Posted on

A View from Beyond the Ivory Tower: An Addendum to Elizabeth Dunn’s “The Problem with Assholes.”

I am a fourth generation academic. I am the daughter, niece, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of professors.  I left academia soon after I got my PhD, because I had neither the money nor the patience to keep playing the adjunct/visiting appointment/job market game.  I became a teacher.  So my fight is not your fight.  But by way of encouragement, and caution, I would like to add some observations to those of Elizabeth Dunn.

1)            Beware the manipulation of selective targeting, by means of which the assholes corrode the solidarity of their weaker colleagues.  “Well, he doesn’t treat me that way,” as readers may know, is one of the notorious traps that women fall into as they form relationships with abusive partners. In our  highly prestigious PhD-granting department (yes, we two Elizabeths take our inspiration from the same program), the confusion of selective targeting was endemic to maintaining a culture of assholery.  One cohort had a great experience with a professor who was abusive toward another class.  Professors were verbally abusive of different individual students.  Professors who abused some students comforted others when their colleagues abused them, thus winning their undying loyalty – their colleagues may well have been doing the same thing for them!  My abusive advisor was entirely supportive of me for several years – until I became “his student,” formally as well as de facto.  During those years I heard plenty of stories and even witnessed his abusive behavior toward other students – but, I thought, he doesn’t treat me that way, and he was really supportive when Professor X… etc.  I fell into a trap that I had known about before starting grad school, due to recovery from an abusive relationship with a professional mentor outside of academia that I ended by… leaving for graduate school.  What if people who are NOT treated abusively supported those who are?  Assholes who think nothing of bullying one student, or a few students, might reconsider their sense of entitlement if they faced consequences from ALL their students.

“Do not be a bystander!” is a key point in our middle school anti-bullying curriculum.  I have presented scenarios from my graduate school experience in our anti-bullying lessons, and it’s pretty sad to see 8th graders better able to identify abuse and discuss counter-measures than people with PhDs.

2)            I have seen “amplification” work, and it’s awesome.  A professor with whom at least one of my female colleagues had a great advisorial relationship, go figure, quickly showed our class that he was ready and willing to offend anybody – you’re a woman, you’re Jewish, you’re gay, you’re black, whatever, he had something for everyone.  But there were more women in the class than members of the other groups, so we were his main focus.  I don’t know how the guys stumbled onto it, but tag-teaming by male graduate students won us the battle, if not the war.  Two minutes after he dismissed somebody’s point, a hand would go up: “To get back to the point that My Female Classmate made a few minutes ago…[that you dismissed instantly], I wanted to add…”  and then, after another two minutes, another hand:  “But to return to the point that My Male Classmate and My Female Classmate were pursuing [before you cut both of them off]….”   It was utterly supportive and completely disruptive of the professor’s assholery, all without breaking a single rule of academic discourse.   I have never forgotten it.  I am grateful to this day.

3)            At one point, I went to a consistently supportive professor who was being worked half to death by emotionally supporting every victim who came to her, and said, “He behaves in this way because his colleagues allow it, and his graduate students allow it.” She replied, “This is not a confrontative culture, Elizabeth.”  And it wasn’t.  And under the prevailing circumstances she may well have been right to wait for her own, eventually inevitable, turn to be chair – when she, with allies, could, and did, make changes.  But I think the era of Wounded Warriors waiting for their turn for institutional power within the inherited institutional structures is over.  Those institutional structures are collapsing all around us. Is it worth the wait?  How much remains to inherit?

4)            Specifically to Dunn’s first suggestion, “Creating a Disciplinary Code of Conduct:” the most liberating thing ever said to me in response to my describing my situation, to a friend who happened to be ethicist by academic specialty (thank you, Michael Jaycox), was “Oh! That’s unethical.  You know, academics don’t have a code of professional ethics that covers our relationships with students and colleagues.  We are entirely dependent on the mentoring we ourselves received.  One of my professors is working on that.”  In this case the person I was describing was the female enabler (the “F.E.”), an undergraduate advisor not yet mentioned (it’s quite a society, isn’t it?).  His comment allowed me to move from, “How could she have done that to me?” to “How would she have known not to do it?”  I was then, from the safety of my non-academic career, able to approach my F.E. with some empathy.  The empathy was abusively rejected because empathy inevitably implies a wrong having been committed; it is a step forward from utter anger.  The F.E. was unable to face up even to my having been angry, past tense; she was unable to face my clear persistence in thinking that I had been wronged.  She had also been wronged.  That’s one of the ways that assholery perpetuates itself – “I survived, and I decided it was all worth it, so it was all right for me to encourage you to get into the same situation.”*  The F.E. perceived an implied accusation, and was hurt by it, and I can understand that.  But she got an academic career out of it, in a supportive environment that gave her, in due course, institutional power.  That outcome is rare now.  Even at my highly prestigious program, the kind which fills more than half the jobs, as Dunn writes, only about half of the PhDs of my decade got tenure track appointments (this from departmental records that I had the opportunity to scan)**.   And that coveted outcome often comes at an unsustainably high cost — financial, emotional, personal, physical.  Our institutions cannot be saved by people whose professional socialization and working conditions just suck.  Too many anthropologists are people who are either damaged, or damaging others, or both.  We need academics who have not had their spirit sucked out of them by the dementors, who have not become vampires by the bites of other vampires.

5)            It’s change or die, people.  Education from kindergarten through the PhD and beyond has been under persistent attack from the political right since those late 80’s days when we frittered away our seminar time in spurious debates about post-modernism (I thank Ira Bashkow for that point).  That I view the disintegration of academia from the safety of a secure job with a decent salary, here in my poverty-stricken urban school district, depends on this city’s decades of history in the labor movement.  Charter schools?  We FILL that approval hearing room with well-prepared, angry teachers.  Inequitable funding?  We sue the state’s ass.  Unsupportive elected officials?  See you in November.  I may be a fourth generation academic by birth, but after I got the damn PhD, I had the luck to find a job teaching among the grandchildren of factory workers, who understand that mutual respect = survival.  It is a lesson that my community of origin would do well to learn, fast.  Some on the political right, I believe, simply stand back and laugh while we destroy one another, while responsible state legislators legitimately wonder why state budgets should fund Assholery.  Academics, whether privately or publicly employed, are supposed to be public servants, not assholes.  Assholery is indefensible in the state houses, as much as in the Halls of Academe.  State universities educate over 70% of American undergraduates, according the U.S. News and World Report, so when underfunding forces them to casualize and cut, the entire sector is affected.  Departments filling over half their positions with the damaged and the damaging – blindly hiring from the Highest Citadels of Assholery – is an existential threat.  Solidarity is a survival strategy.

*There were other ethically iffy specifics to my situation, which combine to make it unique. However, they also fall under the general question, “How do we think about our personal experiences as we ethically give professional advice?”  A thoughtful answer to that question belongs in Dunn’s suggested Disciplinary Code of Conduct.  I would be delighted to help write it.

**Those records also show that the above-mentioned Supportive Female Professor brought twice the number of students through to the PhD than any other professor in that department, during that decade – another workload reward of being a decent person within a Culture of Assholery.

Posted on

The Problem with Assholes

Anthropology has an asshole problem. If the recent revelations about misconduct at the journal HAU have made one thing clear, it’s that there is a culture of mistreatment and bullying in the discipline. There is a pervasive elitism that enables some people – those at elite institutions or in structural positions of power – to act like assholes to people who are weaker, including students, junior faculty, and scholars who are deemed unworthy.

The asshole problem is far larger than one editor at one journal. It’s a problem that has haunted the discipline for decades, at least since I have been in anthropology. I remember being a first-year anthropology student at a Prestigious University in the Midwest, sobbing in the bathroom because a Big Famous Professor had stood up in front of the class and delivered a 15 minute lecture on how he was against my being admitted, how he’d seen nothing so far to change his opinion, and how I would never, ever make it as an anthropologist. I was eight weeks into graduate school, and I had had a cerebro-vascular accident on the first day. With one exception, every other woman in my first year class ended up crying that first year, having been keelhauled by a faculty member. It was a culture of brutality that, thanks to the spread of the department’s students to other departments, became a part of the norms of the discipline. We learned it was normal to see people treated this way; we learned to enact those forms of brutality in every day action and we replicated them.

The point here is that assholery is not antithetical to the discipline, despite our self-declared commitments to equality, decolonization, appreciation of the diversity of humankind, and other high-minded principles. Assholery structures the entire discipline from top to bottom, shaping the goals and dreams of graduate students, allowing faculty at every rank to sneer at those in lesser positions (or, God forbid, working outside academia), and determining our formal criteria for hiring, promotion and tenure. We are a discipline of assholes.

Why do I use the word “asshole,” a term so vulgar that it rarely appears in scholarly discourse? Think of it as a technical term. Aaron James is the author of Assholes: A Theory, a brilliant book that defines assholery in rigorous philosophical terms. James uses three criteria to identify an asshole:

  1. He allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systemically.
  2. He does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement.
  3. He is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people.

Assholes take advantage of other people because they feel that it is their natural right to do so.   They yell and berate other people because they think they are so brilliant or so busy or so moral that they have the right to do so, they deceive other people because they think it’s in the service of a higher good (usually their own), and they demean other people because they feel that they are already superior to them.

Assholes are, of course, the scourge of the modern era. Self-serving narcissists are in every walk of life, from the grocery store to the White House, and assholery has become not only the moral principle behind American life, but the driving force in contemporary capitalism. But assholery in anthropology takes on a special aroma, because of the formal and informal hierarchies that structure the discipline. So, to James’ three general criteria, we could add three special ones to define AnthroAssholes:

  1. They value theory, preferably pitched in impermeable language meant to scare away outsiders and addressed at issues only of interest to those in the In Crowd, at the expense of ethnographic inquiry into other people’s lives. (This, ironically, was the thing HAU was founded to move away from but ended up replicating).
  2. They judge the worth of an idea by the pedigree of the person advancing it, particularly by their past or present affiliations to prestigious institutions.
  3. They engage in what Carlota McAllister has called “bigtiming,” or the ritual enactment of their own status in relation to others both by belittling, ignoring, and excluding others and by ritually anointing those they deem worthy.

Notice that criticizing the ideas of others is not on the list of asshole behavior. That is both because it is a legitimate function of scholarly discourse, and because in the ritual dance that is bigtiming, criticism is a mark of honor and inclusion, not of dismissal. Assholes know that the real cut in anthropology is not to be criticized, but to be ignored.

One of the major reasons there is a disciplinary nomenklatura in the first place has to do with the way anthropology reproduces itself. More than 20% of the jobs are filled by graduates of the top five placing departments; more than 50% are filled by graduates of the top 15. This has led to incredible elitism, in which the worth of someone’s contribution is often judged by the place they got their PhD or the institution where they hold a job. Those anointed “superstars” have, by the virtue of their position and status, the privilege of anointing others by publishing their work or by naming them to huge and largely non-functional editorial boards whose rosters serve as lists of the nomenklatura. Those with the power to anoint generally anoint others who have the same PhD pedigree, who do work that agrees with theirs, and who circulate in their same networks, which leaves people with degrees from outside this small range of departments, who aren’t in the networks of people from elite institutions, with little chance to break in (see Kawa et. al. 2016, which offers startling statistics on this).

This has created a class system that incessantly reproduces intellectual and social elitism in which people with the social capital to get into a “prestigious” institution in the first place reap more social capital by virtue of their networks. Classism is thus a fundamental platform for assholery. Firing one editor won’t change the disciplinary class system, nor will reorganizing a journal that has the same editorial board, connected to the same networks. We have to break the star system by finding ways to let people who did not go to the top five institutions enter these networks. That means using a conscious strategy to publish scholars from outside elite networks, to invite them to conference panels, editorial boards and visible service positions, and to open the social world of the discipline (AAA parties, etc.) to them. Every Ph.D. producing department, every hiring committee, and every single journal in the discipline needs to make formal commitments for including scholars at community colleges and land-grant institutions.

In the wake of the HAU debacle, many anthropologists have suggested that AnthroAssholery is a manifestation of the discipline’s perennial racism, coloniality, and misogyny. This may well be true. There have been long and very credible explorations of the discipline’s racist history and the ways that has affected its canon and hierarchy. Likewise, there have been significant revelations about the discipline’s enduring sexism. But assholery is not limited to white men, even though they certainly make up a good portion of the assholes. Assholes can be women (I know because I have been one, frequently) and people of color. Some women of color even have a term for white women’s assholery: “Beckyism,” or the crying of crocodile tears after they throw somebody else under the bus to advance their own cause (I thank Kaifa Roland for this information). Assholery is contagious. Once people see an asshole being an asshole and winning, actually gaining power and prestige by being an obnoxious self-interested bully, it creates a huge incentive for other people to emulate that behavior. Assholery has ripple effects as it spreads in the form of disciplinary norms that not only enable, but hyper-value nasty, elitist, demeaning behavior.

To say this a different way: Racism, colonialism and sexism are like the congestive heart failure of the discipline, long-standing but slow-moving problems that will eventually kill it, that we have all known about for decades but have been unwilling or unable to change our habits to address. Assholery is more like a heart attack, an emergency caused by the deeper underlying problem. When an emergency caused by assholes hits, it’s immediate and throws everyone into crisis mode. Limiting assholery does not invalidate the deeper critique of the discipline’s racism or sexism. It’s emergency medicine, meant to stop more damage from occurring while the underlying etiology of the problem can be solved. Thus the immediate question then isn’t why people are assholes (although that’s a problem that has to be understood in the longer term), but how to limit the assholes in the short term, so that we can gain the space to deal with the fundamental problem.

Luckily, there are steps that can be taken immediately. Aaron James suggests that the flourishing of assholery in the general culture is due in part to the weakening of what he calls “asshole dampening systems.” He mentions family, religion, and the regulatory state as three systems that put limits on how much an asshole could do before he was sanctioned. What are potential asshole dampening systems that we could enact as a discipline? This is the conversation we need to engage in now. I propose six, as a starting point:

  1. Creating a Disciplinary Code of Conduct: The AAA has a code of conduct for protecting human subjects, meaning the people we work with in the field. But we have no code for protecting students, contingent faculty, and colleagues. We need a code of conduct that spells out in detail what kind of behavior is beyond the pale and that sets a tone for disciplinary interactions. AAA’s new sexual harassment policy is a start, but we need a policy for harassment that isn’t overtly sexual but is nonetheless harassment. Moreover, we need mechanisms to enforce this code in ways that do not unduly burden the aggrieved party.
  2. Treating Graduate Students as Employees: In some European countries, graduate students are not students, but employees of the university. They get a modest but livable wage, full benefits, and access to all the structures that ensure (or at least attempt to ensure) the fair treatment of workers. It is true that making graduate students into employees would be costly, and would dramatically reduce the number of PhDs granted. Given the state of the job market, wouldn’t contracting the labor supply while treating that labor more equitably and humanely be a good idea.
  3.  Practice Amplification: “Amplification” was the name given to a strategy used by women in the Obama Administration. When a remark made by a woman was passed over, her female colleagues would repeat the comment and give credit to the person who first said it. It worked: Obama noticed and began taking the ideas of women more seriously.   Anthropologists can practice amplification by placing a special premium on publishing the work of people from outside the usual networks and by making special efforts to cite underrepresented scholars and people from outside the top 15 institutions. This not coincidentally tends to also valorize work by women, people of color, and members of other marginalized groups, as the #citeblackwomen campaign has shown.
  4. Creating a Metric for Hiring Beyond the Top Five Departments: In 2016, the top ten Ph.D. granting departments filled 43% of jobs. AAA and EASA should publish this statistic annually, and we should set a target that reduces this number substantially. Members of hiring committees can contribute to this effort by not using Ph.D. granting department as a proxy for the worth of candidates’ work, and by devaluing letters of recommendation from high-profile scholars.
  5. Issuing a Disciplinary Standard for Tenure and Promotion that Valorizes Work Beyond Journal Articles and Monographs: One of the problems that the HAU scandal brought to light was how much young scholars are dependent on editors of the top five journals for progress in their careers. Because departments often demand that junior scholars publish single-authored articles in a top five journal, the editors of these journals have enormous power. If the discipline devalues these journal articles and valorizes other forms of scholarly activity, the oligopoly that runs the discipline will be broken. The AAA Guidelines for Tenure and Promotion Review go in this direction.  We should value work published in wide-circulation media more highly, not less highly, than scholarly journal articles. We should value work in new digital media, including scholarly blog posts.
  6. Change Editorial Practices: HAU had a whopping 61 people on its editorial board, few if any did any actual work for the journal. The editor was editor-for-life. Editorial boards should be small and term-limited, and should have real oversight of the practices of the journal and its editors. Either the editorial board or the board of parent institution should regularly review the financial reports of the journal and provide an ombudsman to deal with complaints of misconduct. Editors in chief, too, should be term limited.

Anthropology has always seen itself as a profession that roots for the little guy. We pride ourselves on our commitments to equality and fairness. In an era of unrestrained social assholery, in which the rich and powerful have come to feel their wealth and power is their natural right, anthropology has the power to throw those assumptions into question. But to do so, we have to save our own discipline from the assholes. This will require some steep uphill battles – but it is well worth the fight.

 

* Many thanks to Kaifa Roland, Jason Cons, Martin Demant Frederikson, Antonio De Lauri, and Tom Widger for their thoughts on an early draft of this piece.

Posted on

Question Time

“I think that the anthropology of morality and the morality of anthropologists are two interrelated subjects that cannot really be separated. In this sense, I think that someone who does not have a moral stand is not in a very good position to explore and understand the morality of others. We need a moral compass. For example, if we knew that somebody has intimidated, bullied or even sexually harassed others, how should we behave? I think we should do everything in our power to prevent those actions from happening again and to undermine the social status of the perpetrator. But, in practice, what can an undergraduate or postgraduate student in anthropology do? An early-career anthropologist of morality, like myself, what can I do? A senior anthropologist, what can they do? Thank you.”

I asked these questions at a symposium, “Where is the good in the world?” on May 18th 2016. I have been thinking about these issues, in these terms, since the beginning of my association with HAU – Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

For 2 years, from March 2013 to March 2015, I was the treasurer of HAU. I progressively became aware of its internal disorders. I was never a victim of the abuses (although I came very close just before I left) but some of my close friends and colleagues were. I could not remain indifferent, for I know that being subjected to abuse changes you, and not for the good, especially when no one cares to help. I tried to give my friends and colleagues some support, but I realized there was no way I could do much: there was a general fear that seeking justice was going to have negative consequences on their careers. Some were also afraid of having to defend themselves in court, without the financial means to do so. In short, it was an issue of power and money.

The power and money imbalance was the result of the way HAU was constituted and realized. Power was concentrated in the hands of the Editor-in-Chief because of two main factors: the perception of public support by famous academics and respected institutions, and the HAU constitution. The victims lacked money, because, quite simply, the majority of junior anthropologists live in precarious working conditions. The power resulting from the perception of public support is perhaps the most effective and the most inexplicable factor. The way the constitution enabled Giovanni Da Col to maintain his position of power, instead, is easy to illustrate.

Journals need a constitution to prevent concentrations of power so strong that it unilaterally intimidates scholars. It should contain an article stating that the position of Editor-in-Chief must be subject to terms, to prevent the accumulation of excessive power and influence over successive terms. Such an article was absent from the HAU constitution. We also need another crucial article, one that gives the Editorial Board the power to remove an Editor-in-Chief, or any other member, who breaches academic ethics. Such an article was also absent in the HAU constitution. Hence, even if members of the Board wanted to remove the Editor-in-Chief, they could not.

A more precise statement of the opening question is: what can we do when the constitution of an institution in which unethical deeds have become a public secret does not enable us to intervene? We should probably resign. Then, if everybody else does the same, the institution will lose its power and, by extension, so will the person whose deeds are problematic. But what if we are not sure that everybody else will resign? What if we cannot be sure that there will be enough support to turn this individual action into a collective action? That is exactly the situation in which many of the victims, as much as some members of the Editorial Board, found themselves: maybe they wanted to take action, but the context made them doubt whether it was a good idea. Hence, individual consciousness and courage to intervene is not necessarily the problem. The problem is that we work in a culture in which speaking up against unethical deeds perpetrated by powerful members of our academic network may turn out to be completely useless, and instead punish the ingenuous whistle-blower(s).

We need a system of incentives that encourage victims to speak without fear of professional retaliation. This system should have simple procedures that are clearly explained in the constitutions of journals and societies. It should be obvious that victims of abuses will be supported, they should have no doubt about the support they will get, no matter what. The fact that a media storm was necessary to encourage the victims of the abuses to declare, still anonymously, what they went through, is perhaps the clearest evidence that a system of incentives is currently lacking or non-existent. The lack of a system to encourage ethics of care and inclusiveness means a greater risk of their opposites to concretize: exploitation and exclusiveness, which is what happened.

The situation remained an open secret for many years and those who knew what was going on did not intervene early enough. I think it is fair to say that no one involved is entirely exempt from at least some degree of responsibility. A widespread but ill-managed sense of guilt might perhaps explain the vitriolic tones of many comments circulating on social media in the past few days. Personally, I perceived a lot of fear, presented in a variety of ways, as suspicion, hate, and panic. The Statements of the Board of Trustees, the tweets of @haujournal, and the supposed “leak” of emails, show the authors acting like important chess pieces frantically moving to the corner squares of a chessboard. Although this is perhaps an apt metaphor for a productive confrontation of arguments, we cannot hope to build a better ecology for our discipline in this climate.

Every one of those who have had something to do with this regrettable affair now needs to sit for a moment with their own consciousness and think about the people they have interacted with.

There are people who were afraid to say “help me.” They were able to come forward last week and is important to continue to give everybody the space to do so. At the same time we have to pave the way for people to say “I am sorry.” We should not be too concerned about accusing, defending our reputation, finding culprits and punishing them. We should be much more concerned with listening to our own inner voice and asking ourselves, “have I hurt someone?”, “have I failed to intervene?”, “have I done enough?”, “am I afraid to say sorry?” If we feel we have someone we should apologize to, we should probably just do it. Now. It might surprise you how easy it is, in retrospect.

What I am trying to say is that the HAU Affair is not the result of a single person’s deeds, but that of a context, a culture, a climate of fear. If we want to recreate the Society of Ethnographic Theory we need to change the atmosphere in which such a society will be able to grow and thrive. How do you feel about your colleagues? Trust? Fear?

Calling for anyone who dares to care to come forward, in private or public, give an apology, receive it, and maybe reciprocate it, might perhaps appear to be too idealistic. But I’ll do it anyway.

Posted on

Suggested by Public Anthropologist – Private Oceans

Today we suggest the reading of Private Oceans. The Enclosure and Marketisation of the Seas by Fiona McCormack.

What does neoliberalization of oceans mean? What implications does it have on fishing communities and endangered fish species? How does the privatization of ecosystem services work? And what long term effects does it have?

Through fieldwork conducted in New Zealand, Iceland, Ireland and Hawaii, McCormack develops a comparative study of the dynamics driving the profound changes unleashed by a new era of ocean grabbing.

 

 

Posted on

Assessing the Anthropology of Humanitarianism: Ethnography, Impact, Critique

What is the aim of an anthropology of humanitarianism? How is anthropology addressing the growing convergence of policing and aid? To what extent does the humanitarian imperative to save lives influence the work of the ethnographer in the field? What is the relationship between moral anthropology and humanitarian ethics?

In this workshop, we will address these questions by developing a comparative reflection along three main axes:

1. The ethnography of humanitarianism;
2. The impact of anthropology on the broader field of humanitarian studies;
3. The need for a political critique of humanitarianism.

The main aim of the workshop is to assess what anthropology has been able to produce in this field of study and explore the future developments and articulations of the discipline in a world where humanitarian exceptionalism is becoming the rule in a number of spheres of ordinary governance.

Organizer: Antonio De Lauri (Chr. Michelsen Institute)

Conceptually, we consider the construction and reproduction of “crisis” as a key element in the analysis of contemporary humanitarianism. As several researchers have emphasized, to describe something as “humanitarian crisis” implies facilitating specific forms of action to the detriment of others; enabling the public to think a contemporary issue (i.e. human mobility) in one way, but not in another. More than that, once a crisis is qualified in specific terms (i.e. the humanitarian crisis), it directly calls for a power that is able to manage and administer it. In opposition to a historical narration that is “disrupted and episodic” (A. Gramsci), humanitarianism corresponds to a universal narration that creates a constant nexus between crisis and the politics of exceptionalism.

The workshop places particular emphasis on the use of ethnography as a crucial instrument to investigate humanitarianism in practice. Building on the idea of ethnography as political critique, we ask what the ethnography of humanitarianism is able to reveal and produce. Ethnography does not simply hold potential for a theoretical critique of humanitarian politics, but is a form of action itself in its evidence-making practices and in its relational dimension. To understand the point of view of the “ethnographic subject” in the realm of humanitarianism means to be aware of a number of different institutional and political subjectivities who deliver “aid” as well as a wide range of social and political actors who “receive” it. At the same time, ethnography reveals a complex map of social interactions that questions the simple equation giver-receiver. Participants will reflect on the main opportunities and the main challenges of doing ethnography of/within humanitarianism, in terms of political concerns, methodological questions and ethical issues.

Participants:

Erica Caple James, Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology and Urban Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Andrew Gilbert, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, McMaster University.

Synnove Bendixsen, Postdoctoral fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen.

Lauren Carruth, Assistant Professor at the School of International Service, American University, Washington DC.

Carna Brkovic, Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Regensburg.

Katerina Rozakou, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Amsterdam.

Alexander Horstmann, Associate Professor in Modern Southeast Asian Studies, University of Tallinn.

Julie Billaud, Post-Doctoral Associate, University of Sussex.

Nefissa Naguib, Professor of Anthropology, University of Oslo.

Ekatherina Zhukova, Visby Programme Postdoctoral Researcher, Lund University.

Heike Drotbohm, Professor, Heisenberg Chair of Anthropology “African Diaspora and Transnationalism,” Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

Jon Harald Sande Lie, Senior Researcher, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

Nichola Khan, Reader, University of Brighton

25 – 26 October 08:00 – 17:00 | CMI, Jekteviksbakken 31

Organised at CMI with funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

If you wish to attend the workshop, please contact antonio.delauri@cmi.no

Posted on

Suggested by Public Anthropologist – Against Charity

This time’s “everybody must read” book is Against Charity by Daniel Raventos and Julie Wark.

The book is both a critique of institutional charity as based on the unequal relationship between giver and receiver and a defense of kindness, understood as a call for equality and fraternity.

Raventos, a Spanish economist, and Wark, an Australian/Spanish human rights activist, develop a reflection that transcends disciplinary boundaries (anthropologists will be particularly familiar with the analysis of the “gift”) and promotes concrete instances such as the universal basic income. Against Charity is accessible and engaging. It presents a position not all readers will necessarily agree with, but one that everybody should certainly be fully aware of.

 

 

Posted on

Teaching humanitarianism in Lebanon, Turkey, and Italy

In an attempt to reflect on some lectures I have delivered on humanitarianism in Lebanese, Turkish, and Italian universities over the last three years, I would like to advance a few reflections on the “public afterlife” of my experience of teaching, the language I used in those classes, and the response I received from different cohorts of students. Delving into the afterlife of my humanitarianism classes allows me to tease out some of the current epistemological challenges of my primary area of studies and underscore the very importance of de-centring the humanitarian discourse.

Humanitarianism was born from the will to assist crisis-stricken populations and alleviate their suffering, thus humanitarian intervention has historically been a symptom that states are not doing too well. As such, speaking of and teaching humanitarianism cannot produce the same effects everywhere, especially when the framework used to explain theories and concepts is not culturally customised, but is rather drawn on the one developed in British and Northern American universities and institutions.

The act of teaching humanitarian ideologies, policies, and practices is thus necessarily an act of social positioning. It is about positioning the social and public Self as a teacher, and it is about the teacher presupposing the social positioning of her own audience.

More generally, in order to teach, we all rely on what Pierre Bourdieu used to define as “linguistic capital”, the set of linguistic capabilities, ways of expressing oneself, and embracement of normative terminologies which characterise everyone’s speech. In that sense, we are all linguistically political when we choose a term at the expense of another one.

As lecturers in class we own the biggest linguistic and epistemic power: But is the language I use legitimate in response to different students and backgrounds? I am not a native English speaker myself, but having received my postgraduate education in humanitarianism in an Australian university, English is my mother tongue for teaching humanitarianism. This became a factor which is worth reflecting on, especially when I delivered lectures in countries diversely familiar with the English language, and where English is not the official language.

What shapes the cultural pattern of students across Lebanon, Turkey, and Italy is certainly not their very national origin, but I here refer to an overarching cultural framing of a multiplicity of backgrounds that come to forming an identifiable “academic culture” within different countries. It is in this sense that I will now compare my teaching experience in Lebanon, Turkey, and Italy.

In this post, my primary goal is to explain how this long established theoretical framework, that increasingly populates academic books and media outlets, does not meet its listeners identically. I believe teaching humanitarianism particularly tests the students’ cultural dispositions – dually meant as both habitus and cultural capital – with respect to teaching something like physical quantum theory or algorithms. This is not because quanta and algorithms are bereft of imperial history: Let’s think of the way such scientific studies emerged, of the social classes in which they became objects of study, and the way these studies were funded and even traded worldwide. Rather, what I mean is that speaking humanitarianism overtly puts down the veils of the relationships between Others, breaks down the Other and the Self, demolishes certainties between the Self and the Other through the exploration of the necessarily dialogic act of assistance provision and aid reception.

Likewise, teaching exposes the lecturer to multiple encounters at once. The encounter with the students first – the immediate interlocutors of the teaching frame. Second, the encounter with one’s own society at large, which may identify with a single geographic space or more than one – as the teacher, by conveying knowledge and, hopefully, triggering critical stimuli, comes with an experiential baggage accumulated in one or more societies that historically shape the teacher’s way of thinking, speaking, and building the teacher-student encounter. Third, it is also an encounter with the multiple societies of the others, that is all of the societies “summarised” into the intellectual presence of each student in class.

It is exactly this collective moment, made of several encounters at once, that characterises the ways in which humanitarianism is both individually thought and culturally nuanced.

In light of this, each academic culture frames displacement, migration, and humanitarian action differently. The latter are undoubtedly tied up to broader politics and social processes which often intertwine, but each of them is differently thought and responded to in Lebanon, Turkey, and Italy. I experienced solipsism when I lectured in Turkey, as I realised how unfamiliar the students were with my Anglo-centric way of explaining humanitarianism-related topics. The most responsive to my lectures were the Lebanese students, who seemed to be highly familiar with the catastrophe discourse. This therefore led me to further reflections, as the fact that Lebanon has historically been more exposed to crisis than Italy and Turkey did not sound entirely convincing to me. There are, in fact, two factors that contribute to the students’ response to humanitarianism delivered in the form of an academic framework: The first is academic literature, and the second is postcoloniality – which, surely, to some extent, underlies the former. In fact, the Anglo-centric character of the humanitarianism framework – as it is globally discussed nowadays – is fully reflected in the academic literature which is delivered to students. Neither literature nor students themselves are bereft of political history.

Lebanon, having become home to several refugee groups, has often been studied in international academia in the context of the catastrophe discourse. Thus, humanitarianism has framed a large part of local learning about external interventions, especially since the years of the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. In this vein, even local infrastructures and local populations in Lebanon have drawn greater academic attention when turning into humanitarian spaces, host communities, displaced people, or migrants. Contrarily, Turkey is a country where catastrophe does not need to be there to justify tough security, anti-democratic measures, and political states of exception. Therefore, Turkish scholars have set up a mostly legal and policy-oriented framework for discussing refugee influxes and humanitarian practices,. The catastrophe narrative neither needs to strengthen a state which is already centralised and has rather enhanced domestic accountability by carefully gate-keeping refugee-populated areas, international support and involvement in domestic humanitarian affairs. In other words, in Turkey refugee influxes have been studied as a means to capture domestic changes, e.g. in market, employment, and housing. In Lebanon, however, the very goal of humanitarian research has long since revolved around refugees and NGOs themselves. Scholars of humanitarianism now increasingly address Lebanese people, governance, and services in light of the Syrian crisis. However, local people and services are still approached in the light of their response to crisis and given their relationship with refugee-related issues. In Italy, humanitarianism-related issues start stimulating academic curiosity in the wake of the Kosovo war in 1999, the 2001 western intervention in Afghanistan, and more recently, the migration flows from African, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries. Often unfamiliar with the anglo-centric ways of setting and naming the humanitarian framework, Italian students increasingly find themselves in the need to manage a foreign language and tackle diverse conceptual universes (mainly published in English) before encountering humanitarianism in their own language and academic culture. It is indeed meaningful that domestic emergency crises and humanitarian management – such as the earthquakes in central Italy– have primarily been tackled through the lens of disaster and risk reduction.

The postcolonial character of Lebanon vis-à-vis Turkey and Italy also sets up different student responses to learning humanitarianism in class today.

The French colonial mandate in Lebanon between 1920 and 1943 consistently shapes today’s student response to humanitarianism; familiar with postcolonial governance and catastrophisation as a way of understanding the current humanitarian discourse, my Lebanese students seemed to rely on categories of thinking which easily suit the humanitarian framework. The colonial mandate and the intervention of international assistance providers to back domestic parties and local communities gradually overshadowed the pre-existing thick network of local community services in academic literature. The present literal inundation of international crisis managers in Lebanon makes local students suitable interlocutors on the humanitarian mainstream narrative as well as its critiques.

In Turkey, humanitarianism has been acquiring international colours way before the beginning of the Syrian refugee influxes and the latest intervention of several humanitarian agencies. The 1915 Armenian genocide and deportations from Ottoman Turkey prompted the first cases of foreign charitable assistance in the region, in addition to the international refugee regime set up to deal with the massive displacement caused by the First World War. Overall, Ottoman authorities were reluctant to accept unconditional international assistance because they did not want to see their political power undermined. Traditionally decentralised and domestically managed, humanitarian services to forced migrants during the Ottoman Empire were mostly delegated to local communities, making the contemporary humanitarian approach to crisis and assistance unsuitable in the Turkish context. Nevertheless, while the Turkish government has already been pursuing a politics of intervention in Somalia since 2011, the recent intervention of international humanitarian agencies inside Turkey in response to the Syrian crisis is unprecedented.

Italy seemingly looks to humanitarianism with an ambiguous gaze. Past colonial governors in the Horn of Africa, and historically imbued with the Christian Catholic culture of assistance to the vulnerable, Italian students responded to my humanitarianism classes with the curiosity of the potential missionary. Approaching the catastrophe discourse to understand how new migration flows are shaping politics and ethics in the Mediterranean doorway, Italian students tended to associate humanitarianism either with human rights – which would require several political steps ahead – or with philanthropic charity. Italian students were rather inspired by the future possibility of doing good, and focussed on humanitarian sentimentalism, such as the pros and cons of compassion: Humanitarian governmentality, managerialism, donorship, and bureaucracy seemed to scarcely inhabit their humanitarian imaginary.

These reflections of mine also suggest that alternative humanitarianisms should be taught at school to unlearn their “alternative” – that is non-mainstream – character. This can be done if students are also allowed to develop contents and critical consciousness in their first language too. Skipping these stages leads to the imposition of one among many possible understandings of – and ways of teaching – humanitarianism. Individual responses, cultural patterns, ideologies, and material circumstances will always colour humanitarianism differently. The teacher’s challenge should be expanding the students’ gaze across political histories, human behaviours and moral expectations, while conveying one’s own identity peacefully. This is certainly not an easy job.

This research has been conducted in the framework of the project “Analyzing South-South Humanitarian Responses to Displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey”, funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation agreement no. 715582.

Posted on

Woe to the Poor: The Sad Face of America

Guai ai poveri: La faccia triste dell’America [“Woe to the poor: The sad face of America”, Gruppo Abele) by Elisabetta Grande, a professor of comparative law at the University of Eastern Piedmont (Italy), is a fresh take on America’s “War on the Poor”.

Engaging, well written and suitable for a non–expert audience, the book is both a detailed account of the USA’s stubbornly high rate of poverty, and a critical analysis of the politics that produced it.

From the very beginning, the author gives a full statistical picture of the subject: despite the recovery of the US economy, extreme poverty has been growing continuously for over forty years. According to conservative estimates of the US Census Bureau, in December 2014 almost 21 million people (men, women and, more shockingly, children) lived with an income that fell below half of the federal poverty threshold.

Unmasking the myth of poverty as a natural phenomenon by considering the economic, cultural, political and legal forces that lie behind it, Grande goes far beyond the depiction of a doomsday scenario.

The meticulously quantitative description of poverty in the essay is enriched by several life stories of real people stuck at the bottom of the economy.

Although the author doesn’t explain in detail the methodological tools she used to select and textualize the stories, the book is informative about the struggles of people who lost their jobs, homes, families and lives, often for reasons that go far beyond their personal choices and responsibilities.

A refined jurist, the author insists on the role of legislation in creating poverty, focusing particularly on the intertwining of the market and the law.

On one hand, the new rules of the international market favored what she defines as “extractive globalization” against workers, a form of globalization that led to a progressive loss in their contractual power, a decrease in their salaries and benefits and a general decline of their working conditions. On the other hand, the American legal system didn’t intervene to redress the situation: no longer conceived as re-distributors of wealth and distancing themselves from all forms of impositive progressiveness, the American fiscal policies eased the adverse effects of globalization. Establishing tax deductions for the rich and reducing fiscal pressure on capital gains, they ended up favoring the interests of the corporations and the unchallenged domination of the market.

Such politics, Grande remarks, were all but inevitable. A different model, that she defines a “generative globalization”, potentially linked with new egalitarian and redistributive policies, was deliberately rejected.

Guai ai poveri takes into account a further cause of the explosion of poverty in the USA. In what is probably the most striking part of the essay, the author reflects on the negative public discourses regarding poor families entailed in the government actions against poverty.

Looking at the cultural and symbolic representation of the poor is all but an abstract academic exercise, as the perceived beneficiary of policies bears practical consequence on how the policies themselves are designed. Breaking the continuity with the compassion towards the poor that characterized other historical phases like the New Deal and the years of Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan’s presidency spread skillful propaganda that turned those in greatest need into dangerous criminals or lazy parasites to be punished and removed from the streets.

In the same period, several prototypes of poor emerged. One of the best known is the so-called “Welfare Queen”. Introduced in the 1970s by Ronald Reagan, it referred to (black) single mothers accused of defrauding the government by accumulating welfare checks through false names and addresses.

Such stereotypes helped dismantle the USA welfare system carried on by bipartisan politics, from Reagan to Bill Clinton. In 1996, Clinton signed a sweeping welfare reform bill that cut off economic support to poor mothers, which was guaranteed by the American government since 1935. Since then the number of people living in extreme poverty ($2 per person, per day) has more than doubled.

A further stereotypical representation of the poor that Grande analyzes is the homeless. Although homelessness has been growing constantly over the past 35 years, she exhaustively discusses how its social composition has drastically changed in recent years. Unlike the image of the elderly, white, male, homeless drunkard, the homeless population today is mostly made up of families, and the fastest growing category of homeless people is children. Almost 50 percent of homeless people have a degree and between 30 and 40 percent work full or part time.

The homeless are now “a population within the population”: not only they have grown in number, but since the 1990’s they have become a target for “zero tolerance” political, legal and cultural practices.

The author builds a strong argument that the negative representation of the poor has systematically destroyed the protective barriers built over a long history of social struggles and policies, gradually transforming the “war on poverty” into a “war on the poor.”

The book’s title: Guai ai poveri, “Woe to the Poor” can refer both to the criminalization of poor people and to  the problems that poor people face in the contemporary USA, where people can be arrested if they are caught sleeping in a park or begging.

Guai ai poveri contributes to the understanding of the failure of the trickle-down theory’s rhetoric, as it makes clear that despite the growth of the USA GDP, wealth didn’t reach everyone. Although it doesn’t directly delve into current political issues, such as the recent election campaign, the book offers a good key to understand why Donald Trump was elected. This is highly relevant in Europe too where more and more countries seem to be embarking upon a similar path.

As already mentioned, the essay explores poverty in the USA focusing on the legal system that deliberately produced it. Needless to say, the new politics of poverty and the social representation of poverty are complex, multifaced and highly interdisciplinary subjects. It would be therefore interesting to investigate further some of the key issues that Elisabetta Grande raises.

A growing body of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship on governments and neoliberal policy have produced rich analyses on how poverty has been, and still is, gendered and radicalized not only by politicians but also by influential people. In Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture sociologist Eva Illouz suggests that, for many years, The Oprah Winfrey Show perpetuated a negative representation of the Welfare Queen, presented as an obstacle and a burden to the emancipation of black women. It would be thus interesting to investigate further the role of the emergent American black middle class and intelligentsia in retrieving the stereotype of the Welfare Queen.

Secondly, in 1996, drawing on a survey sample of Baltimore residents, sociologist George Wilson documented that Americans distinguished between different types of poverty. Asked about the causes of poverty, respondents pinpointed three different groups: welfare recipients, migrant laborers, and the homeless. They explained the existence of the homeless in primarily structural terms (no good schools, low wages, lack of jobs), welfare recipients in predominantly individualistic ways (lack of thrift, lack of effort, loose morals) and migrant laborers with a mix of structuralist and individualistic patterns. It would be pertinent to check whether Wilson’s assumptions are still valid today.

Finally, what role does the so-called, and well known, “Protestant work ethic” play in shaping cultural and religious belief about inequality, social hierarchies and poverty in contemporary North America? Weber’s concept, a classic in the literature which attracted widespread debate and criticism during the last century, clearly represented a subtle rhetorical device for politicians like Donald Trump, who embody the mainstream work ethic narrative to an extreme. After all, in the USA there has been a consistent emphasis on individualistic success stories that are romantically cast as the hallowed conquests of strong and patriotic men. For this reason, rather than approaching the Trump phenomenon as an already constituted object that simply awaits any analytic attention, cultural anthropologists are (perhaps belatedly) investigating what vision of work, consumption, saving, wealth and poverty the 60+ million who voted for Trump embraced.

In the age of Donald Trump and of nationalist populism in Western Europe, many academics showed their will to further debate the role of social sciences in the contemporary political landscape. As Paul Stoller wrote in a recent Huffington Post blog post, “Now is the time for ethnographers to step up to the plate and communicate our powerful insights to our students and to the public. Now is the time to craft a powerful counter-narrative that will ensure a viable future for our children and grandchildren.”

More analyses on the structural changes that the Western countries are facing are needed. More studies on the reconfigurations of power, wealth, and identity in today’s global neoliberalism are required now more then ever. Guai ai poveri perfectly fulfills these goals.

Posted on

Suggested by Public Anthropologist – Contrarian Anthropology

Once in a while Public Anthropologist will suggest a new or recent book that we believe “everybody must read”. We start the “Suggested by Public Anthropologist” series with Laura Nader’s Contrarian Anthropology. The Unwritten Rules of Academia, which is a call to reinvigorate anthropology’s principal attitude: crossing boundaries.  As Nader puts it in the introduction of this rich collection of essays, “Anthropology has been called the ‘uncomfortable discipline’ and ‘an institutionalized train wreck caught between science and humanities,’ thus inherently contrarian. It is the anthropological perspective that sees what other disciplines often do not see, that makes connections that are not made elsewhere, that questions assumptions and behavior that is contrary to cultural expectations.”

With essays covering important areas of both anthropological inquiry and public debate – (in)justice, energy, gender, power, democracy, law – and written in the course of half a century effort in research and teaching, Nader’s book unravels professional mindsets (within and outside of anthropology) and solicits critical attention toward increasing hyper-specialization and narrow delimitation of knowledge production.

Posted on

Commissioned Anthropology

The account of the history and current position/role of anthropology has effectively been co-opted by academics, at the expense of the many anthropologists who “choose instead to practise anthropology along career paths outside of academia: for example, in public service, NGOs or commercial organisations” (MacClansey 2017). One of the main employment arenas of anthropologists and anthropological knowledge – at least in the Nordic countries – has been in development and aid in the form of commissioned research and evaluations.

Academic anthropology has taken a very critical stand on development and aid along the past few decades (Escobar 1991; Edelman and Haugerud 2005; Crewe and Axelby 2013). The scholarly attention has mainly focused on the deconstruction of the global aid architecture and critique of the approaches and methods of aid interventions and their evaluations (Mosse 2005; Harrison 2015). Most applied anthropologists/practitioners of aid, on the other hand, argue that there is space for qualitative/anthropological insights and they want to contribute towards making development interventions as successful as possible.

For some of us, working as applied anthropologists and consultants is a matter of “political” choice and well within the confines of anthropology. The politics does not refer to the research process as such, which must adhere to normal academic standards, but to the choice of projects and the nature of dissemination of their findings. Doing commissioned work and consultancies entails an opportunity to target research findings at institutions and people who can make a difference – in government, among donors and in communities.

In some ways, applied anthropologists turn the “moral imperative” around: In a world of poverty and injustice anthropology has a unique contribution to make and there is room for such a contribution in development and aid.More anthropologists should aim to move out of their ivory towers – at least temporarily – in order to reach decision-makers and have a real impact rather than only write for the anthropological congregation.

I have myself combined academic work with commissioned research and consultancies for decades. An example of the former is the project ‘Reality Checks Mozambique’ carried out for Sweden in order to inform their development work in the country over a five-year period between 2011-2016 (Tvedten et al. 2016). An example of the latter is an evaluation of a Swedish higher education program in Rwanda, aimed at institutional development, research capacity building and broader impact of research at the University of Rwanda (Tvedten et al. 2018).

In 2010, Sweden commissioned a series of Reality Check studies (2011-2015) in the remote Mozambican province of Niassa. The explicit objective was to use anthropological/qualitative approaches and methods to monitor and evaluate development interventions done by the Government, Sida and other donors in agriculture, governance and private sector development ”from below” with a focus on poverty and gender.

A team of three senior researchers and six research assistants carried out the studies in three project sites, with fieldwork of three weeks per year in each site. The studies were based on a combination of official quantitative information; baseline and end line surveys; participant observation/household immersion; and a set of qualitative/participatory methodologies including wealth ranking. A key finding was the social marginalisation and exclusion of the very poorest from the development interventions, which made it necessary with alternative and targeted project components.

Three issues separate this project from a conventional academic anthropological study on poverty. One is the fact that it is commissioned, with Terms of Reference indicating a set of objectives, evaluation, research questions and deliverables. While this restricts “academic freedom” (which of course also has its own conventions), most progressive donors (including Sweden/Sida) are open to and appreciate academically based alternative approaches and points of view.

The second deviation is related to methodology. The limited time at disposal makes it necessary to develop alternative approaches, in this case combining qualitative/ participatory work with survey data. Qualitative approaches are key to understand the impact of interventions on the dynamics of poverty and well-being, but quantitative data are necessary to assess possible changes in consumption-based poverty over space and time.

A third and final difference lies is in style of writing and modes of dissemination. With a non-academic (development stakeholders) and often illiterate (target population) audience, the normal academic channels of publication and jargon will not do. The writing must be accessible in form and content, and be supplemented by workshops, briefs, community radio, local exhibitions/performances etc. in order to reach the target groups.

The purpose of the evaluation of Swedish support to the University of Rwanda was – according to its Terms of Reference – to “analyse, assess, generate knowledge and provide lessons” for the ongoing and possible future project periods with reference to the standard OECD/DAC evaluation criteria of relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, impact and sustainability.

The programme is implemented in partnership between the University of Rwanda and its seven colleges and 12 Swedish universities. It includes PhD training, Master’s training, development of curricula, joint research projects and institutional capacity building. The overall objective of the UR-Sweden programme is to “Increase production and use of scientific knowledge of international quality at the UR that contributes to the development of Rwanda”.

Against this background, the evaluation is embedded in a context analysis of the political economy as well as higher education and research in Rwanda. It goes beyond studying outputs (such as number of PhD graduates, publications, citations etc. even though this is also done) to assess results at outcome and impact levels with focus on changes in research capacity and contributions to better policy making and improved products or services by the private sector and civil society organisations in Rwanda.

The evaluation uses a mixed method approach: document and programme data review including bibliometric information; semi-structured interviews with relevant UR/programme and external stakeholders; case-studies of specific research projects and their impact; and a tracer study of PhD graduates from the programme. Fieldwork was carried out over a period of two weeks, and involved four team members including from Rwanda.

In line with recent international trends (IDRC 2016), the evaluation gives special attention to defining and assessing the impact or benefit of research cooperation to society. This was found still to be inadequate. One of the main recommendations to accomplish this – related to UR’s decision to focus its research on a set of ten interdisciplinary research clusters – was to include a social science component in all of them including those dominated by science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Both evaluation projects presented above relate to central anthropological issues such as the relation between structure and agency, the dynamics of social change and the impact of external interventions. For anthropologists doing this kind of work, there is a trade-off between the limitations inherent in being “commissioned” and the possibility to have influence on real peoples’ lives.

It should matter that the consultant doing commissioned work and evaluations is an anthropologist. Good applied work and consultancy must adhere to normal academic standards – but not to academic publications as genre as readers are less interested in for instance elaborations of theories and methods than they are in the research findings about impact.

The anthropologist as consultant should bring in academic insights and communicate those in a way that both the and target population can relate to; bring in new locally based perspectives; challenge the client by being explicit at critical points; and give clear recommendations that are manageable as points of departure for action.

In order to generate knowledge within the time frame and scope set by the funding agencies, the anthropologist/consultant needs to use innovative methodologies which can capture relevant issues over a short time frame. Also, in order to communicate well with policy makers and reach key decisions-makers, anthropologists need to adapt their style of writing and modes of research dissemination and publish in creative and innovative ways.

Commissioned work and consultancies are interesting and challenging. The extent to which they actually have an impact on the lives of the poor or other target groups depends on the ability to position ourselves as anthropologists in relation to central development actors and decision-makers and make anthropology relevant.

References

Crewe, Emma, and Richard Axelby. 2013. Anthropology and development. Culture, Morality and Poltics in a Globalised World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edelman, Marc, and Angelique Haugerud. 2005. “Introduction: The anthropology of development globalization.” In The anthropology of development and globalization, edited by Marc Edelman and Angelique Haugerud. Malden: Blackwell.

Escobar, Arturo. 1991. “Anthropology and the development encounter: The making and marketing of development anthropology.” American Anthropologist 18(4): 658-682.

IDRC (2016). A Holistic Approach to Evaluating Research. Ottawa, Canada: International development Research Centre.

Lewis, David. 2005. “Antropology and development: the uneasy relationship.” In A handbook of economic anthropology, 472-86. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

MacClansey, Jeremy. 2017. “Transcending the academic/public divide in the transmission of theory: Raglan, diffusionism, and mid-century anthropology.” History and Anthropology 28(2): 235-253.

Moss, David. 2011. Adventures in Aidland. The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development. New York and london: Berghanh Books.

Tvedten, Inge, Minna Tuominnen and Carmeliza Rosário (2016). Reality Checks Mozambique. Final Report 2011-2015. Stockholm: Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.

Tvedten, Inge et al. (2018). “Evaluation of the Sida supported research capacity and higher education development program in Rwanda, 2013-2017”. Sida Decentralised Evaluations [2018:1]. Stockholm: Swedish International Development Agency

Posted on

Water Day 2018

On the occasion of the AAM Special Issue, MANAGING GLOBAL SOCIAL WATER , the editors Nadia Breda and Elena Bougleux will organize a debate on 23rd March 2018 at the University of Florence.

Practices, strategies and rituals related to water have been studied in depth by anthropologists. In our perspective, all the specific and disciplinary declinations of water are entangled in a social-water continuum that cannot be separated or split into fragmented elements. Global Social Water unfolds as a unique multiple concept. At the same time, the Anthropocenic approach meets and amplifies our need and desire as anthropologists to create a concrete occasion of dialogue.

In such a framework, the processes and the crises implicated with water appear as the most urgent ones, and require complex visions. Water can no longer be understood by unrelated actors, and no local insight on water can stand independently from the multi-scale picture drawn within a global-social continuum. The authors contributing to the AAM special make solid references to their ethnographic research, localizing their reflections on very specific water-related grounds: from rivers in Southern India to the Anthroposophic Community in Italy, from the Venice Lagoon to Agro Pontino, from the sea and its coastlines to the water needed to make wine. At the same time, the authors project their visions into a wider cosmology of meanings and inscribe their discourses in the framework of the Anthropocene so their outcomes can be shared and discussed according to diverse competences and disciplines.

Through this set of papers, anthropologists have started a fruitful dialogue with climatologists, architects, marine biologists, botanists, economists and more, each bringing their specific contribution to our studies. The emerging vision mainly depicts the issue of water as a natural + social resource, where the natural and social dimensions always remain interconnected and interdependent, each requiring a local and a large scale perspective in a global and social approach.

For more info: nadia.breda@unifi.it

Posted on

Genocide: A Conversation with Alex Hinton

Alexander Hinton is Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights. He is Professor of Anthropology and Global Affairs at Rutgers University, Newark. He was previously President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and currently holds the UNESCO Chair in Genocide Prevention. His most recent book on an international tribunal in Cambodia is Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer; a companion volume, The Justice Facade: Trials of Transition in Cambodia, is forthcoming in the Spring of 2018. In 2013, Professor Hinton served as an expert witness at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.

Read the introduction of Man or Monster? here.

In this interview, Alexander Hinton discusses issues related to anthropology and genocide in the context of his work on Cambodia. The interview was motivated by my personal interest in genocide, the study of genocide and the issue of the “ordinary perpetrator”. Although my background is in history, I am interested in the multi-disciplinary nature of genocide studies, and wanted to establish what role anthropology can play in understanding genocide. Further, looking at the example of Cambodia, specifically the Duch trial, gave a contextual insight into the study of genocide.

Anna: Although a cross-discipline subject, genocide studies is perhaps synonymous with history or political science. What role does anthropology play in the study of genocide?

Alex: While other approaches offer important insights into genocide, anthropology is distinct in its insistence on deep contextual knowledge to understand the origins, dynamics, and aftermaths of genocide and other forms of political violence. Perhaps in part because of an uneasiness with the questions genocide raises about relativism, anthropologists long ignored this topic, though this neglect began to change in the 1980s and especially the 1990s with a surge of interest in political violence. Still, genocide hovers on the edges of anthropological interest as highlighted by the remarkable lack of work on the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, among other cases. I attended a panel on the Rohingya of Myanmar at the last AAA meeting and just a handful of people were in the large ballroom.

Anna: I find it interesting, and unsettling, that such events appear “on the edge” of the discipline. What new perspectives do you think can anthropology give to understanding mass atrocity?

Alex: Much of the literature on genocide and atrocity crimes tends to be more experience-distant and comparative. An ethnographic approach, much like a historical approach (and good genocide scholarship combines the two), demands in-depth, experience-near engagement with particular cases – even as anthropologists keep an eye on the comparative as well but only after deep, contextual understanding.

Anna: In your most recent book, Man or Monster?, you closely address the Duch trial in Cambodia. To provide some context, Duch was the first Cambodian leader to be tried at the special court, backed by the UN and established to try crimes committed during the Cambodian genocide. Duch was the commander responsible for the notorious S-21 camp. To me, your focus on Duch relates to what you said earlier about getting the deep contextual knowledge of a situation through an anthropological lens. Why did you specifically focus on this trial in your analysis? Was there something unique about this case, or did it simply provide a good example of such a trial at a criminal tribunal?

Alex: There is a bit of a backstory here. I actually had intended to write a book that focused on how Cambodians understood the global justice experiment that suddenly arrived in the mid-2000s. This first book project ended up being the focus of my second book on the tribunal, The Justice Facade: Trials of Transition in Cambodia, which is coming out with Oxford this Spring.

Duch was the first person to be tried and I became fascinated by Duch himself, his trial and what it revealed about the court, Duch’s relationship to the civil parties, and ultimately, what his trial means to all of us as human beings. The question in the book title, Man or Monster? is in a sense a riddle that is also an answer, almost an aporia.

Anna: Is there a benefit of focusing on a single case, rather than examining the tribunal as a whole?

Alex: Always – that’s the basis of good fieldwork in a sense as long as the research is aware of and keeps an eye on the multidirectional intersections of the single case. As I mentioned, deep, experience-near understanding lays the basis for the comparative. Also, amidst the ethnodrama of the book, there is a background conversation with other broader debates and key texts, especially Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Anna: In Man or Monster?, you use the term “banality of everyday thought” to distinguish from Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” I think this is an interesting distinction to make. Can you elaborate on what you mean by this phrase, and how it differs from Arendt’s work?

Alex: I have always been fascinated by Arendt’s book, which is admirable in so many ways even if it has been more recently critiqued for missing what some assert was Eichmann’s strong antisemitism. Regardless, her point about the banality of evil is important and does work that much scholarship today is afraid to do – venture into the realm of ethics and even speak of moral lessons.

At the core of Man or Monster? , then, is a “lesson” which is meant to echo Arendt’s “lesson” about the banality of evil. The etymology of “lesson” suggests moral edification, as in a Biblical lesson. Along these lines, Arendt was not just suggesting that Eichmann was a mindless bureaucrat as popularized versions of the banality of evil idea sometimes claim. Instead, her key “lesson” was Eichmann’s failure to think, his “sheer thoughtlessness” as she put it. His failure was a lesson to all of us about the importance of critical thinking, even if she didn’t phrase it in quite this way.

The “banality of everyday thought” takes up her insight about genocide and the lack of critical thinking while taking off in a different direction, even a bit of a reversal. If the action of perpetrators like Eichmann and Duch are “thoughtless,” the lack of critical thought is directly tied to the way we think – parsing our worlds in reductive terms as we navigate the dilemmas and anxieties of our human predicaments. Here the book draws on philosophy and psychology (Lacan, Derrida, and Levinas) in considering subjectivity even as the book recognizes the larger structural forces at play in producing subjectivity, a notion I discuss in part through the concept of the “thick frames of power.”

Let me conclude by saying that, while observing Duch’s trial, I saw direct parallels in the way meaning was articulated during torture at S-21 (the prison Duch ran), the KRT Trial Chamber / law, the psychological assessment, and so forth. A simple paradox is at work: by the way we think (our articulations) we redact complexity. At S-21, confessions produced an articulation of the enemy; at the ECCC, the juridical process produced the criminal (Duch was convicted). And so forth.

My book ends by calling for an ethics of afacement as opposed to the effacing convictions that propel not just genocide, but the way we operate in our everyday lives – thus the banality of everyday thought – amidst the thick frames of power in which we are enmeshed (discourses, disciplines, structures of power, including law, and so forth). And here the insights about Duch also bear upon contemporary issues such as the rise of bigotry and hate in places like the U.S.

Anna: We indeed live in a world where hate is on the rise. When reflecting on the development of mass atrocity, the notion of the “ordinary perpetrator,” or the idea that anyone can become a perpetrator of genocide, becomes disconcerting. I think that people like to distance themselves from the idea that they can become perpetrators and believe that they wouldn’t commit crimes, even if pushed to do so. But I suppose this isn’t the case, and it is true that anyone can become a perpetrator?

Alex: The easy answer – though perhaps unsettling to many — is that anyone can become a perpetrator. That said, the difficulty of explanation arises in explaining the paths to – and sometimes in and out of – participation in genocide and mass murder. If any of us might become a perpetrator, the book implicitly argues that those who are driven by effacing conviction may more readily be attracted to totalizing ideologies of hate, ranging from totalitarian sentiments to genocidal imperatives.

Perhaps this resembles Adorno’s search for a set of dispositions that may incline people to violence and hate – “the authoritarian personality” as he puts it. But I discuss the idea of “disposition” with great wariness, noting that our subjectivities are bound up with power and also deeply enmeshed with personal and social histories. The idea of a disposition can naturalize the fluid and historical, mask power, and thereby redact precisely the dynamic processes to which we need to attend.

Here is where the deep contextual knowledge issue arises – those who move too quickly to the comparative (or the natural) oversimplify and, to use the terms of Man or Monster?, render articulations of the perpetrators that redact their complexity and make them “other” than us. Indeed the word “perpetrator,” like “criminal,” “enemy,” and so forth, is dangerous in this regard since we emplot complex individuals in reductive categories and narratives. We can’t help but use abstraction and simplification but we can do so with varying degrees of reflexivity. To aface or efface? That is the moral question that we confront everyday as we decide to act in complicated worlds. It’s also the key ethical question Man or Monster? raises.

Anna: There are a number of tools used by leaders to initially incite hatred, and then to justify killings of “another” group. A common thread in the build-up to genocide is that the reality of the massacre disappears behind other words, phrases and justifications. A famous example is that of Rwanda, where the Tutsi were described as “cockroaches” and genocidal killings as “work” or “clearing.” In Cambodia, the reality of what was being perpetrated in prisons was sanitized by discussion of eradicating the ‘woodworm’ that would eat away at the healthy revolutionary people. How does this language develop, and how is it used by a regime?

Alex: Yes, for sure. There was pervasive ideological language that included metaphors exhorting people to work, purify themselves, and eradicate the enemy. Discourse helps constitute the “thick frames” that push actors to think and act in certain ways, including violent ones. This language of hate legitimates violence, making it not just morally more acceptable but even urgent.

Mary Douglas’s work on language, the body, and border provides one anthropological perspective for considering the motivating force of language and symbolism. As she suggests, the language and symbolism of violence, hate, and genocide don’t emerge out of the blue, but play upon what preexists and has bodily resonance (Turner highlighted the intersection of the political and felt dimensions of social action through his discussion of the sensory and ideological poles of meaning).

The Khmer Rouge, for example, banned Buddhism even as they drew upon Buddhist concepts such as the idea of renunciation (revolutionary renunciations paralleling Buddhist renunciation). There are many examples of this in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, ones that emerged in Duch’s trial but are also discussed in detail in an earlier book I wrote, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide.

Anna: The Duch trial is interesting because it represents the first trial of a commander at the tribunal. It also provides a good example of the notion of command responsibility, that the most responsible is the person in charge. However, Duch contended that he was acting on orders from the government and was not in a position to argue. This can raise the question of how responsible an individual is for their own actions in these circumstances and whether state responsibility takes precedence over self-agency.

Alex: That’s a complicated legal question. But perhaps the easy answer is that, when asked to violate international law, each person become culpable and is obligated to disobey superior orders. In other words, superior orders are preempted by international law even if, paradoxically, it may be illegal to disobey such an (internationally illegal) order within a domestic jurisdiction. Duch, for his part, claimed that S-21 operated long ago and that he knew little of international law – he claimed he just obeyed the dictates of his superiors, a classic “obedience to authority” defense, and followed Khmer Rouge law. Nazi criminals, including Eichmann, made similar claims — as have many others accused of genocide and atrocity crimes.

Anna: Although Duch claimed to be obeying his superiors, it can be argued that he did have his own agency and made conscious choices to commit the crimes he did. Here, the links between collective behavior and individual conviction are apparent. But can these collective actions prove the individual conviction or motivation for involvement in genocide?

Alex: No but it provides context, a marker of context — the thick frames of power — in which individual conviction may be transformed and accentuated in a manner that motivates genocide and mass murder.

Anna: Understanding motivation is clearly an important aspect in understanding genocide. There are a vast number of people in different roles involved in a genocidal regime – from those following orders and doing administrative tasks distant from the killing to those actively killing, or ordering others to kill. Do you consider there to be a difference in motivation, beliefs and the kinds of people that fulfil different roles within a genocidal regime?

Alex: There may be, but it is difficult to parse things in this way due to variation. Scholars now sometimes differentiate between the micro-, meso-, and macro- levels, but even these categories totalize things. The best approach is one that is processual and fluid, taking into account intersections of structure, power, and agency that ebb and flow in different ways across context. Performance theory is suggestive in this regard as perpetrator motivation may be disaggregated in considering the flow of experience, audience, and emotion.

Anna: International trials, such as that of Duch, have brought these perpetrators increasingly into the public eye and into discourse surrounding the conflicts. In some senses, these tribunals have provided a “face” of the conflict, a recognizable perpetrator. This must lead to the media and politicians framing these perpetrators differently.

Alex: Yes, though different actors appropriate the legal proceedings in different ways. There are often very different, and sometimes directly conflicting, stakes for the “international community,” government elites, civil society actors, and local communities. This has been true in Cambodia and other situations as the literature on transitional justice demonstrates.

Anna: Despite its successes in providing a historical record and providing some justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was divisive, it made some into heroes and further victimized others. There were some notable differences between the tribunal for Yugoslavia and that of Cambodia, not least that the Yugoslav tribunal was established before the end of the conflict whereas the Cambodian trial followed years after the genocide. Reflecting on the two tribunals, do you think that the Cambodian tribunal had the same issues that faced the Yugoslav tribunal?

Alex: I think this is the case for international justice in general. It is always politicized and leaves some more or less satisfied or dissatisfied.

One key difference in this case is that the Khmer Rouge Tribunal is being held in Cambodia. The complicated hybrid structure and rules of the tribunal, which give the Cambodian government a great deal of influence over things, have made this one even more politicized with controversies over corruption and political influence.

Overall, and this is too sweeping a statement, I would say that the victims are more satisfied with the KRT even if the population is somewhat less engaged with it due to the amount of time that has elapsed, the fact that there is a degree of victor’s justice involved, and the on-going difficulties in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia that continue to amplify tensions. The situation is different in Cambodia.

Anna: Finally, I find it important within the study of genocide to reflect on what we can learn or take from previous experiences, as it can be easy to become disheartened that things won’t change. In this spirit, do you think there any lessons that the international community can take from the Cambodian case to apply to ongoing atrocities, such as that facing the Rohingya?

Alex: We return to lessons! I spoke earlier of the lessons of Man or Monster?, including the imperative of afacement. The Justice Facade similarly argues that we need to step aside from the transitional justice imaginary and focus on lived experience and on-the-ground understandings. Here are a couple of imperatives with which can perhaps finish.

Aface others — even those (like the Myanmar government) who appear to act in illegitimate ways.

Step behind the (justice, human rights, peacebuilding) facade. Understand conflicts from an experience-near, deeply contextual, historicized perspective. This is the first step in any sort of process of conflict resolution and prevention.

Posted on

Humanitarianism and Security: New Berghahn Books series

General Editor:
Antonio De Lauri, Chr. Michelsen Institute

Editorial Board:
Reece Jones, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Chowra Makaremi, CNRS, Paris
Mark Maguire, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Vanessa Pupavac, University of Nottingham
Peter Redfield, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Tazreena Sajjad, American University, Washington D.C.

Amid the growing convergence between the politics of aid and policing, emergency and military governance, securitization and the production of collective fear, this series examines humanitarianism and security as both ideology and practice. To this end, it offers ethnographic and theoretical analyses that contribute to the development of critical approaches at the intersection of anthropology, sociology, geography, international relations, and other disciplines.

Submissions
Formal submissions should be sent directly to Berghahn Books, however initial enquiries are encouraged and should be sent to Antonio De Lauri (antonio.delauri@cmi.no), who will be able to advise and help you through the formal procedure. For more information on Berghahn’s manuscript submission procedure, please look at the Info for Authors section on the website: http://berghahnbooks.com/authors/