Not long ago, I received a text message from a young woman, a minor acquaintance I'd only met a couple of times:

Hi Barb its something personal bt I think u sud help me out plis… if posible plis I really want 2 make frend wit one of whom u knw who is interested with PNG girls plis im intrested. sicret u and me.

Though she didn't spell it out, the type of person she wanted to make “friends” with was, I knew, a white man. This wasn't the first time a young Papua New Guinean had asked me to help them find a white boyfriend or husband. On my first visit to the country in 2008, I found myself being asked to take carefully posed photos of 15 and 16 year old girls in their smartest, most fashionable clothes, which they subsequently directed me to show to my “brothers and friends back home.” Since then I've had many young women inquire about whether or not my male friends in America would be interested in being matched up with Papua New Guineans. As with my text messaging acquaintance, these requests were supposed to be “secret you and me”—these young women didn't want their families or other people to know that they hoped to “befriend” foreigners. Another companion even snuck a look at my phone while I was sleeping, and started sending flirtatious text messages to one of my contacts, whom she knew to be white, male, and single. (I found out about this much later, when he informed me, amused, of the messages he had been receiving late at night.) These girls are hardly “gold diggers” or loose women; most are churchgoing “good girls” with dreams of upward mobility and international travel that are tragically inaccessible to most Papua New Guineans.

These requests are always awkward for me. I find it hard to explain that dating works differently where I'm from, and that few American men in their twenties and thirties would be interested in, or even aware of, the possibility of striking up a long distance relationship with a Papua New Guinean girl. The fantasy combines a very Papua New Guinean approach to courtship, in which an intermediary establishes contact between two people with the hope of making a match, with a series of assumptions about how romance, sexuality, and love work in “the white countries”. Most of these assumptions are simply the inverse of racist stereotypes about Papua New Guinean men (which both men and women have internalized to an often upsetting degree). Unlike PNG men, girls tell me, white men are uniformly kind, monogamous, non-violent, non-jealous, sober, and financially responsible. They never hit their wives and don't cheat with other women. They don't drink, or if they do, they “know how to drink well and don't get drunk.” Even when they leave their wives, they do it better than Papua New Guineans do: “white people know how to divorce properly,” a woman in her fifties once informed me. (Needless to say, women who've actually lived overseas or spent time in expat enclaves often have a very different perspective on white men's fidelity and sobriety.) I've lost track of the number of times I've heard young women, and even a few older married ones, declare with exasperation that they're finished with PNG men and want to find a white husband. Many ask me about immigration opportunities, fantasizing out loud about, for example, going to pick fruit in Australia and nabbing a man at the same time, or going on a tourist visa to America and “just staying forever”.

I should emphasize here that most of these fantasies are just that: a way of expressing frustration with male behavior and marital restrictions on PNG women, as well as the unfair limitations on international migration and travel that Papua New Guineans face. The politics of migration in the Pacific are defined and policed by Australian authorities—for most Papua New Guineans, “overseas” means Australia, their former colonial overseer, and Australian media regularly expresses terror at the thought of masses of Papua New Guinean “boat people” crossing the Torres Strait. In these accounts, Papua New Guineans are often depicted as vectors for infectious diseases like cholera, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS, threatening Australian public health and the solvency of the Australian health care system. Public service announcements targeting the state of Queensland (where most of the migration traffic between PNG and Australia occurs) warn Australian men working in the mining industry of the health risks of sex with Papua New Guineans. In reality, while many PNG women would jump at the chance of overseas travel—something that is accessible to only a tiny minority of the population, usually through educational exchange and, yes, marriage to foreigners—most are deeply attached to their home and relations, and understand that life in other countries might be isolating and difficult. Moreover, many of them have met women who have been married to or otherwise involved with white men, and their life stories are not always fairytale romances. In many cases, desire for “white men” is actually desire for an imaginary life of leisure and plenty known primarily through TV, movies, magazines, and observations of the lavish lifestyles of tourists and other expatriates.

When I interview informants, they often take the opportunity to ask me personal questions about sexuality, romance, and racial difference. After an hour-long interview with two twenty-year-old men, one of them politely inquired if I would ever consider marrying a black man. At first, embarrassed, I wondered if he was hitting on me, but I quickly realized that he was actually asking a broader, political question about race relations: Why, he continued, did white people in PNG “keep to themselves” so much? Why did they seem unwilling to establish long-term relationships with blacks? Did the thought of intimacy with Papua New Guineans disgust them? Why did they come to the country if they had no interest in a lasting connection with its inhabitants?

In this young man's account, interracial marriage was a sign of commitment to the country's well-being and a willingness to participate in reciprocity with its people—a metonym of more equal relations between nations. The desire for connection with whites has parallels with the populist analyses of regional political economy, in which the commodities readily available in Papua New Guinea are derided as “rubbish from China,” and Australian, European, or American goods are imagined to be of superior quality. Papua New Guineans know they are exploited as both a resource-rich site for extractive industries and as a dumping ground for cheap, poorly made goods. Girls often compliment my athletic sandals not in terms of their being attractive or fashionable (which, in my opinion, they are not), but as being “strong.” They link this “strength” to their overseas origin, and often complain in the same breath that “we Papua New Guineans wear rubbish sandals that break quickly, because they're made in China.” They request gifts—usually phones and shoes—“from America”, apparently assuming that goods on the American market are not made in China. These analyses uncover an acute awareness of PNG's position in the global economy. What is highly disturbing to me is when this populist hatred of Chinese “exploitation” and derision of Papua New Guinean lifestyles combines with retro-colonial nostalgia for white supremacy. Decades of failed development, government corruption and manipulation by (largely invisible) global neoliberal forces have convinced many that black men are incapable of governing themselves or taking care of their dependents. When this political cynicism is transferred into the realm of romantic relationships, you get the false notion that white men are the answer to women's disempowerment and poverty.

I describe these political and economic analyses in the same breath as young women's romantic aspirations because I have come to see them as intimately connected. Race in Papua New Guinea, as Ira Bashkow has so elegantly shown in The Meaning of Whitemen (2006), is often understood through an idiom of consumption, and white people are known and appreciated through the goods they possess. People slip easily between discussing the qualities of commodities and the nature of the persons who use them—sometimes arguing, for example, that Papua New Guineans are poor because they spend all their money on “Chinese rubbish” and thus have trouble saving up to improve their lives. These analyses are upsetting to me because they misconstrue the effect of poverty as its cause,and continue the cycle of self-blame and self-hatred engendered by colonialism.

So what do I do when my informants ask me to help them find a “white man”? In the case mentioned at the beginning of this essay, I replied (truthfully) that I didn't know many white men in the town where I am conducting fieldwork, and that those I did know were taken. But for some reason I couldn't bring myself to criticize her desires—what would be the use, after all, of telling her that she should be satisfied with the romantic and economic opportunities already available to her? She shouldn't be. Her picture of a life of luxury and ease with a caring white husband might be an illusion, but it is predicated on a lived experience of dispossession that I would be wrong to dispute.

Barbara Andersen is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department at New York University. At the time of writing she was conducting research on nursing education and changing gender relations in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.

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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