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.

A Right to Beauty

Alexander Edmonds

While living in Rio de Janeiro in 1999, I saw something that caught my at­tention: a television broadcast of a Carnival parade that paid homage to a plastic sur­geon, Dr. Ivo Pitanguy. The doctor led the procession surrounded by samba dancers in feathers and bikinis. Over a thundering drum section and the anarchic screech of a cuíca (Brazilian friction drum), the singer praised Pitanguy for “awakening the self-esteem in each ego” with a “scalpel guided by heaven.”

It was the height of Rio’s sticky summer, and the city had almost slowed to a stand­still, as had my progress on the research for my anthropology doctorate on Afro-Brazil­ian syncretism. After seeing the parade, I be­gan to notice that Rio’s plastic surgery clin­ics were almost as numerous as beauty parlors (and there are a lot of those). New-stands sold magazines with titles like Plás­tica & Beauty, next to Marie Claire. I as­sumed that the popularity of cosmetic surgery in a developing nation was one more example of Brazil’s gaping inequali­ties.But Pitanguy has long maintained that plastic surgery was not only for the rich: “The poor have the right to be beautiful, too,” he has said.

The beauty of the human body has raised distinct ethical issues in different epochs. The literary scholar Elaine Scarry pointed out that in the classical world a glimpse of a beautiful person could imperil an observer. In his “Phaedrus” Plato describes a man who after beholding a beautiful youth be­gins to spin, shudder, shiver, and sweat. With the rise of mass consumerism, ethical discussions have focused on images of fe­male beauty. Beauty ideals are blamed for eating disorders and body alienation. But Pitanguy’s remark raises yet another issue: Is beauty a right, which, like education or health care, should be realized with the help of public institutions and expertise?

The question might seem absurd. Pitan­guy’s talk of rights echoes the slogans of make-up marketing (e.g., L’Oreal’s “Because you’re worth it” campaign). Yet his vision of plastic surgery reflects a clinical reality that he helped create. For years he has per­formed charity surgeries for the poor. More radically, some of his students offer free cos­metic operations in the nation’s public-health system.

After a long wait, I began new fieldwork among a “tribe” of Cariocas (residents of Rio) less familiar to me: socialites and their maids, divorced housewives, unemployed secretaries, aspiring celebrities, transvestite prostitutes, and other patients who were making Brazil, as a national news magazine bragged, the “empire of the scalpel.”

I first met Ester through her former employer, a successful plastic surgeon, for whom she’d worked as his personal cook. Ester lived near the surgeon in Vidigal, a favela flanking the brilliant white sand beach of Leblon. One day, after she’d prepared dinner for his family, she shyly told him in private, “Doc­tor, I want to put in silicone.”

After reading up on prosthetic materials in an Internet café, she’d settled on a mid-cost model of breast implant (1,500 real, or about $900), size (175 cm), and shape (nat­ural), and convinced the doctor in a minute that she was a good candidate. Hesitant to perform the surgery on his domestic em­ployee, he referred her to a young resident in Pitanguy’s clinic.

Ester left school at 14 to work beside her mother as a maid, and now has two young kids. While taking night classes to get her high-school diploma, she dreamed of “working with numbers.”� Job prospects were grim, however, and she said she’d take anything, even “working for a family” (a eu­phemism for domestic service). I asked her why she wanted to have the surgery. “I didn’t put in an implant to exhibit myself, but to feel better. It wasn’t a simple vanity, but a … necessary vanity. Surgery improves a woman’s auto-estima.”

Ester mentioned a key concept in Pitan­guy’s vision of plastic surgery’s healing po­tential: self-esteem. A prolific writer, Pitan­guy says he takes a “humanistic” approach to medicine. Most of his 800-plus publica­tions are technical, but some cite thinkers, such as Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss, rarely found in medical works (hence Pitanguy’s sobriquet, given by a col­league: the “philosopher of plástica”). With its wide-ranging reflections, this oeuvre has earned Pitanguy a place in Brazil’s presti­gious academy of letters.

It also outlines a radical therapeutic justi­fication for cosmetic surgery. Pitanguy ar­gues that the real object of healing is not the body, but the mind. A plastic surgeon is a “psychologist with a scalpel in his hand.”

This idea led Pitanguy to argue for the “union” of cosmetic and reconstructive pro­cedures. In both types of surgery beauty and mental healing subtly mingle, he claims, and both benefit health. Pitanguy still makes a distinction between cosmetic and recon­structive operations. Santa Casa—which is run with a mix of charity and state fund­ing—offers the latter for free, but charges a small fee to cover the costs of anesthesia and medical materials for cosmetic opera­tions. But other surgeons, including some of Pitanguy’s students, have gone further, offer­ing free cosmetic surgery in public hospi­tals.

We might ask: if you’re psychologically suffering, why not have psychological treat­ment? One doctor had this response: “What is the difference between a plastic surgeon and a psychoanalyst? The psychoanalyst knows everything but changes nothing. The plastic surgeon knows nothing but changes everything.”

He was joking, but he hit on a change in Brazil’s therapeutic landscape.

Psychoanalysis and plastic surgery, both once maverick medical specialties, overlap closely in their historical development. While the “talking cure” treated bodily complaints via the mind, plastic surgery healed mental suffering via the body. Histo­rian Sander Gilman called plastic surgery “psychoanalysis in reverse.” In Brazil, as in Argentina, psychoanalysis enjoyed extraor­dinary popularity among wealthier Brazil­hans.

“The poor prefer surgery.”

ians. But many veterans of Freudian or La­canian therapy have supplemented or sup­planted it with plástica. For the patients at public hospitals, psychoanalysis had never been “an option,” a psychologist who worked in Pitanguy’s clinic told me. Echo­ing the words of the mischievous Carnival designer, she explained, “The poor prefer surgery.”

Pitanguy’s ideas would have had little influ­ence if it were not for his reputation as a skilled surgeon. Starting in the 1940s Pitan­guy trained with leading plastic surgeons in Europe and the United States. One of his mentors in Britain was Sir Harold Gillies, who pioneered techniques in modern plas­tic surgery while operating on mutilated World War I veterans. His long career thus spans the 20th-century transformation of the specialty from primarily reconstructive tech­niques to primarily cosmetic improvements. Over the last five decades, Pitanguy has trained over 500 surgeons. His students have in turn trained new generations of sur­geons, spreading their mentor’s techniques and “philosophy” as they open up practices around the country and abroad.

Pitanguy’s views of plastic surgery are in some ways no different than those of the wider specialty. Plastic surgery gained legiti­macy in the early 20th century by limiting itself to reconstructive operations. The “beauty doctor” was a term of derision. But as techniques improved they were used for cosmetic improvements. Missing, however, was a valid diagnosis. Concepts like psy­choanalyst Alfred Adler’s inferiority com­plex—and later low self-esteem—provided a missing link.

Victorians saw a cleft palate as a defect that built character. For us it hinders self-realization and merits corrective surgery. This shift reflects a new attitude toward ap­pearance and mental health: the notion that at least some defects cause unfair suffering and social stigma is now widely accepted. But Brazilian surgeons take this reasoning a step further. Cosmetic surgery is a consumer service in most of the world. In Brazil it is becoming, as Ester put it, a “necessary van­ity.” Or as one surgeon said, “Faced with an aesthetic defect, the poor suffer as much as the rich.”

Oddly enough for a plastic surgeon, Pi­tanguy is an aesthetic relativist. Some plas­tic surgeons cite Greek mathematicians to argue there is a universal beauty ideal based on classical notions of proportion. But Pi­tanguy, whose patients often have mixed African, indigenous, and European ancestry, stresses that aesthetic ideals vary by epoch and ethnicity. What matters are not objec­tive notions of beauty, but how the patient feels. As his colleague says, the job of the plastic surgeon is to simply “follow desires.”

Yet, such desires are not simply a matter of psychology. Brazil’s pop music and TV shows are filled with talk of a new kind of celebrity: the siliconada. These actresses and models pose in medical magazines, the mainstream women’s press, and Brazilian versions of Playboy, which are read (or viewed) by female consumers. Patients are on average younger than they were 20 years ago. They often request minor changes to become, as one surgeon said, “more per­fect.” Unlike fashion’s embrace of playful dissimulation and seduction, this beauty practice instead insists on correcting pre­cisely measured flaws. Plastic surgery may contribute to a biologized view of sex where pleasure and fantasy matter less than the anatomical “truth” of the bare body.

While Pitanguy views plastic surgery as part of mental health, it is also becoming a rou­tine intervention in women’s health. As else­where in the world, the majority of patients in Brazil are female. Ester said, “I was a mother twice. I had an enormous belly and it never returned to normal. Plástica can give you a muscular correction, they stretch the skin, cut it.” Happy with the results of her breast surgery, she was now saving up for abdominoplasty and liposuction. Some women (and plastic surgeons) blame preg­nancy and breast feeding for breasts that are “fallen,” “shrunken,” or “shriveled like a passion fruit left in the refrigerator drawer,” and which can be corrected with cosmetic surgery.

In the United States, the growth of the “mommy job” has provoked a medical and cultural controversy. Bloggers have vehe­mently denounced “yuppie yummy mum­mies,” while the New York Times warned about the “pathologization” of motherhood. But in Brazil, such postpartum body con­touring is in many ways becoming inte­grated into mainstream reproductive and sexual health practices.

Some ob-gyns and psychologists refer pa­tients to plastic surgeons. Ob-gyns may also counsel expectant mothers how to manage weight gain, balancing between health and aesthetic factors. News media run features on women’s health that juxtapose advances in dieting pills and breast implants next to improvements in techniques for breast can­cer screening. Brazil also has a highly inter­ventionist tradition of medical managing of women’s health. It is perhaps not coinciden­tal that Brazil has not only high rates of plastic surgery, but also high rates of Ce­sarean sections (70 percent of deliveries in some private hospitals), tubal ligations, and other surgeries for women. Plástica can be seen as a means to correct a scar or flaccid­ity following a C-section, or else more sub­tly as a “gift to the self” after the sacrifice of childbirth and the pain of other surgeries. Other women see elective surgeries as part of a modern standard of care, more or less routine for the middle class, but only spo­radically available to the poor. One favela resident remarked: “If a girl from Ipanema can have a 5,000 reals breast job, then I have the right, too.”

Brazil also provides a “good working en­vironment,” surgeons say, compared to the United States or Europe. One resident re­marked, “Patients here do not feel they have the right to pursue a malpractice suit.” He linked this to a cultural trait: “The Latin pa­tient is friendly, more open, more sentimen­tal. This is better for us because even if the patient is not satisfied, she is less likely to sue.” In the United States, patients must sign a form saying they understand the risks of sur­gery—a formality often dispensed with in Brazil. In public hospitals, which often have very short consultations, some patients were uninformed about the possibility of compli­cations or unaware that operations would leave a scar. When complications do occur, surgeons sometimes blame the patient’s “re­sponse to surgery.” Or else, patients simply blame themselves. One woman said, “Plás­tica is a lottery. Because of the first opera­tion I had to do others, and others, and oth­ers. They cut the nerves. It was an elaborate and sad road. … I was one of the rare ones who failed with plástica.”

While the rate of complications may be low, a surprising number of patients I meet are seeking a touch-up. Due to the subjec­tive nature of body-image, it’s not always clear whether a resident botched the job, or the patient is simply disappointed with the results. But aside from the quality of the sur­gery, the “popularization” of plastic surgery raises another question: Are scarce public healthcare funds being diverted from other purposes?

Santa Casa and some public hospitals house residency programs that provide ex­traordinary opportunities for training in cos­metic procedures. In the United States, plas­tic surgeons usually get experience in cosmetic surgery through a lengthy appren­ticeship in a private practice. In Brazil, resi­dents—some of whom receive scholar­ships—do cosmetic operations beginning in their first year. One resident who performed ninety-six surgeries in one year said, “There is nowhere else in the world where I could have gotten that kind of experience in so short a time.” Such opportunities attract doctors from around the world. At Santa Casa, I met residents from Italy, Switzerland, India, Mexico, Peru, and Colombia.

This experience is a valuable resource for the novice surgeon. Many plastic surgery residents later find work in the private sec­tor, where pay is much higher. Brazilian cities have some of the highest densities of plastic surgeons in the world, which creates downward pressure on prices. Younger sur­geons often open practices in smaller cities or in the interior of the country. Landlocked Minas Gerais now has more plastic sur­geons than the state of Rio de Janeiro. Cheaper prices and reputation for quality is also luring medical tourists from North America, the Middle East, and Europe. What these patients may not realize is that their surgeon’s expertise—offered at a com­petitive price—was gained through an op­portunity to perform state-subsidized cos­metic operations.

Pitanguy’s philosophy is disturbing for many reasons, yet it suggests a point about the sig­nificance of attractiveness often overlooked in academic discussion. Pierre Bourdieu ar­gued that nearly all aspects of taste reflect social class. He extends his argument to the body itself: posture, gesture, even habits of chewing food. Curiously, and almost in passing, he makes an exception for physical attractiveness. Bodies “should,” he writes, “be perceived as strictly corresponding to their ‘owners’ position in the social hierar­chy.” And yet they aren’t. “The high and mighty,” he argued, “are often denied the “bodily attributes of their position, such as height or beauty.” In other words, attractive­ness is a quality that is at least partially in­dependent of other social hierarchies. For

In poor urban areas, beauty often has a similar importance for girls as soccer (or basketball) does for boys: it promises an almost magical attainment of recognition, wealth, or power.

Beauty is unfair: the attractive enjoy priv­ileges and powers gained without merit. As such, it can offend egalitarian values. Yet, while attractiveness is a quality “awarded” to those who don’t morally deserve it, it can also grant power to those excluded from other systems of privilege. It is a kind of “double negative”: a form of power that is unfairly distributed but which can disturb other unfair hierarchies. For this reason it may have democratic appeal. In poor urban areas, beauty often has a similar importance for girls as soccer (or basketball) does for boys: it promises an almost magical attain­ment of recognition, wealth, or power.

In Brazil’s favelas many dreams for social mobility center on the body. NGOs offer free lessons in fashion modeling. Marriage is often seen as an out-of-reach luxury, se­duction a means of escaping poverty. Pow­erful attractions that cross class lines are a favorite theme in telenovelas. And working-class women face long lines at public hospi­tals to have cosmetic surgery. These social facts stem from the lack of other opportuni­ties for many women. Yet, they also reflect an accurate, not deluded, perception of the role of physical attractiveness in consumer capitalism.

For many consumers, attractiveness is es­sential to economic and sexual competition, social visibility, and mental well-being. This “value” of appearance may be especially clear for those excluded from other means of social ascent. For the poor, beauty is often a form of capital that can be exchanged for other benefits, however small, transient, or unconducive to collective change.

Winner of the 2001 Miss Brasil contest. After she divulged she’d had multiple cosmetic surgeries, the Brazilian media dubbed her “Miss Siliconada.”

Note

This article is adapted from an essay titled “A Necessary Vanity”that was first published in the New York Times series on philosophy, “The Stone,” on August 13, 2011.

Alexander Edmonds is assistant professor of an­thropology at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex and Plastic Surgery in Brazil (Duke University Press). More about his work can be found at http://home .medewerker.uva.nl/a.b.edmonds/.

Image from http://www.riobookings.com

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.

Recent protests in Karachi against continued U.S. drone strikes should serve as a reminder that the violation of international law and Pakistani sovereignty in the interests of U.S. security predates the recent discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden. Under Bush and Obama, the U.S. government’s justification for these military operations is Pakistan’s unwillingness and inability to govern the tribal regions along its border with Afghanistan.

What is often less remarked upon is that Pakistan has served as a model for how to govern borderlands closer to home. The U.S. military has been deploying drones along the Mexican borderlands since 2006 and, more recently, along the Canadian border. The use of drones for surveillance, and possibly more, is only likely to increase. In a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Canadian border is singled out as a major security threat that calls for more intervention on the part of the Department for Homeland Security (DHS).

In my contribution to the April 2011 issue of Anthropology Now, “Transnational Waste and its Discontents,” I discuss the politics of unwanted traffic along the U.S.-Canadian border. Specifically, I examine how waste imported from Canada to a rural Michigan community became a source of political controversy in the first decade of the twenty-first century:

“For many residents, Canadian waste took center stage as a meaningful trope for widespread fears about personal, economic, and environmental insecurity in a post-agrarian, post-industrial, post–housing-bubble world dominated by challenging new forms of global connection.” (Reno 2011: 23)

In that piece I suggest that, though less discussed in social science and public culture than the southern border with Mexico, the U.S.-Canadian border has generated its own unique predicaments over the last two centuries. Like the southern border, the U.S.-Canadian border has long been profoundly shaped by racial and ethnic politics, with the presence of indigenous people along the borderlands a perceived barrier to U.S. security and sovereignty throughout the nineteenth century that lingers still today. Much the same could be said of Alaska’s transcontinental border with Russia. As Sonja Luehrmann discusses in her first book, “Alutiiq villages under Russian and U.S. Rule” (2008), Alaska represents a hybrid zone where indigenous communities and contiguous empires square off.

Perhaps no part of the U.S. border is more representative of the complications surrounding sovereignty and citizenship in the Alaskan context than the Akwesasne territory along the St. Lawrence River. A Mohawk reservation that covers portions of New York State, Quebec and Ontario, Akwesasne has risen to prominence as a site of disputes concerning crime, settler and indigenous sovereignty, and jurisdictional authority.

In 2001, some Mohawks enabled Direct Action Network and other “anti-globalization” activists to cross the border into Quebec in anticipation of actions in Québec City surrounding the Summit of the Americas. More recently, the Mohawk community has appealed to the UN to stop Canadian officials from carrying guns in their territory, in violation of treaty.

Thus it should come as no surprise that the GAO choose Akwesasne as one of several border sectors they examined in a sweeping overview that called for the DHS to improve their oversight of interagency coordination in the area. Since a number of the agencies in question are tribal and Canadian, this calls for the jurisdiction of the “homeland” department to become larger indeed. In a Global Post special report last month, “Indian Reservation: a Smuggler’s Playground,” Lorraine Mallinder describes the difficulty of asserting the power of “Homeland Security” in such a context: “The sovereign Mohawk territory, with its traditional hostility toward outside authority is a fertile recruitment ground [for drug smugglers]. A roadside sign on one of the reservation’s main drags proclaims U.S. Border Patrol, New York State Police, the FBI and others to be ‘terrorists’.”

Mallinder’s focus is the way Akwesasne has been negatively affected by low employment opportunities and the drug trade. In Akwesasne, as in Pakistan, U.S. investment in security issues now trump any attention to the worsening quality of life in the region. As David Graeber recounts in his ethnography of the 2001 actions in Quebec, the Mohawks that the Direct Action Network worked with were as concerned, if not more, with environmental racism and ongoing toxic pollution from a nearby GM Plant, as they now are with things like border patrols, guns and drones. If it is the latter that are more discussed and resisted today, it is because they stand for the military might that allows their neighbors to keep on violating both their borders and their bodies.

One could argue, as does political scientist Peter Andreas, that since 9/11 the U.S.-Canadian border has undergone “Mexicanization”—by which he means an increasingly asymmetrical power swing. With the increasing use of militarized surveillance and security measures along the Canadian border, and the promise of more direct oversight from the DHS in the near future, perhaps one day we will have to go further abroad for our analogies and describe this as a process of “Pakistanization.”

Author 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 from Zed Books in 2012.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

About the reviewer:

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

This is a special feature from the first print issue of Anthropology Now.

The following piece is drawn from a forthcoming book written by Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Lutz with the assistance of Betsy Brinson and Jose Vasquez entitled War Epiphanies. This group of researchers interviewed dozens of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who have become vocal opponents of those wars. The book traces the lives of five men and one woman who enlisted like millions of other young people—to get money for college, to seek adventure, to serve their country, and hoping to find a way to do good in the world—and the conclusions they have drawn from their military work and their return to civilian life.

Many U.S. soldiers who return home from Iraq have or will develop crippling psychological problems—by one estimate, fully 40 percent of combat veterans. Among the most common diagnoses given them is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an affliction resulting from exposure to traumatic events that, according to the American Psychiatric Association, have “involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others.” The cause here, of course, is exposure to combat itself, more universal among the troops in this than any previous U.S. war. Factors that exacerbate PTSD include frustration and anger because of insufficient preparations, equipment, and training; the feeling that there is no end in sight; discomfort and deprivations of life in a war zone; worries about careers and families back home; racism and sexual harassment within the military; and extended tours of duty.

Over the years, the military has called soldiers’ traumatic response to war shell shock, combat neurosis, battle fatigue, or war-zone stress reaction. In addition, officers have often refused the diagnosis claiming it is an excuse for malingering, or in more contemporary language, “anger dysregulation.” Nonetheless, and despite the continuing stigma of mental illness, many accept and even welcome a diagnosis of PTSD as part of the process of recovery from the mental wounds of the Iraq war. Why then would a group of veterans declare that in fact PTSD is normal and, in some sense, good?

For a growing number of anti-war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, PTSD is not an unhealthy or abnormal condition but a reasonable and normal human reaction to what they saw and did while serving in the United States military. While many returning vets reject treatment because of the stigma attached to it or find it inaccessible, some anti-war vets accept treatment and medications but reject how the Veterans Administration (VA) understands their diagnosis. Some refuse standard treatment and argue that other methods will help them move beyond their suffering. These anti-war vets all agree with VA doctors that they have received a traumatic injury to the self, but they see the injury as an assault not simply on their mind but on their whole person. What the medical establishment calls a disorder, they call a form of dehumanization. In coming to this conclusion, these dissenting soldiers focus on the fate of Iraqi civilians at the hands of the U.S. military. In fact, what makes the lives of these troops distinct from the rest of the armed forces sent to Iraq and Afghanistan is not so much their experiences of such civilian harm, which is ubiquitous, but rather the conclusions they have drawn. It turns out that how soldiers react to civilian war injuries and death is decisive for their emerging critique of the war and to understanding the injuries of war to themselves and others. Ultimately veterans who reject the diagnosis of PTSD as being a disorder are making a political statement more than a medical or personal psychological diagnosis. The point for both anti-war veterans who seek counseling and medication for post-traumatic stress, as well as those who prefer to avoid such treatment even though they may suffer from the same symptoms, is that, regardless of medicalized analysis, the fundamental cause of their affliction is that they have witnessed and participated in dehumanizing crimes against people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Charlie Anderson

Navy medic Charlie Anderson, originally from Rossford, Ohio, crossed into Iraq in March 2003 with the Marines. Like most everyone around him in uniform, he was full of fear and curiosity, anger and resignation, excitement and ambivalence about the mission. Trained as a medic, he especially relished the idea of helping his buddies if they got hit. Looking back later, though, he said, “I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.” The learning curve would soon rise steeply in front of him.

On an early convoy operation in 2003, his unit began taking casualties on the outskirts of Sadr City. Someone radioed that they were looking for a young Arab male wearing black pants, white shirt, and sandals, and carrying an AK-47—in other words, almost anybody. From the back of the column came machine gun fire. One of Anderson’s sergeants had been telling the younger men a story. Suddenly he opened fire with his weapon, apparently aiming at nothing and no one in particular. Then he went back to telling his story right where he left it mid-sentence only seconds before, pausing now and then to sip his coffee. “A lot of people would think that was cool,” says Anderson. “I thought it was scary.” This was the first of a set of political and moral epiphanies Charlie Anderson underwent in combat and after.

Later that same day, Anderson relates, orders came through to load up and drive into Sadr City. They had high hopes for what was to come. Given the standard American diet of World War II movies, he and his comrades expected to find “a kind of air of liberation parades in Holland and France.” They believed that they would be rewarded for protecting the population from further depredations by Saddam Hussein and his “bad guys,” but the civilian reception was quite different from what they expected. The thousands of civilians out in the streets of Sadr City didn’t seem excited to see them— except the kids. “There are kids running up and down the sides of streets begging for food.” The Marines were still looking for the young Arab male carrying an assault rifle. And there were people everywhere. “You’re looking at the kids, at the doorways, at the windows, and the rooftops. You’re trying to scan the alleys, looking for a guy [who wants to kill you] in this crowd of 5,000.” Anderson was riding on the passenger side of a Humvee with his weapon in his left hand, safety off, finger on the trigger, pointed at the vehicle’s door. With his right hand he was throwing food out and waving at the kids. After rounding a corner, the crowd seemed to thin. Then all hell broke loose and Marines began shooting in all directions. “We’re trying to figure out what one guy is firing at, and he yells, ‘Don’t ask me what I’m shooting. I’m shooting at fucking people!’” Anderson pulled the trigger on his gun until someone said he could stop. "There’s all this pandemonium. Women. Children. Mostly women and children. And it seems so cliché. But that’s really what was happening. Mostly women and children. And a few old men running every which direction screaming and yelling.… My thoughts were the black and white photograph of the little girl running down the street in Viet Nam. She’d been napalmed. All her skin’s falling off."

Five years later, in January 2008, as we sat in his home in the mountains of Boone, North Carolina, Charlie Anderson still looked shell-shocked in recounting those operations around Sadr City. Whether he shivered from the cold outside that winter day, or from the still painful memory of having been a part of the military force that caused terrified civilians to flee through the streets of an Iraqi city, he didn’t say. In either case, even in 2008, Anderson was continually trying to come to grips with his early tour of duty in Iraq. Regardless of what the ground troops were ordered to do in the war, he remained convinced their motivations were noble. “Most of us thought that we were there to do something good. I don’t think anybody joins an army or goes off to war thinking they are going to do evil.” Like thousands of other veterans, Anderson sought counseling from time to time after he returned. “I did go through one support group meeting at the VA, and I didn’t find any support. I spent most of the night talking about why it was okay for me to be a veteran against the war, and listening to some of the other members of this group talk about how we should just have a policy of genocide because if we don’t kill everybody in Iraq, then they’re going to come over here and kill our kids. It didn’t even make sense.” Beyond feeling like an alien in this group of vets, he nonetheless shared much in common with them. Like the others, Anderson, too, had to cope with the traumas of war including what he called “survivor’s guilt,” and the feeling that he was personally responsible for helping other returning vets with their own cycles of depression. Eventually, after return to the United States, Charlie Anderson was given an honorable discharge from the Navy after being diagnosed with PTSD.

Garett Reppenhagen

Like thousands of other soldiers, Garett Reppenhagen put in time at checkpoints. Trained as a sniper and born to a military father in Fort Hood, Texas, Reppenhagen found himself one day flagging down a quickly approaching vehicle, and trying to get its Iraqi driver to leave his vehicle. As this car, like many before it, had approached, Reppenhagen recalled, "You’re thinking there could be a car bomb. And you got your heart pumping and your adrenaline flowing because you think you’re just going to get bombed. And the car screeches to a stop. And you go over and you’re yelling at the guy in the car. Only he doesn’t speak English, so he’s not getting out of his car, you know? You’re trying to open the door, but the door’s jammed because his car sucks. It’s junk. And you’re frustrated because you can’t open the door. You’re embarrassed that you’re trying to open a door that doesn’t open. So you just grab the guy and pull him out the window and you throw him on the ground and you zip-strip him [with plastic ties used by U.S. forces]. And then you realize, out of the corner of your eye, that his wife and kids are staring at you with this intense hatred in their eye. You just realize you are part of the problem. And you don’t mean to be, and you don’t want to be, but you’re there, you know? And that’s the crime. The crime is that you’re there."

Many soldiers, says Reppenhagen, “started to loathe themselves. But instead of changing to make it better, some changed for the worse. They just dove into it and became monsters.”

Like those of other dissident U.S. veterans who have come out against the war, Reppenhagen’s stories focus on the hubris of this war, how the war destroyed some part of him and violated the trust that he, as a citizen soldier, once had in the U.S. military. As Garett Reppenhagen says, "I always saw myself as doing the right thing, taking the proper course of action, as thinking about ethics and morality. And here I was, the one with my hands on this dude, feeling justified to rip him out of his car and throw him on the ground and put him in handcuffs. It made me feel like an asshole. I’m the guy acting like a Nazi." Although some troops and veterans have sought relief from their post-traumatic nightmares by popping what medics in Iraq sarcastically call “happy pills,” Reppenhagen is staunchly opposed.

I’m certainly not going to take any medication. I am flat against that. Personally, I don’t want to separate myself from my war experience. I think my war experience is part of who I am now, and I’ve got to learn to carry that. My healing comes through helping other veterans, being part of the movement. IVAW [Iraq Veterans Against the War] is redeeming me. Garett Reppenhagen was the first active- duty soldier to join IVAW while still in Iraq.

Men experience trauma, he knows, when their buddy is blown up in front of them, when someone is shot and no one can get to him. Or, as he puts it, “When innocent people get waxed.” But, Reppenhagen insists, for the most part, the average American soldier is not the victim.

"He’s the victimizer. And I think he feels like a criminal, honestly. He feels like the killer and the rapist and the thief, and he comes back to America and it’s, “Thank you for your service.” But we’re, like, “You have no idea what you’re thanking me for. You don’t know what I did.”

If men did the same things in the streets of the United States they did with no repercussions in the cities and villages of Iraq, they would be imprisoned or even executed, Reppenhagen believes. But since they are not punished by others, they punish themselves. “They start drinking themselves to death and doing drugs and being abusive to their family—and committing suicide, because they can’t find redemption.”

So what’s a medical practitioner going to do for a veteran in this situation? "If you’re a clinical doctor, you cannot fix a problem that’s social and political. Let’s say you sit down with a counselor and say, “I’ve been betrayed by my government and I’m fucking pissed off, and this is debilitating. I am unable to fit into society. And it’s directly because of the war.” Well, they’re gonna be like, “Here’s a pill. Don’t be so pissed off.” They try to make it your problem. And it’s not your problem. It’s society’s problem. You don’t have to readjust to society; society’s going to have to readjust to you."

Ricky Clousing

When Ricky Clousing deployed to Iraq in December 2004 at age 22, he didn’t rely on the media to understand the situation in Iraq: “I kind of wanted to formulate my own idea about what was going on.” He had high expectations that his military intelligence training would help identify people who were threats to Iraqi freedom. Years before, Clousing had become a born-again Christian and done missionary work in Latin America and Thailand. He was eager to find a way to help the Iraqis as he had helped farmers in Mexico on several earlier trips. Soon after arrival in Iraq, Clousing saw civilians killed and harassed with impunity by U.S. soldiers. He began to mistrust the mission that used such methods, and went to his command with serious questions about whether to continue to participate in the war or even in the Army itself. It was recommended he speak with counselors and chaplains, and he did so. He told them “about the spiritual basis for my conflict of conscience [but] they came back with all these cliché statements, and even Bible verses taken out of context, justifying war and saying God is favoring us, and that I should just trust in his plan. Just surface-y, watered down statements that didn’t answer anything that I was really feeling.” His commanders asked Clousing if he was trying to get out of the Army. “There’s ways to do that, such as saying you’re gay or saying you have mental problems. I was insulted, to tell you the truth. I wasn’t trying to play that card to get a ticket out of the military.” Clousing tattooed the word “Veritas” on his arm to signify his quest, and started reading books about the run-up to the war in Iraq and on U.S. foreign policy in general. In addition, he read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, and Thoreau’s essay On Civil Disobedience. After returning to the United States, Ricky continued to be tormented by his time in Iraq. He talked to more counselors and chaplains and commanders.

All to no avail. He went AWOL and after a year he turned himself in. Following his military trial, he served three months in the Camp Lejeune brig in North Carolina. During the entire period after his tour in Iraq, Army officers proposed various options to Clousing such as filing for conscientious objector status or a diagnosis of PTSD, any one of which would have allowed him to serve out his remaining time in non-combat assignments—and the military would have avoided further embarrassment (Clousing’s case had become international news). He refused conscientious objector status because he does not oppose all wars. He rejected the PTSD diagnosis because he considers post-traumatic stress not a disorder but, as he called it, “a patch” that conceals deeper problems: “I mean, it’s a natural reaction of culture shock, of being in a combat zone, and the realities and the expectations of fighting, and being expected to kill people, and then coming back home to what we have here.” Far from representing an abnormal adaptation to civilian life, he adds, traumatized soldiers are the norm: “They’re actually tapped into their human and spiritual and emotional side enough to feel the effects of [the war]. They’re not numb enough to just blow it off like it doesn’t matter.”

Anti-war vets like Ricky Clousing, Garett Reppenhagen, and Charlie Anderson may be no more or less traumatized by what they saw and did than other service members. However, their distinctive understanding of the problem and of the remedies available to them—particularly political action and helping other vets—allows them to reshape their sense of self in crucial ways. Each has been an active member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, and has worked in a variety of ways, including recruiting for IVAW from within the active duty military and others, lobbying Congress, and long public marches and talks to educate the public. They are working to advance the goals of the organization, which includes campaigning for an immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq; reparations to the Iraqi people that they, rather than corporate profiteers, would administer; and lobbying for full benefits and adequate healthcare for returning vets. They have also forged strong bonds of advice and help with dissident Vietnam War era vets and organizations and are helping with counter-recruitment efforts in high schools around the country.

Each is also trying to reestablish himself in work and/or school: in winter 2008, Charlie Anderson was attending Appalachian State University in Boone and working with the VA nearby, Garett Reppenhagen was studying at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs and working as a parttime organizer and consultant for Veterans for America, and Ricky Clousing was working in a gift shop and learning to be a dealer in Las Vegas.

As another anti-war veteran said about his emerging recovery-through-activism from the war, “I am no longer the monster I once was.” These vets are convinced they have found a kind of redemption and balm by breaking ranks and speaking out against the war, by forging a new kind of comradeship with their fellow dissenters, and by beginning to make amends with the Iraqi and Afghani peoples. Some might say that these veterans were dehumanized from the moment they began basic training, and that by turning against the war in Iraq and what they saw and did there, they are simply reclaiming their humanity. But that conclusion would be too easy. Because if anything these anti-war veterans were among the most idealistic of soldiers, committed to the idea of armed service in defense of the nation and indeed serving humankind through their participation in military operations in Iraq.

As contradictory as it might seem, and despite all the questions they had from the beginning about military service and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, these men at the same time believed that they would be doing good for others through their participation in the war. In the end, however, they do not want their post-traumatic stress to be neatly boxed off by a medicalized diagnosis that separates their condition from the total experience of the war in Iraq and from a moral and political critique of its impact on the people of that country.