something as ‘wrong’ is an expression and struggle of power on its own. Humanitarianism is rarely labeled as wrong by its practitioners, but might be labeled so by its academic critics or, for example, by the governments whose territory has seen interventions on humanitarian grounds. This subjective understanding is lacking in Mill’s thinking. Rather, Mill ontologically sees that justice exists in a pure format: justice “is a name for certain classes of moral rules which concern the essentials of human well-being more nearly, and are therefore more absolute obligation, than any other rules for the guidance of life” (p. 59). People who act wrongly seem to have either gone against what is just or misunderstood its essence, and what is considered wrong shifts at the societal level. Addressing this before moving on to discuss Hannah Arendt’s work, I quote again from Mill:

The entire history of social improvement has been a series of transitions by which one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of a universally stigmatized injustice and tyranny.(p. 63.)

Hannah Arendt: “When every one is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before.” (citing Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, 1951, p. 282)


Humanitarianism is a response to the inequalities and cruelties of the world, a subject on which Hannah Arendt is a master commentator. She provides in-depth thinking on imperialism, an important theme considering the Western tradition of humanitarianism. Like colonialism, imperialism seeks to expand political power overseas by intervention in other governance regimes and ways of living. Imperialism was, and political expansionism is, often paved with alleged humanitarian intent, such as the vaunted Western riches “in education, technical know-how, and general competence” which “has plagued international relations ever since the beginning of genuine world politics” (p. 163).

            For Arendt, racism is the totalizing concept and main driver behind systematic and structural inequality and deprivation. This originates from historical developments of race-thinking (an ideology which can be considered more neutral and less politically harmful for Arendt), which was “the ever-present shadow accompanying the development of the comity of European nations” (p. 214). Race-thinking was linked with the class societies of the nation-state building West, or more precisely, their ruling class, the bourgeoisie. Imperialist political philosophy incorporated businessmen into the political arena, and the law of the state illustrated not a “question of right or wrong, but only absolute obedience, the blind conformism of bourgeois society” (p. 189). Similarly, according to Arendt, racism continues to be enabled and reproduced by bureaucracy as “bureaucracy was discovered by and first attracted the best, and sometimes even the most clear-sighted, strata of the European intelligentsia” (p. 245).

Race-thinking preceding racism stems from the fatal conceptualization of race. Race as an European ideology signifies the worst of Western civilization with the most devastating consequences: “race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death” (p. 209). Similarly, a central concept for Arendt is imperialism. Arendt characterizes imperialist action as dividing “mankind into master races and slave races, into higher and lower breeds, into colored peoples and white men” (p. 202). The danger of the tradition of this thinking has not ceased to exist: we can only look at the present-day United States and how it is riven by deep racial divides and mistreatment of non-whites. Instead of nourishing the idea of humanity and its common origin, imperialist attempt directs political thinking into a “predestined by nature to war against each other until they have disappeared from the face of the earth” (p. 209). In (hu)man-made conflict leading to humanitarian needs, similar ideologies of ‘predestined war’ drive ethnic, religious, tribal and other tensions. Arendt argues that race-thinkers showcase patriotism in the ugliest of forms, denying common principles of equality and solidarity across mankind. Human worth becomes a subjective estimate based on racial origins in which Western whiteness is a default. This further shades into more nuanced understandings, such as religious differences and minority-majority politics, both representing the birthplaces of the German Nazi movement. The eradication of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s fascist Italy are extreme examples of organic doctrines that have a naturalistic appeal, which call for “ideological definitions of national unity as a substitute for political nationhood” (p. 220).

One thing that does clearly unite humanitarianism and race-thinking is political romanticism. According to Arendt, political romanticism has been correctly accused of inventing race-thinking as “every other possible irresponsible opinion”. Humanitarianism, with its goals to ameliorate the lives of the misfortunate, can be understood in a politically romanticized sense. International interventionism—which belongs to the same phenomenological family with humanitarianism—entailing stark imbalance of global resources and political power, does not provide a level playing field. Its indefinite purposes, direct and indirect effects and lack of accountability proves useful for those with the best and worst intentions. The political romanticism of humanitarianism nourishes the idea of universal human worth, and the need for protection of this worth disguises the times when humanitarianism is not used as an end, but as a tool. Humanitarianism can be understood through its principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence as life-saving action, but it can also lead to political manipulation, business platforms and the enabling and sustaining of the very structures of human terror that gave rise to it in the first place.

            The predecessors of today’s humanitarians could be seen as kinds of missionaries, which in Arendtian understanding could be the “queer quixotic protectors of the weak” (p. 273). By this Arendt is referring, for example, to certain British people traveling overseas on colonial service to teach what they saw as ‘the best’ of European and Christian traditions. Such people had a certain, if youthful integrity with correspondingly naive ideas about Western moral standards:

It was neither His Majesty’s soldier not the British higher official who could teach the natives something of the greatness of the Western world. Only those who had never been able to outgrow their boyhood ideals and therefore had enlisted in the colonial services were fit for the task. Imperialism to them was nothing but an accidental opportunity to escape a society in which a man had to forget his youth if he wanted to grow up. English society was only too glad to see them depart to faraway countries. (pp. 273–274)

Similarly, humanitarians, more often than not, represent Western nations in the Global South. Many are young volunteer workers during their gap years who buy into the idea of ‘the helper identity’, in which a) they are able to help others in foreign contexts; b) their help is needed, requested and makes a difference (for the better); c) the perceived beneficiaries would be worse-off without their intervention, and d) their engagement is limited and comes to a defined end, after which they can return back to the comfort of their own societies and homes, leaving the humanitarian reality far behind—as was the case for the staff of colonial services. Here again, humans are divided into two categories: those who help and those who are helped.

            When looking at humanitarianism from the angle of Arendt’s ‘great game’, it seems there is no end in sight for humanitarian action: “Since life itself ultimately has to be lived and loved for its own sake, adventure and love of the game for its own sake easily appear to be a most intensely human symbol of life” (p. 281). Humanitarianism is a product of the inequal world in which it is created. As such, by failing to address the root causes of the problems, the oppressive structures in which humanitarian need is created are sustained. The critics of humanitarianism often highlight the hypocrisy and mistrust that is interwoven into the system. They are right to do so, showcasing, for example, corrupt practices within the humanitarian system. Yet this critique does not take away the ongoing suffering of people in humanitarian need, nor do many of the critics provide an alternative solution to resolve this ongoing vulnerability and suffering. At times, Arendt’s discussion falls into this category.

            Against these reflections on Arendt’s work, it comes as no surprise that her thoughts have been influential in humanitarian literature. The Origins of Totalitarianism refers directly to humanitarianism only on certain occasions, yet it discusses and addresses the phenomenon as a parallel universe. Some of the secondary readings of Arendt in humanitarian studies capture this idea, particularly when the research interest lies in violence and war. One interesting example is Patricia Owens (2005) who discusses the shift from “humanitarian intervention” to “war on terror” following the events of 9/11 from an Arendtian stance. Further, she discusses the concept of “humanitarian war”. For Owens, “violence is the evil twin of Arendtian politics” (p. 50), in which violence is understood as humans radically altering and manipulating by force the earth-given nature. It is also “the realm in which the means are justified exclusively by reference to the ends” (p. 52). In the context of humanitarian war, violence becomes honorable and deliberative “if those intervening agree through fair procedures that the violent means justify ends” (p. 54). Through this logic, legitimacy and justification become conflated.

            Whereas this is a useful understanding and depiction of humanitarianism’s intersection with violence and war, capturing the nuances of what is behind a humanitarian intervention, such as political, economic and expansionist interests, is less tangible. This is not to blame Owens or her reading of Arendt or Arendt herself; rather, it is a built-in paradox of humanitarianism. One illustrative example is the related concept jus in bello. This refers to the ‘just’ and ‘fair’ conduct of armed conflict, a kind of oxymoron to begin with. Its two central ideas capture proportionality in the use of force, and the inclusion of warring parties with ‘legitimate’ interests, such as soldiers (in contrast with civilians, for example). To further illustrate this paradox, jus in bello can be seen as synonymous with international humanitarian law. They both seek to reduce human suffering in conflict. Similarly, jus ad bello lays out a framework in which beginning a conflict can be seen as ‘justified’. Humanitarianism tends to operate in the realm of idealism, in which human suffering should not be tolerated to begin with, and human dignity should be protected at all times. These approaches, including Owen’s reading of Arendt, represent rather the realpolitik of humanitarianism—given that conflicts will happen, the only option is to create rules to control them. Yet rules drawn up by whom and in whose interest are the next logical questions.

            Another secondary reading of Arendt on humanitarian war is by Iris Marion Young, who builds upon Arendt’s works On Violence and The Human Condition, providing a more skeptical and critical reading. According to Young, Arendt does not understand how racism manifests itself  in the United States. Yet, and in contrast to Owen, she finds Arendt’s thinking that “violence may be sometimes justified but never legitimate” (2002, p. 281) useful in the context of humanitarian war. As an empirical example, Young points out that the ‘humanitarian war’ during the Kosovo conflict in 1999 contributed significantly to human suffering.

It is intriguing that different scholars choose to discuss Arendt in the context of humanitarianism, particularly in relation to violence and the humanitarian intent in the wars. Arendt’s work can be indeed read as classic conflict literature. However, her work extends far beyond this approach: how the world with its societies and history can be viewed, international systems that operate within certain Arendtian logical realms and how human beings are understood, labeled and organized.

Martha Nussbaum: “The accident of being born in one country” (2019, p. 6)


Shifting to the last thinker included in this article, I will discuss Martha Nussbaum’s recent publication on the cosmopolitan tradition. Nussbaum’s idea of treating human beings as worthy and equal has shaped much of the Western political imagination. Nussbaum argues that our understanding of the undivided human dignity, the equal and unconditional worth of all human beings, arises from the cosmopolitan tradition of Hellenistic philosophy. The concept that emphasizes our shared humanity, ‘world citizenship’, can be traced back to the Cynicism of the third century bce and in particular to Diogenes the Cynic (c. 412/404 bce–323 bce). This Cynic/Stoic cosmopolitan tradition leads to “cosmopolitan politics,” which “impose stringent duties of respect, including an end to aggressive war, support for people who have been unjustly attacked, and a ban on crimes against humanity, including genocide and torture” (p. 5).

As world citizens of equal and unconditional worth, and by using the words of Nussbaum, being born is simultaneously an “accident of being born in one country” (p. 6). Nussbaum makes references to the Roman statesman Cicero, who saw Hercules as an ideal world citizen, and whose humanitarian acts made him god in Greek mythology (2019). Ultimately, humanitarianism carries the meanings of Cynic/Stoic cosmopolitan politics and the philosophical tradition, where it is one’s moral duty to help those who have been born into or face misfortune during their lifetimes, regardless of the country and context. The Western approach to humanitarianism is perhaps clear in this sense, having arisen as a product of imperialism, and the modern understanding of humanitarianism can be traced back to 19th-century Europe.

The Cynic / Stoic cosmopolitan tradition creates a world in which all human beings are to be recognized as equal and worthy, unconditionally. In this tradition, attributes such as nationality, ethnicity, class or gender do not contest these values (p. 75). Nussbaum contests this morally beautiful ideal of humanity by bringing attention to a void in the ideology—a lack of discussion on material distribution. “Stoic cosmopolitanism, like that of the Cynics, involves the thought that the so-called external goods are indifferent” (p. 79) and “not necessary for the flourishing life” (p. 142), as they are perceived as secondary to human worth. Nussbaum further analyzes the thoughts of Adam Smith (1723–1790) in this regard:

Smith also has a keen understanding of the reality of working-class life. He sees clearly what a difference habit and education make to human abilities, and he sees that circumstances of life may, if propitious, cause basic human abilities to flourish or, if malign to be starved and deformed. He sees that legal and economic arrangements have a crucial role to play in permitting people to develop their innate human capacities. (p. 143)

 From a humanitarian stance, the question of material wellbeing, the means to sustain life, is essential. Ideals of shared human worth are valueless if there is no food to eat, clean water to drink or shelter. Basic legal rights, such as the right to life and non-violent treatment, are essential as are basic economic arrangements, such as supporting one’s very basic needs and those of one’s own family. The Stoic/Cynic cosmopolitan tradition serves as an idealistic platform for principled humanitarian understanding of the world, but it lacks, in reality, a contribution on essential material grounds—reflecting the status of present-day humanitarianism. The ability to be a ‘humanitarian’ in respect of others, as guided by this tradition and way of thinking, is deeply elitist. Throughout this article the thought of who is being helped and who gets to help is paramount to the discussion. Having the capacity to help others requires prosperity and stability: without these, the material means to help are lacking. Central question, therefore, is, does materialism dictate human worth?

Refugee–migrant–expat nexus


Because only savages have nothing more to fall back upon than the minimum fact of their human origin, people cling to their nationality all the more desperately when they have lost the rights and protection that such nationality once gave them. (Arendt, p. 381)

Humanitarianism poses many troubling ideas on human worth. Not because it is unclear or unprincipled, but because its realities seem far removed from its ideals, and the fact that it arises from and contributes to regenerating the very inequalities it claims to protect people from. To bring the discussion of this article together on an empirical note, I will conclude by exploring ideas of human worth in the realm of nationality and citizenship, what I label here as the refugee–migrant–expat nexus.

            I use these terms to illustrate how people who are ‘on the move’, people who are outside  their given nationality’s geographical borders, have and give rise to differing interpretations of human worth. I was tempted to see what kind of definitions are given to these three terms. In order to use the same measure and approach to each, I consulted the Merriam-Webster dictionary. ‘Refugee’ is defined as “one that flees”, or “a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution” (Merriam-Webster 2). ‘Migrant’ is defined as “one that migrates”, or “a person who moves regularly in order to find work especially in harvesting crops” (Merriam-Webster 3). ‘Expat’ is “an expatriate person”, where ‘expatriate’ stands for “to withdraw (oneself) from residence in or allegiance to one’s native country” or “to leave one’s native country to live elsewhere” (Merriam-Webster 4).

Somehow, the levels of autonomy, independence and voluntary action seem to increase with each given definition in this order. There are several other, possibly still unnamed, categories that fall in between and perhaps beyond these three definitions describing people on the move, for example a ‘settler’ as in settler societies such as the United States, South Africa or Australia. Both visible and hidden hierarchies are present in the chosen terminology and each of the three terms carries connotations that are tied to both context and time. For example, the definition of ‘migrant’ as relating to harvesting crops seems outdated in relation to the Global North usage of the term. However, it is one thing to discuss definitions and terminology, and another to explore the phenomenology itself. In exploring how these categories manifest in today’s world and their relationship to nationalities and citizenship, I turn to some illustrative empirics.

According to the UN refugee agency UNHCR, 68 percent of refugees displaced across borders come from just five countries: Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Myanmar (UNHCR, 2020). This high percentage gives ‘refugeeship’ a nationalist flavor. One mark of citizenship status, a passport, is another interesting empirical measure. The world’s passports are ranked according to their ability to grant holders access to other countries. Out of the 198 countries whose passports are ranked in this way (in which first place is granted to the highest utility and easiest border-crossing access), a Syrian passport ranks 197, Venezuelan  91, Afghan 198, South Sudanese 182 and finally, Burmese 191 (Passport Index 2020). These rankings serve as manifestations of the likelihood of other nations welcoming these nationalities into their societies. The category of ‘refugee’, combined with these empirical considerations, illustrates differing rankings of human worth within the world.

Moving to the category of ‘migrant’, less clear-cut empirics avail themselves. Internet data, especially that from Global North locations, often indicates migrants’ country of departure. According to the World Migration Report 2020 produced by the United Nations’ migration agency, IOM, in 2019, one in thirty people were considered as an international migrants (IOM, 2020). Europe and Asia were the receiving areas of 61 percent of the migrants. The top five destinations for migrants were the United States, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the Russian Federation and the United Kingdom. The top five origins for migrants were India, Mexico, China, the Russian Federation and Syria. Illustratively, “in regard to the distribution of international migrants by countries’ income group, nearly two thirds of international migrants resided in high-income countries in 2019” (p. 26). This would signify that the category of ‘migrant’ often indicates a striving for economic betterment, signifying a conscious choice to seek a better life than one’s own country can offer. Human worth in this context seems somehow agency-dependent—where individuals face an unfavorable structure, they can use their own agency in changing their surroundings. Yet this leaves a certain power dynamic out of the equation—migrants, particularly those moving from lower- or middle-income countries into high-income countries, often face harder realities than persons born into the high-income society.

Lastly, when discussing the term ‘expat’, it seems we have reached the highest rung of the ladder. One indication of this is that expat as a term and social category manifests in the development cooperation category. Expats often work for the organization; they are not its targeted beneficiaries. InterNations, an online “community for expatriates & global minds”, seeks to explain expatriation as follows:

The term “expat” derives from the Latin prefix ex (out of) and the noun patria (home country, native country, or fatherland). In today’s globalized world, as the reasons for going abroad become more diverse, it’s no longer easy to find a concrete definition for this term. That said, the word “expat” is generally used to refer to people who temporarily or permanently live in a different country than the one they were born in or whose nationality they have. Expats usually choose to leave their native country for a career boost, or to fulfill a personal dream or goal, rather than as a result of dire economic necessity. (InterNations, n. d., emphasis added)

Fulfilling dreams or career goals are different for expats than the economic push-factors for migrants. Online searches suggest that expats’ reasons for being ‘on the move’ ooze liberal global citizenship, even hinting at the ideal ‘world citizen’ that Nussbaum discusses in relation to the Stoic/Cynic cosmopolitan tradition. Possible key differences, or distinguishing characteristics of expat status compared with the two other categories are financial independence, high-brow/white-collar professional affiliation and fulfillment of one’s own humanity on the basis of independence and viable choice. In this category human worth seems ever-present and flourishing.

            This brief empirical and reflective discussion on the troubling ideas of human worth also resonates with humanitarianism. From the perspective of humanitarian needs—those who are being helped—the most relevant of the given categories seem to be refugees. Yet not all those seeking refuge are in need of humanitarian assistance. From the perspective of the humanitarians—those who help—the most relevant of the given categories seems to be expats. Expats as the world-travelling professionals feed into the professionalization of the humanitarian field, of which Thomas G. Weiss and Michael Barnett write:

In other words, [humanitarian] volunteers began as amateurs. But increasingly the humanitarian enterprise frowned upon such naïfs and began demanding that staff have real expertise and rewarded them accordingly. A CEO or CFO of a major not-for-profit aid agency should not require less training or fewer skills or relevant work experience than a CEO or CFO of a for-profit Fortune 500 company. And if they are experts, they expect to be paid accordingly. (2013, p. 116.)

To conclude, given both the reflective discussion on the three thinkers discussed in this article and the empirical refugee–migrant–expat nexus, I remain skeptical about the universally perceived concept of human worth in humanitarianism and beyond.

 Sources


Arendt, H., and Power, S. (2004 [1951]). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Schocken.

Barnett, M., and Weiss, T. (2013). Humanitarianism Contested: Where Angels Fear to Tread. Vol. 51. Routledge.

International Organization for Migration (IOM). 2020. World Migration Report 2020. Available at https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/wmr_2020.pdf

InterNations. (n.d.). What’s an Expat Anyway: Defining the Expat. Available at https://www.internations.org/guide/global/what-s-an-expat-anyway-15272.

Merriam-Webster 1, dictionary definition for “utilitarianism”, available at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/utilitarianism.

Merriam-Webster 2, dictionary definition for “refugee”, available at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/refugee.

Merriam-Webster 3, dictionary definition for “migrant”, available at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/migrant.

Merriam-Webster 4, dictionary definition for “expat”, available at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/expat.

Mill, J. S. (2009 [1861]). Utilitarianism. Floating Press.

Nussbaum, M. (2019 [1951]). The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal. Harvard University Press.

Owens, P. (2005). Hannah Arendt, Violence, and the Inescapable Fact of Humanity. In: A. F. Lang Jr and J. Williams, eds., Hannah Arendt and International Relations: Readings Across the Lines, Palgrave, pp. 41–65.      

Passport Index. (2020). Available at https://www.passportindex.org/, data collected in September 15, 2020.

UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). (2020). Refugee Facts: What is a Refugee? Available at https://www.unrefugees.org/refugee-facts/what-is-a-refugee/.

Weizman, E. (2011). The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza. Verso.

Young, I. M. (2002). Power, Violence, and Legitimacy: A Reading of Hannah Arendt in an Age of Police Brutality and Humanitarian Intervention. In: M. Minow, ed., Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair, Princeton University Press, pp. 260–287.

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Breathing as Politics

This summer evening in 1943 in Wanchai district, British Hong Kong, my grandfather lies on the bed, his racked body still atop the finely woven matting. He has tuberculosis, even though he is a doctor of tuberculosis. He is smoking opium to dull the painful contortions caused by his bloody cough, his fever, flushed cheeks, the ache of his sunken, too-brilliant eyes, his bones. There is no cure, opium smoking is his doctor’s prescription. My mother, a child, prepares his pipes. She heats the pin over the lamp’s flame, rolls opium onto the pin, and heat and rolls it alternately on the bowl to coax it into readiness for smoking. She approaches her reclining father, his head on the small headrest for smoking, pushes the hot black resin into the pipe which he holds in both hands, his right hand cradling the resting bowl and his left raising the long end to his mouth. She watches, and cares, as he inhales the vaporising smoke in short and long bursts, deeply, until every last tendril is pulled into all corners of his lungs and holds onto the precious smoke and his desire for oblivion before exhaling. After three preparations he is sufficiently distant and removed from his fading body which will not survive long, from the pain of knowing he will die young, leave his wife and six children, his lover and their child who live upstairs, and the bombs and relentless war which the British have done nothing to alleviate. My mother knows that the comfort of smoking is temporary, but makes the pipes so she can be near her father.

This evening all the family are home. My grandmother rocks the baby at the stove where she cooks, my infant uncle plays on the floor. My grandfather’s lover is upstairs with her child and her mother, who is also my mother’s grandmother. The evening is interrupted by a fracas on the street. Two Japanese soldiers shout after a young woman. They enter the staircase of the building, turn their way upwards and beat the door. My grandmother opens, they burst in. In fright she drops the baby. The woman the men are looking for is a prostitute they shout. They insist she is hidden here, in this flat. Furious at the unyielding homely scene, they instead turn their boots on my grandfather, smash his face and body, leave him unmoving. Afterwards my grandmother will tenderly clean and try to repair him, but he will die days later, 26 August. For my mother, his death, and the death soon after of her mother in the same building, will mark the end of all hope and the beginning of survival.

My mother sought forgetting in a refusal to remember until she became old, unlike her father who died at thirty-three, leaving us now to recreate a factual heritage from her fragmented and reluctant memory—although her imparted, inhalatory, and affective history is an ancient, familiar one. The connection of breathing and urgent unmet needs is one learnt in infancy; crying and breathing are so interlinked sometimes so entwined an infant cannot stop crying because to stop crying is to stop breathing. I wonder if grieving is as natural as breathing too, and if to stop grieving is to stop being alive.

—

Two years after Yuen Sing Chi died, just short months from the war’s end, U.S. planes bombed Hong Kong’s North coast, and the whole street they lived on was bombed. My mother recounted, the children sheltered by huddling together on the staircase, while their mother hid inside the apartment. Because of fears the building would collapse, her aunt gathered the children and they fled across the street. From the vantage-point of looking back across the road, my mother saw pieces of bodies, arms, legs, a torso without legs that was still moving. Her mother was eventually pulled from beneath the wreckage, alive but badly injured in her legs and taken to hospital. Her aunt took my mother to visit her only once, a tumulus shape beneath the sheet. The smell of bloated, decaying, suppurating holes in her flesh-stripped wounds was suffocating; they did not return. Years later she realised her mother had died of untreated bedsores, not her injuries.

The memory of my grandmother’s death surfaced in my mother’s fears of drowning, her vivid imagining of death by asphyxiation, being buried alive. Now in her eighties, living in England with her English husband, she no longer went swimming because she feared she would drown if she swam too far from the pool-sides, sink like a stone, and her body remain there decomposing and undiscovered. Even if she swam out with courage, there remained the possibility she would lose direction and breath, and her lungs fill with water and drag her downwards. Though I inherited her swallowed grief, and her asthma, transmission is not a finite phenomenon but insinuated continuously into the enduring impression of other family violences. My father silenced my childish defiance with innumerable punishments. I developed “symptoms”: sore throats, stabbing pains, panic attacks, asthma. Hence breathlessness became a shared heritage between mother and daughter in the oppressive atmosphere of home—our suffering rendered silent and unworthy in its subordination to my father’s needs. In Chinese and English patriarchy, men’s breathing difficulties are tended to by women, as with my grandfather’s tuberculosis, and men do not “naturally” care for women. 

In old age God became my mother’s opium (being no Marxist). Having moved across oceanic divides from China to England, from Taoism to Christianity, her prayers transcend the nationalist and territorial divisions of war and religion. For her, prayer, like the dream of free breathing, resembles the wind of the soul. As regulated rhythm, prayer offers a way to align scattered consciousness with the self, to enter the abode of God residing in the body, and to transport consciousness into a more primeval, primal state of time that transcends suffering and the world.

Now Covid-19 has confined us at home like prisoners of war, new thoughts about breathing, suffocation, and oppression cross-hatch the return of family history. Amidst this new epidemic which trapped many elderly people in domestic prisons with memories of war and the everyday violence of maddening spouses, my father circles the domestic space menacingly. My mother’s response is tempered, habituated—and from a distance we pace and attune our breathing to a new mutuality and time.

Read Nichola Khan’s article Breathing as Politics and Generational Transmission: Respiratory Legacies of War, Empire and Chinese Patriarchy in Colonial Hong Kong.

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“Je suis venu récupérer mon bien”. The ancestors to respect, the anthropology to refound

This paper is one of a series, written in Italian, called “Diary of an Insurrection”, a public dialogue with the reader with which the author reflects upon the global developments of Black Lives Matter. This is the fourth reflection and examines the concept of “original mixedness”, previously defined as the informal potential of the differentiation, common ground, and often negated, to all the differences established in act, the claimed identities. Building on Jean-Loup Amselle’s (1998) seminal critique of the tendency of ethnologists and colonial administrators to extract “pure” anthropological types where continuity of socio-cultural forms exists, my articulation proposes that it is the field of the original mixedness where it is necessary to ground a cultural policy that perseveres the objective to overcome racism rather than reifying it. Italian version available here.

Maybe it was inspired by a scene from the Black Panther, the first Marvel movie with black superheroes, released in 2018. Michael B. Jordan, as Killmonger, the anti-hero and enemy of T’Challa, the Wakanda leader, aka the Black Panther, steals an artefact belonging to the reign made of precious “vibranium” from the Museum of Great Britain. He has a brief but decisive conversation with a female curator, before she faints from the poisonous in her tea she sips while, with the aid of security, keeping this suspicious black visitor, carefully gazing at African objects, under control. «How do you think your ancestors got these – Killmonger reacts to the curator’s piqued answer who interpreted his “I am gonna take it off your hands for you” as a purchase offer, remembering that the objects are not on sale – Do you think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it like they took everything else?».

Or, more simply, the scene just evokes a real problem, long ignored yet strongly felt by whoever enters a museum of any capital, or important city, of a then empire, and distinctly perceives, inside the polished glasses of exhibit cases, a reopening of historic wounds, never healed. Wounds that extend from the surface of one’s own skin directly to the heart.

It is so that when, on Friday June 12th, Congolese Mwazulu Diyabanza, alongside few other militants, entered the Musée du Quai Branly, home to a large collection of African, Amerindian and Oceanic objects, some previously displayed at the famous Musée de l’Homme, and in a concerted and well-planned action, he is videoed removing a wooden funerary pole from its base, saying he would return it to the ancestors’ home; he verbally overpowers the employees who try to stop him, telling them he needs no permission to do what he is doing because, he thunders, «who gave you the authorisation to steal these objects, these expressions of African genius, stolen through genocides, massacres and violence to children?»; he lectures the astonished and curious visitors to the museum that they need to learn what respect means; and then the video clip ends with his arrest – the impression is that a quality jump here has been produced, live-streamed, in the excitement of the moment filmed with a phone; a powerful assertion for decolonising museums as a result of the global movement Black Lives Matter.

«Je suis venu récupérer mon bien, ce qui à eté vole et pillé dans toute l’Afrique entre 1880-1960», Diyabanza says, accusing all the French presidents of hypocrisy, starting with Jacques Chirac, who strongly advocated for the museum’s opening in 2006; his accomplices; the incapable and corrupt African heads of states, useless, unfit to stand up for themselves; and he warns that next it will be the turn of other museums around the world that make money on the suffering of his ancestors; he tells them he is coming; he is talking to you, London, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany; he is coming to you too. The policeman Diyabanza refers to as «are you Europe’s delegates?» asks him if the object is his. He replies: «Of course, it belongs directly and indirectly to me, it was made by my ancestors, it belongs morally and spiritually to me, and I have come to take it back home».

Macron took everyone by surprise when, in Burkina Faso, in November 2017, he said that he can no longer accept that a huge part of African heritage is housed in France. A commission he appointed had looked into the issue and after one year concluded that the collections kept in France, such as, the seventy-thousand sub-Saharan objects at the Quai Branly, should go back to their homelands if the countries from which they were taken ask for their return . The report was characterised as “very militant” by Emmanuel Kasarhérou, the museum’s director since late May 2020, of Melanesian descent. He explained that it would be difficult to follow the report’s directives, that not all of the objects were obtained through violence, some were legally acquired, others were donated, claiming the need to look at a complex and articulated period such as colonialism with an objective stance.

It is thus that Diyabanza’s action comes during a moment of stasis. The twenty-six treasures that the French president, in November 2018, after having received the report, declared would be given back to Benin, still remain in Paris. They are waiting for a museum to be built in the African state to host them. The reason why many oppose the notion of repatriation, among them the new Quai Branly director, because they feel the objects would be given back, only to rot. But who loves the ancestors most? The one who asks for a ticket for their genius, as Diyabanza calls it, to be seen, even in a decontextualised manner? Or the one who, like the Congolese militant, places the ethical question first that these objects belong to Africa and it should be Africans who manage their heritage? And the management needn’t include putting them in a museum. Instead, this is primarily about the gesture that the ancestors be returned to their communities and there they be treated as the communities see fit.

In this context, the silence through which the professional French associations of anthropologists have received Diyabanza’s irruption is dumbfounding. Yet this action precisely calls to question the founding fathers of French anthropology. It is enough to say that most of the Quai Branly’s objects come from the Musée de l’Homme, for which Paul Rivet was first director, followed by the great André Leroi-Gourhan and, from ’49 to ’50, a certain Claude Lévi-Strauss. The museum has always been at the centre of the national anthropological debate. The silence is disturbing in that it reveals a tendency for departments of anthropology to carry on with business as usual, to pretend the problem simply doesn’t exist. But the problem is not even a new one. Yanomami shaman, Davi Kopenawa, 2019 Right Livelihood Award winner, tells of how he also became upset with those in his party on his first visit to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris when saw the remains of ancient people, including children, and their objects, caged in glass boxes. According to him, that also looked like an insult to those ancestors, because their spirit was kept as a prisoner in those glass boxes, impeding it to be set free in the air, to go back to the world of above, in the sky. Yanomami traditionally burn their dead and the objects belonging to them to allow for that (see Kopenawa & Albert 2013: 345-348). There were no phones to capture Kopenawa’s rage and this was neither planned nor at the centre of a political action, but does that matter? Is it not the same lack of respect for the ancestors that these western museums exhibit just as Diyabanza reprimanded them for?

The same silence that we see in Paris is present in Oxford, where anthropology departments or professional British anthropological associations utter not a word of support for the removal of Cecil Rhodes’ statue and decolonisation of the university’s space (see NB at the end of the article). There have been fourteen Oxford academics who countered vice-chancellor’s statement that Nelson Mandela would be against the statue’s removal, deeming inappropriate to ventriloquise the South African leader dead in 2013 . But none of those fourteen academics was an anthropologist, although some anthropologists, such as Nayanika Mathur, individually and courageously support the protest on the ground. This also impacts a geographical zone, Rhodesia, and institutions such as Rhodes Institute and Rhodes Scholarship that are key to the development of national anthropology (see Shilliam 2019). It could be said that, without Cecil Rhodes, much of British anthropology, its greats such as social anthropology professor at Cape Town Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and the school of Max Gluckman, born in Johannesburg, would have not existed, so the silence seems embarrassing, to say the least, as it seems to have been decided not to deal with the topic at an institutional level.

How can we interpret this muting of anthropology except as an admission of complicity? To be right to the point: how many conferences have been organised on racism in Oxford’s Oriel College, where the statue of Cecil Rhodes is displayed, or where racism was debated? How many conferences have been organised at the Quai Branly in which anti-colonialism was debated? And before then, and still today, at the Musée de l’Homme? I attended a conference at the British Museum on climate change taking place inside an auditorium called “British Petroleum Lecture Theatre” . How credible can a conference like this be? How many have denounced racism in these conferences funded by institutes named after racists, slave-owners, and imperialists who said, like Rhodes, that he preferred “land to niggers”’? How many grand strategies for ending inequality and the dominance of the West over the World South have been proposed in meetings of privileged held in buildings whose façade feature the statues of those whose wealth and reputation were founded on inequality, dominance and genocide?

It is only with forceful gestures, sometimes even violent, that it is possible to make a hole in this curtain of silence. In March 2015, student and activist Chumani Maxwele, collected human faeces in the slum city Khayelitsha, where sanitary services are inadequate for the population, and threw them at the Cecil Rhodes’ statue at the University of Cape Town. This single gesture launched a movement that in one month saw the removal of the monument. Just one month. It further opened up a global conversation on the fate of Rhodes’ statues, that included the United States, Caribbean and United Kingdom. Who knows? Diyabanza’s gesture might have a similar impact. That may be determined on September 30th when the trial is due to begin. He and the other militants of his group will risk, with the complaint filed by the Quai Branly, detention and heavy fine. And Diyabanza shows every intention, judging from his statements after he was released by the police, to turn it into a political trial, sending messages to Africans and Afro-descendents to unite and stand up in defence of the ancestors.

This is what Nelson Mandela did, to demonstrate our Cape Town-Paris-Oxford connection, when he risked everything, in April 1964, in his famous speech before the court in which he defended armed struggle, not for love of violence, as he makes clear, but as the only way to end apartheid in South Africa. Fifty years of non-violence, he said, had worsened the conditions of Africans in the country, and he added that this choice to take up arms did not in any way betray his determination to live in a free and peaceful society, where no one would be discriminated against for the colour of their skin. It was a choice for which, “if needs be”, he was prepared to die, knowing that this declaration would probably earn him the death sentence. His lawyers and other members of the African National Congress, his fellow prisoners, tried in vane to dissuade him from saying it. But the judge, realised that a death sentence would make of him a martyr and that a dead Mandela would be more problematic than an alive one, opted for life in prison.

This was not the Mandela to whom the vice-chancellor of Oxford University was referring when she said, generating the criticism of those fourteen academics, that Madiba (the name he was generally and affectionately called to show his belonging to the Xhosa group, not used by the vice-chancellor in her statement), would be against the taking down of Rhodes’ statue. Mandela, out of prison after twenty-seven years, after having become the first black president of South Africa, collaborated with institutions named after Rhodes, and, in 2003, founded the Mandela Rhodes Foundation in London to award scholarship to young Africans. His political intention was not to make the new South Africa a vengeful country. Instead, he embraced the model of the “rainbow nation”, a term coined by bishop Desmond Tutu, and made current by Mandela the President.

But it was exactly this model that was the target of the student protests in Cape Town, the Rhodes Must Fall movement of 2015. The movement accused it of not having changed the structural inequities of South Africa (see Ahmed 2019: 23). After prison Mandela made an enormous moral commitment to not fostering vendetta. On the other hand, however, he became an example for liberal leaders, such as Tony Blair, to deactivate his past struggles, turning him into a sort of “Santa Claus”, a good and wise man who had suffered but who now seeks only peace of mind, and has a nice word and fatherly smile for all. That forgets that the same man was once the head of the military wing of the African National Congress, and was convinced that only an armed liberation would put an end to the monstrous system of apartheid. Those same people who glorified him as Santa Claus once he got out of prison often agreed with those who viewed him as a terrorist when he was in prison. Theresa May, as Prime Minister, in August 2018, on an official visit to South Africa one month after the centenary of the South African leader’s birth, visited, as a tourist, Mandela’s cell on Robben Island, not remembering, apparently, that her party at the time, led by Margaret Thatcher, called Mandela a terrorist and fully supported the apartheid regime of South Africa, as the Channel4 journalist Michael Crick made her notice, embarrassing her on national television.

De-santaclausifing Nelson Mandela was my objective when in March 2018, after the Macerata incidents of February, in which one man indiscriminately shot anyone black he met on the street, I decided to perform his I Am Prepared to Die speech of 1964. My aim, as suggested in the written introduction to the video, was to channel the African migrants, migrants in general and all those who stood in solidarity with them, towards that using that speech as a reference for their own actions; even to employ strong gestures and stubborn persistence. And to act rather that waiting for the Left to show concern for their condition. It was very clear that leftist parties and movements, expect for a few rare cases, simply couldn’t care less that Africans died at the hands of Italian racists.

The shadow of that speech looms over Diyabanza’s September trial, though, we obviously are not talking of armed struggle, nor the death sentence nor life in prison. We are simply talking, and it is a “simply” pregnant with consequences, of the rebellion of the ethnological object of anthropology. The same thing we witness at Oxford when black students, British, Africans or Americans, forcefully demand for not only the removal of Rhodes, but, through that gesture, for the decolonisation of the university’s space, designed, from the beginning, for the white western male. Even the illustrious recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, Stuart Hall, through which he came to Oxford from Jamaica in the ‘50s, and became the founder of the New Left in Britain, couldn’t but note, as evidenced by Shilliam (2019: 4), the unquestioned and all-pervasiveness of the colonial context with which the black student has to come to terms when moving through an environment thought for whites upon the exploitation and slavery of black student’s ancestors.

As a student of anthropology at the University of Rome La Sapienza in early 2000, I felt a strange sensation when my professors talked of anthropology as the study of the Other. I felt that here the Other was me, my family’s story, and yet I felt they talked about it just to talk about it, so they could write books, rather than interact without borders with this Other, without knowing where the interaction would have led. I began viewing them with suspicion when I realised that in the corridors and rooms of La Sapienza, there were, in the ‘30s, anthropologists who had written the “Manifesto della Razza”, supporting the legislation, “leggi razziali”, for which my mother could have not married my father, who was born in Panama. But I didn’t know this from them. None of my professors ever talked about it; not even once they mentioned Lidio Cipriani of the University of Florence and Guido Landra, from La Sapienza, assistant of Sergio Sergi, who wrote the actual document. Instead they talked about Ernesto de Martino as the leftist political founder of the discipline, but even then without telling the whole truth. They talked about de Martino the established elitist intellectual, not the one he could have become had he had the courage he had shown, at the beginning of his ethnographic investigation of Southern Italy, when he was in his forties.

Reflecting on the time on the ground spent with the Rabatani people, in a rural district of Tricarico, in the region of Basilicata, he wrote Note Lucane (“Lucanian Notes”), whose epilogue is a manifesto of what anthropology should be, had taken on the task of decolonising itself rather than persevering in the silence of colonial complicity. With the Rabatani people “kept at the level of beast” and fighting against the landowners, he realised how stupid and futile the narcissistic petit-bourgeois debates are over the Other’s dignity. He understands there is nothing left to do than to fight along with them, that his struggle is their struggle. Therefore he thanks them for having made his role as an intellectual clear, and as an intellectual coming from the South, being de Martino from Naples. They were revolutionary words, that de Martino himself rejects, once he had obtained a teaching post in the university and had editorial success. He treated his words as youthful mistakes, when he was already forty-two when he wrote them, four years older than I am now. They were revolutionary words that for me opened the possibility of decolonialising anthropology in the respect of those exploited and abused ancestors (see Berrocal 2009, 2015). My professors, by contrast, let those words fall into a void, worried only about assignments of offices and competition among themselves for research funding. The international debate passed by their very existence.

This is why, in February 2018, inaugurating the place, a rural house in the countryside, where I  strategically retired to live and from which I write, with the goal, in due course, of making it a cultural centre of thought experimentation; inside an Etruscan cave, called “The Ancestors’ Cave”, I recited the Note Lucane’s epilogue to launch this new path. For when the ethnological object does rebel, anthropology, as de Martino shows, cannot but accompany the explosion of the conflict, must become that Gramscian organic intellectual, in sentimental connection with their own group, that western anthropology has never been able to become.

The best anthropologist who ever lived was not, in fact, an anthropologist, but a guerrillero: the Insurgent Subcomandante Galeano, previously known as Marcos. Let us look at it this way: before engaging in a field research, the anthropologist advances a proposal, in which, from the table, s/he asks some questions, how s/he thinks to answer them, which type of problems s/he thinks s/he will encounter and so on; then, once in the field, s/he realises those questions and proposals have to be thrown up in the air because reality, in medias res, is another thing. So s/he begins to follow the course of events, become part of it, become modified by it. By the time the fieldwork is over, s/he will be have changed, as a result of an experiential, learning and initiating route.

Marcos who went to Chiapas in the ‘80s did the same. He arrived with a group of classic Marxist-Leninist guerrilleros of Latin American guerrilla warfare, with the idea of “converting” the indigenous to the faith of revolution. After the first few unsuccessful years of being faced with the diffidence of local communities and the considerable challenges of jungle life for a metropolitan bourgeois man, a philosopher from the UNAM of Mexico City as Rafael Sebastian Guillén Vicente was – the rain, insects and discomforts of the place; Marcos and his group leave behind their initial views and end up becoming, thanks to the mediation of the Viejo Antonio, indigenous themselves.

An anthropologist, having reached this point, of becoming “native”, and having accessed the secrets of the local culture, normally returns home to academia, writes a book on the experience which is read by students and debated in seminars, conferences, anthropological meetings. The people the book talks about have no opportunity to read and/or understand what is written about them, since the text is so full of anthropological jargon and bibliographical references, so packed with anthropological jargon themselves, that only university students or professional anthropologists can understand it. By contrast, Marcos stays there and builds with the Marxists become indigenous and revolutionary indigenous projects of life, political-communitarian experiences of liberty. The reciprocal recognition of the Other happened in the field, in the name of which the initial diffidence falls and the initial project is modified, becomes the pivot of an identity project based on such possibility. A possibility that starts from an ethical fundamental pre-comprehension that Marcos certainly had before going to Chiapas, because if it is true that an anthropologist deliberately chooses her/his object of study, the contrary is also true. The anthropologist is chosen by her/his object of study, in this case, a great calling from the ancestors, to be respected and honoured.

It is so that also with Marcos and the Zapatista movement it was necessary to inaugurate the new space. A video shot in July 2018 was published on YouTube in November, and centred around Entre La Luz y La Sombra, a speech made by Marcos in 2014 in which he announces the death of Marcos; that is, Marcos the character. In his characteristic literary style, he recounts the twenty years that had passed since the insurrection of January 1st 1994. He recalls the invention of the mask with the balaclava to make fun of the media and through them let the indigenous “giants” speak; those giants that the midgets of the communication system, so used to looking at their feet and never able to look up, couldn’t see. Yet they could see the only midget as tall as them, him and, via him, the giants could finally be heard. But even here, in order to break the wall of silence that had fallen over the original peoples of America, killed and violated since 1492, it was necessary to rise up in arms. And if on a previous occasion, Marcos had said that whoever recurs to violence lacks great ideas, therefore, implicitly conceding that on January 1st 1994 the Zapatistas lacked great ideas; in May 2014 he maintains, on being authorised, he clarifies, by Insurgent Subcomandante Moisés, the new leader of the movement, that nothing good or bad that in these twenty years happened in Chiapas could have been possible without the armed insurrection of San Cristóbal de las Casas.

All that happened in 2018, annus horribilis for Italy, from the racist resurgence both in Parliament, as represented by Salvini-Di Maio government, and on the streets, with continuing and insolent Nazi attacks against the Other that rendered everyone speechless. Words were certainly not spoken by anthropologists, who showed themselves to be insignificant, aligned with the white western left, unable to face the racist storm.

2020’s silence is the child of that silence, but this time there is an insurrection in the making. And toppling down racist statues might lead to the dethroning of locked-up-in-chairs anthropologists, who have done nothing to combat racism while everything to fatten up that system with the illusion of being against it, of wanting its end. The silence we see in Paris, Oxford, Rome may be the harbinger of an extinction of colonial anthropology, may finally open up the possibility for anthropology, de-colonised.

For anthropology remains the only great alternative for defeating racism. Its being founded on prolonged fieldwork, face-to-face relationships, that involves senses, emotions, that can lead anywhere, towards unexplored shores, and destinations previously thought as unreachable, makes of it a valid empiric demonstration of what an ethnic identity is: its possibility of always reshaping itself, reformulating, never stopping, continuing to move, to climb trees, falling and trying again. Fieldwork is open ground that awaits to be walked upon, and that is the territory of original mixedness, the persistent promise of new combinations, new developments, new destinations.

Achille Mbembe, Cameroonian philosopher, has defined, to then change his own initial position, the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Cape Town as similar to Boko Haram, the fundamentalist Islamic terrorist group of Western Africa (see Ahmed 2019: 120-121). His consideration was based on some despicable facts. After the removal of the statue, Chumani Maxwele was denounced for having assaulted a white professor shouting “whites must be killed”. This is because, Mbembe’s argument against the students movement goes, rather than being demythologised, whiteness has remained an obsession in South Africa (see Ahmed 2019: 123-124), in a country where, during and after Mandela, the whites have kept their monopoly intact and little has changed for the black population. All of this speaks to a vicious result of the process of the santaclausification of Nelson Mandela, through which, and thanks also to the corruption of his successors heading the ANC, a veil has been lowered to mask the unsolved problems of the country.

However that university movement has also been transformed, as Abdul Kayum Ahmed notices in his PhD thesis, by its feminist and trans-feminist component. Practicing intersectionality, the recognition of the overlapping and interdependencies of the systems of discriminations, has allowed this movement to create the space for a new discourse on an open identity claimed in Africa before any other western country, in an intriguing way and with concrete results. The women of the movement consciously adopted, in connection with the critical theory of Californian feminist and African-American movement, the wording “womxn” to define themselves, adopting this x in the most inclusive way so as not to exclude the forms of being woman that the patriarchal language “man” cages in the binarism of gender choice (Ahmed 2019: 124-136). It is an interesting use: it recalls the incognita of Malcolm X which was intended to let people know that because of slavery he could not know his origins. Today we need to claim this x as a condition of humanity that with the incognita means the conscience of the yet to come, of the always possible, of the possibility of the original mixedness of leaving its mark on any identity process. The x, as I propose, can stand for original mixedness.

We don’t know if Mwazulu Diyabanza is an anti-hero like Killmonger of Black Panther, even if Killmonger, albeit in reach for power, is likely more useful than dangerous to the Wakanda reign. He looks like a typical PanAfrican leader. His call is to Africans which might suggest that a closed notion of identity is behind his plan. The discussion has to move quickly on to the fact that the ancestors Diyabanza wants to respect are not only African, but belong to everybody, are part of everybody’s heritage, from whom we all became who we are. It is right that they come back to Africa to have Africans decide what to do: no question about it. But there’s an anthropological discussion to be had, an all levels, about decolonialisation of thought, about recognition of the infinite combinatory possibilities, and in the making, of original mixedness. That is why it is hugely important for anthropology to be present for the 30th September’s trial, and in preparation for it. It will occur during a time we might feel strongly the bad byte of the covid19-related economic crisis, when the authoritarian discourse may return more aggressively than ever. It is essential thus for anthropology to get onto the battle-field, defend Diyabanza and widen the horizon.

We cannot repeat the same errors of the past. Errors such as the historic PanAfrican movement that adopted the idea of the European nation, that claimed the borders set by the colonialists by a ruler on the table, that declared war on the traditional authorities in the name of “progress”, throwing away a precious opportunity to show the African way of modernity to the Europeans, spitting, they themselves for first, on the memory of their ancestors. We cannot allow the same error to happen today. It is because we need to found a new knowledge, one that decolonises our thought while simultaneously championing respect for the ancestors.

There is a strong resonance that supersedes all others: the Medici’s Neo-Platonic Academy by Cosimo I. That project sought to re-discover Plato as a means of re-accessing ancient thought which was rejected by Aristotle, at least as he was referenced in the Middle Ages. It was a project that showed its limitations by enmeshing Plato inside Christianity, conforming him in great part to St Augustine’s reading. Marsilio Ficino freed Plato from that reading and then he imprisoned him there again, when he became a priest. Today our “scienza nova” (between Latin, nova, and vulgar from which Italian scienza) will be more successful the more it rests on the hands of Marcos’ giants: our, that is, of all humans living in 2020, ancestors.

Casolare del Pensare

June 20th

 

NB: since writing this article, June 20th, several declarations by some European professional associations of anthropologists have been made, such as the statement by EASA, European Association of Social Anthropologists, of June 22nd,  motivated by the strong statement made in the previous few days by its Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity Network  that explicitly supports the Black Lives Matter movement and, channelling the statement, released on June 6th, by the Association of Black Anthropologists  (section of the American Anthropological Association) invites anthropologists to reflect on the problem of whiteness in the discipline and how this is reflected in hiring, career, etc. Even the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK & Commonwealth, almost obliged, finally released a statement, rather weak, on racism. However in none of these cases is there a direct reference either to the Oxford Rhodes Must Fall movement, even though, at least ideally this is implied in the Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity Network’s statement, where the removal of statues and figures of the colonial past “also linked to our discipline” is recommended, or to the Mwazulu Diyabanza’s case in Paris. Still no mention of this last case from the French associations of anthropologists. The good news, however, comes from the Pitt River Museum in Oxford, whose director, archaeologist Dan Hicks, appears to be strongly committed to decolonise the institution.

 

 

References

Ahmed A. K. 2019. The Rise of Fallism: #RhodesMustFall and the Movement to Decolonize the University. PhD Thesis. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Columbia University.

Amselle J. L. 1998 [1990]. Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

Berrocal E. G. 2009. “The Post-colonialism of Ernesto De Martino: The Principle of Critical Ethnocentrism as a Failed Attempt to Reconstruct Ethnographic Authority”. History and Anthropology 20 (2): 123-138.

Berrocal E. G. 2015. “Other-Hegemony in de Martino: The Figure of the Gramscian Fieldworker between Lucania and London”. Journal of American Folklore 128 (507): 18-45.

Kopenawa D & B Albert 2013 [2010]. The Falling Sky. Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge, MASS & London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Shilliam R. 2019. “Behind the Rhodes statue: Black competency and the imperial academy”. History of the Human Sciences. 32 (5) 3-27.

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Volunteering, care and the self in a Chinese metropolis

Charlotte Bruckermann:

With China’s increasing integration into global capitalism after the demise of high socialism, feelings of moral decline and even moral crisis have taken hold throughout the country. In the ensuing decades, individual philanthropy and volunteering spread, crystalizing in the popular media during mass events, especially in the wake of disasters such as the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 or even in the responses to the Coronavirus in 2020. Such mobilizations for social support defy concerns over a “missing” civil society in China and break with explanations tracing comparable phenomena to the demise of the welfare state under neoliberalism anthropologists traced elsewhere. I have written about this in relation to housing in small cities and villages in North China where the use of online media fostered and accelerated social support in response to a perceived housing crisis (see Bruckermann 2020).  Nonetheless, assumptions about the novelty of such phenomena in China are debatable, given historical narratives replete with persons exhibiting exemplary behavior, ranging from benevolent imperial bureaucrats to Maoist model workers.

Beyond the spectacular flow of altruism orchestrated during cataclysmic disasters, you uncover the underlying rhythms of social support that pattern and punctuate everyday life in urban China. You show how Guangzhou residents provide social support to each other as part of the mundane yet ethical struggles to forge sociality under conditions of heightening urban pressure in the new millennium. These intimate and personal accounts of the motivation to care for the families, neighbors, and even strangers in their midst, reveal a dense moral tapestry difficult to capture in quantified statistics, metrics, and big data. As corporations and governments in China, and indeed the world over, seek to identify and measure “good deeds” for the distribution of trust, credit, and credibility, for instance in the emerging “social credit system” in China, the book lays the groundwork for important current issues of public concern, anthropological and otherwise.

I believe your 2018 book Soup, Love, and a Helping Hand: Social Relations and Support in Guangzhou, China provides an accessible, yet substantive, ethnographic account of the massive transformations Chinese urbanites face in providing and receiving social support, as well as their moral motivations in fostering sociality and reshaping the social contract with the state. How did you come to write this book? What were your main aims and challenges in writing it?

Friederike Fleischer:

The book is the result of my post-doctoral research in Guangzhou, China, between 2006 and 2007. In my first book, Suburban Beijing, I examined reform-period urban transformations, especially the expansion and privatization of housing, and how residents of Wangjing, a Beijing suburb, had been affected by these changes. One of the major issues that came to the fore was the effect of spatial transformations on interlocutors’ social relations, both positively and negatively. Some enjoyed the newly found privacy and anonymity in modern middle class residential compounds, while others lamented the loss of neighborly solidarity and support. It is through this that I came to be interested in exploring how urban, social, economic, and political transformations have affected social relations in urban China. That is, in the context of rapidly expanding and increasingly stratified cities, a curtailing of state provided social services and support, and the one-child policy, how do people go about organizing their daily lives in an exploding, rapidly transforming, dynamic city like Guangzhou? Who do they interact with, relate to, and rely on when they need help or support? How are families, friends, work affected by the new urban landscape?

Whereas the new urban middle class played an important role in Suburban Beijing, in this project I was especially interested in the laobaixing, the “common people”. That is, those who have not directly profited from the socio-economic reforms but have not completely lost out either; those who managed to get by but would be seriously challenged by any unexpected turn of life. Age-wise, my prime focus was on the “sandwiched” generation, i.e. those who have adolescent, or young-adult children and elderly parents they tend to support – with money or practical help. This is (or was at the time) also the generation who had been especially affected in their youth by the Cultural Revolution. Thus, they are not only strongly marked by Maoism but also have to shoulder many of the negative socio-economic effects of the reform period.

The main challenge for the research was – as often in urban anthropology – that I did not have a specific locale, a place, where I could go and hang out in order to meet and mingle with interlocutors. Organizing meetings and interviews in an expanding city like Guangzhou is time-consuming and physically exhausting. As for the book, the main challenge was how to integrate the different realms of inquiry: the family/ neighborhood, the church, and the volunteers.

Charlotte:

Your spatial insights into urban China certainly provide a fascinating thread across both books, with your first book exploring a Beijing neighborhood of diverse middle class urbanites, retirees, and rural-to-urban migrants living side-by-side as a community (Fleischer), and now with your second book focused on this demographic that sees itself as “the common people” across different Guangzhou areas, yet experiences residential communities breaking apart to the extent that they feel compelled to forge new socialities. It almost seems counterintuitive, that it is these middle-aged homeowners who become so unsettled, and even anxious, by the changes to their social context that they reach beyond their networks for social fulfillment. Did this come as a surprise to you, or did you expect to find that homeowners felt this erosion of a proximate community living side-by-side so keenly?

Friederike:

That’s a great question, thank you, but not that easy to answer. On the one hand, no I was not surprised because already in my Beijing research this middle generation of lower-income home-owners appeared to be the ones most worried about the effects of the socio-economic reforms. They grew up during Maoism and its promises of a basic security net, including health care, job security, pensions, and (eventually) some form of housing. To see all that falling away obviously is an intimidating prospect. All the more so since they have the additional responsibility to care for the elders, while also providing for the offspring. At the same time, this should not suggest that not a few of my interlocutors experienced the breaking apart of the previous collectives as something positive. “Finally I have some privacy,” I recall well a woman complaining about her snooping neighbors in her previous residential compound. How they evaluated the situation depended a lot on their financial standing. What did surprise me, though, in the Guangzhou research was where interlocutors sought new socialities – the taijiquan group and especially the Church. I never planned on doing research on religion but that was something that really emerged from the field.

Charlotte:

Your focus on the personal and spiritual search for new socialities provides an intriguing way of rethinking a number of key tropes in the anthropology of China, including perceptions of moral crisis and individualizing modernity in the post-Mao Era. The taijiquan practitioners, church goers, and NGO volunteers in your book put intimate quests for meaning center stage in their motivations in creating sociality. As you say, they now finally feel they have some privacy. But you also show that there is a political dimension to this, as common values and meanings based in high socialism fell apart without being replaced in post-Mao China, and citizens had to reorient their lives around new priorities. It seems that these Guangzhou residents are much more dedicated towards rebuilding, even expanding, their social, rather than political, lives. Are they simply tired of politics? And is this specific to China? What broader insights could your research provide into solidarity, altruism, and collective action elsewhere?

Friederike:

I am not sure if I would say that people were tired of politics, maybe more frustrated or resigned. But I find it really hard to generalize about this issue as it depends so much on the individual and their personal experience. At the same time, among interlocutors in this project there were important differences between the generations. The older generations, who experienced the Cultural Revolution, were very focused on their everyday lives. Most acknowledged that overall life was much better than during Maoism. Even those with grievances in the present day had little expectations from the government and rather sought to knit their social networks of support and embedding. Among the younger generation there appeared to be something more of a political project of building a better society. But again, given the political, social and economic realities of present-day China, apart from the few people I met who had aspirations in the Communist Party, interlocutors focused on their own practices and immediate social environment. One factor that is important, I think, and which I also observe in my other field research site Colombia, is a lack of trust – in (political) institutions and strangers. That’s why I think spaces such as the church and the sustained volunteering efforts (the long-term, personalized engagements) are so important. This is where trust can be established and lasting social relations, and thus solidarity, can be formed. Beyond this, I think the research shows that the simple distinction often made between altruism or solidarity and self-realization falls short. At the same time, we can see the power of the (Chinese) state to set or influence discourses and practices. Yet this is never absolute; people will always “resist” even if it is not explicitly political.

Charlotte:

The book itself gradually broadens its outlook on urban life, beginning with the family and relatives, then moving on to the neighborhood and community, before delving into institutional settings of religious organizations and NGOs. In classic social theory, this might imply a continuum from more intimate, personal, proximate connections to more public, formal, distant settings, often associated with the world of strangers. But your ethnography shows that the connections forged in the exercise groups, church communities, and volunteer associations, are at least as intimate, personal and private as those embedded in family or residential arrangements. They are actually deeply entangled with participants’ sense of self. Why do you think this is the case? Is this because they are more intentional and purposeful than relationships that are specified, or sometimes even imposed, by the world? Or is there something about the contemporary moment that makes these relationships of faith, ethics, and a common cause, so important?

Friederike:

Great question. I actually think that the issue among interlocutors was that the familial world has become strange/ filled with strangers – including family members, friends, and colleagues. That is, since new paths, life styles, desires, and ideas about a “good life” have opened up in the last 30 years, interlocutors experienced more divergences, more rifts, and even open conflicts. So the familiar has become (more) strange. As a result, it appeared to me that there was a lot of “soul-searching” going on among interlocutors in Guangzhou. Maybe apart from the oldest generation, they looked for a way and place to be in the world. For those who were financially end emotionally secure, it was more a matter of trying out new things, identities, past times, etc. But for those with bad experiences and worries about the future, there was an almost existential element to the searching. Then again, young people – the volunteers – transmitted such a sense of lack and need to improve themselves; they clearly did not seem to see their parents’ generation as a source of guidance. They were very explicit about the weight of responsibility they felt was put on them, by their families and society at large, that they would not only have to care for their elders, but that they were also the backbone of society, the new China. So, yes, I think this is (or was at the time of my research) a particular moment. I would be curious to find out how this search for meaning has changed in recent years.

Charlotte:

Absolutely, me too! This is definitely a space to watch. Is this where your current research is heading or are you exploring another direction?

Friederike:

I have been working in Colombia in recent years and been a bit disconnected from China, but would actually like to go back to revisit some of these issues. Especially from a more comparative perspective. Even though changing my field site has been a challenge, I have found it inspiring to distance myself a bit from the sometimes quite insular China field of studies. My research in Colombia has highlighted the complex and important role that the state plays in Chinese people’s everyday lives, and how that affects personal relations but also ideas and practices about the future.

Charlotte:

Agreed, there is so much to be gained from anthropological comparison beyond narrow regionalism, and your work certainly shows how comparative insights accrue, and transmute, while researching different locations, both in China and now Colombia. I very much look forward to reading more of your work!

 

References

Bruckermann, Charlotte. 2020. Claiming Homes: Confronting Domicide in Rural China. Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books

Fleischer, Friederike. 2018. Soup, Love, and a Helping Hand: Social Relations and Support in Guangzhou, China. Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books

Fleischer, Friederike. 2010. Suburban Beijing: Housing and Consumption in Contemporary China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 

 

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In Solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter and Call for Dismantling Structural Racism in Germany

Public statement issued by the Working Group Public Anthropology, German Anthropological Association.

Drafted on 6 June 2020  

Follow us on Twitter @AGPublicAnthro and Facebook

In the aftermath of the brutal police killing of George Floyd, nation-wide protests have erupted against police violence and structural anti-Black racism in the United States. In most major cities in Germany, massive demonstrations organized by BIPoC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) and a supporting public are taking place. As engaged actors and witnesses of the contemporary, anthropologists in Germany cannot and should not stay silent and passive in the wake of one of the most significant anti-racist social movements in recent history. Neither can we afford to look away from Germany’s homegrown racism, systemic oppression, and structural discrimination against BIPoC communities intersecting with other minorities, vulnerable and underprivileged people.

While the German media are condemning police violence in the US, the unresolved cases of police violence, persistent racial profiling, and everyday racism in Germany (as well as in other European countries) and its central institutions hardly make it to the front page. Critical voices, for instance, have pointed out that the process that started in Germany with the NSU trial is unlikely to be finished until institutional racism in the country is faced and addressed accordingly. Spectacular acts of right-wing terrorism and populist politics have triggered public condemnation in recent years. But the everyday structural racism that BIPoC communities confront throughout their lives remains the hardest to disentangle from everyday white privilege. Institutionalized forms of racism have, for instance, systematically excluded BIPoC communities from employment and subjected them to racial discrimination, which has endured in Germany since colonial times. Decolonization calls for attention to the fact that coloniality is not over – that it is not ‘post-’ but rather continues to permeate almost all aspects of our lives.

As members of the German Anthropological Association, we condemn police violence and structural racism everywhere and stand in solidarity with the #BlackLivesMatter movement and BIPoC protests in the US, Germany, and elsewhere. We take this opportunity to call on the general public to intensify a critique and dismantling of white privilege maintained in Germany. We emphasize the need to reinforce the longstanding and unfinished project of decolonizing the colonial and imperial legacies. We demand a renewed commitment to affirmative action in supporting the BIPoC and other minority communities in Germany at all levels.

Each epoch of social movements has reconfigured the mainstream society as much as it has shaped anthropological theory and practice in the history of our discipline. Anthropology in Germany was rooted in colonialism, like elsewhere, and complicit with the Nazi regime supported by many German anthropologists and their unquestioned white privilege. German universities and our own discipline have largely failed in institutionalizing affirmative “inclusion” of BIPoC communities. Reworking our epistemologies and engaging in more collaborative forms of research are necessary steps in this direction. However, rhetoric gestures, methodological reforms, and “discursive” solidarity on social media, in classrooms and academic texts are not sufficient. In the wake of current events, we call on fellow members of the German Anthropological Association to express solidarity with the #BlackLivesMatter protestors and to recommit to the task that we demand from German society. Through a dual critique of the white privilege perpetuated in society and within our discipline with a renewed commitment to affirmative, practical action of solidarity in executing concrete plans of action can we, as anthropologists, join the public in their call for systemic change.

Please click the following link to see the list of individual supporters and working groups/regional groups of the German Anthropological Association:

See here also the statement against police violence and anti-Black racism issued by the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA), a section of the American Anthropological Association, and published on 6 June 2020.

Acknowledgments

We thank the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA), a section of the American Anthropological Association, for allowing us to post here their statement against police violence and anti-Black racism. The original google document based on which our public statement has been crafted is closed now. We thank everyone for supporting the statement and the valuable feedback we received. It is possible to sign the document at a later period. Please contact us if you wish to do so:

Nasima Selim and Judith Albrecht

Email: nasimaselim@gmail.com, judithalbrecht@hotmail.com

Spokespersons, Working Group Public Anthropology

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Public Anthropologist Award 2021

Public Anthropologist Award (PUAN-A) is awarded to a social and cultural anthropologist who has published an outstanding contribution that addresses – in innovative, engaging and compelling ways – key societal issues related to one or more of the following topics: violence, war, poverty, social movements, freedom, aid, rights, injustice, inequality, social exclusion, racism, health, and environmental challenges.

A contribution can be any published research output – for example a book, peer reviewed article, documentary, etc.

Application: submit your research output together with your CV (2 pages) to Public Anthropologist’s Editor-in-Chief, Antonio De Lauri: antonio.delauri@cmi.no

Write PUAN-A + “Title of the research output” in the subject heading.

Prize: A committee chaired by the Editor-in-Chief will select one research output for the Public Anthropologist Award. The author will receive a prize of 500 €.

Deadline for PUAN-A 2021: 15 January 2021 (for outputs published in 2019 and 2020).

For more information on the journal, please visit brill.com/puan.

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Suggested by Public Anthropologist: On an Empty Stomach

Public Anthropologist‘s suggested reading today is On an Empty Stomach. Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief.

Research, activism and policy debates on the issue of hunger continue to be high on the political agenda at the global level. Moving away from contingent assessments, especially common in this time of coronavirus, Tom Scott-Smith provides  an informative reading to understand humanitarian approaches to hunger in historical perspective.

The book links humanitarianism to the broader context in which it takes place. As the author explains, “My central argument can be expressed relatively simply: that humanitarian practices, even at the most technical level, reflect the social and political conditions of the age. The way humanitarians feed hungry people, in other words, is influenced by prevailing patterns of power, systems of thought, and approaches to governance”.