"FEMA has took over this parish. We know what we need to do and how to do it, but you know, what can we do when somebody else is calling the shots?" 

-Buffy (November 2005)

Katrina tore into the Gulf Coast in 2005 bringing fright and ruin and heartbreak. It ripped open the collective American psyche and, for a brief moment, left a void. That space within fresh disaster is quiet, and in its stillness we breathe the rawness of impermanence, and we wonder if anything can ever be mended back. None whose lives were changed by the horror of Katrina needed anything more to endure beyond the shock and grief of the disaster. They needed every possible comfort, every shred of understanding a rescue could lend. Instead, the system deployed to secure their recovery and help them heal piled on bewildering new hardships, and in the years to come, increased the suffering of survivors and prolonged the time it took them to get their lives back in order. 

The storm and levee breaches left a “terrifying wilderness of ruins”ⁱ that constituted the largest residential disaster in US history,ⁱⁱ with damage or destruction to more than 500,000 homes in Louisiana and countless other structures in a 90-square-mile area. Every one of the 300 family members in my research experienced profound material loss from Katrina. ⁱⁱⁱ

But there was more than material loss. Invisible blows also threatened the group’s connective tissue formed from generations of cultural adaptations and traditions. In both visible and invisible ways, the community of African Americans I studied suffered at a collective level as a “wounded culture.” Meanwhile, the work to recreate communities was placed in the hands of recovery authorities like FEMA and Road Home.^iv Institutional authorities rarely recognize the presence of their own assumptions or the problems those assumptions pose for those unfamiliar with them. We need not attribute malice to those who intended every good. But at the same time, we do need to become aware that authorities carry with them their own institutional culture, systems, procedures, values, and expectations, and for purposes of this discussion, I am calling these authorities the “rescue culture.” 

What follow are some of the stories that demonstrate how post-Katrina communication between cultures failed and, in failing, undermined recovery. In this piece, I introduce three types of communication failure: “the unheard local knowledge,” “the non-responsive response,” and “the black hole.” 

*   *   *

Buffy is a soft-spoken 45-year old man who lives within a 15-minute drive of scores of family members in the bayou-rich area of St. Bernard Parish, just southeast of New Orleans. He is hard working and, as a black man in a mostly white parish, has had experience taking things in stride. Buffy’s cousins and aunts and uncles respect his carpentry skills and his role as a head cook at large family gatherings. He is one of the few family members with a parish government job, a job with the road crew that he had been promoted to supervise not long before the storm.

Buffy did not evacuate with his family to Dallas before Katrina. The hurricane season is serious, but when the caravan of cars headed for Texas and shelter with cousin Connie, both Buffy and his cousin Terb stayed put out of a sense of obligation. Terb was a hospital tech who, with the other staff who stayed, moved the sick to safety. They endured four ghoulish days of panic, lack of food and supplies, and death. 

As a parish employee, Buffy reasoned that staying was the only responsible thing to do. He wanted to help residents who lacked transport or were elderly or handicapped. He had stayed before many times, but this time, the experience proved terrifying and left him with haunting memories. Not until years later did Buffy feel comfortable enough with me to share a few of those horrors, stories I will recount in the book I am writing about this research.^v All I knew then was that unexpectedly sudden and massive storm surges put Buffy at extreme risk as he helped the helpless find their way to safety. When he talks about the days-long wait for relief from their helpless perch on a rooftop, Buffy’s face tells the story—his mouth works as his eyes narrow. He shakes his head in disbelief. But with a deep breath later, he allows the authorities some slack. After all, he says, they had far more trouble on their hands than they knew how to handle. 

Buffy: “Don’t You Know What I Do?”

Buffy’s own effort to rescue others makes clear his sense of obligation and loyalty to his job and to the parish. So once the floodwaters had receded and it was time to begin cleanup, Buffy’s role as road crew supervisor seemed straightforward. He pulled together the few crew members he could, and together they undertook a big cleanup of the “yard” (Buffy’s term for his job site) where their equipment was stored. They sorted the odd fragments of plastic, concrete, iron, and metal from machine parts, broken and uprooted trees, and debris that had been blown in by the wind. But after they had it sorted, collected, and dumped, all their progress got unceremoniously reversed by FEMA. In March, 2006, Buffy told me,

"We can’t do street repairs, clean up trash, can’t do much of anything. We could clean up this whole area, all the trash. We tried that—we cleaned up our area, our yard where we work at, we went to the landfill to dump it, where all the trash at. FEMA made us bring it back, put it back on the ground, and they have another crew come over and inspect it to pick it up."

Buffy didn’t understand why FEMA blocked his initiative, why they couldn’t recognize the common sense of his effort. By FEMA’s own account, some 3.3 million cubic yards of debris needed collecting in the parish and more than 12,000 homes and other structures needed demolishing.^vi Surely a little help from local residents would be welcome. For their part, FEMA’s envoys charged with cleanup and recovery used a playbook filled with top-down rules and favored, no-bid contractors. They had no idea who Buffy was or how he was capable of helping. FEMA arrived and took over without knowledge of local people, their community, or how to tap into their strengths. They did not know that most people in this part of Louisiana claim membership in large family groups and are used to taking care of themselves through their own family networks. Instead, the government personnel in charge seemed to import everything they would use to do their job, including assumptions about what people needed, procedures for getting things done, lists of approved contractors, and even the language for how to talk to people and how to oversee a disaster zone. Buffy assumed his work would be a desirable aid in the process of cleanup, but FEMA wasn’t listening.

Cultural Insiders with No Standing

When FEMA turned back Buffy’s effort to clean up, they trivialized his initiative and undermined his sense of potency in his home environment. The rigid adherence to a set of rules developed elsewhere signaled the beginning of a chronic mismatching of expectations between local residents and the agencies charged to help them. Over the first year of cleanup, demolition, and trash hauling, FEMA repeatedly dismissed the efforts of other cousins in the family, who, like Buffy, were skilled workers and accustomed to taking care of things themselves. No black residents of the parish were ever awarded contracts from FEMA to help in this work, and according to the men I interviewed, the contracts went to people who weren’t even from Louisiana. How could local talent, the pride of local residence and the financial need for work suddenly carry so little value in the parish’s post-disaster setting? Buffy chafed at the situation:

"We’re not used to that, you know, because they say we taking money from the contractors."

FEMA’s personnel on the ground remained unresponsive and non-negotiable, more concerned with maintaining an efficient central command than with using the energies of the communities it was charged with helping. The communication failure in this situation arises from a pattern in which authorities did not “hear” or “recognize” local knowledge.

Negotiating the Divide in Dallas: Connie as Culture Broker

The experience of Buffy and his male relatives demonstrates how the seeds of miscommunication take root in disaster recovery efforts immediately and if not addressed, can grow from there into a thicket of more and more failures and disconnects. Yet these problems are neither necessary nor inevitable. Perhaps what Buffy and FEMA needed to help them cross the divide was a person or team of translators. In fact, Buffy’s evacuated relatives had such a person to help them out—Connie, a relative who had grown up with the family and moved to Texas with her husband. For four months in Dallas, I witnessed first hand the value of Connie’s role as a “culture broker.” Then, after family members had returned to their home communities of St. Bernard Parish where life in FEMA trailers would drag on for years to come, I witnessed an ongoing succession of struggles in dealing with FEMA and Road Home, dealings people had to navigate without benefit of a Connie. Ultimately, I came to realize that Connie’s role in Dallas could provide a model for a new paradigm, one that would increase the effectiveness and responsiveness of recovery authorities and give local people in the wounded culture a reason to trust the outsiders. The Dallas story demonstrates how a “culture broker” can work. 

In 2005, Connie was 40 years old and had lived in Texas 20 years. She was cousin to some, aunt to others, daughter or granddaughter to others, sister to others who arrived at her home, a natural refuge for the family. Huddled around Connie’s TV in the days following Katrina’s landfall, family members learned that St. Bernard Parish had taken the brunt of the storm. There would be no quick returning home. Suddenly, they needed everything basic to living: clothing, medical supplies, prescription glasses, and lodging for the months to come. They had to tend to the sick, the elderly, the children. They had to register with FEMA to get a victim ID number, contact insurance companies, and get on a waiting list for a trailer.

Connie could help her family with all of these jobs. She was one of them and recognized their needs. She got on the phone with FEMA, Red Cross, local housing authorities, and a host of private landlords. She worked to get her family members into decent housing. In a hundred ways, every day, Connie smoothed the path and “rescued” her family from the inside out. Never once did they feel misunderstood because Connie mediated the disaster for them. She understood their language, their attachment to the parish, their ritual feasts, their reliance on each other, and their strong faith. She knew how to give them comfort. 

At the same time, Connie had been educated in the language and skills of the world beyond the bayou. She knew how to communicate with bureaucracies. She understood from years of practice with institutions that there is a way to talk to such people, to ask the right questions, and know when to press. Connie managed all the communication with the bureaucracies charged to help her relatives—getting registered in the FEMA database, working to locate other family, collecting rent payments, requesting short-term credit cards, and filing the paperwork needed to get a FEMA trailer. She also called upon her extensive network of “weak ties,”^vii that is, ties to people she didn’t know well, but could ask a favor of. With the help of these differently positioned secondary friends from work and church, Connie secured an astonishing array of resources: housing, clothing, personal supplies, furniture, and counseling. According to Connie, God had sent her all these relatives so that she might have a chance to help them and regain a cherished role in the family she had left 20 years before. This belief and her unbounded love of family led her to become a warrior for their cause, sparing nothing to make things work. 

Of course, Connie could not solve all the problems her family faced. She couldn’t take away the shock and stress of damaged or destroyed homes. She couldn’t help them secure the familiar foods they needed for emotional comfort, and she couldn’t duplicate the home churches where her relatives had worshipped together for generations. But she could provide safety and material aid. She could also supply emotional comfort with both her large, modern kitchen, where family members could prepare their own gumbo, and her sprawling backyard, where they had the space to gather and talk. Everything from home on the bayou that could be replicated was replicated in Dallas.

The example of Connie’s role is instructive: she supplied a bridge over the communication divide between the cultures of the wounded and the institutions assigned to recovery. She lived outside the wounded culture, but her knowledge and experience positioned her to recognize what cultural comfort looks like and to maximize its availability. Then, her family went back home.

The Short-lived Euphoria of Being Back Home

At first, when Connie’s sister Robin returned to St. Bernard Parish after 10 months in Dallas, she was euphoric, like everyone else. 

"It’s just so good to be back, where people know who you are and you don’t have to say something 23 ways for them to understand what you mean or even what you’re trying to say. That’s home. I don’t care about the house, I don’t care about the car. I just wanna be home because that’s where I feel good. It’s comfortable."

Robin’s relief of being back home “where people know who you are” and where she felt recognized and understood points up the insularity of her family system. Members of the 300-plus family rarely traveled outside southeast Louisiana. That limited experience with the outside world and their habits of high-context communication ^viii intensified their difficulties in speaking to disaster authorities once they got back home. 

Robin did not realize that although people in Dallas spoke differently and had trouble understanding her accent, she had been spared a more painful indignity—not being understood in her own home environment, now occupied by FEMA and its alien culture. In Dallas, Connie had brokered all that unfamiliar communication for Robin and the rest of the family. Once home, Robin and her relatives faced a harsh and unexpected irony—the people she could communicate with could not help her. The people who could help, did not understand her.

Robin: “Don’t You Know What I Need?”

As the first anniversary of the storm approached in August 2006, Robin and her family could not escape a bitter reality: the home environment they had longed for during their dislocation was gone. Forever. Where the modest character of small brick and wood homes had anchored a people’s sense of community, there were now rows and rows and miles of disfigured homes: broken, collapsed, but not yet demolished, sometimes invaded by wildly overgrown vegetation. Big heaps of debris crowded the streets with the ghastly remnants of individual lives—furniture, appliances, beds and personal belongings, purged from the guts of homes. 

To patch up this emotional landscape of hurt, FEMA brought its promise of human solutions— tens of thousands of tiny white trailers. For Robin, the “itty bitty” FEMA trailers seemed more an emblem of a faceless, shrunken future than a cause for hope. But it was all there was. There was no nearby grocery store, cleaner, pharmacy, bank, post office, or restaurant. The local churches had been destroyed, and attending Sunday services required a drive into another parish to an unfamiliar congregation.

Into the second year after the storm, unsettling realities from the previous months shifted from background nuisances to stressful, preoccupying concerns. For Robin, the fact of her powerlessness started sinking in during the fall of 2006 after she had taken on two jobs to try to keep herself and her daughters afloat financially. Her repeated calls to FEMA went unanswered (the non-responsive response), and her confidence about the future began to dissolve. 

"My trailer is leaking right over the big bed. I had to put pots in the middle of the bed. I’ve called them, but they never come. I have a work order, they promised to come in 72 hours. Nothing."

By spring 2007, Robin’s exasperation with her trailer had spilled over into her whole life:

"They keep saying everything is getting better. But it’s not true. Half the houses are still not gutted out because they don’t have trailers to stay in to get the work done. You’re working and you still can’t do anything. Men not feeling like men anymore. We came back as soon as we did because we wanted what we used to have. What we used to have was comfortable. What we have now is misery. I’m miserable." 

The spring of 2007 brought no relief, and as another hurricane season loomed, the sense of despair deepened. The rescue culture had no idea of the collective (and invisible) suffering they had made worse by their lack of attention to the fundamental needs of a black, bayou community. Communication failures were not simply additive in their impact—the repeated instances of these problems across family members compounded the collective sense of alienation and frustration. 

Katie: “Don’t You Know Who I Am?”

A communication “black hole” occurs when the words one says to a bureaucrat or other authority simply disappear into the void. Black holes in this sense are especially common when stylistic barriers exist in how people in an exchange use language. Members of the bayou family are native English speakers. But their strong inter-reliance on each other, their high-context form of communication, their unusually limited travel outside the parish, and their autonomy from government aid all put them at a serious disadvantage in speaking effectively to representatives from large, impersonal bureaucracies. The communication style recognized within institutional hierarchies of government takes practice to master: to articulate one’s needs in a concise way, to ask the right questions at the right time, and to push for answers with force but diplomacy tends to demand either the use of front-end credentials or linguistic agility that authorities on the other end will recognize as worthy of respect.^ix

Katie was Buffy’s favorite aunt; she was Connie’s “nanny” (godmother). She was mother to Terb, Roz, and Nell, and grandmother to a growing tribe of children who called her Bammy. I met Katie in Dallas and quickly observed how she filled the room with her buoyant spirit and easy laugh. Without ever breaking a sweat, she cooked the most food I had ever seen come out of a single kitchen. Katie was fiercely devoted to her family and her home community in lower St. Bernard Parish. She drew people to her through her storytelling and creole cooking. Few could rival her gumbo or stuffed bell peppers. On Sundays, she had always cooked enough to feed dozens after church.

Few who did not know Katie would have guessed that she wore a prosthetic leg. Her movement was so normal and her personality so vibrant, it was easy to miss the slight limp. While she was still living in Dallas, Connie had helped Katie order a handicapped trailer to put on the lot where her home had been. But when FEMA called months later to say she could go home, the trailer was wrong. Never mind, she told them, she’d take what they had brought because she could not wait another day to get home. 

But just a few weeks after getting installed in the trailer, Katie fell down the rickety metal steps to the front door. The injury to Katie’s leg, which never properly healed, reversed 60 years of unassisted walking. 

After her fall, Katie could either walk with crutches or use a wheelchair. She called FEMA; her daughter Nell called FEMA. Both begged for the handicapped trailer. Weeks later, a carload of six FEMA employees came out to take pictures of the step and prepare the necessary paperwork for her new trailer. Nell looked at the men in disbelief and cried out, “Why you want a picture of the step? You see she ain’t got but one leg. What more you want?” The men left. Months passed. No word, no handicapped trailer. Finally, in July of 2006, they delivered the trailer along with the hope that living there would be temporary. Indeed that summer, nearly a year after the storm, Louisiana’s Road Home program began accepting applications. Road Home was FEMA’s designated state authority charged to evaluate these applications and allot compensation to eligible homeowners from the pot of $7 billion of federally allocated funds. Road Home would pay homeowners up to $150,000 for the cost of their damaged or destroyed homes, minus the amount paid by insurance.

One humid summer day nearly two years after Katrina, I stepped up into Katie’s trailer. She was sitting as she often did, sunken down on the end of a narrow, cream-colored couch with her head turned to watch the small TV perched at the top of an étagère straddling the opposite corner. The physical strain of living in a small container designed for a weekend hunting trip was showing, even if she rarely complained. 

What do you hear from Road Home, I asked, knowing full well the answer, having asked the same question every few weeks for months. “Nothing. I don’t hear nothing.” I asked her if she had tried to call them. She had been calling every week lately. And every time, she said, they told her the same thing, that she was in the “verification phase.” Well, what is that, I asked? “Nobody can explain it—it’s just what they say.” I knew it was time to figure out what was happening, so I asked her if she would mind calling them while I was there so I could listen. 

Katie pulled herself up and took the crutches I handed her. She was fiercely independent, and even though she could have easily pointed me to the folder on the pantry shelf, she stood, hoisted her weight with the crutch, and then hopped past the couch to pull the file off the shelf and up under her arm. 

“You know, every time I call, it’s a different person. I try to get the name of somebody and then the next time, nobody heard of that person. You can’t get nowhere with these people.” 

She dialed the Road Home number she knew by heart and waited for the recorded voice. She held out the phone so I could hear the message, “Remember, Louisiana wants you to come home.” She glanced at me, shaking her head. It took another 5 or 6 minutes to get a human voice.

“Hello, this is Katie Williams,” she offered politely. "My case number is 06HH087563. I’m calling to find out where my case is and how much longer I got to wait.” Several minutes passed before the agent came back. “I’m showing you are in the verification phase, Ms. Williams.”

“Well, how long is it going to take to get out of there?” It had been more than a year since Katie had submitted her paperwork for the Road Home program. 

“We have no information about that. But it will be as soon as possible. Thank you for calling. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Wow, I thought. The Road Home people really know how to clear callers off the phone lines. Polite and completely non-committal, all in the flow of a single sentence. But I knew their tricks. I had learned for myself that bureaucracies were full of ordinary people who follow the rules they are given. The clerk gave Katie the only answer she had. 

“Katie, what if I called them just to see if I could get somebody else who might tell us more?”

How could someone so important to so many be so easily dismissed, I wondered. “You can’t talk to them,” she said. “Has to be the name on the file. Nobody else. “Okay, then,” I said, “I’ll pretend I’m you.” She mustered a smile and handed me the receiver. 

Over the course of the next 45 minutes, I worked my way up four levels of clerks to a top-level supervisor who finally gave me what I was looking for. “I need to understand exactly what the verification phase entails,” I said politely. For the first time, the person I was talking to actually left the phone to search for Katie’s application. She came back with a sheepish apology: “I’m very sorry, Ms. Williams. There is nothing in your file.” “What?” I said with alarm. “That isn’t possible. Back in November of 2006, my husband and I met with your people, and I handed them all my documents. (Katie was pointing to her inch-thick file folder) That was seven months ago. Where did those go?” 

“I can’t say, Ms. Williams. I can only say that they aren’t there now.”

Katie and I were both in shock. Before I returned to Colorado that next day, I took her folder, copied all the documents, and once I got back home composed a stern memo to fax along with all the documents. Three days later, Katie called me to say she had been contacted by Road Home and moved out of the verification phase. They had assigned her a case manager, and she would be getting her check soon.

But the misery wasn’t over. When her check arrived late that summer, it was dramatically less than she expected, just $25,000. She had used the money she got from her insurance to pay off the mortgage on her demolished house. Connie stepped in to file an appeal, but by early December 2007, Katie got the word that the appeal had been denied. Two weeks later, Katie suffered a massive stroke, leaving her without speech and without the ability to walk on crutches as she had done since her fall. Katie died three and a half years later. 

Conclusion

The communication failures of “the unheard local knowledge,” “the non-responsive response,” and “the black hole” illustrate some of the degrading effects that cultural divides can produce, especially when a wounded culture and the rescue culture are asymmetrical in power. Yet there is a bright spot in this painful saga, a way to see how things might work if we proceeded with more awareness and applied a little imagination. In this story, Connie’s knowledge and experience allowed her to straddle cultures and lighten the burdens for those who needed so much help. In every disaster, there are people who could be tapped to work with agents of recovery—people who understand local cultural systems and values, and who could help broker communication with outsiders. There are also anthropological studies of most every disaster-vulnerable area on the planet that could be synthesized in advance and used as a local roadmap. These are possibilities that Connie can help us imagine. And, as poet Rita Dove once said, it takes imagination to make possible other realities.

"You have to imagine it possible before you can see something, sometimes. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible."^x

What Anthropology Brings to the Study of Disaster

The long arc of time needed to reclaim a familiar, routine life after disaster dramatizes a key insight—only by documenting the full expanse of time people need to resettle can we see how the process unfolds. For plenty of people in southeast Louisiana, the experience of recovery from Katrina took longer and hurt worse than it had to. For the family I came to know, the movement toward settling into a new reality was neither linear, nor steady, nothing like the way a bone heals. Alien logic and inflexible systems piled on new sources of exhaustion and frustration and added insult to hardship, leaving people with the sense of having lost control of their lives and futures.

When I reflect on what I have learned over these last seven years, I ache for the people whose lives and needs remained opaque to authorities. Perhaps the agents of recovery made no attempt to understand local needs or the resourcefulness of local people because they could not imagine a way to work with these needs and also maintain control. A lack of awareness, a lack of curiosity, and a lack of imagination effectively prolonged suffering. With imagination, compassion, good sense, and experience, I believe we could discover that there is another way, a better way, to help the wounded recover from collective devastation.  

Katherine E. Browne, Ph.D. is Professor of Anthropology at Colorado State University. Browne’s research has focused on French Caribbean societies like Martinique and New Orleans. She has published two books, Creole Economics: Caribbean Cunning Under the French Flag, and Economics and Morality: Anthropological Approaches, and produced two documentary films: Still Waiting: Life After Katrina (broadcast on PBS stations) and Lifting the Weight of History: Women Entrepreneurs in Afro-Creole Martinique (broadcast in French on French TV and French global satellite channel, TV5). Browne is currently preparing a book about her post-Katrina research with the large bayou family discussed here. Her work has been funded by numerous grants from National Science Foundation and she is currently president of the Society for Economic Anthropology.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the members of this beautiful bayou family for sharing their struggles and stories with me over the years. Their wisdom and courage have inspired me to work from the heart and to aim that work toward a broader public.

Notes

^[i]Wallace (1956:127)

^[ii] Plyer (2008)

^[iii]My research with this bayou family from the lower, eastern part of St. Bernard Parish has spanned seven years following the storm. The first two of these years focused on producing a documentary with filmmaker Ginny Martin. Our film, Still Waiting: Life After Katrina was broadcast on PBS stations nationwide. My research continued for five more years, through 2012, after the film’s initial broadcast.

^[iv]FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency.The Road Home program was put in place and funded by the US Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and administered by the state of Louisiana .

^[v]The working title of the book I am writing is Standing in the Need: A Bayou Community’s Struggle After Katrina. The book is part of the SSRC’s Katrina Bookshelf being published by University of Texas Press.

^[vi] FEMA news release dated April 30, 2007. http://www.fema.gov/news-release/2007/04/30/st-bernard-parish-benefits-fema-funds.

^[vii]See Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” 1973. Connie’s family members had few if any weak ties.

^[viii]High-context communication tends to characterize speakers who communicate primarily within their own highly dense social networks, making verbal shorthand a common practice (Hall 1976). People from this area are not accustomed to having to explain themselves to outsiders.

^[ix]For example, Cushman, The Struggle and the Tools (1998).

^[x]Rita Dove, was former poet laureate of the United States. This quote comes from an interview with her in 1994.

References Cited

Cushman, Ellen. 1998. The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 

Dove, Rita. 1994. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/dove/onlineinterviews.htm.

Granovetter, Mark. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6, 1360–1380.

Hall, Edward T. 1976. Beyond Culture. New York: Anchor Books.

Plyer, Allison. 2008. “Four Years after the Storm: The Road Home Program’s Impact on Greater New Orleans.” Testimony presented to the House Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity on August 8, 2008 by Deputy Director of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.

Wallace, Anthony F.C. 1956. Tornado in Worcester. Disaster Study Number Three, Committee on Disaster Studies, National Academy of Sciences—National Research Council.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I was a graduate student I remember reading an account by an anthropologist of Africa who watched helplessly as local communities responded to a virulent epidemic by coming together not to develop public health measures but to identify and kill the witches presumed to have caused the epidemic.  I feel just like that helpless anthropologist whenever I watch Americans react to their latest gun massacre.  Always hoping that this time the response will be different (paradigms can change, after all), so far I have seen in the reaction to each massacre the predominance of a magical thinking that seems impervious to reason.

No matter what the magical thinkers of the NRA may say, the evidence is clear.  This graph [from http://globalsociology.com/2012/12/15/on-the-guns-thing-i-would-just-like-to-point-out/], which shows that the U.S. homicide rate is almost literally off the chart, demonstrates a clear positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide.  The U.S., which has five percent of the world’s population but 50 percent of its guns (300 million guns!) has a homicide rate far in excess of any other industrialized country.  But homicide is actually the smaller part of the problem: while 12,000 Americans are killed by others with guns each year, 18,000 Americans kill themselves every year with guns and another 600 are killed in gun accidents.  Some who shoot themselves would surely have found other ways to commit suicide in the absence of guns, but the gun in the cupboard at home or the easy availability of guns with no waiting period makes it easier for some to succumb to fleeting suicidal impulses.

We now know that Nancy Lanza, the mother of the Connecticut shooter, was a survivalist.  She was collecting guns for her own protection in anticipation of societal collapse.  But the threat was inside her house, not outside, and she was killed by her own guns.  The week before, in a smaller tragedy, Joseph Loughrey of Pennsylvania put a gun he thought was unloaded in his truck; it went off and killed his seven year-old son in the back seat.  One of these stories has played endlessly in the media in recent days, while the other was a small paragraph buried deep in the newspapers, but both speak to the ways we are endangered by the weapons in which we seek safety.

Maybe it is easier not to see what is happening here because 45 percent of the eight children a day killed by guns are black or Hispanic.  The gun manufacturers whose interests are represented by the overwhelmingly white leadership of the NRA make their profits with a product that disproportionately kills those disposable kids in the ghetto.  If Newtown had been in central Detroit, would we have cared?  But Newtown shows that no one is safe.

Australians, unlike Americans, figured this out.  They are, like the U.S., a frontier society but, unlike the U.S. they do not have a culture of gun idolatry of the kind we see in the U.S. in everything from spaghetti westerns to Die Hard.  (Gary Wills, a conservative catholic whose prophetic voice I admire, calls guns “our Moloch, our god” in an angry article he wrote this week.)  After a mass killing of 35 people in 1996, Australia’s conservative prime minister John Howard banned semi-automatic weapons of the kind used in the Sandy Hook shooting and tightened regulations for registering and storing guns.  There had been 13 mass shootings in the 18 years before the new law, but none since.  Gun-related homicides fell 59 percent and suicides by gun dropped by 65% in the decade after the law was passed.

But according to American magical thinkers, the solution to gun massacres is more guns.  Thus Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America and Bob McDonnell, the governor of Virginia (where I teach) have both said that the way to stop massacres in schools is to arm the principals and the teachers.  TN state Senator Frank Niceley is planning to introduce legislation to require one armed teacher at each school.  This assumes again that the threat is outside, and the gun will save us from it.  But the threat is often inside, and we are arming it.  Every week I read about a teacher in the Washington DC metropolitan area who has been arrested for possessing child pornography or sexually abusing children.  Today’s Washington Post has a page three story about child care workers at one of the largest day care centers in Northern Virginia arrested for punching, pinching and dragging two year-olds entrusted to their care.  And we think that giving such people guns will make our children safer?  How long before we read about a teacher who snapped and became the shooter the doors of the school were locked to keep out?  Or about the teacher who did not secure a gun properly, so that one first-grader shot another?

Pogo famously said, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”  Why would we arm our enemy?

Natasha Dow Schüll

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Suspending Choice

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

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

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

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

Suspending Social Exchange

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

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

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

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

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

Suspending Money Value

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suspending Clock Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Machine Life

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

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

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

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

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

Additional Resources

60 Minutes Broadcast featuring Natasha Dow Schüll. 

Natasha Dow Schüll's homepage.

Natasha Dow Schüll's faculty MIT page.

Notes

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

All photos are by the author.

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Harel. Part 1 was posted on Thur, March 3rd, please click here to read Part 1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The yarmulke stayed on my head until I passed the last checkpoint out of the occupied territories.

Postscript

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

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

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

Works Cited:

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 Harel. 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.