Alanna E. Cooper, an anthropologist and a Jewish cultural historian began her research on an old Central Asian Jewish community because of a small and curious dictionary:

 I don’t remember the name of the man who sold the dictionary to me. He was one of the many people I met in the 1990s who was getting rid of his belongings in advance of his migration from Bukhara. He invited me to his home and showed me the small stack of books on the floor of his empty living room.

I couldn’t quite make out what they were, except that they had been printed in Jerusalem about a century earlier. The man wanted only a few dollars for them, so I took them with me.

The dictionary was the most curious of the lot. Less than 50 pages long, with translations of just 700 words, its ambition lies not in its length but in its breadth. Six columns run across each page: Hebrew, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Arabic and Turkish.

Read the rest at the Jewish Daily Forward:

Jews of Bukhara Helped Me To Understand Personal History
By Alanna E. Cooper, May 09, 2013

The Toronto Star discusses the research of Jennifer Lansford, a professor of psychology and cultural anthropology at Duke University.  Lansford conducts cross-cultural research on motherhood. 

 “Universally, one of the key tasks of motherhood is to make children feel loved, accepted and valued, and that’s regardless of cultural context…Mothers who are able to do this successfully will have children who are better adjusted,” she says.

“In the U.S., for example, a good mother is reactive… She responds to the child’s needs, feeding or changing him when he cries. In contrast, a good mother in Japan is proactive, attempting to anticipate the needs of her baby before he cries.”

 “Lansford acknowledges that her research makes cultural generalizations, and cautions against drawing sweeping conclusions because there is significant variation within countries and cultures.”

Read more at thestar.com

Mothers love differently around the world

New research explores the different ways mothers show they love their babies in countries around the world.

Marco Chown Oved, May 09 2013

Writing for NPR, the anthropologist Barbara King observes: “some parents, mostly in one area of New York City, as far as I can tell, are raising their children from birth without diapers.” She speaks to Meredith Small, an anthropologist from Cornell University, who explains: "Only Westerns make such a big deal about toilet training," and adds that the lack of diaper use in many cultures does not reflect a lack of diapers:  “Of course they could use any cloth, but often this is the much easier way.”

Read more at NPR:

"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.

New York has long been a city of immigrants, and as a result of waves of immigration, language experts describe it as the most linguistically dense city on earth. Mark Turin travels to the Big Apple to track the many languages of New York. He travels the 7 train, designated a US Heritage Trail, as it rattles its way from Flushing to the heart of Manhattan, passing through areas where Korean, Bengali and Spanish are the languages spoken on the street. He meets the linguists who are tracking New York's many languages and hears from those who believe that the US needs to promote the English language ahead of all others.

His journey ends with a story of linguistic rebirth as he discovers how the Yiddish language, once in decline, has attracted a new generation of speakers.

This post originally appeared here, Monday, December 17th, 2012. 

Mark Turin has also written about New York's linguistic diversity for BBC news here. 

Audio originally produced by Mark Rickards.

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

Right? 

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

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

Working-Class Conservatives 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reasons of State 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gun-Rights Side 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gun-Control Side 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culture of Distrust 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References and Suggestions for Further Reading 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Viral Time

What was your reaction to KONY 2012?  Do you remember it?  Did you have a reaction?  Did it serve as fodder for an anthropologically grounded treatise in one of your classes or a conversation in the spring of 2012 during it’s viral time?  Did it launch you into instant empathy and social action as the filmmakers intended? Or, did you create a condescending Willy Wonka or Skeptical African Kid meme to mock it? To recap briefly: The group Invisible Children and filmmaker Jason Russell launched a video on March 5, 2012 to bring awareness to the war criminal Joseph Kony.  As of early August 2012 the video has been viewed over 104 million times with the majority of that number coming within 24 hours of it’s initial posting making it the most successful launch of a social media campaign in the history of these movements.  The premiere of the video preceded a planned ‘Cover the Night’ campaign that encouraged individuals, mostly college age youth, to cover cities with Shepard Fairie like posters of KONY 2012 globally.  The failure of the postering campaign, the very public mental breakdown of the filmmaker, and questions about the organization and it’s intentions on numerous blog posts led to an almost simultaneous dismissal of the movement.  As The Atlantic’s Megan Garber noted, “The end game of the Kony 2012 video — the most successful viral video campaign of all time — was supposed to be a physical world awash with the graffiti of digital empathy.  The consensus, though? The thing was a flop. Hardly anyone came out” (Garber 2012).

The video, and unfortunately, the good intentions of the organization and filmmaker were dismissed as quickly as an unknowing undergraduate dropping an anthropological theory course.  There are a number of obvious reasons for the rapid decline of the KONY movement including the supposed nonexistent attention span of the target age demographic, the unfortunate linkage of the film to the travails of the filmmaker, and the problematic narrative within the video itself.  Many saw the viral video’s attempt to be relatable by linking Joseph Kony to one of his victims and the filmmaker himself as the latest embodiment of the ‘White Savior Industrial Complex’. (Cole 2012)  In addition, citizens of Uganda protested the content of the video as well.  And, the once empathetic audience of Invisible Children almost instantaneously dismissed the KONY 2012 campaign quickly turning it into a drinking game amongst other mocking imagery.  So why did the generation that is so readily available to the impact of social media, create an instant backlash to this campaign?  I was amazed at the speed at which the same students who I have seen impacted by Invisible Children quickly contextualize and dismiss the KONY 2012 social media campaign when it was introduced.  That was easy to negotiate in class. 

But, it was the follow-up question by my students that has kept me thinking about this the last several months.  “Well, Dr. D you are always talking about neoliberalism and human rights issues and all that stuff over in Africa.  You make videos, why don’t people know about the people you work with as much as the KONY filmmakers have made people think about what’s going on there?”  Hmmmm.  The instant diatribe response that the professional anthropological audience is drumming up as you read this was not going to fly.  This student audience did not want to hear about academic integrity, fieldwork methods, pesky ethics or the inability of visual anthropologists to produce anything aesthetically pleasing.  The gauntlet was thrown down by this media savvy contingent of digital indigene pushing back.  So, what would anthropologists do differently?  Is academic trepidation stifling a much-needed contribution to the public discourse?  Not only in print, but also particularly in visual media?  Where are the public anthropologists that work in an immediate public space?  Paul Stoller is doing an incredible job through a series of op-eds at Huffington Post.  The number of anthropology bloggers continues to expand but remains somewhat insular.  It all leads to the question, (and I include myself here) are we making the social impact that anthropology, and particularly anthropologically intended media could be doing?

The Video

I have seen the entire KONY 2012 documentary.  Invisible Children screening advertisements have been chalked onto my campus sidewalks for years.  As students have done in several papers in my media courses, one can also map the last several years of developments in social media technologies alongside this human rights effort.  And, you have to respect any effort to try to move a western audience from sympathy or empathy with the plight of different human rights atrocities to more of a pragmatic solidarity.  So, the anthropological audience needs to respect what they do.  Right?  Any organization that can bring glaring human rights issues into the public domain with media should garner some critical attention and praise.  Individuals unbridled from institutions have been providing this media for years now.  The encouragement of this practice is based on a common-sense position I have articulated in previous writings that the visual image brings an immediacy to human rights issues more than any other medium could hope for (Durington 2008).  As far as KONY 2012 goes, the interviews with Russell’s colleague Jacob in the video are compelling to say the least.  The 7:15 mark in the video seemed to elicit the most tears when viewed in class.

The issues surrounding the Lord’s Resistance Army and many of the socioeconomic issues that have been going on in Uganda and surrounding nation states is problematic to say the least.  A well-informed audience knows this.  Perhaps one of the most alarming problems in Uganda is the persecution of homosexuals through some very troubling legislative attempts in that country and ties to one particular American faith-based organization.  As any respectable anthropologist will dictate, an explanation of current human rights issues is over simplified if it does not look at the historical trends that inform contemporary problems.  Many westerners look at former colonial states and want to place blame for what is happening solely on the shoulders of Africans today.  One has to realize that colonial history and continued neocolonialism fed by a global neoliberalism influence current problems in places like Uganda and elsewhere.  One would be ignorant to not realize that these forces feed events like the Rwandan genocide and enable someone like Joseph Kony to flourish in former African colonial states.  In many ways, KONY 2012 continues the dominant representational regime about Africa that places the continent and it’s people in framing devices of disease, warfare, strife, etc…  Numerous critics have pointed this out thus far.  Could the filmmakers have provided more context?  Absolutely. But how is that going to be done in a viral video?  How is the necessary anthropological context going to be provided in a hot medium like internet viral videos?  The new temporal construct of media ‘viral time’ enabled by time and space compression and internet technologies does not mesh particularly well with anthropological analysis either.

Some college students are drawn into the KONY 2012 movement in the same way that they were with Invisible Children.  What the filmmakers have run into this time though is an audience that is already aware of KONY 2012 and in some ways has moved on because of the speed of media and the concomitant dismissal of anything considered popular. Social media has created new networks and collaborations heretofore unimaginable even a decade ago.  With that comes never before imagined pitfalls as well.  Just because an individual has exposure to problematic global issues like never before does not mean that it creates direct action.  In fact, it can have the opposite effect.  As others have stated, ‘liking’ or ‘sharing’ is solidarity, but not necessarily pragmatic in its outcomes.  It would be great if students who want to do something driven by the consciousness they get from watching KONY 2012 would also consider doing something pragmatically about the innumerable human rights abuses occurring globally, even in immediate proximity to Uganda. Media saturation leads people to believe that ‘someone else is taking care of it’ in a more profound and troubling way.  But, it would be ignorant to state that social media has not influenced conversations.  Folks actually know what is going on in a way they never did before.  You only have to witness the Arab Spring to recognize this.  Perhaps anthropologists in their writing and teaching can harness the immediate knowledge of human rights issues brought by media viral time more expeditiously.  Many already do so.

One also has to applaud KONY 2012 in some capacity for trying.  If you are not able to do this, perhaps you have moved into a realm of cynicism that is troubling.  Americans are a unique group.  We contribute to charities that provide international assistance more than any other population in the world.  The United States both as a government and as a population is involved in humanitarian efforts globally in a profound way.  The ethos is that if you can help, you should despite calls by many to halt international aid.  This latter sentiment is supported by the knowledge that there is nothing more tragic than humanitarian aid and assistance that does not really do what it is supposed to because it is not what is actually needed in many locales.  Numerous anthropologists have brought attention to that dilemma.  If development entities would actually involve local populations in decision making processes and, dare I say, listen to anthropologists who often have very specialized knowledge and can broker that understanding, we might be even that much more instrumental in the help we give.  What if those same anthropologists were actually producing media to document and encourage these efforts? 

So, the question I want to ask using the KONY 2012 straw man is what would media anthropologists do differently? As a networked anthropology, what would we do differently?  Would KONY 2012 have been better served in something akin to what we are calling a networked anthropology (Collins and Durington 2012) where metadata, tags and smaller social networks would create inertia in much the same way as Invisible Children did? What would it look like if an anthropologist produced it, or could we?  Does the endeavor produce too many ethical quandaries, or, perhaps too much aesthetic value?  Despite labeling the KONY 2012 effort as a flop, it appears that the campaign is making an impact.  Human Rights Watch and an envoy for the African Union have praised the filmmakers for continuing to bring attention to the issue that has spurred action by the United Nations Security Council and the United States House of Representatives (Rainey 2012).  When is the last time an anthropologist with local knowledge and media documentation elicited that kind of attention? 

Matthew Durington is theMedia Editor at Anthropology Now 

Gina Athena Ulysse, a Prof. of Anthropology & African American Studies at Wesleyan University, writes at the huffingtonpost about the oppression of Vodouists in Haiti: 

Read the rest here:

Gina Athena Ulysse, Defending Vodou in Haiti, 10/18/2012 

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.

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.