In one of the latest academic-cum-political dust ups, Jason Richwine, formerly of the Heritage Institute, co-authored a study estimating the “cost” of regularizing the immigration status of the undocumented.  Imagined by the Heritage Foundation as a high profile and hard-hitting attack on proposed immigration reform, the study was widely criticized by both liberals and conservatives for poor methodology and analysis.  When the Washington Post reported that Richwine's 2009 Harvard PhD dissertation entitled IQ and Immigration argued that Hispanic immigrants have lower IQs than so-called “native whites” the Heritage Institute back-pedaled as speedily as it could.  Richwine resigned several days later.

Richwine’s dissertation committee, like the Heritage foundation itself, sought to distance itself from the content of the dissertation, though his committee chair commented that “the empirical work was sound.”  Charles Murray, a mentor to Richwine, and one of the co-authors of The Bell Curve, a 1994 book that sparked a controversy over IQ and race, defended Richwine's work, accusing those who criticized Richwine of suppressing his right to freedom of speech.  Murray claims that Richwine is being treated for “crimethink” and that the situation is downright Orwellian. 

Rather than relying on second-hand characterizations of Richwine's dissertation, I decided to read it myself. I wasn’t surprised by the ideological content of the work, but I was quite startled by the lack of analytical rigor, the specious use of data, and the consistent use of gross generalization rather than disciplined scholarship.  Did Richwine's committee even read his dissertation, I wondered?  Had a student submitted something like that to me, I would have covered it with questions, suggestions, proddings and requirements for more.  So I decided to put myself on his dissertation committee after the fact.

Here are some of the comments I would have provided to him:

Dear Jason:

I have read your dissertation and have several key areas where you need to devote serious attention to developing your work before it can rise to the level of PhD worthy work. 

These are: 

1. The framing and theoretical basis for the study itself lacks rigor, internal logic and consistency.  Your variables are poorly defined and your justification in particular for using “native whites” as your control group does not make sense.

Let's look at your argument.  You state that you aim to show that immigrant IQ is, on average, lower than that of the “native white” population in the United States.  Remember that in good science, we work to prove our hypothesis WRONG, not to substantiate a pre-formed idea.  In choosing your control group as “native whites” you make a serious misstep.  According to you, natives are those who have been several generations in the United States.  Yet you show no evidence that white natives are different, IQ-wise, from other natives. This problem with your research design is compounded by the fact that your stated justification for choosing “native whites” as your control group is also that “for better or worse, most of America's institutional, social, and political structure is the product of Euro Americans, which makes them the natural standard by which immigrants may be compared” (P. 33).  Remember that your thesis is about race and IQ and heredity, not culture and politics.  Choosing your control group based on elements utterly unrelated to what you propose to analyze makes the scientific validity of your work untenable from the start.  You just cannot forward a thesis about IQ and heredity and then use the supposed cultural dominance of “native whites” as justification for choosing them as your control group. 

2.  Your literature review is consistently biased, incomplete, and cursory. The only work you cite that is openly critical of the IQ-race theory is that of Stephen Jay Gould.  For goodness sake, Wikipedia covers more literature than you do on the question of race and IQ.  You cannot convincingly argue for the validity or overall acceptability of your IQ-race thesis while refusing to substantially engage the large body of work that is highly critical of that idea.  As it is, you do not review even enough of the work that embraces this point of view.  Nobody in academia will take you seriously unless you deepen and widen your command of the relevant literature, the complexities of the arguments, and the substance upon which different positions are based.  In other words: you cannot only read the things you like and explain why you like them.  You have to read what you don't like as well, and demonstrate the flaws. That’s what it means to be an intellectual and a scholar, rather than an ideologue.

3.  Your writing consistently substitutes unsubstantiated generalizations for careful argument and presentation of evidence.  This is poor scholarship and again, unacceptable at an undergraduate level, much less in a PhD thesis.  On page 21 you write that “…[T]here is no racial or ethnic policy agenda here.  One can deal frankly and soberly with group IQ differences while still subscribing to the classical liberal tradition of individualism.” If there is not a race or ethnic agenda, why base the analysis on race and ethnic groups?  More to the point, if race and ethnicity are not the agenda, how do you justify making the “native white population” the control group in the analysis?  I also note that you justify excluding IQ data “black” native populations, because their IQ scores are historically “unstable.”  This so-called instability was evidenced in a marked closing of the IQ gap between blacks and whites over time.  It appears to me that you exclude this particular data because it is inconvenient for your theory.  Such selective practices are bad science and bad scholarship. 

Another example.  On page 15 you write that, “IQ can be an uncomfortable topic in a liberal democracy. The reality of innate differences between individuals and groups is often difficult to accept for those with an aversion to inequality. For this reason, journalists and academics in other fields are naturally attracted to scholars who downplay the role of genes in determining IQ, even if these scholars are a distinct minority.”  Your wording implicitly argues that those who challenge the scientific validity of IQ science work from an emotional rather than rigorously scientific position.  This impression is magnified when you claim that those who disagree with the IQ material are “naturally attracted” to scholarship that challenges the point of view that you endorse.  It really is a cheap shot.  There are serious scientific debates out there, and it is incumbent upon you to address them.  Furthermore, your claim that those who reject the IQ and genes hypotheses are a “distinct minority” is patently untrue. 

The American Anthropological Association, in its statement on race, specifically rejects the genetic validity of the idea of race, period.  Furthermore, a task force report from the American Psychological Association notes that “Several culturally-based explanations of the Black/White IQ differential have been proposed; some are plausible, but so far none has been conclusively supported. There is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation. In short, no adequate explanation of the differential between the IQ means of Blacks and Whites is presently available” (Neisser et al. 1996, 97).  While you do selectively cite this report, you neglect to mention this key conclusion.  Authored by ten top academics and published in the discipline's flagship journal, the report effectively stands as the discipline's definitive statement on the matter and can hardly be characterized as representing the position of a “small minority.”

As an anthropologist I cannot sign off without seriously challenging the implicit ideas about race upon which your entire thesis is built.  Throughout the work, you strive to link IQ to genetics and heritability.  You further assert that inheritance of IQ is empirically reflected in the data you present, and that the patterns reflect accurately in racial and ethnic groups.  The massive underlying problem is that this model assumes that the ethnic and racial groups you discuss possess relatively homogeneous gene pools, and, moreover, that the gene variance and distribution of one group are substantially distinguishable from those of another:  “Hispanics,” in your formulation, are genetically different from “whites”  and this is seen in their differential IQ scores.  First of all, “Hispanics” have only existed for a little under 400 years, not nearly enough time evolutionarily to produce significant genetic distinctiveness.  Second, those in the contemporary “Hispanic” population include descendants of indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and European immigrants. 

These are groups that you treat separately in your U.S. data.  On what scientific basis can populations be treated as genetically separate groups in one geographic location (the United States), then be grouped together genetically in another (Latin America)?   Your data would need to more finely parse these issues, separating “white descendant Hispanics” from both black and indigenous descendant Hispanics for the racial/IQ argument to remain convincing.   Even then, I fear your task will be fruitless, because the root of the problem is this: you are claiming that socially constituted category –that of race – is genetically identifiable.  That's a bit like saying those who attend Harvard are genetically distinct and naturally superior.  One thing doesn't have much to do with the other in terms of having a causal relationship. 

Nobody uses genetic information to determine racial identity.  The closest instance might be Native American tribes who are obligated by the U.S. Government to use blood quanta to determine tribal membership.  But even here the so-called standards range so widely that genetics are not the determining factor.  Even you yourself use socially defined categories when you speak of race and in your analysis.  This is simply not scientifically justifiable.  You present no evidence at all as to the genetic distinctiveness of the populations you identify.  Without the genetic material, the main arguments of your thesis do not hold water.

I am forced to conclude that your work is bad science.  Your conclusions are not objective but ideologically driven.   Your research is narrow and selective in the extreme and aligns rather dramatically with racist attempts to justify white superiority.  Declaring that scholars who reject such racism are a minority and that the science you present in this work represents a mainstream position is both dishonest and disingenuous.  Did you know that the scholars you cite most often: Philippe Rushton, and Richard Lynn, were supported by the Pioneer Fund, which has long-standing affiliations with the movement to create a pure white race, that is, eugenics?   Richard Lynn, whom you cite copiously, is unapologetic in his support of eugenics; it is his data set—one generated with the same flawed notions of race I discussed earlier–that you use for the foundation of your empirical work the key studies from which you pull your data.             

So, there it is.   If you are applying for membership in the Aryan nation, this work might be your ticket. But if you are claiming any kind of legitimacy as a scholar, I'm afraid the only thing I can suggest is for you to scrap the dissertation and start over.

Elizabeth Chin, PhD is an anthropologist whose work centers around issues of race and social inequality.   Her book Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture (Minnesota 2001) was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Prize.  In 2007 she was awarded the American Anthropological Association prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching.  In 2011 she joined the Art Center College of Design as a founding faculty member of the MFA track Media Design Practices/Field.

​In December, nine Pakistani health workers, most of them women, were murdered as they went door-to-door delivering polio vaccines to the children of their neighbors. Media attention to this event has focused on the fact that the CIA recently used a fake vaccination campaign as a cover when searching for Bin Laden, claiming to be giving children vaccinations while actually taking blood samples.  This reprehensible CIA plot has contributed to public distrust of vaccination and suspicion of health workers. That said, in the last month, other female health workers, not working on polio or immunization, have been targeted, so the story is not quite that simple. I don’t have insight into the motives of the militants, and nobody has claimed responsibility for the killings. But it’s likely that the murders are part of a broader militant effort to destabilize the Pakistani government, and militants may have focused on polio workers because of intense international pressure to eradicate polio in the country.

The assassination of health workers in Pakistan does make a couple of points crystal clear. These workers, often women, are the critical links in delivering health services across the most dangerous and undeserved areas of Pakistan. Terrorists targeted them precisely because of this importance. Yet while these workers have put their lives on the line, their own government and the international organizations that sponsor their work have undervalued them.

Women who deliver polio vaccine in Karachi and other cities in Pakistan are, for the most part, struggling to get by. They're doing hard work for a small amount—under $5 a day—because they don't have other options, and because they aim to serve God by serving their neighbors.

“I get paid for my blood and my sweat, but there’s relief in the work too,” Aisha [names have been changed], a confident and articulate 25-year-old, explained to me last year as I interviewed polio workers in Pakistan. She works on polio campaigns—and does broader work providing basic health education to her neighbors—because it was some of the only work available when her husband abandoned her and her young son.

 “I'm very satisfied,” she explained, “that I didn't have to beg from anyone. Sure, my salary was very small, but it was my own money. With that money I took care of myself, I took care of my son.  Everything is so expensive now, so expensive, but I can scrape by. My son is seven, mashallah, and he's in second grade. I'm sending him to school.

“Standing on your own two feet is the most important thing. It's just the first step that someone has to take by themselves. When someone tries, Allah surely will give them rewards for their work, and Allah builds courage in that person. And I’m satisfied with my life, thanks to God.”

Hamida, in her thirties with three children, added, “I think it’s better than complaining about your fate to work hard. Feed your children, raise them well. But when after working so hard you get so little money, your heart breaks.”

And as committed as these women are, job advancement is all but impossible. “I had such a desire to become a doctor!” said the lively and slender Shazia, laughing. “There was a dentist here, and I used to go to her office and follow her around.”

When her father died unexpectedly, Shazia began working for the health department to support her mother and young siblings. The money she made wasn’t nearly enough, but it was better than nothing, and it was honestly earned. Over the years—she is now in her mid-thirties—she has sacrificed her opportunities to have a family of her own in order to continue to live with her aging mother.  “I’ve been thinking of further study, because really, I want to move up. But I look, and there really aren’t any ways for me to advance. There’s no chance, absolutely no way. All of my dreams, I’ve left them all behind. What I wanted to do.”

The women who died were drawn from a group of the most pious, moral, and inspiring women I know. They bravely ignore the gossip that follows them in neighborhoods where many women only rarely leave the house. They tell me that if they do the right thing, God will provide.

Fear of murder must not be compounded with financial insecurity and lack of support as among the problems these brave women face. Partners in polio eradication—WHO, UNICEF, CDC, Rotary, and the Pakistani government—should immediately prioritize funding for support of these critical workers. Given the dangers, $20 a day for polio work is not too much. These partners should also make scholarship funding available for those brave women who want to do more to serve their communities. It is time for everyone who desires the eradication of polio to affirm the commitment and worth of some of the world’s most courageous women.

Svea Closser is a Middlebury College assistant professor of sociology and anthropology. She is the author of the book, “Chasing Polio in Pakistan” (Vanderbilt University Press, 2010). The research described here was carried out in the summer of 2011 and was funded by UNICEF.

Anthropologist and linguist Dr Mark Turin travels to South Africa to get to grips with the country's complex language politics and policies. Until the mid 1990s, there were just two official languages, English and Afrikaans, while other indigenous African languages were sidelined. Today the situation is different, with eleven official languages recognized by the Constitution of South Africa as having equal value and importance.

But what does that mean in reality? How can so many languages operate alongside each other in Parliament? And can they all have equal weight? Mark Turin visits a Soweto school to find out which languages children learn and what they speak in the playground, and talks to multilingual journalists and writers about the importance of their mother tongues.

He meets Afrikaans speakers to learn whether their language can shake off its associations with the racist apartheid regime, and visits Cape Town to see the South African Parliament in action and meet the interpreters that make it work.

Mark Turin is used to heated discussions when it comes to politics and language, and in South Africa he finds his greatest challenge.

This post originally appeared here, Monday, December 10th, 2012. 

Audio originally produced by Mark Rickards.

A lineup of hot-button issues has plagued the political life of the United States for decades, at least since the 1970s: abortion, sexualities, religion, evolution, censorship, recreational drugs, guns. An odd list on the face of it, but supposedly, the nation’s population divides into one of two camps over each issue, or so sociologist James Davison Hunter influentially claimed in Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991). If a person opposes abortion, we should be able to predict that they’ll oppose recreational drug use, GLBT sexualities, and erotic imagery in the media, and they’ll probably tote a gun. 

Right? 

I’m one of the few anthropologists who has actually looked for this predicted creature “in the field.” After 18 years of research, I must report that I have not found it, not yet anyway. At this point, my professional opinion is that it’s a bogeyman. Real U.S. citizens do not line up so predictably on the “culture war” front. 

I’m not saying that there are no gun-toting rednecks out there, but rather that they are probably as likely as anyone to try recreational drugs or peep at porn on the Internet. I’m saying that perceiving the population through the lens of the “culture wars” reduces a vast cultural field of conservative pulls and experimental tugs in every direction, to a two-dimensional cartoon. Looking through that lens, we can imagine the worst about the people around us, and even despair of democracy altogether. 

Working-Class Conservatives 

In the 1990s, as Hunter’s book was hitting the stores, I dove headfirst into the belly of the beast, setting up in central New York State, where I could study flag-waving, guntoting conservatives at close range. I expected to find the people I was educated to find, the people who blocked progressive reform, complacent, mired in the ignorance of outdated views. I reasoned that capital flight, out-sourcing, and massive job loss would surely have cracked the shell of complacency in which conservative ignorance could fester.

Instead I found working-class conservatives with long memories—informed, opinionated, and ready to talk. I found a grassroots conservatism, not dulled, but sharpened by the return of hard times and different in many particulars from the “culture wars” template. 

My base of operations was Ilion, New York, a small manufacturing center in a depressed Rustbelt region. Ilion has been the hometown of the Remington Arms company since the 1820s. Nearly every adult in the region, man and woman, is a member of the National Rifle Association (NRA) or a sympathizer with its aims. 

As it happens in ethnographic fieldwork, the people I was studying were also studying me. They quickly nailed me as a gunhating liberal and needled me about it with what sounded like NRA boilerplate. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” they said, and “If guns are illegal only criminals will have guns.”

Over the months I observed how they handled firearms and talked about them— respectfully, even reverently. I explained it to myself in the terms I was trained to use: it’s fetishization, attributing living qualities to an inanimate object. Well, why wouldn’t they fetishize guns, considering their position? The situation for most households is unrelieved, nerve-wracking insecurity. They have no say in the decisions that govern their livelihoods. They are politically weak, and they know it. When you’re “the little guy” at the mercy of the “big guys,” guns become a symbol of strength, the great equalizer. In an area where they are readily available, guns too can be weapons of the weak. Locked up in a drawer or closet, as they usually were among the people I studied, guns symbolize a hidden reserve of power. 

Then one night I found myself in an excited conversation with a group of local activists about the harassment several of them had experienced at the hands of local police and government officials. One man said in mock exasperation that he was just about ready to blow some heads off. Others chimed in with their own fantasies of decisive force, and suddenly I caught their point of view. It wasn’t exactly the NRA slogan, “If guns are illegal only criminals will have guns.” It was more like, “If guns are illegal only police will have guns.” The danger they were looking at was not from criminals but from “the government”—the State. 

Reasons of State 

Working-class conservatives’ suspicion of the state does not represent ignorance but conservatism, in the basic sense of cultural conservation. Anti-statism was a political cornerstone of the United States from its formation and for more than a century. As everyone knew in those days, states are predisposed to tyranny. To avoid that outcome, the founding generation insisted on adding a Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution—the list of things that the State may not do, including disarm its citizens. 

States have long tried to keep weapons out of the hands of “dangerous classes” (often made dangerous by actions of said State). A sword in the belt was the mark of a “gentleman” because the State did not permit “commoners” to bear swords. Firearms law under the British Empire followed this ancient pattern, effectively limiting the right to bear arms to “gentlemen.” 

In liberating itself from that empire, the United States’ founding generation turned to republicanism, the radical European political theory of the 1700s. Republicanism called for a state in which sovereignty resided not in a monarch but in “the people,” each vested with “natural rights.” These were popular political ideas in the colonies. Republican thought connected popular sovereignty with a broad right to bear arms. Cato’s Letters of the 1720s, a foundational text of Anglophone republicanism, saw “the Exercise of despotick Power” as “the unrelenting War of an armed Tyrant upon his unarmed subjects.” 

In the heat of the American Revolution, “commoners” made a claim to equality with real teeth: the right of all free men to bear arms. Their claim prevailed because the Revolution could not have been fought without “commoner” soldiers, tradesmen, and farmers. 

At the First Congress in 1789, legislative debate around the Second Amendment to the Constitution heated up from time to time, but never questioned the right to bear arms itself. The hot-button issue was the role of militias. Democratically inclined leaders wanted the Second Amendment to prohibit “standing armies,” that great tool of tyrants, except in times of war. “What, Sir, is the use of a militia?” demanded Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts on a hot August 14. ”It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty!” 

In historical context there can be no question that the U.S. Constitution recognizes a right to bear arms for all free men (implicitly including women), both for the “natural right” of self defense, and for collective self defense against State tyranny. Bearing arms ceased to signify “gentleman” in contrast to “commoner” but it picked up another symbolic task, signifying free as opposed to enslaved, a contrast that the country’s earliest gun-control policies strictly policed. 

The Gun-Rights Side 

Gun-rights advocates still draw on republican tradition. At the surface of their appeals is the less controversial claim, the natural right to self-defense. This finds voice in emotional tales of crime and criminals, all to illustrate that firearms are necessary for the defense of life and property. But under the surface, just as I found in central New York, is an appeal to the controversial side of republican tradition, in which a collective right to bear arms is the ultimate guarantee of popular sovereignty. The Web site of a nonprofit called the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), for example, ends a long FAQ about crime and self-defense this way: 

Finally, the founding fathers believed that gun ownership was necessary for a country to truly be free. If the government distrusted the people so much as to disarm them, then that government no longer truly represented the people. In other words, in our structure of government, the power is supposed to lie in the hands of the people. 

Another example, a blog by gun-rights activist Theodore Lang, tells several hairraising stories of policing gone horribly wrong, to make a point: if you think that the police will protect you, you are “encased within the imaginary bliss of police state security.” Then the argument shifts. Contemplating “the despotic, secret and criminal activities of the present regime inside the Beltway” (he meant George W. Bush’s), Lang ends on a note of fiery republicanism: 

What possible last resort is available to a people oppressed by statist tyranny if not to use its own force to throttle such despotism?

As with the SAF example, the clincher assumes that the ultimate political problem is collective self-defense against State tyranny. 

A final example, found all over the gunloving Web (24,900 hits in Google on 11/12/09), pushes the collective self-defense argument to mythic proportions. “A Little Gun Control History” argues that the hidden history of 20th century genocide is the in-ability of stigmatized groups to defend themselves. The Web site reads: 

“The Soviet Union established gun control in 1929. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated. 

Turkey established gun control in 1911. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated. 

Germany established gun control in 1938. From 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated. 

… [likewise China, Guatemala, Uganda, and Cambodia] 

With guns, we are “citizens.” Wthout them, we are “subjects.” 

The Gun-Control Side 

Before the 20th century, gun control laws in the United States were usually aimed at African Americans. The liminal category of free blacks was a special target for enforcement. After the Civil War all African Americans became “dangerous” in the eyes of the State. The so-called Black Codes, later known as Jim Crow Laws, effectively disarmed African Americans in the South. 

In the early 20th century, the stigma spread to new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. New York’s groundbreaking Sullivan Law regulated handguns for all law-abiding citizens, but in the long effort to get it passed, proponents used images of hot-tempered foreigners to recruit support. A January 27, 1905, New York Times editorial supported a ban on all concealable weapons in these terms: 

[The proposed] measure would prove corrective and salutary in a city filled with immigrants and evil communications, floating from the shores of Italy and Austria-Hungary. … Italian and other south Continental gentry here are acquainted with the pocket pistol, and while drunk or merrymaking will use it quite as handily as the stiletto. … It is hoped that this … mode of settling disputes may not spread to corrupt the native good manners of the community. 

The measure, effectively a handgun ban for all but the wealthy and connected, passed in 1911, after the fatal shootings of a New York City mayor and well-known muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips seemed to establish the existence of a threat. 

In those days the Left uncompromisingly opposed gun control. Socialist Labor Party leader Daniel De Leon, for example, attacked the Sullivan Law on the front page of the Daily People (October 3, 1911)—in the venerable terms of republican tradition. 

The Sullivan Law is a midnight burglarious attempt upon the freedom of the citizen and residents generally, their right “to KEEP and bear” arms;—it is a backstairs manoeuvre to place the State under martial law. … Even if it were not unconstitutional, the Sullivan law should be opposed tooth and nail as a scheme of tyranny. 

Federal gun control laws followed. First, under the Progressive government of Wood – row Wilson, was a 1919 excise tax that raised the price of firearms, then a 1927 ban on mail-order guns through the U.S. Post Office. (Private shipping was OK.) Both measures had the socially engineered effect of reducing the availability of guns to poor folk. 

More comprehensive laws extended their predecessors’ prohibitive taxes and licensing policies. The National Firearms Act of 1934 passed in a media blitz of sensationalist stories about the machine-gun violence of Al Capone and other hot-tempered foreign mobsters. The 1968 Gun Control Act passed in the wake of the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, and Dr. King. Proponents focused public attention on lone gunmen misfits, although not far under the surface was a fear-mongering subtext about the danger of urban “race riots.” Gun control, to put it bluntly, has ever operated at the lowest common denominator of racial/ethnic fear mongering. 

Today’s gun-control proponents are sensitive to overtly biased language but have not renounced the strategy of gaining support for the measures they propose by stigmatizing a recognizable segment of the population. A rash of recent gun-control appeals symbolically equates working-class whites, like the people I studied, with gun violence. The Web site of the DC nonprofit, Violence Policy Center (VPC), for example, warns ominously against 

a palpable, growing unrest among domestic fringe groups. … It was just this sort of discontent that led to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. 

The VPC (along with other gun-control activist groups) is waging a campaign against gun shows, portrayed on its Web site as a

readily available source of weapons and ammunition for a wide variety of criminals, including street gangs, white supremacists, would-be presidential assassins, and domestic terrorists. 

They’re tarring white gunlovers with the brush of “domestic” terrorism. Isn’t “domestic” a proxy for “white”? Considering that many gun-control activists are white, the finger of stigmatization would point perceptibly to class, and indeed studies show a class gap between gun-control proponents and gun-rights proponents. 

Another example from the wireless service provider, Credo, fans the same flames. Consistent with their branding as liberalprogressive activists, Credo fashioned a gun-control campaign around the fatal shootings of a medical doctor who performed abortions and a security guard at the Washington, DC, Holocaust Museum. Gone is the lone-gunman focus of 1968. In Credo’s appeal, these killings are not the acts of deranged individuals but “horrifying acts of right-wing domestic terrorism.” The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the appeal anxiously asserts, has called “rightwing extremism” the “most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.” 

A final, more explicit example: journalist Yasha Levine in an Alternet article linked a nationwide-ammunition shortage to the Tea Party demonstrations and the rants of a white supremacist. After describing a Tea Party demo as “channeling the spirit of Timothy McVeigh,” Levine too cited the Department of Homeland Security, warning that 

America’s shifting political landscape, the economic downturn and influx of returning vets all combined for a perfect storm likely to cause a swell in right-wing extremist organization activity. 

DHS has evidence, Levine claims, that the ammunition shortage can be explained by one thing: “Extremist groups are stockpiling weapons and ammo in preparation for … something.” This is stigmatization. 

Culture of Distrust 

Gun rights and gun control operate from mutually exclusive premises. One assumes a tyrannical state. The other assumes a benevolent state. One fears tyranny “from above.” The other fears disorder “from below.” One bases its argument on tradition. The other argues modern progress. 

But has gun control been progressive? Sociologist Gary Kleck’s 1997 book, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, finds defensive gun use in the deterrence of crime to be many times more frequent than official figures indicate. Economist John Lott’s More Guns Less, Less Crime (1998) argues (with abundant statistics) that widespread gun ownership actually lowers crime rates by increasing the “cost” of committing a crime for the criminal. If a possible crime victim might be armed, Lott explains, the stakes are higher—life and limb. The gun-control side of course has its own statistics: clearly gun control reduces the number of gun-related crimes. Overall crime rates, however, remain too close to call. 

So perhaps, from the State’s point of view, crime rates are not the point. Perhaps the State continues to commit public resources to the legislation, adjudication, and enforcement of gun-control measures for other reasons, classic but unmentionable reasons of State. The issue’s culturally polarizing effect could itself be a boon for the State, dividing the ranks of the governed for a symbolic combat that absorbs their energies and leaves actual governing to the experts. Mutual distrust between middle-class progressives and working-class conservatives would have the salutary political effect (from the State’s point of view) of pre-empting the emergence of an overwhelming popular mandate for deep systemic change. 

It seems to me that recent history gives us a good example of how this polarization effect works. The gun question, along with the other “culture-wars” issues are so-called “wedge issues.” To see what they wedged apart, we have only to consider whose feelings would have been polarized over these traditional versus modern “cultural” issues. 

In this case, I think what has been wedged apart was the working-class/middleclass political coalition of the New Deal era, a political problem for the restless “globalizers” of the 1970s. Intact, the political alliance that brought us the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, and other restrictions on the flow of capital, would have been capable of impeding the progress of “globalization.” 

It doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to connect these dots. It takes a longer view of history. The political alliance of middleclass professionals with the working-class, the people at the front lines of economic risk, has ever been the bane of financial schemers. Examples abound in the histories of industrial states. 

The great U.S. labor historian Herbert Gutman pointed out years ago how local middle classes of the late 19th century, including constables and sheriffs, commonly allied with strikers against the aggressions of the newly forming corporate giants. Together they chose state and federal politicians to fight “the trusts,” the disreputable ancestors of today’s corporate giants. The “wedge issue” trotted out by corporate promoters then was as old as the hills, the “violent” nature of the working class or socalled “lower classes.” Given a strong enough strike, unsympathetic newspapers would invariably accuse strikers of violence, splashing page one with a giant, fearsome headline—”Reign of Terror!”—even if it took paying local toughs to stage a riot. No expense was spared. The political alliance of middle class and working class had to be broken then, and had to be broken again after the New Deal reconstructed it. 

In our time, as it happened, workingclass livelihoods were spirited away in a torturous, prolonged process of global investment and local disinvestment, with no apologies and few defenders. Across the country, countless households, neighborhoods, and towns took a vertiginous fall from the brink of prosperity, and the bottom is not yet in sight. The people I studied in central New York believe that “the elite” have turned their backs on the “little guy” and on traditional American values in general. That would explain why residents were harassed for exposing the unethical schemes of local officials, or why “politically correct” administrators dismantled the High School marksmanship team at a time when hunting skills can put meat on the table more reliably than a paycheck. Along with millions of others in their position, the people I studied feel disenfranchised. 

This is where the gun question has been critical to the “culture wars” intervention. Without it, the other issues lack the force to make depressed working-class whites look scary enough to be political bogeymen. 

Working-class whites—and not only whites—are depressed for good reason, because they lost the homes and hopes that were theirs by generations of “sweat equity.” But they are no longer the only victims. In recent years, the risks and losses of “globalization” have ramified up the social scale, affecting even the lives of middleclass professionals. 

As it was in the 1930s, hard times so widely shared can be the foundation of a reinvigorated popular politics. Then as now, the disastrous fall-out of financial schemes, executed with the full connivance of public officials, revealed that our political problem is not the people beside us but the people “above” us. Liberated from the “culture wars,” we might again agree, across the middle-class/working-class gap, that the people “above” us have gone too far. 

References and Suggestions for Further Reading 

Adams, Jane, and D. Gorton. 2006. “Confederate Lane: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the Mississippi Delta.” American Ethnologist 33:288–309. 

Bageant, Joe. 2007. Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. New York. Crown Publishers. 

Bluestone, Barry, and Bennet Harrison. 1982. The De-industrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry. New York: Basic Books. 

Doukas, Dimitra. 2003. Worked Over: The Corporate Sabotage of an American Community. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 

Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth A. 1994. Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 

Ginsburg, Faye D. 1989. Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Hansen, Ed. 1995. “The Great Bambi War: Tocquevillians versus Keynesians in an Upstate New York County.” In Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf. Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Kleck, Gary. 1997. Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control. Chicago: Aldine Transaction. 

Lott, John R., Jr. 1998. More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Dimitra Doukas is a semi-retired anthropologist who continues to study and write about class cultures, politics, and local economies in the United States. She has taught at New York University, Cornell University, Dalhousie University, and the University of Denver.

Natasha Dow Schüll

Patsy, a green-eyed brunette in her mid- forties, began gambling soon after she moved to Las Vegas from California in the 1980s with her husband, a military officer who had been restationed at Nellis Air Force Base. Video poker machines had been introduced to the local gambling market in the late 1970s, and she discovered them on her trips to the grocery store. “My husband would give me money for food and milk, but I’d get stuck at the machines on the way in, and it would be gone in twenty minutes.. . . I would be gone too, I’d just zone into the screen and disappear.”

Ten years later, Patsy’s gambling had progressed to a point where she played video poker before work, at lunchtime, on all her breaks, after work, and all weekend long. “My life revolved around the machines, even the way I ate,” she recalls as we talk outside the Gamblers Anonymous meeting where we had met. Patsy dined with her husband and daughter only when the three met in casinos; she would eat rapidly, then excuse herself to the bathroom so that she could gamble. Most often she gambled alone, then slept in her van in the parking lot. “I would dream of the machines, I would be punching numbers all night.” Eating alone, sleeping alone, Patsy achieved a sort of libidinal autonomy. Her time, her social exchanges, her bodily functions, and even her dreams were oriented around gambling. “When I wasn’t playing,” she tells me, “my whole being was directed to getting back into that zone. It was a machine life.”

* * *

Since the mid-1980s in the United States, there has been a dramatic turn away from social forms of gambling, played at tables, to asocial forms of gambling, played at video terminals. Slot machines, formerly relegated to the sidelines of casinos floors, today generate twice as much revenue as all “live games” put together. As gamblers describe it, machine gambling is a solitary, absorptive activity in which they enter a dissociative state—a “zone,” as they call it—in which a sense of time, space, monetary value, social roles, and sometimes even their very sense of existence dissolves. “You can erase it all at the machines—you can even erase yourself,” a middle-aged electronics engineer named Randall tells me. Machine play conjures a cognitive and psychological state virtually free of the events, difficulties, and contingencies that life entails.

When machine gamblers began to present themselves in growing numbers for addiction treatment, clinicians and researchers proposed the term “escape gambling” (as opposed to “action gambling”) to describe their experience of withdrawal. “The consistency of the experience that’s described by my patients,” said Robert Hunter, a Las Vegas psychologist who has carved out a therapeutic niche in the treatment of gambling addiction, “is that of numbness or escape. . . . They don’t talk about excitement—they talk about climbing into the screen and getting lost.” By the mid-1990s in Las Vegas, the vast majority attending Gamblers Anonymous meetings played machines exclusively, and most preferred the game of video poker. While all contemporary slot machines offer a choice of how many credits to bet on each spin, video poker goes a step further by allowing players to decide which cards—of those they are “dealt” by the machine—they wish to hold or discard in order to make winning hands. As Hunter understands it, the game so completely concentrates the players’ attention on a series of specific choices that anything about their lives that is troubling—physically, emotionally, or socially—gets blotted out.

What can the self-dissolving zone of intensive video poker play tell us about the discontents of the self in contemporary American life? More than a symptom of the extreme tendencies of individual gambling addicts, it offers a window onto more general predicaments and anxieties and insight into the sort of technological encounters that individuals are likely to employ in the management of these predicaments and anxieties. Computers, video games, mobile phones, iPods, and the like have become a means through which people can manage their affective states and create a personal buffer zone against the uncertainties and worries of their world, and video poker is a case in point. The game allows players to suspend key elements of contemporary life—market-based exchange, monetary value, and conventional time—along with the social expectation for self-maximizing, risk-managing behavior that accompanies them. The activity achieves this suspension not by transcending or canceling out these elements and expected modes of conduct, but by isolating and intensifying them to the point where they turn into something else. By following this process, it becomes possible to track how shared social conditions and normative behavioral ideals contribute to shaping gambling addicts’ seemingly aberrant “machine lives,” and to discern in those lives a kind of immanent critique of broader discontents.

Suspending Choice

Since the late 1970s, in the context of diminishing governmental regulation and rising expectations for individual self-regulation and responsibility, citizens of capitalist democracies have come to regard the self “as a kind of enterprise, seeking to enhance and capitalize on existence itself through calculated acts and investments”; life choices are expressed and evaluated through a vocabulary of “incomes, allocations, costs, savings, even profits.”¹ Contemporary selfhood is a sort of “privatized actuarialism” in which individuals reflexively apply to their own lives the same techniques used to audit and otherwise ensure the financial health of corporations and government bureaucracies.²

As in the spheres of insurance, finance, and global politics, the application of risk- assessment techniques at the scale of individual lives is a means for controlling—and even profiting from—the particular contingencies of post-Fordist, finance-based capitalism. Specifically, the model actuarial self is expected to indemnify itself against the increased risks of unemployment that have accompanied the emergence of “flexible,”short-term regimes of service-based labor and the eclipse of social-welfare programs, while simultaneously reaping the economic rewards that come with exercising their own flexible and sometimes risky responses to this field of contingency. To fulfill this double expectation, individuals must be extremely autonomous, highly rational, and ever-alert masters of themselves and their decisions; constant contingency management is the task.

Practically speaking, this task is framed in terms of choice making. As the psychologist Barry Schwartz points out, the pressure to sift through an “oppressive abundance” of choice can tyrannize and debilitate, increasing the potential for disappointment, regret, and guilt, and leaving individuals “feeling barely able to manage” their lives.³ It is not merely the abundance of choice that burdens, for citizens of contemporary capitalist societies must, more often than not, make those choices without the knowledge, foresight, or resources that would enable them to be the maximizing, actuarial virtuosi of self-enterprise they are exhorted to be. Confronted with multiple choices and risks, they base their conduct as much on emotion, affect, and reflex as on calculative rationality.

What links can be drawn between the often perplexing circumstances of choice making, the cultural imperative for individual contingency management, and the zone of intensive video poker? While at play, individuals are continually in the position of making consequential choices—choices, that is, between right and wrong decisions, continuing a winning streak or ending a losing streak, ramping up or reducing their magnitude or speed and investment, and so forth. In this sense, machine gambling multiplies occasions for the kinds of risk taking and choice making that are demanded of subjects in contemporary capitalist societies. At the same time, it takes the edge off the task of contingency management by dis- tilling risks and choices into a digitized, programmatic form. In effect, the activity contracts the scope and stakes of risky choice; although gambling has very real consequences in players’ daily lives, within the moment-to-moment process of repeat play inconsequentiality holds sway. In the smooth zone of video poker, choices become a means for tuning out the worldly decisions they would ordinarily concern; every choice, that is, becomes a choice to continue the zone.

Suspending Social Exchange

The tuning out of out worldly choices, contingencies, and consequences in the zone of machine gambling depends on the exclusion of other people. “I don’t want to have a human interface” says Julie, a psychology student at the University of Nevada. “I can’t stand to have anybody within my zone.” Machine gamblers go to great lengths to ensure their isolation. Some select machines in corners or at the end of a row, while others place coin cups upside-down on adjacent machines to prevent people from sitting beside them. “I resent someone breaking my trance” says Randall, who cashes out and moves to another machine if someone talks to him while he is playing. Sharon has learned to buy a liter of Pepsi and two packs of cigarettes before sitting at the machines, so that cocktail waitresses will not interrupt her. “I put my foot up on one side and that’s the final barrier: Leave me alone. I want to hang a DO NOT DISTURB sign on my back.”

Even as the zone ultimately effaces their sense of self, machine gamblers’ rigorous exclusion of relationality appears, at least initially, to be an act of extreme autonomy and even selfishness. In this sense, video poker would seem to fit the script for the maximizing self—a being who is expected to pursue its goals without being hindered by human ties, commitments, and dependencies. “Other people break the flow and I can’t stand it,” says Julie of live-card gaming. “I have to get up and go to a machine, where nobody holds me back, where there’s no interference to stop me, where I can have my free rein—go all the way with no obstacles.” Other people figure as a kind of “interference” that acts as a drag on her propensities.

Yet alongside machine gamblers’ self-interested drive to pursue the zone unhindered by others runs an equally strong current of self-protection and distrust of social relations. This becomes readily apparent in the comparison with the interpersonal engagement of traditional card gambling. “In live games,” Julie observes, “you have to take other people into account, other minds making decisions. Like when you’re competing for a promotion—you’re dealing with other people who decide which one is the best. You can’t get into their minds, you can’t push their buttons, you can’t do anything about it—just sit back and hope and wait. But when you’re on a machine, you don’t compete against other people.” Live card play demands that she “take other people into account” in order not to be displaced or passed over by them, and yet, perversely, provides no clear feedback on which she might base her calculations or hedge her bets. The immersive zone of machine play, by contrast, offers a reprieve from the nebulous and risky calculative matrix of social interaction, shielding her from the monitoring gaze of others and relieving her of the need to monitor them in return.

Lola, a buffet waitress and mother of four, describes this reprieve as a kind of vacation: “If you work with people every day, the last thing you want to do is talk to another person when you’re free. You want to take a vacation from people. With the machine there’s no person that can talk back, no human contact or involvement or communication, just a little square box, a screen.” Machine gamblers like Lola frequently connect their preference for the asocial, robotic procedure of machine play to the hypersociality demanded by their jobs—in real estate, accounting, insurance, sales, and other service fields. In the 1980s, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild proposed the term “emotional labor” to characterize the demands placed on many workers in the postindustrial, service economy.⁴ While physical machine labor carries the risk of alienation from one’s body, emotional labor carries the risk of becoming estranged from one’s feelings and affects as they are processed and managed in the marketplace of social relations. Josie, an insurance agent, experiences this kind of emotional exhaustion: “All day long I have to help people with their finances and their scholarships, help them be responsible. I’m selling insurance, selling investments, I’m taking their money—and I’ve got to put myself in a position where they will believe what I’m selling is true. After work, I have to go to the machines.” There, she finds respite from the incessant actuarial practices and interpersonal pressures that her vocation entails. “I was safe and away,” Josie elaborates. “Nobody talked to me, nobody asked me any questions, nobody wanted any bigger decision than if I wanted to keep the king or the ace.”

Patsy recalls her work as a welfare officer at the State of Nevada’s food stamp office: “All day long I’d hear sad stories of no food, unwanted pregnancy, violence. But it all slid right off me because I was so wrapped up in those machines. I was like a robot: Next. Snap. What’s your zip code? I wasn’t human.” In the simplified, mechanical exchange with gambling machines, she removes herself from the complicated and often insurmountable needs and worries of others, to a point where she herself becomes robotlike, impervious to human distress and her inability to assuage it. “The machines were like heaven,” Patsy remembers, “because I didn’t have to talk to them, I just had to feed them money.” The digitized process of “feeding” and response is a form of exchange emptied of the inscrutabilities of social relations. “The interaction was clean cut, the parameters clearly defined,” Sharon notes. “I decided which cards to keep, which to discard, case closed. All I had to do was pick YES or NO.” Video poker gamblers enter a kind of safety zone in which choices do not implicate them in webs of uncertainty and consequence; choices are made without reference to others and seemingly impact no one.

Suspending Money Value

At the same time that machine gambling alters the nature of exchange to a point where it becomes disconnected from relationships, it alters the nature of money’s role in the social world. Money typically serves to facilitate exchanges with others and establish a social identity, yet in the asocial, insulated encounter with the gambling machine money becomes a currency of disconnection from others and even oneself. “You put a twenty dollar bill in the machine and it’s no longer a twenty dollar bill, it has no value in that sense,” Julie tells me. “It’s like a token, it excludes money value completely.” “Money has no value, no significance,” says another, “it’s just this thing—just get me in the zone, that’s all.” “In the zone state,” echoes a gambler named Katrina, “there is no real money—there are only credits to be maintained.”

Attesting to the conversion of money value into zone value, Sharon admits that she would rather “play off” a jackpot than cash it out, as this would mean halting her play to wait for the machine to drop her winnings, or, in the event that its hopper is low, for attendants to come pay her off. “It’s strange,” says Lola, “but winning can disappoint me, especially if I win right away.” Winning too much, too soon, or too often can interrupt the tempo of play and disturb the harmonious regularity of the zone. Julie explains: “If it’s a moderate day—win, lose, win, lose—you keep the same pace. But if you win big, it can prevent you from staying in the zone.” If in the everyday economy time is spent to earn money, within the economy of the zone money is spent to buy time. “You’re not playing for money,” says Julie, “you’re playing for credit—credit so you can sit there longer, which is the goal. It’s not about winning, it’s about continuing to play.”

Paradoxically, in order for money to lose its value as a means of acquisition, that value must be at stake in the gambling exchange. “The transaction must involve money,” the gambling scholar Charles Livingstone elaborates, “because money is the central signification of our age, the materialization of social relations and thus the bridge to everyone and everything that is to be had in modernity.”⁵ It is possible for a sense of monetary value to become suspended in machine gambling not because money is absent, but because the activity mobilizes it in such a way that it no longer works as it typically does. Money becomes the bridge away from everyone and everything, leading to a zone beyond value, with no social or economic significance.

When credits get too low, money’s everyday value moves to the fore and begins to matter once again. “I get really tense if I only have twenty credits left,” says Lola, “the tension, the anxiousness, starts building in me; all I really want at that point is enough credits to just keep playing.” “When you start losing,” Julie tells us, “the pace picks up—you’re running out of player credit, you’re running out of money. . . .” As the worldly value- charge of money intrudes upon the zone, it introduces tension where tensionlessness is sought and relationality where dissociation is sought. “In the back of my head I know it’s going to end, I know the transition is going to come—no longer the world according to the zone, but the real world. The things I escaped from start crowding back into my brain.” In the moment of its total loss, money returns to the scene as a tangible limit and a medium of dependency. “Money disappears in the zone,” writes Livingstone, “yet in the moment when the money’s gone, so too is ‘the zone.’”⁶ The value of money reasserts itself precisely because money in its conventional, real-world state remains the underlying means of access to the zone.

This is not to say that money’s real-world value remains unaffected by zone value. “Gambling changed my relationship to money,” remembers Randall. “I’d conserve gas so I’d have the money to gamble, and instead of going to the grocery store regularly, I’d wait to go to Wal-Mart and do it all at one time—that way I wouldn’t have to waste the gas to go more than once. I economized.” Caught between the zone and the ordinary world, gamblers “economize” in a register of value that has no clear reference point.

“In a society such as ours,” asks the cultural historian Jackson Lears in his book on gambling in America, “where responsibility and choice are exalted, where capital accumulation is a duty and cash a sacred cow, what could be more subversive than the readiness to reduce money to mere counters in a game?”⁷ Because gamblers play with money rather than for it, he concludes that they pose a challenge to the maximizing ethos of American culture. Yet as their “machine lives” show us, despite their seeming renunciation of money they continue to act, however perversely, within the mainstream monetary value system. This becomes readily apparent when one considers gamblers’ extensive know-how and use of everyday finance and banking practices.

“I always had income coming in,” Patsy tells me, “every week it was something—a $600 paycheck, $500 child support, my husband’s retirement checks. We always had like three credit cards so if I had a bad spell I’d just put it on the cards.” The resources of a conventional financial lifestyle—mortgages, credit cards, bank loans, and alimony payments—support Patsy’s compulsive gambling, and occasionally vice versa: “One time I had maxed out the three cards, but then I hit a jackpot and paid them all off.” This sort of fiscal triage does not exactly subvert the logic of the actuarial self; if anything, it intensifies or “maxes out” that logic. Although it may seem contrary to calculative rationality, it shares something with the quotidian shuffling of debt among credit sources that has become typical among Americans.

Although gambling addicts’ treatment of money neither neatly renounces nor neatly rehearses the workings of the everyday value system, it alters this system in a way that brings its discontents and contradictions to the fore. As Josie told us earlier, by day she advises others on how they might best insure against future losses: “I have to help people be responsible. . . . I’ve got to put myself in a position where they will believe what I’m selling is true.” One gets the sense that she herself does not quite believe in what she is selling; it is as if her awareness that the levels of risk assigned to lives and investments by the insurance industry are always more arbitrary than stated leads her to take greater personal financial risks. “After work, I have to go to the machines.” Her gambling both employs and rejects the actuarial logic of insurance and the monetary value that undergirds it. “In my life before gambling,” she tells me, “money was almost like a God, I had to have it. But with the gambling, money had no value, no significance, it was just this thing—just get me in the zone, that’s all. . . . You lose value, until there’s no value at all. Except the zone—the zone is your God.”

Suspending Clock Time

The element of time is another resource of calculative selfhood that gambling addicts manage to convert into a means of escape through their machine play—again, by distilling its real-world value to a point where it assumes another value altogether. While gambling addicts may remain for seventeen hours or even whole weekends at machines, the “clock time” (as they call it) by which those long stretches are measured “stops mattering,” “sits still,” is “gone” or “lost.” Like money, time in the zone becomes a kind of credit whose value shifts in line with the rhythms of machine play; gamblers speak of spending time, salvaging it, squandering it. Randall, noting a phenomenological kinship between his video poker play and his race car driving, comments that both activities make him feel he is “bending” time: “I go into a different time frame, like in slow motion . . . it’s a whole other time zone.”

Just as gamblers must maintain sufficient monetary credit to keep the zone state going, they must maintain sufficient temporal credit; too little time, and the real world will impinge upon the zone—work shifts to begin, doctors appointments to be kept, children to be picked up from school. When time begins to “run out,” players thus seek to extract more and more plays from it. As Julie describes in the following passage, she extends zone time by constantly resetting the endpoint of her play:

When the time comes to leave and the things I escaped from start crowding back into my brain, I find myself rationalizing, Well, I don’t really have to go today . . . and I ask an attendant to hold my machine while I run to the payphone to call and buy myself more time, and then back to continue, and now there’s three more hours. And when those three hours are up, I think, I’ll have to save money for the phone calls I’ll have to make to cancel all the appointments I am going to miss. . . .I’m thinking of how to arrange things so that I can stay there, how to economize.

In the intervals of tension that threaten the continuation of her play, Julie calculates in two registers of time at once—clock time and zone time. How can she parlay the former into the latter? Or, as she asks above, how to economize? At the edges of the zone, Julie must remain mindful of the coins she needs to “save” to cover the cost of phone calls that might free up clock time and thus buy her more zone time. (Again, we see that the zone never entirely loses its economic market metric, for real-world money is what buys the clock time that buys zone time.)

When she can buy herself no more time and real-world demands press upon her, Julie resorts to speed, as she does when her play credits are running dangerously low. “When I absolutely have to be somewhere, then I have to play as much as I can possibly play before leaving. I start chasing, I play faster and faster—Oh God, I only have fifteen more minutes, ten more minutes. . . .” In the zone, she experiences time as event driven rather than clock driven, elastic rather than rigid.

If real-world temporal tendencies express themselves in the zone and in gamblers’ addiction to it, it is also the case that the technologically accelerated temporality of the machine zone enters into and saturates gamblers’ experience of real-world time. “Time in general, not just when I’m playing,” Sharon notes, “becomes very distorted. I feel like I can manipulate it very easily, salvage much more than I can from a small unit of it: go grocery shopping on the way to the casino, and while I’m there make a doctor’s appointment on the cellular phone, and then on the way home get the shoelaces I need. . . . Everything I do is relative to gambling time.”

“I’d be later and later and later to work,” Patsy recalls. “At break time, I’d ask my supervisor, Do you mind if I go to the bank?— and I’d already be out the door. My sense of time was totally out the door. I was just wound. I’d win a Royal [Flush] and I’d be ticked off because I’d have to wait for them to come pay me off. The other workers would look at the clock when I came back and I would think, What are you looking at the clock for? Mind your own business.” At every chance, Patsy attempts to escape clock time, such that she becomes almost like a clock herself: she is “wound”; she is “ticked off” as time ticks by during her wait for a jackpot payoff; when she returns to work, resentful co-workers look pointedly at the clock. “When I wasn’t playing,” she told us earlier, “my whole being was directed to getting back into that zone. It was a machine life.”

Machine Life

“I was like the walking dead,” Patsy remembers. “I went through all the motions, but I wasn’t really living, because I was always channeled, super-tunnel vision, to get back to that machine.” “Awake, my whole day was structured around getting out of the house to go gamble,” echoes Sharon. “At night, I would dream about the machine— I’d see it, the cards flipping, the whole screen. I’d be playing, making decisions about which cards to keep and which to throw away.” In Sharon’s account, the game interface structures her waking life and dream life with its unending flow of minute “decisions.”

As we have seen, a complicated relationship exists between the technologically mediated mini-decisions that compose video poker and the ever-proliferating choices, decisions, and risks that actuarial selves face in free-market society. The activity narrows the bandwidth of choice, shrinking it down to a limited universe of rules, a formula. Although choices are multiplied, they are digitally reformatted as a self-dissolving flow of repetitious action that unfolds in the absence of “choosing” as such. In this sense, it is not the case that gambling addicts are beyond choice but that choice itself, as formatted by machines, becomes the medium of their compulsion. “I was addicted to making decisions in an unmessy way,” Sharon remarks, “to engaging in something where I knew what the outcome would be.”

“Most people define gambling as pure chance, where you don’t know the outcome,” she goes on. “But I do know: either I’m going to win, or I’m going to lose. . . . So it isn’t really a gamble at all—in fact, it’s one of the few places I’m certain about anything.” Counterintuitively, what gamblers seek through their engagements with gambling machines is a zone of reliability, safety, and affective calm that removes them from the volatility they experience in their social, financial, and personal lives. Although the activity deals in chance, its holds worldly contingencies in a kind of abeyance by immediately resolving bets with the quick press of a button, admitting gamblers into an otherwise elusive zone of certainty. In this zone, aspects of life central to contemporary capitalism and the service economy—competitive exchange between individuals, money as the chief symbol or form of this exchange, and the market-based temporal framework within which it is conducted and by which its value is measured—are significantly altered. Video poker distills these aspects of life into their elementary forms (namely, risk-based interaction, actuarial economic thinking, and compressed, elastic time) and applies them to a course of action formatted in such a way that they cease to serve as tools for self-enterprise and instead serve as the means to continue play.

Yet the suspension of the self and its actuarial imperative is never entirely complete. This incompleteness is reflected in the ambivalence that gamblers express toward the “choices” they face while gambling, describing them as at once emancipatory and entrapping, annihilatory and capacitating, reassuring and demonic. Lola, the buffet waitress, speaks of “resting in the machine,” then later in her narrative describes video poker’s relentless stream of card choosing as commanding—the activity “hooks,” “holds,” and “captures” her attention. “You have no choice but to concentrate on the screen,” remarks Julie, “you simply cannot think about anything except which cards you are going to choose to keep and which you are going to choose to discard.” Even as gambling addicts in the zone strive for release from the procession of choices they face in their daily lives, they remain caught in the predicaments of the enterprising self.

Natasha Dow Schüll is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her book, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press, 2012), explores the feedback between the technological configuration of gambling activities and the experience of addiction. 

Additional Resources

60 Minutes Broadcast featuring Natasha Dow Schüll. 

Natasha Dow Schüll's homepage.

Natasha Dow Schüll's faculty MIT page.

Notes

This article is drawn from Natasha Dow Schüll’s book, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press, 2012). Used with permission.

All photos are by the author.

1. Rose 1999, 164. 2. O’Malley 1996, 198. 3. Schwartz 2005. 4. Hochschild 1983. 5. Livingstone 2005, 533. 6. Livingstone 2005, 533. 7. Lears 2003.

References

Hochschild, Arlie. 1983. The Managed Heart. Berkeley: University of California.

Lears, Jackson. 2003. Something for Nothing: Luck in America. New York: Viking Press.

Livingstone, Charles. 2005. “Desire and the Con- sumption of Danger: Electronic Gaming Ma- chines and the Commodification of Interiority.” Addiction Research and Theory 13 (6): 523–34.

O’Malley, Pat. 1996. “Risk and Responsibility.” In A. Barry, T. Osborne, and N. Rose, eds. Fou-cault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liber- alism, and Rationalities of Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 189–208.

Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Re- framing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press.

Schwartz, Barry. 2005. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. New York: ECCO.

Dillon Mahoney

#Anthropology

Once upon a time, in the late 19^th century, anthropology was popular, but it wasn't necessarily a good thing. From pseudo-scientific justifications of racial hierarchies to the displays of so-called primitive people at ethnographic expositions, anthropology satisfied an ever growing public yearning for the exotic thrill. This thrill for the exotic, for the occult, for the uncivilized, was fueled on the one hand by an assumption that gazing at exotic peoples was like traveling back in time, like staring at your own primitive reflection. On the other hand, and quite paradoxically, this nostalgia for an imagined past was fueled by a modern desire to eliminate the “primitive” aspects of modern, civilized society. In contrast to anthropological evolutionism with its origins in European colonization and natural history, the American anthropologist, Franz Boas, considered by many to be the father of American cultural anthropology, felt that anthropology had an obligation to counter incorrect assumptions about the superiority of the West. While Working on ethnographic exhibits at museums and “Pre-Colombian Expositions,” Boas believed in these early days of his career that, by making anthropological knowledge from long-term research with so-called “primitive cultures” publicly available, he could ingrain in average citizens certain ideas of cultural relativism – that while all cultures are different, none is better or worse, more “civilized” or less. He argued that anthropology had an important role to play in providing the public with beneficial examples of cultural differences and similarities that they might then use for self-reflection.

I think of Boas as I write this first post of Anthropology Now's Betwixt and Between, because just like Boas, our goal here is founded on a possibly naïve assumption that when presented with anthropological perspectives on contemporary events, the public will learn to think beyond simple “white” vs. “black,” “us” vs. “them” or “West” vs. “rest” ways of understanding cultural differences and similarities. Instead of connecting to the public through public displays like Boas, we will use the World Wide Web. Instead of looking for the exotic in history or in distant locations, we look for the exotic in our own home fields and look for the familiar in faraway places. Instead of invoking science to legitimize our ideas, we aim to encourage critical anthropological thought, of science too. In short, we hope that we can help make anthropological insights more popular and accessible without being superficial.

If it were not for the sudden explosion of excitement caused by Kony2012 and the accompanying viral video, I would not think back to Boas right now.  Within one week of being posted on YouTube by San Diego-based creators Invisible Children, Inc. The 25-minute video profiling Central African warlord Joseph Kony and his recruitment of child soldiers had received more than 80 million views, prompting a wave of youth mobilization in American high schools and furious critiques of Invisible Children, Inc. Having taught about Joseph Kony and his Lords Liberation Army in my Anthropology of Africa classes at Rutgers University, I was intrigued by any discussion of Kony.  However, and quite to my own disappointment, I could see the same problems encountered by Boas in the late 19th century emerging from Kony2012.  I cannot help but wonder if Invisible Children are not trying to achieve something similar to a 19th century Popular Anthropology through the use of videos like that profiling Joseph Kony.  Like the “exotic” and evolutionary-oriented anthropological exhibitions of the past, they allow us to gaze at a “primitive” reality (who would dare to argue that child soldiers represent progress?) at some far away exotic land from the comforts of our own familiar environment. And like the ethnographic expositions of the past, their popular message distorts more than it reveals. However, unlike the ethnographic expositions of the past, Kony2012 is free for everybody with high speed internet. Now, press “like” to make a change!

Since the early days of the industrial revolution, intellectuals have been warning of the dangerous myth of technology as an emancipatory force. First, because it is exactly what many of those in positions of power want us to think, and second, because it blinds us to the violent sides of so-called progress. We, as a new generation of anthropologists that have both the access and the understanding of new media, face the challenge of provoking the public to think beyond taken-for-granted notions of right and wrong in the face of widespread social injustice.

So we return to Boas.  By the eve of the First World War, Boas had left the museums for the classrooms at Columbia University and began to train a new generation of American cultural anthropologists.  His attempts to make the American public more aware of cultural differences and similarities had not worked as planned.  His confidence in the mobilization of the public, of popular anthropology, or of how the public would respond to anthropological knowledge presented through popular displays was shaken, especially after the Spanish American War and a continued rise in American imperialism throughout the early 20th century. In 1916, Boas wrote that “the number of people in [the United States] who are willing and able to enter into modes of thought of other nations is altogether too small … The American who is cognizant only of his own standpoint sets himself up as arbiter of the world.”  These words are just as true 100 years later, especially in light of the naiveté accompanying Kony2012.  How can Anthropology Now's guest blogger venue take on this new challenge of disseminating and translating anthropological knowledge, while learning from Franz Boas, Kony2012, and so many others who have attempted to bridge the gap between social knowledge and social action?  We are not completely sure, but this uncertainty implies numerous possibilities, and possibility is a wonderful place to start.

Dillon Mahoney teaches cultural and linguistic anthropology at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the politics of telecommunications and tourism development in East Africa. He has done research in Mombasa, Kenya since 2001.

Betwixt and Between is Anthropology Now's guest blogger venue. We welcome posts that engage the public with contemporary issues and anthropological thought. Betwixt and Between lies between the material and the virtual; between the local and the global; between the text and the hyper-text; between the real and the imagined; between academic-speak and daily-speak. It refers to a state of being in several worlds at once, to a state of being neither here nor there, while being here and there at the same time. It is a state of uncertainty, of insecurity and of numerous possibilities.

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 Harel. 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.

Postscript

2013: The last two years were characterized by a drastic increase in settler violence (pdf file) against Palestinians, which included the torching of fields, burning of mosques, as well as bodily harm. In 2011, settler violence appeared for the first time in the US state department list of "terrorist incidents."[1] The settlers committing the violence oppose the secular elements of the Israeli state and work towards establishing a Jewish theocracy in the Biblical Land of Israel instead. Espousing a theology of spiritual hierarchy, they place Jewish “souls” as supreme to all others, and take actions to undermine Palestinian state-building through a myriad of activities including terror. These acts of violence received a new ethical support from The King’s Torah (Torat Ha’melec), a recent Hallachic book, which provides theological rationales for the killing of non-Jews: “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults” (Elitzur and Shapira 2010: 207).

The last two years were also characterized by the unexpected rise of a new settler peace movement, Land of Peace, lead by Rabbi Menahem Froman, the chief Rabbi of the settlement of Tekoah and a Jewish mystic. Members of Land of Peace understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as religious at its core and therefore view themselves as the “heart of the conflict.” However, emphasizing the uniting power of monotheistic faith, members of this movement believe they are also “the heart of the solution.” Rabbi Fruman contends that all peace initiatives are doomed to fail without the central involvement of Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the US, EU and Israel. Some members of this settler movement are offering to live as a Jewish minority in a future Palestinian state and act as “a bridge toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians.” Indeed, “settlers for peace” sounds like an ethical oxymoron. Yet, in challenging our taken for granted sociopolitical categories, these settlers and their brave Palestinian partners bring us back to a basic human fact: true peace will always be the work of true enemies.     

Rabbi Froman (fourth from the left) and members of Land of Peace during a peace missionin in Qusra (plestinian village, West Bank), where a mosque was vandalized by extreemist settlers

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