This is Part 2 of a two part series by Prof. Joshua Reno on conspiracies in the U.S. You can read Part 1 here.

In the August 2011 issue of American Ethnologist, I discuss how it is that evidence becomes inadmissible, stopping us from giving an argument due consideration. According to Marilyn Strathern, the use of evidence relies on the ability to create analogies between general claims and particular facts. In a criminal case, for example, establishing “guilt” requires making links between this account of events and information about the perpetrator, their intentions, the scene of the crime, the victim, their relationship, and so forth. But there are many ways of establishing such analogies. The rejection of certain claims as “inadmissible” can arise from a sense that they somehow violate the unspoken rules of establishing truth.

One thing that those labeled “-ers” (i.e. 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers, bin Laden deathers) seem to have in common with each other is that they find an account more convincing the greater the stakes. Thus, if Obama’s entire presidency can be invalidated by his being foreign born, if Bush Jr.’s entire war on terror is premised on a danger posed to U.S. security, if Osama bin Laden’s death is meant to symbolize a historic victory in that same war, then the likelihood of a cover-up increases and a search for corroborating evidence begins. There is an analogy established, in other words, between the significance of the event, the political gain of the conspirator, and the appeal of conspiracy to explain it. It is suspicion aroused from a perceived motive.

What stops so many others from drawing this analogy? The answer certainly does not lie in their careful consideration of the facts. Professional conspiracy debunkers focus on the technicalities of evidential claims, rather than the assumptions underlying them. Like most people, I do not have in depth knowledge of the physics of demolition, of the bureaucracy of birth documents, or of covert military tactics, and yet I do not feel I need to see any of the mounting “proof” which conspiracists and debunkers regularly cite in order to settle on my opinions. Thus when someone emails me with “evidence” that Obama was not born in the United States I immediately deem it inadmissaible, not because I know for certain that it is wrong, but because I suspect the conditions under which it was derived. To be more specific, I assume that the “evidence” was artfully manipulated by some “-er” bent on feeding their obsession. Of course, this is merely reversing the “-er” logic described in the previous paragraph, assuming that the greater the desire the conspiracist has to prove their point, the less trustworthy their data. Once again, perceived motive overrules evidentiary claims. The question remains: what unspoken rules are “-ers” suspected of breaking, that makes their claims seem inadmissible from the start?

One possible reason for skepticism such as mine may lie in the appeal of conspiracy theories to people in the U.S. generally. Olmsted’s book would seem to suggest that an historic embrace of freedom and dislike of big government is responsible for the last century of developments in U.S. conspiracy culture. If this is true, then those same sentiments may prevent people from believing that conspiracy could be bureaucratically managed in a practical way. When I was young I was fond of a joke that went something like this: “how is the U.S. government supposed to manage covering up the Kennedy assassination when they can’t even deliver the mail properly?” To believe in the power of the state is to respect it, and people in the U.S. tend not to respect the government that much. This is why, at least since Reagan, Republicans can win elections by accusing their opponents of favoring “big government,” and why it is difficult to find any elected representatives who claims to be in favor of “big government” today. Would not the effective management of conspiracy on an everyday bureaucratic level, in office meetings, paperwork and communiqué, prove the ultimate triumph of big government: its capacity to manage truth itself?

Let me put this more clearly. The “-ers” I have met tend to accuse the uninitiated of being manipulated by the mainstream media to believe the “official” narratives that those in power demand. A complementary criticism is that those who do not believe would rather hide behind smug cynicism then challenge convention and seek out the truth at any cost. One possible reason people do not become “-ers” is not that they are media-manipulated dullards, or postmodern cynics, however, but that they optimistically believe the reverse of conspiracists: that a cover-up becomes implausible, regardless of the perceived reward to prominent political figures, when the risk of the whistleblower effect is so high. Whatever the advantages for the Bush administration of staging a terrorist attack, the planning and resources required to orchestrate such a massive event would seem to vastly increase the likelihood of something going wrong or of someone with knowledge of the cover up coming forward. John Dean testified against the president of the United States when the crime was only a simple burglary and conspiracy, a far cry from the mass murder of thousands of innocent U.S. civilians. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 might have taken only a few dozen Al Qaeda operatives to conduct, but it would have likely taken the complicity of thousands of government employees, most of them not well paid or rewarded for their efforts, to succeed in preventing any internal memo or illicit correspondence from coming to light.

Whether or not most people perform such a calculation, it seems as if “-ers” hold the opposite view: the bigger the scandal, somehow, the easier it is to believe. I would add another qualification to this, in light of the kind of “made up person” that “-ers” are supposed to be: the fewer people that believe you, the easier it is to believe. If this equation holds true, then one of the conditions that sustains “-ers,” for one reason or another, is the knowledge that their evidence is considered widely inadmissible, that their claims attract so much scorn and skepticism. It is easy to attribute the emergence of such a way of being to the isolated and anonymous experience that surfing the Internet can be, but that hardly explains Donald Trump. The core of narcissistic fantasy may be much simpler: an individualist enjoyment of being the heroic advocate for truth in the face of overwhelming opposition.

There are real conspiracies in the world, but I would argue that the biggest are rarely successful in accomplishing what conspiracists think they ought to first and foremost, which is to fool (almost) everyone. The Arab Spring is widely agreed to have begun in Tunisia, where people first rose in popular revolt. According to a recent dialogue between Zizek and the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, the Tunisians were inspired to overthrow their government, not because they were surprised to learn of political corruption within the ruling family (the so-called “Cable-gate” scandal attributed to Wikileaks), but because suddenly that vast public secret was out in the open. As described by Michael Taussig (1999), a public secret is something everyone knows yet no one is supposed to know. According to Zizek and Assange, the released Wikileaks cables made Tunisians suddenly aware that they were not alone and that no one, not even the U.S., could now deny what they knew to be true about their government.

It may be, in fact, that the greatest conspiracies are maintained by the complicity of people who know very well what is going on but do not or cannot act. This would be a conspiracy of knowing silence, rather than a conspiracy maintained, as many “-ers” assume, by ignorance. If information leaked tomorrow that Obama secretly received a promise of campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry in return for watering down his healthcare proposal, or from Wall Street executives for not seeking a tax on financial speculation, then there would be a new “-gate,” but no newly vindicated “-ers,” precisely because no one would be remotely surprised to learn that power and influence flows just as we all suspected. This is not conspiracy based on mystification. Maybe the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was not convincing people he didn’t exist, as the old adage says, but convincing people that they were the only ones to believe in him. Perhaps what maintains the worst conspiracies is not that people are so easily corrupted or manipulated, but that they tend to think that other people are. In the case of “-ers,” this lack of faith in others may go a long way toward explaining the appeal of “being” one of them.

Joshua Reno is a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in the Department of Anthropology. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2008. He has articles on waste, techno-science, and environmental politics appearing in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist and Science, Technology and Human Values in 2011 and a book co-edited with Catherine Alexander on recycling economies expected in 2012.

It is both disturbing and fascinating to follow the role of conspiracy theories in U.S. politics over the last decade and their apparent relationship to the Internet. One could claim that nothing has really changed, that mysterious and powerful cabals have always played a significant part in the U.S. political imagination. Consider the Anti-Masonic Party (1828-1838), which was founded in Upstate New York by Federalists to challenge the perceived influence of secret societies on settler life, or the Midwestern Populists, at the end of that century, who alleged that an international Jewish conspiracy was responsible for lowering farm prices.

Conspiracy theories about treacherous minority groups, political factions and foreigners are not exclusive to the U.S., of course. In Jordan and elsewhere in the Middle East, one of many anti-Zionist rumors holds that Pepsi actually stands for “Pay Every Penny to Save Israel,” a belief that has helped encourage boycotts of foreign products. Throughout Latin America a legend of children being abducted for organ harvesting spread moral panic at the end of the twentieth century, which ultimately led to an attack on an innocent tourist in a Guatemalan town in 1994.

In her new book, Real Enemies (2009), historian Kathryn S. Olmsted claims that this widespread tendency to project treacherous plots onto various cultural “others” began to change direction in the U.S. after WWI, when the role of the federal government expanded considerably. While the moral panics of the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings are well documented, for most of the twentieth century people in the U.S. have been equally if not more captivated by secret government plots—the hidden assassins that assisted Lee Harvey Oswald from the grassy knoll, the Roswell landing that did happen, the Moon landing that did not—and, by all accounts, they find these theories more convincing than ever. A similar number of Americans—around 80%—believe that Kennedy’s assassination and the existence of extraterrestrial life have been covered up. To take the first example, according to a recent Gallup poll 34% believe that the CIA was responsible for Kennedy’s death, and 18% blame Lyndon Johnson. At the time of the assassination, only half of Americans suspected a conspiracy, but the percentage grew after the release of findings from the House Sub-committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1976 and Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK” in 1991.

If anything changed with the rise of post-modernism and the information society, it is the introduction of a suffix to brand conspiracies and related events. Since Nixon’s disgrace and resignation, it has become commonplace to label popular scandals and cover-ups with “-gate.” The addition of this signifier says nothing about the reality of an alleged crime, whether it actually took place, but only its reality as a particular kind of media event. True media events are, strictly speaking, “new news.” As Greg Urban argues in his book Metaculture (2001), news constitutes an important form of “culture about culture,” one which frames occurrences in a meaningful sequence as “stories.” Though media events are partly triggered by public interest, they are heavily shaped by how happenings around the world are presented as new and important within the non-stop telecommunication cycle. With the perpetual search for “new news” to sell, actual events quickly disappear into the background with each story that “breaks” and more and more attention goes to the process of metacultural production itself: the format of news presentation, the personalities of the pundits and anchors who present it, and the storylines that accompany competing brands of new news (e.g., “liberal vs. fair and balanced”). The “-gates” suffix indicates a particular way of presenting new news; such is the appeal of its narrative model. It is only appropriate that this is the lasting legacy of the Nixon administration’s very real cover up, which is linked in the public imagination with a growing paranoia about government power in general. Indeed, still today much is made of the missing 18 ½ minutes from the Watergate tapes, as if any of the actual revelations that became public are exceeded by the event’s symbolic import as the first “-gate.”

I would amend Olmsted’s claim only slightly and suggest that over the last decade the culture of political paranoia may have made another significant break with the past. As new “-gates” continue to develop and disappear in the twenty-four hour news cycle, those who believe in such cover-ups are now themselves suffixed into a type: 9-11 truth-ers, Obama birth-ers, Osama bin Laden death-ers, and so on. One could argue, though I know no one who has, that this may have originated from the use of the appellation “Holocaust deni-ers” (that ostracized and discredited group to whom other conspiracists are often compared, much to their chagrin). Regardless, this shift from marking events to marking persons is telling. For one thing, it reflects the relative ease with which like-minded people, of all political persuasions, can not only find and amass information and opinion, but also share it through a wide variety of media channels.

Any time a new type of subjectivity arises a new form of “making up people” is involved, as philosopher Ian Hacking puts it. Being an “-er” is distinctive, as a new way of being a person, because it involves sharing one, and only one, belief. Even anti-masons, populists and anti-communists had other agendas, but an “-er” need only possess a single conviction, one which spirals out into a predictable set of propositions: that there is some cover up of significant proportions and that government officials, experts and members of the media are complicit in spreading a lie. As Hacking argues, there tends to be a “looping effect” when new human kinds are introduced. Pundits may think they are dismissing conspiracy theorists when they give them a suffix, but they are also giving them a rallying cry (“no one believes us, look how we’ve been unfairly excluded…”) and, before long, a Wikipedia entry.

As is common with new human kinds, much is made of what makes them the “type of person” who could “believe something like that.” Less discussed is why many of us are not that “type of person.” After all, conspiracies do happen. Government officials do lie and conceal facts from the public on a regular basis, even if only about infidelities, campaign contributions, and relationships with special interest groups. They might not possess secrets about aliens and assassinations, but they must surely collude in various ways to misrepresent their actions to the public. Similarly, members of the media can and do selectively misrepresent events to suit the interests of corporate sponsors and their own ideological commitments. It is hardly surprising that Fox News Channel and its affiliates have reported very little on the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed its parent company, News Corp, this summer. Many are aware, similarly, that the “Clean Coal” lobby sponsored the presidential election debates on CNN in 2008, during which “clean coal” received a strong endorsement from all of the candidates. Finally, expert accounts may indeed be riddled with errors of judgment, shaped by personal and political ambitions, and so on. Scientists from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, for example, may have actively sought to have the International Panel on Climate Change exclude views they disagreed with and include their own instead, and this may seem like a good conspiracy tale—it was certainly enough to give the episode a “gate” suffix during the extensive media coverage—but it is also something which can happen during normal academic peer review processes.

And yet, the reality of collusion in the corridors of power does not prove conspiracists correct or make them seem any more believable to the majority of us (at least for now). To paraphrase philosopher Slavoj Zizek (1999), even someone whose paranoid suspicion about their partner’s infidelities is proven correct is still pathologically jealous, because their beliefs are ultimately rooted in fantasy, not fact.

Why are many of us not conspiracist believers? Check back on Wed, August 17th for Prof. Joshua Reno’s answer in Part 2 of this two part essay!

Joshua Reno is a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in the Department of Anthropology. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2008. He has articles on waste, techno-science, and environmental politics appearing in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist and Science, Technology and Human Values in 2011 and a book co-edited with Catherine Alexander on recycling economies expected in 2012.

One of the most interesting turn of events during the current nuclear crisis in Japan is how by Thursday, March 17, 2011 the ongoing drama of the catastrophe was displaced from the headlines by stories about the rebellion in Libya. Just as it seemed the story of the nuclear crisis came to a head with startling revelations about more widespread damages to the reactors, higher levels of radiation than previously detected, flaws in Japanese leadership and the contamination of food crops as far as ninety miles from the stricken Fukushima plant the media seems to have turned its attention to a different front.

By the end of the week stories about the escalation of the nuclear crisis and to a lesser degree, the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami still appeared the media, but the headline grabbing story in the media has become the conflict in Libya. As catastrophic and unprecedented as the tragedy in Japan is, the media’s attention seems to have waned. One wonders if media gatekeepers sense that their consumers have tired of the drama in Japan, or perhaps because of the US’s primary role in the no-fly over zone, American and audiences are more concerned about events in Libya than in Japan. Or perhaps that warfare is more vivid than the invisible threat of radiation.

Historically, the media has always had a fairly short attention span for disasters, including even catastrophic ones like those that have occurred in the last year; beginning with the nightmarish earthquake in Haiti which destroyed the fragile infrastructure of a nation and whose toll took over 300,000 lives. The Haitian earthquake is a tragedy that is far from over and whose misery continues to unravel largely because of the lack of continued aid and attention from the international community.

As stunned as the world was by misfortune of Haitian people attention quickly turned to the more powerful, but less destructive quake in Chile. Then came the terrible floods in Pakistan, which killed of thousands and left a nation in anguish but received only little more than passing attention from the international press. The horrific and relentless floods in Australia captured the world’s attention very briefly despite the disturbing magnitude of the disaster. Next up was the recent earthquake in Christ Church, New Zealand. It made front-page news for a few days but now seems to have lapsed form the media and the public’s view.

None of this is new. The monstrous tsunami that that shocked the world and unleashed a flurry of destruction on several Southeast Asian nations made headlines for sometime. Nevertheless, despite the horrific magnitude of the event it slipped from the media’s radar. Eight months after the event, while the stricken nations were still struggling to recover Hurricane Katrina came ashore in the gulf. Almost without looking back, the media’s attention turned to the Gulf Coast and forgot the unparalleled tragedy in Southeast Asia.

As shocking as the media’s headlong pursuit of reporting the most recent sensational story and rapid abandonment of previous disasters it is an all too common pattern. One that perhaps reflects our modern day culture’s increasingly desensitized attention span for suffering and our addiction to ever more sensational stories.

The public, politicians and especially the media have a penchant for what seems like short-term memories when it comes to disasters. We tend to neglect the fact that major disasters have long-term, often second generation impacts that require us to invest in long-term recovery efforts rather than to take the band aid approach that typifies most modern day disaster response.

The media tends to only revisit earlier calamities with occasional anniversary stories. Such coverage often only consists of a retelling of the early days of the event and neglects the continuing plight of the disaster victims; thereby ignoring the fact that in the wake of calamity disasters continue to unfold for extended periods of time. Thus, the cascading series of events that unfold in the wake of most disasters are all but ignored except by the local media. Unfortunately, at times media retrospective accounts can downplay the seriousness of previous disasters as have some recent accounts that have surfaced during the current Japanese nuclear crisis. It causes one to wonder if revisionists accounts of Chernobyl are possible what future revisionist accounts might be made of the current nuclear crisis.

It is troubling to wonder how the media and our culture seem to take such vicarious interest in disasters. For disaster researchers like myself I am disturbed by what may be another tendency: our refusal, despite irrevocable empirical evidence to the contrary, to recognize that in recent years the frequency, magnitude and severity of disasters has increased tremendously,

The recent tide of major catastrophic events underscore the emerging reality that there is an urgent need to develop the conceptual tools, strategic and material tools to confront the increasing challenges of disasters which have been made more potent and complex by environmental degradation, climate change, and the increasing production of technological hazards. In another words, rather than continuing to view catastrophic events as isolated episodes we need to systematically examine the cumulative forces that confront us in the guise of disasters and begin to address the larger issue: why is it that disasters of such magnitude are becoming so commonplace?

Gregory Button has been researching disasters for over three decades. His most recent book is: Disaster Culture: Knowledge and Uncertainty in the Wake of Human and Environmental Disasters (Left Coast Press 2010). He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at The University of Tennessee Knoxville.

This continues our special essay by our new editor, Assaf H. Part 1 was posted on Thur, March 3rd, please click here to read Part 1.

Two units of security forces remained in the area. Partly police partly military unit, the notorious Border Police is feared and admired for its efficient use of brute force. It also serves as a model of ethnic diversity, containing high numbers of Ethiopian Jews, Bedouins, Druze and migrants from the former Soviet Union. The 50th Battalion of the Nahal (the Hebrew acronym for Pioneering Fighting Youth) is less varied in its ethnic composition and most of its soldiers arrive from secular settlements and Kibbutzim traditionally known for their Leftist orientations. The Nahal was established in the early years of the Israeli state for the purpose of realizing a socialist-Zionist settlement ideology. Nahal groups would camp in territories lacking Jewish populace, their military camps eventually naturalized and transformed into civilian communities. Over the years this national task was mostly taken over by religious-Zionist settlers.

In comparison to the light gear of the Border Police, the equipment of the Nahal soldiers appeared very cumbersome. Red army boots, camouflaged ceramic helmets, a fat ammunition vest, a short M-16 rifle and a large backpack completely full with who knows what. I examined the differences when all of a sudden I heard loud hurried voices coming from the communication devices of the Border Police. Nahal soldiers began running down the slopes toward the road. Inspecting my surrounding I could not miss the two thick columns of smoke that began to rise up to the north, the closest one no more than 300 meters ahead. Price Tag policy. I began running up the road.

“Price Tag” is an economically inspired euphemism given to violent actions of intimidation and revenge carried out against Palestinians and their possessions. These violent acts are executed by a group of probably no more than two hundred mostly teenage settlers who are backed by several hard-line Rabbis. The political rational is quite simple: Palestinians serve as scapegoats for any governmental or non-governmental action taken against settlers. These highly committed Jewish troublemakers hope to strategically compensate for their small numbers through battles of attrition with Israeli security forces. An additional deeply ingrained logic is at work: Arabs only understand the language of force and they need to realize that this is not their land, but a divinely sanctioned Jewish land.

Hardly keeping up with the Nahal soldiers, I passed a traffic blockade made out of concrete cubes and continued running up the dusty road into the Palestinian area. A brushfire in the terraced olive grove to the left produced a lot of smoke. Several smoking charred circles to the right marked a failed arson attempt. A young settler was being dragged by Border Policemen out of the olive grove ahead. Beyond the grove, Nahal soldiers slowly climbed yet another hill toward a small settler “outpost” of tin houses. Next to the olive grove and outside the patio of a flat-roofed two-story building, a mixed group of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian women was forming. Three settlers walked down the road in my direction, smiling as they passed the soldiers. Price Tag attacks sometimes occur when many of the physically able Arab males are at work. Women, children and old are usually left to fend for themselves. When around, the heavily equipped soldiers cannot catch the light footed thugs. But all I could see was the waving of arms in the distance. I wanted to get closer.

Inside the olive grove the soldiers finally rejoined a larger group. Their commander, a red headed Major began debriefing them. I was about to pass them when the Major commanded me to stop: “Where do you think you are going?” “Over there” I pointed my finger. “What business do you have there?” “I am an anthropology student, doing research on settlers. I am not going to cause any trouble,” I assured him, thinking I should have left my yarmulke in the car. “You are not supposed to be here, do you have a journalist or a photojournalist card?” “I can show you my student card if you don’t believe me,” I responded with a smile. He did not smile. Red-faced, sweaty and still heavily breathing due to a recent physical effort, he looked at me with anger. “Get out of here now” he ordered with a raised voice. “I promise you I am only here to look,” I said trying to appear as emphatic as possible. I gently laid my hand on his shoulder. “Don’t touch me, get your hand off me” he barked and recoiled in disgust. Last try. “I am sorry, but I am really a student, a doctoral student.” “Well, I am a doctor too” he threw back at me, “now get the hell out of my sight.” You!” he yelled at one of the smallest soldiers in the group, “take him and escort him all the way down. Make sure he does not come back.”

The soldier grabbed me by the shirt and shoved me out of the olive grove. Shortly after he apologized, “don’t take it personally, but yarmulke wearers are not too popular here at this moment, if you know what I mean.”

The brushfire burned low. An overweight reserve officer stood on one of the terraces and gazed at it. Behind him, a young female soldier looked unhappy. “This is not a big one, we should be able to handle it with a fire extinguisher” the officer told her. “What?” ”We should use a fire extinguisher in case it spreads further” he repeated. “We don’t have one” she replied while moving down and away from the fire. “Isn’t there one in the Jeep? Bring one from the Jeep.” He seemed to be talking to himself. “There is none in the Jeep” she replied with a whining voice. The reserve officer did not give up. “We should get a fire extinguisher!” he shouted to an older officer waiting below. The Grey haired Lieutenant-Colonel was also ready to leave but he looked too exhausted to even respond. “He asks if you have a fire extinguisher in the jeep” I told him. He made a tired gesture with his hand and muttered “come on, let’s get out of here. Their own services can take care of that.”
The yarmulke stayed on my head until I passed the last checkpoint out of the occupied territories.

This finishes our special two part essay by new editor Assaf H. Click here to read Part 1.

Highway 60 coils through the southern hills of Hebron and Judea, dissolves into Jerusalem, reemerges from it toward Samaria, and as it nears the biblical Mounts of Blessing and Curse, it escapes the West Bank. Roughly reflecting the ancient Route of the Patriarchs – a path which followed the imaginary line of this hilly region’s watershed – it is the longest and most traveled road in the West Bank. Joining countless nomads, pilgrims, merchants, refugees and armies that have marched upon it throughout history, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are said to have traveled it too. Over the years, the highway’s route and appearance were altered in architectural attempts at reducing violent frictions between Jewish and Arab populations while also maintaining or even upgrading the quality of Israeli life. It now bypasses those Palestinian population centers identified as hostile, and hosts many checkpoints that regulate Palestinian movement. Monumental walls were erected, electronic fences planted, military watchtowers were raised, bridges constructed and long tunnels were carved into mountain sides in order to protect Israeli passengers from stones, molotov cocktails, explosive cars, side bombs, and sniper attacks.

Defying human actions, the scenery managed to sustain much of its rustic character. And, regardless of all the security bypasses, Highway 60 still passes through several Palestinian villages, sometimes cutting them into half, sometimes reconstituting itself as their main road, merging into a militarized discord of an increasingly urbanized rural life. With the latest Israeli easements of Palestinian movement restrictions, those residing under Palestinian jurisdiction get to use Highway 60 too. The Highway consist mostly of two lanes, contains maybe two or three traffic lights on its West Bank path, and sharply illustrates why the area is often referred to as “the wild west.” The road is a vigilante zone where lawlessness manifests itself in countless forms as national and personal anxieties find their motorized alleviation in a host of logically defying accelerations, stunts, and just plain stupid driving. I constantly witness trucks, school buses, military vehicles or simple family cars speed on the wrong side of the road without any care for basic traffic laws. Sometimes when I drive my body tenses in a disciplined manner when I notice Palestinian vehicles heading toward me. All that officially protects me is the thin white line in the middle of the road. Paint, that’s all there really is to it. But even though so many people ignore this thin white line, when the moment of truth arrives, everyone seems to possess an existential knowledge about the correct side and the proper actions they must take.

On the eve of the latest round of peace talks, four Jews rode Highway 60 down south toward their settlement. Shortly after passing the road leading to Hebron – the City of the Patriarchs – they were ambushed and shot to death by Palestinians. Two of the victims, the parents of six, were pregnant with a seventh child. Another female victim gave birth to a single child following many years of fertility treatments. Her husband volunteers at a religious medical organization that identifies and treats the dead following “tragic incidents.” He found his dead wife inside the bullet ridden white station wagon while on duty. The 25 year old male victim left a young widow, pregnant with their first and last to be born child. All murdered for a cause, their death feeding a growing violence and suffering of people in this land.

Around noon-time the following day, the 25 Kilometer stretch of Highway 60 connecting my settlement to the victims’ home was temporarily modified. Dozens of checkpoints appeared, deserted military posts were manned and hundreds of Israeli soldiers took positions on roadsides, adjacent hills, fields, and buildings. Military traffic was drastically increased and Palestinian vehicles disappeared completely from the main road, only to be seen slowly accumulating beyond military blockades separating their local roads from the Highway. More than a thousand mourners attended a quadruple funeral service of national significance, forming a long convoy armed with enough privately owned weapons to protect itself without a need of additional assistance. Having failed to protect Israeli citizens the former evening, Israeli security forces still had to maintain order and display sovereignty through a spectacular performance of presence.

Tragedies of this kind are always expropriated from the private domain when given social meanings. ”In the building of Jerusalem and Israel we shall be consulted, and all enemies shall know they cannot defeat us,” is one example from the funeral service. But such rhetoric was mostly drowned by an excess of sorrow. A husband begging his dead wife not to leave him alone. The communal rabbi confronting God for bringing six orphans into this world. A contagious sobbing of hundreds of people. At some point I began to explore the outskirts of the funeral. Emanating from large loud speakers, the eulogies continued to follow me. At the back of the empty communal center I saw a lone middle-aged man. Black bearded, light-colored crochet Yarmulke and a short-sleeved flannel shirt. The classic look. Seated on a small school chair, an M-16 rifle laying on the ground, he silently wept.

The four dead were to be buried at three different cemeteries, and when the large service broke into smaller funeral processions, people were forced to choose one burial site over the other. I decided to follow the large procession heading north toward Jerusalem, which was also the direction of the nearest gas station. With hundreds of cars parked at the roadsides, a traffic jam was to be expected. Not waiting for the mess to coalesce, I quickly escaped the area and drove toward Hebron’s gas station where I filled my station wagon with $60 worth of gas before heading back. It was busy around the spot where the four were murdered. Policemen and soldiers tried to regulate traffic. Some funeral attendees improvised a monument out of stones, flowers, and small Israeli flags. Security forces guarded entrances to neighboring Palestinian areas, preventing Jewish troublemakers from instigating conflicts with the local Arab population. I continued driving back to see what was going on at the procession’s point of origin and found the place empty except for hitchhikers trying to catch a ride south. Returning north to the place of the attack I saw that the funeral procession already left during my 15 minutes absence. Several groups of soldiers still patrolled the nearby hills. Aside from that, a relative calmness. I parked the car.

End of Part 1 of a two-part special Fieldnote from Anthropology Now’s newest editor, Assaf H. Keep an eye out for Part 2 to come Monday, March 14!

**This is a special feature from the newest September 2010 issue of Anthropology Now. In “The Keeper of the Kris,” Janet Hoskins reviews Ann Dunham Soetoro’s book, Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia.**

If she were alive today, Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham Soetoro, would be 67. The president’s mother was portrayed in Obama’s presidential campaign as both a “free spirit” and the “moral bedrock” of her son’s idealism. A cultural anthropologist who worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, Ann Dunham increasingly emerged as an object of media scrutiny and contradictory assessment. Dunham was praised for her dedication in getting up at 4 a.m. to tutor her son in English subjects while he attended Indonesian public schools. At the same time, she was vilified for “abandoning” him when she returned to do fieldwork, and he remained with her parents in Hawaii.
As someone who has shared many of the same times and places as Ann Dunham, and has also lived as a single mother with two young children, balancing the demands of academia with family, my sympathies in these controversies were always with her. Through a strange sort of professional kinship, I felt that I knew what she must have gone through, and wondered if we had, in fact, met when I spent three months in Java in 1979 or visited Ford Foundation offices in Jakarta in the mid 1980s.

I was captivated when Duke University Press published Dunham’s dissertation on village industry in Indonesia, 17 years after it was completed and 14 years after its author died. Many who read the book will be drawn to it primarily because it was written by President Obama’s mother. What does this sober and detailed analysis of census data, economic surveys, and local tax records tell us about this woman, about Indonesia, and about the values she taught her son? The book is dedicated to “Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field,” but readers will find little information about Dunham’s children or her own life. Surviving against the Odds, however, tells us a lot about Ann Dunham as an anthropologist who combined moral commitment to help the powerless with pragmatic policy solutions.

Dunham was an early advocate of microcredit, which provides capital to small-scale village industries. In Indonesia, microcredit built on the traditional rotating credit associations (arisan) is found throughout the country. She wrote before there was widespread disenchantment with the Green Revolution. She worked in Indonesia during an era of optimism about rural development, which proceeded with some success, despite the human-rights restrictions of the Suharto regime.

Dunham frames her study as an account of craft industries and “non agricultural activities” in Java, aiming to fill a gap in the literature that had tended to portray most village dwellers as paddy farmers and little else.

Her account of the work of Indonesian blacksmiths illustrates both these themes. By documenting the development and expansion of blacksmithing, she provides a subtle critique of earlier views of Javanese society as “large, dense, vague, dispirited communities” of “flaccid indeterminateness,” caught up in a stagnant pattern of “agricultural involution” (Geertz 1963: 102–3). Clifford Geertz had argued that the Javanese economy, faced with external pressure from the economic demands of the Dutch colonial regime and internal pressure from rapidly increasing population, intensified existing forms of agriculture rather than changing them. Even more labor was put into paddy-field cultivation, increasing the per-hectare output while maintaining per-capita output, and there was little incentive to innovate or diversify economic activities. Dunham notes the perhaps obvious, but often-overlooked point, that villagers “tend to specialize in the activities that they see as most profitable” (2009:2). They are, therefore, quite entrepreneurial in their orientation, and eager to expand once they have some access to the capital to do so. Dunham’s study joined a branch of economic anthropology that portrayed peasants as exercising a fair degree of agency and fully capable of seizing opportunity and embracing change when it suited their needs.

Dunham notes that many Indonesian academics and officials have “rather tragically” (2009:13) accepted the argument proposed by Geertz and his Dutch predecessor Boeke that peasants will never be motivated to significantly improve their lot because their needs were limited to the desire to fill their bellies and to continue to occupy their traditional lands. She refers to Geertz as “Boeke reincarnated” for perpetuating colonial-era myths about Javanese society— that rice and sugar cane were not ecologically compatible, that Javanese society was static. She criticized his pessimistic assumption that the Javanese economy has missed its chance to “take off” into prosperity. Geertz had also described village industries as “now only of marginal importance” because the artisans were less interested in increasing efficiency or profits and more in “reliable, riskless sources of supplemental income, in return for irregular application of otherwise idle, unskilled labor” (Geertz 1963:70).

Reacting to this earlier portrait of village Java, which veers dangerously close to the stereotype of the lazy native, Dunham’s argument is developed in counterpoint. She shows how metalworkers are highly skilled craftsmen who seized earlier opportunities to expand (notably by producing goods from scrap metal during the Japanese occupation), and who built modest but increasingly profitable industries at the price of greater stratification and inequality in the village setting. Javanese peasants routinely practice “occupational multiplicity,” combining farming with small-scale craft production, and balancing the risks of both activities while taking advantage of seasonal lulls. She cites the banking surveys she carried out showing that the average family had three or four income sources, and those who had more diverse sources tended to earn more (2009:34). “This book differs from most studies of small industries,” she notes, “in emphasizing their long-term stability and comparative advantage within the context of the rural market” (2009:39), a thesis she demonstrates in chapters on socio economic organization, description of a blacksmithing village, as well as the implications of government intervention and development.

The most ethnographically vivid chapter provides a portrait of Kajar, which she describes as “a wonderful and mysterious place” (p. xxxii), where magic voices echo underground, occasionally erupting as springs or wells to relieve a drought (2009: 85). Kajar lies in a somewhat isolated, traditional area, Gunung Kidul, where older architecture is still common, although over the 14-yea span of her fieldwork, tiles have replaced earthen floors. The people who live in Kajar say that they are destined to be blacksmiths because a stone near the spring bears a naturally etched image of a Kris, a serpent-shaped blade of great supernatural power.

Dunham explores both the practical aspects of blacksmithing and its mystical legacy, enhanced by detailed portraits of a few master smiths (empu), whose careers she traces with particular care. The spring at Kajar is the location of a ceremony to ask for rain, symbolically tying the power of metalworking to the control of the seasons. This is perhaps the reason why Kris makers are understood to be masters of ilmu kebatinan, “the science of the inner self.” The Kris is seen as an inanimate being, and the metal smelter must first become acquainted with the spirit (roh) within the iron through the practice of meditation. If a smith does not get acquainted with this spirit, or fails to pace the production of the Kris over the year, he risks production failures, work accidents, blindness, paralysis, or even death. The most delicate state of Kris preparation is in the formation of the pamor, the pattern of nickel decoration on the blade. The pattern is traced by the smith, and sensed through meditation, but not visible to the naked eye until the Kris is soaked first in sulphur, then in lime juice, and finally arsenic. The process resembles that of developing a photograph from a negative. The blade is first dark, then whitened by the lime, and finally revealed in its full, intricate complexity on the day of its final bath, which is followed by a consecration ceremony (2009:111). The rituals of metalworking are kept secret, and women are normally excluded. Dunham notes that she was allowed to observe the rites because “Western women are treated as honorary males” (2009:289).

Kajar’s association with traditional mysticism (abangan culture, in Geertz’s term)meant that members of this village were targeted by anti-communist groups in 1965– 66, narrowly escaping execution. A cooperative formed at the time, however, managed to circumvent government monopolies and demands for “restitution” (fines paid to corrupt officials). Dunham’s account of these village-level strategies offers one of the more biting portraits of the abuses common during the Suharto era. Despite little in the book that is overtly “political,” there is evidence of Dunham’s affection for local people and alienation from exploitative government officials.

We understand Ann Dunham’s vocation as an anthropologist and defender of the powerless when we read her son’s account of the ideals she carried with her on her first trip to Indonesia. He remembers arriving as a six-year-old boy, traveling with his mother to rejoin her new Indonesian husband, Lolo Soetoro. “Walking off the plane at Djakarta, the tarmac rippling with heat, the sun bright as a furnace, I clutched her hand, determined to protect her from whatever might come” (1995:32). Just a few minutes later, hints of what “might come” appear. His mothers asks a question about Sukarno, the founding president of the republic and a revolutionary hero, recently deposed in massive waves of violence that made the rivers run with blood. His stepfather, who is described as having “possessed the good manners and easy grace of his people” (1995:30), does not answer, but points instead to a statue of Hanuman, the monkey god, saying “When he fights the demons, he is never defeated,” and then jokes and trades knowing glances with the soldiers surrounding them at the airport.

His stepfather, it becomes clear, shared the vaulting idealism of the Sukarno years, but then accepted the fact that he was conscripted to serve under Suharto’s increasingly authoritarian government. For a year he fought insurgents in New Guinea and later worked as a geologist for the army. “Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford,” he tells his young wife, and dismisses
her request for details (Obama 1995:46). At home, the young Barack is given a set of exotic pets, including an orangutan and two baby crocodiles, and is told to witness the bloody beheading of a chicken being prepared for dinner. At first it was “one long adventure, the bounty of a boy’s life” (1995: 37), filled with boxing lessons, angry spirits, tragic droughts, and sudden floods. But conflicts soon emerge between his mother’s “soft heart” and his stepfather’s lessons in “how to be a man.” His stepfather had been “pulled into some dark, hidden place, out of reach, taking with him the brightest part of himself” (1995:42). The force that has taken him away “yanked him back into line just when he thought he had escaped” (1995: 45) is “Power”—by capitalizing this word, Obama implies its force and intensity—the Power of Suharto’s Indonesia, which is“undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory” (1995:45).

Obama describes his mother as deeply attached to Indonesian culture and many people there, but increasingly alienated from her husband and fearful that her son will also succumb to this “Power.” She became a lonely witness for “secular humanism” (1995:50), and struggled hard to imbue her son with Midwestern ideals of honesty, integrity, and social service. Barack resisted these lessons. “My mother’s confidence in needlepoint values depended on a faith I didn’t possess” (1995:50). But he realized why she turned to praising the struggle for success that his African father made, in contrast to the soft, complacent corruption of
her then still-present Indonesian husband. This launched him on his own journey to seek out his father’s family in Africa and to come to terms with the significance of his biracial heritage.

Ann Dunham’s dissertation was finished almost thirty years after her first arrival in Indonesia, so there were many layers to her relationship to the country that are not narrated in “Dreams from My Father.” A foreword by her daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, includes her own memories of accompanying her mother to visit blacksmiths, potters, weavers, and tile-makers when Barack was in Hawai’i going to high school. In 1980 Dunham divorced Lolo Soetoro, but she didhelp him to travel to Hawai’i to seek medical care when he developed a fatal liver ailment in 1987. She worked for a series of development organizations, and from 1981 to 1984 served as a program officer for the Ford Foundation, work that required a balance of idealism and realism as she dealt with issues of rural poverty, social injustice and gender. Her colleague at the Ford Foundation, Mary Zurbuchen, describes her as more of an “academically informed development specialist,” while Robert Hefner prefers to call her a “socially engaged scholar” (2009 AAA panel). Both agree that she was both a practitioner and researcher, and that for her, the intersection of academic concerns and practical ones was always most important. Ann Dunham hoped that her research, grounded in quantitativ and pragmatic considerations, would help improve people’s lives.

Had she lived, Ann Dunham would be enjoying not only the immense satisfaction of seeing her son achieve a history-making position as president, but also a sense of accomplishment from having correctly identified promising forms of rural development, as well as successfully campaigning to have them implemented. Over the past fifteen years Suharto has fallen from power, Indonesia has become a more democratic nation, and it is even a somewhat more prosperous one.

Ann Dunham’s snake-bladed Kris, made for her by one of the master smiths, is discussed and pictured in the book as a sort of “biographical object” (Hoskins 1998). Th black forged iron has a dark patina and is a weapon capable of killing. Yet it is also ornamented with a wonderfully delicate nickel lamination, a work of art as well as a spiritually charged cutting instrument. Keeping the Kris by her side, Dunham maintained a tie to Kajar, where she was initiated into the mysteries of metal smelting. She was also holding onto a tool of power in very Indonesian sense, which could stand up to the wider “Power” of government planners and international development agencies. A powerful Kris can be used to intimidate an enemy in a bloodless act of self defense that asserts the agency of the bearer, at the same time drawing on the store of power contained in its ceremonial use. Ann Dunham used her anthropological knowledge as a practical weapon and a spiritual talisman, hoping that through it, and by imparting its values to her children, she could bring into being the changes she deeply wished to see in Indonesia and the world.

Ann Dunham Soetoro. Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia. Edited and with a preface by Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper, as well as a foreword by Maya Soetoro-Ng and an afterword by Robert W. Hefner. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2009. 374 pp., 20 pages of black and white photographs, 16 pages of color photographs, 4 maps, 10 pages of Dunham’s handwritten fieldnotes and letters from the field.

References:

Geertz, Clifford. 1963. Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hoskins, Janet. 1998. Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Story of People’s Lives. New York: Routledge Press.

Obama, Barack. 1995. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. New York: Three Rivers Press.

About the reviewer:

Janet Hoskins is professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Her books include The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange (University of California Press 1994, winner of the 1996 Benda Prize for Southeast Asian Studies) and Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Story of People’s Lives (Routledge, 1998). She spent two decades doing ethnographic research in eastern Indonesia, and is now studying Caodaism and other indigenous Vietnamese religions from a transnational perspective in Vietnam and California.

While planning the relief event, I could not see the magnitude of our efforts – I was simply too busy. The total weigh-in of donations was undoubtedly impressive, but with no prior experience in planning disaster relief events, I pondered how I acted so quickly and without reservation. It was difficult to see where my actions stemmed from. Was I motivated out of human compassion or more so because of my profession? Or, was it a combination of both? Or, perhaps something else? Then I recalled why I was drawn to the field of anthropology – other cultures, people, and my own place within the world. Simply put, I recognized anthropology fulfills my sense of human interest and compassion. I have never considered myself an applied or public anthropologist per say because I think it is essential for all anthropologists to engage beyond professional rigor, academic or otherwise. It behooves us to harness our knowledge and skills within the scientific community and share it with others. As an anthropologist, I represent a field that is oftentimes misunderstood by the general public, so working outside the academy is essential for me and as I assert here, for the profession itself. Irrespective of the sub-field, public engagement is critical for anthropologists because we all strive for better understandings of the human condition. Without such engagement, our specialized skills and knowledge are only meaningful within the profession – a profession that values, above all else, the entirety of humanity. Public engagement ensures anthropological advancement by offering anthropologists the opportunity to learn and help others while honing their skills.

Humanitarian efforts move people toward action and I observed this with many people in the greater Valdosta area. Public outpouring made me realize even more clearly the importance of community and global solidarity in extraordinarily difficult times. My role as an educator aided me in cultivating and soliciting assistance from others at the university and beyond, and my role as an engaged cultural anthropologist provided me the necessary insight to work successfully with and for diverse populations. Whether serving as an educator, researcher, or humanitarian, a common thread is that my motivations are grounded in moral obligation. By moral I mean living, working, and adhering to the values within a cultural group, mine and otherwise. This sense of moral commitment is a responsibility we all share and one the American Anthropological Association supports as illustrated in the recently approved Code of Ethics (2009). Being an anthropologist is more than working in a traditional research setting or within the university. Only by extending our skills outside the academy, do we truly experience the full breadth of anthropological engagement. Consequently, utilizing anthropology in the public sphere has affirmed my compassion for people and my passion for the field which together permeates every aspect of my personal and professional lives.

This ends our 2 part series by Dr. Melissa A. Rinehart. Click here to read Part 1 if you missed it on Friday. Also, keep an eye out for a companion photo essay illustrating Valdosta’s Haiti water and food relief event – coming later this week!

Dr. Melissa A. Rinehart is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia. With a specialization in Native American Studies, her work bridges ethnographic and historical methodologies. As an ethnohistorian, she has several areas of interest including the removal and boarding school eras, language shift and revitalization, identity and performance, and indigenous resistance. Ongoing research projects include Native American participation at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and a book project concerning a former Catholic Indian boarding school, St. Joseph’s Indian Normal School, in operation from 1888 to 1896, in
Rensselaer, Indiana.

While trained as a cultural anthropologist, I also work within linguistics and have worked as an archaeologist. This freedom to be more holistic in my research is, I feel, one of anthropology’s strongest attractions. Combining this with anthropology’s hands-on field research with Native American communities, I find it immensely meaningful to teach anthropology in the university and conduct research that is beneficial to others. Giving back to the community, for which anthropological research relies on, is always a concern. This is especially the case when longstanding oppression has taken a toll in communities, such as Native Americans, that not only face socio-economic, but health-related concerns. In spite of these longstanding problems though, Native American communities have continuously demonstrated their resiliency. It is this connection with Native American peoples and issues that drew me to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti earlier this year. I know no one in Haiti and have never been to Haiti, but as a cultural anthropologist and even more importantly as a humanist, I recognized the need to apply my knowledge and skills somehow.

Clean potable water has been a problem in Haiti for some time and although there are efforts to curtail continued environmental devastation, eroded land makes agriculture difficult. Socio-economic issues, such as imported commodity foods sold more cheaply than those produced in Haiti are coupled with cyclical poverty and result in significant food insecurity for many Haitians. They, too, are an oppressed community, but one marked with historical resiliency. I felt compelled to do something more for Haitians given their devastating circumstances, so organizing a water and food relief effort became evident. I envisioned organizing anthropology students from Valdosta State University (VSU) in south Georgia to collect rice, beans, and water for victims. Rice and beans are two important staples for Haitians, and consequently two affordable food sources for most Americans. Recognizing students have limited funds, I felt physical donations consisting of inexpensive bags of rice, beans, and bottled water made more sense than soliciting monetary donations. I also worked collaboratively with colleagues, administration, and student organizations from VSU as well as the American Red Cross and Second Harvest Food Bank. What began as a simple idea of collecting food and water grew into a city-wide relief effort. There was extensive media coverage including television, radio, and print media; and I began a Facebook group. Social networking quickly proved useful because it was an easy way for students and others from the community to post questions, concerns, and commentary about Valdosta’s response to the Haiti earthquake. It also enabled me to keep everyone abreast of continuing developments regarding the relief event.

The relief event took place ten days after the earthquake struck. We set up a drive-thru in the VSU baseball stadium parking lot to facilitate donation activity and the turn-out was remarkable. The American Red Cross’s disaster relief team collected monetary and blood donations, and Second Harvest Food Bank supplied a crew for collecting, palleting, and trucking donations to storage. Additionally, over 50 students from an area middle school volunteered. In all, we collected 35,000 pounds of food and water equivalent to 17 tons. Second Harvest Food Bank trucked 1/3 of the donations to Miami, Florida, where the State Department then flew the shipment to Haiti. The remaining 2/3 of the donations were picked up by the Feed the Children organization and then flown gratis by FedEX to Port au Prince where the shipment was immediately trucked to and distributed at the Feed the Children refugee camp housing 15,000 Haitians.

End of Part 1, look for Part 2 of this special 2 part article this coming Monday!

In the meantime, check out these other links about VSU’s rice, beans and water drive for Haiti:

VSU Continues to aid Haitian Disaster Relief Efforts

WCTV-TV article

Dr. Melissa A. Rinehart is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia. With a specialization in Native American Studies, her work bridges ethnographic and historical methodologies. As an ethnohistorian, she has several areas of interest including the removal and boarding school eras, language shift and revitalization, identity and performance, and indigenous resistance. Ongoing research projects include Native American participation at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and a book project concerning a former Catholic Indian boarding school, St. Joseph’s Indian Normal School, in operation from 1888 to 1896, in Rensselaer, Indiana.

Outsmarting Risk: From Bonuses to Bailouts
By Karen Z. Ho

Recent criticisms of Wall Street bonuses and bailouts—whether they express incredulous disbelief, hopeless resignation, or unfortunate necessity—somehow leave us unsatisfied. Most explanations fail to satisfy us precisely because they accept the “common-sense” understanding of Wall Street risk—an “understanding” that itself fundamentally misapprehends the culture and practice of financial risk in the United States, especially as it pertains to the most powerful members of the financial elite.

The central “common-sense” logic undergirding these accounts of “financial risk” is that high risk and reward necessarily go together with high uncertainty and loss. Actors, from small-business entrepreneurs to Wall Street investment bankers, make the rational calculation that “those who can make an opportunity from risk can quickly fall prey to uncertainty’s blows” (Martin 2007, 41). Wall Streeters represent themselves as risk takers par excellence, constantly embracing risk and not clinging to security, stability, and by extension, stagnancy. Risk takers are defined as having a future orientation, an anticipation of loss, which “must be built into any calculation of risk, rendering contentment a particularly scarce commodity” (Martin 2007, 47).

Of course, this time, as the consensus goes, Wall Street went too far, took too much risk, engaged in too much leverage, and thereby instigated worldwide crises. The pervasiveness of these assumptions explains why many of us are at a loss to understand why Wall Street investment banks were bailed out. If the risk/reward/loss bargain holds true, then shouldn’t Wall Street, the exemplary risk takers, have accepted the consequences? Similarly, consider the public’s confusion over Wall Street’s ritual of the bonus, which focuses on this quandary: how can investment bankers command such high bonuses when their practices so often generate crisis and massive socioeconomic volatility, even decline? It is only a quandary, however, if we presume the connection between reward/risk and loss/uncertainty where Wall Streeters get “paid for performance” and thus should not get paid when they do not “perform.” The fact that despite depression, they still get paid brings to light the central contradictions underlying dominant assumptions of financial risk and the unequal effects of a finance-capital dominated social economy.

Yet could it be precisely our too easy acceptance of this bargain that prevents a more serious challenge to these powerful financial ideologies? Through a brief exploration of investment banks’ bonuses and Wall Street’s bailout, I attempt to chart another approach.

A Peculiar Culture: Bonuses, Measuring Performance, and Performing Smartness

I begin with Wall Street’s bonus and compensation practices, since they are perhaps the keenest expressions of their central ethos, before I turn to a discussion of their culture of risk in particular. I ask readers to turn their attention first to this press release from the New York State Comptroller’s Office, where in January 2009, the Office of the State Deputy Comptroller compiled a table of New York City securities industry bonuses from 1985 to 2008 (see table below). Although, admittedly, there are multiple ways to interpret and contextualize these numbers, I read them as indicative of the growing influence of financial values and practices. With a cursory glance, it is striking how Wall Street bonuses have been increasing exponentially in the past two decades: in the 1980s, the “decade of greed,” bonuses hovered around a “mere” $2 billion; in the mid-1990s, around $5 billion; in 1999, around $9 billion; in 2003, around $16 billion; and in 2007, almost $33 billion! Not surprisingly, the massive rise of the total bonus pool (which is based on the number and size of financial deals generated by Wall Street investment banks) is indicative of “the financialization of everyday life,” where corporations, institutions, and even individuals went from being separated and protected from, avoiding, and/or faddishly dabbling in the financial markets to nearly conflating all their hopes and labors for growth with constant financial transactions. Financial deal making has become the routine path for corporations to “demonstrate” growth, responsibility, and success, despite the fact that such narrow strategies often led to long-term decline in corporate productivity, not to mention shareholder value volatility. Simply comparing 2007 with 1987— 32.9 with 2.6 billion—gives a sense of Wall Street’s stakes and interests in restructuring the global economy, not to mention the acceleration and intensification of the widereaching effects of financial crises.

Upon further examination, another interesting pattern and possible correlation emerges: notice how the bonuses peak and trough within the general upward climb. Reflecting on the multiple moments of crises and heightened financial market volatility that have characterized the past two decades, pay attention to how bonuses “peak” at precisely the moment of financial crisis. In 1987, bonuses culminate at $2.6 billion with the stock market crash of 1987 and the impending junk bond collapse. In 1993, bonuses rise to $5.8 billion, right before the Mexican peso crisis of 1994. In 1997, bonuses crest at $11.2 billion, at the moment of the Asian and Russian financial crises. In 2000, bonuses top out at $19.5 billion, right at the dot-com bust. And in 2006 and 2007, bonuses are at a record $34.1 billion and $32.9 billion, as the current subprime debacle implodes. Could bonuses, then, index crises; that is, could bonuses be used as an approximate predictor and indicator of impending financial disaster? In other words, to the extent that stratospheric bonus numbers demonstrate the frenzy of deal making that helps to constitute bubbles in the first place, they also set the stage for the impending crash.

Contrary to the dominant representation that Wall Streeters are masters of risk, their compensation culture indicates that they produce crises and pass on risk. Moreover, at issue here is a fundamental misapprehension of Wall Street’s practices of compensation, which is largely represented as “pay for performance.” I would argue that there is not so much a contradiction between Wall Street bonuses and the larger performance of our social economy as there is a misplaced understanding of what actually constitutes financial “performance.” Investment bankers and traders measure performance according to the number of deals executed, regardless of their impact on the corporation or society at large. Even in a recession, transactions such as selling off toxic assets or bankruptcy advice count toward the bonus.

As I argue in my 2009 ethnography, Liquidated, many of my Wall Street informants actually sensed the impending bubble burst. Through their daily practices, they often recognized that they had pushed through as many financial transactions as the markets could bear. And, yet, this knowledge did not so much curtail their deal making as it hastened their efforts to eke out even more deals that would count toward their year-end bonus. After all, investment bankers and traders themselves have jobs that are on the line, rife with insecurity. For them, a sacred cultural value is to “be one” with the market, to work simultaneously and in “real-time” with it as their cultural embodiment. They are culturally conditioned to mortgage the future through their bonuses. Of course, Wall Streeters’ experiences of financial crises and job insecurities have historically been much more cushioned than those of the average worker; they are amply resourced, highly networked and pedigreed, exorbitantly compensated, and valued as “the smartest.” As such, their understandings of what it takes to be a successful worker in the new economy, to act simultaneously with the market that they have had a strong hand in constructing, are internalized as challenges and sources of empowerment, however unstable and disruptive such standards are for most people. The dominance of short-term, transaction-led compensation schemes, the understanding that Wall Street investment bankers, as the smartest investors in the world, are deserving, and the taken-for-granted divorce of executive pay (and stock prices) from the livelihood of most workers in the service of quick shareholder value are all at work here.

Recently, we see the way bankers’ smartness is mystified and then marshaled to defend their bonuses. Despite their roles in failed deals and financial crises, bankers are depicted as indispensible, and bonuses are the crucial vehicle for retaining talent. And, precisely because bonuses are a core part of Wall Streeters’ sense of themselves, totally eliminating bonuses for still-employed bankers would be all but culturally unthinkable. Of course, the persistence of high bonuses despite Wall Street’s instigation of the global financial meltdown raises the question of who bears the brunt of high-risk practices, a question to which I now turn.

Reframing Risk

In the wake of the Russian and Asian financial crises in the late 1990s, veteran Wall Street observer Michael Lewis wondered why hedge funds didn’t lose credibility after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the world’s leading hedge fund. After all, this fund had been blamed for exacerbating these crises. He wrote, “But the panic—like all panics—did nothing but strengthen the booming hedge-fund industry.” Today, almost a decade later, with Wall Street at the helm of the subprime debacle and global financial crises, it is hard to believe that Goldman Sachs just posted astronomical profits and bonuses. Goldman Sachs was itself on the brink of elimination in 2008. To the extent that Wall Street’s continual regeneration seems mystifying, I offer two explanations: one is that mainstream economic and governmental structures accept Wall Street’s key cultural values that maintain and legitimate its success; the other is that, in practice, their confidence, survival, and extraordinary risk taking are only possible through subsidy.

Surely, the smartest in the world could be trusted with risk. In fact, Wall Streeters pride themselves in going beyond the simple risk/reward/loss bargain. For themselves and investors writ large, risk is marketed as mitigated by smartness. In one sense, their investments in subprime mortgages (and hedges against it) demonstrated for my informants their smartness in inventing new sources of profit taking that circumvented and outwitted both governmental regulators and risk managers in their own firm, while seeming to address the concerns of those they had circumvented and outwitted. As many investment bankers told me, “We are so much smarter than the folks in risk management and audit.” It is important to recall that at most investment banks risk management is a middle-office function, not part of the prestigious, revenue-generating front office. As such, until the meltdown, traders and bankers in structured finance and mortgage backed securities were lionized for profiting on both sides of the trade. Unlike the conventional risk managers, who were seen as dampening profitability, front-office bankers and traders were able sell their version of risk management as products, such as credit-default swaps that would allow buyers to recoup some of their investment in case they bought loans or bonds that defaulted. (Of course, since these swaps were not actual insurance policies, Wall Street did not set aside capital reserves as collateral for these products; therefore, such risk-hedging products actually exacerbated risk globally.)

Many Wall Streeters came to believe that they had in fact “mastered” risk. An informant from Lehman Brothers told me he did not believe that Lehman would go under precisely because the firm’s exposure to subprime was offset, “hedged,” by purchases of credit-default swaps and other derivatives. A few weeks before Lehman declared bankruptcy, he continued to claim, or perhaps hope, that Lehman was “market-neutral,” that its “value at risk” balance was effectively “zero.” The firm was, in his view, smart enough to control its exposure to risk even as it plunged as deeply into the market as possible. Wall Street leveraged claims of its own smartness and in the end also fell victim to its own self-representations.

Another core Wall Street value is the privileging of market identification and simultaneity, where the creation of constant, often short-term, transactions and products are the measures of corporate success. For Wall Street and evaluators of the financial markets, the commonsense understanding is that financial architects and innovators have demonstrated the ability to create entirely new market opportunities characterized by immediate exploitation and high growth. As such, according to this culture of expediency, even those implicated in the worst excesses of hedge funds, derivatives, junk bonds, and subprime mortgages are understood to have excelled in “making markets happen,” that is, generating a market and being “in it” as of yesterday. In this ethos, market simultaneity, not wisdom, is a central goal. The very structure of Wall Street encouraged the milking of the present and thus created exactly the conditions that rendered Wall Street’s financial modeling, “protection,” and predictions obsolete. Full speed expansion into subprime mortgages and buying and selling credit-default swaps without capital reserves, more for the purpose of generating profit than protecting against risk, might be called a strategy of no strategy.

In addition to smartness and the culture of market simultaneity, Wall Street risk-taking, I argue, is produced through government subsidy and the Wall Street–Washington consensus of “too big to fail.” Let me recount a conversation with Peter Felsenthal, a bond trader at Salomon Smith Barney, in the wake of the Russian and Asian financial crises in the late 1990s. When I asked him about how the emerging market crises affected his work, he replied that his trading desk “knew” that Russia “was not sustainable.” Feeling confused, I asked why they continued to trade the foreign debt of Russia, and he replied “We didn’t get burned” because “you have all of the upside when things go well,” and “if you do poorly, you don’t owe anybody any money, so you might as well take as much risk as possible.” Thrown off-balance, I further inquired how they knew that they wouldn’t fail, and how they guaranteed “only the upside” despite their massive risks. Felsenthal calmly explained that for five years, they happily rode the bull market, knowing that in the worst case scenario, the U.S. government or the IMF would bail them out because they could not let a major country fail. “Russia is in this sort of too-big-to-fail category. So, that’s what people say at U.S. banks. With Russia’s nuclear weapons, there is no way we are going to let them fail, not a chance.”

Throughout my fieldwork on Wall Street, I would hear of Wall Street banks and their trading partners being “too big to fail.” In their worldviews, countries (or, rather, Western “investors” in these countries) and global financial institutions were too global or powerful to fail. Before Lehman Brothers (where one could argue, the “free market” worked for one day—the day they went out of business), their predictions were correct: Long-Term Capital Management, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and AIG were all subsidized. From the third world debt crisis in the 1980s to the Asian and financial crises of the 1990s, the IMF and U.S. Treasury stepped in during emerging market crises to demand policies that enhanced repayment for western creditors, and compromised economic sovereignty.

Simultaneously, as I suggested earlier, my informants often anticipated when the bubble would burst; they could sense from their own practices that they had committed as many transactions as their clients could bear. As Paul Flanagan, an M&A associate at Goldman Sachs, articulated, bankers are so worried for their own jobs and so plagued with job insecurity that their goals are to “get what you [can] out of it for a short term,” rushing to complete as many deals as possible to increase their bonus compensation. (It is important to note that what is understood to be at risk is mainly their own jobs, not the systemic risk they inflict on the financial markets.)

What I want to stress in this discussion of risk is that many of my informants anticipated not only a crash, but also an eventual bailout, on the grounds that Wall Street investment banks were “too big to fail.” Such an assumption demonstrates that, contrary to their free market discourses, investment banks embraced risk not because they had successfully hedged their bets or managed their exposure. Rather, they depend on the state to underwrite their risk and profit taking. A key question then becomes, to what extent, in the past fifteen years, did Wall Street models, expectations, and risk practices presume an eventual bailout? In my current research I entertain the provocative possibility that from Wall Street’s point of view, default no longer became a concern over the past fifteen years, allowing investment banks to reframe its risk culture and aspire to work “only on complete leverage.”

Of course, increasing the complexity of their product offerings, even to the point where they did not know what was on their own books, as well as the global spread and interconnection of their products helped to construct, enable, and codify “too big to fail.” In other worlds, financial hyper-specialization and intricacy as well as “the global” became insurance policies against their own leveraged practices and strategies to avoid regulation. It was precisely Wall Street investment banks’ involvement in and construction of global interconnection, their global spreading of risk, that both generated the crisis and assured its rescue: the more the world bought into Wall Street (from American investors to entire governments), the more leverage Wall Street had to hold the globe hostage. The complicity of our retirement funds, for example, the extent to which middle-class Americans’ security has been outsourced to the global capital markets, deters our ability to critique and reform Wall Street. What cushions Wall Street’s hard landing is not the bankers’ much-touted future orientation and risk management skills (which have largely been exposed as hype in any case) but the deliberate tethering of their fortunes to those of the global economy so that they can command state support and bailouts. It is in this light that the much-talked-about privatized gains and socialized losses make sense. It is through these subsidies that Wall Street financiers and economists believed that they had moved beyond boom and bust, that they had outsmarted crisis.

Further research on when and how “too big to fail” began is crucial to contextualize and fully analyze how Wall Street’s approach to risk in practice operates according to a no-default worldview. To the extent that the risk bargain was not a cost-benefit analysis and that losses were cushioned by definition, common cultural assumptions about risk are turned on their head. The unearthing and unpacking of such cultural assumptions would reframe the very foundations of the professed identities, skills, and even the cultural and economic legitimacy of both financial economics and finance capital.

References

Martin, Randy. 2007. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Karen Z. Ho is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Her recent book is Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke University Press 2009).

*This is a special feature from the third, Darwin themed print issue of Anthropology Now.*

spitting image, spit’n’ image. Informal. exact likeness; … bef. 950; (v.) ME spitten, OE spittan; c. G (dial.) spitzen to spit; akin to OE spætan to spit, spætl spittle …. (Dictionary. com 2009).

Last year, the California-based project 23andMe—a project that offers to estimate a person’s predisposition for a number of traits and diseases on the basis of a saliva test—held a “spit party” during New York fashion week; volunteers would spit into a test tube to provide their DNA for sequencing and analysis. The photo shows the vibrant scene, a young couple opening their kits and donating saliva, to explore what their genomic constitution might tell them about their identity and the kind of life they might lead. Apparently, they were publicly celebrating both their self and their genome, staging their persona and their bodily essence for the media, in the process of lobbying for personal genomics and the company responsible for 23andMe, an affiliate of Google. An article in The New York Times announced the launching event by saying that 23andMe “wants people to think of their genomes as a basis for social networking,” adding that “the company … hopes to make spitting into a test tube as stylish as ordering a ginger martini” (Salkin 2008). In November 2008, Time Magazine declared the retail DNA test of 23andMe the best innovation of the year. The year before, Apple’s iPhone was the winner. Several other companies have either started or scheduled one form or another of retail genomics. This is consuming genomics, a rapidly growing business receiving both substantial financial support and intense public attention. Clearly, something new is in the air.

The notion of spitting and related concepts has proved to be a powerful metaphor. Exploring its social history is like fol¬lowing the trajectories of ancient DNA. The English verb to “spit”—to “spew” or to “expel saliva”—is of early medieval origin. The noun “spit,” in the meaning “the very likeness,” is more recent, attested from 1602, while “spitting image” is a twentieth-century thing, apparently from as early as 1901. It may be interesting to note that there has been some debate on the etymology of the phrase. Some have suggested it is derived from “splitting image,” based on the two identical parts of a split plank of wood. Such an account would resonate perfectly with the modern concept of the double he¬lix and the splitting of DNA, underlining the relevance of the idea of the “spitting image” for both modern gene talk and the genealogical tree. The discovery of the structure of DNA material has been heralded as the key to the understanding of the continuity and change of life forms, as the missing conceptual link of evolutionary theory finally solving the mystery of the “tree of life.” Also, “splitting” might highlight the Western notion of the duality of the individual as a natural body and a social person, a notion often challenged nowadays by the monistic concept of the biosocial (Rabinow 1996). Given such reasoning, the 23andMe “spit party” might just as well have been called a “split party.” It seems, however, that the reference to spitting was based on “spit,” not “split,” an allusion to someone who is so similar to another as to appear to have been spat out of his or her mouth (Martin 2009).

The spit party and the notion of spitting image invite interesting anthropological questions: What are the overall spin-offs from personal genomics, especially with respect to the understanding of self, person¬hood, relationships, and ancestry? Despite sustained criticisms of the gene talk current in the West and the determinisms it implies, personal genomics along the lines of 23andMe seems to have a substantial public appeal. At the same time, the services offered by genomics companies give rise to new kinds of relations and networks based on genetic signatures presumed to be en¬coded in DNA. Like many others, I decided to indulge in a kind of spitting, mixing ethnographic observation, theoretical reflection, and narcissistic pleasure. One of the key companies in the development of personal genomics, deCODE genetics, hap¬pens to be located on the outskirts of my campus in Reykjavik, Iceland—within spit¬ting distance, if you like.

deCODEme: “Dig into Your DNA!”

A few days before the launching of 23andMe, deCODE genetics announced a similar service—deCODEme. The project now offers both a “complete” scan ($985) and two more narrow scans focusing on specific conditions, cancer ($225) and cardiovascular problems ($195). I signed up for the complete scan, eager to find out how anthropological understanding of humans and their differences was being used and developed in the project, to explore the assumptions about cultures and bodies on which analyses would be based, to see what the scan might tell me about myself and my roots, and to follow the development of the virtual community of people who subscribe to services of this kind. For some months I resisted the narcissism of personal genomics. Both of my parents had struggled with cancer and I wasn’t terribly keen on the kind of fortune telling offered by personal genomics. I guess news of the New York spit party helped to change my mind. Somehow collective spitting and the bonding involved appealed to the anthropologist, curious about the implications of the new genetics for modern life. In my case, how¬ever, there was no formal party. Extracting the cheek swabs, signing the relevant forms, and mailing the lot to the lab was a solitary event.

Two weeks later, I received an email from the company. The results were now available and I would be able to access them through the password provided. Once I logged on, I was urged to “have fun browsing [my] … genome,” “dig into [my] … DNA,” explore my ancestry and my “genetic risks,” play with fancy maps and other visuals, search for specific genetic variants (SNPs or “snips”), and download my genotypes for 1.2 million SNPs (a 33Mb datafile). The comparison of my genetic code with that of populations covered in the “Genetic Atlas,” I was told, was based on several hundred thousand genetic variants and more than 1,000 reference individuals from 50 different populations worldwide (see the illustration). My genome, not surprisingly, turned out to have most in common with “European” reference groups (a genetic similarity of 83.99%), in particular those of Iceland, the Orkneys, France, and Russia.

More astonishingly, another feature of deCODEme, “ancestral origins,” indicated that judging from chromosomes 1 to 22 my ancestry was no less than 7% East Asian, 16% according to the X chromosome, considerably higher than for most Icelanders. I found this an interesting and puzzling revelation. To speak of “genealogical dis-ease” (Rapp, Heath, and Taussig 2001)—to use a term developed by anthropologists studying what people make of genetic information about their roots and ancestry—would, however, be an overstatement.

According to the analysis of my maternal DNA, I belong to “mitogroup R*.” This is a category shared by 4.8% of deCODEme users, all of whom can trace their mitochondrial DNA to a woman thought to have lived about 60 thousand years ago, probably somewhere in the Near East. Analysis of my paternal DNA, on the other hand, shows that I belong to “Y-group R1a,” a category shared with 10.3% of deCODEme users tracing their Y chromosomes back to one man who is thought to have lived about 10 to 15 thousand years ago, probably in Western Asia. A further feature allows users to explore their “map of kinship,” a visual representation of genetic space on the basis of so-called principal component analysis (PCA, for short). This method compares the genetic code of many individuals to uncover genetic patterns or dimensions involving many different SNPs. On the basis of this evidence, I seem to occupy a somewhat marginal position, neither firmly within the European reference group nor any of the others, probably reflecting the puzzling observation about my partial East Asian ancestry.

The other main service offered by de-CODEme is that of analyzing the genome with respect to specific traits and health risks. The current list of risks analyzed by deCODEme is a mixed bag of forty diseases and traits, including alcohol flush reaction, Alzheimer’s disease, heart attack, lactose in¬tolerance, male pattern baldness, multiple sclerosis, prostate cancer, and psoriasis. My results for the diseases and traits covered are based on calculations comparing my genetic sequence to sequences of participants in studies published in the scholarly literature. To access results for some diseases I was invited to read about the genetic and medical details and to sign a statement about informed consent, by clicking on “Accept.”

I need not bore the reader with the personal details. Suffice it to say that some of the information provided sounds trivial (no alcohol flush reaction), some of it resonates with what I thought I already knew (I am less likely than the general population “to become nicotine dependent [15% or less]”), some results are encouraging (I have low lifetime risks for some diseases, much less than for males of European ancestry in general), and some details may encourage the hypochondriac in me to request further medical information (my risks for some dis¬eases are significantly higher than those of my genetically significant others).

When presented with these results, I was offered details on the mathematics of risk analysis. Also, I was invited to zoom in on my genomic landscape, focusing on a part of a chromosome and the location of specific mutations reportedly responsible for potential traits or diseases. The website drew the parallels of the two universes of in¬side and outside: “In the same manner as Google Earth allows you to explore the world map, the deCODEme Genome Browser enables you to visualize the genome.” The tour was far more fun than the mathematics. Again, there were some surprises and some food for thought.

Emergent Communities and Technologies of the Self

It seems reasonable to argue, as Hacking observes (2009), that personal genomics represent one example of what Michel Foucault referred to as “technologies of the self.” For Foucault, technologies of the self “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and a way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (1988:18). One of the pioneers of the genetics of ancestry is Bryan Sykes of Oxford University. Significantly, his book on ancestry (2001) opens with the question “Where do I come from?” and closes with a chapter on “A Sense of Self.”

For many people, then, hereditary material provides an important avenue into identity and personhood. Knowing our genetic constitution and where we come from, we apparently also know who we are. As Pinker observes (2009): “Affordable genotyping may offer new kinds of answers to the question ‘Who am I?’—our ruminations about our ancestry, our vulnerabilities, our character and our choices in life.” This is a theme underlined by Anne Wojcicki, the cofounder of 23andMe: the 600,000 genetic markers interpreted by 23andMe, she argues, are “the digital manifestation of you” (see Hamilton 2008).

One may object to the rhetoric of self-discovery evident in the marketing of personal genomics by saying that personhood is not a matter of genetics, whatever people say at modern spit parties. Indeed, many ethnographies would testify to other ways of establishing personhood. For many Canadian Inuit, for instance, personhood is largely framed in the context of name talk, not gene talk (Pálsson 2008); the essence of the person, it is assumed, is constructed through a highly communal project heavily dependent on personal naming. During the life course, a person acquires a series of recycled names from friends and relatives that collectively establish the identity, personality, and fate of the individual concerned. An Inuit spit party, as a result, is likely to have a radically different meaning from that of many New York spit parties. Perhaps one should keep in mind that gene talk has only been around for half a century or so while name talk has probably followed culture since the beginning of humanity. New York celebrities, however, much like Inuit and everybody else, construct their personhood and identities in the course of everyday life, possibly through “Facebook” kinds of networking based on genome sequencing. The virtual becomes the real thing.

Personal genomics not only establishes, it is assumed, who we are, but it also generates new networks and communities. Indeed, a thriving imagined community of the users of personal genomics projects has been developing on the Internet. The Genome Browser of deCODEme allows users to compare their complete data with friends and family. While my reference group of friends and family includes both hypochondriacs and anthropologists, so far they have seen few good reasons to participate and, as a result, there isn’t much to compare. The Web site, however, allowed me to examine my genetic sharing with three “famous” people: Kári Stefánsson (the president, CEO, and cofounder of deCODE genetics), Craig Venter (founder of the Institute for Genomic Research), and James D. Watson (codiscoverer of the structure of DNA). Here, sharing is indicated visually by the coloring of the relevant bits of the chromosomes. Not surprisingly, I had more in common with my fellow Icelander than with Venter and Watson. So, after all, I did have a kind of spit party, online in absentia.

No doubt personal genomics is becoming both a family affair and a global concern. A number of websites testify to a lively discourse on the issues involved, including thinkgene.com, dna-forums.org, Eye on DNA, Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog, and Urban Semiotics. Users can draw their own conclusions from the analyses provided and engage in dialogues with genomic experts, sometimes becoming experts themselves in the process. Several users have tried two or more services to explore the extent to which their results on health risks and ancestry might agree or disagree. Sometimes people check if they are being cheated. One blogger claimed to know of “at least one case … where a customer deliberately submitted a dog’s DNA just to ‘test’ the company. He was willing to pay for his little experiment, and yes, the company figured out exactly what had happened!”

Many people have little interest in exploring their health risks in public. Judging from the websites, there seems to be more interest in discussing ancestry. Sykes’s service (Oxford Ancestry), which offers people an opportunity to see which “clan” they belong to, to trace their ancestry to one of the seven daughters of Eve, has generated extensive discussion. Here is a reference from one of the blog sites:

I received my DNA results earlier this year and was surprised to find myself in clan Ulrike. I have traced six generations of ma¬ternal ancestors in the Beds/Northants bor¬ders region. The Viking invaders did travel into this area…. I have always been at¬tracted to northern wilderness and have visited Alaska, Greenland/Iceland and Siberia. Is this my DNA speaking?!

Some bloggers take a playful attitude to genome testing. One woman had her husband “tested” for fun:

I admit it. I have no self-discipline when it comes to genetic genealogy. When de-CODEme launched, I had to be one of the first in line to get tested. So I ordered … and received results … —my husband’s results, that is. I thought this might be a little more interesting since he sports a Y chromosome.

Clearly, there is a rapidly growing interest in personal genomics, for the purpose of celebrating our past and for managing our lives and our future.

Analyses of ancestry are likely to remain more or less intact, despite some anthropological doubts about important issues (Bolnick et al. 2007, Marks 2008), including the identification and sampling of populations and the shape of the family tree, partly because there is not so much at stake and, in any case, it is play. Studies of the genomics of diseases, in contrast, are riddled with contests, doubts, and conflict. Most common diseases are only minimally explained by genetic factors and in each case a great number of genes are likely to be involved. Also, the exact constellation of genes seems important, which further complicates analyses. Last, but not least, there is growing evidence for the importance of “epigenetic” factors, way beyond the simple concept of DNA sequence.

Given the evidence, and the growing public awareness of it (see, for instance, Hall 2009), why would people bother to measure their health risks with personal genomics services? While the hype may have faded, there seems to be a continued market for the kinds of services provided. The narcissistic pleasures of late modernity are reaching levels that Foucault could not possibly anticipate, and personal genomics is just one example of the fascination with the body. Also, the power of computing machinery continues to expand and cheap complete sequencing is within reach. Moreover, there are immense financial stakes and concerns on the global level, for biotechnical and pharmaceutical companies. As a result, one may expect personal genomics projects to expand. Although deCODE genetics has been in dire financial shape for some time, burdened with the excessive costs of its scientific work and its laboratory, and its future remains uncertain, other companies specializing in personal genomics seem to thrive. New services continue to be added to the menu.

Laboring Consumers

The companies involved in personal genomics emphasize consumers’ relative autonomy and independence from the medical establishment. Indeed, personal genomics of the kind discussed here may involve an element of empowerment. The virtual community of genetic citizens actively debates and negotiates roots, identities, and health risks fusing the expertise of professional and “lay” geneticists for the purpose of scrutinizing genomes. In a sense, then, this is science from below (Harding 2008). The forums involved are reasonably democratic social networks based on identification with genomic characteristics.

While giving people an opportunity to become active explorers and governors of their genomes is a good idea, the arguments about individual freedom, informed choices, and the unregulated genomic marketplace emphasized by genomic companies should be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing, they disguise the fact, as Prainsack et al. argue (2008: 34), that personal genomics is pushing the individualization of responsibilities a bit too far. Public authorities, they suggest, should “make it a priority to fund empirical research exploring what individuals expect from personal genomics, and in what way genetic susceptibility information is likely to affect practices and lifestyle choices.” Here, anthropology can play an important role (Nelson 2008, Santos et al. 2009).

Another qualification concerns the labor that users of genomics services perform for personal-genomics services. I suggest that genomic services engage the bodies and labor power of their consumers in what may be called biosocial relations of production (Pálsson 2009). The spokespersons for 23andMe, unlike most of the other projects, including deCODEme, have been quite open about the issue of alternative uses of their data. Wojcicki suggests signing up for 23andMe is “a great way for individuals to be involved in the research world….

You will have a profile, and something almost like a ribbon marking participation in these different research papers. It will be like, ‘How many Nature articles have you been part of?’” (pimm.wordpress.com 2007). The people contributing spits and cheek swabs to personal genomics services, then, take part in a labor process that ultimately may result in other projects, including large-scale biobanking. Whatever their current ambitions, personal genomics projects are likely to connect with larger bio¬medical projects in the future. Spitting and snipping, after all, is work, potentially contributing to the global networks and hierarchies involved in the manufacture of biovalue.

Recombinant Metaphors

The image and the report in the New York Times regarding the launching of 23andMe draw attention to the role of metaphors. Reporters quickly drew upon a series of related metaphors; the event was described as a “spit party,” the message of 23andMe and personal genomics in general, it was argued, was “when in doubt, spit it out,” personal medicine was said to be “within spitting distance,” and so on. The people of 23andMe now have a blog site called “The Spittoon,” drawing its name from an object also called “spitter,” a receptacle for spitting into: “Using nothing more than a bit of saliva (Get it? The Spittoon!), the genotyping process we use analyzes more than 580,000 locations in a person’s genome” (The Spittoon 2009). It is tempting to assume that the spit is becoming one of the key metaphors we live by, informing our speech and our thoughts. Metaphors, however, just like DNA, frequently undergo mutations, re¬combining available material from everyday language and experience. The notion of the “spitting image” as we have seen, is a case in point.

While 23andMe is probably the only personal genomics project that uses “spittoon” samples and the others seem generally to draw upon buccal swabs, the “spit party” seems to nicely capture various aspects of personal genomics. It captures the gene talk on which it is based, the mechanisms of inheritance, the matching or mismatching disclosed through the sequencing of DNA material, and the establishing of distance and ancestry, both genetic and social. When spitting out one’s saliva, one is presumed to provide a spitting image of oneself, encoded in DNA. The transparent metaphor has, finally, been elevated above the debates of etymologists. The emphasis, on the other hand, is no longer on spitting at someone (usually a gesture of contempt) but on the conviviality of spitting with a fellow human being, for the purpose of celebrating biosocial bonds, for founding social networks based on bodily signatures—with a ginger martini!

References

Bolnick, Deborah A., et al. 2007. “The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing.” Science 318 (19 October): 399–400.

Dictionary.com. 2009. http://dictionary.reference. com/browse/. Accessed 29 May.

Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of the Self.” In Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds. Technologies of the Self. 16–50. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press.

Hacking, Ian. 2009. “What Will Commercial Genome-Reading—from Cheap 23andMe to Costly but Complete Knome—Do to Middle-Class Conceptions of Personal Identity? On the Human Forum: Current Controversies in the Study of Humans, Animals, and Machines. http:// onthehuman.org/humannature/?p=176&cpage= 1#comment-295. 30 March.

Hall, Stephen S. 2009. “Beyond the Book of Life.” Newsweek, July 6/July 13: 38–41.

Hamilton, Anita. 2008. “The Retail DNA Test.” Time Magazine. November 3. http://www.time. com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804 ,1852747_1854493,00.html.

Harding, Sandra. 2008. Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Marks, Jonathan. 2008. “Recreational Ancestry-Caveat Emptor? Relatedness Is More Complex Than Commercial Gene-Based Family Trees Would Suggest.” Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News 21, no. 11.

Martin, Gary. 2009. “Spitting Image.” The Phrase Finder. www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/spitting -image.html. Accessed 11 May.

Nelson, Alondra. 2008. “Bio Science: Genetic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry.” Social Studies of Science 38, no. 5: 759–783.

Pálsson, Gísli. 2008. “Genomic Anthropology: Coming in from the Cold?” Current Anthropology 49, no. 4:545–568.

———. 2009. “Biosocial Relations of Production.” Comparative Studies in Society and His¬tory 51, no. 2:288–313.

pimm.wordpress.com. 2007. “23andMe’s Mission: Connecting All People on the DNA Level or Social Networking XY.0.” November 19.

Pinker, Stephen. 2009. “My Genome, My Self.” The New York Times, January 11.

Prainsack, Barbara, et al. 2008. “Misdirected Precaution.” Nature 456 (6): 34–35.

Rabinow, Paul. 1996. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rapp, Rayna, Deborah Heath, and Karen-Sue Taussig. 2001. “Genealogical Dis-ease: Where Hereditary Abnormality, Biomedical Explanation, and Family Responsibility Meet.” In Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 384–412.

Santos, Ricardo Ventura, et al. 2009. “Color, Race and Genomic Ancestry in Brazil: Dialogues between Anthropology and Genetics.” Current Anthropology. In press.

Salkin, Allen. 2008. “When in Doubt, Spit It Out.” The New York Times, 12 September.

The Spittoon. 2009. http://spittoon.23andme. com/. Accessed 29 May.
Sykes, Bryan. 2001. The Seven Daughters of Eve. London: Bantam Press.

Gísli Pálsson is professor, Department of Anthro¬pology, Gimli, University of Iceland, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland. His most recent book is Anthropology and the New Genetics (2007). Currently, Pálsson’s research focuses on the social implications of biotechnology, genetic history, and environmental change.