Anthro Now Spring 2009

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Volume 1 Number 1
A P R I L 2 0 0 9
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G E N E R A L E D I TO R Katherine McCaffrey Montclair State University A S S O C I AT E E D I TO R S Emily Martin New York University Ida Susser City University of New York Susan Harding University of California, Santa Cruz E D I TO R I A L B OA R D Don Brenneis University of California, Santa Cruz Joe Dumit University of California, Davis Susan Harding University of California, Santa Cruz Louise Lamphere University of New Mexico George Marcus University of California, Irvine Emily Martin New York University Frances E. Mascia-Lees Rutgers University Lorna Rhodes University of Washington Dan Segal Pitzer College Ida Susser City University of New York
E D I TO R I A L A S S I S TA N T
Will Thomson New York University http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/journals/an
PARADIGM PUBLISHERS
Boulder London
Anthropology Now, a general interest peer-refereed publication, is published three times a year in April, September, and December. Each issue contains six feature articles about current anthropology research, plus surveys of new research projects, essays, interviews, photo essays, poetry, and book, film, and exhibit reviews on a wide range of topics of interest to anthropologists, students, and the interested public.
SUBMISSIONS All submissions are processed electronically. Please e-mail your submission as a Word attachment (not a pdf). Include a brief biographical statement. Tables and figures must be cameraready. Please do not use color in any illustrative materialgrayscale or line art only. Photos may be sent as jpeg or tiff files (color photos that are accepted for publication will be printed in black and white). Photos must be at least 300 dpi at the size of publication; 600 dpi is preferred. For extra-large files, please consult with the editor for special instructions before sending. E-mail submissions to: Katherine McCaffrey, General Editor, Anthropology Now, at mccaffreyk@mail.montclair.edu. Please include AN Submission in the subject field. For further information on the publication, visit our Web site, http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/ journals/an. ISSN: 1942-8200 Copyright 2009 Paradigm Publishers. Can Anthropology Ever Be Innocent? pp. 4350. Gerald M. Sider. Cover photo by Scott Webel Published in the United States by Paradigm Publishers, 3360 Mitchell Lane, Suite E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA. Paradigm Publishers is the trade name of Birkenkamp & Company, LLC, Dean Birkenkamp, President and Publisher. Printed and bound in the United States on acid-free paper that meets the standards of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
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April 2009 Volume 1 Number 1
From the Editors
Introducing Anthropology Now, Katherine McCaffrey, Emily Martin, Ida Susser, and Susan Harding
F E A T U R E S Are Women Evolutionary Sex Objects? Why Women Have Breasts, Fran Mascia-Lees Becoming Monsters in Iraq, Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Lutz All-You-Can-Eat Buffets and Chicken with Broccoli to Go, Kenneth J. Guest Margaret Mead: Public Anthropologist, Nancy Lutkehaus Womens Autonomy Combats AIDS in the Kalahari, Ida Susser and Richard B. Lee Can Anthropology Ever Be Innocent? Gerald M. Sider
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Background illustration: Ernst Haeckel, 1904, Siphonophorae, Kunstformen der Natur, plate 7.
D E P A R T M E N T S
Anthropologies
Anthropologie Now, Scott Webel and Kathleen Stewart

Visual Essay
51
Human Terrain: Hearts and Minds, Bullets and Bodies, Will Thomson
Fieldnote
54
Anthro Mom: Obamas Mother the Anthropologist
56
Stories from the Field
Death in a Family, Emily Yates-Doerr

Uncommon Sense
57
Nightmares, Hugh Raffles

Creative Writing/Poetry
60
SoCal Local, Christine Gailey
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Background illustration: Ernst Haeckel, 1904, Campanariae, Kunstformen der Natur, plate 45.
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Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009
from the editors

Introducing Anthropology Now
Katherine McCaffrey, General Editor Emily Martin, Associate Editor Ida Susser, Associate Editor Susan Harding, Associate Editor
ther disciplines have a magazine for the general public. Why cant we? Why cant we have a popular anthropology magazine that would fill the gap between conventional news coverage of current events and topics and the more specialized analysis of similar events and topics in professional journals? If our scholarship were written in clear and accessible language and embellished with photographs and other visual materials, wouldnt there be public interest in the ways that anthropological theory and research can inform and affect contemporary public discourse and public policy debates? Over the last decade, a group of cultural anthropologists has been working toward such a publication. Some of the traditional subfields of anthropology, especially archaeology, human evolution, and primatology, already enjoy a substantial presence in popular media. For a variety of reasons, cultural anthropological approaches to current social issues do not often get incorporated in existing media. Despite its low public profile, however, cultural anthropology is
positioned to offer a unique perspective on many current social issues. We think that if this perspective were more accessible to the general public, it would enliven and enrich public debate. Anthropology Now s mission is to make anthropological knowledge accessible to lay readers, and to enrich knowledge and debate in the public sphere. The magazine aims to reclaim a voice for anthropology in public debate, not by simplifying complex problems, but by conveying anthropological knowledge in clear and compelling prose. Anthropology Now will build on a growing commitment among anthropologists to make our research findings open and accessible to the world outside of the confines of the academy. Contemporary anthropology has a way of complicating our understanding of the world by dislodging common sense assumptions and revealing hidden forms and sources of injustice. Anthropology can also delight the reader with its appreciation for the ingenuity and verve with which people live their lives, in whatever circumstances. As works of art, literature, and journalism often remind us, serious and critical observations of the current state of the world can be presented alongside appreciation of the humor, creativity, and surprise always present in any human endeavor. Anthropology Now aims to capture the breadth and depth of our work, to reveal what is fascinating, unique, and important about the human experience. Anthropologists work on every corner of the planet, and they research virtually every
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From the Editors
aspect of the human condition. With the publication of Anthropology Now, cultural anthropologists, who often have extensive long-term experience in settings and contexts that fill the news, will have a chance to say in a public forum how their experience and knowledge shed light on current issues. In this issue we are pleased to draw on a diverse range of voices from our discipline to analyze some of the most pressing issues in the world today: war, AIDS, globalization. We are delighted to also provide a forum for the quirkier, creative side of our work and to include poetry, photos, and letters from the field. The analysis we present here draws on the strength of our discipline in challenging taken-for-granted truths and unexamined assumptions. It is our goal to promote conversation, not only among our colleagues, but with the broader public. Anthropology Now issues will always include a number of 2,5003,000 word feature articles discussing research and analysis that is fascinating, timely, and important, plus a selection of pieces from the following departments: From the Editors Notes from the editors about the current issue, upcoming issues, or comments about anthropology in general. Letters/Exchanges Letters to the editor, with exchanges with the author when this would enrich discussion. Conversations Interviews with anthropologists engaged in compelling research and topical public policy issues.
Findings Short abstracts discussing new and noteworthy anthropological research and contributions to public policy and debate. Written by a collective of graduate students. Stories from the Field Human interest essays on everyday life, work, and struggles, of the people we encounter during fieldwork. Angles Reflections on books, films, and exhibits from an anthropological perspective. Uncommon Sense Examinination of obvious and everyday realities, questioning taken-for-granted assumptions. Anthropologies A look at anthropology in the popular culturewhat goes on under the label anthropology outside the discipline? How and why has anthropology been taken up as a symbol in action movies, crime dramas, clothing styles, and beauty products? Noted Brief accounts of underreported contributions of anthropology and anthropologists. Visual Essay Stand-alone photo or art essays, and visuals connected to text. Creative Writing Poetry, short stories, and fiction. Backstage Notes Personal essays, reflections and/or interviews about anthropol-
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ogists ongoing research. How did they become involved in their projects? What changes have researchers witnessed in their lifetime of work? What ethical, political, and personal issues confront our research endeavors?
Coming Soon ...

We have a roster of exciting articles for upcoming issues including: Video Poker, by
Natasha Schull; Life in Supermax Prisons, by Lorna Rhodes; Putting Racial Drugs in Context, by Jonathan Kahn; A Machinery of Mirrors, by Hugh Gusterson and poems by Renato Rosaldo. Take a look; share Anthropology Now with a friend. Lets make our voices heard. If you believe in the importance of this effort as deeply as we do, support this new publication by recommending subscription to your university library. We trust you will enjoy this inaugural issue.
McCaffrey, Martin, Susser, and Harding
From the Editors
feature
Are Women Evolutionary Sex Objects?
Why Women Have Breasts
Fran Mascia-Lees
My wife was nursing our almost nineweek-old baby girl while reading to our five-year-old at the library yesterday. She was then approached by one of the childrens librarians who informed her that one of the male patrons in that room complained about her nursing. Does anyone know if there is a policy about nursing there? It sounds discriminatory to me? Anyone else had problems there in the past?
JSR, Maplewood On-Line, 1/17/081
SRs query on Maplewood On-Line, a blog for the residents of Maplewood, New Jersey, elicited 390 responses about the propriety of breastfeeding in public in the three weeks following his post. Most bloggers appealed for balance. Of course women should be able to breastfeed in public, they recognized, but they should be discreet. Others questioned why men have a problem with such a natural function in the first place. The original purpose for breasts was for feeding babies, writes SAC; only conveniently and wonderfully, did they become sexual afterwards. But PeggyC
protested, I feel a chicken and egg argument coming on... surely the sex preceded the baby? Of course, some sort of sex preceded the baby, but what does that mean about the development of breasts in human evolution? Do women have them so that they can nurse their babies? Did they only later become sexual? Or did breasts first act as a powerful erotic enticement to attract a man to a woman for sex? Since the very definition of a mammal is a group of animals that has mammary glands [breasts] to secrete milk to suckle its young, it might seem obvious that breasts primary function is lactation. But, humans are not like other mammals when it comes to this trait. After the age of puberty, the breasts of a human female remain permanently enlarged. Permanently enlarged breasts (pebs) are what scientists call a sexually dimorphic trait, one that exists in two different forms in males and females of the same species. Even among primates, our closest relatives, breasts are not sexually dimorphic. If you were to look at an adult chimpanzee, or any other ape or monkey,
Of course, some sort of sex preceded the baby, but what does that mean about the development of breasts in human evolution? Do women have them so that they can nurse their babies?
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you would have difficulty distinguishing a male from a female based on this characteristic alone. Although the breast tissue of a female ape or monkey can become swollen when she nurses her young, once the mother is done lactating, it typically recedes back to its flattened form. Perhaps the unique evolutionary history of our human ancestors holds the key to PeggyCs chicken and egg question. John Relethford, a biological anthropologist, Tim Sorger, an endocrinologist, and I, a cultural anthropologist, have argued that sometime in humans evolutionary past, permanent breast enlargement allowed some of our female ancestors to better adapt to their environment and increased their chances of survival and of passing their genes on to subsequent generations (1986). In other words, we think that natural selection what Charles Darwin, the founder of modern evolutionary studies, saw as the driving force of evolutionis responsible for the development of pebs. We do not think that pebs directly helped human females survive, but that pebs were associated with another critical trait that sets humans apart from other primates. Compared to other primates, humans have a higher amount of fat tissue as a percentage of overall body weight. These fat stores could be used in times of scarce resources to turn into energy. Evolution selected for the increased fat, and enlarged breasts were the coincidental by-products. Natural selection, however, is not the only force operating in evolution. Darwin was particularly puzzled by sexually dimor-
Darwin was particularly puzzled by sexually dimorphic traits. His theory of natural selection could not explain characteristics that existed in only one-half of each species.
phic traits. His theory of natural selection could not explain characteristics that existed in only one-half of each species. If a trait aided certain individuals ability to adapt to their environments, increasing their chances of survival and passing on their genes to subsequent generations, why would it not appear in both males and females? Looking at it another way, we might ask, if peahens survive without spectacular feathers, what accounts for the magnificent plumage of peacocks, the males of the species? Darwin suggested that a sexually dimorphic trait such as peacock feathers evolved because the individuals who possessed them had an increased reproductive advantage stemming not from natural selection but from the advantage it conferred on them in terms of increased access to mates. Sexually dimorphic traits, Darwin argued, were advantageous to an individual in the struggle over mating opportunities rather than in the struggle for survival. He called this differential access to mates sexual selection and outlined how it worked in animals, including humans, in The Descent of Man (1871). In Darwins view, in most species,
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females choose among available males, but among humans, the opposite situation prevails: men choose women because of certain desirable traits. This is precisely what a number of contemporary researchers, once known as sociobiologists and now called evolutionary psychologists, have argued. They suggest that long ago some hominid male ancestors became more attracted to females whose chests were not completely flat and favored having sexual intercourse with these more voluptuous females, thus increasing the chances of these females getting pregnant and passing this trait on to their offspring. More concisely, they suggest that pebs became sexual signals to attract males. But how did hominid males come to find pebs erotic and attractive? Desmond Morris, a curator of mammals at the London Zoo, was among the first to offer a sexual selection answer to this question. In his widely read book, The Naked Ape (1967), he suggests that pebs in human females resulted from hominid bipedalism. As early hominids began walking upright, face-to-face encounters between the sexes became the norm, affecting the position used in sexual intercourse. Males, Morris hypothesizes, no longer mounted females from behind, as do non-human primates. In the non-human primate position, presentation of the female buttocks to the male is an erotic display that stimulates male interest and excitement. With the advent of bipedalism among humans, evolution would have to do something to make the frontal region of females more stimulating to males. According to
Morris, this was accomplished through selfmimicry in which female breasts came to look like rounded buttocks. Female breasts became mimics of the ancient genital display of [the] hemispherical buttocks (1967:75). Szalay and Costello (1991) continue this line of thinking, arguing that males become sexually aroused by breasts because they mimic the appearance of female genitalia. However, this scenario, like many others in evolutionary psychology makes an unsubstantiated generalization about the universality of our own societys sexual norms and behaviors, and then asserts that, because these traits are universal, they must have come about during the long evolutionary history of humans. Anthropologists call this ethnocentrismthe practice of generalizing the perspective, values, and behaviors of ones own culture onto other cultures. Morris thinks that the (supposed) preference for face-to-face intercourse found in U.S. society existed millions of years ago. But preference for sexual positioning does not fossilize; we have no direct evidence that the missionary position was the sexual position used by our hominid ancestors. In contrast, we do have anthropological evidence that calls Morriss assumption into question. There is a great deal of variation, both across societies, and within them, in preferred sexual positioning. Therefore, evolutionary psychologists are not justified in assuming that sex in the missionary position is a cultural universal, or that it was the primary form of copulation practiced millions of years ago. Even if we were to
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Anthropological data indicate that breasts are not sexual objects of attraction in all societies. In some societies, for example, a chubby body size is considered womens most erotic feature, while in others, it is a womans face.
grant the problematic assumption that copulating face-to-face was the favored position for sexual intercourse prehistorically, we do not know that it evolved at the same time as pebs. Similarly, we may question Morriss claim that womens breasts evolved because of their direct erotic appeal. The claim supposes that what some men find attractive today is what males in general find enticing, and that it aroused our hominid male ancestors as well. But there is no evidence for either supposition. Anthropological data indicate that breasts are not sexual objects of attraction in all societies. In some societies, for example, a chubby body size is considered womens most erotic feature, while in others, it is a womans face. In Breasts: The Womens Perspective on an American Obsession (1998), the author, Carolyn Latteier, recounts that women in Mali were both appalled and entertained when anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler told them that American men find breasts sexually arousing. You mean men act like babies, they shrieked, collapsing in laughter (p. 158).
The appeal of large, hemispherical breasts has even varied within the history of Western culture. In Europe during the 16th century, for example, tiny breasts and thick waists were the ideal, while the small, flattened breasts of the flapper dominated images of ideal feminine beauty and attractiveness during the 1920s in the United States (Angier 1999). Morris was not alone is suggesting that womens breasts evolved because of their erotic appeal. The evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup also sees pebs as a sexual signal, but focuses on them as indicators of fertility. He links pebs to the loss of estrus, or concealed ovulation, suggesting that when human females were no longer able to advertise their periods of fertility through distinctive odors, swelling of sexual tissue, and marked changes in behavior, then firm, well-rounded breasts became the reliable cue for detecting periods when a female was ovulating. Hominid males who were able to recognize the wrong shape of the small, flat breasts of prepubescent girls or the sagging breast of menopausal women, according to Gallup, would avoid copulation with these non-fertile women and instead be attracted to fertile hominid females with the right shape breasts. But, Gallups notion that breasts signal periods of fertility makes little sense. Breasts enlarge during pregnancy and lactation. These are not times when a woman would be particularly receptive to sex. In fact numerous societies prohibit sexual intercourse during pregnancy and/or lactation. It is hard to explain why some hominid males would
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have come to prefer females with permanent breast swelling if enlargement is actually associated with these periods of nonfertility (Pawlowski 1999:150). Moreover, if male desire for large, round, and firm breasts is deeply embedded in the human male psyche, how do we explain child marriage, the widespread sexual abuse of young girls, or the high prevalence of child pornography? A number of theorists have argued that at some point in our evolutionary history, humans needed to develop long-term pairbonds to ensure survival. Some suggest this became necessary with the increased time it took hominid children to become independent of their mothers care. It is hypothesized that because human children needed such intensive and time-consuming attention and over such a long period of their life, that hominid mothers needed to settle down and spend most of their time and energy focused on childcare. Females thus became dependent on a male for necessities, especially food. Successful women were the ones who used permanent features of their body, such as their hair, skin, breasts, and shape, to attract a male (Lovejoy 1981). T. Halliday (1980) and R. Short (1980) have suggested that it was shapely breasts in particular that allowed a female to attract a male and keep him around. Why? Cant (1981) suggests that because breasts are primarily composed of fat, they became signals alerting a male to which female would be more likely to raise his offspring successfully, increasing the likelihood that his genes would be passed down: females better able to build up fat and
maintain it would have more energy reserves to convert to parental investment during pregnancy and lactation. But, once again, anthropological data challenge these claims: the presumption that the long-term commitment of one male to one female is an old, established pattern in human prehistory is not supported by the evidence. Monogamy is a relatively rare pattern even in modern times. A family organized around a single, male economic provider with one dependent female caretaker and their children is simply not that common on a global scale (Slocum 1975: 43). This nuclear family form may be the Anglo-American middle-class ideal, but it is neither the most prevalent nor the most desired form of family in most societies around the world. The assumption that early hominid females became sedentary and dependent on males to bring them food is not supported by ethnographic evidence either. Early hominids lived a life based on a scavenging or foraging food-collecting strategy. Among contemporary foragers, women are highly mobile; even with infants they often range over large areas in search of vegetable foods. They are anything but sedentary. Women in such societies tend to be the primary providers, often contributing the largest proportion of food to the diet of men, women, and children in the group. This consists primarily of vegetable foods, but can include meat from the small animals that they routinely capture as they gather. It is not surprising that evolutionary psychologists treat womens breasts primarily
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as objects that attract and excite males. Contemporary Western culture fetishizes large breasts. Every day, ads in popular magazines, on TV, and on the Web suggest their importance and desirability. Increase Breast Size Guaranteed! #1 Seller in America announces an advertisement in Vogue for Bioussant Breast Enhancing Tablets. Breast Enlargement through Hypnosis is offered by The Body Contouring Programme on the Internet. And, indeed, dissatisfied with their breasts, women in the United States have spent millions of dollars on creams, lotions, devices, and techniques for breast enlargement in the last few decades. For women who are suspicious of claims that such products will have the intended effect, Victoria Secret developed a new twist on the old push-up braa Miracle Bra which has silicone-filled cups meant to mimic the shape and feel of breast tissue. Until recently, silicone was also used for surgically inserted breast implants, still the only way to ensure a permanent increase in breast size. Over 2 million U.S. women opted for surgical breast enlargement last year (http://surgery.org/stats), despite the health risks the procedure poses and its considerable expense. Big breasts are big business. Morris, Cant, and Gallup suggest that this desire is natural, deeply embedded in the human evolutionary past, but their evolutionary stories reveal more about modern Western cultural values and the capitalistic profit motive than evolutionary history. We would argue instead that permanently enlarged breasts can be explained
without reference to assumptions about their erotic appeal. Drawing on evidence of fat ratios in primates and humans, energy expenditure in contemporary hunter and gatherers, and endocrine studies, we have argued that permanently enlarged breasts were not selected for at all. Rather, breasts developed out of selection for fatter humans. But why was fat selected? Fat is a way that the body stores energy that can be used in times of food emergencies. Fat is accumulated in the body when resources are plentiful, when there is more food available than is necessary to fuel daily activities. When food is in short supply, extra fat can be burned for energy. One important trait distinguishing humans from nonhuman primates is the amount of fat we have as a percentage of overall body weight. Humans also evolved in an environment of resource fluctuation, one characterized by cycles of food abundance and scarcity. These are conditions that favor fat storage and under which individuals with greater amounts of body fat would be more likely to survive. Women on average have more fat than men per overall body weight. An increased fat reserve gave our female ancestors the energy necessary to produce breast milk, a function requiring a large number of calories. They could also continue in the high-energy expenditure activity of food collection, as women do in contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. These activities would increase their own or their childrens chances of survival. Thus, hominid females who were able to store fat would have a re-
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lective pressure operatproductive advantage ing on early hominids. over those who were Thus, hominid females who He argues that in addinot as able to store fat. were able to store fat would tion to food scarcity, the Those with inadequate have a reproductive advantage large difference befat reserves would not over those who were not as tween daytime and be able to withstand renighttime temperatures source scarcity, would able to store fat. characteristic of the be less able to have open environment of healthy children and to early hominids might also account for the successfully nurse and rear them into adultimportance of fat storage to early hominid hood. survival. Those individuals with decreased What does storing fat have to do with amounts of fur were able to withstand very pebs? One important characteristic of fat is high daytime temperatures, but then would that it stores estrogen, and estrogen is the be more vulnerable in the very cold nights hormone responsible for breast developon the savanna. Pawlowski hypothesizes ment at puberty in human females. Hothat individuals with more fat were better minid females higher concentration of fat, able to withstand these hypothermic condiwhich develops during puberty, results in tions. So Pawlowski suggests, just as we do, higher estrogen levels. Higher levels of esthat permanently enlarged breasts are side trogen in the body stimulate breast growth. effects of fat storage. Under conditions of We know that the breast tissue of nonearly hominid development, fat storage human female primates swells during lactawould increase the likelihood of the survival tion and pregnancy when there is more esof individuals possessing the trait. trogen circulating in the body. Thus, we It is clear that the evolution of permanent know that the conditions necessary for breast enlargement in human females need breast tissue growth existed in our primate not be explained through their erotic appeal ancestors. Once estrogen levels increased to men. The kind of sexual selection in our hominid ancestors due to the selecDesmond Morris proposed may not have tion for increased fat storage, the potential applied at all. Permanently enlarged breasts for permanent breast enlargement became may instead have been the outcome of the an actuality. This also helps answer Darsuccess they conferred on females who wins quandary about breasts as sexually diwere better able to nurse and rear their morphic traits: adult human males do not young to maturity. We argue that larger have pebs because of the lower levels of esbreasts, to the extent that they reflect higher trogen circulating in their bodies. fat stores, gave some females greater flexiBoguslan Pawlowski (1999) has elabobility to survive environmental variation, rated on our scenario by arguing that fluctuwhich increased their ability to rear their ating food resources were not the only se-
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children successfully, and thus increased the representation of their genes in subsequent generations. Thus, early hominid females need not be understood primarily as sex objects any more than their twenty-first century counterparts. Perhaps Maplewoods offended male library patron should have just quietly left the room.
Gallup, G. 1982. Permanent Breast Enlargement in Human Females: A Sociobiological Analysis. Journal of Human Evolution 11:597601. Halliday, T. 1980. Sexual Strategy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latteier, C. 1998. Breasts: the Womens Perspective on an American Obsession. New York: The Haworth Press. Mascia-Lees, F., J. Relethford, and T. Sorger. 1986. The Evolution of Permanently Enlarged Breasts in Human Females. American Anthropologist 88:423428. Morris, D. 1967. The Naked Ape. New York: McGraw-Hill. Pawlowski, B. 1999. Permanent Breasts as a Side Effect of Subcutaneous Fat Tissue Increase in Human Evolution. HOMO 50(2):149162. Short, R. 1976. The Evolution of Human Reproduction. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 195:324. Szalay, F., and R. Costello. 1991. Evolution of Permanent Estrus Displays in Hominids. Journal of Human Evolution 20:439464.
Notes
1. http://maplewood.southorangevillage.com/ thread.php?qs1=18422
Bibliography
Angier, N. 1999. Woman: An Intimate Geography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Braunstein, G. D. 1999. Aromatese and Gynecostia. Endocrine-Related Cancer 6:315324. Cant, J. 1981. Hypothesis for the Evolution of Human Breasts and Buttocks. American Naturalist 117:199204.
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feature
Becoming Monsters in Iraq
Matthew Gutmann Catherine Lutz
The following piece is drawn from a forthcoming book written by Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Lutz with the assistance of Betsy Brinson and Jose Vasquez entitled War Epiphanies. This group of researchers interviewed dozens of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who have become vocal opponents of those wars. The book traces the lives of five men and one woman who enlisted like millions of other young peopleto get money for college, to seek adventure, to serve their country, and hoping to find a way to do good in the worldand the conclusions they have drawn from their military work and their return to civilian life.
any U.S. soldiers who return home from Iraq have or will develop crippling psychological problemsby one estimate, fully 40 percent of combat veterans. Among the most common diagnoses given them is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an affliction resulting from exposure to traumatic events that, according to the American Psychiatric Association, have involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others. The cause here, of course, is exposure to combat itself, more universal
among the troops in this than any previous U.S. war. Factors that exacerbate PTSD include frustration and anger because of insufficient preparations, equipment, and training; the feeling that there is no end in sight; discomfort and deprivations of life in a war zone; worries about careers and families back home; racism and sexual harassment within the military; and extended tours of duty. Over the years, the military has called soldiers traumatic response to war shell shock, combat neurosis, battle fatigue, or war-zone stress reaction. In addition, officers have often refused the diagnosis claiming it is an excuse for malingering, or in more contemporary language, anger dysregulation. Nonetheless, and despite the continuing stigma of mental illness, many accept and even welcome a diagnosis of PTSD as part of the process of recovery from the mental wounds of the Iraq war. Why then would a group of veterans declare that in fact PTSD is normal and, in some sense, good? For a growing number of anti-war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, PTSD is not an
Many U.S. soldiers who return home from Iraq have or will develop crippling psychological problems. ... The cause here, of course, is exposure to combat itself. ...
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unhealthy or abnormal condition but a reasonable and normal human reaction to what they saw and did while serving in the United States military. While many returning vets reject treatment because of the stigma attached to it or find it inaccessible, some anti-war vets accept treatment and medications but reject how the Veterans Administration (VA) understands their diagnosis. Some refuse standard treatment and argue that other methods will help them move beyond their suffering. These anti-war vets all agree with VA doctors that they have received a traumatic injury to the self, but they see the injury as an assault not simply on their mind but on their whole person. What the medical establishment calls a disorder, they call a form of dehumanization. In coming to this conclusion, these dissenting soldiers focus on the fate of Iraqi civilians at the hands of the U.S. military. In fact, what makes the lives of these troops distinct from the rest of the armed forces sent to Iraq and Afghanistan is not so much their experiences of such civilian harm, which is ubiquitous, but rather the conclusions they have drawn. It turns out that how soldiers react to civilian war injuries and death is decisive for their emerging critique of the war and to understanding the injuries of war to themselves and others. Ultimately veterans who reject the diagnosis of PTSD as being a disorder are making a political statement more than a medical or personal psychological diagnosis. The point for both anti-war veterans who seek counseling and medication for post-traumatic stress, as well as those who prefer to avoid such treatment
even though they may suffer from the same symptoms, is that, regardless of medicalized analysis, the fundamental cause of their affliction is that they have witnessed and participated in dehumanizing crimes against people in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Charlie Anderson
Navy medic Charlie Anderson, originally from Rossford, Ohio, crossed into Iraq in March 2003 with the Marines. Like most everyone around him in uniform, he was full of fear and curiosity, anger and resignation, excitement and ambivalence about the mission. Trained as a medic, he especially relished the idea of helping his buddies if they got hit. Looking back later, though, he said, I didnt even know what I didnt know. The learning curve would soon rise steeply in front of him. On an early convoy operation in 2003, his unit began taking casualties on the outskirts of Sadr City. Someone radioed that they were looking for a young Arab male wearing black pants, white shirt, and sandals, and carrying an AK-47in other words, almost anybody. From the back of the column came machine gun fire. One of Andersons sergeants had been telling the
Trained as a medic, he especially relished the idea of helping his buddies.
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younger men a story. Suddenly he opened fire with his weapon, apparently aiming at nothing and no one in particular. Then he went back to telling his story right where he left it mid-sentence only seconds before, pausing now and then to sip his coffee. A lot of people would think that was cool, says Anderson. I thought it was scary. This was the first of a set of political and moral epiphanies Charlie Anderson underwent in combat and after. Later that same day, Anderson relates, orders came through to load up and drive into Sadr City. They had high hopes for what was to come. Given the standard American diet of World War II movies, he and his comrades expected to find a kind of air of liberation parades in Holland and France. They believed that they would be rewarded for protecting the population from further depredations by Saddam Hussein and his bad guys, but the civilian reception was quite different from what they expected. The thousands of civilians out in the streets of Sadr City didnt seem excited to see them except the kids. There are kids running up and down the sides of streets begging for food. The Marines were still looking for the young Arab male carrying an assault rifle. And there were people everywhere. Youre looking at the kids, at the doorways, at the windows, and the rooftops. Youre trying to scan the alleys, looking for a guy [who wants to kill you] in this crowd of 5,000. Anderson was riding on the passenger side of a Humvee with his weapon in his left hand, safety off, finger on the trigger, pointed at the vehicles door. With his right
hand he was throwing food out and waving at the kids. After rounding a corner, the crowd seemed to thin. Then all hell broke loose and Marines began shooting in all directions. Were trying to figure out what one guy is firing at, and he yells, Dont ask me what Im shooting. Im shooting at fucking people! Anderson pulled the trigger on his gun until someone said he could stop.
Theres all this pandemonium. Women. Children. Mostly women and children. And it seems so clich. But thats really what was happening. Mostly women and children. And a few old men running every which direction screaming and yelling. My thoughts were the black and white photograph of the little girl running down the street in Viet Nam. Shed been napalmed. All her skins falling off.
Five years later, in January 2008, as we sat in his home in the mountains of Boone, North Carolina, Charlie Anderson still looked shell-shocked in recounting those operations around Sadr City. Whether he shivered from the cold outside that winter day, or from the still painful memory of having been a part of the military force that caused terrified civilians to flee through the streets of an Iraqi city, he didnt say. In either case, even in 2008, Anderson was continually trying to come to grips with his early tour of duty in Iraq. Regardless of what the ground troops were ordered to do in the war, he remained convinced their motivations were noble. Most of us thought that we were there to do something good. I dont
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think anybody joins an army or goes off to war thinking they are going to do evil. Like thousands of other veterans, Anderson sought counseling from time to time after he returned. I did go through one support group meeting at the VA, and I didnt find any support. I spent most of the night talking about why it was okay for me to be a veteran against the war, and listening to some of the other members of this group talk about how we should just have a policy of genocide because if we dont kill everybody in Iraq, then theyre going to come over here and kill our kids. It didnt even make sense. Beyond feeling like an alien in this group of vets, he nonetheless shared much in common with them. Like the others, Anderson, too, had to cope with the traumas of war including what he called survivors guilt, and the feeling that he was personally responsible for helping other returning vets with their own cycles of depression. Eventually, after return to the United States, Charlie Anderson was given an honorable discharge from the Navy after being diagnosed with PTSD.
Garett Reppenhagen (Photo by Matthew Gutmann)
this car, like many before it, had approached, Reppenhagen recalled,
Youre thinking there could be a car bomb. And you got your heart pumping and your adrenaline flowing because you think youre just going to get bombed. And the car screeches to a stop. And you go over and youre yelling at the guy in the car. Only he doesnt speak English, so hes not
Garett Reppenhagen
Like thousands of other soldiers, Garett Reppenhagen put in time at checkpoints. Trained as a sniper and born to a military father in Fort Hood, Texas, Reppenhagen found himself one day flagging down a quickly approaching vehicle, and trying to get its Iraqi driver to leave his vehicle. As
getting out of his car, you know? Youre trying to open the door, but the doors jammed because his car sucks. Its junk. And youre frustrated because you cant open the door. Youre embarrassed that youre trying to open a door that doesnt open. So you just grab the guy and pull him out the window and you throw him on the ground and you zip-strip him
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Although some troops and veterans have sought relief from their post-traumatic nightthen you realize, out of the corner of your mares by popping what medics in Iraq sareye, that his wife and kids are staring at castically call happy pills, Reppenhagen you with this intense hatred in their eye. is staunchly opposed. You just realize you are part of the probIm certainly not going to take any medlem. And you dont mean to be, and you ication. I am flat against that. Personally, I dont want to be, but youre there, you dont want to separate myself from my war know? And thats the crime. The crime is experience. I think my war experience is that youre there. part of who I am now, and Ive got to learn Many soldiers, says to carry that. My healReppenhagen, started ing comes through to loathe themselves. helping other veterans, You just realize you are part of But instead of changbeing part of the the problem. And you dont mean ing to make it better, movement. IVAW [Iraq to be, and you dont want to be, some changed for the Veterans Against the but youre there, you know? ... War] is redeeming me. worse. They just dove Garett Reppeninto it and became And thats the crime. The crime hagen was the first acmonsters. is that youre there. tive-duty soldier to join Like those of other IVAW while still in dissident U.S. veterans Iraq. who have come out Men experience trauma, he knows, when against the war, Reppenhagens stories focus their buddy is blown up in front of them, on the hubris of this war, how the war dewhen someone is shot and no one can get stroyed some part of him and violated the to him. Or, as he puts it, When innocent trust that he, as a citizen soldier, once had people get waxed. But, Reppenhagen inin the U.S. military. As Garett Reppenhagen sists, for the most part, the average Amerisays, can soldier is not the victim.
[with plastic ties used by U.S. forces]. And I always saw myself as doing the right thing, taking the proper course of action, as thinking about ethics and morality. And here I was, the one with my hands on this dude, feeling justified to rip him out of his car and throw him on the ground and put him in handcuffs. It made me feel like an asshole. Im the guy acting like a Nazi. Hes the victimizer. And I think he feels like a criminal, honestly. He feels like the killer and the rapist and the thief, and he comes back to America and its, Thank you for your service. But were, like, You have no idea what youre thanking me for. You dont know what I did.
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If men did the same things in the streets of the United States they did with no repercussions in the cities and villages of Iraq, they would be imprisoned or even executed, Reppenhagen believes. But since they are not punished by others, they punish themselves. They start drinking themselves to death and doing drugs and being abusive to their familyand committing suicide, because they cant find redemption. So whats a medical practitioner going to do for a veteran in this situation?
If youre a clinical doctor, you cannot fix a problem thats social and political. Lets say you sit down with a counselor and say, Ive been betrayed by my government and Im fucking pissed off, and this is debilitating. I am unable to fit into society. And its directly because of the war. Well, theyre gonna be like, Heres a pill. Dont be so pissed off. They try to make it your problem. And its not your problem. Its societys problem. You dont have to readjust to society; societys going to have to readjust to you.
Ricky Clousing
When Ricky Clousing deployed to Iraq in December 2004 at age 22, he didnt rely on the media to understand the situation in Iraq: I kind of wanted to formulate my own idea about what was going on. He had high expectations that his military intelligence training would help identify people
who were threats to Iraqi freedom. Years before, Clousing had become a born-again Christian and done missionary work in Latin America and Thailand. He was eager to find a way to help the Iraqis as he had helped farmers in Mexico on several earlier trips. Soon after arrival in Iraq, Clousing saw civilians killed and harassed with impunity by U.S. soldiers. He began to mistrust the mission that used such methods, and went to his command with serious questions about whether to continue to participate in the war or even in the Army itself. It was recommended he speak with counselors and chaplains, and he did so. He told them about the spiritual basis for my conflict of conscience [but] they came back with all these clich statements, and even Bible verses taken out of context, justifying war and saying God is favoring us, and that I should just trust in his plan. Just surface-y, watered down statements that didnt answer anything that I was really feeling. His commanders asked Clousing if he was trying to get out of the Army. Theres ways to do that, such as saying youre gay or saying you have mental problems. I was insulted, to tell you the truth. I wasnt trying to play that card to get a ticket out of the military. Clousing tattooed the word Veritas on his arm to signify his quest, and started reading books about the run-up to the war in Iraq and on U.S. foreign policy in general. In addition, he read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Zinns Peoples History of the United States, and Thoreaus essay On Civil Disobedience. After returning to the
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United States, Ricky continued to be tormented by his time in Iraq. He talked to more counselors and chaplains and commanders. All to no avail. He went AWOL and after a year he turned himself in. Following his military trial, he served three months in the Camp Lejeune brig in North Carolina. During the entire period after his tour in Iraq, Army officers proposed various options to Clousing such as filing for conscientious objector status or a diagnosis of PTSD, any one of which would have allowed him to serve out his remaining time in non-combat assignmentsand the military would have avoided further embarrassment (Clousings case had become international news). He refused conscientious objector status because he does not oppose all wars. He rejected the PTSD diagnosis because he considers post-traumatic stress not a disorder but, as he called it, a patch that conceals deeper problems: I mean, its a natural reaction of culture shock, of being in a combat zone, and the realities and the expectations of fighting, and being expected to kill people, and then coming back home to what we have here. Far from representing an abnormal adaptation to civilian life, he adds, traumatized soldiers are the norm: Theyre actually tapped into their human and spiritual and emotional side enough to feel the effects of [the war]. Theyre not numb enough to just blow it off like it doesnt matter.
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nti-war vets like Ricky Clousing, Garett Reppenhagen, and Charlie Anderson
may be no more or less traumatized by what they saw and did than other service members. However, their distinctive understanding of the problem and of the remedies available to themparticularly political action and helping other vetsallows them to reshape their sense of self in crucial ways. Each has been an active member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, and has worked in a variety of ways, including recruiting for IVAW from within the active duty military and others, lobbying Congress, and long public marches and talks to educate the public. They are working to advance the goals of the organization, which includes campaigning for an immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq; reparations to the Iraqi people that they, rather than corporate profiteers, would administer; and lobbying for full benefits and adequate healthcare for returning vets. They have also forged strong bonds of advice and help with dissident Vietnam War era vets and organizations and are helping with counter-recruitment efforts in high schools around the country. Each is also trying to reestablish himself in work and/or school: in winter 2008, Charlie Anderson was attending Appalachian State University in Boone and working with the VA nearby, Garett Reppenhagen was studying at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs and working as a parttime organizer and consultant for Veterans for America, and Ricky Clousing was working in a gift shop and learning to be a dealer in Las Vegas. As another anti-war veteran said about his emerging recovery-through-activism
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Brig Art (Photo by Ricky Clousing)
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beginning about military service and the infrom the war, I am no longer the monster I vasion and occupation of Iraq, these men at once was. These vets are convinced they the same time believed have found a kind of rethat they would be doing demption and balm by good for others through breaking ranks and speakThey do not want their their participation in the ing out against the war, by post-traumatic stress to be war. In the end, however, forging a new kind of comneatly boxed off by a they do not want their radeship with their fellow medicalized diagnosis. post-traumatic stress to be dissenters, and by beginneatly boxed off by a ning to make amends with medicalized diagnosis that the Iraqi and Afghani peoseparates their condition from the total exples. perience of the war in Iraq and from a moral Some might say that these veterans were and political critique of its impact on the dehumanized from the moment they began people of that country. basic training, and that by turning against the war in Iraq and what they saw and did there, they are simply reclaiming their humanity. But that conclusion would be too Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Lutz, Departeasy. Because if anything these anti-war vetment of Anthropology, Brown University, Box erans were among the most idealistic of sol1921, Providence, Rhode Island 02912. E-mail: diers, committed to the idea of armed sergutmann@brown.edu; lutz@brown.edu. Gutvice in defense of the nation and indeed mann is professor in the Department of Anthroserving humankind through their participapology at Brown University and Lutz has a joint tion in military operations in Iraq. appointment as professor in the Department of As contradictory as it might seem, and Anthropology and at the Watson Institute of Indespite all the questions they had from the ternational Studies at Brown University.
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feature
All-You-Can-Eat Buffets and Chicken with Broccoli to Go
Kenneth J. Guest
herever you live in the United States, you most likely have noticed a Chinese take-out restaurant or all-you-can-eat buffet opening nearby. In strip malls and converted houses, in small towns and large, thousands of new Chinese restaurants are opening across the United States each year. According to restaurant industry sources, there are now over 36,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, more than the number of Burger King, Wendys, and McDonalds restaurants combined. Chinese food has become a basic part of American culture. Combining fresh food, fast service, and low prices, Chinese restaurants have flooded the landscape by relying on the entrepreneurial efforts of new immigrants and the abundance of unregulated cheap labor. Where have all of these Chinese restaurants come from? And how can they afford to charge $9.99 for all-you-can-eat or deliver a dish of chicken with broccoli with rice and a fortune cookie for $6.95? Answers to our questions lie in New Yorks Chinatown, along a little-known street called East Broadway. There, under the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, beats the heart of Chinatowns changing ethnic enclave and the operational hub of an expanding ethnic restau-
rant economy that now stretches across the country as far west as the Rocky Mountains. New Yorks Chinatown exists in the American popular imagination as one of the signature sights of New York City along with the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Wall Street. The name, Chinatown, evokes images of crowded streets, curbside fish and vegetable markets, and cheap restaurants. Tourists from across the United States and around the world flock to Mott and Canal Streets to buy Chinese trinkets, sample Chinese food, and bargain for knock-off handbags and watches. But over the past twenty years, the arrival of large numbers of new immigrants from Fuzhou, southeast China, has shifted the center of Chinatown away from Canal and Mott Streets to East Broadway and the Manhattan Bridge, an area most tourists and even native New Yorkers rarely see. Simultaneously, the Fuzhounese have driven the rapid expansion of the Chinatown restaurant industry into a national restaurant economy. Our stereotypes of Chinatown as a self-contained, exotic, ethnic neighborhood and of Chinese immigrants as a homogenous ethnic group tend to obfuscate and mystify the complex internal dynamics at work in the
There are now over 36,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, more than the number of Burger King, Wendys, and McDonalds restaurants combined.
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immigrant Chinese community. Whether in Chinatown, New York, or in the expanding ethnic restaurant economy, vulnerable immigrant workers rely on fellow Chinese entrepreneurs for employment opportunities and a pathway of upward mobility. Chinese employers rely on vulnerable cheap labor for profits. These dynamics provide some immigrants with opportunities for entrepreneurial success, but often pit Chinese against Chinese based on differences of regional origin, language, educational background, economic resources, political persuasion, and legal status. As a result, intense exploitation of immigrant Chinese workers by Chinese owners and managers is at the core of this economic expansion.
Chinatowns New Immigrants

Over the past twenty-five years hundreds of thousands of new immigrants from the towns and villages outside Fuzhou, in southeast China, have been making their way to New York to work in restaurants, garment shops, and construction trades. Spurred by the lack of opportunities at home and the promise of jobs in New York, able-bodied men and women of all ages have been pouring out of these rural areas, leaving behind hometowns populated only by children, teenagers, and senior citizens. The arrival of the Fuzhounese has transformed New Yorks Chinese community, supplanting the Cantonese as Chinatowns largest ethnic Chinese community and vying for leadership in the areas economics,
politics, social life, and even language use. What is it that draws these thousands of immigrants to New York? And how are they related to our Chinese take-out restaurants and all-you-can-eat buffets in Vermont, Ohio, and Texas? For most Fuzhounese, New York City is their first stop in America. Here they reconnect with family, friends, and home villagers and begin to mobilize the social and financial capital they will need to repay their migration costs and develop a strategy for survival and success in American society. But their entrance is not easy. Most Fuzhounese are from rural farming and fishing villages. They arrive with no money and may in fact be in significant debt to smugglers who helped them migrate. (The smuggling fee in 2008 was $70,000 per person.) They speak little to no English, have never lived in a major city, and are completely unfamiliar with American culture. In order to survive, Fuzhounese turn to ethnic Chinese economic, social, and religious networks that have grown in and around New Yorks Chinese community.
From Ethnic Enclave to Ethnic Economy

Chinatown itself is often referred to as the quintessential ethnic enclavean area where immigrants of similar national origin live, work in ethnic businesses, and support each other. In Latin Journey (1985) Portes and Bach document the development of an ethnic enclave among Cubans in Miami,
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An unregulated free enterprise zone creates opportunities for some members of the community to succeed by exploiting other disadvantaged Chinese immigrants.
which they see as an emerging, positive model for immigrant incorporation in todays global cities. They argue that the success of Miamis Cuban immigrants derives specifically from the establishment of this ethnic enclave in which successive waves of immigrants utilize networks of ethnic solidarity to mobilize the cultural or social capital that they need to survive and succeed in their new country. The enclaves economic structure, they suggest, enables immigrants to achieve upward social mobility otherwise unavailable to them in the mainstream U.S. economy. In this scenario, they claim, immigrants use social capitalfamily, hometown, surname, language, common history, and traditionsto find better-paying jobs and more social mobility than are available to them in the dead-end jobs of the secondary labor market of the dominant economic structures. Other scholars, including Zhous work on Chinatown (1992), have accepted Portess caricature of the enclave as a beneficial model of immigrant incorporation and have sought to apply this theory to various immigrant communities, but with mixed results.
In contrast, Peter Kwong and I have argued (Kwong and Guest, 2000; Guest 2003) that Chinatowns enclave economy has not been primarily a system of mutual support, but an unregulated free enterprise zone that creates opportunities for some members of the community to succeed by exploiting other disadvantaged Chinese immigrants, in this case particularly, recent Fuzhounese arrivals. Ethnic solidarity and cooperation does allow many Fuzhounese immigrants to mobilize the financial and social capital necessary for surviving and succeeding in the United States. But immigrant success is not uniform within the ethnic enclave. Some workers use ethnic solidarity to mobilize the capital to survive. Others parley the situation into paths of upward mobility, particularly through establishing small businesses. Their success, however, is built upon the cheap labor of their fellow immigrants. In Chinatowns ethnic enclave, restaurants, garment shops, and construction jobs operate six days a week, 1012 hours a day, pay below minimum wage with no overtime pay and no benefits. We have suggested that this co-ethnic exploitation, rather than the more reassuring notion of ethnic solidarity, is actually the primary dynamic at work in the Chinatown ethnic enclave. In fact our research shows that the idea of ethnic solidarity is actually promoted by employers to attract vulnerable workers to the Chinese industries. Owners recruit workers through kinship and hometown networks with the promise that their ethnic ties will lead to better working conditions, higher wages, and greater opportunities for upward mobil-
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try is organized primarily through more than two dozen Chinese-run employment agencies located in small storefronts near the Manhattan Bridge. On any given day thousands of Fuzhounese workers circulate among them, looking for jobs. Restaurants across the country looking for cooks, waiters, busboys, receptionists, and delivery people post their jobs in one of the employments agencies. Inside, white boards list jobs by area code, specifying the type of work, the hours, and the monthly salary. Busboys make around $1500, receptionists $2000 and chefs $2500 a month depending Chinatown: Hub of a National on location. For these non-English speaking Ethnic Restaurant Economy immigrants, the area code is crucial. A map of the United States posted on the employThe local restaurants that dominate New ment agency wall divides the country up acYorks Chinatown cater heavily to the tourist cordingly: 715 is Wisconsin, 317 is Indiana trade. But in the past decade, Fuzhounese and 813 is Florida. Few workers know the immigrants have turned Chinatown into the names of U.S. cities where they have center of a vast ethnic economy (Light and worked, but they do know the area codes. Gold 2000) servicing the national network After identifying an attractive job, the of Chinese restaurants spreading across the worker will have a telephone interview and United States. East Broadway is its central negotiate with the owner while still in the business district and key staging ground for employment agency. If they agree on terms, mobilizing capital, labor, food, and restauthe worker pays the employment agency a rant supplies. The network of restaurants ra$25 fee and quickly makes plans to leave diates out like the spokes on a delivery bicyfor the restaurant. cle. A restaurant in Pennsylvania or Virginia Workers flow between or North Carolina may restaurant jobs along an rely on the related busielaborate transportation nesses around East BroadFuzhounese immigrants system anchored on East way to supply financial Broadway constructed by capital, cheap labor, have turned Chinatown restaurant supplies, and the Fuzhounese over the into the center of a vast last fifteen years. Begineven specialty foods. ethnic economy. ning in the 1990s, vans The labor that fuels the began operating routes Chinese restaurant indusity. Vulnerable immigrant workers with few transferable skills and little knowledge of the outside labor market or labor standards turn to fellow Fuzhounese employers for points of entry to the U,S. economy. As the Fuzhounese have expanded the Chinese restaurant industry beyond New York, these complex inter-ethnic dynamics now play out between employers and the chefs, waiters, and delivery people in small take-outs and buffets across the country.
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from New York to Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, to deliver restaurant workers to jobs along the way. These popular vans quickly evolved into the now-somewhat-famous Chinatown buses, like Fung Wah, Lucky Star, and Eastern Shuttle, a highly competitive industry that today not only moves Fuzhounese restaurant workers but also college students, tourists, and other bargain hunters, all for unbelievably low prices: $25 roundtrip New York to Boston; $35 roundtrip New York to DC. Despite their reputation for skirting safety regulations, these bus companies have played a central role in the fluid circulation of workers among isolated restaurants throughout the northeastern United States. As New Yorks Fuzhounese population expanded and established satellite Chinatowns in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Flushing, and Queens, a second bus transportation system has emerged in the last decade, this time within New York City. Today, fleets of fifteen passenger vans shuttle passengers frequently between East Broadway, Sunset Park, and Flushing, delivering Fuzhounese directly from East Broadways main business district to their main residential and business districts outside Manhattan. Intense competition between these unregulated van companies keeps fares below the cost of a subway ride. More recently, Fuzhounese entrepreneurs have launched daily service from New York along routes north, west, and south, delivering workers to restaurants as far away as Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, the Carolinas, and Florida. Workers find jobs at
In reality, workers rarely stay at one job more than a couple of months. The work is too grueling. And the life is too isolated. Regardless of job type, everyone works at least six days a week and twelve hours a day.
the East Broadway employment agencies and often later that evening board a van to their out-of-state jobs. They are dropped off at an exit along the interstate. A cell phone call easily alerts their new employer to their arrival; they are retrieved and put to work. These newer van lines are the arteries that provide the life blood of labor to the ethnic economy of Chinese restaurants expanding through the American heartland. The farther removed from New York, the more restaurants must pay to attract employees. Higher wages may be attractive to some workers, particularly more recent arrivals saddled with heavy debt. But the separation from Chinatown and the isolation in small towns and cities across the country take their toll. In addition, workers must pay their own travel expenses to the job, though the ticket may be reimbursed if they stay three months and the return trip paid after six months. In reality, workers rarely stay at one job more than a couple of months. The work is too grueling. And the life is too isolated. Regardless of job type, everyone works at least six days a week and twelve
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hours a day. If the job is outside the New York metropolitan area the employer provides housing in the restaurant or at a nearby apartment. Meals are eaten at the restaurant. The intense work schedule, sometimes spilling into a seventh day, leaves little time for leisure or interaction with people outside the restaurant. Workers limited English skills and their lack of familiarity with the local community and culture leave them sticking close to work until they return to New York City and East Broadway. For many of these workers, laboring in restaurants across the country, New York remains home base, and they return to East Broadway regularly. The area overflows with recreational activities for workers between jobs. The East Broadway mall, under the Manhattan Bridge, provides one-stop service where they can buy phone cards, rent DVDs, have their hair cut, buy new clothes, send money home to relatives in China through MoneyGram or Western Union, and have their blood pressure checked. Offthe-books gambling operations and brothels are scattered through the neighborhood, and direct bus service is provided to Atlantic City and Connecticut casinos. East Broadway is home to a vast array of social service providers, including lawyers, matchmakers, human smugglers, and financial service centers. Health service providers, both Western and Chinese, licensed and unlicensed, are plentiful, including doctors, dentists, acupuncturists, and pharmacists. Churches, temples, and ritual centers support weddings, funerals, and offerings to the gods as well as providing locations for mo-
The East Broadway mall, under the Manhattan Bridge, provides one-stop service where [workers] can buy phone cards, rent DVDs, have their hair cut, buy new clothes, send money home to relatives in China through MoneyGram or Western Union, and have their blood pressure checked.
bilizing social and financial capital. An extensive network of single-room-occupancy hotelsmany the old Bowery flop-houses offer short-term housing arrangements for transient immigrant workers. Beds rent for $15 to $20 a night and are readily available to the constantly circulating Fuzhounese laborers who return to New York for a period of rest and recuperation from their strenuous restaurant jobs. Fuzhounese entrepreneurs rely on New Yorks East Broadway hub for more than access to cheap, vulnerable labor. As the Fuzhounese central business district, East Broadway is also the primary location for mobilizing capital to open a new restaurant, renovate an existing establishment, or trade up to a bigger operation. Fuzhounese entrepreneurs rely heavily on informal credit networks and revolving loan funds to mobilize capital. Kinship networks, hometown associations (of which there are nearly three dozen along East Broadway alone), and even religious communities have mecha-
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nisms to provide that capital, usually at substantial interest rates. This modest start-up capital, sometimes as little as $50,000, enables first-time entrepreneurs to launch a small take-out restaurant or buffet in an urban strip mall or small rural town. And where do Chinese restaurants get all those chopsticks, tea cups, packages of soy sauce, and placemats with the Chinese zodiac? Chinatowns restaurant supply stores fill those orders. Owners visit New York to personally order and pick up supplies or have them delivered around the country. As one nineteen year old, recent arrival from Fuzhou explained to me,
Most of us have the same dream. We want to make some money and make a better life for ourselves and our families. Its not easy for us here. We work really hard. Not everyone is successful. It will probably take me four or five years just to pay off my smuggling debt. In the meantime, Im getting experience. I started doing bicycle deliveries. Then I was a bus boy and a chefs assistant. Some day I hope I can move up. Be a waiter or even a chef. I could do that! If I can learn some English I could get a job as a receptionistthough they like to have girls do that job. Eventually I hope I can have my own restaurant. Maybe I can be rich too. Its not easy. But Im just getting started.
Lu Yang, East Broadway
tem of labor exploitation that undergirds the rapidly expanding ethnic Chinese restaurant economy. Ethnic networks provide jobs to immigrants whose language skills and educational backgrounds leave little opportunity for success in the mainstream U.S. economy. Some are even able to parlay their social capital, hard work, and good fortune into small-scale entrepreneurial success. But that success is not guaranteed. And it comes at a cost. It is built upon the exploitation of fellow Fuzhounese immigrants working in an unregulated labor market. So next time you dine at an all-you-caneat buffet in Des Moines or Asheville, or order chicken with broccoli from a Chinese take-out in Sheboygen or Tampa, think about the intricate system of entrepreneurialism and cheap labor that goes on beneath the veneer of fortune cookies and fried rice.
Bibliography
Guest, Kenneth J. 2003. God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New Yorks Evolving Immigrant Community. New York: New York University Press. Guest, Kenneth J., and Peter Kwong. 2000. Ethnic Enclaves and Cultural Diversity. In Cultural Diversity in the U.S.: A Critical Reader. Edited by Ida Susser and Thomas C. Patterson, 250266. Oxford: Blackwell. Light, Ivan, and Stephen Gold. 2000. Ethnic Economies. Burlington, MA: Academic Press. Portes, Alejandro, and Robert L. Bach. 1985.
Lu Yangs dream of economic success, like those of so many recent Chinese immigrant workers, is complicated by the intense sys-
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Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the U.S. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Zhou, Min.1992. Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Kenneth J. Guest is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College, City University of New York, and author of God in Chinatown: Religion and Sur-
vival Among New Yorks Evolving Immigrant Community.
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feature
Margaret Mead
Public Anthropologist
Nancy Lutkehaus
argaret Mead was the best-known anthropologist in 20th century America. The American Museum of Natural History even includes her as one of its treasures, the only person in a list that includes fossilized dinosaur eggs, meteorites, and rare uncut emeralds! Mead was born in 1901, at the beginning of what Henry Luce later described as the American century. It was also the century in which the science of anthropology came to maturity. By the 1960s, Meads name as well as her imagethat of a short (she was only 5' 2"), stocky, grey-haired woman often dressed in a flowing cape, wearing sensible low-heeled shoes, and carrying a forked walking stickhad become recognizable to a large portion of the American public through her many appearances on television talk shows and her monthly column in Redbook magazine. By the time of her death in 1978 Mead had become a public intellectual and an iconic figure who represented a range of different ideas, values, and beliefs to a broad spectrum of the American publiccritics and supporters alike. For many she also came to symbolize the disci-
pline of anthropology, and she was the only anthropologist some had ever heard of. Why now does Mead, whose name has become increasingly unfamiliar to younger generations of American college students, remain significant, perhaps even more so, to the field of anthropology today? I have recently completed a book about Margaret Mead that describes why she became famous and what her celebrity says about the role of anthropology in 20th century American society. I embarked on this project in part because I had worked for Mead at the American Museum of Natural History while I was an undergraduate anthropology major at Barnard College. I was impressed by the broad range of social issues and contemporary problems to which Mead applied her anthropological expertise. A closer look at Margaret Meads career reveals that she has many lessons to teach us about the continued relevance of anthropology and, just as importantly, how to communicate anthropological findings to a broader public. Although in the popular
Although in the popular mind Mead is often associated with her work in Samoa and studies of so-called primitive societies, Mead was an early pioneer of what many of us like to call public anthropology.
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mind Mead is often associated with her work in Samoa and studies of so-called primitive societies, Mead was an early pioneer of what many of us like to call public anthropology: an anthropology engaged in studying local concerns and in helping to solve the problems of people living in the contemporary world. For Mead, anthropology was never a discipline limited to the study of formerly primitive non-Western people. As she was fond of saying, Everything is anthropology! Meads skill as a writer helped to propel her into the limelight as one of the 20th centurys leading public intellectuals. She first attracted popular attention with her classic Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). Because she wrote in engaging and non-jargon-laden prose, her work was able to attract nonspecialist readers. Her anthropological insights presented new perspectives on issues that many readers during the Roaring Twenties cared passionately about, such as American adolescents and sexuality. This Week: Sex in the South Seas, ran the headline for the Nations review of Coming of Age in Samoa. According to her reviewers, Mead found that the premarital sexual permissiveness that she had observed among adolescents in Samoa was responsible for the lack of adolescent stress in Samoan society. The implication was that similar relaxed attitudes toward adolescent sexuality should be adopted here (although Mead herself never stated this explicitly!). As a result of the popular success of her book, Mead began to be regarded as an expert on adolescent development and human sexuality.
It was her talent as both a writer and a public speaker that elevated her status from merely that of a proficient anthropologist to that of media pundit. Meads ability to give her readers and audiences a new understanding of themselves, their children, and their culture was an important aspect of her popular success. Her succinctness, a good sense of humor, and accessibility of language and ideas are key elements in communicating the relevance of anthropological insights to a wider public. Mead established her reputation as an anthropologist on the basis of her fieldwork among various tribal groups and small-scale societies in Samoa, New Guinea, and Bali. However, it was her research, writing, and speaking about American society, as well as what we might today acknowledge as a prescient interest in globalization, that set Mead apart from her contemporaries and earned her popular renown. During World War II, she published her first book about American culture, And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America. Written as part of the war effort to encourage American support for the war, Mead sought to identify the characteristics of Americans that would be most useful in fighting against fascism and in leading the world after the war had ended. In part because of her new expertise on American culture, the U.S. government sent Mead to Britain as a spokesperson who could interpret American culture, and, in particular, dating behavior, to the British, who were inundated with American troops stationed throughout their country.
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After the war, Mead returned to Manus Island in New Guinea to examine the impact of the war on the islanders. Their lives had been upturned by the arrival of huge numbers of American soldiers in the Admiralty Islands during the war. In New Lives for Old and in her television documentary, Margaret Meads New Guinea Journal, the stories she told suggested that the postwar world was one of greater interconnection between remote cultures such as the Manus and the United States, that change was inevitable, and that both societies had things to learn from one another. Many Americans, especially women, became familiar with Mead through her monthly column in Redbook magazine, which she wrote during the 1960s and 1970s. One column that created a stir was entitled Marriage in Two StepsA Proposal (July 1966). Mead proposed that two types of marriage should be available to Americans. One, which she called Individual Marriage, would be a licensed union in which a man and a woman were committed to each other as individuals for as long as they wished to remain together, but not as future parents. In contrast, the second type of marriage, Parental Marriage, would be explicitly directed toward the creation of a family. The individual marriage, Mead thought, would give young couples the opportunity to get to know one another intimately with more sense of commitment and caring than a brief love affair, while the Parental Marriage would have at its core economic concerns as well as the establishment of a social network of people invested
We need, she argued, to rethink the future, and to rely less on technological fixes and more on behavioral change, such as our conserving of natural resources.
in the lives of the couples children. In many respects, todays acceptance of people living together for years before they marry or separate resembles Meads concept of an Individual Marriage. This article, and others like it, expressed Meads ongoing interest in experimenting with new forms of traditional institutions, adapting them to the realities of a changing society. Few people are aware that Mead was also interested in very pragmatic problems such as housing, urban development, race, water and air pollution, or nuclear breeder reactors, or of her work with educators, architects, urban planners, and environmental scientists. Her approach to practical problems changed over the latter part of her career in a way that we can now recognize as prescient. In the 1950s, she optimistically promoted the introduction of culturally appropriate forms of technological change, but twenty-five years laterhaving seen the disastrous results of programs such as the Green Revolution in Asiashe had changed her mind. In her 1975 photo essay, World Enough, done in collaboration with the photographer Ken Heyman, Mead argued that postwar technological progress had not
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solved the problems of the poor and underdeveloped nations. We need, she argued, to rethink the future, and to rely less on technological fixes and more on behavioral change, such as our conserving of natural resources. Meads message, largely unheeded except by fledgling environmentalists, came decades before Al Gore published An Inconvenient Truth. Mead thus became a celebrity as a result of her skill at translating anthropological insights garnered from non-Western societies into meaningful and accessible critiques of American society, and because she was committed to using anthropological methods to study her own culture. Not only were her insights relevant and engaging, she had at her disposal a proliferation of new mass media with which to communicate them. Her wit, humor, and self-assurance were particularly well suited to radio and television. These all combined to afford her a
unique opportunity to have her voice heard as a public intellectual. Over time anthropology has evolved in ways that Mead would appreciate. Indeed, many of the current developments of a public anthropology are actually practices that Mead either initiated or paved the way for through her own projects and her broad conception of what anthropology could do. One reason to look anew at Margaret Mead is that her career as an anthropologist presaged the trajectory that anthropology has taken around the turn of the millennium. That trajectory includes developments such as medical anthropology, the ethnographic study of the practice of medicine, and anthropological work in the fields of mental health and health care delivery. It also includes what is now known as media and visual anthropology, inspired by Meads use of movies and photographs as a source of valuable data about cultures. She was among the first anthropologists to point out that the processes of media production were culturally determined and demanded anthropological study. Mead was one of a group of anthropologists who transformed their wartime experiences in Washington, D.C., into the postwar subdiscipline of applied anthropology, the application of anthropology to practical problems of development and culture change. Her study of nutrition during World War II initiated the anthropological study of food and nutrition in the United States. Meads work inspired various approaches to the study of psychological anthropology and cultural psychology. Anthropologist
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tributes and the discipline of William Beeman has even aranthropology resonated with gued that Meads work durthe period in which she ing the 1940s on the study of lived. Perhaps most significulture at a distance was an cant was the fact that she was intellectual and methodologa woman. Mead understood ical precursor of todays Culthis herself when she said, I tural Studies. make much better newspaMeads contributions to per copy as a woman than I the anthropology of educawould as a man. She came tion began in 1930 with the of age during a period of great change in the publication of Growing Up in New Guinea roles of women in American society. She and continued throughout her career. Her was both instrumental in shaping some of study (with Rhoda Metraux) of the image of those changes and was in turn shaped by the scientist among American high school them. Thus it was newsworthy when she students, and her continual attention to the transgressed various boundariesprofesimpact of new technologies on different culsional, social, sexual, and genderin what tures presaged todays Science and Technolshe did, what she said, and how she lived ogy Studies. Although at the time many of her life. Today, such moves are commonMeads anthropological colleagues were place among women. disdainful of her interest in applying anthroMead lived during a period when an anpological methods to everyday problems, thropologist could be both a heroine and a today Meads forays into these areas are reccelebrity. The public intellectual Susan Sonognized as groundbreaking, leading to the tag could still, in the 1960s, write about development of the disciplines present fothe anthropologist as hero without being cus on public anthropology. either ironic or cynical What was it about about the anthropological Mead and the era in endeavor. Yet it is unlikely which she lived that alMead lived during a period that any anthropologist lowed her, an anthropolowhen an anthropologist will ever achieve the same gist, to achieve the degree kind or degree of fame as of national and internacould be both a heroine Mead did. This is not betional fame she had during and a celebrity. cause anthropology will and after her lifetime? And never attract anyone as why has anthropology not smart and as media-savvy produced another Maras she was. It is because the moment when garet Mead? The answer lies in several one anthropologist could capture the pubquite specific attributes of Mead as an anlics imagination and serve as a representathropologist and the ways in which these at-
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tive figure for much of American society has passed. During the first half of the 20th century in America, there was a great intellectual and popular preoccupation with questions of race, sex, gender, culture, and civilization questions that anthropology and anthropologists addressed either directly or indirectly in their work. In the marketplace of ideas, anthropology was a hot new commodity. Moreover, Mead became famous at a time when American intellectuals began to wrestle with the idea of culturewhat exactly was culture? Did Americans have culture? What was the difference between Culture and cultures? Were some cultures superior to others? Today the ethnographic concept of culture is now widely accepted and its use ubiquitous in common parlance. Although her name is no longer a household word or as readily recognized as when she was alive and seen frequently on television, Margaret Mead lives on in popular culture. The Internet in particular has provided her a new means of immortality. You can download your favorite Mead quotation and emblazon it on T-shirts, coffee mugs, or screen savers, and her image is used to promote everything from the legalization of marijuana to fat peoples pride. Aside from the omnipresent references to Mead as a 20th century female icon and role model for young women and girls, another frequent reference to Mead is her most famous quotation: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, its the
only thing that ever has. A huge number of organizations and causes, from the Cayuga Nation, a Native American group that is fighting to regain land in upstate New York, to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, use the quotation as an epigram. The quotation does not appear in any of Meads published work, and may have first appeared in one of her public speeches, perhaps, some say, in her speech at the Earth Day celebration in 1970. The essence of her words, however, may be found in her book, The Wagon and the Star: A Study of American Community Initiative; the book analyzes community projects that are very
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much like the small group, communitybased, local endeavors to which the quotation refers. The quotation is emblematic of a set of ideas and values that Mead has come to represent for Americans: a pioneering can do spirit that helped people create the United States in the first place, and the importance of a community taking the initiative to work together toward a common goal. Meads words and her lifes work represent the desire for a socially engaged populist anthropology and a strategy for chang-
ing anthropology itself. After all, we, too, are a small group of thoughtful committed citizens.
Nancy Lutkehaus is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her book, Margaret Mead:
The Making of an American Icon (2008) is published by Princeton University Press. Her most recent research includes working with community-based organizations in Kenya that care for orphaned children.
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feature
Womens Autonomy Combats AIDS in the Kalahari
Ida Susser Richard B. Lee
ndangwa is a town of 10,000 people on the main truck route in a densely populated region of northern Namibia. We had come to Ondangwa with our University of Namibia research assistants, Pombili Ipinge and Karin Nasheya, to launch a study of the social and cultural factors surrounding the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa. The year was 1996 and AIDS was rapidly overtaking Namibia and southern Africa as a whole. Pombili and Karin assembled a dozen women for an impromptu focus group on prevention strategies. The women spoke with great intensity and feeling about the rapidly spreading disease. They spoke of friends and relatives lost to a disease so deeply stigmatized that its name was never mentioned, and of the shame and guilt felt by the families whose loved ones succumbed to that illness. The women clearly understood the nature of the disease and its sexual transmission. They also spoke frankly about the local culture of sexuality, which accepted that men andto a far lesser extentwomen could maintain more than one partner at a time. Of course, such liaisons were a key
source of the rapid spread of AIDS. But when it came to the question of prevention, our inquiries hit a brick wall. Male condoms were widely publicized by the government and NGOs as a prevention measure and were readily available. Yet when we asked the married women Do you and your partner(s) use condoms? the answer was a shocked, No. Woman after woman repeated the mantra, We could never ask our partner to use a condom. That would indicate a lack of trust. He would never accept that, and if we insisted he would get angry. We might be beaten or even abandoned. However, when we showed the women at Ondangwa the female condom, they were extremely enthusiastic. They saw it as a way to avoid unprotected sex with its fatal consequences of infection. The women believed that the female condom would be regarded as the womans prerogative and might even be welcomed by their male partners. Thus, although women in Ondangwa were not powerless, they had to work within a particular set of cultural assumptions about sex and intimacy, assumptions that meant they could not ask a man to use a basic life-saving technology. Later that summer we moved our base 500 km to the southeast, where we encountered a dramatically different picture. We were based in a village of about 1000 people in a remote corner of the Kalahari Desert, an area that is the home of the Ju/hoansi, also known as San or Bushmen. Historically, the San, whose lands straddle the Namibia/Botswana border, lived as hunter-gatherers in an egalitarian social or-
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ganization, or band society. Although the San have now settled in villages, we discovered that their deep-rooted patterns of social equality still endured and had a remarkable effect on how the AIDS epidemic was playing out in this particular area. In our interviews with San women, we asked the same crucial question we had asked in Ondangwa: Would you ask your husband or boyfriend to use a condom? The answers we received were strikingly different. As one young San woman put it emphatically, Of course I would ask him to use a condom; if you didnt you could catch that terrible disease! If he did not do what she asked, she continued, she would refuse sex. She did not worry that her boyfriend might become angry. She did not worry that she might be abused or abandoned. All the San women we spoke with offered similar responses. In corresponding contrast to the Ondangwa women, they did not recognize any particular advantage in the female condom. Although much had changed since Richard first met the San in the 1960sa time when they lived by gathering and huntingwe were amazed to see that, at least in terms of sexuality, the women among the San exhibited a remarkable autonomy. It seemed that this autonomy, which allowed both men and women to hold their own with one another about sex, was fundamental to protecting the villages from the spread of the AIDS epidemic. It is certain that gender inequity can be deadly. In southern Africa today, young women from the ages of 14 to 25 are three times more likely to be infected with the
Focus group viewing a female condom (Courtesy of Richard B. Lee)
HIV virus than young men of the same age. And in South African prenatal clinics, anonymous testing of blood samples of pregnant women shows that the rate of HIV positive women rose from 0.7 percent in 1990 to 27.9 percent in 2003. In 2007, the percentage of HIV positive pregnant women in some areas reached the alarming level of 57.5 percent. Given these disturbing statistics, we set out to explore the ways that the historical autonomy of San women might protect them from AIDS in the rapidly globalizing context of today and how women might be able to draw on this resilience to protect themselves from the threat of AIDS. Historically, San women provided 70 percent of the food, and this economic contribution was an important source of their strength. For example, young women could and did veto marriage plans. Womens voices were heard in the village councils. In addition, women constructed their wattle
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and daub houses and could move around with ease. A woman could divorce a man simply by leaving the shelter they shared. Women controlled their own childbirth practices, and could share breastfeeding, childrearing, and meal preparation with other adults. Women were not individually burdened by childcare, because they raised their children to be autonomous early on, and they could count on the help of family and community members. Children wandered between households in the village and expected to be fed and sheltered wherever they went. Over the past 40 years, much has changed among the San. As a result of colonialism, wars, and agricultural incursions by both white settlers and African farmers, much of the San way of life has disappeared. Many San have left their villages for the margins of cattle farms, working intermittently at various jobs, for which they are often paid in beer or home brew. Even among the San who still live in settled villages, rapid changes have taken place over the past decade that have transformed their way of life and threatened to undermine womens autonomy. As a result, two different responses to HIV/AIDS are emerging among the San, one that leads to a tragic picture of destruction and a second that leads to a hopeful picture of resilience in which people can protect themselves from the threat of AIDS. Tsumkwe had once been a remote San village where elders met under the huge trunk of a gnarled, ancient baobab tree, still standing near the government buildings. Be-
fore Namibias liberation from its colonial occupation in the late 1980s, South African army units were based there. Personnel from the apartheid South African government built a clinic, a police station, stores, and rows of small, cheap cement houses during this period. After independence soldiers were replaced by border guards and other administrative personnel, who were posted far from home and who sought the local nightlife. In the past decade, a good quality gravel road from central Namibia and an airstrip have increased accessibility to the village. As a result, Tsumkwe now has a co-ed boarding school and a safari lodge. The lodge, which opened in 1997, provides a base from which tourists can visit the San villages to witness traditional healing rituals staged specifically for their consumption. Complicating this picture, since 2001 (and particularly after 2005) there has been an influx of men from outside groups such as Ovambo, Tswana, and Herero, who come to Tsumkwe on labor contracts. Not surprisingly, relationships have sprung up between San women and these outsiders. Outside men make desirable suitors because they earn more money than San men. At Tsumkwe it was common knowledge that non-local menroad crews, traders, civil servantsdrank at the numerous shebeens (home-brew bars) and then had liaisons with San women. In these liaisons, non-San male attitudes and power relations were more likely to expose San women to the risk of HIV. For example, ethnographic findings by one of our Namibian research associates, Pombili Ipinge, suggest that Ovambo men,
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Tsumkwe might be slowly following the route of other regions of southern Africa, leading to a place where women bear a greater burden from HIV than men.
unlike San men, expect to have pre-marital sexual relations with a series of women, and they dismiss the idea that they would be obligated to marry a woman who agreed to sex. These patterns take their toll: in 2003, we counted a cumulative total of seventeen deaths from AIDS in Tsumkwe, and more women had died than men. Tsumkwe might be slowly following the route of other regions of southern Africa, leading to a place where women bear a greater burden from HIV than men. Dobe, another village that we first revisited in 1999, provides a more hopeful contrast. The village enjoyed so much stability that we met many of the adults who had been described as youth in ethnographies written forty years ago. The village was not isolated: alongside its San population of 175, Dobe also had a resident population of about a dozen border guards and livestock inspectors. The San now earned cash, sold crafts, purchased tea and tobacco (and alcohol), fixed cars, and participated in various ways in the global tourist economy. Yet signs of autonomy and agency remained. Both men and women continued to gather nuts
and berries, and men continued to hunt small animals to cook over the open fire. Men and women worked in groups together in the bush for government wages, although the Botswana government regulations dictated that men were paid more than women. Women still built the shelters and both men and women moved from place to place as they chose. Children too could wander from shelter to shelter, well known to all their many kin. When a small boy around ten years of age asked us for a ride in our SUV, we asked him to check with his family. Oh, dont worry, we were told, I have relatives at the other camp. When we arrived about ten kilometers distant, at a newly created shelter around a fallen tree log, it was evident that this was true. The boy just ran off into the circle of huts and was immediately incorporated into the family group. As in previous eras, we found that a daughter might still breastfeed a mothers infant. One woman we met, breastfeeding one tiny infant while a toddler climbed on her lap, told us that the infant was her mothers and that she had nursed the child since her mother died. Under these conditions, although much else had changed, women still maintained and exercised an extraordinary amount of autonomy. Their autonomy clearly continued to figure in important ways in the sexual sphere. When we asked a group of married women if they would be able to use male condoms, their response was firm and swift. Give us some and we will teach our husbands how to use them. Interviews with young men in Dobe in 1999 corroborated
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the womens views of their sexual autonomy. The men talked as if women had the power to turn down sexual advances. One evening after a local soccer game, Richard and a couple of our crew members talked to five young men from Dobe. This exchange show that a girls accepting a mans sexual advances is tantamount to agreeing to marry him.
Tsau, a young Ju man: I was just given a wife by her parents. Richard: How many girls did you approach before marrying her? Tsau (without hesitation): Five, the first four refused, the fifth agreed. Richard: What exactly did you ask for? Tsau: I asked that we should lie down together, then make love, then cook food.
Several other young men told similar stories:
Kashe: I approached four and they refused, the fifth agreed. Richard: Why do girls refuse? What are they after? Kumsa: They want Goba boys, because they say Ju boys have no money.
In settled villages like Dobe, women and men were able to sustain stable relationships for decades. Women also seemed to maintain a degree of power and independence in marriage. Both men and women had access to small sums of money from government work programs. Both men and
women derived income from craft production, such as beading and carving. Even when Dobe women had relationships with non-San men, they could maintain their autonomy. Karu, a young San woman who had a relationship with a married Herero man, kept condoms at her house, and they used them. Her boyfriend brought her many presents and often spent weeks at her house. She seemed happy with the arrangement, and after several years with him, she was only concerned that she was beginning to want to have a child. Karu did not mention marriage with her Herero boyfriend, but expressed her main dilemma straightforwardly: I want to have a baby. I use the condoms because Im worried about sickness, so I really dont know what to do. If you have a child, sickness could also get in. She continued, My boyfriend really likes me, he divides his time between his village and herehe spends weeks at a time with me. We use a condom every time. . . . My boyfriend gives me shoes, blankets, and food. She said that she did not dare to stop using the condoms because she was afraid of infection with the HIV virus. In the conversation of this articulate and
I want to have a baby. I use the condoms because Im worried about sickness, so I really dont know what to do. If you have a child, sickness could also get in.
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self-assured San woman we saw signs that in spite of the changing population of the area, San women were effectively building on their history of autonomy even as they had to address new problems such as AIDS. In fact, despite the presence of outside men, a detailed house-by-house survey among the San households in Dobe in 2001 revealed not a single case of any illness resembling AIDS. In 2003, at a nearby clinic that treats San women from Dobe and elsewhere, Dr. Elizabeth Yellen reported that none of the tests for San mothers-to-be had come back positive for HIV. Dobe residents themselves saw the ominous contrast with the situation at Tsumkwe. At Dobe one teenage girl said: There is no AIDS [at Dobe], but I know they have it at Tsumkwe. The girls over there told me not to sleep with the boys because they have that disease there. I am afraid of AIDS at Tsumkwe. Informants at Dobe in 2001 could name only three women who they believed had died of AIDS, and all of them lived at Tsumkwe. In contrast, when Dobe residents leave their villages for work on road crews, cattle ranches, and in regional centers, their lives become more wretched as they become an underclass. They also experience a higher risk for HIV/AIDS because poor women must find money through casual sex work or simply seek sexual relations with men who will provide gifts for themselves and their children. In the Omaheke, a region of white-controlled commercial farms 300 km to the south of the Ondangwa area, Rene Sylvains research on San farm workers has shown how low wages and frequent layoffs
create conditions that increase alcohol, domestic violence, and family dysfunction. Omahekes location on long-distance truck routes exacerbates these problems and further raises the rates of HIV. Nuntla, whom we met at Dobe, outlined her fears for her daughter, who lived along the truck routes far from the settled San villages. Indicating that her daughter was involved in what has become known as survival sex, she told us:
She is taking terrible chances. She has a child with this man and he leaves and then she is with another man. She could be getting sick. . . . I tell her about the risk shes taking going with men like this, and she says, Dont talk to me! You are not giving me anything, what can I do? I have to support myself.
Nuntla elaborated, They do not give her cashjust soap, food, and sugar. In answer to a question, she answers, No, the men do not live with her. They have their own village and would stay a night where she lives with me, then come back in a week. Nuntla explained to us that she did get general rations from government assistance: Mealie meal [corn], beans, cooking oil, and sorghum [cassava], but no sugar. Nuntla said she knew about condoms, but reiterated the generational difference remarked upon by the young girls in Dobe: People my age [probably in her 40s] dont use them, but people in their 20s and 30s do use them. Both Goba and Ju carry condoms with them in their pockets. I have not
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seen women carrying them, but I have seen many men with them. Nevertheless, even where San were most afflicted by HIV/AIDS, as at Omaheke and Tsumkwe, there were still hopeful signs that women and men could grapple with the threat of HIV by drawing on their historical patterns of gender autonomy. When we first asked about AIDS in the Tsumkwe area in 1996, no women were involved in the government council for the San region. But by 2003, groups of women were advocating within the council for AIDS education of children and youth and for condom distribution. Francina, the vice-chair of the Town Council, was even spearheading a challenge to the encroachment of the shebeens, with their hard liquor and associated violence and sexual assaults, which the San fully realized added to the spread of AIDS. The Council enlisted the support of a local pastor to drive around the makeshift bars and overturn their barrels of hard liquor. All such gains are fragile. Every small outpost of development, whether it brings
men from a nearby town to dig the foundation for a new store or develops a trust to allow tourist hunting from safaris, introduces an increased threat of HIV. Although the San do not yet confront the epidemic rates of AIDS found in other regions of southern Africa, they may find themselves devastated by increasing rates of HIV/AIDS accompanying the influx of alcohol and the tourist economy. Still, the San traditions of egalitarianism and female autonomy constitute a significant resource that, coupled with support from indigenous organizations, health activists, and others, can lead to effective HIV prevention.
Ida Sussers book, AIDS, Sex and Culture: Global
Politics and Survival in Southern Africa, is forthcoming from Blackwells. Ida Susser, Graduate Center, City University of New York; susseris@ gmail.com Richard B. Lee is the author of The Dobe
Ju/hoansi, 3rd Edition, Harcourt, Brace.
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feature
Can Anthropology Ever Be Innocent?
Gerald M. Sider
Two Stories
The first comes from an early 1970s offBroadway play about a huge coal miners strike in Colorado in 19131914. The coal miners were striking against three mining companies, one of which was owned by the Rockefeller family. The miners had been evicted from their company-town homes and were living in a tent city of about 1200 people, when the mine owners called in the Colorado National Guard, in April 1914. In what has come to be called the Ludlow massacre, women, children, miners, and union officials, plus one National Guardsman, were killed. The play was about the strikers and focused on a union organizer. There were two other central characters. One was portrayed as a sweet, helpful, and friendly young man, the other as nasty and arrogant, who mocked the strikers and was definitely unfriendly. At the very end of the play, when the police came to arrest the union organizer, it turned out that the sweet young man was an informer for the mine owners and the police, and the nasty guy risked his own arrest to try to save the union organizer. The union organizer, in the midst of being
hauled away, probably to be sentenced to death, turned to the audience and said, in simplistic, romantic, but very useful terms: You dont choose your enemies, and you dont choose your friends. History chooses them for you. Anthropologists might usefully keep this in mind while telling themselves, their colleagues, and friendsand if they teach, their studentsabout how much they like and respect the people they study. This is a lovely emotion, and we can only wish it was more relevant to our current situation. This second story is an event that happened at the annual meetings of the Canadian Ethnological Society, held jointly with the American Ethnological Society, at Laval University in Quebec City, also in the early 1970s, in the context of the Vietnam War. A French anthropologist and ethnomusicologist, Georges Condominus, was invited to give the plenary address to the meeting. He stood at the podium, tears rolling down his face, saying that the doctoral dissertation he wrote in France, on the music of the Vietnamese Montaignards, had been acquired by the U.S. CIA, translated, and used in Operation Phoenix to identify and kill the village leaders of the villages he had studied. The point he was making is still brutally direct: at this moment in history there is no such thing as an innocent anthropology. We have to consider if there can be a more and a less innocent anthropology, in the context of this perceptive judgment. The judgment does not reference our intent, or our hopes and dreams; rather, it refers to how our studies of mostly vulnerable peo-
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ples can be used, whatever our intent. There is a related question in the context of this issue, about how a partisan anthropology, done to help the victims of currently intensifying inequalities, might begin. Such anthropologies do not begin in sympathy, or any good-hearted attempt to be helpful. They begin in the design of fieldwork and in the context of understanding struggle and its potential.
Appropriating Anthropology
Currently, by widespread, but far from universal consensus, the most morally corrupt, discipline-degrading, and destructive to the people we study form that anthropology takes is a practice that the U.S. military has named the Human Terrain System. The military has decided that it needs to know more about the people it seeks to dominate and control, and so, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are starting to attach people with some anthropological training to military patrols, but usually people with scant knowledge of, or experience in, the countries in which they operate. These folks, some of whom seem to either carry arms, or go in with armed protection (hard information about the program, beyond the public relations flack that is disseminated, is very difficult to get). These anthropologists go in to villages, or to sites that the military considers high priority, to discover what they can about local people that might be useful to the military. Interestingly, since anthropologists are supposed to study whole so-
cial systems, which here very much includes the military presence, the anthropologists dont seem to ask the military what they want and what they expect the locals to say or think. The militarys defense of this use of anthropology is that it enables them to substitute knowledge for bullets, to talk to people instead of shooting them. But so far shooting is the primary mode of attempted domination, and it is clear that the threat of being shot permeates this call to dialogue. It is as if a man sat down for a moment in the midst of very seriously battering his wife, in front of the children, and said to her and the children, lets talk about how you feel about me. Or perhaps he could just sit alongside an anthropologist, while the anthropologist asked the questions. This is my way of looking at it: you can share or deny this perspective and these values as you wish, for the central point is that all this is not fully relevant to the issue of what constitutes a decent anthropology. We just had to invoke and critique such direct and open betrayals of our profession to put that whole phenomenon aside. Otherwise anthropologists might think that if they dont work in such contexts they are doing well. But this evades the issue of how work gets used, despite its intent. We need to consider more fundamental, if less dramatic, issues. I want to suggest that the fundamental mistake that anthropologists who work for the militarys Human Terrain project is the same mistake almost all anthropologists make, and that is to ask the people that we study questions. This seemingly simple act opens our work to use by those who seek to
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Asking questions seems so fundamental to our fieldwork that we only worry about what questions to ask, and not about the questioning itself. But it is a very problematic aspect of our discipline.
dominate and control the people we study. There are other ways we can work, less open, but not impervious, to subsequent manipulation. Asking questions seems so fundamental to our fieldwork that we only worry about what questions to ask, and not about the questioning itself. But it is a very problematic aspect of our discipline, and one that leads us down alleys that we might not want to traverse. A further story to underscore what is at stake in this issue. In 1965 I was working for a government contract research organization in Washington, DC. I was studying poverty and the design of community-action programs on Native American reservations, for the so-called war on poverty, or as we later realized, the war on the poor. In addition, for my own interests, I was trying to develop a potential Ph.D. dissertation study of native resistance to French colonial domination on the island of Madagascar, in its postWorld War II transition to becoming the Malagasy Republic. One afternoon, I was visited by two men from the CIA who
had heard about my planned research. After what they regarded as some pleasant chitchat they handed me a slip of paper, with the address of a so-called foundation in downtown Washington. They told me that if I went there I would get the money I needed to do this research. The United States had a very large airbase on the island, and they were interested in what had been happening. I told them absolutely no, and they told me that I was being foolish and nave. They said that when my dissertation was done, they would buy a copy from University Microfilms, and so they would know what they wanted to know anyhow. All they wanted to do at this point was to make sure that the study got done. A half a decade before Condominus spoke, I was confronted with what seemed to me an impossible dilemma: there was no way I could find to study what I wanted to study without helping the cause of imperialism. A portion of my readers may want to do this, but I did not. Again, the major issue is not what our personal political feelings and commitments areto think this is to misunderstand fundamentally the issues here. The major issue is: can there be an anthropology which does not lend itself to being bent to the ends of state or capital domination and exploitation of the people we study, whether we want it to be or not?
Questioning
Forty-three years later I still cannot deal with this problem completely, although I have worried about it since. The first thing I
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did, to my sorrow, was to abandon this study of Madagascar becoming the Malagasy Republic. The second thing I did, very much to my joy and my own learning, was to go and join, as an activist and organizer, a civil-rights struggle being developed by the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolinaat that point primarily offreservation sharecroppers and small-scale farmers, as hard pressed and vulnerable as were African Americans, but with fewer resources for the struggle. Being an activist seemingly put to rest many of the concerns that I had, but these concerns have reemerged in my current research on child suicide, substance abuse, and domestic violence among the native peoples of Labrador, both Inuit and Indians. What has brought these issues back to the foreground is the fact that at the current moment there is little open and apparent struggle by ordinary native people themselves against their domination and exploitation, or against the individually and collectively self-destructive practices that have very significantly intensified in this context. There are a great many expert-designed government and tribal programs seeking to deal with the issue of self-destruction, so far mostly unsuccessfully. The self destruction is clearly connected to the appalling ways native people are, and have been, treated, but the connections are neither very direct nor mechanical. One of the primary and usual accomplishments of struggle is to clarify such connections; the current absence of open struggle leaves the underlying issues largely concealed, and an activist or parti-
san anthropology rootless in significant ways. In the quiet recesses of family and of community social relationships there are probably all sorts of struggles, much of it, we may assume, rather individualized, and it is scarcely possible to join such struggles. Without an open struggle to join I am once again confronted with what it means to be an anthropologist. In a context where government control over native lives is intense, and almost certainly part of the problem, I am faced again with the issue of what kind of anthropology lends itself more to peoples needs than to aiding further control by the Canadian federal and provincial states and by the large and very intrusive mining, timber, and hydroelectric projects. Clearly part of the answer lies in what I write and how I write it. At this point I am planning to write two related books: one for an academic and professional audience, where the detailed analytical and theoretical points are elaborated in lengthy endnotes. The second, which will have the identical theme, written from the outset in clear language, will omit the endnotes, and instead and in some detail suggest relevant further reading for those who want to pursue particular points or issues. This second book I will be seeking to get published by a local Canadian publisher, in a low-cost edition. But how I publish what I write is, in many ways, the easy part. The more complex point is how I learn what I know, or think I know, to write about. The primary purpose of this essay is to raise that problem for people to think about
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and talk about. In the books that I am presently writing I discuss the how of my subarctic research in some detail. This seems appropriate in that context, because it explains the specifics of what I do and do not know. It seems inappropriate in this context, for my task here is not to tell people how to work or to suggest that they copy what I do, but to get them to worry about a problem that anthropology I think needs to address openly, particularly now. Particularly now is a complex issue. Anthropology has long served the interests of the state, as it has been practiced throughout the late 19th century and the whole 20th century, in the United States, Great Britain, and Western Europe. Sometimes it served the state in causes where the alliance made a bit of moral sense, such as in World War II. The anthropology done in this context was usually arrant nonsense, but that is a different issue. More often, as in Vietnam or in the British and French colonies of Africa and the East, the anthropology done in service to the state is far less excusable. But as the United States turns increasingly ugly and desperate in its pro-
Anthropology has long served the interests of the state, as it has been practiced throughout the late 19th century and the whole 20th century, in the United States, Great Britain, and Western Europe.
cesses of domination, openly flaunting basic human-rights guarantees, the alliance of anthropology with the state becomes even more problematic, even more corrupt, than usual. Here I just want to make two suggestions, one of which will take us back to the issue of asking questions. The first suggestion is that what I know, in part (because we can only know a part of what we study), comes from an intensive engagement with a history of the people and the issues. This needs always to be done from primary sources, for five decades of anthropology have shown me that the secondary sources almost always misrepresent what happened. But the key here is to never do history in terms of what happened, for that is the most nave and simplistic kind of history, useful only as a starting point. The point is to see what gets carved into peoples bodies, into the landscape of their lives, and what reemerges, inescapably, in confrontation with their present and their future. History, exactly like the utterly nave anthropological concept of culture, is not something that people just have: it is something they often must struggle against, whether they want to or not. The second suggestion is to never ask any direct questions beyond ordinary daily life questions, such as Im going to town to pick up groceries. Do you want a lift? Or Do you think it will storm, or blow over? Sometimes, when I know people better, I ask more serious daily life questions, such as Is the doctor in town any good? To ask a more probing question is to assume that
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you know what is important, and this is either an intrusion of your fantasies onto their situation, or a probing for something that is useful to you, and perhaps the CIA or the military, rather than an exploration of their situation in terms they care to reveal. All I do out in the field is to say to people something like Hi, my name is Gerry Sider. Im writing a book about health here in the past decades. If they are interested, I tell them in more detail what I am trying to study, but I do not ask any questions about it. Then I see what if anything they want to tell me or ask me. If it brings no response I chat about the things one chats about with casual acquaintances. They usually ask me where Im from, and I tell them, and this sometimes leads somewhere else, where they want to go, if just very briefly and tentatively.
At the core of the field research that I do is something I call listening for the silences.
Order, Coherence, Silence

Once, years ago, doing field work in Newfoundland on the collapse of the fishery in the 1990s, and the massive depopulation of Newfoundland fishing villages, I encountered a woman who asked me to ask her questions, and asked me to tape record her answers. I have never tape recorded any person in the field, nor do I ever take notes, unless at times when I am talking to government officials and program officers. With those folks a notepad makes them think they are actually being interviewed, and keeps them centered and serious; with ordinary people, a pad of paper and a pen is a
wall or worse, a rocket ship that usually rapidly makes increasing distance from what you want to be close to. I carry a small pocket tape recorder in the car or in my backpack, for talking to myself about theory and interpretation as my ideas get provoked by field encounters. I got the tape recorder from the car and gave it to her to let her record herself. This whole process made me very uncomfortable, because it seemed to change the human encounter that always ought to be part of an anthropological engagement. Actually, all it did was take the exchange between us out of my control she held the tape recorder, controlled its on/off button, and shaped the questions she wanted to be askedand that helped me understand something about anthropological fieldwork as a form of domination and control, not too far underneath its illusions about participant observation. The point about asking no substantial questions is not just to let the people define the issues and their content. At the core of the field research that I do is something I call listening for the silences. This is an attempt to grasp what might be said but is not, what might be brought out in the open but is kept hidden. My point is never to speak
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the silence, toas innocent historians put it give people back their hidden history. Silences ought to be respected: people have their reasons. But they need to be acknowledged, for they color what is said. There is a way of making this all far less mysterious, far less a new-age mumbojumbo. That is to put aside all our Weberian fantasies about social order and realize that power and domination do not make anything remotely resembling some kind of social order. Rather, power routinely brings chaos and rupture to peoples lives. Power is utterly incoherent in some of its central effects: thats about one half of how it works. Power may organize the regular and for a while routine extraction of a surplus from peasants and workers, and simultaneously it seeks to mobilize and discipline labor as its other half, but in doing so it routinely brings chaos to peasant and worker lives. Power is, in a word, incoherent: it does not cohere at its center, and what it does is, for many, unspeakable in any clear or direct form. To listen for the silences is to grasp in our minds and our hands the incoherence of power and domination, and this grasp is the beginning, only the beginning, of our service to those we study. This is so because turning the specific forms and processes of incoherence back on the perpetrators is often a very effective strategy of struggle against domination and exploitation: make them deal with the chaos they create, or try to. Think about it. Check it out. Let people know what you find.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Joe Vitti for the productive suggestion that anthropologists who work for the Human Terrain Program are not doing their job well unless they also interrogate the military; Fran Smulcheski, an artist who did an exceptional installation at S.U.N.Y New Paltz in 2007 about domestic violence and another in 2008 on Inuit suffering, which alerted me to some of the hidden dimensions of domination when the violent speak of, and to, the vulnerable; and Katherine McCaffrey for fine editorial suggestions.
Suggestions for Further Reading

For a methodological illustration of my work in historical anthropology, see the prologue (which also contains the taped interview) in my Between History and Tomorrow: Making and Breaking Everyday Life in Rural Newfoundland, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2003. There is a more developed engagement with partisan anthropology in my Living Indian Histories: Lumbee and Tuscarora People in North Carolina, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. For a very fine presentation of an analytical basis for a deeply engaged anthropology, see Gavin Smith, Confronting the Present: Toward a Politically Engaged Anthropology. New York: Berg. The best presentation of the need to work in this engaged
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manner is from a medical doctor, Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, California Series in Public Anthropology, 4. Berkeley: University of California Press, and for a vision from a new generation of smart confrontational anthropologists, I recommend Charles Menzies and Anthony Allen Marcus, Toward a Class Struggle Anthropology, in the online journal hosted by the University of British Columbia, New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdiscipli-
nary Inquiry, vol 1, number 1, Fall 2007. http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/new proposals/

Gerald M. Sider
Gerald M. Sider: professor of anthropology, emeritus, City University of New York; professor of anthropology, honorary, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
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anthropologies
Anthropologie Now
Scott Webel Kathleen Stewart
The Arcade. The advertising agency Pompei A.D. developed the Anthropologie brand and designed 92 stores in close collaboration with a nationwide network of artist and artisan subcontractors. Anthropologie is famed for its informal layout [including] a sculptural arcade of vignettes customized so that customers in each store can explore its flea-market treasures (http:// www.pompeiad.com/articles/6_105). (Photo by Susan Harding)
Found Objects. We have a team of buyers who spend the entire year traveling around the world going to antique stores, flea markets, and small towns in the U.K. and India looking for pieces. They send crate after crate back on the steamers, and we distribute those objects to the stores and then merchandise around the found objects. http: //retailtrafficmag.com/mag/retail_anthro pologies_cultured_approach/index.html. Randy Southerland, Anthropologies Cultured Approach to Style. July 2000, Retail Traffic. (Photo by Scott Webel )
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Antigravity (lightness, whimsy, the floating world). Anthropologie store, Rockefeller Center, NYC. In January, the Anthropologie website had an escape section that read Imagine throwing a dart on a map, and wherever it landed, you picked up and went (http://www.anthropologie.com/ anthro/index.jsp. Accessed January 28, 2008). You could picture yourself in Hanoi or the Dominican Republic by studying the complete commodity package on display in the catalog (clothes, travel necessities, shoes, bags, a Not For Tourists tour book, little objects you can pick up while youre there and bring home to your living room). (Photo by Mark Gerstein, mark@gerstein. info)
Dirt. You could escape, or implant the tropics right at home using common objects plants in dirt in sandwich bags become window jungles. The closets cloth prints crawl with leaves, ivies, and animals. Tea sets that are sea urchins, dresser drawer handles that are pears and flowers. Like living in a Haeckel illustration. (Photo by Sheila OMalley)
Background illustrations: Plates 7 and 45 from Ernst Haeckels Kunstformen der Natur (1904).
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Transformational Environments. Pompei A.D. creates transformational experiences [that] strengthen the emotional bonds between brands and their communities. Their clients range from museums to MTV. Each themed environment is designed as a habitat for peoples deep physical, emotional, and symbolic needs. It allows them to feel like they belong, and establishes a deeply felt trust that encourages the possibility of genuine transformation (http://www .pompeiad.com/articles/9_263). But transformation of what, into what? (Photo by Scott Webel )
Scott Webel is a graduate student in the Center of Cultural Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, and co-curator of the Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata in Austin, Texas. Katie Stewart is the executive director of the University of Texas Project on Conflict Resolution in Austin, Texas, and owner of Iron Scaffold, a management consulting industry.
Aesthetic Tourism. Anthropologie markets to hip professional women in their 30s living in households with $200,000 to $300,000 incomespeople with a little whimsy in their distinction. Its owned by Urban Outfitters, developed in symbiosis with the Urban Outfitters folks growing up and becoming two-income professionals on the top of the world. But there are also aesthetic tourists to the storewomen who spend way too many lunch hours there browsing, making mental wish lists, being charmed, inspired, getting a fix (http:// cravinganthropologie.blogspot.com/). (Photos by Scott Webel )
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visual essay
Will Thompson
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Will Thomson
Human Terrain
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Will Thomson, is the editorial assistant for An-
thropology Now and a graduate student in the

anthropology department at New York University. He studies rural to urban migration and the creation of new Chinese spaces and new Chinese subjects in the era of post-Maoist Reform.
fieldnote
Anthro Mom
Obamas Mother the Anthropologist
Abraham Lincolns motherNancy Hanks Lincolnwas a much admired seamstress before she married. Thurgood Marshalls motherNorma Arica Marshallwas a public school teacher for over 25 years. Jimmy Carters motherLillian Gordy Carterwas a registered nurse and Peace Corps volunteer. Sandra Day OConnors motherAda Mae Wilkey Daywas a rancher in Arizona. and . . . Barack Obamas motherAnne Dunham was an anthropologist. Anne Dunham got her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii in 1992 for her three-volume ethnology, Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds.
Anne Dunham with her son Barack Obama. (AP Photo/Obama Presidential Campaign)
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stories from the field

Death in a Family
Emily Yates-Doerr
Emily Yates-Doerr, a doctoral candidate at NYU, has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Guatemala, looking at changes in what people eat and how they understand a healthy diet. The traditional local diet of beans and tortillas is being challenged by imported foods and snacks (soda, chips, sweets, and the like), while medical clinics are spreading new ideas about nutrition and health. In January, soon after settling in with a family in a small town, Emily wrote:
her nieces and nephews, and her husband takes on extra hours of construction work so that there is always enough food to feed everyone (even if plain fried tortillas are served as the main course a couple of times a week). I asked the husband shortly after we met whether his job was dangerous. He said yes, it was, but because of a recent promotion to oversee a construction team, he thought some of the danger had been minimized. He gave a blessing of thanks to God as he told me this.
In April, Emily returned to New York to attend her brothers wedding. She wrote the following letter a few weeks later, shortly after getting back to the field.
am living with a large extended family, an experience that has been both comforting (people are always everywhere) and lonely (what a social misfit I am, living so far from my own strong kinship ties!). Seven siblings (now ages 5035) inherited the house I live in when their parents died. When one of the brothers wives died in childbirth, a sister adopted his two small children and is raising them as her own. Several years back, this sister and her husband moved into the parents room on the top floor. Their room is next to the largest kitchen in the house, the one that doubles as the main social gathering space. This sister cooks and does childcare for many of
I returned to the shock of discovering that a couple of Sunday mornings ago, when clocking some extra work hours before breakfast, the husband had fallen from the third floor of a building and died instantly. The grief ... the confusion ... the moments of laughter-relief release ... the unspeakable, unthinkable weight of sadness ... the impossible difficulty of rationalizing or making sense of this death against the relentless desire to do so. Im afraid this sentence must end there, defying proper sentence structure, since right now Im not sure what structure really gives us in the end. Tonight the dinner table was struck by an unusual moment of stillness that once allowed to enter overtook the space around us. I swear that everyone was thinking the same thing: At any moment he could walk through the dooronly to have to remind themselves
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that he would never walk through the door again. How do you believe the unbelievable? Theres a sense of wanting more than anything for time to pass so that the pain is lessened, while also not wanting time to move a second ahead, as this means a second more of life without him. The grief is not really mine. I only knew him a handful of weeks. I wasnt here when he died. Someday soon I will need, because of my research, to switch families and will leave again. Im trying to sit alongside their grief though. Family members have asked me to please stay. I know the $3 a day I give for room and board is needed and Ive been told that my company is a good distraction; the busier they can stay the better. I have no idea how any of this ties into my fieldwork and it might not. I want to learn from it, but that desire is accompanied with such a strong feeling of guilt (what privileged distance I must have to want to make use of the pain of others). Perhaps the pain in this household right now might help me to better understand this country with the deep, layered, experiences of death and grief that it holds? But am I capitalizing on the pain of those around me by analyzing it, and do I have that right? Would it be better to keep my own mind still and let the sorrow move around me where it wants to move? And then, life goes on: a baby was born to one of the cousins in the family the day before yesterday (the first son at the greatgrandchild levelIll attach a silly picture of me with the baby below). The eldest sister turned 50 a week ago and was celebrated
Emily and the great grandson of her family, Carlos Moreno Cruz, and his father Carlos Moreno Cajas. (Photo courtesy of Emily Yates-Doerr)
with a huge party. And my days have been completely filled with semi-structured interviews with a range of different friends-offriends here (beauticians, aerobics instructions, amas de casa (lovers of the home, or housewives), teachers, students, farmers). I really dont know where much of it is going yetIm going to try to spend more time in some of the outlying rural communities and Im choosing between a few different clinics, taking my time with this since once I start working there, Ill have less time with people at their jobs and in their homes. There are some major recurring themes that Ive been marking: a new economy of time management alongside increased stress, which people say is affecting their appetites and metabolisms; the impact of working mothers on household diets; the general distrust of what is in the countrys food supply. As for what Im learning: sometimes I feel like everything is completely obvious and other times I feel like what people are telling me is unbelievable. Ive been recording al-
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most everything and am leaving some of the processing of it all until Ive been here for a while longer. I suppose I am trying to do my best to follow the most enduring of our methodological techniques: to listen, although right now it seems as though mostly I am listening to that which is unspoken and which may never be able to be put to words.
Now Im off to go finish fieldnotes for the night. ...
Emily Yates-Doerr is a graduate student in the anthropology department at New York University and is currently conducting field research in Guatemala.
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uncommon sense
Nightmares
Hugh Raffles
Of all the animals, insects are the most confounding. They exist in vast numbers and astonishing diversity. They occupy every surface of the planet. They thrive in our homes and on our bodies, an intimate presence in our daily lives. Yet they are radically different from us. This is an excerpt from Raffless forthcoming book, The Illustrated Insectopedia. The book explores human history and culture from the vantage point of our dense social connection with insects. Organized in twenty-six, alphabetized entries of varying lengths, it begins in mid-Air and ends in the Zoarium.
or a long time I thought only of bees. They crowded out all the others and this book became just for them. A Book of Bees in all their bee-ness. All the physical capacities, the behavioral subtleties, the organizational mysteries. All that golden beeswax lighting up the ancient world. All that honey sweetening medieval Europe. All those bees, timeless templates for the most diverse human projects and ideologies. Bees took over. But then a plague of winged ants invaded my apartment, and after they left I began thinking of locusts and then beetlesall those beetles!and then caddis flies and crane flies and vinegar flies and bot flies
and dragonflies and mayflies and house flies and too many other flies. Then one thing led to another and I came across field crickets and mole crickets and Jerusalem crickets, and then Jessy sent me a weta from New Zealand. And then the 17-year cicadas emerged in Ohio, and I discovered the thrips, and the katydids, remembered the aphids on Californian roses and the end-ofsummer wasps drowning in water-filled jam jars, and then termites, and hornets, and earwigs, and scorpions, and ladybugs, and praying mantids sold dry in packets in garden supply stores. And then there were the mosquitoes with long legs and the mosquitoes with short legs and far too many butterflies and moths of all kinds. And I remembered what we all already know: that insects are without number and without end, that in comparison we are no more than dust, and that this is not the worst of it. There is the nightmare of fecundity and the nightmare of the multitude. There is the nightmare of uncontrolled bodies and the nightmare of inside our bodies and all over our bodies. There is the nightmare of unguarded orifices and the nightmare of vulnerable places. There is the nightmare of foreign bodies in our bloodstream and the nightmare of foreign bodies in our ears and our eyes and under the surface of our skin. There is the nightmare of swarming and the nightmare of crawling. There is the nightmare of burrowing and the nightmare of being seen in the dark. There is the nightmare of turning the overhead light on just as the carpet scatters. There is the nightmare of beings without reason and the nightmare of
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being unable to communicate. There is the nightmare of being out to get us. There is the nightmare of knowing and the nightmare of nonrecognition. There is the nightmare of not seeing the face. There is the nightmare of not having a face. There is the nightmare of too many limbs. There is the nightmare of all this plus invisibility. There is the nightmare of being submerged and the nightmare of being overrun. There is the nightmare of being invaded and the nightmare of being alone. There is the nightmare of numbers, big and small. There is the nightmare of metamorphosis and the nightmare of persistence. There is the nightmare of wetness and the nightmare of dryness. There is the nightmare of poison and the nightmare of paralysis. There is the nightmare of putting the shoe on and of taking the shoe off. There is the slithering nightmare and the one that walks backwards. There is the squirming nightmare and the squishing nightmare. There is the nightmare of the unwelcome surprise. There is the nightmare of the gigantic and the nightmare of becoming. There is the nightmare of being trapped in the body of another with no way out and no way back. There is the nightmare of abandonment and the nightmare of social death. There is the nightmare of rejection. There is the nightmare of the grotesque. There is the nightmare of awkward flight and the nightmare of clattering wings. There is the nightmare of entangled hair and the nightmare of the open mouth. There is the nightmare of long, probing antennae emerging from the overflow hole in the bathroom
Illustration by Bill Russell, www.Billustration.com
sink or, worse, the rim of the toilet. There is the nightmare of huge, blank eyes. There is the nightmare of randomness and the unguarded moment. There is the nightmare of sitting down, the nightmare of rolling over, the nightmare of standing up. There is the nightmare of the military that funds nearly all basic research in insect science, the nightmare of probes into brains and razors into eyes, the nightmare that should any of this reveal the secrets of locusts swarming, of bees navigating, and of ants foraging, the secrets will beget other secrets, the nightmares other nightmares, the pupae of other pupae, insects born of micro-implants, part-machine/part-insect insects, remote-controlled surveillance weaponized insects, moths-on-a-mission, beetles-undercover, not to mention robotic insects, mass-produced, mass-deployed, mass-suicide nightmare insects. These are the nightmares that dream of coming wars, of insect wars without vulner-
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able central commands, forming and dispersing, congealing and dissolving, decentered, networked, netwar, network-centric warfare, no-casualty wars (at least on our team), dreams of Osama bin Laden somewhere in a cave. These are the nightmares of invisible terrorists, swarming without number, invading intimate places and unguarded moments. The nightmares of our age, nightmares of emergence, of a hive of evil, a brood of bad people, a superorganism beyond individuals, swarming on their own initiativehoming in from scattered locations on various targets and then dispersing, only to form new swarms.1 The nightmare of language. The language of bees. Nightmare begets nightmare. Swarm begets swarm. Dreams beget dreams. Terror begets terror. Where are the bees now? Collapsing in their colonies, gliding through their plastic
mazes, sniffing out explosives, sucking up that sugar water, getting fat and weak on corn syrup, locked in little boxes at airports, sticking out their tongues on cue. Who knew the tiny critters were so smart? said the journalist. Fuzzy little sniffers. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Keeping us safe. Helping us sleep easy at night.
Note
1. Scott Atran, A Leaner, Meaner Jihad, New York Times, March 16, 2004.
Hugh Raffles is associate professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He is the author of In Amazonia: A Natural History (Princeton, 2002).
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poetry
SoCal Local
Anthropology in Southern California
Christine Ward Gailey
Doing Ninety on the 91

Doing ninety on the 91 past Corona, pavement etched in case of rain. Bride Expo flier flutters on a power pole long after June. Billboards tout Exotic Massage (New girls every week!) Lasik Empire Scratches out desert dreams.
Gated Community
Chaise and body long. Patio door mirrors nuclear sun. Digital camera pixilates the zircon pool, silicone breasts, block walls that keep her in.
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Rubidoux
A trailer park condenses life beneath Mount Rubidoux. A hill in truth, Its pinnacle cross a lie, not sown by padres seeking souls, but boosters of an Empire. People fill container lives with work and birth and legal woes. Jos in the latest war Ppi in the last. Money orders, flowing borders beyond immobile homes. Desert to desert, Dust to dust. Hawks spiral above, Coyotes below.
Drive-By on the 60
Palm trees wave their blackened dreds. Toxic sunset for the gridlocked. Tattoo Expo Day-Glo Poster-child of Inland Empire. Riverside, your river, dried bed for homeless seekers of work. Pampas grass crowds putting greens ensured by Colorado melt and Colored men. No mission here: never was just real Estate Planning.
Christine Ward Gailey, is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and in the Department of Womens Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is also chair of the Department of Womens Studies.
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anthropology
NOW

Anthro Now Spring 2009

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anthro

Will Thomson New York University http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/journals/an

April 2009 Volume 1 Number 1

From the Editors

Anthropologie Now, Scott Webel and Kathleen Stewart

Anthro Mom: Obamas Mother the Anthropologist

Stories from the Field

Death in a Family, Emily Yates-Doerr

Nightmares, Hugh Raffles

SoCal Local, Christine Gailey

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

from the editors

McCaffrey, Martin, Susser, and Harding

From the Editors

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Coming Soon ...

McCaffrey, Martin, Susser, and Harding

From the Editors

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Are Women Evolutionary Sex Objects?

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Are Women Evolutionary Sex Objects?

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Are Women Evolutionary Sex Objects?

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Are Women Evolutionary Sex Objects?

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Trained as a medic, he especially relished the idea of helping his buddies.

Gutmann and Lutz

Becoming Monsters in Iraq

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Garett Reppenhagen (Photo by Matthew Gutmann)

Gutmann and Lutz

Becoming Monsters in Iraq

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Gutmann and Lutz

Becoming Monsters in Iraq

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Brig Art (Photo by Ricky Clousing)

Gutmann and Lutz

Becoming Monsters in Iraq

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

All-You-Can-Eat Buffets and Chicken with Broccoli to Go

Chinatowns New Immigrants

From Ethnic Enclave to Ethnic Economy

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

All-You-Can-Eat Buffets and Chicken with Broccoli to Go

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

All-You-Can-Eat Buffets and Chicken with Broccoli to Go

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

All-You-Can-Eat Buffets and Chicken with Broccoli to Go

vival Among New Yorks Evolving Immigrant Community.

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Margaret Mead: Public Anthropologist

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Margaret Mead: Public Anthropologist

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Margaret Mead: Public Anthropologist

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Margaret Mead: Public Anthropologist

Volume 1 Number 1 April 2009

Focus group viewing a female condom (Courtesy of Richard B. Lee)

Ida Susser and Richard B. Lee