Asef Bayat. 2012. “Politics in the City-Inside-Out” City and Society 24, 2:110–128.

In cities such as Beirut and Cairo, the quiet everyday ways that poor people reappropriate space from the rich in the Middle East creates a new version of urban public space that Asef Bayat terms the “city-inside-out.” This new version of urban public space is one in which the city’s levels of public-ness mean that the city is, quite literally, inside out, a place in which poor people have no option but to have a heavy presence outdoors, on the streets, and in which the response of the rich is to seek their own exclusive and enclosed zones. 

For the poor and disenfranchised the streets are central because they are simultaneously a place to express contention and an indispensable asset where economic and cultural life is reproduced. Bayat argues that in both of these ways people are involved in creating a set of “street politics.” These “street politics” take the form of conflicts over the control and use of public space and are also venues “where people forge collective identities and extend their solidarities beyond their immediate familiar circles” (120). Here slum settlements, street hawkers, and the urban disenfranchised form particular types of mobilization that Bayat terms “non-movements,” because they are “the collective actions of non-collective actors”(121).

As the streets are used by the urban poor for daily practices they become spaces where people “carve off, claim, and even push back elites from sizable pieces of the urban universe” (122). This occurs not only through physical control but also through the creation of social and political spaces that mean that the city is a place where the subalterns are overwhelmingly present in public arenas. This presence then is a way that the disenfranchised, who have been denied the benefits of urban citizenship, force elites to retreat into gated communities and locked vehicles and to hide behind private security guards. This art of presence is the way the disenfranchised reclaim the city.

To what extent do college anthropology departments unknowingly reproduce academic spaces in which being white is the norm? Critically taking on race, racism, and racial practices within anthropology, Brodkin, Morgen, and Hutchinson argue that anthropology has “not done well when it comes to decolonizing their own practices around race” (545). Their reasoning revolves around two types of practices: a racial division of labor within departments, as well as a range of everyday practices that recreate white public spaces. 

Where has anthropology gone wrong in creating a more inclusive and equitable discipline? The authors find, through an online survey of anthropologists of color, that while the discipline has made gains in terms of diversity and inclusivity since the 1960s, these gains have not been significant. Thus, many anthropologists of color feel that they get put on “diversity duty,” meaning that they are deemed responsible for researching race on behalf of the discipline and taking on issues of race in the university (550). This creates a pernicious division of labor in which their white counterparts have more time doing research and writing because they do not have to be responsible for issues of diversity and race. Another problem that Brodkin et al. point to is the preservation of a primarily white intellectual lineage in which works by minority scholars and their role in theory building are not reflected in the canon. Lastly, they argue that departments need to think about their own internal practices and “be conscious of class and gender associated social and financial responsibilities as well as different levels of class-associated academic know-how” (554). 

The authors offer a stinging, but necessary, critique of our discipline that needs to be taken seriously by everyone in the discipline, not just anthropologists of color. In their conclusion they call for a shift in the belief that because anthropologists study race and racism they aren’t also implicated in its perpetuation, in particular through the creation of “white spaces.” These authors believe that this call for internal critique will only translate into true change if the American Anthropological Association intervenes by collecting more data on diversity and engaging in the a more active promotion of it. Simply put, the authors’ recommendation is that the discipline needs to practice what it preaches and take seriously the points of view of those who are its “internal others” (555).

Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson. 2011. “Anthropology as White Public Space?” American Anthropologist 113:545–556.

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.

Surrealist painter René Magritte’s famous painting “The Treachery of Images” displays a drawing of a pipe with the caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (this is not a pipe). The painting points out a problem with referential images: when we look at an image that refers to another object, making the connection between image and object replaces further thought about the work itself. Tess Lea and Phil Pholeros argue that to understand the failures of publicly funded housing for indigenous Australians we must do what Magritte prompts—pry the “image” of a house apart from what makes a “real” house. Understanding the controversy surrounding the alleged “incapacity” of Aboriginal householders to care for their housing requires the recognition that, in some cases, “a pipe is not a pipe” (191). 

“A length of polyvinyl chloride tubing is not a pipe,” they write, “when, as is the case with much indigenous housing in Australia, it is not connected to an effluent disposal system” (191). This is only one of the more common failings of structures that appear to be houses but are, in fact, “composite deceptions” (191). After extensively studying the quality of housing provided to indigenous communities around Australia, Lea and Pholeros argue that most of the houses are illusions. They look like houses but lack key features of functionality: working bathrooms, kitchens where food can be prepared, basic electrical safety. These treacherous illusions persist despite government regulation. In fact, regulatory bodies participate in making non-houses into houses by regularly signing off on shoddy or incomplete maintenance work. 

Most people, whether donors, government, or the public, don’t distinguish between the image of a new house and the functionality of that house, so when housing disintegrates, its failure is attributed not to builders’ cheap materials and poor construction, but to the moral failings of house owners. Some anthropologists have objected to the blaming of indigenous residents by putting forward “sympathetic” accounts of how indigenous communities have differing cultural conceptions of space and technology. However, Lea and Pholeros argue, these interpretations only perpetuate the idea that genuine housing is falling apart due to inadequately prepared owners. They thereby hide the reality: the cause of Aboriginal housing failure is primarily the failing of the physical housing itself. Their point is neatly made in a final image depicting a row of beaming funders standing in front of a brand-new house, the first in a new development. The caption? “This is not a house.”

Tess Lea and Phil Pholeros. 2010. “This Is Not a Pipe: The Treacheries of Indigenous Housing.” Public Culture 22(1): 187–209. 

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.

Anthropology courses often teach us to recognize the humanity in others. Introductory textbooks reveal the logic behind social practices of native peoples, inviting the reader to identify with foreign cultures. At the same time, the desire to preserve the sanctity of such common humanity motivates communities to demonize individuals who commit “acts against nature.” The moral belief in our shared human nature is entangled with the moral outrage directed toward deviants whose conduct exceeds the limits of cultured behavior. 

Feminist-physicist-philosopher Karen Barad offers a fresh perspective on this conundrum by reflecting on how distinctions between humans and less-than-humans are made to matter. She examines the character of some “queer critters” whose substance, identity, or very existence is called into question by modern science: stingrays, atoms, unicellular predators, and lightning. For example, dinoflagellates are unicellular creatures that are neither plant nor animal, but can act as both. In varying environments, they obtain energy through photosynthesis, like plants, or by feeding on other organisms, like animals. A toxic species of this creature was profiled by The Washington Post as a “Cell from Hell,” and accused of “terrorizing” coastal estuaries as the “phantom suspect in a string of mass killings that destroyed more than a billion fish.” Its notoriety swelled when scientists were unable to identify even its most basic characteristics. In laboratory settings, toxic dinos exhibited inconsistent behavior, and the material entanglement between these creatures and their environment could not be reproduced in an artificial culture. The question of whether their toxicity is responsible for ecological destruction remains unresolved. 

This example of “nature’s queerness” is not a metaphor for human relations. Instead, it illustrates the particular relationship between social practice, the boundaries established by disciplinary knowledge, and the suspicions that arise when such boundaries are violated. It indicates that questions of identity that have preoccupied scholars of the humanities remain a blind spot in how we understand both our natural and social worlds. Barad suggests that our knowledge of these worlds should take their mutual entanglement as its starting point. Her reflections challenge us to rethink the stakes behind the age-old anthropological question of “what makes us human?”

Karen Barad. 2011. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Qui Parle 19, no. 2: 121–158. 

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.

Frantz Fanon’s powerful and enduring legacy has deeply inspired contemporary social movements organized by the poor in post-Apartheid South Africa. Fanon summed his relentless criticism of hierarchies, even within anticolonial movements, in the phrase “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.” This is a phrase that has informed the political philosophy and organizational mandates of Abahlali base Mjondolo (AbM)—a contemporary movement of marginalized and impoverished shack dwellers who articulate their right to live and work against their increasingly violent exclusion from the space and politics of Durban and other South African cities. 

In this article, Nigel Gibson illuminates the AbM’s ideas about organization, intellectual leadership, and politics. The group’s concepts, which Fanon inspired, are rooted in directly democratic, decentralized, and horizontal relationships. They begin with their everyday experiences and evolve practices of social change—what the AbM calls a “living politics”—arising from a shared analysis of how their lives, their activities, and their thinking are affected by postapartheid government policies. Gibson writes that the group regards structural transformation of post-apartheid society as necessary to satisfy needs of housing and dignity. 

The group’s concept of a “living politics” analyzes post-Apartheid reality with and from the perspective of the poor: those who suffer its gravest consequences. While they welcome others to help them construct concepts that aid their organizational goals, they are wary of how outsider allies use power and knowledge to contain or control their activities. 

It is for this reason that AbM remains autonomous from established political parties, whose influence might serve to stifle their radical demands, as well as from intellectuals, who might seek to maintain power over them by discounting their intelligence. Both represent groups who, in their words, “come to the poor and pretend to be the experts on our struggles without ever talking to us about our lives, our struggles, what we really want, what we can really do, and how we can really do it. We always felt that this way of doing politics is just another way for another elite to keep us in our place” (AbM 2010b). 

For Gibson, this offers a “challenge to committed intellectuals and activists [similar to what] Fanon mapped out” (66). Though its historical connections, the AbM’s reinvention of anticolonialism contains powerful lessons to those today, for example, who are interested in the worldwide Occupy movements, which are similarly searching for dignity, social justice in everyday life, and structural transformation at a societal level.

Nigel C. Gibson. 2012. “What Happened to the ‘Promised Land’? A Fanonian Perspective on Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Antipode 44(1): 51–73. 

Trauma site museums are dedicated to historic events of mass suffering, such as genocide or war, and are often built at the site of such events. How can these museums themselves act as living records of violence and trauma? What role do they play in practices of reconciliation, memorialization, and testimony for countries dealing with the aftermath of political violence? Patrizia Violi examines the politics of memory at work in visitors’ experiences of museums’ physical space and in their historical narratives. Moving from Chile to Cambodia and Italy, the author examines how different forms of memorializing past traumas affect how the future of a post-conflict society is imagined and articulated. 

At the Tuol Sleng Museum of the Crimes of Genocide in Cambodia, a former prison and detention center used by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, visitors are transported into a past that has been “frozen in time.” Through the careful preservation of interrogation rooms, prison cells, and instruments of torture (47) visitors are transformed into witnesses of a history that most Cambodians have denounced and have chosen to radically distance themselves from. The sense of historical distance that is created by this “frozen past” plays an important role in the political framing of Cambodia’s future and the construction of a national identity that is distinct from the experience of genocide and violence. 

At Villa Grimaldi in Chile, designers deliberately left out any trace of the Pinochet Era in an effort to dramatically transform the experience of the trauma site. The conversion of the Villa from a former torture center into the Park for Peace takes place amid a widespread debate about the transition to democracy, negotiations of public history, and how victims of Pinochet are to be remembered. At Tuol Sleng, the author argues, the preservation of history is a strategy that places the violence of the Khmer Rouge in the past. The Park for Peace does not attempt to evoke life under military dictatorship in this way, but rather distances Chilean visitors from the violence of the Pinochet era because of fears that a direct link to Pinochet’s crimes will destabilize the emergence of a fragile democracy. 

Taking us finally to the Ustica Memorial Museum in Italy, Violi examines an experimental approach to reenacting the past that produces a different affective experience. Here a catastrophic plane crash and its memorialization in fictional wreckage and audio recordings is mediated by art and the fabrication of a “reality effect.” The symbolic transformation of trauma into aesthetic experience offers new possibilities for trauma site museums to craft narrative experiences around memory, history, and now, art.

Patrizia Violi. 2012. “Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory: Tuol Sleng, Villa Grimaldi and the Bologna Ustica Museum.” Theory, Culture and Society 29(1): 36–75. 

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.

The Nimiipuu people of the Pacific Northwest (more commonly known as the Nez Perce Indians) have a close, interdependent relationship with salmon. This fish has long been central to their diet, rituals, stories, and understanding of the environment, the cultural consequence of their physical interdependence with the salmon. At the time of their first contact with Europeans, the Nimiipuu consumed some 500 pounds of fish per year, principally chinook, coho, chum, and sockeye salmon, as well as trout. Their nature-based spirituality also revolved around water, the salmon’s habitat. Today, reliance on salmon for food signals that a family maintains Nimiipuu tradition: salmon and water remain central to tribal gatherings, rites of passage, marriages, and ceremonies. Julia Davis-Wheleer, an elder in the society explains, “The salmon is a part of us, and we are a part of it. Our chil dren need to be able to feel what it is like to catch and eat salmon” (83). 

When one or more animals becomes so integrated into the life of a culture, argues Benedict Colombi, there is little separation possible among environmental stewardship, defense of rights to the landscape, and cultural survival. Nimiipuu have been obliged to apply their collective knowledge, work, and claims for sovereignty to the daunting challenge of sustaining salmon in rivers interrupted by nearly a century of dam building. Large-scale dams for hydroelectricity and the irrigation of export crops like wheat have cut salmon runs by 90 to 98 percent from their historic levels, just as the Nimiipuu population is returning to its mid- 1800s peak. In an effort to cope with these opposing trends, the community has opened seven fish hatcheries and lobbied for habitat restoration and dam decommissioning. Traditional environmental knowledge is combined with environmental policy intervention in efforts like the Wykan- us-mi Wa-kish-wit (The Spirit of the Salmon) plan for the species’ recovery. Invoking 19th century treaties that affirmed their right to fish for salmon at “usual and accustomed places,” the Nimipuu have reclaimed land and water rights, deploying the latter to increase the flow of Snake River. Their treaty rights and complex cultural connection make the Nimiipuu uniquely able to intervene forcefully in federal water policy to ensure salmon’s recovery. The Nimiipuu people’s sovereignty and their leverage over land-altering decisions are now vital for the future of the fish they have valued for centuries.

Benedict J. Colombi. 2012. “Salmon and the Adaptive Capacity of Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) Culture to Cope with Change.” The American Indian Quarterly 36(1): 75–97.

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.

On September 22, 2010, Tyler Clementi, a gay freshman at Rutgers University, committed suicide. Many held his roommate responsible for the tragedy: Dharun Ravi had spied on Clementi’s rendezvous with a male friend and tweeted about what he saw (Ravi was later convicted on charges of bias intimidation, invasion of privacy, and tampering with evidence in a highly publicized trial). One day earlier, gay journalist Dan Savage had initiated an anti-suicide project titled “It Gets Better” on YouTube, and it rapidly went viral in the wake of Clementi’s death. A protest against the bullying of gay youth in North America, the campaign hopes to stem the tide of rising gay teen suicides by having gay adults attest to how their own lives had improved with time. Savage and his husband kicked off the project with a moving description of their present life together in Seattle as happy, successful, and full of love—something they would have never imagined possible when they were bullied gay teens. 

In her article, Puar criticizes “It Gets Better,” noting that most of the campaign’s initial videos came from a narrow adult experience exemplified in Savage and his husband’s testimony. She argues that they restrict the promise of a life free from bullying and homophobia to white, urban, affluent males who have attained a degree of middle-class success. In a 2010 editorial published in The Guardian, she describes how perspectives of queer people of color, transgender, genderqueer, gender non-conforming youth, and lesbians are effaced in the “Better” campaign’s exhibition of one class of gay citizens at the cost of others. To assume that stigma and suffering can be erased by “making it” financially is a narrow vision of social justice which does not grapple with the ways race and gender impact what it means to be gay. For example, the medical industry, big businesses, and government policies maintain economic inequality and inflict suffering upon racial and sexual minorities. 

Puar links the campaign’s vision of “getting better” to the premises underlying gay assimilation. An emphasis on upward social mobility for empowering queer people reinforces the idea that money is the route to progress and freedom. She writes that, in truth, only a few can afford the costs for things to “get better.” In addition, Puar highlights a precursor to suicide: a state of “slow death,” the painful experience of being worn out—or “killed slowly”—by the everyday struggles to maintain life amid stress, insecurity, and sometimes violence. Lifelong forces of racism and class division can extend this slow death far beyond the teens. So, Puar argues, responding to events like Clementi’s suicide by focusing on just homophobia misses the point of how systemic discrimination works. Puar calls on us to diversify the contemporary landscape of dissent and pay greater attention to the endemic crisis of slow death undergone daily by many, less visible, others.

Jasbir K. Puar. 2012. “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better—Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18(1): 149– 158. 

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.

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