anthropology

In a recent anthropological lecture at UCLA an unnamed professor stated that colonialism is over, that somehow, somewhere all anti-colonial revolutions succeeded, or all colonials gave up because of cost or frustration. I was in the lecture hall and had already edited my antagonistic response. Here it is. Belfast is Still a Divided City is a documentary I shot and edited in 2008. It was broadcast on cable and satellite TV in US, Ireland, UK, and Italy to 55 million viewers. No it is not observational or ethnographic but yes it is anthropological. Argue it out. It is surely slanted in favor of the Irish liberation movement. They were the ones who housed, fed, and gave me access. They became my friends. So access goes.

And so it also went in Palestine in 2009. The shoots in Palestine and Northern Ireland are part of a documentary about divided cities around the world: Belfast, Jerusalem, Nicosia, Berlin….LA. Usually the indigenous or minority population is more apt to work with rogue mediamakers, the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the Irish in Northern Ireland. Nonfiction media is a weapon of the weak; economics, sanctions, barriers, state racism are the weapons of the strong.

On St. Patty’s Day, school yourself on the indigenous Irish sovereignty movement and the Protestant colonial activities by scoping my short doc.

The network’s blurb goes: “Ten years after the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland maintains a relative calm. Despite a few isolated incidents, the fighting seems to have ended. But has this brought Protestant and Catholic groups closer together? In Belfast the two groups live in neighborhoods that are still physically separated by ‘peace walls.’”

Check it: Belfast is Still a Divided City: 90014381_belfast-is-still-a-city-divided.htm or http://current.com/items/90014381_belfast-is-still-a-city-divided.htm

The AAA was briefly mentioned on the Brian Lehrer Show during a discussion of the 2010 Census and the barriers to counting individuals in New York City. Angelo Falcón of the Census Bureau’s Hispanic Advisory Committee referenced the work of the CfHR/SLA joint Task Group on Language and Social Justice, specifically the efforts of anthropologists Ana Celia Zentella and Laurie Graham in contesting the term “linguistic isolation.”

Guests include:

Rafael Dominguez, NY Partnership coordinator for the U.S. Census Bureau New York Region Angelo Falcón, chair of the Census Advisory Committee on the Hispanic Population Stacey Cumberbatch, coordinator at the NYC 2010 Census Office Valeria Treves, executive director of New Immigrant Community Empowerment Rong Xiaoqing, reporter for the Sing Tao Daily Seema Agnani, executive director of Chhaya Community Development

Language & Social Justice Task Group products:

• Op-ed: An Effective Census in 2010
• Letter to House Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives
• Letter to US Census Bureau

See this brief article from Inside Higher Ed:

The U.S. Interior Department issued final rules this week on an issue of concern to Native Americans, anthropologists and many campus museums: the repatriation of the remains of Native Americans that have been held by museums.

This week it’s the tops, mind, compulsions, fMRI, and anthropology. Enjoy.

Top of the List

Nicolas Baumard, Cognition and Culture Reader Great collection of articles that cover the field of Cognition and Culture.

John Rich, Doctor Works to get Young Man out of ‘Wrong Place’ NPR show featuring the author of Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men. Rich explores the reasons why so many young African American men are ending up in hospitals with various injuries. He seeks to find a better life for these men.

Dan Hope, iPhone Addictive, Survey Reveals The anthropologist Tanya Luhrman surveys Stanford students. Looks like the iPhone can be addictive. Like seriously. And the story even makes it to the always funny radio show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me – check out the Limericks!

Elizabeth Green, Building a Better Teacher I liked this thought-provoking piece on how to improve schools through improving teaching skills.

John Pavlus, The Science (Fiction) of Embodied Cognition Embodied cognition demonstrated through Avatar!

Rob Nixon, Literature for Real The draw of the real – can anthropologists learn something from creative nonfiction? For more on the fiction/nonfiction debate, head over to Blue to Blue’s Sometimes a Fantasy

Mind

Marcus Raichle, The Brain’s Dark Energy At Scientific American, one of the main researchers on the brain’s default network explains its importance

Judith Warner, Concocting a Cure for Kids with Issues Vision therapy for learning and behavior problems. Quite interesting for how it pushes what we mean by “vision” and how perception/processing problems can play a role in things we normally confine to “learning”

Jesse Bering, If Darwin Were A Sports Psychologist: Evolution and Athletics Why do we love and care so much about sports? Why do we care so much about displays of physical and mental prowess?

Jonah Lehrer, Inequality Aversion The ultimatum game and the importance of starting conditions, as seen through the brain

Mo Costandi, Neurosurgical Patients Get Closer to God This article explores… “Removal of specific parts of the brain can induce increases in a personality trait which predisposes people to spirituality, according to a new clinical study by Italian researchers.”

David Dobbs, Does Depression have an Upside? It’s Complicated. Another take on Lehrer’s evolution explains depression piece – not quite so simple…

Compulsions

Jonah Lehrer, Marijuana and Divergent Thinking Looking at the possibilities of self-medicating ourselves into the ideal mood

Sharon Begley, Forget the Cocaine Vaccine Why other low-tech treatments may be better than the vaccine for those who are addicted to cocaine.

Christian Science Monitor’s Editorial Board, Marijuana Legalization? A White House Rebuttal, Finally The Obama White House finally lays out its most detailed, logical confutation to arguments for marijuana legalization – countering a movement that is gaining momentum at the state level.

Stephen Totilo, The Next Big Thing in Video Games Might be Fear of Embarrassment Maybe fun isn’t the key ingredient that makes people love video games. What’s so intriguing about FarmVille on Facebook?

Michael McWhertor, Civilization Creator Explains Why Everything Game Devs Know is Wrong The psychology of game design

fMRI

Neurocritic, Friston is Freudian Karl Friston is one of the most prominent researchers in the field of neuroimaging. Now he’s looking to psychoanalysis for ideas.

Blog Archive, fMRI Becomes Big, Big Science The growing popularity of fMRIs as shown through teams of researchers

Martin Metzmacher, Dan Fitzgerald About fMRI – Video Interview A video explaining the basics of fMRI

Anthropology

Eugene Raikhel, An Interview with Marcia Inhorn Marcia Inhorn’s biography and personal encounters in the field of medical anthropology. She discusses such things as overpopulation and technology for male infertility.

Pleiotropy, Putting Together a Curriculum in Evolutionary Medicine Research on evolutionary medicine and why it is important.

Jim Holt, A Word About the Wise What is wisdom? A review of the new book Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience

Greg Laden, The Paper: “Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and opportunities” Laden examines the paper by Inna Kouper, and adds some ideas and criticisms of his own about science blogging. You can get the actual paper, which looks at 10 different science blogs, here

Ilke Kocamaz, PhD Candidate University of Exeter

Malraux's concept of the "museum without walls" informed us about the museum as a concept or a construct that is not dependent on any particular place or time. It referred to the museumization processes in our modern societies, i.e. our streets, cities etc. becoming ever more museum-like. Today many museums are going under refurbishment and rebranding to fit themselves into the 21st century consumer culture. It is seemingly a time of crisis/opportunity for many of them because they have to lead the refurbishment processes without having to loose their customers. Times are fastening and refurbishments seem to eventually become a normal procedure that museums, just like many other basic institutions like banks or schools, will have to face every couple of years, if not more often. So, the museum seems to eventually have to literally be without walls. Museums are looking for immaterial ways of rebuilding themselves in the hope that they will be able to make necessary changes more often and with less burden. Going under a huge refurbishment and rebranding process, the story of the RAMM tells us a lot about how a museum can literally work without walls. While being shut down, the museum takes its collections to many different interest groups and keeps its relationships up and running with them. The museum is becoming ever more immaterial, using the Internet and other technological sources and extending its boundaries to become a global player. The museum is using the refurbishment process as an opportunity to come together with many people from around the world, not being restricted to the people from Exeter (even though it has initially been built up as a local museum). Some staff members say that the refurbishment process itself has brought them together to work in a single office where they can see and interact with each other and form a renewed sense of unity.

(This CFP seems relevant to this dialogue about the utility of theorizing policing around a concept of culture)

Call For Papers — Proposed Session for AAA 2010 THE CULTURE CONCEPT IN CONTEMPORARY CIRCULATION

Does the culture concept have a place in anthropological understandings of a world increasingly defined and shaped by global circulations? Or, as decades of critique would wish it, can a concept of distinctive logics organizing human relations no longer hold water as the boundaries between the contexts and spaces in which those relations are negotiated become increasingly porous?  This panel will consider, in light of both the history of its critiques, and recent ethnographic work from diverse locations and positions, the continuing relevance of a concept of culture — taken as a distinctive logic organizing social relations, moral and political projects, collective histories and imagined futures — as anthropology responds to the apparent dissolution of spatio-temporal, social and communicative boundaries. To what extent does the culture concept rely on our capacity to identify bounded collectivities, or on the isolation of those collectivities from each other, their ignorance of a world outside their “own” world, or on the difficulty of people associating with more than one of them or moving between them? (To put it another way: must “cultural” context always be relatively presupposed, rather than entailed?)  What do prior theorizations of culture qua both difference and structure bring to our understanding of contemporary negotiations of the semiotic fields in which identity, alterity, and other sorts of projects come (or fail to come) into being?  As it proliferates as a form in circulation beyond anthropological discourse, what force does culture retain or accrue as context or pretext, social text or hypertext?  What pressure does the appearance of culture as a form in circulation place on our uses of culture as analytic frame?

Rather than seeing contemporary difficulties with deploying the concept of cultures as objects coterminous with geographically bounded social entities as an occasion for despair we see it as an opportunity for a productive untangling:  Is difference (especially difference marked by a boundary) essential to the culture concept or simply the context in which it was first noticed?  Need cultural “logics” be largely or partly unconscious to be powerful or is this a misguided analogy with linguistics? Need people have only one culture?  Are unit cultures but one historically specific way in which human semiotic life can be organized (as bands, empires, or states are historically specific ways of organizing human political life)?  Such untangling might let us continue to understand culture as the ground on which both alterity and alliance are negotiated regardless of the size and boundedness of the units involved, a use we see as faithful to its intellectual and political history, as well as one with a promising future on both fronts.  As a platform for — and as a form accompanying— people and projects in circulation, the analytic concept of culture may in fact be of greater importance than ever.

Please address inquiries and submissions, in the form of an abstract of no more than 250 words, as e-mail text or attachment, to session organizers:  Amy McLachlan (University of Chicago) amclachlan@uchicago.edu, or Daniel Rosenblatt (Carleton University) daniel.rosenblatt@gmail.com, by Friday, March 26th.  In addition to an abstract, please also include your full name, contact information and institutional affiliation.

Feel free to circulate this announcement widely!

2010 American Anthropological Association Meeting/ Society for Visual Anthropology

*”Perception, Production and Circulation: Sensory Ethnography through Media”*

Session Abstract: This panel is organized by graduate students at Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab in conjunction with the launch of a new academic journal of sensory ethnography. Selected projects/papers will have the opportunity to be published in the first edition of the Journal of Sensory Ethnography (working title).

Through this panel we aim to recognize and problematize the relationship between theoretical abstraction and material concreteness, to reimagine the relationship between sensing, knowing, and thinking, and to reexamine the implications of this for ethnographic media. “Sensory ethnography” holds promises of engaged scholarship that explores the evocative and representative, the affective and effective, the feeling and the meaning of salient features of everyday life.

Today the potential for innumerable combinations of media promises innovative modes of producing, transmitting, circulating and generating ethnographic material. This panel seeks to discuss these various modes and mediums vis-à-vis its relevance to improving our understanding of culturally mediated apprehension of sensoria. Submitted abstracts may include but are not limited to paper presentations, video, audio recording, and multimedia projects with a goal to elaborate the capacity of these modes for critical engagement with the emerging scholarship of sensory ethnography. Panel abstracts can explore (but are not limited to) such themes as:

- image production and circulation - senses and religion - senses and the city - memory - place-making - affect and publics - senses of home - sound/soundscapes - senses and the built environment - senses and gender - media and perception - ethnographic methodologies/ethics/research - sensory engagement.

Key Words: sensory ethnography, media production, anthropology of the senses, aesthetics, practice, circulation, affect

Please submit abstracts, no later than *March 26th*, to: Julia Yezbick yezbick@fas.harvard.edu and Aryo Danusiri danusiri@fas.harvard.edu

This panel for the 2010 AAA seeks to explore the ways in which contemporary aesthetic practices are interpreted and valued - where value is broadly construed. Labels such as contemporary, modern, fine, gallery, investment, high, blue chip, insider and so forth for art are all problematic in one way or another - we seek to investigate the various cultural dynamics that give rise to these categories.  We are particularly interested in aesthetic policies, practices and goods that might be used in the service of economic projects; the “value” and valuation of fine arts; and the ways in which aesthetics might underpin various facets of political economy.

Please send inquiries and abstracts to Susan Falls at sfalls@scad.edu

In an unfortunately-forgotten bit of 70s academic bloodsport, Marvin Harris and Marshall Sahlins battled it out in the pages of the New York Review of Books over the origin Aztec cannibalism: was it, as Harris argued, something Aztecs were driven to as a result of a protein deficiency? No, Sahlins answered, but even if it was all of the symbolism and institutions surrounding it would still have to be explained as a result of culture, not nutrition. Sahlins’s argument was devastatingly convincing because it explained two phenomenon with a single maneuver: Aztec cannibalism was a result of culture, not nutritional needs, just as Harris’s belief in it was motivated not by facts, but by his own (American) cultural tendency to see human behavior as shaped by biological factors.

A disagreement with similar contours is afoot today. The latest skirmish in the Jared Diamond wars deals not only with issues of scholarly accuracy, but also the cultural/personal motivation of the protagonists as well as the social effects of their arguments. The main protagonists are the authors of Questioning Collapse, an edited volume in which expert scholars take issue with Jared Diamond’s reading of their specialty topics: the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) specialist discusses Diamond’s use of the Rapa Nui data, the Incan specialist discusses Diamond on Pizzaro and Atahualpa, and so forth. The book is critical of Diamond, who has responded with a review in Nature that is none too friendly itself.

The Usual Denunciations are already issuing from Stinky Journalism.org, which mostly focus on how unethical it was for Diamond to write a review of a book that criticized his book without explicitly telling readers the book he was criticizing criticized him. You can check it out if you want, but I think its much more interesting to see how the back and forth between Questioning Collapse and Diamond exemplified some of the issues that played out twenty years earlier in the Sahlins/Harris debate. How do we tack between the social effects of our work and its accuracy? How can we address the cultural underpinnings that motivate an author’s writing without falling back into ad hominem attacks? How well does Collapse stand up to scholarly scrutiny? And how good a job does Questioning Collapse do of reaching out to Diamond’s popular audience? These questions are worth asking — even if you are a little burned out on the Jared Diamond wars. In this piece I want to review Questioning Collapse through the lens of these issues. I’ll start by working backwards from Diamond’s review in Nature to the book itself. In the end, I find Questioning Collapse’s critique of Diamond extremely compelling, particularly for the way it highlights the theoretical difficulties of Diamond’s position. That said, however, Questioning Collapse’s (henceforth ‘QC’) authors often don’t do the readers any favors — as a piece of public anthropology I feel it has a long way to go.

Diamond’s piece is actually a review of two books, Questioning Collapse and The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age. In the event, however, only about 400 of its 1300 words focus on the later volume. In the review, Diamond pulls a classic Sahlins maneuver, arguing that the authors are driven by a tendentious preference for a “positive message about human behavior” is “laudable” but, unfortunately, does not mesh well with the facts. The result is a “naively optimistic redefinition” of the data which “inevitably forces one to distort history and to avoid trying to explain what really happened.” Indeed, Diamond even claims that although they take issue with his work the authors of QC “do not offer a substitute thesis” for facts which “cry out for explanation, even if one relabels them as something other than collapse”. Political correctness, it seems, blinds Questioning Collapse to The Facts. Or, as the subtitle of the review puts it, ‘realism’ (i.e. Diamond) must trump ‘positivity’ (i.e. QC).

In fact there are four themes in Questioning Collapse: that of resilience (as opposed to collage), of colonialism (‘empire expansion’), of the similarity of current environmental issues to the past, and that of what constitutes an adequate popular anthropology. Diamond deals mostly with the first two topics in his review, and I will skip the third here but I’ll address the rest as well as make a few points about the factual errors each side accuses the other of having.

Resilience versus collapse, or, seven million Mayans can’t be wrong

Is Diamond correct when he says QC’s feel-good agenda prevents it from seeing the truth about collapse? On this first major claim, I think Diamond and QC are talking past one another. At the broadest level, QC takes issue with the three key words in Collapse’s title: ‘collapse’, ’success’, and ‘choose’. What, specifically, counts as collapse? The authors of QC argue that there is more to societal continuity than Diamond’s focus on population size and social complexity. There are, they point out, millions of Mayan people alive today — how then can we say that Mayan culture has disappeared? They also point out that it is hard to tell where one society starts and another begins. Is agriculture in the Netherlands an example of ecological success once we think about the effects their importation of fodder has on countries like Brazil from which they import it? And ‘success’: how long does a society have to be around before it is officially considered to be one? In his excellent article in the QC McNeill points out that Diamond plays fast and loose with dates — the Greenland Norse, for instance, survived longer than all of the modern societies that Diamond lists as successes. And ‘choice’: many of the authors of the volume point out that societies are not people — different parts of them make different decisions for different reasons. Often times ‘choices’ are the emergent property of many individual decisions. And in a world where actions have unintended consequences, even selfish choices might end up being sustainable ones, and vice versa. It is for this reason that the authors tend to focus on ‘resilience’ rather than ‘collapse’ — on the way that populations change over time, but tend overall to endure.

In sum, QC argues that Diamond’s notion of collapse is too simple. Societies are not externally bounded and internally homogeneous. They do not make decisions like humans do. They change through time, making it difficult to identify when they change beyond recognition. Long-term trends are, they argue, mostly for continuity, which is why they use the term ‘resilience’ rather than collapse. Mayans are still around. Easter Islanders are still around — in fact, QC has little boxed-in sections highlighting contemporary descendants of supposedly-collapsed societies.

Diamond is not having any of it. He responds that “It makes no sense to me to redefine as heart-warmingly resilient a society in which everyone ends up dead, or in which most of the population vanishes, or that loses writing, state government and great art for centuries… Even when many people do survive and eventually reestablish a populous complex society, the initial decline is sufficiently important to warrant being honestly called a collapse and studied further.” Diamond’s model of collapse is that familiar to us from the video game Civilization by Sid Meier: civilizations all grow in one direction towards more and more complexity with bigger and bigger cities, and if they go down in size, you lose. The authors of QC have a more anthropological understanding of societies, insisting that they not internally homogeneous or externally bounded, that they persist in time, and that we must understand their ups and downs.

At heart, then, the resilience/collapse debate is a discussion of interpretation, not facts. Many readers will probably find Diamond’s civilization-or-bust definition of collapse compelling, and agree with him that ‘positivity’ leads QC’s authors to a tendentious interpretation of the facts. This is a pity since I think QC takes a principled and satisfying theoretical position on collapse. Still, one can see why popular readers might not be swayed.

It’s the Colonialism, Stupid

Diamond does remarkably less well when it comes to ‘empire expansion’. One of the most egregious howlers from Diamond’s review is his claim that “although the authors of Questioning Collapse may wish it were otherwise, students and laypersons alike know that Europeans did conquer the world” and that “the authors seem uncomfortable with the glaring fact that it is Europeans, not Native Australians or Americans or Africans, who have expanded over the globe in the past 500 years.” The kindest thing one can say about Diamond’s position here is that it is unintelligible, because the alternative options are that a) Diamond’s personal animus against the authors was so intense he could not understand the content of the book or b) he simply did not read the book he is reviewing.

As far as I can tell, Diamond believes the book argues the exact opposite of what it actually says. He appears to think that the authors of QC are arguing that the hand of European rule lay lightly on the colonized world, which never suffered population loss. QC doesn’t admit that there is such a thing as ‘empire expansion’? How about the ending of Michael Wilcox’s essay in the volume (one of my favorites):

Diamond’s tidy explanation of conquest and global poverty is not only factually incorrect; it gives us the sense that its origins lie somewhere out there, beyond the agency of the reader. The implication is that if conquests were situated long ago, somewhere else, then we are powerless over their contemporary manifestations. Conquests are never instantaneous, transformative, or all encompassing. They are enacted, reenacted, and rewritten for each succeeding generation. In this sense Diamond’s narrative of disappearance and marginalization is one of conquest’s most potent instruments. (p 138)

Does this sound like someone who didn’t get the memo that “Europeans did conquer the world”?

Diamond accuses QC of down-playing the role of colonialism in human history, and not offering an alternate explanation for the collapse of indigenous society, when in fact colonialism is their alternate explanation for the collapse of nonwestern societies. Wilcox writes “a more appropriate troika of destruction [than guns, germs, and steel] would be ‘lawyers, god, and money’”. Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo write that “ancient deforestation was not the cause of population collapse. If we are to apply a modern term to the tragedy of Rapa Nui, it is not ecocide but genocide.”

In sum, QC attempts to take the moral high-ground out from underneath Diamond when it comes to colonialism, arguing that he underplays the horrors of colonialism because his cultural blinkers prevent him from seeing the truth. Indeed, one of the major arguments of the book is that Diamond (and other social scientists) aid and abet on-going oppression of indigenous people. The proper response from Diamond — had he noticed — would have been to cast the authors of QC as a bunch of lefty radicals who have given up on Scientific Accuracy in the name of advocacy. Except of course he didn’t notice.

Some readers may find Wilcox’s invective overheated, and find the anti-colonial agenda of QC too ‘pc’ in their denunciation of the book’s social effects. That is why it is so gratifying that the volume also takes up the issue of accuracy and never lets go: Diamond is not just tendentious, he is also wrong. The fact that Diamond simply missed this major part of their argument really detracts from his credibility.

Fact Checking

Beyond these overarching themes there are a number of particular factual disputes between Diamond and the authors of QC. In his review, Diamond argues that the Yali he met and the Yali that Gewertz and Errington’s volume is about are different people; he argues against Wilcox that Chaco canyon was deforested; he argued against Berglund that the Greenland Norse died out, rather than emigrating; he argues against Taylor that ecology was a factor in the Rwandan genocide; and he argues against what he calls David Cahill’s “absurd rewriting” of the Spanish conquest of the Inca.

None of Diamond’s factual claims are very convincing. Which Yali was which does not matter, because Gewertz and Errington’s merely use the conversation with Yali as a set piece to raise a series of other claims about colonialism in Papua New Guinea, none of which Diamond addresses. Diamond offers as evidence that overpopulation was a factors for genocide in Rwanda a school teacher’s assertion that “The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.” Which seems to me to be an argument about inequality rather than population pressure — if it is not just a statement about shoes. Wilcox provides two citations to back up his claim that Chaco canyon was forested, while Diamond never cites his sources in the review or in Collapse, and so it is impossible to verify his claims. This also makes his claim that there is archaeological evidence of the death of the Greenland Norse impossible to verify. His claim that David Cahill’s paper is an “absurd rewriting” of Incan-Spanish relations seems to miss Cahill’s careful and, as far as I can tell, uncontroversial point that conquerors often keep local systems of social stratification intact and install themselves on top of them.

Now, it is surely unfair to ask a 1300 word review to exhaustively respond to all of the criticisms made in a 375 page book. Still, one can’t help but notice that the authors of QC make serious claims that throw Diamond’s entire reading of societal collapse into question, and Diamond’s response is to ignore the forest and call out a few trees. When people like Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo argue that Diamond’s claims about Rapa Nui are fundamentally mistaken, you expect such big-issue claims to merit a response.

Of course, Questioning Collapse was not perfect either

That said, the authors of QC do not always make it easy for readers to be swayed to their point of view. The editors claim that “participants committed themselves to setting aside abstruse academic prose and cumbersome in-text references in favor of a more user-friendly text.” Really? Can we blame Diamond for not lingering carefully over, for instance, Cahill’s prose when it contains sentences like this:

It encoded all the familiar generic facts of colonial conquests as seen by Europeans: the mutual incomprehension and marveling at the mirror-image alterities; the chasm between New World and Old World epistemologies, “true” rational knowledge against heathen superstition; clever Castilian against dullard Inca; true believers versus the unevangelized barbarians, at best seen as promising neophytes; asymmetrical technologies manifest in the flash of steel and the thrust of lance against bronze close-combat weapons, slingshot, cotton armor and buckler; European initiative against the kind of unquestioning obeisance associated with “oriental despotism.”

I am guessing the average reader will quit long before they get to the part of the sentence where they miss the Wittfogel reference. While several of the authors write clearly and passionately, on the whole Diamond still wins the contest for clear prose. In fact, many of the essays employ all the apparatus of scholarly prevarication: introductory sections reflecting on what it means to write for a popular audience, wider theoretical issues of contextualization, and so forth. You must wade through all this to get to the point where they actually talk about why they think Diamond is wrong.

Or you may not. One of the strangest things about this otherwise very ballsy collection is that many — maybe even most — of the articles do not actually quote Jared Diamond. Sometimes I think the authors are so immersed in the topic that they forget to leave signposts to the reader about what they are doing. Joel Berglund’s piece, for instance, appears to be a valuable detailed commentary on Diamond’s chapters on Norse Greenland, but only if you put the two books next to one another. For many readers it will seem like a tour of various facts about Norse Greenland which mentions Diamond at the start. Cahill’s paper often takes aim at “standard colonial tropes” of “indegnous dullards who ‘didn’t know what hit them’” or views in which “Andean civilization… becomes a kind of ‘unenlightened’ primitive polity”. The positions he put in scare quotes are certainly worth criticizing — but are they Diamonds? A close reading — and actual citation — of Diamond’s argument would have made the essay stronger, especially since Cahill’s data so obviously gainsays the claims Diamond actually does make. The best pieces — Hunt and Lipo’s and Wilcox’s, McNeil’s, and so forth — are very strong (disclosure: I share a department with Hunt) and other pieces could have profited by being as tightly written.

Above all, a central argument of QC is that the world is ‘complex’ and it would be better if popular audiences did not need to have it ’simplified’. As Thomas Hylland Eriksen reminds us, however, this simply will not fly. Public anthropology is, I’ve argued, the bar at the conference — when people tell you straight up and without hedging what they think is really going on in their papers. It is in the nature of the game to “dare to be reductive”. I think QC would have done better to explore how to reduce effectively, rather than lament the fact that such a move was necessary — or attempt to avoid making it at all.

Taking the fight to the streets?

Regardless of what you think about the particulars of Questioning Collapse, it establishes once and for all that mainstream academic authors consider Diamond’s work to be problematic. Coming from a major major press (Cambridge) with a roster of quality specialists, Questioning Collapse is undoubtedly Ivory Tower. If anything, it could have let down its hair a bit more. If only there were some way to reach a popular audience… to take the fight to the streets… in like… say… a blog…? Luckily, they have one, although it has not been updated regularly.

It seems to me QC’s blog could serve two purposes. First, it would also be an excellent place to begin a long and exceedingly detailed analysis of some of the particular factual claims Diamond makes — particularly those in the Nature review. This is the sort of intellectual spadework that publishers are not keen on, which should be made available to the public, and works well in small sub-essay size units which can be clearly written and do not take forever to read. Blog posts, in other words.

Second, Questioning Collapse is relatively expensive (US$30) and formally written — not ideal for spreading the word. The website could become a great location for remixed versions of the articles: piece available for download as teaching resources, or for the casual reader, where the authors cut right to the chase, free and open access, for anyone who is interested in reading them.

Conclusion

In sum, QC excels in empirical accuracy, not public outreach. While I find their arguments persuasive — in most cases, completely persuasive — I think they could have done a better job reaching a broader audience. There is a danger that their accounts of the social effects of Diamond’s work, and his personal/cultural motivations for writing could turn into ad hominem, which would be a shame. Because Diamond is a public figure, the proper course would be to be even more scrupulous in adhering to standards of professionalism and impartiality than a scholar normally would, even though the impulse is (I imagine) to go in rather the other dimension. From my point of view, the central issue has got to be the empirical adequacy of his claims.

As for Diamond, the impression I get of him is of a scholar who increasingly refuses to adhere to the best practices of the university, and who can get away with it because of the power and influence that comes from being in the public eye. Of course, there is nothing wrong with going AWOL from the academy if one wants to become a free-floating intellectual. But Diamond is not Carlos Castaneda, and his audience gives him credence because of his situation within the academy and his role as a translator of technical discourse. It is easy to become complacent when you’re, you know, an ultra-rich Pulitzer Prize-winning author (or so I imagine!). But one must resist the temptation to relax one’s standards. Both lay readers and his colleagues deserve better work than we see in Nature review.

In the seventies, Sahlins and Harris didn’t have the Internet to fall back on. Today, we are blessed with a means of communication that allow incensed scholars to argue endlessly in front of the entire planet! Now that the book is published, I look forward to seeing the authors of Questioning Collapse – and perhaps even Diamond himself? — move these issues forward.

Farming, family and fertility were prevalent themes in the cultural anthropology of Ireland in the 1980s. Over the past two decades, however, cultural anthropologists have pursued a wider range of research topics including violence, politics, heritage and language, policy and transnational issues.

I constructed the following list of references using AnthropologyPlus for the journal articles and a perusal of books in my personal library.

As with previous lists of references posted on this blog, the following is admittedly a partial collection. I offer it to you with the hope that it will inspire you track down some of these sources, read them, and further explore the literature on Ireland and the Irish. The journal articles are not open access, so my apologies once again to readers without access to a library.

Image: Marilyn Monroe Reading James Joyce. Flickr creative commons licensed content by user I, Puzzled.

Read, enjoy, and join in raising a glass to the Irish!

Andriolo, Karin. 2006. “The Twice-Killed : Imagining Protest Suicide.” American Anthropologist 108(1):100-113.

Bairner, Alan. 2003. “Political Unionism and Sporting Nationalism: An Examination of the Relationship between Sport and National Identity within the Ulster Unionist Tradition.” Identities 10(4):517-535.

Ballard, Linda-May. 2008. “Curating Intangible Cultural Heritage.” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 17(1):74-95.

Best, Alyssa. 2005. Abortion Rights Along the Irish-English Border and the Liminality of Women’s Experiences. Dialectical Anthropology 29(3-4):423-437.

Brown, Kris, and Roger MacGinty. 2003. “Public Attitudes Toward Partisan and Neutral Symbols in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland.” Identities 10(1):83-108.

Bryan, Dominic. 2000. Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual, Tradition, and Control. London: Pluto Press.

Cadhla, Stiofán Ó. 2001. “Fast Knocks and Nags: The Stolen Car in the Urban Vernacular Culture of Cork.” Ethnologia Europaea 31(2):77-94.

Carter, Thomas F. 2003. “Violent Pastime(s): On the Commendation and Condemnation of Violence in Belfast.” City & Society 15(2):255-281.

Carter, Thomas. 2003. “In the Spirit of the Game?: Cricket & Changing Notions of being British in Northern Ireland.” Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe 3(1):14-26.

Cashman, Ray. 2006. “Critical Nostalgia and Material Culture in Northern Ireland.” Journal of American Folk-Lore 119(472):137-160.

Cohen, Marilyn, 2002. “It Wasn’t a Woman’s World”: Memory Construction and the Culture of Control in a North of Ireland Parish. Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives: 53-64.

Crowley, Tony. 2006. “The Political Production of a Language: The Case of Ulster-Scots. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16(1):23-35.

Costa, Kelly Ann. 2009. Coach Fellas: Heritage and Tourism in Ireland. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Curtis, Jennifer. 2008. “‘Community’ and the Re-Making of 1970s Belfast. Ethnos 73(3):399-426.

Donnan, Hastings and Graham McFarlane, eds. 1997. Culture and Policy in Northern Ireland: Anthropology in the Public Arena. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast.

Donnan, Hastings, and Kirk Simpson. 2007. “Silence and Violence among Northern Ireland Border Protestants.” Ethnos 72(1):5-28.

Eyetsemitan, Frank E. 2002. “Perceived Elderly Traits and Young People’s Helping Tendencies in the U.S., Ireland, Nigeria & Brazil.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology 17(1):57-69.

Finlay, Andrew. 2008. “The Persistence of the ‘Old’ Idea of Culture and the Peace Process in Ireland.” Critique of Anthropology 28(3):279-296.

Fong, Vanessa L. 2008. “The Other Side of the Healthy Immigrant Paradox: Chinese Sojourners in Ireland and Britain Who Return to China due to Personal and Familial Health Crises.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 32(4):626-641.

Helleiner, Jane. 2003. “The Politics of Traveller ‘Child Begging’ in Ireland.” Critique of Anthropology 23(1):17-33.

Hill, Andrew, and Andrew A. White. 2008. “The Flying of Israeli Flags in Northern Ireland.” Identities 15(1):31-50.

Hyde, Abbey, Jonathan Drennan, Etaoine Howlett, and Dympna Brady. 2008. “Heterosexual Experiences of Secondary School Pupils in Ireland: Sexual Coercion in Context.” Culture, Health and Sexuality 10(5):479-493.

Kaul, Adam R. 2007. “The Limits of Commodification in Traditional Irish Music Sessions.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(3):703-719.

Kierans, Ciara M. 2005. “Narrating Kidney Disease: The Significance of Sensation and Time in the Emplotment of Patient Experience.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 29(3):341-359.

Kierans, Clara M., and N. U. I. Maynooth. 2001. “Sensory and Narrative Identity: The Narration of Illness Process among Chronic Renal Sufferers in Ireland.” Anthropology and Medicine 8(2-3):237-253.

Lele, Veerendra P. 2008. “‘Demographic Modernity’ in Ireland: A Cultural Analysis of Citizenship, Migration, and Fertility” (PDF file). Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe 8(1):5-17.

LeMaster, Barbara. 2006. “Language Contraction, Revitalization, and Irish Women.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16(2):211-228.

Maguire, Mark, and A. Jamie Saris. 2007. “Enshrining Vietnamese-Irish Lives.” Anthropology Today 23(2):9-12.

McCarthy, Elise. 2007. “Land of Saints and Tigers: The Transformation of Responsibility in Ireland?.” Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe 7(1):3-7.

O Dochartaigh, Niall. 2009. “Reframing Online: Ulster Loyalists Imagine an American Audience.” Identities 16(1):102-127.

Ó Laoire, Muiris. 2005. “Three Languages in the Schools in Ireland.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 171:95-113.

Rosland, Sissel. 2009. “Victimhood, Identity, and Agency in the Early Phase of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.” Identities 16(3):294-320.

Salazar, Carles. 2008. “Knowledge and Discipline – Knowledge as Discipline: Aspects of the Oral History of Irish Sexuality.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14(1):135-151.

Salazar, Carles. 2003. “Demographic Growth and the “Cultural Factor” in Ireland: Rethinking the Relationship between Structure and Event.” History and Anthropology 14(3):271-281.

Saris, A. Jamie. 2008. “An Uncertain Dominion: Irish Psychiatry, Methadone and the Treatment of Opiate Abuse.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 32(2):259-277.

Saris, A. Jamie, and Brendan Bartley. 2002. “Arts of Memory: Icon and Structural Violence in a Dublin “Underclass” Housing Estate.” Anthropology Today 18(4):14-19.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2001 [1979]. Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland. Berkeley: University of California Press. Twentieth Anniversary Edition.

Shandy, Dianna J. 2008. “Irish Babies, African Mothers: Rites of Passage and Rights in Citizenship in Post-Millennial Ireland.” Anthropological Quarterly 81(4):803-831.

Skinner, Jonathan. 2008. “The ‘PB’ and the Aestheticization of Violence in Northern Ireland.” Ethnography 9(3):403-414.

Sluke, Jeffrey A., ed. 2000. Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Tonkin, E. 2009. “Is Charity a Gift?: Northern Irish Supporters of Christian Missions Overseas.” Social Anthropology 17(2):171-183.

Tuck, Jason. 2003. “Making Sense of Emerald Commotion: Rugby Union, National Identity and Ireland.” Identities 10(4):495-515.

Warren, Kay. 2007. “Writing Gendered Memories of Repression in Northern Ireland: Begoña Aretxaga at the Doors of the Prison.” Anthropological Theory 7(1):9-35.

Were, Graeme. 2007. “Fashioning Belief: The Case of the Baha’i Faith in Northern New Ireland.” Anthropological Forum 17(3):239-253.

Whitaker, Robin. 2008. “Gender and the Politics of Justice in the Northern Ireland Peace Process: Considering Róisín McAliskey. Identities 15(1):1-30.

Whitaker, Robin. 2008. “Writing as a Citizen?: Some Thoughts on the Uses of Dilemmas.” Critique of Anthropology 28(3):321-338.

Wilson, John, and Karyn Stapleton. 2007. “The Discourse of Resistance: Social Change and Policing in Northern Ireland.” Language in Society 36(3):393-425.

Wilson, Tamar Diana. 2006. “‘I Thought Horses was the Best Thing Ever’: Irish Jarveys in Dublin.” Critique of Anthropology 26(2):139-156.

Wilson, Thomas M. and Hastings Donnan. 2006. The Anthropology of Ireland. New York: Berg Publishers.

Wulff, Helena. 2002. Yo-Yo Fieldwork: Mobility and Time in a Multi-Local Study of Dance in Ireland. Anthropological Journal on European Cultures. 11:117-136.

_____. 2007. “Longing for the Land: Emotions, Memory, and Nature in Irish Travel Advertisements.” Identities 14(4):527-544.

A short outline of the theoretical and historical development and relevance of the concept of field

Although today we associate field theory with the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 1996), this theory has a far longer history originating in physics and Gestalt psychology (Martin 2003). In anthropology, the first sustained usage and elaboration of the concept of field can be traced to the Manchester School of anthropology (1940s-1960s). Led by Max Gluckman, the Manchester scholars conducted fieldwork in Central and Southern Africa during the end of Empire.  They struggled with the problem of how to study urbanised localities under conditions of rapid social and political change. This was a time in which ‘tribal’, linguistic and other ‘community’ groupings were in flux and new kinds of affiliations were being constantly made and remade around novel occupational and recreational practices. Faced with such fluid actualities on the ground, Gluckman and his followers moved away from the structural-functionalist paradigm then predominant in British social anthropology and towards historical-processual accounts informed by new concepts such as ‘field’, ‘network’, ‘social drama’, ‘trouble case’, ‘situation’ and ‘arena’ (Evens and Handelman 2005; Swartz, Turner and Tuden 1966; Turner 1974). The result was a series of now classic ethnographies published in the 1950s (incl. Mitchell 1956, Turner 1957, Epstein 1958).

By the mid-1960s, two key concepts had emerged from these post-War efforts, namely network and field. On the one hand, Mitchell, Epstein and others followed the lead of Barnes (1954) and Bott (1955) and enthusiastically adopted social network analysis. The hope was that this new method would prove as useful to anthropologists working in urban areas as the genealogical method had been to the study of kinship in rural areas (Sanjek 1996). Their investigations crystallised in the volume Social Networks in Urban Situations, edited by Mitchell in 1969. On the other, Turner and his associates – some of them in the United States where he had emigrated – had continued to work on the concept of social field, and particularly on its cognate, the political field. Their efforts culminated in the volume Political Anthropology (Swartz, Turner and Tuden 1966). The starting point was Gluckman’s Zululand research where he found not the ‘tightly integrated systems’ of structural-functionalism but rather ‘social fields with many dimensions, with parts that may be loosely integrated, or virtually independent from one another’ (1966: 3, see also Epstein 1958). For these authors, political fields can expand and contract as political processes migrate across group and geographical boundaries (1966: 8). They saw the concept of (political) field as a way of overcoming the fixity of existing notions such as ‘political system’, ‘political structure’ or ‘governmental process’ (1966: 27).

By the 1970s, the Manchester School had disbanded and interest in both concepts – field and network – had declined within the discipline. A notable exception is Victor Turner’s mid-1970s essay, ‘Hidalgo: History as social drama’ (1974), in which he uses both field and network to reconstruct a failed uprising in colonial Mexico. Turner understands this historical episode as a social drama that unfolded across a rapidly shifting political field made up of the people, institutions and resources mobilised to assist or thwart the rebellion. Defining political field as ‘the totality of relationships between actors oriented to the same prizes and values’ (1974: 127), and in line with Gluckman’s emphasis on conflict, Turner argues that a political field is constituted by ‘purposive, goal-directed group action, and though it contains both conflict and coalition, collaborative action is often made to serve the purposes of contentious action’ (1974: 128). Such contentious action is fought out in ‘arenas’. An arena is a ‘bounded spatial unit in which precise, visible antagonists, individual or corporate, contend with one another for prizes and/or honor’ (1974: 132-3). It is an ‘explicit frame’ in which ‘nothing is left merely implied’ and major decisions are taken in public view (1974: 134). In a clear reference to Goffman’s dramaturgical model, Turner adds that in an arena

[a]ction is definite, people outspoken; the chips are down. Intrigue may be backstage, but the stage it is back of is the open arena (1974: 134).

Keen to distance himself from game theory and other rational actor approaches popular among political anthropologists at the time (e.g. Bailey, Barth and Swartz), Turner emphasises that an arena is neither a market nor a forum, although they can both become one ‘under appropriate field conditions’ (1974: 134).  As arenas change, so do the geographical boundaries of the political field, expanding and contracting as the social drama unfolds.

It is difficult to imagine a starker contrast between this conceptualisation of the field and our present-day understanding of this notion, largely derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu.  For Bourdieu fields are those slowly changing, established domains of cultural life in which practitioners acquire a ‘feel for the game’ over many years, for example, the fields of art, sociology, or boxing. Take Bourdieu’s (1996: 52) brief account of Flaubert’s famous Madame Bovary trial, where the novelist stood accused of publishing immoral materials. At the time of the trial, the Parisian salons, says Bourdieu, became sites for mobilisation in support of Flaubert. Bourdieu mentions in passing this episode to illustrate the importance of the salons as points of articulation between the fields of art, commerce and government, distinguished more by who they excluded than by who they included (1996: 51-53). Yet he does not consider the trial to be a political process (or ‘trouble case’) worthy of detailed analysis in its own right, as Turner and other Manchester scholars may have done. Bourdieu focusses on the slow-moving, cumulative changes that take place within an established field (Swartz 1997: 129, Couldry 2003), not on potentially volatile, unpredictable processes such as trials that often migrate across fields. The Parisian salons, brasseries, courthouses, and so on, provide Bourdieu with a relatively fixed spatial matrix of objective relations – a socio-physical backdrop to a slowly changing field of practice (see Bourdieu 1996: 40-43).

This contrast should not make us lose sight, however, of the areas of broad agreement between the Bourdieuan and Manchester approaches. First, both Turner and Bourdieu use the metaphor of game to refer to the field whilst rejecting rational actor models of human agency.  Second, despite popular misconceptions of Bourdieu as a theorist who neglects social change at the expense of social reproduction, both Bourdieu and Turner study social fields diachronically and resist the structural-functionalist idea of fields as self-regulating entities. Third, both scholars place conflict at the heart of their field theories, but whilst Turner is interested in group-driven conflicts that spill over established fields, Bourdieu is more interested in the field trajectories of individual agents within a given field.

In my own recent anthropological work I have sought to synthesize both field-theoretical models in order to study internet activism in the Kuala Lumpur suburb of Subang Jaya (Malaysia). Although the Manchester scholars conducted fieldwork in a very different part of the world (British Central Africa) and under radically different historical conditions (the end of Empire),  the conceptual issues they confronted were strikingly similar to those I faced on returning from fieldwork in postcolonial Malaysia.

Like rural migrants in the booming urban areas of post-War Africa (Epstein 1958), many present-day suburbanites find themselves in densely populated settlements with inadequate social and public facilities. The result is the mushrooming of ad-hoc initiatives seeking to resolve the more pressing problems (Postill 2008). New suburbs such as Subang Jaya are ideal settings in which to rethink our current dependency on ‘community’ and ‘network’ as the paradigmatic notions in the study of how local authorities, firms and residents around the globe are appropriating the Internet to pursue parochial goals. These are frontiers where newly arrived people, technologies and ideas shape one another in unforeseeable ways. Over time new forms of residential sociality arise out of this flux as local stakeholders strive to ‘produce locality’ (Appadurai 1996).

In such unsettled conditions, any attempt at positing an existing ‘local community’ being impacted upon by a globalising ‘network logic’ (Castells 2001) is doomed. Instead, my focus in the forthcoming monograph Localizing the Internet is on how variously positioned field agents and agencies in Subang Jaya (residents, politicians, committees, councillors, journalists, and others) compete and cooperate over matters concerning the local residents, often by means of the Internet. I call this dynamic set of projects, practices, technologies, and relations the field of residential affairs, and in the book I develop an anthropological account of its uneven development from 1999 to 2009. Adapting Bourdieu, I define this field as a domain of practice with its own ‘fundamental laws’, field-specific forms of capital and irreducible logic. Yet I extend the analysis beyond the remit of Bourdieu’s field theory by means of the Turner-inspired discussion of two social dramas that broke out in 2004 and were played out across a range of face-to-face and internet-mediated arenas.

References

Appadurai, A. (1996) ‘The Production of Locality’, in A. Appadurai Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Barnes, J. A. 1954 “Class and committees in a Norwegian island parish”. Human Relations 7: 39-58.

Bott, E. 1955. “Conjugal Roles and Social Networks.” Human Relations, 8:345-84.

Bourdieu, P. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production.  Cambridge:  Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. 1996 The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge:  Polity Press.

Castells, M. 2001 The Internet Galaxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Couldry, N. 2003  ‘Media Meta-capital: Extending the Range of Bourdieu’s Field Theory’, Theory and Society 32(5-6): 653-677.

Epstein, A.L. 1958. Politics in an Urban African Community. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Evens, T.M.S. and D. Handelman (eds.) 2006. The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn.

Martin, J. L. (2003) ‘What Is Field Theory?’, American Journal of Sociology 109: 1-49.

Mitchell, J. Clyde. 1956. The Yao Village. Manchester: Manchester University Press for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute.

Mitchell, J. Clyde (ed). 1969. Social Networks in Urban Situations. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Postill, J. 2008. Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks, New Media and Society 10 (3), 413-431.

Postill, J. forthcoming Localizing the Internet: An Anthropological Account. Oxford and New York: Berghahn.

Sanjek, R., (1996) ‘Network Analysis’, in A. Barnard and J. Spencer (eds.) Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, pp. 396–397, London: Routledge.

Swartz, Turner, Tuden (eds.) (1966) Political Anthropology. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.

Swartz, D. (1997). Culture & power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Turner, Victor W. 1957. Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu VillageLife. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Turner, V.W. (1974) Dramas, fields and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

With three weeks to go, Sanne Maris looks back on her fieldwork in the Philippines. This is part 6 of our series on master students’ fieldwork.

It is nine weeks now that I am in the Philippines, and fieldwork preparation taught me things should get normal after a while. They don’t. Every week I find myself in several situations in which I am either overwhelmed by everything that happens or it raises many questions on how to respond. I am here in the Philippines to conduct research on prostitution. My main question is how women who prostitute create and maintain security and how the organization I work alongside plays a role in this process.

I knew prostitution was big in the Philippines, but walking in the huge red light district of Angeles City, which is known as the sex city of the country, is still an experience. The clubs and bars with names as ‘Dirty Ducks’, ‘Eruption’ and ‘Forbidden City’ are concentrated on one main road and some side streets. Most of them are open 24 hours and girls in outfits from tiger prints to too tight glittering pink dresses call out to every white man passing with, ‘Sir, please come in’. In Angeles City the sex industry is focused on the tourists and you won’t find many Filipino men in the bars. Inside the bars the the dancers stand in their bikini, underwear or body paint on the dance floor, look bored, check their bodies in the many mirrors on the walls and try to get attention from the customers.

My presence in the bar most of the time is not unnoticed. The dancers stare at me and the customers look at me with question marks in their eyes. A few weeks ago when ‘barhopping’, we went to bar where the mamasan (female pimp), living in the same compound with me, invited us. She seemed happy to see us and affably served us a beer. A drunk customer sitting beside me asked me whether I wanted to pick a girl. No, I was not interested. A guy then?, he asked. He stood up and took the papasan (foreign guy who works in the bar to help the customers) by the arm and put the guy on my lap. All dancing girls started yelling. The papasan apologized quickly, but the commotion in the bar continued for a while and some girls called ‘barfine!’ (money for sex), ‘pay her a barfine!’. We both thought that was not a good idea.

The bar or club where the music is too loud to have a conversation with the girls and where I still feel somewhat uncomfortable being stared at is not my favorite place for gathering data. I much more prefer the drinking nights in the compound where the neighbor girls (former bar girls and mamasans) and I drink vodka and eat fish under the mango tree. Although girls when drunk often behave as lesbians by flirting with me, sitting very close to me and telling how beautiful my eyes are, they also tell their life stories more easily than when sober and often shy.

However much I sometimes want to study their lives while remaining invisible myself, there is no way I can go unnoticed. I become part of their lives for a while and they become part of my life. They ask me for help, advice and money and since I am not only a researcher but also a human being, I try to find my way in between being the anthropologist and being their friend. Some of the girls find their job fun, others find it horrible. Many of them see this job as the only way of earning enough money to provide for their families and kids, others use it to find a foreign husband to secure financial support and again others like to make big money and live life comfortably.

I have three more weeks in this very corrupt and incredibly beautiful country, and of course time is too short. There is so much more to see and to learn. Maybe the next visit.

Two Facebook partners have to friend one another, and exchange “likes” and links incidentally; they behave as friends, and have a number of mutual duties and obligations, which vary with the distance between their real life homes and with their reciprocal status. An average user has a few friends nearby, as a rule his co-workers, or his family, and with these contacts he is on very friendly terms. The Facebook friendship is one of the special bonds which unite two people into one of the standing relations of mutual exchange of social reputation which is so characteristic of these digital natives. Again, the average person will have one or two celebrities in his network with whom they are “friends. In such a case they would be expected to serve them in various ways, such as becoming a “fan” and to share links to any new media these celebrities might post to their fan pages.

H-Madness is intended as a resource for scholars interested in the history of madness, mental illness and their treatment (including the history of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and clinical psychology and social work).  The chief goal is to provide a forum for researchers in the humanities and social sciences to exchange ideas and information about the historical study of mental health and mental illness.  The blog, therefore, primarily serves university and college faculty, students, and independent researchers.

On the surface, this proposal sounds sensible and desirable. Major Depression, for example, requires the presence of five symptoms but there is no natural cut-off point between four and five symptoms, or at any other particular point for this diagnosis. Depression, as well as the other major conditions in the DSM, seems to naturally be a continuous rather than a categorical condition.

The problem in dimensionalizing common conditions such as depression and anxiety is that a small number of “subthreshold” symptoms typically indicate a non-disordered condition, not a milder form of disorder. The only way to accurately use a dimensional system is to initially use criteria for disorder that separates natural from disordered conditions, regardless of how many symptoms are present. If adequate conceptions of disorder first distinguish contextually appropriate symptoms that are commonly transitory responses to stressors from mental disorders, then dimensional measurement could represent a distinct improvement in the DSM. As the discussion of bereavement indicates, however, the separation of disorders from non-disorders in the DSM-V seems to be getting worse rather than better. The current proposal to dimensionalize measures of frequently occurring disorders threatens to pathologize even mildly distressing conditions. While potentially valuable, it needs reconsideration and reformulation. (Horwitz 2010)

Anthropologist Roxanne Varzi came to our UCLA working group Culture, Power, and Social Change last week and spoke and showed a courageous and wise reflexive ethnographic film “Plastic Flowers Never Die” on the religio-statist support of martyrdom in Iran. I asked a question about how to theorize the role of digital ‘texts’ in the present era of ubiquitous self-publishing and social broadcasting. I was thinking about jihadi videos that are shot and distributed on online video portals as advertisement, recruitment tools, or celebrations of religio-military success. According to the IntelCenter, jihadi videos can be categorized as operational, hostage, statement, tribute, training, and instructional videos.

Essentially antagonistic with technoprogressive modernity while exploiting the simplicity, freedom, and access that comes with new media, these videos can be described as vanguard, counter, resistant, or subversive to capitalistic modernity while using the forefront of the sociotechnical tools of that capitalist technocracy. Our models of user-generated labor, from Shirkey and Benkler’s celebrations of social production to Terranova’s Marxist perspective on exploitative and ‘free’ labor, might not fit this un-capitalist media production practice. It is going to take a mix of something new to get it. But what?

I asked Varzi about jihadi videos: “These strike me as a rich source of information about a culture that is otherwise inaccessible to anthropologists: jihadi martyrs. How would you go about developing a critical anthropological methodology to reading these video texts?” Correctly but dangerously she stated she wouldn’t do it without an ethnographic component. I thought to myself: Let me get this right. I gotta hang out, like, deeply, with jihadi terrorists? As an anthropologist I cannot make a statement about jihadi video production practices without having first squeezed my way into their schedule and shared a few meetings over tea with my local jihadist? I’d love to, frankly, but I doubt I can network into their cliques. Are we going to let these remarkably reflexive, vocal “weapons of the weak” go unnoticed? If we can’t talk about these videos we are losing our disciplinary focus on subcultural expression and resistance and an opportunity to expand our methodological repertoire.

Jihadi video producers and new media firms, my focus, share little but extreme privacy. The similarities end there, but the problems for the ethnographer of either are identical: gaining access. My subjects are powerful. They have ideas that are worth millions in venture capital. Their lawyers are all about intellectual property. They live comfortable lives. They don’t need my cultural capital. They don’t need me around. Infrequently and for whatever reason, they invite me into their world. The Frontline documentary Behind Taliban Lines is a rare example that follows a single video journalist into the operations of the Taliban attempting to blow up a US convoy. This rarely happens in every context where a researcher wants access. Though our own Rex thinks our focus should be on the subtle and not the savage, he’ll be happy to know that anthropologists usually are gutsy enough to pursue such inaccessible subjects.

What if I couldn’t meet these wealthy entrepreneurs in person? What if they were so private that participant observation was impossible? I would be forced to construct something anthropological through their public representations. Thankfully, my subjects produce a lot of media. They socially broadcast on Facebook and Twitter and have scheduled relations with the public at conferences. (Except for TED, which at $6000 a weekend excludes most.) But with or without ethnography, this project, like a hypothetical investigation of jihadi video producers, needs to happen. If we have to begin-and probably end-with texts, what will we do? We’ll need to first develop an anthropologically specific way of reading these video texts and other public media artifacts.

The time is now to revisit our present anthropological theories about the role of textual studies. Finding its most useful expression in reconstructive indigenous and postcolonial historiographies, texts have long been an essential part of our field. But have we fully fleshed out a spectrum of specific theories for each type of text? I am not interested in adjudicating the validity or truthfulness of this text versus that. Colonial documents, biographies, and census records need to be differentially theorized not as statements of fact or fiction but as culturally situated texts. What I am fishing for is a debate on whether the new digital documents can find a home in contemporary anthropological theory. What differentiates paper-based from Web 2.0 personal documents and text from video? Most importantly, how can we take a culturally distinct but necessarily distant visual text of war and conflict, consider its technical and productive online existence, not defer to speculation on auteur intentionality, be mindful of the artifacts that appear on screen, and extrapolate back to the producer’s culture?

More broadly, we need to ask ourselves how to do an anthropological study of ethnographically inaccessible objects: leadership of corporations, governments, terrorist cells, elite institutions. Anthropologist Jane Weddell’s recent book, The Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market” is a fine example. Ethical problems abound in all these projects. Just as Nancy Scheper-Hughes prospered, so will the anthropologist of video culture of martyrdom and other inaccessible objects.

• Yo-Yo Ma’s anthropological soul

Classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma is, according to an article in the Washington Post, “one of the most recognizable classical musicians on the planet.” Besides being a star of the musical world, he is also a social activist, in his own way. “I realized late in life,” Ma says, that my twin passions are music and people. Maybe that is why I am an odd person in this profession.” The article goes on to point out that Ma’s wonderful oddness may be in part due to his liberal arts education at Harvard where he expanded his view beyond music: “I have been passionate about music … but people in my dorm were equally passionate about other things. So suddenly, it was like, oh my gosh, what a huge world.” He is still an avid fan of anthropology. Blogger’s note: Thank you, Yo-Yo Ma.

• Knowledge about domestic violence for prevention

What safety nets are in place to protect women from domestic violence/partner abuse? The recent murder of two women in Miyagi Prefecture has raised concern about how to provide protection for potential victims. The Daily Yomiuri (3/14, page seven) of Tokyo quotes Ichiro Numasaki, professor of social anthropology at Tohoku University: “Many victims of domestic violence are scared to end the relationship because they are kept under the control of the abuser … Police need to learn more about domestic violence itself.”

•”I’m done with Indian stuff”

According to an article in The New York Times, a likely American Indian site has been, or soon will be, destroyed due to pressure from local business interests to “develop” the area. Harry Holstein, a professor of archaeology, has been lobbying for protection of what was a mound. Leon Smith, the mayor of Oxford, wasn’t eager to discuss the issue with the NYT: “You’re not going to hear from me … I’m done with Indian stuff.” He plans to top off the mound, level it and build a restaurant, hotel or clinic: “It’s going to be pretty,” he said. Blogger’s note: Yet another chapter in the shameful treatment of American Indians and their heritage in the United States.

• Career skill: anthropology students love the odd

A story on NPR applauds a new documentary, The Parking Lot Movie. It’s about a parking lot in Charlottesville, Va., and the characters who populate it. Most of the workers, all male, are students from the University of Virginia. The manager, who is also the filmmaker, says: “The anthropologists are always the best. They have a perspective that allows them to look at oddness and be interested in it, and not be bored.”

• Culture and AIDS in Lesotho

The Chronicle of Higher Education carried an article on the efforts of David Turkon to push policy makers to rely more on anthropological research in combating AIDS. Turkon is associate professor of cultural anthropology at Ithaca College and chair of the AIDS and Anthropology Research Group within the American Anthropological Association.

• Freedom of speech in China

Scott Simon, associate professor of cultural anthropology at Ottawa University says that freedom of speech in China is a global issue. He hosted a discussion forum profiling three Chinese human rights activists.

• Homage to American Jewish cultural anthropologist who redefined “blackness”

A review of the 2009 film, Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, praises it as a “dense and fascinating documentary. ” Herskovits, a Jewish American cultural anthropologist, pioneered African American studies in the United States.

• Welcome to England and off with your head

Excavations for a road near the London 2012 Olympic sailing site unearthed a mass grave of 51 young Viking males. All were decapitated, and some showed multiple body wounds. The remains are dated between 890-1030 CE.

• Prehistoric climate change responders

Ezra Zubrow, professor of archaeology at the University of Buffalo, has been conducting research with other scientists in the Arctic regions of Quebec, Finland and Russia to understand how humans living 4,000-6,000 years ago coped with climate change. Zubrow is quoted in Science Daily: “…analysis of data from all phases of the study eventually will enable more effective collaboration between today’s social, natural and medical sciences as they begin to devise adequate responses to the global warming the world faces today.”

• Sick or just small? Hobbit debate still newsworthy

The Canberra Times quoted several biological anthropologists commenting on a recent publication in the Journal of Human Evolution in which Peter Brown and Tomoko Maeda argue for the position that the Hobbits (aka Homo floresiensis) were small but healthy. Dean Falk, Florida State University, supports their view. Daniel Lieberman, Harvard University, now agrees that the Hobbits represent a new species. Ralph Holloway, Columbia University, has not ruled out the disease hypothesis.

• Those bonobos are sharing again

BBC News picked up on research by Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, showing that bonobos share food. He conducted research on orphaned bonobos living in a study center in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In experimental settings, the bonobos willingly share food with other bonobos. He now wants to understand why they share. His findings are published in Current Biology.

• American biological anthropologist wins Max Planck Research Award 2010

Tim Bromage has been awarded one of the two annual Max Planck Research Awards for his achievements in establishing the field in human evolution of growth, development and life history. Bromage is professor of basic science and craniofacial biology and of biomaterials and biometrics in New York University’s College of Dentistry. The award carries a stipend of $1.2 million.

Recently, Anthropology and some AAA members have been featured in the public eye!

Dr. Harriet Ottenheimer of Kansas State University helped debunk the myth that those responsible for the “Nigerian 419″ scam were actually from Nigeria, according to this article.

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars and a  former professor of anthropology at Boston University was recently featured on NPR’s “On Point” in an episode about anger in America.

Finally, Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is one recipient of the 750,000 EUR Max Planck Research Award.

If you know of any notable awards received or of colleagues in the news, please be sure to let us know!

In Ian McEwan’s new novel, Solar, an anthropologist of science named Nancy Temple causes the downfall of the hero, Michael Beard, a Nobel laurate physicist, by resigning from a committee he heads in protest to his statement that women are just not as interested in physics as men, and this has to do with biological differences. The press then accuses Beard of being a social Darwinist, a eugenicist and a hegemon, and digs out his womanizing to compound the evidence of him being a misogynist.

The story is somewhat caricaturistic (in particular, I doubt that the totality of British press is so receptive to cultural studies terminology), but it is also quite real. In many debates, whether about nature/nurture, development,  or multiculturalism, I often have a sort of split reaction. On the one hand, I feel very uncomfortable with any argument that biologizes culture or culturalizes politics. On the other hand, I often feel that my own counterarguments are not convincing enough and rely on overgeneralised stereotypes as well. In other situations, I am not sure which side I am really on, and I seem to identify with anthropologists’ arguments more on an emotional than a rational basis.

Take, for example, Russell Harwood’s chapter in a book called China’s Governmentalities, edited by Elaine Jeffreys (Routledge  2009), which I happen to be reading at the moment in parallel to Solar. It’s a good chapter, on how state expectations of modernity are encouraging labour export from one of China’s most remote regions and thereby transforming subjectivities. He writes things that I also often write, and I find myself mentally nodding most of the time. But then, on the other hand, what? Much as I cringe at the hegemonic (yes!) state discourse of modernization and harmonious society, much as I detest the homogenization that it prescribes, I do think that learning Mandarin and going out to get jobs in the cash economy will make the lives of most of these people, or their children, better.

Obviously, the issues of “what kind of development” or “how do nature and nurture interact” are different from the issue of “is development/gender a social construct.” But it seems that the temptation to conflate them is often too great, even inanthropology. Harwood’s chapter describes a primary-school textbook that teaches students that they are poor and underdeveloped in comparison to those in cities like Shanghai, and thus both instils in them a sense of being at the low end of a hierarchy and primes them to follow certain models of mobility. This sense of self-inadequacy is different from both postwar Western and Soviet-style education systems, and because of its distinctly colonial taste I suspect was also expunged from most postcolonial curricula. It makes me uncomfortable, too, but mostly because of the seemingly inevitable, single pathway to move up in the hierarchy that the text cuts out for each individual student, rather than because of the imposition on students of a self-image of poverty; the latter I find potentially stimulating, and of course expose myself to charges of neoliberalism and so on.

By Katie, Laura, Matt, and Claire

Diane was diagnosed with HIV at eight months old. She was infected through her mother, who was not aware that Diane’s father, her husband at the time, had HIV. He left before Diane’s mother found out that she had HIV and that she had passed it on to her newborn daughter.

Infected with HIV for her entire life, Diane “acts like she doesn’t have it” and “tries to go on with her life” even though she thinks about it everyday.

HIV has had a huge impact throughout Diane’s (a pseudonym) twenty-one years of life. One summer she was given just months to live, and her family, doubtful she would live until December, celebrated Christmas in July. She has survived several health scares, and although her health is currently not great, it is improving as her new medication begins to bring her viral load under control.

The Challenges of Being HIV-Positive… and a Woman

HIV-positive women cope with their disease in ways that are strikingly different from HIV-positive men. Women’s roles as caregivers, mothers, wives, and daughters make their experiences with HIV unique. These roles shape how much they are willing to deal with the disease on a daily basis as many women put the needs of their children and families before their own. Furthermore, their identities as caregivers may conflict with their identities as recipients of care that their HIV status necessitates. Consequently, these women, many of whom are in difficult socioeconomic situations, may not seek the support they need.

To help these women, last year a group of students helped to establish a much-needed HIV/AIDS women’s support group in our Midwestern city (see their post, Just A Place to Talk: Women & HIV/AIDS). It was a success initially. However, the student who helped facilitate the support group moved away this summer, and the support group lost its impetus.

This year our community-based research project explored why women stopped attending the support group, women’s interest in participating in a new support group, and how to develop a support network that addresses the many needs of HIV-positive women. The two most important lessons we learned this semester include the importance of emotional support and the value of resources, such as transportation and childcare, that enable these women to care for themselves and their families while living with HIV.

Seeking Solidarity and Support

Several women expressed a desire to learn from others who are willing to share their experiences with HIV. They think that sharing their stories with other HIV-positive women will lessen feelings of isolation and better equip these women to handle the burdens of the illness. As Joyce, who has been HIV-positive for twelve years, reported, she is interested in the group because she “wants to feel supported.”

Four of the eleven women we interviewed had attended at least one of last year’s support group meetings, but they stopped going to the meetings because of consistently low attendance.

Shannon, who was diagnosed with HIV seventeen years ago, believes “getting women to come out and talk about their condition” is the most difficult part of organizing a support group; however, she says she would be more willing to come to the meetings “if she knew that there were going to be people there each week.”

Margaret, who has been HIV-positive for twenty years, attended several of the women’s support group meetings last year. During the interview, she seemed a little frustrated that some of the women stopped showing up, but she understands the obstacles women face in getting to weekly support group meetings: “I know people have things to do and things come up, but people attending is the biggest thing. It usually starts out pretty good but then just dies off.”

Increasing Attendance So how should we go about addressing the attendance issue? How do we get women to come to the support group meetings each week? Women said that they would be more likely to return to the support group each week if they were learning new things, feeling supported, and helping other women deal with the challenges of HIV/AIDS.

“Fellowship, friendships, and a chance to learn how the disease is for others” are the major things that Adrienne, who has attended three different support groups, would like out of a support group.

Sue is looking for a group of “nice women who are willing to come, be supportive, and respect someone else’s privacy.” Sue also said she would like the support group “to make her feel better about her illness, like she is not the only one with HIV.”

Many HIV-positive women, like Sue, feel alone and uncomfortable talking about their illness. Most do not even tell their family or close friends about their status. One woman disclosed that she has gone a year without interacting with another HIV-positive woman. Consequently, it can be very difficult for women to handle all of the challenges they face, especially if they feel isolated and depressed as a result of their illness.

A support group, however, enables women to share their stories and to understand that they are not alone in their struggle. They can cultivate genuine friendships and establish an intimate support network that can help them overcome obstacles associated with HIV.

Kara, who contracted HIV from her then drug-abusing husband nearly twenty years ago, has definitely felt her fair share of isolation. She would like to get involved in a support group in order to share her story and help other women deal with HIV. Kara told us, “I would come to the meetings each week knowing that I could help someone.”

Some women, however, are either not comfortable sharing their HIV status with others or do not want to discuss their illness because “they are feeling pretty good.” Margaret, who has been blind since suffering from severe complications of HIV nearly fifteen years ago, has been undetectable for ten years and says, “Now that the virus is undetectable, it is not really a topic of discussion.”

A student involved in last year’s support group talked with us about encouraging women like Margaret to come to support group meetings and share their stories of hope with women who are struggling with a recent diagnosis, a health scare, or feelings of loneliness and despair. It is important that these women know how much they can impact the lives of other HIV-positive women who are seeking a safe space to voice their concerns about HIV and to find encouragement and solace in the experiences of others.

A Support Network

After talking to eleven HIV-positive women, we realized they have a variety of emotional and financial needs. Many HIV-positive women are looking for more than just a support group. They need a support network.

A support network will provide women with the resources needed to live their daily lives as well as to fight the disease. In addition to friendships with other HIV-positive women, this multi-faceted support system will provide women with everything from basic necessities, such as toiletries and food, to childcare and reliable transportation to healthcare appointments.

Many HIV-positive women are mothers and need help with childcare so they can visit the doctor or participate in a support group. Some women mentioned that more resources should be tailored to the specific needs of HIV-positive single mothers.

Adrienne, who was diagnosed with HIV eighteen years ago, suggested that support for HIV-positive women should be more comprehensive and aim to “help the family as a whole” as HIV affects not just individuals but entire families.

“I could use support in the form of childcare and money for utilities but any type of support is welcome. Anything can help,” says Sue, a young mother of three children under the age of seven who has been HIV-positive for four years.

Many women are unemployed and must get by on a fixed monthly income. They also do not have access to reliable transportation. These problems are barriers to the support they might receive if they had the money, time, and resources to seek it out. In consideration of the obstacles these women face, we decided to explore their needs and determine how best to support local HIV-positive women.

With a support network in place, these women could better confront their disease and make it through each day. Beyond the basic needs of food, transportation to doctor’s appointments, and occasional childcare, these women also desire emotional support. Some keep a positive attitude like Adrienne, who insists that “the disease won’t beat me”; however, many feel depressed and isolated from others.

Most women claim they are not treated differently because of their HIV status simply because they do not tell anyone about their disease. These women are especially in need of a support group to minimize mental health risks associated with hiding a significant part of their lives from others. Improving the support network for these women in terms of monetary and emotional needs decreases their risks of mental illnesses, such as depression, that stem from their HIV-positive status.

Women, particularly young women like Diane and Sue, are a demographic not often associated with HIV. As a result, support services often do not directly address their needs or provide the appropriate type of care. Some are ashamed of their diagnosis, some are fearful of what others will think if they find out about their HIV status, and others are concerned about opportunistic infections and other complications of HIV.

Whatever their concerns may be, all HIV-positive women are in need of additional resources and improved support networks to face their illness and its many challenges. Women, burdened with their responsibilities as daughters, wives, and mothers, now more than ever, need strong support networks behind them.

Further Reading

World AIDS Day Official Website

AVERT: Averting HIV and AIDS

AIDS.gov: United States Department of Health and Human Services

Pittiglio, L. and E. Hough (2009). Coping with HIV: Perspectives of Mothers. Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care 20(3):184-92.

Bova, C. et al. (2008) Improving Women’s Adjustment to HIV Infection: Results of the Positive Life Skills Workshop Project. Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care 19(1):58-65.

(Coppelia Line, Photo by GV, 2010)

Valentine¹s Day in Santiago de Cuba

Its a breezy Sunday, less hot than usual, so I decide to go for a walk. Heading down Avenida Garzon I see lines snaking down sidewalks. All are clustered in front all the new moneda nacional restaurants. There is a new head of the communist party in the province of Santiago: Lazaro Ésposito, and changes are afoot. Ésposito was brought in from a successful stint in nearby Bayamo province to modernize Santiago, a city known for its juicy music, traditional neighborhood carnival associations, old-style Caribbean red-tiled-roof architecture, and antiquated water mains, lousy municipal services, food shortages, annoying power outages, and provincial backwater status. Starting in September, he presided over the opening of a series of new restaurants, cafeterias, and food vending carts. All sell in moneda nacional, the Cuban peso. Valentine¹s Day gave folks an reason to try the new restaurants, and long lines ensued. I squeezed thru crowds and peeked into several of the gleaming new establishments. White tablecloths, real china, nice plastic flower centerpieces. All this and a fish dinner for only 25 pesos (a little more than one US dollar)? Wow, Santiago is on the up and up! Families and couples line the sidewalks as moms, wives, and girlfriends are feted on this special day of San Valentin. Ambulatory sellers of fabric roses encased in plastic bubbles and little heart pins and teddy bear key chains are doing brisk business. Everybody is dressed up. Ironed and pressed. The women navigate broken pavement in high heels, waving fingers with mini-rhinestone manicures. Cologne and hair oil wafts from the men. Many are wearing yellow and white, not the pink or red we might think of as “valentine colors” in the US. Two couples in line have even pattern-coordinated their outfits. One woman has a white top and bright yellow jeans, her friend white capri pants and a yellow blouse. Their men also sport the yellow & white theme. In the Afro-Cuban religion Santería (also called Regla de Ocha), the divinity of love, river waters, honey, romance and flirtation is named Oshun and her color is yellow or gold. Maybe in Cuba, Valentine¹s Day is more yellow than pink due to the influence of the African gods.

One of the new restaurants, named España, has an especially long line and a few women in very high heels are actually sitting on the curb in front. Cubans almost never do this. The curb, the gutter, sidewalks, streets, and floors in general are considered “dirty.” Parks and plazas have benches. If they are full, people stand. Children are admonished not to run barefoot. Rarely do folks flop on lawns or plant their behinds on a curb. The beach is about the only place where you¹ll see anything other than the soles of Cuban¹s shoes in contact with the ground. Cubans are used to waiting in lines. For the bus. For bread. At the bank. To see the municipal coordinator of such-and-such. On this Sunday coinciding with the day of San Valentin, I calculate the waitlist to get a table at España must be more than an hour to force the ladies to desperate measures – sitting on the curb in their stepping-out attire. One fellow has actually made his lady a little temporary stool out of three empty rum bottles and a stout piece of cardboard. Valentine’s was made for Cuban caballerosidad, no?

(España Restaurant, photo by GV, 2010)