Category Archives: Culture

Remembering My Friend, Véronique Amenan Akpoueh (d., Aug. 3, 2023)

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Ours was not an ordinary friendship.

Race, class, religion, citizenship, educational background, and (for 14 years) parental status divided us. Language brought us together. Curiosity and intellectual companionship kept us going.

Véronique and me in the village (1993) (photo by Philip Graham)


Initially, Véronique (given that personal name in the French colonial-style school she attended) grabbed the chance to practice her grade-school-era French with me, an uninvited visitor in her village bordering the rain forest. As for me, while I struggled to learn the tonal West African language surrounding me, I immediately felt grateful to find a woman who spoke a language I knew. Later, as my grasp of Beng developed, Véronique turned out to be a naturally gifted language teacher. She happily shared her love of her native language, finding ways to explain the nuances of proverbs, metaphors, and secret speech. From there, our friendship blossomed.

During my first month in her village in east-central Côte d’Ivoire, Véronique and I met daily as she oriented me to the new worlds confronting me. “Why do babies wear so much jewelry and make-up?” was the first question I had asked our new village father. “That’s secret women’s business,” he answered. “Ask my cousin, Véronique.” I did, and Véronique immediately explained the medical goal of this symbolically resonant bead and face paint, distinguishing it from that purely decorative bead and face paint.

Amenan readily distinguished the linear and circular medicinal treatments from the decorative eyeliner and eyebrow pencil adorning this baby boy (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

Here was a villager who operated far from her neighbors’ proclivity to conceal knowledge from a stranger—understandably wary (from decades of colonial and post-colonial oppression) of what I might do with it. Instead, Véronique delighted in sharing her knowledge of her world. Quickly, she moved from informant to instructor, and from there, to friend.

Back in 1979, both my academic mentors had firmly instructed me to choose a village with a population of fewer than 500 people for the year-plus of doctoral research I would conduct in rural West Africa, so I could get to know everyone in a face-to-face community. Véronique tried to convince me to remain in her village of 1,500 for the next 14 months. But my advisors’ instructions remained firmly in my head. So, after a month of browsing among the 20 or so Beng villages, my husband and I left Véronique’s welcoming space and moved to a village of 250 notoriously suspicious people some 2.5 miles up the road.

The tiny village I chose to live in during our first stay in Bengland (1979) (photo by Philip Graham)

Véronique warned me repeatedly that the residents of the village I selected—the seat of the local, secretive, traditional religion—had strong reasons to reject me. Attentive to these warnings, my husband encouraged me to remain with my new friend in her village. Stubbornly, I ignored both their urgings and promptly experienced firsthand all that Véronique had predicted.

But Véronique forgave me my arrogance; by the time I confessed my decision, our friendship had been sealed. As Philip and I packed up our suitcases, Véronique made me promise that I would return once a week to spend the day with her. And, so I did. Moreover, over the following 14 years, when we returned twice to Bengland (the second time, with our son, then six years old), we lodged in her compound.

Amused, Véronique watches our six-year-old son observing two girls pounding corn (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

*

My writer-husband has written that “anthropology is gossip with footnotes.” Véronique had never heard of anthropology when we met, but by Philip’s definition, Véronique turned out to be a consummate anthropologist par excellence.

Every week of our first year’s stay, I drove or biked 2.5 miles to chat with Véronique in her village. No sooner had we completed the long, formulaic greetings required of a hostess-and-guest than Véronique launched into a monologue consisting of all the village goings-on I had missed over the past six days. Véronique was literate—one of two women in her village who had gone to elementary school—but she didn’t need to jot down notes about any of the week’s events to keep them in her mind. Out poured a list of the week’s highlights, from quotidian to momentous.

From these sessions, I soon learned the meaning of fɛn plã na. Literally, the expression means two days. But its reach is more than that, with two standing in metonymically for several. A better translation would be, in the past few days or, even more vaguely, recently. And so, within an hour of my weekly arrival, I heard about everything that, according to Véronique’s all-seeing ethnographic eye, had happened fɛn plã na. As Philip once described Véronique (referring to her by her Beng name, Amenan) as she eagerly approached us with village news, “Amenan was already making a beeline to us, her juicy-gossip face firmly in place—at times like this, Amenan was most Amenan.”

Nothing was out of bounds for Véronique’s skilled storytelling. I learned about breastfeeding woes suffered by a new mother, and a strange condition afflicting the rectum of an old man. I heard how a young girl had been sent to Abidjan as a companion for a childless aunt, and about the latest rants of the village madman. I learned who had broken the weekly sacred day by cursing a relative, and whose domestic dispute ended up in the village chief’s court. After this rich news catch-up, we would settle down under the shade of her coffee trees for a more systematic conversation about a topic of interest to us both, whether wily hyena folktales or witchcraft. But Véronique’s expansive mind was such that one recounting led to five more. I soon learned to restrain my impulse to return to the original story and let Véronique’s prodigious memory, knowledge fund, and chain of associations take her where they would.

Véronique and me in our signature spot under her coffee trees (1980) (photo by Philip Graham)

*

The balance of power between the two ends of this financially unequal relationship tilted constantly. Véronique gave me intellectual gifts that became symbolic capital fueling my career. I brought material gifts that Véronique and her family valued (first, soaps, baby clothes, and dried fish; then, furniture; finally, we funded the construction of a new house and, more recently, an adult daughter’s business venture, and treatment for a serious sinus infection that threatened my friend’s eyesight). Véronique also readily offered advice whenever I solicited it (how should I respond to learning that the chief of our tiny village had blacklisted me, or to my husband who was angry with me for not fully translating something he needed to say?); I timidly returned the favor on the rare occasions that Véronique solicited advice (two of her daughters were fighting, or her Ghanaian husband had disappeared yet again). In these ways, across the darkness created by drastically divergent social histories, the sunlight of common humanity shone through.

Véronique and me walking to interview her uncle, the king of the Savanna region (1980) (photo by Philip Graham)

It was obvious enough what I gained from our relationship. But beyond the day-to-day gifts I could bring her (and the larger investments I was able to make later), what did Véronique have to gain?

I believe Véronique longed for a conversation partner of a different type from what her beloved family and neighbors offered. After all, she had attended school through the fifth grade. That modest level of education gave her expanded life experiences, compared to those of her peers. Following her five years at a Catholic elementary school, the nuns coordinating her education must have seen the bright spark of deep intelligence that drew her to me, for they soon offered Véronique a year’s job as an assistant, accompanying them as they conducted a regional program to promote rural health.

Based in the nation’s second-largest city of Bouaké some 80-miles-and-a-world away from her home territory, the program brought young Véronique from village to village—mostly, inhabited by Baulé people, not Beng. Her cultural horizons expanded as she gauged similarities to, and differences from, her homeland. She learned how to help women birth and breastfeed, how to diagnose diseases from Guinea worm to tetanus. She came to juggle two distinct religious systems—the spirit- and ancestor-based cosmology of the Beng world view, and the monotheistic cosmology of Christianity. And she gained knowledge of a new biomedical pharmacopeia that complemented the healing forest herbs she already knew. Beyond these technical funds of knowledge, making the rounds of villages beyond her own made Véronique a new sort of cosmopolitan. Returning to the somewhat insular bounds of her own village must have felt confining. By the time Philip and I showed up unannounced one hot September day in 1979 that surely started out like any other hot September day, I must have offered food for a hunger that had long but quietly gnawed in her belly.

*

Véronique was born to political and religious privilege on both sides: her father’s older brother was king of the Savanna region, while her mother’s brother was the most senior Master of the Earth of her village.

L: Véronique’s paternal uncle, King Bonde Como, of the Savanna region (1980); R: Véronique’s maternal uncle, Kokla Kouassi, senior Master of the Earth (1980) (photos by Alma Gottlieb)

Dire poverty underlay all these rich cultural inheritances. More comfortable walking barefoot than wearing the rubber flipflops I once bought her, Véronique did, and did not, exude royalty.


From a lifetime of work—rising by 6 am to walk deep into the forest to chop down trees for firewood, carry a log on her head back to the village, use it to light a fire, then bathe babies, cook breakfast, and wash the dishes, all before returning to the forest for a full day of hard farming in her rice and vegetable fields, followed by cooking dinner, washes the dishes, and bathing the babies again—Véronique’s clothes were as threadbare as her neighbors’. Nor, at something like 4’ 9”, did her height visually mark her status. Her tall husband sometimes teased her in his lilting Ghanaian English: “She’s just a Pygmy, a regular Pygmy.”

Véronique carrying her baby grandson on her back and a log on her head


Yet, as Véronique walked through the village, her tiny frame commanded attention far beyond its dimensions. Everyone greeted her, and, as she returned the greeting, more often than not, she was asked for advice. A baby wasn’t eating, a child had developed a mysterious rash, a fever wasn’t disappearing, and what did Véronique advise?

Véronique helping a young relative learn to walk (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

Sometimes, she sold home-grown medical treatments for a shotglass of grain alcohol she made; more often than not, she dispensed herbal remedies at no charge. If her preparations healed, she was thanked; if they didn’t have the desired effect, I never saw her blamed—confidence in her knowledge, unshaken.

Whether working or relaxing, Véronique was widely appreciated by relatives and neighbors as an impromptu babysitter.

This set of photos of Véronique taking care of multiple infants (including “dry-nursing” one from her milk-less breast) was taken on a single day in 1993 (photos by Alma Gottlieb)

Her skill in massaging infants’ heads widely was especially sought out by new mothers.

Véronique massaging an infant’s head (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

Our own bonds spilled over beyond fictive kinship. I was present at the home birth of one of her daughters who, as coincidence would have it, bore the same Beng day name as mine. Véronique made sure to instruct baby Amwé that I was an important person in her life.

Véronique points to me and asks her baby Amwé, whose birth I observed, “Who’s that?” (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

Nor did her skills remain confined to the gender-stereotyped world of women. Men paid attention when Véronique directed animal sacrifices. On several occasions, she asked me to buy trapping line in the Bouaké market so she could set traps and hunt small animals.


Véronique overseeing the apportioning of meat from a sheep that was slaughtered in honor of Philip’s recently deceased father (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

*

This week, I learned that Véronique had finally succumbed to an illness that had caused her much suffering over the past month. Medical care being what it is across much of the continent that Europe underdeveloped, her illness will forever remain unidentified. Two doctors to whom her daughter Lucie took her for consultations claimed they couldn’t do anything for her, and the emergency money I wired to Lucie didn’t make a difference.


Maybe it was pulmonary complications caused by chickenpox—which my American dermatologist, on hearing about the symptoms, named as a likely cause. Maybe it was something else. Maybe Western biomedicine could have effectively treated it, and Véronique would be alive today. My dermatologist said that had Véronique been in an ICU, round-the-clock nursing care would at least have alleviated the symptoms, and perhaps held death at bay. Or maybe Western biomedicine could not have identified or treated the disease, and no medicines yet exist that would have kept her alive.


Being a continent away, my imagination and guilt are both running riot. What if? I keep asking myself. But, no What if can rewrite history. The global North and the global South cohabit the same planet yet continue to produce human experiences worlds apart. As I contemplate how I can honor the ordinary-yet-extraordinary life that my friend Véronique lived, she continues to peer over at me through her framed photo.

Véronique’s signature look (1980) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

Those wry, wise eyes remind me daily that we humans must constantly endeavor to bridge all that separates us. Our distinctive subjectivities may conspire with the institutional structures that divide us to keep us from ever fully knowing each other. But, as Véronique implied when I once expressed surprise that she—then, a 30-something woman—was good friends with an elderly woman well into her 70s—trying to see each other across our multiple divides is all we’ve got.

Véronique continues to watch over me in my home office as I work at my desk (2021); (photo by Philip Graham)

Update, Dec. 2023: If you’d like to support education in Bengland via the Beng Community Fund (a non-profit organization we established to provide sustainable assistance to the Beng community), we have created a GoFundMe campaign — you can make a tax-deductible contribution via the link here.


Africa, Africanist scholarship, Anthropology, Beng, Cultural Anthropology, Culture, Friendship, Humanistic anthropology, Intercultural communication Read more

What Day is It? Depends on whose Calendar You Consult

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Just when you think you know what day it is, along comes this research on the ancient Mayan calendar.

By fifth grade, most schoolchildren know that a week contains seven days, a month contains either 30 or 31 days (or 28 days, in those strange “leap years”), and a year contains 12 months and 365 days.

That seems self-evident, right?

Not so fast.

The quasi- (increasingly) hegemonic calendar long common across the global North and, now, parts of the global South has long had competitors—including the ancient Mayan calendar, which features an 819-day cycle.

What might have motivated Mayan scholars to orient a calendar around 819 days?

New research by anthropologists John Linden and Victoria Bricker from Tulane University suggests intriguing explanations. Ancient Mayans were astute astronomers and mathematicians and, according to Linden and Bricker, calculated human calendrical systems based on cyclical orbits of Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Saturn. The article linked here offers more detailed calculations that, to my non-mathematical eye, sure seem convincing.

When I lived among the Beng in Côte d’Ivoire, I became used to their indigenous temporal system, based on a six-day week. But the Beng also acknowledged the seven-day week of their neighbors, and they easily interdigitated the two systems: every 42 days, a sacred day required special rituals acknowledging the intersection of the two calendars.

In other words, the Beng don’t dismiss alternate calendars as mutually incompatible. Maybe they are better anthropologists than those in the global North who might easily deride the Mayan calendar as quaint but anachronistic.

Calendars, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Relativity, Culture, Maya, Time Read more

Ten Treasures (and a Bonus): A Selection of Anthropological Gems You Might Have Missed from the Past Few Years

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I began interviewing authors of fabulous new anthropology books for this space back in 2016. While completing 11 interviews, I also amassed a backlog of more terrific books whose authors I planned to interview. One thing led to another, and my embarrassingly accumulating backlog fell hostage to a pandemic. I’ve finally harnessed my guilt and bundled these beauties into a group. No author interviews this time (who has time for that in a pandemic?), but below, you’ll find capsule descriptions of why I love every entry in this archive.

To be sure, my selection is idiosyncratic. I don’t claim that these books are the only works in anthropology worth reading that were published in the past few years. Yet, individually, each of these books grabbed my attention because of its brilliant analysis of some topic(s) I judge to have critical importance to the world. Plus, the writing in all these books is oh-so-readable. Collectively, they remind us: Anthropology is not only alive and well, the discipline continues to offers unique insights into vexing issues in ways that only long-term immersion can produce.

Acknowledgments: In curating this collection, I’m inspired by Philip Graham‘s “Some Books You May Have Missed” posts for the literary/arts magazine, Ninth Letter, for which he serves as Editor-at-Large. (You can read his latest literary rundown of great new fiction and creative non-fiction here.)

So, here goes.

*

C. Richard King, Redskins: Insult and Brand (University of Nebraska Press)

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, one of the many critical lessons that at least some of white America has learned is this: Representation matters. In that sense, Richard King‘s brilliant book provided an overdue argument that at least one sports team has finally heard. In 2020, the Washington Redskins at last acknowledged the racist foundation to their team’s name, which they changed (temporarily) to the Washington Football Team (with a new name soon to be announced here). The placeholder name may be boring— but boring is better than offensive. For its part, King’s scholarly exercise in a theoretically and historically informed argument can now be considered a paragon of engaged, critical anthropology. A review in the Chicago Tribune called this a “must-read book.”

Publisher’s webpage here.

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Amy Starecheski, Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City (University of Chicago Press)

Over the past two pandemic years, real estate stories have dominated the news, from personal tragedies (eviction stories following job loss) to personal triumphs (the privileged few scooping up “deals” outside major metropolitan areas). Lurking behind those individual tales chronicling the human joys and costs of gentrification lies a broader story of economic trends (falling prices in some markets, skyrocketing prices in others). In that sense, this book by anthropologist/oral historian Amy Starecheski remains more timely than ever. A beautifully crafted narrative balances individual tales of urban squatters’ experiences across three decades of New York City’s increasingly unaffordable housing market with “big-picture” trends of macroeconomic, political, and legal developments in New York and beyond. This book contains so many lessons about where and how to make a livable space for “home.” A “recommended” book by Choice.

Publisher’s webpage here.

*

Rosa De Jorio, Cultural Heritage in Mali in the Neoliberal Era (University of Illinois Press)

Rosa De Jorio‘s early research in West Africa concerned women’s political participation in Mali.  In this book, De Jorio focuses on the same country but has switched gears to focus on cultural heritage.  Political scientists rarely pay attention to artistic and cultural performances, while art historians rarely focus on political structures.  In a broad sense, this book might be characterized as an engagement of political perspectives with humanistic spaces.  As such, I take this work—based on careful field research in urban Mali over the course of 16 years—as a model for how scholars working elsewhere might unpack the questions De Jorio asks here surrounding the politics of culture and the culture of politics. Jean-Loup Amselle calls this book “in the tradition of Michel Foucault’s work.” The title appeared in the Interpretations of Culture in the New Millenium series (now closed), edited by Norman E. Whitten, Jr.

Publisher’s webpage here.

*


Jane C. Desmond, Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press)

Some years ago, I made a case for an anthropology of infancy.  In this book, Jane Desmond makes something of a similar case for an anthropology of animals.  In both arenas, subjects communicate with us in ways that we adults/humans understand only partially, and with difficulty—as if through a scrim.  Of course, the same can be said for all communication among human adults . . . but the barriers appear more extreme and daunting with both human infants and non-human animals.  In a provocative set of thematically linked essays (think: pet cemeteries, taxidermy, roadkill), Desmond makes a persuasive case for developing a robust ethnography of non-human animals and, perhaps more broadly for an inter-species ethnography.  An NPR review called it “an important and moving book.” The title appears in the terrific new Animal Lives series at Chicago edited by Desmond.

Publisher’s webpage here.

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Jennifer Cole and Christian Groes (eds.), Affective Circuits: African Migrations to Europe and the Pursuit of Social Regeneration (University of Chicago Press)

If the predominant narrative of Covid-19 emphasized immobility, that memo didn’t reach African migrants. Over the past two years, refugees fleeing Africa’s multiple postcolonial catastrophes have continued to seek more hospitable living spaces. This rich collection co-edited by Jennifer Cole and Christian Groes thus speaks to continuing hemispheric challenges, even as it centers personal experience. Moving discussions humanize the dehumanizing images, statistics, and political directives that dominate so much discussion of African migrants in Europe. Eleven case studies range from intimate topics such as child fostering, bi-national marriages, and coming-of-age rituals to explorations of the ways that government actors, laws, and policies shape migrants’ lives.  As such, this volume serves as a welcome, “bottom-up” corrective to the “top-down” trope of “migrant crisis” that too often frames both government policies and journalists’ stories coming out of the EU. The book won the Most Notable Recent Collection Award from the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction.

Publisher’s webpage here.

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Andrew Bank, Pioneers of the Field: South Africa’s Women Anthropologists (Cambridge University Press)

The notion of a “scholarly canon” is a bit of an oxymoron. Do what passed as the great works in any given field in the past still deserve pride of place today? By contrast, in re-reading “the classics” year after year, what hidden treasures might we have overlooked because of unconscious biases surrounding what “counts” as quality scholarship . . . and who “counts” as serious scholars? The brilliant scholars who have become so demonized by the U.S. right of late in promoting critical race theory prompt us to recognize the importance of regularly revisiting “the canon,” to rethink our understanding of history with new eyes and new questions. In Pioneers of the Field, historian of science Andrew Bank has done our discipline a great favor by reminding us of six brilliant women scholars of the early/mid-20th century whose work had a major impact both within and beyond South Africa. If you’re an Africanist up on your early British social anthropology, you might at least have heard of Audrey Richards, Monica Wilson, and Hilda Kuper, but if Winifred Hoernlé, Ellen Hellman, and Eileen Krige weren’t even on your radar, they will be now. Elizabeth Colson called this volume a “major contribution to intellectual history.” No History of Anthropology course should neglect this correct-the-record book.

Publisher’s webpage here.

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Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia (University of Texas Press)

There’s a good reason this marvelous book received Honorable Mention for the 2017 PROSE Award for Anthropology offered by the Association of American Publishers. Ana Mariella Bacigalupo challenges stereotypical images of shamans as either extinct or anachronistic religious practitioners long left behind by history. Based on extraordinary research that Bacigalupo conducted from 1991 to 2015, the book serves, at once, as a biography of a single Mapuche shaman who accepted the author into her life in a deep, cross-cultural friendship; and an argument for a reëxamination of how we define what counts as “religion” in the modern world.

Publisher’s webpage here.

*

Naomi Leite, Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging (University of California Press)

When I lived in Lisbon in 2006-07, I found myself shocked and appalled at the extent to which the nation’s long, rich, and traumatic Jewish history had been rendered virtually invisible. In this riveting book, anthropologist Naomi Leite profiles a small group of Portuguese who are actively reclaiming their ancestral Jewish ancestry hidden from them, and from the nation, for centuries. With its beautiful narrative writing allied with a thoughtful analytic engagement linking hyper-local spaces in Lisbon with hyper-global spaces of international Jewish tourists, it’s easy to see why the book won two awards and was a finalist/honorable mention for two more:

Publisher’s webpage here.

*

Timothy R. Landry, Vodún: Secrecy and the Search for Divine Power (University of Pennsylvania Press)

This intriguing work offers another fascinating look at international religious tourism. In this case, Western tourists travel from the U.S. and Europe to Bénin, homeland of the famed religion of Vodún (a.k.a. “voodoo”), in search of a West African spirituality. Becoming apprenticed to a Vodún priest, Timothy Landry offers, at once, an outsider’s and insider’s look at Vodún practice from the intertwined perspectives of practitioner, acolyte, seeker, and casual tourist. Along the way, he engages with issues ranging from the challenges inherent in representation of a stigmatized religious tradition to the ethical quandaries inevitably brought on by participant-observation. The book won the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. It appears in the Contemporary Ethnography series that I edit for Penn Press.

Publisher’s webpage here.

*

Michelle Johnson, Remaking Islam in African Portugal: Lisbon—Mecca—Bissau (Indiana University Press)

Grounded in rich fieldwork in both Guinea-Bissau and Portugal conducted across 20 years, this book is an ethnographer’s dream. Oozing with gorgeous ethnographic details, the book at the same time tackles all the issues one could hope to think about concerning West African Muslims’ lives in Europe. Challenges of racism. Challenges of Islamophobia. Challenges by mainstream Muslims of heterodox practices. All these big-picture issues frame the stories Michelle Johnson exquisitely tells. Those stories center stunning discussions of life-cycle and other rituals—including a never-before-described practice of “writing on the hand” to initiate young students into learning the Qu’ran. Along the way, Johnson explores how immigrant African women and men rethink and adapt rural practices of female genital cutting, pilgrimages to Mecca, and funerals to urban neighborhoods in a European capital. Paul Stoller predicts: “Given the depth of its analytical insights and the grace of its presentation, this is a work that will be read, savored, and debated for many years to come.” This fabulous book appears in Indiana’s Framing the Global series.

Publisher’s webpage here.

*

Cati Coe, Changes in Care: Aging, Migration, and Social Class in West Africa (Rutgers University Press)

Hot off the press, this new ethnography, like Johnson’s, sings with all that contemporary anthropology can offer. Over the course of 20+ years, Cati Coe has lived and conducted research for long periods both in Ghana, and in the U.S. with Ghanaian migrants. The result is just the sort of rich ethnography that centers global flows, while also remaining deeply grounded in knowledge of intimate practices of the local. A short film accompanies the book, available online here. The book appears in Rutgers’ wonderful Global Perspectives on Aging series, edited by Sarah Lamb.

Publisher’s webpage here.

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A Tale of Two [Unvaxed] Women

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We needed to find a new plumber. I called around. The first business that seemed willing to clean our boiler and replace a problematic hose spigot had availability soon. Before settling on a date, I remembered to ask the woman answering the company’s phone–let’s call her, Mary–a non-plumbing question: Will the plumber who comes into our house to work on the boiler for a few hours be fully vaccinated?

That inquiry took us to a place I hadn’t prepared to enter while finding the right vocabulary to explain our garden issue. Indeed, Mary’s unwelcome answer brought us into one of those difficult conversations we all dread these days. Here’s my best memory of how it unfolded:

Mary: I can’t guarantee that the plumber would be fully vaccinated.

Me: Are SOME of your company’s plumbers fully vaccinated?

Mary: We don’t require our staff to be vaccinated. The owner can’t force them. We’re not legally allowed to do that.

Me: Absolutely. But, the owner doesn’t have to keep paying people’s salaries if they won’t get vaccinated. That’s not forcing, that’s just his legal right to hire whoever he wants to hire. He’s got that freedom.

Mary: He won’t require it.

Me: But, are ANY of the plumbers who work for you vaccinated?

Mary: No.

Me: Hmm. In that case, I’ll probably wait to use your services until after the pandemic is over.

Mary: [Silence.]

I sensed that Mary was struggling to refrain from going into a political tirade about how Democrats and scientists were lying to Americans, and the vaccine would make people magnetic or sterile or digitally trackable or . . .

A normal person would have ended the conversation there. But I’m not a normal person. Suddenly, this conversation offered new possibilities for engaging with someone outside my usual social circle. The anthropologist in me was activated. I forged on.

Me: My husband and I are both vaccinated, but this aggressive Delta variant is now causing some mild, breakthrough cases that people might pass on without knowing. Since we have young grandchildren who can’t yet get the vaccine, and we’ll soon see them, we’re being extra-cautious.

Mary: Hmm.

Now the citizen in me was activated. Reckless, I plunged ahead.

Me: Meanwhile, since only the unvaccinated are dying from Covid now, you might want to recommend that your plumbers get vaccinated–not only to protect themselves, but also your customers.

Mary: We won’t do that.

Re-enter the anthropologist.

Me: Ah. [Pause.] Out of curiosity, I’m wondering why you don’t urge them to get the vaccine.

Mary: All our plumbers are very healthy and have great immune systems. They won’t get sick.

Me: Oh, that’s wonderful that they’re so healthy. [Pause.] Still, I keep seeing videos of people in the hospital with Covid, on ventilators, who said exactly that. This Delta variant seems to be extra-contagious and is getting so many people sick who had strong immune systems. The vaccine is a great way to protect your plumbers.

Mary: My husband and I don’t believe in the vaccine. We’re not vaccinated, and we don’t want our employees to get the vaccine, either.

Me: Really? Why’s that?

Mary: [Hangs up.]

So much for my long-honed interviewing skills. I’d have to grade myself an “F.”

But I’m never one to take failure lightly. The anthropologist in me wanted to call back and see if I could gently persuade Mary to explain her opposition to a vaccine that has so much overwhelming scientific evidence supporting its efficacy. Exactly what unfounded fears had grabbed Mary’s imagination? Who, or what, was her source of information? Why did she trust that source?

Still, the plumbing issues beckoned. Rather than re-engaging with Mary–trying to conduct instant phone ethnography that was, undoubtedly, doomed–I sighed and returned to an inventory of plumbers recommended on a neighborhood list-serv.

Phone call #2 produced an outcome at once similar, and worlds apart.

The woman answering the phone of the second business I rung up–let’s call her, Carol–offered a complicated reply that invited a conversation. Here’s what I remember of the non-plumbing portion of our exchange.

Me: Will the plumber who comes into our house to work for a few hours be fully vaccinated?

Carol: Probably, yes.

Me: Ah, that’s great. My husband and I are, too. But since we have young grandchildren who can’t be vaccinated yet, we’re being extra-cautious. Are all your plumbers fully vaccinated, then?

Carol: All but one. But, I can make sure that the one who isn’t vaccinated isn’t the one who comes to work in your house.

Me: Thank you, I appreciate that. [Pause.] Out of curiosity, is your boss encouraging that plumber to get the vaccine, to protect himself and your customers?

Carol: Actually, he’s already gotten the first shot. He just hasn’t gotten the second one yet.

Me: Oh, great.

Carol: Yeah, our boss is very big on the vaccine. He’s encouraged everyone in the company to get it. I’m the only one who hasn’t!

Me: Oh. [Pause.] Well, since you won’t be coming to work in my house, that’s not a problem for me. [Pause.] But, would you mind me asking why you haven’t gotten it, if your boss is encouraging you?

Carol: I’ve heard there are a lot of bad side effects. Did you have any bad side effects after your shots?

Me: Well, after my second shot, I was tired for a few hours, and the spot on my arm where I got the shot hurt a lot for about a day. But, really, it was no big deal. I’d much rather have a sore arm than die from Covid!

Carol: Oh! [Giggles, pauses a few seconds.] But, I have underlying conditions, and that’s what makes me very nervous about the vaccine.

Me: Ah, I can see that would make you nervous. Have you discussed your situation with your doctor?

Carol: No, I haven’t. I’m just reading stuff on social media.

Me: Maybe your doctor might have more information about whether your condition would make you a good candidate for the vaccine — whether it would be safe for you.

Carol: I guess so. But, I had [pauses] cancer some years ago, and I wouldn’t want the vaccine to bring that back. That was a nightmare. The treatment was so awful. And, the vaccine’s so new, no one knows what it will do, years later.

Me: I hear you. My husband was actually in treatment for cancer the past year, and his oncologist urged him to get the shot as soon as possible. He got it very early. I was online every day for a few hours, starting in January, looking for an appointment for him.

Carol: Wow, really?

Me: Yes. My husband got the first shot as soon as he could. Even though he’s now completely recovered from his cancer, now that booster shots are available, he’s going to get that third shot as soon as he’s eligible. His doctor thinks that’s a good idea.

Carol: Oh, yeah?

Me: Yeah. Because all the available scientific evidence shows that if you have a history of cancer, your symptoms may be much worse if you come down with Covid.

Carol: I didn’t know that.

Me: Yes, there’s a list of underlying medical conditions that make you more vulnerable to catching Covid, and suffering more, if you do. Cancer is one of them. Diabetes and asthma and obesity are some others. That’s why people with those underlying conditions were being urged to get the vaccine early on, before other people.

Carol: Hmm. You sound very knowledgeable. [Pauses.] Maybe I should consider it.

Me: Just this morning, my husband was almost in tears when he read a profile of an ER doctor in Los Angeles who is so, so frustrated with her Covid patients. None of them was vaccinated, and now, many of them are dying. As a doctor, she wants to do everything she can to help people survive, and she can’t believe that people are refusing to get vaccinated, since the vaccine pretty much guarantees that, even if you come down with Covid, it’ll probably be mild, and you won’t end up in the hospital and won’t die from it. Just about everyone in the hospital with Covid now is unvaccinated.

Carol: Where did your husband read that story?

Me: I think he said it was in the Los Angeles Times. If you like, I can ask him and maybe send you the link.

Carol: Oh, yes, please, I’d like to read that.

Me: Sure, I’ll send that to you as soon as I can.

We scheduled our plumbing appointment and Carol dictated her e-mail address so I could send her that newspaper article link. A few minutes after ending the conversation, Carol called back to double-check our street address. But first, she said, “I haven’t gotten that link yet. Are you still going to send it?”

I reassured her I would, then told her some updated statistics about Covid’s ravages that I’d read in the past few minutes. Carol eagerly resumed our conversation.

Carol: You sound so knowledgeable. I’ve enjoyed talking with you.

Me: Thank you. Same here! I do spend a lot of time every day reading updates, since the pandemic has taken such a toll.

Carol: I think I need to stop looking at social media and stop listening to people telling me not to get the vaccine.

Me: I know there’s a lot of claims out there about how the vaccine is unproven or dangerous. But, there’s definitely a lot of scientific evidence now that shows that the vaccine is super-safe and super-effective to keep you from dying from Covid. So far, something like 200 million Americans have gotten the vaccine, and no one has died from it. But we’ve had over 600,000 deaths from Covid.

Carol: Wow, really? [Pauses.] I think I’ll get it soon.

Me: That sounds like a good decision for you.

Carol: Yeah, I’m sure I’ll get it, now.

On the surface, the two women I spoke with share a lot of demographic characteristics. They’re both white. They both sounded within about 10-15 years of each other (I’d say, in their 40s to 50s). They’re both part of the working class. From a variety of speech styles and other markers, I’d guess they both stopped their formal education after high school. They’re both native English speakers. They’re both American. And they’ve both resisted getting the vaccine to protect themselves, their families, and their communities against Covid-19.

But, that’s where the similarities end. Together, Mary and Carol occupy two distinct points on the non-vaccinated spectrum in the U.S.

To put the contrast at its starkest . . .

Mary opposes the vaccine for political reasons; Carol opposes it for personal reasons.

Mary is angry about the vaccine; Carol is afraid of it.

Mary is sure in her decision; Carol is uncertain about hers.

Mary refuses to listen to counter-evidence that would challenge her decision; Carol is willing, even eager to listen to counter-evidence that might impel her to rethink her decision.

What does this tale of two women tell us about the people who have yet to get a free vaccine in the U.S. against COVID-19, despite incredible effectiveness and widespread availability? True, they’re only a sample of two. I can hardly claim that’s a scientifically representative group. But between them, these two women cover a lot of fascinating territory that I think is important, and instructive.

I draw some admittedly big lessons from my conversations with those two plumbing company receptionists. At the ethnographic level:

  1. The “vaccine-hesitant” are not a single, homogeneous block. They include a variety of people who have arrived at their caution–or refusal–from a variety of subject positions.
  2. If Mary and Carol offer strikingly different reasons for rejecting the Covid vaccine, they still do not represent the full range of reasons. Notably . . .
    • Some undocumented immigrants remain nervous about deportation, in case they have to show an ID at a vaccine clinic (as with some in the Cape Verdean community I research in Rhode Island);
    • Some blue-collar laborers work such long hours that they don’t find time or energy to go get a shot (as with the Stanley Steemer employee who came to clean our carpet earlier this spring, pre-Delta);
    • Some young people find it impossible to imagine that they could die (who among us hasn’t been there?);
    • Some “gig economy” workers live so precariously, from paycheck to paycheck, that they can’t risk missing a single unpaid day or two of work (why can’t the federal government address this with direct compensation?);
    • Some people of color retain such deep distrust of a medical system steeped in racism that they see no reason to let down their guard now (happily, physicians and nurses of color are starting to effectively address these concerns).
  3. At the pragmatic (or, should I write, methodological?) level: Because “vaccine hesitancy” has many, diverse foundations, addressing it requires a multi-pronged approach.
    • “Meeting people where they are” has recently become a catch phrase among some in the medical community. That pithy motto is really just a simple way of signaling that what’s needed is an army of anthropologists. Who better to plumb people’s hidden, implicit values?
    • If the Biden administration were on the ball, they’d be recruiting anthropologists left and right for their medical team.
This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Help-Wanted-Anthropologist.jpg

At the truly big-picture level: Education matters. Without research skills training us to evaluate the clearly false from the potentially true from the absolutely true, we are at the mercy of anything passing for “fact” that crosses our screen. Whatever the grade level, whatever the class subject, whatever the instructor’s expertise, every teacher’s first task should be to teach basic skills to evaluate evidence. The story of Mary and Carol makes it clear: our lives depend on those skills.

Meanwhile, here’s a rash prediction. This Monday, the F.D.A. is said to announce full authorization of the Pfizer vaccine. For some of the under-informed and mis-led Carols of the world ruled by a troubling combination of fear, misinformation, and eagerness for reliable advice founded in facts that regularly evade them, that authorization should provide some assurance that may motivate them to roll up their sleeves for their first shot. In short, I anticipate an enormous wave of new vaccine doses in the coming week or two, as several dams of hesitation break.

And, a wish. Maybe, just maybe, as the Marys of the world watch more people they know and even love die needlessly of Covid, at least a few of them may find some face-saving cover in the F.D.A. move and finally decide to go for a shot. After all, joining the pro-life camp of the vaccinated will confer the ultimate freedom.

Covid-19, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural values, Culture, Current Issues, Diversity, Intercultural communication, knowledge systems, medical anthropology, Medical issues, Vaccination campaigns Read more

Weed or Not Weed?

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Weeding is an exercise in anthropology.

How do we know what’s a weed?

The great French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, organized his nearly-80-year-long career around a single, foundational principle: “culture” basically comes down to classification. If something is “this” (whatever “this” is), then it’s not “that.” Reciprocally, if something is “that,” then it’s not “this.”

If that observation seems banal, we rarely dwell on it precisely because it seems so obvious that it becomes invisible, like the air we breathe. Nevertheless, it’s a powerful lesson that summarizes quite a lot about the human condition. In a nutshell, our relentless urge to classify the world is one of the most important (if not first-that-comes-to-mind) features that distinguishes us from other intelligent species.

Perhaps nowhere is this species marker more sensorily evident than in an ordinary space that seems far removed from deep philosophical tenets — a garden.

True, what we choose to plant depends a great deal on soil composition and rainfall patterns. But it also reveals our values, as well as the power structures buttressing those values.

Planting a flower garden? That requires the rare privilege of having enough leisure time to value labor expended for no economically useful payoff, just sensory and aesthetic pleasure.

And, not just any flowers. A riotous garden crammed full of mixed wild flowers produces one effect.

These wild flowers scattered hither and thither create a carefree look signaling cheerful creativity

A clearly delimited plot of begonias or rose bushes neatly lined up next to a carefully trimmed lawn produces quite another.

These red creeping sedum arranged neatly as a border create a manicured look signaling control

As for a vegetable garden — that project may result from a careful calculation to provide dinner ingredients for a small fraction of the cost of supermarket prices. Or it may derive from a busy, weekend gardener’s passion . . . or a bored retiree’s new hobby.

Likewise, the selection of exactly which seeds to sow rests on whole worlds of cultural values, conjoined with economo-political structures. Pierre Bourdieu might as well have devoted a whole chapter in his book, Distinction, to analyzing what a rare breed of Japanese eggplant versus a common variety of iceberg lettuce signals about a gardener’s educational level, financial resources, and social network expectations — all of which shape our (seemingly) personal palates.

Not only that — we like to think about gardening as a paean to life. But, to be honest, we should acknowledge the reality of the euphemism we politely term “weeding.” Gardening relies on at least as much destruction as nurturance.

Trowels double as tools of promoting — and destroying — life

All those gardens (whether filled with dinner-worthy tomatoes or vase-worthy hydrangeas) require regular “weeding” — clearing space for “this” plant to derive enough nutrients from the soil to thrive, while “that” plant sacrifices its existence for its neighbor. The decision of what to “weed” announces our values about what we consider worthy of life, and what we feel justified to kill.

All of which is to say: Today, when I decide to spend half an hour “weeding“ our backyard, every plant I choose to uproot will also make a cultural statement. Indeed, in my (culturally influenced) classificatory calculus, perfectly lovely plants meriting space in the garden take on another identity when they invade the narrow gap between cobblestones lining our driveway. That, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas would have termed it in her magnum opus, Purity and Danger, is clearly “matter out of place,” and won’t evade my trowel’s ruthless digging.

Perfectly healthy plant doomed by suburban U.S. aesthetics

We can take the cultural foundations to gardening (suburban U.S. style) even further, seeing in it a veritable political parable. The delicate blades of Kentucky bluegrass count (for me) as worthy of life; those tall, thick stalks of “crabgrass” that threaten to crowd out their frailer neighbors merit death. In our garden, the never-ending drama of colonial domination and resistance plays itself out, one blade of grass at a time.

Kentucky bluegrass fighting for its life against the invasion of the imperialist Crab grass (photo by Alma Gottlieb)
Classification, Cultural Anthropology, Culture, Gardening Read more

Does “Reasonable” = Racist?

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What can anthropology contribute to the critical conversation about race in America, following the welcome jury decision in the Derek Chauvin trial?

After they amassed and presented a week’s worth of technical details–medical, anatomical, temporal, legal–in the end, the prosecuting attorneys’ case against Derek Chauvin rested on a simple claim: A “reasonable” police officer would have removed his knee from George Floyd’s neck well before the excruciating 8 minutes and 46 seconds it took to kill him.


Miraculously, a jury of 12 peers unanimously agreed with that argument.

Every Black American (and probably every U.S. historian) knows how unlikely that verdict was. Indeed, on average, only one or two killings of a civilian out of a hundred by a police officer even goes to trial in the U.S. Why? Because, at base, the general assumption goes that a “reasonable” police officer would have acted the same way, given the challenging circumstances, so there’s no need to put him (or her) on trial.

And, until now, that argument–both its racist assumptions, and its racist implications–won out.

But what does it mean to invoke the “reasonable man [or woman]” as a model for a jury’s decision?

Back in 1955, the eminent social anthropologist, Max Gluckman, pointed out that the notion of the “reasonable man”–which lies beneath all Anglo-Saxon as well as many other systems of jurisprudence–is, at base, founded on cultural values.

He didn’t put it in quite that way. In analyzing the legal system of the Barotse or Lozi people of Zambia, he wrote:

“as Barotse judges define the reasonable man, they bring into their definitions many facets of Barotse life which are not ostensibly part of the law. These facets include a variety of social and personal prejudices. I believe the same process can be detected in the decisions of our own judges and juries.”

From: Max Gluckman, “The Reasonable Man in Barotse Law,” in Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (New York: Free Press, 1963)

Those “prejudices”–which we might as well consider equivalent to “values”–dictate what members of particular societies consider what is, and is not, “reasonable.” Like most cultural values, these cultural models are neither universal nor unchanging.

Before the Derek Chauvin verdict, police departments across the U.S. judged it “reasonable” for 98-99 police officers out of 100 (likely, a white officer) to kill a civilian ( likely, a Black civilian), because of the particular context. Even in the rare cases that police officers killing civilians are formally charged, it is unlikely that the trial will result in a conviction–and, especially, a conviction of murder.

Last week, a jury in Minneapolis gave America a gift. Suddenly, the racist justification for (white) police officers easily killing (Black) civilians is no longer a basis for a “reasonable” decision.

As Black commentators have been pointing out since the moments after the verdict was handed down in court, it will take far more than one trial to change cultural values. For, in the end, cultural values are at stake–and such values do not change quickly or easily.

Yet, thanks to the past year of BLM events remaining front and center around the country (even the globe), racism is one cultural value that no longer holds primacy in the white American imagination. Now that the eyes of the nation were trained on the Minneapolis courtroom, there is no going back to assuming that a white officer killing a Black civilian is, automatically, “reasonable.”

We must, of course, keep pushing for accountability in all police killings. Even more importantly, we must keep pressing for structural change not only to put murderous police officers on trial, but to retrain all police officers in de-escalation tactics. Re-labeling them as “peace officers” or “safety officers”–emphasizing their potential for nurturing rather than violence–might be a good, discursive start. Incorporating mental health professionals and social workers into their departments–as the city of Santa Fe did last week with their new “Alternative Response Unit”–would be a great, more tactical start.

Meanwhile, I remain proud of my discipline. The late Max Gluckman fundamentally got it right when he argued that, ultimately, legal systems rest on cultural values.

But, community standards of “reasonableness” hold sway–until they don’t. If he’d been around to hear last week’s verdict, I’d like to imagine Gluckman breathing his own sigh of anthropological relief as he nodded approvingly.


Anti-racist activism, Community, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural values, Culture, Legal anthropology, Politics and society, Racism, Social activism, Social justice Read more

What Anthropology Teaches Us about COVID-19, Part 3: A Few Thoughts about Culture, and What We Can Learn from Artists . . . and the Homeless

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What is “culture”?

Early generations of anthropologists offered all sorts of definitions. No matter what their specifics, the various definitions inevitably shared one feature: “culture” is identifiable. Above all, it encompasses a set of beliefs and behaviors that, together, are premised on an enduring set of values.

Or something like that.

And, as such, culture (it was thought) offers a source of stability. It occupies broad swaths of time and space: associated with a delimited place, and occupying long patches of history. For these reasons, culture makes for a certain level of predictability in the lives of community members.

Source here.

Or does it?

Starting in the 1960s, anthropologists started questioning those assumptions. Marxists pointed out that ever since, oh, the advent of capitalism, or feudalism, or agriculture (pick your favorite starting point), “culture” has been perpetuated by the ruling class. Once the poor get fed up enough, they protest; eventually, they revolt. Then, suddenly, what passed for an enduring model of “culture” turns into a set of values to be challenged, and “culture” — or, one particular version of it — doesn’t seem so reliable or inevitable.

This “Occupy Everything” poster featured on Day 14 of the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 summed up a great deal of diverse social justice perspectives that sheltered under the umbrella of the global social movement. Source here.

Around the same time, feminists began pointing out that “culture” has been perpetuated by men-in-power. Once women get fed up enough, they protest; eventually, they revolt. See above.

One can repeat similar arguments focusing on many other oppressed groups: racialized minorities, religious minorities, ethnic minorities, citizenship minorities, language minorities . . .

Nor is oppression the only reason for change. “Culture” also mutates when people from different backgrounds meet up, live near each other, work with each other, eat each other’s foods, dance with each other at street fairs, marry each other, have children with each other.

This ethnic-restaurant map of Queens, NY–an area of 109 square miles/52 square kilometers–hints at the extent to which large numbers of people from diverse cultural backgrounds (21,000 of whom live in every square mile) encounter each other daily.
Source here.

You get the point. “Culture” turns out to be way less permanent, less bounded, less intractable than early anthropologists claimed.

Unlikely neighbors enjoy dancing together at a street fair in the Mountain View section of Anchorage, Alaska — which is currently America’s most ethnically diverse neighborhood. Source here.

Not that the idea of culture is worthless. Contra some serious critics (Lila Abu-Lughod famously urged anthropologists to “write against culture“), I still find plenty of value in the notion. That’s because I see a lot of space between worthless and intractable. Culture can be malleable, adaptable, dynamic, while still remaining rooted in something. And, although the values that buttress culture can change, while they are active, they are powerful. They lie behind many (perhaps, for the privileged few, most) of our decisions.

Still, in pop culture, the current generation of anthropologists’ critiques of what culture is, and isn’t, hasn’t taken hold. Instead, in texts ranging from newspaper articles to corporations’ reports, we easily read disturbingly essentializing claims about “the Chinese” and “the French” and “the Muslims” as if all Chinese people, all French people, and all Muslims were easily interchangeable, eagerly sharing all values and forever speaking with one voice.

Or we read simplistic assertions about “corporate culture” in the halls of this or that company, as if all employees endorsed and enacted daily the corporation’s stated idealistic goals.

Along comes COVID-19.

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

Of course, the most poignant takeaway of COVID-19 is the tragic demise of its most vulnerable targets.

But alongside the wrenching announcement of the day’s latest mortality statistics, as a cultural anthropologist, I find myself fascinated to read “culture” changing before our eyes — weekly, daily, even hourly. What we took as immutable practices grounded in deep-seated values are turning out to be far more pliable than most of us imagined.

Take the case of exercise. For the first few days of their local “lockdown,” people who got their workout in gyms despaired. How could they stay fit with health clubs closed?

Enter human ingenuity. Gyms have figured out ways to run “live” classes online. The acronym du jour — WFH for work from home — is expanded by some clubs to WFHBT: work from home better together. Buttressing that conceptual adaption is a simple technical one. Don’t have weights at home? How about using any heavy-ish household item you have lying around that you can hold? Say, pasta sauce jars, six-packs . . . or suitcases.

Coach Andrew Samuels of New York’s Mile High Run Club models creativity in suggesting the “suitcase squat.” Source here.

In such cases, people substitute one space for another. The exercise formerly done in the gym is now done in one’s living room.

But for some urbanites, studios may prove way too tiny to offer space for exercise. City-dwelling coaches are undaunted. Some suggest finding new purpose in a balcony.

Coach Marni W. of New York’s Mile High Run Club demonstrates lunges on her tiny balcony. Source here.

For fitness enthusiasts, daily habits of organizing one’s life around outings to the gym morph into organizing one’s life around coaches’ new online classes. That may entail switching work and sleep schedules to accommodate new class times. But the stable source, here, remains the commitment to “fitness,” no matter where, when, and how. That part of local culture and its underlying values remains stable.

But, for a stronger challenge to “culture,” let’s look at a different physical practice common to most of us: that of ordinary walking. For those who learn to walk competently some time in the second year of life, walking becomes a rote activity by the third year. As adults, we rarely contemplate our gait, pace, or stride. No matter where in the world we live, we have a sense of exactly how much distance we should put between us and the next person in order to avoid being judged creepy or reported as criminal. In a New York City subway, that space might be just an inch or two; in rural Sweden, it might be quite a few feet.

Whatever the interpersonal space bubble that feels “natural” to us while out in the world, we must all now confront our unconscious body awareness as we constantly re-calibrate distance. Keeping six feet from the nearest person may now require crossing the street to avoid being too close to the person approaching you on a narrow sidewalk.

Previously, such an action might have seemed, at best, rude; in some contexts, it could have been deemed racist. (As a short film by Cydney Cort called “Passing” once suggested, even speeding up while walking on the same side of the sidewalk can be motivated by racialized fear). Now, not crossing the street to avoid someone approaching you might be assessed as thoughtless, selfish, even potentially murderous.

Normally, producing such a 180-degree turn in what constitutes proper etiquette doesn’t happen overnight. Anthropologists and sociologists from Erving Goffman on have chronicled the deep-seated values that lie behind bodily practices as basic as walking styles. Those values tend to make somatic habits relatively resistant to quick or arbitrary changes.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed such practices, habitus. He spent much of his celebrated career studying how we experience and embody entrenched assumptions about the world and our place in it, and how these assumptions shape everything from architectural styles to taste in dinnerware.

But with COVID-19, much of what heretofore passed for habitus has suddenly become its evil twin. An attempt at a friendly hug might as well be a curse.

If maintaining a span of two meters from the nearest human may require doing a sort of dance down the sidewalk, suddenly, we are all turning into novice choreographers, performing an awkward solo tango across the street. What was heretofore a routine somatic movement becomes a basis for uncomfortable improvisation.

Perhaps the professional dancer, actor, and jazz musician can teach us a thing or two. All these artists learn the art of improvisation as part of their training. It may seem odd to think of improvisation as something to be learned. But improvisation is actually a discipline that students practice in dance, theater, and music classes. Ironically, it turns out that the art of improvisation is, indeed, a teachable skill, and the rest of us non-artists are suddenly being required to master it. If you’ve got an artist friend or relative, ask them for some tips.

Gwendolyn Baum is one of many dancers now offering online classes — including how to plan for a dance audition. Source here.

Artists are now designing striking face masks, teaching us to find beauty in even this new health requirement while enjoining others to do the same.

Abiquiú, NM-based artist, Suzie Fowler-Tutt, showing off her hand-sewn face mask color-coordinated with her hair adornments. Source here.

Powerful new works of art, such as this one by performance artist, Miles Greenberg, may speak to how many people feel these days — alone, awkward, defenseless, shackled.

This short but moving work of performance art by Miles Greenberg is part of a COVID-19-themed series for Document Journal. Source and video here.

But artists no longer have a monopoly on improvising new ways to cope with unprecedented challenges. Many who never considered themselves especially creative are finding themselves inventing new ways to cope with challenges and celebrate what remains noteworthy.

Neighborhoods are now organizing weekly shout-outs to thank those who risk their own health daily to care for the sick.

Every Friday night at 7 pm, residents up and down the street of this suburban neighborhood in RI stand outside their houses to clap, bellow, and bang their gratitude for local health care workers. Source here.

And those whose jobs put them daily in harm’s way are, themselves, figuring out the life-saving art of improvisation. In the U.S., thanks to an infuriating two months of inattention to the looming pandemic on the part of the Trump administration, medical professionals at risk of infection because of inadequate supplies are actually making their own masks.

In the U.S., lack of preparation for COVID-19 by the Trump administration propels hospital workers to sew masks. Unsurprisingly, this is feminized labor. Source here.

Workers in plenty of private businesses are also digging deep to find new modalities.

Distilleries that otherwise produce vodka have found a new use for excess alcohol: they are re-purposing that newly-hyper-valued substance into one of the rarest commodities of the day, sanitizing wipes.

Source with video clip here.

Inside supermarkets, managers are getting creative about indicating six-foot intervals delimiting where people should wait on the checkout line.

Photos: Alma Gottlieb

Meanwhile, gig-economy musicians position themselves outside those supermarkets, where they entertain customers awaiting their turn to enter at safely-spaced intervals.

Photos: Alma Gottlieb.

With all this creativity occurring in the economy, I find all the more reason for us to take another look at the homeless.

And, no, I don’t mean because they are especially vulnerable. They are, but we already know that. We’ve known that for a long time. Too many books have been written about their vulnerability, with not nearly enough done to address it. Here, I’d like to point out something we rarely think about when we consider the situation of those who live on the streets.

By necessity, the homeless are masters of improvisation. From whatever tragedies led to their plight, they must scrounge anew for food and safe spaces daily. As if that weren’t enough, they must often manage these demanding tasks while being stigmatized, mocked, even arrested or assaulted. Although the homeless are more frequently the object of derision than admiration, their life skills in the face of almost unimaginable obstacles are extraordinary. Along with artists, they, too, could teach the rest of us some important life lessons.

As an anthropologist who researches the lives of homeless people in Leipzig, Germany, Luisa Schneider writes in a new poem:

while you wait it out at home

part of an expanding digital universe

connected to those you love

millions of us

have no doors to close behind us

or doors behind which

violence waits

or loneliness

or emptiness

or fear

(Source here.)

Even as many in the middle class (and beyond) are now coming to appreciate for the first time the low-paid workers who (often, invisibly) make their privileged world work — producing payroll checks, bagging groceries, cooking restaurant meals, packing and delivering packages, cleaning houses, teaching children — the one group that remains invisible for their life skills is the homeless. When this COVID-19 state of emergency finally passes, might this moment of global reflection produce new policies of compassion for helping the homeless to find new living quarters, while also helping them adapt their formidable survival skills to new careers?

What levels of grit and ingenuity are required to amass and transport daily this collection of necessary life goods as an impoverished, homeless urban nomad across the streets of NYC? Source here.

*

At the biomedical level, the most urgent lesson of this COVID-19 moment, of course, remains: isolate, isolate, isolate. For understanding the epidemiological challenges of this infectious disease emergency, we can turn to readable digests and thoughtful analyses of the week’s scientific COVID-19 findings such as this one, by the brilliant infectious disease specialist, Dr. Bill Rodriguez.

But that biomedical level has its counterpart in sociological factors — inevitably, given that humans are, above all, a social species.

The new catch-phrase guiding our lives is “social distancing.” For some, the required new habits of isolation are causing great loneliness and worse. For others, the phrase couldn’t be more of a misnomer, as people with access to advanced technology forge ingenious ways to stay in touch with those they hold near and dear. In the global North, Zoom is making geeks of technophobes.

I do not mean to underplay the suffering that the most vulnerable are enduring. Of course, that group includes not just the homeless but also the incarcerated and the medically compromised — the elderly, and those with the now-famous list of “underlying medical conditions” that, especially, stress the heart (diabetes, cancer, obesity, serious organ issues) as well as the lungs (asthma and respiratory conditions).

But it also includes the sociologically most vulnerable — the poor. And, in most parts of the world, that means, especially — for historical reasons having everything to do with the past half-millenium of European colonial expansion — people of color. Maps plotting those five groups — the homeless, the incarcerated, the medically vulnerable, the poor, and Black and Brown populations — are disturbingly close to isomorphic.

In a future post, I will explore these sorts of social vulnerabilities in this COVID-19 moment. Here, I want to end on a different note.

COVID-19 is forcing us to do no less than not only reinvent ourselves as individuals, but reinvent components of who we are as communities. For those who fear change but recognize the suddenly urgent need to embrace it, artists and the homeless alike offer powerful models of inspiration.

The transformations now occurring at every level of society will offer anthropologists research topics for years to come — starting with reëvaluating some unexpected benefits of what we might have formerly dismissed as fragility, and what we mean by “culture.”

Source here.
Anthropology, Creative thinking, Cultural Anthropology, Culture, Current Issues Read more