Ed Bruner passed away yesterday, at 95–peacefully, at home. I wish my daughter and I could have been with him, but–Covid.
Ed started out as my senior colleague in the anthropology department at the University of Illinois. He soon became a mentor, then writing/editing buddy, then dear friend, then adoptive grandfather of my daughter. With 37 years of a richly multi-layered relationship, how do I begin to mourn?
I will post some memories soon. For now, I just wanted to inform my anthropology colleagues that our discipline has lost a great scholar.
Meanwhile, if you’re not familiar with Ed’s wonderful writings, a few of his many brilliant articles are available for download on his ResearchGate page here–catch them while you can.
August 8, 2020
Some especially strong memories of Ed Bruner will always remain. Here’s one.
In my early years as a professor, he and Ann Anagnost and I co-created a graduate course (on Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology) and co-taught it twice. I learned so much about how to teach from that semester, watching Ed masterfully lead discussions like an orchestra conductor. He always knew when to lecture, when to call on the quiet student, when to apologize for having been unclear or unfair, and how to lighten the moment when two students risked having their theoretical disagreement turn nasty. In that classroom, Ed taught me to be an anthropologist of our students, to pay attention to their realities and meet them where they were. He also modeled the righteousness of democracy.
Although Ann and I were un-tenured assistant professors, and Ed was already a full professor and had been head of the department many years earlier, he treated the two of us as fully his equals. We co-created the syllabus, each of us meticulously responsible for one-third of the readings and leading one-third of the class sessions; we divided up all other responsibilities equally, even the grading–Ed never shirked on his share of work. In that classroom, Ed modeled egalitarian values that I still try to live out.
There’s also this: When Ann and I both became visibly pregnant toward the end of our second round of co-teaching, Ed never made us feel out of place, as many male colleagues might have, for our bulging bellies. In fact, he joked about his disadvantaged position as the only non-pregnant instructor. Although he came of age well before the second wave of feminism changed America, Ed’s basic humanity led him to feminist stances, even if he didn’t know to call them such. So, when I started schooling him in the basic tenets of feminism, he was a quick study. I was just giving him a vocabulary for something he already knew–that women are human.
In my next post, I’ll address that hunger to learn.
August 9, 2020
Ed Bruner celebrating his 91st birthday in our Illinois home (2015) Photo by Alma Gottlieb
August 9, 2020
Soon after I arrived as a new professor at the University of Illinois, a graduate student in my department offered me his version of a rundown on all my new colleagues, complete with some juicy nicknames he’d concocted. His moniker for Ed Bruner: “What’s-New Ed?” This grad student gently mocked Ed for having switched intellectual paradigms more than once. I was intrigued and resolved to understand what lay behind such multiple shifts.
What I discovered was a voracious appetite for knowledge. Ed frequently asked me what I was reading and told me excitedly about what he’d just read. For years, he was a member of an interdisciplinary reading group that exposed him to new trends in the humanities. In mid-career, reading interpretive theory led him to migrate away from the positivist orientation of his graduate school training and help forge what became known as interpretive anthropology. Ed edited two influential collections of essays (one, with Victor Turner, one of my own mentors in grad school) that marked the interpretive turn in anthropology. To further cement this major shift and legitimize humanistic perspectives in anthropology, Ed helped found the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, and (ever generous) he (anonymously) funded its Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing.
For all his humanism, Ed also loved science. His first major in college was engineering; his son became an engineer; and he never relinquished his fascination with the latest STEM discoveries. Into his 90s, Ed was always the first person I knew to buy (and master!) the latest cell phone model; I learned about GPS technologies installed in cars from Ed, who once proudly gave me a detailed tour of his new car that had one of the first GPS technologies available. Once my son started working as a software engineer for Apple, Ed enjoyed geeking out with Nathaniel about the most minute of tech niceties. When the field of anthropology was being torn apart by bitter and rivalrous claims between the humanistic and scientific ends of the discipline, Ed wrote a piece for the major anthropology newsletter gently taking us all to task for seeing the two perspectives as mutually exclusive. When that disciplinary rupture started tearing apart our own department, Ed’s was always the calm voice of reason at faculty meetings at which reason was in short supply.
Ed’s intellectual adventurousness didn’t only lay in theory–he also lived it. He conducted his earliest research with Native Americans, then switched to study Indonesia (and learned the Indonesian language). Late in life, he started a major new fieldwork project of studying tourist behaviors around the world. Observing American tourists in Asia, Africa, and the U.S., Ed helped forge Tourism Studies as a serious discipline.
Ed and Cookie Bruner (left) interviewing Maasai performers for tourists in Kenya (1984)
Ed’s book, Cultures on Tour, a compilation of his best articles on the topic, is must-reading on every Tourism course syllabus.
Back in 2014, a session at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association addressed Ed’s impactful work on tourism. That session was so strong that the participants decided to publish their talks. Such projects always take more years than anyone predicts. As Ed’s health declined, awaiting the publication of that book became one of the things that kept him going.
Ed Bruner at a session on tourism organized by Naomi Leite and Queetzil Castañeda in his honor at the American Anthropological Association (2014) Photo by Alma Gottlieb
When The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond appeared last October, Ed felt gratified that much of his life’s work had firmly found its place in the scholarly world.
For my part, Ed’s scholarly globe-trotting gave me courage to contemplate my own major fieldwork switch (from Côte d’Ivoire to Cabo Verde). I was thrilled when Ed agreed to write what turned into a magisterial chapter for a book I edited (The Restless Anthropologist), thoughtfully and honestly looking back on his (then) 60 years of global field research.
Ed didn’t only read scholarly work; he also devoured fiction. Once, my writer-husband, Philip Graham, mentioned a list-in-progress he kept of his favorite works of contemporary world fiction, to share with his students. Ed begged for the list and soon started reporting his impressions of the books he was reading. After plowing through the initial list of hundreds of novels and short story collections, he kept requesting Philip’s periodic updates.
In short, Ed was a model for his students, and for me, of how to be a scholar–not the kind of scholar who revels in the trivial, or who defends a single idea to the grave, but the kind of scholar who remains perpetually intellectually alive and open to the world of ideas.
When she was three years old, our daughter Hannah declared that she needed us to find her a grandfather. Both of her biological grandfathers had died before she was born, and she felt that lack early. I asked her if she had anyone in mind. She asked me to list all the older men in our lives who she knew. When I got to Ed’s name, she stopped and said, “That’s my grandpa.”
At that point, our daughter had only met Ed a few times. Until they were old enough to balk, my husband and I regularly dragged our children to conferences, dinner parties, lectures, classes, and even some faculty meetings (poor things), to keep them an active part of our lives. That meant, they got to know a lot of adults. At the cocktail parties that Ed and his wife Elaine (“Cookie”) hosted, Hannah was usually the only child present. Ed had always taken kind notice of Hannah: asked her what she’d like to eat, found her a cozy spot to sit, asked if she was afraid of his large dog (she was, and Ed removed the animal to another room). Clearly, Hannah (always emotionally wise beyond her years) intuited that Ed was someone who was sensitive to other people’s realities, even those of a far different age category. Hannah picked well.
Over the next 23 years, Ed indeed became our daughter’s grandfather. (He already had grandchildren from his son, but they lived a couple of states away.) Year after year, Ed and Cookie bought our growing daughter the perfect, age-appropriate presents for her birthday and for Chanukah. When she was young, there was a stuffed panda bear about three times Hannah’s size, which occupied a very large corner of her bed for many years.
In middle school and high school, there was an increasingly sophisticated set of jewelry gifts. In college, there was a designer purse. When Ed was heartbroken that he couldn’t travel to Rhode Island to attend Hannah’s college graduation in 2017, he sent the largest flower bouquet he could.
Nor did Ed’s involvement end at charming and extravagant gifts. In elementary school, Ed-as-Grandpa came to Hannah’s school performances; in high school, he watched her cheerleading gymnastics. When the first serious boyfriend entered Hannah’s life, Ed insisted on meeting him and giving him The Grandfather Talk (complete with You’d-Better-Treat-My-Darling-Granddaughter-Right sort of warnings). When Hannah had an offer of an internship at a very prestigious art gallery in NYC the summer after her junior year in college, Ed helped subsidize her overpriced NYC studio sublet (which happened to be close to the old site of Stuyvesant High School, the competitive high school that Ed had attended decades earlier). When it came time (a few years back) to donate his professional papers to the Wenner-Gren Foundation and figure out what to do with his extensive library, Ed had Hannah sort through his books and papers and organize and pack them up.
Elaine (“Cookie”) Bruner, Hannah Gottlieb-Graham, and Ed Bruner in our Illinois home (2015) Photo by Alma Gottlieb
Last week, Ed learned from his doctors that the end of his days on this earth was approaching, and he wrote me a farewell note. After tearing up, I shared the terrible news with Hannah. Immediately, she called Ed on FaceTime and they had their final conversation. By now, Hannah had a new partner. She’d hoped to introduce Andrew to Ed on a trip back to Champaign-Urbana (for a dear friend’s wedding) this past May, but, to everyone’s deep dismay, Covid postponed that trip (and wedding) until next May. Hannah fretted greatly about the delay in seeing her rapidly aging grandfather; last week, her worst fears were confirmed.
It meant the world to her that she was able to introduce Andrew to Ed over FaceTime. I don’t know what Ed said in that final conversation, but it must have been just the right thing. Ever an anthropologist, Ed must have managed to intuit Hannah’s mood and speak to it because, although Hannah emerged crying, she also emerged in peace.
Thank you, Ed, for that final gift to your beloved, adopted granddaughter–and for living out your scholar’s understanding of the bonds of kinship. Anthropologists have long known that what we used to call “fictive kinship” can feel as real, as deep, and as meaningful as any bonds forged by biology. Ed demonstrated that theoretical insight as lovingly as anyone might.
August 12, 2020
Last installment of my thoughts about Edward M Bruner (at least for now).
Ed and I were 30 years apart. When we met, he was twice my age. That age difference might appear to offer an unpromising basis for a friendship. In choosing friends, most of us tend to find a path to people who are like us in some obvious ways. Age and gender often rank high on the list of shared criteria. For Ed and me, somehow, neither of those differences interfered with our friendship.
My inspiration was my long-ago Beng friend, Amenan Véronique. One late afternoon, while we were chatting in her compound in the rain forest of Côte d’Ivoire, Amenan excused herself from a conversation, to take dinner over to someone across the village. When I asked about the recipient, Amenan said she was bringing the dish to a very elderly woman who couldn’t easily cook for herself any more. I asked if she was an aunt–in those villages, most people are related to each other in some way or another. Amenan surprised me by telling me that they weren’t related at all–they were friends. At the time, Amenan was in her early 30s, and the age gap further surprised me. “Age doesn’t matter for friendship,” Amenan quietly declared. Ed re-taught me that lesson.
Over the years, Ed and I indeed became friends, of the sort that, in most places, women typically reserve for each other. Ed told me about changing dietary decisions and showed off a new suit or cashmere sweater he’d bought himself. We regularly confided in each other about family issues. As he aged, he asked my opinion about whether he should get this or that medical treatment for this or that condition. That sort of vulnerability that is the hallmark of a good friendship is harder to establish across age and gender divides; to Ed, it came easily.
None of those intimacies prevented Ed from critiquing my work when he thought I needed to rethink a point in a manuscript-in-progress. But it did mean that his critiques were delivered especially kindly, and that I took them especially seriously.
Four years ago, telling Ed that Philip and I would be retiring and moving to Rhode Island was the hardest Goodbye I had to say when we left east-central Illinois after 33 years. Ed was already 91, and increasingly feeble. Nevertheless, he managed to give a beautiful speech at the retirement party my department hosted.
Ed Bruner speaking at my retirement party from the. University of Illinois (May 2016) Photo by Philip Graham
We left unspoken our worries that we might not see each other again. I am grateful that I did see Ed during a trip back to Champaign-Urbana a year later.
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, aLevel 1 Trauma Center in Minneapolis thatsees 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.
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 Minneapolis.
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 Westgardhere and his LinkedIn pagehere.)
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 ahemoglobinopathy. 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 forcytokine 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 tosyndemic 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 docase-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 inmobilizing 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, maybeAtmosphere, 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 auser-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.
N.B. Another version of this post appears on the website of the anthropology journal, Public Anthropologist. You can find it here.
UPDATE, June 19, 2020: Bjorn has just published a co-authored article analyzing changes in the numbers and kinds of patients arriving at ERs in one large, public Minneapolis hospital. You can request a copy here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342111120_An_analysis_of_changes_in_emergency_department_visits_after_a_state_declaration_during_the_time_of_COVID-19
Cultural anthropologist, Robbie Davis-Floyd, is a leading anthropologist in the fields of childbirth, midwifery, and obstetrics.
A Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas-Austin, she has studied childbirth practices firsthand in the U.S., Mexico, and elsewhere, and has promoted the work and legitimacy of midwives around the world.
Robbie Davis-Floyd (back row, right) honored by the North American Registry of Midwives (NARM) for helping create a nationally recognized certification process for professional midwives in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada
She has also lectured as a featured, keynote speaker at over 1,000 universities and health practitioners’ conferences in the US and internationally, always taking the opportunity to learn more about the maternity care systems of the countries she has visited.
Robbie Davis-Floyd speaking at the 2014 Symposium of the California Endowment
Considering the cumulative impact of her energetic and creative efforts on many fronts to promote healthy childbirth without unnecessary, high-tech interventions, it is probably no exaggeration to say that Robbie Davis-Floyd has long served as the “public face of anthropology” to the international childbirth movement. Her work has been instrumental in bringing anthropological insights into the global childbirth arena and in effecting humanistic changes in childbirth practices in many countries. Indeed, given the impact of her work, she is considered a “living legend” among birth activists both within and beyond anthropology.
Despite the enormous impact of her research, writing, and speaking on childbirth practices in the U.S. and elsewhere, birth is by no means the only topic that Davis-Floyd has studied. She’s recently given birth to a delightfully readable, new book, The Power of Ritual, co-authored with neuroanthropologist, Charles Laughlin.
Cultural anthropologist, Claire Farrer, has called the new volume “an exquisite and informative book,” writing:
I wish that this book had been available during my long teaching career–I would have used it in all my relevant courses!
Beyond professors and students, because of its breezy writing style, combined with its captivating examples from common experiences in Westerners’ lives, the book will surely appeal to many “ordinary” readers. Birth educator, Debra Pascali-Bonaro, has written:
Before I read The Power of Ritual, I thought I knew what ritual was, yet now I know that it is so much more–it can be everything from a simple conversation-opener to a powerful healing process, from an individual’s daily habits to full-scale ceremony. I have learned much from this book that I can apply to my own life to enable me to more consciously perform my daily, family, and professional rituals.
Robbie and I recently chatted about the book online. You can read our conversation below.
Meanwhile, you can learn more about Robbie Davis-Floyd’s work on her website here, including her C.V. You can also find a view of Davis-Floyd’s many published books here, and downloadable PDFs of most of her dozens of published journal articles and book chapters here.
RDF: Robbie Davis-Floyd
AG: Alma Gottlieb
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AG: You’re well known for helping develop and promote the anthropologies of childbirth, midwifery, obstetrics, and reproduction. Your fans may be surprised at the focus of this book on ritual. Yet, your first book (developing from your dissertation), Birth as an American Rite of Passage, used ritual as an analytic frame.
In that sense, would you say that The Power of Ritual reprises the conversation about ritual that you began nearly 30 years ago? Or, takes it in new directions? Or both?
Put differently (and more broadly), why would an anthropologist of childbirth write a book about ritual?
RDF: I’ve come full circle, as I did not start out as a birth anthropologist! My original graduate training was in both Folklore and Anthropology, and my interest in ritual was sparked by one of my Folklore professors, Roger Abrahams, whose writings on ritual I found enticing.
I did my Master’s thesis on the folklore of a Texas madam, Edna Milton, who for many years ran the notorious Chicken Ranch in La Grange, Texas—featured, after its closing, in the movie, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. The article I wrote about how Edna’s masterful use of jokes and other forms of language manipulation kept her in total control of the Chicken Ranch, its customers, and its employees was published in the Journal of American Folkore and was widely used for teaching for many years, as it clearly shows how jokes and folktales can be used for manipulation, plus it is hysterically funny!
In the middle of my PhD studies, I took some time off to spend a year traveling around Mexico and learning Spanish. I returned to Mexico often and worked with two shamans—Don Lucio, a traditional shaman and “weather-worker” (trabajador del tiempo) from a small village in central Mexico, and Edgardo Vasquez Gomez, a wealthy businessman living in Cuernavaca who had traveled the country in his younger years studying sorcery (brujeria), magic, and traditional healing, and later combined that with the teachings and philosophy of the Russian philosopher, G. I Gurdjieff. Both had large followings, and both could actually manipulate energy and perform what I experienced as magic. If you combined them into one person, you would get someone very like Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan.
I know that Castaneda’s work has been discredited, but the two shamans I worked with were real—as were the effects of the (very different types of) rituals they performed. We used to joke that Edgardo was Don Juan. In my doctoral program, I later wrote several long papers on myth, ritual, and shamanism in Mexico and expected to do my dissertation research with those two. (That was before computers, and those papers, sadly, were lost in a house fire.)
But then I had a baby, got “bitten by the birth bug,” and decided, instead, to research women’s childbirth narratives, as I was still in folklore mode. Yet the more women I interviewed, the more one question grabbed me:
Given the highly individual nature of each woman’s birth experience for that woman, why is birth treated in such a standardized way in American hospitals?
I began to research the scientific literature on birth. I soon realized that the vast majority of “standard obstetric procedures” did nothing to make birth safer. Instead, they made it more predictable and controllable—while unnecessarily harming women and babies in the process.
Davis-Floyd has chronicled how fetal heart rate monitors keep women attached to a bed and claim attention on a machine’s readouts, rather than on a laboring woman’s subjective experience
At first, I was confused. Like most people, I had assumed that obstetrics was based on science. When I realized it wasn’t, I had to ask the most basic anthropological question: Why? Why would doctors do things to women that didn’t make birth safer? The explanation hit me like a bombshell.
’”Standard obstetric procedures” do not come from the logic of science but, rather, from the logic of ritual. Like most rituals, they reflect the core values of their culture—in this case, the culture of technocratic societies.
They are designed, as so many rituals are, to try to control the uncontrollable forces of nature, to keep fear at bay–in this case, fear of both death and lawsuits. So, I switched from simply analyzing women’s birth narratives to a focus on analyzing obstetric procedures as rituals.
To fully explore this notion, I needed to understand ritual more, and its primary characteristic– the use of powerful symbols to convey meaning. I took a summer seminar at the University of Virginia with Christopher Crocker on what was then called “symbolic anthropology” (now “interpretive anthropology”). I also taught myself medical anthropology, which I had never formally studied. But I had to become an expert in it, as pregnancy and childbirth had long ago become defined as medical events.
After reading almost everything that Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, Arnold van Gennep, and many others had written about ritual, I saw that birth, which used to be a physical and social rite of passage replete with social rituals, had become a completely medicalized rite of passage. The rituals that characterize birth everywhere had become medical rituals, officially disguised as “standard procedures.”
Dissatisfied with the many definitions of ritual I read, I created my own:
a ritual is a patterned, repetitive, symbolic (and often transformative) enactment of a cultural (or individual) belief or value.
Obstetric rituals enact the core values of what I called “the technocracy”—a term that came to me from Peter Reynolds, via his book, Stealing Fire: The Atomic Bomb as Symbolic Body, but that I redefined:
a technocracy is a hierarchical, bureaucratic, capitalist, and (still) patriarchal society organized around the supervaluation [a word I coined] of the progressive development of high technologies and the global flow of information via those technologies.
I generated a list of what we might perceive as characteristics of rituals: symbolism, rhythmic repetition, order, formality, framing, performance, acting, stylization, staging, and often, intensification toward a climax. In my dissertation (which became my first book, Birth as an American Rite of Passage), in a chapter called “Birth Messages,” I dissected each standard obstetric procedure—its official rationale, the scientific evidence against it, women’s highly varied responses to it—and explained how it acted as a ritual by enacting, displaying, and transmitting specific core technocratic values and beliefs to women, their partners, and their practitioners.
In Birth as an American Rite of Passage, Davis-Floyd analyzes the wheelchair as a powerful symbolic statement conveying the clear message that the woman in labor is “disabled”
At first, some ritual scholars like Ron Grimes argued that I was metaphorizing obstetric procedures as rituals, but that they were not really rituals—they were like rituals—because most scholars saw ritual as religion-based. But since the publication of my book in 1992, and its second edition in 2003, my analysis of hospital birthing practices as rituals has held, and its framework for understanding the characteristics of “secular ritual“ (using childbirth as an example) has been widely used.
AG: What a fascinating intellectual history! So, for this book on ritual, how did you decide to collaborate with a co-author who specializes in neurological approaches to human experience?
RDF: From analyzing birth narratives, I saw that women’s perceptions of themselves and their ability to give birth were profoundly affected by technological hospital rituals (such as IVs, electronic fetal monitoring, Pitocin induction or augmentation, episiotomies, immediate cord clamping, etc.). So I knew there was a missing piece in my growing understanding of ritual. It seemed clear that ritual can affect the human brain–but how?
Davis-Floyd’s research has helped document the much higher likelihood of a C-section once a woman’s labor is “induced,” or accelerated, with Pitocin
I searched the literature but found no answers until, one day, while browsing the book stalls at the annual American Anthropological Association conference, I saw a book way at the back of the Oxford exhibit booth. That particular book was literally glowing at me—in much the same way that I could often see the reins of energy that Edgardo held in his hands glowing during group meetings. I pulled the book out, and my life changed! It was called The Spectrum of Ritual, and it gave me the answers I was looking for. Here, finally, was the missing piece—the neurophysiology of ritual, the explanations for how ritual works on the brain and, thus, where it gets its power over us humans—starting with its multiple roles among animals.
A few years later, I met one of its authors, Charles Laughlin, at a conference. We both had read everything the other had written, so our meeting was intense and our ensuing friendship equally so. We eventually decided to co-author a book on The Power of Ritual–because I wanted to expand my study of ritual into other arenas besides birth, while Charlie wanted to put his highly esoteric work on ritual (characterized by what he termed ”neurognosis”) in more straightforward language, so he could make it accessible to people with IQs lower than 180. I kept telling him, “Just dumb it down and tell stories”!
AG: Did you run up against differences in approach?
RDF: Not really. Charlie accepted my definition of ritual as the one we would use. We also used most of my list of the characteristics of ritual. At some point, though, we realized that some factors on my original list, such as the fact that rituals generally work to preserve the status quo yet, paradoxically, can also be used to generate rapid social or religious change, were actually effects of ritual, not characteristics.
In this book, I finally was able to write about my long-ago work with the two Mexican shamans. Unfortunately, it was all from memory, since, as I previously mentioned, the graduate school papers I had written about those experiences had all burned up in a house fire.
AG: This book begins with a theoretical discussion of how to define and analyze ritual, but it ends with a surprisingly down-to-earth section offering models for how contemporary readers might create their own rituals for important moments in their lives, whether for menarche, meditation, lucid dreaming, prayer, birth (as Melissa Cheyney has shown, homebirthers in particular create lots of rituals for honoring, de-medicalizing, and helping them through the labor process–see her article, “Reinscribing the Birthing Body: Homebirth as Ritual Performance”), death, or other significant events or experiences.
When we think about “engaged anthropology,” we usually have more economic or political transformations in mind. Would you consider the “how-to” section of the book another variety of “engaged anthropology”?
RDF: Yes! And also of “applied anthropology.” Anthropological understandings gained from studying people and their lifeworlds should be expressed in ways that enable people to apply them to their own lives and use them for their own purposes. We need to come down out of our ivory towers and make our work relevant and useful in immediate ways. That is why Charlie and I put so many personal examples of ritual into our book—to engage readers with those experiences and help them directly apply them, should they wish to do so.
AG: So, what’s next?
RDF: Our refinement of both of our life’s works in this book is now feeding back into the third edition of Birth as an American Rite of Passage, which I am working on now, and which will be a complete revision and update (this time with a co-author, the amazing Missy Cheyney). Another full circle!
But I‘ve never confined myself completely to birth and related subjects. In addition to ritual and symbol, I’ve also intensively studied cults (as described in The Power of Ritual), medical doctors who became holistic healers (as described in From Doctor to Healer: The Transformative Journey), futures planning via global scenarios, and aerospace engineers. But those are stories for another time. That’s one of the great values of anthropology. Once you have the tools, you can study any phenomenon that captures your interest!
AG: Any other future projects in the works?
RDF: Betty-Anne Daviss and I are in the process of finishing Childbirth Models on the Human Rights Frontier: Speaking Truth to Power—a sort of follow-up to our book, Birth Models That Work(2009), which has been called “seminal” (though we would have preferred “ovarial”) because it was the first book to describe truly functional birth practice models that are woman-centered and evidence-based—as opposed to the dysfunctional, non-evidence-based maternity care models that predominate almost everywhere.
This new follow-up volume describes models that are way more “out on the edge”—in high-poverty, disaster, and war zones, for example. It also discusses birth models that are more iconoclastic, while addressing professional bullying and competition among doctors, and the de-skilling of obstetricians in techniques for vaginal breech birth.
Our next project will be an edited volume called The Global Witch Hunt: The Ongoing Persecution of Woman-Centered Birth Practitioners. Its purpose is to call attention to the often-intense persecution of some of the most skilled midwives and obstetricians in the world, who will often go out on a limb to honor the wishes for a normal birth of women considered high-risk, by attending them at home or in hospital, but then get punished for putting the woman, not the protocols, first. The “witch-hunted” practitioners will tell their own stories in each chapter, while we co-editors (Betty Anne-Daviss, Hermine Hayes Klein, and myself) will contextualize those stories in the Introduction and Conclusion.
In another vein, for years I have been writing short stories, which I hope to publish some day in a book called Robbie’s Reader: Vignettes of My Magical Life—for my life has indeed felt magical, primarily because my anthropological research and international talks have taken me all over the world, filled my life with adventure, and given me great stories to tell!
Daniel Jordan Smith has been conducting research in, and writing about, West Africa since 1995.
Dan Smith in his office
His first book, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria, was a compelling work narrating the daily experience of interrelations between morality and economy, seen from the bottom up. It won the 2008 Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology/American Anthropological Association.
You can learn more about Dan Smith’s work on his website here from Brown University, where he holds multiple positions—as the Charles C. Tillinghast, Jr. ’32 Professor of International Studies, the chair of the Department of Anthropology, and the director of the Africa Initiative for the Watson institute for International and Public Affairs. You can also find a list of many of Smith’s published journal articles and book chaptershere.
Recently, Smith published a fascinating study of masculinity among the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria: To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job: Masculinity, Money, and Intimacy in Nigeria (University of Chicago Press, 2017). You can find the publisher’s web page for the book here.
Robert Morrell has praised the book:
“In this brilliant and highly readable exploration of masculinity, Smith bores down into the lives of his Nigerian friends and informants to find out what makes them tick. Through his interest in and involvement with a local tennis club for a period of over twenty-five years, he has developed a depth of understanding that even for anthropologists is unusual.”
And anthropologist James Ferguson has written:
“Brimming with insightful observations and telling details, this book makes an outstanding contribution to our understanding of a topic of enormous contemporary significance—in Africa and beyond.”
Dan and I recently had a chance to speak online about his new book. You can read our conversation below.
DJS: Daniel Jordan Smith
AG: Alma Gottlieb
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AG: In the past, your work in West Africa has focused on a variety of medical issues, economic questions, and gender topics. If we consider mental health a component of medical anthropology, one might say that your new book combines some of the most important questions you’ve addressed across some 25 years of ethnographic inquiry. What made you decide to write a book drawing together (but also going well beyond) issues you’ve tackled from all these diverse writings?
DJS: In many respects, my decisions about what to study and write about in Nigeria are driven by what seems most salient in the lives of the people I live with and work with there—intersecting, of course, with what I find interesting and important as an anthropologist.
The focus of this book on masculinity in Nigeria–and, specifically, on the relationship between money and intimacy in men’s lives—is the product of having spent much of my time in Nigeria in the company of men. In the places where I work in southeastern Nigeria, social life is quite gender-segregated—not extremely so, but to the extent that, as a man, over the years, I have spent a disproportionate amount of time with men. This book is an attempt to draw all of that experience together and to try to understand men’s lives.
The author during a match with his Nigerian tennis partner, Osofia, in 1989
Beyond that, I wanted to use masculinity as a prism or a vehicle through which I could explore social life, and social change more broadly, in Nigeria. I never actually did a research project focused on masculinity, per se—though many of my projects focused on masculinity implicitly in one way or another. But at some point, I realized that I had a huge corpus of material about men and masculinity, and so I decided to write this book.
The author with his Nigerian tennis partner, Osofia, 15 years after their first match
AG: Feminist anthropologists have critiqued earlier generations of scholars for focusing exclusively on men’s lives, without acknowledging this gender bias as such. Your study, grounded in the new “masculinity studies,” strikes me as quite different from those early works that discussed men’s lives without really problematizing the gendered nature of their experiences. Can you talk about the premises of the new masculinity studies that underlie your approach?
DJS: As your question suggests, I think one of the key premises of new masculinity studies is that the generations of scholars focusing more or less exclusively on men’s lives almost never examined masculinity “as gender.” By that, I mean that, while men were the assumed objects of study when trying to understand economics, politics, social organization, and culture, masculinity itself was not really examined, problematized, and unpacked in and of itself. The idea that masculinity is socially constructed and performed–rather than simply given—is at the heart of new masculinity studies. So, too, is the idea that there are multiple masculinities, not just one.
Portrait of an elderly Igbo man in his village in southeastern Nigeria
Also central is the recognition that masculinities, like femininities, are relationally constructed—both broadly and specifically in relation to femininity.
Portrait of a vulcanizer (tire repairer) in southeastern Nigeria
My work has benefited from all the excellent recent scholarship on masculinities, including in Africa. But my goal in the book is broader than trying to understand masculinity in Nigeria. I try to show that by understanding masculinity and men’s lives, we can better understand wider aspects of social life and social change in contemporary Nigeria. The book’s focus on the complex geometry of money and intimacy in men’s lives is intended not only to understand Nigerian masculinities, but Nigerian society more generally.
Men enjoying a moment of relaxation at Umuahia Sports Club, southeastern Nigeria
AG: In the book, you make this connection quite explicit. For example, you document what you call the “changing landscape of intimacy” by providing so many life stories that exemplify how “money has become the essential means to prove one’s value as a man.” In insisting on the deep nexus between emotion and economy, are you trying to make a theoretical point about, say, the mutual braiding between the anthropology of emotion on the one hand, and economic anthropology on the other? And, if so, do you think southeastern Nigeria is an especially apt place in which to make such a claim?
DJS: In connecting money and intimacy (and economics and emotion more broadly), I am certainly building on what I think is an already well-established theoretical point in anthropology—and specifically in Africanist anthropology—about the inextricable intertwining of economics and emotion in social life. But I think my more central conceptual contribution focuses on the way that concerns about morality infuse the intersection of money and intimacy. For example, I argue that men are constantly engaged in projects of what I call “conspicuous redistribution,” whereby they are trying to put money into the service of sociality, even as they show it off. This occurs, I argue, in both large collective occasions, like weddings and funerals, but also in more everyday contexts in which a man shares his money in his intimate relationships—such as with kin, friends, or lovers. At stake for men in these performances of conspicuous redistribution is whether their money is socially productive and morally legitimate.
I think the stakes are particularly high in southeastern Nigeria because money often stands symbolically for social changes about which people are ambivalent at best, including the rise of individualism and the pursuit of wealth. Even more negatively, money symbolizes (and is seen as creating) the pervasiveness of greed and corruption. Men face a double bind. They need money to be good men, yet they often feel compelled to pursue it by socially and morally problematic means. In this context, how they spend it becomes all the more scrutinized.
Portrait of a shop owner in southeastern Nigeria
AG: Bringing up the problematic relationship linking money, morality, and men in southeastern Nigeria inevitably leads us to the present moment in the US, where gender relations are an especially fraught topic—with a president accused multiple times of sexual harassment and even sexual assault, and a powerful and growing “#MeToo” movement arising among women to resist intimate practices of patriarchy. (How) would you say your book speaks to this moment in the US? That is, what lessons might American men draw from your discussion of contemporary Nigerian men’s lives, challenges, and frustrations?
DJS: I wrote the book well before the revelations about Harvey Weinstein and the rise of the “#MeToo” movement, so I certainly never intended for it to speak to the US context directly. That said, I think there are always opportunities to reflect on social life in one’s own culture that come in the process of trying to understand another society. For me, one of the most powerful (and in many ways most appealing) aspects of masculine social life in Nigeria is the pervasiveness and importance of homosociality—that is, of men’s social relationships with other men. As I discuss at length in the book, I found this dimension of Nigerian masculinity very compelling. At the same time, it was clear that Nigerian men frequently reinforced and rewarded patriarchal privilege in male-dominated fraternal settings.
I think similar dynamics between fraternity and patriarchy are common in the US. But it seems to me that the masculine enjoyment of male fraternity need not depend on patriarchy to enable men’s social solidarity. I think American men would benefit from more male comraderie, but in both the US and Nigeria it would be preferable to de-couple fraternal solidarity from patriarchy. They are often intertwined, but I don’t think they have to be.
AG: What’s on the horizon for your next research and writing project?
DJS: In Nigeria, people have a saying that “every household is its own local government.” By this, they mean that because the state so woefully fails to provide basic infrastructure and services—water, electricity, security, transportation, etc.—every household must figure out how to address these needs and desires. My current research project (and next book) examines the informal economic and entrepreneurial means by which Nigerians cobble together basic infrastructure, and what all this reveals about the state, citizenship, and political culture.
AG: That sounds like such an important issue for so many places (not just Nigeria).
Finally, a more personal question. While remaining extraordinarily productive as an author, you’ve held many administrative positions, and you’ve even won a campus award for teaching. Do you have any time-management secrets you can share with colleagues who might assume that being excellent simultaneously in all arenas of the academy (research/writing/ administration/teaching) is beyond impossible?
DJS: It’s very generous of you to pose the question in this way. I am afraid I don’t have any magical time-management secrets, but I can share a couple of thoughts. Most important, I think, is loving what you do, which makes it easier to work hard and work effectively. It sounds cliché, but it makes such a difference to like what you are doing. At least, that’s my experience. So, whether it’s research and writing, teaching, or administration, I try to do work that I want to be doing. That’s obviously easier said than done, especially for junior faculty, but in academia, we have a remarkable amount of freedom to pick what to work on—in administration and teaching, as well as in research and scholarship.
More mundanely, I think the secret to time management in academia is being able to use both huge chunks of time (like summer and winter breaks) and short spans of time (like 45 minutes between a class and a committee meeting) efficiently. Our profession provides an unusually large number of both very long and very brief periods of time that can be managed well or squandered. I always tell my junior colleagues that if you have 45 minutes between things, you can use it to grade some papers, or update a lecture, or read an article (or whatever). Those little chunks add up to a huge amount of time over a year (not to mention, over a career). And they are relatively painless to utilize. Using the big chunks effectively takes more discipline, but if they are filled with work you like (at least mostly), then working is easier and more rewarding.
Anthropologist Helena Wulff has been conducting research on youth culture and multiple art worlds (especially in Western Europe) for over thirty years.
In a review of her new book for the Irish Times, Irish literary critic, Anna Fogarty, writes:
Her pioneering investigation nicely balances an advocacy of aspects of Irish cultural traditions which may be taken too much for granted by those living and writing in the country with a shrewd and timely critique of the inbuilt sexism of our public institutions and the provincialism of our general outlook.
You can discover more about Helena Wulff’s work on her website here from Stockholm University, where she is a professor and deputy head of the Department of Social Anthropology. Wulff has also held visiting professorships at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National University of Singapore, University of Vienna, and University of Ulster, as well as a Leverhulme visiting professorship at the University of East London.
You can find downloadable PDFs of many of Wulff’s published journal articles and book chapters here. Beyond her many scholarly publications, Wulff also occasionally writes popular articles for newspapers and magazines in Sweden and the UK.
She has served as Chair of the Anthropological Association of Sweden and is a member of the board of the five-year, multidisciplinary research program in Sweden, Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures. With Dorle Dracklé, she served as Editor-in-Chief of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, the journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), and was also Vice-President of EASA.
We recently had an e-conversation about her new, pathbreaking book about Irish writers. Read the interview below.
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HW: Helena Wulff
AG: Alma Gottlieb
AG: In your previous work, you’ve written about lots of different topics–dancers, emotions, youth, and ethnographic writing and research practices, among others. This book is about a subject that’s quite unusual for an anthropologist. What inspired you to write a book about Irish writers?
HW: My love of literature goes back to my childhood and youth. I grew up in a home where reading fiction was a central activity, as well as, importantly, talking about it. The fact that my mother preferred reading stories to me and my brother when we were small, rather than cleaning the house, made a lasting impression on me.
I was soon a voracious and precocious reader. Not only did I devour European classics early on, such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but also, in secret, novels my parents said I was too young to read. Literature was my way of finding out about life, history and the world, although my literary horizon was limited to Europe and North America. This was before the idea of “world literature” would include the circulation and translation of literary work from regional or national to global contexts (which I’ll come back to, as that’s my current research.)
Both my parents had been students of comparative literature. As this was such a strong interest also for me, comparative literature was the only subject I wanted to study when I enrolled at Stockholm University in 1973. I had a fabulous year, but towards the end I realized I wanted to do something different from my parents, to develop on my own.
I had learnt from friends who studied philosophy that there was something called social theory, which seemed useful as a way to understand the world around us. So I took up philosophy. On the whole, I enjoyed it–but I missed attention to empirical evidence, and the link between theory and the empirical world. That was when I found anthropology, a discipline that included both empirical evidence/ethnography and theory–and everything fell into place. I became an anthropologist–first focusing on youth culture, and later on ballet and dance as a transnational occupation. My first study of the dance world (published in 1998) was Ballet across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers.
Then Riverdance, the Irish dance show, made a global splash. I was intrigued by its success in very different countries and cultures. So I set out to do a major study of dance in Ireland–a country that, with its difficult history, artistic vein, and eloquence, was a most rewarding place for anthropological research.
In addition, it was easy and cheap to get there from Stockholm. It didn’t take long before I was doing what I came to think of as “yo-yo fieldwork,” going back and forth between Stockholm and Dublin on a regular basis. I spent one or two weeks at a time in the field—altogether, eight months. My study was published in 2007 as Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland.
It was during the research for this study that I spotted the novel, Dancers Dancing by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, in a Dublin book shop. Thinking it might be relevant for my study, I bought it, read it with great delight, and then was able to interview the author. This was my first contact with the contemporary literary world in Ireland.
I started reading work by Colm Tóibín, Colum McCann, Anne Enright, and Joseph O’Connor–all award-winning writers–and couldn’t stop.
Colum McCann (photo by Bryan Schutmaat for The New York Times)
I was impressed by the style and the stories, and I identified an ethnographic presence. I noticed that Roddy Doyle was publishing at a high speed. And, suddenly, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes was everywhere, selling like hotcakes.
Pulling together my lifelong love of literature with my anthropological experience of Ireland, I was thrilled to see a new study emerging: one of Irish writers in terms of their craft and career. It was triggered by one basic question: How come the Irish are such skilled writers? This was followed by two more: How do they learn to write? What does the Irish literary world look like—not just the world of writers, but also publishers, with all the attendant breakthroughs and competition?
AG: I’m struck by how seamless your move from one project to another has felt to you, even though all these projects might appear so different from one another to a casual reader.
Can you talk about the interview process you’ve experienced across these projects? For example, dancers are notoriously reluctant to speak about their art. At least, many dancers I’ve known have often said something like, “If I could tell you about it, I wouldn’t need to dance it”! By contrast, for writers, verbal language is their chosen medium. Were the Irish writers you’ve interviewed happier than other interviewees to keep talking and talking?
HW: I wouldn’t say that the writers were happier than the dancers to keep talking and talking . . . but they were more difficult to get an appointment with, in the first place! (The dancers were easier to get hold of, as I spent many months with their companies, so I was around them on a daily basis.)
With the famous writers–just like the famous dancers–once I had them in front of me, I had to break through their shield of expectations, which inclined them to provide routine answers to journalistic questions that weren’t necessarily well-informed. This shield entailed a risk that they would be indifferent to the situation. I had to surprise them in order to get their engagement.
Asking John Banville, one of the most prominent and prolific contemporary Irish fiction writers: ”Why do you write?” was such a moment. He was taken aback and started thinking out aloud, off track. By then, I had established rapport with him.
I didn’t experience any significant differences between interviewing Irish dancers and Irish writers. There’s definitely a fascinating truth in Isadora Duncan’s famous observation:
“If I could tell you what it means, I would not have to dance it.”
But my questions for the dancers would mostly be about the social organization of the dance world–ranging from ”How come you started to dance?” and ”What is good dance?” to ”What do you think of dance critics?” and ”Tell me about camaraderie as well as competition in the dance world.”
I think it also mattered that I used to dance (ballet), myself. That meant that I had the vocabulary and general understanding of ballet culture, which the dancers appreciated. They often see themselves as misunderstood by other people.
AG: That aspect of “native ethnography” was also relevant, to some extent, in your research with the Irish writers. But they may have also perceived themselves as “native ethnographers” of you, as well. Did you ever find yourself reversing roles with them? That is to say, did you ever fear that the writers might end up interviewing you (or just observing you), to make you into a character in one of their books?
HW: Unlike most Irish writers, who are eloquent speakers as well as sociable people, there was one writer I interviewed who told me beforehand, on e-mail, that she was ”a reserved, private person,” and that she didn’t think she’d be able to contribute all that much to my study. But she agreed for us to meet up in a café in Dublin. I told her that I, too, used to be a shy person. I found her really pleasant, and we did connect, even though the interview was a bit slow in the beginning, as I felt I had to be careful. She kept her low-key approach but seemed to appreciate my questions. Then suddenly, she took charge! Amused, I realized that I was replying to her questions–about anthropology, my research, my writing, and my own family–in a more detailed way than I’d ever done before in an interview I was supposed to be conducting. It was funny and revealing to me. I remember thinking that she seemed to be taking the opportunity to do research for her own writing.
I haven’t come across myself as a character in any of her books yet. But I did notice that John Banville featured an anthropologist as a minor character in one of the books he wrote after I interviewed him!
In a similar vein, I did a pilot interview with Éilís Ní Dhuibhne for my research application for the project on Irish writers that I submitted to the Swedish Research Council.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
I was delighted to be awarded three years of funding for the research. Talking to Éilís about my plans for a study of writing as career and craft in Ireland turned out to give her an idea for a novel on the social organization of the literary world in Dublin, with all its collaborations, competitions, and even plagiarisms. It was published as Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow by Blackstaff in Belfast in 2007.
While inspired by certain circumstances in the literary world in Dublin, the novel does exaggerate, in order to make some points–as novels are allowed to do.
Such artistic license is also prevalent in Éilis’ short story, ”A Literary Lunch” (2012), where she satirizes the work of a board that awards literary prizes. In my book, I discuss how literary prizes are considered an important part of a writer’s career, not least because their publishers regard them as evidence that they have selected the right book to publish.
AG: Few anthropologists have chosen either writers or literary texts as their research subject. In the preface, you summarize some of the main points of overlap between anthropology and literature. Any further thoughts about anthropologists who influenced you in your decision to take on this project?
HW: As a student, I was already aware that Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz had an interest in literature, which I found reassuring. Later, I learned that James Clifford did as well. And when my contemporary, Nigel Rapport, wrote in 1994 about the ”prose and the passion” in the writings of E. M. Forster, I was intrigued and felt an affinity.
Even though I was deeply involved in my fieldwork and writing on ballet as a transnational occupation at the time, a desire to do an anthropological study of literature had already sprung up. It would have to wait, though, until I had completed my study of dance in Ireland. Then it was just a matter of course to stay in Ireland, but move to another topic, a prominent and influential topic in Ireland-–its writers. It made a lot of sense.
This was also when I started attending sessions on literary anthropology at the American Anthropological Association, sponsored by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.
With pleasure, I had long identified a literary sensibility in a number of anthropologists who are well-known for something else. Now, I was excited to meet and read the work by anthropologists such as Paul Stoller, Kirin Narayan, Ruth Behar, Kristen Ghodsee, and yourself, who were fully engaged in literary anthropology.
AG: What difference does anthropology make for a study of writers? Can you talk about how the questions you asked about Irish writers’ lives might be different from the sorts of questions that biographers and literary scholars might ask?
HW: Many contemporary literary scholars consider cultural, political or historical context, but their focus is on the literariness of the text, while anthropologists would focus on the context, while paying attention to the text. Not only for my study of writers, but also for both my studies of dancers, my guiding light has been Howard Becker’s Art Worlds, where he shows that artists don’t work in isolation, but in “art worlds”–in other words, in professional and cultural contexts.
As for biographers, while they might set their stories against a backdrop of culture, politics or history, their focus tends to be on private and/or professional lives. Mine is a study of a profession that sometimes can be understood through private lives–but, even more, through Ireland’s special situation historically.
AG: I’m struck by how you organized the book. In a work about writers, one might have imagined a focus on a single writer in each chapter. Instead, each chapter addresses a component of the literary career, or the social organization of the literary world. Can you discuss what went into your thinking about how to structure the book’s chapters?
HW: The structure of the book is chronological. It starts out with learning how to write, then moves to the making of a writer’s career, breakthroughs, maintaining a reputation, drawbacks, and finally demise. This is also reflected in some writers’ career trajectories, beginning with the local literary milieu in Dublin via varieties of translations of their books into films and musical shows in London and New York; America as hope; and, finally, Irish literature and the world.
AG: Given their literary expertise, are you more nervous about your interviewees reading this book than you have been with earlier projects? Has any of the writers (or agents or others in the publishing world) read it and shared any reactions with you yet?
HW: I’m not more nervous about this book. Ballet dancers, contemporary dancers, as well as Irish dancers were all experts in the fields I was writing about, and I did get really appreciative feedback from dancers who read those books. I felt mutual respect with them, as I did with the writers.
I may hear about other commentaries, but for now I’m very pleased that two of the writers (that I know of) have read Rhythms of Writing and say that they are ”impressed.” Another reaction is a very favorable review in The Irish Times by Anne Fogarty, an esteemed professor of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin. This was fabulous not only because the review was substantial and very positive, but also because Fogarty, who is a literary scholar, appreciated my anthropological take on her world.
AG: Speaking of reviews: In the book, you profile the structure of the literary marketplace. Do you see any overlaps with scholarly publishing? Any warning signs for us scholars to take note of? Any lessons we scholar-authors might learn?
HW: Yes, there are overlaps between literary and scholarly publishing, not least in the notion of a prestige hierarchy of publishers. Among Irish writers it’s more prestigious to publish in London or New York with a global conglomerate than in Dublin with a local boutique publisher, even though that’s where most writers start.
A warning sign for us scholars to take note of is the rise and impact of the agent. Irish writers who publish internationally all have agents, but I did hear certain reservations about these brokers from both writers and publishers. There were writers who found that they had to revise their texts according to the agent’s criteria, and these criteria would follow the agent’s predictions of the market, rather than the writer’s own literary inclinations. But then, the agent may actually be right.
For publishers, the agents are necessary, as it’s often agents who spot a new talent. Yet one editor was quite frank with me in his description of how agents put their own interests first, in terms of making money for themselves.
There are, of course, already scholar-authors in the U.S. who have agents, and this might well work for them. Still, for those of us who have a firm engagement in writing as a craft, and take a lot of pride in formulating sentences and keep searching for new expressions, the idea to have not only an editor and peer-reviewers but also an agent suggesting revisions, if not enforcing them, seems scary, to say the least. For in the end, who is the author, then?
AG: Let’s end on a happier note! Can you say something about your new research on “world literatures” beyond the Euro-American traditions?
Sweden used to boast an ethnically welcoming policy, but has now restricted its migration and refugee intake. There is also a growing anti-immigration party. Still, these writers are diversifying Sweden from within. Some of them have international reputations. While the Irish writers were surfing on the mighty fame of their predecessors such as James Joyce and Seamus Heaney, migrant writers in Sweden are not associated with August Strindberg or Astrid Lindgren. So, how is it that the writings of Jonas Hassen Khemiri (of partly Tunisian origin) on terrorism and racism in Sweden have become acclaimed in New York, London, Tokyo and many other places across the globe?
The curse of the anthropologist: finding culture everywhere in nature.
Publicly posted signs reinvent the medieval European town crier, or the West African village drummer
Today, the coastal neighborhood in which my husband and I now live hosted a cleanup in a nearby cove.
Of course, this effort was billed as an environmental event. But whenever I bent down to pick up a piece of blue plastic poking up from the sand, or a shard of brown glass glinting under the noonday sun, I couldn’t help thinking of the organization of labor required by clever humans to lug this alarming collection of detritus to a landfill.
Or perhaps a container ship will transport the bags of sea trash halfway around the world. Someplace in China, rural-to-urban migrant laborers might pick through heaps of American scrap and send the sorted pieces to factories in Shenzhen or Dongguan. There, other rural-to-urban migrant workers (of the sort profiled by the fascinating book by Leslie Chang that I am currently reading, Factory Girls) will make new products from recycled glass and bits of plastic. Maybe next year, those products will make their way on new container ships headed back to the Port of Providence, right up the road from us. And then, I might buy a set of drinking glasses or a plastic spatula at the local mall that boasts, “Made in China.” Was it really? Our work today suggests that such a label might tell only a very partial story.
Or so I fantasized, as I picked out crushed straws and dirtied pencil stubs from the wet sand and stuffed them in my rapidly filling trash bag.
Enjoying a beautiful day for a clean-up; photo by Philip Graham
As I joined in today’s collective effort, my mind wandered back to an annual community cleanup that occurred in the small villages of the Beng people in which my husband and I have lived for long periods in the rain forest of Ivory Coast. There, the male chief of every village organizes the event. The goal: to sweep the paths clean that connect village and forest. Farmers walk these paths daily to reach their fields, which are located deep in the heart of the West African rain forest. It’s important to keep the paths clear–otherwise, inattentive farmers worried about this year’s rainfall might forget to look where they’re stepping and tread on a poisonous millipede, a scorpion, or a snake.
Beng villages are designed as discrete clearings in the surrounding rain forest; photo by Philip Graham
Once those paths into the forest are cleared, the residents tackle the village itself. The goal: to clear every blade of grass, so no child inadvertently steps unsuspectingly on a green mamba hiding among tall plants while walking to Grandma’s house.
A Beng chief’s word is next to that of god. Beng chiefs are said to use witchcraft to protect their villages, and no sane person would dare deny their annual order to sweep the paths.
A young Beng man sweeps in front of the assistant chief (seated, with a white shirt), while behind him, his older brother, the village chief (seated, with a long, light blue robe) looks on, approvingly; the space is being cleared before a village meeting is convened
Moreover, these chiefs occupy a hereditary position. Sure, villagers might dispute the suitability of this or that genealogically qualified candidate, after a particular chief dies. But the basic system offers an official and more or less predictable structure into which individual successors can be slotted.
The neighborhood in which my husband and I now live in Rhode Island lacks such an inherited leader. So how does our annual neighborhood cove cleanup get organized?
As it happens, one woman named Barbara Rubine occupies something of a chief-like position.
Barbara Rubine (left) oversees today’s cove cleanup, along with Andy Gell and Mark Garrison, two Board members of the Edgewood Waterfront Preservation Association
Yet, from what I can tell, many volunteers at today’s cleanup don’t know this energetic and visionary woman–even though she is, herself, a veritable force of nature. No, it’s not Barbara Rubine’s moral authority that draws groups of neighbors to add their e-mail address to a list of volunteers, study a long list of labor-intensive tasks, then grab trash pickers and leaf bags and get to work.
Environmental activist groups sponsoring the clean-up requested e-mail addresses to recruit volunteers for future tasks, then provided supplies for all volunteers to use
It must be some collective sense of purpose that, despite its amorphous shape, draws individuals here.
Dean’s grandfather
Moreover, many parents clearly aim to model civic engagement for their children. After all, it takes a village to maintain our neighborhood cove–which, as my five-year-old grandson Dean proclaimed last year (following a tour of Rhode Island’s magnificent coastline), is, after all, “the original, the best, and the most beautiful cove.”
And so, behind all this laudable effort to preserve the habitat of shellfish beds in their vulnerable corner of the natural world, the structure and motivation of the human labor on behalf of the mussels somehow claim most of my attention.
Fragile mussel beds benefited from the housekeeping efforts of their human friends
Anthropologist Charlie Piot has been conducting research on the political economy and history of rural West Africa for over thirty years. His first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999), has gained wide attention for re-theorizing a classic, out-of-the-way place as existing within the modern and the global.
His next book, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War(2010), explored shifts in Togolese political culture during the 1990s, when NGOs and charismatic churches reorganized social and political life in the absence of the state.
His current project focuses on Togolese who apply for, and attempt to game, the US Diversity Visa Lottery.
You can find out more about Charles Piot’s work on his Duke University website here.
While pursuing his own research in Togo, Piot now brings undergraduate students from his U.S. campus (Duke University) for short stays in the West African villages of the Kabre people where he has made a second home. While there over summer and winter breaks, the students have developed and pursued their own, small-scale development projects. In developing these projects, the students aim to tap into both their own skills and the needs of the villagers.
Neophytes are notoriously doomed to fail in such culturally and politically sensitive work. But these students are lucky to have Professor Piot to guide them in the exceptionally thoughtful and informed way that anthropologists do best. Many of the projects have already proven transformative, while the failures have proven instructive.
Anthropologist Brad Weiss calls the book “an innovative . . . eminently readable and teachable text valuable to courses in international relations, political science, and anthropology.”
The book was “Highly recommended” for libraries by Choice.
Recently, Charlie and I had a conversation online about the book. During part of our conversation, Charlie was actually back in the villages, checking up on recent projects and tweaking them to make improvements. I think you’ll find the conversation fascinating.
CP: Charles Piot
AG: Alma Gottlieb
AG: This book features projects that your undergraduate students at Duke have undertaken in a rural area of Togo where you’ve conducted research among the Kabre people for a few decades. What inspired you to compile a book of essays by and about research in West Africa done by American undergrads?
CP: The idea for the book was entirely student-driven! One year’s group of students with academic leanings – all three went on to graduate study, with one now pursuing a PhD in medical anthropology – asked if they might write up the results of their summer projects in an Independent Study class.
I agreed and put them through the paces – first week, produce an abstract; second week, an Introduction; and so on. Before you knew it, they each had short articles, which were surprisingly strong. One of the students asked if we couldn’t try to publish them, and of course I said, “Sure”–while secretly imagining that we’d end up publishing them on a website of our own design.
But one thing led to another. We added more essays the following year. We found some money to fly in to Duke an anthropologist (John Hawkins) who had published a similar book of student essays, and he gave us outstanding editorial advice. We had lunch with a Duke University Press editor who was super-supportive of the idea – for him, it was a novelty, a book by undergraduates for undergraduates about development – and said he’d send the essays out for review. But then, of course, the real work of producing a book – of editing and fitting all the pieces together – began.
Then, too, the projects themselves have always drawn me in. These projects – all, student-designed – are interesting and doing important work in the villages. And they tell interesting cultural stories.
Recipient of the Writer’s Collective Award for Best Poem (with a Duke Student), in a Kabre Village (Togo)
Finally, the problems and challenges of development in West Africa are vexing and fascinating. I didn’t used to think so. In fact, in years past, I would run the other way when I saw a development worker. But now I find issues of development not only urgent but also (as Lévi-Strauss might have said) “good to think with.”
2017 Group of Duke University Students in a Kabre Village (Togo)
AG: Let’s start with that last comment. As an Africanist, I spent three decades lecturing to students about the failures of large-scale “development” programs across Africa. I suspect you did, too. Yet we both find ourselves now working with small-scale “development” projects in our fieldsites. Or maybe, it’s because we found so much wrong with those large-scale programs that we’ve both now embraced much more local, small-scale projects, in spaces we know well. (Your work with these projects in Togo is exactly why Philip Graham and I invited you to join the Advisory Board of the Beng Community Fund that we founded, to create small-scale projects with Beng villagers in Côte d’Ivoire.)
In helping your students design their micro-projects, do you find yourself thinking explicitly about the failures of so many past IMF (etc.)-funded projects in Africa, and working with these students to design projects that will avoid those well-documented problems?
CP: Everything we do in Togo is tied to the spectre of development’s many failures that you reference. My own feeling is that many of those failures, whether large-scale or small, are due to the failure to understand or engage with local culture. How can you introduce new systems of debt (that come in with a microfinance project) if you don’t understand local notions of debt? How can you design farming or health projects if you don’t understand local labor and cultivation practices, the way gender and labor intersect, and even local conceptions of the body? But, astonishingly, most development projects never get down in the weeds of the local like this. They assume the benefits of their projects will be obvious to all. So they hire technicians and economists and agronomists, who are all well-versed in the Western sciences—but, rarely, anthropologists!
All of our projects in Togo – a microfinance opportunity for teens, a village health insurance system, computer classes, a writers’ collective – attempt to draw on local knowledge from the get-go, from design to implementation. If we’ve had any success at all–and I believe we have– it’s because of our attention to local culture and history.
But there are no guarantees! Indeed, as a provocation, I tell the students they shouldn’t get their hopes up too much, they should remain humble (and assume that locals know much more than they do – about farming, their bodies, local institutions), and even expect failure. But such failure can be instructive in informing future efforts.
Another blind spot of many development projects is sustainability and follow-up. Do they ever think about the time, five or ten years down the road, when the outside director or project manager will no longer be there? Usually not. This is a topic I’m preoccupied with right now. What will happen to these projects after I stop taking students to Togo? And what happens each year after we leave? Do the computer classes live on, does the microfinance project continue to function? I’m actually in Togo right now for a few weeks for that very reason, to follow up on all of the projects and continue to brainstorm the question of sustainability.
Charlie Piot Drinking Sorghum Beer with a Local Chief in a Togolese Village
AG: That’s fantastic that you’re writing about this from the village–using Internet supplied by one of your students’ projects. That would certainly be one of the success stories. Can you talk about the projects that have been the most–and least–sustainable? In the case of the projects that are faltering, are the obstacles more technical, or sociological, or economic, or emotional . . .or a combination of some or all the above? Are there things you now realize you could do in the future to make new student projects more sustainable?
Wireless Relay Station outside a Kabre Village (Togo) Demonstrated by Duke Student
CP: A nice question! I’ll respond by discussing two examples of projects of ours that have had mixed success.
First, the health insurance system we’ve set up in a village clinic. With this project, member families get free consultation and pay 25% the normal cost of medications, all for $4 a year per family. The project has had fluctuating membership since it began 10 years ago, with only 25 families out of 200 currently enrolled. And this, despite the fact that all insurees are unanimous in their praise of the benefits of the system. Every year, we interview members and non-members to try to get to the bottom of why more families aren’t signing up.
Some of their responses: the health insurance scheme requires payment on a schedule, while the local system of payment and debt is more accommodating to unforeseen contingencies; the indigenous system of medicines is also efficacious and cheaper (you never “thank” a healer until after you are cured, with payment in kind – some beer, a chicken); some worry that paying for a cure before you fall sick might (through mystical means) bring on the sickness; others want to know if they can get their money back at the end of the year if they never attend the clinic. All these responses make us realize how culturally shaped the idea of “health insurance” is!
The second example involves the cyber café.
Muddy Flip-flops Left outside the Entrance to the Kudwe Cyber Café in a Kabre Village (Togo)
The computer classes we’ve offered while we’re there have been wildly successful.
Schoolroom Chalkboard Demonstrating the French Keyboard in a Kabre Village (Togo)
And we’ve found a high school student, a real wiz, who took our classes, to teach them to others after we left. That could make the project sustainable beyond our presence.
Students inside Classroom in a Kabre Village (Togo)
But last month, when I was visiting the villages, I discovered that the cyber café has been closed to classes since we left last August, because the person responsible was transferred to a town fifty miles away, and the person taking over hasn’t yet done what they call a “transfer of power” (passation de service), because no one has yet compiled an inventory of the materials in the cyber café.
So, as you can see, these are not technical problems–they’re social and cultural. And while both projects are “successful” – the health plan works well for some families, and we’ve taught computer and Internet skills to several hundred youth in the villages – they’ve nevertheless fallen short of realizing their full potential.
AG: You’re unusually honest in assessing the weak spots of promising projects. I’m guessing this is because your training as an anthropologist compels you to see the social fissures that are invisible to the directors of so many large-scale development projects, who often focus on the technical components alone. Our propensity as anthropologists to see the invisible but powerful lines of the social universe may make it easy for us to spot problems that elude the gaze of others.
But, does that skill also enable us to fix the problems? For example, once you discovered the personnel problem with the cyber café, did you perceive any viable way to tackle it?
The insurance situation strikes me as even more challenging, because there, you’re dealing with a clash of values, and that’s almost always far trickier to address than other challenges.
Thinking about both these projects–with their encouraging yet mixed successes–I wonder if you have thoughts about how the next group of Duke students you bring to Togo might brainstorm solutions that could further address this thorny but critical question of sustainability.
CP: I do think our training as anthropologists aims our attention to the social life of communities, with all its messiness and conflict and fissure. Do these insights also enable us to find solutions to the problems of development in small-scale contexts like this? In principle, yes.
To stay with the example of the cyber café we’ve installed: despite the frustrating loss of time – eight months of inactivity – my students and I have familiarity with the lines of authority at the cyber café and in the larger community, and we know what jealousies might be in play—so we are able to brainstorm solutions with local allies.
In this case, a promising outcome is in progress – and one that may vault the cyber-café into a whole new orbit of activity, with a private entrepreneur from a different ethnic group managing it, while adding a photo-copier and printer, and installing a money transfer kiosk. (Local wisdom is to go outside the community to look for a manager, as locals might attempt to poach on the goodwill of a family member or close acquaintance, quickly bankrupting the enterprise.) So – perhaps! Only time will tell if this will be a failure-into-success story. If it does, even a success will surely generate its own new round of challenges and setbacks.
But, development in such a context is always like this. If we’re lucky, we might take three steps forward for every two steps back. And, in any case, staying with the challenges has its own rewards.
2017 Teen Microfinance Awardees (and Family Member Guarantors) in a Kabre Village (Togo)
Can artists and social scientists inhabit the same universe?
Melisa (“Misha”) Cahnmann-Taylor embodies that nexus.
Her advanced degrees include an MFA in poetry . . . and a PhD in educational linguistics.
She’s published plenty of scholarly work in academic journals and books (about language learning, sustainable or fragile states of bilingualism, and teacher education) . . . and plenty of poems in literary journals.
She uses poetic and theatrical exercises to teach everyone from young children to future English language teachers.
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor (in black, with hat) running a poetry program at an elementary school in Cajones, Mexico
Misha’s professional quest is to understand the complexities of U.S. bilingual education, second language teaching, and world language education . . . and, more broadly, the intersections between language, culture, identity, class, and power. She dubs her work, “scholARTistry,” which she sees as spanning linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor (back row, left) celebrating writing bilingual and trans-lingual creative writing with participants in a workshop for students held in Guanajuato, Mexico; sponsored by the Richard Ruiz Residency Scholar Program(a fellowship program for scholar-artists through the U of Arizona Resplandor program)
Misha began her career as a bilingual (Spanish/English) elementary educator in south-central Los Angeles and went on to teach and conduct research among Latino/a communities in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Mexico City. She now works with bilingual youth and their families in Georgia, where she is Professor of Language and Literacy Education in the College of Education at the University of Georgia.
As a teacher, Misha seeks a humanistic approach–one that honors lived experience, and that cultivates the potential for cross-cultural dialogue and deep listening in and out of the classroom. Some of her pedagogical activities are inspired by Brazilian activist Augusto Boal’s development of a Theatre of the Oppressed. A book that Cahnmann-Taylor co-authored on Teachers Act Up! Creating Multicultural Learning Communities through Theatreexplores the potential for theatre to inform teaching.
Misha also incorporates poetry at every level of teaching.
A student’s edited poem done in a workshop taught by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor
Misha brings her creative approach to the classroom in training pre-service Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages [TESOL], foreign language teachers, and K-12 English language arts teachers. To these different constituencies, she offers a wide array of courses on topics ranging from Spanish-language children’s literature and bilingualism/bilingual education to theatre for reflective language teachers, poetry for creative educators, and trans-lingual memoir.
A moment with Edgar Allen Poe, while Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor (center) directed her second Big Read-Jeffers Program for the National Endowment for the Arts
You can find Misha’s university webpage here and her Academia.edu page here. And you can follow her pedagogically oriented blog (Teachers Act Up–Thoughts on Teaching, Language, and Social Change) here.
Many of the poems in this book reflect on what Cahnmann-Taylor learned while serving in 2013-14 as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Oaxaca (Mexico), where she researched American adults’ Spanish language acquisition. In a pre-publication assessment of the book, distinguished poet Thomas Lux wrote:
“These poems are about language and are brilliant evocations of what it is like to be human in a world that seems to make that more and more difficult. This is an original and powerful book.”
I recently interviewed Misha about Imperfect Tense. Have a read (AG = Alma Gottlieb; MCT= Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor):
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AG: Given your training as a social scientist, why do you (also) write poetry?
MCT: One answer is that I was mentored and inspired–directly or indirectly–by creative scholars and anthropologists such as Ruth Behar,Renato Rosaldo, Fred Erickson, Nancy Hornberger, Ivan Brady, Gloria Anzaldúa, Augusto Boal, you, and others who maintained lives as creative people . . . and whose social science was better because of their engagement with music, image, metaphor, and vulnerability.
Equally true is that I write poetry because it’s how I’m built. I use the tools of an anthropologist to listen deeply, and see and process what I’m experiencing and what I’ve learned from others’ scholarship. I also use the tools in which I was trained as an artist. Metaphor, image, meter, rhyme, stanzaic structure–these aspects of craft and form help me shape what Robert Bly referred to as a “leaping consciousness,” one that is unafraid to go back and forth between the head and the heart. I can’t help but want to “feel” data and find the right words in the right order. With any luck, my poems may also help others feel the compressed complexity of human experience through lyric form.
AG: Does writing poetry also inform your ethnographic writing?
MCT: Only now, so many years after writing about “arts-based research” (culminating in a book I co-edited, Arts-Based Research in Education:Foundations for Practice), have I begun to defy separation between these two genres and look at them both as forms of “trans” writing–writing that’s often trans-lingual and trans-genre. Writing poetry has helped me clarify and claim my own voice as a poet scholar, or “scholartist”–one who wants to move away from tired explanations of method and theory.
That said, when I wrote my 2013-14 Fulbright application to study adult North Americans’ Spanish language acquisition in Mexico through poetry, I did so with trepidation, as well as a healthy dose of “conventional” methodology–interviews, planned participant-observation. I went into the field to collect ethnographic data much like any conventional anthropologist.
Observing Jonathan Blasi teaching Spanish to an adult American language learner in Oaxaca
But doing so as a poet, perhaps, also meant that I was open to the unconventional, that my fieldnotes and poetry notes intermingled, and that the ethnography study I might also write might never get written. The poems felt more accomplished than my ethnographic prose writing. That said, there was one interview that I found too big and too important to compress into a single poem or series of poems. This is why I took up ethnographic playwriting and wrote my first play. But I don’t think I’ll do that again because it requires a commitment to working with staged readings and theatre companies that I just don’t have. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I prefer poems because I can craft them virtually alone.
AG: Ha, yes, that’s probably something many poets might identify with.
Many of the poems in your new book have a “meta” foundation—they address different aspects of language itself, from being bilingual, or trying but failing to learn another language, to nuances of modal verbs and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Can you talk about the grammatically-themed title to this collection—“Imperfect Tense”?
MCT: The title is a direct result of an interview with an English-speaking, American woman I met in Oaxaca, Mexico in her 60s who described her own painful process toward the never-ending goal of “fluency” in Spanish. Like many of those I interviewed, she was disappointed with traditional language classes for foreigners where verb tenses are taught in isolation. She told me how accomplished she felt when she could describe a film she’d seen all in the “imperfect tense” rather than in the present or fixed past–a tense that doesn’t exist in English. “The imperfect is so good for telling stories,” she said.
I got a chills as soon as she’d said it. That’s it! What we tell ourselves as language learners are all stories of imperfection–I’ll never know enough, I’m not a good enough student, I’m not native–all these negative messages we tell ourselves and others. These seemed to help me better understand the grit of those who study a second language in spite of the hardships–it’s a reckoning with permanent imperfection.
AG: I love that.
MCT: In putting together the book manuscript, I had poems from earlier phases of my life as a bilingual teacher, a bilingual daughter, and future aspirations as a bilingual mother. So the “past” and “ever-present” tenses seemed like good additions to the “imperfect” for drawing together different sections of the book and the poems that have composed my life.
I should add that I’m teaching a course now on “translingual writing” and work toward changing my language from describing “bilingualism,” implying two separate codes, towards translingualism or code-meshing. I’m grateful to Suresh Canagarajah for inspiring this movement. Translingualism helps me grapple with my own imperfect command of Spanish, English, Yiddish, and other codes that transgress my system.
AG: The notion of “translingual” writing seems especially apt these days, with so many conversations about “transgendered” identities.
At the same time, another set of poems in this book addresses mothering, child-rearing, and childhood.
A somatic statement on the politics of motherhood
The poem, “Mother Less, Mother More,” especially blew me away (and I love your dramatic reading of the poem, online here):
I can imagine that poem speaking to any mother, anywhere—no small feat. If you agree, would you still see this poem as ethnographic? Or do you think a poem must treat a culturally specific experience in order to qualify as “ethnographic”?
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor with her daughter in Mexico
MCT: That is a very good question, and quite a compliment. That poem was published in a journal called “Mom Egg Review: Literature & Art” that targets mothers as its primary audience, so I was happy that this poem was showcased there. While its audience, if I’m lucky, may find it compelling to mothers in general, its trigger is partly personal (I have two small children ages 8 & 10), but also ethnographic. My training was in the Department of Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania founded by Dell Hymes. I was informed by many linguistic anthropologists, including Elinor Ochs and Shirley Bryce Heath, who drew my attention to the different ways language is used according to race, class, gender, age, and a host of other variables.
If I were restricting myself to terms current in linguistic anthropology now, I might replace “motherese” in the above excerpt with “caregiver speech” or “infant-directed speech.” But that’s head language and not poetry. And this is a poem, not ethnographic prose. Or is it?
I had poems informed by theory, by the many academic disciplines in which I was trained, and the permission that making art has given me to defy boundaries and write it! (a nod to Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”), anyhow. I trusted that coherence between individual poems would happen. It took quite a while, but the centering work of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico gave me the backbone I needed to hold these varied language poems together in one book’s spine.
AG: They do hold together, even as another set of poems in this collection addresses your experiences with Judaism. Religion is a classic topic for anthropology. Why have you chosen the genre of poetry to write about it? Do you think there are things you can say about Judaism (or any other religion)—or ways to say it—that work better through poetry than through social science?
MCT: For me, the theme in this book is imperfection. Speaking a “standard language,” or becoming a “good mother,” or abiding by the tenets of one’s “religion”–these are all socially constructed roles which privilege an unattainable ideal. The poems are informed by interviews, participant-observation, library research, theory, and of course life experience. I would say that choosing to write religious poems was the choice made by my unconscious mind, a choice I might not have made had I restricted myself to writing only about my ethnographic focus of Spanish-English bilingualism.
AG: Can you compare your process of writing scholarly texts (including the research necessary ahead of time) with the process of writing poems (whether or not this ever involves “research” for you)? Any overlap, or are they two entirely different processes?
MCT: Earlier, I said that I am taking advantage of aging into a voice that isn’t one or the other but is always both. This may also be due to restrictions in the time I find I can spend doing extensive, planned fieldwork abroad, and to the increase in time I spend researching communities around me. Recently, I have been teaching poetry courses to international students enrolled in graduate-level TESOL programs [Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages]. They will return to their home countries to teach English, and I am teaching them to consider their own poetic voice and those of their future students.
Misha also incorporates drawing as a visual complement to writing in her pedagogy; here, students drawing on the streets of Oaxaca
Studying this process involved collecting data in the form of interviews, but also these students’ poems as well as my own poetic response to the shared educational experience. I am constantly searching for ways to merge my thinking and my poetic voice. Recently, I did this in a “manifesto” I wrote for a journal called Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal. I needed a new genre as a way to find language for grappling with #BlackLivesMatter as a white, female academic. Finding this journal and their open call for the “manifesto” form felt like finding a “home”–one I didn’t know existed but have been seeking.
AG: That “manifesto” genre is an unusual one for a scholar. Did having anthropologist-poet role models like the ones you mentioned earlier help give you courage to explore new writing styles?
MCT: I feel so “at home” when I meet members of this hybrid tribe. I began to find community through the Society of Humanistic Anthropology where I first met Dell Hymes in person and was awarded the ethnographic poetry prize so many years ago.
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor receiving Ethnographic Poetry Award from Alma Gottlieb (president of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology), November 2003
Then I became a judge for this prize, and not long after, Ather Zia came to my attention. She was one of the prize winners, and she has been a dear companion and now co-judge ever since. Nomi Stone, Adrie Kusserow, and Dana Walrath are some of the many other poetic anthropologists I’ve met through various meetings, often organized by the late, great Kent Maynard who I will forever miss since his early passing.
I continue to be drawn to panels at AAA that address creative crossings and genre bendings. At this last year’s 2017 meeting, I met wonderful poets and poetic anthropologists through the This Anthro Life [podcast series] and the wonderful new Sapiens [blog] from Wenner Gren. I’m also newly connecting with ethnographic songwriters like Kristina Jacobsen, as well as with ethnographic fiction writers and ethnographic dancers. My new heroes are often younger than I am, pushing and changing the field, daring to do things that might have felt impossible or taboo to do earlier.
AG: What’s next? More poetry? More anthropological writings? Both?
MCT: I just came out with a second edition of my co-edited book on “arts-based research” as I continue to articulate what it means to create new transdisciplinary work spaces that sit between the social sciences and the arts. I keep my creative writing alive, and I am open to more poems as well as finding new spaces for trans-genre writing that is both empirical and aesthetic.
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor (second from right) leading students and colleagues from the Autonomous University of Oaxaca at a poetry reading at the Oaxaca Lending Library
Finally, I am still doing some conventional qualitative inquiry, especially as I mentor students. It’s very important to me not to lose touch with the nuts and bolts provided by theory and ethnographic research design.
AG: As a scholar-poet, have you found a space in the academy that accommodates that dual career? Or, do you bifurcate these parts of your life into two separate career tracks? Based on your own experience, how would you advise young scholar-poets to construct their professional lives in the present moment of the academy?
MCT: In the last chapter of our new book, Arts-based Research in Education, I answer this question. I am tired of bifurcation and am teaching new generations of students to defy binaries. They push and pull, and I push and pull back, and this is happening in different ways in creative writing, the arts, and social sciences both in the U.S. and around the world. Based on my experience, I train students to strive to do “double”–to train in conventional research methods and theory as well as in poetry or other creative genres, and discover ways they can fuse them. In this way, they can play more than one game, to be able to get through the dissertation process and find a job in various possible homes.
But I feel I have a lot to learn from daring and younger scholars who won’t necessarily seek or find the same kind of academic jobs I was prepared for, and that I uphold. Based on my experience, I encourage younger “scholartists” to take my advice . . . but I know that only 50% or less will be relevant for them, their particular identity, and the new market in which they find themselves. To be relevant means to be present in the moment as you learn all about what has come before. My job is to nurture confidence and humility, and try to exercise those skills myself as my students continue to teach me about unknown futures. The poet in me tries to train the pedagogue to share what I have learned, but also to invite students to surprise me with what they know or can newly conceive.
The lives, status, and image of immigrants may constitute the single-most urgent human issue of our time. In an arresting and captivating new study of Cameroonian mothers now living in Berlin, Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg challenges just about everything we thought we knew about immigrants. Living as migrants in a nation infamous for its twentieth-century genocides against “others,” these educated, often middle-class women demonstrate over and over again the common impulses that define our shared humanity.
The publisher offers complementary desk copies and exam copies to instructors here.
From the website of Carleton College (where she is the Broom Professor of Social Demography and Anthropology, and Director of Africana Studies), you can find Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg’s institutional home page here.
I recently interviewed Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg online about her new book. Here’s what she had to say (AG = Alma Gottlieb; PFS = Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg):
Photo by Alma Gottlieb
Interview with Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg
AG: Your early research focused on the lives of women in Cameroon. This book focuses on women who’ve left Cameroon to re-start their lives in Berlin. What inspired you–both to switch fieldsites to a new continent, and to write a book on a new subject?
PFS: Each research project has opened up new questions and curiosities. Following these leads has led me to new fieldsites within Cameroon, and then within Europe. Along the way, I am not only following up on questions raised by prior research projects, but I’m also following people from the same ethnic group and region—sometimes even the same people, or their friends and children—from the countryside to the city, and on to Berlin or Paris.
And I’ve always been interested in women’s lives, in reproduction and family-making, and in tensions between belonging and marginalization. Thus, even though I’ve switched fieldsites, there’s a lot of continuity in my work. The transnational migration aspect is new, but otherwise this book is not about an entirely new subject.
Even my next planned research project—about ways in which the contexts of reception matter for Cameroonians’ changing notions of transnational family obligations—continues along these lines, while bringing me to new sites (Paris, Cape Town).
AG: That should be a wonderful new project.
Meanwhile, Western media images of migrants and refugees tend to focus on the poorest of the poor—those in desperate conditions, in need of serious outlays of both aid and
sympathy. The West African migrants you profile are mostly highly educated, and at least middle-class. Did you choose to focus on this group of semi-invisible migrants to challenge stereotypes? What lessons can they teach Western readers?
PFS: Yes, I do aim to challenge stereotypes. I tell one among many possible stories about African migration and family-making in Europe. Other important stories have been told about migration and the search for well-being. I fear that some of these narratives end up reinforcing stereotypes of “the African migrant” as illegal(ized), impoverished, and in need of help.
In dialogue with my Cameroonian interlocutors and colleagues, I became aware of the pain caused by the repetition of a one-sided story of abjection. Stereotypes hurt. However well-meaning, fundraising campaigns portraying poor, helpless African women and children belie the energy, intelligence, and educational resources of Cameroonian immigrant women. Without sugarcoating the hardships of migration, it’s important to let readers know that the story of abjection does not fit the data for Cameroonian immigrants to Berlin.
There are enormous distinctions in women’s lives depending not only on class background and class attainment, but also immigration status upon entering the new country, as well as the ability (or lack thereof) to maintain or obtain regularized immigration status. These critical distinctions often lead to vastly differing reproductive strategies, which in turn are linked to different ways that women seek a sense of belonging in multiple communities.
As anthropologists we look for both patterns and particularities. The former are important for telling a coherent, social-scientific story; the multiple stories of particular individuals’ lives are important to work against typification, which is by definition reductionist.
AG: Your book details examples of daily racism that Cameroonian immigrants experience in Berlin . . . yet, new Cameroonian migrants continue arriving. In the wake of Germany’s role in WWII aiming to annihilate Jews, Roma, gays, and other groups of people that white Germans dubbed “Others,” how do you explain the decisions of these African elites to emigrate, of all places, to Germany?
PFS: There are many reasons that Cameroonian migrants—and as we know from the news, many, many others—choose to emigrate to Germany. Economics is primary—because of the country’s strong economy and job opportunities. Especially important to upwardly-mobile Cameroonians is Germany’s almost-free university education. And, interestingly, many Cameroonians appreciate the fact that it is not France. Cameroonian migrants in both Germany and France—and, as I learned this summer, those who remain home in Cameroon—perceive that immigration bureaucracy works more reliably and predictably in Germany than it does in France. Even if the UN, in its Decade for People of African Descent, finds significant structural racism in Germany, native-born Germans hold a variety of political and ideological positions. Thus, despite the catastrophic history of racism in their country, some Germans are more aware of inherent racism, and eager to discuss it, than are their counterparts in countries with less tainted histories. And, for all its faults (past and present), Germany is certainly more welcoming to refugees than is the U.S. in the current Trump era.
Still, the common question posed often by Germans to immigrants in daily life, “Where do you come from?” haunts Cameroonian parents and their children in Germany, as does the general image of “Africa” that is portrayed in mass media. One Cameroonian mother told me a poignant story about her seven-year-old son’s visit to Cameroon. “This isn’t Africa, mom,” he exclaimed. There were no lions or giraffes, not even a little monkey in the big port city of Douala. Instead, while visiting his urban cousins, he experienced air-conditioned office buildings with elevators, manicured gardens, and schoolchildren in neatly pressed uniforms. None of this fit with the image of game parks and starving, half-naked children that the boy had learned about from television.
AG: Wow, what a moving (and disturbing) story. It reminds me of all the mini-stories you write about the women whose lives you’ve followed in Berlin. These women will feel very much like real people to a reader–individuals with their own idiosyncratic biographies and challenges, rather than what Renato Rosaldo might call the dreaded Group Noun (which, in this case, would be a single kind of person we could categorize as “Cameroonian women migrants”). Why did you decide to feature a number of individual women, and how did you decide on these particular women to feature?
PFS: In this book I aim to portray the voices of individual women, each with her own concerns, challenges, resources, and desires. I mentioned earlier that I want to work against stereotypes and typification. This doesn’t mean that I don’t look for patterns in Cameroonian migrant women’s lives. Of course I do! Migrant women share predicaments of belonging, reproduction, and connection that are created and/or exacerbated by migration. But, shaped by their diverse biographies and circumstances, each woman manages these predicaments in her own way. I decided to feature particular women because they illustrated the diversity of women’s experiences and strategies.
When women told me about their lives, I was just fascinated by how their individual characters came through. I think of Maria telling me her love story—starting with her surprise meeting with a childhood sweetheart in Berlin—while showing me her family photo album. Or of Mrs. Black’s anguish that her white German husband just couldn’t or wouldn’t understand how important it was to her to help her extended family with gifts of cash.
I’d like to add something else about stories. Cameroonian migrant mothers share stories, or anecdotes from their lives, with one another. This is just a normal part of socializing. My book shows how, through stories, individual experiences are communicated and become crystallized into collectively held orientations toward the world, toward a new context.
AG: One of the key concepts you deploy in the book is the notion of “affective circuits.” Can you speak about how you seized on that metaphor from electrical engineering to speak to the issues concerning migration that you are tackling?
PFS: I didn’t invent the term. I got the idea from our fellow anthropologists, Jennifer Cole and Christian Groes, who had invited me to contribute to an edited volume on affective circuits. I loved the layers of metaphors—gesturing simultaneously toward research on migration circuits and toward electrical engineering—so I took the idea and ran with it, developing the notion further. So often in studies of social capital, researchers write as if economic and informational flows along network ties are constant. But the network ties of the women I studied were neither constant nor additive. Women dropped some relationships, gained others, and then renewed old ties, depending upon how their circumstances and their feelings changed. Neither words (whether loving or nagging) nor money nor presents flowed continuously along women’s social connections; the flows stop and start and must be managed. And this careful management that women do is all bound up in the feelings they have toward their families, their fellow migrants, and the German bureaucrats they meet.
AG: Indeed. Moreover, in Berlin, the children of the migrants you’ve followed are growing up in very different circumstances from the childhoods of their parents. You’ve highlighted the term “Belonging” in your subtitle. Can you talk about the different issues that the two generations experience as black migrants in a predominantly white nation?
PFS: What an interesting question, with many layers! Some aspects of belonging are not questioned in Cameroon, but are brought to consciousness in Germany. One difference is that parents, growing up in Cameroon, largely didn’t have to worry about being black. They didn’t grow up as a “minority”—but their children do. On the other hand, the children of migrants grow up fluent in German, and they get early practice in code-switching between forms of behavior deemed appropriate in “German” vs. “Cameroonian” settings. Language learning and cultural adaptation are more challenging and self-conscious for their parents.
Another difference is that migrants who arrived in Germany as adults had earlier experienced challenges of belonging in Cameroon. It may seem surprising that individuals have a hard time belonging in their country of origin, but the legacies of Cameroon’s complex colonial history (which included three different colonial powers—Germany, France, and England) mean that people of certain ethnic groups and regions are disadvantaged on the national scene. These groups—for example, the Bamiléké and English-speaking Cameroonians—make up a large proportion of the Cameroonian diaspora. Their children, by contrast, grow up in Germany with a different view of their homeland—a place of origin, a place to visit, a place where Grandma and Grandpa live.
Still another difference in migrants’ experiences concerns recent historical change in Germany. Earlier migrants faced many more challenges than do more recent migrants, because there are now settled migrants and migrant organizations that can ease newcomers’ transition to life in Germany.
AG: In the US, we now have a president who campaigned on a platform of drastically restricting immigration, and many of his supporters easily denounce whole groups of immigrants. Alongside health care reform, restricting immigration (including refugee applications) has been one of Trump’s major agendas. What do the experiences of Cameroonian immigrant women in Germany have to teach us in the US?
PFS: Immigrants can bring a lot to our country. Overall, immigrants are more law-abiding than native-born Americans, and in terms of college and post-graduate degrees, they are better educated. Immigrants tend to be ambitious, making many personal sacrifices for the well-being of their children and families. We have a lot to learn from them when we consider “family values,” and perhaps even reconsider what family can mean. Providing chances and being welcoming allows these immigrants to contribute to society.
We’ve all heard these trendy mottos, and most of us have probably cringed.
Anthropologists know the world as an infinitely more complex place than such simplistic catch-phrases and predictions can possibly describe.
Yet simplistic catch-phrases and predictions are–well, catchy.
In a new book, instead of dismissing them out of hand, Ulf Hannerz tackles these pseudo-scholarly slogans head-on.
One of our discipline’s most renowned, thoughtful, and witty writers, Hannerz has just published a new collection of tightly interrelated essays analyzing the blockbuster books that have promoted popular yet maddeningly misleading scenarios predicting anything from political realignment of continents to doom and gloom for the world.
The book’s prologue + nine chapters (some, previously published in different forms) combine to make a case that anthropology is more relevant than ever.
Anthropologist Didier Fassin has this to say about the book:
With his uniquely elegant style and subtle irony, Ulf Hannerz offers a penetrating anthropological reflection on this singular anticipatory genre that simplifies and dramatizes the representation of global tensions. Multiplying examples and crossing perspectives, he proposes an indispensable critical analysis of the way in which our worldviews are shaped.
And Michael Herzfeld cheekily sums up the book’s importance by urging:
This book deserves greater and longer-lasting prominence than those with which it engages.
You can find a Table of Contents and an excerpt from the Prologue here.
And the publisher offers discounted e-books for sale here.
I recently interviewed Ulf Hannerz online. Here’s what he had to say (AG = Alma Gottlieb; UH = Ulf Hannerz):
Interview with Ulf Hannerz
AG:
Traditionally, cultural anthropologists have specialized in local, micro-communities. In this book, instead of a remote village, you train your eyes on a very different tribe: the miniscule set of public intellectuals who have published books claiming to explain everything occurring in the modern world, and predicting what will happen next to our species and our planet. As an anthropologist, what special insights can you bring to this tribe?
UH:
Let me contextualize and historicize a bit. There was a time when most social science and humanities disciplines were quite Eurocentric, and anthropologists seemed to have much of the world more or less to themselves, as far as the production of scholarly knowledge was concerned. That began to change in the Cold War era with “area studies programs” and the like, and then toward the end of the twentieth century, terms like “globalization” and “transnational” entered our vocabulary. Some time in the 1990s, after periods of field work in a Nigerian town for one thing (and finding “creolization”), I began to take an overall interest in the landscape of transnational knowledge production, in and out of academia. I did a first conference paper identifying three categories of professional people who, like anthropologists, had been pioneers in that field: spies, missionaries, and foreign correspondents. Their objectives and working circumstances were, of course, quite different from those of anthropologists. And, characteristically, the relationships between them and the anthropologists have tended to be complicated. I described that effort as “studying sideways,” and that is what I have been doing since.
“Studying up” and “studying down” in anthropology have involved mostly differences in power and privilege. “Studying sideways” is more a matter of looking at groups on more or less parallel tracks of knowledge production–in the scholarly disciplines, in the media, or wherever. I turned first to news media foreign correspondents, and a book came out of that – Foreign News (2004). Incidentally, when I first made contact with some of them, introducing myself as an anthropologist, they responded, “So we will be your tribe.”
Now, what can I bring as an anthropologist, studying sideways into the genre of global future scenarios? For one thing, a knowledge of relevant ethnography. Even when the writers in question do touch ground somewhere in the world, you may get eloquent, impressionistic reporting, but often shoddy, misleading description. And that reporting is very uneven – people’s everyday life can be very important in generating their futures, and the scenario writers tend to give little attention to that. Probably they have seen little of it, in other parts of the world.
I would also compare their concepts with ours. For one thing, a number of them use the culture concept in ways that few anthropologists would now accept. Indeed, they may be inclined to what, within our discipline, has recently been described as “cultural fundamentalism.” Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis stands out as one example. I know there are anthropologists who feel that as the concept is often misused, we should just give up on “culture.” I think that is an ostrich policy. The concept will not go away just because one academic discipline turns away from it. If it is a key notion in understanding human life, and involves matters where we may still be recognized as having some intellectual authority, let us use that in whistleblowing when we feel that the culture concept is misused. So I use it above all as a matter of understanding the organization of human diversity, varying in scale between the global ecumene and microcultures, and always in motion in time and space. That matters, whether you are dealing with “soft power” or “Jihad versus McWorld.”
AG:
The authors you profile in this book propose models for understanding human societies that most anthropologists would dismiss as hopelessly reductionistic. Besteman and Gusterson (2005) and others have already scorned these “pundits”for having gotten everything wrong. What made you decide to spend more time commenting on their simplistic (often binary) models?
UH:
Part of the answer is that I had already started on this before Besteman’s and Gusterson’s Why America’s Top Pundits are Wrong came out. I fundamentally agreed with their and their collaborators’ critiques. But I also felt that there was much more to be said. For one thing, there was that title. Certainly, these “top pundits” may have been American, and addressing primarily U.S. readers – a general audience, but sometimes not least the White House, Foggy Bottom and Pentagon.
Even in the American context, the place of the “scenarios” in public culture seemed interesting. The writers inhabited a complex terrain of academia, media, think tanks and politics, and there was an interplay between the long-term views of the scenarios they proposed, and that daily coverage of international news that I knew about from my study of foreign correspondents. Since I came from an anthropological interest in the ways that networks weave in and out of institutional contexts, that probably intrigued me.
But then, the simplistic “scenarios” that those scholars and journalists proposed actually found quite a lot of readers just about everywhere. A number of these authors appeared on ranking lists of “top global public intellectuals.” I soon found their books, in the original or in translation, in airport book stalls all over Europe and Asia—often, next to how-to-succeed-in-business type books.) When Samuel Huntington died in 2006, one obituary noted that his “clash of civilizations” book had been translated into three dozen languages. For that matter, I could read in Swedish newspapers that the leader of the growing Swedish neonationalist, more or less xenophobic, political party had talked about the “clash of civilizations” as if it were an established fact, at campaign meetings in 2014.
That first generation of America’s top pundits, too, was in large part based somewhere on the stretch between Cambridge, MA, via New York to Washington, DC – with some trans-Atlantic commuters from Britain. This is the home ground of a lot of American academic, media, and political power. I add some number of writers from that group, like Joseph Nye, Robert Kagan and Niall Ferguson. Then, however, I go on to consider the contributions of a number of other, mostly later writers. Some of them resemble that prominent cohort of anthropologists, particularly in the United States, who have sometimes playfully described themselves as “halfies”: people who have some of their personal background linking them to other parts of the world. This includes people like Amy Chua (actually more famous for her “Tiger mother” book on tough-minded parenthood) and Fareed Zakaria – with his Harvard Ph.D. (advised by Samuel Huntington) but more recently a CNN talk show host, and a Washington Post columnist.
But I also consider a number of contributors to the scenario genre from elsewhere in the world: including Bernard-Henri Lévy and Amin Maalouf from France, and Kishore Mahbubani from Singapore. These, again, are global public intellectuals, with mixed academic, political, and media involvements. With people like these, the “global future scenario” genre really becomes part of a world-wide public culture. I would like to see it as a space of conversations about the future of the world. Yet the trouble is that there is not a whole lot of dialogue. Those European and Asian writers are frequently familiar with the American pundits and comment on them, but the Americans do not seem to pay much attention to these far-away others. That, of course, is another, dubious, aspect of American soft power.
AG:
Most anthropologists do face-to-face ethnographic fieldwork with live humans living in communities. You’ve done plenty of this sort of fieldwork yourself. But in this book, your interlocutors are authors, many of them fellow Ph.D.-bearing scholars in the social sciences who you’ve never met (notably, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Joseph Nye, Thomas Friedman, among others). Moreover, unlike your book about foreign correspondents—who you interviewed—for this book, your data set is the corpus of books, not their authors. What was it like to do this sort of virtual fieldwork in the “virtual community,” if we might call it that, of quasi-scholarly books, without doing a single interview, let alone “participant observation”? Or, do you consider the act of reading the books you discuss here, a literary form of “participant observation”?
UH:
With the foreign correspondents, I had interviews of a kind I like to think of extended, free-flowing conversations, and I liked many of them as persons. I tend not to feel comfortable in the role of adversarial interviewer – I suspect many anthropologists don’t – and talking to writers of whose work I am in large part critical, that is what I would have to have been.
Moreover, I have heard people who have interviewed veteran interviewees complain that these would tend to drift into their routine responses, without listening very carefully to the questions. I suspect that might have happened too often, had I been given a chance to talk to the stars of scenario writing. So, in my book I really don’t say very much about the writers themselves. Instead, concentrate on the texts and their reception–their impact both nationally and transnationally.
I did conduct a set of interviews with academics in Tokyo about how the “scenarios” were received in Japan. As far as the texts are concerned, I found them interesting not only in terms of content, but also with regard to style. Writing about the future is necessarily at least semi-fiction, so I place the scenarios next to other such varieties of writing, like “subjunctive reporting” and “counterfactual history.” There is also the way their various key messages are summarized as fast food for thought, often through more or less counterintuitive catch phrases, like “the end of history,” or “the world is .”
AG:
Ha, yes–more like marketing slogans than analytic concepts. There’s an argument to be made that these “future scenario” books really belong more in the genre of science fiction than social science.
UH:
Then, certainly, there is also the issue of the success or failure of the scenarios in anticipating what would really happen in the world, and the relationship between texts and coming realities. A hundred years ago, you had the famous commentator-muckraker Lincoln Steffens proclaim, “I have seen the future, and it works.” He made that remark about the young Soviet Union. Well, it did not really. That cohort of future scenarios that started appearing after the Soviet Union came to an end has also been a set of clear failures and mixed successes.
But what part did they play in shaping the future? Some commentators feared that Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” scenario might turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. So far, that has hardly happened – at least not on any major scale.
In fact, if you see the scenarios as in large part dystopic, early warnings, you may see them as the opposite–possibly self-destructive. People read them, shake their heads, and do something about the threats.
Again, I would think one can most usefully see the scenarios as a kind of global conversation pieces. But then, it helps if they are really well-informed, and manage to reach out at the same time.
AG:
The books you analyze all claim to predict the future. This past year has caught many “pundits” in the prediction business by surprise. Looking back on two of the biggest political surprises to “experts” in the UK and the US—the Brexit and Trump votes—can you say that any of the authors you discuss in your book would have predicted these outcomes?
UH:
I suspect Robert Kaplan, who stands out as a conservative anti-elitist–in a way, a populist–might be least surprised, given the books he’s written reporting on his travels in the US. Samuel Huntington, rather anti-Muslim in his “clash of civilizations” scenario (“Islam has bloody borders”) and warning of Mexican immigration in his last book, Who Are We? (2004), could just have fit into a Trump administration if he had been alive.
Probably most of the others would have been fairly surprised. If there had ever been an “end of history” of the kind once sketched by Fukuyama, Trump seems more likely to start it going again – intentionally or unintentionally. Thomas Friedman certainly shows in his New York Times columns that he is no Trump admirer. And Joseph Nye’s program for “soft power” will not get much funding from Donald Trump.
AG:
Given your vast reading of world history, what surprised you the most in 2016?
UH:
In October 2016, before the election, I did two commentaries on the election campaign, one for a Cultural Anthropology blog–presumably mostly for an American audience—and another one in Swedish for the new blog site of the Swedish Anthropological Association. It was an interesting experience, writing about the same thing for two different audiences.
Looking back at them, I see that I did not take a Clinton victory for granted. But then, I had been reading some “early warning literature” relating to the American scene – beginning with Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2005)–a fair number of years ago, and then, coming closer, Mark Leibovich’s This Town (2013), about the Washington, DC elite, and George Packer’s The Unwinding the same year, an account of a country coming apart, to mention some. And then, around mid-year 2016, one book quickly became a bestseller: J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, basically an auto-ethnography. In large part, these are books by journalists. I was only a little sorry not to find more anthropologists contributing some visible grassroots ethnography to this literature.
AG:
Indeed, that’s a real failing on our part.
UH:
Then I might add that some time ago, I wrote a piece titled “The American Theater State,” inspired by Clifford Geertz’ interpretation of the precolonial Balinese state. This essay just appeared in the book, America Observed, edited by Virginia Dominguez and Jasmin Habib (2016). Changing the notion of the theater state into a traveling and comparative concept, I suggested that Americans had turned it over sideways: if the Balinese had celebrated hierarchy, the ruling obsession in American political culture became one of a dramatization of egalitarianism – no less urgent when real social inequality actually grew. As I see it, in the campaign phase of American party politics, each candidate must build his/her own campaign apparatus, and create his/her own personal “brand.” A presidential candidate should be someone to identify with: someone with appealing interests and personality. But again and again, it helps that the boundaries of politics are porous, so that existing symbolic capital can be imported from other domains: the entertainment industry, big business, televangelism, the drama of warfare.
So Donald Trump may be an extreme case, but he is not the first one to move in his career from show business into politics: remember Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Fred Thompson. And at present, there is a senator from Minnesota who came into politics from “Saturday Night Live.” My favorite case here is really George Wallace’s third-party campaign in 1968. Governor Wallace, a populist in his time, tried to recruit John Wayne from Hollywood for the vice-presidential slot – Wayne was just then on the screens in Green Berets, the Vietnam War epic. But Wayne stayed loyal to the Republicans. So then Wallace reputedly attempted to get Colonel Harland Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), to take on this part, before ending up with General Curtis LeMay. Which was a disaster.
AG:
Ha, you probably have a better memory of these strange nooks and crannies of American political history than most Americans.
Well, however much they disagree on particular points, all the “scenarios” you discuss in this book share a broad look at global politics. By contrast, both the US and the UK have recently voted for a candidate or a policy, respectively, that would drastically close borders and limit immigrants. Beyond these leading Anglophone nations, one might suggest that the opposed forces of globalization and xenophobia are at war in many nations these days. Or, perhaps, that’s yet another simplistic binary scenario. Regardless: who do you think best explains the current moment?
UH:
Probably there is no simple explanation. Above all, there is probably the fact that globalization has had its winners and its losers – which is not only a matter of competition, but also of technological changes. And established political elites have tended to pay too little attention to this, which has left a wide field open to protest parties and politicians, strong in declining areas, and combining economic messages with xenophobic scaremongering. I actually have a chapter on this in Writing Future Worlds, focusing on an early phase with such scenario notions as “Eurabia” and “Londonistan,” and Huntington’s anti-Mexican book. Islamist terrorism seems to me to be a mirror image of this, in the Middle East and in the banlieus of western Europe.
But then, one should see that 2017 has also brought some reasonably good news. It is true that xenophobic populism is now on the scene more or less everywhere in Europe, with political parties that are among the larger in many countries–but that has been in large part because the opposition to them is divided into so many parties, from establishment conservatives to Greens and post-Communists. They are mostly far from a majority of their own – the elections in the Netherlands, France, and Britain have shown that. In part, of course, that may be a reaction to Donald Trump’s presidency. And that in itself is a result of that peculiarity of the American electoral system whereby the loser of the popular vote has become president in two recent elections out of five.
One more thing: the early cohort of scenario writers paid little or no attention to the new media, which then grew and diversified extremely quickly in the period that followed. Obviously, social media have played a major role, everywhere from the abortive 2011 Arab Spring to the 2016 election in the United States. That is a real revolution, penetrating social life just about everywhere.
AG:
Indeed–and we anthropologists, like other scholars, have been slow to catch up with those horses long out of the gate.
Actually, I also have another new book, Small Countries: Structures and Sensibilities (2017), co-edited with Andre Gingrich, my friend and colleague in Vienna. We deal largely with countries up to 10 million inhabitants or so. That includes some European countries like the Scandinavian countries and Austria, but we also have contributors writing about Jamaica, Sierra Leone, Israel, Singapore and New Zealand. A major point is that smallness may be both absolute and relative: the size of the population, on one hand, with its implications for the structure of social relationships; but also, perhaps, the presence of some large, more or less dominant neighbor, on the other. Ireland next to Great Britain, for example; or Austria next to Germany; or New Zealand next to Australia.
Mostly, in my anthropological endeavors, I have not written much about my home country of Sweden, but in this case, in a concluding chapter, I get somewhat auto-ethnographic: I try to show how Swedish smallness is reflected in my own encounter with His Majesty the King, in the context and aftermath of the assassination of a prime minister, and in the festivities surrounding Nobel Prize awards.
After this editing project: well, I am leaning back a bit, but playing with different possibilities.
AG: Any time you want to take a break from well-deserved relaxation, your many fans await.
Portrait of a shop owner in southeastern Nigeria
