Writing Life

There was an intriguing article in the Washington Post yesterday (26 Mar 08). It talked about Sierra Leoneans’ reaction to the Special Court established there in 2002 after the end of that country’s horrible civil war. Set up in conjunction with the United Nations, this court was to prosecute those who “bore the greatest responsibility” for the violence. It was said to be a compromise that would hold the very top responsible but not focus on actual perpetrators, who number in the thousands and often involved child soldiers and forced recruits.

The problem is, some locals feel just the opposite. They think the $150 million spent so far to prosecute 13 top-level war criminals could have been better spent in a country ranked near the bottom in terms of development. Funds for daily needs, employment, training, and medical care are desperately needed. Additionally, many of the perpetrators of actual violence, those who cut off limbs and killed people, are not being punished or prosecuted. This is partly due to a barely functioning judicial system, one of the reasons given for creating the Special Court in the first place.
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Last week, I attended the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. That’s my professional association. I’m an anthropologist – politico – writer. I’ll put up a few posts on the conference sessions I attended and whatnot later. This post is to highlight an op-ed piece by the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson. I love Mr. Robinson’s pieces, often the first I turn to when I crack open the Post. As a matter of fact, I dropped him an email to that effect just before the AAA’s (what anthros call the annual meeting). Turns out, Mr. Robinson was on a panel at the conference that had one of my former professors and a few other anthropologists I respect. He wrote a piece in the Post afterwards, talking about his experience on the panel “The Insecure American”.

Now, as an anthropologist who also does activism and inside-the-beltway policy work, I know that anthros have a hard time meeting the requirements of activist / policy speak. I delight in the fact that anthropologists contextualize, historicize and problematize issues. However, it’s hard to translate that into a vernacular suited for the targeted audience. Fundraising copy needs to be short and sweet, getting across its point in about 100-150 words. Activist emails need to be 50-250 words, max, with some repetition, excitement and often no shades of gray. It’s black and white: grab their attention, offer a solution, tell them how to implement it, and we’re outta there. A policy briefer for the Hill shouldn’t top more than 1 page, double-sided, with bullet points galore. It should succinctly define the problem, lay out a remedy, give a short background, and provide contact information.

Some anthropology programs are working on this. It’s not about dumbing down anthropology discourses, but learning to effectively communicate with people. People aren’t dumb, but they’re busy and they’re bombarded with tons of solicitations all day long. If you want to get your point above the level of noise, you need to write in the format that each audience demands.

Now, having rambled, I really think that we should make Mr. Robinson an honorary and exemplary anthropologist. Take a look at his piece from December 4th. It’s short, it covers many of the issues covered in the session, it provides some analysis and background and it wraps up. Very well done!

Wow, I’m so impressed and proud of my professional organization, the American Anthropological Association.  In response to worries about anthropologists providing unethical aid to U.S. military operations, in particular the Human Terrain System project, the AAA Executive Board has stated that

The Executive Board views the HTS project as an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise. 

I wrote about this issue previously. You can read the text of the resolution and follow a new blog set up by the AAA to cover the discussion of this important issue.

I ran across this article in the New York Times, and also received the petition from academic anthropologists mentioned in the 7th paragraph.

Just to out myself, I’m a trained anthropologist and a leftist activist. I find the work being done by Tracy (the anthropologist) offensive. As the article notes, anthropological techniques and anthropologists themselves have been involved in counter-insurgency efforts in the past, using their specialized knowledge and relationships to often work against those they seek to understand.

Tracy and others like her hurt my profession and diminish my ability to work with communities throughout the world. I ask her to think through what she’s doing and to hark back to her training, especially if she’s younger and has seen the impact of anthropologist’s naive actions in Vietnam and Latin America (e.g. Guatemala).

To extrapolate, though, I also feel huge discomfort when military units are assigned to civilian reconstruction teams. In Afghanistan, they’re called Provincial Reconstruction Teams, and they blur the line between military pacification and humanitarian aid. In some sense, it destroys the value of the civilian endeavor, since it militarizes traditionally civilian activities. If the military was seen as a problem, as is often the case in counter-insurgency operations where the military is fighting an indigenous rebellion, then having the military provide the humanitarian reconstruction can put the population in an uncomfortable situation.

The article talks about one of Tracy’s “contributions”, where she is the impetus for the U.S. military’s creation of a job training program for war widows. As Linda Green discussed in her work in post-civil war Guatemala (Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala, 1999), these well-intentioned programs can often backfire in the larger context, by privileging one group of individuals (war widows) over others. Are beneficiaries receiving such largess because they’re bad, i.e. their family members were rebels, or because they’re cooperating with the counter-insurgency program now? What about others who lost their livelihoods due to the civil war? Are new divisions being created due to not thinking through aid programs that are targeted at short-term goals of ending immediate insurgency activities?

I’m seriously concerned with this quote:

[Ms.] Montgomery McFate, a Yale-educated cultural anthropologist working for the Navy who advocated using social science to improve military operations and strategy

. To me, the goal of social science is not to improve military operations or strategy, it’s to better understand local communities and to work to help them improve their own communities. I can’t see how the two intersect. The article even calls such anthropologists “embedded” social scientists. If such “embedding” is like it is for journalists, than social science has taken a huge hit. Embedding has, in this writer’s opinion, become code for “mouthpiece” of the Administration. To be allowed to be embedded, you must agree to the party line, and thus once embedded, you echo the talking points you’re fed. Additionally, I believe Stockholm Syndrome (whereby captives gradually come to empathizes and defend their captors) thrives in such situations. Living in such real life and death situations breeds brother/sister-hood, and is hard to shake off in order to live up to your previous ideals.

After reading this article in today’s Post, I had two thoughts. First, it’s another way to look at the ugly American tourist. The arrogance of this man, who was told he had infectious TB and suggested he not travel for his wedding and honeymoon in Europe, is astounding. He disregarded his doctor’s suggestion and flew. Contacted in Italy, he was told that his type of TB was extremely rare and dangerous, so called eXtremely Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (XDR-TB). He was told this time to turn himself into Italian authorities and health service personnel to be treated immediately. He chose to ignore that, fled to Prague in the Czech Republic, flew to Canada, and then surreptitiously crossed the U.S. border.

He claims he’s a highly educated and intelligent man who thought he would die if he didn’t get back to the US for treatment. He flagrantly disregarded medical advice twice, with the second situation being more an order than a suggestion. He put his fellow travelers, especially plane travelers, at extreme risk. All for his own selfishness. This is disgusting and a sad commentary on the self-centeredness of this man.

My second thought after reading this article was the disservice it does to the general public in its description of XDR-TB. It says that this type of drug-resistant TB is often found in prisoners and AIDS patients. That’s it. It doesn’t go on to explain why this is the case. It would have only taken a few sentences that would work to de-vilify prisoners and AIDS patients.

TB often arises in closed in areas, such as prisons, and is an opportunistic disease that can attack AIDS patients. In developing nations, and even some developed ones, patients are given a standard first-line drug regimen to treat TB. These very inexpensive drugs can treat some forms of TB, but they’re given under poor direction, and supply may run out before a standard course is applied. Additionally, these are often the only drugs available as second line drugs cost more. In countries where access to quality health care and medication is low (even in the United States), it’s hard for public health officials to get funding to provide high-end, expensive drugs to individuals that are portrayed in mainstream venues as less deserving, maybe even less than human.

Before XDR-TB, there was MDR (multiple-drug resistant) TB. It was treated with the same first line drugs that were ineffective, with patients often knowing that such a course of treatment would fail. However, patients were labeled non-compliant and then stereotyped in articles like this one in the Post as less deserving prisoners and AIDS patients. We need to look at the structural component of TB treatment and how the government, medical providers, the public health infrastructure, and individuals act and react to the situation. Providing quality treatment from the start, to everyone who needs it, would work to prevent the rise of such “super-bugs”. Nature will still produce virulent attacks on the human body. But we shouldn’t be doing are best (or worst) to help it along this course.

I just finished reading Jimmy Carter’s controversial book on the Palestine-Israel conflict. It’s both fascinating and accessible. Everyone should read it, no matter where they stand on this divisive issue. President Carter, responding to some of the vitriol that surrounded his book tour, said that we need to have a discussion and his book opens up space to have that discussion. I heartily agree.

Carter provides much needed historical and political context to the problem, covering the issue not only from the dominant Israeli / US point of view but also from Palestinians, surrounding Arab nations and his own personal intersection with the region through his faith, his presidency and his work with The Carter Center. In the conclusion, he writes “voices from Jerusalem dominate in our media, and most American citizens are unaware of circumstances in the occupied territories” (Carter 2006:209). This book helps bring other pieces of information and experience to the table.

A common theme throughout the book is Carter’s insistence that the United States needs to talk to both its friends and its supposed enemies. Diplomacy is paramount. While you surely can talk to your friends, it’s imperative that you reach out to people with whom you disagree. The U.S. did that with its deadliest enemy, the Soviet Union, but in recent years and under the George W. Bush administration, it has failed to practice this fundamental tenet of international relations. Carter writes, “A major impediment to progress is Washington’s strange policy that dialogue on controversial issues is a privilege to be extended only as a reward for subservient behavior and withheld from those who reject U.S. demands” (Carter 2006: 202-203).

He also writes about how the White House and U.S. Congress have been less than vocal in response to illegal Israeli actions, partly due to the immense power of the Israeli lobby in the United States. This influence is strengthened by its practice of silencing dissent by labeling it anti-semitic. Let’s just be clear here, opposing Israeli state policy is not anti-semitic in and of itself; just as opposing Iranian state policy is not anti-Islamic.

Very near the end of the book, Carter reflects back on a remark he made to the Israeli Knesset in 1979 that still rings true in 2007: “The people support a settlement. Political leaders are the obstacles to peace” (Carter 2006:211). He meant leaders on both sides as well as international actors. It is sad that almost thirty years have passed, countless lives have been lost, millions have become refugees, and still our leaders cannot sit down, talk and settle this problem. Let’s hope this book kicks the process in the butt and gets it moving once again.

Something that’s really been bothering me lately is the national security frame. This frame has cropped up more and more in political dialogue. Basically, in order to gain attention for your cause du jour, you must frame it as a national security issue.

HIV/AIDS is a national security issue. Climate change is a national security issue. Hunger is a national security issue, and has even been re-franked as “food security”. To be hungry now means to be food insecure. Energy policy is a national security issue. It’s as though an issue isn’t important unless it’s something that affects national security.

I worry about this further militarization of our language and our thoughts. War and violence themes abound in our metaphors. Daily life is a battle, we need a plan, our company’s life is at stake, we must overwhelm and destroy our competition, etc. Now, basic human rights, especially of the social, economic and cultural bent, are being militarized and brought into a national security realm.

Some might not care, being content with the tactical benefit that a favorite issue is at least being discussed. However, these issues had value and importance before they were dragged into a militaristic frame. Why weren’t they discussed before? What insight can we gain from an analysis of that? Tactics matter but strategy is important for the long haul.

Just something to think about.

This was an amazing collection of articles edited by anthropologists Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg. The 13 essays are broken up into four section, focusing on historical articulations, cinemas and cyberspace, the politics of music and regional and global circuits. With this collection, the authors sought to introduce a prime focus on popular culture when discussing politics and power in the Palestine-Israel situation. The authors seek to break away from traditional Palestinian-Israeli binaries and to crack open the mixing and heterogeneity of relations between and among these two groups. The editors also seek to reinscribe Israel within the Middle East, both geographically and politically (Stein & Swedenburg 2005: 11).

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Still in the throes of my anthropology [mental] feeding fest, and on top of my recent post on the dilemma of international justice, this post is very timely. I just finished reading Sanford’s book this morning. I’d actually used her Ph.D. dissertation as a source when I wrote my Master’s thesis on postconflict life in Rwanda and Guatemala. It was very cool to meet her at the 2005 AAA’s in DC and to get a copy of her book. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the book before her talk, so I couldn’t get it autographed (I’m an anthro groupie).

Sanford’s book is a must read for a slew of audiences: anthropologist, Latin Americanist, human rights worker, international justice specialist, postconflict specialist, and the genearl public. There may be a few groups I left off, but that’s purely unintentional. Sandord has done what so few anthropologists have done, write an accessible book. I read every word and took my time working through her narrative. In some anthro texts, I glance from paragraph to paragraph, looking for little gems amongst the rough. With hers, I took something from almost every sentence. Kudos to you, Victoria!

As for the content, she’s covering her work in Guatemala at the tail end of the civil war and in the postconflict transition. She’s focused her story from the ground-up, building collections of testimony from Maya who survived La Violencia, the local name given for the 36+ year civil war in Guatemala. Her field techniques should be mandatory reading material for future anthropologists and all NGOs that do field work.

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Jonesing for an anthro fix, I attended the public oral defense of my friend Damien’s PhD last Thursday. Hosted in the anthropology department’s lounge on American University’s campus, I got there a bit early and ran into Damien, Bill, Brett, and Apollo. It was so great to see all of them, it’d been ages. I’ve really been pondering my return to anthropology lately, and getting back on campus, in the department, and into a dialogue was really uplifting.

Seeing Damien defend his dissertation, which was on gentrification, grassroots power, and identity in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of DC, was very empowering. He framed his research on power, place, and history, always strong concepts in AU’s department of anthropology. Using ground-up ethnography, participant and observation, and a Marxist class-based approach, he vividly portrayed and analyzed a community and its efforts to maintain, sustain, and grow public space in the midst of economic and social restructuring in the neighborhood. I even got to ask him a question during his defense.

Everyone was emotional when we were invited back in the room after his committee had discussed the defense. He passed! Yay! Very cool to see that happen. This was my first oral defense in anthropology and it really made my day. I’m so glad I was able to attend and be there for him, and to be honest, being there for me too.

Continuing in my anthropological readings, I took on Hancock’s The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen. This seemed like a logical follow up to Marcus’s Where have all the homeless gone. This book-length treatment of the public image of welfare recipients and especially the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Act (PRWA) of 1996 would have been better rendered as a long article, perhaps 20 to 40 pages. At 250+ pages, it’s full of repetitions. However, it could also be a fine class syllabus on the topic, as it continually reinforces past learnings as it moves through its theses.

Hancock presents the politics of disgust as characterized by four features: perversion of democratic attention; monological not intersubjective communications; representative thinking; and finally a lack of solidarity between citizens marked and unmarked as the target of the PRWA legislation. The first of these features means not providing attention to all citizens claims, thus presented a highly circumscribed view of the issue at hand. The second feature implies that one has one voice in front of a large microphone instead of many voices. Representative thinking is when people react to stereotypes or the representative image of a person or issue, instead of the actual person or issue. In other words, the politics of disgust displays how emotions regulate power relationships. This brings to mind, for me, the frame concept I discussed in my posting on Lakoff’s book. Stereotypes are frames we have in our head; and we’re more likely to throw away facts that discredit those frames rather than disposing of the frame.

A large portion of her analysis is textually-based, looking at public, media, and Congressional documents and how they frame, or de-frame, welfare recipients. This analysis shines a light on the public identity of welfare recipients, an identity that “serves as an unconscious filter through which Americans receive the policy options presented in pubic discourse about welfare reform” (Hancock 2004: 115). She notes how “policy options were discussed, selected, and implemented with no effective contributions from those affected most” (Hancock 2004: 115). More insidiously, this public identity serves to delegitimize welfare recipients’ claims and lived experiences. She writes that “democratic deliberation falters as public identities long debunked by empirical research persist in the memories of elites and citizens” (Hancock 2004: 150). While welfare recipients have agency, the ability to act themselves in the public sphere, this agency can be severely circumscribed by the construction of the public they inhabit.

In an epilogue, she looks at the renewal process of the PRWA Act under the second Bush administration. With the President turning towards faith-based, hetero-normative values, he is seeking to impose ideology rather than policy. The administration posits marriage as a panacea to income and social inequities, without any regard to how this devalues female voices and potentially forces woman back into abusive relationships that some of these woman fled from. Welfare was their safety area and with it being removed, the return to the nest, as it were, is not a medicine that’s palatable to them.

Where have all the homeless gone? The making and unmaking of a crisis, by Anthony Marcus, explores the homeless crisis in the 1980s. He explores the rapid rise in public and scholarly attention to the homeless that started at the beginning of the 80s and how attention to this crisis rapidly disappeared by the beginning of the 90s. He turns a focused anthropological gaze onto who are the homeless and, more importantly, explores the reification of the category of homeless that academics, social works, and government policy makers focused their attention on.

Why should we focus on why the homeless were carved out as a distinct category and offered assistance? Isn’t that a good thing, i.e. identifying people who need help and helping them? The effort is good, but it’s important to look at the bigger picture. Marcus writes that this delineation and laser-focus on the homeless has “left much of the theoretical debate on poverty in America focused on arguments over who the poor actually are and where they came from, rather than the politics of social inequity in America” (Marcus 2006: 60). Later on, he concludes that “a group of nonwhite urbanites who were often lacking in some combination of proper housing, medical care, education, and employment was reified and ethnicized into ‘The Homeless’ … Rather than identifying a concrete set of needs and life tasks bedeviling all working Americans and destroying the lives of my informations there were two nations that were imagined: those who made it over the bar that separated homeless and homeful and those who did not.” (Marcus 2006: 147)

Getting into the details, Marcus talks about food stamps and how while they offer assistance, they also create an alternative currency to delineate the other in America. I’d add that food stamps help render the poor visible. Poverty in America, especially in the post-Fordist era, has worked hard to push the poor into the shadows. Food stamps bring them into the light, albeit it’s not a flattering light.

Marcus did much of his research in shelters set up in New York City for transitional and permanent homeless people. He deconstructs the public reports of the disfunction and exotic behavior in shelters (e.g. surrounding open and/or homosexual relationships), positing that such behaviors are more the result of viewing private actions in the public spaces of shelters (Marcus 2006: 74). I’d note that public performative behavior is tiring cognitive work and such social performances cannot be kept up 24-7, blurring the line between public and private space.

He devotes a chapter to black families and discussions around black homeless men and women. He takes on public discourses that ask why can’t African American families act like recent immigrants, suck it up and make a better life for themselves. His thoughtful and detailed research shows that it’s not fair to compare African American families to recent immigrant families. Black families grew up as Americans and thus have the same values, goals, and beliefs in what citizenship confers on them as white families. It’s asking a lot, and perhaps too much, to demand that they give up their birthright to accept a different bill of rights that is conferred on recent immigrants. Marcus writes that “there are few American families that can comfortably incorporate high-functioning socially successful extended kin, much less those who have fallen on hard times and absorbed the quirks and liabilities that come with failure” (Marcus 2006:115).

Overall, this is a fascinating book and one that you should check out if you’re interested not only in the homeless but on how policy makers, activists, academics, and the public look at, react to, and comprehend social and economic crises in the United States. My only negative comment about the book is superficial: the font is horrible and makes reading difficult.

I rapidly moved through Carolyn Nordstrom’s Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. I picked this book up at the 2005 AAA meeting, and just turned to it about a week and a half ago. [Aside: I have found that I really need to re-energize my anthropology side of late. My career in political campaigns has had a profound draining effect on my inner being. More on that in a future posting!]

Nordstrom’s book is a fabulous tour through the shadows, the places where legal and illegal, extra-state and state, and survival and profit intersect. She studies these shadow phenomena primarily along the front lines of wars in Angola, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, and elsewhere. However, her trenchant analysis shows that how the local is intimately intertwined with the global. It’s not a simply globalization is bad story, nor it is a simplistic core/periphery argument that she lays out. She shows how people survive, both culturally, politically, and economically in today’s world. She shines a bright light on these shadow or informal economies that are so often ignored by academics, politicians, and diplomats, or, perhaps worse than ignoring them, these people place informal economies within less-than-civlized groupings of people or speak of them as solely illegal.

Her deep ethnography of those living through war and not-war as well as the humanitarian and development corps that always pop up on the scene, illustrates the deep, varied, and strong ties that link human beings in one area to people in other areas. Surprisingly, she shows us that while statesman and media focus on illegal drug or arms networks, these informal economies also provide food, medicines, clothing, and the various necessities and pleasures of life. Additionally, in some war-torn or recently postwar societies, these informal economies can make up 20, 30, even 90% of the total economic activity of the nation. Economists, development organizations, the United Nations, and national leaders do not look at these economies, perhaps because doing so would lend credence to the fact that states aren’t as powerful as they portray themselves to be.

This is a fabulous book that explores territory that you won’t normally find in a international relations text or an economics lecture. But, you should read it to start to explore notions of power, the state, legal and illegal, formal and non-formal. In order to work in the international realm, be it development, politics, conflict resolution, or humanitarian aid, Nordstrom’s book should be in your satchel as you work to help people.

The last thing I did at AAA on Saturday (besides buying tons of books) was to see Anthropology off the Shelf: Speaking Truth to Power With Books. This special session featured Paul Farmer, Howard Zinn, and Andrew Barnes.

Paul Farmer spoke first, trying to talk to the session’s theme. However, he noted that he didn’t think his books had had that much impact or that books were the best method for action in some cases. He made two comments about writing and research with respect to his work that really hit the nail on the head. He said that in talking with his patients and informants over the years, “No one has ever asked me to write about their suffering” and “No one asked me to do research.” I really took those two comments to heart, in the vein that we should not just sit back and write about injustice. The poor already know their situation. Get out there and act, dammit, and act now! Scholars must do activism, not just with their graduate students but with all their students, and with the general public. Farmer noted that he wrote his book Uses of Haiti to influence U.S. policy on that country. He said it was one of the few books that he’s written that had that direct aim when he started out. This book was never meant for his anthropological or medical colleagues. Sadly, he noted that “it’s had very little impact.”

Howard Zinn rambled on for quite a bit (about 15-20 minutes over his alloted 15 minute presentation). But, he was an affable gentleman, who had lots of interesting stories to tell. He talked about how books can change consciousness, via throwing out new ideas the reader might never have thought about or showing that not all people see things the same way. Ironically, while I think he’s right, his comments (cheered on by many of the listeners) implied that once people hear new, and correct facts, will shock people into changing their world view. A lot of my work with CGS, and especially with our US in the World framework tool has shown that people are more likely to throw out facts rather than the frameworks that guide their thinking. So, Zinn’s got good ideas but how he communicates them might need some fine tuning. One of Zinn’s coolest comments was when he quoted Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut, when asked why he wrote, said, “I write so you won’t feel alone.” Paraphrasing another Vonnegut quote: he writes so that you know know there are others like you in the world.

The final panelist was Andrew Barnes, who works for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and also served on the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1996 through 2005. He’s an historian by education and a journalist and writer by profession. He talked about the Pulitzer Prize process, as an insight into speaking truth to power via books. Regarding writing, he stressed that the topic must resonate with the general public to have an impact. He agreed that it was sad that this was the case, but it was true. An interesting quote from Mr. Barnes was one that I swear I told some CGS folks about 9 months ago. He said “if you try to speak truth to power and power doesn’t want to hear it, it will shut the book.” An important take away comment from him was that “if you wish to be widely read, you’ve got to focus on your writing. It’s very hard work.”

Sadly, many people at this session took little note of Farmer’s comments. They were shocked, literally, that he said that books might not have as much impact as they thought. They took it the other way and cried out that books are critical and important. Farmer responded later, during the discussion period, by noting that research and writing are indeed crucial. But, they should pair that with action. Most people still missed the point. My take is that books don’t change the world, action does. Writer later, act now!

My first session on the 2nd day was What’s the Matter with the United States? One of the early speakers was Jeff Maskovsky, whose work I find excellent. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it there early enough to see him speak, but I did see him make some responses during our short discussion period. Unlike many sessions at AAA, this one had a shortened discussion session since the hotel fire alarm went off during one of the presentations. We all had to hurry out a side exit and stand on an elevated concrete area waiting for the all clear.

During this session, Jane Schneider made a great connection between government morality policies and an actual upsurge in vice. One example she presented was the puritanical imposition of Prohibition in the early 20th Century. It was meant to cut down on vice but it ended up created an entire new market niche for liquor producers and runners. This illicit business actually caused more harm (bodily and mentally) than the supposed vice that Prohibition was attempting to proscribe.

Ida Susser described the impact of US neoconservatism on US AIDS policy (both domestic and international). She noted the current administration’s attempt to re-regulate the poor and ethnic minorities. She threw particular scorn (as do I) on the abstinence only requirements built into TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). In PEPFAR, it’s mandatory that 33% of the funding provided be spent solely on abstinence programs. Condoms, birth control, help for sex workers, and sex education are forbidden. This ideological policy is a death sentence for so many people in the US and throughout the world. The ideologues say that abstinence and “be faithful” are the best options. However, some married men stray and have multiple sex partners and the woman living in an assumed monogamous relationship suffer the consequences. The ideologues are creating repressive understandings of familial and women’s roles in society.

Dorothy Roberts, the discussant, summed it up well by noting the punitive aspect of American neoliberalism. The state is not simply withdrawing from its responsibilities but it is leaving in its wake a new, repressive social contract. Claims of multiculturalism and social harmony from the right simply mask strong racist policies.

My next session was Public Interest Ethnography: Theory, Practice, and Action. There were some interesting talks about Indy Media, and how it might help unite the cyber-left and provide an avenue for praxis-oriented ethnography. Amy Rosenberg Weinreb described an interesting concept of shadow publics. Chris Thornton and Peggy Sanday raised an interesting tidbit in their talk on male violence. The described a model of male-male social relationship that posited woman as the medium through which men define these relationships.

I attended the AIDS and Anthropology Research Group (AARG), which is a special interest group in the Society for Medical Anthropology section of the AAA. It was an interesting meeting and something I might get involved with in the future.

After that, I went to the Compliance, Resistance and Social Realities: How Does Medical Anthropology Inform Ethically Responsible Research. Chris Simon talked about the difficulties of funding social health research vs. what a community needs and desires. He and others on the panel discussed the 90/10 problem where 90% of the global research dollars for health are applied to 10% of the total global disease burden. In the developed world, anti-aging and sexual performance are the primary focus while health dollars rarely go towards developing world problems such as clean water, treatable infectious diseases, etc. In summing up this panel, Barbara Koenig noted, as I and many people have said before, that the root causes of today’s global health situation is rooted in poverty and wealth inequality. While biotechnology is a unique tool we can use to work on health issues, we must avoid a biomedical reductionist solution that renders invisible poverty as the core factor.

My first day’s impression (December 1st) wasn’t that great, although it started out good. My first session was Bringing the past (back) into the present: Exploring the Present Tense of History in Queer Lives – Part II. I don’t have a great deal of experience with gender theory in anthropology, but the chair of the anthropology department at American University, where I went, was speaking on this panel.

The talk that stood out the most to me was one by Deborah Elliston. Her paper was entitled Queer History and its Discontents at Tahiti: The Contested Politics of Modernity and Sexual Subjectivity. In this paper, she discussed the mahu and rairai of Tahiti and how these two groups of people create and are created by historical, economic, and social forces in Tahiti. The Mahu are male-bodied but present a female persona in public. They dress in female clothes and affect female speech patterns They are accepted by the community and form this gendered identity is adolescence. The rairai are also male-bodied, but perform a female gender internally and externally. The mahu have more of a ritualized place in the society while the rairai often perform as sex workers. Elliston tied the rise of the rairai to the 1960s, when the French colonial authority poured a great deal of money and people into the area, in order to facilitate transfer of their nuclear weapons testing from newly independent Algeria to the South Pacific. With the influx of capital, and men to spend it, the rairai started servicing these foreigners for cash. Internal to the society, there was an attempt to assert who was the truest mahu, between the two groups. The rairai said the traditional mahu weren’t true to their gendered identity, while the mahu asserted their traditional role as their authenticity. It was a really exciting talk.

After that session, I went to In the Name of Security: Anthropology in the Age of Surveillance. This was a good preaching to the choir session. This was one of the closest talks to what I do at CGS; however, there were no solutions offered. The speakers simply talked about the horrible state of our national and foreign policy, but they didn’t provide any options for how we should fight back. My last session on Thursday was Reinscribing the State: Governmentalities of Globalization. This was predominantly a student panel and the presentations weren’t delivered in the best of ways. The topics were intriguing and more time or a roundtable discussion with the authors would have been much more valuable.

I picked up a ton of books at the AAA exhibit hall last week. Discounts galore, with books selling at 20, 25, and 50% off. On the last day, some of the university presses were selling paperbacks at $5 and hardbacks at $10 a pop. This was 50 – 75% off the list price. Woohoo! The books I got were:

Achino-Loeb, Maria-Luisa, ed.
2006    Silence: The Currency of Power. New York: Berghahn Books.

Collins, John
2004    Occupied by Memory: The Intifada Generation and the Palestinian State of Emergency. New York: New York University Press.

Hancock, Ange-Marie
2004    The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen. New York: New York University Press.

Marcus, Anthony
2006    Where have all the homeless gone? The making and unmaking of a crisis. New York: Berghahn Books.

Nordstrom, Carolyn
2004    Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sanford, Victoria
2003    Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stein, Rebecca L. and Ted Swedenburg, eds.
2005    Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Walkowitz, Daniel J. and Lisa Maya Knauer, eds.
2004    Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space. Durham: Duke University Press.