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Anthropology TodayCONTENTS 2006 – vol 22December 2006 – vol 22 – no 6
Front cover caption: 'From this murdered man are born all the men of tomorrow': 'The death and resurrection of Ernesto "Che" Guevara', by Alicia Leal. Che Guevara died nearly 40 years ago in the jungles of Bolivia. He was almost immediately drafted into the canon of post-Catholic saints. Jorge Castaneda argues that the official army photograph of Che, taken after he was executed by Bolivian soldiers with CIA assistance - head raised, eyes open, a faint smile on his lips - became the very icon of a saintly revolutionary. This Christ-like image fuelled a popular myth among the poor of Latin America that their 'querido Che' would some day rise again. A Cuban expedition to Bolivia in 1997 located, exhumed and repatriated Che's remains. Dr Jorge Gonzalez, the forensic pathologist in charge, later described to Nancy Scheper-Hughes the 'almost mystical' moment when his shovel hit a skull and he had the privilege of reaching down into the earth to retrieve the bones of their national hero. For Catholics and communists alike, dead bodies exercise a strong influence on the imagination. Once transplanted for human use, however, body parts are stripped of their owner's personality before being implanted into another body, whose biography they then assume. In this issue, Nancy Scheper-Hughes considers the criminal traffic in tissues and other body parts brought to light by the abuse of the body of broadcaster Alistair Cooke (1908-2004), whose bones were anonymously and illegally sold to be implanted in many bodies worldwide. When told of the crime by police, Cooke's daughter, an Anglican priest, invoked the death, vanished body and resurrection of Christ in her preaching as she struggled to come to terms with the crime. Back cover caption: 'OSAMA BIN LADEN'S MEN' IN THE SAHARA. Terrorists' belonging to the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC), who took 32 European tourists hostage in the Algerian Sahara in 2003, pose for tourists in Mali and Niger. Despite the Algerian and US authorities' claim that their leader, El Para, is, or was, bin Laden's 'man in the Sahel', many local people believe him to be a member of Algeria's counter-terrorist service, the Direction de Renseignements et de la Sécurité. The last of the 32 hostages were released in August 2003. Between December 2003 and March 2004 El Para and his men were allegedly chased from their 'terrorist bases' in Mali across Niger into Chad by a combined force of Malian, Nigerien and Algerian troops, assisted by US aerial surveillance. They ran into groups of German, French and Austrian tourists near Timbuktu (December 2003) and then at Temet in the Aïr Mountains of Niger on 24 February 2004. On both occasions they were keen to be photographed (right). The 'contract' was signed at Temet on 24 February 2004. For all the claims made by U.S. and Algerian authorities, no 'al-Quaida bases' have yet been found, despite the best efforts of American satellites and Special Forces on the ground. We are now told that the bases, rather like Saddam Hussein's chemical weapon factories, are 'mobile', and thus hard to find. These photos depict such 'mobile bases' - easily 'located' by tourists passing by. It is less difficult to conjure up terrorists than to control their legacy. The Tuareg term for a 'terrorist' like El Para is the French word 'fantôme'. This ghostly metaphor invokes comparison with 'freedom fighters' who, after death, are glorified by their followers as heroes and martyrs. A notable example is the legend surrounding Che Guevara (see front cover). American intelligence agencies, in seeking to spread 'democracy' and secure their people against foreign threats, have been involved in fighting both types abroad. Perhaps they have learnt that the 'phantom terrorists' are easier to control than real-life martyrs. CONTENTS Gustaaf Houtman 1 COMMENT CONFERENCES News 26 Calendar 28 classified 29 October 2006 – vol 22 – no 5
Front cover caption: Kayapo men of Brazilian Amazonia dance at a meeting of all Kayapo villages held in March 2006 with the aim of forging a united movement against the encroachment of agribusiness and large-scale development projects into the Xingú river valley. Up to the time of this meeting the widely dispersed Kayapo communities had never joined together as a single political organization under a common leadership. That they were able to do so at this meeting owed much to their ability to draw upon their shared tradition of collective ritual dance performances, which serve as the principal means of reproducing the social and political structures of their separate villages. At the meeting, held at the Kayapo village of Piaraçu on the Xingú, members of rival communities with mutually suspicious leaders joined in dances such as this one, drawn from the ritual for war, that expressed their solidarity in opposition to the common external threat. For the general audience, periodic interludes of dancing also provided a dramatic way of showing solidarity with one another and jointly expressing support for the orators, who were mostly leaders of the different communities. The meeting closed with a new ritual created for the occasion that began with a collective dance and culminated in a rite symbolizing the new level of common chiefly authority and leadership, encompassing Kayapo society as a whole, that had been created at the meeting. Back cover caption: COMPETITIVE HUMANITARIANISM. The back cover of this issue shows a detail from a map of 'Humanitarian actors involved in tsunami-related activities in Sri Lanka'. This excerpt lists but a few dozen of the many hundreds of agencies competing to provide relief in the wake of the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka in December 2004. In most disasters, a major problem facing relief agencies is a lack of resources. In the case of the 2004 tsunami, however, agencies were forced into competition with each other for effective distribution of an embarrassment of riches. Yet this distribution had to be in line with international standards, and needed to meet the requirements of those who had donated to the various appeals in other parts of the world and had specific ideas of what constituted relief. The result was an over-concentration on the visible and the photogenic rather than the arguably more important work of rebuilding institutions and social networks. As well as needing to meet international standards, relief agencies were subject to the bureaucratic requirements that they should expend their resources in an accountable fashion. Their slow reaction opened the way for a plethora of small and inexperienced organizations (and individuals) to enter the relief business. The aid they dispensed was often poorly directed and technically inferior, but the visibility of their operations prompted an easy criticism of the more ponderous activities of the larger relief organisations. While ready availability of resources marked out the tsunami relief effort from most other disasters, what seems to characterize aid operations in the wake of such disasters is a high degree of competition between relief agencies, and a continual call for a greater degree of co-ordination between relief organizations. Yet competitive pressures mean that co-ordination is unlikely to be attainable over more than the short term. From an anthropological point of view the following paradox is worthy of study: while philanthropy can be seen as the antithesis of self-interest, philanthropic organisations are inherently part of a self-interested, market-orientated social order. What starts out as a 'free gift' from the public of Europe, Asia or elsewhere ends up as a commodity in the marketplace of competitive humanitarianism. CONTENTS Jonathan Benthall 1 FROM THE ARCHIVES OBITUARY COMMENT CONFERENCES News 26 Calendar 27 Classified 28 August 2006 – vol 22 – no 4
Front cover caption: Destruction and fertility meet in this photograph of a swidden ('slash and burn') field cultivated by the Rmeet in highland Laos, illustrating Guido Sprenger's article in this issue. After the secondary forest has been burned from the plots, fresh rice stalks grow between charred stumps during the weeding season in June. A field hut, built each year on the newly cleared plot, can be seen in the background. The author's main informant, one of Takheung's village elders, waits for the author to catch up on the slippery paths. Although denigrated as unsustainable by governments and development agencies worldwide, and hotly debated by agricultural experts and policy-makers, swidden agriculture persists in mountainous areas where wet rice cultivation is difficult. Swiddening involves much more than mere subsistence, and anthropologists have been concerned for many decades with questions of its sustainability, as it forms a central focus for a way of life that integrates all aspects of community life, from economy to cosmology and the reproduction of social relations, including families and marriage ties, ritual and exchange, relations between humans and spirits and also identity. Guido Sprenger seeks to remind those with the power to make decisions over swidden agriculture of the importance of being well informed, as their decisions may radically influence an entire way of life. Back cover caption: ISLAMIC CHARITIES. Islamic charities are found all over the world and are mostly uncontroversial. Our back cover shows an appeal, with detachable banker's order form, for the orphan programme of the Beit Al-Khair ('house of charity') Society, a domestic charity in the United Arab Emirates launched in 1989. Almost every Islamic charity operates an orphan programme. Islamic charities have been subjected to close scrutiny, especially by the US Treasury, since 9/11, and are the subject of two books recently published by the university presses of Yale (by Matthew Levitt) and Cambridge (by J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins), which belong to the genre of counter-terrorism studies. Such studies emulate the methods of police investigators and financial regulators, making ample use of intelligence websites and newspaper reports and seeking to identify associative networks of culpable individuals and entities. The drawback of these studies is that they do scant justice to the positive aspects of Islamic charities and often attribute guilt by association, since charities blacklisted by the US Treasury have only limited rights of defence and appeal, though very few have been successfully prosecuted. Scrupulous social research, by contrast, tries to understand the words and deeds of charities and charity workers in the widest context. The social research published so far on Islamic charities has focused on their political aspects, including Western-Islamic relations, divisions among Muslims, and connections with opposition movements. In this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Jonathan Benthall, who has been studying Islamic charities for 13 years, turns his attention to analysing the special opportunities that international Islamic charities can take advantage of in majority Muslim countries. His article outlines the work of the British-based Islamic Relief in the north of Mali, one of the world's poorest countries, with the implicit suggestion that more in-depth residential ethnographic fieldwork in such settings could yield valuable insights. CONTENTS Dean J. Saitta 1 NARRATIVE COMMENT CONFERENCES News 27 Calendar 29 Classified 30 June 2006 – vol 22 – no 3
Front and back cover caption: ANTHROPOLOGY AND
SOCIAL MEMORY. The back cover shows a formerly unmarked mass grave strewn with floral tributes after a spontaneous ceremony led by relatives of the 46 people killed near Villamayor de los Montes (Burgos), following the exhumation of the bodies in July 2004. In this issue, Francisco Ferrándiz describes the debates taking place in Spain around the exhumation of mass graves from the Civil War (1936-1939). In the last few years the strength of the ‘movement for the recovery of historical memory’ linked to the exhumations has been such that some on the political right are denouncing the advent of a ‘new hegemony of the defeated’ that is taking the place of the ‘agreement of all’ which many believe was the trademark of the Spanish transition to democracy. Proposing that anthropologists visit and address the sites of memory – exhumations, cemeteries, political discourses, laws and commemorations, claims of victimhood, media reports, artistic performances, forensic laboratories, academic meetings and summer schools, historiographical debates, civil associations, historical archives, public and private rituals, narratives of the defeat and old photo albums, to name a few – Ferrándiz encourages anthropology to engage in ‘rapid response’ research, to diversify fieldwork locations, to modulate research strategies in order to address rapidly evolving problems, to continue visiting the sites of violence, past and present, and to produce the type of knowledge that allows us to participate in substantive ways in social and political debates well beyond our discipline and beyond our academic setting. CONTENTS Soraya Tremayne 1 COMMENT News 26 Calendar 28 Classified 29 April 2006 – vol 22 – no 2
Front & back cover caption: ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTIAL LIFE. The debate around the likelihood of humans encountering extraterrestrial life is based in the broad context of cosmic evolution, which encompasses astronomical, biological and socio-cultural evolution. In this depiction of cosmic evolution from the US National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA), the upper left portion shows the formation of stars, the production of heavy elements and the formation of planetary systems, including our own. On the lower left-hand side prebiotic molecules, RNA and DNA are formed within the first billion years on the primitive Earth. The centre shows the origin and evolution of life leading to increasing complexity, culminating with intelligence, culture, and the astronomers who contemplate the universe on the upper right. The image was created by David DesMarais, Thomas Scattergood and Linda Jahnke at NASA’s Ames Research Center in 1986, and reissued In this issue Steven J. Dick, Chief Historian at NASA, recounts the history of anthropological involvement in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and discusses SETI’s broader relevance to anthropology. Anthropologists are uniquely qualified by knowledge and training to contribute to SETI, since central concerns when and if contact is made will include socio-cultural difference and cross-cultural communication. In turn the extraterrestrial perspective has much to offer anthropology, both in expanding its boundaries, its insights and its tools, and in casting a fresh light on cultures on Earth. Valerie Olson, in her review of the session dedicated to SETI at the 2005 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, argues that the SETI vision of a terrestrial/extraterrestrial dichotomy between human and alien ‘others’ brings older and more recent anthropological ideas into a new juxtaposition, and that SETI has potential for stimulating the anthropological imagination. CONTENTS David Mills 1 NARRATIVE OBITUARY COMMENT CONFERENCES News 27 Calendar 29 Classified 30 February 2006 – vol 22 – no 1
Front cover caption: 'Strasbourg: 15th night of rioting. A French riot police officer gestures to direct the fire fighters to a torched car after vandalism in the eastern French city of Strasbourg early Wednesday 9 November 2005. Police forces have been deployed in the city as authorities expect a 13th night of disturbances all around France. Schiltigheim, France, 10/11/2005.' This photo illustrates Didier Fassin's editorial on the riots in the French banlieues. Although the immediate cause of the riots must be ascribed, at least in part, to the ill-advised reactions of the French police and government, the Prime Minister proceeded to proclaim a state of emergency, using a 1955 law passed during the war in Algeria. These events call for serious examination not only of what France stands for, especially in terms of racial discrimination, but also of why anthropologists should have felt so uncomfortable about analysing these events, just as they did with the controversy over the veil. The political foundations of the discipline in France posit a knowledge of remote societies rather than of others close to home, and aspire to theoretical universalism combined with an element of colour-blindness which ignores local social realities. Back cover caption: Saving Children. In the back cover photo, a little girl holds a dummy pistol in Bella Camp, near Nazran, Ingushetia, Russia, in November 2002. In this issue Jason Hart considers the ways in which children are commonly represented. Particularly in conditions seen as especially adverse, children's lives have overwhelmingly been viewed through the prism of humanitarianism. Accounts of children living amidst conflict, social upheaval and extreme poverty produced by humanitarian organizations are commonly framed by contrast to Romantic ideals of childhood. The disparity thereby demonstrated has fuelled popular imagination in the developed economies of the world - useful not only in eliciting support for humanitarian action but also, under the current world order, in discrediting certain societies and ultimately in justifying military intervention. Hart argues that anthropology has a valuable role to play in enhancing understanding of the lives of children globally. Key to this is locating children within social, economic and political processes that extend beyond the local to the national and international. Taking the issue of 'child soldiers' as an example, Hart argues for the importance of including a focus upon the ways in which such phenomena as the global arms trade and the foreign and economic policies of Western governments contribute to the circumstances in which children come to engage as combatants. Furthermore, the dangers of such engagement need to be placed in the context of the diverse array of risks encountered by children in impoverished and marginal settings. We urgently need a child-centred ethnography attentive to the interaction between the global and the local in the everyday lives of the young so that we may interrogate more closely the moral authority of those who justify their actions in terms of 'saving children'. CONTENTS Didier Fassin 1 COMMENT NARRATIVE CONFERENCES Calendar 27 News 28 Classified 30 |
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