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Breathing as Politics

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Casolare del Pensare

June 20th

 

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

 

 

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Volunteering, care and the self in a Chinese metropolis

Charlotte Bruckermann:

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

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

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

Friederike Fleischer:

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

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

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

Charlotte:

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

Friederike:

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

Charlotte:

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

Friederike:

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

Charlotte:

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

Friederike:

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

Charlotte:

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

Friederike:

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

Charlotte:

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

 

References

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

Drafted on 6 June 2020  

Follow us on Twitter @AGPublicAnthro and Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acknowledgments

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

Nasima Selim and Judith Albrecht

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

Spokespersons, Working Group Public Anthropology

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Public Anthropologist Award 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Suggested by Public Anthropologist: On an Empty Stomach

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BW = Bjorn Westgard

AG = Alma Gottlieb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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Snake Oil: A Memoir on the Rise of ‘Trafficking’

When future historians try to understand what ‘trafficking’ meant in the first 20 years of the 21st century, I hope this essay of mine gives them pause. This is a memoir recording how my questions about migration from 25 years ago coincided with the rise of a thing called trafficking as a major social issue.

Snake Oil

Swindle, chicanery, skullduggery, con. There’s no one perfect word to describe how trafficking came to be hailed as one of the great problems of our time. Excess in rhetoric has known no bounds, with campaigners saying theirs is the new civil-rights movement and claiming there are more people in slavery today than at any time in human history, amongst ever-intensifying hyperbole.

And there was me thinking it was about folks wanting to leave home to see if things might be better elsewhere.

The outcry had begun in insider-circles when I stumbled onto the scene in the mid-1990s, but I didn’t know the lingo or even what ideology was. Novels were my reading, not social theory. I hadn’t ‘studied’ feminism but felt myself to be part of a women’s movement since the early 1960s. I believed I was asking reasonable questions about a puzzling social phenomenon and refused to be fobbed off with explanations that made no sense. My trajectory as a thinker happened to coincide with a piece of governmental legerdemain that switched the topic of conversation from human mobility and migration to organised crime, like peas in a shell game.

At the time I was thinking about how so many, when faced with adversity, decide to try life in new places. I was not specially disrespectful of laws, but, like most migrants, didn’t feel that crossing borders without paper permission was a criminal act. I had no preconceived notions about prostitution; the women I knew who sold sex, poor and less poor, understood what they were doing. For a while I had a job in an AIDS-prevention project in the Caribbean and was sent to visit parts of the island known for women’s migrations to Europe, where they would work as live-in maids or prostitutes. I visited small rural houses where daughters living abroad were money-sending heroes. At a film showing migrant women being beaten up by Amsterdam police, campesina audiences scoffed: their friends and relations in the Netherlands told the opposite story. A funding proposal I worked up for improving the experiences of migrants was returned with everything crossed out except ‘psychological help for returned traumatised victims’, an element I’d never included in the first place.

At a daylong event in Santo Domingo that was organised by black bargirls who called themselves sex workers, I sat in the last row. After a series of testimonies by the women and expositions by local legal experts, a speaker appeared who was said to have flown in from Venezuela. Addressing herself to the women in the first row she said ‘You have been deceived. You are not sex workers; you are prostituted women’.

I was horrified: How could she be so rude to her hosts? Someone said she was a member of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, but I didn’t know what that meant. From my place at the back I couldn’t see the bargirls’ reaction, but no angry words or protest ensued, perhaps because at that somewhat formal event a certain middle-class respect held sway.

A couple of years later, working in Miami as a secretary, I got on the Internet. When I finally learned how to search properly, I connected to a forum of escorts and activists who seemed to be on my wavelength about selling sex. Advocates of rights, they spoke about their personal experiences, and while they didn’t share the migration context, their feelings about this livelihood were the same as those of migrant women.

So now I was really puzzled: Where did the disparity of ideas about prostitution come from? What was the uproar about? What about the women I knew? No one was talking about migrants. When I set out to read about them, I found nothing at the public library.

To cut the story short, I ended up in a Master’s programme in something called International Education, which led to my first visit to a university library, call-number for prostitution in hand. Books with this number stretched from the top shelf to the bottom and up and down again into the distance. Beginning at the first book I began to read, but it didn’t take long for the books to seem indistinguishable. I began to riffle though tables of contents and key chapters, looking for discussions of my common-sense questions. When I found nothing, I wondered how there could be so many books so short on actual information. No one like my friends was ever mentioned, migrant or not. Something strange was going on.

For fieldwork purposes I proposed a short ethnographic stint in Spain, where I’ve often lived, amongst migrant women selling sex. One application for funding got me onto a shortlist, but at the interview by a committee, a political science professor slapped my proposal impatiently. ‘These women’, he jeered. ‘How do they get there?’ ‘In airplanes’, I replied.

My limited but grounded experience was whole discourses away from how such academics had begun to talk. Later I was told he was acquainted with Kathleen Barry, whose books hating prostitution had figured in my reading.

This was my first experience of bias based on my having framed the subject wrong: rather than Migrant Women Selling Sex, my proposal should have been titled Trafficked Women. I know this now, but at the time I was only mystified.

Soon after, I was invited to speak at an event for International Women’s Day to be held in the community centre of a small New England town. Someone had to drive me hours through heavy snow to get there, but upon arrival we were told my name had been removed from the agenda. Some influential person, probably an academic, had been outraged that I’d been invited, but I never met them, knew their name or received an apology. This was my second experience of bias against my way of thinking.

After that, I lost count.

In 1998, I was invited to join the Human Rights Caucus at meetings to draft protocols to the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime. My ideas were welcome to this group, but I said no, because I still believed there was a misunderstanding. I thought there must be women I hadn’t met who could be understood through this concept of trafficking, and since I wasn’t studying them I saw no reason to get involved.

But as time went on and I presented my work here and there, I realised we were all talking about the same thing: women who leave home and make a living selling sex, in a variety of circumstances. But where I was describing how they try to take control of their lives, others were denying them any part in their fate. In the process of defining women who sell sex as victims, all differences in experience were being erased. I considered the result to be the antithesis of interesting and meaningful intellectual work.

I had set out to understand the disconnect between what I saw around me, amongst my friends and increasing numbers of acquaintances who were selling sex and how they were discussed by outsiders. At the end of the Master’s degree I had inklings of what was going on but hadn’t answered my original question: Why were women who opted to sell sex such a source of discord? And the corollary: Why were so many vowing to save women from prostitution?

Rather reluctantly, I pursued these as a doctoral student in Cultural Studies in England, but I spent several years in Spain doing the field work. My research topic was not migrant women, since there was no mystery to me about what they were doing. Instead, my subject was those social actors who professed to help migrants and sex workers, in governmental, NGO and activist projects. They were my mystery. When I started in 1999, none of them were talking about trafficking, but polemic about prostitution was ubiquitous.

In 2000, the editor of a migration-oriented journal in Madrid invited me to write about migrants who sold sex, sin polémica (without polemic), because by now outraged ranting was the only tone heard in public. By this point I was observing in a consciously anthropological fashion, so her requirement suited me. The resulting article, Trabajar en la industria del sexo (Working in the sex industry), led to a high official’s infiltrating me into an event held by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, to spite an abolitionist rival. Although I had no intention of making my presence known, I did attend, and for one long day listened to the ravings of some of the world’s most well-known anti-prostitutionists.

I won’t forget how Janice Raymond narrowed her eyes and dropped her voice when denouncing those who disagree with her fanatical abolitionism: ‘There might even be some of them in this room’, she said.

I backed against the wall where I was standing, wondering if she knew I was there. Later they trooped into an elegant salon for smug feasting on elegant canapés and wines, inside the hyper-bourgeois Círculo de Bellas Artes.

When the Palermo Protocols were published I saw the human-rights group had managed to limit the damage, but I was glad I had decided to stay away from meetings to draft them. While trying to understand the humanitarian impulse to ‘help’ the poor I had appreciated Cynthia Enloe’s work showing how ‘womenandchildren’ are treated as an indistinguishable mass of helpless objects. Now here these objects were, enshrined in a trafficking protocol that scarcely acknowledged women as migrants, while migrant men exercised agency in the smuggling protocol.

It was soon obvious to insiders that the situating of migration- and sexwork-issues within the ‘organised crime’ framework was a fatal event that would determine the nature of all conversation afterwards. Many who believed distinctions between smuggling and trafficking could be maintained and the trafficking concept kept within bounds soon threw up their hands. Ever more activities were said to be trafficking, causing numbers of presumed victims to skyrocket.

My counter-narrative formed part of a calm and conventional report on migrant women’s jobs in Spain carried out by a collective of Madrid sociologists glad to have someone to do the sex-work section (2001). A few years later Gakoa published my various writings so far in a book called Trabajar en la industria del sexo, y otros tópicos migratorios (2001, Working in the sex industry, and other migration topics). I was reaching an audience skeptical of the news they were being fed in mainstream media about migrant women.

Trafficking became a big-time crime issue not because of its truth but because it served governments’ purposes. The interminably warlike USA loved a reason to go after bad men of the world on the excuse of saving innocent women. European states got justification to tighten borders against unwanted migrants. The UK could pretend it was going to be the new leader of anti-slavery campaigning just as their empire comes to an end. The UN was authorized to set up numerous new programs and initiatives. A range of other governmental entities benefited; Interpol and many police services were able to expand to new areas of ill-informed expertise. And then the NGO sector began to sign up to this infantilisation of women, just as if we were living hundreds of years ago, when East End social workers set out to raise the fallen women of London. Even Hollywood actors jumped on the bandwagon as ambassadors claiming to be ‘voices for the voiceless’. The urge to Rescue was mainstreamed.

Meanwhile, I finished the PhD and put the thesis away. For several years I ignored a contract I had signed with Zed Books to publish, because I’d answered my own questions and didn’t imagine others would be interested. Eventually I changed my mind and edited the thesis to become accessible to more readers. When Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labor Markets and the Rescue Industry came out in 2007, it spoke to a growing social controversy and, rather than die the usual quick death of even quasi-academic volumes, has continued to sell, as relevant now as it was 12 years ago – alas. This was the birth of the term Rescue Industry. Mainstream media were interested; I wrote for some established news sources.

By 2010, when the BBC World Service invited me to speak at a televised debate on trafficking at an event sponsored by Madame Mubarak in Egypt, anti-trafficking had taken over the airwaves. But 50 minutes called ‘debate’ needed drama, and so far the panel was composed of guests all singing the same Rescue tune. I demurred: Why would I subject myself to such nonsense? Everyone would hate me – No. Then they said I could bring a friend, and I gave in, ending up on a stage in the Temple of Karnak. I managed to keep a straight face at the piffle flowing forth until Siddharth Kara’s pretence of expertise made me laugh out loud, causing Hollywood actors Mira Sorvino and Ashton Kutcher to rise from their seats in the audience to deplore me and deplore the BBC for having me. The meaning of the word ‘debate’ had escaped them. Symbolic, really.

Nothing that has happened since has changed my mind about the Protocols. A complex situation was deliberately obscured by governmental actors who set up a straw man so frightening scads of educated liberal folks were bamboozled, and through heavy financing and institutionalisation of programmes the fraud continues. I do not refer here to what is called moral panic, though that helps explain how the general public got caught up in the frenzy. I’m referring to the cynical selection of a fake tragic and terrifying cause as governmental policy.

Mechanisms to frame policy based on lies are not uncommon: a similarly egregious recent case involved ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that didn’t exist. And just as hardcore war was waged based on that lie, softcore belligerence has been endlessly launched at migrants and women who sell sex, via the claim that everyone who facilitates a trip is a criminal, everyone who buys a trip is a victim and every prostitute must be rescued. Embarrassing mainstream pundits like the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof elide all kinds of commercial sex with trafficking, in an undisguised campaign against prostitution that allows them to take imperialistic jaunts such as live-tweeting brothel raids in Cambodia (2012), shenanigans moral entrepreneurs carry out in an effort to look like heroes.

The actual earthly problems behind all this derive from poor economies and job markets that spur people to go on the move in search of new places to work. Sometimes home-conditions are direr than usual; sometimes there is gang conflict, war or natural disaster. At times societies are so unjust that those persecuted for beliefs or personal characteristics feel compelled to abandon them. In all these cases, when they illegally move into other countries, anti-foreigner sentiment, underground economies and social conflict flourish.

Which alternative policy-frameworks might have described this complexity, and which policy responses could have ensued, had honesty prevailed? In countries of origin, better distribution of wealth via economies that provide jobs with wages that can be lived on. In destination countries, an overhaul of government accounting so that more jobs are included in the formal sector, coupled with migration policy that allows more work-permits allotted for jobs not defined as ‘highly skilled’.

There are challenges here, but the ideas stick to the ground where ordinary people pay other ordinary people to help them travel, get across borders without visas and get paid jobs without holding residence or work permits. This includes women who opt to at least try selling sex.

Which mountebanks sold the snake oil first? Who suggested laws against trafficking were the way to solve migration problems? Moral entrepreneurs who cry about wicked foreigners are never scarce in times of stress. By the 1990s, scare-tactics increasingly turned to bogus estimations about illegal migration. Statisticians, tech-personnel and macroeconomists professed to provide data on how many criminals move how many victims around, with fancy new graphics and obfuscating equations.

None could have any real idea how many undocumented migrants work in informal-sector employment; they are extrapolating and estimating, often based on crude and random police reports. More recently, projects of surveillance using algorithms claim to tell us how many females are snapped up by sex-predators on the web. This disinformation was and continues to be promoted by a variety of opportunists for their own ends. The nonsense appears to have no end, as even certain emojis used in social media are banned as prurient.

It is not difficult to understand why politicians and government employees decided to buy the miracle product of trafficking: they stood to gain money and power. Trafficking narratives present a struggle between Good and Evil in which masculine men are protagonists, and a women’s auxiliary takes up the veil of Rescue. As time goes on, terrorism and war are mentioned more often, with victims a kind of collateral damage that justifies more programming and more police.

Ten years into the skullduggery I had a request for an interview from a young woman studying journalism and wanted to support sex workers’ rights. We met in a small old pub in Islington where, after the usual niceties, she put her question in a pleading tone. ‘Are you sure it’s not true?’ ‘What?’ ‘There aren’t millions of women trafficked into sex-slavery?’

I pointed towards the busy City Road. ‘Do I think lots of women are chained to radiators in flats out there? No. But I’m sure there are women who considered that coming to London to sell sex was a feasible way to solve their problems, and some will have paid a lot of money for help getting here’.

I have since 2008 done public education from a blog and other social media. By 2013 the disconnect between what mainstream news was feeding the public and what I was saying led to so many requests for clarification that I published Dear Students of Sex Work & Trafficking. I deconstruct Rescue-Industry claims, debunk research methods and statistics and track the progress of Law-and-Order projects to surveil sex workers and other undocumented folk.

In the 17th year after the Protocols I published a novel, hoping for a better way to tell the truths underneath bamboozling policy. Set in Spain amongst migrants and smugglers, many undocumented and selling sex, The Three-Headed Dog is a fiction version of Sex at the Margins, to be enjoyed as story and glimpse of reality.

In the 20 years since the Protocols were published, nothing has improved for migrants, sex workers or teen runaways. Things have picked up greatly for smugglers, though.

Works cited

Agustín, L. (2000). Trabajar en la industria del sexo. Ofrim suplementos, Número 6, dedicado a Mercado laboral e inmigración.

Agustín, L. (2001). Mujeres migrantes ocupadas en servicios sexuales. In Colectivo IOÉ (Ed.), Mujer, inmigración y trabajo (pp. 647–716). Madrid: IMSERSO.

Agustín, L. (2005). Trabajar en la industria del sexo, y otros tópicos migratorios. San Sebastián: Gakoa.

Agustín, L. (2007a). Sex at the margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed Books.

Agustín, L. (2007b). What’s Wrong with the Trafficking Crusade? The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Agustín, L. 2012a. A man of moral sentiments. Review of Siddharth Kara, Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, H-Net, February.

Agustín, L. 2012b. The soft side of imperialism. Counterpunch, 25 January.

Agustín, L. 2013. Dear students of sex work & trafficking. 25 March.

Agustín, L. 2017. The three-headed dog. Amazon, ASIN: B01N2V79UC.

BBC World Trafficking Debate. 2010. The full videos have been removed, probably because of the Mubaraks’ disgrace, but the event and line-up are visible.

Highlights of the debate are available, thanks to Carol Leigh.

Many of my other publications, including those published in Spain when I was living in Madrid and Granada, can be got from the top menu of this website.

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A somewhat different version of this piece appeared in a specal issue of the Journal of Human Trafficking, Palermo at 20, written at the invitation of Elzbieta Goździak.

 

 

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Reflections of a Coronavirus Shut-In

As I write this today I am doing my best at “sheltering-in-place” with Mike in our California bungalow on Walnut Street in Berkeley, California. Has it been six weeks that we are in house arrest? Time and space are so transmogrified that it feels like living on a spaceship or a lifeboat. I don’t grasp the rules. Am I a potential threat or a potential victim of the current global plague? Or both?

The last dream of mobility was in mid March. Our suitcases were packed with clothes, books, games, and various delicacies ready to ride 500 miles south of the border to Riverside, California to visit our eldest daughter, Jennifer (a UC Riverside University professor of colonial history and the genocide of indigenous peoples in Mexico), her husband, Santos, completing his PhD dissertation on the Boer War and its role in the creation of “races” in South Africa, and our grandsons, two young teenagers, Salvador, Dito, and our eldest grandson, Santiago, who like his graduating classmates had to bail out of Oberlin College for his final semester that would have ended in a glorious graduation ceremony. It was Santiago who called us to stop our van and stay put in Berkeley: “Grandma,” he said on his cell phone, “Don’t you and Grandpa take the risk. Don’t get in trouble with the highway police who will stop you and ask why you are breaking the governor’s order to stay at home.”

So we turned around and obeyed the new surrealist reality and its rules. How does an active ethnographer deal with immobility? Not too well. Boredom was followed by claustrophobia and finally to an attack of cabin fever: “Get me out of here!” Virtual communications are for the Zoomer generation; the graduating students whose real time lives have been upended. As we hunker down during our forced hibernation, even the cell phone calls and emails become fewer as there is almost nothing to say that might booster morale.

Yes, we are the privileged ones. Our complaints are pitiful. We miss eating out in our favorite restaurants and cafes in the “gourmet ghetto” of North Berkeley. Now we talk, as my mother always did, about “food” itself. We scrabble for groceries. “I got a large can of pinto beans and a box of oatmeal,” my husband said much to my dismay.

“I had two cans of pinto beans, but I gave one to the woman behind me with three little children.” Ok, I got it. Later I sneak out to grocery stores wearing my homemade mask, respecting the 6-foot separation between the chalked lines, and enter the Frey, the carnival, the hustle to grab the last piece of fresh fish and raspberries. But truth is told I sometimes go on the grocery line without looking for anything more than to be next to people.

We ZOOM-In and email-out to keep in touch with family and friends both near and far. A few have been infected; many more are grieving the deaths in their community. Their struggles make it all the more difficult to make peace with the shut-in role while doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and other “essential workers” bravely put themselves in risk. Why aren’t anthropologists seen as essential workers?

It is also difficult to write and concentrate in semi-isolation. But one thinks of Nelson Mandela who managed during his twenty-seven years of confinement and solitary confinement in prison to define a model for the coming democratic South Africa. Or Anne Frank, writing her diary in an attic. For the first time in my life I feel totally useless, and caged.

Slowly, we have to accept our more modest selves. The epidemic is us. Putting on those suffocating masks before leaving the house is a little act of care: I am doing this for you just as you are doing this for me. We have to abide the “hunkering down” in the hope that fewer bodies will be dead by the cruel virus the next morning. We have to learn to live with uncertainty. How long will this last? Will I have the patience? Will I lose my mind? Pulled by social gravity, I take my time sauntering home like an urban flâneur except that there is almost no one out and little to see as so many shops have emptied out and the signs that announced, “Closed Until April 7” have been replaced by signs reading just “Closed.”

Social distancing may be a lifesaver, but it feels like apartheid. We’d love to hug our neighbors, but we can only mimic our desires with body gestures. We bow, we open our arms, and we try to put a twinkle in our eyes, and to carry an invisible smile under our tight masks. The animal world is also shaken: squirrels are skinny and nervous and the birds are quieter during this silent spring except for the “crow conferences” along the telephone wires in front of my window. The latest crow conference took place two weeks ago. On that day the crows were more raucous than usual and their screeching seemed on the verge of mental breakdown. What was the hysteria about? Was it the lack of pizza crumbs and other tidbits on the empty sidewalks? I wasn’t surprised when the crows disappeared the next day not to return the next day or all the days since.

 Earth is Sleeping

While sitting in Berkeley’s former junk site now the restored and beautiful César Chávez Park the rain stopped and the sky opened to a brilliant blue sky amidst a few fluffy white clouds so close one could almost touch them. The air was so clean I could taste its sweetness. Something was wrong: no pollution. With cars and trucks off the road the lungs of the air were recovering. My friend Bernadette Track from Taos, New Mexico told me about the “special period” between late winter and early spring when the Pueblo is in lockdown “while the earth is sleeping.”

Bernadette often calls to remind me of what I should be doing. “Go outside tonight when the moon is new. Be calm.” She said that the elder men of Taos Pueblo had gone deep into the kivas where they are fasting, sweating, and praying to the earth. “We have a lot to amend for the heedless who trample the ground, the ones who don’t know that the earth is alive, that it lives, it breathes, and it needs to rest and to sleep.” During this sacred time the men descend into the kiva, as many as forty of them together. “Should they be so close to each other?” I ask. Bernadette replies: “They are like monks in the kivas. They are still and silent. They cannot argue, they cannot have sex, they cannot work with an ax, and they cannot kill anything. When they come out of the kiva they will be dressed like black bees coming out of a hole.” They keep their monkish life, Bernadette told me, until next fall when they will walk to the top of Taos mountain in gratitude.

Bernadette’s stories remind me of Jon Sobrino, a Basque Jesuit priest who gave three challenges to the Americas: to fix the unbearable and untenable situation of women, especially poor women; to value the great cultural legacy of Native Americans; and to love Mother Earth.

When the crows return, I will take a deep breath.

Maybe then, God willing, it will be over.

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The “real” transformation of migrant smuggling in the time of COVID-19

As COVID-19 continues to spread around the world, allegations of migrant smuggling networks evolving, changing, and undergoing drastic transformations as a result of the pandemic are starting to emerge. Claims of this kind are not new. In fact, assertions of smuggling undergoing Darwinian transformations tend to follow the aftermath of border closures, ramped-up immigration enforcement controls, environmental catastrophes, civil war, military conflict and the like. The leitmotiv remains surprisingly unchanged amid changing upheavals and tragedies: migrant smuggling is evolving from a cottage industry into one dominated by highly complex transnational criminal networks.

While successfully peddled among anxious publics by law enforcement and policy makers, this recurring representation has consistently failed to account for the available empirical evidence. A plethora of ethnographic studies have dismissed the claim that crises and emergencies empower human smuggling networks by turning them into veritable criminal conglomerates that systematically enslave, kidnap and deceive masses of vulnerable and desperate migrants, especially women and children. On the contrary, a growing body of work has shown how most facilitators of irregular or clandestine migration come together for profit or partner with others on demand, working directly with migrants on a “pay-as-you-go” basis. In other words, those who we typically refer to as smugglers generally perform specific, single tasks conducive of a clandestine journey – transportation, cooking, housing, trekking across a stretch of the trajectory, etc. – for which they receive a nominal compensation to address their personal needs. They rely on their own expertise and resources, which are often quite limited and reflective of their own precarity. In fact, many facilitators are themselves migrants or asylum seekers who became stranded or unable to complete the journeys on their own.

It is presumable that things will not change radically as the pandemic unfolds. There are two dimensions in smuggling facilitation that will be important to follow in the weeks and months to come, which will give us an indication of the response of smuggling networks to the current epidemic. Both are related to the kinds of interactions that emerge among groups that rely on the same geographies in the exercise of criminal activities. We would like to examine them here.

One is market diversification – that is, the notion that actors in a specific market or activity may opt to pursue a different one in order to maximize profits. As we have witnessed in the past, claims of migrant smugglers “venturing” into the smuggling of other commodities or services, or even into radically different activities are commonplace. Our work, however, has emphasized how the protracted precarity of an already precarious group of people often pushes them, rather than into other criminal fields, into activities that lead to their criminalization. Put differently, it is unlikely that given the structure and organization of the market, smuggling facilitators seeking to temporally cope with market adjustments as a result of COVID-19 will morph into criminal networks. On the contrary, it is more likely that increased controls and enforcement makes them and the migrants they transport more prone to detection, apprehension and criminalization.

Why does this matter? Claims concerning diversification, rather than tackling organized criminal activity, have relied on the notion that people can only venture into other criminal spaces. This is, however, hardly the case among people already facing conditions of precarity, which limited resources affect the likelihood of market expansion. Even in the event the possibility of venturing into other markets exists, that is not necessarily in line with what the person may want to or be able to do. For example, Italian cigarette smugglers were reluctant to go into migrant smuggling in the 1990s. To them, losing a person to drowning would never be the same as losing tobacco, which could be easily replaced. In the US, women who worked housing migrants in their homes would return to low-paying jobs in the service industry during times of low demand, rather than venturing into markets like drug trafficking, which carried more stigma and higher risk in case of detection. As changes and restrictions to mobility as a result of COVID-19 responses are lifted, continue or increase, it is also likely that other criminalized actors and the goods and/or services they peddle gain prevalence, and that struggles over territory, clients and resources emerge. And yet, it will be those operating individually or casually in the facilitation of irregular migration, along with migrants themselves, who will be most at risk of being impacted by territorial and market struggles coupled with COVID-19 responses and their migration restrictions and controls, given the disposability of their lives.

A second notion is market convergence. With the term, the relevant literature broadly refers to the coming together of seemingly different criminal markets. Researchers and other commentators have written about convergence as related to migrant smuggling. In the case of the Central America- Mexico-US migration corridor for example, the alleged takeover of migrant smuggling by drug trafficking organizations is taken as a fact. Similar imbrications have also been postulated between smuggling and terrorist organizations in the Middle East. We do not deny the existence of multiple interactions and collaborations among groups. Yet many claims are often based on sensationalist, graphic and even racist depictions that provide scant and simplistic details of the long-standing interactions between transporters and traders along specific geographies, and more specifically of how state security projects have shaped their actions. There is significant evidence of how both state and non-state actors often impose tax-like fees to groups of lesser rank seeking to operate within their specific territory. Arrangements of this kind have been documented as taking place in migrant smuggling on the US-Mexico border, the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahel. Imposing payments and regulations, however, does not amount to groups merging or coming structurally together. Yet the dynamics concerning interactions between multiple groups sharing increasingly policed geographies pose interesting questions for the future, especially if migration dynamics and restrictions related to the COVID-19 response last long or become permanent.

The unspeakable stories of pain and tragedy migrants endure might tempt us to accept at face value the claim that as the direct result of the current pandemic, human smuggling groups will increasingly become more complex, organized and technologically advanced – a notion often summed up with/by the term “evolution.” There is, however, scant empirical data to back up these claims. Here we argue the opposite. If the COVID-19 response brings about a transformation in migrant smuggling, this will not be towards increased complexity and structure, but rather towards further individualization, fragmentation and disposability. We recognize that the pandemic might play a role in the adaptation or form of criminalized practices and on the modus operandi of groups. Yet, we argue that the real transformation of illicit markets lies in the progressive precarization of their actors. In other words, rather than organized, structured networks, we see the further proliferation of individual actors in hyper-fragmented markets. These, contrary to the dominant narrative of criminal networks as off-limits and closed, present weak or altogether inexistent barriers to participation, which yet provide scant if any paths towards the social or economic mobility of its participants. If at all, solutions to counter the spread of crime, and in particular of migrant smuggling in the time of COVID-19 should incorporate alternatives to reduce the precarity of all its actors, and their likelihood of being disposed or discarded through state-sponsored mechanisms like border and immigration controls.

 

 

 

 

 

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Public Anthropologist Conference – May 8

May 8, 2020

VENUE: BERGEN GLOBAL, JEKTEVIKSBAKKEN 31, BERGEN

12:50  Coffee and welcome

13:00  Introduction, Antonio De Lauri (CMI)

13:15  Costs of War: A Usable Model for Public Intellectual Work, Catherine Lutz (Brown University)

13:45  A Public Conscience? Peace at a War Museum, Tobias Kelly (University of Edinburgh)

14:15  Social Anthropologists and their Publics, Shalini Randeria (Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna)

14:45  Q&A

15:30  Refreshments

The event is moderated by Public Anthropologist’s Editor-in-Chief Antonio De Lauri. All welcome!

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Harmony ideology at The Hague: Myanmar before the International Court of Justice

In what ways can Laura Nader’s concept of “harmony ideology” (1990) help us shed light on an ongoing international legal dispute over genocide accusations? In her village ethnography from rural southern Mexico of the 1960s, Nader demonstrated that Talean Zapotec judges were “active in articulating a harmony model for dispute resolution” in order to prevent the Mexican government from interfering in the relative autonomy of their villages. Displays of harmony had originally been promoted by Spanish Christian missionaries and were eventually customized by the Taleans, argues Nader, thereby becoming “a counterhegemonic response by the indigenes to more than five hundred years of dealing with colonization” (2002: 29). She later applied this concept to American alternative dispute resolution (ADR) where she detected a shift away “from a concern with justice to a concern with harmony and efficiency, and from a concern with right and wrong to a concern with therapeutic treatment” (2002: 139). Claims of harmony, thus, were on the one hand revealed as a weapon of the weak, and on the other, a tool of governance that blocked the most vulnerable members of society from seeking legal recourse.

Far from the Mexican periphery in space and time, in the currently pending case of “The Republic of the Gambia vs Myanmar” that was heard at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Dec. 10-12, 2019, the spectre of instrumental harmony rears its head again. Speaking as a member of her country’s delegation, Myanmar’s “Agent”, Aung San Suu Kyi left the more legalistic arguments to the specialists for international law, and challenged the legitimacy of the case on the basis of harmony ideology. Similar to Nader’s Talean Zapotec, Aung San Suu Kyi drew on a historical legacy of the colonial encounter to account for Myanmar’s contemporary problems. She argued that the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, should refrain from interfering in Myanmar’s domestic affairs. She depicted her country as “less materially resourceful” and lacking “sustainable development”. This is a plea to be granted special considerations for being underprivileged, but the “harmony ideology” in evidence at the ICJ was not a weapon of the weak, as Nader had it for the Talean Zapotec. It was wielded by a powerful politician who was backing a military justice system “at home” and a constitution that seeks to cement that status quo; the purpose was to avert the attribution of “the crimes of crimes” onto Myanmar’s army, and, by extension, the entire nation and herself. In short, Aung San Suu Kyi acted as if her country were a southern Mexican village, needing protection from illegitimate legal governance that interfered with its internal affairs, while at the same time embodying the very state apparatus that is now internationally accused of having committed genocide against its own population.

Background

The Gambia had initiated proceedings against Myanmar at the ICJ on November 11, 2019, with the support of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Their high-profile team of lawyers asked the court to hold Myanmar accountable for having committed genocide and to lay down “provisional measures” to prevent Myanmar from further committing genocide against the ethnic group of Muslim Rohingya living in the coastal Rakhine state which borders on Bangladesh. Myanmar has consented to the court considering the issue; this focuses on the question whether the atrocities committed by the Myanmar army since 2016, which led to hundreds of thousands fleeing their homes and thousands losing their lives, were carried out with “genocidal intent.” The ICJ has no jurisdiction to try individuals accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity, but it can rule on the issue of genocide based on the 1948 Genocide Convention. Since its inception, it has decided only once that “genocidal intent” had been the case, namely in regard to the massacre of Srebrenica (Bosnia and Herzegovina v Serbia and Montenegro 2007). The stakes for a case of genocide to be made are thus extremely high. While the facts are largely uncontested, the court “requires proof at a high level of certainty appropriate of the seriousness of the allegation” – a formulation which resembles that of criminal proceedings where evidence “beyond reasonable doubt” needs to be presented. William Schabas, who is part of Myanmar’s team of lawyers and an international expert on genocide, has argued in a publication that this approach “seems wise” given the fact that it “brings with it a terrible stigma, not to mention potentially enormous financial liabilities” (Schabas 2007: 108).

No other than Aung San Suu Kyi, the acting “state counsellor” and foreign minister of Myanmar, is heading the Myanmar delegation at The Hague. She is the only member in her team without any legal qualifications. Officially acting as Agent, she came, as we have argued elsewhere, in her role as “Mother Suu”, as her supporters call her, and as the daughter of Aung San, the founder of the army who died as a martyr shortly before Burma gained independence in 1948. In Myanmar, she continues to be viewed as an icon of democracy, who sacrificed her personal happiness for the nation, spending fifteen years under house arrest between 1989 and 2010, before returning to politics with her party National League For Democracy (NLD) and winning the elections in 2015. Both Judith Beyer and Soe Lin Aung have shown why this focus on her as an individual is analytically barely productive. Although atrocities against Muslim Rohingya were committed under her government already in 2016, a large part of the population – across religious and ethnic divides – continue to bestow all hopes on her. “We stand with Aung San Suu Kyi”-rallies have been held throughout the country in support of her appearance at the ICJ and Myanmar travel companies have arranged special offers that allow her supporters to travel to the Netherlands. That she opened Myanmar’s first response to the arguments The Gambia had brought forward heightened attention both in Myanmar and across the world.

Domestic accountability instead of international law

In her address to the court, Aung San Suu Kyi emphasized that her country was already doing its utmost to bring perpetrators of crimes to justice, including army soldiers. She warned of international interference in Myanmar’s domestic affairs at this crucial point, saying “there are those who wish to externalize accountability for alleged war crimes committed in Rakhine, almost automatically, without proper reflection”. Only if domestic accountability fails, she argues, is it warranted to intervene: “A rush to externalize accountability may undermine professionals in domestic criminal justice agencies”. She embedded this position firmly within a narrative of Myanmar still struggling with the legacy of British colonialism, particularly with the long-term effects of the border demarcation between Burma and India in 1937, a border than today runs between Myanmar and Bangladesh.

She spoke of “cycles of violence” that were set in motion with this demarcation which she specified as “Muslim-Buddhist intercommunal violence”. Her usage of the category of “community” was uncritical, but “community” is a term that demarcates an ethno-religious group and in this context separates “Muslims” from “Buddhists” and also from “Hindus” and thus laid the ground for divisions along the lines of ethnicity and religion. Her country is “striving to cope with the burden of unhappy legacies”, she argued, again hinting at British colonialism being the actual source of these “cycles of conflict.” She thereby sought to diminish any demand that could possibly be issued by Western countries at this moment, emphasizing that the court’s action would be “feeding the flames of an extreme polarization in the context of Rakhine” that would “harm the values of peace and harmony in Myanmar”. She thereby opened up an opposition between the “interest” of the court on the one hand and the necessary “spiritual mindset of unity” that pervades in Myanmar on the other. Even speaking in a “language that contributes to extreme polarization also amounts to hate narratives”, she argued, polarization that would likely be achieved already by using the word “Rohingya”, which any Myanmar state official avoids. The state and its institutions insist on using the term “Bengali” instead to insinuate that these people are foreign and belong elsewhere. On social media, Aung San Suu Kyi-supporters from Myanmar expressed their disappointment and confusion that William Schabas, ostensibly on their side, said the word a few times – but he was only quoting other documents. Aung San Suu Kyi concluded that “[i]t is a moral responsibility of leaders to guard the aspirations of people for harmony and peace” and listed a number of “social cohesion” measures “to promote social harmony among all communities”, among them the encouragement of “interfaith fora”: “We pray the Court to refrain from taking any action that might aggravate the ongoing armed conflict and peace in security in Rakhine … We look to justice as a champion of the reconciliation and harmony that will assure the security and rights of all people”.

Harmony ideology at The Hague

According to Aung San Suu Kyi, not letting institutions in Myanmar do their domestic work in conflict resolution and legal settlement of grievances, speaking about the events in Rakhine state in terms such as genocide, and using the word Rohingya will lead to aggravation of the situation on the ground. She thus wishes for a cordon sanitaire between her country and its ‘internal’ affairs remaining on one side, and global judgment and interference on the other. Harmony here is not only a global value, but is presented as a tool of governance that will, in the long run, have beneficial effects. Of course, these claims and demands would be easier to stomach if not – time and again – the Myanmar military had not been revealed to generally act with impunity. The soldiers who were eventually sent to prison for a massacre committed in September 2017, served less time than the two journalists who documented and brought the crime to light. And it is near inconceivable for any high-ranking generals in Myanmar to ever face charges in court. While the Zapotec might have had effective measures for local dispute resolution and good reasons to keep the state courts at bay, the atrocities committed against the Rohingya and the poor record of Myanmar to police itself suggest that Suu Kyi’s harmony ideology at the ICJ is sorely misplaced.

References

Nader, Laura. 1990. Harmony ideology. Justice and control in a Zapotec mountain village. Stanford University Press.

Nader, Laura. 2002. The life of the law. Anthropological projects. University of California Press.

Schabas, William. 2007. Genocide and the International Court of Justice. Finally, a duty to prevent the crime of crimes. Genocide Studies and Prevention 2(2): 101-122.

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Illumination in Dark Times: David Scott on Stuart Hall

The following interview was recorded at the House of Literature in Oslo on October 15, 2019. The interview has been transcribed by Gard Ringen Høibjerg (INN University College), and edited and amended for clarity by Sindre Bangstad, David Scott and Antonio De Lauri.

Sindre: First of all, David, I am going to cite one of my favorite passages from your own work on the late Stuart Hall (1932-2014). It is a moving tribute that you published already in 2005 in your journal Small Axe, entitled Stuart Hall’s Ethics. What strikes me is that this is in fact poetry. I have actually used it as an epigram in one of my own monographs. You wrote the following there, and this was at a time when Stuart Hall was still alive: “We live in dark times; they are not times that favor forbearance, they do not shelter generosity, they do not encourage receptivity. They are rather obdurate times, cynically, triumphalist and ruthlessly xenophobic times that seem to require new regime of silencing and assimilation. A new regime of prostration, submission and humiliation. Who, looking forward from a generation ago – in the middle of another imperial moment – could have imagined they would be living in a world that looks like this one. But Dark Times, as Hannah Arendt memorably said, need people who can give us illumination, and who calls them forth into the public realm.”

So, in order to talk about beginnings here David, who was your friend Stuart Hall and why does his work matter so much right here, right now?

David: Sindre, you begin with an impossible question. I thought you would begin with rather more elementary questions that would then take us gradually into the heart of the matter. But you begin with very, very large issues. So, let me try and find my way to your question. The passage that you read from was written roundabout in 2003-2004, and it was written for a really important event. Maybe we should begin there. It was the first time that a symposium had been organized at the University of the West Indies, Mona (the Jamaica campus of the University of the West Indies) in honor of Stuart Hall. It was a very telling and significant event, and as significant for Jamaican intellectuals as for Stuart. It was very significant for Stuart and for his relationship to Jamaica. My concern in my lecture (and it was the sort of keynote lecture delivered at the opening of the conference) was to try to present Stuart Hall in as broad a manner as possible—to try to characterize something about the texture of his orientation towards thinking, more so than to try to present the details of his particular conceptions of culture and politics. And so, part of what I wanted to evoke in the passage that you read was the signature way in which Stuart Hall entered conjunctures, as he might have called them, to try to unpack what he thought the dead-ends were, and to try to offer glimpses of alternative ways to think ourselves out of the present dark times. In many ways, that was his modus operandi. What was amazing about the character of the movement of his mind was a refusal to be imprisoned by the dark time of the present: the present was always for him a kind of challenge to unlock, to both re-describe the way in which the present appeared to us, and to re-describe it in such a way that we could see better where the present had come from—what kinds of pasts, and what kinds of pathways from the past, had led to this present. And to do so, moreover, in a way that would enable us to recognize the contingencies and the “constructedness” of the present so that we might think of the possibility of alternative futures. And that capacity, that uncanny capacity to re-describe the present as a way of thinking futurity, was to my mind unique.

Sindre: It is quite clear from Stuart’s own memoir, written with Bill Schwarz and published as Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands in 2017, that he had a sense of profound ambiguity towards his native Jamaica. He was of course born in 1932 in the later stages of British colonialism in Jamaica, and had grown up with the anti-colonial horizon. He describes himself as the proverbial “black sheep” in an elite brown middle class family in colonial Jamaica, with a very troubled relationship with his quite domineering mother, who had Scottish ancestors, and who had imbibed British colonial attitudes. With tragic consequences for Stuart’s own sister, who suffered a mental breakdown over her mother’s refusal to accept her much darker boyfriend. So, in terms of this very ambiguity, can you tell us something about what you have characterized as the Caribbean “problem space,” what kind of work does it do in Stuart’s own work?

David: Before I even attempt to characterize or to describe something of the location of Stuart’s own social and familial background, it needs to be said that Familiar Stranger is a very strange kind of document. It is a very complex ambiguous way of Stuart trying to come to terms with the making of the figure that he encountered later in life, named “Stuart Hall.” And part of that was an attempt to try to spell out, not just for others but also for himself, how it was that someone who came from where he came, the Jamaica of 1930s and 1940s, could have had the kind of impact that he had on intellectual life in Britain from the 1960s to the early years of the 21st century. And not just on Britain, but in many ways the modern Western world. His impact was of course quite large.

It is really important to understand Stuart’s emergence as a youngster in a very particular moment in Jamaica’s cultural political history. He was born in 1932, and he was a child of six or seven when there were major transformative riots in Jamaica, which were part of a regional upsurge of popular struggles in the late 1930s. The Jamaican riots of May and June 1938 are the real beginnings of the nationalist movement for self-determination and independence. They are the beginnings out of which the People’s National Party emerges in September 1938. Although Stuart was a mere child and barely remembered the riots, what he talked about was the terror that the mass of the black Jamaican population on the streets of Kingston in 1938 inspired in his middle-class family. And Stuart’s middle-class family was perhaps atypical in some respects. He was a child of relative privilege, but his family was distinctive in its peculiar antinationalist stance.

Whereas very many other families of that particular social status oriented themselves, or reoriented themselves, in a nationalist direction, his family was very, very conservative: socially, culturally, and politically. They were not sympathetic to the emergence of a discourse of decolonization and certainly antipathetic to the Left, and in particular the Marxist Left that drove the nationalist movement in the 1940s when Stuart was a youngster. But Stuart (as did many of the boys of his social class in that particular period) went to a very particular secondary school, a grammar school called Jamaica College, which certainly had conservative elements, but was also a very intellectually oriented secondary school. And it was a secondary school in which people were talking about the most recent advances in understanding literature, it was a place where Stuart began to read Marx, a place where he discovered Freud. So, it was an intense intellectual center for teenage boys, that provided in some way the idiom in which he began to think self-consciously about politics, about literature, about social life as Jamaica began the process of constitutional decolonization.

Sindre: We also need to talk a little bit about Stuart’s relationship with the Marxist tradition. Because he comes to Britain on a Rhodes scholarship, takes up studies of literature at Oxford University, gets introduced to a leftist intellectual circle which would later coalesce around Universities and Left Review, which later became New Left Review. In those circles there were people like Raphael Samuel, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Charles Taylor. He becomes for a short period the editor of New Left Review before Perry Anderson takes over. So, I think in a profound sense, there is for Stuart Hall an element of the profound significance of the Marxist tradition, but also a rupture with Marxism occasioned by the Suez crisis of 1957 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Later he would describe himself as an independent socialist. Even much later, when he becomes the doyen of cultural studies, one gets the sense that the most virulent attacks come from people who come out of a Marxist tradition, and that this never ceases.

You are probably familiar with this recent book by Perry Anderson, his successor at the New Left Review as an editor. It is entitled The H- Word: The Peripiteia of Hegemony.

Here, Anderson’s argument is basically that Stuart Hall discovers Antonio Gramsci’s English translations in the 1970s. Perry Anderson basically argues that Stuart Hall’s interpretation of Gramsci gets it wrong, it is not orthodox enough in terms of Marxist understandings. There is later also Chantal Mouffe, who in For A Left Populism invokes Stuart Hall’s legacy as if Hall’s rupture with Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive turn in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy from 1985 never really happened. What is there to say about how Stuart Hall, and I realize that this is another very big question, how he reworks the Marxist tradition?

David: You know, one of the remarks that Stuart makes somewhere is that he always lived, as he put it, in very idiomatic terms, “within shouting distance of Marxism.” Which is to say that Marx was never biblical for him. It was never a dogma for him. Although he was very serious about his reading of Marx, Marx was there precisely to be read and re-read. Of course, there were periods in Stuart’s life and work when Marx and debates about Marxism were much more foregrounded than at others. But there was always a sense for him that he was within shouting distance of Marxism.

I think that the figure of Gramsci for Hall was a way of articulating that shouting distance, a way of articulating a kind of mediated relationship to a Marxist canon, and a way of mediating the question of Marx as a reader of the social and political structure that emerged as a consequence of global capitalism, and as a reader of Marx also almost as a literary figure. I think that Gramsci provided both a textual example of how that might be done, but also, given Gramsci’s own distance from the availability of the texts about which he wrote (as consequence of being in prison in Mussolini’s Italy) he was himself always writing only within shouting distance of Marx. There is nothing really interesting, I think, to argue with Perry Anderson because he obviously believes that his reading of Gramsci in the very famous “Antinomies” essay is the biblical reading of Gramsci.

And there is a lot to be reconstructed about the displacement of Stuart Hall’s version of New Left Review and the character that New Left Review takes from the early 1960s onwards under the editorship of Perry Anderson—but that would be another evening’s discussion.

Marx remains crucial to Stuart partially because capitalism remains crucial in his understanding of the contemporary world. And for him, as I said a moment ago, one doesn’t take Marx at face value. One has always to read Marx inside of the conjuncture out of which Marx himself was trying to grapple with the world in which he lived. And that was an example, I think, of the way that Stuart approached historical figures. Never in their reified, canonical instantiation, but as always themselves historicizable figures, always themselves figures who needed to be read and re-read in the various conjunctures in which one found oneself. And that was Stuart’s modus operandi, always reading in and through his own conjuncture: a conjuncture that of course changed from the 1950s through the end 20th century when he wrote.

Sindre: So, this is what Stuart Hall referred to as a “Marxism without guarantees,” right?

David: Yes, I think that phrase, which comes to be used from the early 1980s onwards, is important. In fact, you can already detect it in the essays that Stuart wrote in the late 1950s in Universities and Left Review, because he is there reading very close to the complicated coming together of various social forces, which he is trying to unpack, namely, what he called the “settlement” in Britain in the post-war years, and the emergence, that he could discern already in the late 1950s, of what would eventually come to be called consumer capitalism. He recognizes very early on that one can’t read Marx as theoretical closure. One has to read Marx partially against the grain of certain dogmatic ways of reading. After all, Stuart well recognized that Marx was himself involved in serious politics in the 1840s and 50s that sometimes obliged a stipulative (even deterministic) discursive organization of his views. One has to read against that grain, and try, as Stuart’s successor at the Birmingham center, Richard Johnson, once said, to read for the best Marx. I think that was always crucial to Stuart as well.

Sindre: I remember that Paul Gilroy raised a similar issue in the conversation I had with him at this very venue in April 2018. Part of the mutual ambiguity within the British Marxist tradition stems from what Hall sort of identified as an element of so-called “Little Englander” nationalism in British Marxist circles. Therefore, there is a recounting in his memoir of an encounter with E.P. Thompson, the grand British Marxist historian, and his wife, at their home, and Hall is over for dinner and remarks on the selective blindness pertaining to race in these circles. And Thompson and his wife – to Hall’s despair – only seem prepared to talk about class in this context.

David: There is a lot to be said about E.P. Thompson. Stuart revered Thompson and honored the enormous contribution he made to the refiguring of the Marxist tradition in Britain—after the famous Khrushchev revelations at the 20th congress of the CPSU in 1956, and the Hungarian crisis, that led to the walk-out of the British communist party by members of the Historians’ group. Their attempts to reconstitute what Thompson called a “humanist Marxism” was very important as the background out of which the British New Left emerged, and therefore very important for the idiom of Marxist conceptualization that Stuart inherited, immobilized, and also critiqued. For there is a good deal that Thompson and others on the Left did not appreciate. This is also the moment of the war in Algeria, the coming of Ghanaian independence, and decolonization movements are developing across the Anglophone Caribbean. Thus, the question of decolonization is on the table, and consequently the emergence of social differences that are not simply reducible to class but are nevertheless very visible in important ways.

The fact that someone like E.P. Thompson could not quite recognize social difference in terms other than class was baffling to Stuart. And not only Thompson, but also even someone like Raymond Williams, given his own cultural difference. So, the absence of a language in which to talk about racial difference was very present. Stuart talks (I think he does in Familiar Stranger as well) of being in Marxist circles in Oxford in which Marxists are trying to talk about the character of class-consciousness. And Stuart, who comes from a very particular class fragment in Jamaica, one that is marked by an obsession with color and racial distinction, would intervene and say “Wait a minute, class is not unmarked in ethnic and racial terms.” So, the fact that someone like E.P. Thompson could recognize the nuances of the cultural character of the English working class, but not recognize the way in which social and cultural difference marked other modalities in the social movements that were emerging at the time was a matter of good deal of puzzlement for Stuart.

But there is more to it. E.P. Thompson was central to the merger between Universities and Left Review and the New Reasoner (the New Reasoner of course emerged out of the old dissident Marxist Left that had been part of the British communist party, and the Universities and Left Review emerged out of the Oxford student Left). They merge to form the first New Left Review in 1960. Thompson was the dominant force, and in many ways a dogmatic force. And among the student Left, Stuart was in many ways the visionary figure. And so, not surprisingly, Stuart and Thompson had encounters that, to put it mildly, were conflictual. Thompson often felt that the student Left was a bunch of dilettantes interested in youth culture, interested in the emergent rock music, interested in art and in aspects of cultural and social life that were not going to generate the revolutionary movement. And therefore, they came to very serious impasses, and in some way it was one of those impasses that led to the collapse of first New Left and Stuart’s departure from the New Left project.

Thompson’s blindness was not necessarily distinctive to him, but what made it especially stark was the fact that whereas he (like Richard Hoggart) could recognize the cultural distinctiveness of the working class, he could not recognize colonial difference and could not recognize racial difference attached to colonial difference. And of course, therefore could not recognize Stuart’s own particularity.

Sindre: This seems to me to be a question inherent to certain strands of left nationalism, which has never really left us either in Britain or in Norway for that matter. There is a recent monograph by Sivamohan Valluvan titled The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Britain, which is profoundly indebted to the work of Stuart Hall. It is, much like Hall was in his time, sharply critical of the tendency in many leftist circles to read the working class in racialized terms. In other words, the rise of nationalist populism throughout Europe – including Norway – being read as some form of “authentic” expression of a working class that is being understood and rendered only as white. If we go, then, to Stuart Hall’s work in his 1994 Du Bois Lectures published in 2017 as The Fateful Triangle could you perhaps help us understand where his crucial intervention lies? In terms of the work that his concept of “race” as a “sliding signifier” does in this context?

David: I am not sure that I can do justice to that question. But I think that, to begin with, part of what Stuart wants to gesture at is not only the senses in which working classes in Europe, or certainly in Britain and in England most particularly, are infected by Englishness. What really interested him, I think, was the political conjuncture in which that Englishness comes to count as a political force in relation to other particularities of working-class self-consciousness. I think what was always interesting for Stuart was not just that one’s consciousness or one’s social identity is made up of various kinds of historicizable fragments, but those conjunctures in which one organization or one dimension of social identity or social consciousness comes to be inflected or comes to be hegemonic. Which is why Thatcher interested him. It was not that the working class suddenly became English in the 1980s. Rather, it was that a very specific organization, or re-organization, of right-wing politics enabled the flowering of a reactionary Englishness.

I think, to go to the larger part of your question, the distinction that Stuart sought to make, not always successfully, between “race” and “ethnicity” functions as a distinction in which ethnicity was imagined as a much more malleable and historicizable mechanism of identity than race. Race seemed mired in a biological or sociobiological language, which made it very difficult to historicize in political terms. And that, of course, was always Stuart’s direction. How to make social and historical concepts available for political interventions. Or how to disable their reactionary implications in thinking political intervention. And so, I think that from the early 1980s, we see this in his attempt to rethink what he called the end of the “essential black subject.”

We see this across the 1980s in all of his thinking about post-Fordism and all of his thinking about identity. He attempted to produce a concept of identity that could be connected to the cultural histories that subjects invariably embody, in the sense that they are historically inscribed in their social formation, and also connected to critical cultural and political conceptual uses. And I think that was a very difficult and complicated terrain in Stuart’s late thinking of the 1990s, especially difficult in the Du Bois lectures, because in some form the construction of racial identity in the Americas appears not exactly in the same configuration as the structuring of raced identity in Europe. And so, the attempt to think race and ethnicity, or the connection between the two, in his classically Derridian terms of floating signifiers that come in particular conjunctures to stabilize around one or another kind of provisional identity, does not work in the British context in exactly the same way as in the context of the Americas. This, of course, hangs importantly on the difference between the histories of enslavement in the Americas as opposed to the European context. Race appears inscribed directly in corporeal embodiment in the Americas (and I should note that I say “Americas” here in plural because I want to distinguish the Americas from the United States of America, which is only one very particular instantiation of what constitutes the Americas). Where enslavement was part of generations of history, of the reproduction of social formations from the 16th and 17th century through the end of the 19th century, race was a very different experience from a situation in which enslavement did not occur in that constitutive way. I think in many ways, Stuart’s attempt to rethink the relation between race and identity was an attempt to work out some of that, which in some way, was perhaps not exactly as successful as he hoped it might be. Which is not to say more than that Stuart was always learning, and re-learning. The context of the Americas, which is partly the context out of which he himself emerges, is a thorny one in which to think the question of racial identity.

Sindre: I wanted to draw attention to some of your own work now. Stuart Hall’s Voice, was published by Duke University Press in 2017. It is a series of very moving epistolary letters to the late Hall. They originated as a series of invited lectures you gave at the Center for Humanities at the University of Western Cape (UWC) in Bellville, Cape Town, South Africa. This is for me a profoundly interesting contribution to the by now quite extensive secondary literature on Stuart Hall’s life and legacy. Your contribution here stands at a peculiar angle, because this is really a profound meditation about what you term “intellectual friendship,” and on Stuart Hall’s style of scholarship and engagement.

David: The thing that has always and still does animate me about Stuart as an intellectual was less the substantive points of intellectual arrival than the way in which he got from point A to point B. You know, to go back for a moment to the objections of Chantal Mouffe to some of Stuart’s formulations. Chantal and Ernesto Laclau were part of an enormously important study group in London called the Hegemony Group, which was really a study group around Gramsci. Laclau and Mouffe developed a particular way of thinking about Gramsci, elements of which Stuart shared: a very discursive reading of Gramsci, an anti-reductionist reading of Gramsci, and so on. But one of the things that Stuart disagreed with or at least didn’t share was the desire for a philosophic reading of Gramsci. Stuart’s readings were always informed philosophically, but they were political readings first and foremost: What do we do now? How do we mobilize a concept like hegemony to think ourselves out of a political conjuncture that has been shaped in this particular way and not that particular way?

That way of thinking, thinking dialogically, thinking provisionally, thinking strategically, was what interested me and what has always interested me about Stuart. It is never the question of the metaphysical character of concepts like hegemony, but always the strategic value. I mean, he was never a reader of Wittgenstein, but in many ways, it is the uses of concepts, rather than the meaning of concepts, strictly speaking, that interested him. His way was to mobilize terms, divest them of their metaphysical underpinnings, and put them to work strategically, provisionally, and politically. This is what seems the most valuable aspect of his thought. How to characterize that was the challenge for me in Stuart Hall’s Voice. The book emerged when I already knew that I wanted to write his biography, and emerged out of many hours ofconversations between us. One of the fascinating things about Stuart’s way of being an intellectual was his ability to listen to an interlocutor, and to find the idiom in which to offer back to the interlocutor what they were trying to say. He had an uncanny way of providing a mirror to a speaker in which the speaker could find a voice that was haltingly, fragmentarily, seeking to articulate something.

That way of thinking, as a matter of listening, was to my mind unprecedented. And to me, as I say in the book, it is as valuable or in some sense more valuable than the idea that Stuart himself mobilized often, the idea of critique and what critique means in intellectual life. Listening itself has critical, clarifying, reconstructive value.

Sindre. Hall himself was an independent socialist at a time in which it was still possible not to have been thoroughly disillusioned by certain post-colonial regimes, and to retain a sense of optimism about independence and sovereignty all over the post-colonial world. Now, part of what attracts me in your own work is that it is as much a contribution to political theory as it is to anthropological theory. And I don’t mean this in a sort of disparaging manner, because I don’t share certain strands of methodological fetishism, which implies that anthropology is all about doing ethnographic fieldwork. Your own contributions, and I am thinking here about Omens of Adversity (2017),

Conscripts of Modernity (2004), and Refashioning Futures (1999), are profoundly marked by your emphasis on tragedy and ruined time as a precondition for thinking critically about the post-Bandung world. Or, in other words, the politics of disillusionment, which is a striking feature of many post-colonial societies. To what extent is there a disjuncture here between your own work and that of Stuart?

David: That is a place where we disagreed, and around which we argued a lot. This begined to emerge with my own work in Conscripts of Modernity and onwards. It partly turned, I think, on my sense of the generation that comes of age in a post-colonial world, which is full of a kind of socialist hope that turns very rapidly into disappointment and ruin. That ruin is the background of all of my thinking: how to understand the nature of the unravelling of the Bandung project. Stuart wrote very interestingly about non-alignment at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s when the question of non-alignment was the bright light of the possibility of a reimagined global world. That global world comes to be undone by the middle-late 1970s, and that imagination comes to be replaced by regimes that are part of my own experience, that are part of the rampant cynicism of post-Bandung third world political projects. How to think the unravelling of those possibilities, which it seems to me are not merely administrative. They are not simply local or contingent dead ends, they are fundamental in the sense that it is the very conceptual and political grounds on which the idea of political alternatives is imagined that comes to ruin. The very possibility of thinking social progress, the very possibility of thinking social transformation, the very narratological terms in which and through which those futurities are imagined—this was a whole that came to be deconstructed in a way that is now not simple to restore or repair.

Stuart and I knocked heads around that. I think for him, the place of the tragic in my own work signaled something that I don’t imagine him being able to easily embrace. That sense of finitude and sense of failure, was something that for him was immediately to be recontextualized in relation to a politics of hope; that despair and disillusionment were not themselves a problem-space (to use a term that I have come to find helpful) out of which we might think ourselves in a way that did not presuppose futurity. I think, for my generation certainly, futurity is not a very straightforward conceptual idea. And Stuart would not have thought that. So, one of the terms that we often went around and around with (I talk about it briefly in Stuart Hall’s Voice) is the idea of contingency. Contingency was an enormously important concept for Stuart; it was for him a way to be able to think the past as non-necessary. Whereas contingency for me is a way of thinking possibilities that go awry, of thinking the tragic. I think of these as in some sense different sides of the same coin, the ways in which people from different generational experiences come to think an attitude to the present in which they find themselves.

 Sindre. Thank you very much David.

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Suggested by Public Anthropologist: Class, Race, and Marxism

In his new collection of essays Class, Race, and Marxism, David Roediger provides the reader with an incisive and accessible prose an entry point into the history of oppression and resistance. By exploring the intersections of culture, social identities, and political economy, Roediger investigates solidarity and its challenges as produced along the nexus of class and racial inequalities. A must read.