Posted on

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)

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

“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.

Posted on

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.

 

 

Posted on

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

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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”.

 

Posted on

What Anthropology Teaches Us about COVID-19: A Conversation between Cultural Anthropologist, Dr. Alma Gottlieb and Physician-Anthropologist, Dr. Bjørn Westgard

Recently, I checked in with Dr. Bjørn Westgard, to see how he was doing.

Back in the ‘90s, Bjørn was enrolled in a wildly demanding, combined M.D./Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois, where I had the pleasure of serving as his academic advisor. After completing his medical school coursework, Bjørn conducted doctoral research in cultural anthropology in a small town in northern Senegal, studying the complexities of intersecting local and global medical systems as they sometimes complemented one another and sometimes competed. He intentionally combined “bottom-up” and “top-down” perspectives, interviewing everyone from village-based farmers and healers to biomedically trained nurses and doctors. (From that research, Bjorn is fluent in French and Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal; he also speaks Serer and Mandinka, two linguistically unrelated languages spoken in the region of his research.)

When it came time to choosing a medical specialty in which to pursue his residency, Bjørn surprised me: he decided against his early interest in pediatrics or family medicine and opted instead for emergency medicine.

Initially, I was disappointed: I thought that working in ER rooms would waste Bjørn’s formidable scholarly skills. How could he get to know transient patients and put his extensive training in biomedical cultural sensitivity to work? Of course, Bjørn had already thought through that concern. “There are more return patients than you’d think,” he explained. Bjørn understood what few others in the U.S. yet knew: that many, many uninsured Americans used emergency rooms for routine medical services. That included the poor and the undocumented—for all of whom, Bjørn (with his ample wading into the deep waters of culturally sensitive issues) would have special insights.

Bjørn had an additional reason for selecting emergency medicine that made equally compelling sense. “There’s so much wrong with the American medical system, and a lot of it is encapsulated in ERs,” I remember him explaining. “As an anthropologist, I can start addressing the systemic problems if I have a position working in the belly of the beast.” At the time, no one was talking about this problem in such clear ways–at least, not in public conversations about healthcare policy. I remember being instantly both impressed and persuaded: Bjørn was making the right decision.

Besides, if I thought about everyone I had ever known, Bjørn would have been my first pick for an ER doctor. He has the sort of calm temperament and clear, logical mind that would make him the obvious choice for captaining any sinking ship.

Fast-forward fifteen years, and Bjørn now finds himself working as Research Director and Senior Staff Physician at Regions Hospital, a Level 1 Trauma Center in Minneapolis that sees over 90,000 Emergency Center visits every year. A Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians, Bjørn holds secondary medical appointments in emergency departments of four other hospitals in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Over the years, Bjørn has researched heart disease among Somalis in Minneapolis (with support from the National Institute for Health); has specialized in hyperbaric oxygen therapy for certain medical conditions; and has helped create an innovative program finding housing and lifestyle amelioration for homeless people in Minneapolis.

Clearly, Bjørn has harnessed the wisdom he gained from studying pluralistic health practices in a small town in Senegal to the technical skills he gained in studying medicine. With his incredible combination of scientific and humanistic talents, I was unsurprised to learn that Bjørn is now leading a medical team that is fashioning policy responses to COVID-19 for the state of Minnesota.

On his home page, Bjørn describes his approach to medicine this way:

My teaching and research have focused on Emergency Department use for preventable conditions among priority populations, “food deserts” and diet-related Emergency Department visits, longitudinal changes in Emergency Department use among the homeless, supportive housing, and reducing health disparities in emergency care.

Who could be more qualified than an ER physician-anthropologist such as Bjørn Westgard to understand the COVID-19 crisis in both scientific and human terms?

(You can read a brief bio of Bjørn Westgard here and his LinkedIn page here.)

Recently I had a conversation with Dr. Bjorn Westgard about this long COVID-19 moment—about what he has learned, and what he can teach the rest of us.

BW = Bjorn Westgard

AG = Alma Gottlieb

AG: An ER doctor in New York, Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell, recently claimed that ER doctors around the world may have drastically misjudged the nature of the COVID-19 beast when it enters the lungs, and may have unintentionally harmed patients by keeping them attached to respirators administering too much pressure on fragile lungs. His claims are quite striking and disturbing! If this ER doctor is right, it’s tragic to think of what damage might have already been done by mis-calibrating those respirators. What do you think of his claims, medically? And, why do you suppose he posted this video on YouTube for general consumption?

BW: This has gotten a lot of play. Unfortunately, his understanding of high-altitude pulmonary edema is a little off, and no one has put anything together about his critique that is systematic or peer-reviewed. However, multiple physicians from China, Italy, and New York in particular (on some emergency medicine podcasts and the like) have raised the possibility that treating COVID using ventilator parameters for ARDS [acute respiratory distress syndrome] may be incorrect, at least initially.

The ventilator management of these patients doesn’t sound incompatible with early ARDS, but it is still very controversial. I just got into a heated argument with an intensivist earlier today for even bringing up the above. There is fear among all sorts of health professionals right now, especially among those who tend to “know what they know” with the most certainty. So the idea of managing critical pathophysiology that might be different from what is expected–requiring a veritable, Kuhnian paradigm shift–can be very anxiety- and anger-provoking.

To add further fuel to that fire, there has also been discussion of a possible hemoglobin issue (oxygen carrier in the blood), but there has been nothing other than a pre-press 3D computer modeling paper out of China in the rapid-fire literature to support that idea. However, a group from NYU did use machine learning to predict severe disease, with results that could support the idea of a hemoglobinopathy. I even have colleagues in my other Board specialty, hyperbaric medicine, who are working on a trial to use hyperbaric oxygen to get around the possible hemoglobin issue. I think there’s probably more to the receptor for COVID, which is present in all of the body’s vasculature, which could potentially trigger inflammation and coagulation that way, and that inflammation and small clots, which we’re finding everywhere in coronavirus patients, could be causing diffuse injury.

It’s fascinating to watch the accretions of science and knowledge in the age of the Internet and social media. Already, cranks are hawking conspiracy theories and supplements in response to the “censored” knowledge above.

As an emergency physician and an anthropologist, I’m a bricoleur of the contingent and the emergent, by trade. I’ll consider new ideas if they make pathophysiologic sense, and I have no doubt that someone will examine these ideas further and more systematically, so I’ll keep watching for more evidence. For now, I’ll care for the patient in front of me and adjust their vent settings as needed.

AG: That sounds like a good strategy both for an ethnographer and a doctor. But then, I always thought that all doctors ought to have training in anthropology.

BW: I hope I didn’t give you the impression in my last email that I was resistant to the ideas presented, just that I’m looking for more information, whether from personal, clinical experience or other data. I’m just not generally inclined to change my clinical practice in response to social media. I’m in the middle of our Thursday morning residency conference right now, and we’re discussing initial and ICU ventilator settings, given developing information, and it’s fascinating to hear an intensivist colleague suggest that “we’re all in the same boat here, the attendings [fully credentialed, attending physicians], the fellows, the residents, and the med student . . . we’re all learning together as we go.”

AG: Speaking of combining social and technical approaches, we’ve been reading about efforts to systematically calculate social contacts for COVID-19 patients, to help track the socio-geographic spread of the disease. What do you think of those?

BW: Very cool. I’m trying to get our state to do something similar using an app I’ve worked with a team to develop. I’m arguing with our Department of Health, who have difficulty appreciating how technology might help. But they’re also feeling less pressure to consider novel options, since our state is doing relatively well.

AG: Here’s something else I thought you might have a lot to say about . . . the whole “herd immunity” question strikes me as so interesting for anthropologists. I’ve been reading a lot about this recently.  This piece in the Boston Globe really caught my attention.

First, there are the epidemiological questions. How accurate is the concept of “herd immunity” to begin with? As a doctor and scientist, I assume you’ll have much to say about that.

Second, there are the sociological implications. How can your perspective as an anthropologist speak to the epidemiological factors? If the US (and/or other nations) adopts a “herd immunity” approach at some point (before a vaccine is widely available), what sorts of people will be allowed—or even encouraged–to be exposed to the virus? What sorts of people should be allowed, or even encouraged, to be exposed to the virus? Are those two groups of people the same? Or, will socioeconomic disparities intervene, and might large numbers of the wrong people (the most vulnerable) end up being exposed to the virus? I’m thinking about this because, over the past two weeks, many mainstream journalists in the U.S. have begun noting racial disparities in COVID-19 mortality. Of course, that’s no surprise to anthropologists (and some other social scientists), though it seems to be surprising plenty of politicians. Thinking about these social factors, are there new risks to perpetuating racial disparities with a “herd immunity” strategy?

Third, there are the symbolic/conceptual/philosophical implications. As a scholar steeped in sensitivity to discursive implications, what are the ramifications of using a metaphor of (non-human) animal behavior for human behavior, in evoking “herd” immunity?

The maddening “organism at the edge of life” (as virologist E. P. Rybicki describes viruses) that is far too dangerous to appear this beautiful

BW: I haven’t had time until after my shift this evening to get to your questions, but I like them. It prompts me to reflect and consider with a wider lens.

I’m not an expert in infectious disease or epidemiology, but my understanding is that “herd immunity” is primarily a statistically useful concept that expresses the aggregate balance between immune systems and infectious vectors such that there’s enough immunity to prevent ongoing transmission. But when you get into the immune system, things become very complex very quickly. Talking about vaccines and immune medications (like those being discussed as treatments for cytokine storm, for example), the questions pertain not just to the dose of a drug in the volume of an aqueous human, but also to what the most productive triggers are for the bodily machinery churning out the immunity widgets of antibodies. The questions become: What is needed to trigger the production of immunity? How effective is the immunity that is produced? Does it wane, and if so, when?

And all that is without discussing the social patterns of intermixing that we all experience, and which have become the main means by which we are currently intervening upon the spread of this pandemic. I think that’s where the concept of “herd” becomes interesting. Anthropologists and many others are comfortable with the idea of the population as a biopolitical concept generated by a certain kind of governmentality. But how do we, the multitude, deploy that in an effective, self-governing manner?

It seems to me that the concept of the “herd” could allow us to conceive of our collective biology, our animality, in a way that is positive and potentially collectively empowering, rather than biostatistically disempowering. That said, it seems clear that a “herd immunity” strategy that treats the lot of us like chattel (the flip side of the “herd”), positing that we should all “put on our big boy and big girls pants” and accept that a lot of people must die, will undoubtedly do more harm. We’re seeing this in those areas of the country where few or late actions have been taken to mitigate the spread of coronavirus.

It’s my hope that we’ll use available information from around the world to develop better methods that capitalize upon our current collective engagement. It seems like “flatten the curve” has brought the collective back to the biostatistical. Hopefully, well-thought-out approaches to “reopening” and easing social/policy measures could do the same. But the evidence for these measures is thin, and we are all learning about one of my favorite areas or research, complex population models of disease. This is another area where science is being built daily, as the pandemic provides some of the first empirical test cases for these tools.

But it is disheartening that in areas both with and without aggressive measures, we see the impact of racial and socioeconomic disparities. Those disparities are at play in health inequities and inequitable care in the best of times. Now, resources are strained, so it would be almost unthinkable that those factors would not be significantly at play in the pandemic. In areas with less, or late, social and political measures to isolate people, the historic clustering of populations through systemic segregation, with associated increases in population density and decreases in access to resources, lead to syndemic conditions. In areas with more social and political measures to isolate people, many who work low-end jobs become unemployed, with all the accompanying fears and hardships, while those who keep their low-end jobs–clerks, janitors, service workers, etc.–are left out in public in positions that put them in contact with large numbers of potentially infectious people. So, between the two groups, disparities in rates of infection and adverse outcomes should come as no surprise.

I’ll get back to you with more, as this is the next bit of thinking required. In Minneapolis, the group I’ve assembled between HealthPartners and the University of Minnesota are going to consider how to model this process to provide guidance for the long term of the pandemic.

AG: Yes, racial disparities are emerging with disturbing alacrity and intensity in the US. But, as you say, that’s hardly a surprise, for all the reasons concerning systematic, structural disempowerment that have characterized US society since Europeans set foot on these shores. Those sorts of disparities have begun to be part of a growing national conversation since the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s, and they took on new force more recently with the Black Lives Matter movement. One of the components of the current horrible moment that I’m actually finding most heartening is the extent to which social conditions ARE finding their way to being front and center of many conversations. It strikes me that this moment of national (and global) crisis offers America new opportunities to expand that conversation and really take its lessons seriously in a new way for the first time in US history. And, medical researchers and doctors will be at the forefront of that conversation. Someone like you, with your dual training, is especially well positioned to think systematically about just how to operationalize those lessons in ways that work with public health protocols. That’s why I’m excited about our continuing conversation!

BW: I think it’s very clear that this virus is hitting communities in both indiscriminate ways (with some reportedly healthy individuals going on ventilators or even ECMO life-support machines) and in VERY discriminating ways, hitting poorer communities and those of color. What I haven’t heard exactly is any discussion about ways to focus resources on those communities that are hardest hit, which is disappointing but not unexpected, given the current national leadership.

I actually think race and structural inequalities and violence have very much come to the fore within medical practice. It’s just that our sphere of influence is limited. For example, in Minnesota, our healthcare system has an Equitable Care Committee that has done a lot of great work, although it has vacillated between focusing on equitable care and health equity, depending upon what we think we can actually achieve. Residents and med students, particularly the med students, are very aware of disempowerment, and it’s one of the things I teach about when I’m on shift [teaching residents]. In fact, next week, I’ll be drawing directly from anthropology in giving a talk as part of a panel at our Society for Academic Emergency Medicine national meetings (now online!) about teaching residents to be “structurally competent”—meaning, thinking about larger, structural issues that shape the experiences they see in particular patients.

What’s most difficult is to figure out how to get beyond the clinical domain and affect pathologies upstream, closer to their source. It helps one understand why Paul Farmer long ago advocated for large-scale wealth transfers between north and south, and why we need to do the same in the U.S. That’s actually some of what was achieved by the Affordable Care Act but then was largely undone or undercut by recent tax cuts for the wealthy. So it’s good that these issues are front and center, but I think they could be even more so. And it’s good that we’re thinking communally, as I said before, but the idea that we might differentially focus collective resources upon communities that are hardest hit seems to meet resistance with predictable frequency.

AG: In Rhode Island, where I now live, there’s actually a vigorous initiative (Beat COVID-19) with just that emphasis. Beyond the capital, the two cities hardest hit in Rhode Island are Central Falls and Pawtucket, both of which have large, immigrant communities of color (mostly from Latin America and Cape Verde). The current rate of infection in both those cities currently surpassess that of New York City. Nationally, these two small cities are invisible in news reports, but locally, a multidisciplinary coalition has formed that is forging creative approaches to reach these communities. The coalition includes a normally unlikely set of folks, including a local doctor, representatives from the state’s Department of Health and the two cities’ police departments, marketing specialists, local community organizers and advocates, translators, and even yours truly, as an academic critic. I’ve been heartened to see a far more open-minded approach to reaching these communities than I would have imagined. For example, since many residents of these neighborhoods feel more comfortable speaking either Spanish, Portuguese, or Care Verdean Kriolu, a new COVID-19 hotline in these three languages now welcomes callers, and there are now public service announcements in those three languages that are being promoted online in all sorts of social media spaces where people from these communities are likely to read them. I’m so impressed by what I’m seeing that I’m starting to consider this local initiative a model for communities elsewhere.

Once COVID-19 starts hitting the white heartland–as now seems inevitable–because of resistance both by Republican governors and local residents to maintain social isolation procedures, and insistence to “re-open” the economy prematurely and indiscriminately–it will be interesting to see how those communities respond to the crisis suddenly invading their families. As a physician, I imagine you must feel quite frustrated by those conditions.

BW: Just look at the largely white nationalist forces that have hijacked what began as small-business protests about state efforts to enact social-distancing policies, in an effort to minimize the impact of the COVID surge.

Photo by MEGAN JELINGER via Getty Images. A local militia group is seen at a rally to protest the stay-at-home order amid the Coronavirus pandemic in Columbus, Ohio, on April 20. For the third time that week, hundreds of protesters gathered at the Ohio State House to protest the stay home order that was in effect until May 1. Source here.

Those folks are having trouble getting on board with just the baseline collective actions needed for public health. Currently, so many folks in the rural parts of the country see this crisis as an urban thing. But if we look back at the influenza pandemic of (supposedly) 1918-19–which actually lasted three years (my grandfather nearly died of it in 1921)–the initial wave hit densely populated areas, but the next waves were largely rural. And today, if you look at rural areas, they’re as disproportionately disadvantaged as are many of the low-income, urban communities from which we’ve divested as a society. In fact, rural America overall is actually less insured, has less access to services, and is more dependent upon government transfers of resources than is most of urban America. So, I’d really like us to be able to see both of those kinds of communities with one gaze.

AG: That makes a lot of sense both politically and intellectually. It will be interesting to see if white conservatives come around to that position, once they are affected.

Since you’re enjoying thinking about epistemological issues raised by COVID, I wonder what you might think of an e-mail I recently received.

A prominent medical school has decided to confer MD degrees a little early, for med students who had completed all their training and were scheduled to receive their degrees within a few months. (The e-mail subject line read: “Emergency Powers Exercised: Approved Early Degree Conferral of 4th Year Medical School Students.”)

That will allow these brand-new medical residents to start practicing in COVID-19 hotspots and help alleviate the hospital crisis in those areas. Seems like a great idea–this is a good time to challenge bureaucracy, right?

But I also saw an online petition on a related question that made me more nervous–to grant “registered nurse” (RN) licenses to “licensed practical nurses” (LPNs), who have quite a bit less training than registered nurses do. That struck me as way riskier. But perhaps I’m being too conservative. Maybe LPNs are actually being asked to do the work of RNs in this crisis, and so they should be credentialed and salaried accordingly. What do you think?

BW: I definitely agree with deploying fourth-year medical students early. It strikes me as a safe move at this time in their training.

However, in areas that are not already seeing surge conditions, I think the country would be best served by deploying medical students to do case-contact tracing.

And I agree with you that granting RN licenses to LPNs is riskier. Credentials are indicators of different kinds of training, and their significance should be maintained, though that’s the professional in me coming out and maintaining boundaries.

As with many things at the moment, one could simply and temporarily alter practice parameters for surge or crisis standards of care.

AG: I recently read another, especially thoughtful piece in the New York Times, about when to “re-open America”—with the intentionally provocative title, “Restarting America Means People Will Die. So When Do We Do It?” A staff writer for The New York Times Magazine moderated a panel discussion with five people with varying backgrounds (a minister, an economist, a global health specialist, a civil rights specialist, and a bioethicist). They raised sociological issues related to those raised in the Boston Globe piece about “herd immunity”–but from broader perspectives, and more critically, I think. Lots of food for anthropological thought here. As a physician-anthropologist, you can, I imagine, bring special perspectives to this emerging national conversation about how we think about risk in “re-opening society.”

BW: There definitely needs to be attention to those who are at higher risk for contracting and dying from COVID-19, and to those communities whose residents don’t have a choice about going back to work. It’s really a matter of whether people are forced to be at risk, or are allowed to be agents of their own risk and that of their loved ones. Are we going to make re-opening businesses opt-in?

Unfortunately, the baseline state of affairs in America is far from a level playing field. Some people will, essentially, be forced to work so that states don’t have to pay them unemployment benefits, and small business owners will be forced to run risk so they can qualify to get loans and other state-funded stimulus funds. Yet, somehow, there’s no national conversation questioning whether oil, airlines, and other large industries should be bailed out.

I think we could consider restarting by focusing on the social and the scientific. I think most of us would be doing better with all of this isolation, quarantine, and lockdown if we had a few more people to connect to. If you look at places that are opening up, or even how we started this all, we could start clustering in smaller groups, 10 people or fewer. Just folks who you would know were sick. And we could get the kids back together. Given the low likelihood of adverse effects in children, the fact that they have been much less symptomatic, but that they are also very good at transmitting disease to each other (just ask any parent of a daycare child), getting them back together would get us started with herd immunity. Bioethicist and oncologist, Zeke (Ezekiel) Emanuel was one of the first to say that we should probably get summer camps up and running. To me, that makes sense. But, again, it’d have to be opt-in, both for those who run the place and those who go to camp.

AG: Scholars and doctors aren’t the only ones talking about how to protect ourselves from this virus. I just discovered a pretty awesome rap video about COVID-19 from Y’en a Marre, a group from Senegal (here). Any thoughts?

BW: Y’en a Marre are a great group. They were instrumental in mobilizing the youth vote to get Wade out of power in Senegal, so I feel like they’re always “au service du peuple et de la nation” [in the service of the people and the nation]. It’s so interesting how hip-hop and other forms of art in a smaller country, fending for its own identity and economy with a smaller media space due to the constraints of language, can be called on–if not officially (like this probably was), then culturally–to serve the body of the nation. In this new video of theirs, I love how they’re all doing scientific activities–looking at charts, microscopes, and blood specimens–instead of just striking stereotypical poses in hazmat suits. It’s a solid video. I can’t imagine many hip-hip artists in the States pulling something similar off with the same tone–in Minnesota, maybe Atmosphere, but not many others in the national mediasphere.

Senegalese group, Y’en a Marre, in a new music video (singing in Wolof) advocating safety measures to protect against COVID-19. Source here

AG: You mentioned that you’ve just co-authored a short piece about COVID-19 that you’ve submitted to a medical journal. Can you talk a bit about the orientation of that article? Were you able to insert an anthropological perspective into an article for a medical journal?

BW: In Minnesota, we’ve just had a huge decline in visits to the emergency department and to the hospital for just about everything. Most of the news outlets have covered it, but no one has published any numbers or more detailed reports of what’s not coming in. I’m fine with a slowish day in the ER, but across the country, particularly in those places not seeing the surge, the changes in patient volume have had devastating effects on clinics, hospitals, and health systems that have to operate at near full capacity and with razor thin margins in normal times just to stay afloat. So, at the same time as we have surge, we’re also seeing mass furloughing and pay cuts for nurses, doctors, and even (gasp) administrators.

So we just pulled the numbers for before and after our great Governor Walz’s announcement of a statewide “peacetime emergency,” comparing volumes and visits to a year ago, and we found a 70% drop off in strokes, and a 50% drop off in heart attacks, but also declines in really painful things like kidney stones, too. And, who’s not coming in? Well, it’s the elderly, children, and those who have insurance through Medicare. Much of this drop is likely prudence on the part of high-risk individuals, but we know there’s also some desire to not burden the health systems with non-COVID related care, as well as some fear of actually contracting coronavirus in healthcare settings.

Similar trends have been seen in China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Europe, as well as in chronic care. In Minnesota, the HealthPartners Institute has a chronic care surveillance group, and they saw visits drop off by 90% in three days after the statewide announcement.

We’re interested in doing follow-up studies, monitoring for the effects of delayed or deferred care, both acute and chronic, and seeing who comes back first, and with what. 

AG: That sounds like an important set of considerations I haven’t yet seen anyone talking about in the press. Everyone is so focused on the now of the emergency, and how to extricate ourselves from it, that few I’ve seen are allowing themselves the luxury of imagining ancillary questions such as those you’ve just raised. Again, I imagine your training in anthropology makes it easier for you to keep your eyes focused not only on the big picture, but on seemingly unrelated factors that, in the end, turn out to be deeply related. That’s what we do in anthropology, right?

Well, let’s end on a positive and practical note. Last week, the team you’re leading produced a new app, “SafeDistance,” to provide up-to-date information about COVID-19 incidence in micro-neighborhoods.

Online, the website for the new app describes it this way:

SafeDistance is a free, non-profit app and website that crowdsources symptom data to help detect, predict, and prevent the spread of COVID-19, while assuring your privacy.

  • Personalized, social distancing recommendations
  • Neighborhood-level COVID-19 risk map
  • Privacy assured – no account required, you remain anonymous

Can you talk about what sorts of social knowledge about Minnesotans factored into how you designed the app for ordinary people?

BW: The basics are maintaining privacy while collecting data of actionable utility. So we’re focusing on anonymity–both to allay privacy concerns, and also to make it an easy tool to begin using. Instead of identifying individuals, we’re mapping and doing analytics by neighborhood. This approach allows both individual users, and anyone else who is interested in the data from a more sociogeographic perspective, to have some granularity to what they’re seeing.

If you look at most of the data that’s out there, even the Johns Hopkins and Unacast or SafeGraph data, it’s mostly out there in county form, which is fine if you’re interested in the temperature of the pandemic locally, but it doesn’t tell you the weather and how much caution you should be exercising. Right now, that’s not a huge deal, because we’re all being very cautious with our efforts to self-isolate, mask and the like. But as we open up, and we find that our prior efforts burn out and COVID-19 flares up in different spots, we’ll probably have to dial up and dial down and differentiate our self-protective and collective efforts to deal with the virus. As I said, the “1918” influenza pandemic actually lasted until 1921, so it’s like [epidemiologist] Mike Osterholm has said, we need tools to figure out how we’re going to live WITH this virus, since it’s unlikely that we’ll just out and out defeat it–at least, until an effective vaccine is available globally.

AG: You initially launched the app in and for Minnesota, but it’s now available for anyone across the U.S. via a user-friendly website. Do you imagine it could have equal relevance anywhere in the country?

BW: If all the app does is give users good information and maps that convey the details of the pandemic in their neck of the woods, I’ll be satisfied.

But the detailed neighborhood maps that will be produced in the app from new user data will soon be available nationwide. If the data that are generated can be combined with other datasets to get us to a geospatial SEIR model that would allow us to predict more accurately when and where future outbreaks might occur, that would be a real contribution to fighting this pandemic–as well as to science more generally.

Well, it’ll likely only be the former, but hope springs eternal.

Posted on

The time of masks: everyone to themselves and Covid-19 for us all

The title of this paper is borrowed from my sister. During a family conversation about Covid-19 in Bamenda, Cameroon, she used the expression to describe the DIY cynical adaptations to the requirement to wear facemasks in Cameroon, which she described as entertainment. There is a scarcity of surgical masks because of border closures and strict directives by certain governments regulating the export of personal protective equipment. This scarcity means that import-dependent countries such as Cameroon have to invent emergency strategies to supply masks to its people, or simply abandon every person to fend for themselves and expose them all to Covid-19.

This “social abandonment” (Joao Biehl 2013) or slow death, exacerbated by structural adjustment, is in the DNA of a system that is accustomed to allowing people to die through dependency and neglect. In the Cameroon Grassfields, masking is part of the repertoires of cultural codes. They are used for special occasions, often sacred. They transform, reveal and conceal in ways that are decoded by people embedded in customs and rituals that give them meaning. That everyone is required to mask is profane. When my sister made these comments, there were questions being asked in Cameroon about the whereabouts and health of the president, who no one had seen since the Corona virus outbreak. Despite this physical absence, he continued to speak to the country through declarations, papers and proxies, that decreed curfews, hand washing and hand sanitizers, social distancing, and wearing masks. This political system thrives on “omnipresence” (Nyamnjoh 1999) and existence by “simultaneous multiplicities” (Mbembe 2001). Mbembe (2001: 103) observes, “In the postcolony, the commandement seeks to institutionalize itself, to achieve legitimation and hegemony (recherche hégémonique), in the form of a fetish.” For over 30 years, Cameroonians domesticated this presidential leadership by proxy, Nyamnjoh (2002) refers to this as “cosmetic democracy”.

My family were discussing the aesthetics of cosmetic face masking during this Covid-19 pandemic. The mask has become the fetish through which the absent state seeks to institutionalize itself and legitimate its hegemony and relevance; especially in a place – Bamenda – that has become distant from the center through marginalization and neglect, and where there is an ongoing struggle for monopoly over violence. Since 2017, the world has looked on as people’s lives are disrupted by rights struggles in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions, as a peaceful protest by teachers and lawyers rapidly degenerated into one of the most catastrophic humanitarian crises. With over 969,000 internally displaced persons, Cameroon currently ranks highly amongst global rates of internally displaced populations. An estimated 459,000 were displaced by the crisis in the North West and South West Regions. It is not surprising that for many people in this region masks are a technology, interface or frontier for mediating and peddling multiple questions.

In Bamenda, Covid-19 unleashed a new fashion trend to adhere and conform to, to mock and to show off being part of the global performance of care and empathy for local peoples’ predicaments. The result is a bifurcation divided between a fear of the un/known and embracing this technology. Fear especially pertains to the trust in government and the international community’s tendency to allow people to die through abandonment, marginalization and the absence of state intervention. However, others have embraced the multiple uses of masks and, like sunglasses, some wore it on their chins or walked around with masks on their foreheads. Others simply placed them under their nostrils to allow them breathing space as the masks were suffocating them. Following a government decree that made masks compulsory, some simply wore them for the police checkpoint. While others carried them handy in their hands, handbags and pockets to be produced if and when they were confronted by state security; whom, some indicated, had been provided with an opportunity to make money through the new fine for not wearing a mask. A large variation of DIY masks emerged, especially from tailors and those who could sew, who found ways to covering Covid-19’s main doorways.

The result was a cacophony of sorts. Masks were masks deployed for generating prestige, to navigate belonging, to lampoon the state and the international community, and ultimately to seek to survive in a context where every country had retreated to themselves, leaving Covid-19 to everyone. The underlying irony of these contradictions is the appearance of false solidarity and the fake politics of care. Masks serve to disguise the underlying structural preconditions that already limit people’s capacities to apply preventative measures and deal with the consequences of the pandemic. Furthermore, it masks the narrow ways in which “small” people, like those in Bamenda and much of the “Global South,” are perplexed by the doctrine to adhere to hygiene practices that already form part of their every survival repertoires/registers. Unfortunately, these long-established survival repertoires are often coded as DIYs, “fake news” or part of preposterous local beliefs. It is not surprising that people use the opportunity to parody the materiality of living with technologies of abandonment. Sadly, this is not read as parody but is instead interpreted and paraded by “experts” as part of the tragedy of incompetence, buffoonery and “waiting to see” inaction associated with continent.

Since the start of this pandemic, the African continent has demonstrated outstanding leadership in activating early warning systems established since the experience with Ebola and working with continental structures such as the Africa CDC and other international institutions. The continent currently accounts for roughly 1% of global infections and casualties. This should not simply be interpreted as the product of weak institutions, its inability to carry out accurate mass testing or an act of faith. Such pathologizing merely masks a brutal kind of racism that is frequently deployed to obscure any efforts by the continent to confront its challenges, and fails to appreciate the complexity of the continent as a living organism, rather than an imagination. Over the past few months, many parts of the continent have produced hand sanitizers to cater for local need and people are currently producing stylish facemasks. In countries such as Senegal, Ghana and Kenya, teams of researchers are conceptualizing and trying out rapid tests and ventilators. In Madagascar and several other countries, both local remedies and other treatment are being experimented. It is clear that the continent took advantage of the knowledge accumulated from years of experience with pandemics and other disasters to strategically respond to Covid-19. Yet the discourse of pathology and buffoonery continues to be pandered about the African continent.

In the early weeks of WHO naming the virus and declaring it a pandemic, Tanzanian president John Magafuli was mocked for his recommendation that people resort to foot greeting as a social distancing measure in lieu of the traditional handshake. Pictures, videos and stories of him executing the “footshake” with opposition leader Maalim Seif Sharif Hamad were paraded globally as another example of the irrationality and foolishness that the continent, its peoples and its leaders are associated with. Apart from Zimbabwe defense minister Oppah Muchinguri’s claim during the early days of the virus that it was God’s punishment on Europe and America for imposing sanctions on the country, Africa has not displayed the kind of outlandish buffoonery that certain world leaders continue to demonstrate. US President Donald Trump’s supposition that “we hit the body with a tremendous ultraviolet or just very powerful light” and that we inject the body with a disinfectant, which “knocks it out in a minute. One minute… almost a cleaning. It gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number on the lungs” is just one example of this absurdity.

Over the past weeks a video of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa struggling to wear a mask went viral across the world. Friends, family colleagues and collaborators from across the world forwarded it to me, across all social media, with the comments “see your president” accompanied by a laughing out loud emoji. Dressed in a beautiful black suit worn over a white shirt and red tie, he is standing behind a rostrum carrying the official seal/code of arms. He is struggling to wear a mask, locally made from African cloth. He struggles in vain to strap the mask that is covering his eyes on both ears, but they keep falling off. On the left of the screen, the sign language interpreter appears to look in bemusement. The South African rainbow flag is standing calmly on the President’s right, under which is written (on the screen) the words “South Africa: Inspiring new ways.” The short clip is hilarious, the irony unmistakable.

No one could produce or photoshop such ludicrous performance. Yet, there is one grave problem with the video. It is a mask. There is neither voice nor context, or the time to ask when it happened, how it happened, what happened before or after, whether he successfully wore the mask, or the opportunity to sympathize or empathize with his struggle. What remains is the ostensible, the apparent buffoonery and incompetence of this great African leader’s inability to do a simple preventive measure which he himself recommended – to wear a mask. Yet, the incident occurred on Thursday April 24 when the president addressed the nation to assess the effectiveness of the lockdown measures so far, and as well announce the measures to systematically and gradually re-open the economy. He was struggling to put on and encourage people to wear masks, produced by the local textile industry that was moving in to contain the global strategy to protect themselves and their citizens, and abandon everyone else to their constraints. But, as is frequently the case, Africa is imagined as an abstruse monstrosity with being African framed as an affliction (Fuh 2019). As Mbembe (2001: 1) posits “speaking rationally about Africa is not something that has ever come naturally.” The complex ways in which people interact with the pandemic and its technologies/techniques of prevention are masked by our collective tendency to treat Africa as a pathology. Everyone to themselves and Corona for us all. My sister is right: it is the time of masks.

References

Biehl, J., 2013. Vita: Life in a zone of social abandonment. Univ of California Press.

Fuh, D., 2019. Bending over backwards: dismantling toxic ‘opportunities’. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 31(3), pp.264-267.

Mbembe, A., 2001. On the postcolony (Vol. 41). Univ of California Press.

Nyamnjoh, F.B., 1999. Cameroon: a country united by ethnic ambition and difference. African Affairs, 98(390), pp.101-118.

Nyamnjoh, F.B., 2002. Cameroon: Over twelve years of cosmetic democracy. News from the Nordic Africa Institute, 3, pp.5-8.