Politics and society | Alma Gottlieb

Category Archives: Politics and society

Have Students Stopped Reading? Thoughts on Some Protesters’ Outrageous Chants

April 30, 2024 by Alma Gottlieb 4 comments

Source here

I get why social justice-oriented college students are furious with Israel. (I am, too.)

I get why they are protesting to support Palestinians’ right to an independent homeland. (I support that, too, though the boundaries are up for negotiation.)

While I find it a deeply offensive, emotion-based tactic, I even get why these students ignore the atrocities that Hamas terrorists committed on October 7th. Acknowledging harm committed by their cause would render it problematic, vulnerable.

What I don’t get is how these university students have managed to avoid learning anything from the history, political science, and philosophy courses they have taken. Or maybe they haven’t taken history, political science, or philosophy courses. In that case, they should be wary of making arguments reliant on historical, political, or ethical claims.

Case in point: Let’s deconstruct just one of the many offensive taunts recently hurled at Jewish students at Columbia University, one of the world’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning.

“Go back to Poland!”

This directive makes five deeply problematic assumptions. It’s hard to know which is more historically inaccurate, politically simplistic, or morally outrageous.

The students easily hurling such insults are now paying over $350,000 for four years’ education at our nation’s most elite universities. Oops, it seems they forgot to attend class. When they remember why their education is being funded by a lot of hard-earned money (whether by their family, a foundation, or an endowment), here’s a sample emergency reading list they might consult, to encourage them to rethink the easy but devastatingly wrong assumptions implied by their shouted claims:

All Jews come from Poland, right? Nope. Even for those with “Ashkenazi” backgrounds, America’s Jews hail from most countries across northern, central, and eastern Europe. A browse through Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman’s edited collection, Connecting Histories: Jews and Their Others in Early Modern Europe would quickly correct this nonsense.

If they’re all from Poland, all Jews must be White, right? Assuming that all Jews come from Poland would imply that all Jews are White. But, nope. Just skimming, say, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz’s The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism would give even a lazy student a run for their money. And let’s not even bring up how “race” is a social construction, making easy classification of racial categories problematic at the theoretical level. Surely, these “progressive“ students could have learned that, in one of their classes on identity formation.

All Jews have “Ashkenazi” backgrounds originating in central or eastern Europe, right? Nope again. Simon Schama’s The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC-1492 AD offers a magisterial but concise overview of the global Jewish diaspora. Karen Primack’s breezy collection, Jews in Places You Never Thought of, expands that view to far-flung outposts of the Jewish diaspora. Too busy protesting to read anything but social media posts? A quick peek at the maps included in Eli Barnavi’s collection, A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, from the Time of the Patriarchs to the Present, doesn’t require engaging with texts. Surely, the busiest of student protesters can take a break to peek at images, no?

Jews don’t have a place in America. Or so “Go back to Poland!” implies. This taunt has such chilling echoes of the racist chants urging Black Americans to “return” to Africa heard across too many periods of US history that I can barely wrap my head around the echoes. We are venturing far beyond anti-Semitism here. Do we need scholarly references to remind passionately progressive students how historically absurd and ethically offensive it is to categorically police who gets to be “American”?

Poland has a strong history of killing Jews, so “returning” to Poland sounds like a death sentence. In Poland, Nazis murdered three million Jews — half the Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Once that student chanting “Go back to Poland!” graduates, perhaps his degree will earn him enough money to do some affordable tourism in Poland. There, he might visit the sites of the two most infamous concentration camps of the Holocaust — Auschwitz and Treblinka. Had he known about those when he urged a “return” to Poland? Reading Jan T. Gross’s Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz might give him further pause.

“Stop killing children!”

“All you do is colonize!”

These taunts recently hurled at Columbia University Jewish students offer different problems. Here, our passionate protester was accusing one person of representing — and being responsible for — all the policies that a government espouses, funds, and enacts.

This is a classic case of the part standing for the whole. Literary theorists have a fancy name for this trope: synecdoche. It works well in all manner of everyday expressions we use unthinkingly. “All hands on deck” is the classic example evoked by English teachers, where “hands” stand for the rest of the human body (while “deck” stands metaphorically for any space of work). No harm done here.

But when a person is used to stand for a nation, it’s hard to imagine not being offended. Let’s call this, the synecdochal fallacy. Sound too abstract? Here’s how it played out at Columbia University.

The Jewish students targeted by protesters were treated as if they were citizens of Israel, hence blamed for that government’s current policies. But, wait. Are Columbia University’s Jewish students who were being targeted all Israeli citizens? Unlikely. Now we are venturing even deeper into the land of the absurd.

Assuming that any Jew is automatically a citizen of Israel — and therefore a defender of all Israeli policies, up to and including “killing children” — smacks of just the sort of essentializing that anti-racists, feminists, and other progressives have rightfully decried for decades. Suddenly, essentializing is de rigueur among the progressive left?

Using this logic, the recipients of these offensive chants could have assumed with equal absurdity that their critics were citizens of the US, hence descendants of the original White settler colonialists who conquered the Native peoples who inhabited the territory that is now the US, hence supportive of all US political evils. How would it have sounded if the Jewish students had yelled back:

“Go back to England!”

“Stop driving polluting cars!”

“All you do is enrich corporations and oppress people of color!”

You see the problem here?

It doesn’t make sense to blame individuals for the ills of a nation.

At best, students targeting fellow (Jewish) students for the horrendous policies of another nation (Israel) is an ill-thought-out tactic that has no rational goal, hence unbecoming of our most elite universities’ admissions choices. At worst, since these (Jewish) students are being inappropriately and offensively targeted, it smacks of anti-Semitism.

Taking issue with national policy is a contemporary luxury offered in the modern world. Respecting this luxury requires paying attention to how to enjoy it. Those who decry national policies have every right to protest outside embassies or consulates that represent the nation. Protesting against national policies by railing against random people with a particular religious affiliation who may or may not endorse those policies would seem silly, even laughable — if it weren’t so serious. No, odious.

Moreover, branding Israel itself a “settler colonialist” nation has its own historical fallacies, as historian Simon Sebag Montefiore argued brilliantly last October.

Then, we have the moral quagmire of progressives supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization whose charter endorses killing Jews. For students who haven’t read the Hamas charter, the Charter describes its armed Islamic Resistance Movement this way (Article 8):

“Jihad [commonly taken as “armed struggle”] is its path[,] and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.”

Do our elite students recognize that they are repeating talking points articulated by a terrorist organization that is largely funded by Iran? (As of 2021, Iran supported Hamas to the tune of $100,000,000.)

And what about their professors?

Teachers: Let’s remember why we chose our profession. Isn’t our job to teach facts? And, as long as those facts involve humans, don’t facts require appropriate interpretation to recognize nuance?

Source here

The current crisis in the Middle East is nothing if complex. Attending to history doesn’t mean renouncing the quest for justice. But it does require looking into all the vexing places where injustices lie – in this case, not only at the heart of Israel’s current government, and among the Jewish settlers still maddeningly expanding into internationally accepted Palestinian territories, but also in the terrorist organization currently speaking for—and brutally using as human shields—Palestinians. If today’s university students are incapable of understanding nuance and complexity that defy easy binary judgments, it’s our job to teach them.

As for university presidents: How about requiring a course on “Evaluating Evidence and Arguments” for all students, no matter their major? And another one on “Binary Thinking: Seductions, Fallacies, Dangers,” for students who graft simple good guy/bad guy models onto multi-leveled geopolitical quagmires.

Source here

In short, let’s start equipping our students with the tools they need to think critically and assess complexity. Surely, a $350K education ought to offer that.

Source here

P.S. Fascinating op ed piece just up in Newsweek by a Palestinian peace activist from Gaza begging US students to rethink their protests. He urges: “You know what would help the Palestinians in Gaza? Condemning Hamas‘ atrocities.”

P.P.S. A comment by a historian friend, Harry Liebersohn: “One book I would strongly recommend: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust. By going back to a moment before the Holocaust it allows you to see the patterns of violence against Jews going back to the late nineteenth-century pogroms in the Russian Empire and how October 7th was a continuation of those patterns.”

Academia, Anti-Semitism, Binary thinking, Education, Essentializing, History, Israel, Judaism, Language politics, Learning, MidEast, Othering, Politics and society, Public anthropology, Sephardic Jews, Social activism, Teachers Read more

Let’s Agree . . .

November 26, 2023 by Alma Gottlieb 24 comments

That the deaths of civilians killed by the IDF targeting Hamas leaders, command centers, and weapons caches are tragedies.

That the continuing occupation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights by Israeli settlers is unethical, illegal, and outrageous.

Once we agree on these disturbing points, it is equally critical for us to agree that . . .

Hamas’ charter justifying its existence abhorrently prioritizes genocide against Jews at its heart, as responsible journalists lay out (quoting directly from reliable English translations of the Hamas charter).

Hamas’ October 7th murder of some 1,400 Israeli civilians was brutal and unjustified, and Hamas leaders’ disingenuous claims denying their militias’ rapes of Israeli women as “Jewish dogs” have no reason to be believed.

These two sets of claims appear opposed because they appear to be “taking sides.” If you accept one set, you would, “of course,” reject the other set.

But that conclusion assumes that only one side can be entirely right and the other side, entirely wrong. If only live humans’ political institutions operated as simply as Disney movies’ good-guy and bad-guy cartoon characters.

The ongoing Israel-Hamas war has so many “wrong actors,” it’s becoming hard to count. Unfortunately, among them are those in the U.S. who view themselves as the fiercest of social justice warriors on the progressive Left.

Yes, Palestinian Arabs have a right to live, as any human (including Jews) should assert.

Yes, Israel has a right to defend itself, as any modern country (including the U.S.) would assert.

Both these can be true at the same time.

Which can lead to only one conclusion.

Political activists: let’s stop “choosing sides” — beyond the side of peace.

If there’s any choosing to be done, it’s at the ballot boxes in Israel and Palestine.

It’s time for Palestinians — a majority of whom did not support Hamas , in recent polls — to choose another party to govern them — a party that does not put genocide at its center, nor illegalize same-sex relations or sanction killing LGBTQ residents. A party that acknowledges that the Holocaust that killed some 60-63% of Europe’s Jews justified the creation of one country on the planet to provide a safe space for Jews, and that thus acknowledges Israel’s moral and historical right to exist.

It’s also time for Israelis — a majority of whom do not support Netanyahu, in current polls — to choose another party to govern them — a party that does not turn a blind eye to, let alone sanction, illegal new Jewish settlements in lands that Israel long ago agreed ought to be governed by Palestinian Muslims. A party that is not led by a leader being investigated for corruption crimes, and that does not threaten to un-do 75 years of democratic rule.

Unless they just want to kill each other off, both groups deserve parties that take the history of some 1,400 years of more-or-less peaceful co-existence between Jews and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, and Palestine and the Mid-East at large, as their model for the future.

Update, Dec. 27, 2024: I recently collaborated with my colleague, Ron Duncan Hart, to write an opinion piece about the ongoing war in Israel/Palestine. Titled “At the Heart of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict, Anthropology Matters as Much as History,” it appeared today on The Hill, here.

Anthropology, Anti-Semitism, Israel, MidEast, Palestinian rights, Politics and society, War, Women's issues Read more

Does “Reasonable” = Racist?

April 25, 2021 by Alma Gottlieb 3 comments

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

Two Lessons I Learned about the Transfer of Power while Living in Africa

January 11, 2021 by Alma Gottlieb 2 comments

1. The moment that any transfer of power occurs from one individual or regime to another is fraught—ritually, sociologically, emotionally.

Why? This is a liminal period–“betwixt and between,” as the great anthropologist Victor Turner described it–neither fully in one political space, nor in another. Liminal moments offer options for creativity, inviting artistic license. They also represent spaces of danger.

Here’s what I’ve learned about the liminal times of interregnum–those intervals between political regimes–from West Africa.

For the better part of two years, I lived in small, rain-forest villages hosted by the Beng people of Côte d’Ivoire. Their practices for seating a new king are a study in (ritual) risk management.

The late King Bonde Chomo of Bengland, Côte d’Ivoire
(photo by Alma Gottlieb)

Beng people rank a king’s inauguration as an extended moment of extreme spiritual danger. During the days and, especially, hours before the installation concludes, witches reportedly roam freely during the daylight hours, taking advantage of the temporary power vacuum. As the time approaches for the king to be ritually seated, the witches’ work increases to a fever pitch, culminating in maximal damage during the moments right before the climactic ritual. It is said that more people die during the interregnum period than at any other time. Babies and children never attend a king’s investiture: parents fear that their weakness and youthfulness would render them especially vulnerable to the power of witches. Likewise, a pregnant woman assiduously avoids the event, protecting her fragile fetus.

Some in the modern world might dismiss such accounts as anachronistic relics of an ancient era. I suggest otherwise.

At the broadest level, let’s take “witchcraft” as a metaphor for the unleashing of any illegitimate and mystical power aimed at causing harm in the lives of ordinary humans. (That’s how the Beng perceive witches.) It becomes clear how the ritual drama of Beng kingship illuminates the events of last week in the American capital. The insurgents attacking the U.S. Capitol building played the role of witches, spreading spiritual chaos.

The much-photographed costume of the fiercest-looking insurgent was worn by one Jacob Anthony Chansley–an Arizonan man who forsook his prosaic name in favor of “Jake Angeli,” with its obvious religious reference to “angel.” But his attempt to wield spiritual power was not only through reference to Christianity. In a second perverse act of cultural appropriation, the terrorist also drew on indigenous religious traditions, calling himself a “QAnon Shaman.”

Voice actor/conspiracy group QAnon follower appropriating stereotypical image of a shaman to visually persuade others of his power (spiritual and otherwise)
*(Getty Images–source here)*

That is not just a meaningless moniker. The now-notorious Arizonan claims spiritual powers equivalent to those of the classic shamans of the Mongolian steppes. Chansley has categorized himself as a “multi-dimensional or hyper dimensional being” and claims he can “see into these other higher dimensions that these entities – these pedophiles, these rapists, these really high up people … that they can almost hide in the shadows in.”

Beyond Chansley, QAnon–the amorphous collection of groups with which Chansley associates himself–itself displays many qualities of a religious cult. For one thing, its strangely spelt name hints at a secret identity: Anon[ymous]. The secrecy encoded in its very name implies mystical foundations.

Then, too, the conspiracy-oriented group promotes hyperbolic but vague claims drenched in sensationalist innuendo: Satanic kidnapping, pedophilia, child trafficking.

Moreover, according to NY Times reporter Kevin Roose, QAnon followers have also been “flooding social media with false information about Covid-19, the Black Lives Matter protests and the 2020 election.” Some have, additionally, embraced anti-vaccine and anti-child-trafficking movements; others make further “claims about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the existence of U.F.O.s, and the 9/11 ‘truther’ movement.”

What’s more, its messages are sometimes penned in cryptic language.

All these features smack of religious cults.

Dare I point out that this shambolic collection of creative but unrealistic fears constitutes a veritable witches’ brew?

Chansley is now in custody. I’m guessing that the higher powers with which he claims to be in touch may not prove persuasive in a court of law.

But Chansley is just the side show. The main act, of course, is Donald Trump. These past four years. Trump has turned into a religious cult leader par excellence.

Trump may not drape himself flamboyantly in bearskins or sport buffalo horns, but his toxic narcissism produces just the sort of charismatic charlatanism in which certain types of religious cult leaders have long specialized. Allying himself with flashier devotees merely highlights the religious fervor he ignites on his own.

As I watch reruns of the mob scene that Trump incited, I imagine that the great French sociologist, Emil Durkheim, would have recognized the energy as effervescent, when large gatherings of people create great emotional intensity dedicated to serving ancestral spirits. Tragically, the religious fervor we witnessed in the U.S. capital produced tragedy rather than spiritual enlightenment.

Last week in Washington, D.C., the bureaucrats in charge of security failed our nation miserably. Eventually, a systematic inquiry will determine whether this failure originated in inattentive incompetence or coordinated sedition. (All signs are currently pointing toward the latter.)

For now, I humbly point out what those in charge might have learned from Beng villagers (assuming they actually wanted to protect the nation): moments of political transition represent the most dangerous times of civic life.

During periods of political interregnum, society cannot be too cautious. Leaders must take all conceivable steps to protect the vulnerable and safeguard the polity, lest the forces of chaos–modern-day witches–avail themselves of the power vacuum and take charge.

2. The institution of democratic rule is strong, sturdy, and stable–until it’s not.

In the village, my Beng friend Yacouba once told me, “When the walls have holes, the cockroaches get in.”

Yacouba had in mind the ravages of his two co-wives. In his view, their endless bitter arguments were causing all their children to constantly fall sick; one had even died.

Yacouba’s cockroach lesson might be applied to the broader house of civil society. Once foes scratch cracks into the walls of an institution, elements of destruction expand those chips and find their way in.

In Côte d’Ivoire, the initial challenge to the modern nation’s first democratic elections occurred in 1994. The past 26 years have seen more failed coup attempts than I have counted, punctuated frequently by violent civil unrest and two periods of out-and-out civil war. Today, the nation remains as unstable as it was at the beginning of those early political challenges. Côte d’Ivoire’s recent history should serve America as a warning.

During the past week, we have heard many journalists and political experts write that America is on a precipice. But, if we want to be honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that, from the nation’s earliest days, America began in violent efforts to either subjugate or annihilate people of color–first, native peoples; then, Africans kidnapped and brought to these shores while enslaved. To claim that we are on a precipice now implies that this is the first time we face stark choices concerning racism. In truth, we have been balancing uneasily on that precipice since the founding of the republic.

Nevertheless, each time we venture farther out on that cliff, we come closer to toppling over its edge.

The lessons of Côte d’Ivoire’s difficult modern history are still something from which it’s not too late to learn. There’s still time to conduct thorough inquiries into who organized last week’s insurrection and then prosecute them. All of them. Even if he neither resigns nor is removed from office via the 25th amendment nor is impeached, Donald Trump can, and should, ultimately be judged–ideally in court, but certainly by history.

Meanwhile, we have an interregnum to plow through.

Africa, Anthropology, Beng, Citizenship, Current Issues, Donald Trump, Far right, Politics and society, Power, U.S. Congress, West Africa Read more

What Anthropology Teaches Us about COVID-19, Part 2: An Optimist’s Scenario

March 19, 2020 by Alma Gottlieb 2 comments

Here’s what I imagine could–and should–emerge from this viral nightmare.

Locally, stranger-neighbors will (re)discover each other. Re-appreciate the bonds of co-residence.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Elevator-Friends-300x200.jpg

Translate that appreciation into forging new relationships, even new neighborhood groups. Friendly elevator chats, book groups, block parties, children’s after-school clubs.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Homework-Club-300x235.png

Remember that our common humanity unites us more than our cultural differences divide us.

Online, new connections and groups will form.

In this often scary and lonely world, like-minded folks will find their way online to one another, whether as individuals or in groups.

A new Facebook group for physicians seeking the latest information about COVID-19 has popped up; as of March 18, it had 14,641 members.

Another Facebook group of “Artists against COVID-19” is already sharing both critical information, and equally critical (virtual) hand-holding.

The non-tech-savvy will discover their Inner Geek and figure out how to connect virtually.

https://www.aphasia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Virtual-Chat-2.png

Politicians who specialize in policies of the heartless–generously supporting their own kind, and pretending their ilk have a monopoly on being human–will recover their souls.

Re-learn empathy for anyone other than their immediate families and business associates.

Translate that empathy for other humans into public policy supporting those other humans.

Globally, political leaders will recognize that it is actually possible to band together with parallel, even coordinated, strategies for the common good.

Translate that realization into new, viable policies to counteract climate change.

Embrace the youthful energy of the Sunrise Movement, whose political leader is already calling on Pres. Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act for Planet Earth. That would direct private industry to produce essential equipment to counteract imminent threats–viz., not only the health of our individual lungs, but the health of our collective environment.

Dismantle the fossil fuel industry.

Enact international legislation promoting sustainable energy.

Invest in civic-minded engineers and their research.

Save the planet.

It’s true that I have a reputation for being a bit of a Pollyana in my family.

Still, even I don’t dare hope that any or all the above will happen overnight. Once the microscopic creatures causing COVID-19 chaos have (mostly) died off, we will need time to remember who we were.

But, also, time to think about who we want to be.

This horrible moment provides an important opportunity for us—as individuals, as communities, as nations, and as a globalized species—to rethink, well, everything.

Climate change, Community, Cooperation, Covid-19, Creative thinking, Cultural Anthropology, Empathy, Environmental anthropology, Environmental issues, Fossil fuel industry, Humans as a social species, Politics and society, Public policy Read more

When Women’s Laughter Keeps Men in Line; or, What Gathering-Hunting Women of Central Africa Have in Common with Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, et al.

February 12, 2019 by Alma Gottlieb One comment

Among the Mbendjele gathering-hunting people who live in the Republic of Congo,

“women’s laughter manages to keep men in line.”

Drawing from ethnographic research by Jerome Lewis, anthropologist Chris Knight relates that among the Mbendjele, “senior women exercise a special privilege, seeing it as their enjoyable role to bring down anyone who seems to be getting above themselves.”

To explain what “getting above themselves” might include, Knight enumerates an impressive list:

greediness
selfishness
dishonesty
cheating
laziness
arrogance
boastfulness
carelessness
cowardice
intolerance
moodiness
impulsiveness
aggression
possessiveness
not providing enough to eat
threats of, or attempts at, violence
chasing another woman
not having sex often enough.

Why should we care about Mbendjele women’s complaints about their men’s bad behavior?

Given that all humans began (evolutionarily speaking) as gatherer-hunters in sub-Saharan Africa, anthropologists have long pointed out the special insights that contemporary hunter-gatherers of Central Africa hold for our species history. Expanding on writings by anthropologist Chris Boehm, Knight uses the example of laughing Mbendjele older women to develop a broad-ranging theory of how laughter may have evolved as a unique human pleasure.

Here, my aim is far less ambitious.

Let’s call this a Memo to the [Increasingly Empowered] White-Clad Women of the U.S. Congress:

Why not learn from your Mbendjele sisters and take up coordinated public laughter at out-of-control men as your next power move?

In fact, our newly-elected women Members of Congress have already gotten a brief but great head start.

I’m guessing that Mbendjele women would recognize their strategy.

Maybe the next group press conference held by our women MoCs critiquing unjust laws and unethical practices (patriarchal and otherwise) will be accompanied by a full-scale, Mbendjele-style laugh-in. Our species’ long evolutionary history might well support it.

Africa, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Anthropology, Congo, Cultural Anthropology, Current Issues, Donald Trump, Ethnography, Feminism, Gender equity, Gender relations, Human evolution, Humans as a social species, Hunter-gatherers, Inequality, Mbendjele, Nancy Pelosi, Politics and society, Sexism, Social activism, Social justice, U.S. Congress, Women, Women's activism Read more

Is History Over? How Can Power be Soft? Ask Ulf Hannerz

July 18, 2017 by Alma Gottlieb One comment

The end of history
The clash of civilizations
The coming anarchy
Soft power

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.

Writing Future Worlds: An Anthropologist Explores Global Scenarios (Springer/Palgrave, 2016) appears as part of a new series, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, edited by Deborah Reed-Danahay and Helena Wulff.

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.

In many other arenas, you’ve been on the vanguard. You’ve produced one of the first urban ethnographies of African-American communities, you’ve pioneered the anthropology of transnational flows, and you’ve interrogated the contemporary moment in anthropology. What’s next?

UH:

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.

Academia, Academic Career, Anthropology, Author interviews, Book reviews, Books, Cultural Anthropology, Current Issues, Future global scenarios, Journalism, Politics and society, Public intellectual, punditry, Research methods, Studying up Read more

An Anthropologist at the Women’s March on Washington, Part 2: The Posters

March 1, 2017 by Alma Gottlieb One comment

Photo by Noam Galai

Women (and some men) with signs, as far as the eye could see.

In my first post about the Women’s March of January 21, 2017, I chronicled the social and emotional ties I saw created in this space of massive communitas, feminist style. Here, I offer a textual analysis of the posters I observed.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

Above the sea of pink knit hats, thousands of posters claimed the sky. Their messages ranged from instructive to witty, from loving to outraged. Let’s browse through a small selection of some of the most creative and impassioned, and see what they can tell us about this extraordinary moment in America’s still-young democracy.

Photo by Linda Seligmann

At the entrance to the event, a team of independent filmmakers documented the day’s events. They didn’t need to pester people to beg them for interviews. Instead, they staked out a prominent spot and simply held up an appealing sign: “Tell us why you came.”

Everyone had her story, and these filmmakers wanted to document as many as they could.

Mine was simple. I told them: “I came as a feminist dedicated to the radical proposition that women are human.”

Photo by Alanna Vaglanos/The Huffington Post

Later, I was gratified to see a man bearing the same conviction. The strategy behind the motto works best when men are on board, too.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

I like the multiple layers of this poster.

The long lashes and bright blue eyes evoke women’s beauty—a classic subject of men’s gaze.

But the message below up-ends that practice and puts women in the active position of viewer rather than viewed. That message challenges the gross misogyny of Donald Trump’s outrageous comments about women (the infamous “pussy-grabbing” remark being only one of many).

More broadly, this poster announces that women are paying attention to any gross misdeeds Trump may attempt. The women’s movement that re-birthed on January 21^st, 2017 attests to this poster.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

This poster adds another sense modality to the sentiment of the last one. Not only are women watching the antics on the House and Senate floors, they are also listening to the outrageous speeches. And they are not forgetting. Trump’s bank account can’t buy amnesia for the rest of the world.

This poster implicitly evokes the power of the Internet. Pre-Digital Age, politicians could conceal their misdeeds, their offensive statements, and even the bills they introduced into the legislature, far more easily. Now, digital cameras and cell phones-turned-tape-recorders document politicians’ back-door dealings; investigative reporters “follow the money”; and any citizen can hold police accountable with a simple snap of the shutter.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

Donald Trump’s infamous comment resonated everywhere that day in Washington. In case anyone had been living under a rock all fall and needed help decoding the pink knit caps with “cat ears,” this poster reminded everyone of the odious Say what?! statement that outraged even Republicans.

“Pussy” used to be an X-rated term used by men to refer insultingly to women’s genitals. With a president as an avowed, enthusiastic sexual harasser, women have now re-appropriated the metaphor and turned it against would-be “pussy grabbers.”

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

Photo by Mina Cooper

“Pussy”-as-vagina and “pussy”-as-cat have now combined such that women are re-claiming their gendered identity as a space of agency rather than victimhood. Effectively using the strategy of the gay rights movement, which re-appropriated “gay” and “queer” as terms of pride and self-identification, feminists have re-appropriated “pussy.” Not only was “pussy” a degrading term for women’s genitals; “Don’t be a pussy” previously meant, “Don’t be a coward,” with the vagina standing in synecdochally for cowardice. The thousands of cat-pun-themed posters and -knit hats in view everywhere in D.C. signaled a powerful message: these women would not be bullied into submission. Rather, women own their genitals and feel empowered to push back against the sexist agenda of the Trump regime.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

This poster distressed me more than all others I saw. I kept finding myself somehow compelled to look at it, then compelled to look away.

The idea of a sexually harassing president is odious enough. Taking that image as a metaphor for raping democracy, as symbolized by the feminized Statue of Liberty, is, if such a thing is possible, even more disturbing. Whether from direct experience or from hearing about it from friends and relatives, all women know what it is to be sexually assaulted. Imagining our collective polity and shared values assaulted in this symbolically resonant way is almost too painful to contemplate.

Yet Trump’s abhorrent statement from long ago, now immortalized, has spawned a new generation of feminists. The feminist artist who visualized this metaphor has created a powerful image that is bound to speak for months and years to come, for all who so much as glimpsed her horrifying poster.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

Donald Trump’s personal history as a proud sexual harasser may even include rape—several accusations have been neither fully proven nor discredited. As such, the individual representing our nation to the world is deeply problematic. How can such a person have been chosen as Time magazine’s “person of the year”? This poster mocks Time’s decision by applying a new, degrading title, along with an iconic image of evil–the horns of the devil in Christian iconography (inherited from the satyrs of Greek mythology)–to our commander-in-chief.

Photo by Alanna Vaglanos/Huffington Post

Why does everyone like Dr. Seuss? Because he distills complex concepts into simple rhymes that even young children get.

This brilliant poster takes advantage of that strategy. Donald Trump’s disturbing history of sexual aggression towards women is protested via a child’s rhyme—not to belittle the seriousness of our president’s outrageous misogynist history, but to insist in the clearest and simplest possible terms on the basic fact of its unacceptability.

And, in case anyone missed the Dr. Seuss connection, the poster mad that inspiration explicit with a signature red-and-white-striped hat.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

This sign echoed hundreds of others referring to so many issues important to America’s women. Having a “pussy-grabbing” president terrifies young women, who keenly appreciate the battles their mothers and grandmothers fought to keep abortion legal and safe, breastfeed in public, name sexual harassment as a crime, and put rapists behind bars. In other words, “My Body. My Choice” resonates across multiple registers. It indexes the many struggles women have waged across multiple centuries and communities to assert somatic autonomy; the battles that have already been won to achieve this aim; and the precarity of those successes in the new U.S. administration.

This particular sign was silk-screened, along with hundreds of others, by members of an arts collective who donated their expertise and services at the Nasty Women Exhibition, a six-day art fair held in Queens, NY, the week before the Women’s Marches. All artwork at that exhibit sold out, and the entirety of the $42,000 raised was donated to Planned Parenthood. In this photo, my daughter, Hannah Gottlieb-Graham, doubled as sign-holder and photographer as she observed and marched.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

Another devastating combination of 2 words + 1 image.

Roe v. Wade represents just one of many rights that people at the Women’s March aimed to defend. But it epitomizes the anger that women feel at the life-threatening medical risks they would incur if Roe V. Wade were reversed.

This poster speaks poignantly to my own family history.

My maternal grandmother had thirteen dangerous and illegal abortions.

Or so my mother once told me. Out of a combination of shock and embarrassment, I never asked my mother any details. And I certainly never queried my beloved grandmother about what must have been painful memories, as the topic was entirely taboo during the years when my grandmother was alive. But from what I know of my grandmother’s life, I find the claim entirely plausible.

As Jews living in extreme poverty in shtetls of Eastern Europe, both my maternal grandparents had only managed to attend grade school, through maybe the third or fourth grades, before they managed to flee religious persecution and make new lives for themselves in the U.S. Once here, they found religious freedom but continued to live in poverty: they rented the same three-floor-walk-up, one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx for 50 years. They both worked long, hard hours for decades—my grandfather, as a waiter; my grandmother, as a licensed practical nurse.

My grandmother had two daughters, but the second (my aunt) was born with a serious kidney disease, and the doctor wasn’t optimistic about her chances for survival. My grandmother devoted herself to her sickly daughter’s health, and through her love combined with her basic nursing training, she managed to keep her daughter alive.

According to my mother, this medical and emotional trauma, combined with the family’s poverty, convinced my grandmother to put an end to her childbearing years after my aunt was born in 1923. But reliable birth control methods were still decades away. My grandmother’s only recourse to thirteen more pregnancies was to have thirteen back-alley abortions. Here’s where my pre-anthropological days fail me. I don’t know the details of who did the work, where, and how much they charged, although I imagine that coat hangers might well have been involved.

Until Jan. 21, 2017, this old family story, while a part of my maternal lineage, seemed worlds away from the lives of modern American women. As we await the drama unfolding in the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, images of coat hangers sometimes invade my dreams.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

A personal favorite. This poster says so much with two words and one powerful image.

So many women–in the U.S. and elsewhere—are sexually assaulted. So few rapists are ever even tried, let alone convicted and jailed. And in recent years, so much legislation has been proposed by Republican politicians at both state and federal levels in the U.S. that aims to curtail women’s hard-won freedoms.

Moreover, in middle schools, girls across the U.S. and elsewhere view textbook drawings that make the inside of their bodies seem like alien territory.

The net effect of these efforts is that, to some young women, it feels that the simple state of being a woman is being criminalized.

The artistic creator of this poster has used warm colors to draw the uterus as an object of beauty. Along with the über-short and über-clear text, she declares that a woman’s genitals should be the source of pride, not fear, much less invasion–whether physical, symbolic, or legal.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

And this poster individualizes the determination to protect women’s bodies by evoking a veritable vagina dentata motif. Here, we see an empowering response to Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights and sexual autonomy.

Photo by Alanna Vaglanos/The Huffington Post

For many years, “Grow a pair” or (more explicitly) “Grow some balls” has served to urge men and boys to gain courage. In that idiom, testicles function as a metaphor for all that is stereotypically associated with masculinity — physical strength, emotional steadiness, tenacity.

This women’s march not only challenged the economics of patriarchy. With posters such as this, the protest challenged our deepest assumptions about gender.

“Grow a vagina” as an exhortation to be brave urges girls and women to think of their genitals as organs of strength. Any woman who has ever menstruated gets it. So does any woman who has lost her virginity to a man. And what about childbirth? There’s a reason Asante women of Ghana liken childbirth to going to war. And don’t even get me started about rape. As every woman knows, women’s genitals are the site of almost super-human strength.

Photo by Alanna Vaglanos/Huffington Post

This poster expands the notion of female strength from the genitals. Here, women are depicted categorically as strong. The poster’s motto overturns two phrases commonly used to encourage boys to be strong: “Don’t cry like a girl” and “You fight like a girl.” Here, fighting like a girl is taken as a badge of honor, with girls depicted as a model to emulate, not avoid.

Photo by Alanna Vaglanos/Huffington Post

In this poster, the beloved fictional character of Princess Leia stands dramatically for women’s ability to defend themselves. The double-entendre, single-word text packs a powerful punch. With those eight letters, women are at once offered Princess Leia as a role model for resistance, and a vision of sisterhood both with that fictional character, and with one another.

Years ago, the renowned anthropologist Ashley Montagu argued that men are, intrinsically, the weaker sex. His book, The Natural Superiority of Women, first published in 1952, was an inspiration to the founders of the National Organization of Women in 1966.

The set of posters just analyzed suggests it might be time for Ashley Montagu’s book to become required reading in high school social studies classes across America.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

If the hundreds of posters I saw shared an overarching theme, it was probably, “Intersectionality.”

Unlike the “second wave” of (largely white) feminists of the 1960s, feminists of the 21^st century understand that the fates of the world’s women are interlinked, and, moreover, that our struggles are also interlinked with those of other marginalized and oppressed populations. At the Women’s March in Washington, everywhere, I saw religious minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities, racial and ethnic minorities, and the economically vulnerable—both in person, and represented on signs.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

I took the “bridges” on this sign both in the literal sense, concerning the US/Mexican border—and as a metaphorical sign urging political alliances to link the many marginalized and vulnerable groups now targeted by the Trump administration.

Photo by Alanna Vaglanos /Huffington Post

This poster makes ironic ties to another bitter controversy in the contemporary era: the rights of gun owners vs. the need for public safety.

Are women really less valued than guns in American law and American society?

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

These young Latina girls probably ranged from 13-16 years old, but their posters testified that they already identified as women. And their posters signaled their early understanding that in 21^st century America, this identity comes with political baggage, and demands solidarity and pluck.

The energy and positivity of this cheerful but powerful young group felt infectious.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

This young Muslim women displayed a dazzling understanding of intersectional issues. Islamophobia, reproductive rights, racism, misogyny, ignorance, hatred, climate change, the school-to-prison pipeline, the Black Lives Matter movement, and love all found a place on her packed poster. As such — and in contrast to her own headscarf-wearing body — her poster proclaimed a subliminal retort to the common American stereotyping of Muslims as “other.” Through her poster, this young woman asserted her common humanity with so many “others,” thereby deconstruction the “othering” impulse itself.

Photo by Linda Seligmann

If the protesters understood acutely the ways in which seemingly disparate issues intersect, the same cannot be said for Republicans who see these issues as unrelated. This poster in effect offered a meta-critique of those conceptual blinders. The ironic result it pointed out: the unborn have more rights than many groups of people outside the womb.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

The movement began with women, and attracted over a half a million of them in Washington, D.C. alone. But men joined in as allies, often pointing out the intersections with other issues.

The legal right to protest Trump’s policies was on people’s minds early on. The button I spotted on this man’s hat proved prescient.

With a president who has declared that journalists are “the enemy of the people,” the ACLU — staunch defender of free speech — should become a major player in the next four years.

Thankfully, in the weeks following the inauguration, the American Civil Liberties Union attracted unprecedented donations by ordinary Americans. According to a report published by CNN on Jan. 31, 2017:

“The American Civil Liberties Union said it received $24.1 million in online donations over the weekend.

In a normal year, the activist group makes about $4 million in online donations. In one weekend, it raised six times as much money.”

The ACLU will doubtless put these funds to important use.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

Another personal favorite.

Back in Aug. 2015, Fox news journalist Megyn Kelly moderated a debate among Republican primary contenders. Kelly was especially tough on Trump for his anti-women agenda. After the interview, Trump dismissed Kelly’s challenging questions by referring to her genitals: he implied her questions lacked legitimacy because they must have been produced by menstrual processes — “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her . . . wherever.” Reverting to an age-old patriarchal habit of delegitimizing women’s claims for equality by suggesting out-of-control hormonal processes signaled that Trump’s misogyny was unlimited.

This poster revisits that moment and turns it against Trump. The sign holder owns her anger, and even associates it with her menstrual cycle. As with the pink knit “pussy hats,” in so doing, she is, in effect, using the logic of the gay rights movement, once activists re-appropriated the previously insulting terms used against them–“gay” and “queer.” This sign-maker’s menstrual anger does not control her; rather, she controls it, and for a political purpose: to push back against the sexist agenda of Donald Trump and others of his ilk.

Note, too, the angry tampon in the upper-right corner. Animating that piece of menstrual technology gives life to an inanimate object that is an intimate part of many modern women’s monthly bodily regimes. As such, the angry tampon re-channels the anger of all women, everywhere, who were denigrated by Trump’s insulting dismissal of Megyn Kelly’s professional journalism.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

Not all posters were grim or angry. Even through their outrage, some protesters found ways to make us laugh. This clever Miller analogy offered a bitter chuckle for Jewish protestors.

Photo by Linda Seligmann

Another punster targeted not Trump, but his Cabinet picks.

At the time of the Women’s March, Trump had already announced many outrageous choices for top Cabinet positions, including Betsy DeVos for Education, Rick Perry for Energy, Tom Price for Health and Human Services, and Ben Carson for Housing and Urban Development. Just a day after the inauguration, reasonable people educated about these picks were already furious.

Nevertheless, this protester’s play on words earned a smile wherever she went.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

Another poster offered a different play on words. The time for Cyndi Lauper’s celebration of girls protesting against sexism via partying is over. With the assault on women’s bodies on many registers, today’s girls just wanna have fun-damental rights.

Even in the most urgent of political crises, a joke can keep us sane. As H. L. Mencken once said, “What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.”

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

The last theme I want to signal is the set of inter-generational conversations that abounded on many posters.

Women who remember earlier women’s rights struggles displayed their frustration with old battles that they thought they had won, only to see them re-appear with new force and Hydra-like terror.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

In the U.S., Republicans often point to the 1950s as a Golden Age. Women, and minorities of all sorts, know better.

American schools were still segregated, and Jim Crow laws were still on the books and followed across the South. Gays were still either closeted or bullied. Women were still expected to marry, have children, and devote themselves exclusively to their families while abandoning all career aspirations. The “military-industrial complex” was just being born. The Cold War divided the world into “us” and “them” while starting to outsource military conflicts to the global South. No concept of rights for the disabled even existed. Public awareness of any religions beyond Christianity was nil. Industrial expansion produced unprecedented toxins polluting the water, air, and land, without nary a protest.

Today, our nation is far from utopian, yet the gains made over the past half-century in rights for women, for minorities of all sorts, and for the earth, are undeniable. The Trump administration’s efforts to turn back the clock and undo those significant gains reminds women old enough to remember the 1950s of a nightmare that, until now, seemed like it was just a distant memory.

Photo by Alanna Vaglanos/Huffington Post

This poster reminds us of a far longer timeline. Evoking the Massachusetts’ Salem witch trials of 1692-83, the women carrying this set of posters performed a sort of moving political theatre.

Feminist scholars such as Isaac Reed have argued that the Salem witch trials must be understood as a component of gendered history — rooted in patriarchal institutions and mindsets of colonial America. These contemporary protesters argued that the Puritan patriarchal mindset is still with us. They also saw the accused witches as early feminist rebel-heroes — and themselves, as their heiresses.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

As a feminist grandmother, I can relate to this one.

If women in general are supposed to demonstrate infinite patience, that gendered stereotype applies tenfold to grandmothers. They’re the ones kids turn to when parents are mad. If even Grandma is pissed off to the point of making a crude hand gesture, something is seriously amiss.

This poster highlights issues of special concern to the elderly — having enough money to live on after retiring, and a good enough medical insurance policy to cover the increasing costs of staying healthy.

And, yes, the poster also reminds us: old women are also vulnerable to sexual assault.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

Finally, lurking at the back of all our minds that day was the unstated question: “Now what?”

Posters abounded proclaiming, in one way or another, that the sun would not set definitively on that day. The momentous event — with its global impact — will be hard to dismiss or forget.

Although the Washington protest was the largest and, because of its location, the most symbolically most potent, it inspired sister marches around the country, and across the globe. Crowd estimates by scholars tell us that something like 4.5 million people marched in 915 individual events around the world.

These extraordinary numbers suggest two striking facts: a great deal of passion, and a great deal of coordination. When passion and coordination are harnessed, a powerful cocktail is created.

Which brings me to the next poster.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

During the campaign season, Donald Trump’s campaign motto, “Make America great again,” resonated with many white voters who feared global flows. But others saw in that slogan an unrealistic effort to close our borders to the world, and a dangerous evocation of earlier nationalist moves that produced imperialist invasion/expansion in places ranging from Vietnam and the Philippines to Iraq and Afghanistan.

This poster bitterly mocks that motto. Here, “Feminism” substitutes for “America” — thereby, implicitly, challenging not only the nativist/xenophobic agenda of Trump, but his longstanding misogyny, as well. This especially subversive slogan is bound to irritate Trump (and his supporters) greatly.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

What to do with all these posters at the end of the day?

Many marchers felt reluctant to ditch them in trash cans.

A spontaneous art exhibit formed at this metro station, as protesters donated their signs to thE subway floor-turned-impromptu art-gallery that expanded by the minute.

Only two days later, museums and libraries around the world, from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. to the Royal Alberta Museum in Vancouver, announced that they would start collecting the posters.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

While museum curators soon presented exhibits protesting President Trump’s executive order against Muslim immigrants and refugees either by removing (or covering over) all artwork by immigrants, or by featuring such works, political activists forged their own plans.

Across the US, a new organization has formed: “Indivisible.” Already, 7,000 chapters have been created. Members are busy protesting the Trump agenda, while mindful of the numbers necessary in Congress for Democrats to reclaim the national agenda. The most effective way is to “Mobilize for Midterms”—that is, the “mid-term” elections that will take place in 2018, in the middle of the current presidential term.

This poster featured the pragmatic side to the march, complementing the poetic and the artistic approaches featured in the posters highlighted above.

All approaches were in full force in Washington, and equally welcome.

Photo by Linda Seligmann

The joy of raising a feminist.

My daughter, Hannah Gottlieb-Graham, had accompanied my husband and me to smaller protests over the years, but this massive scene made an impression like no other.

To plan for our trip to Washington, she’d bought us matching t-shirts. No offense meant to men, but given the past few millennia ruled by patriarchy, redressing the balance seems in order.

Photo by Alma Gottlieb

When Hillary Clinton was still running for president, people from Kim Kardashian and Oprah Winfrey to Barack Obama declared their allegiance by announcing, “I’m with her.” The un-referenced pronoun easily stood for Hillary Clinton because she was the first woman ever to win the nomination of one of the two major political parties of the United States. T-shirts supporting Hillary didn’t even have to mention her name—the “her” in question was obviously Hillary.

At the march in Washington, these simple three words took on a powerful new meaning when added to multiple arrows pointing in every possible direction. Once Hillary lost, “I’m with her” referred not to one woman, but to Every Woman. The power of a gendered political movement was born with those arrows.

The official Women’s March on Washington has called for a national Women’s Strike on March 8th. Let’s join them!

Abortion rights, Anti-Semitism, Current Issues, Diversity, Donald Trump, Feminism, Hillary Clinton, Immigration, Intersectionality, Islamophobia, Latino/as, Menstrual politics, Othering, Politics and society, Racism, Sexism, Social activism, Women's activism, Women's issues Read more

An Anthropologist at the Women’s March on Washington, Part 1: Finding Communitas, Feminist Style

January 23, 2017 by Alma Gottlieb 15 comments

Mass of Demonstrators in Front of Capitol 1, cropped

(photo by Alma Gottlieb)

The doors of our metro car opened and closed, opened and closed with increasingly alarming dysfunction. On any other day, the many more dozens of people jammed into our subway car than (for safety reasons) should have occupied our tight, air-deprived space would have panicked–jostled, elbowed, and accused one another. Instead, taking the occasion as an opportunity to befriend new neighbors, we asked from where and how far our companions had traveled, asked where they were staying, asked if the growing-short-of-breath needed water. In other words, we bonded.

Anthropologists have a name for that feeling of spontaneous community that developed in an unlikely place: we call it, “communitas.” Coined by the great Victor Turner (one of my long-ago mentors), the term originally referred to feelings of solidarity forged in African initiation rituals. But anthropologists now apply the word to all sorts of places beyond rain forest groves. Two days ago, an urban subway offered my first sighting of communitas in Washington, D.C.–but certainly not my last. On Jan. 21, 2017, feminism and anthropology converged, as women around the country–and around the world–forged a sense of communitas that, unlike many temporary feelings of communitas, may well have lasting effects beyond the day’s euphoria.

Indeed, after it was over, yesterday’s march in the nation’s capital felt, if anything, infinitely grander and more important when we learned of the 600 or so sister marches around the world attracting some 2 million protestors, begun on Facebook and coordinated by the miracle of social media.

I’m old enough to have intense teenage memories of participating in the huge marches on Washington of the 1960s, supporting civil rights and protesting the Vietnam War. But my anthropologist friend, Linda Seligmann, and I were accompanied to yesterday’s march by three young women (aged 17 to 21 years old) who had never participated in such a momentous event.

(photo by Linda Seligmann)

I watched their wide-eyed wonder with delight as some 500,000+ strangers, mostly women, found a new pink-knit-capped sisterhood.

Mass of Demonstrators, Pink Hats, cropped more

(photo by Alma Gottlieb)

My day’s companions had their own somatic challenges. One became dizzy and nearly fainted in the overcrowded, under-oxygenated metro car we occupied for nearly two hours; another exercised all her willpower to control her bladder, when toilet facilities proved elusive during six hours of enforced standing. And yet, they never complained, never begged for an exit strategy. Instead, they felt that strong pull of communitas.

I, myself, felt the tug of an old back injury asserting itself as those six hours of standing activated muscular fatigue. And yet, communitas asserted a stronger pull.

After three hours of listening to inspirational speeches, many in the crowd became restless. “Start the march! Start the march!” some began chanting. And, indeed, some began marching (or, truth to tell, shuffling, amidst the thousands of protesters barely able to move), while others remained at the rally, to listen to yet more speakers. Yet even that splintering of attention didn’t fracture our sense of common purpose. Among those who stayed behind and those who forged on, communitas asserted a stronger pull.

Some protest signs and speeches signaled disturbing acts of police abuse across our troubled land. And yet, even when faced with police officers and security guards trying to direct our unruly numbers, communitas won out, as protesters and cops responded with noticeable civility to one another.

The people who flocked to the nation’s capital looked more diverse than those at any march in my memory. Judging by what I saw and heard, the event attracted white, brown and black folks; Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus; straight people, gay people, drag queens, and everything-in-between; breastfeeding babies and grandmothers in wheelchairs; sighted walkers and white-caned walkers; people sporting designer clothes and others wearing hand-me-downs; groups of teachers and groups of students; executives and labor union members; English-speaking and Spanish-speaking youth.

(photo by Alma Gottlieb)

And yet, despite this extraordinarily diverse concatenation of humanity, we forged communitas.

Muslim Woman Holding Poster (LS Photo) cropped

(photo by Linda Seligmann)

Or perhaps I should say, because of that extraordinarily diverse concatenation of humanity, we forged communitas.

(photo by Linda Seligmann)

I don’t mean to paint an overly Pollyana-ish portrait of an admittedly extraordinary day. The challenges to maintaining momentum and organizing such a diverse constituency into a viable political movement are far from trivial.

But in the right circumstances, communitas can also cast a long shadow that can even produce some staying power. Maybe, just maybe, it may prove powerful enough to help the organizers of these diverse groups–both those with impressive experience, and those just cutting their eye teeth on their first demonstration–mobilize the global energy, incorporating both love and anger, that asserted itself yesterday on all seven continents.

Citizenship, Communitas, Community, Cooperation, Cultural Anthropology, Current Issues, Disability, Diversity, Donald Trump, Education, Far right, Freedom, Health care, Immigration, Intersectionality, Latino/as, Othering, Politics and society, Politics of representation, Presidential election, Racism, Social activism, Social justice, Women, Women's activism, Women's issues Read more

« Older Entries