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Corona-Anthropology: We feel safe with "people we know", for the danger always comes from "the others"

Published on January 19, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, medical anthropology / ethnobothany, Northern America, politics, Us and Them

Do you wear a mask when you meet your friends? Do you?

Recently I often had to think of an observation of a Twitter user in Germany: She or he realised that people do wear masks in public transport or in supermarkets but showed careless behaviour when they are with people they know: They rarely wear a mask when they are with friends or with colleagues at work.

Today I’ve stumbled upon anthropological research that conforms this observation: In her short article Staying safe in the time of coronavirus: pay attention to ‘the guy you know’ medical anthropologist Lisa J. Hardy writes about her ongoing research on how people in the US experience living during a global pandemic. She and her team bserved the same tendency: People feel safe with people they know, but are scared of people they define as “others”, although people know that “viruses do not travel along lines of familiarity”. Our behaviour is far from logical:

What we are seeing in our data from this project has a twist on the idea of “other.” People are telling themselves stories about the safety of people they know. This means that many people report that they’re doing everything possible to stay safe and, in the next breath, tell us about a party they attended for the holidays with friends and family. “It’s OK,” they say, “we knew everyone there.”

The danger, we tend to think, always comes from “the others”.

Some interviewees in the Southwest told us that they avoid shopping where Indigenous people go because of high rates of Covid-19 on reservations, indicating the kind of racism and avoidance that often comes with contagious disease.

These “sometimes illogical conclusions about other people” are ” not unexpected”, she writes:

Throughout history there have been examples of epidemics and blame. Someone else is often considered to be the vector of disease.

>> read the whole article in StatNews

In her article she also links to a paper she published in the journal Medical Anthropology last September called Connection, Contagion, and COVID-19 where she in the abstract stresses the importance of social science research when dealing with Covid-19:

In the United States people understand the global pandemic not as biology, but as the manifestation of political affiliation, difference, connection, and disconnection. COVID-19 is, according to public perception, dangerous because it maliciously mutates to attack. It is “a guy we don’t know.” Relationships between the mysteriousness of the virus and heightened visibility of longstanding inequality in the United States form new contexts for existing social tensions. (…)

Here I draw on analysis of 50 semi-structured interviews we conducted from March to August of 2020 demonstrating how understandings of the biology of a virus are woven into perceptions of politics, inequality, and the fractures of a divided nation. To understand social and political responses to the global pandemic it is essential that we continue to investigate xenophobia, inequality, and racism alongside the biological impact of SARS-CoV-2.

She also has a nice website with many articles, including creative writing, check www.ljhardy.com

There has already been conducted extremly much anthropological research on Covid-19 / Corona, I have lost the overview, so, for the time being, I just refer to The Anthropology Newspaper on Covid-19 and the coronavirus and also on open access journal articles in The Anthropology Journal Ticker on Covid-19

Do you wear a mask when you meet your friends? Do you?

Recently I often had to think of an observation of a Twitter user in Germany: She or he realised that people do wear masks in public transport or in…

Anthropologist: “Stop the abuse of migrants at the U.S. – Mexican boder!”

Published on November 3, 2011 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, migration, Northern America, politics, Us and Them

They beat children and adults during apprehensions and in custody, they deny people with life-threatening medical conditions treatment, separate family members and confiscate their belongings.

“We were held with another woman who was coughing so badly that she threw up violently, over and over. The others in the cell called for help. An officer came over and said, ‘Que se muera!’ – ‘Let her die!’”

Two months ago anthropologists Rachel Stonecipher & Sarah Willen alerted the public on the Access Denied blog about the abuse of migrants on the U.S–Mexican border.

Now, anthropologist Randall McGuire draws our attention to a recently published report “A Culture of Cruelty” that documents the “systematic abuses of human rights” by U.S. Border Patrol along the U.S.-Mexican border.

McGuire, who is the author of Archaeology as Political Action, writes:

This report demonstrates that the Border Patrol systematically abuses people in short-term custody and that existing policies and standards inadequately address a culture of impunity within the agency. Rather than these abuses being the work of a few rogue agents, the Border Patrol has become a rogue agency. The report draws on interviews with almost 13,000 deportees conducted over 2.5 years. (…)

Despite this fact, inadequate procedures exist within the Border Patrol for identifying and correcting systematic abuse. The abuses continue as part of United States border policy. The border wall forces migrants into perilous deserts and mountains.

Since 2008, the number of migrants crossing the border has fallen precipitously. But, the number of people dying in the desert has remained constant. The systematic abuses of human rights and the culture of cruelty in the Border Patrol directly reflect a border policy designed to maximize the risks to migrants’ health and lives.

The report was produced by the organisation No More Deaths. One of its members is anthropology student “Corbett” who on his/her (really good!) blog “The Wild Anthropologist” gives us a summary of the findings.

The whole report can be downloaded from the website http://www.cultureofcruelty.org

It hasn’t received much attention from mainstream media. And when Reuters writes about the report, they use the authorities’ perspective and describe the victims of abuse as “illegal migrants”, as criminals. The difference to the coverage in the independent media publication In These Times is striking.

As “The Wild Anthropologist” writes:

The term “Illegal” serves to dehumanize people who, even though they are within the country without the approval of the US, are guaranteed human rights by the 14th Amendment: “…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”.

The “illegal” anthropologist: Shahram Khosravi’s Auto-Ethnography of Borders

Research in refugee camps: Too political for anthropology?

No more conferences in Arizona: Anthropologists condemn Immigration Law

“Human smugglers fight global apartheid”

Why borders don’t help – An engaged anthropology of the US-Mexican border

Online: On the Margins – An Ethnography from the US-Mexican Border

Migration: Paperless underclass exposes dark side of Europe

They beat children and adults during apprehensions and in custody, they deny people with life-threatening medical conditions treatment, separate family members and confiscate their belongings.

“We were held with another woman who was coughing so badly that she threw up…

“Similar to the Third World debt crisis” – David Graeber on ‘Occupy Wall Street’

Published on September 20, 2011 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Northern America, politics

(UPDATE:) David Graeber: Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination (Guardian 25.9.2011)

While the Guardian is sending an anthropologist on fieldwork among bankers to give us insight in the destructive culture of finance, thousands of people in New York are occupying the Wall Street, “the financial Gomorrah of America” and “greatest corrupter of our democracy”.

Inspired by the massive public protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Square, hundreds have slept outside near Wall Street for the past three nights. The campaign “Occupy Wall Street” began on Saturday when thousands gathered in New York City’s Financial District.

As Egyptian researcher Maha Abdelrahman said a few months ago, we might be witness to a global revolutionary movement against neoliberalism.

Most protesters are under 30, and “over-educated and under-employed” according to the Guardian.

“We have a president who tells us to do the right thing, to go to school, to get a better life, but I’m not getting a better life. I am a new college graduate and I have $50,000 of college debt built up while studying business management at Berkeley. I can’t find a job to pay it off”, says one of them, 26 year old Romeo.

“Who is here? Young people and students with college debts. They want to talk to the people who took away their future”, explains anthropologist David Graeber who is one of the protesters.

Graeber has just a few weeks ago published his new book Debt: The First 5,000 Years where he highlights the exploitative nature of debts and “virtual credits”. According to a review in the Financial Times by anthropologist Gilian Tett:

Graeber insists that debt is intrinsically linked to power, since credit can be used to exploit or control people. And the power is doubly effective, he adds, because debt is so overlaid with moral context. There is no better way to justify unequal power relations than “by reframing them in the language of debt … because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim which is doing something wrong”

In an interview with Democracy Now Graeber compares the current economic crisis in Europe and the U.S. with the so-called Third World debt crisis.

The austerity regimes that are being imposed now on Europe and on America are remarkably similar to what happened—you know, what used to be called the Third World debt crisis. First you declare a financial debt—a financial crisis. You bring in these people who are supposedly neutral technocrats, who are in fact enforcing this extreme neoliberal ideology. You bypass all democratic accountability and impose things that no one ever possibly have agreed to. It’s the same thing.

And one reason it’s happening to us now is that there was really successful mobilization around the world against those policies. In a lot of ways, the global justice movement was successful. The IMF was kicked out of East Asia. It was kicked out of Latin America. And now it’s come home to us.

David Graeber on the Occupy Wall Street Protest & Forgiving Debt of the American Poor

After quick googling it seems that American mainstream media covers the protest mainly as a police story with focus on arrests, see New York Times or CBS or Business Week.

So we have to turn to Russia Today: Occupy Wall Street – America’s own Arab Spring? or the Guardian: Wall Street protesters: over-educated, under-employed and angry and The call to occupy Wall Street resonates around the world.

Or of course to alternative media and the official website of the campaign https://occupywallst.org/

For more information on Graebers new book see his essay Debt: The first five thousand years (Mute/Eurozine) or an interview with David graeber: Debt’s history, implications, and critical perspective (No Borders) and Debt Came Before Money: An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber (Naked Capitalism)

UPDATE: EGYPT SUPPORTS PLANNED US-PROTEST

“Egyptian activists are lending their support to a planned protest in Washington, DC, which US activists hope will become an open-ended sit in modeled on the Tahrir Square protests that helped bring down former President Hosni Mubarak”, according to the newpaper Al-Masry Al_Youm:

The demonstration, which is being organized under the banner “human needs not corporate greed,” will be held on 6 October, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the start of the US occupation of Afghanistan and as the recently passed US budget takes effect.

Egyptian activists plan to hold a concurrent protest in Tahrir Square.

UK Riots: Let's talk about class and oppressive states

From Tahrir to Israel: "Protest movements inspire greater human understanding"

How anthropologists should react to the financial crisis

Anthropologist uncovers how global elites undermine democracy

Saba Mahmood: Democracy is not enough – Anthropologists on the Arab revolution part II

Thesis: Neoliberal policies, urban segregation and the Egyptian revolution

– Use Anthropology to Build A Human Economy

(UPDATE:) David Graeber: Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination (Guardian 25.9.2011)

While the Guardian is sending an anthropologist on fieldwork among bankers to give us insight in the destructive culture of finance, thousands of people in New York are…

Deadly migration: The ignored health crisis on the US-Mexican border

Published on August 27, 2011 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, globalisation, Latin- and Central America, medical anthropology / ethnobothany, migration, Northern America, politics, Us and Them

A multi-dimensional public health crisis is unfolding on the U.S.-Mexico border that few seem ready to acknowledge, anthropologists Rachel Stonecipher & Sarah Willen write on the Access Denied blog.

The complexity of this crisis came to light during a recent study tour to Tucson, Arizona, in which Rachel Stonecipher took part.

Dehydration and heat-related illness claim hundreds of lives annually, and many of these deaths go unrecorded. No uniform system exists to count or repatriate remains. “We can only imagine the impact of these missed opportunities for identification on family members searching for their loved ones”, Stonecipher and Willen write.

For migrants who do reach their destination but face subsequent arrest, “interception” itself can involve serious health risks:

What happens to migrants after they are arrested and detained often remains shrouded from both the public eye and, to a great extent, the eyes of the human rights community. This is a particularly grave concern when arrested individuals already are sick or injured. (…) One especially serious concern involves the deportation of injured individuals who have not yet been medically stabilized. (…)

Detainees are also at risk of abuse – physical and mental – at the hands of police and Border Patrol officers. Despite official denials, No More Deaths, the Border Action Network, and other NGOs have collected and responded to numerous reports of abuse.

Through water stations, humanitarian aid camps, and desert patrols, a handful of NGOs provide assistance to migrants in need. But this cross-border health crisis is “far too vast for activists to address alone”, the anthropologists note:

Both human rights principles and contemporary realities demand that we hold countries with porous borders – including but not only the U.S. – accountable. Not only must such countries recognize migration as an enduring global phenomenon with complex causes and share accountability for both lives and deaths, but they must also engage in transnational public health efforts to develop the kind of multi-layered interventions needed to protect human life in border regions. (…)

Like the humanitarian organizations that work along the border, we all must insist on an expansive understanding of “public health” that recognizes people in transit as members of a common moral community: as people who are connected to us, and whose lives matter. Whether or not we understand or agree with the choice to migrate, activists along the U.S.-Mexico border remind us that border crossers are human beings who – like all other members of our moral community – are deserving of health-related attention, investment, and care.

>> read the whole post at Access Denied

"Human smugglers fight global apartheid"

No more conferences in Arizona: Anthropologists condemn Immigration Law

Why borders don’t help – An engaged anthropology of the US-Mexican border

Online: On the Margins – An Ethnography from the US-Mexican Border

Migration: Paperless underclass exposes dark side of Europe

"Ethnographic perspectives needed in discussion on public health care system"

A multi-dimensional public health crisis is unfolding on the U.S.-Mexico border that few seem ready to acknowledge, anthropologists Rachel Stonecipher & Sarah Willen write on the Access Denied blog.

The complexity of this crisis came to light during a recent study…

Anthropologists: “It’s time to kill the Osama bin Laden myths”

Published on May 4, 2011 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Northern America, politics, Us and Them

(draft, post in progress) It’s not the first time that Osama Bin Laden has died. Nevertheless, the Western political leaders, even European leaders who were supposed to oppose death penalty, are celebrating the killing of Bin Laden (incl. CIA torture), and the frontpages of American newspapers are shouting in Wild West style “ROT IN HELL”, as Daniel Martin Varisco documents on the blog tabsir.

Varisco is one of several anthropologists who have already started commenting this issue.

William O. Beeman, chair of the department of anthropology, University of Minnesota and past president of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, explains in an article the myths surrounding Osama bin Laden.

One of the myths is bin Laden’s supposed importance. “Osama bin Laden at the end was far from the looming powerful figure he was made out to be”, he writes:

bin Laden was promoted by the Bush administration as the mastermind of a gigantic apocalyptic global organization under his control. (…). This was a gigantic exaggeration that was largely accepted by the American public without question.

In fact, bin Laden was an incredibly useful symbolic bogeyman. His mere existence justified the United States’ presence in Afghanistan, as well as billions of dollars spent supporting the Pakistan military regime without complaint from the American public.

Furthermore, bin Laden was seen as promulgating the United States as al-Qaeda’s principal target. That’s not so true either.

“The mythic ideology of Islamic confrontation with the West, inherent in the bin Laden myth, should die with him”, he writes:

Americans, rather than celebrating a triumph over Islam, should instead be looking forward to a new era of cooperation with the progressive peoples throughout the region, who, with bin Laden’s death, have now begun to have the false accusation of Islamic extremism lifted from their shoulders.

W. Porter Bourie, a PhD student of cultural anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, comments on his blog Dynamic Relations:

Celebrating his death only redefines the Us-Them divide and misdirects our gaze from the conditions that have led to the state of the world. His death won’t cause more violence, but the West’s continued political economic imperialism will. (…) Celebration blinds us to empathy and deludes us into thinking that the world is easily knowable.

Anthropologist Jason Antrosio, presents on the blog Living Anthropologically insights from anthropology and its “voice for tolerance”, contrasting it to the us-versus-them mentalities of the American “war on terror”. It would have been much a more powerful and enduring victory to see bin Laden tried in a court of law, he argues. “Let’s celebrate by investing in jobs, an inclusive healthcare system, schools, and paying our teachers”, he concludes.

The History News Network has published an interview with anthropologist and Afghanistan expert Thomas Barfield on Bin Laden’s death. Barfield seems to identify with the official American rhetoric, and when he says “We”, he means the U.S. administration.

Hamid Mir was the last journalist to interview Osama after 9/11. In his article The Osama bin Laden I knew, published today in the Pakistani newspaper The News, he concludes:

Physical elimination of Osama bin Laden is big news for the Americans but many outside America want elimination of the policies that produce bin Ladens. America came into Afghanistan in search of Osama bin Laden. No doubt that he was responsible for the killing of many innocent people but Americans cannot justify the killing of innocent people through drone attacks just because Osama killed some innocent Americans.

Both Osama bin Laden and Americans violated the sovereignty of Pakistan. It must be stopped now. Osama is dead. If America does not leave Afghanistan after the death of Osama bin Laden, then this war will not end soon and the world will remain an unsafe place.

Check also Wikipedia for the CIA-Osama bin Laden controversy

UPDATES:

Interesting analysis by Matt Thompson at Savage Minds: “One of the most revealing bits of trivia has been that Bin Laden was assigned the code name “Geronimo” by the operation tasked with capturing and killing him”, he writes:

This raises the question, what does a nineteenth century Apache leader have to do with twenty first century Saudi millionaire? Perhaps nothing when viewed from an academic standpoint, it seems more like a non sequitur. But when read as expression of an underlying ideology, one that has legitimated American military action for centuries, the answer is: quite a lot, actually.

Yes, and then we’re back we I’ve started this post, actually, in the Wild West! (Check also Osama, Geronimo, and the scalp of our enemy by Aaron Bady at zunguzungo)

Extremism: “Authorities -and not Imams – can make the situation worse”

Selected quotes from “On Suicide Bombing” by Talal Asad

Anthropologist: Al-Qaeda uses dreams to justify violence

Fieldwork reveals: Bush administration is lying about the “war on terror” in the Sahara

Anthropology and CIA: “We need more awareness of the political nature and uses of our work”

War in Iraq: Why are anthropologists so silent?

Thesis: That’s why they go to war

(draft, post in progress) It's not the first time that Osama Bin Laden has died. Nevertheless, the Western political leaders, even European leaders who were supposed to oppose death penalty, are celebrating the killing of Bin Laden (incl. CIA torture),…