*This is a special feature from the third, Darwin themed print issue of Anthropology Now.*

spitting image, spit’n’ image. Informal. exact likeness; … bef. 950; (v.) ME spitten, OE spittan; c. G (dial.) spitzen to spit; akin to OE spætan to spit, spætl spittle …. (Dictionary. com 2009).

Last year, the California-based project 23andMe—a project that offers to estimate a person’s predisposition for a number of traits and diseases on the basis of a saliva test—held a “spit party” during New York fashion week; volunteers would spit into a test tube to provide their DNA for sequencing and analysis. The photo shows the vibrant scene, a young couple opening their kits and donating saliva, to explore what their genomic constitution might tell them about their identity and the kind of life they might lead. Apparently, they were publicly celebrating both their self and their genome, staging their persona and their bodily essence for the media, in the process of lobbying for personal genomics and the company responsible for 23andMe, an affiliate of Google. An article in The New York Times announced the launching event by saying that 23andMe “wants people to think of their genomes as a basis for social networking,” adding that “the company … hopes to make spitting into a test tube as stylish as ordering a ginger martini” (Salkin 2008). In November 2008, Time Magazine declared the retail DNA test of 23andMe the best innovation of the year. The year before, Apple’s iPhone was the winner. Several other companies have either started or scheduled one form or another of retail genomics. This is consuming genomics, a rapidly growing business receiving both substantial financial support and intense public attention. Clearly, something new is in the air.

The notion of spitting and related concepts has proved to be a powerful metaphor. Exploring its social history is like fol¬lowing the trajectories of ancient DNA. The English verb to “spit”—to “spew” or to “expel saliva”—is of early medieval origin. The noun “spit,” in the meaning “the very likeness,” is more recent, attested from 1602, while “spitting image” is a twentieth-century thing, apparently from as early as 1901. It may be interesting to note that there has been some debate on the etymology of the phrase. Some have suggested it is derived from “splitting image,” based on the two identical parts of a split plank of wood. Such an account would resonate perfectly with the modern concept of the double he¬lix and the splitting of DNA, underlining the relevance of the idea of the “spitting image” for both modern gene talk and the genealogical tree. The discovery of the structure of DNA material has been heralded as the key to the understanding of the continuity and change of life forms, as the missing conceptual link of evolutionary theory finally solving the mystery of the “tree of life.” Also, “splitting” might highlight the Western notion of the duality of the individual as a natural body and a social person, a notion often challenged nowadays by the monistic concept of the biosocial (Rabinow 1996). Given such reasoning, the 23andMe “spit party” might just as well have been called a “split party.” It seems, however, that the reference to spitting was based on “spit,” not “split,” an allusion to someone who is so similar to another as to appear to have been spat out of his or her mouth (Martin 2009).

The spit party and the notion of spitting image invite interesting anthropological questions: What are the overall spin-offs from personal genomics, especially with respect to the understanding of self, person¬hood, relationships, and ancestry? Despite sustained criticisms of the gene talk current in the West and the determinisms it implies, personal genomics along the lines of 23andMe seems to have a substantial public appeal. At the same time, the services offered by genomics companies give rise to new kinds of relations and networks based on genetic signatures presumed to be en¬coded in DNA. Like many others, I decided to indulge in a kind of spitting, mixing ethnographic observation, theoretical reflection, and narcissistic pleasure. One of the key companies in the development of personal genomics, deCODE genetics, hap¬pens to be located on the outskirts of my campus in Reykjavik, Iceland—within spit¬ting distance, if you like.

deCODEme: “Dig into Your DNA!”

A few days before the launching of 23andMe, deCODE genetics announced a similar service—deCODEme. The project now offers both a “complete” scan ($985) and two more narrow scans focusing on specific conditions, cancer ($225) and cardiovascular problems ($195). I signed up for the complete scan, eager to find out how anthropological understanding of humans and their differences was being used and developed in the project, to explore the assumptions about cultures and bodies on which analyses would be based, to see what the scan might tell me about myself and my roots, and to follow the development of the virtual community of people who subscribe to services of this kind. For some months I resisted the narcissism of personal genomics. Both of my parents had struggled with cancer and I wasn’t terribly keen on the kind of fortune telling offered by personal genomics. I guess news of the New York spit party helped to change my mind. Somehow collective spitting and the bonding involved appealed to the anthropologist, curious about the implications of the new genetics for modern life. In my case, how¬ever, there was no formal party. Extracting the cheek swabs, signing the relevant forms, and mailing the lot to the lab was a solitary event.

Two weeks later, I received an email from the company. The results were now available and I would be able to access them through the password provided. Once I logged on, I was urged to “have fun browsing [my] … genome,” “dig into [my] … DNA,” explore my ancestry and my “genetic risks,” play with fancy maps and other visuals, search for specific genetic variants (SNPs or “snips”), and download my genotypes for 1.2 million SNPs (a 33Mb datafile). The comparison of my genetic code with that of populations covered in the “Genetic Atlas,” I was told, was based on several hundred thousand genetic variants and more than 1,000 reference individuals from 50 different populations worldwide (see the illustration). My genome, not surprisingly, turned out to have most in common with “European” reference groups (a genetic similarity of 83.99%), in particular those of Iceland, the Orkneys, France, and Russia.

More astonishingly, another feature of deCODEme, “ancestral origins,” indicated that judging from chromosomes 1 to 22 my ancestry was no less than 7% East Asian, 16% according to the X chromosome, considerably higher than for most Icelanders. I found this an interesting and puzzling revelation. To speak of “genealogical dis-ease” (Rapp, Heath, and Taussig 2001)—to use a term developed by anthropologists studying what people make of genetic information about their roots and ancestry—would, however, be an overstatement.

According to the analysis of my maternal DNA, I belong to “mitogroup R*.” This is a category shared by 4.8% of deCODEme users, all of whom can trace their mitochondrial DNA to a woman thought to have lived about 60 thousand years ago, probably somewhere in the Near East. Analysis of my paternal DNA, on the other hand, shows that I belong to “Y-group R1a,” a category shared with 10.3% of deCODEme users tracing their Y chromosomes back to one man who is thought to have lived about 10 to 15 thousand years ago, probably in Western Asia. A further feature allows users to explore their “map of kinship,” a visual representation of genetic space on the basis of so-called principal component analysis (PCA, for short). This method compares the genetic code of many individuals to uncover genetic patterns or dimensions involving many different SNPs. On the basis of this evidence, I seem to occupy a somewhat marginal position, neither firmly within the European reference group nor any of the others, probably reflecting the puzzling observation about my partial East Asian ancestry.

The other main service offered by de-CODEme is that of analyzing the genome with respect to specific traits and health risks. The current list of risks analyzed by deCODEme is a mixed bag of forty diseases and traits, including alcohol flush reaction, Alzheimer’s disease, heart attack, lactose in¬tolerance, male pattern baldness, multiple sclerosis, prostate cancer, and psoriasis. My results for the diseases and traits covered are based on calculations comparing my genetic sequence to sequences of participants in studies published in the scholarly literature. To access results for some diseases I was invited to read about the genetic and medical details and to sign a statement about informed consent, by clicking on “Accept.”

I need not bore the reader with the personal details. Suffice it to say that some of the information provided sounds trivial (no alcohol flush reaction), some of it resonates with what I thought I already knew (I am less likely than the general population “to become nicotine dependent [15% or less]”), some results are encouraging (I have low lifetime risks for some diseases, much less than for males of European ancestry in general), and some details may encourage the hypochondriac in me to request further medical information (my risks for some dis¬eases are significantly higher than those of my genetically significant others).

When presented with these results, I was offered details on the mathematics of risk analysis. Also, I was invited to zoom in on my genomic landscape, focusing on a part of a chromosome and the location of specific mutations reportedly responsible for potential traits or diseases. The website drew the parallels of the two universes of in¬side and outside: “In the same manner as Google Earth allows you to explore the world map, the deCODEme Genome Browser enables you to visualize the genome.” The tour was far more fun than the mathematics. Again, there were some surprises and some food for thought.

Emergent Communities and Technologies of the Self

It seems reasonable to argue, as Hacking observes (2009), that personal genomics represent one example of what Michel Foucault referred to as “technologies of the self.” For Foucault, technologies of the self “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and a way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (1988:18). One of the pioneers of the genetics of ancestry is Bryan Sykes of Oxford University. Significantly, his book on ancestry (2001) opens with the question “Where do I come from?” and closes with a chapter on “A Sense of Self.”

For many people, then, hereditary material provides an important avenue into identity and personhood. Knowing our genetic constitution and where we come from, we apparently also know who we are. As Pinker observes (2009): “Affordable genotyping may offer new kinds of answers to the question ‘Who am I?’—our ruminations about our ancestry, our vulnerabilities, our character and our choices in life.” This is a theme underlined by Anne Wojcicki, the cofounder of 23andMe: the 600,000 genetic markers interpreted by 23andMe, she argues, are “the digital manifestation of you” (see Hamilton 2008).

One may object to the rhetoric of self-discovery evident in the marketing of personal genomics by saying that personhood is not a matter of genetics, whatever people say at modern spit parties. Indeed, many ethnographies would testify to other ways of establishing personhood. For many Canadian Inuit, for instance, personhood is largely framed in the context of name talk, not gene talk (Pálsson 2008); the essence of the person, it is assumed, is constructed through a highly communal project heavily dependent on personal naming. During the life course, a person acquires a series of recycled names from friends and relatives that collectively establish the identity, personality, and fate of the individual concerned. An Inuit spit party, as a result, is likely to have a radically different meaning from that of many New York spit parties. Perhaps one should keep in mind that gene talk has only been around for half a century or so while name talk has probably followed culture since the beginning of humanity. New York celebrities, however, much like Inuit and everybody else, construct their personhood and identities in the course of everyday life, possibly through “Facebook” kinds of networking based on genome sequencing. The virtual becomes the real thing.

Personal genomics not only establishes, it is assumed, who we are, but it also generates new networks and communities. Indeed, a thriving imagined community of the users of personal genomics projects has been developing on the Internet. The Genome Browser of deCODEme allows users to compare their complete data with friends and family. While my reference group of friends and family includes both hypochondriacs and anthropologists, so far they have seen few good reasons to participate and, as a result, there isn’t much to compare. The Web site, however, allowed me to examine my genetic sharing with three “famous” people: Kári Stefánsson (the president, CEO, and cofounder of deCODE genetics), Craig Venter (founder of the Institute for Genomic Research), and James D. Watson (codiscoverer of the structure of DNA). Here, sharing is indicated visually by the coloring of the relevant bits of the chromosomes. Not surprisingly, I had more in common with my fellow Icelander than with Venter and Watson. So, after all, I did have a kind of spit party, online in absentia.

No doubt personal genomics is becoming both a family affair and a global concern. A number of websites testify to a lively discourse on the issues involved, including thinkgene.com, dna-forums.org, Eye on DNA, Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog, and Urban Semiotics. Users can draw their own conclusions from the analyses provided and engage in dialogues with genomic experts, sometimes becoming experts themselves in the process. Several users have tried two or more services to explore the extent to which their results on health risks and ancestry might agree or disagree. Sometimes people check if they are being cheated. One blogger claimed to know of “at least one case … where a customer deliberately submitted a dog’s DNA just to ‘test’ the company. He was willing to pay for his little experiment, and yes, the company figured out exactly what had happened!”

Many people have little interest in exploring their health risks in public. Judging from the websites, there seems to be more interest in discussing ancestry. Sykes’s service (Oxford Ancestry), which offers people an opportunity to see which “clan” they belong to, to trace their ancestry to one of the seven daughters of Eve, has generated extensive discussion. Here is a reference from one of the blog sites:

I received my DNA results earlier this year and was surprised to find myself in clan Ulrike. I have traced six generations of ma¬ternal ancestors in the Beds/Northants bor¬ders region. The Viking invaders did travel into this area…. I have always been at¬tracted to northern wilderness and have visited Alaska, Greenland/Iceland and Siberia. Is this my DNA speaking?!

Some bloggers take a playful attitude to genome testing. One woman had her husband “tested” for fun:

I admit it. I have no self-discipline when it comes to genetic genealogy. When de-CODEme launched, I had to be one of the first in line to get tested. So I ordered … and received results … —my husband’s results, that is. I thought this might be a little more interesting since he sports a Y chromosome.

Clearly, there is a rapidly growing interest in personal genomics, for the purpose of celebrating our past and for managing our lives and our future.

Analyses of ancestry are likely to remain more or less intact, despite some anthropological doubts about important issues (Bolnick et al. 2007, Marks 2008), including the identification and sampling of populations and the shape of the family tree, partly because there is not so much at stake and, in any case, it is play. Studies of the genomics of diseases, in contrast, are riddled with contests, doubts, and conflict. Most common diseases are only minimally explained by genetic factors and in each case a great number of genes are likely to be involved. Also, the exact constellation of genes seems important, which further complicates analyses. Last, but not least, there is growing evidence for the importance of “epigenetic” factors, way beyond the simple concept of DNA sequence.

Given the evidence, and the growing public awareness of it (see, for instance, Hall 2009), why would people bother to measure their health risks with personal genomics services? While the hype may have faded, there seems to be a continued market for the kinds of services provided. The narcissistic pleasures of late modernity are reaching levels that Foucault could not possibly anticipate, and personal genomics is just one example of the fascination with the body. Also, the power of computing machinery continues to expand and cheap complete sequencing is within reach. Moreover, there are immense financial stakes and concerns on the global level, for biotechnical and pharmaceutical companies. As a result, one may expect personal genomics projects to expand. Although deCODE genetics has been in dire financial shape for some time, burdened with the excessive costs of its scientific work and its laboratory, and its future remains uncertain, other companies specializing in personal genomics seem to thrive. New services continue to be added to the menu.

Laboring Consumers

The companies involved in personal genomics emphasize consumers’ relative autonomy and independence from the medical establishment. Indeed, personal genomics of the kind discussed here may involve an element of empowerment. The virtual community of genetic citizens actively debates and negotiates roots, identities, and health risks fusing the expertise of professional and “lay” geneticists for the purpose of scrutinizing genomes. In a sense, then, this is science from below (Harding 2008). The forums involved are reasonably democratic social networks based on identification with genomic characteristics.

While giving people an opportunity to become active explorers and governors of their genomes is a good idea, the arguments about individual freedom, informed choices, and the unregulated genomic marketplace emphasized by genomic companies should be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing, they disguise the fact, as Prainsack et al. argue (2008: 34), that personal genomics is pushing the individualization of responsibilities a bit too far. Public authorities, they suggest, should “make it a priority to fund empirical research exploring what individuals expect from personal genomics, and in what way genetic susceptibility information is likely to affect practices and lifestyle choices.” Here, anthropology can play an important role (Nelson 2008, Santos et al. 2009).

Another qualification concerns the labor that users of genomics services perform for personal-genomics services. I suggest that genomic services engage the bodies and labor power of their consumers in what may be called biosocial relations of production (Pálsson 2009). The spokespersons for 23andMe, unlike most of the other projects, including deCODEme, have been quite open about the issue of alternative uses of their data. Wojcicki suggests signing up for 23andMe is “a great way for individuals to be involved in the research world….

You will have a profile, and something almost like a ribbon marking participation in these different research papers. It will be like, ‘How many Nature articles have you been part of?’” (pimm.wordpress.com 2007). The people contributing spits and cheek swabs to personal genomics services, then, take part in a labor process that ultimately may result in other projects, including large-scale biobanking. Whatever their current ambitions, personal genomics projects are likely to connect with larger bio¬medical projects in the future. Spitting and snipping, after all, is work, potentially contributing to the global networks and hierarchies involved in the manufacture of biovalue.

Recombinant Metaphors

The image and the report in the New York Times regarding the launching of 23andMe draw attention to the role of metaphors. Reporters quickly drew upon a series of related metaphors; the event was described as a “spit party,” the message of 23andMe and personal genomics in general, it was argued, was “when in doubt, spit it out,” personal medicine was said to be “within spitting distance,” and so on. The people of 23andMe now have a blog site called “The Spittoon,” drawing its name from an object also called “spitter,” a receptacle for spitting into: “Using nothing more than a bit of saliva (Get it? The Spittoon!), the genotyping process we use analyzes more than 580,000 locations in a person’s genome” (The Spittoon 2009). It is tempting to assume that the spit is becoming one of the key metaphors we live by, informing our speech and our thoughts. Metaphors, however, just like DNA, frequently undergo mutations, re¬combining available material from everyday language and experience. The notion of the “spitting image” as we have seen, is a case in point.

While 23andMe is probably the only personal genomics project that uses “spittoon” samples and the others seem generally to draw upon buccal swabs, the “spit party” seems to nicely capture various aspects of personal genomics. It captures the gene talk on which it is based, the mechanisms of inheritance, the matching or mismatching disclosed through the sequencing of DNA material, and the establishing of distance and ancestry, both genetic and social. When spitting out one’s saliva, one is presumed to provide a spitting image of oneself, encoded in DNA. The transparent metaphor has, finally, been elevated above the debates of etymologists. The emphasis, on the other hand, is no longer on spitting at someone (usually a gesture of contempt) but on the conviviality of spitting with a fellow human being, for the purpose of celebrating biosocial bonds, for founding social networks based on bodily signatures—with a ginger martini!

References

Bolnick, Deborah A., et al. 2007. “The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing.” Science 318 (19 October): 399–400.

Dictionary.com. 2009. http://dictionary.reference. com/browse/. Accessed 29 May.

Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of the Self.” In Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds. Technologies of the Self. 16–50. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press.

Hacking, Ian. 2009. “What Will Commercial Genome-Reading—from Cheap 23andMe to Costly but Complete Knome—Do to Middle-Class Conceptions of Personal Identity? On the Human Forum: Current Controversies in the Study of Humans, Animals, and Machines. http:// onthehuman.org/humannature/?p=176&cpage= 1#comment-295. 30 March.

Hall, Stephen S. 2009. “Beyond the Book of Life.” Newsweek, July 6/July 13: 38–41.

Hamilton, Anita. 2008. “The Retail DNA Test.” Time Magazine. November 3. http://www.time. com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804 ,1852747_1854493,00.html.

Harding, Sandra. 2008. Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Marks, Jonathan. 2008. “Recreational Ancestry-Caveat Emptor? Relatedness Is More Complex Than Commercial Gene-Based Family Trees Would Suggest.” Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News 21, no. 11.

Martin, Gary. 2009. “Spitting Image.” The Phrase Finder. www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/spitting -image.html. Accessed 11 May.

Nelson, Alondra. 2008. “Bio Science: Genetic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry.” Social Studies of Science 38, no. 5: 759–783.

Pálsson, Gísli. 2008. “Genomic Anthropology: Coming in from the Cold?” Current Anthropology 49, no. 4:545–568.

———. 2009. “Biosocial Relations of Production.” Comparative Studies in Society and His¬tory 51, no. 2:288–313.

pimm.wordpress.com. 2007. “23andMe’s Mission: Connecting All People on the DNA Level or Social Networking XY.0.” November 19.

Pinker, Stephen. 2009. “My Genome, My Self.” The New York Times, January 11.

Prainsack, Barbara, et al. 2008. “Misdirected Precaution.” Nature 456 (6): 34–35.

Rabinow, Paul. 1996. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rapp, Rayna, Deborah Heath, and Karen-Sue Taussig. 2001. “Genealogical Dis-ease: Where Hereditary Abnormality, Biomedical Explanation, and Family Responsibility Meet.” In Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 384–412.

Santos, Ricardo Ventura, et al. 2009. “Color, Race and Genomic Ancestry in Brazil: Dialogues between Anthropology and Genetics.” Current Anthropology. In press.

Salkin, Allen. 2008. “When in Doubt, Spit It Out.” The New York Times, 12 September.

The Spittoon. 2009. http://spittoon.23andme. com/. Accessed 29 May.
Sykes, Bryan. 2001. The Seven Daughters of Eve. London: Bantam Press.

Gísli Pálsson is professor, Department of Anthro¬pology, Gimli, University of Iceland, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland. His most recent book is Anthropology and the New Genetics (2007). Currently, Pálsson’s research focuses on the social implications of biotechnology, genetic history, and environmental change.

Still ranting about our naivete in the face of Haitian poverty.  One of my good friends was telling me about a story she’d heard where a woman was being treated on the USS Comfort for two legs and an arm all of which needed to be amputated.  Now that medical ethics have caught up at least to the idea of informed consent, the surgeon asked her for her permission to do the amputations.  She did not grant the permission.  The surgeon was taken aback.  The woman’s point was that in Haiti, for her to even imagine being able to work or make a living with just one arm was pointless.  Her position was not one arrived at from depression or lack of get-up-and-go, it was, rather, a pretty rational assessment of her options. Why go through the additional trauma and fuss of the amputations when, as far as she could figure, she then wouldn’t be able to feed herself and would die slowly of starvation afterward? Once again, given some bad options, she took the least bad one and did not have the amputations.

This is among the kind of harsh realities that Haitians must always face.  In a  moment where I was trying to get my students to really understand what the conditions are like, I pointed out that there are no ambulances, no paramedics, no fire departments.  “How do you get to the hospital when you need to?” they asked.  How indeed.  You get there as you can — walking, being carried, or more likely you just don’t get there.

And then there was the ridiculous and vile op ed piece that showed up in the Wall Street Journal the other day, the one written by some joker who spent two years running USAID in Haiti during Duvalier’s regime and never managed, as far as I can tell, to learn anything at all about Haiti.  For instance, he pooh poohed the analysis of those who point to the mulatres of Haiti and the ways they have swung their power and influence around by saying that Papa Doc wasn’t from that class and he was president!  Which completely ignores the way that Haitian politics and commerce have long worked, which is that the Negres like Papa Doc have the presidency and the mulatres have all the businesses.   So no, the mulatres don’t run the government but because they have all the money, and since the government has virtually no income — 80% of its budget is international AID money — the government (corruption aside) isn’t exactly always ‘in charge’ in the ways one might imagine.  It is also of course maddening that this guy claims that Vodou “has no ethics” whatever that means, which again bespeaks a pretty spectacular lack of knowledge about what he’s talking about.  His main expert informant is — get this — his son in law who is Haitian and who he makes sure to note has a degree from Harvard which I suppose confirms that he is also smart.  This is such a fantastic mini-model of the whole USAID problem, at least in Haiti.  For USAID, Haiti is pretty much a punishment assignment and the US staff are basically working as hard as they can to get out of there and into somewhere ‘good.’  So rather than working to understand Haiti, Haitian culture or Haitian language, the whole ethos of USAID (and yes there are some great people who work there so I”m not trying to smear the entire place) is about impressing Washington so they can get the hell out.  Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that impressing Washington and doing the right thing for Haiti just might not be exactly the same thing.  So they’d also have these really dumb, paternalistic policies.  For instance, when having trainings or other events for local Haitians, USAID doesn’t pay for food.  This might seem like a small thing, but remember that quite often to get peasant leaders to come from their villages to the regional center might mean a five hour walk each way for them.  “They’ll just be coming for the food,” was the excuse.  Darn right.  Heck I won’t go to faculty meetings where I work except for the free lunch.  And how many food-laden receptions are these very same people going to on a regular basis?

Getting back to the Wall Street Journal thing, most offensive from the anthropological point of view is that this guy blames it all on culture, which again, he clearly knows nothing about.  He can’t seem to tell the difference between Africa (which I wonder if he thinks it’s a country) and Haiti, and claims that because Barbados is doing OK this is proof that Vodou is the problem.  Does the guy have the slightest notion of religious practices in Barbados?  Clearly not, ’cause all that anglican looking stuff is not all it appears to be on the surface, that’s a fact.

I almost hate to put the link up, but here it is, see for yourself how ridiculous this thing is. Makes me nostalgic for something even remotely based in reality, no matter how right wing.  Shame on the Wall Street Journal, really.  What a lazy thinker.  It’s a great example of lazy thinking, and a great example of exactly what I hope my students will never do.  Be as right wing as you want, kids, just be smart and disciplined and use stuff like actual evidence to support your argument.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704533204575047163435348660.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

Research takes perseverance and grit, but there is no denying that it comes with certain pleasures, too. In Palestinian society, research feeds both mind and body. Once, I was interviewing two young men who were in a hurry to go on an afternoon excursion. Still, they presented me with soda and then coffee on a shiny round tray. During another interview, I enjoyed watermelon and ice cream cake. As I ate, I pondered: What could be easier than research in which people conceive of the researcher as a guest?

Obviously, though, the work of research is more than just managing the watermelon juice that threatens to escape from the sides of one’s mouth as one poses the next question. Another juicy challenge of this project has been tracking key terms as they circulate between U.S. news articles and Palestinian interpretations. The word “chaos” popped up often in U.S. news coverage of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Yasser Arafat’s 2004 funeral. That November day, PA officials’ plans to bury Arafat in a private ceremony went awry when some of the tens of thousands of Palestinian mourners who had gathered for the funeral scaled walls to fill the courtyard where Arafat was to be buried. PA officials struggled to move Arafat’s body from the helicoptor that bore it to the gravesite, fearing the crowds might whisk it off for a more traditional – but less controlled – public procession.

Some of the U.S. foreign correspondents’ writings about the funeral reflected longstanding U.S. critiques of Arafat. A Newsweek correspondent wrote,

[Arafat’s] successors wanted an orderly funeral. They brought in bulldozers to clean up Yasser Arafat’s broken-down headquarters in Ramallah. They sealed off the compound to keep out the crowds. They even cleared a hall in which Arafat would lay in state while dignitaries passed by the coffin. What they got instead was the untidy drama of the old regime, the kind of chaos that Arafat thrived on.

In a similar vein, USA Today reported, “In an alley off the square, a man whose face was covered with a black-and-white keffiyah – the headscarf worn by Arafat and that has come to symbolize the Palestinain cause – fired a pistol in the air before melting into the crowd.” Such descriptive passages are laden with meaning. I was curious about how my interviewees would interpret them.

I knew the term “chaos” – translated to fawda in Arabic – would attract my interviewees’ attention. I had found that fawda could describe everything from a buzzy throng at a children’s summer camp to the political crisis of leadership in the West Bank in 2006 and after. During that time, the PA had lacked the power to prohibit militia members from carrying bigger guns than the official security forces, or to keep a marriage dispute from turning to fisticuffs and gunfire. Over the last two years or so, many have conversely complained that the PA has gone too far in repressing its political opponents.

The Palestinians I spoke to expressed diverse readings of the passages. One college student in Nablus thought the articles aptly identified a stubborn problem in Palestinian political culture. As he said, “One of our historical mistakes from the beginning of the modern revolution in 1964 was that the kind of enculturation we had was not democratic and civilized. It was revolutionary: ‘Let’s fight, and we’re going to liberate our lands and return to them’… there wasn’t a theoretical framing that there should have been, and there wasn’t a democratic enculturation, either. So what I liked about [the Newsweek] article was the tie between the disorder that Arafat caused, and its effects after he died. It even affected his own funeral.” His friend, a Nablus student in the department of political science, parsed the word fawda as “anarchy,” and though he referenced Bakunin with enthusiasm, he maintained that a bit more order at the funeral would have been a good thing.

On another day, I spoke to a Palestinian from a Bethlehem refugee camp, who was also in his early twenties but was not in college. He was much more critical of the articles. He had been at the funeral, and he knew the crowds had been unruly. He insisted, however, that it had been,an “organized chaos,” which can be a “beautiful thing, because authorities cannot control people absolutely, to give people a line and insist that they walk it perfectly.” He continued that an “organized chaos can be something sweet because it can be the expression of a popular opinion.” Although he had not studied anarchism, or much other political theory, the theories he expressed about “chaos” resonated deeply in a context in which state authority has been so repressive.

He also read into the passage about the gunman “melting into the crowd” a suggestion that violence was a pervasive part of Palestinian life, something which he adamantly rejected. He pointed out that Israelis also use gunfire as a means of saluting fallen soldiers and leaders.

I was curious at their different evaluations of the articles. Perhaps their answers had sprung from different political orientations or philosophies. I also wondered if the Nablus students’ evaluations of “chaos” were in part rooted in their own experiences in their city, where lawlessness had affected daily life more than in any other part of the West Bank. Perhaps the Bethlehem man who had attended the funeral was analyzing the day and the articles on the basis of his own experiences, too. He had been proud to take part in that historic day.

Ultimately, fieldwork can feel piecemeal and inconclusive, but, as I packed my bags, I looked forward to bringing my own analytic writing into dialogue with these young men’s perspectives – even though I knew I’d have to make my own coffee and slice my own watermelon to fuel my writing.

This research was funded by the Tufts University Faculty Research Fund.

Amahl Bishara is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at Tufts University. This is the 3rd and last post in a series of ‘Fieldnotes’ she has written for www.anthronow.com. You can find her previous posts under the ‘Fieldnotes’ category.

Where do I even begin to explain what I’m thinking and feeling about how children are appearing in the coverage, being responded to on the ground, and what’s actually happening to kids in Haiti?  When I’m feeling sour (like right now) I think, well, Haitians don’t have pets so unlike Katrina where we covered all the puppies and kittens, we’re focusing on the helpless kids.  As a way of avoiding the real issue.

My main research focus is kids, so I take them very, very seriously.  In a hilarious moment in class the other day, when I was pushing my students to examine why they found the idea of childhood sexuality so unthinkable, one student blurted out, “Well to me an 8-year-old child isn’t even, you know, HUMAN!”  It isn’t surprising that given the very particular ways we think about children and childhood in the wealthy world that is Europe and the US (that is, the bulk of the aid-giving nations currently in Haiti) most people newly on the ground are utterly unprepared to confront, much less understand what kids lives are like there.

Haiti is a place where three year old kids routinely work as child domestic servants, doing hard physical labor from hauling water to cooking food, washing laundry, and scrubbing floors.  Plenty of kids are on the streets, whether temporarily or permanently.  And to ‘us’, they appear out of childhood — that is, they seem to be ‘children without childhood,’ a term I could never hate enough in a jillion years.

I’m disgusted by all the journalism I’ve been reading that emphasizes issues like ‘neglect’ and ‘abuse’ of children.  No doubt, life in Haiti is friggin’ hard.  And it’s hard for everybody, kids included.  What often looks like abuse to us rich people is, in reality, the reality of being truly, truly poor.  As most Haitians are.

The real problem is of course the poverty.  Haitian parents whether rural or urban find themselves more often than not quite literally unable to feed their kids.  So they have a couple of options.  Keep them and watch them die before their eyes; send them to another better off family so they can eat and maybe get educated; put them in an orphanage.  In case you haven’t noticed, these are all bad choices.  How does one diagnose abuse or neglect under those conditions?  Is it neglectful to be so poor that you and your children are starving?  Is it abusive to give your child to another family because if he or she stays with you death is on the horizon?

The current brouhaha over the supposedly naive and only well-intentioned missionaries from Idaho is just the tip of the iceberg.  I’ve been happy to hear it called child trafficking.  Many orphanages have been essentially trafficking in Haitian children for some time now.  Certainly there can be no doubt at all that some substantial portion of children in Haitian orphanages aren’t what most people would consider orphans.  They have families and they have one or even both parents.  They are in orphanages because they are poor.

Our helping dynamic, which focuses on the child (like the cute puppy) depends upon a surgical view of the child that denies the context in which that child was produced (as poor and Haitian) and made available (for adoption).  When we focus only on the questions of ‘neglect’ and ‘abuse’ but not on the loss of 80% of Haitian rice production and the concomitant doubling and tripling of the price of imported rice, we fail to pay attention to — or take responsibility for — the nightmarish conditions that force parents to give up their children in the hopes that they might simply live.  And part of the horror is that the luxury of hoping that your child might live a ‘good’ life is even more remote.  More likely, when children go to live with families as what are known as ‘restavek’ their treatment is really dreadful.

I’m not someone to stand up for the rights of anybody to take advantage of anyone else, but on the other hand, the harshness of much of Haitian society, and its violence, needs again to be understood in the context of poverty that is so soul-scraping that the mortifications of the flesh are a mere bagatelle.  Confront the poverty.  Really confront it.  Then those parents suddenly might appear not as abusive but something else.

Here’s one clue — even before the earthquake, many of the Haitian orphanage sites had this really creepy message.  Say you were looking at a kid and clicked on the picture to learn more.  Pretty often there would be a tag line that said something like, “Yannik is not in residence at the orphanage, but should you be interested in her, more information is available.”  Subtext: this child has a family, but the family is so poor they are hoping you will adopt their child so she can live to grow up, go to school, and have a life.

Why do people think they are doing a good deed if they take these parents up on this act of desperation?  Fix the poverty.  Let kids stay with their families.  That’s got to be the commitment.  Children shouldn’t be Haiti’s most valuable export.

At the moment I’ m being a little dumbfounded at what strikes me as a generalized lack of interest in actual Haitians, and a huge interest in imaginary Haitians.  The objectification thing.  There are a ton of events going on here in Los Angeles, each put on and designed for its particular micro-selection of the population: the hipster edgy art people, the world music people, the art lover elderly people…It shouldn’t be surprising that people would mobilize the networks they know best when they put on events where’ they’re trying to raise money for Haiti.  What’s missing in most of them, as far as I can see,  is much of an effort to learn anything about Haiti (except for the earthquake which is, so to speak, the tip of the iceberg), or to engage with the local Haitian community.  I’ve had any number of  conversations and have been in any  number of meetings where my efforts to get people to talk to an actual Haitian person, or consider involving a real Haitian are met with blank stares, non-commital murmurings, or, simply, are ignored.

There are a lot of things at work there.  Here in LA most people aren’t even aware that there is something that might be called a Haitian community, so I suppose the attitude or assumption that including Haitians isn’t necessary is understandable, even if it isn’t excusable.   I admit that I suspect that there are uglier things beneath it.  For one, it’s a lot more fun to “help people” if you don’t actually have to deal with them in 3D.  Or worse, have to negotiate what they might think or feel that isn’t contained in your own imaginings of who they are.  All of that is sticky, sticky business.  Keeping one’s ‘helping’ activities hermetically sealed means protecting  one’s view of oneself as good, as knowing, as powerful.  Collaboration, however, means opening oneself up to not knowing — and really, most people in the U.S. don’t know diddly about Haiti and never even heard of it before two weeks ago.  Keeping Haitians out of their own engagement with its disaster is a way of ensuring that they never WILL know diddly about Haiti, and that they never will have to confront, either, the complex history and politics in which they, unfortunately, are implicated whether they like it or  not.

Take the upcoming interfaith service that will be held at Occidental.  No Haitians needed, thank you.  We can emote and pray for your wholeness without you!  we can do it in 15 different spiritual traditions, too!  Never mind that there are many Haitian religious leaders who would love the opportunity to speak about their culture, their nation, their families, their homeland and to communicate the depth of their love and appreciation for this place that, to most in the U.S. at this moment, appears as nothing more than a scene of devastation and ugliness.  Never mind that these same Haitian religious leaders are Seventh Day Adventists and Evangelicals who aren’t exactly either welcome or represented on Oxy’s campus.   Never mind that some of them got here not too long ago, refugees who speak with accents and have antiquated, formal manners most of us haven’t seen in living memory.  To engage with all of that, however, requires letting go of one’s belief in oneself as being the point, and letting go of that idea is something eminently unpleasant for so many Americans who believe in the power of one.

Yes, there is a lot of ugly, nasty business going on down there and it’s certainly not a bad thing for ‘us’ to feel bad about it and to want to do something about it no matter how incohate and disorganized (and utterly ineffectual) that desire might be.  But it’s way too convenient for ‘us’ to chalk up the devastation and ineffectiveness of those emotive efforts  to corruption and lack of development and all that other crap that we use to explain why the poor and disenfranchised did it to themselves.

What including Haitians means, at every point along the way, is facing ourselves, and taking on the responsibility for understanding that we are not the calvalry riding in on white horses to save the day, not saviors, not even witnesses most of the time but navel gazers.  Unless Haitians are included in  whatever the effort is — spiritual wholeness, raising money — I’m afraid it’s just self-serving bullshit.  We need to get off those high horses, put our feet upon the dusty and muddy earth where all those Haitians are living right now, and put our shoulders to the wheel.  And maybe it’s us who should be taking direction from them.

Just an idea.

Even now,  I’m sure, so much of Haiti is breathtakingly beautiful.  There is something of an upside to the country not having had enough money or cachet to get utterly overdeveloped and paved over.  The mountains up above Miragoane, for instance, with their breezes that arrive from both sides of land, are cool, misty, piney, and clear-skied; meanwhile I’m sure that many of the little pocket beaches along the southern coast near Jacmel are still as magically warm and blue and seaweedy as I remember.

I’m sick to death of hearing about the ugliness of Haiti — and so much of the beauty goes beyond anything natural and is deeply cultural.  There is, of course, the painting tradition for which Haiti is rightly famous, and the sequin art is something staggeringly rich and imaginative, especially the beaded flags with their overlays of Catholic and Vodou imagery. The language, too, is quick and sly in its varigated meanings — Kreyol is a language stitched through with idomatic sayings, aphorisms and little riddles and English, with its sawdusty seriousness seems emberassingly awkward and stilted– and frankly, poorly developed — in comparison.

At my daughter’s ballet class the other day, I got talking with one of the moms about Haiti.  She was telling me about some people at her church, people who go often out of the country and do volunteering and stuff, and what she said, basically, was that in Haiti, they’re not being helpful to volunteers.

I’m afraid my response was a little too snippy to count as polite.  “Well that might be because I heard that last week a bunch of volunteers showed up at the airport asking for water and supplies,” I said, “and the first responders weren’t exactly thrilled at having these folks expecting water when all these Haitians who had JUST BEEN IN AN EARTHQUAKE kindof needed it more than they did.”  Ok, well the second part of my response is more what I wish I’d said than what I actually said.  But I did get the point across.

Lots and lots of people have been seized by the urge to do something and, perhaps unfortunately, because Haiti is so much closer to “us” than Sri Lanka, people really were just jumping on planes to the Dominican Republic and getting themselves to Port au Prince, all ready to help.  Unfortunately they hadn’t thought it through much further than that.  Many didn’t have their own supplies.  Or a place to stay.  Or contacts.  Or facility with Kreyol.  Or useful skills and expertise.  Or, let’s face it, common sense.

The impulse is understandable and even noble.  But it’s the kind of ‘helping’ impulse that not only gets people into trouble, but causes trouble for others.  The urgency of doing something is hard to resist and there was a sort of massive surge of compassionate, anxiety and adrenalin-fueled energy that took hold of so many of us in the first week or two.  In my heart I’m thanking the people who resisted that impulse and who recognized that their desire to help needed to be couched within a realistic assessment of their ability to actually be helpful.

That energy has ebbed a bit, the stories of Haiti have migrated first ‘below the fold’ on the front page of the paper, and now right off the front page altogether.  The need has hardly lessened.  Just the other day a message came through and someone observed that the streets are full of amputees.  Somehow that image stuck with me with incredible force, because I realized that the streetscape of Port au Prince, and the  entire nation, will be transformed for an entire generation not just because the skyline will never be the same, but because for the next few decades, the streets will be full of people with missing limbs, a living embodiment of the literal and figurative dismemberment that Haiti has suffered here.

===In response to the terrible devastation in Haiti, Anthropology Now is offering special coverage of events in Haiti. For the next few weeks, Press Watch will be a dedicated Haiti Watch. Elizabeth Chin, a professor of anthropology at Occidental College who has worked for many years in Haiti joins us as a Featured Special Report guest blogger.For her previous posts, Click on ‘Read More’ in Press Watch. We will also be tracking news coverage of anthropologist Paul Farmer and his work on the relief efforts. And we encourage all concerned readers to donate generously to Partners in Health, the organization Paul Farmer co-founded that is working on the ground in Haiti. Please contact us with links and news on Haiti that we can share with our readers.===

*Special Report blogger Elizabeth Chin is an anthropologist who has studied Haitian Folklore dance for over 20 years, both in the US and in Haiti. Currently a professor at Occidental College, she has been spending time in Haiti since 1993, sometimes doing fieldwork and sometimes not. She will return to Haiti in May to assist with the relief effort.*

Like anything having to do with Vodou — or Haiti for that matter — the songs song by Vodouisants are rich with multiple layers of meaning.  Pat Robertson’s vile and mean spirited remarks about Haiti having a pact with the devil (as if that would explain an earthquake 200 years after the revolution) have been dealt with handily by the likes of Elizabeth McAlister, who knows a great deal about Haitian music and culture, and by Gina Ulysse.

Here’s something from Liza:  http://interfaithradio.org/node/1218

Here’s something from Gina: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122567412

The Vodou songs are incredibly dense pieces of history and culture and life and emotion.  “Manman Mwen,” which you can hear being heard by Pierre Cheriza for a mere  .99 cent download from itunes, goes like this:

my rough translation:

But the song is ever so much deeper than it might appear.  It is being sung to Erzulie Dantor, the fierce mother, the dark-skinned woman who is represented in Christian iconography as the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.  She’s serious and dour looking, holding her son in her arms, her cheek bearing two long gashes still weeping blood.  This is a woman who will fight to the death to protect her children. Her symbol is a heart with a knife through it.  She doesn’t play around and she doesn’t tolerate betrayal.  But if she’s so strong and protective, how come in the song her children sound so lost, so afraid?  

Her children are calling to her, and the song is heart-breakingly sad.  I always think of abandoned children when I hear it, children calling out desperately for their mother to come to them, frightened and alone.  “Mother, O mother where are you?” the song says, over and over and over.  Well, that sense of abandonment comes from many quarters — the people who had been snatched up and thrown on ships, for instance, probably felt the need to cry out in just this way, and thinking of those ships crossing the wide, wide waters of the Atlantic, unimaginably wide, one can imagine why ‘waiting in the water’ was terrifying. 

But water has many other meanings and uses, and often in Vodou rituals people stand in sacred pools, under waterfalls, or pour water on themselves as purification and spiritual renewal.  So this also speaks of an expectant group of devotees, standing perhaps in one such sacred pool, eagerly awaiting Erzulie’s arrival.  They cajole — “Pwoche lakay o” — come into the house!  Perhaps they are joyful, saying come into the house, we are ready for you!  Perhaps they are cold and miserable and want their mother to return to them to enfold them in her arms, and cast her baleful stare upon anyone who might dare to harm her precious children.

Erzulie’s rage, and Erzulie’s passion are surely big enough to take on the work of avenging all of her children now suffering in Haiti.  Let’s hope her knife doesn’t come flashing in our direction, because we have inflicted much that is worthy of regret, much that requires atonement on an epic scale.

Anthropology Now Issue 3
After Darwin

Features

•Darwin’s Ventriloquists by Jonathan Marks

•Spitting Image by Gisli Palsson

•Race Drugs by Jonathan Kahn

•Soccer, Sex, and Scandal in Brazil by Don Kulick

•Rights and Security: Contradictory or Complementary? by Daniel M. Goldstein

•Making Old Histories New in the Peruvian Amazon by Shane Greene

Departments

Letters to the Editors

Films
Eye of the Storm by Carolyn Rouse

Findings
CUNY Graduate School Student Collective:
Akissi Britton, Risa Cromer, Chris Grove, Carwil James,
Martha Lincoln, Michael Polson, Sophie Statzel, and John Warner

Uncommon Sense
A Border That Divides. A Border That Joins. by Josiah McC. Heyman

Photo Essay
A Trail of Thirst by Orlando Lara

Noted
Paul Farmer and Ashraf Ghani

Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcelin and Anne Marie Coriolan, founders of three of Haiti’s most important women and girl’s advocacy groups, are confirmed dead in the aftermath of the recent Haiti earthquake.

Myriam Merlet was until recently chief of staff of Haiti’s Ministry for Gender and the Rights of Women and continued to serve as a top advisor. She was also one of the founders of Enfofamn, an organization that raises awareness about women through media, collects stories and works to honor their names.

Magalie Marcelin, also a lawyer and actress, established Kay Fanm, a women’s rights organization that deals with domestic violence, offers services and shelter to women and makes microcredits, or loans, available to women working in markets.

Anne Marie Coriolan served alongside Myriam Merlet as a top adviser to the women’s rights ministry. She founded Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen (Solidarity with Haitian Women, or SOFA), an advocacy and services organization.

In honor of these women and to continue the legacy of their work and advocacy groups, please visit the sites below that link to information on Enfofamn, Kay Fanm, and Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen (Solidarity with Haitian Women, or SOFA). (Note: some page are in French but can be translated by Google if needed.)

http://www.kayfanm.info/

http://www.oxfamsol.be/fr/Solidarite-Fanm-Ayisyen-SOFA.html

http://www.dwafanm.org/international.htm

http://www.dwafanm.org/partners.html

http://www.dd-rd.ca/site/

http://www.peacewomen.org/contacts/americas/haiti/hai_index.html

Additional Links:

A document Haitian Women’s Rights Organisations worked on (available only in French):

Pour la cause des femmes, avançons !
Un modèle de plaidoyer dans la lutte des organisations de défense des droits des femmes haïtiennes

(Onward for Women! An Advocacy Model in the Struggle Waged by Haitian Women’s Rights Organisations)

CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/01/20/haitian.womens.movement.mourns/index.html?hpt=C2

More on Myriam Merlet:
http://mongoosechronicles.blogspot.com/2010/01/myriam-merlet.html

The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/22/earthquake-kill-haiti-feminists

Women’s E-News:
http://www.womensenews.org/breaking-news

Women’s Media Center:
http://womensmediacenter.com/blog/2010/01/she-wanted-women-to-hold-their-heads-high-haiti-mourns-the-deaths-of-three-womens-rights-leaders/