CUNY Graduate School Student Collective:

Akissi Britton, Risa Cromer, Chris Grove, Carwil James, Martha Lincoln, Michael Polson, Sophie Statzel, John Warner

This column, a new regular contribution to Anthropology Now, will highlight emerging anthropological research that has the potential to reshape contemporary social and political debates. A series of short reviews will be coauthored and edited each issue by a diverse student collective from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, which has historically supported publicly engaged anthropology. The members of the collective would like to thank Katherine McCaffrey, Ida Susser, and the rest of the editorial board for this opportunity and their continued support.

In addition, the members express their appreciation to the “Discoveries” student collective of the sociological journal Contexts for generously advising on process and approach.

Silencing Race

Angelina E. Castagno. 2008. “‘I Don’t Want to Hear That!’: Legitimating Whiteness through Silence in Schools.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39(3): 314–333.

Despite the adage “Silence is golden,” stifling and ignoring student discussion about race in schools helps reinforce whiteness as the status quo. Angelina E. Castagno’s one-year ethnographic study of two junior high schools in Utah found that the primary lessons taught about race and racism are often communicated through silence. This remains common even in school districts that embrace “multiculturalism” as school policy, educate racially diverse student populations, and employ racial categories to measure and track gaps in academic achievement. White educators frequently prioritize their own comfort over allowing frank discussions about race in their classroom both by remaining silent about race and racism and by silencing students’ “race talk.” Teachers use racially coded language—such as language ability and reference to social class—to avoid talking about the social significance of race in structuring the school environment and student experience. Further, teachers ignore “race talk” by failing to address students’ informal charges of systematic racial discrimination and by failing to interrupt racist comments by students in class. Such “color-mute” strategies convey to students that systemic racism is either nonexistent or unimportant. Teachers also actively silence student commentary about race as “impolite,” thereby reinforcing the message that race should not be publicly discussed. Engaging in silence and silencing helps to enforce the illusion that race does not matter and reinforces the dominance of whiteness in schools.

Given the ongoing prevalence of de facto racial segregation in public schools in the United States, such a consistent pattern among educators defending the racial status quo through silence is troubling. Castagno’s research illustrates that teachers’ desires to alleviate conflict and fear of broaching discussions about race provide the emotional base for silencing race-talk. However, this commitment to politeness reinforces the status quo and inhibits educators from challenging students’ racial biases. Recognizing that all U.S. youth encounter a social world steeped in racial images and organized by racial hierarchies, adhering to the rule that “silence is golden” does our youth an injustice.

—Sophie Statzel

Waging Tourism

Rebecca Stein. 2008. “Souvenirs of Conquest: Israeli Occupations as Tourist Events.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40:647–669.

Last March, global media outlets celebrated the resumption of package tours to war-ravaged Iraq as a sign of more settled times and a potential revenue stream in a devastated economy. A more critical look at tourism raises uncomfortable questions about the global distribution of wealth and power. Who has the financial means and political standing to cross borders as consumer and voyeur? What kind of travel is celebrated in tourist accounts, obscuring more painful journeys of economic migrants, refugees, and prisoners? When colonial occupation or military violence facilitates vacationing, another question arises: when does tourism become complicit with violence?

Rebecca Stein addresses this last question with reference to Israel in her article, “Souvenirs of Conquest.” She explores connections between militarism and leisure through a critical reading of media accounts of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and ensuing occupation, as well as the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Israeli tourist activities boomed in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other occupied Palestinian cities in the days following the 1967 war. Reports of sightseeing excursions, pilgrimages, and bargain-hunting expeditions lauded Israeli tourism while masking the recent violence. Occupied Palestinian territories were redescribed as tourism locales at the same time that they were recon-figured as exploitable sources of cheap labor and natural resources, markets for Israeli commodities, and targets of territorial expansion through the construction of settlements.

In accounts of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli soldier becomes the new tourist-consumer. The violence and suffering of war are hidden amid tales of outings to restaurants and markets, of soldiers dancing the night away in clubs and enjoying the hospitality of their Lebanese hosts at a picnic.

Tourist accounts depict occupation in “positively pleasurable terms, rewriting [incursion and occupation] as experiences of collective sightseeing” (661). Stein argues that tourism is a tactic of “anti-conquest”—a means of cloaking ongoing state violence and occupation in a consumer-friendly shroud. Tourism explicitly avoids recognizing the violence that underwrites it. Reminders of this entanglement of tourism and militarism abound, whether in new package tours to Iraq or in picnicking sightseers in the hills above Gaza, replete with binoculars and portable espresso machines, consuming scenes of destruction in the first days of 2009.

—John Warner

CUNY Graduate School Student Collective:

Akissi Britton, Risa Cromer, Chris Grove, Carwil James, Martha Lincoln, Michael Polson, Sophie Statzel, John Warner

This column, a new regular contribution to Anthropology Now, will highlight emerging anthropological research that has the potential to reshape contemporary social and political debates. A series of short reviews will be coauthored and edited each issue by a diverse student collective from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, which has historically supported publicly engaged anthropology. The members of the collective would like to thank Katherine McCaffrey, Ida Susser, and the rest of the editorial board for this opportunity and their continued support.

In addition, the members express their appreciation to the “Discoveries” student collective of the sociological journal Contexts for generously advising on process and approach.

Defining Torture

Christina Schwenkel. 2009. “From John McCain to Abu Ghraib: Tortured Bodies and Historical Unaccountability of U.S. Empire.” American Anthropologist 111 (1): 30–42.

In April 2009, the Obama administration released a series of CIA-authored “torture memos” that established a program for the physical and psychological mistreatment of presumed Al-Qaeda operatives, employing means such as the “insult slap” and water-boarding. These documents sealed the case that detainee abuses were not mere aberrations by rogue soldiers, but were premeditated by the highest U.S. authorities. Preempting calls for criminal prosecution of the authors of the torture memos, President Obama declared that the United States faced “a time for reflection, not retribution,” and asserted, “nothing will be gained by…laying blame for the past.”

The president’s gesture is consistent with U.S. leaders’ longstanding refusal to express remorse following the exposure of U.S. war crimes. It also resonates with the nation’s precedent for applying torture toward strategic ends. The counterinsurgency tactics of today’s U.S.-led War on Terror were refined during the Vietnam War. Under the auspices of the Phoenix Project, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces tortured and killed tens of thousands of suspected Viet Cong (South Vietnamese National Liberation Front) combatants and civilian sympathizers and pioneered the use of psychological techniques like sensory deprivation. Somehow these war crimes have evaporated from U.S. national consciousness. A recent article by Chris tina Schwenkel explores wars of empire and the selective forgetting that follows them. Schwenkel explains how U.S. citizens came to embrace state-sponsored torture, while at the same time enshrining John McCain’s brutal treatment in the “Hanoi Hilton” as an enduring trauma. Schwenkel argues that the United States imagines Vietnam as a “land of terror”—a preoccupation that appears everywhere from “Rambo: First Blood” to McCain’s campaign speeches. Further, she demonstrates how these ideas are used as political ammunition against postwar Vietnam. Both in international diplomacy and global media, the Vietnamese were never allowed to forget the damages—real and imagined—that Americans suffered on their soil.

As the U.S. War on Terror becomes enshrined as an “American tragedy,” U.S. mourners fixate on national losses, honoring fallen combatants and grieving over the corrosion of national values in a foreign war that is reminiscent of the U.S. “quagmire” in Vietnam. But as Schwenkel argues, Americans must not commemorate and forgive themselves while forgetting their offenses against adversaries. “U.S. empire must ultimately recognize and be held accountable for the unreconciled historical wounds and legacies of suffering and trauma that it continues to reproduce and inflict on others”(39).

—Martha Lincoln

Working on Waste

Kathleen Millar. 2008. “Making Trash into Treasure: Struggles for Autonomy on a Brazilian Garbage Dump.” Anthropology of Work Review 29 (2): 25–34.

In 2009, the International Labor Organization estimated that as many as 52 million people would lose their jobs in the formal economy due to the ongoing economic crises. What will happen to the millions of unemployed? Ask Zezinho, the current head of the Association of Catadores, or trash pickers, in Rio de Janeiro. The grandson of a union organizer, Zezinho’s chances for employment in the formal, or legally regulated, economic sector were devastated by recession, inflation, and government policies in the 1980s. These policies contributed to the creation of mass unemployment and undermined social services. Now Zezinho lives and works on a trash dump on the urban periphery of Rio. Collectors of redeemable recyclables in places such as Rio’s “Jardim das Floras” dump may tell us a lot about where and how 52 million newly unemployed people not only struggle to survive, but also how they organize new forms of social, cultural, and political life.

Kathleen Millar’s timely research on this trash dump illuminates how people create meaning and social relations in the most trying situations, as well as how these workers are integrally enmeshed in an economic system that formally excludes them. Millar navigates between the Scylla and Charybdis of catadores as passive victims of economic redundancy and simple happy souls reveling in their material poverty. In doing so, she unsettles basic notions of poverty and work. Despite the precariousness and daily dangers of their work, catadores build a sense of autonomy over their work, networks of support, a basis for political organization, and class consciousness. This is not how those within the informal “underclass,” outside formal wage relations, are generally understood.

Millar’s argument is not simply descriptive. In the ethnographic detail of how people create life out of trash, how struggles between catadores and recyclable purchasers develop, and how community and kin ties emerge that knit together social life on the dump, we begin to see where new forms of struggle, consciousness, and life emerge. Because these dumps become the sites of regeneration for the dispossessed, during times of economic crisis and further dispossession, studies such as this one underscore the holes and pressure points in our current economic system. In a world where 52 million workers will be thrust into unemployment, studies like this are crucial toward understanding not just bare survival, but also how new forms of organization, meaning, and consciousness arise from the waste of economic crisis.

—Michael Polson

CUNY Graduate School Student Collective:

Akissi Britton, Risa Cromer, Chris Grove, Carwil James, Martha Lincoln, Michael Polson, Sophie Statzel, John Warner

This column, a new regular contribution to Anthropology Now, will highlight emerging anthropological research that has the potential to reshape contemporary social and political debates. A series of short reviews will be coauthored and edited each issue by a diverse student collective from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, which has historically supported publicly engaged anthropology. The members of the collective would like to thank Katherine McCaffrey, Ida Susser, and the rest of the editorial board for this opportunity and their continued support.

In addition, the members express their appreciation to the “Discoveries” student collective of the sociological journal Contexts for generously advising on process and approach.

Fair Capitalism?

Daniel Reichman. 2008. “Justice at a Price: Regulation and Alienation in the Global Economy.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 31(1): 102–117.

A growing number of U.S. consumers choose to spend a bit more for a “fair” cup of coffee. By guaranteeing farmers $1.26 per pound for unroasted beans, consumers affirm a commitment to “fair capitalism” in a global market of mass-produced commodities and stark inequalities. This “fair trade” movement emerged after the dismantling of Cold War–era international treaties, which attempted to stabilize coffee prices in developing economies through production quotas. Daniel Reichman delves into the consequences of international deregulation in “Justice at a Price,” examining limited attempts by different social groups at transnational market regulation. Reichman suggests that these attempts largely fail to secure fairness or justice for alienated individuals, whether fair trade consumers or exploited coffee plantation workers, separated from one another in the global market.

The people that Reichman portrays in his account perceive only limited aspects of the global economy and resort to individual actions as bases for social change. After being fired from McDonald’s during a cost-cutting measure, Tony used his savings to buy a Honduran coffee farm. He sells some of his coffee in the cargo areas of JFK airport, but most must be sold for 35 cents per pound to a corporate subsidiary. Tony expresses frustration with the national coffee chains that dominate the JFK passenger terminals but does not question the wider economic system. His Honduran workers direct their anger toward him, a New Yorker presumed to be making millions by exploiting their labor. In turn, troubled by injustice, many New Yorkers choose to purchase “authentic” fair trade coffee, affirming their individual identities as socially conscious consumers. Fair trade purchases increased 1000 percent from 2000–2005, to two percent of the U.S. coffee market. However, by focusing on incremental social change through individual choices, fair trade marketing also tends to neglect important questions about systemic global inequalities and the role of states in regulation.

As the current economic crisis continues to broaden awareness of inequalities and interconnections, Reichman offers an important exploration of the limits of different forms of regulation, encouraging a comprehensive or systemic understanding of the global economy. While fair trade coffee might help wake thousands of individuals, a systemic analysis promises renewed attention to the importance of the state, international institutions, and collective political action—not just individual consumer choices—in challenging interconnected injustices worldwide.

—Chris Grove

Social Movements as Makers of Meaning

Charles Price, Donald Nonini, and Erich Fox Tree. 2008. “Grounded Utopian Movements: Subjects of Neglect.” Anthropological Quarterly 81(1): 127–159.

María Isabel Casas-Cortés, Michal Osterweil, and Dana E. Powell. 2008. “Blurring Boundaries: Recognizing Knowledge-Practices in the Study of Social Movements.” Anthropological Quarterly 81(1): 17–58.

Anthropologists have often taken a backseat to sociologists and political scientists in studying social movements. The winter 2008 issue of Anthropological Quarterly, however, presents the work of twelve anthropologists who draw on the discipline’s strengths in understanding culture and social practices. This collection calls for a new understanding of social movements as sites where meanings are made, furthering social movement scholarship in the areas of identity, tradition, and emotion.

In one article, Charles Price, Donald Nonini, and Eric Fox Tree introduce the concept of the Grounded Utopian Movement(GUM). GUMs are long-term efforts such as Jamaican Rastafarianism and persistent Maya cultural resistance in Mexico and Guatemala that envision an alternative, ideal social order. GUMs have their own “rationalities, often based in religious or non-Western cultural perspectives,” (145) which go beyond their economic or political demands. Their visions are grounded in “real places, embodied by living people, informed by past lifeways,” and kept alive through everyday practices (128). For example, a variety of Maya movements have emerged over generations of conflict with the state. Each time, new leaders, forms of action, and ways of organizing have connected to ongoing cultural traditions. Price, Nonini, and Fox Tree believe that many, and perhaps most, movements include GUM-like efforts “to constitute more satisfying lives and generate personal transformations in pursuit of grounded utopias.” These qualities occur alongside the goal-oriented strategies of “gaining power and representation” that traditional social movement studies emphasize (135).

María Isabel Casas-Cortés, Michal Osterweil, and Dana E. Powell see social movements as prolific producers of knowledge. Besides mobilizing their members, social movements often get involved in scientific debates. They encourage their members to look at the world in new ways and to develop their own theories of society (19). For example, indigenous environmental justice networks rely on conventional ecological science and push for scientists and the public to take “stories, community-based research, and lived experience” as seriously as they do numbers-based research (31). The article also considers how direct-action movements use consensus decision making as a way to reimagine social relationships. In listening to one another and acknowledging hidden differences of power among themselves, activists “relearn how to act and think about democracy.” In the process, they gain new knowledge of “hidden privileges,” silences, and “participatory possibilities” in person-to-person interactions (35, 37).

Anthropologists are now encountering social movements as producers of meaning and, like themselves, theorists of society. According to these authors, this redefines the role of researchers beyond the charting of movements’ rise and fall toward “the documentation of and engagement with activist knowledges” (28).

—Carwil James

CUNY Graduate School Student Collective:

Akissi Britton, Risa Cromer, Chris Grove, Carwil James, Martha Lincoln, Michael Polson, Sophie Statzel, John Warner

This column, a new regular contribution to Anthropology Now, will highlight emerging anthropological research that has the potential to reshape contemporary social and political debates. A series of short reviews will be coauthored and edited each issue by a diverse student collective from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, which has historically supported publicly engaged anthropology. The members of the collective would like to thank Katherine McCaffrey, Ida Susser, and the rest of the editorial board for this opportunity and their continued support.

In addition, the members express their appreciation to the “Discoveries” student collective of the sociological journal Contexts for generously advising on process and approach.

Retracing Histories of Race

Jemima Pierre. 2009. “Beyond Heritage Tourism: Race and the Politics of African-Diasporic Interactions.” Social Text 27(1 98): 59–81.

Many hope that Barack Obama’s election points to a “postracial” age. However, lingering histories of racism were on the minds of many as Obama visited the West African nation of Ghana this summer. Ghana’s historic role as the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence and its Elmina slave castle make it a premier site for diaspora tourism. As the first African American president of the United States, Obama’s first official “return” trip to sub-Saharan Africa is tremendously symbolic—not only for African Americans (and other Blacks in the African Diaspora)—but for continental Black Africans too. Indeed, while it is often imagined that race only has significance in the United States and the African Diaspora, Jemima Pierre reminds us that race has been central to self-understanding for continental Africans.

In her article “Beyond Heritage Tourism: Race and the Politics of African Diasporic Interactions,” Pierre uses Ghana’s booming heritage tourism industry (one avenue that facilitates interaction between Africans and
Diaspora Blacks) as a point of departure. She adeptly argues that to comprehend Ghanaians’ history and self-understanding, one must understand the country’s complicated racial history. Africa is not just a land of “ethnic conflicts” or “indigenous cultural traditions,” but it is also shaped by conceptions of race and related racial dynamics and tensions—dimensions many social commentators avoid. A focus on “ethnicity”
and “nation” alone fail to consider how Africa, as well as local events in Ghana, relate to global inequalities and power imbalances that rely on race and racism.

Similarly, the diaspora cannot continue to be construed as a privileged site of racial understandings—race has a long and complex history in Ghana, via slavery, colonialism, development, Cold War politics, and pan-Africanist movements. This history is marked by local, continental, and global socioeconomic hierarchies that shape Ghanaian experiences in ways similar to those of Blacks throughout the diaspora (62). Heritage or “roots tourism” is often viewed as a harmful imposition of “racial” ideologies upon an apparently nonracial Ghanaian public. This ignores the history of race within Ghana. Ghanaians have lived and are living within a cosmopolitan society, whose commercial and political interactions connect them to global ideas about race. As Obama follows the “return” route of so many diasporic Blacks to Ghana, Pierre reminds us that this doesn’t simply hold significance in the United States but has a real—and racial—importance in contemporary continental Africa. Indeed, this importance has roots in a long history of African interactions with its diaspora amid shifting global hierarchies.

—Akissi Britton

Caring about Dementia

Janelle S. Taylor. 2008. “On Recognition, Caring, and Dementia.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 22(4): 313–35.

Like millions of Americans caring for aging parents, anthropologist Janelle S. Taylor is the primary caretaker for her mother, who lives with dementia. Taylor reflects on the question that sympathetic friends always
seem to be asking: “Does she recognize you?” These queries about her mother’s memory encourage Taylor to explore a larger social phenomenon: “Why is it apparently so difficult for people to ‘recognize’—
as a friend, as a person, as even being alive—someone who, because of
dementia, can no longer keep names straight?” Taylor asks. “How does the turning away of friends, at the level of personal networks, relate to processes of ’social death,’ social exclusion, and abandonment of people with dementia on a broader level? In short, how do questions of ‘recognition’ in its narrowly cognitive sense get implicated in the ’politics of recognition’ on a broader scale?” (324–325).

This second meaning of “recognition” is the one raised by political movements working to achieve official governmental acknowledgement, including movements to legalize gay marriage. “Recognition politics” movements aim beyond pragmatic goals to seek social recognition for their members and thus a sense of legitimacy or selfhood. But as Taylor notes, dementia complicates key assumptions of recognition politics. She explores how claims to social and political recognition are often linked to
cognitive capacity, the ability to “recognize” people and things. How then can people such as Taylor’s mother retain social visibility in an age of recognition politics and popular horror stories about “losing” a loved one to dementia? Taylor argues for a new politics of recognition that would let people such as her mother retain their social visibility as caring—and cared for—individuals.

In the 1990s, a movement began within medical institutions that championed a humanist concern for recognizing the essence of the person within dementia, or what other anthropologists of senility describe as the “personhood turn.” This movement resists the treatment of people with dementia as “socially dead”—an idea that links personhood to cognitive capacity. Taylor shares this movement’s concern, but she suggests that we think about personhood not as something one has, like an essence or a capacity, but as something defined through social interactions, such as caring and relating. She cites memoirs from adult caretakers and personal memories of afternoons spent with her mother to illustrate ways to relate to, and thus “recognize,” people with dementia. For example, Taylor describes instances that might be interpreted as her
mother’s failure to follow social norms, such as her hyper-attentiveness to neatness, as ways her mother “cares back.” This alternative approach offers ways to see and care anew. For elderly people who suffer from
dementia, Taylor’s proposal for a new politics of recognition offers personal evidence to affirm how caring is a political and regenerative
act.

—Risa Cromer

Findings is a new, regular column contribution appearing in the magazine, Anthropology Now. Each column highlight emerging anthropological research through a series of short reviews co-authored and co-edited by a diverse student collective from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The website is happy to be able to offer a sample of this column appearing in the new Fall issue #2 of Anthropology Now. If you like what you see, please visit Paradigm Publishers for more information on how to subscribe and get full access to the magazine, Anthropology Now.

Silencing Race
Angelina E. Castagno. 2008. “‘I Don’t Want to Hear That!’: Legitimating Whiteness through Silence in Schools.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39(3): 314–333.

Despite the adage “Silence is golden,” stifling and ignoring student discussion about race in schools helps reinforce whiteness as the status quo. Angelina E. Castagno’s one-year ethnographic study of two junior high schools in Utah found that the primary lessons taught about race and racism are often communicated through silence. This remains common even in school districts that embrace “multiculturalism” as school policy, educate racially diverse student populations, and employ racial categories to measure and track gaps in academic achievement. White educators frequently prioritize their own comfort over allowing frank discussions about race in their classroom both by remaining silent about race and racism and by silencing students’ “race talk.” Teachers use racially coded language—such as language ability and reference to social class—to avoid talking about the social significance of race in structuring the school environment and student experience. Further, teachers ignore “race talk” by failing to address students’ informal charges of systematic racial discrimination and by failing to interrupt racist comments by students in class. Such “color-mute” strategies convey to students that systemic racism is either nonexistent or unimportant. Teachers also actively silence student commentary about race as “impolite,” thereby reinforcing the message that race should not be publicly discussed. Engaging in silence and silencing helps to enforce the illusion that race does not matter and reinforces the dominance of whiteness in schools.

Given the ongoing prevalence of de facto racial segregation in public schools in the United States, such a consistent pattern among educators defending the racial status quo through silence is troubling. Castagno’s research illustrates that teachers’ desires to alleviate conflict and fear of broaching discussions about race provide the emotional base for silencing race-talk. However, this commitment to politeness reinforces the status quo and inhibits educators from challenging students’ racial biases. Recognizing that all U.S. youth encounter a social world steeped in racial images and organized by racial hierarchies, adhering to the rule that “silence is golden” does our youth an injustice.

—Sophie Statzel

Waging Tourism
Rebecca Stein. 2008. “Souvenirs of Conquest: Israeli Occupations as Tourist Events.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40:647–669.

Last March, global media outlets celebrated the resumption of package tours to war-ravaged Iraq as a sign of more settled times and a potential revenue stream in a devastated economy. A more critical look at tourism raises uncomfortable questions about the global distribution of wealth and power. Who has the financial means and political standing to cross borders as consumer and voyeur? What kind of travel is celebrated in tourist accounts, obscuring more painful journeys of economic migrants, refugees, and prisoners? When colonial occupation or military violence facilitates vacationing, another question arises: when does tourism become complicit with violence?

Rebecca Stein addresses this last question with reference to Israel in her article, “Souvenirs of Conquest.” She explores connections between militarism and leisure through a critical reading of media accounts of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and ensuing occupation, as well as the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Israeli tourist activities boomed in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other occupied Palestinian cities in the days following the 1967 war. Reports of sightseeing excursions, pilgrimages, and bargain-hunting expeditions lauded Israeli tourism while masking the recent violence. Occupied Palestinian territories were redescribed as tourism locales at the same time that they were reconfigured as exploitable sources of cheap labor and natural resources, markets for Israeli commodities, and targets of territorial expansion through the construction of settlements.

In accounts of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli soldier becomes the new tourist-consumer. The violence and suffering of war are hidden amid tales of outings to restaurants and markets, of soldiers dancing the night away in clubs and enjoying the hospitality of their Lebanese hosts at a picnic.
Tourist accounts depict occupation in “positively pleasurable terms, rewriting [incursion and occupation] as experiences of collective sightseeing” (661). Stein argues that tourism is a tactic of “anti-conquest”—a means of cloaking ongoing state violence and occupation in a consumer-friendly shroud. Tourism explicitly avoids recognizing the violence that underwrites it. Reminders of this entanglement of tourism and militarism abound, whether in new package tours to Iraq or in picnicking sightseers in the hills above Gaza, replete with binoculars and portable espresso machines, consuming scenes of destruction in the first days of 2009.

—John Warner

Want to read more? Click here to find out how you and your local library can subscribe and get full access to the magazine!

Findings is a new, regular column contribution appearing in the magazine, Anthropology Now. Each column highlight emerging anthropological research through a series of short reviews co-authored and co-edited by a diverse student collective from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The website is happy to be able to offer a sample of this column appearing in the new Fall issue #2 of Anthropology Now. If you like what you see, please visit Paradigm Publishers for more information on how to subscribe and get full access to the magazine, Anthropology Now.

Defining Torture
Christina Schwenkel. 2009. “From John McCain to Abu Ghraib: Tortured Bodies and Historical Unaccountability of U.S. Empire.” American Anthropologist 111 (1): 30–42.

In April 2009, the Obama administration released a series of CIA-authored “torture memos” that established a program for the physical and psychological mistreatment of presumed Al-Qaeda operatives, employing means such as the “insult slap” and water-boarding. These documents sealed the case that detainee abuses were not mere aberrations by rogue soldiers, but were premeditated by the highest U.S. authorities. Preempting calls for criminal prosecution of the authors of the torture memos, President Obama declared that the United States faced “a time for reflection, not retribution,” and asserted, “nothing will be gained by … laying blame for the past.”

The president’s gesture is consistent with U.S. leaders’ longstanding refusal to express remorse following the exposure of U.S. war crimes. It also resonates with the nation’s precedent for applying torture toward strategic ends. The counterinsurgency tactics of today’s U.S.-led War on Terror were refined during the Vietnam War. Under the auspices of the Phoenix Project, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces tortured and killed tens of thousands of suspected Viet Cong (South Vietnamese National Liberation Front) combatants and civilian sympathizers, and pioneered the use of psychological techniques like sensory deprivation. Somehow these war crimes have evaporated from U.S. national consciousness. A recent article by Christina Schwenkel explores wars of empire and the selective forgetting that follows them.

Schwenkel explains how U.S. citizens came to embrace state-sponsored torture, while at the same time enshrining John McCain’s brutal treatment in the “Hanoi Hilton” as an enduring trauma. Schwenkel argues that the United States imagines Vietnam as a “land of terror”—a preoccupation that appears everywhere from “Rambo: First Blood” to McCain’s campaign speeches. Further, she demonstrates how these ideas are used as political ammunition against postwar Vietnam. Both in international diplomacy and global media, the Vietnamese were never allowed to forget the damages—real and imagined—that Americans suffered on their soil.

As the U.S. War on Terror becomes enshrined as an “American tragedy,” U.S. mourners fixate on national losses, honoring fallen combatants and grieving over the corrosion of national values in a foreign war that is reminiscent of the U.S. “quagmire” in Vietnam. But as Schwenkel argues, Americans must not commemorate and forgive themselves while forgetting their offenses against adversaries. “U.S. empire must ultimately recognize and be held accountable for the unreconciled historical wounds and legacies of suffering and trauma that it continues to reproduce and inflict on others” (39).

—Martha Lincoln

Working on Waste
Kathleen Millar. 2008. “Making Trash into Treasure: Struggles for Autonomy on a Brazilian Garbage Dump.” Anthropology of Work Review 29 (2): 25–34.

In 2009, the International Labor Organization estimated that as many as 52 million people would lose their jobs in the formal economy due to the ongoing economic crises. What will happen to the millions of unemployed? Ask Zezinho, the current head of the Association of Catadores, or trash pickers, in Rio de Janeiro. The grandson of a union organizer, Zezinho’s chances for employment in the formal, or legally regulated, economic sector were devastated by recession, inflation, and government policies in the 1980s. These policies contributed to the creation of mass unemployment and undermined social services. Now Zezinho lives and works on a trash dump on the urban periphery of Rio. Collectors of redeemable recyclables in places such as Rio’s “Jardim das Floras” dump may tell us a lot about where and how 52 million newly unemployed people not only struggle to survive, but also how they organize new forms of social, cultural, and political life.

Kathleen Millar’s timely research on this trash dump illuminates how people create meaning and social relations in the most trying situations, as well as how these workers are integrally enmeshed in an economic system that formally excludes them. Millar navigates between the Scylla and Charibdis of catadores as passive victims of economic redundancy and simple happy souls reveling in their material poverty. In doing so, she unsettles basic notions of poverty and work. Despite the precariousness and daily dangers of their work, catadores build a sense of autonomy over their work, networks of support, a basis for political organization and class consciousness. This is not how those within the informal “underclass,” outside formal wage relations, are generally understood.

Millar’s argument is not simply descriptive. In the ethnographic detail of how people create life out of trash, how struggles between catadores and recyclable purchasers develop, and how community and kin ties emerge that knit together social life on the dump, we begin to see where new forms of struggle, consciousness, and life emerge. Because these dumps become the sites of regeneration for the dispossessed, during times of economic crisis and further dispossession, studies such as this one underscore the holes and pressure points in our current economic system. In a world where 52 million workers will be thrust into unemployment, studies like this are crucial toward understanding not just bare survival, but also how new forms of organization, meaning, and consciousness arise from the waste of economic crisis.

—Michael Polson

Want to read more? Click here to find out how you and your local library can subscribe and get full access to the magazine!

Findings is a new, regular column contribution appearing in the magazine, Anthropology Now. Each column highlight emerging anthropological research through a series of short reviews co-authored and co-edited by a diverse student collective from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The website is happy to be able to offer a sample of this column appearing in the new Fall issue #2 of Anthropology Now. If you like what you see, please visit Paradigm Publishers for more information on how to subscribe and get full access to the magazine, Anthropology Now.

Fair Capitalism?
Daniel Reichman. 2008. “Justice at a Price: Regulation and Alienation in the Global Economy.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 31(1): 102–117.

A growing number of U.S. consumers choose to spend a bit more for a “fair” cup of coffee. By guaranteeing farmers $1.26 per pound for unroasted beans, consumers affirm a commitment to “fair capitalism” in a global market of mass-produced commodities and stark inequalities. This “fair trade” movement emerged after the dismantling of Cold War–era international treaties, which attempted to stabilize coffee prices in developing economies through production quotas. Daniel Reichman delves into the consequences of international deregulation in “Justice at a Price,” examining limited attempts by different social groups at transnational market regulation. Reichman suggests that these attempts largely fail to secure fairness or justice for alienated individuals, whether fair trade consumers or exploited coffee plantation workers, separated from one another in the global market.

The people that Reichman portrays in his account perceive only limited aspects of the global economy and resort to individual actions as bases for social change. After being fired from McDonald’s during a cost-cutting measure, Tony used his savings to buy a Honduran coffee farm. He sells some of his coffee in the cargo areas of JFK airport, but most must be sold for 35 cents per pound to a corporate subsidiary. Tony expresses frustration with the national coffee chains that dominate the JFK passenger terminals but does not question the wider economic system. His Honduran workers direct their anger toward him, a New Yorker presumed to be making millions by exploiting their labor. In turn, troubled by injustice, many New Yorkers choose to purchase “authentic” fair trade coffee, affirming their individual identities as socially conscious consumers. Fair trade purchases increased 1000 percent from 2000–2005, to two percent of the U.S. coffee market. However, by focusing on incremental social change through individual choices, fair trade marketing also tends to neglect important questions about systemic global inequalities and the role of states in regulation.

As the current economic crisis continues to broaden awareness of inequalities and interconnections, Reichman offers an important exploration of the limits of different forms of regulation, encouraging a comprehensive or systemic understanding of the global economy. While fair trade coffee might help wake thousands of individuals, a systemic analysis promises renewed attention to the importance of the state, international institutions, and collective political action—not just individual consumer choices—in challenging interconnected injustices worldwide.

—Chris Grove

Social Movements as Makers of Meaning
Charles Price, Donald Nonini, and Erich Fox Tree. 2008. “Grounded Utopian Movements: Subjects of Neglect.” Anthropological Quarterly 81(1): 127–159.

María Isabel Casas-Cortés, Michal Osterweil, and Dana E. Powell. 2008. “Blurring Boundaries: Recognizing Knowledge-Practices in the Study of Social Movements.” Anthropological Quarterly 81(1): 17–58.

Anthropologists have often taken a backseat to sociologists and political scientists in studying social movements. The winter 2008 issue of Anthropological Quarterly, however, presents the work of twelve anthropologists who draw on the discipline’s strengths in understanding culture and social practices. This collection calls for a new understanding of social movements as sites where meanings are made, furthering social movement scholarship in the areas of identity, tradition, and emotion.

In one article, Charles Price, Donald Nonini, and Eric Fox Tree introduce the concept of the Grounded Utopian Movement (GUM). GUMs are long-term efforts such as Jamaican Rastafarianism and persistent Maya cultural resistance in Mexico and Guatemala that envision an alternative, ideal social order. GUMs have their own “rationalities, often based in religious or non-Western cultural perspectives,” (145) which go beyond their economic or political demands. Their visions are grounded in “real places, embodied by living people, informed by past lifeways,” and kept alive through everyday practices (128). For example, a variety of Maya movements have emerged over generations of conflict with the state. Each time, new leaders, forms of action, and ways of organizing have connected to ongoing cultural traditions. Price, Nonini, and Fox Tree believe that many, and perhaps most, movements include GUM-like efforts “to constitute more satisfying lives and generate personal transformations in pursuit of grounded utopias.” These qualities occur alongside the goal-oriented strategies of “gaining power and representation” that traditional social movement studies emphasize (135).

María Isabel Casas-Cortés, Michal Osterweil, and Dana E. Powell see social movements as prolific producers of knowledge. Besides mobilizing their members, social movements often get involved in scientific debates. They encourage their members to look at the world in new ways and to develop their own theories of society (19). For example, indigenous environmental justice networks rely on conventional ecological science and push for scientists and the public to take “stories, community-based research, and lived experience” as seriously as they do numbers-based research (31). The article also considers how direct-action movements use consensus decision making as a way to reimagine social relationships. In listening to one another and acknowledging hidden differences of power among themselves, activists “relearn how to act and think about democracy.” In the process, they gain new knowledge of “hidden privileges,” silences, and “participatory possibilities” in person-to-person interactions (35, 37).

Anthropologists are now encountering social movements as producers of meaning and, like themselves, theorists of society. According to these authors, this redefines the role of researchers beyond the charting of movements’ rise and fall toward “the documentation of and engagement with activist knowledges” (28).

—Carwil James

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Findings is a new, regular column contribution appearing in the magazine, Anthropology Now. Each column highlights emerging anthropological research through a series of short reviews co-authored and co-edited by a diverse student collective from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The website is happy to be able to offer a sample of this column appearing in the new Fall issue #2 of Anthropology Now. If you like what you see, please visit Paradigm Publishers for more information on how to subscribe and get full access to the magazine, Anthropology Now.

The student collective is composed of Akissi Britton, Risa Cromer, Chris Grove, Carwil James, Martha Lincoln, Michael Polson, Sophie Statzel, and John Warner.

Retracing Histories of Race
Jemima Pierre. “Beyond Heritage Tourism: Race and the Politics of African-Diasporic Interactions.” 2009. Social Text 27 (1 98): 59–81.

Many hope that Barack Obama’s election points to a “postracial” age. However, lingering histories of racism were on the minds of many as Obama visited the West African nation of Ghana this summer. Ghana’s historic role as the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence and its Elmina slave castle make it a premier site for diaspora tourism. As the first African American president of the United States, Obama’s first official “return” trip to sub-Saharan Africa is tremendously symbolic—not only for African Americans (and other Blacks in the African Diaspora)—but for continental Black Africans too. Indeed, while it is often imagined that race only has significance in the United States and the African Diaspora, Jemima Pierre reminds us that race has been central to self-understanding for continental Africans.

In her article “Beyond Heritage Tourism: Race and the Politics of African-Diasporic Interactions,” Pierre uses Ghana’s booming heritage tourism industry (one avenue that facilitates interaction between Africans and Diaspora Blacks) as a point of departure. She adeptly argues that to comprehend Ghanaians’ history and self-understanding, one must understand the country’s complicated racial history. Africa is not just a land of “ethnic conflicts” or “indigenous cultural traditions,” but it is also shaped by conceptions of race and related racial dynamics and tensions— dimensions many social commentators avoid. A focus on “ethnicity” and “nation” alone fail to consider how Africa, as well as local events in Ghana, relate to global inequalities and power imbalances that rely on race and racism.

Similarly, the diaspora cannot continue to be construed as a privileged site of racial understandings—race has a long and complex history in Ghana, via slavery, colonialism, development, Cold War politics, and pan-Africanist movements. This history is marked by local, continental, and global socioeconomic hierarchies that shape Ghanaian experiences in ways similar to those of Blacks throughout the diaspora (62). Heritage or “roots tourism” is often viewed as a harmful imposition of “racial” ideologies upon an apparently nonracial Ghanaian public. This ignores the history of race within Ghana. Ghanaians have lived and are living within a cosmopolitan society, whose commercial and political interactions connect them to global ideas about race. As Obama follows the “return” route of so many diasporic Blacks to Ghana, Pierre reminds us that this doesn’t simply hold significance in the United States but has a real— and racial— importance in contemporary continental Africa. Indeed, this importance has roots in a long history of African interactions with its diaspora amid shifting global hierarchies.

—Akissi Britton

Caring about Dementia
Janelle S. Taylor. 2008. On Recognition, Caring, and Dementia. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 22(4): 313–35.

Like millions of Americans caring for aging parents, anthropologist Janelle S. Taylor is the primary caretaker for her mother, who lives with dementia. Taylor reflects on the question that sympathetic friends always seem to be asking: “Does she recognize you?” These queries about her mother’s memory encourage Taylor to explore a larger social phenomenon: “Why is it apparently so difficult for people to “recognize”—as a friend, as a person, as even being alive— someone who, because of dementia, can no longer keep names straight? How does the turning away of friends, at the level of personal networks, relate to processes of “social death,” social exclusion, and abandonment of people with dementia on a broader level? In short, how do questions of “recognition” in its narrowly cognitive sense get implicated in the “politics of recognition” on a broader scale?” (324–325).

This second meaning of “recognition” is the one raised by political movements working to achieve official governmental acknowledgement, including movements to legalize gay marriage. “Recognition politics” movements aim beyond pragmatic goals to seek social recognition for their members and thus a sense of legitimacy or selfhood. But as Taylor notes, dementia complicates key assumptions of recognition politics. She explores how claims to social and political recognition are often linked to cognitive capacity, the ability to “recognize” people and things. How then can people such as Taylor’s mother retain social visibility in an age of recognition politics and popular horror stories about “losing” a loved one to dementia? Taylor argues for a new politics of recognition that would let people such as her mother retain their social visibility as caring—and cared for—individuals.

In the 1990s, a movement began within medical institutions that championed a humanist concern for recognizing the essence of the person within dementia, or what other anthropologists of senility describe as the “personhood turn.” This movement resists the treatment of people with dementia as “socially dead”—an idea that links personhood to cognitive capacity. Taylor shares this movement’s concern, but she suggests that we think about personhood not as something one has, like an essence or a capacity, but as something defined through social interactions, such as caring and relating. She cites memoirs from adult caretakers and personal memories of afternoons spent with her mother to illustrate ways to relate to, and thus “recognize,” people with dementia. For example, Taylor describes instances that might be interpreted as her mother’s failure to follow social norms, such as her hyper-attentiveness to neatness, as ways her mother “cares back.” This alternative approach offers ways to see and care anew. For elderly people who suffer from dementia, Taylor’s proposal for a new politics of recognition offers personal evidence to affirm how caring is a political and regenerative act.

—Risa Cromer

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CUNY The Graduate Center

Findings is an a collectively written and co-edited column by a students at CUNY’s Graduate Center that reviews emerging anthropological research relevant to current public debates and discussions. Although the column currently appears in the print issue of Anthropology Now only, be on the lookout for a soon-to-come online component that gives you, the reader, a chance for interaction and feedback! Coming soon…

In the meantime, check out Paradigm Publishers to find out how you and your library can get copies of the new Fall print issue of Anthropology Now.