Taking Sides: Ethics, Politics, and Fieldwork in Anthropology 9780857454089

Citation preview

Taking Sides

For Nancy

TAKING SIDES ETHICS, POLITICS AND FIELDWORK IN ANTHROPOLOGY

Edited by

Heidi Armbruster and Anna Lærke

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/27/09

9:47 AM

Page iv

First published in 2008 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2008, 2010 Heidi Armbruster and Anna Lærke First paperback edition published in 2010

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Taking sides : ethics, politics, and fieldwork in anthropology / edited by Heidi Armbruster and Anna Lærke. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-421-0 (hbk) -- ISBN 978-1-84545-701-3 (pbk) 1. Anthropological ethics. 2. Anthropology--Research. 3. Anthropology-Fieldwork. I. Armbruster, Heidi. II. Lærke, Anna, 1964-

GN33.6.T35 2008 301.072--dc22 2008031178 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-1-84545-421-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-84545-701-3 (paperback)

CONTENTS Preface

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction. The Ethics of Taking Sides Heidi Armbruster

1

1. Starting from Below: Fieldwork, Gender and Imperialism Now Nancy Lindisfarne

23

2. Arriving in Nowhere Land: Studying an Islamic Sufi Order in London Tayfun Atay

45

3. Friendships and Encounters on the Political Left in Bangladesh Nayanika Mookherjee

65

4. Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences Panagiotis Geros 5. Memory, Ethics, Politics: Researching a Beleaguered Community Heidi Armbruster 6. Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist Anna Lærke 7. We Will Not Integrate! Multiple Belongings, Political Activism and Anthropology in Austria Sabine Strasser

89

119

143

175

vi • Contents

8. Taking Sides in the Oilfields: For a Politically Engaged Anthropology Heike Schaumberg

199

9. Ranting and Silence: The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics Jonathan Neale

217

Notes on Contributors

257

Index

259

PREFACE This book is for Nancy Lindisfarne. Her sixtieth birthday was an occasion we had to step up to. Dr Lindisfarne (formerly Nancy Starr Self Tapper), ethnographer of the Middle East and anthropologist of gender, has been an inspiration to all contributors to this volume. She has done fieldwork in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey and Syria, taught anthropology for many years, and has been a political activist within and outside academe. She has published widely on the topics of gender, the Middle East, and anthropological theory. As Reader at the Department of Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies, she supervised the doctoral work of several of the contributors. An artist at heart, Nancy has published a collection of short stories (Dancing in Damascus, State University of New York Press, 2000) and exhibited paintings, prints, collages, and photography. Nancy is one of those rare people who seem able to embrace whatever happens to cross her path. That is why she is such a good teacher. We know Nancy as a demanding and exceptionally inspiring supervisor, a fiercely intelligent discussant, and, above all, as a lovely friend. Heidi Armbruster and Anna Lærke

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We owe thanks to Jonathan Neale for his support at the early stages of this book project. His experience and clear-headedness as an author have been very helpful. The Berghahn copy editor Jaime Taber meticulously worked through the manuscript, and her invaluable professionalism made our own editing far easier than it would have been otherwise. Carsten Agger and Nicky Robbins provided essential help with our computer problems at several critical moments. Finally, special thanks go to Sif and Magnus Lærke-Hall who left us to work in peace for hours on end in their kitchen.

Introduction

THE ETHICS OF TAKING SIDES Heidi Armbruster

This is a book about the impossibility of removing the anthropologist and her mode of learning from the composite site of ethics and politics. The ethical1 is not meant here as a prescription of some universal value scheme, but rather as an invitation to consider questions about the value orientations of a discipline and its practitioners in the contemporary historical moment. Ethical questions about what one should do or how one should act towards others impose themselves within the practice of a science whose primary object is cross-cultural understanding. Anthropology seeks this understanding on the scene of politics, that is across and within structures of power and domination and on the shoulders of the particular political history of the discipline. Ethics questions are not new in anthropology, and have periodically resurfaced. Currently they are important again, not only to anthropologists and their professional bodies but also to contemporary neoliberal governments that tout policies of disciplinarian ethics in response to political crises (cf. Caplan 2003: 1–3). Ethics in anthropology generally means both research ethics, as a concern with the conduct of inquiry and utilization of data, and what might be called committal ethics, a concern with the role of values in research. These have often been divorced from each other.

2 • Introduction

Research ethics have been codified by professional associations such as the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA), and have become standard questions to attend to on any funding application for research. Concerns with research ethics have clearly intensified over recent years, in large part as a symptom of ‘audit cultures’ (Shore and Wright 1999; Strathern 2000) now ubiquitous in higher education and beyond. Some would argue that ethics formulas now increasingly emerge as legalistic nods towards employers and funders and as a formal appendix to research, rather than as a serious matter of engagement with the ethical complexities in contemporary research fields (Pels 2005: 82; Silverman 2003: 127). Both the AAA and the ASA revised their ethics guidelines in the late 1990s. The authors of both statements wish their guides to be understood not as fixed prescriptions for action, but as documents that serve to ‘promote discussion’ (AAA 1998: Epilogue) or ‘help(ing) anthropologists to reach an equitable and satisfactory resolution of their dilemmas’ (ASA 1999: Epilogue). However, it is instructive to see which relationships they define as ethically relevant in anthropological work, as both sets of guidelines come from within the mainstream of the discipline. I will briefly examine them for what they say that is useful, and for what they fail to say. The AAA document represents ethics mostly in terms of obligations; the ASA document differentiates to some extent between obligations anthropologists owe and rights they are entitled to. Both documents agree that a primary ethical responsibility binds the anthropologist to the people studied. They highlight trust, respect, informed consent, confidentiality and reciprocity as major moral principles.2 The British document identifies ‘sponsors, funders and employers’ as the next relevant group with whom anthropologists should seek ethical relationships that are balanced against the rights and interests of researched subjects and ‘professional colleagues’ (ASA 1999: II). AAA guidelines allude to similar potential conflicts of interest. However, they pay more attention to the anthropologist’s obligation to be honest to her funders than to any expectation of honesty from the funders. ‘The discipline’ is the third party anthropologists should be on an ethical footing with, its ‘good reputation’ (ASA 1999: III.1) to be promoted through, for instance, courtesy and collaborative spirit towards colleagues (ASA), and the dissemination and preservation of data (both). Further, both documents are in agreement on the specific ethical responsibility owed to the wider public, which is largely defined as ‘responsible’, harm-preempting and harm-avoiding communication of findings. While the AAA includes the relationship to ‘students and

Introduction • 3

trainees’ (ASA 1998: IV) as another crunch point for ethics, the ASA largely ignores this group, perhaps because it emphasizes anthropologists as researchers and neglects them as teachers. In further interesting contrast the British document specifies ‘relations with own and host governments’ (ASA 1999: IV) that matter in ethical terms. This is understood as adherence to legal constraints and to the principle of open research. In addition it stipulates that ethical conduct can be complicated by the structures of power and politics within which anthropologists work and by wider structural inequalities that may separate researcher from researched. The American document makes no obvious reference to the link between ethics, politics and power in anthropological research. Pels observes that the rhetoric of ethics guides largely obscures the wider ethical and political complexities that impinge on any ethnographic research. Turning ethics into the personal responsibility of the individual is mystifying, given that the work of anthropology takes place within specific political contexts and across asymmetries of power (Pels 2005: 82; cf. Nugent 2003: 91). Questions of ethical conflict between the personal, professional and political remain indeed a silent subtext in these guidelines. Despite some interestingly nuanced differences, a close reading of these documents reveals that both (perhaps inadvertently) testify to the fact that the ethics of conducting research are hardly detachable from the question of values in research. In the first instance this is because the imperative to study people in ethically guided, that is, empathic and respectful, ways is a form of valuing and validating how someone is to be known and what types of knowledge should merit the label ‘anthropological’. On further levels, and this is what these guidelines clearly also imply but make no attempt to scrutinize, ethics dimensions in anthropology stand in complex, ambivalent tension with one another and go far beyond the individual researcher’s good or bad intentions. The working anthropologist may indeed wish to steer through the multiple loyalties these documents identify – with people studied, employers, funders, the discipline, colleagues, students and governments. But she will also have to contend with the different moral and political contexts she is operating in and the pressures, expectations and failures they engender. To remain capable of acting, she has to make some value judgements along the way. Most likely these will be judgements about preferential loyalties, situated partly in her own moral and political convictions, partly in the commitments she owes to the people she works with, partly in the career commitments she makes. In the course of research these values and commitments can change, conflict with one another or come under pressure. Their effects are hardly always predictable.

4 • Introduction

Nevertheless, the question of moral commitment in anthropology has given rise to more intensely negotiated anxieties than ethics codes. Thus, for instance, advocates of anthropology as ‘science’ (D’Andrade 1995) and ‘scholarship’ (Hastrup and Elsass 1990) have stood opposed to advocates of anthropology as ‘advocacy’ (Paine 1985), ‘cultural critique’ (Marcus and Fischer 1986; Ahmed and Shore 1995a) or as ‘militancy’ (Scheper-Hughes 1995). Some claim that ‘science’ cannot be moral lest it lose its neutrality and autonomy as a distinct realm of knowledge (Hammersley 2005). This has stood against the claim that science is always already culturally and historically situated, and that disinterested knowledge is neither possible nor desirable. The hunch that anthropologists’ work involved ethics and conflicts on all levels of engagement received its most vocal expressions in consequence of the political moment of the 1960s. The specific interest of anthropology to work across culture(s) implied (and still often implies) working across the boundaries between Western and nonWestern, (ex)colonisers and (ex)colonised, white and black, rich and poor, powerful and powerless. Crossing these boundaries raised questions about the positioning, context, purpose and aim of what one was doing – both ethically and politically. Human diversity and shared humanity were clearly part of the answer – but what again had been (or should be) the questions? One of the ethical principles the discipline’s canon and its practitioners shared before the 1960s was that cultural diversity was an important value in itself. Respect for difference was ethically paramount not only to the discipline but to being human as such. With the political awakening in the 1960s, a number of other questions clearly followed from this, which have not lost their validity since. Some of the most basic questions are: If respect for others is an important moral value, what follows from this if we study others whose rights to dignity and respect have been tampered with – or if we study people who tamper with other people’s dignity? Where do we look, what do we ask, what do we write – and why? These are ethical questions, but they are also about power. In anthropology questions and loci of ethics have followed on the heels of questions and loci of power and its changing theoretical framings.

Questions of Power and Ethics In the 1960s and 1970s the Vietnam War, the radical student movement, widespread anticolonial resistance and the rise of American neocolonialism were the background to the ferment that began to stir critical and radical voices within the discipline. These voices placed the

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

2:28 PM

Page 5

Introduction • 5

micro-relationships anthropologists lived and studied across the world into macro-relations of inequality that had carved up the world into those with power and those without. In many ways the partiality of power was the partiality of the Western colonial and capitalist system, and anthropologists were, mostly ignorantly, implicated in this partiality through the history of their own discipline. While even colonial anthropologists might have been politically liberal and ethically responsible as persons, their implication in wider systems of power worked primarily through what they did ‘professionally’(Asad 1973a: 18). This involved the discourse they were trained in, the knowledge base they worked from and its assumptions about ‘natives’, the questions they asked, the theories they applied, and the ways in which they used or let others use their knowledge. Thus the asymmetry of the world was reflected and perpetuated, or at least not challenged, in what had counted as professionalism, and in the conditions that enabled the pursuit of that professionalism in the first place (Asad 1973a: 16–18). Professionalism was not ‘value free’. Many anthropologists now turned to the task of unpacking the ideological baggage that had gone into its making (e.g., Asad 1973b; Huizer and Mannheim 1979). They also tried to make it more relevant to what was diagnosed as reality ‘out there’. The political impetus and ferment of change that came from ‘out there’, including from societies that struggled against what the Western anthropologist represented, enabled a debate about values and called into question the possibility of an objective, neutral science. However, these stimuli came mainly from those on the political left who had chosen to take sides with those who they felt were placed on the receiving end of systemic oppression. It is interesting and instructive to read some of these earlier texts, both for the political passion they exude and the still relevant questions about power they identified. Kathleen Gough’s ‘New Perspectives for Anthropologists’ (1968), for instance, was a central piece in a Current Anthropology ‘symposium on social responsibilities’. Gough had no qualms about identifying herself as a ‘revolutionary socialist’ (1968: 429).3 She associated herself with revolutionary movements across the world, and expressed belief in the demise of capitalism through revolutionary force. She was equally clear on what anthropologists should study: ‘[A]lthough we have worked for over 100 years in conquered societies, and also for at least 50 of them we have emphasized the interconnectedness of parts of social systems, we have virtually failed to study Western imperialism as a social system, or even adequately to explore the effects of imperialism on the societies we studied’ (1968: 405).

6 • Introduction

However, what leftist anthropologists tackled with a spirit of passionate urgency was not so much the foundation of the discipline as such but the anthropologist herself. She was called upon as a practising social scientist and as an ethical and political being. She should realize this double-bound identity and translate it into a particular responsibility to ‘address the problems of our time’ (Berreman 1968: 394), or, in other words, the question of power in society. Many intellectuals now felt that their work entailed the specific responsibility to help transform society into a better place. Transferred onto the specific intellectual mandate of anthropologists, the argument was compelling: students of humanity should have a primary interest in the wellbeing of humanity. Taking sides on behalf of the disadvantaged meant minimally to study anticapitalist, anticolonialist, antiracist, and soon also antisexist processes. In more zealous terms, the imperative was ‘to serve the movement’ at home and abroad (Frank 1968: 413). This could entail the need to ‘study up’, to study the powerful at home instead of the powerless abroad and make ethnographic knowledge available to citizens who were regularly disenfranchised by political elites (Nader 1969). By taking sides with the oppressed and asking questions about injustice, exploitation and inequality, the democratically committed intellectual would ‘reinvent’ (see contributors to Hymes 1969) a more relevant science. The ‘anthropologist’ was entrusted with remarkable authority and agency in some of these texts, able to intervene in liberatory ways and to write liberatory ethnographies (e.g., Frank 1969; Wolff 1969; Nash 1979). Feminists started to suggest that female researchers could assume a privileged access to the oppressed by virtue of their ‘double consciousness’ (Rohrlich-Leavitt et al. 1975; Nash 1976). It is hard to imagine that fieldwork then was less ‘messy’ than fieldwork now. Yet taking sides seemed fairly straightforward, with sides clearly identifiable as distinct camps and a morally unswerving anthropologist activist who could easily cross and mediate the boundaries between them. In the 1980s, domestic and foreign policies in the centres of global power turned to the right, flanked by the Reagan era in the US and Thatcherism in Britain. In obvious response to the political climate, social movements that formed around feminist, gay and lesbian, and indigenous rights, as well as environmental and peace activism, grew in strength. Many anthropologists on the left diagnosed a postmodern transition within the discipline and a shift of attention from the political to the conceptual. Power seemed no longer lodged or primarily sought in nations, governments, economic systems or institutions but in rhetoric, representation, discourse and epistemology. While the world was not seen as less fraught by structures of inequality and domination,

Introduction • 7

the anthropologist’s implication in the Western project was now slightly different. She was implicated not through who or what she studied, nor by who used her knowledge. Now the fault lay in the interpretive process itself and its translation into language and text. In the wake of Said’s critique of Orientalism (1978), Foucauldian critiques of power, the ‘multifarious critique’ (Clifford 1986: 10) of representation, and feminist and non-Western interventions, anthropology was put under scrutiny as a project of scientific knowledge that was ailing from a misplaced confidence in ‘objectivity’.4 The ‘anthropologist as author’ is perhaps the most dominant figure emerging from the discomfort with objectivity in the 1980s. Her political and ethical situatedness lay within her authorship, now conceptualized as her ‘authority’ to represent the ethnographically apprehended ‘other’. By employing the stylistic, rhetorical and discursive conventions of the discipline, she established a narrative that was scientifically ‘authoritative’ and legitimate, but worked to appropriate the researched subject as a voiceless ‘other’. Most contributors to the seminal Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) worked on variations of this theme. The new anti-authorial cum anti-authoritarian ethics necessitated a transformation of authorship into a self-conscious, reflexive act of accountability. Laying open the conditions of textual production, identifying the research participants’ collaboration in authorship and refusing textual closure were some of the ways in which a partial science should dismantle and replace the myth of objectivity. Partiality, translated into the relationship with the researched subject, fed on the irony that the other could never be truthfully represented and that keeping her in spectatorial distance or pondering with readers about the contingencies of interpretive meaning carried more ethical sincerity than assuming that one had a cause, a hope or a condition to share that could easily be channelled into joint action against oppression. At the same time, however, this rejection of activist research was not simply a reflection of a general move to the right in the wider world. For many, the preoccupation with ‘ethnography as text’ was also a search for a more ethical subject (Rabinow 1986: 256). This subject would genuinely seek ‘dialogue’ (not a new, but a much used term) with the researched, aspire to build relationships of trust and reciprocity, and undercut her own authority by departing from the ‘realist’ forms of writing that had been characteristic of the positivist and ‘modernist’ anthropological tradition.5 The dialogical model depended on a recentring of fieldwork as the epistemological engine of the anthropological project.6 Fieldwork shifted into focus as the actual locus of authorship, the sphere where those crucial discursive

8 • Introduction

encounters between self and other took place, to be ultimately transformed into text. The textual presence of the fieldworker was not new, but the explicit presence of the author struggling to communicate was. The construction, the possibilities and the choices were laid bare, while the author was shown trying for ways to make an honest dialogue out of her complex experience in the field. Yet, this injunction was more often laid down than followed. The task of translation seemed trapped in an inexhaustible and ironic dilemma: the dialogue between observer and observed had to be transformed into the dialogue between writer and reader, that is, into the language of the interpreter. Strathern notes that this implied the mission to break with the modernist self-other distinction that was based on treating the other as an object. In postmodern terms ‘the author must objectify his own position in the ethnography quite as much as he or she strives to render the subjectivity of others’ (Strathern 1987: 264). Turning the fieldworker-author into an object of reflection was supposed to do several things at once. It deflated the alien nature of the other, for it said ‘we’ are culturally situated too. It made ethnocentrism available for inspection, accommodated its inevitable presence in learning cultural otherness and illustrated the effect of fiction in any process of cultural translation. In representation the ‘other’ had been dominated and in representation she should be liberated, or at least humanized, which in actual ethnographies often translated into a rather traditional assertion of cultural relativism, based on the insight that accessibility to each other in communicative exchange is never fully achieved. Critics pointed out that the focus on communication in fieldwork and writing was deeply limiting, and could descend into narcissistic self-inspection (e.g., Friedman 1987; Kapferer 1988). Others accused postmodernism of disembedding relations between the self and the other from the wider contexts of history, politics and power in which they are set (e.g., Strathern 1987; Friedman 1987; Sangren 1988; Ulin 1991; Scholte 1987). The 1980s in Britain and the US, and to a certain degree across the globe, had been an era of right-wing individualism. Postmodernism had somehow reflected this, and the concentration on individual discursive relationships had hidden the larger structures of oppression. Similar lines of critique grew stronger in the 1990s and 2000s, when, as some now argued, anthropology was losing its ‘confidence’ and increasingly its relevance in the face of postmodern and literary turns (Ahmed and Shore 1995a). Anthropologists on the left bemoaned the discrepancy between a seemingly self-referential, inward-turning reflexivity and a rapidly transforming political and cultural reality ‘out

Introduction • 9

there’. As in the 1960s, many now suggested that ‘out there’ should be the real reference point for anthropological ethics and politics (e.g., Gledhill 1994; Ahmed and Shore 1995b; Lindisfarne 1997; Smith 1999; Burawoy 2000; MacClancy 2002; Eriksen 2006). At the end of the millennium, the transformative currents seemed profound in how they redefined both global relationships and more locally anchored relations of place, class, race, gender or generation. The rapid progression of globalization in terms of border-crossing capital, technological interconnection and human mobility produced its own new perplexities and contradictions. The supra-nationalization and centralization of high-powered economic and political institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and EU went along with the ‘revival of localism and ethnic chauvinism … xenophobia and nationalism throughout Europe and beyond’ (Ahmed and Shore 1995b: 13). The intellectual scepticism about capitalist consumer democracies in the West contrasted with their seemingly enthusiastic embrace in the postcommunist East. A new transnational Europe was promoted on the inside, but closed to the outside. Hitherto excluded regions were included in the capitalist economy, even as entire continents were suddenly ‘switched off’ (Castells 1998: 93). The rise of identity politics included both creolization in some places and nativist reshuffles elsewhere. The world failed to respond to the genocide in Rwanda. The US had become the sole superpower. Environmental degradation and neoliberal ‘restructuring’ continued apace, and new but very traditional, imperial wars began in Iraq and Afghanistan. Critical anthropologists registered these changes and once more began thinking about how to relate them to their science. Their calls for renewal, reinvention and more relevance sounded similar to those in the 1960s and early 1970s, as did their exasperation with critical thought that seemed to have become self-creationist as it retreated from real problems of real people. Yet these echoes from a radical past resonated with discontinuities as well, which were tangible for those who, like most of the contributors to this book, received their training in the 1990s. Postmodern, feminist and postcolonial interventions had made a clear impact on how one imagined the social world one was studying. Theoretical journeys offered intriguing shifts from seemingly self-evident categories for ‘people’, like ‘the group X’, ‘women’, or ‘peasants’. Now visions of subjectivity and identity emphasized difference, heterogeneity and fragmentation within and across formerly imagined homogenous ‘communities’. From the 1980s on, anthropologists began to notice that the ‘natives’ were disappearing, both as people with firm roots in place and ‘ethnic’ identity, and as people who are willing to be studied under

10 • Introduction

the aegis of Western academic expertise. Was one still able to anchor people in places? Was one still an interpreter, explicator, translator of different cultural texts, or was the role less clear, the ability to make sense of cultural difference much more modest? Or maybe even simpler? Capitalism was restructuring the world. The old opposition between good colonized native and bad colonial power no longer seemed to hold water. Lumumba had been replaced by Mobutu and then Kabila. Mugabe the liberator had become Mugabe the dictator. The divisions between oppressor and oppressed now ran, much more obviously, within communities. And the postmodern challenge could not be simply wished away. The simple certainties of the 1960s had glossed over a complex political reality. It seemed there was no going back to Kathleen Gough’s view of the world. This did not mean that one was any less politically angry and frustrated by neocolonialism or neocapitalism. But one felt much less confident about locating power and understanding one’s own complicities in it. Power seemed to be everywhere, filtering down into every aspect of communication, from writing research grant applications to pushing one’s fieldworker pen. And, if Foucault was right that power was largely transmitted (and challenged) in discourse (Foucault 1980: 93–108), were discourses of liberation not in themselves part of the economy of power? Were intellectual leftist aspirations for liberation not driven by knowledge claims that, while socially and historically situated, could easily work as manipulative ‘truths’ in concrete relations between groups or people? As Rorty puts it: ‘One might spot a corporate bagman arriving at a congressman’s office, and perhaps block his entrance. But one cannot block off power in the Foucauldian sense’ (1998: 94). In anthropology it seemed one could no longer clearly see or analyse culture without getting entangled in Foucauldian webs of power or caught in the problematic of representation. Rorty and others noted the incapacitating effects of postmodern theories of power for a politics of emancipation. This felt somewhat baffling, given that many postmodernists had championed the standpoint of the excluded and marginalized before arriving at a deeply sceptical assessment of the possibilities of effective political criticism and change (see Benhabib 1992: 14–15). Feminist anthropology serves as a good example of the shifts towards more complexity and less confidence in collective identities. Feminism was rooted in a movement outside academe with a clear emancipatory political and ethical agenda. By the 1990s, however, feminist theories about gender inequality had become quite complex. The question had shifted from ‘Why are all women oppressed?’ in the 1960s to ‘How is a female (or male) embodied subject constituted

Introduction • 11

within a wider field of power?’ While the first question implied a shared identity of women, the second implied a notion of identity that rested on all sorts of differences, among which gender was just one.7 In response to postmodern theories, feminists had de-emphasized gender as a sole cause of oppression in human relationships. They now worked on the assumption that subject formations were crafted by the complex intersection of a number of inequalities, most notably race, age, class and sex. While it seemed simple to build coalitions and act politically on the basis of universal womanhood, it looked less feasible to do so on the basis of partially shared or incompatible femininities. In any event, taking sides had become more complicated, perhaps because what constituted a side was no longer so clearly graspable, epistemologically and empirically. If how we came to see others went in important ways through how we see ourselves (the principle of reflexivity), one could not just claim to take someone else’s side without not also, in some way, taking one’s own. Epistemologically speaking, the self was present in the other and the other present in the self. Moreover, if the world was in motion and the relationship between identity, place and belonging had become discontinuous, then there was no real important difference any more between where anthropologists did research and where they lived. The home was in the field, just as the field was in the home.

The Primacy of Fieldwork This volume is about ethnographic work that rests on such doublesourced (if not multiply-sourced) consciousness. Most contributors went through their academic training in the 1990s, and all did fieldwork in the 1990s and early 2000s. Most were well aware of the ways in which postmodern theory was tugging at the discipline’s confidence. Many of those assembled in this volume walked off to do fieldwork with a sense of over-theorized anxiety. At the same time, all of them also had a set of political values that came from positions of the cultural left and a clear sense of identification with, or, in some cases long-term experience of activism in, the new global social movements. All had gone into anthropology because they were in favour of a political ethos of equality and justice, and they anchored this particular moral sense of self in the questions and contexts they chose to study. The purpose of this volume is to contribute to a clarification of political and ethical partiality in the formation of anthropological knowledge. Partiality is explored in both senses of the term, as commitment and taking sides, but also as incompleteness and

12 • Introduction

limitation. Moral and political partiality is seen and discussed as inseparable from epistemology. By this we do not mean applying a political opinion to what we study, but asking what chances and limitations might govern our ability to perceive others in ethically and politically committed terms and explore which contributions this could make to understanding the problems and characteristics of contemporary societies. The experiential core of the politico-ethical, not just as impingement on the formation of knowledge but as the condition for obtaining knowledge, lies in fieldwork. In the actual fieldwork experience of many anthropologists, the ethical and the political are intertwined. In other words, questions about ways of conduct, about the evaluation of actions, about right and wrong, about social relations that involve authority and power are wrapped up together. However, in the immediacy of fieldwork it seems that the ethical impresses itself first. Anthropologists who have recently written on ethics rightfully stress the ‘existential commitment’ (Carrithers 2005: 436) fieldwork can imply. This commitment works itself out in contacting and learning about new political and ethical worlds in ways that are conditioned by using one’s own embodied historical self as a primary research tool. Carrithers puts this eloquently: ‘[M]any of us have experienced fieldwork as being constituted as much by its labours and its rigours, its embarrassments and adjustments, as by its discoveries, so that one’s commitment to the new is written not only in fieldnotes but also in … our blood, or at least our blushes. Taken from this viewpoint, it is the openness to others … that not only make[s] fieldwork possible but also constitute[s] much of both its pith and its pain. Indeed, the pain may become knowledge (2005: 437). This commitment and openness to others is a primary ethical stance no anthropologist can do without. The anthropological ethicist lays positive emphasis on relational selves, on the capacity to form concrete, positive relationships and to act and think in relation to others as a condition for understanding.8 She has to know the other ethically before she can know the other at all. This process of knowing may involve a personal transformation into someone she did not think she was before. Understanding how people in different moral worlds define themselves as persons can quite literally work through how they define and see the fieldworker, judge what they take to be her moral universe and teach her rules of conduct. This epistemological route can be unsettling as well as rewarding. ‘Double standards and double identities’ (Pels 2005: 84) are necessarily involved when understanding others works through a confrontation with one’s own personal, political and moral certainties. Many of the

Introduction • 13

contributions of this book address the intensity of the process, and its lingering effect long after fieldwork. At the same time, learning other people’s principles of right and wrong in the minuteness of the everyday reveals that ethics as practice is always political, embedded in power relations between people. In the field, principles of empathy can clash with real experiences of closeness and distance. Learning about someone else’s point of view, or about how they treat those in their care, can induce all those oppositional emotions that make the fieldworker hold on even more strongly to her own. After all, she just might not like all the people she studies and not all of them might like her. Empathy is not identity. The contextualization of ethics in politics, both writ small and with a capital P, is the politically sourced ethics all contributors to this volume engage with. Their openness and orientation to the other is primarily motivated by an empathy with pain and suffering, and by ‘taking sides’ with people in struggle. As will be seen in the chapters that follow, this stance does not mean a final closure to questions of ethics and politics in anthropology. Rather, it is an invitation to ask some more.

The Contributions Nancy Lindisfarne’s ‘Starting from Below: Fieldwork, Gender and Imperialism Now’ was originally the Audrey Richards distinguished lecture at Oxford in 2002. It is a clarion call for anthropologists to start from the point of view of the oppressed. She reconsiders anthropology’s relevance in a post- 9/11 age that she sees marked by both a fierce American imperialism and a growing antiglobalization movement. In her text taking sides is foremost a commitment to ‘studying up’ the proliferations of American empire at every local fieldsite, and to produce ethnographic accounts that are intelligible to nonacademic audiences. The following chapters are a response to her piece, all situated in specific fieldworks. Most of the authors specifically chose fieldwork that reflected their political commitments and socializations as leftists in their own cultures of origin. Most found, however, that loyalties and choices were not simple. Tayfun Atay, for instance, came from a secular left-wing political position in Turkey to study a Turkish Islamic Sufi order in London. However, both the Turkish left and the secular middle class in Turkey regarded such Islamic activists as backward and dangerous to the modern state. Not surprisingly, the people Atay studied were initially deeply distrustful towards him and what they felt he represented. His friends and his wife were appalled to watch him begin to talk and dress

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

2:30 PM

Page 14

14 • Introduction

like the working-class Muslims he was studying. Pulled from both sides he realized the full force of class hostility that lay behind the secularism he had never previously questioned. Committing to the other was only possible through an estrangement from the self, which left him unsure about his own sense of belonging. His chapter reveals a journey towards a true respect for the politics and ethics of resistance in this transnational Islamic group. Nayanika Mookherjee describes a similarly intense experience of exposure to partial conflations between home and field. A left-wing, middle-class Bengali Indian, she did research among the Bengali community in Bangladesh, studying public memories of sexual violence during the 1971 war. Like Atay, she found herself negotiating the conflicting identities her hosts impressed on her. These were, evidently, expressions of the political conflicts they themselves were immersed in. Her account is a lucid testament to the impossibility of imagining the anthropologist as an independent moral agent in fieldwork. Her primary allegiance to poor women who had suffered sexual violence in 1971 led her to study the intricacies of national, class, religious and gendered conflict. Her research topic, however, had been popularized in Bangladesh itself by a leftist cultural elite that positioned itself in opposition to right-wing Islamic nationalists. During her fieldwork her initial alliance with that intellectual left became increasingly uneasy. She found that their activism was in itself fraught with class prejudice, sexism and nationalism. Mookherjee began to ask important questions about ethical murkiness and the responsibility of the intellectual. Like Tayfun Atay, Mookherjee began and ended on the side of the oppressed. But like him, she found that the left she knew was not quite on the same side. For both of them, that was not an easy process. Both Panagiotis Geros and Heidi Armbruster address taking sides as a dilemma arising in a situation where they studied a discriminated (Armbruster) or politically ambivalent (Geros) minority, yet failed to align themselves with the political convictions and principal moral norms of their subjects. Geros’s study of Syrian Christians in Syria is set in a political climate of intense state oppression that engendered fear and silence. However, many of his Christian informants supported the regime of the Asads, who they saw as granting them protection and upward mobility. Geros could not accept what he saw as their acquiescence to a dictatorship. He was himself an ‘ethnic Christian’ from Greece, but firmly a man of the left there. In Damascus he found himself gravitating towards more radical left-wing Palestinians. While struggling with his loyalty to the group he had chosen to study, he reminds us that their moral choices can only be judged within the

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

2:30 PM

Page 15

Introduction • 15

political and economic system within which they live. By grounding himself in the anthropologist’s task of understanding the historical and political context within which these everyday Christian moralities operate, Geros allows himself to practice more forbearance. Heidi Armbruster did multi-sited research in Turkey and Germany with Syrian Christians, a community that has suffered discrimination in both countries. However, here too taking sides became a complicated and partial process. Armbruster set out to use anthropology as a compassionate tool of understanding political oppression, but learned she could not identify with the moral universe of her hosts. They felt justified in fear and contempt towards Muslims in both Germany and Turkey. Given their historical experience, this was not surprising. But for Armbruster, herself a German, identifying with anti-Muslim thought would have felt like identifying with racism in Germany and the general anti-Muslim backlash in the West. Like Geros, she found herself aligning with those whose struggles she could more readily identify with. Her chapter details the dilemmas of this split loyalty. For Lærke, Strasser and Schaumberg, identifications and loyalties in fieldwork remained simpler. Anna Lærke took sides with children, doing research with primary school children in an English village. Her chapter describes, in insightful ethnographic detail, the intricate ways in which uses of knowledge and constructions of ‘truth’ were part of a school regimen that enabled certain identities whilst disabling others. Drawing parallels between ‘discipline’ and ‘socialization’, she argues that all identity formations are also struggles for power and must be seen as inherently mutual, involving both adults and children. She reflects on how the fieldwork encounter elicited strong emotional reactions that were (and are) linked to recollections of her own childhood. She finally argues that the researcher’s own emotions and personal history must be explicitly recognized as key ethnographic methodological tools. Sabine Strasser writes about adults fighting back. Her ‘field’ is her own political context rather than a place to enter and leave. It is framed by transnational migrant activist networks that span Turkey and Austria. She tells the life stories of three antiracist activists in Vienna. They are a Kurdish working-class man, a Turkish Islamist woman and a secular upper-class Turkish woman. She traces the ways in which class, gender and ethnicity have influenced three very different but complementary strategies. She draws conclusions not from looking at oppression but from looking at how oppressive structures are fought. Comparable to Strasser, Heike Schaumberg puts her fieldwork into a context of political activism in which she is herself involved. With an interest in socialist and anti-imperialist politics, she left England for

16 • Introduction

Argentina and conducted research about workers’ co-operatives, organizations of the unemployed, and university activists in the middle of a political crisis. All were struggling with forces and pressures of neoliberalism. Her own fieldwork ethics were those of a like-minded, compassionate participant-observer who sought to enter dialogue and debate with those encountered in the field. In her chapter she explores some of the complexities and tensions such engagement gave rise to. Schaumberg was careful to learn politically rather than just ethnographically from the struggles she witnessed in Argentina. For her, this meant learning about political resistance from activists, sharing political experiences with them, and feeding that knowledge back into thought on political activism and universities in Britain. In the final chapter Jonathan Neale addresses a subtext in nearly all the contributions to this book: the question of representation. While for him loyalties in fieldwork were clear, he found that writing conventions in anthropology militated against the representation of such commitment. He suggests that a politically committed anthropology finds a more congenial home in activist writing. His text is a ‘how to’ chapter focused on the difficulties radical anthropologists face in writing up their research. Neale traces in detail the mechanisms by which mainstream ideology in universities silences uncomfortable voices, making radicals feel confused and paralysed when they sit down to write. He then explores various strategies for resisting that pressure, and for writing usefully for the two very different audiences of anthropologists and activists.

Partiality The political and ethical partiality in these contributions cannot be reduced to the self-inspection of the anthropologist and her narrative self-promotion as the sole moral and political protagonist. It comes to the fore as a motivated interest in a particular set of people and a particular set of questions, and it develops in the ironies, pains, failures and successes of fieldwork. In fieldwork, everyday ethics and politics reveal themselves in their complexities of agreement and conflict, contestation and difference. It is in everyday encounters that people determine the norms and values that contextualize a specific situation, justify their actions, take a stand and negotiate their place in the world. All who have done fieldwork know that it is in everyday social interaction that the inner fragmentations of a group become explicit – its margins and centres, its fissures and blurry boundaries. Anthropologists often latch on to these margins, knowing that it is through studying a society’s exceptions and outsiders that one learns important lessons

Introduction • 17

about its centres and rules. If one studies transnational sites and migratory movements that are themselves embedded in different national and political frameworks, the sense of fragmented realities and contested cultural truths intensifies. And if we accept Nancy Lindisfarne’s dictum (this volume) that no cultural site remains untouched by the effects of American empire, the idea that any place could be locked into a self-contained cultural script holds up even less. Most cultural theories now acknowledge the fact of inner variation. They take issue with determinist ‘software-like program’ notions of culture (Carrithers 2005: 434) and stress culture as negotiation and process, as transformative practice in which people work out a ‘compromise’ (Wimmer 2005: 7–17; 25–33) rather than merely inhabit a fixed semiotic script. More recent ethnographic work may be seen as an attempt at finding out what this means for cultural analysis, and for models of ‘holism’. ‘Holism’, as some chapters in this volume suggest, is not about whole social entities. It is about ‘joining the dots’ (Neale, this volume) that make up the bigger picture. Under conditions of globalization this picture includes the translocal, transcultural and transhistorical connections that inform local political and economic orders and the opportunities for life and identity they enable. The present image of culture suggests that ethnography is best used as a tool for analysing intercultural brokership and (mis-) encounter rather than as a means of representing a particular brand of ‘otherness’. The morally and politically engaged enquiries that are presented here direct a critical interest onto local fields of inequality. This translates into a focus on local elites and/or on those who are in dispute with them, and into an attention to the ways in which people are socialized into, resist or accommodate unequal power relations. This is the major form of ‘latching on’ to others (who are not always cultural others in the ethnic sense) attempted by the authors in this volume, in which they recognize their own cultural, biographical and political selves. As the chapters show, this can result in convergence and complicity, but also in dilemma, crisis and disagreement with a significant section of those whose hospitality the fieldworker enjoys. However, these disputes are shown to be enabling. They generate the types of critical self-reflection through which one recognizes the limits and partiality of one’s own moral, political and academic certainties (cf. Moody-Adams 1997: 196). This happens not least through the mirrors that people encountered in fieldwork hold up to the researcher in their midst. Moreover, while using their own disagreement and compassion reflexively anthropologists can hone their sensitivity to the moral dilemmas of those they interact with in fieldwork, to their self-

18 • Introduction

reflections, self-recognitions and conflicts of interest, to local structures of dispute and the (legitimate and illegitimate) forms of contesting cultural and moral norms. However, it becomes evident in all chapters of the book that a critical interest in relations of domination and oppression puts moral relativism into question. Moody-Adams rightly observes that a ‘descriptive moral relativism’, which refrains from making moral judgements about the other is generally motivated by the idea that cultural criticism signals disrespect towards the culture in question. She notes that this subscribes to an image of ‘culture’ as a homogenous whole that lacks internal dissent (1997: 208); one might add that it also peddles the idea that culture is coterminous with ethnic group. Of course, a committed interest in muted or dissenting local voices might be seen as biased research. On the other hand, it can be an attempt to explore how successes and failures in fieldwork might serve as expressions of contemporary encounters in a globalized neoimperial world, and of the localized barriers of inequality across which they take place. Representation in terms of ‘speaking for’, or ‘speaking on behalf of’ has become problematic. But the possibilities of ‘speaking with’, ‘debating over’, ‘diverging from and converging with’ still need exploring. This might entail ways of recognizing and investigating where racism in Germany is similar to racism in Austria and Turkey; where cultures of fear in Europe and the US approximate cultures of fear in Syria; where the struggle of Argentinian oil workers may be linked to the struggle of university employees in Britain; where the disciplining of English school children is revealed as a socialization process that might well go some way to explain, for instance, why young women and men still submit themselves to war; where ideological ploys that contrast backwardness and tradition with progressiveness and modernity serve middle-class interests in Turkey and in Bangladesh alike; or where local expressions of struggle and dissent can be translated into a language that is comprehensible to more than one audience. It is in this respect that taking sides becomes a way of seeing the ‘other’ as more than a representative of ‘a culture’. And, indeed, not as the ‘other’.

Notes 1. Despite the often-made philosophical distinction between the ethical and moral, I use both terms interchangeably in this text, in so far as they both refer to an evaluative language of right and wrong. 2. According to Fluehr-Lobban the first ethics codes were introduced in American anthropology as a direct reaction to protests against government-funded

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

2:34 PM

Page 19

Introduction • 19

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

counterinsurgency research in Latin America (Project Camelot) (2003: 8–10; see also Mills 2003). For Pels this coincides with a shift of ethical hierarchies within academic anthropology, from the main allegiance to research-funding or colonial governments to a foregrounding of allegiance and responsibility to the people studied. He claims, however, that this new ‘dyad’ resulted in ‘amnesia’ about wider power relations that continued to inform fieldwork (1999: 110–111). Since first writing this introduction a new ethics debate has gained momentum in the wake of the US-led ‘war on terror’ and the growing recruitment of anthropologists into military, intelligence and security agencies. This has also stimulated renewed discussions about research ethics within the AAA. For details see, for instance, the journal Anthropology Today, which has provided an important forum for this debate. Not in the text itself, but in her reply to comments. Critiques of ‘objectivity’ and critical explorations of scientific models of knowledge were paralleled in a rich body of feminist theory in the 1980s and early 1990s (e.g., Bordo 1987; Caine et al. 1988; Code 1991; Haraway 1991; Harding 1986, 1991; Longino 1990). For a discussion of modernist conventions and new experiments see Marcus and Cushman 1982. Works such as, for instance, Okely and Callaway 1992, Kulick and Willson 1995, Gupta and Ferguson 1997, Coffey 1999, or Watson 1999, located fieldwork in these debates. For transforming models of gender, power and subjectivity in feminist anthropology, see, e.g., Moore 1988, Di Leonardo 1991, Del Valle 1993, Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994, Visweswaran 1997. Anthropologists who have studied non-European concepts of personhood have often noted the intricate difficulties Westerners face when confronted with relational concepts of personhood that run counter to the enlightenment model of the atomistic individual. The difficulties have often been described as complicating the interpretation and translation task of the ethnographer, rather than as hampering her field-relations (e.g., Strathern 1988, on multiple personhood and ‘dividuals’).

References Ahmed, A. and C. Shore (eds). 1995a. The Future of Anthropology: Its Relevance in the Contemporary World. London: Athlone. Ahmed, A. and C. Shore. 1995b. ‘Introduction: Is Anthropology Relevant to the Contemporary World?’ in A. Ahmed and C. Shore (eds), The Future of Anthropology. London: Athlone, pp. 12–45. American Anthropological Association (AAA). 1998. Code of Ethics. Retrieved 14 March 2006 from http://www.aaanet.org/committees/ethics/ethicscode.pdf Asad, T. 1973a. ‘Introduction’, in T. Asad (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, pp. 9–19. Asad, T. (ed.). 1973b. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press. Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth (ASA). 1999. Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice. London: ASA. Retrieved 14 March 2006 from http://www.theasa.org/downloads/Ethical_guidelines.pdf Benhabib, S. 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press.

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

2:34 PM

Page 20

20 • Introduction

Berreman, G. D. 1968. ‘Is Anthropology Alive? Social Responsibility in Social Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 9(5): 391–396. Bordo, S. 1987. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. Burawoy, M. et al. 2000. Global Ethnography. Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caine, B., E. Grosz and M. de Lepervanche. 1988. Crossing Boundaries: Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Caplan, P. 2003. ‘Introduction. Anthropology and Ethics’, in P. Caplan (ed.), The Ethics of Anthropology: Debates and Dilemmas. London: Routledge, pp. 1–33. Carrithers, M. 2005. ‘Anthropology as a Moral Science of Possibilities’, Current Anthropology 46(3): 433–456. Castells, M. 1998. End of Millennium. Oxford: Blackwell. Clifford, J. 1986. ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, in J. Clifford and G. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–26. Clifford, J. and G. E. Marcus (eds). 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Code, L. 1991. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Coffey, A. 1999. The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity. London: Sage. Cornwall, A. and N. Lindisfarne. 1994. ‘Dislocating Masculinity: Gender, Power and Anthropology’, in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies. London: Routledge, pp. 11–47. D’Andrade, R. 1995. ‘Moral Models in Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 36(3): 399–408. Del Valle, T. (ed.). 1993. Gendered Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge. Di Leonardo, M. 1991. Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eriksen, T. H. 2006. Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence. Oxford: Berg. Fluehr-Lobban, C. 2003. ‘Ethics and Anthropology 1890–2000: A Review of Issues and Principles’, in C. Fluehr-Lobban (ed.), Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology, 2nd ed. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, pp. 1–28. Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Prentice Hall. Frank, G. A. 1968. ‘Comments (Social Responsibility Symposium)’, Current Anthropology 9(5): 412–414. ———. 1969. Latin America: Underdevelopment of Revolution. Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy. New York: Monthly Review Press. Friedman, J. 1987. ‘Beyond Otherness or: The Spectacularization of Anthropology’, Telos 71: 161–170. Gledhill, J. 1994. Power and its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics. London: Pluto Press. Gough, K. 1968. ‘New Proposals for Anthropologists’, Current Anthropology, 9(5): 403–407. Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson. (eds). 1997. Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hammersley, M. 2005. ‘Is Social Research Political?’ in C. Pole (ed.), Fieldwork. Volume III: Ethics and Politics in Fieldwork (Sage Benchmarks in Social Research Methods). London: Sage, pp. 3–21. Haraway, D. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books.

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

2:34 PM

Page 21

Introduction • 21

Harding, S. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Harding, S. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Buckingham: Open University Press. Hastrup, K. and P. Elsass. 1990. ‘Anthropological Advocacy: A Contradiction in Terms?’ Current Anthropology 31(3): 301–311. Huizer, G. and B. Mannheim (eds). 1979. The Politics of Anthropology: From Colonialism and Sexism towards a View from Below. The Hague: Mouton Press. Hymes, D. (ed.). 1969. Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon Books. Kapferer, B. 1988. ‘The Anthropologist as Hero: Three Exponents of Post-Modernist Anthropology’, Critique of Anthropology 8(2): 77–104. Lindisfarne, N. 1997. ’Local Voices and Responsible Anthropology: Finding a Place from which to Speak’, Folk, Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society 39: 5–25. Kulick, D. and M. Willson (eds). 1995. Taboo: Sex, Identity and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork. London and New York: Routledge. Longino, H. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton: Princeton University Press. MacClancy, J. (ed.). 2002. Exotic No More. Anthropology on the Front Lines. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press. Marcus, G. E. and D. Cushman. 1982. ‘Ethnographies as Texts’, Annual Review of Anthropology 11: 25–29. Marcus, G. E. and M. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mills, D. 2003. ‘”Like a Horse in Blinkers”? A Political History of Anthropology’s Research Ethics’, in P. Caplan (ed.), The Ethics of Anthropology: Debates and Dilemmas. London: Routledge, pp. 37–54. Moody-Adams, M. M. 1997. Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Moore, H. 1988. Feminism and Anthropology. London: Polity. Nader, L. 1969. ‘Up the Anthropologist – Perspectives Gained from Studying Up’, in D. Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon, pp. 284–311. Nash, J. 1976. ‘A Critique of Social Science Roles in Latin America’, in J. Nash and H. Icken Safa (eds), Sex and Class in Latin America. New York: Praeger Publishers, pp. 1–21. ———. 1979. ‘Ethnology in a Revolutionary Setting’, in G. Huizer and B. Mannheim (eds), The Politics of Anthropology. The Hague: Mouton Press, pp. 353–370. Nugent, S. 2003. ‘The Yanomami: Anthropological Discourse and Ethics’, in P. Caplan (ed.), The Ethics of Anthropology: Debates and Dilemmas. London: Routledge, pp. 77–95. Okely, J. and H. Callaway (eds). 1992. Anthropology and Autobiography. London: Routledge. Paine, R. (ed.). 1985. Advocacy and Anthropology, First Encounters. Memorial University of Newfoundland: Institute of Social and Economic Research. Pels, P. 1999. ‘Professions of Duplexity: A Prehistory of Ethical Codes in Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 40(2): 101–114. ———. 2000. ‘The Trickster’s Dilemma: Ethics and the Technologies of the Anthropological Self’, in M. Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge, pp. 135–172. ———. 2005. ‘”Where There Aren’t No Ten Commandments”: Redefining Ethics during the Darkness in El Dorado Scandal’, in L. Meskell and P. Pels (eds), Embedding Ethics. Oxford: Berg, pp. 69–99. Rabinow, P. 1986. ‘Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology’, in J. Clifford and G. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 234–261.

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

2:34 PM

Page 22

22 • Introduction

Rohrlich-Leavitt, R., B. Sykes and E. Weatherford. 1975. ‘Aboriginal Woman: Male and Female Anthropological Perspectives’, in R. R. Reiter (ed.), Towards an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 110–126. Rorty, R. 1998. Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sangren, P. S. 1988. ‘Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethnography: “Postmodernism” and the Social Reproduction of Texts’, Current Anthropology 29(3): 405–435. Scheper-Hughes, N. 1995. ‘The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 29(3): 409–440. Scholte, B. 1987. ‘The Literary Turn in Contemporary Anthropology’, Critique of Anthropology 7(1): 33–47. Shore, C. and S. Wright. 1999. ‘Audit Culture and Anthropology: Neo-Liberalism in British Higher Education’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 5: 557–575. Silverman, M. 2003. ‘Everyday Ethics: A Personal Journey in Rural Ireland, 1980–2001’, in P. Caplan (ed.), The Ethics of Anthropology: Debates and Dilemmas. London: Routledge, pp. 115–132. Smith, G. 1999. Confronting the Present. Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Strathern, M. 1987. ‘Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 28(3): 251–281. ———. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. (ed.). 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London and New York: Routledge. Ulin, R. 1991. ‘Critical Anthropology Twenty Years Later: Modernism and Postmodernism in Anthropology’, Critique of Anthropology 11(1): 63–89. Visweswaran, K. 1997. ‘Histories of Feminist Ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 591–621. Watson, C. W. (ed.). 1999. Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology. London: Pluto. Wimmer, A. 2005. Kultur als Prozess: Zur Dynamik des Aushandelns von Bedeutungen. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Wolff, K. 1969. ‘This Is the Time for Radical Anthropology’, in D. Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 99–118.

Chapter 1

STARTING FROM BELOW: FIELDWORK, GENDER AND IMPERIALISM NOW Nancy Lindisfarne

This chapter is about gender and imperialism in the Middle East, but my starting point is fieldwork in anthropology. I begin with a brief discussion of the fundamental contradiction between conservative politics and our main method of study, participant-observation. It is a contradiction that frames the limits of anthropological studies today, as it has in the past. The method of participant-observation systematically focuses on the everyday, and on otherwise unheard, or muted, voices. Because anthropologists pay attention to the lives of ordinary people, they see society from below. From there, power and privilege stand out in sharp relief. This creates the potential to analyse social formations of inequality, and a disciplinary disposition to dissent. This is the social anthropologist’s strength. But anthropology from below only works if it also includes looking up. And ethnographies only become gripping, and relevant to the anthropologist’s own life, when they include a commitment to make sense of ethnographic data in terms of explicit, coherent theories about regional and national elites, and their relation

24 • Starting from Below

to all the other players in the global political economy (Nader 1969; Lindisfarne 2000a). And this is where things quickly begin to get scary, for two reasons – making connections up seems both too ambitious, and too political. I do not think it is in fact too ambitious. But I do think it requires a commitment to work with what Paul Farmer has called ‘willed interdisciplinarity’ (1999), by which he means thinking and reading widely outside of anthropology. Without such an intellectual commitment, I suggest that the relation between imperialism, ethnography and theory is as problematic today as ever it was in the middle of the twentieth century. And then there are the political questions. Anthropologist participant-observers strive to relate to other people as equals. Studying up means holding onto this personal commitment, and the premise of equality, in other situations, and across the board. Yet, as we all know, our disposition to dissent is limited by our class allegiances, and by the complex processes of censorship and self-censorship that are part of academic life. So anthropological studies are often muddled, and always in danger of being boring and politically safe. Others, of course, have also made these same points. More than a decade ago Talal Asad recommended that anthropologists develop an anthropology of Western imperial hegemony, with the aim of describing and theorizing ‘the radically altered form and terrain of conflict inaugurated by [Western imperial power] – the new political languages, new power, new social groups, new desires and fears, new subjectivities’ (Asad 1991: 323; Gledhill 1994; Di Leonardo 1998; Nordstrom 2004). And David Price has set out the personal issues in his excellent guest editorial in Anthropology Today on Bush’s War on Terrorism. Echoing David Aberle, Price challenges anthropologists to recognise that there is no such thing as an apolitical course of action, and that inaction is nothing more than political action that supports prevailing military policies (2002: 5). I know that most anthropologists are unlikely saints or revolutionaries. But I do have a simple, important, suggestion. In the early 1970s, as the women’s movement began to have an effect on anthropology, all of us learned to ask, systematically and repeatedly, what happens in our jobs, and in our ethnographies, and to our theories when we raise questions about women and gender. When we asked such questions, we found that the answers were invariably exciting, and revealing of earlier biases. And nowadays we know that the work of an anthropologist, male or female, who does not practise this feminist discipline is frankly not worth the time of day. I am sure that my fellow anthropologists have thought long and hard about American foreign policy, at least once a day during this past

Nancy Lindisfarne • 25

year. I suggest that it is now time to ask, systematically and repeatedly, about American imperialism and its relation to our jobs, our ethnographies and our theories. If we go one step further, and ask questions about gender and American imperialism, we double our explanatory power, and the impetus for political action. In doing so, we make the personal political big time, and our anthropology becomes relevant to the world in which we live.

Anthropology of the Middle East In the anthropology of the Middle East, the connections between imperialism and gender are obvious – so obvious that the real puzzle is why many prominent anthropologists have often failed to connect the dots. But to do so they would have to break a powerful taboo. They would have to name American imperialism and include its effects in their analyses. Let me clarify what I mean by the shorthand ‘American imperialism’. I am referring to the global economic and political system that serves the interests of members of an international ruling class. It is a system dominated by American and other corporate businesses and finance houses. It is legitimized by government institutions of the rich countries of the North, and underwritten by the force of the American military machine. The US prefers economic domination by proxy. If a national ruling elite is sympathetic to US interests, and prepared to use force in the exploitation of their fellow citizens and the expropriation of national resources, it receives financial and military aid from the US, from Western banks and from the IMF. If, however, there is popular opposition to the national elite and things threaten to get out of control, or the local ruler will not hand over the oil, or begins to talk about independence, then the US government starts talk about freedom, and democracy, and standing up to tyrants. And if the US is unable to force regime change by covert means, it will resort to sheer military power and begin to wheel out the B-52s. The US has bombed more than twenty countries since 1945, some of them for over a decade. There are American bases in over one hundred countries today. This, of course, does not mean that things are simple. They are not. American imperial relations with client states are immensely complicated, as we all know from what is going on throughout the Middle East – certainly in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Palestine/Israel, but also, and just as importantly, in the ‘stable’ states such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. I believe there is absolutely no one outside of

26 • Starting from Below

Euro-America who is not fully aware of the contours of American imperialism and willing to talk about it, whether they support American imperialism or not. There are also plenty of people in EuroAmerica who do talk about American imperialism. Some of these are people of the left. Some are liberals. Some subscribe outright to the Madeleine Albright school of political philosophy. What I am saying is that academics are among the people most affected by the taboo, and among them are many academic anthropologists. It is hard for conservative anthropologists to come right out, as Madeleine Albright did, and say, of the 500,000 child deaths caused by the sanctions on Iraq, that ‘[s]ometimes there is a price that has to be paid’ (Neale 2002). This means that writing by conservative anthropologists is evasive on questions of history and political economy. Such writing often lacks causal connections of the kind that are perfectly familiar to journalists, generals and ordinary people. The writing of liberal anthropologists also lacks such connections. Though some do contextualize their ethnographies in terms of a particular state and its problems, typically they do not take their analyses further. When challenged to make a link with imperialism, their replies are likely to be dismissive: ‘Of course, everybody takes American imperialism as given. That’s an old hat’. Yet American imperialism remains remarkably absent from their writing and teaching, which is prone to compartmentalization, non sequiturs, internal contradiction and sheer mystifying confusion. Clarity in anthropological writing on the Middle East has come consistently from scholars of the left (see, e.g., Alexander 2001; Ali 2002). Writing from the left, Pierre Bourdieu is particularly instructive. Bourdieu’s first fieldwork was in Algeria, where he was deeply politicized by the Algerian war. His early writing on Algeria is a model of cogent description (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1962 (1958); Wolfreys 2002; Johnson 2002). Yet, when his work lost political urgency and was directed towards his middle-class colleagues, his writing style became abstruse and pretentious. A key to this contrast lies in a speech to demonstrators at the Public Sector Strike in Paris in 1995. The speech is in dense academic-speak. Then Bourdieu pauses, catches himself, remembers his audience, apologizes and simply and clearly declares his solidarity with those who are fighting to change society (1998). There is no mistaking the source of his clarity. It comes from his personal connection, and commitment, to the interests and politics of ordinary people. I turn now to two detailed examples. My first concerns the gendering of the Afghan War. The second is about Islamism and veiling in Turkey. My aim is to show that we can learn far more about our own

Nancy Lindisfarne • 27

lives, as well as the lives of others, by daring to dissent, by adopting a perspective from below, by linking fieldwork loyalties and anthropological insights to an informed account of gender and American imperialism. Photos of women in burkas, their faces hidden behind embroidered lace grilles, their bodies enveloped in gathered rayon cloth, were a striking feature of the US and UK propaganda of 2001 in the lead-up to the recent Afghan War. The liberation of these women has been used as justification for the bombing of Afghanistan and the removal of the Taliban regime from power. These images, and the rhetoric of veiling used by the US and UK rulers, were, and continue to be, both powerful and confusing. The most important general question raised by the women’s dress is, ‘why are dominant political practices so highly gendered?’ I shall return to this question later; to make sense of what is going on, there are more general issues to consider first. Contradictory attributions of ‘human nature’ are elaborated wherever social hierarchies prevail. This is because ranked divisions between human beings are always based on lies that serve the interests of some people and harm others. Gender differences are among such attributions of ‘human nature’. Class and racialized differences are others. In any particular historical period, there are congruences between these different ways of describing inequality. The present dominant configuration of human nature has an ancient history, at least as ancient as the Mesopotamian myth of Gilgamesh. The configuration is deeply embedded in all three of the Middle Eastern monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And it is embedded in their secular alternatives, and in old imperialisms and the resistance movements they fostered. Though we now associate this gendered discourse with its Western origins in the Enlightenment and with Orientalism (Said 1978), it is important that similar ideas about human nature have a long, independent history in Afghanistan, Turkey and the rest of the Middle East. In its present dominant incarnation, Orientalism works because it creates and sustains hierarchies in the First and Third Worlds alike. That is why it has been such a powerful way of legitimizing the spread of first mercantile, and then industrial and corporate capitalism. As many scholars have pointed out, Orientalist discourses became particularly highly gendered with the emergence of the professional middle classes in the nineteenth century, and with the related notion of ‘family values’ in the twentieth (see, e.g., Enloe 1989, 1993; McClintock 1995; Scanlon 1995). I find it useful to think of the capitalist/Orientalist paradigm as a set of stereotyped dichotomies that underpin ranked differences. Men and

28 • Starting from Below

maleness are associated with the West, with science, modernity, and civilization, with Christianity, whiteness, the upper classes, and with able-bodied, heterosexual adults. By contrast, women and femininity are associated with the East, with superstition, tradition and primitiveness, with Islam and other non-Christian religions, with blackness, the working classes, the weak and disabled, homosexuality and childhood. Put this way, the dominant paradigm seems nonsensical. However, when used piecemeal – as it always is – it can simplify and naturalize inequality in a series of endlessly variable formulations. For example, relations between owners and working-class people in one setting are often expressed in terms that are strikingly similar to the relation between whites and blacks in others. Or, class and race may be conflated and gendered, as when the citizens of Afghanistan are repeatedly spoken of as primitive, tribal people whose barbarism is evident in their oppression of women. Descriptively, the capitalist/Orientalist paradigm naturalizes inequality. It is used with facility by the Saudi ruling class and by the American elite alike. Analytically, the paradigm raises questions about the links between different systems of domination (such as those based on patriarchy, Islamism, race or social class) and structural inequalities (such as those affecting veiled women, or the sectarian and ethnic fighters in Afghanistan). This linkage makes clear the extent to which inequality of all kinds (whether domestic, class-based or ethnic) is underwritten by force and violence. In the capitalist/Orientalist paradigm, the relation between men and women is premised on two fundamental lies. First, men can and must protect women (and by extension the whole society) from external social evil. Second, men can and must protect society from the weakness and evil that emanates naturally from women. It follows from the logic of the paradigm that men who fail in these respects are feminized, but often in quite contradictory ways: sometimes as weak and foolish, sometimes as lascivious and aggressive. In either case, they become like women, as do workers, blacks, gays, and children. They become the Taliban soldier whose castration was the main photograph on the front of the Mirror in November 2001 (14 November 2001: 1). They become the front page Mirror headline, ‘Impotent’, over a huge photo of Colin Powell after his mission to Sharon in April 2002 (13 April 2002: 1). Yet, the logic of the paradigm can be turned on its head to resist oppression. Late in his life, a reporter asked Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization. ‘Western civilization?’ Gandhi replied, ‘Yes, that would be a terribly good idea’. Bashir Asad of Syria also reversed the

Nancy Lindisfarne • 29

logic of the dominant paradigm to embarrass Blair in a live press conference in Damascus in November 2001 (The Guardian, 1 November 2001: 1). Asad challenged the rhetoric of terrorism by asking Blair how the Palestinian freedom fighters differed from the French resistance and Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Army. Blair was not expecting the comparison and had no answer. Gender relations in the Middle East, and the politics of veiling, depend on this same logic and also have both emancipatory and oppressive effects. And gender politics has been part of a much bigger political struggle, the struggle between socialists and conservatives, throughout the twentieth century. Afghans and Turks are no longer exotic others when we share the historical frame. Early in the century socialists in the Middle East, as in Europe, sought greater equality of opportunity, and equality of outcome, for everyone. Women’s emancipation was part of a wider aim to remove class and race discrimination as well. For conservatives, women’s emancipation remained tied to the other forms of gender, class and racialized discrimination that are basic to the capitalist system. Religion did not really come into it. In the Middle East, there were Muslims, Christians and Jews who were socialists and communists. Others of each religious background were colonial loyalists, and yet others were fervent right-wing nationalists. The family household as an economic unit has been a crucial variable in this struggle between socialists and conservatives. Among peasants and the self-employed petty bourgeoisie, women’s work is intrinsically tied to household units of production. The owning class has a different kind of investment in the family. For them, access to, and control of, property is managed through the family and inheritance. In none of these cases does women’s education or emancipation jeopardize a social hierarchy based on unequal property relations. But among working-class people the situation is different. Among wage earners, individual men and women’s education and work can be detached from family and household commitments. They can organize around their workplaces and live independently, or with straight or gay partners, in shared houses hundreds and even thousands of miles away. This poses a deep threat to property owners. They keep this threat at bay by introducing strict control on migrant workers, who often become the targets of racial abuse, and by subscribing to a system of ‘family values’. The system of ‘family values’ ties men, and especially women, to unpaid domestic labour, while reinforcing divisive gender stereotypes and inequality between men and women. The system of ‘family values’ works against the ‘dysfunctional families’ of single,

30 • Starting from Below

working mothers, and against the health, welfare and nursery provisions that would help working class-people. By understanding the place of the family in the capitalist system it becomes easier to make sense of the state-sponsored dress reforms that were imposed by Atatürk in Turkey, Reza Shah in Iran and King Amanullah in Afghanistan (see Baker 1997; Norton 1997). These leaders were all capitalist modernizers. Their dress reforms aimed to end women’s veiling and put men in trousers. Atatürk, Reza Shah and Amanuallah intended to homogenize regional differences and prepare people for capitalist development, from which the national ruling class would benefit disproportionately. These rulers were not opposed to the emancipation and education of women per se. But like their counterparts in Euro-America, they were frightened of workers’ power, so they systematically sought to limit workers’ rights and unionization. They also committed themselves to the notion of ‘family values’ because gender inequality is such a good way of keeping class and other hierarchies in place. During the twentieth century, genuine socialist and communist movements from below became bureaucratic, brutal and authoritarian. They became Stalinist or Maoist parties wanting to rule from the top down. As in China and the Soviet Union, the rhetoric of socialism thinly disguised a centralized, hierarchical form of state capitalism. In the Middle East, as elsewhere in the Third World, egalitarian nationalist movements filled the place of revolutionary communism. But many of the nationalist leaders also turned to forms of top-down rule. Atatürk’s right-wing nationalism borrowed heavily from the state capitalist model. And like North Viet Nam, Nasser’s nationalism and state capitalist regime in Egypt is an example from the left. In such states, workers’ rights and class politics from below were systematically suppressed. In this process, class more or less disappeared as an idiom for challenging capitalist, or state capitalist, hierarchies. Then, as the century progressed, movements for national independence, and the Civil Rights movement in the US, made it increasingly difficult for conservatives to use racism blatantly to justify inequality. Ethnicity, and multiculturalism, became increasingly prominent as substitutes for racism. Discourses on ‘family values’ were altered accordingly: the families of the working poor were divided up and given ethnic labels. In Britain, Afro-Caribbean families, and particularly men, are said to have different problems from those of ‘traditional’ Pakistani families. The important thing is they all have ‘problems’, and these problems are highly gendered. So class and racialized discourses became less marked, though ethnicity was made to do the job pretty well. Yet because conservatives

Nancy Lindisfarne • 31

themselves use families to sustain their privilege, sexism remained a central way of construing inequality. Dialectically, the dominant forms of sexism, and the rhetoric of family values, invite highly gendered responses. Thus oppositional movements are also highly gendered. Such is the case with political Islam, which began to fill the void previously occupied by socialism, and nationalism, in the political spectrum. Many ordinary Muslims have come to understand new veiling practices as a form of protest against repressive national governments, Euro-American imperialism and corporate capitalism. But the oppositional use of a rhetoric of veiling is always double-edged. Ordinary men may claim rights for themselves while oppressing their female coreligionists. Muslim and Islamist rulers (the Saudi ruling family, the Ayattullahs in Iran, the Taliban), without being explicitly racist, and without having to acknowledge the class bases of inequality, may use veiling as a metaphor to support their own power, while oppressing the people they rule. Equally, Islamists can naturalize sexism, and veiling, as a metaphor for resistance, without acknowledging that nonsexist, secular, socialist alternatives might also serve such oppositional ends.

Gendering the Afghan War Against this background, how has the Afghan War been gendered?1 The British created the nation state of Afghanistan as a buffer between their empire and that of the Russians. In this process, they fought three Afghan wars in which they were opposed by people united by the rallying cry of Islam. By the 1950s and 1960s, the dynamics of imperialism had changed. In response to pressure from below (there were elected communist representatives in the Afghan parliament in 1951), King Zahir Shah and the ruling class of feudal landlords sought some modernizing reforms with the help of US and Soviet aid. Afghan development projects of this period included the emancipation and education of women. But they did not address ‘modern’ forms of sexism – family values, glass ceilings, or how consumerism is gendered – any more than such issues are addressed by conservative modernizers in the First World. Nor of course was the Afghan ruling class, nor their aid advisers, interested in forgoing their own class privileges. To this end they actively stifled industrial development in favour of cash-cropping and other kinds of agrarian change. They also emphasized ethnic and sectarian differences to create division among Afghan peasants and workers.

32 • Starting from Below

Yet in the early 1970s, among the people I knew best (N. Tapper 1991) – rural Pashtuns like those who later supported the Taliban – Islam was a tolerant faith, and largely taken for granted. Both women and men covered their heads out of respect for God. They laughed a bit at the few middle-class townswomen who wore the burka, noting that the burka was a pretension they did not need. They accepted the great social distance between themselves and the schoolgirls in the local town who, like middle-class women in Kabul and other cities, wore Western-style clothes. They bore them no grudge. Among these rural Pashtun peasants there was a gendered division of labour. But there was no divorce, in spite of what was permitted under Islamic law. Men and women of a household worked together for the whole of their lives to protect their families from destitution. And they were kind and generous parents, offering a model of childrearing that Richard Tapper and I later tried to emulate as parents in Britain. Then, in 1971–72, there was drought and a famine like the one Afghanistan experienced in 2001–02. The crisis revealed the deep corruption of the Afghan rulers. In 1973 the king was toppled, and in 1978 there was a communist coup. The communists made women’s emancipation and education, as well as land reform, central planks of their political programme. They had the support of many middle-class Afghans but failed to win enough support in the rural areas. Partly this was because the communists underestimated the strength of the feudal opposition, who called on Islamism, and Islamic family values, to rally the peasants. It was also because the communists subscribed to an undemocratic model of topdown revolution drawn from the Soviet Union. This was a model that invited the abuse of power. As they began to lose control of the country, the communists used force to impose their rule. In this process the emancipatory ideals they proclaimed became utterly contaminated by their brutality. This meant that the cause of land reform, and women’s rights, and the whole egalitarian project, was lost. It also left Islamism as the most effective way to unite the motley resistance parties after the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979. Eight years of war against the Soviets, and a decade of civil war, followed. The infrastructure of the country was utterly destroyed, some five million people became refugees, and less than half of Kabul had been cleared of landmines before the Americans began bombing the capital in October 2001. Through these tragic years, Islamists dominated the guerrilla war and also effectively controlled the refugee camps in Pakistan. Veiling and other practices associated with Islamic family values became a way of creating an oppositional Muslim identity

Nancy Lindisfarne • 33

and supporting resistance to the Soviet army. Curtailing women’s freedoms, and their right to middle-class work, was a way of masculinizing and militarizing power. In practice, however, only the warlords and their lieutenants were actually empowered by enforcing the laws against women. Most men were terrified and left helpless to protect their families against the brutalities of these tyrants. Meanwhile the new Islamism encouraged women to accept and admire their husbands and sons as brave warriors and willing martyrs, while shouldering the care of children and men disabled by war. For Afghans, khaki, as much as the burka, had become the new black (Pyne 2001). The incidence of rape is a measure of how gender relations changed over these twenty years. In the eight years following the Russian invasion, when millions of Afghans fled to refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran, there were almost no reports of rape by either the Afghans or the Russians (Lindisfarne 1997). Certainly this was not because the rape of women in war was unknown to the Afghans or the Russians. Rather, it was army commanders on both sides who did not allow it to happen. Then, during the ten years of the following civil war, a real change in gender relations occurred. For a decade, conservative mujahedeen (the Northern Alliance Islamists and the Taliban) systematically used the control of women as a way to claim legitimacy for themselves and to discredit others, and to terrify a population already brutalized by poverty and war. By the end of that decade, dominant styles of masculinity were so deformed that military rape became a reality, and a source of great fear, just as it had been in Viet Nam and in the Yugoslav war. Rape became a way of demarcating the warring groups. Rape shamed and feminized opponents, and it created terrible divisions among Afghan peasants and workers who had previously managed to get along together reasonably well. And along with rape came massacres and ethnic cleansing. Veiling, and the control of women, also served the leaders of the resistance parties (the Northern Alliance and the Taliban) in other, contradictory ways. These parties were funded by the US, and by the dictatorships of Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. By inventing increasingly vicious laws targeting women in the name of Islam, the resistance parties could pretend that they were purer, or more holy, than their corrupt foreign sponsors. It was a way of distancing themselves from their sponsors’ deceptions and political ambitions. It also distracted attention from the fact that virtually all the work of government and public service was in fact done by aid agencies that were also funded by the US, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Conversely, for the foreign sponsors, support for fundamentalist versions of Islam served their various national and imperial interests.

34 • Starting from Below

Thus in spite of the American government’s habitual Islamophobia, US rulers were prepared to ignore the oppression of women by Afghan Islamists, and after 1994, by their creatures the Taliban, just as they do for their allies, the Saudi ruling family. Oil politics is the key in the Saudi case. In Afghanistan, the US government sought Soviet expulsion from the country by proxy. In that war, and in the civil war that followed, US powers benefited politically and financially from the arms trade and drugs, and the possibility of controlling the vast gas and oil reserves in Central Asia. In varying degrees US interests overlapped with those of the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. These latter states also benefited directly from their support of political Islam abroad. It was a policy that damped down internal dissent while legitimizing imperial projects, such as Iran’s ambitions in Central Asia and the Saudi rulers’ interest in funding Sunni Islamism across the globe. Others too had an interest in tolerating the mujahedeen’s oppression of women. Many aid agencies could function only if they accepted the strictures on women’s freedom. To make this step more comfortable for themselves, they reified the new kind of gendered inequality and violence as something basic or ‘natural’ to ‘Afghan culture’, and ‘Afghan Islam’. For over twenty years, liberal aid agencies in the refugee camps and in Afghanistan have deemed ‘Afghan culture’ and ‘Afghan Islam’ sacrosanct areas where they should not interfere. It is notable that foreign aid agencies were pleading for the help of foreign troops in Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul in 2001. Without such troops the aid workers did not feel safe. This is unsurprising, when most aid agencies are not neutral but are funded by the invading powers. By comparison, aid workers in Palestine feel safe because Palestinians know the aid workers who come are on their side. It is also notable that much NGO effort in Afghanistan has been directed towards women, as if helping women is sufficient to salve a liberal conscience (see Kandiyoti 2005; cf. Lindisfarne 2006). ‘Afghan culture’ was sacrosanct until the US turned against its clients, the Taliban, between 1996 and 1998. Only then did we begin to hear about Afghan women. Since then, the US and UK officials who favour the continuing Afghan war have focused on veiled women, and ethnic and sectarian divisions, to underwrite stereotypes of Afghans as brutal, tribally organized natives. In November 2001, Laura Bush and Cherie Blair loudly lamented the plight of the veiled Afghan women, whose oppression no one can doubt (BBC Online News, 16 November 2001). But their comments were massively loaded. Wealthy warmongers’ wives were using the full weight of the capitalist/Orientalist paradigm to justify an imperialist

Nancy Lindisfarne • 35

war against some of the poorest people on earth by blaming the victims, who are both Afghan women and Afghan men. In this newest version of the Great Imperial Game, Afghans have been portrayed as people too backward to understand democracy and sort out their own affairs. These stereotypes were used to justify the crushing of democratic aspirations – first by the US-backed Taliban, and then by the American military itself after it turned against its erstwhile Taliban allies. Next the Afghans were saddled with the interim leader, Hamid Karzai, an American puppet who was formerly an official of the UNOCAL company with interests in the oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to the Persian Gulf. Since 9/11, there have been domestic consequences in EuroAmerica as well. The Afghan War has fueled Islamophobia and has led to hate crimes against women and men and the incarceration of Muslims. In the United States in the first few months of the Afghan War, some 11,000 people were detained without due process of law, yet only four of these people have been shown to have any kind of link at all with terrorist organizations (Davis 2001). Such a draconian policy is an extraordinarily powerful way of dividing working-class Muslims from other workers, and creating real fear of the price of dissent, domestically and abroad. The rhetoric of veiling has proved a versatile political tool. Generalizing arguments often appear compelling because they suggest that the ‘veil’, or ‘veiling’, is a unitary phenomenon. Yet the power of the imagery of the veil lies is its vacuity: everything depends on who is describing veiling, for whom and to what end. In Afghanistan, the veiling rhetoric has been used by Islamist and other Muslims to signal loyalties and interests that are not particularly religious or sectarian in any sense. Yet others, in both Euro-America and the Middle East, have focused on the veil to identify and castigate the ‘fundamentalist’ threat by contrasting the ‘repression of women’ with their own women’s ‘emancipation’.

Islamism and Gender in Turkey Let me pursue the theme of veiling but in another setting, this time in Turkey. The comparison is instructive. My argument here too rests on an understanding of how the capitalist/Orientalist paradigm works. The historical frame is again the struggle between socialists and communists in the twentieth century. My Turkish case study is less dramatic and violent than the Afghan one. Indeed, at first sight, it may seem only tenuously connected to the Afghan tragedy, and rather closer to home

36 • Starting from Below

– after all, the Turkish state is NATO’s ‘Muslim’ ally, and the Turkish state is keen to join the European Union. Yet just because of its apparent familiarity, the Turkish case makes it easier to ask why gendered inequalities are crucial to class hierarchies in nation states, and to imperialism now. There is currently an enormous debate about democracy, gender and Islam among the people in Turkey, across the Middle East and among Euro-American academics. The debate polarizes into two positions. To simplify, one position supports secular dictatorships (Arafat in Palestine was an example, as is Mubarak in Egypt, the Turkish military oligarchs and the Algerian state) on the grounds that they are modernizing and good for women. The other position supports Islamist (i.e. ‘Islamic fundamentalist’) movements, on the grounds that they are anti-imperialist and based among ordinary people. I take a third position. I argue for democracy and women’s liberation, but I am on the side of ordinary people, including Islamists, against the states and imperial system that oppress them. This is an important argument for many people who feel torn between authoritarian secularists and Islamicists. In Turkey since the 1980s there has been much discussion about ‘veiling’ and what is called in Turkey, as it is in France, ‘the headscarf question’. Much of what is said and written has a strongly classist character. Let me explain what I mean. Under the Turkish dictator Kemal Atatürk, a national Turkish identity became attached to a modernizing state based on a state capitalist economy. Since the 1950s, a democratic façade has partially disguised a military dictatorship that rules in favour of the urban bourgeoisie. From the beginning of the Turkish republic, an opposition between the labels ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ has been the coded way of talking about class hierarchy. Meanwhile, secularism has been treated as superior to both past styles of Muslim belief and practice and those of contemporary Islamicists. From the beginning, the Turkish army has been the embodiment and instrument of secular republicanism. For the last sixty years, Turkish army policy has been to secure and sustain the NATO alliance and US military funding. To do so, the army instigated the coups of 1960, 1970 and 1980. They invaded Cyprus in 1974 and went to war against the Kurds of Turkey after 1991. And, in a situation reminiscent of Algeria, the Turkish army was also behind the so-called Velvet Coup in 1997 that forced the democratically elected Islamist party out of government. There is no secret about military ties between the Turkish state, the Turkish army and the United States (see Chomsky 1999). But the balance of power changed somewhat when the Islamists again won

Nancy Lindisfarne • 37

democratic elections in 2002, and in 2003, bowing to popular pressure, the Turkish parliament refused to allow the Americans to launch their invasion of Iraq from Turkish soil. Richard Tapper and I did extended fieldwork about practised Islam in Turkey in the late 1970s and early 1980s (R. Tapper 1991; Lindisfarne 2000b, 2001). Recently I was fortunate to return to Turkey for a year to teach anthropology at a university in Istanbul. There I heard both students and teachers comment sympathetically about young women who were determined both to wear a headscarf and study in a university – something that is presently illegal in Turkey. The sympathizers’ support was often linked with a principled stance on human rights, with which I completely agree. But in any particular case, few were interested in the young woman’s own understanding of her decision – which some of her liberal supporters actually deplored. And relations between the young woman and her teachers were fraught, and made nearly impossible, by the fact that the state has placed the burden of monitoring women’s dress on the academics themselves. What became clear was that, above all else, the young woman was making a political statement. The headscarf stood for a rejection of the prevailing ideas and presiding powers in Turkey. It was a statement that there are other and better values than those of the present Turkish state. The headscarf said loudly, but without words, ‘I would rather appear superstitious, traditional, and working-class, than look like the daughter of a general’. In the headscarf debate, class and gender issues are completely intertwined (cf. Saktanber 2002; White 2002). However, the dominant position treats the headscarf as an argument between secularists and Islamicists, and in terms of relations between women and men, while class issues drop out of sight. Meanwhile the headscarves also act as class markers. In Turkey many so-called traditional women, peasants and many working-class women wear headscarves, while so-called modern middle- and ruling-class women do not. Now, through veiling, otherwise ‘modern’ Islamist women have reopened questions of class. Most Islamists in Turkey are from working-class backgrounds. The new versions of Islam promoted by the revivalist Islamist political parties are a class discourse that challenges bourgeois values. This is true even when the Islamist leaders use Islamism cynically to enrich themselves and join the ruling class. Because it is a class discourse, Islamism provokes considerable hostility among people of the ruling and middle classes. This makes the headscarf an icon of difference, and leads to headscarves being such an incendiary issue. Earlier in the century Atatürk’s imposition of a Western dress code served bourgeois interests. But what is confusing is that even when

38 • Starting from Below

dress is used to oppose neoliberal capitalism and imperialism, as in the case of Islamist veiling, it still serves the status quo. This is because it forefronts Islamism and gender, but not class. First, it allows bourgeois women and men to express class antagonism by deploring the patriarchal control of Islamist women. This is so, because whatever else she is saying, the young woman in the headscarf is also saying that she finds certain Islamicist forms of patriarchy acceptable. And because these enjoin her to mark her belief sartorially, she becomes visible in public in ways that male believers often are not. So Islamist women, and not Islamist men, are subject to discriminatory laws, along with middle- and ruling-class pity and scorn. The middle- and ruling-class arguments that decry Islamist forms of patriarchy have the same structure as another set of arguments used by the well-to-do. Such people often say Islamist women wear the veil to gain financial support or scholarships for themselves or their families from Islamicist parties. Such statements have the character of urban myths. They are based on the premise that the Islamists are insincere. The secularists accuse Islamists of being bought by the Islamist parties, while ignoring the fact that the secularists of the middle and ruling classes are also bought by the political parties of the centre-right through tax concessions, policies on army conscription and in many other ways. Islamist women are also convenient targets because they displace attention that might otherwise be paid to the sexism in ‘modern’, secularist women’s lives. Both the student with the headscarf and the woman without one are wearing clothes that are responses to dominant masculinities – though these masculine styles of control differ from each other, and are ranked and privileged in different arenas. ‘Modern’, secularist women in Turkey, as in Euro-America, are subject to patriarchal control in their homes, at work, and in public places. Turkish feminists have long been arguing that the ‘modern’ legal code of the country is replete with sexist biases. But few secularists decry, or even notice, these ‘modern’ sexist strictures because they, like ‘modern’ consumerist styles of dress, create and sustain class identity. Indeed, feminism in Turkey has itself had a troubled history, in large part because of the confusions sown by the rhetoric and practices of state secularism (see Sirman 1989; Arat 1993). In the United States and Britain, the feminisms of recent decades grew out of the civil rights and anti-war movements opposed to American imperialism. They are an emancipatory discourse, and depend on a mass movement from below. In Turkey, the impetus for middle-class feminism can be seen as an import from the West, and therefore as part of an imperialist, capitalist

Nancy Lindisfarne • 39

and modernizing political project. So working-class Turkish women who are opposed to the West have found themselves opposed to feminism, while middle-class feminists have all too often lined up with the authoritarian Turkish state. This has meant that the challenges offered by Islamist women to Western-style feminisms have had little resonance or impact, compared with the effects the scathing critiques of women of colour have had on the white, middle-class feminisms of Euro-America. Consider again the young Islamist student in the headscarf. Her scarf threatens privilege and inequality – that is why it is forbidden. But because the headscarf debate is also couched in terms of ‘religious freedom’, many of the political implications of political Islam – to do with welfare and greater social equality – are lost from view. The woman’s scarf also defends the inequality the Islamists want to see between men and women. There is a contradiction here between the headscarf as a sign of both quasi-socialist policies from below and a right-wing style of patriarchy. Many secularist middle-class feminists have been unable to deal with this contradiction because they accept that the only choice is between a conservative, yet secular Turkish state and conservative, working-class Islamism. This contradiction is, of course, also part of the story about the women in burkas in Afghanistan. Laura Bush and Cherie Blair would be in deep political trouble if they talked of the oppression of veiled women in Detroit or Bradford, or about the head coverings of Orthodox Jewish women in New York or London. But they can, with impunity, attack Islamist patriarchy abroad. And in doing so, they simultaneously denigrate the emancipatory anticapitalist elements of Islamism as well. We get an even better idea of why Laura Bush, Cherie Blair and the Turkish secularist women are so vociferous in their condemnation of Islamist patriarchy, if we start from a different place. This brings us to the most important general question raised by the headscarf debate – why are dominant political practices so highly gendered? A partial answer is that unequal gender relationships ensure, through their intimacy and near universality, that inequality and hierarchy are fundamental premises, and a continuing feature, of everyone’s everyday lives. Everyone, daily, experiences cross-gendered relations: in interactions between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, and lovers in heterosexual and homosexual relationships. All of us live gendered inequalities all the time. They infuse our bodies, our sexuality and our social practices. By contrast, class, sectarian or racialized inequalities do not necessarily affect each and every one of us so intimately, so regularly

40 • Starting from Below

and in such a marked way. Indeed, it is through gendered relationships that inequality is most completely naturalized. And through the capitalist/Orientalist paradigm, these gendered relationships can, in turn, be used to naturalize all other unequal social relations. They can be used to create wider expectations of inequality as ‘natural’ or ‘legitimate’ at work, in the law, and in nationalist and secularist discourse. To put it another way, inequalities at work, and elsewhere, would be far less acceptable if people had the daily experience of equality within intimate sexual and family relationships. If there were a radical discontinuity in people’s experiences of equality and inequality in different social settings, resistance to inequality would be far more widespread, easier, and much more threatening to those who are privileged in hierarchical societies. If we start from the idea that inequalities of gender reinforce, justify and reproduce other, wider social inequalities, including those perpetrated in the name of the Turkish state (and those perpetrated in the name of the British or American states), then we can look at the woman in the headscarf and ask how to fight inequality in her particular case. The answer, for me, is that I support her right to wear what she chooses, because I support the right of all women to dress as they please. This is because I support the right of women and men to control their own bodies and to control them in equal measure. I recognize too that her scarf is a protest against wider social inequalities. On that basis, I would want to argue with her personally that Islamist policies will lead to more inequality, between both women and men, and rich and poor. Such an argument links different systems of domination (whether based on patriarchy, Islamism or social class) and structural inequalities (such as those affecting the women who choose not to veil in Afghanistan and those who wish to veil in Turkey, as well as the voiceless Kurdish speakers in Turkey and the Muslim victims of hate crimes in Britain and America). It also makes clear the extent to which inequality of all kinds is underwritten by force and violence and how the freedom to dress as one chooses is directly connected with the freedom to speak or broadcast in any language one chooses in Turkey, or the freedom to be Muslim and safe in Euro-America.

Conclusions There are many local, civil wars being fought in the world today. Most of these remain invisible to us, though the violence and brutality we do see in our papers and on television in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine

Nancy Lindisfarne • 41

is astonishing and horrific. Yet in spite of this, it is remarkable how few ethnographies challenge the tyrannies that surround us. As John Pilger has written, ‘(w)e observe the “terrible tragedy” of human rights abuses, but do not even discuss, let alone deal with their true causes. An almost wilful refusal to trace the contours and true motives of great power, simply because it is “ours”, transforms those paid to keep the record straight to mere moral sightseers’ (1999, quoting David Edwards). The taboo against naming American imperialism has crippled the anthropology of the Middle East and, I would guess, the anthropology of the rest of the world as well. Much that is written is as full of holes as Swiss cheese; or more perniciously, it obfuscates, and reproduces new kinds of highly gendered capitalist/Orientalist discourse. The process of dumbing-down is deeply conservative. As Steve Bell has it, in George W. Bush’s Operation Blind Justice, Uncle Sam needs us to keep looking the other way (2001). Donaldo Macedo (1993) has described the academic and media coverage of George W. Bush’s Gulf War as ‘stupidifying’. A decade after that Gulf War, many academic anthropologists of the Middle East continue to be stupidified and silent. Yet 9/11, the Afghan and Iraq wars, and the new kind of censorship associated with George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s war on terrorism have created a world that is much more dangerous, and truly to be feared. This is a depressing scenario. But it is only one side of the story, and there do exist grounds for optimism. Of these, the most important for our purposes is that, contrary to what many academics imagine, it would seem that academics follow, rather than lead, popular interests and concerns. And where dissent is unrepresented by public voices, it is difficult to predict the rise of a revolutionary movement. In this respect the anticapitalist demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in November 1999 are a watershed. For years before Seattle, the majority of people throughout the world had been struggling against structural adjustment programmes, Third World debt, immigration controls and other aspects of the new, neoliberal, world order (see Walton and Seddon 1994). The level of protest is great in Turkey, in India, in China, though we may hear little about it. Popular movements have fought for democracy in Indonesia, Serbia and Venezuela. Since Seattle, anticapitalists have won discursive space in First World political debates in government and in the media. After Seattle, Naomi Klein’s book No Logo stayed on the non-fiction best-seller list for over a year. Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men, a hilarious and uncompromising condemnation of George W. Bush’s administration, topped the bestseller lists in the New York Times, on Amazon.com, and on Waterstones’ list in the UK.

42 • Starting from Below

In early March 2002, some hundreds of thousands of trade unionists and anticapitalists demonstrated against privatization in Barcelona. A week later, some three million people did the same in Rome, and many in that crowd, and in Barcelona, were wearing Palestinian headscarves. Then on 14 February 2003, Stop-the-War brought millions to the streets worldwide. This popular movement delayed the onset of the Iraq war, keeping the imperialist adventurers under extraordinary public pressure and contributing directly to their evident failure at home and abroad. If academic fashion follows popular fashion, we have also begun to see some heartening changes in anthropological concerns, as can be seen at a glance in recent issues of the journal Anthropology Today, or in the discussion of sexual violence as a weapon of war and impediment to peace in Forced Migration Review (2007). Indeed, I would like to think that this paper is one further manifestation of a new wave of political activism in the academy. So just do the feminist thing. Ask those awkward questions, systematically and repeatedly, about gender and American imperialism now. This chapter is a revised version of The Richards Lecture, sponsored by the Centre for Cross-Culture Research on Women and Gender, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford, 22 May 2002 and published in Critique of Anthropology 22(4) (2002): 403–423.

Note 1. For background, see R. Tapper 1983; Albert and Shalom 2001; Cooley 1999; Rashid 2000; Neale, 2001; Ali 2002, Lindisfarne 2002; Khattak 2002. Cf. Banerjee 2000.

References Albert, M. and S. R. Shalom. 2001. ‘The War in Afghanistan’, Z Magazine, 14 October. Retrieved 16 October 2001 from http://www.Zmag.Org/55quhtm Alexander, A. 2001. ‘The Crisis in the Middle East’, International Socialism, Special Issue on Imperialism: Globalisation, the State and War, 93: 59–80. Ali, T. 2002. The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. London: Verso. Arat, Y. 1993. ‘Women’s Studies in Turkey: From Kemalism to Feminism’, New Perspectives on Turkey 6(2): 119–135. Asad, T. 1991. ‘Afterword: From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthropology of Western Hegemony’, in G. W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge. History of Anthropology, Vol. 7. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Nancy Lindisfarne • 43

Baker, P. L. 1997. ‘Politics of Dress: The Dress Reform Laws of 1920–1930s Iran’, in N. Lindisfarne-Tapper and B. Ingham (eds), Languages of Dress in the Middle East. London: Curzon, pp. 178–192. Banerjee, M. 2000. The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier. Oxford: James Curry. Bell, S. 2001. ‘Operation Blind Justice’, The Guardian, 25 October, p. 22. Bourdieu, P. 1962 (1958). The Algerians. Boston: Beacon. ———.1998. Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time. Oxford: Polity. Chomsky, N. 1999. The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo. London: Pluto. Cooley, J. K. 1999. Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism. London: Pluto. Davis, M. 2001. ‘The Flames of New York’, New Left Review 12 (November/December): 34–50. Di Leonardo, M. 1998. Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Enloe, C. 1989. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. London: Pandora. ———. 1993. The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Farmer, P. 1999. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Berkeley: University of California Press. Forced Migration Review. 2007. Special Issue on ‘Sexual Violence: Weapon of War, Impediment to Peace’, 27: 5–60. Gledhill, J. 1994. Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics. London: Pluto. Johnson, D. 2002. ‘Pierre Bourdieu’, The Guardian, 28 January, p.18. Kandiyoti, D. 2005. ‘The Politics of Gender and Reconstruction in Afghanistan’, Occasional Paper 4. Geneva: UNRISD. Khattak, S. G. 2002. ‘Afghan Women: Bombed to Be Liberated?’ Merip: Middle East Report 32/1(222): 18–23. Lindisfarne, N. 1997. ‘Questions of Gender and the Ethnography of Afghanistan’, in J. Hainard and R. Kaehr (eds), Dire les autres: Reflexions et pratiques ethnologiques. Lausanne: Editions Payot, pp. 61–73. ———. 2000a. Dancing in Damascus. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2000b. ‘Anthropology and Exceptionalism’, Folklor ve Edebiyat 22(2): 105–112. ———. 2001. Elhamdülillah Laikiz: Cinsiyet, Íslâm ve Türk Cumhuriyetc˘ilig˘i [Thank God, We’re Secular: Gender, Islam and Turkish Republicanism]. Ankara: Iletisim. ———. 2002. ‘Gendering the Afghan War’, in Eclipse: The Anti-War Review. Brighton: University of Sussex. ———. 2006, ‘Saving Women and Children First?’ Anthropology Today 22(3): 23. Macedo, D. 1993. ‘Literacy for Stupidification: The Pedagogy of Big Lies’, Harvard Educational Review 63(2): 183–206. McClintock, A. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Class in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge. Nader, L. 1969. ‘Up the Anthropologists – Perspectives Gained from Studying Up’, in D. Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon, pp. 284–311. Neale, J. 2001. ‘The Long Torment of Afghanistan’, International Socialism, Special Issue on Imperialism: Globalisation, the State and War 93: 31–58. ———. 2002. You Are the G8, We Are Six Million: Genoa, 2001. London: Vision. Nordstrom, C. 2004. Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California.

44 • Starting from Below

Norton, J. 1997. ‘Faith and Fashion in Turkey’, in N. Lindisfarne and B. Ingham (eds), Languages of Dress in the Middle East. London: Curzon, pp. 149–177. Pilger, J. 1999. ‘Moral Sightseeing by the West’, The Guardian Weekly, 20 June, p.3. Price, D. 2002. ‘Past Wars, Present Dangers, Future Anthropologists’, Anthropology Today 18(1): 3–5. Pyne, K. 2001, ‘Khaki is the New Black’, Private Eye 1038 (5–18 October): 20. Rashid, A. 2000. Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Said, E. W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Saktanber, A. 2002. Living Islam: Women, Religion and the Politicization of Culture in Turkey. London, New York: I.B. Tauris. Scanlon, J. 1995. Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender and the Promises of Consumer Culture. New York: Routledge. Sirman, N. 1989. ‘Feminism in Turkey: A Short History’, New Perspectives on Turkey 3(1): 1–34. Tapper, N. 1991. Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tapper, R. (ed.). 1983. The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan. London: Croom Helm. ———. (ed.). 1991. Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics and Literature in a Secular State. London: I.B. Tauris. Walton, J. and D. Seddon. 1994. Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global Adjustment. Oxford: Blackwell. White, J. 2002. Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics. Seattle: University of Washington. Wolfreys, J. 2002. ‘Pierre Bourdieu: Voice of Resistance’, International Socialism 94: 97–102.

Chapter 2

ARRIVING IN NOWHERE LAND: STUDYING AN ISLAMIC SUFI ORDER IN LONDON Tayfun Atay

For more than two decades, certain theoretical and methodological reorientations have opened the way to lively debates in social anthropology. At the heart of these debates is a shift in the interest of anthropological practice from the description of ‘other cultures’ to the investigation of the anthropologist’s own position in fieldwork.1 Anthropologists are now expected to take into consideration their own experience in the field, and to construct the text on the basis of ‘reflections’ upon interactions with people in the field (Crick 1982; Tedlock 1991).2 Many times, this is complicated by the political constraints of the fieldwork situation, which are mostly out of the anthropologist’s control (see Escobar 1993). In this paper, I attempt to accommodate this self-reflectionist concern and describe the constraints, pressures and worries under which I conducted fieldwork in a religiously charged environment in London. This ‘anthropological autobiography’ (Lewis 1988: 366) aims particularly to contribute to our understanding of the ‘politics’ of ethnographic writing.3

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

11/6/09

5:27 PM

Page 46

46 • Studying an Islamic Sufi Order in London

The Field Between 1991 and 1992, I conducted anthropological fieldwork on the Muslim mystic community of Sheikh Nazım Kıbrısi in London. My aim was to analyse the discourse and social practice of the community. I focused particularly on the members’ definitions of and reflections upon themselves and the wider ‘modern’ society outside their closeknit community. I entered this project from a background of complete profanity, having been brought up in those segments of Turkish society that wore their faith lightly, with a limited formal and informal family religious education. I knew next to nothing about even the most basic tenets of Islamic belief and worship. In addition, my position was clearly rooted in the secular, and more specifically leftist, ‘camp’ within the well-known sociopolitical polarization between secularism and Islam(ism) in contemporary Turkey.4 This was my personal, and no doubt also cultural and political position as an anthropologist at the threshold of fieldwork in Sheikh Nazım’s community. A well-known Sufi master (mürs¸id) with disciples (mürids) all over the world, Nazım Kıbrısi is a sheikh of the Naqshbandi order.5 Originally a Turkish Cypriot, Sheikh Nazım has come to Britain every year since 1974. He usually comes for the Muslim holy month Ramadan and stays for two to three months each time. Apart from his regular yearly visits to Britain, he also travels internationally to meet his disciples. Britain, however, is the country he gives utmost importance to. For him it is a significant launchpad for his mission of ‘spreading the message of Islam in the West’. The sheikh’s permanent residence is his own ‘lodge’ (tekke) in Lefke, a small town in the Turkish-controlled northern part of Cyprus. Yet he spends little time there, as he chooses to travel all over the world to communicate his message and recruit new members to his order. As a ‘travelling sheikh’ he has well-established circles of followers in different parts of the world. While the sheikh is away from London, his disciples maintain activities such as ritual congregations, special meetings, private invitations and regular religious conversations. These activities are carried on by subgroups in separate locations. They gather in mosques or private homes around London and in other major cities such as Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester. The main factors associated with groupings among the disciples are ethno-national affiliation, linguistic background, location in London, age, gender and friendship. But once the sheikh arrives at London, these meetings and activities stop and all disciples from different subgroups join the circle of activities he leads.6

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

2:38 PM

Page 47

Tayfun Atay • 47

Fearing the ‘Green Flag’: The Way to the Field My first contact with Sheikh Nazım and his Naqshbandi community in London was in 1990. Some Turkish postgraduate students took me to a mosque in South London during Ramadan. I was doing an MA and planning to go on to a PhD on Sufism. When I mentioned this idea of studying Sufism to one of these friends, he told me about the activities of the Naqshbandi Sufi order in London, led by a sheikh of Turkish Cypriot origin, which he and his friends had attended on several occasions. After we talked a bit more, my friend suggested I join them on their next visit to that mosque, where the Sheikh and his followers gathered to perform the zikir ceremony, a recitation of names and attributes of Allah, every Thursday night. I accepted enthusiastically. The first thing that struck me in the mosque was the obvious heterogeneity of people from different national and ethnic origins, and particularly the visibility of white Westerners who had converted to Islam. When we entered the mosque, everyone was waiting for the sheikh to come and start the ceremony. At the corners of the mosque people were selling religious materials: the sheikh’s books, cassettes and videos of his recorded talks, and his pictures and posters. The sheikh arrived, followed by an entourage of people. His appearance was striking. Habibis gives a detailed and eloquent description: ‘Sheikh Nazım wears traditional Muslim clothes, something which few urban dwellers do. This marks him out as a religious leader. These include a green or snow white turban, baggy green trousers, green jacket, or green coat. He has a long white beard, large, striking, deep-set green eyes, high cheek-bones and a domed forehead. … His facial expression is reserved, wise and sympathetic but with a hint of steel. These features give him an immediately arresting appearance’ (Habibis 1992: 55). The crowd in the mosque rushed towards him, jostling each other in their attempt to reach him and kiss his hands and feet. He moved through them with difficulty to the front of the mosque and immediately started to perform the night prayer (yatsı), to be followed by the zikir ceremony. Everybody in the mosque joined him in prayer. These first visions of Sheikh Nazım’s community filled me with excitement and confusion. Above all, I found myself unable to behave properly in this religious atmosphere. As I mentioned, I was not religious and was unfamiliar with Muslim practices of worship. Thus, I was able to do my ablutions only by following directions given by a friend. I prayed by simply imitating the person next to me. Only later did I realize that the experienced worshippers must have noticed what I was doing. During the ceremony I watched the others, who seemed to me to be transfixed by its spiritual aura. After the ceremony, people

48 • Studying an Islamic Sufi Order in London

started to chant religious phrases that were unfamiliar to me, and which I learnt properly only later during fieldwork. Meanwhile, people were moving slowly towards the sheikh. In order to see him and what was happening there, I joined them. As I gradually came closer, I noticed that on reaching the sheikh, the worshippers showed their respect by kissing his hands and feet. I realized with alarm that if I continued to move forward, very soon I too would be in front of him and would have to kiss his hand, though not necessarily his foot. To me, this was unacceptable if not unimaginable, so I turned back and left the crowd, though with difficulty, trying not to draw attention to my inappropriate manners. Afterwards, a young Turkish Cypriot, one of the disciples and a friend of my friends, asked me if I had kissed the sheikh’s hand. I can remember how furious my ‘No!’ was, for I felt offended by his question. It was this disciple who would play a crucial role in giving me access to the community and introducing me to one of its most prominent members a year later. Nothing that I saw in the mosque, however, upset me more than someone waving a ‘green flag’ behind the sheikh as the people were greeting him and chanting religious phrases. Everyone familiar with Muslim culture knows that green is the colour of Islam. At that moment, however, the green flag I saw brought to my mind the Kubilay incident of 1930. In secular national discourse this is a landmark event in the history of modern Turkey. That year, Menemen, a small town in western Turkey, witnessed a terrifying event with nationwide consequences. A number of people, said to have come from outside the town, attempted to start a religious revolt against the secular regime established by Kemal Atatürk in 1923. The instigators had millenarian motives, and their leader claimed to be the expected Mahdi. A young army officer, Kubilay, was on duty in the town. He stood up against them, but they knocked him down and the rebel leader hacked off his head. The authorities soon regained control of the town and punished the rebels, also arresting many senior religious figures across the country who were accused of links with the perpetrators. The government blamed the incident on a Naqshbandi sheikh who was living in Istanbul at the time. Today, the event is kept alive in people’s minds, and secular Turks in particular consider it the most ferocious example of Islamic religious fanaticism directed against the foundations of the modern, secular republic (see Üstün 1973). The Kubilay incident is taught in schools and officially commemorated every year.7 It is said that the insurgents used a green flag to incite people to join their rebellion. The flag had been taken from a mosque and had the words Kelime-i Tevhid emblazoned on it.8 According to the story the insurgents even put

Tayfun Atay • 49

Kubilay’s head on a flagpole and paraded their trophy across the town. In the minds of most Turkish secularists, the green flag recalls this ferocious act as a symbol of ‘bloodthirsty delinquents’ who are ready to kill in the name of religion. The green flag waved in that South London mosque behind a Naqshbandi sheikh reminded me of the Kubilay incident, a story that had been part of my secular upbringing. My first encounter with Sheikh Nazım’s community aroused deep feelings of insecurity in me about this ‘green’ world of Islam. This was how I felt about Islam before I started fieldwork. The same feelings were still at work during my initial attempts to get access to the community and during the early stages of fieldwork. What was it that constituted these feelings? Why did I refrain from moving towards the sheikh and reject the act of kissing his hand? Why did I find the question whether I had kissed the sheikh’s hand so offensive to my integrity? Why was I made so uncomfortable by the green flag? What was happening here? I did not ask these questions at the time. Only halfway through fieldwork, when I realized that my feelings about kissing the sheikh’s hand and the Muslim ‘green’ had changed, did these questions start to bother me. By that time kissing the sheikh’s hand had become part of my daily routine, and I was wearing a green cap not only at community meetings, ritual gatherings and prayers, but also on the streets of London. The more I participated in the life of the community, the more I lived the practical requirements of an Islamic lifestyle. Perhaps nothing indicates the changes more clearly than the following. One difficulty I had early in fieldwork was using the Muslim greetings Selamünaleyküm (‘peace be with you’) and, in reply, Aleykümselam. Whenever I had to use them, I felt very strange. In due course I got used to saying them and even did so spontaneously: I had adapted to the discourse of the community. One day I witnessed my wife’s difficulty in replying to such a greeting by a female disciple, and I challenged her. I now found my wife’s attitude strange and was criticizing her for doing just what I used to do. Clearly, my feelings of estrangement had shifted. It seemed as if I had left one world and entered another while seeking ethnographic knowledge. It was through this epistemological transformation that I realized the strength and the compulsion of a particular discourse and became aware of how difficult it can be to consider the world of ‘others’ on equal terms with one’s own. However, the process of fieldwork had not turned me into a devout Muslim. What happened was simply that my perception of the ‘Muslim green’ had radically changed. The symbol was not transformed into the sublime, but I had stopped fearing it. By the time fieldwork drew to a close, the ‘green flag’ did not challenge my sense of self anymore.

50 • Studying an Islamic Sufi Order in London

More generally, this transformative self-experience provided me with significant insights into the deep-seated beliefs and stereotypes about religion in Turkey. These convictions are fed by the positivistmodernist ideology of the Republican period. They have crucially informed the laicist-modernist segments of society, including the civil service and the military as well as the socialist left. This ‘republican epistemology’9 does not grant religion any social legitimacy. Religion cannot be considered a social phenomenon, nor a form of ideology, nor a socio-psychological response to serious ontological concerns of individuals. Rather, under the guidance of Turkish laicist ideology, debates and discussions over religion exclusively centre on the political use of religion. It is regarded as an exploitation of ‘innocent’ creeds and feelings of the populace, and as a device of ‘fanatical movements’ that aim to weaken and destroy the secular regime. Related idioms commonly reproduced and circulated in these debates are hurafe, ‘superstition’, örümcek kafalılık, ‘being old-fashioned’, ortaçag˘ karanlıg˘ı, ‘medieval darkness’, and finally irtica, ‘backwardness’, a common and infamously popular key term that embraces all the previous ones. Instead of being scholarly or sociological, these concepts are both ideological and emotional. They are adopted by most leftist intellectuals and movements and by the ‘modern’, secular and liberal circles in Turkey. Clearly Marx himself was more analytical and empathetic in his approach to religion than a great majority of Turkish Marxists! His own atheistic stance did not prevent him from analysing religion as a significant outcome of human sociality. The Turkish left, however, is not atheist but ‘anti-theist’, that is, it conceives of religion as an ‘abnormality’ in social life. A significant exception to this general ‘antitheist’ stance of the left is Ertug˘rul Kürkçü, a famous socialist activist of the late 1960s and early 1970s who remains a well-known leftist intellectual today. His critique of the movement to which he belongs is succinct: ‘In Turkish Marxism, Islam has always been taken as an obscurantism per se; a product of false consciousness that people, once their eyes were opened to “reality”, would get rid of; and a state of ignorance that would be wiped out after “our” coming to power. The fact that Kemalism, despite all civilizing and Westernizing efforts, is in the end a Middle Eastern (Islam included) reality was ignored by Turkish Marxism, which has more or less shared the same cultural space with the Kemalists’ (Kürkçü 1994: 28). The most problematic implication of this ‘anti-theist’ discourse is the restraint it produces on what can be asked about religion. The questions that are taken as valid derive from the conception of religion as an abnormality: ‘To what extent can this “abnormality” [i.e., religion] harm “our” social structure?’; ‘What are the sources that feed

Tayfun Atay • 51

this “abnormality”?’; ‘How can one overcome this “abnormality”?’ and so on. Take my case: the questions the secular establishment would typically address in a study on Sufism would be: ‘In what ways do the Sufi orders (tarikats) threaten the government?’; ‘What sort of “evil” forces are backing them?’; ‘How do the leaders of the orders politically and economically exploit the people around them?’ etc. Questions such as ‘How and in what ways do the members of the Sufi orders constitute their Islamic identity and distinguish themselves from other Islamic groups?’; ‘In what ways does the discourse of such a community challenge the worldview and values of the “modern” world?’ or ‘What are the inner dimensions of conflict and competition within these circles?’ are all taken as inappropriate and irrelevant. Such questions are met with suspicion, as if they concealed the hidden purpose of advocacy for these movements. For instance, one leftist Turkish journalist who produced a significant account of Islamic movements in contemporary Turkey mentions how his close, secular leftist friends denounced him because of his intimate dialogue with Islamists during his study (Çakır 1990: 10). On returning to Turkey after completion of my PhD I was treated in a similarly suspicious way. Many of my close relatives and friends who identified themselves as ‘modern’, ‘secular’ and/or ‘leftist-socialist’ found it difficult to accept my interest in religion. I had intended to study an Islamic community with the objective of empathetic understanding, rather than rejecting it a priori as a symbol of backwardness. This made me the target of prejudiced and sarcastic comments.

Early Difficulties and Worries in Fieldwork The first part of my fieldwork lasted from the beginning of July in 1991 until the sheikh’s arrival in London in March 1992. This was a period of adjustment to the life of the London Naqshbandis. To become a participant-observer within this religious community, I needed some experience in Islamic religious practice. I spent several weeks reading guide books about Islamic practices of worship and trained myself in the basic rules on ablution, prayer and religious self-conduct. Besides, I memorized the verses of the Koran that are chanted during prayers and ceremonies. I had to reorganize my life and that of my family according to the requirements of this new world that I intended to investigate. This proved to be difficult and exasperating. Nothing, however, was more frustrating than the following incident:

52 • Studying an Islamic Sufi Order in London

One night, I was invited to a meeting of young Turkish disciples in a private home. The meeting had been called to give two Turkish Muslims from Macedonia the opportunity to raise their concerns. They were asking for help to alleviate the difficult situation of Muslims in Albania, as one of them was of Albanian origin. They said they needed food and books on Islam, rather than money, to help counter the Christian missionary activity (both Catholic and Orthodox) that had started to intensify after the collapse of the communist regime. Albania’s majority were Muslim. After a long discussion about what should be done, one of the disciples suggested calling the London correspondent of a moderate Islamic newspaper published in Turkey and inviting him to interview the two guests. In this way, they hoped, the desperate situation of Albanian Muslims would reach a wider audience. Though it was very late, the journalist came and recorded an interview with them. After the interview he posed for a picture with the two Macedonians, which he intended to use in the paper. He also suggested taking a photograph of everybody present as a souvenir. While everybody posed for the picture I chose to stay aside, but when one of the disciples asked me to join them, I complied. A couple of weeks later, this picture appeared on the second page of that newspaper. My first reaction was regret: I worried that if the picture was seen by my family, relations and friends in Turkey, they might think that I had gone religious (‘converted’) and become a member of an Islamic organization. I was certain that none of them would realize that it was part of my fieldwork. The next day, I rushed to my PhD supervisor to tell him what had happened and ask his advice. When he saw the picture in the paper, far from showing any sign of uneasiness, he said cheerfully, ‘Well, it seems fieldwork is going very well!’ I was immediately reminded that I was in an academic setting, where worries stemming from my cultural background and the particular historical and political circumstances of my country obviously did not obtain.

Humiliated by the Sheikh The sheikh came to London in early March 1992, just before the beginning of Ramadan. The three months of his stay in London constituted the most intensive and difficult part of my fieldwork. Throughout this period I tried to follow him everywhere, day and night. I was able to conduct one extended interview with him. More importantly, I had the privilege of joining him on his journey to a number of British cities. My first personal contact with the sheikh was

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

3:01 PM

Page 53

Tayfun Atay • 53

at the airport where I was trying to photograph his reunion with his followers. Like the others, I kissed his hand and said ‘Welcome!’, to which he responded, ‘Thanks’. Some of his disciples took this opportunity to hurriedly introduce me to him, explaining that I was a student from Turkey doing research on Sufism. His short reply was ‘Okay, let him do it’. We had our first proper encounter at his residence. It was a very inconvenient time, after the performance of a long morning prayer at around 6 AM. It was the worst and most painful experience of my fieldwork and, without exaggeration, of my life. For a while it left me uncertain whether to continue fieldwork. My feelings of humiliation and fear seemed unbearable. It was a harsh realization that the sheikh and his community had considerable ‘power’ over me as an outsider and researcher, and that I was rather weak and inferior before them. After the prayers, the sheikh started to chat with the disciples, most of whom were Turkish. Then he recognized me and asked what kind of study I was doing on Sufism. I replied that I intended to write a thesis. He asked whether I could find enough written sources on the subject in the libraries here in London. I pointed out that the library of my school was very rich in sources on Islam. He enquired whether I knew Arabic or Ottoman Turkish (which was written with the Arabic script). As soon as I answered ‘No’, he burst out, ‘Shame on you!’. Turning to the disciples, he sarcastically continued, ‘He knows neither Arabic nor Ottoman, but he wants to study Sufism!’ I was struck dumb. His angry outburst soon transformed into an attack on the present Turkish regime, for which I became personally responsible: ‘This country [Turkey] has shamelessly done what no country of nonbelievers did to Islam! They are sending him [me!] here [to the West] to study Islam. He knows neither old (Ottoman) Turkish nor Arabic, but he studies tasavvuf [Sufism]. He will learn some distorted things from the Yahudi [Jews], then write some nonsense and he will be a “doctor”. It is all to harm Islam!’10 I was devastated. There was no hope of support from the disciples whom I knew and with whom I was on good terms. The sheikh continued his bitter words, making me the scapegoat for the Turkish regime’s anti-Islamic policies. Staring at me, frowning, he asked, ‘Is this [Britain] an Islamic country? How can you study and learn about Islam here? You should have gone to Islamic places, like Damascus!’ Every time I attempted to produce a response to these angry and hostile questions, I seemed to make things worse. I lost my selfconfidence. All I wanted was just not to be there. His questions and scathing comments never seemed to stop. However, when he asked me how long I had been in London, and I replied nearly three years, he was surprised, saying he had thought I had only recently arrived. Toning down his anger, he now (sarcastically) congratulated me on

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

3:01 PM

Page 54

54 • Studying an Islamic Sufi Order in London

finding them at last, after three years. At that moment, another young Turkish disciple, who was worried about having accepted me into their gathering, claimed that I had met them only recently. He mentioned the name of the disciple who had introduced us, whose father was one of the sheikh’s distinguished followers in Cyprus. The sheikh now turned to me with a facial expression that was asking how I had met that disciple. This was my chance to talk. I explained that I had met that young man two years ago, when I first attended a zikir ceremony led by sheikh in the mosque in South London. I emphasized how I had become fascinated with what I saw there and decided to learn more about him as a Naqshbandi sheikh and his community in London. This was why I was in a Western country, to study a subject related to Islam. Indeed, it was a fact, I went on to say, that throughout history Islam had spread mostly by means of the Sufi orders and the Sufi sheikhs. This seemed to be still the case today, since it was Sufism that brought most Western converts to Islam. What I had seen in that mosque two years before had demonstrated this to me and stimulated my interest in Islam in the West in general, and in the activities of his community in London in particular. I pointed out that I appreciated his opinion about the importance of knowing Arabic and old (Ottoman) Turkish. However, this was also one of my reasons for studying a contemporary Muslim community such as his, rather than making a historical study. In any case I was very sorry to have bothered him. With these words, I finished. The sheikh seemed pleased with my response. First he said that he was ready to help me if I prepared my questions. He added that he liked the way I looked at the issue of Sufism and the Sufi orders in Islam, and pointed out that these ideas were not even held by the principal religious authorities in Turkey. He congratulated me on thinking in this way and I thanked him and kissed his hand. That was the end of this long and nerve-racking conversation. When I came home I was mentally and emotionally distraught. The dominant image in my mind was my speechless, helpless and pitiful position in front of the sheikh and his disciples. I was uncertain whether I could bring myself to continue with my fieldwork. It took time for me to control these feelings and realize that the most important result of this distressing experience was that I had survived. No matter how ashamed I was, in the end the sheikh had welcomed me and offered to help. It could have been much worse – he could have asked me to leave. In the end, I had made my point. I buried my injuries and prepared for the ‘adventure’ of the next day in the field.

Tayfun Atay • 55

Becoming Friends The impact of the stressful meeting made me keep a low profile for a while. The disciples who were my friends explained that the sheikh’s outburst was not really targeted at me personally, but at the ‘antireligious’ Turkish state. Turkey had been responsible for my ignorance in choosing to learn about Islam and Sufism in the West. They emphasized that he had wanted to draw my attention to the ‘Jewish traps’ in the university. Gradually I rebuilt my self-confidence and started to follow the sheikh closely everywhere he went. This was during Ramadan, when everything was scheduled according to the requirements of this holy month, such as fasting, extra prayers and a slower-paced life. Now the sheikh even showed an active interest in me. At one of the fast-breaking (iftar) invitations, he called me by my name for the first time and asked how I was. A middle-aged Turkish disciple told me, ‘The sheikh called you by your name. This means you have been recorded in his book. From now on, you have no worries in the world’. Our relationship progressed at the end of Ramadan. After he had completed his address (sohbet) following a noon prayer, the sheikh was answering questions from his disciples and suddenly nodded towards me. I told him that I had prepared my questions and was ready to ask them. He welcomed the idea graciously and decided that our interview should be a kind of religious address (sohbet) in Turkish and that his Turkish disciples should be there to listen. He called a Turkish man from the audience and asked him to make the necessary arrangements for this public dialogue the same night. It was so quick, but I had been prepared for a long time. I had designed my questions for him with certain objectives. Firstly I aimed to get information about his family, educational and religious background. I asked how he had become involved in Sufism, whether there had been any influence from his parents, what were the main aspects of his life and training as a Sufi adept in Damascus;11 how he had started to travel around the world, what his initial objectives were, and so on. Secondly, I wanted to clarify his Islamic and Sufi position by asking about his method of teaching Islam, the basic concepts of Sufism, the difference between an Islamic scholar (alim) and a sheikh, and the place and importance of the Naqshbandi order vis-à-vis other orders. Thirdly, I introduced questions that the disciples had requested I ask, such as when and how the mahdi, or ‘saviour’, would appear. Above all, however, I wanted to demonstrate to both the sheikh and the community members that I was sincere and unthreatening and had no other aim but to learn about Sufism and the Sufi orders. In so doing, I hoped to dispel any suspicions they might still have.

56 • Studying an Islamic Sufi Order in London

The interview was completed with apparent success. The sheikh seemed to be satisfied with the content and length of the questions and the style I used to present them. The disciples later expressed their appreciation. For the first time in my fieldwork, I felt relieved and fully confident. The third and final step in my improving relationship with the sheikh was his invitation to join him on his trip to other cities in Britain. Most disciples competed to join him, but only some succeeded in gaining his permission. This year was no exception. In response to the constant inquiries the sheikh had asked them not to follow him, since the places he was going to did not have adequate accommodation for so many people. I refrained from asking to join him. After the distressing experiences of the past, I did not consider myself in a position to do so. After all, my fieldwork was mainly covering London. I had prepared myself for a week’s break, which I desperately needed, when the unexpected happened. After having led the late afternoon prayer, the sheikh called my name, looked around to find me, and said, ‘You, come with us! Get in this man’s car. You should come for your study.’ Excited, I got in the car and started my journey with the sheikh and a group of ‘lucky’ disciples to the northern parts of Britain. Throughout the journey, the sheikh gave numerous talks to audiences in private houses, mosques and communal halls, and led prayers and zikir ceremonies. He listened to people’s grievances and questions and gave them advice. We stopped at petrol stations on the motorway to perform the daily prayers. Upon returning to London, it was clear that my relationship with the sheikh had finally relaxed. I was no longer struggling to create opportunities to meet him. The sheikh himself started to take me to the houses where he was invited for dinner. On these occasions, he talked about topics related to my interests or those he wanted me to hear. The sheikh’s departure from London in early June 1992 marked the end of the main phase of my fieldwork.

The Pressures From the beginning, I tried to make my position clear to the members of the order: I was a student researcher who, having chosen Sufism and their Sufi order as a research topic, would like to join their gatherings for the purpose of learning. At first, the devotees seemed to be satisfied with this explanation for my presence, though sometimes they revealed worries about my position as an outsider. However, as time

Tayfun Atay • 57

went on, they started to question the validity of what I was doing. They felt that a person who did not commit himself wholeheartedly to the Sufi way could not grasp what it was really about. They argued that one could not uncover the essence of Sufism by simply observing what Sufi practitioners were doing or how they were living. True learning and understanding could only be gained in self-experience. Implicitly they tried to persuade me to become a disciple. As a young Turkish man put it: You cannot understand anything about Sufi ways unless you feel it from your heart. [Therefore] you should be a disciple to understand what it is. You can see or watch us; you can talk with us; but this only gives you the ‘surface’. You cannot understand its essence. Yours [my way of learning about Sufism] is similar to learning how to drive a car without holding the steering wheel. You can read a lot of books on how to drive. But you still cannot know how to drive unless you do it. You have to drive the car to learn how a car moves and what driving is.

Particularly in the early phases of fieldwork, I quite often was confronted with similar statements. In the beginning, when I was pressured to become a disciple, I kept silent and smiled – probably because I felt helpless. Later, however, I responded by saying that I was not yet ready, since discipleship was not at all an easy task that could be achieved by everyone, but a rigorous challenge met only by some courageous and experienced persons. Finally, in the places where even these statements did not work, I said, ‘Let’s wait until the sheikh comes to London’. Some disciples responded to their fellows’ attempts to convince me by pointing out that only the sheikh himself could pull me into the circle of the Sufi order. They felt that academics were ‘naturally’ more stubborn than ordinary people. Meanwhile, I managed to develop a tactical response: using the special terminology of Sufism, I said, ‘I am a muhib [one who has a certain affinity for a Sufi order, but is not necessarily affiliated with it] rather than a mürid [disciple]’. Only in one particular situation did I give in to communal pressure. It was just before the sheikh arrived, and I had gone to a zikir gathering of Indo-Pakistani disciples in Slough. The ceremony was led by a prominent Arab disciple. As usual, he first made a general speech and explained to the audience why the zikir was important in Islam. He touched on the Sufi understanding of Islam and the hostility of some of the other Muslim creeds to Sufism. He pointed out that the ceremony would be followed by a bey’at, or ‘oath of allegiance’ rite, and that anyone who wished to become a disciple should then come forward to take the oath from him.

58 • Studying an Islamic Sufi Order in London

After the performance, he praised again the virtues of Sufi Islam and the zikir ceremony. Then he stood, looked around, and asked, ‘Who wants to take bey’at?’ At that moment, the whole crowd moved towards him. Suddenly he turned his face towards me and said, ‘Come! Do you want to take bey’at?’ I was struck by this unexpected call. Everything moved so fast that I was unable to say anything. In one second, he held my hand, and in the next everybody started to put their hands on ours. He performed the ritual by chanting the ¸sehadet, or proclamation of faith, and other phrases that were repeated by the audience. Thus I was given bey’at; that is, I was officially initiated into the Naqshbandi community of Sheikh Nazım as a ‘disciple’. Yet it did not feel genuine. I had been compelled to act in a particular way, in compliance with what everyone around me was expecting. In a sense, the setting exerted its power over me. On a later occasion, I listened to a conversation between the man who had made me a ‘disciple’ and another member of the order. His words revealed the ‘backstage discourse’ that must have developed about me among the members of the community. He said that when I had first informed him about my identity as a Turkish student in London, he had mistrusted me and believed I was a ‘spy’ who had come to Britain to gather information about the activities of Sheikh Nazım. Later, however, he was convinced that I was a person of ‘good heart’. His confidence in me grew, he asserted, when I first put my hand on his to take an oath. From then on, he continued, I had forgotten my PhD. When I intervened at this point and said that I was continuing my studies, he laughed and said, ‘No, it is just secondary, secondary’.

Being an Alien During some of the most difficult times in fieldwork I felt put on the spot by strong arguments against university education in the West. Particularly, in Western educational institutions, teaching Islam and Islamic sciences was subject to constant Naqshbandi criticism. Their mistrust and suspicion of Western universities was part of their belief universities such as Oxford and Cambridge were under Jewish control. They claimed that courses required for degrees in Islamic studies were taught by scholars of Jewish and Christian origins who deliberately distorted and misrepresented the subject. The sheikh’s first words to me confirmed this. I had already heard him warn theology students: ‘What doctorate is that? You are getting a PhD certificate from the Jews. Their knowledge of Islam is limited. What they will give you is straw.’ Arguments of this sort were quite often brought up in talks and

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

3:08 PM

Page 59

Tayfun Atay • 59

discussions. On these occasions, I felt explicitly or implicitly targeted, as I came from such an institution. Moreover, the orientalist tradition of SOAS, its presumed connections with government departments and, also, the ‘colonial’ nature of anthropology were issues not missed by members of the order. This created considerable anxiety and uncertainty for me as a researcher. As mentioned above, the disciples often questioned the validity of what I was doing and expressed doubts about the ways in which I was trying to gather knowledge about them. Evidently, their tireless criticisms expressed worries about how I would represent them in my writing. Even the initiation rite I was forced into may have been a way of ‘controlling’ me and the outsider status that I was never prepared to fully dispense with. I assume they welcomed me at first, expecting that I would soon discover the ‘beauty’ of their world and convert to their order; after all, such immersions of outsiders had happened many times before. When they started to realize that my case was different and that I kept insisting on treating Sufism as a ‘research topic’, their attitude towards me turned more suspicious. It seemed that for them there was always a question mark about me and my presence. On many occasions, I was suspected of being a ‘spy’. One disciple suggested that I was from MI˙ T (the Turkish secret service). Even the sheikh once made a veiled accusation to that effect in one of his speeches. They were all anxious about the terrible possibility that the ‘government’ (of Turkey) had sent me there to collect information about them. All these issues made the process of fieldwork difficult, painful and sometimes unbearable. As a result, the relationship between community members and myself never fully rested on trust. Sometimes I felt this even with the friendliest and closest people I knew.

Being a ‘Muslim’ among Secular Turks Yet, there is also the other side of the coin! Fieldwork gave me an opportunity to feel what it was like to be a Muslim in the eyes of socalled modern secular Turks. In other words, I recognized the wellknown antagonism between Turkish secularism and Turkish Islam and I felt its repression. There were times in fieldwork when I found myself defending Islamic religiosity. I frequently adopted the linguistic habits of the community members. This happened almost spontaneously, and it was often while engaged in deep conversations that I had a sense of double-dealing. A case in point is the following experience. Near the community’s mosque in South London, there was a café run by Turks who evidently

60 • Studying an Islamic Sufi Order in London

identified with the ‘modern’ middle-class and Westernized segments of Turkish society. The place was regularly used by many non-Turkish Naqshbandi disciples. Particularly after iftar, the break of the fast during Ramadan, I joined them on a visit to the café nearly every night. Naturally, I met the Turks who ran it, and talked with some of them. However, I found their expressions, words and manners very peculiar. I let them know that I was studying for a PhD – without specifying that my topic was the people around me – and their interest in me increased. To them, I was a Turkish student with a ‘green Muslim cap’ on his head and a heavy beard on his face. As I was familiar with this segment of Turkish society, it was not difficult to discern that they regarded this as inappropriate, if not shameful. In one of our conversations, the café’s owner asked me whether I had learned English yet. He clearly did not consider me someone who would be able to speak English, since I was living out of touch with English society and within the isolation of the mosque. Feeling humiliated, I answered, ‘No one can study for a PhD here without speaking English’. A young Turkish waitress asked in a condescending manner, ‘What [the hell] are you studying, then?’ (‘Ne çalıs¸ıyorsun ki sen?’). I responded by repeating her question, imitating her tone of voice and trying to show that I was offended by it. At that moment, I realized for the first time in my life what someone with an Islamic identity might feel when confronted with such fellow ‘modern’ Turks. The message I had received was full of contempt and suspicion. This experience also helped me to understand my Turkish Muslim friends’ seemingly offensive manners towards me, which I had often come across in my early years in London. Knowing all too well how they were perceived by the majority of Turkish secularists and leftists like me (or so they assumed), they often responded assertively in discussions with me. These friends were in London while I was conducting my fieldwork, and we met a few times when they visited Sheikh Nazım. We did not talk at length, but it was clear from their manner that they were happy with what they considered my personal transformation in the ‘right direction’. They believed I was quitting my ‘antireligious’ former life, as a ‘fruitful’ result of my involvement with the ‘aura’ of Sufism. Last, but not least, my relationship with my wife was badly affected by my fieldwork practice of ‘becoming Muslim’. My wife and daughter were with me during the whole fieldwork period in London, and my wife was exhausted by the situation in which she found herself. She felt I had left her alone to care for our daughter, abandoning them to long, lonely, anxious and sleepless nights. She was even more worried and uncertain about my goings-on. The more often I was involved in

Tayfun Atay • 61

the daily routine of the community, the more her concerns about me increased. She accused me of ignoring the way my language was changing into that of a religious Muslim. She worried about me becoming a disciple and often mentioned that the two of us seemed to be coming from different cultures. She desperately wanted us to go to Turkey for a break, to come away from the situation in London and return to the environment where we ‘really’ belonged.

Conclusion: Being Both an Insider and an Outsider In anthropological fieldwork the two contrasting perspectives of ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ are often distinguished. The outsider perspective is that of the anthropologist who comes from another culture to an alien setting in which s/he conducts fieldwork. The insider perspective, on the other hand, is that of an anthropologist who studies a culture of which s/he is, or feels, a part.12 Each of these perspectives has its own advantages and disadvantages. For an outsider anthropologist, everything is new and nothing is taken for granted. The insider anthropologist, on the other hand, will have no difficulty with language comprehension and has different and perhaps better ways of comprehending various facets of the culture. As far as the anthropology of religion is concerned, there is a continuing though tendentious argument that insists that a nonreligious researcher can never understand cultures of religion. On the basis of my own fieldwork experience, I would argue that we should add a third category, that an anthropologist can be both an insider and an outsider in fieldwork. Being a member of Turkish culture and at least a ‘nominal’ Muslim, I shared much with the sheikh and his Turkish disciples. Coming from a secular background devoid of any religious experience, however, I was an outsider. This was a controversial position that created a very particular set of difficulties, anxieties and pressures. On occasions when the Naqshbandi members might have understood the ignorance of a researcher from a Western (i.e., ‘Christian’) background, I was questioned and made to feel embarrassed by my ignorance. On the other hand, had my questions been asked by a devout Muslim researcher, they might have been easily and satisfactorily answered. As a secular, partial insider, however, I was treated with suspicion and controlled. This fieldwork experience took me from a world that is antagonistic to and irritated by the ‘Muslim green’, to that ‘green world’ of Islam. In the end it left me at the margins of both, in a sort of nowhere land. It confirmed to me, though, that identities and, more importantly,

62 • Studying an Islamic Sufi Order in London

feelings are not natural acquisitions, but constructed and created within discourse: [D]iscourse unfolds ‘in every society’ within the context of external restraints which appear as ‘rules of exclusion’, rules which determine what can be said and not said, who has the right to speak on a given subject, what will constitute reasonable and what ‘foolish’ actions, what will count as ‘true’ and what as ‘false’. These rules limit the conditions of discourse’s existence in different ways in different times and places. Whence the distinction, arbitrary but taken for granted in all societies, between ‘proper’, reasonable, responsible, sane, and truthful discourse, on the one side, and ‘improper’, unreasonable, irresponsible, insane, and erroneous discourse, on the other. (White 1990: 89)

Notes 1. This shift to ‘self-reflexivity’ occurred as a result of the discipline’s encounter with postmodern thought, which emphasizes polyvocality, fragmentation of reality and intersubjectivity (Peace 1990). For a classical account see Clifford and Marcus 1986. For a ‘counter’-account that points to the shortcomings of ‘postmodern’ anthropology, see Gellner 1992. For replies to the arguments against this genre, see Tedlock 1987. 2. For an entertaining example of ethnography of this kind, see Barley 1986. For an important early contribution to this ‘innovative’ writing in social anthropology from my area of specialization, i.e., anthropological studies of Muslim societies, see Rabinow 1977. 3. As two basic texts for the politics of ethnographic writing, see Clifford and Marcus 1986, and Marcus and Fisher 1986. 4. For more than the last two decades the political polarization between secular modernism and Islam has been in the forefront of Turkish life. This polarization has deep historical roots. It is particularly based on the uneasy historical transformation of Turkey at the turn of the twentieth century from an Islamic empire to a laic, republican nation-state. At the core of this long-lasting antagonism lies the incompatibility of the ‘exceptionalist’ official (and nationalist) policy of secular modernization with the social realities of Turkish cultural conservatism, which has manifested itself particularly in the styles of Muslim belief and practice (Lindisfarne 2000: 105; for a more detailed account of the topic, see Lindisfarne 2002). 5. Sufism (tasavvuf) can be briefly defined as ‘Muslim mysticism’ and refers to the quest for personal contact with God in an Islamic context. As an alternative form of religiosity, its emphasis is on spirituality and asceticism, while mainstream Islamic orthodoxy has emphasized itself mainly as a legal system. The Sufi orders (tarikat) are simply the institutional manifestations of this mystical tradition, which are based on particular teachings and practices that aim to experience the esoteric knowledge of God. The Naqshbandi order is such a Sufi institution. It has had a widespread historical and contemporary influence on the life of many Muslims. It is present in Southeast Asia and China, Central Asia, India, the Middle East, the Balkans and the Western world. Founded in Central Asia in the twelfth century, the order is best

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

3:13 PM

Page 63

Tayfun Atay • 63

6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

characterized by its ‘middle of the road’ Sufism, its sensitivity to politics, and its ability to accommodate local cultural situations and novel processes while maintaining its traditions (as an account of encyclopaedic value on the Naqshbandi order, see the voluminous book by Gaborieau, Popovic and Zarcone (1990). For an early but still valid assessment of the history of the order, see Algar 1976. For a detailed account of the community, subgroups, communal places and activities, see Atay 1994 and 1999. The Islamic circles in the country today claim that the incident was a conspiracy by the state authorities to curb Islamic mobilization against the regime (see Kısakürek 1992; also Müftüog˘lu 1991). Kelime-i Tevhid is the name for the phrase that states ‘There is no god but Allah, and Muhammed is His messenger’ (Lailahe illallah, Muhammedün resulullah). My use of the term ‘republican epistemology’ is inspired by Kadıog˘lu’s original application of it in her analysis of the aspects of Turkish political culture, particularly in relation to the question of democracy in Turkey (see Kadıog˘lu 1998 and 1999). What the sheikh wanted to say here was that I was going to be taught about Islam by Jewish scholars. It was generally held by Sheikh Nazım’s Naqshbandi community that 'the Jews' were teaching Islam in distinguished British universities. After he had been initiated into the Naqshbandi order and had taken his first training on the Sufi path in Istanbul in the early 1940s, in the mid-1940s Sheikh Nazım moved to Damascus, where the great Naqshbandi master of the time, Sheikh Abdullah Dag˘ıstani, was settled. Nazım devoted himself to the sheikh as a disciple and started to receive his training from him. Daphne Habibis’s thesis on Sheikh Nazım’s community in Tripoli, Lebanon, can be taken to be an example of the ‘insider perspective’ (Habibis 1985).

References Algar, H. 1976. 'The Naqshbandi Order: A Preliminary Survey of Its History and Significance', Studia Islamica (44): 123–152. Atay, T. 1994. ‘Naqshbandi Sufis in a Western Setting’, PhD dissertation, London: University of London. ———. 1999. ‘The Significance of the Other in Islam: Reflections on the Discourse of a Naqshbandi Circle of Turkish Origin in London’, The Muslim World 89 (3–4): 455–477. Barley, N. 1986. The Innocent Anthropologist – Notes from a Mud Hut. Reading: Penguin. Çakır, R. 1990. Ayet ve Slogan – Türkiye’de I˙ slami Olus¸umlar. Istanbul: Metis. Clifford, J. and G. E. Marcus (eds). 1986. Writing Culture – The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crick, M. 1982. ‘Anthropological Field Research: Meaning Creation and Knowledge Construction’, in D. Parkin (ed.), Semantic Anthropology. London: Academic Press, pp. 15–37. Escobar, A. 1993. ‘The Limits of Reflexivity: Politics in Anthropology’s Post-Writing Culture Era’, Journal of Anthropological Research (4): 377–391. Gaborieu, M., A. Popovic and T. Zarcone (eds). 1990. Naqshbandis – Historical Development and Present Situation of a Muslim Mystical Order. Istanbul: Isis. Gellner, E. 1992. Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London: Routledge. Habibis, D. 1985. ‘A Comparative Study of Workings of a Branch of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order in Lebanon and the UK’, PhD dissertation, London: The University of London.

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

3:14 PM

Page 64

64 • Studying an Islamic Sufi Order in London

———. 1992. ‘Change and Continuity: A Sufi Order in Contemporary Lebanon’, Social Analysis (31): 44–78. Kadıog˘lu, A. 1998. ‘Republican Epistemology and Islamic Discourses in Turkey in the 1990s’, The Muslim World 88(1): 1–12. ———. 1999. Cumhuriyet Epistemolojisi ve As¸ırı-Gerçekçi Kimlikler. Cumhuriyet I˙radesi Demokrasi Muhakemesi. Istanbul: Metis Yayınları. Kısakürek, N. F. 1992. Son Devrin Din Mazlumları. Istanbul: Büyük Dog˘u. Kürkçü, E. 1994. ‘Marksizm, Din ve Maddecilik: I˙ki kere laik olmak’, Express (6 August). Lewis, I. M. 1988. Social Anthropology in Perspective – The Relevance of Social Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindisfarne, N. 2000. ‘Anthropology and Exceptionalism’, Folklor/Edebiyat 22: 105–112. ———. 2002. Elhamdülillah Laikiz-Cinsiyet, I˙slam ve Türk Cumhuriyetçilig˘i [Thank God, We’re Secular: Gender, Islam and Turkish Republicanism]. Istanbul: I˙ letis¸im Yayınları. Marcus, G. E. and M. J. Fisher. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experiential Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Müftüog˘lu, M. 1991. Yakın Tarihimizden Bir Olay: Menemen Vak’ası. Istanbul: Risale. Peace, A. 1990. ‘Dropping out of Sight: Social Anthropology Encounters Postmodernism’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 1(1): 18–31. Rabinow, P. 1977. Reflections of Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tedlock, D. 1987. ‘Questions Concerning Dialogical Anthropology’, Journal of Anthropological Research 43(4): 325–337. ———. 1991. ‘From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography’, Journal of Anthropological Research 47(1): 69–94. Üstün, K. 1973. Devrim S¸ehidi Ög˘retmen Kubilay. Ankara: Güvendi Matbaası. White, H. 1990. ‘Michel Foucault’, in J. Sturrock (ed.), Structuralism and Since: From Levi Strauss to Derrida, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 81–115.

Chapter 3

FRIENDSHIPS AND ENCOUNTERS ON THE POLITICAL LEFT IN BANGLADESH Nayanika Mookherjee

Public anthropology’s call for anthropologists to engage as public intellectuals outside academia is considered by many in the discipline as a necessary political statement (Gonzalez 2004a).1 This is based on the assumption that anthropologists side with the oppressed and that their views are in agreement with the principles of ‘progressive’ and ‘radical’ politics. When leftist anthropologists examine progressive movements and the activists and intellectuals engaged in such radical politics, they tend to share the values of the intellectuals they study. At the same time, research on such projects may critically highlight the contradictions, inequalities, injustices and compromises that are also part of progressive politics. Further, if these activist movements aim to redress the traumatic injustices of conflict, war and genocide, the criticism of these communities amounts to an ethnographic dilemma. This is because criticism of these progressives may be understood to strengthen right-wing politics and to harm leftist collectives. This dilemma raises problems greater than those that arise when research focuses on stereotypical ‘evil’ collectives such as repressive states, right-

66 • The Political Left in Bangladesh

wing parties, multinational corporations or military operations. Here, taking sides with ‘my people’, the oppressed, becomes a lot easier. Anthropologists who position themselves exclusively on the side of the oppressed may romanticize the ‘grassroots’. This chapter seeks to address these ethnographic predicaments. It examines middle-class left-liberal activist networks in Bangladesh and their engagement with the public memories of sexual violence of the war in 1971. These networks are part of the political and cultural elite, but they are not necessarily homogeneous. I will explore the ethical ramifications and consequences of criticizing such progressive movements. At the same time, I examine the trajectories of being both an anthropologist and an individual who formed strong bonds of friendship with different constituencies in fieldwork. I shared the progressive values of this leftist collective and found friends among them. They were middle-class activists who sought to rearticulate and represent the history of sexual violence of the Bangladesh war. At the same time, I developed long-term relationships and friendships with poor, landless women who had suffered the violence of rape during the Bangladesh war. These two sets of friendships posed an acute ethnographic and personal dilemma. I will primarily focus on the encounters with the left-liberal intellectuals whose political views I broadly share, as this encounter raises more difficult ethnographic quandaries. The long-term relationships that I formed with the poor women and the ways in which their accounts moved and ‘traumatized’ me will only be briefly addressed. The chapter shows how the anthropologist is caught between friendships and encounters with poor and elite subjects of their research. Rather than identifying the elites as the exploiters and the poor as the oppressed, the ethnographic quandary arises from the fact that both the political and cultural elites and the poor in Bangladesh have suffered many losses as a result of the ravages of the Bangladesh war, including the death and rape of their loved ones. Rather than taking sides, which eventually I also end up doing, I ‘ask the awkward questions’ (Lindisfarne 2002: 420). I try to outline the emotions, interests and the contradictory subject positions that govern the left-liberal activist community and the poor landless women in Bangladesh. I seek solace in Nancy Lindisfarne’s (2002: 420) words: ‘But anthropology from below works only if it includes looking up. And ethnographies only become gripping and relevant to the anthropologist’s own life, when they include a commitment to make sense of ethnographic data in terms of explicit, coherent theories about regional and national elites, and their relation to all other players in the global political economy.’

Nayanika Mookherjee • 67

The first section outlines the historical and political context of the formation of Bangladesh and places my own subject positions between ‘home’ and ‘field’. Thereafter, an outline of the friendships and encounters reveals the moral capital of the intellectuals. This is contrasted with the jujuburi (ghost) of the right-wing militaristic government and Islamic fundamentalism. The chapter seeks to reflect on the debates of ethics, authorship, privilege, power, intervention and accountability for all involved, including the anthropologist. By contextualizing the activist movement in different political milieus I interrogate the role of the intellectuals and the futures they envisage.

The Formation of Bangladesh The independence of India from British colonial rule in 1947 resulted in the creation of a new homeland for India’s Muslims. The eastern and northwestern corners of the country were carved out and came to be known as East and West Pakistan respectively. Though Islam represented the sole principle of nationhood, East and West Pakistan had considerable cultural and linguistic differences. Apparently Pakistani authorities considered the Bengali Muslims of Bangladesh, with their focus on literature, music and dance, as Indianized/Hinduized, and their practice of Islam as ‘inferior and impure’ (Roy 1983, 1996; Ahmed 1988). This can be contrasted with Indians’ contemporary perceptions of the ‘Muslimness’ of Bangladeshis. Over the years, West Pakistani linguistic, administrative, military, civil and economic control led to a liberation war in 1971 that lasted for nine months. Thereafter, East Pakistan became independent from West Pakistan and Bangladesh was formed. At the end of the war Bangladesh was faced with staggering numbers: 3 million dead and 200,000 female victims of rape by the Pakistani army and the razakars, or local Bengali collaborators. On the eve of independence around fifty intellectuals were killed, as they were considered to be the cultural guardians of Bengali Muslim identity. Their killings are held to have been an attempt to weaken Bengali nationalism. Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was the first president of Bangladesh and head of the Awami League (AL). He set about restructuring the devastated country on the basis of four principles: nationalism, democracy, socialism and secularism. In 1972 he adopted a policy of eulogizing the 200,000 raped women as birangonas, or war heroines. This was to prevent them from being socially ostracized, and attempted to rehabilitate them by marrying them off or introducing them to the labour market. However, this state policy of reintegrating

68 • The Political Left in Bangladesh

the ‘war heroines’ was unsuccessful, and the women disappeared from public discourse. Mujibur’s assassination in 1975 was followed by fifteen years of military rule. General Zia became the president of Bangladesh from 1975 until 1981, when he was assassinated. General Ershad followed him as president until 1990. Through democratic elections, Khaleda Zia (the widow of General Zia) of the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) came to power in 1990. In 1996 Mujibur’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, who had become the leader of the AL, became head of state. In October 2001 Khaleda Zia became prime minister after defeating Sheikh Hasina. It is important to point out that the Bengali Muslim identity on the basis of which Bangladesh was formed in 1971 is embedded in a fraught history and a contested discourse. This is apparent in the character of the postcolonial party politics in which the AL and the BNP have opposed each other. Since Bangladesh secured its independence under the aegis of the AL, the celebration of a secular Bengali identity has become rooted in several factors: a literary and left-liberal tradition, the focus on the civilian role during the Bangladesh War of 1971, support for Hindu minorities and a pro-Indian geopolitical position. As a result, the left-liberal activists and intellectuals are supporters of the AL. In contrast, the BNP, formed in 1975, spearheaded quite different constitutional changes. These are, in particular: the replacement of secularism with the ‘Islamic republic of Bangladesh’ and the alteration of the citizens’ identity from Bengali to Bangladeshi. The aim is to distinguish the Bengali-speaking population of Bangladesh from the Hindu Bengalis of India.2 Also, a large number of collaborators who had supported and aided the Pakistani army in committing the killings and rapes during the war of 1971 were politically rehabilitated under the BNP. In contrast to the AL, the BNP is associated with upholding right-wing values that underwrite Bangladeshi identity, Islamism and militarism. In the context of its representation of the Bangladesh War of 1971, the party is predominantly perceived as less sympathetic to Hindu minorities and as anti-Indian and pro-Pakistani in its policies. The issue of rape during the war was widely reported in the press from December 1971. However, after 1973 the topic was relegated to oblivion in government and journalistic discourse.3 The issue arose again on 28 March 1992 with the press publication of a photograph of Rohima, Kajoli and Moyna,4 three landless, poor war heroines from Enayetpur, a village in western Bangladesh. This photograph emerged in the political climate of the 1990s, when the memories of 1971 became increasingly important. Collaborators like Gholam Azum, who was the head of the right-wing Islamicist party Jamaat-e-Islami (JMI)

Nayanika Mookherjee • 69

and who had been politically reinstated by fifteen years of military rule were put on trial. The international recognition of rape as a war crime made it necessary to document histories of sexual violence in 1971 so as to contribute to the evidence against collaborators. On 26 March 1992 the Gono Adalat, or People’s Tribunal, a massively mobilized movement led by the left-liberal cultural elites, demanded that collaborators be tried and protested against their political rehabilitation. Kajoli, Moyna and Rohima’s presence at the Gono Adalat as representatives of women raped during the war symbolically reinforced this message.

The Insider-Outsider and Fieldwork at ‘Home’ This research project was triggered by my outrage and despair as an undergraduate student over the unfolding of intercommunal violence after supporters of the right-wing Hindu nationalist parties had demolished the Babri Masjid mosque in India on 6 December 1992. For citizens confined at home in Calcutta during the imposition of a curfew, and dependent on Doordarshan, or government TV, for news, the role of rumours became significant. Although the state of West Bengal, ruled by a centre-left communist government, seemed to bear the lesser brunt of the violence, rumours of intercommunal sexual violence were spreading. Incidents of sexual violence in Gujarat during 1992 (Agarwal 1995) further reiterated how a woman’s body becomes the territory on which men’s political programmes are inscribed. This point has been again gruesomely reconfirmed by the recent violence against Muslims in Gujarat.5 This, along with events throughout the 1990s relating to so-called comfort women, to Bosnia, Rwanda and the declaration of rape as a war crime in the 1995 UN Beijing session, was a significant trigger for my research in Bangladesh. I already knew about the country’s enormous statistical count of rape during 1971. At the same time, Bangladesh attracted international press coverage when it banned the well-known feminist writer Taslima Nasrin’s 1993 novel Lojja (Shame). In this novel the author portrays the nightmare that befalls a Hindu family in Bangladesh in the context of a backlash against minority Hindu communities. The violence is perpetrated by the Muslim majority in response to the demolition of Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in India and the resultant massacre of minority Muslim communities in India. Lojja ends with the family leaving Bangladesh for India. Lojja was banned in 1993, and Nasrin had to flee Bangladesh and go into exile in Sweden.6 In India, Nasrin’s work was appropriated by the rightwing Hindu nationalist party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose supporters

70 • The Political Left in Bangladesh

had been instrumental in the demolition of Babri Masjid and the consequent communal carnage. It was rumoured that the BJP was selling pirated copies of Lojja that included BJP propaganda about ‘Muslim violence’ against Hindus. Ironically, Lojja provided munition for the BJP’s propaganda, which typically labels Muslims as the demonic threatening ‘other’ and legitimizes the BJP’s call for a Hindu India. Nasrin’s writings made Bangladeshis feel wrongly portrayed as ‘fundamentalists’ within the subcontinent and beyond. This is a media presentation of Bangladesh that persists to this day. Paradoxically, Taslima’s novels Nirbachito Column and Lojja strengthened already existing negative stereotypes in West Bengal and India about the ‘Muslims’ of Bangladesh. As a result, when I started my research on the public memories of sexual violence of 1971 in 1996, Indians would show concern for my safety as an ‘Indian’ in Bangladesh. Ironically, this concern often arose from what they knew about contemporary Bangladesh through Nasrin’s novels.7 Many even advised me that there was nothing to study in Bangladesh and that I should spend my research scholarship on India.8 Being from Calcutta, West Bengal – or the Indian side of Bengal – and having no family connections in Bangladesh, I arrived in London to study for my PhD in September 1996. My attention was drawn to a conference to be held at the London-based Institute of Commonwealth Studies in December 1996 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the war. At the conference my research topic was met with huge warmth and enthusiasm by academics and human rights lawyers from Dhaka. Several of them presented papers on ‘71’ and on Bangladesh’s history of genocide, sexual violence and construction of identity. A research affiliation with the Centre for Social Studies (CSS), headed by the renowned anthropologist Prof. B. K. Jahangir, facilitated my research trip to Bangladesh. Over a half-hour conversation and a cup of tea in the Bangladesh High Commission I was granted a one-year multiple entry research visa. The commissioner was enthused that an ‘Indian’ was planning to work on the Bangladesh War of 1971, since it was very uncommon for Indian scholars to work on Bangladesh. This warmth was further shown by Urmi Rahman, a London-based Bangladeshi journalist, who on our first meeting generously and affectionately arranged for me to be the guest of her sister Shireen Hossein (Tonu) in Dhaka. I stayed there during my initial pre-fieldwork visit in MarchApril 1997 and thereafter. On a warm sunny morning in March 1997 I arrived at the smart Zia International Airport, named after one of Bangaldesh’s liberation fighters and military presidents, Ziaur Rehman (1975–1981). Murals of the war could even be seen from the plane. I had only a photograph of

Nayanika Mookherjee • 71

Urmidi and her two sisters Tonudi and Soma,9 but I found Tonudi and we were soon racing through the streets of Dhaka in an expensive foreign car that drove us to the upmarket diplomatic residential enclave of Bonani. On the way I watched with much curiosity and amusement the endless colourfully painted rickshaws, baby-taxis, and expensive foreign cars (which were a rarity in Calcutta) vying for road space, each mode of transport racing to outdo the others. Tonudi’s husband was a former liberation fighter, and had now become a prosperous businessman. I mused about the irony of my postcolonial subjectivity, about how it was going to London that had allowed me to establish contact with Bangladeshis, with whom I share various cultural idioms and adjacent to whose borders I spent the first twenty-four years of my life. Border crossings to the UK had enabled my boundary-traversing to ex-East Bengal/Pakistan, now Bangladesh, which had been created by the British-engineered partition of 1947 in the first place. Above all, it taught me new idioms of ‘Bengaliness’ and of the shared cultural heritage across the territorial border that had demarcated West Bengal in India and Bangladesh. In spite of this being, in many ways, a ‘fieldwork at home’,10 my multiple subjectivities as a single, young, middle-class, upper-caste Hindu, Calcutta-based, Bengali, Indian woman, studying in London, underwent intense interrogation at all times in Bangladesh. I would reiterate that I was from India and not from Bangladesh, and not connected to the Awami League. However people would rationalize that, being a Hindu (apparent from my surname), I had to be sympathetic to the AL because of its pro-Hindu and pro-India policies. My research on 1971 took place at the juncture of its continuous invocation by Sheikh Hasina, the deluge of public memories and various commemorative events undertaken by a range of organizations and institutions. In the eyes of many, this turned me into a pro-AL agent or government official who was engaged in an ‘undercover project’. As a result, I would hear praise of the Indian army, and it was rumoured that I was there to investigate atrocities against Hindus during and after the war. People were suspicious about my ‘real’ identity, and variously perceived me as an Indian intelligence agent, as a member of the CIA or the United Nations (as I was living in London), an AL official, an NGO worker, journalist and eventually also a student. My multi-sited fieldwork entailed research in Dhaka and the village of Enayetpur in western Bangladesh. My ‘upper-caste Hindu’ identity further proved to be a hindrance in establishing the ‘authenticity’ of my personhood in Enayetpur. I was living in a Muslim household there, which was considered by the villagers to be incongruent with my Hindu norms; questions were raised whether I was actually Muslim

72 • The Political Left in Bangladesh

and hence Pakistani. My ‘fair’ skin was seen as proof of my supposed Muslim belonging. So was the photograph of my mother, in whom people saw a fair-skinned, tall woman, the stereotypical physiological marker of the ‘military’, the term used in Enayetpur to refer to the Pakistani army. I would always emphasize being from Calcutta rather than India so as to forge a closer Bengali identity. I tried to signal distance from Delhi and India, whose linguistic predominance of Hindi could be easily conflated with Urdu and hence be associated with a Pakistani identity. It was insinuated that I spoke Bengali with a Hindi accent, and I was also asked whether I knew Urdu. Both suggestions pointed to the assumption that I was Pakistani. Then again, my present location in London, as well as the spread of the news that I had a white moner manush (‘person of one’s own heart’) and consumed beef sometimes, made me appear a Christian. Further, my adoption of various ‘Muslim’ practices was continuously admonished by the minority Hindu communities in Enayetpur.11 This insider-outsider position at ‘home’ gave me the ‘distanciation’ that Jackson (1987: 14) argues is necessary ‘if we are to see ourselves as others see us’. This ‘double vision’ (Okeley 1984: 6) also calls into question how ‘one knows when one is at home’ (Strathern 1987: 17). The insider-outsider position that I inhabited, and the interrogation that it was subjected to, allowed a rethinking of the concept of home and its degrees of familiarity. It was true I felt completely at home while relearning and unlearning my Bengaliness and our common and different histories. At the same time, I was wary of my outsider status. It is this insider-outsider identity that came into play in my interactions with the left-liberal intellectuals.

Friendships and Encounters The warm welcomes engendered in London continued after the start of my fieldwork in Bangladesh. I started the research in 1997, at a time when the Awami League government, headed by Sheikh Hasina, was in power. Leftist liberals considered her to be the repository of the ideals and legacy of her father, Sheikh Mujib. The ethos of Bengali identity and the spirit of the war of 1971 centred on the principles of secularism, democracy and Bengali nationalism, as opposed to the BNP and JMI’s emphasis on Islam and Bangladeshi nationalism. Under the AL government the Centre for Social Studies became the intellectual nerve centre for the practices of history-making about the war. Leading Bangladeshi scholars from the disciplines of international relations, history, anthropology, politics and gender studies were involved in the

Nayanika Mookherjee • 73

CSS. There was enormous enthusiasm for my work. Everyone welcomed me with warmth and affection and referred to me as ‘the girl from Calcutta working on our ‘71’. In a very short time, I had made some very good friends among some of the feminist scholars and lawyers within and beyond the CSS. I learnt a lot from this entry into the left-liberal activist world in Dhaka and felt fortunate to have been there at that juncture. The scholars of the CSS were part of the political and cultural middle-class elite and supporters of the AL government. I was told that the assumption of power by Sheikh Hasina had enabled oral history accounts of the war to emerge, which stood in contrast to the selfcensorship common among the left under a BNP government. I also learnt that most of these activist scholars and intellectuals had suffered violent, personal losses in the war. Some had lost their fathers, some their brothers and uncles. Many of them were related to the families of the intellectuals who were killed just before independence. The very fact that 14 December is officially commemorated as the ‘Killing Day of the Intellectuals’ highlights the significant role intellectuals play for the Bengali Muslim identity in Bangladesh. The story of the pain and trauma of ‘71 was being revisited and retold under the AL Government. Many intellectuals informed me that one of the main objectives of commemorating the war was to meet the need to educate the young about the ‘real’ events of 1971. The cultural elites attempted to rewrite the war’s history, which they saw as distorted by a militaristic and Islamist state under the BNP and the preceding military governments. They were enraged that the collaborators who had been involved in the rapes and killings of 1971 had never been brought to justice. Further, the rise of fatwas, and the international reference to the liberation war as a ‘civil’, Indo-Pakistani war (it occurred at the conjuncture of Cold War politics), gave weight to this moral imperative of putting right the war’s history. For the leftliberal intellectuals, Bangladesh’s unacknowledged ‘genocidal’ birth represented the unresolved, unreconciled history of the nation. Clearly, this left-liberal community is not homogeneous and disagreements exist among them. The feminist networks in particular were critical of the leading male intellectuals. However, on the issue of the war a certain consensus existed. Intellectuals such as poets, writers, novelists, academics, journalists, feminists, NGO heads, human rights lawyers and activists are revered, and their work is seen to support the secular Bengali Muslim identity in Bangladesh. However, many who were supporters of the BNP (as well as critical supporters of the AL) pointed out to me that the intellectuals had ‘prostituted’ themselves and changed alliances with

74 • The Political Left in Bangladesh

changing governments. This allegation was particularly targeted at intellectuals who headed NGOs. Others claimed that I would get to know nothing from the intellectuals as they were blind followers of the AL. Referring to their intricate familial and professional interconnections, journalists would advise me to obtain intellectuals’ biographies before interviewing them. This, they suggested, would help me determine what issues I could safely discuss with them without having to fear repercussions. Although the significance of the role of the intellectuals might be based on an exaggerated sense of selfimportance, they nonetheless comprise a significant collective whose perspectives are deeply interwoven with Bangladesh’s Bengali Muslim identity.

The ‘War Heroines’ National newspapers reported that Kajoli, Moyna and Rohima had voluntarily testified at the Gono Adalat as women who had been raped during ‘71. I thought that working among women who had willingly come forward to speak about their experiences would make it methodologically and ethically unproblematic to approach the issue of rape. While my fieldwork in Dhaka involved a study of various state commemorative programmes on ‘71, I was also interviewing intellectuals and activists in the left-liberal networks. Significant among them was the legal aid NGO Ain-o-Shalish Kendra (ASK), which was well known for its feminist perspectives on human rights abuses. At the same time, they had started an oral history project with the female victims of sexual violence of 1971. I was given enormous support by the children’s writer and human rights activist Shahriar Kobir and the historian Montassir Mamoon, who facilitated my affiliation with the CSS after I had met him in London. Shahriar Kobir had been at the forefront of the Gono Adalat and had facilitated the appearance of Rohima, Kajoli and Moyna. He had also been in touch with them after the Gono Adalat. Kobir, Mamoon and the dedicated researchers at ASK were thus important informants as well as sources of support and encouragement for my research. In October 1997, a co-researcher of the CSS who was engaged in ASK’s Oral History Project had made a one-day trip to Enayetpur to document the stories of these women. She said: ‘The women are talking a lot of altu faltu [nonsense]. You have to take a lot of trouble to get to the “real history” and the “actual thing”, the incident of rape in 1971.’

Nayanika Mookherjee • 75

Professor Mamoon suggested that I might need a minimum of two weeks to do my fieldwork in Enayetpur. He advised that I live in the Circuit House (reserved for VIPs and politicians) in Kushtia town and commute to the village when required. ‘After all, you are a bideshi [foreigner]’, he reminded me. The notion of ‘nonsense’ emerged in a completely different light when I arrived in Enayetpur and learnt about the hardships faced by the three women and their families over the next ten months of my stay in the village. In the first few meetings the women were extremely hostile to me. To get a fresh perspective, I decided to explore the experiences of local liberation fighters during the war. Soon after, some of their husbands wanted to talk to me, and what emerged in the course of time completely altered the known national narrative about these women. The fact that they were raped during the war was known to all villagers, and no one had faced any sanctions over these crimes after the war. It was a public secret and everyone knew that these violent sexual acts had been a tragedy that could have befallen anyone’s family. But their public appearance had changed this. They were now seen as talking about something that was to be kept a public secret, and many villagers invoked sanctions against them (Mookherjee 2004, 2006). When they were taken to Dhaka to be presented at the Gono Adalat by various local liberation fighters, they were not exactly sure why they were being taken there. Various local power dynamics had ensured their presence at the Gono Adalat. They assumed that they would meet liberation fighters in Dhaka and receive some remuneration. Instead, they found themselves on a stage before thousands of people and appearing on the front covers of leading newspapers. As a result, it became known in Enayetpur that the women had ‘voluntarily’ agreed to talk about their rapes during the war. On their return, villagers scorned them and imposed economic and social sanctions on them. This scorn was further aggravated by the many visitors that appeared in the village after the Gono Adalat, as journalists, human rights activists, feminists, NGO personnel and Awami League officials from Dhaka came to photograph the women and record their testimonies of rape. After the AL came to power in 1996 these visits increased, and the women were taken to Dhaka on several occasions. They were assured that they would meet Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who would empathize with their traumatic experience in the 1970s and 1990s and ensure their rehabilitation. The women spoke in particular about one of these visits to Dhaka on which they met Shahriar Kobir, the human rights activist I referred to earlier. He arranged for them to be taken to Dhaka, on the assurance

76 • The Political Left in Bangladesh

that they would meet the prime minister to put forward their requests for rehabilitation. Instead, they were filmed by an American documentary film team under Kobir’s supervision. I was quite shocked to hear this, as I respected Kobir and considered him to be a friend; yet he had never mentioned this. These women had been brought to Dhaka under false premises so that their presence could provide legitimacy to the professional discourses of intellectuals. Journalists, feminists, human rights lawyers and activists, NGOs and liberation fighters needed them for their project of rehabilitating national history. The women themselves did not want to talk about their chorom itihash, or ‘severe history’. For them this was about the fact that they had been taken to Dhaka under a false pretext. They were not at all prepared to talk openly about their experiences of rape. ‘History’ for them was about the reopening of 1971 in the 1990s and about the consequences for their lives that had followed. At the end of my ten-months stay in Enayetpur, the women and their families asked me to deliver letters to NGO heads, intellectuals and feminists, each of whom blamed the other for the lack of the women’s rehabilitation. I met with Shahriar Kobir, who they felt was intricately involved in what could only be seen as a misuse of their trust. I communicated the women’s plight and reiterated their demand for rehabilitation during our meeting. In response to this and without my consent, he wrote an eight-column article entitled ‘71’s WarHeroine: The Foreign and Other Nayanika’s Experience’, which was published in the leading Bengali daily Doinik Jonokontho (11 July 1998). The article claimed that I had met with him to share my fieldwork experience, although the whole purpose of the meeting had been to bring to light the women’s allegations against him. The article flattered me and my ‘achievements’ but distorted the conversation we had had. It made various untrue, antigovernment statements in my name and painted the women of Enayetpur in a negative light. Kobir acknowledged for the first time that he had attempted to film the women’s testimonies, though he did not disclose the circumstances under which they were brought to Dhaka. I was aware that this article would come to the attention of Enayetpur and the women, as this was the newspaper that came to the village. I was worried about their reactions and feared they would now lose trust in me and see me as Kobir’s ally. To clarify my position I wrote a brief rejoinder to this article in Doinik Jonokontho. However, leading intellectuals saw this rejoinder as anti-AL and pro-BNP because it referred to respected AL intellectuals. I was branded ‘young’ and incapable of understanding the dynamics of history making. The director of the CSS, Dr B. K. Jahangir, an erudite

Nayanika Mookherjee • 77

and respected pro-AL academic and anthropologist,12 asked me to withdraw the rejoinder. He reminded me that he could ‘kill my rejoinder’ and ensure that I would have to undergo special security checks for my forthcoming visa interview. Other friends within the left-liberal activist networks were astounded at the pace of events and suggested that what was going on was worse than a ‘Cosa Nostra’ conspiracy. In the following few weeks, I felt extremely fearful and cautious. I started backing up and copying my files and putting them in the post. In retrospect, that might have been an overreaction, but at the time I felt sufficiently afraid to start distrusting my friends in the left-liberal networks. The paper that I later presented at the CSS elicited cold responses from the male intellectuals. This was in stark contrast to the warm, emotive welcome I had been given earlier in fieldwork. Facing my forthcoming visa interview and the implicit threats against me, I cut my losses and withdrew my rejoinder. A few feminist research colleagues of the CSS who were stunned by the actions of their otherwise progressive male colleagues pointed out that the CSS journal was printed in Kobir’s press, that Kobir and Mamoon were related as uncle and nephew, and that Mamoon and Jahangir were close friends. They referred to the close familial and activist connection between these men and other CSS academics. The appropriation process had finally come full circle, but the question of rehabilitation for the birangonas remained unanswered. Soon after, I visited the women to clarify the situation. This was significant, as I had correctly assumed that the article would have been brought to their attention. As expected, they questioned my friendships and alliances.

The jujuburi of Islamic ‘Fundamentalism’ The overall need to prosecute collaborators and seek justice for Bangladesh’s unresolved genocidal birth-history guides the perspective of most of the intellectuals. This poses an ethnographic quandary. My sympathy and support for Bangladesh’s search for justice for 1971 remain unquestioned. However, as a lecturer of anthropology at Jahangirnagar University, who had a critical perspective of the Awami League, commented, ‘the government and their appointed intellectuals are always telling us they are the best and remind us of the jujuburi of fundamentalism’. A jujuburi is a ghost whose story is told to children. In this nationalist search for justice and jujuburis it is essential to attribute blame for the rapes and genocide to collaborators who are equated with Jamaat-e-Islami and Islamic fundamentalists. This was

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

3:16 PM

Page 78

78 • The Political Left in Bangladesh

evident in the announcement of a commemorative ceremony on the history of rape. Feminist activists stated that, ‘[t]he present rise of rapes and violence against women in society is only a continuation of the violence against women committed during 1971. This is because the fundamentalist forces and those giving fatwas endanger women’s liberty of movement and activity. These are the same forces whose war crimes during 1971 were not tried’ (Doinik Jonokontho, 12 December 1997). An echo of this argument can be found in the two-volume book Ami Birangona Bolchi [‘This Is the Birangona Speaking’] (Ibrahim 1994–95). It contains seven narratives of raped women that Ibrahim documented when she was working in rehabilitation centres in 1972. These narratives also provided the launchpad for various oral history projects in the 1990s. The back cover of the book states that ‘the religiously blind and powerful fundamentalist forces are seeking to distort and wipe out the history of 1971’. The text suggests that ‘these traditional, backward Islamic norms’ cause the rejection of raped women and contribute to their trauma. As a result, members of left-liberal networks in Dhaka often asked me whether the social sanctions brought against the women in Enayetpur had been initiated by ‘collaborators’ and members of the local JMI. Implicit in these questions was a discourse that blamed women’s oppression on the backwardness of the Enayetpur birangonas, their illiteracy and religious beliefs. In a similar vein, a feminist activist referring to the women in Enayetpur stated: ‘They went public with the crimes committed against them. These women and their families had to face considerable social stigmatisation by the fascist forces and religious extremists in their own village’ (Daily Star, 12 December 1997). I have shown elsewhere (Mookherjee 2006 and 2011) that these clichéd assessments are far from the complex machinations of local power politics in Enayetpur. The claim by the feminist activist that ‘the fascist and religious extremists of Enayetpur subjected the birangonas to social stigma’ (Daily Star,12 December 1997), identifies the ‘jujuburi’ of the collaborators as the cause of the sanctions against the women in Enayetpur. Their experiences of rape testify to the need to bring to trial the razakars, or collaborators. This contributes to an ‘epic culture’ (Nandy 2001), or the need to identify as villains and demons the razakars and right-wing Islamic fundamentalists who can be made accountable for the acts of sexual violence and brought to trial. This fulfils the criteria necessary for an international recognition of genocide and rape as a war crime in Bangladesh in 1971. My attempt to highlight the jujuburi of fundamentalism that exists among the left-liberal intellectual and activist networks in Bangladesh

Nayanika Mookherjee • 79

is not an endeavour to ‘take sides’ or romanticize the poor women of Enayetpur. Instead, it aims to highlight the contradictory subject positions occupied by the left-liberal community and the women in Enayetpur and the different contexts within which they seek rehabilitation for the traumatizing experience of war.

The Protagonist ‘War Heroine’ Juxtaposing the public emergence of Ferdousy Priyabhashini with that of the three women of Enayetpur reveals the class sensibilities that are intrinsic to the process of addressing the history of war. In 1999 Priyabhashini, a well-known sculptor, announced publicly that she had been raped innumerable times by the Pakistani army and by local collaborators throughout 1971. Ferdousy’s coming-out had a huge impact, and she has since assumed the acceptable, accessible and respectable identity of war heroine. Intellectuals praised her, her story appeared in newspapers, books and videos and innumerable letters written by young men and women expressing respect towards her were published in newspapers. She clearly captured the emotional imagination of the younger generation. Today she is present on all forums regarding the celebration of the war, and is always invited to provide a ‘birangona perspective’. Compared to the sober ‘portrait’ shots of birangonas that appeared in the newspapers in the 1990s, Priyabhashini’s coming-out and posturing in front of a microphone is always associated with photographs of a smiling face. Reports on her public appearances usually show her alongside the who’s-who of the intelligentsia. They look at her sombrely with a mixture of awe, respect and curiosity. They stand up when she is honoured and accord her a degree of agency. In stark contrast, various liberation fighters and activists derogatorily commented that the women of Enayetpur only highlighted their accounts of rape because they were poor and expected to be paid money. The different responses to Priyabhashini and the women of Enayetpur deserve comment. The acceptability of Priyabhashini is located in her conscious, literate, middle-class, intellectual and Tagoreevoking Bengali subjectivity. She is also perceived to be a success story in her own right, having survived the war as a single woman. Her artistic and professional engagement makes her an ideal role-model birangona whose middle class respectability and agency the middle-class activists can identify with. Poor birangonas have to be framed in photographic ‘mug shots’ outside their contexts. To be included in the category of war heroine, they have to be represented and spoken for by

80 • The Political Left in Bangladesh

journalistic, human rights, feminist, judicial and bureaucratic professionals. The agency perceived in Priyabhashini by virtue of her respectability allows her individuality to be part of her public persona. She no longer needs representation. Ultimately it is her middle-class identity that makes her an acceptable raped woman among the leftliberal activist community. The moral capital attributed to the government of the Awami League, and the attempt to curb any criticism of it by the left-liberal male intellectuals, alienated many from them. In August 1998, some horrific campus rapes in Jahangirnagar University (JU) became public. It was a well-known fact that some of the leaders of the AL student wing in JU were involved in the rapes. The administrative authorities, one of whom had connections in the AL administration, protected them. In the midst of various intrigues, threats and intimidations, when a strong student movement protested against the complicity of the authorities with the rapists and demanded action against those involved, all the pro-AL intellectuals went to the JU campus to address the students. They enraged the students further by attempting to depoliticize the event, claiming that all rapists were ‘animals’ and did not belong to any political party.

The Challenge of 2001 Under the current BNP government, however, the fortunes of the intellectuals changed. This led to a further ethical dilemma in my ethnographic work. Since the electoral victory of the BNP in October 2001 the liberal left has faced various threatening events. It has been taken over by general alarm over the rise of terror and the growing clout of Islamic hardliners (Habib 2005; Lintner 2002). In early 1999 three men attempted to kill Shamsur Rahman, a well-known poet and intellectual and a symbol of Bangladesh’s secular nationhood. During the ensuing arrests, the police claimed to have seized a list of those intellectuals and writers whom Bangladeshi religious extremists branded as ‘enemies of Islam’. A senior Bangladeshi journalist was stabbed in November 2000 for making a documentary on the plight of Hindus. Sheikh Hasina survived an assassination attempt in July 2000. The electoral victory of the BNP was associated with widespread press coverage of rapes of minority Hindu women by BNP members as retaliation for supporting the AL in the elections (Daily Star, October 2001). Following the incidents of rape of October 2001, the well-known human rights activist and journalist Shahriar Kobir was arrested at

Nayanika Mookherjee • 81

Dhaka international airport on his return from Kolkata on 22 November 2001. He had been to India to cover the plight of Hindus who had fled persecution in Bangladesh, and his video tapes, film and camera were confiscated by police at the airport. He was held in custody for nineteen days before he was released on bail. It was rumoured that he was tortured in jail. Various arrests of NGO personnel and bombings of cinemas followed. The violence reached its peak on 21 August 2004, when dozens of grenades were thrown at a protest meeting in Dhaka organized by the AL. Sheikh Hasina, the leader of the opposition and a former prime minister, survived, but twenty-two of her party members, including a central leader and the freedom fighter Ivy Rahman, lost their lives. On 27 January 2005, a grenade attack at an AL (now the main opposition party in the country) rally claimed the lives of five activists. The dead included Bangladesh’s leading intellectual and former finance minister, Shah A. M. S. Kibria. From August to December 2005, various suicide bombs were detonated. In this post-9/11 Islamophobic world, Bangladesh is seen to be a ‘hotbed’ of Islamic extremism, even though the US administration considers it to be ‘moderate’. The left-liberal intellectuals largely support the US position on Islamic fundamentalists, even though strong antiwar demonstrations take place in Bangladesh. Indeed, the left-liberal intellectuals walked together with the Islamic parties for the first time in these demonstrations. Has the jujuburi of fundamentalism finally come to life for the intellectuals? The recent incidents present a certain conundrum in view of the criticisms that emerged from my friendships and ethnographic encounters. Does the inclusion of altered political and social conditions make one’s analysis fruitless and inane? Should ethnographic encounters be seen in hindsight?

Ethics, Authorship and Activism These friendships and ethnographic encounters raise important questions about research ethics, intervention, authorship, representation and activism, for both the ethnographer and the leftliberal community. My study was not confined to the birangonas but involved an examination of the overall history of the war in Enayetpur. It entailed discussions with various villagers, including the war heroines. This mitigated any possibility of exacerbation of the birangonas’ situation in Enayetpur that could have been caused by my presence. I have tried to refer to sexual violence without making it ‘inauthentic’ and yet attempted to keep in mind Daniel’s (1996: 4)

82 • The Political Left in Bangladesh

exhortation not to produce a ‘pornography of violence’. I did not think it was ethical to explore what ‘exactly’ happened to the women in 1971 and based my project instead on what they wanted to communicate. I have been troubled with authorship and issues of representation and realize that as much as I try to convey the views of the birangonas and their families, I engage in what I critique, that is, in the representation of the birangonas. The women’s initial hostility transformed into friendships with them, their husbands and children, that have stretched beyond fieldwork. Our friendship involved my witnessing accounts of their hardships during and after the war and, more recently, in the 1990s. When I felt homesick, these women provided solace and companionship for me. We travelled together to visit their relatives in other villages. We visited government offices, talked, laughed and sang together. Even after I returned to Dhaka, their sons who were working in the city as rickshaw pullers often visited me. I call the women and their families frequently from the UK to exchange news and clarify my queries. This is possible thanks to the presence of a mobile phone in the village now. Their sons and daughters get others to email me from the nearest town when they want to be in touch or if they want me to call them. Their experiences of receiving false assurances of rehabilitation by various left-liberal intellectuals and activists made it imperative for me to lobby individuals in Dhaka on their behalf. After endless letters sent by them and others, the women finally met Sheikh Hasina. Would this be seen as an intervention on the part of the ethnographer? If so, what are the processes of accountability for the ethnographer, and what are the consequences of her actions? These are questions to which I have no answers, except that the least I could do was to deliver my friends’ letters, put forward their views to specific individuals and lobby them by virtue of the symbolic capital and privilege I had as a foreign researcher. I wanted that the women’s wishes to meet the prime minister to be brought to fruition. I realize that this raises important debates about ‘anthropological advocacy’ (Hastrup and Elsass 1990) and the notion of objectivity. I have attempted to engage with my anthropological representation of the birangonas, carry out my ‘burden of responsibility as an interlocutor’ (Das 1990: 33) and highlight the conflicts of interest and emotion that permeate the national and local representations of the history of rape. Both interest and emotion provided me with a moral imperative to communicate the birangonas’ need to highlight their chorom itihash (severe history) to national actors. Hence I straddle two boats. Spivak (1993) cautions that research and representation are

Nayanika Mookherjee • 83

irreducibly intertwined with politics, power and privilege. Taussig (1987) challenges anthropologists to be self-critical of their historical and contextual positions, and to speak out against the injustices they encounter in their research ‘habitus’. The horror and pain of sexual violence that saturate the materials I have dealt with have weighted me down emotionally. Academic analysis of these materials often seems banal. The despair, frustration and silence of the pain and suffering of the birangonas of Enayetpur often left me numb. I took sides when communicating the women’s distress over being pitted against the intellectuals and having their narratives appropriated. On the other hand, I tried to identify the emotions and interests of the activist community, the injustice of the irreconciled war experience they grappled with and their personal traumas of having lost loved ones through violent deaths. There has been a tendentious subtext in my study to contribute to the ‘evidence pool’ about 1971 in Bangladesh. However, I also critique this process, and this study would not easily find hospitable frameworks in Bangladesh. Yet, my friendships with my hosts (Tonudi and Soma), and with some of the feminists, film makers and human rights lawyers in Dhaka, continue till today. These friends enable the continuation of my fieldwork outside Bangladesh by sending me frequent packages of food, books, articles and newspapers, and by answering my innumerable queries. Significantly, my work is based on an examination of the practices of memory by supporters of the Awami League. As a result of more intensive interaction with pro-AL individuals, my knowledge of the historical narratives by the political right (such as the BNP and JMI is largely based on the AL’s view. I feel trepidation at the thought that my criticism of the AL’s approach to the raped women could be appropriated by elements in the BNP and JMI for partisan political purposes. In addition, this research could easily be misappropriated by the clichéd subcontinental interests that also inform it. The suspicion with which Pakistanis and Bangladeshis sometimes asked me why I, an Indian, was researching this topic made me aware of this. It could be used to reiterate the narrative that Pakistan perpetrated torture in Bangladesh. This could in turn give credit to India as a ‘saviour’ and add weight to their age-old enmity. Such potential misinterpretations of this study are far from my intentions. While I am indebted to the processes and sources of history making that made this study possible, I am, at the same time, critical of them.

84 • The Political Left in Bangladesh

Conclusion The overall need for ‘an epic culture’ (Nandy 2001) that identifies villains, prosecutes collaborators and seeks justice for Bangladesh’s unresolved genocidal birth-history guides the perspective of most intellectuals in Bangladesh. It aims to bring to justice those who have killed and raped in 1971 and to ensure an international identification of the events of 1971 as genocide. My support for the cause of justice and sympathy for the traumatic personal losses in Bangladesh remain unquestioned. I am on the side of those seeking redress for the harms inflicted during Bangladesh’s tragic birth. However, this itself poses a problem. It is particularly difficult to criticize progressive movements that attempt to seek redress for the horrors of genocide, even if they construe a hierarchy of grief. Communicating the ‘correct’ history to the younger generation is of paramount significance to the intellectuals in Bangladesh. This activist agenda is based on simple messages so as to make the younger generation conscious of the war of 1971. It seems legitimate to secure this aim by skewing, airbrushing and appropriating the testimonies of survivors of violence and rape. It seems that a more complex narrative would harm the movement and ‘kill’ the message. The complexities revealed by ethnographic research might defy this simple activist message. Keeping these dilemmas in mind, various questions arise. How can the complexities that an academic project brings to the surface relate to the simple messages that are crucial for activist concerns? Further, is this relationship even more complicated in the context of activism that seeks redress for colonialism, imperialism, genocide, rape and the unresolved traumas of past unjust wars? Can academic criticism generate a dialectical and dialogical dynamic of auto-critique that can strengthen these radical movements? Or does such auto-critique get in the way of progressive movements, since successful activism needs a plain message rather than a complex dialectical account? Do altered political and historical conditions such as those of 2001 in Bangladesh make such critique irresponsible and irrelevant? The modalities of class have been intrinsic to Bangladeshi activist expressions. The middle-class activist community lost a large number of family members and friends in the Bangladesh war. Many of the intellectuals who were killed during the war were related to today’s activist political and cultural elite. Their desire to record testimonies of sexual violence during the war, to prosecute the collaborators and to equate them to the jujuburi of Muslim fundamentalism has led to the search for grassroots war heroines. They exhibited the poor, landless war heroines as victims of rape but failed to address these women’s and

Nayanika Mookherjee • 85

their families’ demands for reparations. These women simply disappeared as subjects amidst the activists’ prime concern to try the collaborators who had been politically rehabilitated by the right-wing BNP government. In other words, the women were pawns in the activists’ quest to change the political landscape of the country by supporting the left-liberal AL in its attempt to defeat the BNP and form the government. Meanwhile, the sculptor Firdousy Priyobhashini became the icon of the acceptable raped woman, as the activist community could identify with her middle-class sensibilities. Her testimonies too were made part of this search for justice. I have attempted to address the murky issues surrounding the practice of public anthropology. Instead of taking sides with the women in Enayetpur or with the left-liberal activist community, I have asked ‘awkward’ questions and tried to outline the emotions and interests that govern both sides, along with the ethical issues that arise when fieldwork means taking sides within different contexts of politics and class. However, ‘the alternatives are not “neutrality” and “advocacy”. To be uncommitted is not to be neutral, but to be committed – consciously or not – to the status quo’ (Howd 1964: 54–56).13 Whether we can contribute as public anthropologists to a progressive, radical and moral politics needs to be examined in the context of the historical and political trajectories in which such engagement takes place. In the meantime, this should not deter ethnographers from explicitly articulating and occupying political positions.

Notes 1. See www.publicanthropology.org/Defining/definingpa.htm for the definition and aims of public anthropology. 2. While Bengali nationalism seeks a pan-Bengali (including Bengalis in India) bonding beyond religion, Bangladeshi nationalism primarily refers to those residing within the territorial boundaries of Bangladesh with a reference to their Muslim identity. 3. However, the history of rape has remained a topic in the literary and visual media throughout the last thirty-two years in Bangladesh, thereby ensuring that the raped woman endured as an iconic figure. 4. Respecting the sensitiveness of the materials, some names have been changed to ensure anonymity. 5. According to the news bulletin Communalism Combat (2002), 200 Muslim women were raped in the communal violence in Gujarat in February 2002. Also see The Survivors Speak (2002) and Panjabi et al. (2002). 6. The reason for Nasrin’s exile has to be located within various political contingencies. 7. For many in West Bengal the negative image of Bangladesh is embedded in their experiences of the image of East Bengal prior to India’s independence in 1947 and their loss of property therein.

86 • The Political Left in Bangladesh

8. Publishers at the Delhi office of an internationally acclaimed publishing house also confirmed this opinion. In 2003, when I approached them with my book proposal (on the public memories of sexual violence of the Bangladesh War), it was suggested that I should write the book on the incidents of sexual violence in Gujarat as there is not much of a market for Bangladesh in India. 9. Di or Didi is used to address an older woman among Indian Bengalis. In Bangladesh people address an older woman who is also a Muslim as apa, while the di at the end of a woman’s name has distinct Hindu connotations. I was ignorant of these connotations and started greeting the two sisters with the Hindu suffix. On realizing my mistake I wanted to refer to them as apa, but they insisted I should continue to address them with the di. 10. See Hastrup’s (1987: 95) account of fieldwork in Iceland, whose denizens she considered to be ‘a brethren people to my own, ever since the beginnings of history – marked by a shared Nordic language’. 11. My own biases and simplistic understanding of some ‘non-Bengali’ words as Arabic/Muslim was highlighted by my initial understanding of pani as an Arabic word. I was corrected that pani was the term for water throughout northern India, bereft of Islamic connotations. 12. His brother was the head of the Bangladesh Planning Commission. This highlights a common pattern of familial and professional interconnections between the state and the intellectual community of the civil society. This resonates with earlier cautions by journalists about the need to know about the biographies of the intellectuals and their allegiances. 13. Howd, D. 1964. ‘Thorstein Veblen and C. Wright Mills: Social Science and Social Criticism,’ in I. Horowitz (ed.), The New Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press. As cited in Gonzalez (2004a: 8).

References Agarwal, P. 1995. ‘Surat, Savarkar and Draupadi: Legitimising Rape as a Political Weapon’, in U. Butalia and T. Sarkar (eds), Women and Right Wing Movements: Indian Experiences. London: Zed Books, pp. 29–57. Ahmed, R. 1988. ‘Conflict and Contradictions in Bengali Islam: Problems of Change and Adjustment’, in K. P. Ewing (ed.), Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 114–42. Communalism Combat. 2002 8 (76), 'Genocide Gujarat'. Retrieved 28 February 2006 from http//:sabrang.com/cc/archive/2002/marapril/index.html Daniel, E. V. 1996. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropology of Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Das, V. (ed.). 1990. Mirrors of Violence: Community, Riots and Survivors in South Asia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Gonzalez, R. J. 2004a. ‘Introduction: Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace and American Power’, in R. J. Gonzalez (ed.), Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace and American Power. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 1–20. Gonzalez, R. J. 2004b. ‘Unconventional Anthropology: Challenging the Myths of Continuous War’, in R. J. Gonzalez (ed.), Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace and American Power. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 257–267. Habib, H. 2005. ‘Rising Terror in Bangladesh’. Frontline 22(5). Retrieved 28 February 2006 from http//www.flonnet.com/fl2205/stories/20050311000406200.htm

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

3:19 PM

Page 87

Nayanika Mookherjee • 87

Hastrup, K. 1987. ‘Fieldwork Among Friends: Ethnographic Exchange Within the Northern Civilization’, in A. Jackson (ed.), Anthropology at Home. London, New York: Tavistock Publications, pp. 94–108. Hastrup, K. and P. Elsass. 1990. ‘Anthropological Advocacy’, Current Anthropology 31(3): 301–311. Ibrahim, N. 1994–95. Ami birangona bolchi [This is the birangona speaking], 2 vols. Dhaka: Jagriti. Jackson, A. 1987. Anthropology at Home. London, New York: Tavistock Publications. Kobir, S. 1998. ‘Ekattorer birangona: Bhindeshi Nayanikar Obhiggota’ [71’s War Heroine: The Foreign and Other Nayanika’s Experience], Doinik Jonokontho, 11 July. Lindisfarne, N. 2002. 'Starting from Below: Fieldwork, Gender and Imperialism Now', Critique of Anthropology 22(4): 403–423. Lintner, B. 2002. ‘Religious Extremism and Nationalism in Bangladesh’. Paper presented at Religion & Security in South Asia – An International Workshop. Asia Pacific Centre for Security Studies, Honolulu, Hawaii, August 19–22. Asia Pacific media services. Retrieved 28 February 2006 from www.asiapacificms.com Mookherjee, N. 2003. ‘Gendered Embodiments: Mapping the Body-politic of the Raped Woman and the Nation in Bangladesh’, in N. Puwar and P. Raghuram (eds), Critical Reflections on Gender and the South Asian Diaspora. Oxford: Berg, pp. 157–177. ———.2004. ‘”My Man (Honour) is Lost but I Still Have my Iman (Principle)”: Sexual Violence and Articulations of Masculinity’, in R. Chopra, C. Osella and F. Osella (eds), South Asian Masculinities. New Delhi: Kali for Women, pp. 131–159. ———. 2006. ‘Remembering to Forget’: Public Secrecy and Memory of Sexual Violence in Bangladesh’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12 (2): 433–450. ———. 2011. The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Nandy, A. 2001. ‘Telling the Story of Communal Violence in South Asia’, The 2001 Ethnic and Racial Studies Public Lecture, 3 May. London: South Bank University. Nasrin, T. 1993. Shame [Lojja]. Dhaka: Pearl Publications. Okeley, J. 1984. ‘Fieldwork in the Home Counties’, RAIN 61: 4–6. Panjabi, K., K. Bandopadhyay and B. Gangopadhyay. 2002. ’The Next Generation: In the Wake of the Genocide. A Report on the Impact of the Gujarat Pogrom on Children and the Young’. Retrieved 28 February 2006 from http://www.onlinevolunteeers. org/gujarat/reports/children/ Roy, A. 1983. The Islamic Syncretic Tradition in Bengal. Princeton: University Press. ———. 1996. Islam in South Asia: A Regional Perspective. New Delhi: South Asian Publishers Private Limited. Spivak, G. C. 1993. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory Reader. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, pp. 66–111. Strathern, M. 1987. ‘The Limits of Auto-Anthropology’, in A. Jackson (ed.), Anthropology at Home. London, New York: Tavistock Publications, pp. 16–37. Taussig, M. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: Chicago University Press. The Survivors Speak. The Citizen’s Initiative Report on How the Gujarat Massacre Has Affected Minority Women. 2002. Ahmedabad.

Chapter 4

DOING FIELDWORK WITHIN FEAR AND SILENCES Panagiotis Geros

The discussion here relates to an uncomfortable experience that constantly accompanied me during my fieldwork in Damascus, Syria.1 The people I worked with, the Christian communities of the city, often seemed to be defenders of a political status quo to which I and the majority of Syrian citizens were opposed. This made me explore more closely the polymorphous workings of power in Syria. I looked carefully at the ways various social practices, apparently unrelated to ‘politics’, were structured and constrained by the authoritarianism of the regime that has ruled the country for more than three decades. It is the case that the sense of fear, systematically cultivated by the structures of Asad’s regime, has been underestimated in the scholarly work on social and political relations in Syria. The reasons should be sought partly in the theoretical orientation of this literature. This work has avoided engagement with ordinary people’s practices, feelings and perceptions, and paid attention instead to the deeds of the political elites. My focus on fear has a twofold objective. First, I draw on my ethnography to explore how practices and feelings have been saturated by the sense of fear disseminated by the political structures, while I also

90 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

refer, necessarily briefly, to the divergent ways that social groups and individuals experienced and coped with this situation. Second, I examine the ways these conditions affected and constrained my field research. This article also raises a more general problem for an anthropology that aims to be politically engaged. What are we to do when there is a tension between understanding the ideas or feelings of the people we work with, and analysing the relationship of these ideas to the wider political and economic structures they are embedded in?

Syria and Academic Research On 10 July 2000, 97.29 per cent of Syrians supposedly voted in a referendum for their new president, the only candidate and son of the departed Hafiz al-Asad. That percentage vividly illustrates the farcical character of the Syrian political system. To this day Syria remains a totalitarian state, run by a president and a military and political clique loyal and accountable only to him. Dissent and oppositional voices are ruthlessly repressed. This work is mainly the responsibility of the fifteen intelligence services (mukhabarat), which employ at least 65,000 fulltime officers and several thousand part-timers, occasional collaborators and informers (Perthes 1995: 193). All the formal structures created by Hafiz al-Asad in the early 1970s form a façade mainly used for the legitimization of the regime. These include the constitution, the People’s Assembly (majlis al-sha‘b), and the National Progressive Front (al-jabha al-wataniyya al-taqaddumiyya) – a governing coalition composed of small leftist parties together with the powerful Ba‘th, which in practice is the only party (see Lobmeyer 1994). From 1963 to this day the country has officially been in a ‘state of emergency’ (hala al-tawari), under the provision of which a series of military ‘exceptional’ courts (mahakam al-‘askariyya al-istithnaiyya) have been set up to erode any oppositional voices (see Middle East Watch 1991).2 Since the 1970s thousands of political activists have been jailed, tortured, executed and deprived of basic political and human rights. Ordinary citizens have been interrogated and arrested. In areas where the opposition had popular support and protests against the regime were intense, citizens have been summarily executed as a collective punishment. The best-known example is the armed uprising of 1982 in Hama, when the army shelled the historic centre, killing thousands of civilians together with the rebels (estimates vary from 5,000 to 25,000 people dead). But Hama was not an isolated case. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the activities of both the Islamist and secular leftist

Panagiotis Geros • 91

opposition intensified. The regime turned against them with unprecedented brutality, aiming at their total elimination. There is no doubt that in the early 1980s all currents in the Syrian opposition lost the war, not just a battle. Since then they have fallen into a state of paralysis (Lobmeyer 1994: 86). Until the end of the 1980s a Kafkaesque atmosphere, with continuous security checks all over the city, kept people in their homes during the evenings. Since then the excessive force of the state against its own citizens has declined radically, and thousands of political prisoners have been released in successive amnesties. However, these moves do not spring from any genuine ‘political opening’. Rather, they must be attributed partly to the absence of any real threat to the ruling clique, given that since 1982 oppositional activities have become unknown or rare. The regime also wanted to improve its image domestically and internationally. Political prisoners still remain in Syrian prisons, while the government continues to exercise a stringent control on TV, radio, newspapers and periodicals, which are all subjected to tight censorship.3 Perhaps a more important consequence is that the regime has penetrated almost all aspects of social life and has managed, to a significant degree, to impose isolation and divisions among Syrians. Traditionally vibrant social spaces were destroyed, and after that all cultural, educational, and social activities and associations were incorporated into the state structures. The result is the absence of organized collectivities able to operate autonomously from the state and provide spaces where alternative political visions could be formulated. The constraints that the political conditions in Syria imposed upon my research started before my arrival in the field. The relative absence of scholarly studies dealing with actual social relations in the country – or in the region in general – forms a serious obstacle to anyone who designs a research project with this theoretical focus in mind. Not only is one confronted with a lack of data on various fields of social life, but one is unable to relate one’s research to the theoretical concerns of an existing regional ethnographic literature. I planned to explore the relevance of religion in the lives of Arab Christians and the formation and the day-to-day uses of religious identities within a current urban setting. My initial idea was to study the operation of Christian high schools. Historically, these have been very important for the maintenance and reproduction of a distinctive communal identity, as well as for the formation of a middle and upper class among all religious affiliations. Christian schools in Damascus have a relatively high proportion of Muslim students, so I was also

92 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

interested in studying the modes of intercommunal relations between Christian and Muslim students. Although I wrote my pre-fieldwork project along such lines, I had to abandon this idea before I even found myself in the Syrian capital, as it would have represented a threat to the ‘secularist’ ideology (‘almaniyya) supposedly espoused by Asad’s regime. In terms of official policy, the constitution of 1973 strictly forbids the ‘incitation to religious strife’ (ithara al-naza‘at al-ta’ifiyya), namely, the use of religious affiliation in political or any public discourse. In fact, the ‘multicultural’ policies that the regime claims to have adopted towards the various religious communities in Syria are a cover for the growing sectarianization of the state. Since the 1963 Ba‘th coup, and especially since Asad’s ‘internal’ coup of 1970, the core of the regime is to a great extent formed of Alawi officers. They have monopolized the crucial positions in the public sector and the army, and staffed even minor positions in the state mechanisms and bureaucracy (see Van Dam 1996; Perthes 1995). The reactions against the government, which intensified in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were a response to the widespread corruption, nepotism and enormous enrichment that characterized the circles around the president, in sharp contrast to the worsening economic conditions for the majority of the population. Apart from the action of various leftist parties, this opposition manifested itself through the ideology and organization of Sunni Islamism against the ‘corrupted Alawis’ (see Chabry and Chabry 1987). Hafiz al-Asad attempted to manipulate the religious idiom of this opposition by granting some concessions to Sunni Muslims. The constitution of 1973 prescribed that the president should be Muslim (Seale 1995: 173). Asad also presented himself at times as Sunni and at times as a Shia Muslim, without succeeding in convincing anyone (Zisser 1999).4 Thus, in Syria the mention of religious distinctions in public discourse automatically invokes suspicions of ‘sectarianism’ (ta’ifiyya), a taboo topic due to its associations with politics. It was in this context that I was first made aware of what a dangerous and sensitive terrain the ‘religious issue’ is within the Syrian social landscape. During my first months in Damascus I was in a constant dilemma as to whether to apply to the government for a research permit or not. It would be very difficult to obtain one. If I succeeded, I would supposedly be, or at least feel, more protected vis-à-vis the Syrian state. That would allow the people I worked with to feel more comfortable with me as well – at least, this is what I believed at that stage. Yet, by applying for a permit I would deliberately expose myself to the secret services, which were extremely suspicious of researchers, journalists

Panagiotis Geros • 93

and similar categories of foreigners. I consulted various foreign researchers already working in Syria and received contradictory advice. In the end, I decided that applying for a research permit would make things more difficult for me and for my local contacts. Most of the foreign academics doing research in the country were conducting historical and archival or architectural and archeological work, or they were studying Islamic law and similar topics. The regime encouraged, or at least allowed, study of these ‘neutral’ areas. Anything that was relevant to any current social matter and included long-term field research among ordinary Syrians was strongly discouraged or even forbidden.5 Significantly, among this rather small academic community I heard a few stories about previous researchers who had been deported because they were conducting fieldwork on ‘sensitive’ topics. These stories may have been something of a peculiar urban legend addressed to current and potential social researchers. But real or not, they operated as gatekeepers of the ‘terrains’ defined as permissible by the authorities, and enhanced an atmosphere of secrecy and mistrust between the researchers and the local population. Such limitations touched not only upon the choice of a research subject but also on the theoretical agenda. From the very beginning my main theoretical concern had been to situate ‘local Christianity’ in the current social context in which it was produced and operated. I wanted to look at the ways different people experienced and engaged with various notions and practices related to ‘religion’ in their day-to-day lives. The existing studies on Arab Christians in the Middle East had not been of much help in this respect. Most of them are written from a historical, political or theological macro-perspective, often based on an essentialist view of Christian communities and identities. Instead, I wanted to shift the focus to everyday life and the practices through which sectarian identities were constructed, while at the same time situating these phenomena in wider socioeconomic processes. Moreover, I did not presuppose that a study of phenomena related to religion should necessarily prioritize the predefined categories of either ‘cosmology’ or ‘ritual’. By adopting a ‘polythetic’ definition of religion (Needham 1975), I was more interested in the social uses of religious identities rather than the depiction of the ‘spirit’ that characterized this ‘local Christianity’. To put it differently, instead of focusing on Christian cosmology or ritual, I wanted to closely follow the actual concerns that the people I worked with had and to explore the different ways in which ‘Christianity’ entered their everyday lives. Furthermore, it seemed to me that any attempt to represent local forms of Christianity as a unified system, either in ritualistic or cosmological terms, would be in danger of exoticizing or ‘Orientalizing’

94 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

such socioreligious expressions by implying an essentializing dichotomy between a ‘sensualist’, ‘ritualistic’, or ‘mystical’ Eastern Christianity versus a ‘rational’, ‘legalistic’, and ‘pragmatic’ Western one (cf. Said 1978). Such dichotomies are rather problematic, since historically things have been much more complex. The development of Christian churches in the region has never been isolated from politics. Over the last centuries ‘local’ and ‘global’ elements have always been closely intertwined in the formation of various forms of Christianity in the Arab East within the context of colonialism. Power relations were never absent from these interactions, and the disproportionate economic power of many Arab Christians during the last centuries was directly related to their close links with the great European powers.6 Obviously, an ethnographic strategy concerned more with everyday realities of ordinary people than with church ritual and cosmology faced serious difficulties. Moreover, I wanted to study intercommunal relations, as well as the institutional settings and politics of religion. I spent some time in the field searching for alternative methodological possibilities. Then I came into contact with various church youth associations, which were becoming increasingly popular among young Christians. These associations became one of my primary research settings, for both theoretical and methodological reasons. The church youth groups (firaq al-kana’is) were appropriate settings in which to examine the ways religious discourses, identities and practices were forged, reproduced, negotiated and challenged. They also provided me with the opportunity to enter the Christian communities and expand my network among the local population. At the same time, I had the ‘protection’ of some priests with whom I had built closer links. To be sure, this choice did not mean the end of my problems. The relatively protected spaces where the group meetings took place provided me with enough material and ideas to study the communication, relations and practices of their participants. However, when I stepped, physically and mentally, outside such settings I often met with a reserved attitude. When I attempted to discuss with these people, and their relatives or friends, wider issues than the churches themselves I confronted fear and silences, even in the supposedly protected and private space of the home. In my view, the academic literature that deals with Syria has underestimated the culture of fear disseminated by Asad’s regime and its ramifications for all kinds of social relations. The reason is not that the political order of the country is insufficiently dealt with. On the contrary, the great majority of academic work on Syria is disproportionately devoted to the study of its politics, internal and regional, as well as the economy.7 Rather the problem lies in that most of these studies are

Panagiotis Geros • 95

informed by a restricted and conventional notion of ‘politics’. This underpins a top-down analysis, an almost exclusive focus on political elites, and a lack of engagement with the thoughts and deeds of ordinary people. The contribution of both the theory and methodology of anthropology can be of particular importance here. The problematization of the category of ‘politics’ has made us aware that it is difficult to locate a separable and autonomous ‘political subsystem’, so that the understanding of power relations in a society must involve more than the study of its formal political institutions (Gledhill 1994: 22). It should include the examination of political action in everyday life, with its symbols and rituals, that is, the points where power is affirmed and contested in social practice (Abeles 1988: 17). In this sense, the ethnographic practice, which closely follows the ways such ‘high politics’ work on the ground, can offer significant insights into political culture.8 Apart from the problems of theoretical presuppositions, the absences in the scholarly literature on Syria can to a large degree be explained by the conditions surrounding the production of knowledge about the country, and the resort to official statistics, interviews with persons who hold top positions in the regime, reports from international bodies and so on. Significantly, all analysts agree on the authoritarian or totalitarian character of the Syrian regime. Nevertheless, to refer to the complex ways in which the ‘state’ is connected with ‘society’, most of them put a parallel emphasis on ‘populist corporatism’ (Perthes 1995) or the ‘etatization’ of Syrian society (Lobmeyer 1994). Although it is definitely true that the regime has tied almost all social spaces to its structures, this does not mean it has managed to achieve any important degree of legitimization – something that is accepted by most scholars. These strategies of the state aim more at the policing of such spaces rather than to winning the hearts and minds of the population. The fear towards the regime that runs through the whole social body has not been eliminated or even decreased.9 In this chapter, I would like to put the emphasis instead upon the culture of fear and examine some of the ways it enables the regime to saturate the minds and bodies of the population.

Fear as an Embodied Structure of Feeling From the beginning of my fieldwork in Damascus I was aware that the omnipresence of fear among ordinary Syrians was going to be the greatest obstacle to my research. There seemed to be a general consensus among the people I spoke with about the boundaries surrounding the ‘unspoken’ issues. My first attempts to overcome them

96 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

were usually met with reluctance. For the same reasons, keeping records of discussions and interviews proved to be extremely sensitive and difficult. The presence of the tape recorder in private discussions, or the act of writing notes in public, made people feel very uncomfortable, since both were immediately associated with ideas about secret agents and surveillance. So I took notes only in discussions or interviews with people I knew well, and with whom I had already established relations of trust, and only inside their homes. Under such conditions, the systematic daily writing up of discussions and interviews remained the only available way to keep a record of what had occurred in the course of each day. Furthermore, the peculiarity of the Syrian context obliged me to develop a certain secrecy about what I was doing vis-à-vis those who were not implicated in a direct manner with my research. I would declare that I was a student of the Arabic language in the university, where I had enrolled in order to take a residence permit. I presented myself in the capacity of the researcher only to those who were directly involved in my work or those with whom I had developed close friendships and trust. But the more I engaged with local everyday life the more I became aware that it was not only with a foreigner that locals would not discuss certain sensitive issues – which is not an uncommon experience in fieldwork, after all. They were afraid to talk among themselves too.10 It was more than obvious that the space left for talking about or criticizing the current political order was strictly and carefully limited. Criticism and complaints relevant to politics had to be vague and generic, and in no case could they specifically touch the person of Hafiz al-Asad. People in taxis, restaurants or markets would continually complain about the inflation, the economic regression, and sometimes, in more private conversations, even about the corruption. However, this was the officially permitted space for critique. Issues referring to political parties, the regime’s policies, the constitution of the government, or the participation of the army in politics were conspicuously absent from the ‘public’ and ‘private’ discourse. No one dared break the taboo against saying the names of the president and members of his family in public. When people had to refer to Hafiz alAsad during our conversations, they used his official title ra’is, the President, to avoid speaking his proper name. The imagery of power that fed people’s fears was most vividly personified in the omnipresent mukhabarat agents and the police, who guarded public buildings and powerful members of the regime and were visible everywhere in the city. Mukhabarat agents moved continually around the city, usually in groups of five, riding in white

Panagiotis Geros • 97

Peugeot cars and carrying guns. The term ‘secret services’ was an oxymoron, because anyone could immediately identify these as mukhabarat cars. Their presence had more to do with instilling fear among the population than surveillance of specific persons. Indeed, surveillance of the homes and workplaces of people considered threatening to the regime was the charge of other agents, who worked undercover. The monitoring of telephone conversations and mail was common too. Most people were particularly afraid of the invisible informers working for the mukhabarat. No one really knew how many people worked for the agencies because they hired people in different ways. Some were full-time employees, others were part-timers or paid occasionally according to the information provided. Many people were expected to pass information considered to be valuable about their colleagues and acquaintances to the agencies or to the Ba‘th party. And a large segment of the population was affiliated with the party. Arguably, it is precisely in those situations, in which the reality of power is highly contestable, that images of absolute power become necessary for an authoritarian regime. As Scott (1990: 49) puts it, appearances do matter. If the subordinated believe their superior to be powerful, the impression will help him impose himself and, in turn, contribute to his actual power. Indeed, apart from the numerous cases of actual violence and tortures carried out by the Syrian regime, this seemed to be the way in which the dissemination of fear among the Syrian population worked at the everyday level. The constant and excessive display of agency by the regime engendered a fear in ordinary people that convinced them of the regime’s absolute strength. With the mukhabarat, the army and the prisons as visible symbols of the repression, the daily display of might created impressions of that power, and virtually constituted the actual power.11 Indeed, the great majority of Syrians seemed to perceive the state as the all-powerful machine that it presented itself to be. My local friends and acquaintances would tell me from the outset not to speak about politics (siyasa), because ‘the walls have ears in Syria’ (wahidda al-hitan laha azan bi suria). A lot of Syrians assumed that one in four persons was an informer, or that the simple mention of the name of a minister in a coffee shop might result in a summons from the mukhabarat to an interrogation. Families would turn on their televisions inside their home or close the windows, even during the summer, to comment on – or, better, whisper about – politics. They were afraid to be heard by neighbours. Sometimes, the fear of the regime’s power was expressed in popular stories, such as the one about a person who entered a bookshop to buy

98 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

a photograph of Hafiz al-Asad. As soon as he complained about the quality of the photograph, he was arrested by mukhabarat agents. Another popular story I was told more than once concerned a father travelling in a bus with his young son. When the little boy said something negative against the government, his father pretended not to know him. The fact that I heard these, and similar, stories from different, unrelated people bears evidence of their character as urban myths rather than stories necessarily referring to actual events. Regardless of whether or not the regime had the actual power to exercise complete control over the lives of its citizens, the important point here is that Syrians assumed that it did. They assumed that they lived in a sort of a ‘panoptical’ society (cf. Foucault 1977), where the regime could easily be informed about their smallest discussions with colleagues or neighbours. Thus, most people were self-censored in their public conversations and restricted the topics they discussed to issues as neutral and conventional as possible. These usually centred on the exchange of news about families, friends and work. Issues perceived as ‘dangerous’ would be discussed only with a few close friends and mainly within the home. The street, the workplace, the coffee shops and the means of transport were conceptualized as sites dominated by the omnipresence of power or authority (sulta). Insecurity, fear and powerlessness vis-à-vis the authoritarian state had been routinized. That is one of the main reasons the regime did not have to deploy violent measures to control the population, as it had done in the past. It would be no exaggeration to say that the authoritarian conditions in contemporary Syria had, to a large extent, created an atmosphere of mutual mistrust that had poisoned interpersonal relations. They had imposed a significant degree of isolation and individuation among Syrians, making them resort more and more to the protection of ‘familiar’ spaces, such as the ‘household’. Yet, even the latter could not definitely escape the intrusion of the state. One could say that this omnipresent, but inarticulate, sense of fear had become a ‘structure of feeling’ that saturated all aspects of social life and interactions among Syrians. This concept, proposed by Raymond Williams (1977), refers to a sense of lived experience that, although it has structural dimensions and effects, is largely intangible and cannot find its way into more articulate and overt expressions. Interestingly, Williams himself attempted to trace the presence of these inarticulate elements in older historical periods through their literary and artistic production, since he considered them to lie outside of other sociocultural forms. Similarly, in the Syrian case it is easier to trace such dispersed feelings in the literature produced by local writers rather than in the academic analyses of formal political and social structures.12

Panagiotis Geros • 99

The fact that such elements are inarticulate does not mean they cannot be examined. One can trace the discursive spaces that are closed for examination, the ‘unspoken’ issues. Perhaps more telling in my fieldwork, however, was that this ‘structure of fear’ did not operate solely at the level of consciousness but was literally embodied. The sense of fear had become a habitus (cf. Bourdieu 1977) inscribing the meanings produced by the relations of power on people’s bodies.13 Thus, the discussion or the whispering of ‘political’ topics among Syrians, even in the supposedly ‘protected’ private space, was almost always accompanied by specific and standardized bodily moves. People would first lean over the table towards their interlocutor, turn their head from right to left checking the door and the windows of the room, and then lower their voice before speaking. Doors and windows were seen as openings from which the regime could enter the household. Whenever I unconsciously asked a question considered politically sensitive, they would look anxiously at each other and then go on speaking in a lower voice. Or they would give a conventional response and try to change the subject. In other instances, small jokes explicitly or implicitly referring to politics met with a quick sneer before someone gestured to the others to stop by putting his finger in front of his mouth or by winking at them. As an outsider, I often had the impression that such behaviour was somewhat exaggerated. It was unlikely that the regime had either the ability or the ideological control needed to employ as many informers as most Syrians supposed. There were limits to the regime’s capacity to monitor the trivial actions of Syrian citizens. These included a lack of cooperation between administratively independent secret agencies, bureaucratic deficiencies and, more importantly, the failure of the state to gain the support of the majority of the population (on this issue see Perthes 1995). Nevertheless, I was surprised when, after having spent some months in Syria, I caught myself inside my apartment acting out the same bodily moves as Syrians made. Even though I consciously doubted the idea of the all-powerful state, the internalization of fear was nevertheless reproduced through the postures of my body. The conceptual dichotomy of public and private space, and the supposed autonomy of the ‘household’ have already been theoretically problematized (see, for example, Harris 1981). The Syrian experience suggests that this notion can be challenged from another point of view as well. The state had invaded intimate spaces and relations both by disciplining citizens’ bodies through the culture of fear and by socializing them into its controlled organizations. Popular stories such as those mentioned above, or others about children who unintentionally betrayed their parents’ anti-regime comments to a Ba‘th youth branch, revealed an

100 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

anxiety about the potential intrusion of the most intimate spaces by the state. Even if the family and the household were sometimes experienced as a last refuge against the state’s authoritarianism, they were not perceived as totally impermeable to its power. However, one of the interesting issues was that fear, silences, and attitudes towards the regime did not affect everybody in the same way.

Divergent Political Attitudes On 10 June 2000, the authorities announced the death of Hafiz alAsad, who had been the president (al-ra’is) of Syria since 1970. Many Syrians speculated that the authorities had kept his death secret for some days, until they could ensure that there would be no threat against the regime. During all the months that the ra’is had been ill, there were rumours about a possible military coup soon after his death, while others thought the Islamists might take advantage of the ensuing power vacuum. People’s worried faces and their whole behaviour on the afternoon of that day bore witness to their anxiety about such possibilities. Shopkeepers were quick to close their shops and everybody rushed home. After a while, only policemen and the mukhabarat cars were left on the streets. Syrian acquaintances told me that ‘it is not safe to be outside tonight’, and they advised me to go back home – to Bab Tuma, the Christian quarter of the Old City where I was living at the time. On my way home I met my neighbour, Abu George, a 55-year-old high school teacher, who invited me to join his family and a friend of theirs, Shadi, for dinner. Shadi was a pleasant and witty man in his early thirties who ran his own dental clinic in the new middle-class area of Jaramana, a heavily Christian area. As Shadi and I waited for the others to join us for dinner, the discussion turned to the death of the ra’is. Shadi told me that the People’s Assembly had already confirmed that afternoon a change in the existing constitutional law that a presidential candidate must be at least forty years old. The new law, passed unanimously by the Assembly, defined the minimum age as thirty-four, the age of Hafiz al-Asad’s son Bashar. Shadi seemed sad about Asad’s death. He told me that he felt like he had lost his father that day. I asked him if this was how most Syrians felt, and he responded that the president was beloved by the people. My face must have expressed doubt, because he hastened to add: ‘Yes, I know that in Europe you consider him a dictator, but this is not true for me. He cared a lot about the country, he worked for her, and it was he

Panagiotis Geros • 101

who made her so strong. Take people like myself, the president gave us the possibility to study, to leave the countryside, and to get good jobs. He also brought balance to the religious relations. For us Christians, the president was very good because he did not allow the Muslims to destroy the country and always tried to keep a balance between the religions. We felt safer with him. I grew up in this regime, and I like the idea that someone strong like Hafiz al-Asad can take care of the country and its problems. Irrespective of who is going to succeed him, I think the government must follow the same basic policies.’

When I ventured to ask about the lack of democracy and freedom in the country, it was clear that these were not the most important things. ‘Syria is not ready for democracy. Everybody wants to be a leader here, but if there is no one to control the situation the country will be torn apart, just like Lebanon.’ He was referring to the civil war that ravaged the neighbouring country from 1975 to 1990. We had been speaking in English and when Abu George arrived he joined the conversation. He said, in Arabic, how true it was that the country needed a strong leader (ra’is qawi) and that al-Asad had always been a capable and strong one. Abu George himself had grown up in a Christian village next to an Alawi village, in the area of Latakia. He liked the Alawis and preferred them to Sunni Muslims, he said, because they had always had good relations with the Christians and had protected them from the fanaticism of the (Sunni) Muslims. Although Abu George and Shadi were praising the regime during our discussion, they spoke quietly, almost whispering, looking around nervously from time to time. Houses in Bab Tuma were built in the traditional Arab architectural style, two stories high with open terraces. Since we were sitting outside, someone from the neighbouring houses could have heard us. Indeed, after a while, Umm George, who was preparing dinner in the nearby kitchen, discreetly waved from the kitchen window to her husband to stop the political talk. He immediately did so. From the next morning onwards different civilian marches (masirat) for the departed president were organized around the country. The Ba‘th Party had mobilized every organization on the ground level, from university students to factory workers and schoolchildren. One of the dominant slogans in these marches was ‘Allah, Suria, Bashar wa bes’ (only God, Syria and Bashar). Bashar was Hafiz al-Asad’s son, the successor-to-be, who that day was officially promoted from a lowranking army officer to general, and then to Chief of the Army. These events showed that ‘religion’ entered the public arena not only as the basis of a communal feeling towards the current regime but also through its institutional mechanisms. The Christian churches were closely involved in the organization of the mourning demonstrations.

102 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

In Nahr, the suburb of Damascus where I had built links with church youth groups, the latter had been busy painting black banners that read: ‘We will never forget you and you are with us and in our hearts forever’ (lan nansak, anta ma‘ana wa fi qulubina ila al-abad). These were not spontaneous acts by the young people in the church circles. Rather, as the priest who was responsible for their group let me know, the chief of the local Ba‘th branch had told him to gather the youth group in the church and prepare banners for a masira in the centre of Damascus. In another march in the coastal city of Tartus the same night, the Rum Orthodox Bishop of the city himself, together with a group of Christian scouts (kashaf), participated in the march. Similar things were repeated in Damascus. Furthermore, the patriarchs of the different Christian denominations ordered their priests to speak about the virtues of the departed president in their Sunday sermons. The involvement of Christian churches in the organization of the mournful events was, in many ways, exceptional. The leaders of the other religious communities – Sunni and Shia Muslims, Alawis, Ismailis and Druzes – did express their condolences and admiration for the Departed Leader (al-qa’id al-rahil). But they did not take part in such events as organized communities. In any case, there existed no institutional mechanisms through which these religious communities could have been represented in such an event. The Christians had the right to form their own church associations, such as youth groups and scouts. But the government did not allow associations to be formed on the basis of other religions, especially in the case of Sunni Muslims. This would have been considered a potential threat to the regime, since political Islam had been used in violent opposition to the government in the past, and in many ways still signified an underlying opposition to it. The appropriation of religion for political purposes, even on a rhetorical level, could reveal some latent tensions in this respect. The participants in the mourning marches, holding photographs or posters of the president, would be told to continuously shout ‘La ilah ila Allah, wa al-Asad habib Allah’ (There is no God but God, and Asad is his beloved one). This Shia-inspired slogan paraphrases the shahada, Muslims’ most basic confirmation of the Islamic faith and one of the five pillars of Islam, ‘La ilah ila Allah, wa Muhammad Rasul Allah’, (There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet). This slogan illustrates the spirit of Asad’s cult and the attempt to upgrade him to an almost sanctified position. But a Sunni Muslim acquaintance commented to me that the government had gone too far this time. It was not right to put Asad in the same position with the prophet Muhammad, he said disapprovingly.

Panagiotis Geros • 103

On the afternoon of the same day I went to mukhayyam Filastini (literally, the Palestinian [refugee] camp), an area inhabited predominantly by Palestinians who had fled to Syria after the 1948 and 1967 wars. The district is densely populated, with many large families on low incomes. I had gone there to visit a good friend, Ziyad, who was in his early forties. In the past he had been a political activist affiliated with a leftist party. Ziyad was not exceptional. Palestinians living in Damascus have a tradition of radicalism and many had joined various leftist parties in the past and were particularly active in political struggles. Over the last three decades many of them have been imprisoned by the Bathist regime, the same regime that claims to represent the purest pan-Arabism and the Palestinians’ right to their homeland. I drank coffee with Ziyad and a couple of other friends. We heard voices coming from a march going on in the main street and went out to have a look. It was ironic to witness such a march in the Palestinian area, a place with a strong antigovernment reputation. But the mukhabarat agents were entering the houses and pulling people onto the streets to march for the president. They also obliged the shop owners to put up posters of the president outside their shops. Soon posters of Hafiz al-Asad, with a black strip on the upper corner symbolizing mourning, covered the windows and the walls of the area. Ziyad pointed to one in particular and said sarcastically: ‘You see that shop keeper over there? He was imprisoned for eight years by Hafiz alAsad and now he has to hang his portrait to show sorrow for his death’. Ziyad and his friends seemed to be rather relieved by the end of Hafiz al-Asad’s rule. Many people from these circles had been imprisoned, sometimes for many years, because of their political activism. They were tortured, and after their release they were subjected to close surveillance by the security services. At the same time, it was obvious that these people held no illusions about the future of the country. They were already quite pessimistic and believed that while there might be some superficial changes in the way the country was governed, the basic structure supporting the existing authoritarian and exploitative regime would remain in place.

The Political Economy of Fear The narrative and dialogues surrounding the death of Hafiz al-Asad serve to illustrate differing attitudes towards the political regime. They also give some idea of the conditions that created a conflict within me throughout my field research. The political attitudes cherished by many

104 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

of the people I mainly worked with seemed to my eyes quite conformist and conservative even by local standards. And their attitudes clashed strongly with the left-wing politics I was carrying from home. Although I tried, of course, not to think in judgemental terms, I constantly felt uncomfortable with their reluctance to express the most minimal criticism of the political system and their readiness to justify what I, together with many Syrians, saw as a repressive and exploitative regime. What made this tension stronger was the fact that, apart from the people I met for my research, I was socializing most closely with the circles of radical intellectuals referred to above, sometimes on almost a daily basis. In their company I had the opportunity to hear, firsthand, many chilling stories about the notorious Syrian prisons and the state terrorism that dominated the country throughout the 1980s, and to engage in long discussions about regional and international politics. However, these were issues I could never touch upon with my Christian acquaintances in the Old City or the suburb of Damascus where I settled in the second half of my fieldwork. I developed close links with them, but they were unwilling to engage in such discussions. The reason may have been fear, or lack of interest, or both. The youth in particular, in their early or mid twenties, did not seem to know much about the recent political history of the country. I speculated that their parents had protected most of them from learning about these things. Moreover, if anyone referred to politics they were usually eager to justify the past and current regime’s policies and the repressive state in which it kept the people. So, when I travelled from one part of the city to the other, from the leftist social circles back to the Christian areas where I lived and did my research, I felt as if I was moving between different worlds within the same day. Despite the discomfort I felt from the beginning, I tried to treat this conflict as one of the most important questions of my study. That is, I tried to understand the political conformism and acquiescence that characterized the attitudes of these people. I explored the ways in which this might be related to their communal affiliation and perhaps to the structuring of their lives by their religious institutions. It appeared to me that the study of the general state of fear that enveloped the lives of most Syrians should also involve a political economy of fear, which would situate the social subjects within past and current relations of power. I could then explore how their attitudes and coping strategies were modified by their socioeconomic location. Of course, when I refer to ‘negotiation’, ‘challenge’ or even ‘resistance’ to the political order, it should be clear that I am not talking about any form of organized and overt political defiance against the

Panagiotis Geros • 105

regime. Even the most radical critics of the regime I knew had been ‘demilitarized’ over the years via imprisonment and the outlawing of the parties they had joined.14 Since the brutal crushing of the secular and Islamist opposition in the early 1980s, the only ‘public’ element perceived as an expression of defiance against the regime took the form of a ‘cultural Islamic politics’. This mainly manifested itself in modern Islamic women’s dress – the long coat and head covering (hijab) worn by many Muslim women. It was a widely held idea that the number of women wearing the hijab (the muhajibin, as they are called), especially the younger ones who wore it at school, had increased over the last two decades. As Rabo notes, in countries with a repressive state apparatus that leaves few spaces in which opposition forces can formulate alternative visions, ‘the critique of the state is usually formulated using well-known symbols, as with the multiple meanings of the female Islamic veil’ (1996: 168). Significantly, it was exactly those multiple meanings of the veil that worked as a protective shield against the repressiveness of the Syrian regime. Because it was not evident whether the headscarf worn by each woman signified a ‘religious’, ‘cultural’ or ‘political’ motivation – elements that often were fused in any case – these women protected themselves from the regime’s tendency to repress any challenge to its dominance.15 But the subtle infiltration of daily life with fear did not rule out moments when people used trivial and apparently insignificant practices as a critique of the regime. The innumerable jokes referring to the president and his circle are an example of such rhetorical practices, and perhaps the most popular underground way to criticize the Syrian regime. Mainly inside their homes, and only in the presence of people whom they could trust, many ordinary people loved to tell and listen to these jokes. They poked fun at Asad’s regime and the absurdity of the political cult it cultivated. As Wedeen (1999: 121) points out, although such practices may appear trivial, they operate effectively as resistance to the extent that they allow tellers and listeners to overcome the isolation and atomization that the official performative practices induce. And they allow citizens to recognize the shared conditions of disbelief that Asad’s cult produces.16 Furthermore, critical stances towards the regime could be traced in everyday, apparently trivial discussions. For instance, one of the daily problems in the suburb where I lived was the water supply, an issue constantly under discussion. Water was scarce in the area and only available through the public system for a few hours every four days, and not at a fixed time. Everybody in the area, including me, often had to stay awake during the night, sometimes for hours, waiting for the water to flow and fill the house’s tank. There were some rather rare

106 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

moments when I heard people in private discussions criticizing the administration of the local municipality (baladiyya), implying that they did not care enough for the needs of the locals. ‘If we lived in Malki or in Mezze we would not have such problems’, a Druze acquaintance once said. Malki and Mezze were two of the districts in which a significant number of the masu‘lin, the powerful men of the regime, lived. The scarcity of water in the area can thus be seen as an idiom used by ordinary people to express their critique against the ineffectiveness and the corruption of the state. But not everybody was eager to make or even listen to such comments. When I once expressed my annoyance at the ineffective water supply to a Christian shop owner and good friend of mine, he half-jokingly said that if I went on talking in this way ‘I would not leave Syria in one piece’. He was telling me he wanted me to stop talking about such issues inside his shop. The sense of fear clearly had its own patterns and could vary according to social class, religious affiliation, occupation, locality, education, personal history and other variables depending on the often contradictory positions of social subjects. The most critical and explicit comments about the regime came from people belonging to lower strata who understood their livelihoods to be economically squeezed by government policies and corruption. These were people ‘who had nothing to lose’ by criticizing the government. But people like my friends Abu George and Shadi had profited from the popularization of education by the Bathist regime. They had been able to escape the harsh world of the countryside and join the lower middle class in Damascus. They also held jobs that, though not sufficient to support a family (many had to work two or three jobs), at least allowed them to entertain a certain social status. On the other hand, most of the people of the lower social strata felt quite vulnerable before the regime because they often lacked the connections that would protect them if they got in trouble with the security services. The category of occupation that one held was of critical importance in this respect. People who worked in the public sector, a large part of the Syrian population, did not necessarily have to internalize the regime’s doctrines, but they had to behave as if they had. Their place in the public sector provided a relative security within the increasingly difficult economic environment. Thus, it was more likely to hear some criticism of the government from a merchant than from a public sector employee. The merchants were, or were felt to be, much less controlled by the government. Besides, both the notable merchant families and the self-employed petty bourgeoisie were traditionally hostile to the Alawi regime and had lent their active or

Panagiotis Geros • 107

passive support to the Islamic opposition in the past (Hinnebusch 1996).17 Furthermore, people who lived far from the centre of Damascus were more eager to express their frustration at their living conditions than those dwelling in the centre. I became aware of this by living in a suburb of Damascus and travelling outside the capital. Some Syrians attributed this difference to the heavy presence of the police at the centre of the capital, as well as to the conceptualization of the latter as the basis of authority (sulta). Sectarian affiliation also affected interpersonal relations. Most people were afraid of the Alawis. They assumed that even if the Alawis they knew did not work for the security services, they would have some connections with the regime. Although this was a stereotype and a generalization, the arrogant and provocative behaviour of many Alawis, especially those who held a high post in the government or worked in the security services, helped to enhance such perceptions among the population. Most Christians’ reluctance to engage with the ‘dangerous’ terrain of politics appeared to be closely related to the economic transformation of Christian communities during recent decades and the specific policies of the regime. The policies of economic nationalization and the popularization of the educational system followed by the Bathist governments had hit the traditional Christian communities of Damascus particularly hard. A significant part of them had emigrated to Western countries. At the same time, the rural exodus, which intensified after the 1960s and the 1970s, had brought large numbers of Christians from the countryside to Damascus, where they now lived in particularly difficult conditions. However, in exchange for the economic losses and the overall worsening of their socioeconomic status, Christians had secured a significant degree of ‘cultural freedom’ and privileges, something of a peculiarity within the repressive political structures of the Syrian state. Not only was there no sign of any religious persecution or discrimination, but the Christian communities maintained a large degree of autonomy concerning issues of Personal Status Law (qanun al-ahwal al-shahsiyya). Such cases were tried by the communal ‘Spiritual Courts’ (al-makhakim al-ruhiyya). More important was the fact that the churches administered a wide network of various associations, such as youth groups, scouts, women’s and charity associations, as well as communal institutions such as hospitals, orphanages or homes for the aged. The youth groups in particular were responsible for the organization of a variety of social events, forming an idiosyncratic ‘Christian culture’. Given the relative poverty of social life in the capital, this was an almost paradoxical situation.

108 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

Although these ‘concessions’ to a religious minority were presented as proof of the religious tolerance adopted by the regime, they had to be seen as part of the peculiar political dynamics in the country. Faced with accusations that Asad’s regime was mainly formed of a clique of corrupted Alawis, the government needed the support, or at least the tolerance, of a socially significant religious minority such as the Christian one. The privileges enjoyed by the Christian communities were one way of disrupting a potential oppositional front that would be supported by the religious idiom (see also Mouawad 2001). Thus, the church authorities tended to see the regime more or less as their protector (Valognes 1994: 720). The political framework allowed them to freely conduct their religious work within a ‘secularist’ state with a Muslim majority, where the appeal of the Islamic idiom had witnessed a recent revival. Furthermore, the state had elevated their position within the laity by permitting them to operate, both officially and unofficially, as mediators between the government and their ‘communities’. Thus, they were able to acquire the functions of ‘nongovernmental organizations’. One has to note, however, that the churches promoted a particularist Christian identity among their communities, both by cultivating a sense of cultural superiority vis-àvis the Muslim population and by neglecting to develop any channels of communication with them. Yet, this ‘bargaining’ had led to political conformism and acquiescence by not only the churches but, to a large extent, the laity as well. Ordinary Christians used quite specific discursive tropes to praise the existing political order. All of them would characteristically revolve around the idea that Asad’s regime had ended the decades of sectarian tensions and introduced ‘stability’ (istiqrar) and ‘balance’ (taouwazin) into the country’s intercommunal relations. Significantly, these sentiments and stances vacillated from a politics of silence and compliance to a passive, or sometimes active, support for, and justification of, the current political order and cut across intracommunal class boundaries. Those Christians who maintained high positions in the public and private sector were tolerant if not positive towards the current political situation. But even Christians from the lower and lower-middle social strata who, in some cases, were willing to privately criticize the authoritarianism, corruption and nepotism of Asad’s regime, accepted it in the end as a ‘lesser evil’. Radi, a poor retail employee in his mid thirties and one of my closest contacts in Bab Tuma, serves as a good example. In contrast to many other Christians I knew, Radi often expressed his discontent with the regime in particularly harsh and explicit terms. Lack of freedom, fear, declining economic standards for the population and the huge corruption among the ruling elite were themes that often appeared in

Panagiotis Geros • 109

our discussions. A couple of days after Bashar al-Asad was ‘elected’ as the new president, I was at Radi’s house for dinner. Radi did not share any of the optimism shown by some circles in Syria or the Western press, who saw in Bashar some hope for political reform. Like my radical friends in the Palestinian refugee camp, he was very pessimistic about the political and economic future of the country. ‘Nothing will change here with Bashar. You’ll see, it will be the same situation. But I prefer him to any Muslim’, Radi added, to my surprise. ‘But you don’t like the government at all’, I said. ‘Sure, I don’t like these people, they are thieves and they don’t care about anybody apart from themselves’, he replied. ‘But at least we know that Bashar likes the Christians. If a Muslim takes over the government, who knows what will happen to us here? Did you see what happened with the Taliban and the Buddha statues in Afghanistan? Muslims cannot tolerate anyone else in their country’, said Radi, referring to the well-known event in Afghanistan that, unsurprisingly, had been extensively covered by the state media in Syria. Although there were hardly any similarities between the Taliban and the local Islamist militants who had engaged in violent opposition in the past, or between the Taliban and the majority of Syria’s Sunni population, Radi was keen to homogenize ‘the Muslims’ whom he perceived as a threat. A more hidden subtext behind people’s apologetic stance for the regime’s brutal and corrupt record was their deep anxiety and insecurity about the future. Two recent developments had increased these feelings of insecurity among Christians and strengthened their communal identifications. The first was the civil war in neighbouring Lebanon (1975–1991), a country where many Syrian Christian families had relatives. The second was the situation of quasi-civil war in Syria itself during the period 1979–1982, with the Muslim Brotherhood’s (ikhwan muslimin) violent attacks on critical bases of the regime’s power. At the time of my research this scenario looked rather unlikely, given the traditionally good relations between Christians and Muslims in Syria and the absence of intercommunal violence, in contrast to Lebanon, Egypt or Sudan. But many Christians feared it. The government was doing its best to strengthen these insecurities by referring to ‘the catastrophes of Lebanon and Algeria’ and implicitly warning of the potential dangers that a change of the political status quo could pose for the Christian minority. One should emphasize here that such feelings were being produced in relation to wider local and trans-local forces. The political field within which such insecurities emerged and were expressed was produced by what Laclau and Mouffe (1985) have called the ‘constitutive outside’. The repression by the local regime, the Islamist

110 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

challenge to it, the increasing Islamization of social life in Syria and the failure of secular Arabism to create decent and more equal societies, as well as the rise of ‘global’ Islamism over the previous decades, constituted ‘conditions of possibility’ for the rise of Christian insecurities and their political compliance. Even if such anxieties could not be voiced openly, their perceived antagonism with an often essentialized ‘other’, who was seen as threatening to their long-term security in the country, was crucial in the constitution of these Christians’ political subjectivities.18

Whose Voice Do We Privilege? A historical and social perspective makes it easier to understand the divergent attitudes people cherished towards the present situation and to comprehend the political conformism that many expressed. Furthermore, one could explore the multiple ways they attempted to cope with the repressive circumstances in which they lived and to survive in an increasingly worsening economic environment. The church youth associations provided their participants with social spaces, much needed in a context where both the state and patriarchal relations inside the family represented serious obstacles to their sociality and expression. And the networks of social security and the charity associations administered by the churches were a significant form of protection against economic vulnerability. However, there were serious contradictions in such coping strategies. ‘Christianity’ was in many respects an identity and a strategy of empowerment. But it also made its adherents complicit in maintaining a political order that had negative ramifications for most Syrians, especially those who chose to challenge the dictatorship in a collective and organized form – some of whom I happened to know personally. Yet, my contradictory feelings were only partly an effect of my ‘double life’ in different social circles and my closer political and ideological identification with some of them. In more theoretical terms, they had to do with a tension between the close understanding of people’s ideas and actions at an everyday level, and a more systemic analysis that tended to reveal the ways such notions and attitudes supported the existing political order. These sorts of dilemmas are not new in anthropological practice. But for a strand of anthropology that aims to be morally and politically engaged they acquire an even greater significance (see, for example, Farmer 2002; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Smith 1999; Gledhill 1994; Lindisfarne in this volume). Many would agree today that anthropologists

Panagiotis Geros • 111

cannot avoid engagement with political issues, and that no academic knowledge can claim ‘objectivity’ (Gledhill 1994: 43). Nevertheless, not everybody is eager to take the same political stance towards such questions. Scheper-Hughes (1992), for example, advocates a more interventionist definition of an ‘ethical stance’, which would embrace acting and speaking for something in the context of fieldwork. She bases her conviction in the premise that the everyday violence and cruelty of our world is the effect of dominant people and institutions abusing the kind of people anthropologists usually study. Although Gledhill accepts the political responsibilities of current anthropology, he argues that nevertheless there is ‘a substantial gap between what might be done in terms of ‘speaking truth to power’ at a regional, national and international level and charting a course of justice and fairness as a concrete solution to the accumulated problems of decades’ (2002: 449). In my case, of course, there was no question of actively intervening in social struggles and defending the case of a particular group, as other ethnographic cases entail. My dilemmas had more to do with the privileging of a certain perspective. It would be untrue to say that I managed to solve successfully the tensions I felt during fieldwork. In practical terms, I could not usually express my personal beliefs and feelings to my friends, since that would have engendered anxiety, fear or estrangement from me. Thus, such dilemmas remained with me till the very day I left the country. But, at the same time, it seemed important that one ‘took sides’ at the level of ethnographic writing and analysis, and did not pretend to lay claim to any academic ‘detachment’ that would suppress personal beliefs and commitments. In this sense, both the interpretative approaches and the ethnographic liberalism advocated by post-Geertzian anthropology (Marcus and Fischer 1986) seem to provide unsatisfactory answers to such questions. ‘Multivocality’, although a necessary element of current ethnographic practice, appears to be more interested in the politics of representation than in the wider forces, mechanisms and unequal power relations that structure the lives of those we study and benefit some people at the expense of others. Despite its proclamations (Clifford and Marcus 1986), this perspective – which has gained wide currency in academic circles – has focused more on the poetics than the politics of ethnography (Abu-Lughod 1991: 149). Smith exposes this problem nicely by insisting that understanding people’s self-understandings is not enough, since people’s knowledge is not some local knowledge pure and simple but is shaped by power and is the outcome of power differentials (Smith 1999: 9). The same author argues that a politically engaged anthropology requires:

112 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

that we interpellate such perceptions with an explicit and detailed exposition of mechanisms of social reproduction that are only misleadingly referred to as ‘material conditions’, since they are neither necessarily material, nor simple ‘externally’ restrictive conditions. Neither the world as experienced phenomenologically nor the world as produced through historical fields of force has a greater ‘reality’ the one over the other; yet their analysis does require quite self-conscious shifts of attention and of technique on the part of the analyst’. (ibid.: 8)

Similarly, di Leonardo (1991: 27–33) suggests that we should break out of the closed circle of ethnographic liberalism and turn our attention to the wider political and economic structures of inequality within which gender and other forms of cultural constructions are embedded. Perspectives gained from a particular strand of feminist anthropology can be particularly useful in this respect, not only for their theoretical concern with political economy but also for their ideas on the ‘politics of location’. Although the supposed unity of the gendered subject has been subject to devastating critique from within the discipline, the idea that one is always writing from a specific location, inevitably partial, is one of great political significance for our discussion here. It is becoming more clear now that one can only write through the perspective of multiply situated ‘feminisms’ – or any other perspective for that matter – and that theoretical explanations have to be seen as relative to these shifting positions (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994). In this sense, positionality and partiality might be inevitable, but also allow us to avoid both the veil of positivist ‘objectivity’ and the political nihilism that most of the post-Geertzian interpretive ethnography seems to entail.19 Lindisfarne argues on the issue of positionality: I can only write from my own point of view. And my point of view has a history. It draws on the political dispositions I brought from ‘home’. It is also a synthesis of the different ways my views from ‘home’ were challenged, altered, and augmented in the field. My point of view also includes the extent to which I am now able and willing to find effective ways to share what I have learned. In a sense I am simply arguing that the anthropologist, as both political actor and subject, is at the centre of this descriptive and explanatory process. Inevitably, any account must be partial and subjective, but is also political in a more formal sense. Its value, at least in part, must lie in the transparency of these conditions’. (2000: 151–152, my emphasis)

It seems to me that an important part of such a political commitment is to engage with subjects that are most relevant to the livelihoods of the people we are writing about, and avoid reproducing in an unreflective

Panagiotis Geros • 113

way the categories that have traditionally circumscribed ethnographic research. Furthermore, for an anthropology that aspires to be politically relevant, the prioritization of people’s experiences of inequality and subordination in the ethnographic texts might be a significant point of departure for exploring the power relations that saturate not only the interactions between the ethnographer and her subjects, but all interactions inside these societies.

Concluding Note Since 9/11 Syria has found itself at the news forefront, owing to the war in neighbouring Iraq and the persistent threats by the current American administration. These developments have put much more pressure on those Syrians demanding political reform, since the regime now accuses them of being American proxies – something that has its parallel in Iran as well. Scared by the invasion of Iraq, Syria’s regime has discreetly given in to some of the American demands. It is ironic, though, that although the atmosphere of insecurity and fear that has enveloped Western countries over the last years has brought Syrian and Western politics closer together in some respects, Syria has not been pushed in the democratic direction. I do not imply here that there are not immense qualitative differences in the ways political power is exercised in Syria and the liberal democracies in the West. However, the industry of fear is being rapidly expanded in Western countries. Apart from bringing huge economic profits to corporate interests, it is also being deployed by political elites in order to maintain the acquiescence of a large part of their populations and to manipulate the reactions to their neoliberal projects. In this sense, it is worrying that the Syrian case is becoming perhaps an even less ‘exotic’ reality for all of us.

Notes 1. The field research in Damascus was conducted between September 1999 and April 2001, as part of a PhD research project at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Both the fieldwork and writing of my thesis have been generously funded by the State Scholarship Foundation of Greece (IKY), whose support I gratefully acknowledge. As far as the present text is concerned, I would like to thank Bethany Magna, Sophia Hoffman, Theodoros Paradellis and the editors of this volume for commenting on an earlier draft. 2. The Bathist military coup took place in March 1963, one month after a Bathist takeover in neighbouring Iraq. From 1966 to 1970 the faction of radical officers who then had the upper hand promoted a strict economic nationalization in many

114 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

domains. The internal coup by Hafiz al-Asad in November 1970 initiated instead a turn towards an ‘economic opening’, or the first infitah, as it has been called (see Perthes 1995). In June 2000 Amnesty International reported that at least 1,500 political prisoners were being held in Syrian jails, while thousands of earlier detainees had ‘disappeared’, and probably been murdered. Another 600 prisoners were freed in November of the same year (George 2003: 13). Apart from the issue of internal legitimization, these strategies were also related to attempts to attract or secure the flow of aid from foreign countries. The promotion of the Shia face of the regime, for example, was connected to the cultivation of closer links with Iran. Among the relatively few social studies that have used long-term fieldwork as their methodology are Wedeen’s study of Asad’s cult (1999), Rugh’s study of a Syrian village (1997), Salamandra’s work on public culture (2000) and the reception of television series (1998), Pfaffenbach’s sociological study of the Old City in Damascus (1992), Lindisfarne’s ethnography of weddings in Damascus written in the form of short stories (2000), and Rabo’s ethnography on development projects in northern Syria (1986) and gender issues (1996), as well as some unpublished dissertations that have been written as part of postgraduate degrees in European universities (for example, Noujaim 1991; Gassel 2001; Kortlander 2001). The European states used indigenous Christians for their economic-political penetration of the Near East, while at the same time advancing the latter’s socioeconomic position and status within local societies (Courbage and Fargues 1997; Chabry and Chabry 1987). Moreover, Catholicism spread in the region at the cost of the various Christian Orthodoxies, to a great extent, through the strengthening of certain social strata inside Arab countries (Haddad 1970). See the updated bibliography on Syria edited by Quilliam (1999). For some of the most comprehensive studies dealing with the politics and economy of Syria, see Perthes (1995), Hinnebusch (2001), Van Dam (1996), Kienle (1994a), Antoun and Quataert (1991). For a recent example, see Navaro-Yashin’s (2002) study of political culture in contemporary Turkey. I would also like to emphasize here the importance of Wedeen’s work on Asad’s political cult (1999). Although it is mainly focused on the representations and perceptions of politics in local cinema, TV series and the media in general, it is one of the rare approaches to the ways Syrian political culture operates on the ground and is received by ordinary people. Consider, for instance, a short extract taken from one of the best-known collective volumes on contemporary Syrian politics, published in 1994. The author, enumerating various features related to the gradual political ‘opening’ during the 1990s, writes: ‘People who previously did not want to be seen together in public now meet in cafés and even make the occasional political comment in the presence of the waiter whose accent denotes his origin from the Alawi mountains. No longer do they automatically consider him to be an informer of one of the several secret police forces’ (Kienle 1994b: 115). That reference stands in sharp contrast to the experiences I had myself as well as those of other researchers who were in contact with ordinary Syrians, even in a more recent period. Although Kienle on the whole an acute analyst of the Syrian political system – as most other scholars referred to above are – his approach to the ways this ‘system’ has been perceived and negotiated by ordinary people is less satisfactory. I would like to make clear that I have no intention at all of elaborating another version of the ‘anthropologist as hero’ model, something which has been seriously criticized (cf. Clifford 1988), albeit from a rather different perspective from the one

Panagiotis Geros • 115

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

I have in mind here. Those who were in potential danger were the people I worked with and not myself, as the worst thing likely to happen to a foreigner would be to be permanently deported from the country. For this reason, it goes without saying that I have used pseudonyms for persons (and sometimes places) and have also slightly changed some details concerning personal information where necessary. Some theorists make similar points with regard to violence, paying attention to the role of images and representations of violence in constituting actual power. Scarry (1985: 27) argues that what takes place during the process of torture acted out by authoritarian regimes is an obsessive and self-conscious display of agency that converts the absolute pain upon the human body into the fiction of an absolute power. Moore (1994: 66–70) also writes that one of the most crucial aspects in situations of interpersonal or gendered violence is representation and others’ interpretation of it. For a vivid account ‘from the inside’ of the Kafkaesque atmosphere that characterizes Syrian society, see, for example, Modern Syrian Short Stories (1988, translated by Azrak). See also the postscript in Lindisfarne (2000: 123–159) for some interesting thoughts on fictional modes of writing. Bourdieu’s model, although useful for articulating a theory of the embodiment of dominant meanings, has been criticized for being immobile, as it treats society as a coherent whole and emphasizes the ways in which the ‘structures’ are reproduced through everyday unconscious practices. In this sense, its strongly socialized and collective view of the body in relation to habitus seems to leave such accounts empty of any notion of a multiple subjectivity constituted through multiple positions (Moore 1994: 79; see also De Certeau 1988: 58). I show in the text below that there were differences of degree in the way that fear was embodied, depending on the various, and often contradictory, locations of social subjects. The only manifestation of organized defiance against the regime since the early 1980s was the exceptional ‘Civil Society Movement’ (harakat al-mujtama‘ al-madani), which flourished for some months in Damascus immediately after Hafiz al-Asad’s death in June 2000. Over the following period some groups of intellectuals and political activists started to publicly voice their grievances against the regime. They signed statements demanding deep political reforms and started to organize meetings to debate the current political conditions. Nevertheless, this movement, which was called the ‘Damascus Spring’ by the foreign press – not without a certain amount of optimism – was destined to be short-lived. After a few months the state hit back in the usual brutal manner, imprisoning some of the leading figures and stopping the political meetings. After that, Syrian political life went very much back to its usual misery. For a very systematic account of this movement, in relation to an analysis of current Syrian politics, see George (2003). The political stakes around veiling were illustrated by an incident that occurred in central Damascus in 1983, when veiled women were attacked by teenage members of the Ba‘th party. This attack was widely interpreted as a reaction by the state towards a visible defiance of its authority and a manifestation of female public Islamic politics (Rabo 1996: 168–171). Wedeen offers a long list of some of the most popular jokes and explains the specific conditions to which they refer (1999: 120–129). For the significance of jokes as political critique, see also Lindisfarne (2000: 143). One has to note here that the former political antagonism between the state and the private sector tends to have been bridged, at least as far as big capital is concerned. Hinnebusch has described this process in detail. He writes that the political and military elite, Alawi to a large extent, uses its power to enrich itself and has been embourgeoized, while the private bourgeoisie uses wealth to buy political influence.

116 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

The emergence of the so-called ‘military-mercantile complex’ of Alawi officers and Damascene Sunni businessmen represents the core of an alliance between the ‘new’ state and the ‘old’ private economic elite, while there is evidence of a progressive merger between these two ‘classes’ (see Hinnebusch 1997). 18. Bowman (1993) has made use of this theoretical framework to talk about the ways in which the Israeli state was viewed by Palestinians as antagonistic to their collective interests. 19. See the interesting critique by di Leonardo (1991: 23–24) pointing to the political short-sightedness of the ethnography-as-text school, which, although it has had no difficulty reprobating colonial and racist mentalities, is deeply sceptical towards feminism, insisting on its historical contingency and culture-bound ideology.

References Abeles, M. 1988. ‘Modern Political Ritual’, Current Anthropology 29(3): 391–404. Abu-Lughod, L. 1991. ‘Writing Against Culture’, in R. G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 137–162. Antoun, R. T. and D. Quataert (eds). 1991. Syria: Society, Culture, and Polity. New York: State University of New York. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowman, G. 1993. ‘Nationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-occupied Territories’, Man 28(3): 431–460. Chabry, L. and A. Chabry. 1987. Politique et Minorités au Proche-Orient: Les Raisons d’une Explosion. Paris: Editions Maisonneuve & Larose. Clifford, J. and G. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Clifford, J. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography Literature and Art. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Cambridge University Press. Cornwall, A. and N. Lindisfarne. 1994. ‘Introduction’, in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies. London: Routledge, pp. 11–47. Courbage, Y. and P. Fargues. 1997. Christians and Jews under Islam, trans. J. Mabro. London: I. B. Tauris. De Certeau, M. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Di Leonardo, M. 1991. ‘Introduction: Gender, Culture and Political Economy’, in M. di Leonardo (ed.), Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press. Farmer, P. 2002. ‘On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below’, in J. Vincent (ed.), The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 424–437. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gassel, S. 2001. ‘Dubious Alliance: Film and the Idea of Resistance in Contemporary Syria’, MA dissertation. London: SOAS,University of London. George, A. 2003. Syria: Neither Bread nor Freedom. London, New York: Zed Books. Gledhill, J. 1994. Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics. London: Pluto Press. ———. 2002. ‘Anthropology and Politics: Commitment, Responsibility and the Academy’, in J. Vincent (ed.), The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 438–451.

Panagiotis Geros • 117

Haddad R. M. 1970. Syrian Christians in Muslim Society: An Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harris, O. 1981. 'Households as Natural Units', in K. Young, C. Wolkowitz and R. McCullagh (eds), Of Marriage and the Market. London: CSE Books, pp. 136–155. Hinnebusch, R. A. 1996. 'Class and State in Ba’thist Syria', in R. T. Antoun and D. Quataert (eds), Syria: Society, Culture, and Polity. New York: State University of New York, pp. 29–47. ———. 1997. ‘Syria: The Politics of Economic Liberalization’, Third World Quarterly 18(2): 249–265. ———. 2001. Syria: Revolution from Above. London: Routledge. Kienle, E. (ed.). 1994a. Contemporary Syria: Liberalization between Cold War and Cold Peace. London: British Academic Press/SOAS. Kienle, E. 1994b. ‘The Return of Politics? Scenarios for Syria’s Second Infitah’, in E. Kienle (ed.), Contemporary Syria: Liberalization between Cold War and Cold Peace. London: British Academic Press/SOAS, pp. 114–131. Kortlander, J. 2001. ‘A Minority in the Making: The Politics of Identity in a Syrian Town’, MA dissertation. London: SOAS, University of London. Laclau, E. and C. Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Lindisfarne, N. 2000. Dancing in Damascus: Stories. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lobmeyer, H. G. 1994. ‘Al-dimuqratiyya hiyya al-hall? The Syrian Opposition at the End of the Assad Era’, in E. Kienle (ed.), Contemporary Syria: Liberalization between Cold War and Cold Peace. London: British Academic Press/SOAS, pp. 81–96. Marcus, G. and M. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Middle East Watch, 1991. Syria Unmasked: The Suppression of Human Rights by the Asad Regime. London: Yale University Press. Modern Syrian Short Stories. 1988. Transl. M. Azrak. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press. Moore, H. 1994. A Passion for Difference: Essays in Anthropology and Gender. London: Polity Press. Mouawad, R. J. 2001. 'Syria and Iraq: Repression’. Middle East Quarterly, 8(1). Retrieved on 13 January 2008 from www.meforum.org/article/17 Navaro-Yashin, Y. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Needham, R. 1975. ‘Polythetic Classification: Convergence and Consequences’, Man (N.S.) 10: 349–369. Noujaim, M-L. 1991. ‘La Communauté Chrétienne de Damas’, DEA dissertation. Paris: Institut d’ Etudes Politiques. Perthes, V. 1995. The Political Economy of Syria under Asad. London: I. B. Tauris. Pfaffenbach, C. 1992. Alltag in Damascus: Die ‘Räumlichen Handlungsmuster’ der Bewohner der Altstadtviertel. Erlangen: Fränkische Geographische Gesellschaft. Quilliam, N. 1999. Syria: Revised Edition. Oxford: Clio Press. Rabo, A. 1986. Change on the Euphrates: Villagers, Townsmen, and Employees in Northeast Syria. Stockholm: University of Stockholm. ———. 1996. ‘Gender, State and Civil Society in Jordan and Syria’, in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models. London: Routledge, pp. 155–177. Rugh, A. 1997. Within the Circle: Parents and Children in an Arab Village. New York: Columbia University Press. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.

118 • Doing Fieldwork within Fear and Silences

Salamandra, C. 1998. ‘Moustache Hairs Lost: Ramadan Television Serials and the Construction of Identity in Damascus, Syria’, Visual Anthropology Vol. 10: 227–246. ———. 2000. ‘Consuming Damascus: Public Culture and the Construction of Social Identity’, in W. Armbrust (ed.), Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scarry, E. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scheper-Hughes, N. 1992. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scott, J. C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Seale, P. 1995. Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, G. 1999. Confronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Valognes, J-P. 1994. Vie et Mort des Chrétiens d’Orient: Des Origines à nos Jours. Paris: Fayard. Van Dam, N. 1996. The Struggle for Power in Syria: Politics and Society under Asad and the Bath Party. London: I.B. Tauris. Wedeen, L. 1999. Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zisser, E. 1999. ‘Hafiz al-Asad Discovers Islam’, Middle East Quarterly 6(1): 49–56.

Chapter 5

MEMORY, ETHICS, POLITICS: RESEARCHING A BELEAGUERED COMMUNITY Heidi Armbruster

Insan insan-yo, they said again and again, ‘human being is human being’. I did fieldwork in the late 1990s with Syrian Christians in Southeast Turkey and Berlin, and it was one of their frequent phrases. They used it to tell me, in a laconic way, what they thought about their community’s move to Europe. The phrase often contained the qualifier ‘in Europe insan insan-yo’ as well as nonverbal cues of disappointment and displeasure. From the perspective of European thought, and its master-ideologies of liberalism and democracy, it sounded like a phrase advocating equality and human rights. But for those who used it, it was a statement about disorder. For me it came to capture a great many things I learned from my hosts. And it reminds me now of the challenges that learning posed to my own cultural and political sense of self. This chapter attempts to interpret meanings of insan insan-yo, and the interplay among politics, ethics and memory that underlies its logic. At the same time it deals with my experience of participantobservation, and of my own biases.

120 • Researching a Beleaguered Community

If looking at a foreign society is looking ‘from below’ (Lindisfarne this volume), then who is ‘below’? While the metaphor suggests a social or human category of subordination, in the actual ethnographic encounter such bounded categories of the powerless often appear more mystifying. This is so because in ethnographic research power and hegemony are expected to reveal themselves through social interaction. They should surface in the micropolitics of the everyday, in personal negotiations of status, reputation and identity, and in the regulatory effects of cultural norms and principles. From this point of view, orders of gender, class, race or nation appear as complexly interwoven and multiply refracted. The question of who is subordinate to whom often turns into questions of perspective, event, personality and ‘situated’ fieldwork. In ethnography, politics with a capital ‘P’ shades into micropolitics precisely because looking at the fabric of everyday lives is what anthropologists specialize in. This can potentially offer the metaphoric ‘view from below’. But what one often views instead are several and shifting ‘belows’ and ‘aboves’, and there is very little guarantee of a privileged insight into their workings. In more than one way subordination and vulnerability have marked the historical and present condition of Syrian Orthodox Christians (Suryoye1) in Southeast Turkey. The nation state does not acknowledge them as a minority. They have been afflicted by Turkish nationalism, Kurdish nationalism and Islamist sectarianism in sometimes violent ways. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s they were beleaguered by Turkish-Kurdish hostilities and lived in one of Turkey’s poorest and most conflict-ridden regions.2 Many Suryoye voted against these difficult political and economic conditions with their feet. Large numbers left from the 1970s onwards, and many have settled in different European countries. Since the late 1990s, the Suryoyo population in the Tur Abdin3 area in Southeast Turkey has stabilized at around 2,500. This is only a tiny presence among the neighbouring Kurds, and emigrant Suryoyo communities too are much larger.4 Recently the Suryoye have been hoping for Turkey’s swift accession to the EU, expecting the EU to be a controlling influence on the Turkish government and its policies in the Southeast (cf. Schwaigert 2001). There has long been a certain presence of Westerners or Europeans who treat the Christian communities of the Middle East as protégés.5 During my fieldwork in Turkey the region was still under martial law, and a number of European ambassadors and Church representatives visited the monastery where I was staying to demonstrate symbolic support. Western Christian organizations have provided financial and other assistance, and have often ideologically championed these communities as the last strongholds of Christianity in Muslim lands.

Heidi Armbruster • 121

In 2000 a Suryoyo priest in the provincial capital was prosecuted and put under house arrest for having spoken openly to a national newspaper about the Armenian and Syrian Christian massacres in 1915/16.6 But his case was finally, and surprisingly, dropped (Lembert 2001). It made a considerable difference that European Suryoye campaigned on his behalf, and that European government officials, human rights campaigners and Church representatives were present during his court hearing. Historically, having European patrons has not always been advantageous. But in times when a Turkish government keenly awaits EU membership and needs to be seen to administer reforms and clean up its human rights record, such links can be valuable. In Germany the Suryoye are generally subsumed under the label ‘Turks’, and face similar experiences of discrimination. However, on average, they have had more success than Kurds or Turks in attaining German citizenship, and therefore political rights. This is partly due to their greater willingness to give up Turkish citizenship, but also to the discretionary decisions of local authorities for whom a ‘Christian’ identity is presumably far less culturally alien than a Muslim one.7 Thus, while Christians in Southeast Turkey occupy a vulnerable position ‘below’, the same identity can produce powerful, if momentary, European allies. Hegemonic processes, both from without and within, can involve more complexity in a situation of massive outmigration. Another example may illustrate this. I had become the confidante of a young Suryoyo woman in Berlin who was going through a period of serious domestic conflict over her unmarried status. The crisis worsened when a planned engagement was called off by the prospective husband’s family, and she sought temporary shelter in a women’s refuge. Finally, her family compelled her to marry a Syrian Christian from Syria. He was staying in Germany illegally, and therefore was in danger of deportation if picked up by the authorities. As a matter of fact, he had already been deported once before but made his way back into the country. She had German citizenship. For him, marriage to a citizen was the most immediate way to secure legal residence, but for her family the marriage was pressing for other reasons: it was understood in the community that it was a shameful failure to have a 30-year-old unmarried daughter. Because she had found no suitor amongst the local Suryoyo community, she was a symbolic liability. The family prided itself on the fame of its strong and manly lineage back in Tur Abdin and was unwilling to afford such a blemish. His refugee status did not make him a ‘model’ son-in-law, because he was poor and had no local family support, but the desire to marry her off quickly was stronger. She did not particularly like the

122 • Researching a Beleaguered Community

man but finally agreed to marry him and soon found herself in an unpleasant relationship. If these examples reinforce the academic insight that processes of domination produce multiple and even contradictory identity positions for individuals, they equally reveal some complicated problems of position for ethnographers. Whose position, interests and personal politics do we lend our commitments to? How can partial commitments be negotiated in fieldwork without producing pretence, offence or other unfavourable consequences? What about commitments we are drawn into without our choosing? Which contextual and situated insights do we ultimately channel into more categorical interpretations? While these questions cannot yield unequivocal answers, they certainly structure the complexity of ethics and politics in fieldwork. Suryoyo emigration has changed the established relationships and principles of cohesion, between village communities as well as between the generations, the sexes, and the Church and its flock. It has also, and this brings me back to the start of this chapter, had an impact on Suryoyo theories of social and communal cohesion. ‘In Europe insan insan-yo…’ emerged as a lament over the failure to politicize the relationship between people of different statuses. Because, as the theory goes, everyone is deemed ‘the same’ in Europe, important social values that depend on hierarchical differences and boundaries become obsolete. This adds another question to the list above. How can insights from the ‘below’ of the powerless be configured if local theories of community, status and authority are in themselves not democratic? In what follows I will look at a particular field in which relations of domination and subordination were tangibly expressed, both as a theory and as a site of cultural practice in which concrete identifications, negotiations and conflicts took place. This site is memory. I discuss memory as a primary location of the political for three major reasons. Firstly, in both Turkey and Germany Suryoyo relationships with powerful others were often communicated in narratives that looked to the past. Secondly, memory served as a founding source for an ethics of conduct with powerful others. Thirdly, my own ethnographic engagement with Suryoye continuously drew on situated memories.

Remembering as Moral and Political Practice Remembering as moral and political practice seems particularly salient for the Suryoye. Their recent history has been shaped by the

Heidi Armbruster • 123

experience of migration, and the subjects of my fieldwork understood this experience through a discourse of ‘crisis’ and loss. Across the diaspora map, young and old, men and women, believers and sceptics, all shared that sense of belonging to a community ‘in crisis’. Many contrasted their shared past with a sad future when they would cease to exist as a cohesive group. These expressions of crisis forged a certain unity among people, and they also characterized my fieldwork experiences in both Turkey and Germany. Even though reasons given for the present predicament could vary locally, there was a strong sense in both Turkey and Germany that the crisis of the group was also a crisis of memory. In other words, much collective commitment was a commitment to historically and geographically located memories and, as we shall see, to the ethics of these memories. These concerns charged the present heavily with the past, and everywhere memory was both nostalgic and tragic. In Germany Suryoyo immigrants travelled via memory to Turkey, where they had been driven away by political persecution or economic problems. Yet this was where nostalgic longings transported them. In Turkey, equally, memory was a traveller to other times and a revelation of other ways. People frequently remembered times before ‘everybody’ had left, when villages were still crowded, when parents had not yet been ‘orphaned’ by sons and daughters, as they put it. Back then, village communities had not yet been permeated by a feeling of abandonment. But memory was also inscribed by a history of victimization in Turkey, most importantly the Christian massacres of 1915/16, perpetrated by the Ottoman Turkish government and its Kurdish allies. Within this ambivalent weight carried by memory, the past was actually the main territory in which the Suryoye discursively emerged as a community. ‘We have come to an end’, ‘we are all too scattered’, ‘the Suryoye are lost’ were the most common statements of pessimism. The present, in contrast, was daunting and unpredictable. Many immigrants in Germany saw their knowledge of history ruptured by the move away from Tur Abdin and left to a German-born generation that ‘forgets’. Suryoye in Tur Abdin realized that many young people wished for an opportunity to leave, and none had much trust in a politically stable future. Memory has often, rather fittingly, been described as ‘work’. This implies that memory is an activity that involves mental, social or material effort through which one expects to achieve a specific purpose. The view into the past thus is a motivated and selective engagement, which opens up space for personal involvement, for politics and change. The purpose of such activity has many facets. For instance, writers on diaspora, immigrant and exiled communities have

124 • Researching a Beleaguered Community

shown that remembering can be employed to restore a collective spirit or to come to terms with dislocation (e.g., Hirschon 1989; Ganguly 1992; Gilroy 1994; Kugelmass 1996; Bahloul 1996; Slymovics 1998). Memory has also proved to be a significant cultural tool for dealing with suffering and trauma, a topic that has often been theorized in relation to Jewish/German history and the Holocaust (e.g., Langer 1991; Friedlander 1993). Here memory can be called upon to heal, cope, instruct or blame. I locate the Suryoye within such a thematic field, because they have undergone both migration and dispersal, and a history of persecution and marginalization. More importantly, their own memory work was primarily concerned with these issues. In what follows I will look at memory in a discursive sense. I want to explore the ways in which a number of specific Syrian Christian memories are put to work as ethical scripts about social relationships. I use ‘ethics’ in its general definition, as the concern with human behaviour and conduct, the moral principles that determine what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. As such, ethics is about the codes of being with others. In this context remembering implies a situated look at those with whom one expects to hold moral ties. It is a reasoning about one’s ‘thick relations’, as Margalit (2002: 7) puts it, the webs of people bound to each other by historical links. This can include family, neighbourhood, village or nation, but also, as in this case, spiritual beings such as saints or God. A mnemonic link to meaningful others makes claims that derive their authority from a historically grown relationship that has produced some moral value or that is morally evaluated (cf. Lambek 1996). Rather than looking at past events and the styles in which they are remembered, I will focus on a number of significant relationships in the ever evolving present, and their moral authorization through invocations of the past. Memory, politics and ethics work through social relationships, and through people’s social theories. So I will look at a number of relationships that invoke history and that are understood as important contexts for the perpetuation of social cohesion and collective bonding. These will include the Suryoye and their Muslim neighbours, humans and the divine, home stayers and leavers, and adults and children. As will be seen, the ethics of these relationships resonate with one another and imply theories about ‘natural’ inequalities. Since my own ethnographic and emotional memory work is implicated in this discussion, I will also add my own relationship with the researched community to this list.

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

3:56 PM

Page 125

Heidi Armbruster • 125

Suryoye and Muslims (Being a ‘Christian’) The representation of this relationship is part of a long-term, ongoing language of memory. It is partly objectified in what Lambek calls ‘vehicles of memory’ (1996: 242), commemorative forms that transcend actual experience or withstand the ‘fluidity’ of history. As Christians in Turkey, the Suryoye regarded themselves as fundamentally different from Turks and their neighbours, the Muslim Kurds with whom they have shared a long geographical proximity and a tense political history. In memory this relationship is reduced to a radical opposition between ‘Christians’ and ‘Muslims’ and prominently related to themes of suffering. In Turkey narratives of suffering echoed the wider history of the region. Given the current political tension, past and present were seen as having much in common. In the face of a shrinking local population, political pressure and harassment, and the lack of protection by the Turkish state, historical continuation took on the meaning of a long struggle for the preservation of their distinctiveness and for survival itself. Continuation throughout history thus had a legitimacy by which the difference from the ‘Muslim’ world outside could be upheld. The forces that disturbed the group’s permanence in history were remembered as different events, which were, however, similar in their harmful potential. People returned mnemonically to different levels of history, ranging from late antiquity to the present. Attacks on villages, abuses of men in the Turkish army, abductions of women, killings that were never solved, famines and cattle thefts bore a familiar resemblance in the threat they posed. In Turkey, these themes could issue out of everyday conversations, and they were always present when I inquired about biographical knowledge or village histories. Here, autobiographical short-term experience could easily be narrated in the stylistic form of long-term collective memories. What people had not experienced personally was still often recalled and fleshed out with personal knowledge (cf. Bloch 1998).8 Remembering the succession of hardship and loss was a way of talking about the political pressure the Suryoye experienced in the present and of making moral statements about the difference between Christians and Muslims. One remembered being a Christian through having been persecuted by Muslims. The propensity to harass Christians often appeared as a ‘Muslim’ character trait, which signified ‘their’ political power but also ‘their’ moral inferiority. In Germany, most first-generation Suryoyo immigrants I knew illustrated the political not in relation to the ‘host’ nation but in relation to Turkey and ‘Muslims’ in general.9 Memories of threats and

126 • Researching a Beleaguered Community

suffering were mobilized to explain why the presence of Turkish and other Muslim migrants in Germany posed a threat to the native culture, and why subscribing to the idiom of ‘insan insan-yo’ made Germany blind to what was in fact a Muslim conspiracy to take over the country. This evaluation of the historical relationship between Christians and Muslims in Turkey provided an important moral instruction to young Suryoye born or raised in Germany: the imperative to keep a distance. In this context marriage, as a major symbolic act of accepting a stranger into the family, stood for an important practice of securing community cohesion and distance from the outside. Although ‘marrying out’ was regarded by many as inappropriate, if the outsider was a ‘Christian’ some agreement could often be negotiated. However, ‘marrying a Muslim’ was the ultimate sacrilege. The very few cases that came to my attention during fieldwork made it clear that people who stepped across that border were sanctioned as traitors of Suryoyo values. While ‘Muslims’ were not ‘thick relations’ themselves, they certainly provided the major outgroup against which thick relations were to be upheld.

Humans and the Divine (Sacrifice and Humility) This relationship was most often understood as providing the basic foundation for who the Suryoye felt they were: followers of Christ, the son of God. In Tur Abdin people communicated their relationship with Christ and the divine most tangibly through stories about saints. Saints were seen as intermediaries between people and a powerful God. They could intercede for humans and, according to these stories, many of them had done so on behalf of the Suryoye. Many felt that the saints’ historical presence in Tur Abdin accounted for a special relationship with God, who favoured the Suryoye but also put special obligations on them. I experienced my closest encounter with both a dutiful relationship to God and the narration of saints’ lives while living with a group of nuns in a Syrian Orthodox monastery. This was a mixed monastery; half of the approximately sixty inhabitants were boys and young men who stayed there to study classical Syriac. The group of fourteen nuns were responsible for predominantly domestic tasks: food preparation, washing, cleaning, maintaining the stables and gardens. The nuns performed strenuous physical labour on a daily basis. The work was so hard, especially during the summer months, that they found themselves in a permanent state of exhaustion, many suffering physical pain. Their days were highly regulated, following the rhythms

Heidi Armbruster • 127

of prayer, work and relatively little sleep. This stood in striking contrast to the regimen followed by monks and male clergy. Their tasks were mainly ecclesiastical, and they completely refrained from physical labour. While I never ceased to struggle with this unequal division of labour, only a few nuns ever alluded to it verbally, and all agreed that they ultimately laboured ‘for God’. In their daily lives, the saint’s story was both a narrative medium of memory and a highly popular spiritual practice. The nuns were the only group among the monastic community who regularly dedicated time to saints stories. At such times one of the most learned nuns would read a saint’s life to her fellow sisters. Most stories were already known to the listeners, but refreshing memories was seen as a morally edifying practice. Moreover, it was an exercise of reverence for the life as it unfolded in the story, recorded by a hagiographer many centuries ago. The listeners sat silently on the floor with their backs propped up against the wall. The silence was broken only by occasional whispers of ‘praise the Lord’, uttered by someone who was touched by the sanctity of events in the story. Readings of saints’ lives were a disciplined practice, rarely followed by discussion or questions. The reader was not seen as an interpreter, but as a transmitter of another’s words. Aramaic script and the fact that it enshrined a saint’s life signalled its unshakeable truth. The ‘holy ones’ had attained a level of outstanding perfection and thus received divine inspiration. In most cases they had lived as monks, ascetics or nuns, and had achieved holiness through extraordinary performances. I was often struck by the extent to which these stories, written no later than the thirteenth century, were ‘timeless’ for many nuns. Their identification with these figures seemed unquestioning and often quite emotional. The stories carried similar underlying messages about the virtue of individual strength, stamina and steadfastness in overcoming enemies, oppression, temptation, affliction and threat; about the virtue of humility and self-erasure for a higher goal; about actions and deeds of proper human conduct; and also about human weaknesses and failures. Importantly, all the stories reflected on suffering as bearing a particular significance for the relationship between human and divine. Closeness to God was mainly reached through deliberate acceptance of hardship and self-denial. What is more, the plots often centred on the conversion of nonbelievers or struggles against infidels and the ‘devil’. Thus, apart from offering meaningful examples of the virtue of suffering, the stories produced a certain indebtedness and gratitude in the believers who owed these ancients their own historical survival in a hostile world.10

128 • Researching a Beleaguered Community

Invitations such as ‘come and listen to the story, they are going to read the story of X tonight’; ‘sit down and listen’, or a more reproachful ‘why didn’t you come and listen, where were you?’ were often communicated to me. The reproachful tone and insistence on my coming made me understand from early on that there was an obligation involved, and that listening to the right story was almost equivalent to practising the right faith. Even at times of great exhaustion, when working days had been hard and the nuns were visibly worn out in the evenings, the learned nuns would terminate leisurely chatting. They would then read a long story requiring everyone’s attention and invoking a sense of duty in those present. Only after the readings was the desire for sleep admitted. On the one hand, this form of remembering was semantically fixed and discounted history as a complex site of change and fluidity, because the saints’ achievements transcended differences of time and geography. On the other hand, these were clearly occasions on which the nuns felt a biographical affinity with the recounted history, for many saints were local and had lived and died in the area. And in contrast to a very patriarchal church culture, some of the saints were women. Listening to a saint’s life meant exposure to the moral benefit of perseverance and forbearance in relation to both a specific female experience in the monastery and the Suryoye’s political insecurity in Tur Abdin. These stories clearly included the saints in the orbit of ‘thick relations’ to whom one was indebted and should feel gratitude. Saints had to be commemorated, prayed to and honoured by following their example. The nuns conceded that modelling one’s life after a saint was humanly impossible. But a saint’s life was still a model towards which one should strive, even if that meant feeling inadequate and continuously humbled. At the same time, the hagiographies testified that even as believers human beings were differently positioned before God, who rewarded them relative to the degree of saintly merit they achieved.

Home-stayers and Emigrants (Fear and Self-control) This relates to the more recent autobiographical pasts and to the fact of large-scale emigration as it was understood by many Suryoye in Tur Abdin. Here too we have a backward view with a certain ambivalence written into it – the past was a better moral universe, even as it was also a succession of calamities that produced fear and made people leave. Just as the memory of saintly suffering carries moral messages about

Heidi Armbruster • 129

suffering, the memory of fear implies reasoning about the values of fear. I will illustrate this briefly with the story of a village teacher called Efrem.11 He was in his late twenties when I met him. Efrem had experienced a fair share of fear and turmoil in the early 1990s, a time when the political situation in Tur Abdin was particularly tense and several Christians were murdered by paramilitary Kurdish groups. He was travelling in a car with his young wife when the party was stopped by armed men. They forced Efrem out, abducted him and held him prisoner under traumatic conditions in an underground cave. Meanwhile Suryoye in Europe campaigned on his behalf and collected a large ransom. That was finally handed over to his captors, and they released him after eight months. However, his kidnappers were never brought to justice. After his release Efrem and his wife went to live with relatives in Germany. They returned to Turkey after a year, against her will, because Efrem insisted that looking after his elderly parents in Tur Abdin was a moral duty. Efrem never spoke about his ordeal, but rumour said that his return was the fulfillment of a religious vow he had made while in captivity. He enjoyed a respected position in his village and continued to work as a teacher. I sometimes sat in when Efrem taught his classes. It was there that he told moral tales of fear that had their authority in the past. On the whole this narrative centred on the emigrants, who were frequently chosen as a a conversation topic in Tur Abdin, a community of origin that was now much smaller than the communities that lived abroad. Every family in the village, including Efrem’s, had many immediate and extended members abroad. Looking back at what had happened since, Efrem made use of a framework of loss and collective disintegration. This was not so much a question of numbers and dispersal as a question of ethics: those who left had changed their relationship to their past, and to those who peopled their past. According to Efrem, the long ingrained fear of Muslims disappeared in Europe. With the loss of that fear, everything fear had taught vanished too. Instead, people gained ‘freedom’ or hirutho, said Efrem, using a popular term signalling ‘European danger’. When emigrants dispensed with those inherited experiences of fear they discarded a long list of important moral principles: sticking together as a community and maintaining boundaries between themselves and non-Suryoye, exerting self-control, displaying family commitment, being able to communicate in the mother tongue, and honouring relations of respect. In short, they lost important social values that hinged on the individual’s responsibilities to their ‘thick relations’ and on their appreciation of important boundaries.

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

11/6/09

5:28 PM

Page 130

130 • Researching a Beleaguered Community

Efrem portrayed the Suryoye as a deeply ethical community, regulated by solidarity against a common adversary from without and a range of moral commitments to each other within. Evidently, the view that fear maintains protective boundaries between the community and the outside, produces a positive evaluation of fear. Conversely, the ability to shake off fear amounts to a disengagement from the community and gives a negative flavour to ‘freedom’. The moral obligation thus is to maintain the sentiment of fear that maintains these boundaries and to care for each other. Clearly, ‘fear of Muslims’ did not only imply an emotional state in relation to potential harm but also the moral duty to keep apart and display forms of behaviour that maintained distance from this group. Many Tur Abdin Suryoye shared a particular negative rhetoric about the emigrants that always combined these same issues: while they now mingled with and even married non-Suryoye in Europe, they had ceased to care about their God, their community and their families. Within this rhetoric ‘not caring’ was often equivalent to ‘not fearing’, for renouncing responsibility and commitment towards one’s ‘thick relations’ inevitably produced harm and punishment. Thus, as one had to fear harmful outsiders, one also had to fear a range of other important historical personas: God, one’s elders and ‘the people’. Not displaying an appreciation of ‘fear’ meant subscribing to the European dogma of ‘insan insan-yo’, which levels out difference and generates chaos. In the light of such views the fact of having left became morally reprehensible, and the actual reasons were reevaluated: the émigrés had not left to escape threat and fear but because they were after riches and more comfort in Europe. Here in Turkey comfort was not to be had. Efrem pointed out that his family earned very little through their raisin production, people had no job opportunities, and his dream to open up a shop could not be realized in an area where Muslims would harass a Christian shopowner. In other conversations I had with Efrem and his wife, she suggested that people had left because they were frightened. He protested that that was nonsense since he, after all, knew what fear ‘of them’ was like. As a ‘moral witness’ (Margalit 2002: 149) to the sacrificial rhetoric he used, Efrem made it all the more authoritative. However, he was not unique in reproaching the emigrants. Many others did the same, though usually in guarded ways. After all, this was an ambivalent view to hold because most Suryoye received remittances from their families abroad and thereby experienced much less economic hardship than in the past. In such narratives continuity and cohesion were constituted through a particular ethics of fear and sacrifice that had its authority in longterm Suryoyo experience in Tur Abdin. Yet, there was another past that seemed to have little significance in comparison: the Suryoyo

Heidi Armbruster • 131

migrants’ past in Europe, which in some cases comprised more than twenty-five years. The rhetoric of blame made very little room for acknowledging the fears, anxieties and sacrifices experienced by emigrants in Europe. The contribution to historical continuity they had long been making by sending remittances to family and monasteries seemed to disappear. The categorical neglect of the migrants’ historical experience was a by-product of the moral imperatives entailed in this mnemonic reasoning. By leaving Tur Abdin they had simply stopped ‘fearing’ as well as ‘caring’. In this moral tale, they sacrificed ‘history’ in order to gain comfort, while the Tur Abdinis were left to continuously dispense with comfort in order to salvage their history.

Adults and Children (Discipline and Respect) In contrast to what many Tur Abdinis claimed, lamentations about continuity and the failing transmission of values through time were also manifest in Europe. This was often most pronounced in how émigrés related to the young generation. Evidently, the relationship between young and old is symbolically charged with the transmission of memory, where moral ties to history and to each other are built. I will take an example from a Sunday school in Berlin where Metin worked as a teacher. In Metin’s school I came to understand that not only the taught subject but also the pedagogy surrounding it were part of the same discourse on the past and its moral authority. Metin taught classical Syriac, the Aramaic dialect of Edessa that flourished in the second and third centuries and has survived as the Syrian Orthodox liturgical language ever since. The Suryoye speak a contemporary Aramaic dialect and normally do not understand Syriac, traditionally the preserve of the clergy. This language is generally held in high esteem because it is seen as an authentic link to the remote past. Many people relate it directly to Jesus and the formative years of Syrian Christianity. Learning Syriac (or Kthobonoyo, ‘the language of the book’) traditionally prepared male children for participation in church as singers, deacons, priests, monks or teachers. Now, in both Europe and Tur Abdin, girls also attend church schools.12 Two afternoons a week Metin taught Syriac to children and teenagers from the Suryoyo community. All migrant Suryoyo communities in Europe established such schools, usually affiliated with a church and seen as a continuation of a former monastic as well as village tradition. The madrashto (‘school’) system of education, in which Metin himself was trained, was part of a tradition of learning in which the art of reading, writing and reciting of mostly religious texts is a central activity.

132 • Researching a Beleaguered Community

Understanding and learning is training in recitation, memory and style. Comprehending the actual content is only a secondary aspect. While I attended Metin’s afternoon lessons in Berlin he often reflected on the problems he had with different pedagogies of learning: ‘In Germany they say if a child is afraid he or she will not learn. But for us that has always been different.’ He frequently expressed his irritation about how difficult it was for a teacher to operate if he had no disciplinary measures at hand, regularly using the German word ‘Disziplin’ in Aramaic speech. During my stay in Berlin he took his family to visit his natal village in Tur Abdin and came back full of energy and vigour. Metin desscribed his encounter with the village pupils as follows: Naturally, the children did not know me, but they had heard my name, they knew that Teacher Metin, the former teacher of their school had arrived. They showed me a lot of respect. They were a bit afraid of me, they were shy. Yes I am a teacher, and in Tur Abdin there is still fear of the teacher. Not because of beatings, no, there is another type of discipline. The pupil shows respect to his teacher. I was really pleased. And then I thought of my German school here and it is not the same at all. I want to teach them, but they are not interested. They have no discipline.

It is obvious that Metin taps into a moral discourse about the positive value of ‘fear’, here explained as deference and submissiveness to the teacher. However, neither fear nor discipline was the ruling mode in Metin’s classes. The students simply resisted. Occasional disciplinary measures like shouting, or making a child stand in the middle of the room on one foot, invited giggles and mimicry. Confrontational exchanges in which an enraged teacher exclaimed, ‘Why don’t you speak Syriac? Are you not a Suryoyo?!’ did not make the child speak Suryoyo. Rather, it just diminished his interest in learning. Apart from occasional knocks on the head, the teacher could not resort to physical punishment because everybody knew it was banned within the German school system, and because Suryoyo children, and increasingly their parents, were unwilling to accept it. Metin sometimes inflicted a demonstrative penalty on his own seven-year-old son. He would slap the boy’s face or pull his ears when he did not read without mistakes. But that too failed to impress. For Metin, the ‘proper’ communication of teaching and learning was highly loaded with a symbolic exchange of authority and obedience, legitimated by the subject matter of Aramaic and by the ‘natural’ status difference between those who hold religious knowledge and those who do not. Instead, as he put it, the pupils did ‘as they pleased’, which implied that personal desires corrupted the order in which teaching

Heidi Armbruster • 133

was possible. ‘Doing as one pleased’ also accounted for missing out on a very important moral lesson a child should learn: paying respect to superiors. This was, in Metin’s view and in the Syriac course-books, an important religious and social virtue. However, the pupils were incorporated into the German educational system and attended Syriac classes in their ‘free time’ in the afternoons. For them, the value of Syriac competed with the value of German and other languages such as English and French. They realized, and increasingly so did their parents, that the ‘linguistic market’ (Bourdieu 1992) for Syriac was very small in Germany. Their proficiency in the sacred ‘Language of the Book’ did not generate professional or symbolic capital. In addition many of Metin’s students understood that in relation to the German educational market, their own knowledge was by far superior to the teacher’s, for he had not been educated in Germany and had only an imperfect knowledge of German. All these factors made the students’ resistance possible. Metin saw that his pupils in Berlin did not respond to him as those ‘in the village’ did. He, and many others, understood this within a rhetoric of blame and crisis. First-generation immigrants often claimed that the incorporation of their children and young people into the German educational system, with its philosophy of insan insan-yo, had a destructive impact on respect-relationships and Suryoyo values as ‘they used to be’. For them and for Metin, transmitting knowledge to the young was seen as practical transmission of memory, and the how was just as important as the what. Afternoon school was a potential site for merging a person’s moral history with ‘the people’s’ moral history. The pupils’ insufficient display of obedience, respect and deference to the teacher was understood as a moral failure: by not entering a ‘thick relation’ in the proper way they did not succeed academically either. In lamentations of loss in Berlin, ‘learning the language’ came to stand for one of the most morally charged activities in itself. Language represented all that mattered: the link to the past, to God, to the people; the exclusion of outsiders; the comprehension of respect. Imperfect language learning was evaluated as resistance to the adult world and as an almost wilful disengagement from the community as a whole. By the same token, the mere fact of going to the school carried the meaning of being a good-mannered and virtuous young person. Staying away from school, or not sending one’s children, could be perceived as an issue of parental negligence and indifference to Suryoyo culture – a perspective Teacher Metin never grew tired of stressing (cf. Acar 1997).

134 • Researching a Beleaguered Community

Conclusion: Fieldworker and Researched Community (Empathy and Estrangement) I have always been intrigued by the significance of the ethnographer’s memory for her or his work. After all, ethnographic research involves the researcher’s biography, and the realization of a study often spans a long period of time. The work of memory thus becomes an inevitable part of the process of understanding. Biographical involvement takes place on several levels. There are the ways in which we impinge as historical persons on what we come to know. There are also the ways in which parts of that history can become unsettled in the encounter with other people’s ethics and politics. Initially I set out for fieldwork with a fair sense of ordered memories about who I was, but that sense of historical selfunderstanding often slipped out of place in the encounter with my hosts. My socialization into daily monastic life may serve as a good example. Despite having envisioned some form of participation in my hosts’ practices, I was taken aback by the intense impact of actual participation on my own sense of self. Being a researcher in their midst meant having to become a socially acceptable person and sharing in the daily routine. In many ways, this meant undergoing forms of socialization that I believed I had already undergone in another life. Catapulting myself into the position of linguistic, social and cultural ignorance often triggered memories of childhood, and the associated sentiments about being treated as immature. Being ‘childlike’ because one feels and is treated as culturally naïve is surely a familiar experience for many anthropologists. After all, uninitiated exposure to the ‘strange’ and unfamiliar is seen as an important epistemological condition. From this position one expects to start a chronological journey with a gradual acceleration of knowledge, familiarity and acceptance. But whereas in hindsight that process might appear as progressive acculturation, in actual fact it also provides scope for resistance, distancing and conflict. This can amount to a form of hampered socialization in which wanting to be accepted goes with struggling against the conditions of that acceptance. Thus, for instance, I attended church almost as frequently as the nuns in the monastery, and they expected me to do so. In church I often recalled my Catholic childhood in southern Germany and the lack of understanding and patience I once had for a highly formal and mystifying ritual. Now I wanted to understand the religious context ethnographically, even as my own biographical scepticism and emotional distance made these church visits an often trying and exhausting experience.

Heidi Armbruster • 135

It would go beyond the scope of this paper to recall the countless other occasions on which I wished to learn, and was made to learn, how to be a good person the Suryoyo way, and how I became an accepted person while I was ethnographically tuning in to my hosts’ world. Certainly I wanted to be accepted. It was only in hindsight that I realized how much that ‘acceptance’ hinged on a desire not to be identified as a stereotypical white ‘Westerner’ in Turkey or the stereotypical ‘German’ in Germany. Conversely, I keenly (if perhaps quite unconsciously) assumed that my hosts were a stereotype of sorts, namely the epitome of a disempowered minority, both in Turkey and Germany. It takes sensitive ethnographic fieldwork to understand the positions of advantage and disadvantage in systems of domination and to comprehend the shifts and interconnections of these positions. In my case my own politically leftist position and its intrinsic identificatory desires turned out to produce inner conflict precisely because the person I remembered myself to be – a feminist, leftist individual and lapsed catholic – somehow lost her contours. When I was finally told that I was ‘such a good believer’, and when I realized that I had started to divide the world into ‘Christians’ and (untrustworthy) ‘Muslims’ myself, I began to feel an inner panic and had strong impulses to flee. I surely did not want to surrender my historical self. Meanwhile, my hosts’ beleaguered marginality was not just symbolic of the moral superiority of the downtrodden (even though their moral discourse subscribed to that image), but it was also capable of reproducing inequality within and racist sentiment towards the outside. At the same time, the Suryoyes’ historical experience in Turkey was difficult and full of pain. Their narrative rendering of historical and present suffering was also a form of resistance and challenge to the official Turkish account which has never acknowledged Armenian and Syrian Christian suffering.13 Some of the major narrative and social practices of remembering articulated the ethical imperative to maintain themselves and resist change. I could, in my autobiographical approach, connect to my hosts’ accounts about their oppression in Turkey with an ethics of political anger. But it was much more difficult to develop a sense of empathy towards the moral visions that were associated with self-preservation. On the ground of everyday social relations, the ethics of securing Christian/Muslim boundaries often enabled an assumption of ‘Christian’ superiority and self-righteousness, or gave rise to explicit anti-Islamism. Self-denial and sacrifice for a higher principle easily served to legitimize unequal gender relations, and the ethics of fear, self-control and respect often served to legitimize authoritarian rule over children and women. The more my hosts insisted on the ‘naturalness’ of hierarchy and status differentials in the social, political

136 • Researching a Beleaguered Community

and spiritual universe, the more I felt that insan-insan-yo was an important political principle to hold on to. The decontextualization and challenge to my own history also included the academic persona. To become partially socialized into a new set of moral memories, I inhabited another relationship that informed my conduct and identification with people in fieldwork. This too sometimes felt like a remembering, as the relationship with the academic discipline had its manifestation in a PhD degree based in London and in the theorized formulas of an ethnographic research practice that seemed to belong to a faraway cultural logic. Remembering the disciplinary raison d’être of my stay meant heeding a set of moral practices and disciplines that often felt like ‘strategic fieldworking’. This meant a strategic approach to social interaction in ways that hold out some form of ‘scientific’ productivity. There were moments in fieldwork when I felt like an intruder precisely because of this fact – when I pretended to be naïve or uninterested, for instance, while in fact being highly concentrated. I was opportunistic in many ways, and I often kept quiet when in fact I disagreed. All this made me feel awkward and, at times, socially problematic. Even the building of relationships anchored in heartfelt empathy, mutual understanding and friendship were, in one way or another, tied to strategic fieldworking. It would be dishonest to claim that the friendship plane was completely detached from the fieldwork plane. I often wondered how the levels of identification with the researched that anthropologists define as ‘friendship’, ‘companheira-ship’ (see, e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1995) or as other configurations of intimate selfother mirroring, translate into the making of their academic identities (during and after fieldwork), where different sets of moral rules apply – such as those that measure status according to degree qualifications, publication records and tenured university positions. Desiring to be someone’s friend can sit uneasily with wanting to study them. Nevertheless, my identifications with people in fieldwork (especially those of an amicable nature) became a historically growing, morally charged affair, a ‘thick relation’ requiring ethical responsibilities that reached beyond the usual parameters of research ethics. These memories now bring back many of my felt ‘ethnographic tensions’ (Coffey 1999: 48), and the act of memory still elicits that emotional impact. I would suggest that it is not just memory but the ethics of memory and the serious implications they have for human subjectivity, that make acts of remembering so central in social relationships and ethnographic work. Whether memories clash, get out of synchronicity or resonate with one another is largely a question of whether their ethical and

Heidi Armbruster • 137

identificatory scripts clash, contradict or corroborate each other. As Lambek argues, the moral dimension of memory is best understood as the making of claims about historically grown ‘social commitments and identifications’. As such it is part of a communicative context that implies both consent and challenge (1996: 248). In other words, the process by which ideas about commitment and identification get linked with the authority of the past is multilayered and complex. It is subject to historical change, such as migration in this case, and dependent on the participation of historical and political subjects. The nuns as well as the teachers were astutely aware of this. They invoked autobiographical and semantically prescribed memories, even if differently weighted, to evince moral praise for those who demonstrated loyalty to significant relationships, and moral blame for those who did not. In my own case the post-fieldwork act of mnemonic reconstruction and transformation of experience into an academically viable narrative was actually the site where the complex and always political intersection of ethics and memory became most obvious. My hosts felt that the difficult political situation in Turkey did not allow for an open treatment of history from the Suryoyo point of view, as it might generate a harmful backlash from the Turkish authorities. But they also felt that their beleaguered history should finally be told to the world, and that I should play a part in that telling. While personal conflicts and resistance to the ethics of the past were revealed to me in relationships of trust, I was also often told to treat them confidentially. (Hi)stories told about people who are morally linked often implied the double message of trust and risk, as they were hardly ever impartial. This opened a window for the anthropologist in me to understand the nature of moral links. But disclosing them in a written account could have meant exposing people I knew to social risks. Narrative conventions of ethnography require ‘thick descriptions’ of social reality. However, I found myself struggling with that imperative, precisely because my temporal experience with Suryoye had become morally charged. At my post-fieldwork desk I always remembered my hosts’ ethics of self-maintenance, and their corresponding condemnations, through my own moral and emotional shifts between empathy and estrangement. This moral conflict shaped data collection, analysis and representation. That this tended to hamper identification with the researched is perhaps true for many a fieldwork, but it brought home to me that such failure to identify can debilitate the potential to frame a project as politically significant ‘research from below’, and turn what one can do into a much humbler and messier affair. Or, to put it differently, the minutiae of fieldwork reveal that the impulse to be morally and politically engaged

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

4:02 PM

Page 138

138 • Researching a Beleaguered Community

in relation to those we study is importantly also that: a desire (see Kulick 2006).14 It is a yearning to reconcile our politically and our academically biased selves. While the former is about the alignment with the powerless, the latter still is, in many ways, about an alignment with the powerful. Trying to reconcile the two can certainly produce much ethnographic tension.

Notes 1. Self-ascriptive term, meaning ‘Syrians’. Sg: Suryoyo (m), Suryayto (f). Syriac Christianity has its historical roots in the Middle East and comprises a number of churches, represented today in different countries of the Middle East, in India and across a global diaspora. Most Suryoye in Tur Abdin belong to the Syrian Orthodox Church. 2. The Kurdish-Turkish conflict intensified in the mid 1980s leading to a strong Turkish military presence in Southeast Turkey, where most Kurdish provinces were put under martial law. The Suryoye felt increasingly besieged by both conflicting parties. The late 1980s and early 1990s were particularly problematic. Throughout the period a number of Christian villages were cleared by the army, others came under attack by the PKK because they had military posts in them, several Suryoye were kidnapped or assassinated by Kurdish paramilitaries, some of whom were on the payroll of the state. Evidently many Kurds were victimised by the same practices. By the mid 1990s the PKK, or ‘Kurdish Workers’ Party’, withdrew to the mountainous region further east, which reduced the tension in Tur Abdin to some extent. During my stay political difficulties were still acute but much less tense than in the early 1990s. The capture of Abdullah Öcalan in 1999 and his call upon the PKK to demilitarize eased some of the political tension in the area (see also Merten 1997: 60–66). 3. In Aramaic the Suryoye call their homeland in Southeast Turkey Tur Abdin, which translates as the ‘mountain of the servants of God’. This mountain plateau is bordered by the Tigris to the north and east and by the great Mesopotamian plains to the south. The area was Christianized by the fourth century A.D. and became an early centre of monasticism. Today a traveller is quickly aware of Tur Abdin’s ancient Christian tradition. The landscape is dotted with numerous churches and monasteries, many of them in ruins (see also Palmer 1990). 4. The largest communities live in Germany and Sweden, with about 40,000 in each country (see Björklund 1981, Lembert 2002, Merten 1997). 5. European protectionism became particularly forceful in the nineteenth century, when France, Russia and Britain proclaimed themselves protectors of the Ottoman Sultan’s Christian subjects and demanded reforms on their behalf. These interferences were spurned by their own competing imperial interests to strengthen their spheres of influence in a weakened Ottoman state. European and American missionaries tried to implement some of these imperial desires on the ground by making efforts

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

11/6/09

5:32 PM

Page 139

Heidi Armbruster • 139

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

to convert these Eastern Christians to Protestantism or Catholicism (see, e.g., Schlicht 1981, 1992; Yonan 1989) See Levene (1998) for the Western betrayal of Armenians and Kurds after World War I. During the First World War the Syrian Christians largely shared the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. For the policy of anti-Christian aggression and genocide in Eastern Anatolia see, e.g. Bloxham (2005), Levene (1998), Yonan (1989). The Suryoye remember the events as sayfo, or ‘sword’. Naturalization can be granted on the basis of legal entitlement or discretionary rule by the authorities. Since the time of my research, rules on entitlement have been changed and access to citizenship has eased (a new citizenship law took effect in 2000). Specific criteria for legal entitlement to naturalization were introduced in 1993 (Beauftragte 2005: 3). Before that all decisions were based on discretion. In both Austria and Germany Suryoye told me that they fared better than Muslim Turks in discretionary naturalization procedures because of their Christian identities. See Bloch (1998: 119–124) for the confluence of long-term ‘semantic’ and short-term personal memory. Some authors argue that the degree of ‘homeland’ orientation of migrants is rooted in the exclusion regimes of the host country. Long-term political exclusion from citizenship, along with the pertinent discourse of the ‘Turkish foreigner’ and the ‘guestworker’, produced a dynamic of its own that led Turkish migrant groups in Germany to orientate themselves politically towards the nation of origin rather than settlement (Koopmans and Statham 2001; for a very good study on Turkish and Kurdish homeland politics in Germany see Ostergaard-Nielsen 2003). While this plausibly plays a part in the homeland orientation of the Suryoye, I would argue that the more pertinent reason for looking to Turkey is their beleaguered history there and its significance for identity, particularly among first-generation migrants. This is evidently a wider Christian monastic topos (see, e.g., Brown 1971). Suryoyo interpretations of historical tragedy resemble Armenian and Jewish responses, as described by Peroomian (1993). All personal names are pseudonyms. In Turkey speaking languages other than Turkish was illegal between 1983 and 1991. The dominant language ideology still associates minority languages (especially Kurdish) with a betrayal of the nation. Surysoye in Tur Abdin have had to contend with occasional government bans on using Syriac as a language of instruction in monasteries and church schools. Maintaining the language within this hostile climate was for many a pressing concern of cultural survival (see also Rabo 1998). That this is still a sensitive issue in Turkey could recently be witnessed by the suit brought against the most acclaimed contemporary Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, who had spoken to a foreign newspaper about the Armenian genocide in 1915/16 and was accused of ‘humiliating Turkey’. The charges were dropped in 2006. See also Akçam (2004). Don Kulick’s refreshingly intriguing article on ‘masochist anthropology’ (2006) embeds what he describes as a long-standing anthropological desire for identification with the ‘powerless’ in a psychoanalytic libidinal

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

4:28 PM

Page 140

140 • Researching a Beleaguered Community

economy. Within this scheme anthropologists derive ‘masochist’ pleasure from the powerless by unconsciously substituting themselves for those in disempowered positions – i.e., typically, the subjects of their studies. This psychic desire is driven not so much by the fate of the powerless other, but by a repressed desire for the rewards held out by capitalism and by anthropology as an academic discipline, i.e., by the anthropologist’s own relationship to Western structures of power. His text provides an interesting illustration of the psychic economy that is produced by the contradictory entanglements with power that anthropology as an academic discipline (and by extension its practitioner) can be caught up in.

References Acar, H. 1997. Menschen zwischen Kulturen. Aramäische Jugendliche in Deutschland. Paderborn. Akçam, T. 2004. From Empire to Republic. Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide. London: Zed Books. Antze, P. and M. Lambek (eds). 1996. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York, London: Routledge. Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Migration, Flüchtlinge und Integration (ed.). 2005. Einbürgerung. Daten – Fakten – Trends. Stand: 2004. Berlin. Retrieved 10 January 2006 from www.bundesregierung.de/nn_56712/ Content/DE/Publikation/IB/Anlagen/einb_C3_BCrgerungen.html Bahloul, J. 1996. The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria 1937–1962. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Björklund, U. 1981. North to Another Country. The Formation of a Suryoyo Community in Sweden. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology. Stockholm: The Swedish Commission on Immigration Research (EIFO). Bloch, M. 1998. How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Boulder: Westview Press. Bloxham, D. 2005. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1992. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity. Brown, P. 1971. The World of Late Antiquity. AD 150–750. London: Thames and Hudson. Coffey, A. 1999. The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity. London: Sage. Friedlander, S. 1993. Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ganguly, K. 1992. ‘Migrant Identities: Personal Memory and the Construction of Selfhood’, Cultural Studies 6(1): 27–50. Gilroy, P. 1994. The Black Atlantic. London: Verso. Hirschon, R. 1989. Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Koopmans, R. and P. Statham. 2001. ‘How National Citizenship Shapes Transnationalism: A Comparative Analysis of Migrant Claims-Making in Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands’. Working Paper,

Heidi Armbruster • 141

October 2004 from http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working_papers.htm Kugelmass, J. 1996. ‘Missions to the Past: Poland in Contemporary Jewish Thought and Deed’, in P. Antze and M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past. New York, London: Routledge, pp. 199–214. Kulick, D. 2006. ‘Theory in Furs: Masochist Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 47(6): 933–952. Lambek, M. 1996. ‘The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice’, in P. Antze and M. Lambek (eds.), Tense Past. New York, London: Routledge, pp. 235–254. Langer, L. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lembert, C. 2001. ’Wenn die Wahrheit zum “Verrat“ wird’. Retrieved 9 August 2004 from http://www.sonntagsblattbayern.de/archiv01/11/woche2.htm ———. 2002. ’Migranten aus dem Tur Abdin. Suryoye in einer diaspora community’, in M. Tamcke (ed.), Daheim und in der Fremde. Beiträge zur jüngeren Geschichte und Gegenwartslage der orientalischen Christen. Berlin, Hamburg: LIT Verlag, pp. 143–162. Levene, M. 1998. ‘Creating a Modern “Zone of Genocide”: The Impact of Nation- and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12(3): 393–433. Margalit, A. 2002. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Merten, K. 1997. Die syrisch-orthodoxen Christen in der Türkei und in Deutschland. Untersuchungen zu einer Wanderungsbewegung. Hamburg: LIT Verlag. Ostergaard-Nielsen, E. 2003. Transnational Politics: Turks and Kurds in Germany. London: Routledge. Palmer, A. 1990. Monk and Mason on the Tigris Frontier. The Early History of Tur ‘Abdin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peroomian, R. 1993. Literary Responses to Catastrophe. A Comparison of the Armenian and the Jewish Experience. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Rabo, G. 1998. ‘Die türkische Regierung schließt das Priesterseminar des Klosters Mor Gabriel im Tur ’Abdin’, Gouden Hoorn. Tijdschrift over Byzantium/ Golden Horn. Journal of Byzantium, (6)2. Retrieved 10 October 2002 from http://www.isidore-of seville.com/goudenhoorn/62gabriel.html Scheper-Hughes, N. 1995. ‘The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 36(3): 409–420. Schlicht, A. 1981. Frankreich und die syrischen Christen 1799–1861: Minoritäten und europäischer Imperialismus im Vorderen Orient. Berlin: Schwarz. ———. 1992. ’Die europäischen Mächte und die Religionsgemeinschaften Syriens im Rahmen der Orientalischen Frage: Bemerkungen zum “indirekten Imperialismus“ im Osmanischen Reich’, in T. Beck et al. (eds.), Kolumbus’ Erben. Europäische Expansion und überseeische Ethnien im ersten Kolonialzeitalter, 1415–1815. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp. 247–279. Schwaigert, W. 2002. ‘Zur Situation der Christen in der Türkei’, in M. Tamcke (ed.), Daheim und in der Fremde. Beiträge zur jüngeren Geschichte und Gegenwartslage der orientalischen Christen. Berlin, Hamburg: LIT Verlag, pp. 11–24.

142 • Researching a Beleaguered Community

Slymovics, S. 1998. The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Yonan, G. 1989. Ein vergessener Holocaust: Die Vernichtung der christlichen Assyrer in der Türkei. Göttingen, Vienna: Pogrom.

Chapter 6

CONFESSIONS OF A DOWNBEAT ANTHROPOLOGIST Anna Lærke

I think most ethnographers recognize it – the way in which writing is supposed to take them out of ‘the field’, and ‘the field’ out of them. And writing does indeed put lived experience into a frame, cutting off new associations and hedging in old ones. In most cases, I presume, the process of writing-up flows easily and makes all the entanglements of fieldwork bewilderment seem worth while. In other cases, like mine, it is a recurrent, almost tortuous process of meanings found and then lost, loyalties displaced, and purposes dislodged. Vincent Crapanzano has put it like this: However much the writer of ethnography wishes to separate his ethnography from the ethnographic confrontation, the writing of ethnography is a continuation of the confrontation … Indeed, one could argue that at one level the writing of ethnography is an attempt to put a fullstop to the ethnographic confrontation … The act of writing – the evocation of the response of the other and the constitution thereby of the self and his meaningful world is reified, in its product, the written word … The act of writing ethnography is an act of self-constitution [but] it is also an act of exorcism. (Crapanzano 1977: 70–71)

144 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

In 1994–96 I did fieldwork with children in a primary school in the English village of Little Midby.1 I worked mostly with the children and kept some distance from their teachers and parents. In school, I sat with the children on the floor, played with them on the playground, and ate my school dinners at their tables. This made adults, particularly parents, uncomfortable. But it gave me a view from the floor. Throughout the school day, students were subtly and continuously restricted in how, where and when they could use their bodies; in what they could know and how and when they could ask; and, ultimately, in who they could be. I was overwhelmed by the pervasiveness of adult control and by the constant invocation of who was ‘in charge’, of who was ‘big’ and who was ‘small’, and of what was ‘good’ and what was ‘bad’ behaviour. This particular fieldwork, to paraphrase Ruth Behar, broke my heart (Behar 1996). And while writing has been an exorcism, of sorts, of a fieldwork-identity that literally made me sick, a reconstituted and properly dislodged ‘me’ has yet to materialize. Ten years on, I am still somehow in the grip of it. Rather than putting an alleviating ‘full-stop’ to my troubles, writing about Little Midby has produced a gradual sedimentation of two feelings: anger and sadness. My ethnography focuses on young children’s lives, both in school and in the wider contexts of family and village community. It relies on substantial and largely unedited extracts from my fieldnotes. The raw ethnography is thus literally, and also deliberately, presented as and in my words – something that may (and, indeed, occasionally does) attract ridicule, dismissal, and well-placed questions about the value of an ethnography so explicitly written from the vantage point of the researcher herself. However, I believe I have had my good reasons. As Behar notes: ‘In anthropology, which historically exists to “give voice” to others, there is no greater taboo than self-revelation…The irony is that anthropology has always been rooted in an “I”, (Behar 1996: 26). My position was, and remains, a political one. I do not believe in ‘objectivity’, and my way of dealing with ‘the irony’, with the leap from experience to written ethnography, is to expose as clearly as possible the process by which writing manipulates reality. In doing so, I hope also to demonstrate how I put my own emotional engagement to work as a lens through which others’ experiences might be exposed. Shortly after returning from fieldwork, I wrote my way to a position from which I could make sense of the many and powerful childhood recollections that were triggered by my working with children (Lærke 1998). Explicitly and deliberately using my self as a methodological tool became my way of making sense of emotional entanglement. Finding a respectable balance between navel-gazing and personally

Anna Lærke • 145

grounded intellectual curiosity is not easy – but neither is it impossible. As Boler suggests, there is a mode of reading the emotional as political that ‘calls upon us to “bear witness” and to actively engage in an examination of ethical responsibilities through our own emotional selfreflection’ (Boler 1999: xxiv). It is in this sense – the sense of staying true to one’s own emotional engagement – that I take the personal to be political. To recognize personal involvement in the production of ethnography is to take a political stance. The more the reader knows about me, the more I relinquish the power of ‘ethnographic authority’ (Clifford 1983). What still remains, though, is my struggle to find a language that enables me to write about sadness and anger rather than writing in sadness and anger. As an adult unaccustomed to primary school life, I was initially overwhelmed by how much bodies were being touched, pushed, pulled, directed, constrained and ‘cut to size’. My own body, of course, became part of this. I felt my body was besieged, as if it did not quite belong to me. Out of this first process of field socialization emerged my focus on, and interest in, disciplining practices. The resulting ethnography describes how time, bodies, spaces and knowledges were put to use in the disciplining and socialization of children and adults, and how patterns of consumption and discourses on class and on rural/urban belonging produced villager identities that intersected with, reinforced and challenged identities produced in school.2

Discipline and Socialization Discipline involves practices, strategies and even ideologies that aim at, and sometimes result in, certain desired behaviours and attitudes. Narrowly defined, disciplining could be said to be the practices by which a group of people is made to do what an authority wills that they should do. In this conventional sense, discipline is based on, and in turn produces, notions of ‘a common good’ through the continuous establishment of rules, rewards and punishments. It is a mode of control. In my fieldnotes, I called the process ‘bonsai’, although a more culturally fitting term might be ‘trimming’ or ‘pruning’, which is what English gardeners do to their roses. By ‘bonsai’, I mean practices whereby energies, or ‘potential’, are directed along certain lines of development or growth. ‘Bonsai’ or trimming is the management – and thereby also the identification and construal – of potential wildness, or wild potential, before it unfolds. It is about strengthening certain features, of a plant or a person, by directing development,

146 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

movement or energy into a limited and well-defined arena of becoming. It is also about stifling other potential features before they can grow. The aim of ‘bonsai’ discipline is to concentrate meaning or impact into the smallest possible, the most economically efficient, ‘space’. It produces people who are like Oxo cubes: contained, contrived and purposeful. It is not like amputation. Amputation would be cutting something off that might have its own life that would then be ‘wasted’. ‘Bonsai’ discipline ‘nips it in the bud’, as many villagers put it, not by eliminating ‘wild shoots’ (qualities, attitudes, behaviours), but by cultivating, manipulating, and redirecting their growth. Here, time is at work. Disciplining economizes with ‘potential’; and through the wear and tear of repetition, of habitus (Bourdieu 1977), certain qualities are hardened and strengthened and others crippled. I use the word discipline because it conveys the potency – and in some instances the oppressive nature – of child-adult relations as I experienced and observed them. And I use the term ‘socialization’ to convey the also positive and productive qualities of these same relations. To capture the processes by which disciplining constructs persons, I suggest the term ‘mutual socialization’. Mutual socialization entails practices by which people identify, mark and construe one another in on-going relationships. I call it ‘mutual’ to draw attention to the necessarily dialogic fashion in which adults and children socialize one another. My understanding of discipline draws, obviously, on that of Foucault (1990, 1980, 1977), while the term ‘socialization’ has a longer and more complex genealogy (e.g., Bourdieu and Passeron 1990; Bourdieu 1990, 1986, 1977; Braidotti 1994; Strathern 1988, 1992). My usage of both terms, though, alters them to emphasize interaction and the mutuality of all subjectification. Thus, for me, ‘discipline as socialization’ involves much more than simply practices of control, surveillance and ruling. Discipline is also the practices by which truths are produced and bodies come into being. It is processes whereby knowledges, spaces and relationships become embodied; whereby ‘the child’ and ‘the adult’ are construed; and whereby relational positions of power and authority are invented and negotiated, taken and lost. In this perspective, ‘disciplining’, ‘teaching’, ‘learning’ and ‘bullying’ all involve the same kinds of processes. Moreover, disciplining can not be understood in isolation from practices of resistance to disciplining. Indeed, this emphasis is fundamental to my approach. Socialization, in its different expressions, produces its effects in the tension between domination and subordination, in the balance of power against counterpower. In the field, it was in situations where people appeared to resist the

Anna Lærke • 147

domination implied in disciplining or bullying that notions of good and bad, right and wrong, reality and fantasy, truths and lies, became visible to me. In the following, young persons are depicted as those who most often related to dominant discourses that were not, initially, their own. But I also argue that children were not passive, or semipassive, nonproductive receivers and reactors to ‘teachings’ and ‘treatments’ upon which they had no impact. Children did not simply respond to adult authority – they authorized it. They did not so much act against dominating practices as they acted with those practices to produce others. I understand resistance as the creation of something else, of other ways and outlooks that again reflect back on, and may challenge, dominant practices. But (and when speaking of children this is an important ‘but’) the ability to make other ways and outlooks visible and heard depends hugely on existing relations of power and subordination. This, cut to its bare minimum, is the conundrum of ‘power’. Hence, when I speak of children’s resistance, I do not talk of open defiance against teachers, say, or against me. Students in school did not directly refuse; they rather diffused. They could dislocate assumptions. That these young children were not heard or seen to protest openly was due in part to a dominant adult identification of children as being less civilized and more in the grip of their ‘natures’. Open protest was thus often reduced to a mere confirmation of that very identification. It was also due in part to the fact that children were told, in many ways, that one day they would be adults, powerful adults, themselves. Within this evolutionistic hierarchy of teacher and learner, how could children act against a position they expected themselves to take one day? It was this double bind, or double blind – the apparent impotence and the inability or reluctance to see and reach beyond one’s own constraints – that made me angry. In the following, I describe some aspects of the disciplining practices in school. In doing so, I hope not only to draw attention to a local context in which I got entangled, but also to demonstrate how this entanglement became personal and how, in my writing of it (rather than writing about it), I could not help but taking sides in the continuous struggle over whose version of truth was the more powerful.

The Uses of Knowledge in School On the wall above the teacher’s chair in the Junior classroom, where assemblies were held, hung a sign saying “This weeks theme is ...”. Every Monday morning, Mrs Brixham completed the sentence in her

148 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

clear round writing. Throughout the school year, the absence of the possessive apostrophe went unnoticed. For me, this little mistake came to signify a particular incoherence and lack of continuity that were part of the school disciplinary practice. Of course, the grammatical error was unintended, as were, I believe, many of the other inconsistencies I noticed in school. But that does not mean it did not work. In the following, I describe a disciplining technique that forged certain links between knowledges whilst severing others. It was a use of knowledge that disciplined me, too. It put me in my place. An obvious use of knowledge was the control over the flow of information in school. My presence in the school, for instance, was given the most rudimentary of introductions by the headteacher, Mr Fisher. In a similar vein, issues such as school administration, appointment of staff, and planning of extracurricular activities were not mentioned to students, let alone discussed with them. Students seemed generally ill-informed, and they were often peculiarly uninquisitive about what was going to happen next, why they were asked to do this or that, why they were going to church on this particular day, or whether or not that club was on in the afternoon. For a while, I assumed that the lack of transparency regarding the aim and the planning of school activities was my problem alone: a particular fieldwork problem, and perhaps a question of personal trust. But it was not only that. The children, the school staff, the parents, the neighbours, the nannies and the postman all seemed to lack basic information. Sometimes, a student would ask and be told something like, ‘You don’t need to know this now’ or, ‘Now, let me finish this first, and you’ll all be told later’. There were boundaries around different areas of knowledge in school: some information was for parents, some for students, some for staff, and some for Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, a Government Inspectorate). The first time I stumbled into such a boundary was when I enquired about the possibility of arranging a meeting in school with the parents. I wanted to explain my presence and seek parents’ consent to my work with their children. My enquiry did not go down well with Mr Fisher. Or rather, it did not go anywhere. Not that the headteacher objected in any direct way – it was just that he did not find it ‘necessary’ to inform parents formally in this way. He had decided to allow me access to the school, and that should be enough of a ‘guarantee’ to the parents, he explained. After my repeated enquiries, Mr Fisher did promise me a slot at his next meeting with parents. In the event, however, I was offered no opportunity to speak. I was the last item on the agenda and sat through a very long meeting waiting for an opportunity to introduce myself. I did not get that

Anna Lærke • 149

opportunity; Mr Fisher did it for me, saying that I was a student and from Denmark, and that he and the governing body had given their permission for me to work in the school. That, clearly, was the end of the matter. Thus, Mr Fisher stipulated his own position in the school and he made me know about mine. He exerted his power to identify what parents ‘needed’ to know about activities in school. He also exerted his power to leave me waiting for my moment to speak, which, in the end, did not come. By keeping me ill-informed about his intentions, he made it impossible for me to take any action. The making of worry or uncertainty, and the prevention or discouragement of independent action, were means by which the uses of knowledge could work as a disciplining technique. I cannot think of this as anything other than a creation and exertion of power, an economizing with knowledge through control over the flow of information. I wrote the following about Infant Teacher, Mrs Stenn, and her class (aged 5–8): We were sitting on the floor looking up at Mrs Stenn. It was a bit unusual to be asked to do so after big playtime. There was something not right, something unnerving, restless. I looked at Mary and smiled. She didn’t smile back. There were many pairs of eyes fluttering around, but none venturing above the level of Mrs Stenn’s seated skirt. It took a while, a very long while, before it began to emerge why Mrs Stenn was like this: She asked the two who were in charge today of the lunch boxes if they had fetched them back from the main building. It was Richard and Andrew. Of course they hadn’t fetched the boxes yet – usually the kids do that after the class has had instructions after playtime; then Mrs Stenn will ask two people to go and get the lunch boxes. This time, Mrs Stenn said angrily, ‘Those lunch boxes should be here now. Go and get them’. The two boys went. To the rest of the class, Mrs Stenn said, ‘Now, you sit quietly, and no one talks – I will hear no noise at all’. It was completely silent, dead silent. The kids sat on their bottoms with folded legs and straight backs and maybe knew as little as I did. We were going to sit like this, said Mrs Stenn, until the two boys came back. In the meantime, James and Martin could not stand the trial and whispered something to each other. Mrs Stenn roared (this was serious), ‘Martin, if I hear one more word from you I’ll send you over [to Mr Fisher for reprimand].’ Very quiet again. The situation was at its breaking point (What was the matter? Did anyone know? Apart from Mrs Stenn, of course) when Richard and Andrew returned with the lunch boxes. Finally Mrs Stenn gave us a clue. She said Mrs Rogers and Mrs Brixham [staff responsible for supervision at lunch playtime] had told her all about what had happened on the playground just now. I had been there but didn’t know what she was talking about. The teacher said she knew that this class had behaved very badly, and that ‘playtime is for play, it is not for fighting, it is not for calling each other terrible names, it is not for picking things from

150 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

trees’, she looked down into her lap and up again and added in a strangely tender but austere voice ‘things that grow’. James started saying something but was stopped. He kept his hand up, though. Mrs Stenn said that what they (who?) had done was very bad and that she would take care of those who didn’t behave. She would ask Mrs Brixham and Mrs Rogers to keep an eye ‘on every one of you’ next playtime. Then she finally gave James the word: ‘Yes, James, what did you want to say?’ James started, ‘Amy and Francesca were …’ and Mrs Stenn took over, ‘I know what those two were up to’. James did not finish his sentence. Afterwards, I asked Katie and Jess what had happened on the playground – what had Amy and Francesca done? They said they didn’t know. I then asked James what had happened, and he said Amy and Francesca had pushed him over. No wonder James had wanted to put his case. I asked if it had been worse than it usually is – the fighting? James said it had. (Fieldnotes)

On this occasion, I asked several of the students in the class if they knew what had happened on the playground, and apart from Martin, only the three people directly involved seemed to know. Of course, the students may have known and just not told me, but I do not think so. In so far as my sense of the situation did capture the mood, there was a baffled, uncertain atmosphere in the room that day; not an embarrassed or guilt-ridden one. Mrs Stenn was punishing the class – en bloc – for something most of them did not know about. I could only make sense of this through my own recollection of childhood bewilderment at being made responsible for something I had not done. It was the kind of bewilderment that holds within it a bursting sense of justice denied. Tasks were usually framed in the short-term, but unmarked in terms of their place on a continuum of learning. When activities had no visible and expressed link to other activities, they lost their future, as it were, and their past. They lost momentum. Without linkage or continuity, they did not make space for the conception of possible alternatives, or for autonomous action. This produced its own cycle of uninformedness, turning into unengagement, turning into boredom. The students often complained of boredom. I would have been bored too, had I not had fieldwork to do. I took this boredom to be a result of the detached and desultory nature of the teaching the children received. Although they worked from maths books and took home reading books from a reading scheme, classroom work on literacy, science and technology, geography, history and art was all done on single and separate worksheets with no apparent link to each other. Although the television programmes the students watched once or twice a week had

Anna Lærke • 151

their own continuity, they were not followed up by discussions in the class: when the programme was over, Mrs Stenn would emerge from her paperwork in the teacher-corner and hand out the accompanying ‘BBC Schools’ worksheets. Students’ comments during the programme were not followed up, and when I referred to the programmes in our conversations, students looked at me in a baffled, open-mouthed way. The children were rarely encouraged to work in groups, and when they did, it was not explained to them that group work should be a collective effort by which each worker depended on the others’ contribution. As far as I could make out, grammar was not being taught. Thus, at the level of word- and sentence-making, students did not appear to get a sense of language being the building of links. Nor were questions treated as openings (to learning): rather, they were turned into practical obstacles. There were no dictionaries or encyclopaedias in the classroom, so when students needed to know the spelling or meaning of a new word, they had to put aside their work and line up by the teacher to ask. Not only was students’ schoolwork thus constrained by their inability to seek out answers for themselves and independently, it was also frequently disrupted by the need to seek the teacher’s assistance. Students’ limited access to work materials had a similar effect: it was not common knowledge where scissors, paper, paint, cellotape or glue were kept, nor were these materials kept within students’ reach. Rather than being simply the undesirable by-products of ‘bad planning’, the lack of momentum and apparent purpose – the ‘boredom’ – appeared to be an essential part of an efficient and coherent disciplining practice in school.

The Harvest Festival Amongst Other Things Mr Fisher held the assembly this morning. It was about ‘harvest’, he said. Nobody knew the hymn we were meant to sing, and Mr Fisher mercifully stopped the scratchy high-pitched tape recording after three verses of joined-in hum-mumblings. He then read the text from the assembly book: it was about the plants we eat and the fish we catch and the oil and gas in the earth, and they are all harvested and gifts from God. (Nothing to do with human labour). The teacher asked if somebody could tell him how fish could be a harvest, like apples and corn? ‘Fishes are the harvest of the sea’ sighed Francesca, as if nothing could be more obvious, and no question more stupid. (Fieldnotes)

Mr Fisher could have expanded on the issues of resources, consumption and labour. But he didn’t. He could have talked about

152 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

farming, which was happening right outside the school, or about mining, which was a substantial source of income for at least seven families of the school. But he didn’t. He could have talked about God, and he didn’t. Instead, he first turned to, and then away from, the week’s theme: The theme was ‘saving’. Mr Fisher said (as he often does), ‘This is a hard one’. He left it at that for the time being and asked instead if there were people who could remember an earlier assembly where Reverend Thomas [an Anglican minister who sometimes took assembly] had told them a story? Heads nodded. Now, asked Mr Fisher, had anybody, when they heard Reverend Thomas’ story, thought that they had heard that story before? Heads nodded again, and many students raised their hands. Mr Fisher smiled and said they would have heard it, for he had told them that story a few days before the Reverend did. Mr Fisher was now ready to make the point: ‘Thank you for not telling Reverend Thomas that you had heard the story before’, he smiled. (Fieldnotes)

The teacher commended the students on not enquiring about the repetition, and on not revealing something that might have embarrassed the Reverend. Some knowledge, in other words, was best kept undisclosed; and some questions best kept unasked: Mr Fisher returned to the question of ‘saving’, and asked the students what they thought of when they heard the word ‘saving’? There was a long silence; Mr Fisher’s smile scanning the congregation of wriggly toes and bowed heads. Then Matthew raised his hand and said he thought of toys. ‘Yes-s-s …’, said Mr Fisher reluctantly, ‘… you could have toys you wanted to save … or collect … like Thomas the Tank Engine’. But it wasn’t the answer Mr Fisher was looking for. Now, as often in situations where one person has finally produced an answer, many others suddenly had one too. Because, I think, they now had a clue (pointing in the right direction or not, as the case might be) as to what kind of answer the teacher wanted. Gareth said you could save people, and Mr Fisher smiled broadly: this was the right kind of answer. But alas, Mr Fisher gave too much leeway and asked, ‘What do you mean? Do you mean saving people like rescuing them, or saving them as collecting them?’ Gareth said, ‘Collecting them’. Now, Mr Fisher had a problem again: ‘Well, people like toy people, like small people, you could collect, but …’ He went on to the next, and the next, and the next, and they were all talking about ‘saving’ stamps, coins, Lego. Mr Fisher finally explained, ‘What you mean is “collecting”. But what about “saving”?’ Another silence, another search: What did Mr Fisher want? Francesca said she saved money in the bank. Again Mr Fisher’s ‘Yes-s-s …’ was less than enthusiastic. Finally, Daniel – mature and considerate Daniel – said something about the fire brigade. Mr Fisher beamed, his face widened and he looked happy. ‘Yes, you save people’s lives, what kind of people save

Anna Lærke • 153

lives? There’s the fire brigade and …?’ Someone said hospital people, and Mr Fisher said yes, someone said ambulance, and Mr Fisher yessed again, mountain rescue, bravo!, and the coast guard. Now we were talking! Only, we weren’t. That was it; no more talking. Once again, I was left wondering what Mr Fisher had asked that for in the first place? (Fieldnotes)

Mr Fisher did not elaborate; he did not ask or talk about what it means to ‘save people’s lives’. He did not even mention the otherwise ubiquitous poor and hungry children in countries far away, the reality conjured up by the association between ‘saving lives’ and ‘being hungry’ presumably deemed too brutal. The poor and sick would turn up later, though, in a less morbid context. Of course, asking openended questions is a reliable and well-rehearsed teaching technique. However, in this particular context, the underlying pedagogic purpose of asking questions – that is, to create a space within which students can reach conclusions by their own means – was undermined by the fact that most questions clearly had just one right answer. This peculiar way of asking without really wanting to know was something I learned to understand only very gradually. In the same way, villagers would ask me how I was but not expect an honest answer, or adults would ask children, ‘Why don’t you …?’ or ‘Do you want to …?’ when in reality they were not asking but telling the children to do this or that. Asking in this way was a device by which an illusion of dialogue could be maintained without threatening the teacher’s power to control all communication. After the assembly, Mrs Stenn’s students were gathered on the carpet in front of her: Mrs Stenn said she wanted to talk about what Mr Fisher had been talking about this morning at assembly. Now, could anybody tell her what Mr Fisher had been talking about? Nobody wanted to say anything, and Mrs Stenn began asking individual children. Maybe I wasn’t the only uncertain one: What did she want to know? The stuff about ‘the harvest of the sea’ or the stuff about ‘saving’? She asked Stephen, Jess, and James, and they all replied with a characteristic ‘I forgot’. Apparently leaving it at that, Mrs Stenn went on to say that on Friday, they were going to bring food to school (which was neither something Mr Fisher had mentioned, nor something which seemed to bear any immediately obvious relation to ‘harvest’ or ‘saving’). Mrs Stenn asked what kind of food they have in their gardens (not allowing for the more messy possibility that some people might not have any food in their garden, let alone the one that some people might not have a garden at all). Someone said pears, another said apples, one said potatoes, one said tomatoes, and Mrs Stenn nodded. Jess said peaches. Mrs Stenn said, ‘You do not have those in your gardens, they are from countries far away’. Amy said banana and Mrs Stenn’s face looked hard as she said,

154 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

‘You’re not listening, Amy, someone already said banana’. I hadn’t heard of any banana either. Mrs Stenn now asked, ‘What is celebration? What kinds of things do we celebrate?’ The children said birthdays, Christmas, Easter, and Thomas said that in India they celebrate ‘something with a big snake’. Mrs Stenn looked at Thomas and smiled patiently, ‘Yes, in India they have different celebrations’. What Mrs Stenn wanted to know was, ‘Why we go to church at harvest?’ There was a long silence – do we go to church at harvest? – then it must have dawned on Jess that we do that ‘to celebrate’. Mrs Stenn smiled a broad contended smile and looked attentively at Jess. This was probably the right answer. ‘Yes, we go to church to say thank you’, she said, ‘thank you for all the food we’ve got’. (Fieldnotes)

Mrs Stenn did not say whom we were thanking; she did not say any more about harvest, and she did not tell the students what she told me during the following playtime: that on Friday, there would be a church service in the Anglican church to celebrate the harvest festival. Nor did she elaborate on gardens, peaches, faraway countries or ‘Indian celebrations’. After playtime, the Year One children were each given a piece of paper and asked to draw a fish on it. They sat in their usual boys-only girls-only pattern. I sat down at the girls’ table and asked them why they were drawing a fish. Jess said, ‘Don’t know’. The other girls shrugged their shoulders and bent over the task. From underneath her hair, snug and selfcontained, Mary said it was something to do with harvest. Amy finished her fish quickly and went over to Mrs Stenn to ask what to do next. She returned with another piece of paper and said she had been told to draw another fish. At the boys’ table, there was a less vague notion of the fish’s relationship to the subject of the morning: Thomas said that they were drawing a fish because it was food. I suggested that there are other things in the sea that you can eat, like prawns, for instance, or crabs. Couldn’t they draw some of those things as well, then? Thomas patiently explained, ‘Some people don’t know what prawns look like’. I asked Stephen if he had been to the seaside, and he nodded, looking down on his hands lying on the paper with just one thin line on it – the beginning of a fish’s back, perhaps. I told him I had grown up by the sea and I used to love looking for sea creatures and shells and stones. He must have been thinking about this, for later, as I was talking to Thomas about his seaweed, I saw Stephen drawing a small crab in the corner of his sheet with the discontinued thin line. Thomas had drawn seaweed with wavy fingers in different shades of green around his fish. I said I thought that looked really good. Thomas went over to show it to Mrs Stenn. He returned to the table with a pair of scissors and began cutting out the fish. I said I thought he should keep some of his seaweed with the fish, but he said Mrs Stenn had said he should cut it all off. ‘Why?’, I asked. ‘Don’t know’, he replied. (Fieldnotes)

Anna Lærke • 155

Later in the week, I noticed that Stephen’s small crab had not made it to the fish-sheet display in church. I asked him where his crab was, and Thomas readily burst in to explain that Mrs Stenn said there could only be fish in the display. I realized that I had messed it up for the boys by making conversation about crabs and seaweed. But how was I to know, how was anyone to know, that fish had been imbued with some special meaning in this context? If fish, as a Christian symbol, had been explained to us, I, for one, had not listened carefully enough. Apart from the fish-sheet, no harvest festival-related issues were raised during that week. However, in the newsletter (which came out irregularly, but approximately every three to four weeks) parents were informed that children were expected to bring foods with them for the Friday harvest church service. I was late this morning, and as I arrived, the children were putting on coats and going to the loo before we were to walk to the church. The children had brought food: vegetables, fruit, and some had canned foods. They were to carry their food to the church … and off we went down the Vale Road in a long line along the wobbly verges. The church was beautifully decorated with lots of flowers, fruits, and flame-coloured leaves. The fish-sheets reappeared, stuck to the wall with blue-tack. While sweet old Florence played the organ, the children processed up the aisle to place their food by the altar. Mrs Stenn smiled a lot as she showed the children where to put their things and then directed them to their seats in the third row. There were quite a few parents and grandparents, and some of the regular churchpeople as well. Reverend Thomas said something, but I didn’t hear because Matthew next to me asked what that big chair-thingy up there was? I whispered it was called the pulpit and was about to say some more when Mrs Brixham in front of us turned round and hushed. Luke turned and giggled; it can be delightfully funny when someone else is told off. Then Mr Fisher talked. It was difficult to hear what he said. Baby cries clanked against the unabsorbent church walls, and whispers and hushes rolled round the big room. What I did hear was about food and sharing. From a shopping bag, Mr Fisher took out a bag of sweets. His mum, he said, always said a particular thing to him about sweets. Could anybody think what that might be? Someone from the Junior class in the front row said something, and Mr Fisher replied, ‘Yes, that’s right: you must share’. On the pews opposite, I saw Eleanor’s and Daniel’s mums exchanging sceptical little smiles. The head teacher’s speech now moved towards a world beyond mums and sweet bags: he took out a bag of rice and said that in some countries, they eat rice a lot, ‘like we eat roast potatoes’. He said he was now going to share his rice, and he asked a few Junior students to step up to him. He gave them each a plastic cup and poured in rice: some got a full cup, others only a few grains (as transpired when he began commenting on it). He fetched a second bag of rice and held it closely to his chest with both hands and said, ‘Now, I’ve shared,

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

4:44 PM

Page 156

156 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

haven’t I?’ Children’s hands went up, and Oliver said no, he hadn’t really shared. ‘That’s right’, said Mr Fisher, for some have had a lot, and some have had hardly anything, and in some countries, there are lots of food, and in some countries, there is hardly any. The students sat down again with their cups (and no sweets) and it was time for the Juniors to sing a song. In his closing speech, Reverend Thomas explained that in some countries people have nothing to eat at all, and that he was thinking of Bosnia for example. He said the foods brought to church today would be sold on auction on Monday, and the proceeds would go to UNICEF’s work in Bosnia. Also, the brass plate at the entrance to the church was for collection, and he could assure us that all donations would go to UNICEF and not to this church. Then he smiled. As we walked back to school, Matthew asked me what was going to happen to all the food in the church. I said, ‘But didn’t you hear? Reverend Thomas said it was going to people in Bosnia who have no food’. ‘Oh’ said Matthew and left it at that. (Fieldnotes)

Matthew, I believe, did not hear the remarks about donations to UNICEF because he was a child and not meant to hear them: they were spoken in another, less cute voice than the one the Reverend used when talking to the children. They were also full of words that children might not readily understand (auction, Bosnia, UNICEF, proceeds, the collection), and they were meant for people who had money to drop in the brass plate. I have recounted this harvest sequence at length because its proceedings were typical of much of the school activity I witnessed. It illustrates well the distribution and use of knowledge in staff-student interactions. To the students, the entire episode must have seemed underilluminated at best. From the Tuesday morning assembly where harvest was mentioned, to Mrs Stenn’s talk about gardens, bananas and thanks to God, through the fish-drawings, to the church service, at no point did anyone explain to the children what the harvest festival was and when and why they were going to church. The information the children did get came in a piecemeal and unconnected fashion. Had I not been told by Mrs Stenn about the Friday service, I, too, would not have seen the connections (I did argue with myself at the time over whether or not I should tell the students what I knew; in this case, I didn’t). Mr Fisher’s assembly mentioned the subject of harvest, but swiftly went on to talk about ‘saving’, which had no apparent relation to the harvest festival (and no veiled one either). Even if some connections could have been made between the theme of the week and the event of the week, there were no explicit attempts to do so. Issues that could have been raised and discussed in connection with the subjects of ‘harvest’ and ‘saving’ – such as environment and resources, preservation, disasters, illness and death – were largely left untouched.

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

4:47 PM

Page 157

Anna Lærke • 157

It should be noted here that it was I, not the students, who was confused and surprised by the absence of links. However, mine was not just the confusion or lack of understanding of an outsider. I must trust my own judgement enough to presume that, as a student in Mrs Stenn’s class, one would have been confused or surprised, unless one was already conditioned to expect questions to be left unanswered and connections to be left unmade. I am arguing, in other words, that when the students did not question the meaning of the fish-drawings or the purpose of bringing food to school on Friday, it was because such questioning was discouraged and sometimes even construed, by staff, as signs of unruly or cheeky behaviour, that is, as ‘noise’. In addition, in order to be able to ask questions of something, a certain level of basic knowledge about this something is usually necessary. Often, such basic knowledge was not readily available in school, nor did students seem to expect it to be. The lack of connections and knowledge had the effect of making me uncertain as to what was expected of me. I believe many students felt a similar uncertainty. I could see it in the speed and readiness with which they retreated after unsuccessful attempts at doing the ‘right’ thing or providing the ‘right’ answer, and I could hear it in the long silences following teachers’ questions. Knowledges were construed as separate and disparate, belonging to different groups: Reverend Thomas was not supposed to know that he had repeated a story already told by someone else a few days previously. Matthew was not supposed to know or be interested in what happened to the food after the church service. And the students were not supposed to know why they were drawing fish or that those fish were destined for church decoration. Mr Fisher’s rice-sharing performance in the church was meant to convey certain information to the parents about how their children were taught in school, something I believe the students themselves were largely unaware of. The entire harvest sequence exemplifies how certain kinds of answers and certain kinds of knowledges were explicitly sought, whilst others were brushed aside as irrelevant. At the assembly, Mr Fisher was fishing for a certain type of answer to the question ‘What is saving?’ In the fish-drawing exercise, Mrs Stenn was interested only in fish, and not in their seaweedy surroundings. Knowledge was ‘trimmed’ (or ‘bonsaied’) into a certain shape: An (adult) school institutional version of knowledge – of truth, of connection, of relevance, of purpose – was being constructed. However, by describing this practice as a ‘trimming’, I do not mean to imply an already existing knowledge being put to disciplinary use. Rather, disciplining was a process of knowledge construction. The ‘trimming’ was the ‘knowledge’. Educational

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

4:50 PM

Page 158

158 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

discipline made use of a power that rested on, and in turn maintained, the privilege of knowing about what there was to be known – a power to know about knowledge. It is to this – the construction of proper knowledge and the taming of imagination – that I now turn.

The Duckgoose Assembly stories were often about things ‘remote’, in either time or space, or in terms of their relevance to children’s everyday lives. Their fairy tale or mythical character may have been a useful teaching device, but it also created inflexible stereotypes. Very often the stories were about animals who behaved as if they were human – something that made the stories easy to relate, but difficult to relate to: The morning assembly today was about peace. Miss Taylor asked the children what they thought peace was. She got replies like, ‘having peace and quiet’, ‘lying down’ or ‘being in a room on your own’. Miss Taylor seemed uninterested; she didn’t begin joggling with those answers in the way she would have if they had been what she was asking for. She asked, ‘What is peace an end to?’ One of the Juniors said the word, and Miss Taylor could get on with what she had planned to tell us: a story about white and black elephants who began to fight over whose colour was the nicest. The elephants went into the forest and had a fight, and when they came back again, they were all grey and colour didn’t matter any more and we are all the same although we are different and close your eyes and fold your hands to pray: thank the good lord for peace. Peace was not quiet or rest; it was elephants turning grey. (Fieldnotes) Mrs Cook read a story to the Reception class today before they went home. It was about Santa Claus falling ill. Mummy stayed home (of course) to look after sick Santa, whilst Daddy and his son went out (of course) to deliver all Santa’s presents. Daddy and son put the wrong labels on the presents, and an old lady got a box of cigars. ‘Would you give an old lady a box of cigars?’, asked Mrs Cook. ‘No-o-o’ she intoned, long enough for the children to join in, enthusiastically shaking their heads, faces upwards and lips in little round Os: ‘No-o-o’. A daddy got a bottle of scent. ‘Would you give your daddy a bottle of scent?’ ‘No-o-o’. A mummy got a razor. ‘Would you give your mummy a razor?’ ‘No-o-o’. There was no room between Mrs Cook’s words. You couldn’t have said ‘yes’, ‘maybe’ or ‘don’t know’ without clogging up the flow. There was no need to raise such possibilities either: the story, the teacher, and the pupils were stereotyping gender and patterns of consumption. (Fieldnotes) The Reception class children were playing a Letterland game with Mrs Cook. The teacher had flipcards with pictures on the front and words on the

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

4:53 PM

Page 159

Anna Lærke • 159

back, and the children were asked to identify which pictures were the odd ones out. It struck me how formalized the images were: a gate, a rattle (the odd one out), a golden girl, a greenhouse. So formalized, I had difficulty identifying them. The children had not. Except for Oliver who called out ‘duck’ when Mrs Cook showed them a card allegedly picturing a goose. ‘Who said duck, Oliver?’, the teacher asked. Oliver looked confused. It wasn’t supposed to be a duck, and therefore it wasn’t one. (Fieldnotes)

In these examples, the students were learning to stereotype. The goose, or duck, on the Letterland card was a flat, fat-lined, oversimplified image: it did not in any particularity look like a goose, but it signified one. There were no details; none of the characteristic features that might have enabled one to identify what kind of farm or wild bird this was. Nor was there any explanation or elaboration, or – for that matter – discussion. This was not because Mrs Cook was an incompetent teacher (she was not), but rather because this was what teaching was about in the school: establishing certainties, not discussing them. Oliver often revealed detailed and insider knowledge of farm animals. His parents worked on farms. But what Oliver may or may not have made of his duckgoose was irrelevant. The students were learning about words beginning with ‘g’ through a shared language of stereotypical imagery. Similarly, in Miss Taylor’s assembly, students did not need to know about one another’s’ notions of ‘peace and quiet’, nor did matters need to be complicated by acknowledging the many faces of synonymous words. Students needed to know that ‘peace’ was ‘an end to war’ – a war fought among animals, in a forest, out of reach. Certain knowledges (for instance, my own, that for many years I always gave an old aunt a box of small cigars for Christmas) and certain strands of imagination (for instance, that the fat whitish bird in the picture might be a white duck) were cut off. What is more: ‘good’ students would on their own initiative cut the ‘right’ irrelevancies off. Stereotyping is a process requiring a particularly high level of decomplication, a process of dislocation or silencing of certain associations and ramifications. Stereotyping is the construction of dominant images through simplification. In Midby school, this stereotyping process sometimes involved the literal cutting off of surroundings or connections. The Infant class had been learning about ‘travels’, and Mrs Stenn had been talking about Columbus, America, jungles and Indians: In the afternoon, Mrs Stenn came over to me and said, ‘You can have this group’. I looked at Jacob, Katie, Lucy and Jess, and they looked at me. I was surprised Mrs Stenn had divided the class into mixed groups of boys and

160 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

girls, and I wonder if it was somehow because I have been talking to her about gender segregation. The teacher said all groups were to make a picture of a ship – one of Columbus’s ships. They could do whatever they liked, and it was up to them to decide how to do it. Freedom seemed to have no bounds: each group was given two pieces of paper and we could do ‘whatever, as long as it ends up looking like one of Columbus’s ships’. Jacob quickly took charge. He decided we were going to draw an outline of a ship from a book … Lucy, Katie, and I decided to cellotape the two pieces of paper together, to make a large picture. On her way to ask Mrs Stenn for scissors, Jess had joined another group and we didn’t see her again. Jacob suggested that we could make the sea with bits of blue wool, and went off to ask Mrs Stenn for glue and the bag of wool. Meanwhile, Lucy was drawing fish and starfish round the edges of Jacob’s outline, Katie was drawing windows and people on the ship, and I was colouring in the sails. Jacob returned with the wool and glue, and he and Lucy began wooling up the ocean. The scenery was almost finished when Mrs Stenn came along and said we couldn’t make blue wool water and fishes and starfish round the ship: only the ship itself. She said the pictures had to be of a certain size and we would have to cut off the ocean-bit. I was annoyed that she didn’t tell us why the pictures had to be a certain size and hadn’t given us more accurate instructions in the first place: hadn’t she said we could do whatever we wanted? I guess I was also a bit miffed that she didn’t comment on the niceness of the blue wool. Now, our ship would look silly – unnecessarily sliced, as it was, by a colour-resistant line of cellotape glistening stupidly in the middle. (Fieldnotes)

In the teacher’s version, the blue wool sea was not part of the notion ‘ship’ – in the same way as Thomas’s seaweed and Stephen’s crab were not part of the notion ‘food from the sea’. In all cases, it was the imaginations of students that were cut off. In some situations, and for some students, this disconnecting of knowledges, the disciplining of expression, had profound effects. When the Infant class students made Easter cards, Mrs Stenn put the words ‘Happy Easter’ and ‘Love from’ on the board for students to copy onto their cards, and some pupils did just and only that: there were several cards with no ‘To so-and-so’ and no indication of whom the card was from. I saw this as timidity on the part of those unnamed students, but also as an example of the ultimate ‘good behaviour’. As a student, you were supposed to do what you were told. No less, and certainly no more. Duckgeese, seaweed, crabs, and blue wool oceans were expressions of personal and alternative knowledges that had no place in learning and teaching in Midby school.3 In this way, the use of knowledge worked by making it safest to take the least possible initiative: if you didn’t know what was expected of you, the best way of ensuring that you stayed out of trouble was to do as little as possible.

Anna Lærke • 161

Art and Proper Work Matthew told me one day, as he was looking abjectly at a handout sheet of fruit shapes, that colouring in was boring. I asked him why, and he said, ‘I hate colouring in. I want to work’. Artistic performance was construed as not being work. This was a complex construction reflecting a hierarchy of knowledges that ran across the school’s grading of age and gender. It involved classification of students: colouring in was a distinct Reception class activity, so many Infant class students treated it as a ‘baby’ activity below their capabilities and aspirations. It seemed to be more ‘acceptable’ or ‘natural’ for older girls than for older boys to enjoy colours and drawing. Moreover, it involved the classification of subjects taught; art was not treated with the same serious concern for ‘standards’ and ‘performance’ as were maths, reading and writing. Painting, colouring in and drawing were treated by many older students, and by staff, as ‘extra’ activities that could be used either for punishment/reward purposes or to fill in ‘gaps’, for instance when students who finished their writing quickly were asked to draw an illustration, whilst those who didn’t were not. Apart from the December rehearsals for the Christmas musical, there was a weekly music lesson for the Infant students, taken by Mrs Stenn. These music lessons appeared remarkably unenthusiastic to me. They consisted in singing songs, like the sticky sweet song about one, two, three sticky sweets jumping into your mouth (apparently of their own accord), or Baa Baa Black Sheep. Sometimes, students would play the recorder: simple, single-lined tunes always in unison. Mrs Stenn would hold up a gigantic note sheet in one hand and play a recorder with the other (thus demonstrating how not to play a recorder properly), and the students would sit on their bottoms in front of her and follow her the best they could. Individual performances were not encouraged, perhaps to avoid competition. There was a feeling of disengagement, or boredom. Activities were not allowed to unfold or expand. There was no multivocality, no rhythm, no movement. Nor was there any experimentation with combining different types of artistic expression, such as painting and music. I believe school staff and many parents saw children’s artistic expressions either in terms of adults’ professional assessment and interpretation of expression (and thus as dangerous owing to the association with psychologists and criminal courts), or as leisurely productions that were not aimed at anything other than ‘play’. Defining what was not knowledge and should not be known was as much part of the construction of knowledge as was the teaching of what should be known, and how. On the level of general ‘school

162 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

knowledge’, most adults saw artistic expression as irrelevant. On the level of individual students, certain knowledges were suppressed or silenced. In the following, I try to describe how.

Uniformation and Scapegoating School discipline worked to contain, reconstrue, or render irrelevant certain of the students’ characteristics. In itself this is hardly surprising, in that processes of part-identification or strategic ‘use’ of certain facets of persons’ ‘selves’ are part and parcel of all relationships (cf. Strathern’s notion of dividuals,1988). It did strike me, though, that school discipline seemed to aim specifically (as though with intent) at those features that were construed as special or peculiar to the individual child in her/his out-of-school contexts. The very idiosyncrasies through which children created positions of power or authority in their negotiations with people at home (parents, siblings, grandparents, nannies) were portrayed and treated, in school, as problematic, irritating or outright naughty. Conversely, one can say it was those behaviours constrained by school discipline that children could use, at home, as positive or powerful identification markers.4 Amy was fussy about food and drink. She would not eat biscuits or other sugary foods usually construed as children’s food, and she drank only water. No lemonade, no milk, no soda pop for Amy. School staff, who sometimes had to make special arrangements for Amy, met this with mild irritation and the headshakes by which adults can convey the notion that children ‘will grow out of it’. At the annual school party, Mrs Cook and Mrs Brixham whispered and frowned over the heads of children seated at long balloon-bobbing tables in the village hall and told me how ‘difficult’ and ‘odd’ Amy was with her food aversions. Mrs Stenn would confide in me the trouble Amy’s preferences could cause when they went on school trips. Amy herself seemed proud of her way with food; at lunch time, she often ‘showed off’, to other children and to me, her ability to shovel in large mouthfuls of food ‘in one go’. I think other students were sometimes intimidated by the force and determination with which she accepted some foods and refused others. Her schoolmates would look with big eyes and mute faces from her to staff to me to her. At home, Amy’s mother explained, and encouraged, Amy’s food policies as expressions of independence, competence and personal strength. What was a strength at home turned into a source of irritation in school. Gerry was a ‘troublemaker’ in school. Both staff and students construed his wilfulness as stubbornness, social clumsiness and aggression. In contrast, it was this very wilfulness that was Gerry’s

Anna Lærke • 163

strength at home, where he seemed to take responsibility as ‘the man in the house’. I wrote in my diary after a visit to his home: Gerry’s mum looked very young – much younger than I had expected. Younger than me, certainly, perhaps even quite a lot younger. She looked shy and smiled as if waiting for me to say something. I turned around to Gerry in the back seat [of their car] and said ‘hello’. Gerry smiled, and he too surprised me. There was no trace of naughty-Gerry, silly-Gerry, angry-Gerry about him. He just looked warm, friendly, forthcoming. ‘Mature’, I think is the best word. Mature and calm. The two surprises – one looking much younger, the other much older, than expected – somehow drew Gerry and his mother together. There was something about their way of communicating, and in Gerry’s attitude towards his mum – caring, protective, loving – which made them seem more like peers or partners than like mother and son… We entered from the back, directly into the kitchen. There was a small funny orange dog with shiny-button eyes. Gerry’s mum picked the dog up and said I should go in, the dog was so eager he would jump all over me if she let go. His name is Scamp. I said he was a lovely little dog and I didn’t mind him jumping up … We were in the kitchen. A small bare room with lots of light and a friendly but somewhat uninhabited atmosphere. The sun was bright through very clean windows, and the air was warm and still. For a short moment, I saw Gerry looking very little and lonely, but also proud – as if saying, ‘this is my house’ – as he stood leaning against the kitchen work top. I don’t know how to describe my impression. The way he looked at his mother, in that moment, the way she took her coat off and hung it up next to Gerry’s, there could only be those three living here – Gerry, his mother, and their dog. There was something sad about that. We continued into the living room. Gerry’s mother did not offer tea or anything. She did not ask me to sit down either. She hunched her shoulders and fumbled with her smile. She could have been as much a visitor as I was. It was Gerry who sat down on their big chunky sofa and asked me to do the same. (Fieldnotes)

In Gerry’s case, what was social adeptness and protectiveness at home became social inadequacy and aggressive defensiveness in school. Among students and staff in school Gerry was known to ‘tell tales’, a popular euphemism for being a liar. This perception may well have arisen from the experience that Gerry rarely, if ever, admitted to any ‘wrongdoing’, even when it was obvious that it was he who had stolen a pen, hit someone on the head or giggled during teacher-talk-time. I believe that many in school felt they could not trust Gerry. This was reinforced by the fact that little was done by way of discussing why Gerry might not be telling the truth, or whether the truth might look different from Gerry’s point of view. However, another perception of Gerry’s ‘tales’ was impressed on me:

164 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

Gerry has a technique, it dawned on me today when I visited him at home. A technique of trial and error: he is not lying, he is trying. Today, for instance, we were talking about whether there are other children (than Gerry) in school who do not live in Midby. As it became more and more likely – with our shared efforts to think – that Gerry might be the only child in the school who doesn’t live in the village, Gerry began throwing names around: Katie, Jess, Thomas, Martin did not live in Midby, he said. Every time his mother or I said ‘Yes, he does’, ‘Yes, she does’, Gerry came up with a new name. All were the names of strong, popular kids in school. Gerry seemed desperate, as if he could not bear to be ‘different’ in that respect. I think he may have done something similar on another occasion when I talked with him about his family. We had been talking about his dad, who doesn’t live with him, and about Gerry needing to ‘look after’ his mum. I think Gerry was upset about that. I should not have asked any more about his family. But I did, insensitively. I feel bad about it now. I asked if he had siblings (he doesn’t), and he said Tom, in Year Four, was his brother. Tom is not Gerry’s brother. He is not even a close friend. But he is one of the ‘big boys’ and he has high status among other children. I think that when Gerry is faced with a question he cannot answer satisfactorily – either because the answer is painful for him in some way, or because he doesn’t know it – he will start guessing, sometimes wildly, and he will do his guessing in a very loud, persistent, and persuasive manner. Perhaps an angry manner. It sounds almost like pleading when he throws possible ‘correct answers’ out – like when he insisted that eight comes before seven, one day we did maths. Gerry doesn’t lie, he guesses. And he tries to learn, tries to please, tries to make things ‘right’. Perhaps he is too proud or too insecure (or probably both) to admit to having made mistakes. Perhaps something in his life makes it difficult for him to make mistakes, perhaps he cannot afford admitting to them? (Fieldnotes)

In school, there did not seem to be space for such consideration. There, Gerry was, flatly and simply, lying. Or he was ‘being silly’. Discouragement of individual peculiarities sometimes spilled over into scapegoating. The other side, the ugly side, of uniformation is scapegoating. And Gerry was a good scapegoat, because he vigorously defended himself but did so in a way that was easily undermined by the construction ‘Gerry-the-trouble’. Because I had visited a serious and very caring Gerry at home, and because I had myself been a child with responsibilities and worries far too heavy for any child, I developed a feeling of profound identification with Gerry. I also developed an unforgiving anger. This anger – and my feelings of helplessness in the face of it – can be seen in the following excerpt from notes taken on a conversation with Mrs Stenn after Gerry had suddenly and unexpectedly left the school:

Anna Lærke • 165

Mrs Stenn said that with Gerry, you couldn’t tell him to do something and leave him to it. ‘As soon as you turned your back, he’d be doing something silly.’ Mrs Stenn looked almost shocked by her own revelation that Gerry ‘wetted himself, you know. Again and again’. She said she was sure ‘he did it deliberately’, and that she had had to keep two sets of extra clothes for him, all the time. She said Gerry would just stand in the middle of a puddle and deny it. Sometimes, he would also ‘mess himself’ [i.e., defecate in his pants]. Once, she said, Mrs Brixham had had to wash him after he had done so, and it had been ‘so awful’ that Mrs Brixham had said she would never do that again. That was when they got a bath in the school. Mrs Stenn said she knew Gerry messed himself ‘deliberately’ because she would sometimes see him sitting there and… (here, she didn’t say the words, but demonstrated with a squeeze of her face how Gerry would strain to poo). Gerry’s mum was ‘at the end of her tether’, said Mrs Stenn, and Mr Fisher had had her in to talk to her a few times. Apparently, Gerry wets himself at home as well. Mrs Stenn raised her eyebrows and said with great emphasis, ‘and that’s why he can’t have a carpet in his bedroom! – it’s awful’. Gerry’s mum ‘lets him do anything at home’, said Mrs Stenn, ‘if it was my child, I would …’, and again she ran out of words and showed me, with a brisk movement of both arms, how she would lift her child up and put the child on a toilet seat. (Fieldnotes)

The uniformation involved in school disciplining practices, was not, I believe, something particular to Midby school (or indeed to school contexts in general). Rather, discouraging individual peculiarities is something that happens in most situations where people work together. I noticed the contrasts between ‘home children’ and ‘school children’, partly because I was there to notice things like that, and partly because they were obvious. For many students, their especially positive features at home became their especially negative ones in school. There was Eleanor, who was a neat and well-behaved student according to staff, a boring playmate according to other students, and, according to her mother, a strong and intelligent girl who had all the liveliness and willpower her older brother lacked and who would hopefully go to university. There was Simon, who was described by his mother as physically strong, big, wild and a potential bully, but who in school was remarkably clumsy, mute and a victim of bullying. And there was Matthew, who, according to Mrs Stenn, was ‘emotionally immature’, a bit ‘behind’ and often ‘silly’, but who, according to his parents, was considerate, inquisitive, fun and resourceful in his interaction with other children. What gave those people power or respect at home became (and gave them) problems in school. What they knew – about the power of food refusal, domestic responsibility, parental academic ambition, the might of physical strength or the importance of asking questions and having

166 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

fun – was rendered irrelevant, ridiculed or met with irritation by adults in school.5 These home knowledges were not so much erased as eroded, either by being ignored or by being rearticulated as ‘bad behaviour’. Thus denied their power as individual specialities, students’ home knowledges could not form a basis for resistance. In the same way that my knowledge of my self was undermined by the invocation of the stereotypical Scandinavian blonde bimbo, students’ home selves were rendered powerless in the school context. The following excerpt illustrates how: Jess was suddenly crying. I went over to ask her what was the matter. She said, ‘I want my mummy’. I asked her why. Jess replied, ‘Because I want my mummy’. I said, ‘But in school, you’re supposed to be without your mum, your mum is not supposed to be here’. Jess continued crying. And why shouldn’t she? I, for one, certainly hadn’t managed to say anything intelligent to comfort her. Jess often seems so extremely enmeshed in her own crying that it makes me feel helpless. She is out of reach, inconsolable. Mrs Stenn came to the desk and, assuming she came because of Jess’ crying, I said to her, ‘She wants her mum’. I probably looked as I felt – like a big question mark: what to do about it? But Mrs Stenn ignored both Jess and my remark. That wasn’t the issue. She had come because she had found a small piece of material with needle-work patterns on it in Jess’ drawer. ‘Is this really yours?’, she asked Jess. To me she said, in half-whisper, ‘I think it’s the school’s’. Jess said, ‘It is mine’. Mrs Stenn raised her eyebrows at me. She clearly did not believe Jess. Then the teacher walked away, apparently oblivious to Jess’s continued sobbing. I asked Jess where she had her pattern from. She said, ‘Me and mummy made it. It was last week, but I forgot to bring it to school last week [so I brought it today]’. I have no doubt Jess was telling me the truth. (Fieldnotes)

As I see it, Jess’ connection to home was doubly denied: that she was crying for her mother was simply ignored, and the presence, in the embroidery work, of her and her mother’s shared efforts was being questioned. As the children learned to fit in in school, so did I. And whilst I struggled with a sadness that would eventually find consolation in a growing anger, the children challenged their schooling from within. They found their own little ways around discipline, past discipline or against it. But they were only little ways, for the children knew very well that what they were up against was also what they were growing into. They knew that one day, they would be the big ones telling the little ones how to do things. One day, they would be the grown-ups.

Anna Lærke • 167

Copying, Pretence and Resistance Much teaching was based on students copying the ‘right’ way of doing things. When the children were writing their stories, Mrs Stenn would put all the necessary words, in order (but vertically rather than horizontally), up on the board for them to copy. If they wished to use other words, for instance names or phrases specific to their story line, they would ask the teacher, who would write the word for them on either a sheet of paper or the board. As mentioned earlier, there was no dictionary in the classroom. Copying, of course, produced uniformity, but it also produced gaps – gaps between specific personal experiences and the rendering of such experiences into formalized story lines. Because of my own school upbringing, I expected copying to be something one would, and should, be ashamed of. To me, copying was ‘cheating’. But in Little Midby, the teachers encouraged it and the students seemed comfortable with it. Copying as a teaching technique has its roots in notions, commonly produced by educationalists and developmental psychologists, of children’s ‘pretend play’ and ‘role play’ being necessary and ‘cognitively logical’ rehearsals of equally necessary and developmentally given future ‘adult roles’ (e.g., Bower 1977; Harris 1989; Piaget 1950; Webster-Stratton 1992: 10–21). The television programmes students watched, the books and worksheets they worked from, and the teaching practice of making ‘models’ for students to copy all rested on the idea that child students learn through imitation, through pretence. This pretence, I would argue, was a different kind of trial-and-error from the one described in connection with Gerry’s guesswork (or his ‘lies’), or the one Jonathan seemed to employ when he explained his painting of a sky beneath the orange.6 Pretending to know what has already been shown to be the ‘right’ answer or the ‘proper’ way does not involve imagination. It is not guessing, it is mere copying. There was a gradual move from ‘pretend play’ in the Reception class to copy-learning in the Infant class, and this move was deliberately pushed along and supported by teaching staff. When students in Mrs Cook’s class played, they often pretended that things were other things, or that they were other people. It was a recurrent feature of play in the ‘indoors sand’ or in the home corner that students pretended to be monsters, mums and dads and pets and babies, policemen and bus drivers, or that Lego dolls were people the students knew. The children appeared fully aware that they were pretending: they would say ‘pretend this is …’ and ‘pretend you are …’; they knew they were not ‘really’ monsters when they came roaring up behind me with their heads hidden in cornflake boxes; they knew they

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

4:57 PM

Page 168

168 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

were not ‘really’ mummy laying the little red table with plastic cups and saucers in the home corner. In the same way, the Infant students knew they were not ‘really’ writing their stories in their own words, or not ‘really’ reading the pages in the book. This left scope for covering up what you ‘really’ knew, what you ‘really’ were capable of, and what you ‘really’ thought. It made space for students, not only to hide themselves and what they knew, but also to say things that they might otherwise have found it difficult to say: On the playground Fiona, Rose, and Debbie were lying on their coats on the freezing ground. They were ‘sunbathing’, they explained. We had a little talk about Fiona’s Polly Pocket – a little plastic box, formed as a heart, which revealed a doll’s house when you opened it, complete with woman, child, sofa, television, kitchen sink, and other domestic inventory. Fiona looked at me and said firmly, ‘Could you please go now, we are going shopping’. ‘Of course’, I said, and as I went off, the girls collected themselves and their coats and went in a file, Fiona first with her head high, over towards the tool shed. (Fieldnotes) During playtime, I went into the girls’ loos to wash my hands. They were bustling with activity. Rosy and Jessica grabbed my sleeves and said that Zoey and Lisa were in the toilets again and that they were ‘naughty’ in there. Rosy called to Zoey and Lisa behind the door that they weren’t allowed to be two in the same toilet [cubicle], and she added ‘Anna is here’. Zoey peeped out from behind the door and said, ‘We are waiting for the bus, we’ll be out in a minute’. (Fieldnotes)

In the above examples, secrecy, privacy and rejection were couched in pretence. To withhold information through pretence was a forceful strategy, because it not only excluded others from knowing, it also excluded them from asking the relevant questions. Often, groups of children, especially the younger ones, excluded others from play by creating a pretence situation where the unwanted person could not fit in. Wayne wanted to play with the girls in the home corner, but couldn’t because they already ‘had a daddy’; Oliver wanted to join Luke and David on the Lego building site, but couldn’t because there had ‘been a power cut’; and Debbie wanted to play house with Fiona and Rosy, but couldn’t, the two girls contended, because she had ‘chickenpox’ and would ‘make the baby ill’. Making secrets was another way of withholding information. Here, the power lay in letting others know that they did not know. Whispering and giggling behind hands in little semicircles, darting eyes at the person who was not going to be let in, telling others straight to their faces that you knew something that you were not going to tell

Anna Lærke • 169

them, and sending written messages on journeys across the classroom were all ways in which students disciplined each other. Whether through pretence or secretiveness (and whether one was staff or student), knowing what others did not know put one in a powerful position. It both marked and created privilege; it enabled the knower to plan, to have strategies, to foresee, to respond. As far as secrecy and exclusion were concerned, teachers and students showed mutual disrespect for, and mockery of, one another’s social and personal integrity. Students used the power of secrecy to make spaces for themselves where adults could not go, or to forge friendships among themselves, to establish relations of intimacy and remoteness, of recognition and rejection. Teachers disciplined students by using similar techniques of exclusion and inclusion (e.g., asking children to stand in a corner or sit out Physical Exercise), and they also used exposure of students’ not-knowing as punishment. When a student in class, or at assemblies, did not appear to be concentrating, Mrs Stenn would point that student out and ask her/him to repeat what had just been said. Of course, if this person had not been listening, s/he could not; and this exposure itself was the punishment. It was not uncommon for students caught in this way to begin crying, red-faced and curled up into small balls. When students were not listening to her, Mrs Stenn looked not just annoyed, but also deeply angry in the way people sometimes do when they are covering hurt. I think it hurt Mrs Stenn when students did not pay attention. That exclusion and withholding of knowledge could be powerful tools was something the students learned in school very early on: It was all a bit of a mystery in the Reception class this afternoon: Mrs Cook stood in the doorway with a bunch of paper slips and looked out over the class. The children quickly figured out that something special was happening, but no one had said anything. Whilst the children were doing their work, Mrs Cook called each child up, one at a time, and let them into the office. Here, I learned later, two nurses were giving the children vaccine injections. Each child came out with two stickers on the jumper – one said, ‘Immunised against: Measles. Mumps. Rubella’, and the other was a ‘Bear Bravery’ sticker. The children also had a sweet folded in their fists. David was the first, and he said to me afterwards that it didn’t hurt at all. There was quite a lot of fuss about the sweets and the stickers, returnees showing their rewards to the ones shuffling expectantly round Mrs Cook’s calm appearance. But no one said anything about injections. David told me about his injection because I asked him. Perhaps the nurses had told the children not to tell the others what was going to happen when they got in there? Afterwards, Luke had no sticker on his jumper, and while he and David and Jonathan played with the Lego, I went over and asked him if he had had the

170 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

stickers and the sweet. Luke suddenly looked very hurt, his face closed up, his mouth became a thin pale downwards clench. I hadn’t realized, and perhaps Luke hadn’t realized either, that he was the only one in the class who had not been to see the nurses. Luke retreated from the Lego playing field and went to sit at a table, alone for a long time, with his hands cupped round his chin, scowling at the magnetic board which lay on the table in front of him. He was perhaps thinking hard about why he hadn’t had the stickers, for he called out loud, ‘Mrs Coo-o-ok’. The teacher was busy reading with someone else, and he tried again, ‘Mrs Coo-o-ok. I didn’t have the stickers’. Mrs Cook did not react. ‘Mrs Coo-o-ok. Mrs Coo-o-ok’, Oliver joined in now. Sam went over and sat down next to Luke and tried to hug him. Luke pushed him away, with great force, and sneered. It looked ugly… Finally, Luke’s mum turned up: the reason why he had not had an injection was that his mother wanted to be there with him when he had it. By the time Luke returned from the office experience, the children were gathered on the floor in front of Mrs Cook to hear their goodbye story. Luke posed tall with his stickers and went straight over to the group of boys sitting around David and Jonathan. ‘See, I’ve got the stickers’, he exclaimed. But no one seemed to really care any longer. Luke broke into Mrs Cook’s story and said sharply, ‘I didn’t have a sweet – because I didn’t want one’. Mrs Cook looked over at Mrs Brixham who sat by the desks, they exchanged glances and high eyebrows, and Mrs Cook mumbled over the heads of the children, ‘We always run out of these things, don’t we’. (Fieldnotes)

That the students did not know that they were going to have an injection built up an atmosphere of competition and restless waiting, and one of hurt, humiliation and anger around the one who did not have his injection and was not told why. The staff had undoubtedly decided not to prepare the students for their immunization in the belief that this would secure the smoothest run of this potentially frightening event. And that Luke was not told why he could not visit the office when the others did was probably the result of a rather common adult idea that you protect children by not letting them know. To encourage students to copy was to encourage them to become alike. As I saw it, it stifled innovation and imagination. It was a similar process to the cutting off of irrelevancies like a duckgoose, seaweed, or a wool sea. I did not ask Mrs Stenn or any other member of staff about what possible pedagogical ideas might underlie this copying practice. I wanted to, but I could not bring myself to ask because of what I perceived to be embarrassing implications of making teachers aware that I had noticed. My sense, that encouraging students to copy was ‘not right’ and should not be exposed, echoed my own remembered schoolexperience and stood in the way of my asking a relevant question. Thus, I can only speculate that copy-teaching might be based on a simplistic egalitarianism akin to the one behind the advocacy of school uniforms:

Anna Lærke • 171

if we all look alike and all write similar stories and make similar drawings, then there can be no inequality and no abuse of power. If it were an egalitarianism, it was one that did not extend to acknowledging children’s right to copy each other. It was an egalitarianism that claimed authority for adults to decide who was supposed to be equal with whom and how. It was, in other words, an egalitarianism based on an unequal distinction between adults, who had authority, and children, who did not. So whilst Mrs Stenn encouraged students to learn by copying her, she did not approve of students copying each other. But students did copy each other. This was more or less directly linked to teachers’ disciplinary uses of knowledge: First, the uncertainty that came with not being fully informed about classroom tasks and activity planning could be in part remedied by students copying (and informing) each other. Copying created some security in conformity. Secondly, students made distinctions among themselves through copying. Alongside the staff-student hierarchy imposed by the privileging of adult knowledge, there was another, student-generated, hierarchy that, in its identification of persons’ authority and subordination, was equally important to individual children’s ‘publicly knowing who they were’. Students decided who copied whom. People like the reliable Katie, the tidy Eleanor, and the bright Thomas were often copied by people like the little Lucy, the quiet Stephen, and the willowy Simon. When Richard wrote Martin’s name instead of his own on his worksheet, this was just the logical, if unreflected, consequence of his having copied every single word of Martin’s story. Thirdly, in practice, copying meant that students withheld information from their teacher – about who was doing what, who had taken which initiative, and who had merely copied others. Mrs Stenn complained to me about this, though she never seemed to make any explicit link between her own teaching practice and the students’ learning practice. Having several more or less identical stories returned to her, she said, made assessment of individual pupils difficult.

Feel-writing Students like Fiona, Rose and Debbie, who went ‘shopping’ to get rid of me, used copying, secretiveness and pretence to gain some autonomy in school, and to create some spaces for themselves to know what adults did not know. Copying and pretence, of course, are key ethnographic methods too. By pretending to be only the Anna whom villagers knew, and by copying local speech, styles, tastes and notions,

172 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

I forged for myself a space within which I could do my fieldwork. But in that space, I also encountered a recollected, sad, small and angry me. At the time, when I was in Little Midby, it was not very clear to whom that helpless fury belonged. Even though the Midby children’s situation and context were very different from the ones I grew up in, I recognized (and maybe they did too) a disempowerment reaching across the distance of time and cultural context. Of course, this reckoning was transference; it happened only through my emotion and cognition. I knew that well enough. But at the same time, I could not dismiss the fact that something out there, something that was not my doing, had triggered my reactions in the first place. Thus grappling with the big questions, I pondered the limitations of the psychological notion of transference. In psychoanalysis the other is a therapeutic tool and hence, the psychologist need only use otherness – she does not have to be otherness. Whilst the psychologist can thus somewhat ignore the other through which transference works, concentrating instead on the self and its need for identification, the anthropologist cannot. For the anthropologist, the other is the primary focus; that is, otherness is the object, not the method, of learning. The anthropologist therefore cannot help but see the other as someone upon whom transference works just as profoundly as it does on herself. Nor can she ignore the other’s presence inside her. Thus having to recognise the mutuality in all identification, the ethnographer not only might, but must, write the self into the other, and vice versa. For me, there was no deliberation about it. I got emotionally entangled – it just happened that way. And as it happened, it became clear that drawing on my own history and emotional reactions were the only ways in which I could properly get a ‘feel’ for the community I worked in. Writing out that ‘feel’ – hoping that others might take it and run with it – was the best I could do to help my own helplessness and dare imagine happier days for children who go to school.

Notes 1. Names and characters have been anonymized. 2. Although much of my fieldwork was spent in the school, I do not wish to treat the school as a 'total institution' in Goffman's sense (Goffman 1961). I do not offer a detailed description and analysis of teaching methods, local or otherwise, or of the broader educational and pedagogical issues central to British politics during the fieldwork period. I deliberately sought not to view school – or indeed, children's activities – in isolation from the rest of the community in which these institutions and identities were collectively produced and rendered meaningful. 3. Of course, such stereotyping was not unique to the school. Similar processes happened in other contexts, such as, importantly, children's interactions with

Anna Lærke • 173

parents and siblings. This was the reason for most students knowing, for instance in the duckgoose example, how the Letterland flipcard imagery worked. One day, Jonathan in the Reception class gave his mum a painting when she picked him up from school. It was all orange. His mother asked him what it was, and he said it was the sky. His mother replied that the sky is blue, not orange, to which Jonathan replied that the sky was underneath the orange. ‘That’s typical men’, his mother laughed to the other mums: ‘even when they’re wrong they always have an answer’. Here, Jonathan’s mother taught him not only that ‘orange’ does not signify ‘sky’ (although skies are sometimes orange), but also that typical ‘men’ always have answers. 4. By contrast, in Rosalind Edwards’ collection of studies of home-school relations (Edwards 2002a), many of which focus on England, contributors argue that there is an increasing overlap or simple cross-identification between home and school, between ‘familiarization’ and ‘institutionalization’ of children in the UK (Edwards 2002b: 4–20). They call this the “'curricularisation of childhood'” (Ericsson and Larsen 2002: 100–103). 5. The school's uniformation technique did not result in work being done collectively. The suppression of individual specialities was oddly counterbalanced by a striking emphasis on individual work: students rarely worked in groups, and, as I have mentioned, when they were supposed to do so, they did not, by and large, seem able to. Uniformation, in other words, did not mean collectivization. 6. See footnote 3.

References Behar, R. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer. Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Boler, M. 1999. Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———.1986. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge. ———.1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. and J. C. Passeron. 1990. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 2nd ed. London: Sage Publications. Bower, T. 1977. The Perceptual World of the Child, The Developing Child series, J. Bruner, M. Cole and B. Lloyd (series eds). London: Fontana/Open Books. Braidotti, R. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Clifford, J. 1983. 'On Ethnographic Authority', Representations 1(2): 118–144. Crapanzano, V. 1977. 'On the Writing of Ethnography', Dialectical Anthropology 2(1): 69–73. Edwards, R. (ed.). 2002a. Children, Home and School: Regulation, Autonomy, Connection? The Future of Childhood series. London: RoutledgeFalmer. ———. 2002b. 'Introduction: Conceptualising Relationships Between Home and School in Children’s Lives’, in R. Edwards (ed.), Children, Home and School: Regulation, Autonomy or Connection?, The Future of Childhood series. London: RoutledgeFalmer, pp. 1–23. Ericsson, K. and G. Larsen 2002. ‘Adults as Resources and Adults as Burdens: The Strategies of Children in the Age of School-Home Collaboration’, in R. Edwards (ed.), Children, Home and School: Regulation, Autonomy or Connection? The Future of Childhood series. London: RoutledgeFalmer, pp. 92–105.

174 • Confessions of a Downbeat Anthropologist

Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. ———. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. London: Penguin. Goffman, E. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. London: Penguin. Harris, P. 1989. Children and Emotion: The Development of Psychological Understanding. Oxford: Blackwell. Lærke, A. 1998. ‘By Means of Re-membering: Notes on a Fieldwork with English Children’, Anthropology Today 14(1): 3–7. Piaget, J. 1950. The Psychology of Intelligence. New York: Routledge Classics Edition. Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Oxford: University of California Press. ———.1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webster-Stratton, C. 1992. The Incredible Years: A Trouble-Shooting Guide for Parents of Children Aged 3–8. Toronto: Umbrella Press.

Chapter 7

WE WILL NOT INTEGRATE! MULTIPLE BELONGINGS, POLITICAL ACTIVISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY IN AUSTRIA Sabine Strasser

In her recent work1 Nancy Lindisfarne calls for a critical and political perspective in anthropology that challenges systems of domination such as patriarchy, religious fundamentalism, nationalism and class exploitation. As fieldwork ‘starts from below’ and focuses on the ‘lives of ordinary people’ (this volume), participant-observation is an appropriate tool for analysing and critiquing inequalities of the new world order. Noting that anthropology follows, rather than creates, public opinion, Lindisfarne emphatically demands the discipline’s more active political engagement. In the following, I describe different modes of political activism and compare their distinctive intellectual, participatory and religiously motivated types of political involvement, in an attempt to better understand their successes and failures to intervene publicly. Ethnography – insisting on particularity, complexity and ambiguity – shares strengths and weaknesses in its political dimensions with certain

176 • Political Activism and Anthropology in Austria

kinds of activism (what I shall later introduce as ‘the politics of participation’). Anthropological approaches are strong and successful in the deconstruction of hegemonic practices, but remain largely unconvincing to, and unheard by, a broader public. What does it mean when anthropologists claim a political voice and engage publicly outside the academic ivory tower? Why is it so difficult for anthropologists to intervene, to speak up and, in particular, to be heard? In Thomas H. Eriksen’s view, the public is reluctant to recognize anthropologists’ contributions because anthropologists insist on the primacy of particularity, complexity and ambiguity in the representation of the lived experience of ‘ordinary people’ (Eriksen 2006: 41). Eriksen notes that anthropologists are remarkably hesitant when political and public interventions are at issue: ‘Perhaps non-engagement or aloofness from social issues is the main residue of the old cultural relativism, that is the spirit of letting the natives deal with native problems? Or perhaps the misuse of the culture concept in ethnic conflicts and nationalist wars has given us cold feet?’ (Eriksen 2006: 23). Yet, over recent decades, anthropologists have shifted their focus from a strong version of cultural relativism and the ‘island perspective’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) to questions of interconnectedness in processes of globalization, self-other relations and cultural diversity.2 In the course of analysing these issues, they have become increasingly sceptical about their own notion of culture. Embracing a postcolonial, deterritorialised and translocal approach, a prominent strand has even rejected the notion of culture itself as a problematic expression of holism, distinctiveness and reification (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1991; Appadurai 1996; Wikan 1999, 2002). However, just when anthropologists have become suspicious of the concept, ‘culture’ has been let ‘loose on the streets’ (Wikan 2002: 79). Today, anthropologists largely agree that ‘culture’ is a historically created system of meaning. It is fluid and ambiguous and always interrelated with power structures and reshaped in practice. If we agree that culture is historically construed, territorially unbounded and heterogeneous, it allows us to trace complex and contested experiences of belonging, othering and place-making in national and transnational spaces. Inspired by Lindisfarne’s call for political action, I wish here to consider the very different political strategies of three antiracist activists in Vienna.3 Showing how migrant activists’ political interventions are framed both by Austrian mainstream political culture and by their diverse cultural backgrounds, I ask whether and what anthropology might learn from the experience gained through political activism. Tracing the ‘biographies of belonging’4 of three Turkish-Austrian citizens and activists of Kemalist, Muslim and Kurdish backgrounds, I demonstrate how they challenge structural inequalities and dominant

Sabine Strasser • 177

discourses on Austrianness. In addition, I discuss the potentials and weaknesses of ‘place making’5 in order to better understand the complexity, ambiguity and interconnectedness of struggles against nationalism, Orientalism and social inequality in culturally diverse societies. Focusing on biographical narratives, political networks and place, I wish to consider the extent to which anthropological research can contribute to public debates on national identity (or nationalism), cultural diversity (or cultural fundamentalism) and social integration in multicultural societies. Analysing biographies offers insights into the complex processes of identification, alliances and place-making that are shaped by intersecting experiences and structures of social class, gender, religion, ethnicity and nationality. The activists presented here did not relate belonging to self-evident cultural truths, bounded spaces or culturally separated communities (see Çag˘ lar 1997: 170), but to their experiences, activities and social relations in different places. Careful analysis is needed to understand power relations and how they are interrelated with the political claims, desires and strategies of these activists. I call these claims and strategies ‘place making’, because their users attempt to redefine the social meaning of places in Vienna, thereby claiming social and political recognition. The complex relationships between different activists’ biographies and their strategies of ‘place making’ reveal the potentials as well as limits of political alliances. They also show how activist strategies may affect society at large. My research in Vienna raises several questions. How can cultural practices, shaped by gender, national or ethnic identity, religion and social class, become prominent in political struggles? How and under what circumstances is ‘culture’ rejected, strategically used or essentialized? How does political activism deal with essentialist as well as dynamic and antiessentialist versions of culture, and how do migrant activists deconstruct dominant discourses and negotiate belonging and place? These questions highlight the complexities and ambiguities of ‘identity’, and in doing so complicate any straightforward public intervention by activists or anthropologists. Ethnographically speaking, however, these questions are also crucial to understanding how activists challenge dominant models of national identity and how processes of belonging, networking and political intervention become part of that challenge.

178 • Political Activism and Anthropology in Austria

Cultural Dynamics in Austria: Cultural Fundamentalism and Windows of Opportunity When Austria has come to the attention of the world media, nationalism and right-wing ghosts have usually been the cause. In 1986, the revelation of former UN Secretary Waldheim’s involvement in the Second World War and his famous ‘memory gap’6 drew international attention. In 2000, it was the government participation of the right-wing Freedom Party (FP). Though the FP has its roots in the Austrian ‘Deutschnationalen Lager’ (Pelinka 1990) and in local traditions of ‘frontier Orientalism’ (Gingrich 1998), its success is based not only on the appeal of nationalism, but also on the ‘catch-all’ rightwing populism of the post–Cold War era in Western democracies.7 By inventing ‘threats’ – such as immigration or the imminent enlargement of the European Union – the FP has been successful in splitting society into us, ‘decent and hard-working’ Austrians, and them, aliens and foreigners (Reinfeldt 2000).8 In 2000, the readiness of the People’s Party (ÖVP) to collaborate with the Freedom Party caused fierce opposition in Austrian civil society9 and the imposition of EU sanctions on the Austrian government.10 In 2002, the ÖVP gained more than 42 per cent of the vote and reestablished a government coalition with the FP. Interestingly, this caused little national and international excitement.11 A split within the FP in 2005 caused some irritation in the government, but the ÖVP continued the coalition with the newly founded Movement Future Austria (BZÖ). All the federal ministers of the former FP are now members of the BZÖ. Nonetheless, the BZÖ was not successful in presenting itself as a reliable government partner. On account of the BZÖ’s weaknesses, the ÖVP changed political strategy and recently tried to win over the BZÖ’s electorate. Up to that point, the ÖVP had cultivated a respectful dialogue with representatives of the Islamic Congregation (IGGiÖ)12 and kept a distance from any simplistic critique of Islam. Now, the party has adopted an Islamophobic rhetoric. Minister of Domestic Affairs Liese Prokop recently announced that 45 per cent of the Muslim population in Austria were ‘not willing to integrate’ (Rohe 2006).13 The antiracist movement has grown stronger since 1986. The Waldheim affair weakened the traditional sources of Austrian identity. Most prominent among these were the myth that Austria had been a mere victim of National Socialism and the idea that social conflicts in Austrian society were largely avoidable through a ’Sozialpartnerschaft’14 of all social parties. Jörg Haider’s rise in the FP from 1986 onwards

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

4:30 PM

Page 179

Sabine Strasser • 179

exacerbated the gap between proponents and opponents of old-style Austrian national identity. Protests were first directed against the party’s radical right-wing tendencies and later against the open racism expressed by the party leadership. This culminated in the so-called ’foreigner plebiscite’ in 1993, by which the FP attempted to declare its strict anti-immigration policy a major national issue. A petition for the referendum, however, failed to deliver the expected success,15 although new restrictive laws in its wake revealed its prompt indirect effect. In protest at the referendum, the so-called ‘Lichtermeer’,16 or ’sea of lights’ antiracist march was joined by 250,000 people. Austrian society was waking up to the issues of migration and the legacy of the past. Since the 1990s, immigration policies17 have been shaped by the slogan Integration statt Neuzuzug (integration, not new immigration). In 2002, stricter immigration rules were introduced whereby it became compulsory for immigrants to attend German language and integration courses. Moreover, legal immigration is now restricted to three basic categories: highly specialized skilled labour, family reunion and asylum. Antiracism NGOs are highly critical of the fact that immigrants may be deported if they fail German language exams. It is feared that rendering such courses for adults mandatory, in combination with insufficient education budgets, will have particularly negative effects.18 NGOs are even more critical of the restriction on legal immigration: introducing the categories of ‘au-pair’ and ‘seasonal worker’, these restrictions treat workers from abroad as mere ‘passers through’ rather than immigrants. This, it is argued, is another expression of Austria’s unwillingness to consider itself an ‘immigration country’. Despite the restrictive and selective legislation, however, immigration figures have risen since 2002 (Fassmann and Stacher 2003). The ‘Aliens Law Package’ that came into force in January 2006 was a response to obligations foreseen in EU directives. It provides some improvements, among them the introduction of the title ‘long term resident’ for nonEU country nationals. It is to be granted after five years of legal residence and provides free access to the labour market as well as certain improvements concerning social and residence security. Events such as the Waldheim affair, the rise of Jörg Haider, mail bombs sent between 1993 and 1996 to people who were known antiracists, and the widely reported case of asylum seeker Marcus Omofuma, who died from police brutality during his deportation in 1999, have prepared the ground for rising tensions in society. The ÖVP’s ‘coalition with racism’ in 2000 unified antiracist activists and divided the country further into ‘decent, hardworking, Austria first! patriots’ (i.e., opponents of EU enlargement and immigration) and ‘antiracist others’ (e.g., NGO activists, minority pressure groups, Social

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

4:39 PM

Page 180

180 • Political Activism and Anthropology in Austria

Democrats and transnational elites). The gap between cultural fundamentalism, on the one hand, and the ‘antiracist movement’ on the other, not only stresses the historical cleavage in Austrian society, but also opens a ‘window of opportunity’19 for antiracist activists with a migrant background.

Three Political Activists, Three Strategies for Involvement and Change Here, I introduce the biographical narratives of three persons I have been working with, as an anthropologist and activist, over the past few years: Nihal G. Ongan, S¸enol Akklic and Zeyide Güloglu.20 I met Nihal, S¸enol and Zeyide through a feminist and antiracist network in Vienna. They have widely different ethnic and class backgrounds, and although all were working towards the same overall antiracist goal, they employed very different political strategies. When I met Nihal, she was working in an NGO within which she was soon to rise from a part-time employee to the full-time chairwoman. I met S¸enol during the preparation of a demonstration against the government’s planned reduction of social welfare in 1987. His group ATI˙ GF (Avusturya Türkiyeli I˙ ¸sciler ve Genclik Federasyonu, or ‘Federation of Turkish Workers and Youths in Austria’) was looking for allies against the discriminating Austrian ’alien laws’. Some years later I met Zeyide, along with whom I had been invited to participate in a radio discussion. In the antiracist circuit, the discussion about religion as a tool of social protest emerged in the 1990s. In the aftermath of the Gulf War and the attacks in Washington, New York, Madrid and London, Muslims were given a special status: promoted and in some cases endowed with more rights, yet at the same time exposed to constant hostility and suspicion. On the antiracist activist scene, too, the ’Muslim’ attitude to democracy, human rights and women’s rights is regularly discussed. I had noticed all three activists at various Viennese events. Nihal was active with TschuschInnenPower,21 S¸enol became a candidate for the Green Party in the city council elections, and Zeyide worked for the ’Initiative of Muslim Austrians’. All three emerged in politically innovative contexts and tried to use the widespread antigovernment sentiment in Austria for their own political purposes. They agreed that political struggle must be directed against the Austrian integration regime, nationalism, cultural fundamentalism and racism. Turkey’s integration into the EU, women’s rights and human and minority rights in Turkey were important themes too. They shared many interests, but

Sabine Strasser • 181

were separated by differences of social class, religion and ethnic/national belonging. They never worked together despite their shared ‘migrant’ status. In terms of their identification as ‘Turks’, they differed significantly along class, religious and ethnic lines. Nihal belongs to the secularist upper class. S¸enol is a Kurd with a workingclass background and hails originally from the East of Turkey, which, among urban intellectual elites, is considered ‘backward’. Zeyide belongs to a transnational religious network, identifying herself as Muslim first and Turk second. The different class, religious and ethnic dimensions of their ‘Turkishness’ thus played into their political strategies as antiracist activists in Austria. In the following, I outline Nihal’s, S¸enol’s and Zeyide’s different strategies. I call them, respectively, a ‘politics of distinction’, a ‘politics of participation’ and a ‘politics of religious conviction’.

Nihal: Towards a ‘Politics of Distinction’ Nihal comes from an upper-class family in Turkey. Her family estate, a turn-of-the-century Greek house, is situated in Trabzon, the capital of an eastern province on the Black Sea coast. Her grandfather was a successful businessman in the region, married to an educated, wellrespected woman. The family lived not only in Trabzon but also in Istanbul and Marseille. Because the grandmother’s health was poor, Nihal’s father was brought up by a nurse and his first language was French. He later studied in Belgium. Upon the completion of his studies, Nihal’s father returned to Turkey, entered his father’s business and married. It was his sister who found him a suitable wife: the younger sister of a schoolmate from the private American School in Istanbul. The family associated with high-ranking Kemalist civil servants who believed in republican principles and the blessings of a ‘Western’ education. After getting married, Nihal’s mother moved from urban Ankara to provincial Trabzon, but never got accustomed to living there. Nihal considers herself a Trabzonian because, as she puts it, ‘There, I am somebody!’ At the age of eleven, Nihal passed the entrance exam at an international private school, the Austrian St Georgskolleg: I was very unhappy, you know. Boarding school at the age of eleven, I was homesick … but, on the other hand, I probably had a feeling, like ‘this is a privilege’. It was me who passed this exam, I’m something special. This is a super educational career, I’ll do it, there is no going back. No going back! (Nihal)

182 • Political Activism and Anthropology in Austria

The pedagogic methods used by the nuns largely coincided with Kemalist ideals of education. The young girls were not to be spoiled, and incessant striving for ‘culture’ and ‘refinement’ aimed to raise the next generation of hard-headed ‘road companions’.22 On account of the fact that the school was ‘European’, the teachers and their educational methods were beyond any doubt. After all, weren’t discipline and strictness the values that had brought Europe the economic success Turkey did not have? This image, I kind of imbibed it from early childhood, you know: They [Europeans] are so rich and we [Turks] are so poor. This was the kind of discourse. (Nihal)

Nihal came to Vienna in 1985. She was twenty-seven at the time and expected to get an excellent education in theatre sciences in a city with such rich traditions in arts and music. The story of her first years in Austria is marked by bewilderment at the discrimination she experienced. Given her privileged upbringing in Turkey this came as a surprise to her and influenced her political orientation and affiliations in Austria. It also changed her views on minorities and human rights issues in Turkey, in the past and today. As she put it, ‘All this gave me a terrible shock’. Nihal describes how she wished people would recognize the similarities between her and the Austrian students, instead of constantly emphasizing the differences. After all, she had a European education and knew more about Austrian literature than most of her ‘Austrian’ colleagues. She did not want to be seen as a stereotypical ‘poor Turkish woman’: When I think back I have the impression that this obsession that had seized me clearly was caused by how I felt here: definitely not good. Well, of course, I did sense the exclusion, this omnipresent attitude here, then still called xenophobia; and I guess I was desperately looking for something that would legitimize my anger about my being excluded. Something proving to me that I am right. I am not just imagining it. They do treat me badly in this country. Quite crassly, these Austrians are terrible people. Just look at what they have done. And, whenever I learned something new, in literature, films and so on, it was so brutal, even more brutal – well, they were horrible. (Nihal)

Nihal concentrated her studies on the history of National Socialism and anti-Semitism and wrote an MA thesis on the meaning of Auschwitz in theatre. The 1991 Gulf War, racist riots in Germany (Mölln, Solingen, Rostock-Lichtenhagen), and letter bombs against human rights activists in Austria led her deeper into the study of racism.23 Her criticism of a

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

4:40 PM

Page 183

Sabine Strasser • 183

largely indifferent public, but also of her fellow activists in the antiracist movement, grew harsher. During her studies, she came across questions that haunted Turkey: the Armenian genocide and the Greek ‘population exchange’ were principal among them. She knew about these issues and their relation to the rise of the Turkish Republic, yet, in the Austrian environment, she began to assess these events in a different perspective.24 As the ÖVP-FP coalition government was established in 2000, Nihal became increasingly dissatisfied with her work in a publicly sponsored advice centre where she now felt politically compromised. She wrote for the press, accepted interview invitations and participated in panel discussions, becoming a spokesperson for migrant and minority issues. She rejected the category ‘migrant’, but social tensions and struggles against racism opened a window of opportunity for her and her coactivists to speak for themselves and become publicly recognized. She criticized the leadership of certain established antiracist organisations and declared herself personally ‘affected by racism and discrimination’. Activists with a migrant background became her favourite allies in the struggle for self-representation and political participation. Nihal’s social environment is transnational, cosmopolitan, multilingual and intellectual. Her family and friends share an interest in high culture (theatre, cinema, music, literature) and view differences in nationality, religion and sexual orientation as ‘normal’. Diversity is ideologically appreciated and indicates a shared experience of ‘distinction’ – a ‘distinction’ based on the deconstruction of cultural essentialism, homogenization and Orientalism. The ‘politics of distinction’ provides activists like Nihal with a tool to regain a sense of self by criticizing dominant society’s illegitimate claims to superiority. Nihal and her political network share moral claims of equality with an intellectual antiracist movement in Austria, but position themselves differently by the appropriation and ironic reversal of the derogatory term ‘Tschusch’. However, despite the shared experience of being ‘migrants’ they simultaneously and emphatically reject the ‘migrant experience’ as a fixed commonality. Their political tactics mobilize an anti-essentialist approach, often embedded in performances of social and intellectual distinction. Activities at the intersection of arts, literature and politics offer an opportunity to deconstruct fixed identities and to unveil as Orientalist the dominant demands for ‘integration’. Their satirical and intellectual representation of Austrian cultural essentialism amuses neither the general public nor working-class migrants. Yet, it obviously positions them in the field of transnational elites, joined by some distinguished Austrian artists and intellectuals with whom they share a certain elitist language about critical arts and culture. Critical anthropologists often

184 • Political Activism and Anthropology in Austria

identify with this strategy of intervention since their own emphasis on particularity, complexity and ambiguity resembles the political voice of this network. A problem with this tactic, however, has already been identified by critics of Edward Said (1979). Although Said shows that the ‘Orient’ emerged as a consequence of the desire to construe ‘the other’, he still contributes to the image of the West as a bounded entity. Similarly, by seeking to unmask powerful Western constructions of exclusion, Nihal’s political network risks transforming counter-Orientalism, as a means of critique, into an essentializing Occidentalism.

S¸enol: Towards a ‘Politics of Participation’ S¸enol’s family is from the province of Tunceli, better known by its Kurdish name Dersim. Atatürk, the ‘father’ of the modern Turkish Republic, once described the province as a ‘terrible boil’ that must be ‘eradicated’. The suppression of the uprising of Dersim in 1937/38 claimed thousands of lives and, according to van Bruinessen (1994), constitutes one of the darkest chapters in Turkey’s history. At that time, S¸enol’s grandmother and her brother fled from the soldiers. She held her baby in her arms and her brother allegedly told her, ‘Throw the baby away’. Relating this story, S¸enol laughingly added, ‘If she had done it, I wouldn’t be here, because that was my father’. His father left Dersim to become a migrant worker in Austria in the early 1960s. S¸enol grew up in the house of his mother’s father, whom he describes as a rather reserved, non-dominant man. The grandfather had married S¸enol’s grandmother, an orphan from a small village, when she was fourteen. Years later, when her grandchildren came to live in her house, she made sure they were not put at a disadvantage. She ruled over the big family singlehandedly and strictly, in spite of a patriarchal environment. She married off her daughters and watched over social relationships. S¸enol speaks with respect about his grandmother who was revered as ana,25 the wife or mother of a religious Alevi leader from the holy clan Kureys¸anlı.26 ‘She was highly respected; men came to kiss her hands. She was like a temple for some people’, he says. His grandmother showed him that women can dominate men in relationships. In his view, respect for women is characteristic of the Alevi, his ethnic-religious group. S¸enol went to Istanbul in 1970 to be reunited with his father, who had returned to Turkey in an attempt to reestablish himself. S¸enol attended primary school there and recalls that it was in Istanbul that he first learned about the prejudice against people from Turkey’s eastern

Sabine Strasser • 185

provinces. He cannot remember having felt like a Kurd or Alevi when he was a child, but in Istanbul he started to claim that his origin was Erzincan (a neighbouring province of Tunceli) because coming from Tunceli was considered provocative, especially by conservative Turks: The teacher asked us to talk about personal experience. So I got up and started to tell my story. Then I said, ‘ben ve müsayibim bir gün...’ [one day, my müsayip27 and I…], and everybody laughed. So, I said, ‘what’s the matter, did I do something wrong?’ The teacher asked, ‘what was that you just said?’ and I said‚ ‘I said müsayip’, and then explained it. But all the children laughed at me and I got angry. It was a substantial anger. (S ¸enol)

S¸enol’s father, it turned out, was not very successful in establishing a business in Istanbul, and he returned to Austria. This time his wife joined him, and the children were sent back to his wife’s family in Tunceli. The parents had long wanted to bring the children to Austria, and the impetus for a family reunion came in the late 1970s when the political climate in Turkey became increasingly polarized. Even if the small flat in Vienna was a ‘terrible disappointment’ and S¸enol had not known such cramped conditions before, he tried to see Austria as a place of new opportunities. ‘Home’, he said, ‘is where you have the right to participate’. He became increasingly aware of the connection between poverty, inequality and his Kurdish-Alevi descent. Shortly after their arrival in Vienna, and against the advice of their father, S¸enol and his siblings joined a Turkish working-class organization in Vienna. S¸enol attended classes in Kurdish folk dance and started to feel at home at political meetings. He and his brother became increasingly politicized and were instrumental in founding the transnational leftist organization Federation of Turkish Workers and Youths in Austria (ATIGF): I started to translate into Turkish the Austrian legislation for foreign workers. It was my first insight into the law and I was particularly shocked by the fact that foreigners were the first ones to be made redundant in case of a recession. And a second point I remember: a foreigner can be deported in case he causes the ‘public disturbance of peace’, and I could not find any further explanation of what that meant. I thought: Are they crazy, man? (S ¸enol)

After his marriage to an Austrian Kurd living in a western Austrian province, S¸enol left Vienna but continued his political activities. He participated in the organization of a so-called ‘parallel election for foreigners’ during national and local election campaigns, cooperated with close friends to convince the local government to send aid to

186 • Political Activism and Anthropology in Austria

Turkey after the first Gulf War in 1991 and was involved in struggles for immigrant representation in the workplace. After several years he returned to Vienna, where he focused increasingly on immigrant youths and their integration into Austrian society. Street work in Vienna enabled him to fight for social integration of young people, but did not satisfy his general interest in leftist politics. He joined the Green Party and ran for elections in 1999, dedicating himself to opposing the FP’s ‘Anti-Foreigner Election Campaign’, which won the right-wing party 27 per cent of the vote. S¸enol cannot imagine just being ‘at home’ somewhere. He wants to participate in the shaping of a social, political and cultural environment: ‘I am not satisfied because I am home, rather, because I am satisfied I can feel at home’, he says. He always consults his closest circle of friends and relatives about his political participation. Having had little support from the Green Party in the course of the national election campaign in 2003, he decided to withdraw from activities within the party and started to co-edit a bilingual Turkish-German newspaper, and to negotiate with Kurdish and Turkish associations about founding a new leftist political network. He also got involved with different independent local and transnational projects. Due to his organizational experience and far-reaching contacts he was asked to take part in many different activities. The Tunceli homeland association Initiative Munzur, for example, asked him to organize a panel discussion. The Initiative is an association of Tunceli-born Kurdish Austrians. It aims at contributing to the economic, political and social development of the Tunceli province. The Initiative invites policy makers from Tunceli and organizes press conferences, panel discussions and private dinners in order to support the local Tunceli government’s struggle against economic deprivation and, in particular, the Turkish government’s decision to establish eight power stations in the protected valley of Munzur.28 Resistance has a long tradition in the province of Dersim/Tunceli, particularly since the 1930s, when hundreds of women drowned themselves in the Munzur River to escape the Turkish military’s brutality.29 Resistance is transnational now, and local businessmen are concerned over the close cooperation between local and diasporic communities in drawing international attention to the construction plans. In 2003, S¸enol got involved in a musical event drawing attention to the presence of Kurds in Austria, their transnational political activism, and the problems of Austrian racism. Interestingly, this event was held in the Burgtheater in Vienna, a focal point for Austrian national ‘high

Sabine Strasser • 187

culture’. That antiracist activists performed in such a venue must be taken as testimony to the success with which some ‘fringe’ groups have made a space for themselves in mainstream cultural politics. In this particular context, S¸enol’s politics were Kurdish and transnational. But in other contexts, he represents the Kurdish diaspora in Austria, the Turkish left, Alevi Kurds, or Green politics. These categories are not only constructions from outside, stamped on him, but products of his self-positioning in different contexts. S¸enol makes use of his different belongings to contribute to diverse political agendas. He himself does not claim to represent a particular identity or movement. He does not speak for a selected group, but for the causes he identifies with, such as Kurdish politics, the class struggle, antiracist activism and environmental issues. S¸enol’s politics express the will to contribute to existing movements, projects or parties, and to support a range of social and political struggles. One could call this a ‘politics of participation’. He is not interested in challenging dominant society; he perceives himself as part of this society and wants to engage with its policies, organizations and institutions. His shifting alliances provide him with flexibility and prevent the fixation of identity politics. His will to participate demands adaptation to prevailing political strategies. To belong to Kurds, Greens, Alevis, Leftists, the working class and the middle class at the same time makes it impossible to represent one of these groups exclusively. Whilst adaptation and relational identification are aspects of all social interaction, in this case the adaptation appears to be a deliberate strategy. In its anti-essentialist outlook, this strategy opens up many windows of opportunity, on the one hand, but it also, on the other hand, renders clear-cut allegiance to specific institutional politics difficult, if not meaningless.

Zeyide: Towards a ‘Politics of Religious Conviction’ At the age of four, Zeyide was too young to have clear expectations of migrating to Austria, but certainly not too young to feel disappointment. The sad picture she draws of the run-down one-bedroom flat in which she experienced much loneliness stands in sharp contrast to her animated belief in ‘something better’. In her self-description, the high achievements of a daughter of migrant workers and the story of her career become central themes. Ultimately, it was important for me to have some kind of academic degree, because my mother was a cleaning lady, then janitor, and I remember very well, when I began my studies I came home in the evening, a lot of folders

188 • Political Activism and Anthropology in Austria

under my arm, and a young neighbour says, ‘Hi, how are you?’ And I say, ‘Oh, I am very tired’. He says, ‘Where have you been?’ And I say, ‘At the university’. And he goes, quite naïvely, without any malice, you know, ‘Oh, you got a job as a cleaner there?’ He couldn’t believe that the janitor’s daughter studied at the university [laughs]. But really, you know, completely naïve, yes, no harm meant. (Zeyide)

Religious conviction, which at present is the main driving force in Zeyide’s political activism, became important at a later point in time. She recounted the key event upon which she became aware of the significance of God. When her younger sister fell ill she turned to God for help. Afterwards she felt ‘ashamed’ because she realized that she had invoked God only when she was in need. From then on she lived through a slow process towards faith, and it became important to her that Islam should be recognized at the legal level and in everyday life. Turkey has become increasingly important to her in the course of the past years, and her criticism of the country has grown. She dislikes the fact that the Turkish state controls Islam, and she feels that the laicist dress code at universities and other public spaces prevents people from practising a ‘conscious’ Islam.30 Zeyide is the oldest of three daughters. While her father was a religious and conservative man, he wanted to give Zeyide a good education in order to open up opportunities for her. Religion became important only after she had completed her studies. She said it enabled her, especially as a woman, to fight against prejudice. On account of its past, especially during the Habsburg monarchy, Austria shares a long history with Islam, but the public and legal recognition of Islam as a religion cannot obscure discrimination in everyday life.31 Zeyide uses her faith to stand up to any form of discrimination, in particular forms of discrimination that she says prevail among Turkish migrants. In her view, Islam prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender or race, and she considers feminism and antiracism political fields that grow from religious conviction. Zeyide feels emotionally closer to a Muslima living some distance from her than to a laicist neighbour. She describes herself as a European woman and Austrian citizen who is involved in local politics and the cause of justice at a global level. Though she feels attached to Turkey, reads literature in both German and Turkish, and is more interested in politics in Turkey than in any other country, her religious-political interest focuses increasingly on Europe and the global community of Muslims. The conflict between Israel and Palestine, the war against Iraq in 1991, and 9/11 are global issues that greatly concern her.

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

11/6/09

5:34 PM

Page 189

Sabine Strasser • 189

In 1999, Zeyide joined the platform ‘Initiative of Muslim Austrians’ (IMO) and supported positions favouring an ‘independent’ Islam. She has always been concerned with her own reflexivity and independent conviction. She rejects Austrian claims that she is oppressed because she is Muslim. She invokes her right to wear a headscarf in the name of self-determination, liberal values, democracy and modernity. She supported the election campaign of Omar al-Rawi, a Muslim candidate and co-activist who successfully ran for a seat on the City Council of Vienna in 2001 for the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs, SPÖ). As the only Turkish activist in the IMO, Zeyide was crucial to the campaign, but stayed critical and independent. Zeyide, like S¸enol, perceives herself as a person bridging many contradictory positions, but her concerns are motivated by her religious conviction. She wants to support the social recognition of Islam and combat discrimination against Muslims in Austria, Turkey and Europe. She brings together Austrian Muslims of different national backgrounds and tries to connect feminist Muslim intellectuals and working-class women. Because few Muslim women have been prepared to speak up for themselves publicly, she has felt responsible for intervening in many different contexts. She has participated in panel discussions, given talks and attended public events in order to speak from ‘an insider’s point of view’. A brilliant speaker, she is well known in Vienna’s political circuits. She has built up contacts with different organizations, parties and institutions, but insists on her political independence. While most of her co-activists represent Austrian Muslims in recognized positions (personal consultant to the president, representatives of integration and of media and public relations), she prefers the freedom of an outsider. Nevertheless, she continuously engages in work with the various activist groups, among them the Forum of Muslim Women (Sticker 2006). The Forum was established in the wake of rising public concern about ‘harmful traditional practices’ among migrant minorities in Austria. In 2004, Maria Rauch Kallat, the Secretary of State for Health and Women’s Issues, took it upon herself to contest ‘harmful practices’ such as forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and honour-based violence.32 She particularly stressed the urgent need for an extended cooperation between NGOs working with ‘potential victims of tradition-based violence’ and state institutions. Furthermore, she took joint action with six female federal ministers33 and launched her initiative both nationally and transnationally. Many activist groups, among them the IGGiO, oppose female genital mutilation, forced marriage, honour-based violence, and enforced veiling. They stress the difference between religion and tradition. The IGGiO demands equal opportunities for women and men, especially

190 • Political Activism and Anthropology in Austria

concerning access to the labour market and female professional careers. Veiling is depicted as a Koranic prescription for Muslim women that should not lead to discrimination in the labour market or in any other context.34 The IGGiO, the IMO and the Forum of Muslim Women have initiated activities aimed at rejecting the conflation of Islam with tradition, but also at enlightening Muslims about these issues. Sheikh Adnan Ibrahim delivered a forceful speech at the University of Vienna in which he opposed female circumcision and claimed that it was part of the religious obligations of all Muslims to honour a woman’s right to sexual fulfilment. They try to persuade the general public, as well as Muslims, of the commensurability of Islam with democracy, human rights and gender equality. Yet, in part, these are also reactions of the Muslim community in Austria to the constant public pressure to respond to allegations of Islamic fundamentalism and to what is alleged to be Muslims’ unpreparedness to accept democratic values. Islam provides Zeyide with a voice of social protest that enables her to fight social inequality and prejudice. Although many antiracist activists mistrust social protest founded in a patriarchal religion, cooperation beyond Muslim networks is maintained through interreligious dialogues, as well as through transnational antiracist networks and national political parties. Over the past few years, the IMO and the IGGiO have been successful in unifying Muslims of different national backgrounds and religious schools. Yet, this process not only strengthens the voice of Islam in Austria, but also raises protests by minorities within the Muslim community and debates about who legitimately represents whom. Zeyide is engaged with different national and religious segments within the Muslim community but is embedded in the growing general political network of Islam in Austria and Europe. She and her Muslim co-activists are unified by their religious conviction, but national, ethnic, religious and class differences still give rise to debates about equality within.

The Voices of Political Networks and the Place of Ethnography Nihal, S¸enol and Zeyide were all full of hope before they came to Austria, and they all experienced disappointment. Expectations of coming to a rich and educated society ended in an Austrian reality they perceived as run-down or brutal. In different ways they began to fight for their rights and against cultural fixations. They all positioned themselves on the public arena as activists and made use of highly symbolic places in Austria, such as the Jewish Museum, the

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

11/6/09

5:35 PM

Page 191

Sabine Strasser • 191

Burgtheater and the University. Through this place-making strategy, they imbue with new meaning these places’ assumed highly cultured Austrianness. They connect them with distant places and claim them as meaningful locations for Turkish, Kurdish and Muslim minorities in Austria. They all started new activities at a moment when being a ‘migrant’ became the unifying category of a new politics of resistance in Austria. Yet, despite the shared longing for social access, there are different patterns in the ‘politics of representation’ and in the ways in which Nihal, S¸enol and Zeyide include theory, literature and cultural symbols. I have analysed how their respective networks address different audiences, seek different alliances and contribute differently to the challenge of essentialism and Orientalism. And I have shown how antiessentialist approaches are weakening identity politics at the very moment in which ‘migrants’ speak up for themselves and deny fixed categories. Social movements emerge as counterhegemonic practices against the fixation and normalization of certain cultural meanings as norms (Laclau and Mouffe 1991). The very existence of alternative interpretations unmasks established versions as dominant and exposes them to contestation. According to Koopmans and Statham (2000), ‘political opportunity structures’35 are crucial to the introduction of new topics and conflicts into mainstream politics. If we want to understand how social movements intervene successfully, we must identify the ‘cracks’ in established discourse that represent ‘windows of opportunity’. Activities and controversies that become framed in terms of the ‘deep’ cultural idioms of citizenship and nationhood create structural opportunities for introducing political aims successfully (Koopmans and Statham 2000: 39). The ‘Anti-Foreigner Election Campaign’ by the FP in 1999 and the establishment of the ÖVP/FP coalition government in 2000 represented a breakdown of the political consensus of postwar Austria. Migrant networks took this opportunity to introduce other experiences and were recognized as a new voice within the antiracist movement. Muslims and migrants were invited to represent ‘themselves’ in demonstrations, newspapers and TV broadcasts. Some of them were negotiating with the new government, although many rejected any ‘coalition with racism’ and preferred to take a position within the new politics of resistance. The shift to a right-wing government was followed by resistance from Austrian migrants who, for the first time, criticized the antiracist movement as hegemonic and were heard. I have shown how activists can make use of different versions of (essentialist and anti-essentialist) culture in processes of identifying

192 • Political Activism and Anthropology in Austria

inequalities, and in their demands for recognition. Yet gaps have emerged between the networks. These gaps represent long-lasting cleavages caused by differences of ethnicity, social class and religious convictions in Turkey and in Austria. Even if activists reject essentialism, they do not necessarily transgress class, ethnic and religious boundaries. Nihal’s ‘politics of distinction’, like anthropology, seeks selfdetermination through a critique of cultural interpretations of the inferior ‘other’. Victimization is reversed by the unmasking of Orientalism and dominant cultural claims. Yet, anti-essentialist approaches, while they criticize homogenizing and unifying concepts of nationhood that are based on a shared culture and a shared territory, do not offer viable policy recommendations. The arguments that hinge on multiple identities and complex intersections are often weak and taciturn in contrast to those that make appeals to unity based on commonality. S¸enol’s ‘politics of participation’, like anthropology, rejects strong versions of differences and belonging. Tactics here are aimed at challenging dominant settings by offering alternative versions of reality. Like anthropology, the politics of participation often fail to be heard. Finally, Zeyide’s ‘politics of religious conviction’ perceives religion as a bridge between ethnic, national and social class differences. Success is built on inclusion, and whilst this creates new tensions, a religionfriendly secularism in Austria has proven successful in introducing new dimensions of Austrianness. From the viewpoint of political agency, anti-essentialist models that insist on fluid identities are not useful for explaining modes of belonging in an increasingly diverse world. Equally, it is unhelpful to privilege global difference per se, and to see as merely a threat those who make claims to an ‘authentic’ culture. Anthropology offers useful tools for questioning assumed truths, but it cannot explain why, in a multicultural world, ‘culture’ and ‘difference’ are increasingly seen as threats and why appropriations of ‘culture’ so easily transform into fundamentalisms. Rejecting essentialisms does not help us to understand why people still naturalize power (Benhabib 1999). In a world of uncertainties, notions of culture and identity are at stake because forms of belonging are no longer guaranteed. When people perceive ‘too much’ diversity, offers of security can be more attractive than yet more multiplications of meaning. Moreover, although – or perhaps because – the specific ethnographic understanding of multiple identities intersects dimensions of class, nation, religion and gender, it is almost impossible to convey this complexity to a wider audience. This is not a call for abandoning complex analyses of social realities or

Sabine Strasser • 193

for ignoring their ambiguities. However, if we want to be politically engaged as anthropologists and have an impact on the public, we have to be aware of our weaknesses. Zeyide’s example of Islam in Austria shows how legal support and hegemonic agreements enable a successful bottom-up mobilization based on a shared conviction. Interestingly, Zeyide’s networking strategies proved to be the most successful. Her network was respected in the wider Muslim community, and it got the most frequent mentions in the media, managed to get a representative onto Vienna’s city council, was respected by policy makers, and was invited by the Austrian president and Vienna’s mayor to officially celebrate the end of Ramadan. Anthropological contributions, on the other hand, are diverse, contradictory and often poorly supported ideologically and financially. Anthropologists have no shared religion but rely on contestation, even those who are convinced that anthropology has something to contribute to ongoing debates on culture ‘out there’.

Notes 1. Lindisfarne 2001 and this volume. 2. For some examples of this shift see Abu-Lughod 1991; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Stolcke 1995; Hannerz 1999; Baumann 1996, 1999; Baumann and Gingrich 2004; Wikan 1999, 2002. 3. My research between 1999 and 2002 was sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund (Strasser 2003) and supported by many activists of the antiracist movement, members of migrant women's organizations and representatives of the Muslim Congregation in Vienna, as well as by a number of colleagues in Austria and abroad. I would like to thank in particular Gerti Seiser, Herta Nöbauer, Akhil Gupta, Gerd Baumann, Thomas Fillitz and the editors of this volume for their comments and suggestions. It was Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale who encouraged me to contribute to the discussion of a political field I have been engaged in for more than twenty years. For adaptation of the English version I am indebted to Wolf Zemina and the editors. 4. Following Elspeth Probyn I use the notion 'belonging' (Probyn 1996: 5) as a mode of thinking about how people get along and how various forms of being and longing are articulated. This is an attempt to understand the complexity of their belonging. 5. When I speak of place, I use Doreen Massey’s (1994) concept on what she calls a ‘progressive sense of place’. Massey argues against the widespread use of place as a secure and unproblematic identity and also against the dichotomy: place as being and time as becoming. In contrast, she tries to find a concept of place that represents rootedness, but is able to deal with relations in a global era. Place does not have one coherent and essential identity but is a process of stretched-out social relations. 6. Waldheim insisted on his innocence and maintained: ’Ich musste nur meine Pflicht erfüllen wie hunderttausend andere Österreicher auch’ (’I only had to fulfil my duty, just like hundreds of thousands of other Austrians’).

194 • Political Activism and Anthropology in Austria

7. On neonationalism in Austria see Gingrich 2006. 8. The expression generally used to identify the group the FP wants to address is ‘the man on the street’, or the regular guy (see Gingrich 2006: 208). Reinfeldt elaborates on this in his discourse analysis of the FP: us (decent, hardworking, FP), them (aliens, foreigners), those (policy makers) and not those (other Austrians) (Reinfeldt 2000: 189). 9. ‘No coalition with racism!’ was the motto of the protest march against the new right-wing government in Austria, held on 19 February 2000. 10. The formation of the Austrian government in 2000 accelerated the adoption of the Directives accompanying Article 13 of the Amsterdam Treaty aiming to combat racist discrimination. Paper presented by Vera Egenberger, Director of ENAR (European Network against Racism) in July 2000. 11. The FP shrank to 10 per cent in 2002. 12. The Islamic Congregation is the official representative of Muslims in Austria. It seeks to provide services for all Muslims, irrespective of their national origin, gender, social background or belonging to a certain Islamic School of Law. See http://www.derislam.at/islam.php?name=Themen&pa=showpage&pid=3, retrieved 10 January 2005. See also Heine 2002. 13. In ‘Zur Sache’ 14 November 1999, Austrian National Broadcasting. According to its members the ‘Initiative österreichischer MuslimInnen’ (Initiative of Austrian Muslims) was founded as a reaction to this statement. 14. The ‘Sozialpartnerschaft’ (social partnership) has been the prevailing model of decision making in the postwar era. It is based on cooperation between the government, the employers’ federations and the unions. It has largely been an instrument of consensus implementation and conflict avoidance. 15. A petition calling for a referendum was supported by ‘only’ 417,000 instead of the expected 1.5 million signatures. No referendum was held. 16. This demonstration against xenophobia on 23 January 1993 was the largest political manifestation in the Second Republic. Retrieved from http://www.sos-mitmensch.at 10 January 2005. 17. The system of social partnership, shaped by national and ‘fraternal male interests’ (Neyer 1997: 185) had ensured the establishment of a guest worker regime since the beginning of the 1960s. It was based on the idea that workers would return to their home countries, and integration was not intended. Immigration issues became a recognized field of policy only in the mid 1970s (with the Foreigner Employment Act). It has caused debates ever since. Political guidelines for social integration have been established very slowly. Legislative policies seem largely based on a principle of trial and error. 18. See the resolution of the ‘Wiener Integrationskonferenz’ (Assembly of NGOs working with immigrants and minorities in Vienna) in 2001. 19. Social movements use ‘windows of opportunity’ as occasions for intervention. The deeply embedded contradictory cultural concepts on nation and citizenship in society offer such occasions. Cultural cleavages in the dominant society provide space for dissent not only for right-wing and populist interventions but also for counter-hegemonic movements such as the antiracist movement or minority groups (Koopmans and Statham 2000: 31). 20. Field research and interviews for the ‘Habilitation' project took place between October 1999 and November 2002, the period between two national elections, and thus that of the Austrian Freedom Party’s rise and fall. 21. TschuschInnenPower are a group of antiracist activists who share a migrant background. They are largely professionals, such as academics, social workers, youth workers, local policy makers, journalists, and musicians. The group was founded

ARMBRUSTER-Pi-262.qxd:Senghaas

10/19/09

4:42 PM

Page 195

Sabine Strasser • 195

22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

after the elections of 1999, when the FP won more than 27 per cent of the votes. Tschusch is a derogatory term in Austrian German for a migrant worker from southeastern Europe. Yoldas¸ is literally a person using the same path, i.e., a political associate or comrade. Between 1993 and 1996 several persons were injured by letter bombs; a pipe-bomb placed at the village of Oberwarth, in the province of Burgenland, killed four Roma. Accompanying letters were signed by the ‘Bajuvarische Befreiungsfront’ and ‘Graf Rüdiger von Starhemberg’, leader of the fight against the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. For a comparative perspective of particularly aggressive forms of (primordial) nationalism in Turkey and in Austria see Gingrich (2002). In contrast to the male dede/pir, the female ana was not a function. Women were not allowed to assume leading positions, to administer justice or preside over ceremonies. They were, however, respected as wives or mothers of religious leaders. The social organization of the Alevis comprises a leading group and a group of laics (Firat 1997: 94). Within the Alevi cultural context the müsayip-relation represents the ideal form of a sibling relationship. Two young men are ceremonially linked by a religious leader (pir). The ceremony is completed upon marriage and includes the respective partners. The couples become symbolic siblings and their families have to adhere to a taboo of incest for three generations. Müsayip are responsible for each other’s families. In the case of death of a müsayip the symbolic brother looks after the family of the deceased. The Turkish government plans eight power stations along a 144 km stretch of the river. A consortium consisting of the US company Stone & Webster, the Turkish partners Ata ins¸aat and Soyak, and the Austrian firms VA Tech Elin, VA Tech VOEST MCE and Strabag was recently commissioned to plan the construction. If this project is realized, up to 40,000 local inhabitants will have to leave their villages. Paths now connecting the region across the river will be flooded, and communication and transport affected. In the long run the impact on the water reservoir would also change the agricultural productivity and the landscape of the region. Bee keeping and cattle breeding, the basis of the local population's livelihood, would be made more difficult, which would likely give rise to a new wave of emigration. The power stations would cover only 1 per cent of Turkish energy needs. These facts support the Kurdish activists’ assumption that the project is in fact aimed at resettling a population not sufficiently devoted to the Turkish government. Tunceli politicians have expressed their doubts about the project to their members of parliament in Ankara, organized signature campaigns and informed their hometown associations in Turkey, Europe and overseas. Numerous websites are concerned with these troublesome developments (e.g., www.munzurvadisi.org; www.devrimcidemok rasi.org), Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and organizations for river protection warn of the ecological damage triggered by this project (see also www.rivernet.net and Akkıllıç and Strasser 2003). Van Bruinessen (1994) refers to the events in 1937 and 1938 as ‘genocide in Kurdistan’. Zeyide differentiates between traditional and conscious Islam. Muslims who behave according to the expectations of their family and local traditions are usually not educated and do not know much about their own religion. Conscious Muslims are committed to their religion on the basis of their own decision making, and they practise Islam by conviction, intellectually, emotionally and socially. I intentionally do not use the term ‘Islamophobia’ in this context, because discrimination does not target the ideals of the religion, but rather ethnic, cultural

196 • Political Activism and Anthropology in Austria

32.

33.

34.

35.

and national differences and practices. According to Halliday (1999), ‘Islamophobia’ would also imply the existence of a uniform Islam that can cause phobia. Child marriage, hymen repair, and cosmetic surgery are not mentioned in this debate, nor included in the measures. There are no group rights concerning civil marriage or divorce. The Islamic Congregation, IGGiO, is working on models of Islamic marriage contracts, but as an additional protection of women in compliance with Austrian legislation. (Retrieved 10 January 2005 from http://www.derislam.at/ haber.php?sid=55&mode=flat&order=1). Its representatives stress the difference between arranged and forced marriage. Representatives of the Federal Ministries of Domestic Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Social Affairs, Generation and Consumption, Justice, Education, Science and Culture and of Health and Women participated in these talks. Retrieved 10 March 2006 from http://www.derislam.at/islam.php?name=Themen& pa=showpage&pid=115. For the official position on headscarves, see http://www. derislam.at/islam.php?name=Themen&pa=showpage&pid=51 (Retrieved 10 March 2006.) ‘Political opportunity structures’ consist of ‘consistent – but not necessarily formal or permanent – dimensions of the political environment that provide incentives for people to undertake collective action by affecting their expectations for success or failure’ (Tarrow 1994, in Koopmans and Statham 2000: 32).

References Abu-Lughod, L. 1991. ‘Writing Against Culture’, in R. G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 137–162. Akkılıç, S¸. and S. Strasser (2003). 'Initiative Munzur: Umweltpolitische Arbeitsgemeinschaft oder transnationale Politik von Wiener Kurdinnen und Kurden?' Stimme von und für Minderheiten 47: 16–17. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, Z. 1996. ‘From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity’, in S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, pp. 18–36. Baumann, G. 1996. Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. The Multicultural Riddle: Rethinking National, Ethnic, and Religious Identities. London: Routledge. Baumann, G. and A. Gingrich (eds). 2004. Grammars of Identity/Alterity: A Structural Approach. London: Berghahn. Benhabib, S. 1999. ‘Sexual Difference and Collective Identities: The New Global Constellation’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24(2): 335–361. Bruinessen, M., van. 1994. ‘Genocide in Kurdistan? The Suppression of the Dersim Rebellion in Turkey (1937–1938) and the Chemical War against the Iraqi Kurds’, in G. J. Andreopoulos (ed.), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 141–170. Çag˘ lar, A. 1997. ‘Hyphenated Identities and the Limits of 'Culture'‘, in T. Modood and P. Werbner (eds), The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe: Racism, Identity and Community. London, New York: Zed Books, pp. 169–185. Eriksen, T. H. 2006. Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence. Oxford: Berg.

Sabine Strasser • 197

Fassmann, H. and I. Stacher (eds). 2003. Österreichischer Migrations- und Integrationsbericht. Klagenfurt/Celovec: Drava. Firat, G. 1997. Sozioökonomischer Wandel und ethnische Identität in der kurdisch-alevitischen Region Dersim. Saarbrücken: Bielefelder Studien zur Entwicklungssoziologie 65. Gingrich, A. 1998. ‘Frontier Myths of Orientalism: The Muslim World in Public and Popular Cultures of Central Europe’, in B. Baskar and B. Brumen (eds), Mess: Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School. ———. 2002. ‘When Ethnic Majorities are Dethroned: Towards a Methodology of Selfreflexive, Controlled Macrocomparison’, in A. Gingrich and R. G. Fox (eds), Anthropology, by Comparison. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 225–248. ———. 2006. ‘Neo-nationalism and the Reconfiguration of Europe’, Social Anthropology 14(2):195–217. Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson. (1992). ‘Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference’, Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6–23. Halliday, F. 1999. ’‘Islamophobia’ Reconsidered’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(5): 892–902. Hannerz, U. 1999. ‘Reflections on Varieties of Culturespeak’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 2(3): 393–407. Heine, S. 2002. ‘Islam in Austria’, in W. A. R. Shadid and P. S. van Koningsveld (eds), Intercultural Relations and Religious Authorities: Muslims in the European Union. Leuven, Paris, Dudley: Peeters, pp. 27–48. Koopmans, R. and J. Statham (eds). 2000. Challenging Immigration and Ethnic Relations Politics: Comparative European Perspectives. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Lindisfarne, N. 2001. Elhamdülillah, Laikiz: Cinsiyet, I˙slam ve Türk Cumhuriyetcilig˘i. Ankara: I˙ letiflim Yayınları. Massey, D. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Laclau E. and C. Mouffe. 1991. Hegemonie und radikale Demokratie: Zur Dekonstruktion des Marxismus. Vienna: Passagen. Neyer, G. 1997. ‘Frauen im österreichischen politischen System’, in H. Dachs (ed.), Handbuch des politischen Systems Österreich. Die zweite Republik, 3rd ed. Vienna: ManzVerlag, pp. 185–201. Pelinka, A. 1990. Zur Österreichischen Identität. Zwischen Deutscher Vereinigung und Mitteleuropa. Vienna: Ueberreuter. Probyn, E. 1996. Outside Belonging. New York: Routledge. Reinfeldt, S. 2000. Nicht-Wir Und Die-Da. Studien zum Rechten Populismus. Vienna: Braumüller. Rohe, M. 2006. ‘Perspektiven und Herausforderungen in der Integration muslimischer MitbürgerInnen in Österreich’, Executive Summary, Erlangen, Bundesministerium für Inneres. Said, E. W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sticker, M. 2006. ‘Sondermodell Österreich?’ MA Thesis. Vienna: University of Vienna. Stolcke, V. 1995. ‘Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe’, Current Anthropology 36(1): 1–23. Strasser, S. 2003. ‘Beyond Belonging: Kulturelle Dynamiken und transnationale Praktiken in der Migrationspolitik ‚von unten’’. Habilitation dissertation. Vienna: University of Vienna. Wiener Integrationsfonds: Integrationskonferenz. 2001. ‘Sondersitzung der Wiener Integrationskonferenz’. Vienna. Wikan, U. 1999. ‘Culture: A new Concept of Race’, Social Anthropology 7(1): 57–64. ———. 2002. Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 8

TAKING SIDES IN THE OILFIELDS: FOR A POLITICALLY ENGAGED ANTHROPOLOGY Heike Schaumberg

It is no surprise that in today’s uncertain world, a new generation of anthropologists and social scientists express concern over research methods and ethics in relation to ‘conflict zones’. Since the United States emerged victorious from the Cold War, seemingly as the unrivalled leader of capitalism, subsequent administrations became obsessed with reaffirming U.S. hegemony over the challenges posed by rival contenders. A new era of wars destabilized ‘world peace’, a euphemism that, conveniently for advocates of ‘capitalism with a human face’, ignored the Cold War era’s many bloody conflicts. Anthony Gidden’s ‘Third Way’ (1998) provided economic neoliberalism with a much needed ideological dressing. This has since been embraced by many Latin American governments. Recent Latin American insurgencies suggest that contemporary political processes are underpinned by class struggle. The cost of intensified global market competition is the heightened exploitation of labour power across the world, and the infliction of poverty, war and conflict on a rapidly growing part of humanity.

200 • Taking Sides in the Oilfields

On the global stage an international movement has emerged involving thousands of young people, trade unionists, professionals and grassroots organizations from all over the world. Yet, as Nancy Lindisfarne notes (2004), there has been a surprising lack of involvement of anthropologists in the global anticapitalist movement. In the following, I explore this question. The onset of neoliberal restructuring in the 1970s subjected workers in many countries to various degrees of state terror, while simultaneously dismantling their base organizations. Workers were consequently left ‘unarmed’ in terms of alternative ideas and grassroots organization when, in the 1990s, rapid large-scale privatization and labour flexibilization depressed wages and nullified previously gained social and employment rights. The traumatic transformations in Argentina brought general aspects of neoliberalization into sharp focus. Most of Argentina’s approximately 30,000 ‘disappeared’ under the last military regime (1976–1982) were trade union activists.1 They had been radicalized during the big 1969 labour upheavals sparked by the Cordobazo, a student and labour uprising in Cordoba against the Onganía military regime (1966–1970). Following the three-year Peronist interval (1973–1976), which was characterized by militant left-wing labour struggles, de facto military rule sought to impose a hegemonic order through the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganization). This human devastation prepared the way for the implementation of neoliberal adjustment policies by subsequent democratically elected governments in the 1980s and 1990s. With Peronism’s restoration to power under Menem’s leadership in 1989, the neoliberal project was consolidated with unparalleled market liberalization in the region (Giarracca and Teubal 2004). Comprehensive labour and judicial reforms ensured Argentina’s attractiveness to foreign ‘investors’. The one peso-one dollar parity, la ley de convertibilidad, became synonymous with ‘economic stability’, while millions of workers and their families were banished to permanent poverty and structural unemployment.2 Through the 1990s growing dissatisfaction with corruption and empty promises by the political elites resulted in widespread rejection of the hegemonic order. This was emblematized by the now famous slogan of the 2001 December rising: ‘¡Que se vayan todos!’ (All must go!). This chapter focuses on fieldwork conducted in 2003 to 2005 in Mosconi, Salta province, in the extreme north of Argentina. The militant forms of resistance and productive alternatives elaborated by the UTD (Unión de Trabajadores Desocupados, Union of Unemployed Workers) during the second half of the 1990s came to be a celebrated example for other social movements across Argentina. A frontier zone

Heike Schaumberg • 201

par excellence, in this hydrocarbon- and export-driven, resource-rich agricultural region, the local population, both indigenous and nonindigenous, had to endure the most violent repressions in the recent history of the country, confronting the powerful capital interests of the multinational conglomerates and local political elites. I also draw on my research with the workers’ cooperative Chilavert in Pompeya, one of the oldest working-class neighbourhoods in the capital of Buenos Aires, to examine the significance of a politically engaged anthropology within broader political trends. Finally, I reflect upon the local academic community’s relationship with these movements to explore some of the tensions and possibilities for a politically engaged anthropology.

The Struggle for Work and Justice in the Land of ‘Black Gold’ Until 1991, the national oil company YPF (Yacimientos Petroleros Ficscales) had permanent employment opportunities for thousands of workers and was the country’s ‘biggest company’ in terms of its transactions. It also backed the country’s industrial development and social infrastructure. Established in 1922, YPF bolstered one of Latin America’s most extensive welfare systems throughout most of the second half of the twentieth century. During the 1989 election Menem pledged not to privatize YPF, famously referring to it as ‘the backbone of Argentina’. Upon taking office, with the trade union bureaucracy coopted through a ‘politics of compensation’ (Etchemendy 2001), Menem reneged on his electoral pledge and privatized YPF, dismissing 90 per cent of its workforce between 1991 and 1996. Mosconi, a town created to house YPF’s workforce, initially reflected these unemployment figures. A group of YPF workers began to organize against privatization, forming the Coordinadora Contra la Privatización (Organization Against Privatization). However, the three-stage privatization process, divisions amongst the workers, a coopted trade union hierarchy, and the hopes amongst some to join the ranks of a new entrepreneurial class all helped to isolate and frustrate efforts at effective resistance. Watchdog legislation was relaxed to attract foreign ‘investments’ in the sector. To this day the Argentine government has to trust the data provided by foreign oil companies on their daily oil extraction from Argentine soil. Early in 2004, the oil companies announced a nationwide energy crisis, which happened to coincide with government declarations that in deference to public opinion it would not lift the freeze on tariffs.

202 • Taking Sides in the Oilfields

Large-scale privatization in the early 1990s included a programme to form cooperatives that should absorb the workers who had been shed by the privatized industry. These cooperatives were usually formed by YPF’s lower-management personnel, who would then hire other workers. They provided services to the multinational oil companies and were thus trapped at once in a relationship of competition with each other and of dependency with the multinational oil companies. Moreover, they absorbed much of the workers’ indemnity money as a result of general misspending that attracted speculative entrepreneurs and businesses. Within the first few years after privatization, the vast majority of the approximately 140 cooperatives initially formed in Mosconi faced bankruptcy. Today only five barely survive. Workers and their families in the oil towns were left without alternative employment opportunities, while first-rate health care and social services previously available to the local population had essentially disappeared. YPF’s stern social hierarchy is still visibly structured into this frontier region’s landscape, but its inner boundaries between indigenous and Criollo, YPFiano (YPF workers) and nonYPFiano, male and female, have mutated and blurred since privatization. The puebladas (town uprisings) began in the country’s oil towns in the mid 1990s, giving birth to the piquetero (‘picketing’) movement, led by workers who had actively opposed YPF’s privatization in the late 1980s and early 1990s.They barricaded the roads with their bodies, often for several weeks, to demand work and economic assistance. Although roadblocks had occasionally accompanied labour struggles in the past,3 for unemployed workers strike is not an option, so the piquete was the logical alternative for effectively interrupting economic activities in the region and drawing attention to their plight. In Mosconi some fifteen unemployed YPF workers organized protests in 1996. They later formed the UTD. They occupied the municipality building for twenty three days and demanded urgent action to meet the town’s desperate social and economic needs. During my fieldwork, people in Mosconi recalled how ‘everyone participated’ in the subsequent uprisings and the massive roadblocks between 1997 and 1999. They organized jointly with inhabitants of the neighbouring town Tartagal. The increasingly violent state repressions from 1999 onwards produced a change in leadership, and the workers became prepared to employ physical resistance. At first, the UTD was led by Juan Nieva, a YPF worker and leading member of the Maoist organisation CCC (Corriente Clasista y Combativa, Class Fighting Front). Refusing to accept a watered-down offer by representatives from the province’s government, ‘Pepino’, a former YPF worker

Heike Schaumberg • 203

without political party allegiance, boldly returned to block the road. He has since become the ‘only leader’, on the grounds that everyone else is allegedly ‘equal’. Five people were killed in the repression of the roadblock on the national highway: Orlando Javier Justiniano (21), Alejandro Sebastián Gómez (19), Aníbal Verón (37), Antonio Santillán (27) and Oscar Barrios (17). The gendarmes (the National Guard) and police stormed the town and forced entry into people’s homes and into public buildings, such as the hospital and the church, where demonstrators sought refuge. In 2001, U.S.-trained snipers were employed against the protesters (Weekly News Update on the Americas 2001). Many inhabitants suffered permanent injuries. In 2001, however, the UTD successfully forced the National Guard into retreat and banned the police from their town for the following two years. The UTD’s advantage was its perseverance and commitment to collective struggle. People related to me how they had noted that the gendarmes had looked tired and struck by fear. The local and national media depicted the incident as a battle fought between pobre contra pobre (poor against poor), pointing out that the gendarmes and the piqueteros shared the same social background. The UTD and other sympathetic observers, however, remembered the public shaming of a local comisario (police commissioner). When the protesters took over the local police station in the riots, they found that important emergency relief that had been sent to the town to alleviate flood damage had been hoarded there. They captured the comisario, stripped him naked, exhibited him on a van and thus symbolically stripped him of his status and power. They finally released him in exchange for a compañero who had been arrested during the riots. These small victories, the worsening economic conditions, a strong provincial political system and the ongoing criminalization of social protest are woven into a complex fabric of local perceptions and political identities (Puntano 2004). The UTD became one of Argentina’s most significant ‘piquetero’ organizations. Initially it was the most proactive organization, attempting to appropriate the planes trabajar, workfare schemes distributed by the government since 1997 and backed by the World Bank. The planes served to create alternative forms of economic productive strategies. The UTD launched hundreds of small local projects, including huertas comunitarias (communal fruit and vegetable gardens), ladrilleras (brick manufacturing) and community building projects, such as schools and medical aid centres. They created a preschool nursery, an artisan project involving the local indigenous communities, and recently even appropriated a former YPF building

204 • Taking Sides in the Oilfields

and transformed it into a university. In 2004, the UTD coordinated almost 2,000 of the 8,000 planes in town, the remainder being coordinated mainly by the local municipality. However, the UTD’s hopes for creating an ‘alternative economy’ have been dashed by its dependence on the goodwill of the multinational oil companies and local government for tools and other materials to support these projects. For the beneficiaries, however, the planes have become the only means of subsistence.

After 2001: ‘The Same Stew, but with Different Ingredients’ To explain what happened next in Mosconi, it is necessary to return to the national political scene. The planes trabajar initially consisted of a monthly subsidy of, on average, US $220 per household.4 However, in 2002 the appointed Duhalde government reduced this to 150 pesos (approximately US $30). The justification for this drastic reduction was to make economic assistance available to a growing number of unemployed Argentinians. The state had essentially been bankrupted by massive capital flight just days before the government announced the Corralito5 in December 2001, placing severe limits on bank withdrawals. As the currency devalued in January 2002, so did people’s life savings and wages. Widespread labour flexibilization and unemployment depressed wages across the country’s productive sectors and pushed half of the population below the poverty line of 735 pesos a month. The average income of the employed fell to 645 pesos a month. Duhalde assumed the interim presidency in January 2002 following the popular insurgency in December 2001.The fatal repression at the bridge Puente Puyerredon in Buenos Aires on 26 June 2002 forced Duhalde to announce early elections. Horrifying pictures of children dying of hunger in the northern city of Tucuman filled the front pages of Argentina’s dailies and added to Duhalde’s misfortunes. In April 2003, the newly elected Kirchner government took office with a historically low 22 percent of the vote.6 Kirchner’s rapid moves to tackle corruption in the courts, police and military raised cautious popular hopes for change. As Chilavert, one of the clients of the workers’ cooperative, reflected: ‘We’ve been betrayed so many times, I don’t think there is anyone who will euphorically follow any leader with all-out support.’ It is important to note here that historically Argentina had, through Peronism, developed populist mobilisation into an unparalleled art to manage acute class conflicts.

Heike Schaumberg • 205

After the Corralito came to an end, some people retrieved at least a proportion of their savings. Initially this helped to restore a desire for getting on with ‘normal life’ by ‘working oneself out of poverty’. The government exploited this situation, suggesting that the piqueteros were a nuisance who made life difficult for those who had to get to their work, at a time when ‘you have to look after your work.’ The government claimed it would not repress the social movements, but would process the offenders through the legal system. It thus narrowed the meaning of repression and consequently criminalized social protest.7 The president’s ocular problem inspired cartoonists in Argentina’s national dailies to depict Kirchner with a double face, an insightful commentary on the Kirchner’s two-faced politics. While the Kirchner government did not break with the core of neoliberal thought, it would be a mistake not to take into account the changed circumstances that this government has so far skilfully manipulated. A friend of mine who was a leading member of the UTD fittingly described the new government as ‘the same stew, but with different ingredients’. The government’s double-sided politics had split the social movement organizations across the country into pro- and antiKirchner camps, with the divide often running through the middle of grassroots organisations.

Oiling the Wheels of Power: The Tecpetrol Incident After ten weeks’ absence, I returned to Mosconi from Buenos Aires in November 2003. The country had been in election mood all year. Presidential elections in March had been followed by provincial and local elections across the country. There were only days to go to the election in Salta and in Mosconi. On arrival, I learned that the UTD and the local Mesa Nacional de Ex-Trabajadores de YPF, a separate national network comprised of former YPF workers, some of whom were also active in the UTD, were about to take joint direct action. They were planning to block all the Refinor refineries in the county and the Tecpetrol administrative building in Mosconi. They demanded ‘genuine work’, the re-nationalization of the oil industry, the country’s control of its natural resources and the payment of the Argentine state’s outstanding debt to former YPF workers. As part of the privatization package, YPF workers had obtained shares that subsequently had ‘disappeared’ in the privatization process. Later it became known that the Argentine state had in fact sold the shares. The sixteen-day action coincided with the local elections, and tensions were running high. Remarkably, the Justicialista (the Peronist party) provincial government

206 • Taking Sides in the Oilfields

lost all the municipalities in San Martin to the right. The protest against the oil companies in Mosconi ended with Tecpetrol going up in flames the morning after the new local intendente (councillor) was confirmed. In response to the fire, the right-wing provincial daily El Tribuno immediately lent its pages to an arbitrary persecution of particular UTD members and did not hesitate to call them ‘criminals’. The national government’s ongoing divisive strategies against social movements, especially against the organizations of the unemployed, encouraged deepening local divisions and increasing opposition to the UTD. The UTD was cut off from access to materials and expenses, and became increasingly isolated. Morale fell among the members. As fear of reprisals began to dissipate in town during the next few months, a different picture slowly began to emerge. Rumour had it that Tecpetrol had moved vanloads of papers from the building prior to the fire. One observer who was not aligned with the UTD related in a conversation that he had seen odd activities on the Tecpetrol site the evening before it burned down. The local non-official radio station8 reported that, unusually in this conflicted region, Mosconi had been a military free zone on the night of the fire. Much confusion evolved as people tried to reconstruct what had actually occurred. Public claims and rumours, spread by particular actors attempting to gain politically or materially from the unfolding events, added to the confusion. It was confirmed, then, that Tecpetrol had gone up in flames at around eight o’clock in the morning, and that the police did not appear on the scene until the evening. By that time, mainly young children had looted what they could from the burning building. In the following weeks, a number of UTD members were arrested. The arrests appeared to follow the publication of names in El Tribuno, but there were also people from the town denouncing their UTD neighbours. Ten people were imprisoned for two months. Some, protesting their innocence, are at the time of writing still awaiting trial for arson, which can carry a fifteen-year jail sentence. Interestingly, only days after the incident President Kirchner announced that the giant oil group Techint9 was the successful bidder in a multimillion dollar expansion project. Rumours circulated that Tecpetrol had wanted for some time to cancel its local agreements in order to move its administrative offices to a different location, and it can be reasonably assumed that they had the building insured. After the privatization of YPF, local social, health and educational establishments have increasingly depended on locally operating transnational oil companies for basic resources. Local schools receive book donations and paint from Tecpetrol, not from the Ministry of Education. The costs of emergency transfers to the main local hospital

Heike Schaumberg • 207

in neighbouring Tartagal are covered by agreements with various oil companies, and the UTD receives seeds and tools for its planes projects from the oil companies. The case of Mosconi illustrates how both economic and political power have been transferred from the state to transnational capital. The Tecpetrol incident attracted national media coverage. Renationalizing Argentina’s industry and regaining control of its natural resources has since become a key demand of grassroots organizations across the country.

Negotiating Grassroots Politics: To Speak or Not to Speak In fieldwork at meetings of activist groups, I usually only exchanged ideas with ‘trusted’ individuals. However, on occasion I contributed to communal debates, as the following account of the UTD’s conflict with the municipality in Mosconi outlines. In search of employment opportunities, the UTD had negotiated that the municipality, now controlled by the Partido Renovador, would employ 114 people to carry out streetcleaning and other municipal services. It was agreed that the municipality would pay the normal ‘overtime’ rate set at 1.70 pesos per hour. For the UTD, accepting the ‘overtime’ payment as a flat rate was a way of getting its members ‘on the books’, in other words, officially employed. However, this completely transformed the concept of overtime pay, as this became the sole income and was not paid in addition to a basic wage. Furthermore, two weeks into the agreement, the local councillor lowered the payment to 1.40 pesos and then stopped paying it altogether. When the UTD protested in March 2004, the councillor denied that any agreement existed, as no papers had been signed. However, the affected UTD members had already been working for two months and felt they were owed two months’ pay. No action had been taken sooner, as delayed pay is not uncommon in Argentina. Yet people seemed demoralized and indecisive. The Tecpetrol incident had taken its toll on inhabitants in Mosconi generally, and the UTD in particular. They knew that this was unjust, but felt they could do little because they had no signed agreement. During some of the gatherings in the UTD10 I suggested that it seemed that whereas the councillor was denying that there was such an agreement, he had in fact paid workers for at least two weeks. Was this not sufficient proof that an agreement existed? If there truly had been no agreement, would he have paid at all? In any case, it was one thing for people to work ‘for free’ in a grassroots organization like the UTD on the basis of political or personal

208 • Taking Sides in the Oilfields

commitment, and quite another for a state employer to promote unpaid labour – surely other people in town would identify with their claim? I commented on how this fitted into the wider picture of ever decreasing wages in the country. Around this time, the local official radio began speaking up against the municipality, calling upon the municipality to pay its debt to the workers. In the end, those affected did stage protests outside the municipality, and indeed received support from the local community. In July the municipality paid up, although it did so at the lower rate of 1.40 pesos.

Speaking Up When the anthropologist’s opinion is invited in a public meeting, should she keep her thoughts to herself or should the people she works with be able to scrutinize, learn from and question her understanding at the time when it matters? Whilst it is risky to lay open to scrutiny opinions that may be the result of an on-going analysis, this also allows for analytical progress on the basis of collective debate and clarification. ‘Influencing’ and ‘being influenced’ are to some extent unavoidable. Acknowledging this ‘reciprocal’ nature of what is usually termed ‘dialogue’ can achieve greater analytical transparency and enhance the researcher’s objectivity. The UTD would no doubt have contested the municipality’s injustice without my contribution. Yet, I imagine my contribution encouraged them to stake their claim at a time when morale was very low and mobilization slow. I believe this example highlights how politically engaged fieldwork can help support justified local claims. It also shows how the public voicing of views can be not only more appropriate, but also more effective than individual discussion. There are limits to possible intervention, however, and after the Tecpetrol incident there were some difficult trade-offs to negotiate. A human rights lawyer who represented hundreds of social movement and political activists in northern Argentina free of charge reminded me that it was important to ‘speak out’. Although I was sympathetic to her argument, I was also aware that this was research in progress and I did not feel particularly confident about, for instance, dealing with hostile local media. I did not always successfully escape a public audience when put on the spot by eager journalists. I kept thinking about how I could address this issue without unwittingly putting others or myself at risk at a time when national attention was focused on Mosconi and many individuals I knew faced criminal charges. I became

Heike Schaumberg • 209

aware that the hegemonic notion of ‘violence’ that accompanied the ‘criminalization’ of the piquetero movement was not challenged in public or at the grassroots in any sort of coherent way. I agreed to an interview with the University of Salta radio and decided to problematize the notion of violence, with particular reference to how it was generated in neoliberal society. I avoided referring directly to the incident in Mosconi and extended the discussion beyond the specific events there. I believe that I thereby helped move the debate on to questions about the violence and demonization of grassroots actors that tend to accompany many violent processes in conflict zones. Subaltern resistance movements and struggles that have evolved under the conditions of neoliberalism increasingly reflect the sufferings and violence their communities endure. They are conditioned by local and global political agendas that seek to either obliterate or take advantage of embryonic oppositional political configurations and to galvanize divisions. These are difficult conditions, and scholars should, now more than ever, seek ways to speak with a critical voice. Anthropologists working in frontline zones are in a crucial position to bear witness to complex political dynamics, and to incorporate into that witnessing a knowledge of cause and implication unavailable to a less integrated observer (Hoffman 2003: 10).

Formative Research Towards the end of my fieldwork, I organized small group discussions. Here, three interrelated topics were discussed: democratic participation and organization, work and violence. The aim was to generate a discussion between all participants in the group, including the researcher. The data I obtained were quite different from any other I had gathered. The discussions allowed for the identification of otherwise unspoken or unconscious differences and agreements among a particular group. Beyond the topics discussed, the processes involved were themselves of analytical interest and allowed ethnographic explorations of otherwise obscure subtleties. In Mosconi I organized a discussion with a group of women working in a plastic recycling unit (la botellera), one of the many projects designed and run by the UTD. The discussion focused on the processes involved in this productive project and the daily work experience of the women. It addressed questions of health and safety in a hazardous work environment. At one point, one of the young women enthusiastically and half-jokingly jumped onto the table and made an inflammatory speech in which she denounced the multinational corporations and

210 • Taking Sides in the Oilfields

explained what was wrong with the politics of oil. Her compañeras were delighted and called her ‘Pepina!’ in reference to the UTD’s main leader ‘Pepino’. Their disillusionment with limited participation in decisionmaking processes and with some aspects of the UTD leadership emerged clearly from this, even though they contextualized this within what they saw as a more widely deteriorating political situation. Comparing the UTD’s projects with the municipality’s handling of the planes, they celebrated their more egalitarian collective work ethic. More importantly for the purpose of this chapter, after the discussion they expressed surprise at the knowledge and ideas they now realized they had. The discussion had succeeded in raising these women’s awareness and confidence about their knowledge and their ability to articulate it. A discussion I organized in my second field locality in Buenos Aires was quite different. The participants were nine workers who had taken over their print-shop (Cooperativa Imprenta Gráfica Chilavert) when the owner announced bankruptcy early in 2002. Other casual visitors and some of the college students who conducted their practical learning there unexpectedly came to listen, which inhibited the workers to some extent. This was also a particularly tense moment more generally, as the state’s temporary appropriation of the print-shop to the workers’ control was about to expire in October 2004 and the workers did not know whether they would lose their print-shop altogether. It became clear during the discussions that the workers’ own personal fears about their future were closely tied in with the fate of the cooperative. The workers recognized that they needed to speak openly with one another. As one of the workers noted, ‘There is no space in this work to have this [type of] dialogue’. On reflection, the workers afterwards considered the practice of debate useful for their own purpose of shaping consensus and confronting collectively some of the issues they would otherwise simply try to avoid. Before, they had refused to hold regular assemblies on the grounds that they were a small group and were in ‘permanent assembly’. They now hold regular asambleas, thus creating a space for collective discussion. As it turned out, the Cooperativa Chilavert was one of the thirteen workers’ cooperatives that qualified for permanent appropriation in November 2004,11 on condition that they repay the company’s outstanding debt to the state over a period of twenty years.

Heike Schaumberg • 211

Reflections on Political Engagement Instead of speaking on behalf of ‘dispossessed’ or ‘marginalized’ groups, politically engaged anthropology can enhance the organically existing capacity at the grassroots by contributing with more global perspectives and solidarity. The form this takes depends on where and when it is appropriate to one’s research and political commitments. The fine line between research interests and overt commitment must be negotiated throughout the research process. For most Argentinian scholars the notion of a ‘disinterested analysis’ appears a luxury. The 2001 crisis affected academics’ own lives and prospects in dramatic ways. What is inspiring about a new generation of social scientists is precisely their attempt to come to grips with reality and to position themselves within it. In Argentina, investigador militante (activist researcher) has become a familiar term. Developing this further, Mazzeo suggests that:’ activism is key… [T]he activist assumes a dialectical role which blurs the supposed externality… one thinks from the interior of the subject, from the nucleus of the everyday, the association and the struggle, and thus contributes to the accumulation of social and political experience at the grassroots’ (Mazzeo 2004: 24). There are many examples of how local academics and educational establishments relate directly to events as they unfold. An ‘Open University’ program (Facultad Abierta) run by anthropology and other social science students and staff at the University of Buenos Aires, aims to foster a close relationship between the public university and the movements of workers’ cooperatives. They support these workers in the collection of materials, offer training programs, create archives in the factories, co-convene joint forums for debate, and participate in discussing strategies and solutions to imminent problems. The scholars also attend demonstrations and factory occupations. They practice solidarity and are simultaneously observers. Research and political interests combine. Workers and grassroots activists clearly welcome these educational efforts and co-develop such formative engagements. The workers’ cooperative Chilavert, in Buenos Aires, has many visits by school students. These are organized by the local school to enable pupils to learn about the wider contexts of work in this cooperative. An arts college had agreements with Chilavert through which its students could undertake their practical training in Chilavert and their work would be assessed by two of the workers. Over the past few years, a large number of conferences and gatherings have taken place, involving activists, scholars, students and other professionals in debates about strategies and objectives. This is of enormous significance.

212 • Taking Sides in the Oilfields

Scholars are no longer simply commentators on events, but contribute to how these events evolve. They help define the questions posed and the solutions sought through a dialectical encounter between professional and experience-based knowledge. Understanding the academy as ‘political’ is not new in Argentina, as is attested by the high number of exiled and ‘disappeared’ psychologists and anthropologists in particular during the last military regime (Coutin and Hirsch 1998). Argentinian scholars tend to know almost instinctively that there is a relationship between theory, practice, and politics. For instance, students and scholars in Argentina mobilized in the early months of 2006 against Professor Alterini’s candidacy for vice chancellor of the University of Buenos Aires. Alterini was perceived to have been complicit with the last military regime. Students and scholars petitioned the electoral assembly and occupied their meeting chamber four times to prevent his election. Professor Alterini withdrew his candidacy. While scholars in Argentina demand democratization of the unfair electoral system, the UK academic community can only be envious of even such limited democratic practices. Even at this limited level, the Argentinian academic community can contest, debate, mobilize and, crucially, decide on the fate and nature of university leadership. This might be an important reason why Argentina still has an accessible public university system, despite the crisis and fierce neoliberalization elsewhere in society. The university might lack certain comforts that northern students are accustomed to and no doubt there are many problems, but educational and research activities, including those involving social movements such as the workers’ cooperatives, still seem to be prioritized over state-of-the-art conference venues hired out at commercial rates.

The Challenge at Home My suggestion that Argentinian university life offers positive lessons for scholars elsewhere would stun most of my academic friends in Argentina, given that large numbers of Argentinians have left for the U.S. and Europe. Yet, my work in Argentina has made me reflect on university life in Britain. Anthropological practices must be placed within their institutional context. To do otherwise ignores the insights offered by Gramsci, Bourdieu and others into the academy as an institution that reproduces societal structures of power, hierarchy and control (Bourdieu 2003; Gramsci 1971; Nash 1975).

Heike Schaumberg • 213

Collective political engagement and reflection, however, have become increasingly difficult in today’s British universities. Seminars are crowded with growing numbers of students struggling to combine poverty with academic achievement. Their lecturers are stressed and alienated by an ‘audit culture’ (Strathern 2000), and the competitive strain of the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) leaves faculties wrestling with employment insecurity. A recently published Association of University Teachers report makes for scary reading about the state of the U.K.’s academic community: stress levels for academic and related staff are higher than for other professional groups, as well as for the population as a whole. While funds are insufficient, we are told, British universities have responded to the ‘massification’ of higher education by creating a string of top administrative posts while keeping tenured lectureships and administrative support to a minimum. This has, for instance, led to the closure of seventy-nine science and technology departments within six years. Debates surrounding applied anthropology serve well to illustrate the political tensions within the discipline. In many ways such tensions testify to a market-driven culture (see e.g., Evans 2001; Gledhill 2002; Shore and Wright 1999; Strathern 2000). Whereas in numerous instances anthropologists undertake consultancy work – often linked to advocacy – to aid ‘subaltern’ groups, the majority of consultancy work tends to be paid for by those who can afford to employ an anthropologist and who are likely to be interested in controlling the research data. Researchers committed to the ‘subaltern’ tend to be questioned on their ethics and methods most fiercely by their peers. Ian Harper (Pettigrew, Shneiderman and Harper 2004) describes the antagonism he and his colleagues faced when they signed a petition against U.S. military aid to the Nepali state and its fight against the Maoist ‘insurgency’. This was at a time when Nepal’s rate of violent deaths topped the world rankings. Colleagues argued that by signing such a petition, the researchers had ‘overtly interfered with the workings of the Nepali state and overstepped the appropriate boundaries of foreign academic engagement’. Harper rightly points out that becoming ‘explicitly and intentionally complicit with certain political agendas has the benefit of being overt and thereby creating an arena for debate. Perhaps it is wiser to be explicitly complicit, whenever possible, than to be assigned complicity by default in the wake of silence’ (ibid. 2004: 25). Arguably, such explicit complicity is what makes anthropology dangerous for some. Today, many of our research participants are connected in diverse ways with wider global networks of activists and organizations, where

214 • Taking Sides in the Oilfields

ideas and analyses are circulated and debated, resolutions taken and acted upon. This demands analytical attention to the ways in which these struggles are embedded in wider global political fields. The global anticapitalist movement epitomizes this, but there are others too, such as international trade union federations and NGO networks. Political engagement solely restricted to fieldwork smacks of superiority and the exoticizing of struggles and resistance elsewhere. Consistent political engagement beyond our research locality and topic will provide insights that can support the urgent task of defending human rights.

Notes 1. Most ‘disappearances’ took place in the first couple of years of the military regime. Persecutions and ‘extrajudicial’ killings, however, began as early as 1974 under the ‘chaotic’ governance of Isabel Perón (James 1988; Pozzi 1988). 2. Unemployment figures rose from 9.3 to 18.6 per cent between 1993 and 1995 (Cook 2002). Since the devaluation in 2002, and according to the National Census INDEC (2001), half of the Argentine population subsists below the poverty line, and a quarter of this sector lives in destitution. 3. Besides roadblocks being a familiar sight in miners’ struggles in neighbouring Bolivia, YPF workers resorted to this method in the nearby town of Aguaray in 1985, to demand that the construction of a petrochemical plant went ahead to secure jobs, as job inheritance for YPF workers’ kin had been eroded. 4. The subsidy differed from province to province. 5. The Corralito, introduced in December 2001, stringently limited cash withdrawals from banks. Indeed, when Argentina’s best known football match reporter failed to convince the authorities to free his cash for urgent medical treatment, he died shortly before the World Cup in 2002, where he was supposed to report on the Argentine national team. In a football-crazy country like Argentina, this came to symbolize the dramatic situation that affected so many ordinary people that year. 6. The highest-ever percentage of the population voted in this election, but results were extraordinarily dispersed across the board. It was popularly suggested that ‘the people’ voted, but voted for ‘no one’ in particular. 7. According to human rights organizations such as Correpi, there have been more than 5,000 legal prosecutions against social movement activists, 24 of whom are imprisoned (Gilbert 2004). Since the end of 2003, there have been violent repressions in Mosconi, Neuquen and Caleta Olivia, an oil town in the southern province of St. Cruz, with house-to-house police chases and arrests resembling the experiences of repression in Gral. E. Mosconi. This discrepancy between events and Kirchner’s stance against violent repression seems to confirm that in the localities where important transnational companies operate, they define the local political agenda. 8. The station was set up by two former YPF workers and was a critical voice against the Justicialista party. It played a crucial role for the community in reporting on the repressions in Mosconi. As a result, the radio station was frequently the object of organized robberies and threats. In 2003, the radio’s journalist legally denounced Karanicola, the then Intendente Justicialista, for personally threatening his life in his own home.

Heike Schaumberg • 215

9. According to the company’s own website, Tecpetrol is amongst the six top oil companies in Argentina and is ‘fully owned by the Techint Group’. Retrieved 18 July 2005 from http://www.techintgroup.com/product/oilandgas.html 10. By now there were few general asambleas; most decisions were now taken in ‘spontaneous’ gatherings of specific groups within the UTD or particular leaders. This interesting issue is beyond this paper’s remit. Suffice it to say, the experience of clientelism and political mediation in asambleas contributed to marginalizing assembly practices. 11. In legal terms, the Argentinian case is quite unique. The workers’ cooperative movement eventually won the legal and political battle for the state to expropriate companies in the process of bankruptcy, but without the state retaining control of these companies. Instead, the state will pass over to the workers’ cooperatives the control and collective ownership of the means of production. Some of the workers’ cooperatives had negotiated a two-year temporary appropriation in Buenos Aires. The ‘law of bankruptcy’ has had to be amended to enable permanent appropriation. However, this legislation is only applicable to the capital of Buenos Aires.

References Bourdieu, P. 2003. 'Colonialism and Ethnography: Foreword to Pierre Bourdieu's Travail et travailleurs en Algerie', Anthropology Today 19(2): 13–18. Cook, M. L. 2002. 'Labor Reform and Dual Transitions in Brazil and the Southern Cone', Latin American Politics and Society 44(1): 1–34. Coutin, S. B. and S. F. Hirsch. 1998. 'Naming Resistance: Ethnographers, Dissidents, and States', Anthropological Quarterly 71(1): 1–16. Etchemendy, S. 2001. 'Constructing Reform Coalitions: The Politics of Compensations in Argentina's Economic Liberalization', Latin American Politics and Society 43(3): 1–35. Evans, G. 2001. 'The Integrity of UK Academic Research Under Commercial Threat', Science as Culture 10(1): 97–112. Giarracca, N. and M. Teubal. 2004. ‘¡Que se vayan todos! Neoliberal collapse and Social Protest in Argentina’, in J. Demmers, A. Fernández and B. Hogenboom (eds), Good Governance in the Era of Global Neoliberalism. London: Routledge, pp. 66–90. Giddens, A. 1998. The Third Way. London: Polity Press. Gilbert, I. 2004. 'La Republica', 14 December, Montevideo. Retrieved from http://www.socialismo-o-barbarie.org/argentinazo/041219_b_presos.htm. Gledhill, J. 2002. ‘A Small Discipline: The Embattled Place of Anthropology in a Massified British Higher Education Sector’, in W. Lem and B. Leach (eds), Culture, Economy, Power: Anthropology as Critique, Anthropology as Praxis. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 73–87. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hoffman, D. 2003. ‘Frontline Anthropology: Research in a Time of War’, Anthropology Today 19(3): 9–12. INDEC. 2001. Censo Nacional de Poblacion, Hogares y Viviendas. Retrieved March 2007 from http://www.salta.gov.ar/estadisticas/censo2001/municipio/660000C21.htm. James, D. 1988. Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentinian Working Class 1946–1976. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press. Lindisfarne, N. 2004. 'The Paradigms of People Power', Times Higher Educational Supplement, 8 October, 23.

216 • Taking Sides in the Oilfields

Mazzeo, M. 2004. Piqueteros: Notas para una tipología. Buenos Aires: Fundación de Investigaciones Sociales y Políticas. MTD de Solano, C. S. 2002. Más allá de los Piquetes: La Hipótesis 891. Buenos Aires: Ediciones De mano en mano. Nash, J. 1975. 'Nationalism and Fieldwork', Annual Review of Anthropology 4: 225–245. Pettigrew, J., S. Shneiderman and I. Harper. 2004. ‘Ethics of Research in Conflict Zones’, Anthropology Today 20(1): 20–25. Pozzi, P. 1988. Oposición Obrera A La Dictaduar. Buenos Aires: Editorial Contrapunto. Puntano, M. 2004. 'Avance de la criminalización de la protesta social en la provincia de Salta durante la gestión de Kirschner'. Retrieved 15 January 2005 from www.copenoa.com.ar. Shore, C. and S. Wright. 1999. ‘Audit Culture and Anthropology: Neoliberalism in British Higher Education’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5(4) : 557–575. Strathern, M. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy. London: Routledge. Weekly News Update On The Americas. 24 June 2001. 'Argentina: Two Killed at Highway Blockade'. New York: Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York.

Chapter 9

RANTING AND SILENCE: THE CONTRADICTIONS OF WRITING FOR ACTIVISTS AND ACADEMICS Jonathan Neale

It is not easy to be both an academic and an activist. The values, the audiences and the constraints are different. Sitting down to write, you can feel yourself pulled in two different ways. The result is often muddled thinking and murky prose. There is too much ranting for an academic audience, and too much gobbledygook for the activists. In many cases, there is no prose at all, only silence, and pages crumpled in the wastebasket or erased on the screen. This chapter is about coping with the tensions that work to silence the activist academic, and offers some suggestions about how to write up fieldwork. I originally trained as an anthropologist, and there is some anthropology in this chapter. I have been an activist for over thirty years, and there is a lot of politics here. However, I am also a professional writer and a university lecturer in creative writing, so this chapter is mainly about writing. It is a ‘how to’ piece. While some readers may find the tone too left-wing, I think it is appropriate to my aim – to address directly the problems of radical anthropologists. My hope is that it will also be useful to other graduate students in the social

218 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

sciences and teachers on the left. I have presumed a good deal of common ground with this audience. I begin in traditional anthropological fashion with my fieldwork. My purpose is to explain the desperation and suffering of the people I studied, and the rage I felt. I then follow my career back to London, and the ways I found it difficult to turn pain and anger into anthropology. After that, I look at the differences between writing for activists and for academics, and consider the forces that confuse and muffle radical voices in the universities. Finally I suggest ways of coping and turning out good work for both the movements and the universities.

Fieldwork and Writing Up Between 1971 and 1973 I did fieldwork with Afghans who had once been nomads, but had fallen on hard times and become yoghurt peddlers in the city. By the time I came back to London to write up my thesis, I was filled with sadness and rage. I could not write. My head was full of memories. The people I studied were poor. I remembered Shin Gul, a teenage boy, so proud to have his picture taken astride his father’s bicycle. Father and son worked together every day, loading that bike with yoghurt cans and pushing it to shops all over the city. When the yoghurt was unloaded, his father let Shin Gul ride the bike back, a hero hurtling through the busy streets to their camp by the animal market on the edge of town. Father and son were gentle with each other. Shin Gul was noisy, enthusiastic, his father always in the background, as tall as his son, quietly proud. Shin Gul worried about girls, constantly checking his face in the small mirror on his snuff tin. All men did that, but Shin Gul more than most. His family was so poor he might find it difficult to marry. Nomads, even impoverished former nomads like these, commonly paid a bride price as high as thirty thousand Afghanis – a labourer’s wage for five years. Other, more wealthy nomads with flocks would defer part of the payment or take it in kind; often, continuing political links between their families were cemented by marriage. The people I knew had no such links, and the money was everything. They paid all of it in cash before the wedding. Even though they were poor, the bride price for a pretty young woman remained as high as among rich nomads, because a family’s vending income was now enhanced by a wife attracting customers by flirting with truck drivers and other men on the street. Shin Gul had a younger sister of about eleven, a beautiful, laughing child, a desirable future wife. Shin Gul’s parents had arranged an

Jonathan Neale • 219

exchange marriage. When all the children were old enough, Shin Gul’s little sister would marry a neighbour’s son, and that boy’s sister, Pkhe, would marry Shin Gul. This was how poor people coped when they could not afford marriage payments. Pkhe was old enough to marry already. Shin Gul showed me a secret picture of her. We both looked at it, thinking – beautiful. Pkhe did not fancy Shin Gul at all and spoke of him dismissively. And if even I knew this, he must have known it too. I guessed it was because he was so poor, and gauche. He was always embarrassed by what he did not have, and so boasted of unimportant things like his bicycle, and seemed more gauche. No wonder he kept checking his face in the little mirror. I liked Shin Gul a lot. We chatted at other people’s homes or on the path, never in his family’s white canvas tent. For a long time he did not invite my wife Liz and me to his tent. Hospitality was important to these people, proud of their nomad and Pushtun heritage. But it was also an anxious moment, because only the richest families among the yoghurt sellers could afford to treat us with a single fried egg, or proudly place a potato in my bowl of stew. Shin Gul’s father was not that rich. But after some months, they finally invited us to their tent. I expected tea, which his father offered and we accepted. He handed me a small cup with flowers on it. Then the father looked at my wife and remembered it was his only cup. He hit his son, hard, with an open palm across the side of the head, and told him to go the neighbours and borrow a cup. The eyes of both father and son filled with tears held back – the father, over the humiliation, and the son, because his father hit him. Shin Gul scuttled from the tent and was back in no time with another cup. We made quiet conversation. I remembered their shame as I tried to write at my desk in London. And I remembered what poverty did to Shin Gul’s uncle, Khodai Nur. He was the oldest of three brothers whose shared household was the third richest in the yoghurt sellers’ camp. The two richest households among the yoghurt sellers still had sheep; Khodai Nur and his brothers did not. But their yoghurt peddling did well, they owned one camel, they had married off four sisters and they had a good sideline in lending money to poor farmers. The main reason they had managed so well was that they had kept the joint household together thanks to Khodai Nur, with his trim white beard, his dark skin and kindly face. The next brother was a big man, loud, fun, a joker, sometimes a bully, sometimes a fool, and a good friend to me. A newcomer not ‘in the know’ would think he was the head of household, not Khodai Nur. The youngest brother was big too, with a fierce temper, wild. He would crawl through the alleys of the camp at night on his belly, sneaking towards his lovers, edging his family towards feuds they could not

220 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

possibly afford. It was Khodai Nur who kept them together because he did not compete with his brothers and did not pick fights. ‘He’s kind,’ his sisters said, ‘a good man’. ‘He never beats his wife,’ they said. There was no honour in his quiet goodness, no renown or reward, but the women noticed. Each brother had two wives. Khodai Nur’s brothers had many children, smiling, running, boys and girls in bright clothes. They were here one minute and had vanished the next – to watch a traffic accident, steal a caged bird, pick clover for stew, roll a hoop. Khodai Nur’s first wife had had many children, all stillborn except one daughter whose hips were broken at birth; she could move only in a squat. People said such a daughter could not satisfy Khodai Nur’s desire for children, but would then correct themselves, because of course she was a human being, and he loved her. Yet her injury meant she could not marry, they said; somehow she was not a full person and could not fill the hole in his heart. Khodai Nur took a second wife, a young woman. Neither was she able to give him live children. One night he was sitting by the fire with his first wife, and something went wrong between them. He plucked a burning branch out of the fire and hit her with it, saying things about the dead children. His sisters said it was very wrong of him, that he had never done anything like that before; it was a sign of his pain and desperation. After this night his first wife left Khodai Nur and went to live with her relatives in Baluchistan four hundred miles away, taking their grown disabled daughter with her. Khodai Nur did not know if he would ever see them again. Maybe she would come back, or maybe her relatives would eventually send a couple of men to negotiate some small compensation for divorce. The secret police would not let me live with the yoghurt sellers, so I visited them near the animal market every day. One summer morning I came to Khodai Nur’s tent on the edge of the city. Khodai Nur was sitting by the empty yoghurt pans, alone. He told me his brothers had gone into the city to sell yoghurt. His second wife had given birth the evening before, and the child had died. ‘I am capsized,’ he said. His brothers had told him to pray: God gives, they said, and God takes away. Khodai Nur told me he had prayed each time a child of his had died. God gives, God takes away, blessed be God, he had prayed. But this time he could not. ‘Does God want me to have no children?’ he said. There were no tears, and his voice was steady. Not flat, not empty – steady. I had no idea how to console him. So I said a few polite things and left, not to intrude further. I went back to my rented house and wrote up my notes about attitudes to death. Then, and later, I could not bear watching pain and only writing notes. I was growing angry too. Every manual job paid the same 500

Jonathan Neale • 221

Afghanis a month, just enough to buy bread and nothing else for two adults and two children. Sharecroppers got a third or a fifth of the crop, which came to the same thing. The fear of the secret police was everywhere. I hated them, because they kept disrupting my fieldwork. The people I worked with feared them. A jerk of the head or quick finger tapping the nose would alert me to the entrance of an informer. Some years before, after a man had been robbed and killed near the nomad camp at the edge of the city, the police came to the tent of Khodai Nur’s sister and took her husband away for questioning. He had not done anything; it was just general suspicion. The next day they brought his body back and simply dropped it on the ground in front of her. It bounced a bit. The stomach was ripped open and the whole front beaten black. They told her he had died of eating bad watermelon in the police station. Years later, what she minded, and feared, was not that they had beaten him to death. It was the disrespect they had showed towards his body, and the joke about the watermelon. Other things made me angry too. I managed to get one of Khodai Nur’s nephews into the TB hospital. Once he was there, he had to bribe the doctors to get the medicines, and the nurses and orderlies insisted on small bribes before they would feed him. He and his fellow patients, thin angry men sitting around his bed in the summer sunlight, told me about this. I asked why such things happened. ‘Afghanistan, Zulumistan,’ they said, a proverb: ‘The land of the Afghans, the land of tyranny.’ Then they smiled – what else could you do. From the 1950s to the 1970s King Zahir Shah’s dictatorship was backed by the United States and the Soviet Union. In Kabul we kept meeting refugees from the famine in the north of the country. My friend Michael Barry, half French and half American, was writing a travel book (Barry 1974). He rode his horse through the villages of the north. There was food aid going north, and Barry found the district officers making great piles of grain in the centres of the towns, surrounded by soldiers. They sold the grain at many times the customary rate. The farmers sold their land to the rich merchants so they could eat, and the people without land died. Barry asked some peasants why they did not simply storm the piles of grain. ‘The king has planes,’ they said, ‘and they will come and shoot and bomb us.’ This was true. Those planes were Soviet MIGs, and the pilots were trained in Texas. Barry went and told the head of the US aid mission what was happening. The man did nothing.1 The eyes of a five-year-old boy stay with me still. He was not a famine victim, just one of the nomads. I saw him one morning carrying an empty oil tin full of watermelon rinds on his back. Khodai Nur explained to me that the boy’s father was dead and his mother had

222 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

gone mad. She just sat in front of her tent all day, staring into space doing nothing. That depression, that giving up, is a common madness among the Afghan poor. So the boy was the only support for his family. Every day he went to the melon sellers in the fruit bazaar. They gave him the rinds that were left after they scooped out all the fruit for their customers. Then the boy took them round the camp and sold them to anyone with a goat. Khodai Nur had one goat. He said he bought a load off the boy most days for one Afghani. The goat did not really eat the rinds, but the child needed the money. I watched the child, and he watched me. I have never seen such blankness behind the eyes. I came home to London and sat down at my typewriter to write up my thesis. Nothing happened.

Writing Up My silence was overdetermined. The secret police had interrupted my research several times, so my fieldnotes were thin. Liz had left me just as the fieldwork ended, so I cried every time I tried to read my fieldnotes. My sadness at the desk was also the sadness of the people I had studied. I was consumed by a rage at their suffering, and at the global system that caused it. There seemed no way to fit that rage into the narrow bed of mainstream anthropology. I wanted to change the world, and I could not even write my thesis. It would be a mistake to ask whether the causes of my silence in 1973 were political or personal. That kind of silence is always produced by many forces. The question is not whether your difficulty is your fault or the system’s. In practice, it is always both. However, it is hard to remember that from inside an anxiety storm about writing. When graduate students sit down to write they often feel worthless and inadequate. One has to wonder about an education system that produces students who feel that way. But they do, as do so many other writers. That feeling of uselessness, the personal problems and the holes in your life – these are normal. People who write have to write through them. But I had other difficulties too. ‘My people’ did not fit with how anthropologists wrote about the Middle East in 1973. They wrote of tribes, power and honour. In the months I listened, my people used the word ‘honour’ only once. They used the word ‘shame’ every day. ‘We eat shame,’ they said. And ‘my people’ were not ‘a people’ like those of other anthropologists. Although they had a tribal name, they were really a collection of human beings of various ethnic origins, trying to get by. I wanted to write about poverty, suffering, the world of those

Jonathan Neale • 223

with nothing – the world of the majority of Afghans. I wrote a seminar paper on poverty. My teachers and fellow students seemed to like it, but let me know it ‘wasn’t anthropology’. It was more like journalism, they said. It was too angry. Times have changed. Now I would be allowed to write a whole thesis of reflexive self-obsession about how I could not cope with the poverty of others. I might be encouraged to whine about my white guilt. It would probably even be possible to write about the global economic forces that impoverished the people I watched. These days, I would only begin to run into trouble if I talked about American imperialism, or said I hope the Afghans drive the Americans out. A lot more topics are open, but not if the writer is too angry. Even today, the reflexive turn allows some feelings and forbids others. Indecision, guilt, confusion, identity politics and moralism are encouraged. The key injunction in the reflexive turn is to make the native other, and then wallow in discomfort about difference. Commitment, identification with the oppressed, solidarity, rage and political economy are discouraged.

Academic Marxism I struggled with my thesis and lost, but I did not stop thinking. I was in a Marxist study group with other graduate students in anthropology. It was 1973, and we were young veterans of the 1960s, the antiwar movement and the student occupations. All of us had recently returned shaking from fieldwork in the third world. We wanted to do something, so we studied Marx, trying to apply his ideas to our theses. The study group were nice people, and we had a good time. Kate had some friends with a villa in the Chianti vineyards of Tuscany. In the spring, they let us use it free for two weeks. In the mornings we read Marx’s Capital together,2 taking turns reading two or three paragraphs aloud. Then someone would say ‘I don’t understand this’; someone else did not understand that. We would chew on it together till we did understand, and then another person would read the next passage. It was a good way of learning. We took turns making lunch with olive oil and strange Italian vegetables. We had red wine with the meal, and some dope. All this was new and cool then. In the afternoons some of us would drive to see old Sienna or Arezzo. The international athlete among us stripped to his sarong and practiced throwing the discus amidst the vineyards while the farmers watched in fascination. Of the eight in our group, six were couples falling in love. Then we read some more Capital in the early evening. The local communist party officials

224 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

admired us for being Marxist intellectuals. They were middle-aged, serious men, mostly workers in the hat factory before they became party full-timers. They loaned us their car, and came over one night and showed us the slides of their holiday in Cuba. Back home in London, we finished Volume One and went on to read the French Marxist philosophers Althusser and Balibar (1970). They were much harder to understand than Marx, partly because Marx is just very clear, but also, I think, because Marx is honest. We were looking for revolution in Marx, we found it, and we understood him. We were looking for it in Althusser too but couldn’t find it, so we had difficulty making sense of what he was saying. Balibar’s work was easier, partly because he was also an anthropologist. He focused our attention on a problem in anthropology – how to understand ‘the articulation of modes of production’. We had started out trying to understand capitalism. Now we were looking at the relationship between capitalism and the social relations anthropologists had traditionally studied – what used to be called ‘primitive society’. Now we called it ‘pre-class society’, or ‘classless society’, or a ‘tribal mode of production’. These meant roughly the same thing. The idea was that we would study how one mode of production – the traditional economic system – was linked to the capitalist mode of production. I realized later that there was an intellectual flaw in this project. When theorists like Balibar wrote about how the capitalist mode of production articulated with the tribal modes of the Nuer, the Afghan peasant or the hunter in the Kalahari, they wrote as if capitalism confronted these tribal economies on equal terms. But that was not how it really was. Capitalism dominated and structured every detail of their lives. There was no hiding place by 1973. We all lived under capitalism, except possibly several dozen people on South Andaman. The idea of modes of production was reproducing, in another form, the common idea in imperialist sociology that there are modern and traditional societies, the West and the rest. This approach ignores the fact that what happens in 2006 in a Kashmiri village, to yoghurt sellers in Kabul, in Detroit or La Paz, is all happening in the same year. None is more modern. All are products of the same length of history and the same global system. From one point of view Texas is the centre of capitalism; from another point of view it is Saudi Arabia. You may think New York is the future, if you have not seen Dubai. Capitalism has never been a pure system, originating in the north, that then spread over the world. It has always been a world system, born in a system of global trade and exploitation, the slave trade and colonialism. That is what I know now. But back then I liked Balibar. We hardly noticed that we were suddenly dealing not with the global system and

Jonathan Neale • 225

how to fight it – Marx’s project – but with how to understand primitive society, anthropology’s project. However, I was beginning to feel a bit apart from my friends. We had decided, as ambitious young graduate students will, to found a journal. I argued with them about the title: the rest of our group liked Critique of Anthropology while I wanted Radical Anthropology, something punchy and fighting. I thought ‘critique’ sounded pretentious, like French philosophy, which was why they wanted it.3 I did not really understand the core of the argument we were having, but I do now, looking back. For a critique of anthropology, anthropology would be the subject, and the aim. For radical anthropology, the subject would be the world, not the discipline. While we were arguing about the name – in a friendly way – Kate said I would be going in a different direction from them. I was surprised and upset, as I was very fond of my friends. ‘You are the only one of us who’s truly angry’, Kate said. ‘You’ll do something different.’ She was right. I went and joined the largest far-left party in the country, the International Socialists. They are called the Socialist Workers Party now, and I am still a member. The socialists changed me. I had been an activist for years, but they turned me towards trade unionism, where I found a solidarity and a decency I had not known before. The socialists also showed me a different way of being a Marxist intellectual. They directed me towards reading the classical tradition of Marxism – Marx certainly, but also Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and above all, Lenin (Lenin 2004; Trotsky 1971, 1979, 2004; Deutscher 1970, 2003a, 2003b; Luxemburg 1986, 1989).4 These gave me my first model of how to write for activists. Writing for activists was quite different from writing for academics. It was not just that the theory was different – it was a different kind of theory. The academics treated Marxism as a theory for making better social science, whereas the activists treated it as a tool for liberation. The objectives of the theory were different. I gave up on my thesis in 1975 and went to work in hospitals for many years as a porter, technician and counselor. I became a union shop steward and slowly began to recover from my silence by writing short pieces for the left press. Then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The left had to make sense of what had happened and choose sides. In 1981 I wrote a long piece on Afghan politics for a socialist journal (Neale 1981; see also Neale 1988, 2002). I had found a voice, and suddenly I wrote well because I could say the things I wanted to say. The need to make sense of a difficult political choice meant I had to take the task of analysis seriously. That work gave me the confidence to write more. In 1983 I published my first book, Memoirs of a Callous Picket (Neale 1983), which was about hospital workers and their unions, written for shop stewards and activists. We

226 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

had all been through a series of national one-day strikes the year before, and the book was an attempt to make sense of that experience for other militants. Reading it now, however, you see that it was also an ethnography informed by long anthropological training. That book, in turn, gave me the courage to become a professional writer, and to go back to graduate school and write a thesis in social history. This experience taught me a lesson. If you want to write out of rage and a desire to change the world, write for the social movements. While this must not be confused with writing a thesis, using rage in the right way can give a writer the confidence to write good academic work as well. I am contrasting activist and academic writing here. However, I am not saying there is anything wrong with spending half – or all – of your time writing anthropology. Anthropology and other forms of human knowledge have their own worth. Radical anthropologists, against all the odds, have in fact contributed a wealth of good books.5 Moreover, that kind of work makes for better teachers, and a good teacher is always useful in this world. Indeed, this chapter has two purposes. One is to encourage intellectuals to write for the social movements. The other is to help radicals to write for the academy. I will return to say more about writing for activists later in this chapter. For now, I turn to the academy.

Ideology in Universities To understand how to write in universities, a radical needs first to understand the forces that try to silence her. So here I will not start with the confused student at the desk, comfort eating to avoid writing. Instead I start with the roots of her anxiety, which I believe lie in the contradictions in university education in a capitalist society. Anthropologists often write as if they worked for a discipline and their job was called anthropologist. In fact, the great majority are teachers in universities and colleges. To understand how they have to think, we need to look not at the discipline, but at the job. The analysis that follows is asserted because there is neither time nor space here for detailed proof. However, my analysis is based on wide reading6 and a lifetime of experience – my own and that of my nearest and dearest, including my father, a professor of economics, my mother, a linguist, my partner and my sister. As I said at the outset, this chapter is written for radical academics. Those who know universities well can weigh my analysis against their own experience. Universities do three central jobs in a capitalist system. First, universities and schools justify the division of labour in the whole of

Jonathan Neale • 227

society. Most people have the innate skill to do most jobs. Almost anyone who went to Eton can become a surgeon or an airline pilot. But the structure of the economy means that the best-paid and most satisfying jobs are in short supply. There would be a revolt if jobs were simply handed out on the basis of who your parents know and how much money they have. Instead, jobs are rationed on the basis of education. In practice, how well people do in education is more dependent on who their parents are and how much money they have than it is on anything else. But there is also an element of personal talent and hard work, so exams and grades serve to turn an unfair class system into one based on the notion that lack of success is the individual’s fault. Many people hate their jobs but know they are trapped because they were not smart enough or did not work hard enough in school. This rationing and justification works at every level of the system. It is often particularly confusing for graduate students who, having done well in exams, now find it hard not to believe in the validity of marks. From their point of view, it was not money or luck that got them an A. It was an inner something wonderful. Then they come to graduate school, where the odds are they will fail. The PhD is a preparation for a small number of jobs, much smaller than the number of people writing theses. So there are many unnamed pressures on all candidates not to complete their thesis, or to disappear once they have done so. For people who believe in the system, it can be shattering when the system says they are stupid. The insecurity in the system runs deep and wide. I believe professors of history or English at Oxford and Harvard lie awake in bed at night worrying that the professors at Cambridge and Yale are smarter. This insecurity has consequences for the activist who is also an academic. It means that when her seniors disapprove of her work politically, they need only tell her she is not smart enough. She will internalize that judgement, just as she internalized the earlier As. I will return to how this process works in more detail later. For the moment, let me turn to the two other main functions of the university in capitalism. The second job universities do is to interpret the world and train new professionals in ways that will be useful to business and governments. The third job is to confuse people about reality in order to keep the capitalist system going.

228 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

Ideology and Disciplines The second and third jobs pull in different directions. Their relative importance depends partly on the nature of the discipline. The mathematics and engineering of building a bridge, for instance, must not be overloaded with ideology. No one wants the bridge to fall down – the people on the bridge, the government, and the corporations all want honest mathematics. The same is true of most chemistry, physics and geology. The necessity of justifying the system bears more strongly in other areas of science. Genetics, for instance, is torn between opposing forces. On the one hand, there is a large amount of money to be made out of good genetics that produces new products. On the other, these days a great deal of inequality between individuals in society is justified by the idea that some individuals are born different. Genetic science is under constant pressure to find genes that underlie various forms of inequality. Thus scientists who produce nonsense genetics will be rewarded along with those who make money; meanwhile a constant tug-of-war is waged within the discipline between money and nonsense. Also relevant is the question of funding in science and engineering. There is a lot of money for nuclear physics and surgery, little for wind power and tropical diseases. Over time, this structures the questions that can be asked and the things that can be known. However, because capitalism was born as a system for accumulation, for producing with ever greater efficiency, so on balance and in general those who control capital want serious science. The social sciences are a different matter. Here, it would seem, the capitalists’ need to control people is more important than their interest in accurate descriptions of society. This means they are greatly concerned to invent ideologies that sustain their privileges. These exist in tension with the need for understanding. The elites of capitalism, the actual human beings who run the system, need others of their kind, new blood, as well as a clear understanding of their society, economics and politics. They need universities to prepare new rulers and assistant rulers. Without these props, their companies will go broke, their country lose power to others and their whole system come under strain. To simplify a complex reality, the powerful would like universities that train smart people to work at the top and stupid people to do what they are told. But this is difficult. The people who study economics at the University of Texas El Paso can, and do, read the same books as economists at Harvard and Columbia who go on to run the World Bank. So the powerful have to lie to themselves about reality in order to lie to the rest of us.

Jonathan Neale • 229

The balance of these forces varies from one discipline in the social sciences to another. Sociology, for instance, makes a lot more sense than economics. Sociologists largely study the troubles of the poor and the problems the poor cause for governments. The people who run the system want most people to blame the poor themselves for their troubles. But because they also need people and systems to control the poor, they need social workers, parole officers and housing administrators. Those professionals have to treat the troubled with kindness while rationing what they need. At the top, the people who run the welfare state have to understand the poor in order to govern them. Sociology reflects this contradiction, producing books and articles blaming the poor, but also books and articles trying to make their lives understandable. Many sociologists try to reconcile these two approaches. One way is to write of ‘social problems’ – this allows the sociologist to understand individuals’ pain while still seeing them as a problem. Another way is write with empathy for the oppressed, but always to privilege the pains of identity, race, gender and sexuality over the pain of class. This contradiction at the heart of the discipline creates a space for radical sociologists. The contradiction is played out not simply inside the head of each academic, but in the contest between pieces of research. And on the edges of the liberal school, there is a contested and defensive space for the radicals. Economics occupies a different position from sociology. Economists study capitalism itself. Almost all those in the mainstream are the custodians of the key deception in the system, the one about exploitation. The reality is that we all work, and the employers take more than their share, and the growth of the system depends on this exploitation. The surface appearance is that the boss provides the job and everyone gets paid for the work they do.7 Mainstream economists typically must defend this surface appearance. The cost, however, is that much of university economics makes almost no sense, which has gained it a reputation as a difficult and challenging discipline. It is hard to understand nonsense, and even harder to write it. The trick with modern economics is that it studies something that does not exist, the world of abstract economic theory. This abstract world is quite apart from the one where we work and eat. However, the people who run corporations and governments do need some understanding of the economy. Businessmen do not use university economics. They use the thinking that comes from the Financial Times, Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, and the Harvard Business School. Of course these writings have their ideological bias too, but they can be used. This is why Socialist Worker and the Financial Times often seem to have the same understanding of issues, even if from opposite sides.

230 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

They are both edited by people who want their readers to understand the world. Still, business and corporations pay a real price for the nonsense of university economics. They mystify not only us, but themselves. Political science lies between economics and sociology. Here too, something close to the heart of the system is being concealed, but it is not quite as central as economics. Most of political science is trivial or empty, but it touches base with reality more often than university economics. However, the people who run the world rarely read political science, and for good reason. They read history instead.

Anthropology and Ideology The position of anthropology has changed over the past forty years. Once it was more honest than sociology, but no longer. This is because the people anthropologists study are now more important to the world system. In the first half of the twentieth century, anthropologists mostly studied ‘primitive people’ who lived in huts and tents in the mountains, deserts and swamps of the colonies. These were people on the periphery of the periphery of the global system. This was true even of the Native Americans on the reservations. The global system still had an enormous, often shattering, impact on the lives of the people anthropologists studied, but those lives were unimportant to the rich and powerful in the West. Meanwhile, people like mine workers in South Africa still mattered to the system. The rich and powerful cared deeply about how to exploit them, as they did with the autoworkers of Detroit. But the anthropologists rarely studied South African mine workers; they were off in the Kalahari instead.8 Hence, the concerns of anthropology were far from the fear zones of power, making it possible for anthropologists to think holistically and with some clarity. Ethnographies showed how everything related to everything else. Anthropologists argued that kinship could not be understood without knowing about land ownership, nutrition, magic, gods, myths, war and chiefs. Economics, politics, psychology, society and religion were all intertwined. Most of this writing was functionalist, not Marxist or radical. It was usually backward looking – anthropologists were often writing, explicitly or implicitly, about what the society was like before colonialism, or about what they saw now, minus what they guessed were the effects of colonialism. These ethnographies were comprehensive and connected, and therefore longer, often extending to several volumes.

Jonathan Neale • 231

However, anthropologists have been running out of isolated or recently discovered people since the 1960s. Now the median informant is a peasant, part of the global market, often in a country that matters to Washington. Many of the people studied now are workers, sometimes in the United States itself. To study these people in a holistic way would be to mount a serious challenge to the prevailing ideas that support capitalism. Indeed, the division into disciplines is perhaps the most important way that ideology confuses social scientists and makes many of their observations trivial and irrelevant. Disciplines create blinkers, and disciplinary boundaries justify ignorance of vast areas of knowledge, prohibiting crucial questions and hiding connections. Marx’s insight was that work, power and love are all part of the same system. There is no economy separate from class and the state, no family insulated from power and money. The old anthropologists were mostly not Marxists. But like Marx, they thought about wholes. Now they leave holistic thought behind when they study peasants or workers. Instead, they study a theme, or a problem, and they write about it in isolation from the rest of life. In old ethnographies, for instance, it was taken for granted that religion could not be explained without understanding the production of crops and the role of the chiefs. To say the same thing in the United States today is to say that if we want to understand what a 50-year-old working woman feels in a Baptist church in Baltimore, we also have to understand her job, the power of the corporations in the country, the federal government and American foreign policy. Moreover, we cannot understand what religion means for her if we ignore the religions of George W. Bush, Martin Luther King and Osama bin Laden. However, to put all that together would be dynamite, and not only in the United States. As Nancy Lindisfarne says in her chapter in this book, every shepherd on an Afghan hillside has a well-developed model of American imperialism in his head. He has argued about it with friends and on buses, listened to the radio, and watched carefully. It is as much part of his folk view of the world as is his classification of plants, or his experience of Islam. Not only Afghans and shepherds, but everyone thinks about imperialism. Taxi drivers in Tahiti, auto workers in Lagos, toddy makers in Kerala, municipal officials in Taiwan and indigenous slash-and-burn farmers in the Amazon all have their own personal analysis of American imperialism. They need one, because they think it affects their lives, or it might, or it influences the people who do control their lives. Imperialism is not, however, the only problem anthropologists face outside the United States. To join up all the dots in India or Argentina is also to mount an ideological assault on the ruling ideas of

232 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

the globe. This is not just a matter of what is said; it is a matter of how it is done. Making the connections is in itself a challenge. So nowadays anthropologists mostly study topics, not wholes. Wherever possible, they also study peripheries – the Amish, the homeless, the elderly and the Arctic. They study ethnic minorities more than majorities, and farmers in overwhelmingly urban countries. Moreover, they increasingly study parts as if they were a whole. Once anthropologists studied an Indian village. Now they may study one caste in that village, as if a caste were a society, not a job. Again, an anthropologist will study, for instance, gay men in Seattle. Built into that study is usually an assumption taken from identity politics that being gay is the most important thing about those men. However, it is easy enough to imagine a gay man in Seattle who is also a father, a Methodist, a machinist at the aircraft factory, a union steward and a bird watcher – and whose central identity, for himself, inside his head, is perhaps that he’s a jazz musician at weekends. The anthropologist, studying parts, bits, identities and peripheries does not follow the man he meets in a bar to the union hall, the bird watching club, the jazz rehearsal, or to MacDonald’s with the kid on Saturday. The anthropologist does not join the dots, but stays inside the box. Somehow anthropology has changed without anyone noticing, with little public debate: it has just happened, as is the way with ideology. Some sort of disembodied capitalism, an ectoplasmic rulingclass ideology, has floated though the air into people’s heads. Actually, however, people do things. They fight for ideas, control them and bend others to their will. They may do it without seeming to do it, but that is how people make ideologies work. We will return to the question of just how that happens in universities later.

Negotiating Ideology For the moment, we need another intellectual tool – the idea that ideology is negotiated. Ideologies are built up and refined to justify the system. However, they are useless to the ruling elite if they do not become part of the thinking of the oppressed. An ideology must offer a plausible interpretation of lived experience. To be effective, it must simultaneously hide and illuminate. If it does not hide, it will not disarm, and so it will not serve the uses of power. If it does not illuminate, the oppressed will simply discard it. Moreover, since the oppressed are not homogenous in their employment, their position in society, their experiences or their politics, a system of domination needs different ideologies for different people.

Jonathan Neale • 233

This can be seen in the national newspapers in England. The Financial Times serves the powerful. The Daily Telegraph serves the people who work for the powerful, combining a cranky resentment of the powerful with a hostility to working people and human liberation. The Guardian provides lies that can be adopted by teachers, social workers and journalists, lies full of compassion for the less fortunate, and liberal outrage at the failures of the system. The main lies here are that teachers and social workers are among the elite, and that as bad as things are, nothing can be done. The Guardian also reports all strikes with hostility, except those by teachers and social workers. The Mirror and the Sun provide two different sets of lies to manual workers. In a similar way, sociology is directed mostly at people who will work face-to-face with the needy – sometimes revoking their parole, sometimes helping them fill out rent rebate forms. So sociology has to mix compassion for suffering with blaming the victim. Economics majors are mostly people with a fantasy that they will become rich businessmen, so the discipline can glorify greed. But economics hides the monopolies that crush small businesses and the cruel hierarchies within corporations. It also conceals the class privilege built into an ostensibly meritocratic system. Thus the creation of ideologies in universities is a complex, confused and opaque process that is easier to understand by starting with how ideologies are negotiated and policed in the media. Another bit of ethnography will be helpful in this discussion. From 1997 to 2002 I worked as a sub-editor (or copy editor, in American English) on magazines and newspapers in London. I was a casual (or temp), brought in to replace people off sick or on holiday, so I saw a lot of publications. I thought I had a Marxist cynicism about the media, but several interconnected things surprised me. First, I was surprised at how brazenly the publications lied. This was partly by omission – there was much, in every field, that the journalists knew not to cover. Likewise, every politically unacceptable headline, photograph caption, fact and adjective was edited out. I knew this, because my job was to edit the journalists’ copy as it came in and then to pass my copy to the chief sub-editor, who sent it to the editor. If the chief sub did not take out some controversial point I had left in, the editor would cross it out. This happened not only with articles on education policy for a teachers’ magazine, or Palestine for an encyclopedia, but also with reviews in a show business magazine and articles on soap operas for a TV listings magazine. I was also surprised that the editors above me had the same political understanding I did. We agreed on the precise political implications of every adjective. What I understood about the politics of any subject was

234 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

what they understood. This was just as true when they were rightwing; that is, we shared an understanding of the politics but took opposite sides. The journalists mostly understood the politics too. They censored themselves by omission and commission every day. But part of my job, and the jobs of the editors above me, was to catch what the journalists were still trying to sneak through after they had censored themselves. I was prepared for editors to delete and censor uncomfortable facts. I was surprised, though, when they deleted passages and replaced them with sentences and paragraphs containing facts they had just invented, which both they and I knew not to be true. We were all lying, and knew it, and knew how we were doing it, in detail. I found this appalling, scary and exhilarating all at the same time, because I had never met such a smart group of people. Journalists were wide open intellectually and enormous fun to talk with. What really unnerved me was that unlike in every other job I had done, the bosses were not only hands-on, they were better at the job than we were. The editors read every word in every article, and when their changes came back they revealed acute intelligence. I think this is because to lie really well, as we did, one has to know what the truth is. This is true in personal life as well, where people who cannot distinguish reality from fantasy make very bad liars. Knowing the truth and still lying makes journalists cynical. Cynicism is not fun to live with or carry inside. There were days at work when I sat at my computer, saying to myself very quietly, over and over, ‘I never kiss them on the mouth, I never kiss them on the mouth.’ Every time I tell a journalist this, she laughs. They know. This tension explains a paradox. Journalists are the most left-wing group of people I have ever worked with, as becomes obvious in conversation. Over the past twenty years the most left-wing unions in the country have been those of the journalists, the firefighters and the mineworkers. Even in the dark days of the 1990s, when almost no proprietors recognized the National Union of Journalists, half the journalists in the country paid their union dues in secret every month – for nothing, really, except loyalty to an idea. This seems odd at first sight, because journalists churn out rightwing garbage. But the reason for this paradox is that they know reality. They have to know reality to lie well, and because they know reality they tend to be left-wing. In a way, for many, their politics are their personal piece of integrity, the sign that they do not kiss on the mouth. However, there is a constantly negotiated space between journalist and editor, because a publication’s ideology is constantly negotiated with the reader. Magazines and newspapers have to sell. They have

Jonathan Neale • 235

competitors. Tens or hundreds of thousands of real people have to want to read those words in their own free time. This is true even if the publication depends mainly on advertisements: without the readers, they won’t get the ads. So there is always a tension between the values of the publication’s owners and those of its readers. The space created by that tension is where journalists, sub-editors and editors argue over copy. For instance, I worked on a magazine for schoolteachers owned by a multinational corporation. The corporation’s politics were conservative on all issues, and aligned with Tony Blair and New Labour. The editor had to push this, but at the same time everyone at the magazine also knew the politics of most teachers, whose social attitudes were somewhat left of centre. At least half of teachers voted Labour, but they were also consumed with fury over what the government was doing to their working lives. They particularly hated school inspections, the management dialect they called ‘New Labour bollocks’, and the petty rules and paperwork that ate their lives. Thus any news story or opinion piece that attacked management or the government would attract readers. Putting it on the front page sold still more. If the adjectives of rant and spleen were left in, the readers would warm to them. All this went against the corporation’s politics but made it money. However, job advertisements for teachers were a key source of income. They were placed by middle-level and senior management in education, managers who resented government policy but would be uneasy if the magazine was too radical. This tension made for constant dialogue between journalists and editors, between junior and senior editors, and inside the head of each editor. The most important conflict was over the headlines used for critical stories. Angry, shouting, simple headlines would attract teachers but alienate their managers and ours. The working compromise tended to be balanced headlines on the front page, with more space for rage inside. In short, the magazine represented a negotiated ideology. The background to that negotiation was the power of the corporations, the teachers and the managers. The consequence was a constant deferential struggle on the newsroom floor. This example deals with material – educational policy – that those involved consciously see as political. But similar processes worked in a TV listings magazine aimed at a working-class audience, in a family encyclopedia of history, and in magazines aimed at the acting profession, doctors, nurses and the airline industry. Most of the readers probably did not see these articles as inherently political. Both my editors and I, however, understood the political implications of the personal and mundane. In each case, the ideology was negotiated, and

236 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

negotiated in a different way, for a different audience, with a different balance of forces. This balance of forces is not static, of course. Public opinion changes. People learn from experience. The British public largely supported the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and then opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Teachers voted for Blair, hoped for change, and came to hate New Labour. The balance of forces is not only determined by experience. Political organization matters. A small opposition has to rely on the media for publicity and usually gets none, while a large opposition with its own organization has militants who can speak to people directly. When that happens, the mainstream media have to recognize that their audience is hearing another voice in the other ear. So, for instance, French intellectuals and newspapers alike have traditionally written in the knowledge that all of their audience is familiar with basic Marxist ideas, because the communist party in France has been a real power. In the United States, the media and universities are free to pretend class does not exist. In the same way, teachers in Britain are partly able to think against government policy because they belong to unions that constantly argue against it. Opinion about the war on terror in Britain changed between 2001 and 2003 partly because the Stop the War Coalition organized the largest demonstration in British history. Another example comes from the United States. The historian Linda Gordon has traced the politics of social workers in Boston in the twentieth century by going through case notes (Gordon 1988). She found that through most of the century the social workers usually blamed the poor for their own problems. The exceptions were the 1930s and the 1960s, when there were mass movements of resistance in the United States. In those years, the social workers tended to side with their clients explicitly and to blame their problems on the system. The same process happens in universities, where teachers can, and sometimes do, force students to regurgitate the mainstream political opinions of the discipline. This is generally known as ‘learning theory’ or ‘learning anthropology’. Teachers also have a good deal of control over what the students say in the class. But they are not the only people in the classroom. It is a human situation, and the teacher wants the respect of the students. In militant periods, like the 1930s, 1960s and 2000s, that respect is conditional. The students may not contradict the mainstream teacher, but even if the teacher does not allow himself to know their contempt and alienation, he senses it. The radical teacher, in such times, takes heart and courage from the exuberance of a classroom where opposition ideas are openly discussed. In the 1960s, for instance,

Jonathan Neale • 237

Marshall Sahlins became the anthropologist of his generation with the greatest impact on American life. This was not a result of his anthropology; it was because while he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan he suggested the first teach-in against the Vietnam War (Neale 2003: 126). The opposite is also true. In times of deep reaction, like the 1950s and 1980s, the mainstream teacher takes heart in the classroom and the radical teacher loses hope. The hegemony of postmodernism in the 1980s has to be understood in this context. Ideology, then, is negotiated, and constantly renegotiated. The right, the corporations and the government can lose ground. When they do, they try to recoup it by designing a new ideology that incorporates the experience of the opposition, but still sets limits to what can be thought.

How Ideology Is Policed in Universities I will now return to ideology in universities, and the pressures that bear on radical graduate students and staff. The ruling class need clarity in their thought, and they need good teachers. So there must be some space for clarity and intellectual honesty in universities. That opens the door to radical thinkers. At the same time, because ideology is negotiated, there is an ideological range in the university. The radicals enter and survive on the left of one wing of that negotiation. The larger the independent struggle in the wider society, the greater the space for radicals. This space is real, but it is also defensive and beleaguered. Universities are run by the government, by the church, by boards of rich people, or by some combination of the above. More important, in Marx’s phrase, ‘the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class’. This is true in every society, and happens in a thousand ways. It is reasonable to expect some space for radicals in anthropology, and to expect to be taken seriously. It would be mad, however, to think that the mainstream of anthropology would become radical. Radical anthropologists must also realize that they are always under pressure. Like women, or people of colour, they always have to perform better – particularly if they already are women or people of colour. One of the keys to survival in this situation is to realize just how heavy is the weight of mainstream ideology on radical shoulders. Moreover, there is a difference between how ideology works in the media and in universities. In universities students have to read what they are assigned. It does not matter if the prose is arcane, thorny, confused or incoherent. These prose styles can be taken as signs of difficulty, and therefore complexity, sophistication and intellectual

238 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

worth. If a magazine is similarly incomprehensible, people will simply stop reading. Journalists and editors do not have to write simplistically, but they have to be clear and make sense. In the universities ideological problems can be papered over with sentences that are hard to understand because they do not make sense. Journalists cannot do this. Instead of muddying the waters, they have to lie clearly. In the media there is one insider knowledge, and another thing that is said to the public. This is unimaginable in universities. Senior professors do not take young lecturers aside at the beginning of their careers and explain to them that there is the sociology we tell the students, and then there is the secret true knowledge we talk about in the bar after work. What happens in universities is something altogether more confused and confusing. People lie to themselves and each other, behind their own backs. This does not mean that there is no enforcement and management of ideology in universities, but it means that the process of management is more complex and muddled, and less visible. For the university system to work as it does, it is necessary for the teachers to believe they are speaking their own thoughts. It is also necessary for senior scholars and management to act as if they are allowing people to think their own thoughts. It is even necessary for most senior scholars to think in their own heads that they are doing this. However, it is also necessary for the ruling class that some kinds of thinking are encouraged, and other sorts are silenced or humiliated. So how can ideologies be enforced without anyone noticing? The example of discrimination in universities is helpful in understanding this. Most university teachers, and probably most managers, are genuinely in favour of equal opportunities for women and ethnic minorities. But take a look at any department of English or anthropology. The majority of undergraduates are women – in English, a large majority. A smaller majority of the graduate students are women. But by the time we reach junior lecturers and assistant professors, there is usually a majority of men in the anthropology department, and in English more men than there were among graduate students. Look at the heights of each subject, and you see receding hairlines. The same discrimination happens to people from ethnic minorities, and particularly to students from abroad. Class, although seldom referred to in an equal opportunities context, matters even more. A private education, a family with money, good manners, a smooth voice and fluent English grammar will carry one through a lot of interviews. For many years, friends and family from American universities told me that such things happened in Britain because the law was weak. In the United States, they said, the deans were terrified of the courts and

Jonathan Neale • 239

forced everyone to practice equal opportunities. But when my partner got a job at an Ivy League college for a year, we quickly saw the same pattern as in Britain. Yet no one, at any stage, is publicly prejudiced, and almost no one is privately a bigot. One possible explanation is that invisible evil fairies fly into the ears of the interviewing panel and crawl up into their brains. Another possible explanation is that panels tend to select people they like, because those people are like them – or, to be more precise, they choose people who resemble the most powerful person in the room. For the powerful person, this process feels benign from the inside, and quite unlike bigotry. For the less powerful people on the panel, it feels confusing. The point of all this is that university teachers are accustomed to deceiving and mystifying themselves, yet power is still exerted. This happens in several ways. Funding, for one, is crucial. A small number of funders, particularly governments and a few foundations, control what kind of research is done, and within what framework. Young scholars may start out by applying for that money with a deep cynicism. They fill the form with words they regard as waffle and lies. They tell themselves, I will get through this and then study what I want to. But their monographs eventually come out and validate the existence of a new, funder-created field like ‘social exclusion’. The required language of the forms leaks down through committees, introductions and reading lists, until ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘civil society’ are everywhere. Soon, students are consuming as knowledge what everyone knew was hypocrisy ten years ago. I remember one staff meeting where a senior colleague grew increasingly agitated in her chair, squirming and fidgeting. Finally she burst out, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say this, I know that, but this is all New Labour bollocks’. We all told her that yes it was, and it was all right to say that, but we had to do this. Then we went back to doing it. It is not only funding that controls research. Visas are particularly important for anthropologists. If you tell the truth about Egypt, or Syria, or even India, you will not get research permission again. More important, neither will your students or other people from your institution. For this reason anthropologists have traditionally censored themselves in reporting national politics. This produces students who have read the monographs and think that national politics, corruption, the American embassy and the secret police are unimportant in understanding village life. Then there is the hierarchy of academic life. Most university teachers are not part of a social elite, and most of their students are destined for ordinary white-collar jobs. However, the most prestigious

240 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

universities – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the like – have quite close ties to the government and the ruling class. They educate the children of the elite and they recruit new people to the elite, who might become Henry Kissinger or Condoleezza Rice. The social position, and sometimes the income, of professors at such institutions is very comfortable. The prevailing ideas suit them, feel right. The large majority of students and the majority of university teachers have a different daily experience. Teachers at lesser colleges look to the elite institutions for intellectual validation. They assign books by people from Cambridge and Yale. They gain prestige by having a book published by Princeton University Press, not by their own institution. Their work is evaluated by journal reviewers, editors and research panels disproportionately recruited from the elite. Moreover, in any generation a large proportion of the staff at lesser colleges are recruited from among the graduate students of the elite. All this means that the values appropriate to people close to the ruling class permeate down through academe. I have argued above that graduate students, because they did well at school and got good grades, are particularly likely to internalize the values of academic hierarchy. Then they attend national and international scholarly conferences where this hierarchy is ceremonially displayed, enforced and validated. There is also the detail of daily interaction within an institution. Here mentoring, patronage and supervision are crucial. Students are accustomed to look for an older person who will take them under her wing, encourage them, steer them, praise them, care for them as people and gently correct them. This book is evidence that the process can be beautiful when it works. But it also provides a large hierarchical space for disciplining the dissident. This can be done, and is most effectively done, by mixing a subtle indication of boundaries with praise and nurture. It can, however, also be done with cruelty. Then there is the staff seminar, along with the other occasions when work is made public. In these situations it is not customary to say that a paper is too left-wing. Other strategies work better. There is the raised eyebrow in Britain, or the politely dismissive moderator in the United States. There are also some standard intellectual ploys. One is to say that actually the reality is a good deal more complex than that described in the paper, which, of course, is always true, of every paper. It is used when the mainstream professor cannot deny the reality, or human importance, of what has been said. The effect, the intended effect, is to make the paper giver feel stupid. It also conveniently ignores the political truth that reality is always complicated, but the choice between two sides is simple.

Jonathan Neale • 241

Another, more confrontational maneuver, is to use comments and body language to make the paper giver feel crude, or as if they were ranting. After all, someone who is enraged, and trying to express something difficult to an unfriendly audience, is actually quite likely to find herself ranting. Then there is the discipline ploy. ‘That is interesting, but it is not anthropology,’ or ‘not history’, or ‘not sociology’ or ‘not my field’. This tactic seems ideologically neutral. What it actually does is forbid holistic thinking. You cannot think about connections as long as you think within a discipline. Yet this appeal to disciplinary loyalty is often met with a general chuckle. All these rhetorical ploys work by misdirection. In most cases, it is a powerful person who takes this line, a professor or a rising star. He does so because he feels that the radical has most of the seminar on her side politically, and everyone in the room knows she has called attention to something that does happen and is important. The professor is saying, ‘We won’t talk about it, because we do not talk about things like that. And if we have to discuss them, we do not do it that way’. There is also the more direct attack. Most radicals are vulnerable to this, as are most other people who write papers. There are always weaknesses in a paper, and they are mostly in sight of the seminar. It is only necessary to go for them when you want to shut someone up. There is the query of the footnotes, the savaging of syntax, the flagging up of the missed reading, and the logical error nailed down. This can be devastatingly effective. I said earlier that the silencing of radical voices is always overdetermined. Failures are always in part caused by individual weakness. It can be devastating to be attacked for political reasons by someone who does not admit the political reasons and instead zeroes in on other faults. The victim can crumple inside. All of these pressures come together to silence some people within the academy. They are by no means only used on radicals. Indeed, these techniques are easily to hand because they are weapons in daily use. In almost every academic department, there is a member of staff who has been silenced, and usually more than one. That person was bright once, and hopeful, and is often still a dedicated teacher respected by his students. And yet he could not write the book, or cannot write, and is humiliated over and over for that. Each humiliation silences him further, and is an awful warning to the rest. Radicals can be bullied, because schools and universities are rife with bullying. There is often more kindness at the less important colleges, where people have been hurt and do not wish to hurt each other, but those are not the places where ideologies are built and validated. When these personal techniques fail, there is the direct sanction. This usually takes three forms. One is to fail the thesis. The second is to

242 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

keep someone in part-time casual teaching forever until they give up and go away. The third, mainly used in the United States, is the denial of tenure. All of these are shattering for the person they happen to, but they are taken as a warning far more widely. The direct victim often experiences personal failure; however, other radicals may see it as punishment for going too far. All those little quips in seminars are taken as warnings of what will happen to those who do not listen. Probably they are meant to be taken that way. In North America, the periods of writing the thesis and waiting for tenure both last longer now, typically until a person is about forty. The Jesuits used to have a saying about their schools, ‘Give me a child until he is ten, and he is mine for life.’ There is quite a lot of evidence this is not true. But give me an anthropologist until he is forty, and he is certainly mine for life.

The Functions of Confusion One more piece of the puzzle needs explaining – the role of confusion in universities. Confusion seems to work in three ways. Firstly, ideas are policed in a confusing way. In a university under a dictatorship, people know what is happening. But absent the secret police, everything seems personal. There are kind supervisors and unkind ones, very smart and less smart students, embarrassing mistakes in manuscripts and people who burst into tears after seminars. Unless it is understood that what is happening is not personal, people get lost in confusion. Most people around them are already lost. The second kind of confusion is at the level of ideas. An ideology hides and confuses reality. This makes the ideology confusing. Not only is some reality missing, but certain steps in a logical argument must be skipped. At the same time, a good ideology also incorporates and illuminates parts of reality. This makes it more difficult for the novice to understand what is illusion and what is reality. The third kind of confusion happens with language. Lies are being told, but they are told in complicated ways, not fully understood by those who are telling them. All this must be fudged over. For that purpose, there grows a habit of dense language, which when boiled down says nothing, or is a platitude, or untrue. But that language itself becomes admired, and imitated. Much academic prose is impenetrable not because the writers are stupid, but because they are trying to conceal reality or cannot make sense of reality. So they use ten-dollar words and elephant syntax to muddy over parts of an argument that do not work. Such language is difficult to read, and very difficult to write.

Jonathan Neale • 243

Thinking illogically, without being aware of doing so, is challenging. The production of such ideology is a considerable skill that confuses both the reader and the writer.

Writing for the Movement In short, it is difficult for the radical anthropologist to make herself heard within the university. There are things I know that can help in this project. One of them I have already mentioned – to write for the movement as well as an academic audience. Let me return now to writing as an activist. Writing as an activist is a very different project from writing as an academic. One way to make this clear is to take the example of a non-Marxist theory for activists – psychoanalysis. People who write literary criticism in English departments often use psychoanalysis as a theory of the human mind. It is that, but it is mainly a theory for activists, a tool for healing. Freud’s important works are mostly about particular patients, and therapists refer to them by the name of the patient, not the title of the paper. ‘Dora’ we say, not ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, and ‘The Wolf Man’, not ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (Freud 1977, 1979). The theory of psychoanalysis was developed, and then extended, by doctors, analysts and therapists. It was born and grew in the practice of listening to the mad and the desperate. For most therapists today, the test of the theory is simple. How do I know if this theory makes sense? I use it to give the client an interpretation. Does that enlighten the patient? Do they say ‘Oh, wow’? Does it help them to heal? Or do they dismiss it as boring and irrelevant? In the end, the patient is the judge. Therapists try their best to choose theories that seem to make sense of the world in a way that is useful to the people they try to help. Cultural theorists do not understand this. They treat psychoanalysis as a theory of the mind, which can then be used to explain this or that text. Unlike the patients, the texts cannot reply, so an obvious question recurs again and again in cultural theory: How on earth do you know that? The cultural theorists treat a theory for healing as if it were a theory of literature. The difference between academic Marxism and activist Marxism is similar. When I began reading activist Marxists in 1974, I found book after book written in the heat of a particular strike wave, revolution or moment of terrible defeat for unions and democracy. These books were all about, in Lenin’s phrase, ‘What is to be done?’ They were part of an argument inside a movement about what the whole group should do next. But to understand what to do in changing circumstances, the men and women who wrote these books had to go back to Marxist

244 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

theory. In developing that understanding in the new situation, they developed and changed that theory. For instance, Lenin wrote State and Revolution in the summer of 1917 (Lenin 2004; for historical background see Cliff 1975). Academic Marxists often read the book as about the nature of the capitalist state. It is that, but Lenin did not start there. He was one of the leaders of a movement in a situation clearly pregnant with revolution, and indeed he would lead that revolution two months later. So his book addressed a pressing problem: What kind of revolution should we make? To answer that question, Lenin had to go back to his reading and think hard about the capitalist state. He had been a social democrat all his adult life. All that time, social democrats across the world had been trying to win elections in order to take control of the state. Where there was a dictatorship, as in Russia, they fought to have elections so they could then win them. But Lenin had now come to see that they had to smash the state. This was not a slogan; it was the experience Lenin was living. He was hiding underground, in a factory workers’ suburb. There had been a democratic revolution six months before, and yet the liberal and socialist government was hunting him. Most Russians wanted peace, bread and land. But the new state, like the old state, would not give them to the people. Lenin knew that his side, his people, his party, the whole working class, had to fight back. And so, because he was a Marxist intellectual, he went to the deeper theoretical questions to understand what to do next. What he found, in the pages of Marx (1977) writing on the Paris Commune, was the idea that workers could not take over the old state. That state was not an abstraction but both an organization and a group of real living people. Those people would block workers’ power. Workers would have to sack the bureaucrats and rule in a new way, from elected workers’ committees, with new people running things. This was not quite how things turned out. Indeed, reading State and Revolution is an aching lesson in the difference between the democrat Lenin was and the fate of the state he founded and Stalin ruled. Rosa Luxemburg’s work provides more examples of the dialectical relationship between immediate politics and theory. She wrote Reform or Revolution in 1899 as part of a debate inside the Social Democratic Party in Germany. The SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) had started out underground, illegal and revolutionary. Now that it was legal, in parliament, with open trade unions, the right wing of the SPD began to argue against the tradition of revolution. Bernstein, one of the leaders of the right, wrote a book on this theme. Luxemburg’s book is a reply (Bernstein 1909; Luxemburg 1989). The argument inside the party did not end there, and the right became stronger. Luxemburg was

Jonathan Neale • 245

an immigrant to Germany, originally from the part of Poland then governed by the Russian empire. In 1905 the workers of that empire rose in their first revolution. Luxemburg went back to be part of that and then wrote The Mass Strike (Luxemburg 1986). That book was not reportage but rather part of the continuing argument in the German movement. It addressed the problem of how, if parliamentary leadership is moving to the right, working-class revolutionaries can change the world. Luxemburg now had an answer: do what they’re doing in Russia, mass political strikes and industrial strikes from below. However, in the midst of these daily arguments Luxemburg kept finding herself dragged back to a theoretical question. Why was the leadership of the German party moving to the right? Why were they supporting the German patriotism? She turned to Marxist economics and wrote The Accumulation of Capital in 1908 (Luxemburg 2003). Luxemburg argued, following Marx, that there was an inherent tendency for the rate of industrial profits to fall. Imperialism and colonialism constantly allowed capitalism to raid old centres of profit, so they were necessary to keep the whole system going. I do not agree with Luxemburg’s answer (see debate in Luxemburg and Bukharin 1972), but that is not the point here. The point is that the immediate question can only be answered by understanding the global whole. In order to solve their problems, thinkers like these had to push the general theory on. So Lenin’s understanding of the state is useful every time you have to think about the effect of socialists taking government office in a coalition. Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike is helpful in understanding what happened in Iran in 1979, or Nepal in 1989, or Bolivia in 2005. In short, the Marxist intellectuals I was now reading were arguing strategy, and therefore developing a theoretical understanding of the whole system. This was quite different from what I had done as a Marxist academic, when I was trying to use Marxism to create anthropology. There was another crucial difference between these Marxists and academic writers like Althusser. Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky are easier to understand. This is not because they were less intelligent; rather, they wanted to be understood because they wanted to convince the activists in the movement to do something. The great majority of activists and local leaders in their movements were workers who had left school at a young age. Therefore, they wrote in ways those activists could understand, treating their audience as intelligent and deeply committed, but not academically trained. Academic writing, including Marxist academic writing, seeks a different audience, in a different way. Students do not have to be persuaded. They are assigned reading and examined on it. If they find

246 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

the reading difficult, that is not evidence of the clumsiness of the author. Instead, the student reader is presumed thick and awkward. It is sometimes assumed that the more sophisticated the thinking on the page, the harder it will be to understand. There is no evidence for this assumption, but it is a hardy one in academic circles. Almost never is an academic heard to say, ‘I tried reading that book, but it was too hard for me, so I stopped. I don’t want to waste my life reading someone who can’t write.’ Academic language is used to subordinate, to frighten students, to obscure, to compete and to exclude. It is often opaque, because it is not for looking through. Activist language is meant to be understood and used. In the years since I joined the socialists, I have continued to be a Marxist and an activist. What I have noticed is that other activists use theory and argue strategy in broadly similar ways. They may be autonomists, anarchists, labour activists, pacifists, greens, or feminists. They may understand the crucial forces and divisions in the world in different ways from Marxists. But they too use their theory as a set of tools to change the world. There is another parallel here between psychoanalysis and political activism. It is often said that social scientists, unlike hard scientists, cannot conduct experiments. But political movements and parties are conducting experiments all the time. They argue over what to do. Some people say that reality is this way, and if we do this, the consequences will be this. Others say reality is that way, and if we do that, the consequences will be that. Then the activists look at what happens. On that basis, they judge who was right, and which theory worked. They take into account not only whether a strategy won, but whether the employers, the Conservative Party, the trade union leaders, the Labour Party, their workmates and their neighbours reacted in the way one theory predicted, or in the way another theory predicted. Whole populations of ordinary people judge and weigh the activists and politicians in the same way – were their predictions useful? Of course in the short term it is not quite that simple. Many things get in the way – lies, hope, fear and denial. But the test of political thought is still to ask what happened.

How to Write Each piece of my argument is now in place. We can see why it is difficult for the radical anthropologist to write. We can see how activists write for a movement. Now we turn to what might help in the writing.

Jonathan Neale • 247

The first thing is to know what you are up against, so you do not internalize it. That is the point of my long discussion of ideology in universities. The second thing I find helpful is to think of writing as a part of class struggle. This is clear enough when the oppressed attempt to speak about politics in mainstream contexts: they are challenging power. Speaking out is in itself part of a struggle. When an oppressed person sits down to write, however, that class struggle also happens inside his or her own head. There is the passion to take sides and the desire to tell the truth of, and for, the oppressed. Then, too, there is the voice of the system, of education, perhaps of anthropology – the voice that says, ‘You cannot say that, and you cannot say it that way. You will be punished for that. And anyway, you are not smart enough.’ Once you realize that the class struggle is going on inside your head, it is possible to decide to fight. Then you can take sides inside your head, and let the subaltern speak. But never kid yourself about how hard the struggle is, or how important. Another useful strategy is the one I stumbled on in my own life: to split, writing one thing for the academy and another thing for activists. Ordinarily, graduate students and young teachers try to write for both. In a sense, they are trying to write for people like themselves. This strategy puts them in a very tight and conflicted space. As they write each sentence, they notice it is too direct for the professors, or too convoluted for the activists – or, often, both at once. So they rewrite the sentence and then delete it. Or they write an academic paper, in academic language, while underneath there is a fury bubbling to be free. Suddenly they are ranting, and then, embarrassed, they return to silence. The contradiction is real, and not their fault. One solution is to write for both audiences separately. That may seem like more work, but it is not. If you can write happily for both audiences, you can write twice as much in less time. Splitting your audience frees you to write for activists, in language they can use, sharing assumptions and loyalties, directly to their concerns. The academy will not contaminate this writing. Simultaneously, it frees you to write for academics. That feeling of silence, of omission, of lack of integrity, disappears. You can write about weddings, ethnobotany, spirit mediums or land ownership. It is still possible to write with integrity, not to conceal or lie. The point is that this kind of writing is not a means by which to change the world. It is a thesis, or a paper, or a monograph. The aim is to write something you are not ashamed of in the hope that you will get a job. You need not harbour illusions: an article in an academic journal will not change the world. However, it will inform some people and be valued by those academics who think.

248 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

Other kinds of writing will help change the world. The movements of the oppressed always need intellectuals. Whereas the mainstream has bright and capable thinkers by the thousands, our side has handfuls. Many universities are also full of people who sympathize with mass movements and march on the big demonstrations, but very few of those people are organic intellectuals of the movement. We need every one we can get, to write for our publications, speak at all the small meetings, proofread the leaflets, and use their brains on our committees. Above all, the movements need theory. A movement from below must understand the world in its complexity, or be smashed. It must also know, amidst all that complexity, the simple and most important link in the chain, the place to fight. The most useful thing a radical intellectual can do is to identify one of the key arguments in a mass movement, then think about it as hard as possible and write about it, intervening in the movement. Even the writer who gets it wrong will learn by trying. To intervene in arguments, you have to understand the movement. That means reading the articles and books from inside the movement. It also means going to the meetings, talking to people, participating. The arguments begin in the meetings, and around drinks afterwards, before they happen in print. Only by being part of a movement can you learn how to talk to activists. Anthropologists often face a choice of movements, because their research may happen in a different country from their political activity. In this situation either, or both, is an appropriate place to start. Most anthropologists have something to contribute to the arguments on the left in the countries where they carry out research, but there is no moral reason why that should be the main focus of your political thought. The focus could just as easily, and as usefully, be the movements in your home country. In either case, I am not talking about intellectual work that explains the oppressed or justifies them before the academy. Rather, I am talking about writing as part of arguments among the oppressed about how to fight. Once positioned in that way, some worries that beset anthropologists disappear. The first is the problem of ‘agency’. Anthropologists and sociologists can debate forever to what extent people are in control of their own world. Once you are trying to change that world, alongside them, you realize the power of Marx’s formulation – ‘men (and women) make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing’. The question of agency becomes a lived question, the answer to which is always partial and fought for. Another problem that goes away is cultural relativism, or the liberal agony about how to deal with the faults and weaknesses of the

Jonathan Neale • 249

oppressed. Someone who is writing something to defend the oppressed in front of the oppressors will tend to prettify the poor. But someone writing from within the movement of the oppressed is talking to people who understand only too well the weaknesses of their own side. You treat those weaknesses not as embarrassments, but as obstacles to unity.

Differences from Academic Writing There are important differences between this sort of writing within a movement and academic writing. One difference is time scale. The anthropologist comes back from fieldwork and takes two years to write a thesis. In the next couple of years she publishes a couple of articles in academic journals. Five, ten or fifteen years after fieldwork, she publishes a book. This is useless to the movement. When writing politics, you write now. What is most important to understand, and to act on, is that which is changing. If you learn something in your studies, the movement needs to know that now. To reach the activists, you need to publish in their journals. They will publish an article quickly, within weeks. The academy will pay no attention whatsoever, and it is probably even best to leave such activist writing off your CV. Notably, the left press also publishes books, and it takes only months. A second difference is in object. For an academic piece, the object is likely to be anthropology. There is nothing wrong in that. When writing for a radical audience, though, the object is the struggle, and the background is a tradition of radical theory. Another difference is in audience, even if the difference is not quite as great as expected. In writing nonfiction, it is very helpful to pick an imagined reader – not an abstract one, but a particular person the writer knows. My imagined reader as I wrote my first book about hospital unions was my friend Alistair, who was a shop steward for engineering workers and electricians in a hospital. A union militant, he had left school at sixteen, served an apprenticeship, and come to hate management. He distrusted the left and all rhetoric, did not read widely, and was highly intelligent. Once you select the imagined reader, the writing gets easier. You know what you can assume, what you have to explain, and what you have to argue for. You also know what style to use – not so simple as to make readers feel condescended to, and not so baroque as to make them feel excluded. As you write you can also hear the questions they would ask, the objections they would make, the arguments that must be met. There is no call to obsess over those readers who won’t like the book anyway. The trick is always to pick a particular, named reader, not

250 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

a representative of some category. The book need not be shown to that person until it is published. Your imagined reader might not like it, and that might silence you. Rather, the imagined reader is a useful tool to help write for an audience. Obviously, the imagined reader for activist work will be different from the one for academic work. But they are not that different – the activist reader will be at least as intelligent as the academic reader. Activists tend to be smart. Moreover, the key in political activity is always to persuade the people who think most clearly, for they are the people who will persuade the rest. To make an argument, the best way is to assume that the reader is generally on the same side as the writer, but differs on this issue, yet still can be won over. The selected academic reader, like the activist reader, should be on the writer’s side. Fluency is spurred by writing for academic equals who are willing to accept what is said. It is a mistake to write for superiors, particularly if the writer is nervous about impressing them. Many of them dislike passionate activists, and it is fruitless to tie yourself in knots trying to please them. Colleagues who sympathize are a preferable target audience. The writing will be better and may actually be more likely to impress the professors. There is one more important difference that people often do not notice. In writing for activists, it is usually a mistake to start with a critique of the ruling ideology. Defining yourself against something that is confused makes it hard to think clearly. It is more productive to start by putting together your own analysis. I do not mean that mainstream reading should be ignored, for of course, most of the source material will be found there. What I mean instead is that you should read radical writers you really admire and try to apply their methods to the analysis of a new subject. For instance, in 1999 I wrote a history of the Vietnam War (Neale 2003). The book grew out of my involvement in the U.S. movement against the Kosovo War. I could see then that there were going to be more imperialist wars and bigger peace movements, although I did not foresee the scale of what was coming. I wanted my book to explain both the weaknesses and the strengths of the movement against the Vietnam War in ways that a new movement would find useful. When I began the book I took on the arguments of other writers on the war and the peace movement. I started where they did, and tried to see what I could use and what to discard. The result was that my prose became increasingly difficult, and it grew harder for the reader to understand what I was saying. I kept having to lay out one argument and then take it apart. It was hard for the reader to know what was happening in the story of the war. So I changed course. I decided to see

Jonathan Neale • 251

what would happen if I told the story of the war, bearing in mind Marx and Engels’ phrase that all of past history is the history of class struggle. I looked for class struggle in the American army, in South Vietnamese villages, in North Vietnam, inside the Viet Cong guerilla army and inside the American peace movement. Everywhere I looked I found it, and the story began to make sense. I leave it to the reader to judge how well this worked – the point here is that it became easy to write. To argue with the mainstream, from inside the mainstream, is like trying to run with a paper bag over your head, all the while tearing at the bag with your hands. Moreover, it is usually not the most effective way to challenge the prevailing ideas. The real way to challenge them is to use other ideas, and to demonstrate that they explain people’s experience better. It may also make for fewer enemies in the academic world.

Bad First Drafts One final point is that it is desirable to write shitty first drafts. I take this point from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (1985), the best book I know on how to write. She says that most people who try to write hear critical voices in their heads telling them they’re writing shit. Those voices are right. First drafts are not good. If they were, they would be the final draft. The goal of writing the first draft is to get something down. The later drafts are for making it good. There are two mistakes a writer can make when they hear that voice say, ‘This is shit’. One is positive thinking. The writer tells herself that the critical voices are destructive, and she must have faith in herself. The flaw in this strategy is that the voice is right, and positive thinking will eventually crumble before reality. The smart thing to do is not worry that it is shit, and keep going. The other mistake is to stop and rewrite until it is good. Finishing a bad first draft is the single largest hurdle in writing a good book. Most people who complete a first draft of a thesis, no matter how bad, finish the thesis. Most people who do not finish wrote some early chapters and got lost rewriting them. So my advice is to write shitty first drafts, and be pleased. This is good council for any writer, but it is particularly important to radicals inside a university, for several reasons. They are under considerable pressure and the critical voices in their heads are likely to be loud. They may have a critical supervisor. Both the pressure and the confused nature of much academic writing mean that their first draft is also likely to be muddled and chaotic. Some of the rest will be hysterical rant.

252 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

Moreover, any writer has trouble saying things outside what is normally allowed. This applies when writing into the unconscious, and when writing outside the political rules, for it is frightening to write in these ways. If the fear of saying the unsayable is joined to the fear of writing badly, it becomes very difficult to write. To allow the devil to speak, one must get out of his way. The result may be brilliant, or a mess, or both. But once the first draft is done and the second draft begun, then the critical inner voice is suddenly a friend: before, it shut the writer up; now, it allows him to edit. Write in fire, rewrite in ice. Finally, the split I have recommended between two kinds of writing is a survival strategy. Splitting is necessary in many parts of life. People split between work and home, love and money, in order to stay sane and behave well. But these splits are always pretending, for the connections are real. It is necessary to act with some love at work, or you become a monster. Alienation is the price we always pay for splitting. Splitting between activism and the academy is particularly necessary while embarking on a career. Once established, it is easier to be braver. Then the ways you have grown in political life can feed back into the social science. The work is enriched by a feel for the life of a mass movement, a clarity about power, a habit of thinking holistically, and the attention to detail and honesty that comes with debating things that really matter.9 Along the way, you will have given something of your brain and your skills to the long struggle to change the world. I do not believe that my primary duty to the people I knew in Afghanistan all those years ago is to write a good ethnography. Instead I do what I can, where I am, to stop the suffering.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

This story is from my fieldnotes. The best English translation, although not the one we used, is Marx 1972. Critique of Anthropology won, and has been a fine journal over many years since. For the historical background, I would add now Tony Cliff’s more recent biography of Lenin; see Cliff (1975, 1985, 1987). 5. In addition to those cited elsewhere, my personal favourites include Breman (1996, 2003); Lindisfarne (1991, 2001a); Manz (2004); Nash (1979, 2001); Ngai (2005); Nordstrom (2004); Rhodes (2004); Sacks (1988); Turner (1998); de Waal (1997); and Young (1995). 6. Among the books I have found most useful for thinking about the making of universities and ideologies are Rees (1998); Marx and Engels (1970); Biskind (2001); Price (1989); Schrecker (1986); Wolf (1982); Di Leonardo (2000); Wiener (2005); J. Ferguson (1990); B. Ferguson (1995); Thompson (1978); Boron (2005);

Jonathan Neale • 253

and Lindisfarne (2001b). The analysis here is also deeply in debt to ten years of conversations with Nancy Lindisfarne. 7. This is the central argument of Marx’s Capital. 8. Which is not to say that they did not do interesting and useful work in the Kalahari. I think particularly of Richard Lee’s landmark Marxist analysis (Lee 1979), but also of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s very different memoir (Thomas 1969). 9. There are enough examples of this synthesis. E. P. Thompson’s towering achievement, The Making of the English Working Class (1968) is academic social science at its very best, the model of history from below. But Thompson could not have written that book without the understanding of social movements and class struggle he gained from a lifetime of activism. For other examples see Bello (2005); Bond (2006); George (2004); Zinn (2003); Petras and Vletmeyer (2004); and Callinicos (2003). Among anthropologists the most striking case is Franz Boas, a lifelong socialist, antiracist and trade unionist: see Pierpoint (2004). And there are also Bourdieu (1998); Farmer (1999, 2003); Kidder (2003); Lindisfarne (2001b and this volume); Leacock (1981); Mikesell (1999); Powdermaker (1993); and ScheperHughes (1992).

References Althusser L. and E. Balibar. 1970. Reading Capital. London: New Left Books. Barry, M. 1974. Afghanistan. Paris. Bello, W. 2005. Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire. New York: Metropolitan. Bernstein, E. 1909. Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation, trans. E. Harvey. London: Independent Labour Party. Biskind, P. 2001. Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties. London: Bloomsbury. Bond, P. 2006. Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa. London: Pluto. Boron, A. 2005. Empire and Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, trans. J. Casiro. London: Zed Books. Bourdieu, P. 1998. Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time. Cambridge: Polity. Breman, J. 1996. Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. The Labouring Poor in India: Patterns of Exploitation, Subordination and Exclusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Callinicos, A. 2003. An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto. Cambridge: Polity. Cliff, T. 1975. Lenin: Building the Party. London: Pluto. ———. 1985. All Power to the Soviets: Lenin 1914–1917. London: Bookmarks. ———. 1987. Revolution Besieged: Lenin 1917–1923. London: Bookmarks. Deutscher, I. 1970. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003a. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921–1929. First published 1959. London: Verso. ———. 2003b. The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929–1940. First published 1964. London: Verso. Di Leonardo, M. 2000. Exotics at Home: Anthropologists, Others and American Modernity. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Farmer, P. 1999. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Berkeley: University of California Press.

254 • The Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics

———. 2003. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ferguson, J. 1990. The Anti-politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, R. B. 1995. Yanomami Warfare: A Political History. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Freud, S. 1977. Case Studies, Volume One. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1979. Case Studies, Volume Two. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Froelich, P. 1972. Rosa Luxemburg: Ideas in Action, trans. J. Hoornweg. London: Pluto. George, S. 2004. Another World Is Possible If. London: Verso. Gordon, L. 1988. Heroes of Their Own Lives. The Politics and History of Family Violence. New York: Viking. Kidder, T. 2003. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. New York: Random House. Lamott, A. 1995. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor. Leacock, E. B. 1981. Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-culturally. New York: Monthly Review Press. Lee, R. 1979. The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lenin, V. I. 2004. The State and Revolution. First published 1917. New York: Kessinger. Lindisfarne, N. 1991. Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2001a. Dancing in Damascus. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2001b. Elhamdulillah Laikiz, Cinsiyet, islam ve Turk Cumhuriyetsiligi. Istanbul: Iletism. Luxemburg, R. 1986. The Mass Strike. First published 1906. London: Bookmark. ———. 1989. Reform or Revolution. First published 1908. London: Bookmarks. ———. 2003. The Accumulation of Capital, trans. A. Schwarzschild. First published in English 1951. London: Routledge. Luxemburg R. and N. Bukharin. 1972. Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Allen Lane. Manz, B. 2004. Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marx, K. 1972. Capital, Volume one, trans. B. Fowkes. First published 1867. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1977. The Civil War in France. First published 1870. London: Progress Publishers. Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1970. The German Ideology. Written in 1846 and first published in 1932. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Mikesell, S. 1999. Class, State and Struggle in Nepal: Writings 1989–1995. New Delhi: Manohar. Nash, J. 1979. We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2001. Maya Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in the Age of Globalization. London: Routledge. Neale, J. 1981. ‘The Afghan Tragedy’, International Socialism 12: 1–32. ———. 1983. Memoirs of a Callous Picket. London: Pluto. ———. 1988. ‘Afghanistan: The Horse Changes Riders’, Capital and Class 35: 34–48. ———. 2002. ‘The Long Torment of Afghanistan’, International Socialism 93: 31–59. ———. 2003. A People’s History of the Vietnam War. New York: The New Press. Ngai, P. 2005. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham: Duke University Press. Nordstrom, C. 2004. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-first Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jonathan Neale • 255

Petras, J. and H. Vletmeyer. 2004. A System in Crisis: the Dynamics of Free-Market Capitalism. London: Zed Books. Pierpoint, C. R. C. 2004. ‘The Measure of America: How a Rebel Anthropologist Waged War on Racism’, The New Yorker, 8 March, pp. 48–63. Powdermaker, H. 1993. After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South. First published 1939. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Price, D. 1989. Before the Bulldozer: The Nambikwara Indians and the World Bank. Cabin John, MD: Seven Locks Press. Rees, J. 1998. The Algebra of Revolution: The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition. London: Routledge. Rhodes, L. 2004. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sacks, K. 1988. Caring by the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke Medical Centre. Urbana: Illinois University Press. Scheper-Hughes, N. 1992. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schrecker, E. 1986. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, E. M. 1969. The Harmless People. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Thompson, E. P. 1968. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1978. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London: Merlin Press. Trotsky, L. 1971. The History of the Russian Revolution, trans. M. Eastman. First published 1934. London: Pluto. ———. 1979. My Life: An Attempt at Autobiography. First published 1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 2004. The Revolution Betrayed. First published 1937. Newton Abbot: David and Charles. Turner, C. 1998. Japanese Workers in Protest: An Ethnography of Consciousness and Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Waal, A. de. 1997. Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa. Oxford: James Currey. Wiener, J. 2005. Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower. New York: The New Press. Wolf, E. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Young, A. 1995. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zinn, H. 2003. A People’s History of the United States: 1942 – Present. New York: HarperCollins.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Heidi Armbruster holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She has done fieldwork in Turkey, Germany and Namibia. She is a Lecturer in German and Transnational Studies at the University of Southampton. Tayfun Atay studied in Ankara and did his PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He has published two monographs in Turkish and is Associate Professor of Ethnology at the University of Ankara. Panagiotis Geros studied history at the University of Athens (BA) and social anthropology at the University of the Aegean and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, where he completed his PhD thesis on Arab Christians and communalism in Damascus, Syria. He has worked as a humanitarian worker in the Palestinian Territories, and he is currently teaching Anthropology of the Middle East at Panteion University, Athens. Anna Lærke holds an MSc in Anthropology from University College London and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She has done fieldwork in England and Denmark. She is a research fellow at The Open University and independent evaluator of Children’s Fund services in Milton Keynes. Nancy Lindisfarne taught Anthropology at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, for many years, and also at University of Reading, Kings College London, Dartmouth, Vienna, and Yeditepe in Istanbul. She has done fieldwork in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Syria, and published three monographs.

258 • Notes on Contributors

Nayanika Mookherjee studied at Presidency College, Calcutta, JNU in Delhi, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, where she wrote her PhD on women who had been raped during the Bangladesh war of independence. She is now a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Lancaster. Jonathan Neale studied anthropology at the London School of Economics and did a PhD in social history at the University of Warwick. He has published ten books, most recently a novel for children, a history of the Vietnam War, and a history of Sherpa climbers. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Heike Schaumberg completed her MSc in social anthropology at University College London and worked as a researcher at the Institute of Education, University of London. She is now completing her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester on neoliberalism and grassroots politics in Argentina. Sabine Strasser holds a PhD and Habilitation from the University of Vienna. Her research and publications concentrate on Turkish immigrants in Vienna. Currently she is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara.

INDEX activism, 6, 11, 15–16, 78, 81, 84–85, 104, 246, 253n9; anticapitalist, 214; antiglobalization, 13; antiracist, 176–96; labour, 200–210; and psychoanalysis, 246; in universities, 42, 221, 227. See also political engagement anthropological authority. See ethnographic authority anthropology, and feminism, 10–11; and ideology, 230–32; postmodern, 9, 11; radical, 225, 237 author, 7–8, 67, 81–82 authorship. See author Afghanistan, 31–35, 218–22 Al-Asad, Bashar, 100 Al-Asad, Hafiz, 100–103 Althusser, Louis Pierre, 224 Amanullah (King), 30 Anger, in fieldwork, 135, 144–45, 164, 166, 170, 218 applied anthropology, 213 Argentina, 199–216; oil politics in, 201–10; workers’ cooperatives in, 201 Armenian genocide, 121, 135, 138n5, 139n11, 183 Asad, Talal, 5, 24 Atatürk, Kemal, 30, 37, 48, 184 audit culture, 2, 213 Austria, 175–96 Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP), 178–79, 191 Awami League (AL) (Bangladesh), 67, 71–73, 75, 77, 80, 83 Balibar, Etienne, 224 Bangladesh, 65–86; formation of, 67–69; genocide 73, 77, 84; intellectuals in,

65–86; Islamic fundamentalism, 67, 77–79, 84; liberation fighters, 70, 75, 76, 79; sexual violence in, 67, 80; war heroines in, 74–77, 79 Bangladesh National Party (BNP), 68, 72, 73, 76, 80, 83, 85 Behar, Ruth, 144 Berlin, 120, 131–33 biographies, 177–93 Blair, Cherie, 34, 39 Blair, Tony, 29, 39, 41, 235–36 Bourdieu, Pierre, 26, 115n13, 212 Buenos Aires, 201, 204, 210–12, 215n11 Bush, George W., 24, 41, 231 Bush, Laura, 34, 39 capitalism, 5,10, 27, 30–31, 38, 139n12, 199, 224, 227–29, 231–32, 245 Carrithers, Michael, 12 Children, fieldwork with, 131–33, 143–73 class, 24–25, 27–33, 35–40, 60, 66, 71, 73, 79, 84–85, 106, 108, 120, 144, 175, 177, 180–81, 183, 185, 187, 189, 192, 199, 204, 227, 229, 232–33, 237–38, 245, 247, 251 Corralito, 204–05, 214n5 cultural relativism, 8, 18, 176, 248–49 Daily Telegraph, 233 Damascus, 89–116 Discipline, practices of, 143–73 Duhalde, Eduardo, 204 Elites, intellectual, 68, 73, 84,181, 183, 240; national, 23, 25, 66; political, 6, 89, 95, 108, 113, 116n17, 200–201; transnational, 180, 183 emotion, 130, 143–45, 171–72

260 • Index

England, 143–73 Ethics, and activism, 81–85; and emotion, 145; and fieldwork, 12; guidelines, 2–3; and memory, 136–37; and partiality, 16–18; and power, 4–11, 13; research, 1–3 ethnographic authority, 6–8, 145 fear, culture of, 14–15, 18, 89–118, 128–31 feminism, 6, 10–11, 24, 38–39, 112, 180, 188 fieldwork, 7–8, 12, 16, 120; dilemmas of, 15, 17, 46–61, 65–66, 76–77, 80, 84, 92, 103–104, 110–11, 134–38; and emotion, 13, 54, 82–83, 134, 137,171–72, 222; and friendship, 55–56, 66, 72–74, 82–83; ‘at home’, 69–72; and memory, 134–38, 171–72; multi-sited, 71; and participantobservation, 23–24 Financial Times, 229, 233 Foucauldian. See Foucault Foucault, Michel, 7, 10 Freedom Party (FP) (in Austria), 178–79, 186, 191, 194n8 gender, 11, 126–28, 135, 158, 160–61, 177, 190, 192, 229; and imperialism, 23–25, 27; and inequality, 135; in universities, 238; and veiling, 29, 31, 33–40, 105, 115n15, 189–90; and war, 31–35 Giddens, Anthony, 199 Gough, Kathleen, 5,10 Green Party (in Austria), 186 The Guardian, 233 Gulf War, 41, 180, 182, 185, 188 Haider, Jörg, 178–79 Hasina, Sheikh, 73, 82 Holism, in anthropology, 17, 176, 230–231, 241, 252 identity politics, 9, 187, 191, 223, 232 ideology, and academic disciplines, 228–230; and the media, 233–236; in universities, 226–27, 237–42 Initiative of Muslim Austrians (Initiative Muslimischer ÖsterreicherInnen, IMÖ), 188–90

International Socialists. See Socialist Workers Party Iraq war, 41–42, 188 Islam, 67; in Austria, 187–93; and ’Green Flag’, 47–50 Islamic Congregation (Islamische Glaubensgemeinschaft in Österreich, IGGiO), 178, 189–90 Islamism, 28, 31–36, 37–40, 51, 68, 73, 90, 92, 100, 105, 109, 110, 120 Istanbul, 37, 181, 184–85 Jamaat-e-Islami, 68, 77 Karzai, Harmid, 35 Kemalism, 50, 181–82 King Zahir Shah, 221 Kirchner, Néstor, 204–05 Kurds, 40, 120, 123, 129, 123n2, 177, 184–87, 191, 195nn28–29 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 225, 244 London, fieldwork in, 46–47 Luxemburg, Rosa, 225, 244–45 Marx, Karl, 50, 224, 231, 244–45 Marxism, 50, 233, 236–37; academic, 223–26, 244–45; activist, 243–45; in Turkey, 50 memory, 122–38 Middle East, and anthropology, 25–31; and Christians 120; and gender, 26–42; and socialists, 29 Migration, and Christians 120; Syrian Christian, 121–24, 128, 137;Turkish in Austria, 175–96 The Mirror, 28, 233 Naqshbandi, order of, 46–61 Nasrin, Taslima, 69–70 nationalism, 9, 31, 175, 177; Austria, 178, 180, 195fn24; Bangladeshi, 72, 85n2; Bengali, 67, 72, 85n2; Egypt, 30;Hindu, 69; Kurdish, 120; movements, 30; Turkish, 30, 62n4, 120 National Socialism, 178, 182 neoliberalism, 1,16, 35, 38, 41, 113, 199–215 NGOs: in Afghanistan, 34; in Argentina, 214; in Austria, 179, 180, 189, 195n18; in Bangladesh, 71, 73–76, 81

Index • 261

Nine/Eleven (9/11), 13, 41, 81, 113, 180, 188 Orientalism, 7, 27, 177–78, 183–84, 191–92; and capitalism, 27–41 political engagement, 111–13, 175, 211–14; academics, 212–14. See also activism postmodernism, in anthropology, 6, 8–11, 62n1, 237 Priyobhashini, Firdousy, 79–80, 85 psychoanalysis, 172, 243, 246 public anthropology, 65–66, 85 racism, 15, 18, 30, 179–80, 182–83, 186, 191 Rahman, Shamsur, 80 reflexivity, 8, 11, 17, 62n1 representation, 6–8, 10, 16, 18, 80–82, 111, 115n11, 125, 137, 176, 183, 191 Reza, Shah, 30 Richards, Audrey, 13 Sahlins, Marshall, 237 Said, Edward, 7, 27, 184 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 4,111, 136 School, fieldwork in, 143–73 sexism, 14, 31, 38 Sheikh Hasina, 68, 71–73, 75, 80–82 Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, 67–68 Sheikh Naz›m K›br›s›, 46–58 Socialist Workers Party, 225 social movements, 6, 11, 191, 194n19, 200–214, 223, 226 Soviet Union, 221 Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), 244 Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ), 189 Sufism, 45–63 The Sun, 233 Suryoye. See Syrian Christians Syria, 89–116; and academic research, 90–95; Christians in, 89–116; Palestinians in, 14, 103, 116n18 Syrian Christians, in Germany, 121,131–33; in Syria, 89–116; in Turkey, 119–40

trade unionism, 225; in Argentina, 200–210 transference, 172 Trotsky, Leon, 225 Tunceli, 184, 186 Tur Abdin, 120, 138n3 Turkey, 35–40, 180, 188; conservatism in, 185; eastern provinces, 120–21, 184–87; gender, 35–40; leftists in, 50–51; religion in, 50; and secularism, 59–61 Unión de Trabajadores Desocupados (UTD) (Argentina), 200–210 United States of America, 221, 231, 238; and imperialism, 25–42, 199–200, 223; and resistance movements, 236; and universities, 240, 242 Veiling, Islamist, 38–39; rhetoric of, 27, 31, 34–35; symbolism of, 105. See also gender Vienna, 176–193 Waldheim, Kurt, 178–79 Writing, academic, 245–46, 249–50; activist, 243, 246–52; ethnographic, 7–8, 45, 62n3, 111, 143, 171–72, 230 Writing Culture, 7, 111 xenophobia. See racism Zia, General, 68 Zia, Khaleda, 68