John Hartigan Jr., author of an article on race in the upcoming September issue of Anthropology Now, also writes a blog on race and for publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Statesman. Check out the links below to read his articles and for more about Prof. Hartigan’s research.

Prof. Hartigan’s blog:
Race Talk

“What Does Race Have to Do With It? : Making sense of our ‘national conversation’” in The Chronicle of Higher Education

“Op-Ed >> Hartigan: Is the Tea Party Racist?” in The Statesman
“Op-Ed >> Hartigan: In the debate on affirmative action, calculate policies’ impact on whites” in The Statesman

Prof. Hartigan’s University of Texas at Austin and Project Past webpage:

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/anthropology/faculty/hartigan
http://http://www.projectpast.org/hartigan/

John Hartigan is a professor of anthropology and the director of the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.

John Hartigan’s first book, Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton, 1999), is an ethnography of whites in Detroit, primarily focusing on poor whites from Appalachia living in the inner city. Hartigan found that the way whites think about race is keenly tied to their class identity and their location within in the city. His subsequent book, Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Duke, 2005), is a study of “white trash,” tracing the cultural history of this charged epithet and examining the ways some whites today identify with this term while others still use it as a degrading insult. His recent book, Race in the 21st Century (Oxford, 2010) surveys the efforts of sociologists and anthropologists to study racial dynamics in everyday life. Hartigan describes the emerging view in such research that see race as a performed identity. His most current work, What Can You Say? America’s National Conversation on Race (Stanford, 2010), takes a year’s worth of race stories in the news (from MLK Day 2007 to the subsequent one in 2008) to show the active ways Americans make sense of race. Currently, Hartigan is examining genetics research in Mexico, particularly focusing on recent efforts by Instituto Nacional de Medicina Genómica to establish that a “Mexican genome” exists.

While planning the relief event, I could not see the magnitude of our efforts – I was simply too busy. The total weigh-in of donations was undoubtedly impressive, but with no prior experience in planning disaster relief events, I pondered how I acted so quickly and without reservation. It was difficult to see where my actions stemmed from. Was I motivated out of human compassion or more so because of my profession? Or, was it a combination of both? Or, perhaps something else? Then I recalled why I was drawn to the field of anthropology – other cultures, people, and my own place within the world. Simply put, I recognized anthropology fulfills my sense of human interest and compassion. I have never considered myself an applied or public anthropologist per say because I think it is essential for all anthropologists to engage beyond professional rigor, academic or otherwise. It behooves us to harness our knowledge and skills within the scientific community and share it with others. As an anthropologist, I represent a field that is oftentimes misunderstood by the general public, so working outside the academy is essential for me and as I assert here, for the profession itself. Irrespective of the sub-field, public engagement is critical for anthropologists because we all strive for better understandings of the human condition. Without such engagement, our specialized skills and knowledge are only meaningful within the profession – a profession that values, above all else, the entirety of humanity. Public engagement ensures anthropological advancement by offering anthropologists the opportunity to learn and help others while honing their skills.

Humanitarian efforts move people toward action and I observed this with many people in the greater Valdosta area. Public outpouring made me realize even more clearly the importance of community and global solidarity in extraordinarily difficult times. My role as an educator aided me in cultivating and soliciting assistance from others at the university and beyond, and my role as an engaged cultural anthropologist provided me the necessary insight to work successfully with and for diverse populations. Whether serving as an educator, researcher, or humanitarian, a common thread is that my motivations are grounded in moral obligation. By moral I mean living, working, and adhering to the values within a cultural group, mine and otherwise. This sense of moral commitment is a responsibility we all share and one the American Anthropological Association supports as illustrated in the recently approved Code of Ethics (2009). Being an anthropologist is more than working in a traditional research setting or within the university. Only by extending our skills outside the academy, do we truly experience the full breadth of anthropological engagement. Consequently, utilizing anthropology in the public sphere has affirmed my compassion for people and my passion for the field which together permeates every aspect of my personal and professional lives.

This ends our 2 part series by Dr. Melissa A. Rinehart. Click here to read Part 1 if you missed it on Friday. Also, keep an eye out for a companion photo essay illustrating Valdosta’s Haiti water and food relief event – coming later this week!

Dr. Melissa A. Rinehart is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia. With a specialization in Native American Studies, her work bridges ethnographic and historical methodologies. As an ethnohistorian, she has several areas of interest including the removal and boarding school eras, language shift and revitalization, identity and performance, and indigenous resistance. Ongoing research projects include Native American participation at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and a book project concerning a former Catholic Indian boarding school, St. Joseph’s Indian Normal School, in operation from 1888 to 1896, in
Rensselaer, Indiana.

While trained as a cultural anthropologist, I also work within linguistics and have worked as an archaeologist. This freedom to be more holistic in my research is, I feel, one of anthropology’s strongest attractions. Combining this with anthropology’s hands-on field research with Native American communities, I find it immensely meaningful to teach anthropology in the university and conduct research that is beneficial to others. Giving back to the community, for which anthropological research relies on, is always a concern. This is especially the case when longstanding oppression has taken a toll in communities, such as Native Americans, that not only face socio-economic, but health-related concerns. In spite of these longstanding problems though, Native American communities have continuously demonstrated their resiliency. It is this connection with Native American peoples and issues that drew me to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti earlier this year. I know no one in Haiti and have never been to Haiti, but as a cultural anthropologist and even more importantly as a humanist, I recognized the need to apply my knowledge and skills somehow.

Clean potable water has been a problem in Haiti for some time and although there are efforts to curtail continued environmental devastation, eroded land makes agriculture difficult. Socio-economic issues, such as imported commodity foods sold more cheaply than those produced in Haiti are coupled with cyclical poverty and result in significant food insecurity for many Haitians. They, too, are an oppressed community, but one marked with historical resiliency. I felt compelled to do something more for Haitians given their devastating circumstances, so organizing a water and food relief effort became evident. I envisioned organizing anthropology students from Valdosta State University (VSU) in south Georgia to collect rice, beans, and water for victims. Rice and beans are two important staples for Haitians, and consequently two affordable food sources for most Americans. Recognizing students have limited funds, I felt physical donations consisting of inexpensive bags of rice, beans, and bottled water made more sense than soliciting monetary donations. I also worked collaboratively with colleagues, administration, and student organizations from VSU as well as the American Red Cross and Second Harvest Food Bank. What began as a simple idea of collecting food and water grew into a city-wide relief effort. There was extensive media coverage including television, radio, and print media; and I began a Facebook group. Social networking quickly proved useful because it was an easy way for students and others from the community to post questions, concerns, and commentary about Valdosta’s response to the Haiti earthquake. It also enabled me to keep everyone abreast of continuing developments regarding the relief event.

The relief event took place ten days after the earthquake struck. We set up a drive-thru in the VSU baseball stadium parking lot to facilitate donation activity and the turn-out was remarkable. The American Red Cross’s disaster relief team collected monetary and blood donations, and Second Harvest Food Bank supplied a crew for collecting, palleting, and trucking donations to storage. Additionally, over 50 students from an area middle school volunteered. In all, we collected 35,000 pounds of food and water equivalent to 17 tons. Second Harvest Food Bank trucked 1/3 of the donations to Miami, Florida, where the State Department then flew the shipment to Haiti. The remaining 2/3 of the donations were picked up by the Feed the Children organization and then flown gratis by FedEX to Port au Prince where the shipment was immediately trucked to and distributed at the Feed the Children refugee camp housing 15,000 Haitians.

End of Part 1, look for Part 2 of this special 2 part article this coming Monday!

In the meantime, check out these other links about VSU’s rice, beans and water drive for Haiti:

VSU Continues to aid Haitian Disaster Relief Efforts

WCTV-TV article

Dr. Melissa A. Rinehart is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia. With a specialization in Native American Studies, her work bridges ethnographic and historical methodologies. As an ethnohistorian, she has several areas of interest including the removal and boarding school eras, language shift and revitalization, identity and performance, and indigenous resistance. Ongoing research projects include Native American participation at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and a book project concerning a former Catholic Indian boarding school, St. Joseph’s Indian Normal School, in operation from 1888 to 1896, in Rensselaer, Indiana.

Outsmarting Risk: From Bonuses to Bailouts
By Karen Z. Ho

Recent criticisms of Wall Street bonuses and bailouts—whether they express incredulous disbelief, hopeless resignation, or unfortunate necessity—somehow leave us unsatisfied. Most explanations fail to satisfy us precisely because they accept the “common-sense” understanding of Wall Street risk—an “understanding” that itself fundamentally misapprehends the culture and practice of financial risk in the United States, especially as it pertains to the most powerful members of the financial elite.

The central “common-sense” logic undergirding these accounts of “financial risk” is that high risk and reward necessarily go together with high uncertainty and loss. Actors, from small-business entrepreneurs to Wall Street investment bankers, make the rational calculation that “those who can make an opportunity from risk can quickly fall prey to uncertainty’s blows” (Martin 2007, 41). Wall Streeters represent themselves as risk takers par excellence, constantly embracing risk and not clinging to security, stability, and by extension, stagnancy. Risk takers are defined as having a future orientation, an anticipation of loss, which “must be built into any calculation of risk, rendering contentment a particularly scarce commodity” (Martin 2007, 47).

Of course, this time, as the consensus goes, Wall Street went too far, took too much risk, engaged in too much leverage, and thereby instigated worldwide crises. The pervasiveness of these assumptions explains why many of us are at a loss to understand why Wall Street investment banks were bailed out. If the risk/reward/loss bargain holds true, then shouldn’t Wall Street, the exemplary risk takers, have accepted the consequences? Similarly, consider the public’s confusion over Wall Street’s ritual of the bonus, which focuses on this quandary: how can investment bankers command such high bonuses when their practices so often generate crisis and massive socioeconomic volatility, even decline? It is only a quandary, however, if we presume the connection between reward/risk and loss/uncertainty where Wall Streeters get “paid for performance” and thus should not get paid when they do not “perform.” The fact that despite depression, they still get paid brings to light the central contradictions underlying dominant assumptions of financial risk and the unequal effects of a finance-capital dominated social economy.

Yet could it be precisely our too easy acceptance of this bargain that prevents a more serious challenge to these powerful financial ideologies? Through a brief exploration of investment banks’ bonuses and Wall Street’s bailout, I attempt to chart another approach.

A Peculiar Culture: Bonuses, Measuring Performance, and Performing Smartness

I begin with Wall Street’s bonus and compensation practices, since they are perhaps the keenest expressions of their central ethos, before I turn to a discussion of their culture of risk in particular. I ask readers to turn their attention first to this press release from the New York State Comptroller’s Office, where in January 2009, the Office of the State Deputy Comptroller compiled a table of New York City securities industry bonuses from 1985 to 2008 (see table below). Although, admittedly, there are multiple ways to interpret and contextualize these numbers, I read them as indicative of the growing influence of financial values and practices. With a cursory glance, it is striking how Wall Street bonuses have been increasing exponentially in the past two decades: in the 1980s, the “decade of greed,” bonuses hovered around a “mere” $2 billion; in the mid-1990s, around $5 billion; in 1999, around $9 billion; in 2003, around $16 billion; and in 2007, almost $33 billion! Not surprisingly, the massive rise of the total bonus pool (which is based on the number and size of financial deals generated by Wall Street investment banks) is indicative of “the financialization of everyday life,” where corporations, institutions, and even individuals went from being separated and protected from, avoiding, and/or faddishly dabbling in the financial markets to nearly conflating all their hopes and labors for growth with constant financial transactions. Financial deal making has become the routine path for corporations to “demonstrate” growth, responsibility, and success, despite the fact that such narrow strategies often led to long-term decline in corporate productivity, not to mention shareholder value volatility. Simply comparing 2007 with 1987— 32.9 with 2.6 billion—gives a sense of Wall Street’s stakes and interests in restructuring the global economy, not to mention the acceleration and intensification of the widereaching effects of financial crises.

Upon further examination, another interesting pattern and possible correlation emerges: notice how the bonuses peak and trough within the general upward climb. Reflecting on the multiple moments of crises and heightened financial market volatility that have characterized the past two decades, pay attention to how bonuses “peak” at precisely the moment of financial crisis. In 1987, bonuses culminate at $2.6 billion with the stock market crash of 1987 and the impending junk bond collapse. In 1993, bonuses rise to $5.8 billion, right before the Mexican peso crisis of 1994. In 1997, bonuses crest at $11.2 billion, at the moment of the Asian and Russian financial crises. In 2000, bonuses top out at $19.5 billion, right at the dot-com bust. And in 2006 and 2007, bonuses are at a record $34.1 billion and $32.9 billion, as the current subprime debacle implodes. Could bonuses, then, index crises; that is, could bonuses be used as an approximate predictor and indicator of impending financial disaster? In other words, to the extent that stratospheric bonus numbers demonstrate the frenzy of deal making that helps to constitute bubbles in the first place, they also set the stage for the impending crash.

Contrary to the dominant representation that Wall Streeters are masters of risk, their compensation culture indicates that they produce crises and pass on risk. Moreover, at issue here is a fundamental misapprehension of Wall Street’s practices of compensation, which is largely represented as “pay for performance.” I would argue that there is not so much a contradiction between Wall Street bonuses and the larger performance of our social economy as there is a misplaced understanding of what actually constitutes financial “performance.” Investment bankers and traders measure performance according to the number of deals executed, regardless of their impact on the corporation or society at large. Even in a recession, transactions such as selling off toxic assets or bankruptcy advice count toward the bonus.

As I argue in my 2009 ethnography, Liquidated, many of my Wall Street informants actually sensed the impending bubble burst. Through their daily practices, they often recognized that they had pushed through as many financial transactions as the markets could bear. And, yet, this knowledge did not so much curtail their deal making as it hastened their efforts to eke out even more deals that would count toward their year-end bonus. After all, investment bankers and traders themselves have jobs that are on the line, rife with insecurity. For them, a sacred cultural value is to “be one” with the market, to work simultaneously and in “real-time” with it as their cultural embodiment. They are culturally conditioned to mortgage the future through their bonuses. Of course, Wall Streeters’ experiences of financial crises and job insecurities have historically been much more cushioned than those of the average worker; they are amply resourced, highly networked and pedigreed, exorbitantly compensated, and valued as “the smartest.” As such, their understandings of what it takes to be a successful worker in the new economy, to act simultaneously with the market that they have had a strong hand in constructing, are internalized as challenges and sources of empowerment, however unstable and disruptive such standards are for most people. The dominance of short-term, transaction-led compensation schemes, the understanding that Wall Street investment bankers, as the smartest investors in the world, are deserving, and the taken-for-granted divorce of executive pay (and stock prices) from the livelihood of most workers in the service of quick shareholder value are all at work here.

Recently, we see the way bankers’ smartness is mystified and then marshaled to defend their bonuses. Despite their roles in failed deals and financial crises, bankers are depicted as indispensible, and bonuses are the crucial vehicle for retaining talent. And, precisely because bonuses are a core part of Wall Streeters’ sense of themselves, totally eliminating bonuses for still-employed bankers would be all but culturally unthinkable. Of course, the persistence of high bonuses despite Wall Street’s instigation of the global financial meltdown raises the question of who bears the brunt of high-risk practices, a question to which I now turn.

Reframing Risk

In the wake of the Russian and Asian financial crises in the late 1990s, veteran Wall Street observer Michael Lewis wondered why hedge funds didn’t lose credibility after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the world’s leading hedge fund. After all, this fund had been blamed for exacerbating these crises. He wrote, “But the panic—like all panics—did nothing but strengthen the booming hedge-fund industry.” Today, almost a decade later, with Wall Street at the helm of the subprime debacle and global financial crises, it is hard to believe that Goldman Sachs just posted astronomical profits and bonuses. Goldman Sachs was itself on the brink of elimination in 2008. To the extent that Wall Street’s continual regeneration seems mystifying, I offer two explanations: one is that mainstream economic and governmental structures accept Wall Street’s key cultural values that maintain and legitimate its success; the other is that, in practice, their confidence, survival, and extraordinary risk taking are only possible through subsidy.

Surely, the smartest in the world could be trusted with risk. In fact, Wall Streeters pride themselves in going beyond the simple risk/reward/loss bargain. For themselves and investors writ large, risk is marketed as mitigated by smartness. In one sense, their investments in subprime mortgages (and hedges against it) demonstrated for my informants their smartness in inventing new sources of profit taking that circumvented and outwitted both governmental regulators and risk managers in their own firm, while seeming to address the concerns of those they had circumvented and outwitted. As many investment bankers told me, “We are so much smarter than the folks in risk management and audit.” It is important to recall that at most investment banks risk management is a middle-office function, not part of the prestigious, revenue-generating front office. As such, until the meltdown, traders and bankers in structured finance and mortgage backed securities were lionized for profiting on both sides of the trade. Unlike the conventional risk managers, who were seen as dampening profitability, front-office bankers and traders were able sell their version of risk management as products, such as credit-default swaps that would allow buyers to recoup some of their investment in case they bought loans or bonds that defaulted. (Of course, since these swaps were not actual insurance policies, Wall Street did not set aside capital reserves as collateral for these products; therefore, such risk-hedging products actually exacerbated risk globally.)

Many Wall Streeters came to believe that they had in fact “mastered” risk. An informant from Lehman Brothers told me he did not believe that Lehman would go under precisely because the firm’s exposure to subprime was offset, “hedged,” by purchases of credit-default swaps and other derivatives. A few weeks before Lehman declared bankruptcy, he continued to claim, or perhaps hope, that Lehman was “market-neutral,” that its “value at risk” balance was effectively “zero.” The firm was, in his view, smart enough to control its exposure to risk even as it plunged as deeply into the market as possible. Wall Street leveraged claims of its own smartness and in the end also fell victim to its own self-representations.

Another core Wall Street value is the privileging of market identification and simultaneity, where the creation of constant, often short-term, transactions and products are the measures of corporate success. For Wall Street and evaluators of the financial markets, the commonsense understanding is that financial architects and innovators have demonstrated the ability to create entirely new market opportunities characterized by immediate exploitation and high growth. As such, according to this culture of expediency, even those implicated in the worst excesses of hedge funds, derivatives, junk bonds, and subprime mortgages are understood to have excelled in “making markets happen,” that is, generating a market and being “in it” as of yesterday. In this ethos, market simultaneity, not wisdom, is a central goal. The very structure of Wall Street encouraged the milking of the present and thus created exactly the conditions that rendered Wall Street’s financial modeling, “protection,” and predictions obsolete. Full speed expansion into subprime mortgages and buying and selling credit-default swaps without capital reserves, more for the purpose of generating profit than protecting against risk, might be called a strategy of no strategy.

In addition to smartness and the culture of market simultaneity, Wall Street risk-taking, I argue, is produced through government subsidy and the Wall Street–Washington consensus of “too big to fail.” Let me recount a conversation with Peter Felsenthal, a bond trader at Salomon Smith Barney, in the wake of the Russian and Asian financial crises in the late 1990s. When I asked him about how the emerging market crises affected his work, he replied that his trading desk “knew” that Russia “was not sustainable.” Feeling confused, I asked why they continued to trade the foreign debt of Russia, and he replied “We didn’t get burned” because “you have all of the upside when things go well,” and “if you do poorly, you don’t owe anybody any money, so you might as well take as much risk as possible.” Thrown off-balance, I further inquired how they knew that they wouldn’t fail, and how they guaranteed “only the upside” despite their massive risks. Felsenthal calmly explained that for five years, they happily rode the bull market, knowing that in the worst case scenario, the U.S. government or the IMF would bail them out because they could not let a major country fail. “Russia is in this sort of too-big-to-fail category. So, that’s what people say at U.S. banks. With Russia’s nuclear weapons, there is no way we are going to let them fail, not a chance.”

Throughout my fieldwork on Wall Street, I would hear of Wall Street banks and their trading partners being “too big to fail.” In their worldviews, countries (or, rather, Western “investors” in these countries) and global financial institutions were too global or powerful to fail. Before Lehman Brothers (where one could argue, the “free market” worked for one day—the day they went out of business), their predictions were correct: Long-Term Capital Management, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and AIG were all subsidized. From the third world debt crisis in the 1980s to the Asian and financial crises of the 1990s, the IMF and U.S. Treasury stepped in during emerging market crises to demand policies that enhanced repayment for western creditors, and compromised economic sovereignty.

Simultaneously, as I suggested earlier, my informants often anticipated when the bubble would burst; they could sense from their own practices that they had committed as many transactions as their clients could bear. As Paul Flanagan, an M&A associate at Goldman Sachs, articulated, bankers are so worried for their own jobs and so plagued with job insecurity that their goals are to “get what you [can] out of it for a short term,” rushing to complete as many deals as possible to increase their bonus compensation. (It is important to note that what is understood to be at risk is mainly their own jobs, not the systemic risk they inflict on the financial markets.)

What I want to stress in this discussion of risk is that many of my informants anticipated not only a crash, but also an eventual bailout, on the grounds that Wall Street investment banks were “too big to fail.” Such an assumption demonstrates that, contrary to their free market discourses, investment banks embraced risk not because they had successfully hedged their bets or managed their exposure. Rather, they depend on the state to underwrite their risk and profit taking. A key question then becomes, to what extent, in the past fifteen years, did Wall Street models, expectations, and risk practices presume an eventual bailout? In my current research I entertain the provocative possibility that from Wall Street’s point of view, default no longer became a concern over the past fifteen years, allowing investment banks to reframe its risk culture and aspire to work “only on complete leverage.”

Of course, increasing the complexity of their product offerings, even to the point where they did not know what was on their own books, as well as the global spread and interconnection of their products helped to construct, enable, and codify “too big to fail.” In other worlds, financial hyper-specialization and intricacy as well as “the global” became insurance policies against their own leveraged practices and strategies to avoid regulation. It was precisely Wall Street investment banks’ involvement in and construction of global interconnection, their global spreading of risk, that both generated the crisis and assured its rescue: the more the world bought into Wall Street (from American investors to entire governments), the more leverage Wall Street had to hold the globe hostage. The complicity of our retirement funds, for example, the extent to which middle-class Americans’ security has been outsourced to the global capital markets, deters our ability to critique and reform Wall Street. What cushions Wall Street’s hard landing is not the bankers’ much-touted future orientation and risk management skills (which have largely been exposed as hype in any case) but the deliberate tethering of their fortunes to those of the global economy so that they can command state support and bailouts. It is in this light that the much-talked-about privatized gains and socialized losses make sense. It is through these subsidies that Wall Street financiers and economists believed that they had moved beyond boom and bust, that they had outsmarted crisis.

Further research on when and how “too big to fail” began is crucial to contextualize and fully analyze how Wall Street’s approach to risk in practice operates according to a no-default worldview. To the extent that the risk bargain was not a cost-benefit analysis and that losses were cushioned by definition, common cultural assumptions about risk are turned on their head. The unearthing and unpacking of such cultural assumptions would reframe the very foundations of the professed identities, skills, and even the cultural and economic legitimacy of both financial economics and finance capital.

References

Martin, Randy. 2007. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Karen Z. Ho is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Her recent book is Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke University Press 2009).

Volume 2 Issue 4
Bubbles Issue

CUNY Graduate School Student Collective:

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

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

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

Silencing Race

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

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

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

—Sophie Statzel

Waging Tourism

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

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

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

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

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

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

—John Warner

CUNY Graduate School Student Collective:

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

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

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

Defining Torture

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

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

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

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

—Martha Lincoln

Working on Waste

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

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

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

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

—Michael Polson

CUNY Graduate School Student Collective:

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

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

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

Fair Capitalism?

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

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

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

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

—Chris Grove

Social Movements as Makers of Meaning

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Carwil James