They are both about Haiti. They are both worth reading. In my view, one is the best of op-eds and one is the worst. Please read them and say what you think and why.

Op-ed #1: In the February 7 New York Times, Ben Fountain takes us to rural Haiti in 1999. After driving for a few hours away from Port-au-Prince, he saw sprawling mansions in the hillsides. “Had oil been discovered in Haiti”? His Haitian friend shook his head: “Drogue. Drugs.” Fountain talks about how Haiti, 10 years ago, had become a major transshipment point for cocaine from South America to the United States. It still is. The Haitian military helps keep this billion-dollar-a-year trade going. Fountain concludes: “So it’s come to this: the richest country in the hemisphere and the poorest, the first republic and the second, trapped together in the New World’s most glaring modern failure: the war on drugs.”

Op-ed #2: In the February 5 Wall Street Journal, Lawrence Harrison writes from Boston about how the Haitian people’s widespread devotion to voodoo is its “curse.” He states that although Haiti has received billions of dollars in foreign aid over the past half-century, its progress indicators are more like those of Africa than Latin America. The reason: the powerful influence of voodoo, which, he explains came from Africa and continues to be an “obstacle to development” there. Harrison avers that that all Haitians feel its influence. His sources of data? A son-in-law of his “who is Haitian and holds a graduate degree from Harvard.” And an American missionary who lived in Haiti for 20 years. Shaky grounds? Not for Harrison, who sums it all up for us: “Haiti’s predicament is caused by a set of values, beliefs, and attitudes…”

Image: “Members of the Jordanian Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) take position during a drug seizure exercise. 22/Dec/2008. UN Photo/Marco Dormino.” Link. Creative commons licensed Flickr content.

Filed under: Development, Religion, drugs, poverty by admin on February 8, 2010
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• Son of an anthropologist, President Obama also a yuppie
According to an article in the New Republic, one factor contributing to President Barack Obama’s inability to connect with the working class is that he comes from a family of professionals, including his mother who was a cultural anthropologist. So is the Bush family one of the working or unemployed poor?

• Death in the Andamans
Boa Sr, who was around 85 years old, died last week in the Andaman Islands, India. Many media sources have noted her death. She was one of the few remaining members of the so-called “Great Andaman” tribes, or those groups of foragers who occupied the island of Great Andaman at the time of the British colonial occupation. Due to the British presence, the Great Andamanese were decimated and only a few dozen descendants remain today. They are sequestered on a reservation. CNN World has a video clip showing Boa Sr when she was still alive. The CNN site also offers a string of mostly insulting commentary from over 700 people. In a BBC piece, Anvita Abbi, professor of linguistics at Jawaharlal University in New Delhi, says that India has lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage because one of the world’s oldest languages, called Bo, has come to an end.

This blogger raises three points: the Andaman Islands belong to India as an accident of British imperialist history and so Bo is not really part of “India’s heritage”; India has done little to protect the remaining indigenous islanders but instead allows rampant “development” including the ongoing take-over of traditional territory of the foragers and road construction; a language with only one speaker is not a language at all–the death bell tolled for the Bo language around the time when anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown was on Great Andaman doing “salvage anthropology” in the early 20th century. The story of Boa Sr’s death, like that of so many other indigenous peoples whose livelihoods have been destroyed by rapacious outsiders, is more than just about the end of the Bo language. It’s about a whole way of life that is gone. The only remaining Andaman peoples with any hope for cultural survival are those who live on North Sentinel Island. They are protected, to some degree, by rough waters that make it difficult to land, and to their practice of shooting arrows with high accuracy at anyone who tries to land. The Indian government should cease efforts to “contact” the so-called Sentinelese by boat and lure them with “gifts” sent ashore, and should stop flying over the island for surveillance as such actions undoubtedly cause stress to the people. Let them be. Their undisturbed survival would be a true triumph for Andamanese “heritage.” See an upcoming post on this blog for a profile on the people of the Andamans.

• Death and restless spirits in Haiti
The death toll from the January earthquake is said to be around 200,000. About 150,000 bodies have been found and buried, many in mass graves around Port-au-Prince. USA Today quotes Karen Richman, professor of anthropology at Notre Dame University, as saying that the spiritual and psychological effects of these graves will linger given the cultural importance that Haitians attach to a proper funeral: In Haiti, “You need to communicate with the ancestors to reach these spirits…You need to know they have been respected.” If they are not respected the spirits will return to trouble the living. Mass graves are disrepectful. Richman predicts, however, that Haitians will find “creative, adaptive new rituals in a drive to make meaning” even if just by constructing a monument over a mass grave.

• The taming of the turkey
DNA analysis of turkey bones and coprolites reveal that turkeys were domesticated in two areas: Mesoamerica and the Southwestern United States. Both strains are now extinct and turkeys eaten today are descended from the Mesoamerican domesticates via Europe thanks to Spanish conquerors and then back to North America. Archaeologist Jonathan C. Driver of Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada, comments that the findings “have really helped clarify some of the questions archaeologists have been wondering about for a long time.” For details see the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• We have found a shrubbery
A detailed archaeological survey of the Stonehenge landscape reveals the presence about 4,000 years ago of two circular hedges surrounding the monument. Of course, no one knows why the hedges might have been constructed but that doesn’t prevent guesswork: to serve as screens to prevent the crowds from elite ceremonies.

Filed under: Anthro in the News by admin on February 8, 2010
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In the late 1970s, Haiti’s rural population was 80 percent of the total population, while today it is 55 percent. This rapid shift has led to Haiti being “terribly out-of-balance” as Robert Maguire testified (PDF transcript) before the Subcommittee on International Development, Foreign Assistance, Economic Affairs and International Environmental Protection of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on Feb. 4.

Robert Maguire is associate professor of international affairs and director of the Haiti Program at Trinity College in Washington, D.C., and Jennings Randolph senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. He first went to Haiti in 1974. His most recent visit ended on January 10, 2010, two days before the earthquake occurred.

In his testimony, Maguire laid out five points:

1. Decentralization: help people displaced from Port-au-Prince to stay in rural areas
2. Create a National Civic Service Corps
3. Strengthen state institutions through partnership
4. Get money into the hands of poor people
5. Support institutions, businesses, and leaders who work toward inclusion, less social inequality, and socially responsible investment strategies

Image: “Rural life is hard work,” a scene of rural Haiti. Creative commons licensed content by Flickr user danboarder.

Filed under: Aid, Development, Foreign Policy, poverty by admin on February 7, 2010
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Despite an abundance of aid materials and the good intentions of relief agencies, relief efforts in Thailand following the December 2004 earthquake/tsunami were afflicted by skewed distribution.

Jin Sato, associate professor in the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo, analyzes the factors that skewed relief good distribution in an article in Development in Practice. He discusses how the political and economic turmoil caused by relief efforts themselves constitute an additional risk for victims.

Sato also notes that while the social ramifications of relief efforts are substantial, yet they are often overlooked for three reasons:

• most “disaster management” experts are engineers
• social analysis requires time
• relief organizations are poorly coordinated which prevents the generation of lessons for the future

His recommendations for more effective responses, based on lessons from the 2004-2005 tsunami relief efforts, are:

• the selection of goods and distribution mechanisms are of paramount importance
• aid efforts should not only supply goods but should focus on strengthening institutional resources that allow recipient communities to more effectively absorb the goods and distribute them fairly
• relief agencies should co-ordinate with each other after the emergency stage to develop ways to reduce pre-existing inequalities or dominance

After reading his article, I decided to contact Professor Sato to learn more about him and his involvement in disaster response work. Here is my email interview with him:

Q: What is your background in terms of academic training?

A: My B.A. from the University of Tokyo was in anthropology, and I have a master’s degree in both international relations and public policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard University. My Ph.D. was in international studies (interdisciplinary) at the University of Tokyo, and my dissertation topic was on natural resource governance and politics in Thailand. I did a post-doc at the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University under Jim Scott in 1998-1999.

Since my student years, I have been interested in natural resource governance and foreign aid. The article is a spin off from my interest in the latter.

Q: When you worked as a policy advisor to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of Thailand, what were your major responsibilities?

A: I was there to advise on the formulation (and prioritization) of the Environmental Policy 5-year plan, particularly about citizen participation and the role of international assistance (especially that of the Japanese government).

Q: Where were you when the tsunami hit, and what role if any did you play in responding to the tragedy?

A: As you might remember, the Tsunami hit on Dec. 25. I was taking a vacation in Samui Island in Thailand. Since my duty was to advise on environmental policy, I was not sure what to do, but I contacted the JICA office to offer assistance since I could speak the language. They put me on the first assistance survey team to develop livelihood assistance strategy from Japan. But Japanese assistance was too slow, and I don’t think we had any impact at all.

Q: Can you comment on the current situation in Haiti, in terms of how your findings about Thailand might relate to that context?

A: Since I have not been to the field, it is hard to comment. But judging from the news, there was more order and discipline in Thailand where people could wait in lines to receive aid goods. The tsunami hit only the coastal zone and other parts remain intact (unlike the earthquake). This is a huge difference in terms of the availability of assistance and speed of recovery. I suspect that there will be some structural concentration in either damage or assistance due to pre-existing resource inequity.

Image courtesy of Jin Sato.

Filed under: Agriculture, Aid, Development, Environment, Foreign Policy, Natural Resources, poverty by admin on February 6, 2010
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Despite the American Anthropological Association’s condemnation of the Human Terrain program, in which anthropologists have been recruited to assist with counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon wants to expand the program. Congress is currently considering the Pentagon’s request for increased funding for the program.

Please join us in expressing our firm opposition to this abuse of anthropology by agreeing to add your signature to the “Anthropologists’ Statement on the Human Terrain System Program.” Modeled after a well-publicized 2008 statement written by economists to oppose the Bush administration’s first TARP program, this statement aims to clearly and concisely state the factual grounds for our opposition.

We want to collect the signatures of as many professional anthropologists as possible before Congress takes up the issue in a hearing scheduled for as early as February. To add your name to the statement, please email your name, title and affiliation to nohumanterrain@gmail.com. Please forward this appeal widely.

You can access the AAA Commission’s report on the Human Terrain Program (PDF) here.

The Network of Concerned Anthropologists Steering Committee: Catherine Besteman, Andrew Bickford, Greg Feldman, Gustaaf Houtman, Roberto Gonzalez, Hugh Gusterson, Jean Jackson, Kanhong Lin, Catherine Lutz, David Price and David Vine

Image: “Human Terrain Team Anthropologist Alex Metz: A native of the Pacific Northwest, social scientist Alec Metz is part of the Human Terrain Team that advises the ADT on Afghan tribal culture and interactions,” creative commons licensed Flickr content by user wfiupublicradio.

Filed under: Foreign Policy, Military by admin on February 5, 2010
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Guest post by Laura Wilson

By focusing attention on a single but critical resource, Jessica Barnes sheds light on the complexities of social, economic, and political change in rural Egypt. The resource is water.

Barnes is currently completing her doctorate in Columbia University’s new multidisciplinary Ph.D. program in Sustainable Development. She combines training and perspectives in cultural anthropology, geography, and environmental science to understand the multifaceted world of water in a context where rainfall is extremely scarce and farmers depend on the flow of one river and its tributaries. Her mantra is: follow the water.

In a presentation at the Elliott School of International Affairs on January 27, Barnes described the findings from her research in Egypt on land reclamation from the desert for farming (she focused on the areas around Fayoum). The Egyptian government promotes land reclamation in order to help the country achieve food self-sufficiency and to create agricultural jobs for college graduates who cannot be absorbed by the civil service.

Barnes finds that the new farmers are successful in the “greening” of desert land, and much desert land is now producing food. But such expansion of farming requires water. Reclamation projects are located further from the Nile and its tributaries than the plots of longstanding farmers. Gaining access to irrigation water is difficult, so many new farmers resort to illegal means to obtain water for their farms. Barnes showed a photograph of one farmer’s illegal pipeline.

Long-term farmers said that their lands are no longer productive because the water they normally depend on is being diverted to the reclamation areas. Barnes links this pattern to what David Harvey refers to as “accumulation by dispossession.” The new farmers reclaim land from the desert and earn profits, but they simultaneously deprive long-term farmers of their livelihood. The long-term farmers are forced to abandon their nonproductive land.

Barnes’ ethnographic focus on water, augmented by her use of GIS mapping and long-term multi-level fieldwork, is an excellent example of how a resource-centered approach can yield rich insights of value to international development and environmental policy and programs.

Laura Wilson is a candidate for an M.A. degree in International Development Studies at George Washington University with a focus on gender, human rights, and development. She received a B.S. degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 2007. She is currently the program assistant for the International Development Studies program and a member of the George Washington University Global Task Force on the Status of Women.

Image: “Egyptian stuff BW” from flickr user Richard Messenger, licensed with Creative Commons.

Filed under: Development, Environment, Events, Guest Posts, Natural Resources, Uncategorized by admin on February 4, 2010
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• Paul Farmer on U.S.-Haiti relations
Last Thursday, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing to explore how U.S. foreign aid can best help Haiti. Senator Christopher Dodd (Democrat, Connecticut) suggested that “some sort of receivership,” at least temporarily is in order. Senator Bob Corker (Republican, Tennessee) agreed. One of the three witnesses at the hearing was anthropologist/doctor/health activist Paul Farmer, now also the deputy United Nations envoy to Haiti. He disagreed with such an idea, pointing to the long history of Washington overthrowing and blockading Haitian governments which has contributed to the currently dysfunctional government.

• Let freedom ring
Tristam Riley-Smith first worked as a journalist and then earned a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University. He later began working for the British civil service and was posted for several years to the British Embassy in Washington, DC. As reviewed in the Economist, his book The Cracked Bell: America and the Afflictions of Liberty, draws on all three strands of his training and experience to provide an “engaging and ambitious” commentary on contemporary America and its use and abuse of the concept of “liberty.”

• Neolithic surgery
A discovery in France of an apparent warrior male with an amputated limb joins two other archaeological findings of evidence that surgery was practiced in the early Neolithic in Europe. Limb  amputations have also been found in what is now Germany and the Czech Republic.

• Smart chimpanzees and slow bonobos?
It is well known that substantial social differences exist between two closely related great ape species: chimpanzees and bonobos (the latter are less well-known and often lumped under the former). Notably, bonobos are typified as a peaceful species whose members use sexual interactions to prevent conflict. Chimpanzees are typified as more prone to conflict and competition, and thus, sadly, more like modern humans. The question of why such differences exist between chimpanzees and bonobos prompts biological anthropologists to look for answers in biology. Recent research led by Victoria Wobber of Harvard University’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, suggests that the reason lies in differences in the pace of cognitive development over the life cycle. She and her team compared skills of semi-free-ranging infants, juveniles, and adults in three feeding competition tasks. The findings show that chimpanzee  infants and juveniles are more likely to share food than adult chimpanzees who advance to a stage of “sharing intolerance.” In contrast, bonobo adults retain juvenile levels of “sharing tolerance.” The upshot, per Wobber and colleagues, is that adult bonobos are less cognitively advanced than adult chimpanzees because they retain a juvenile tendency to share. The study was published online in Current Biology. This blogger asks readers to check out the article and ponder the argument, evidence, findings, and implications for understanding cognitive development in humans, variations in selfishness/generosity across cultures, and the cultural shaping of researchers’ categories and values (ie, selfish/successful chimpanzees and sharing/loser bonobos).

•  Altruistic chimpanzees adopt orphans
Behavioral variation across chimpanzee groups throws into question any attempt, such as the above study, to lump all chimps into one category.  Adoptive behavior of chimpanzee caregivers, both male and females, has been discovered in the Taï Forest of the Ivory Coast. The adopters devote substantial time and care to juveniles not biologically related to them. The research leader, Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig comments: “I don’t know of any other cases of unrelated orphans being adopted.” This discovery, he goes on to argue, requires a major shift in discussions about what makes humans human since altruistic behavior has been long argued to make us special. It also requires attention to variation within species and avoidance of broad generalizations at the species level.

Filed under: Uncategorized by admin on February 1, 2010
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If Paul Farmer were to have his way, the answer is yes. Farmer–cultural anthropologist, medical doctor, and health advocate for the poor–testified on January 27 at the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing on Haiti. Farmer is also now the U.N. Deputy Special Envoy for Haiti, working with the Special Envoy, President Clinton.

Farmer first described the Haitian people’s tragic loss of life and loved ones, their new fear of sleeping inside buildings, the massive logistical challenges in providing for basic needs including food and water and toilet services, the need for emergency health care now and rebuilding clinics for the future, restarting schools that still stand and rebuilding those that collapsed, and enabling farmers to plant their spring crops by replacing tools and providing fertilizer.

He then turned to the financial resources needed from donors and how they should be managed.  He suggests the “potential for an entirely reconsidered relationship between the two oldest independent countries in the Americas.” Such a newly imagined U.S.-Haiti relationship would include the following:

• Disbursement of funds that are pledged:  Only about 15% of the $402 million the U.S. pledged in April 2009 to support the Haitian government’s Economic Recovery Program have been disbursed.
• Reform the structure and goals of U.S. aid within Haiti: lower the overhead charged for operations and trim back NGO involvement unless related to the public health and education sectors; focus on creating jobs for Haitians through “cash-for-work” programs and building infrastructure; work to reduce dependence on aid.
• Debt forgiveness to ease the financial drain.
• Creation of a recovery fund managed in Haiti by the Inter-American Development Bank.
• Share the goals of the Haitian people: social and economic rights, job creation, local business development, watershed protection, access to quality health care, and gender equity.
• Provide cash transfers to women.
• Build resilient housing and provide communities with access to clean water.
• Reforest the countryside.

Near the end of his remarks, Farmer said: “As a doctor, I can tell you that bad infrastructure and thoughtless policy are visible in the bodies of the poor, just as are the benefits of good policy and well-designed infrastructure.”

Image: “Paul Farmer and crowds I,” from flickr user Mira (on the wall), licensed with Creative Commons.

Filed under: Development, Health, United Nations by admin on January 31, 2010
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From the Anthropology in Action listserv:

Proposals sought for books on the anthropology of Europe

The editor of the EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) book series, James G. Carrier, is currently accepting book proposals for the series.

For more information see http://www.easaonline.org/bookseri.htm.

You can contact James at jgc@jgcarrier.demon.co.uk.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Updates and Publications by admin on January 31, 2010
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This post is drawn from the remarks made by Robert Maguire, Randolph Jennings senior fellow, United States Institute of Peace, and associate professor of international affairs, Trinity University, Washington, D.C., one of five panelists who spoke at Risk, Suffering and Response: The Earthquake Crisis in Haiti 2010. He provided written notes on his presentation which are provided here. The panel was videorecorded and will be available for viewing on the Elliott School of International Affairs website. (Link to follow when it is posted.)

Professor Maguire said that he has been asked by top officials from the U.S. government, the government of Haiti and the United Nations to assess the damage “from afar” as input to the donors meeting in Montreal. He discussed several areas of “damage” that preceded the earthquake:

1. The effects of decades of misrule by predatory governments and a rigid system of socio-economic dominance by Haiti’s elites, factors which have resulted in extreme disparities between rich and poor
2. The long-term denigration of Haitians by outsiders, from televangelists to misinformed “experts” who label Haiti as a “basket case” or “failed state”
3. Misinformed development policies and programs over several decades that used Haiti as a source of cheap labor, have led to severe population concentration in Port au Prince and neglect of land in rural areas, and promoted since the 1980s a Taiwan-style form of development based on urban industries which neglected rural areas and overlooked the fact that Haiti did not share with Taiwan crucial factors such as land reform, improved agriculture, and education
4. Lack of public investment in services because of uncaring, corrupt governments
5. By the 1990s, Haiti had become a republic of NGOs

He went on to lay out specific priorities that will help address such underlying “damage” and establish a more balanced country demographically, economically, and socially:

1. The tragedy offers a context in which one can work to “rebalance” Haiti
2. Pay attention to the migration out of Port au Prince and work with the migrants to help provide work, services, and restored dignity for them
3. Institute a decentralized system of “Welcome Centers” in towns and villages to assist and integrate the returnees including providing medical care and continuing education
4. Equip the Centers to set up a Civic Service Corps to provide work for cash in several sectors such as public works/environmental restoration
5. It is essential to invest in the rural areas in order to stem the flow of likely return migration to a rebuilt Port au Prince

Image: before-and-after screenshots of the Presidential Palace and an area of Port-au-Prince, from Google.

Filed under: Uncategorized by admin on January 30, 2010
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