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

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

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

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

—Sophie Statzel

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

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

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

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

—John Warner

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Akissi Britton

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

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

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

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

—Risa Cromer

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