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Inquiring and writing about migration and smuggling: an interview with Peter Tinti

Luigi Achilli (L.A.): You belong to the most prolific reporters covering conflict, security, human rights, and organized crime issues. I read in your personal website that, in 2013, Action on Armed Violence included you in its list “Top 100: The most influential journalists covering armed violence.” What is it about violence, crime, and conflict that drew you to write about these topics?

Peter Tinti (P.T.): The September 11, 2001 attacks happened during my last year of high school. As someone who studied political science and international relations in college, 9/11 and its consequences were, for better or worse, the backdrop to my entire education. Issues related to conflict, terrorism, and violence by non-state actors were omnipresent.

On a more personal level, the collapse of Mali, a country where I had lived for several years, first from 2008 to 2011 as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and again in 2013 as a journalist, was searing. A lot of people, from academics to diplomats to development practitioners to Malian government officials, were heavily invested in the narrative of Mali as a democratic model for the region. And yet, so much of what these smart, supposedly earnest people were saying and writing proved fabulously wrong.

I think both examples, the aftermath of 9/11 and Mali, are what make me inherently skeptical of consensus narratives. I’m always ready to accept that the frameworks we use to view the world can suddenly, rapidly, feel obsolete. The challenge as a journalist, at least as I see it, is to find better frameworks and alternative voices to better understand the world around us.

I think this is particularly important when we think about the current “migration crisis” and migrant smuggling. There is an inherent tension between the urgency and novelty of the moment, what constitutes a “crisis” for the people involved, and the need to place it within a broader, more measured context.

 

L.A.: Along with Tuesday Reitano, you recently authored the book “Migrant, Refugee, Smuggler, Savior” (2017 – Oxford University Press). How did you end up writing this book? What are its main goals, its accomplishment, and its shortcoming?

P.T.: The book was an outgrowth of our ongoing research for the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, of which Tuesday is a co-founder. I had done some previous reporting on migrant smuggling networks in West Africa before what came to be known as the “migrant crisis,” but the subject matter took on a new urgency with the explosion of the Eastern Mediterranean route in 2015. Tuesday has been examining issues of transnational organized crime and migrant smuggling for much longer, so she already had deep understanding of some of these issues. I was rapidly bringing myself up to speed as I carried out interviews in North Africa, Turkey, the Balkans and Western Europe.

When Tuesday and I set out to write the book, our main goal was to help readers, whether they be the general public or policymakers, better understand the role that migrant smugglers are playing in facilitating the irregular movement of migrants and refugees. While we didn’t think of the book as a corrective, per se, we did believe that many of the prevailing narratives about smugglers and the migrant smuggling industry were not only incorrect, but counterproductive.

I think we succeeded in helping readers better understand how migrant smuggling works, the different types of actors involved, the shape and structure of some of the main networks facilitating irregular migration into Europe. We wanted people to understand that tens of millions of people around the world are living in precarious situations of protracted, indefinite displacement, and that the international community has failed them. Rather than wait indefinitely for the international community to live up to its own obligations under international law, many of these people have decided to take matters into their own hands. With legal channels for movement limited or completely cut off, many of these people have little choice but to seek the services of smugglers who can help them reach safety and opportunity. It is this pool of displaced and disposed people, and the complete failure of the international system to help these people, that is creating unprecedented demand for smuggler services.

The actors who operate within various smuggling markets carry out their activities along a spectrum of criminality that includes low-level opportunists who seize an impromptu chance to make a quick buck, to highly sophisticated experts who can obtain passports and paperwork for the right price. Some smugglers are highly exploitative and have little regard for their human cargo. Others take pride in their work, operate with professionalism, and are held in high regard by the men, women and children they help reach safety (even if they did so in exchange for payment).

We also wanted readers to understand how polices that seek to block asylum seekers and target smugglers, but do nothing to address the underlying conditions that create demand for smuggler services, are ineffective and counterproductive. In fact, when the borders and barriers to irregular migration increase, but the circumstances that necessitate movement remain constant, lower-level opportunists are pushed out of the smuggling market because the new barriers exceed their criminal skills. Only those with requisite criminal expertise can operate and organized criminal groups, many of which are already involved in activities such as drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and human trafficking, takeover the market and make unprecedented profits.

In terms of shortcomings, I am not sure the book offers the “answers” or “solutions” that many might be looking for. We do analyze the negative impact of certain policies, and we do consider how certain policies might yield unintended consequences, but we refrain from offering a one-size-fits-all solution. Additionally, Tuesday and I came at this work from different backgrounds, so what we consider one of the book’s strengths—the balance between accessibility, timeliness, and rigor—other audiences might view as a weakness. We do cite and reference academic articles throughout the first section of the book, but we do not grapple with existing academic literature or theories of organized crime and irregular migration in ways that academics might prefer.

 

L.A.: The book is one of those rare examples of writings aimed to a broader audience that goes beyond the sensationalism surrounding the rhetoric of human smuggling. It critically engages with the figure of the migrant smuggler while problematizing the simplistic generalizations and representations connected to the phenomenon. In your view, why there is such a discrepancy between informed accounts like yours and mainstream narratives of human smuggling and irregular migration?

 P.T.: In academia, scholarship is an ongoing conversation among experts. It might take place at the speed of annual conferences and peer review, but it is, by and large, taking place in good faith. There are standards and structures in place to actually disincentive sensationalism, and the rewards go to those who do good work.

Regretfully, this is not necessarily the case in journalism, especially since the business models of newspapers and magazines have collapsed in recent years. The monetary incentives at the moment, which often privilege page views and shares on social media, reward the sensational. Those who do great work are still often recognized and lauded by their peers, but they also might go out of business.

While the discrepancy between informed accounts and mainstream narratives is not unique to human smuggling and irregular migration, I do think these particular topics—replete with images of overcrowded boats or masses of foreigners who look different and might practice a different religion—do lend themselves to sensationalism.

I guess the prevailing question, then, is what is the best response to sensationalism. I’m all for calling out the worst examples on social media or in letters to editors, but it seems like the best response in the long term is to counter them with better journalism and scholarship.

Rather than highlight the problematic narratives, Tuesday and I set out to write an accurate one for a general audience. We said in the introduction that our book sits somewhere between a work of journalism and social science, and that it was neither a call to action nor a work of moral outrage. We wanted to write something that is accessible but also challenges readers. That’s why it was important for me that we constantly weave in the characters involved, both migrants and smugglers, so that readers understood that we are talking about real people, not faceless actors operating in the shadows or hidden among the masses.

 

L.A.: Your work involves multi-sited research in increasingly dangerous zones. How did you approach research participants and conduct your investigation? Have there been any dangerous situations during your work?  How did you deal with those?

Depending on the location, particularly in North Africa and the Sahel, I usually make arrangements with people in advance who can introduce me to some of the actors involved. In other cases, such as in the Balkans or in Calais, it can be as straightforward as showing up and asking questions and developing relationships from there. In every case, the key is to establish some sort of trust with people who can help you better understand what is going on.

Mitigating risk and danger is always a complex endeavor. In places that are unambiguously dangerous, I make sure I work with fixers and translators who have a proven track record of working in hostile environments. In places like northern Niger and Mali, I’ve worked with a lot of different interlocutors, and I’m constantly reassessing where I can go and how long I should stay in a certain place while I’m there.

In 2015, for example, I was in Agadez, northern Niger, with a film crew and it was hard for us to keep a low profile given our equipment. The shoot was taking a bit longer than anticipated, and a few of us stayed behind to follow-up on a promising lead. I received a phone call from a Nigerien contact I had met with during a previous trip and with whom I occasionally text. He is not someone I completely trust, and he associates with some sketchy actors who split their time between northern Niger and southern Libya. I had not told him I would be in Agadez, but when he called, he told me that he heard I was in town and asked how long I would be there. It turns out someone else in Agadez notified him of our presence, and now he wanted to know our itinerary and where we were staying. I told him we had already left northern Niger, and then we immediately changed locations for the evening. We left the next day.

 

L.A.: Did you have a translator with you? And how important are translators for your daily work?

 P.T.: I prefer not to have a translator whenever possible, which for me, means finding people who speak English (or often, broken English) or French. Tuesday and I also hired local researchers to carry out fieldwork on our behalf in certain locations. Beyond being able to overcome language barriers, local researchers can be invaluable in navigating the socio-cultural landscape. I have no doubt, for example, that some refugee and migrant women we interviewed were much more comfortable sharing their experiences with a woman than with me.

 

L.A.: As your work involves enquire into criminal business, it steps into a delicate field where ethical and safety issues are of the outmost importance. Since the late 1960s, anthropologists have begun taking seriously the ethical dilemmas entailed in working and living in a world fraught with political turmoil. Today, when anthropologists carry out their researches, they face a whole set of ethical issues including – but not limited to – the need of protecting the autonomy, wellbeing, and dignity of all research participants whose safety our research might endanger. As a journalist, what ethical dilemmas did you confront? And how did you did deal with those?

 P.T.: Unlike in academia, where various disciplines have well-defined, if evolving, ethical standards and researchers are subject to institutional review boards, ethics in journalism is much less clearly defined. Most reputable outlets, broadly speaking, have similar standards and subscribe to similar codes of ethics, and most reputable journalists adhere to them, but heady concepts such as “the public interest” and “newsworthiness” can be pretty murky.

Generally speaking, my main preoccupation is making sure that my own reporting does not put anyone in danger or cause harm. That’s the minimum. For this book, we granted anonymity to anyone who wanted it, and in some cases I assigned pseudonyms to people who, despite the fact that they knew I was a journalist, might not have had a clear understanding the extent to which the information they gave me would be made public. Some of these people were talking to me only minutes after surviving a boat crossing, or as they were preparing to place their lives in the hands of a smuggler, and I constantly reminded myself of that.

A lot of newspaper editors and magazine editors would probably not be comfortable with the levels of anonymity we granted, and I don’t blame them. It makes these stories nearly impossible to fact-check, but for me, it was the only way we could write this book in a way that was truthful and ethical. Some of the people we reference, for example, were in the process of applying for asylum, and I did not want our book to potentially complicate their lives in any way.

 

L.A.: Let us talk about your work one more time. During their fieldwork, researchers usually develop a strong empathy and a sense of personal responsibility for the peoples they study and live with. Neutrality or activism. This dilemma has led scholars like Nancy Scheper-Hughes to question the idea that field researchers can be neutral, detached, and objective observers. In your work, how do you strike a balance (if you do) between being the neutral observing reporter and the engaging, sympathetic human being?

P.T.: I personally do not have much interest in objectivity when it comes to my work. The most important thing for me is that my writing and reporting is factual, accurate, and fair. I actively avoid chasing a false sense of neutrality, because I think it is a slippery slope to inaccuracy. That’s my own preference, and it informs the types of stories I choose to work on. But not everyone prefers this approach, and that is fine.

One ethical dilemma I am always facing, however, is to what extent it is acceptable to ask people to recount or relive traumatic experiences. During recent trips to Libya and Honduras, this was constantly in the back of my mind as men and women were telling me about being tortured and terrorized. How do I justify asking them to incur the emotional and psychological costs of talking to me? I think that is a question that not enough journalists ask themselves.

 

L.A.: Over the past years, the EU member states have developed controversial governmental policies to respond to the refugee and migration movements. What is your take on Europe’s current role in the so-called migrant crisis? From your reporting over the past years, what do you think would be a more ethical and effective European response to the current crisis?

 P.T.: I’m highly critical of the EU responses to refugee and migration movements. When it comes to refugees, I don’t think these are complicated or complex phenomena. You either believe in the 1951 Refugee Convention or you don’t. I find debates over the “politics” of this tiresome and, to be honest, disingenuous. So much of what European policymakers and commentators are framing as clear-eyed realism is really just an exercise in rationalizing why it is acceptable to ignore obligations under international law. The fact that Europe is collaborating with unaccountable militias in Libya, Sudanese security forces, and a range of other unsavory actors in order to stem the flow of refugees speaks for itself.

The most effective way for Europe, and the broader international community, to reduce the number of refugees arriving would be to commit resources to ending and preventing the types of conflicts and situations that produce mass refugee populations, and to address the needs of populations who have found themselves living in situations of protracted displacement. It would require leadership and investing in the types of institutions and structures that can adequately address these issues. That’s easier said than done, but I don’t think anyone can say with a straight face that the international community has committed sufficient resources and energy toward reducing the global pool of refugees and displaced persons. Before we dismiss such proposals, I would at least like to see them tried.

Now, when it comes to economic migrants, that is a much trickier question and one over which I think reasonable people can disagree. It ultimately comes down to whether European countries want to provide safe, legal opportunities for migrants from developing countries to access European labor markets. My personal opinion is that those countries that do, and do it well, will benefit tremendously. But given the current political climate in Europe, even those policymakers who agree with this in theory seem more concerned with finding ways to curb migration for the sake of political expediency.

 

L.A.: Beyond the European context, what do you believe is a realistic approach to irregular migration worldwide? And what do you think would be an ideal solution to human smuggling?

P.T.: These are the types of questions I always try to avoid, in part because people have radically different interpretations of “realistic” and “ideal solution.” The “solutions” question can be particularly dangerous, because it often means tacitly accepting someone else’s framing of the “problem.” When European policymakers ask me what they can do to combat migrant smuggling, for example, they aren’t actually interested in any solution that means taking in more migrants or making migration easier for prospective migrants.

As we say in the book, smugglers exist because in the world we have created, tens of millions of people have deemed them necessary in order to live safe, productive lives. They are the supply in a time of unprecedented demand. The solution to human smuggling, therefore, is to render them unnecessary. For refugees, that would mean providing safe, legal channels for them to reach safety and to escape scenarios of indefinite, protracted displacement. And for economic migrants, that would mean providing more safe and legal opportunities for migration while committing to making the world a radically more equitable place across the globe.

Now, if you do believe that political or security imperatives demand hard borders and restrictions on movement, then you need to accept that human smugglers are going to exist. That’s the tradeoff. People need to and want to move, and restricting their movement means that smugglers will step in to provide services that allow them to reach safety and opportunity. But even within this framing, policymakers and law enforcement officials could adopt a “do no harm” approach. That is, European policymakers could consider if a given policy is likely to put migrants in danger or empower the most exploitative actors within the migrant smuggling economy. If the answer is yes, and it almost always is unless the policy is coupled with actions that credibly engage the drivers of migration and displacement, then moral imperatives might dictate that the policy be discarded.

That’s not a solution, but it would so much better than the status quo.

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Suggested by Public Anthropologist – Searching for a Better Life

Searching for a Better Life. Growing Up in the Slums of Bangkok by Sorcha Mahony is an engaging but highly readable ethnography of youth in Thailand’s capital.

What does searching for a better life mean for those struggling to get by in a rapidly developing and globalizing economy? How do they try to fulfil their dreams? And how do they deal with the outcomes and side effects of their endeavours?

By avoiding sensationalism and by penetrating the everyday dimension of a group of slum dwellers in Bangkok, Mahony develops a reflection along three main axes: living the teenage life, doing the right thing, and forging the future. These translate into forms of engagement in global cultural practices, in local cultural practices, and in educational and economic activity designed to reduce hardship and improve material standards of living

As searching for a better life is currently a dominant concept on the global level, this book is a welcome contribution to scholarly and public debates on inequality and struggles for change.

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Suggested by Public Anthropologist – A World of Babies

Today’s suggested book is A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Eight Societies, edited by Alma Gottlieb and Judy DeLoache. With a first edition published in 2000 and widely read, the almost entirely new, updated edition of A World of Babies confirms the authors capacity to merge ethnography and informed research with original and accessible writing.

Simply put it, the editors explain that the primary aim of the book “is to illustrate how childcaring customs of any community, however peculiar and unnatural they may appear to an outsider, make sense when understood within the context of that society, as well as within its broader geopolitical context. Childcare practices vary so much across time and space precisely because they are firmly embedded in divergent physical, economic, and cultural realities.”

The book also addresses the challenges that poverty and globalization pose for parents. A good example of public scholarship.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

 

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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

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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.