Mass media and intellectuals have typically portrayed them as aggressive, uneducated, and morally spoiled. In his recent book, anthropologist David A. Kideckel challenges these views and lets the Romanian working class speak for themselves.
“Most east and southeast European scholars tend to avoid labor and workers in postsocialist science, a topic that Kideckel embraces”, writes Simona C. Wersching in her review in the Monthly Review.
Kideckel points out the scholarly and political indifference toward the workers’ lives, their physical states, and embodied perceptions. Workers are only visible when they appear threatening and protest.
In Getting By in Postsocialist Romania. Labor, the Body, and Working-Class Culture, he provides according to Wersching “refreshing perspectives” about life coping strategies of two distinct working-class groups in Romania, the miners of the Jiu Valley and the industrial workers of the Nitramonia factory in Făgăraş/Transylvania:
Kideckel’s contribution pays particular attention to workers’ words and thoughts about themselves, their work, their families, their societies, their fears, and their dreams, and highlights the diverse legal and illegal practices of “getting by” (a se descurca) in this changing world after 1989.
Health, living standards, and consumption possibilities have deteriorated. Postsocialist pressures on labor and bodies produce “frustrated agency”. These problems have according the anthropologist nothing to do with ‘socialist legacies’ or ‘culture’, but should be understood as responses to “neo-capitalism”, “a system that reinterprets the main principles of capitalism in a new way and that promotes social injustice much more than does the Western model from which it derives”:
Kideckel interprets the workers’ words as typical preoccupations of workers confronted with the “effects of the forced diet of neo-liberalism” (p. 8), such as changing and uncertain status of property due to privatization, inequalities, instrumentalization, commodification of basic social relations by the market democracy, weak state structures that allow the existence of mafia and corruption, the misusage of funds and foreign assistance, the decline in agricultural markets, the return to subsistence farming, and emigration. Kideckel connects the effects of neoliberalism to his critics’ notion of “transition” as an academic representation of triumphalist politics.
Kideckel, who conducted his first fieldwork in Romania in 1974, also claims that the workers’ “selective perception of the past” (when workers had high status) and their present feeling of alienation from society at large, create a feeling of frustration that hinders effective agency.
Mass media and intellectuals have typically portrayed them as aggressive, uneducated, and morally spoiled. In his recent book, anthropologist David A. Kideckel challenges these views and lets the Romanian working class speak for themselves.
We’ve heard it many times: The Egyptian revolution was unexpected. Especially in Western countries, it is often called “Facebook Revolution”. That is not only wrong but insulting as it renders invisible the previous demonstrations, strikes and other political activities, going back 10 years or even longer, said prominent blogger and activist Hossam El-Hamalawy who blogs at 3arabawy.
This political activism has gone unnoticed by many researchers and political analysts, especially in the West. Why? Because they’ve been too occupied studying the formal institutions and have been more interested in concepts and models than what is happening on the ground, several panelists underlined, among others Maha Abdelrahman (Cambridge University) and Rabab El-Mahdi from the American University of Cairo who recently wrote about Orientalising the Egyptian uprising.
Young people developed new, innovative and effective modes of political activism, as Dina Shehata, from the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, explained. They were not interested in establishing political parties. Everything happened outside the formal structures.
The whole conference was videotaped and uploaded to YouTube.
I especially recommend watching the four mentioned presentations by Hossam El-Hamalawy, Maha Abdelrahman, Rabab El-Mahdi and Dina Shehata
(Maha Abdelrahman starts after 30 minutes)
(starts with the end of Maha Abdelrahman’s presentation, Rabab El-Mahdi begins after 7 minutes)
(Dina Shehata is the first speaker, followed by Hossam El-Hamalawy)
A few days ago, I attended the first day of the conference From Tahrir: Revolution or Democratic Transition at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Researchers and activists were discussing the history and effects of the revolution.
(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.
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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.
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.
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.
(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),…
Much has been said about who or what is going to replace Mubarak after he had to step down two weeks ago. In her article The Architects of the Egyptian Revolution in The Nation, anthropologist Saba Mahmood directs our attention to a rather neclected topic: The economic unjustice in Egypt and its connections to “American driven reforms”. For since the 1970s, she writes, the Egyptian economy has been increasingly subject to neoliberal economic reforms by the World Bank, the IMF and USAID at the behest of the United States government. Egyptian elites have been beneficiaries of, and partners in, these American-driven reforms:
While there is no doubt that the new order in Egypt cannot do without the civil and political liberties characteristic of a liberal democracy, what is equally at issue in a country like Egypt is an economic system that serves only the rich of the country at the expense of the poor and the lower and middle classes.
The vast majority of public institutions and services in Egypt have been allowed to fall into a dismal state of disrepair. Countless Egyptians die in public hospitals for lack of medical care and staff; Egypt’s universities are no longer capable of delivering the education of which they once boasted. Lack of housing, jobs and basic social services make everyday life impossible to bear for most Egyptians, as do declines in real wages and escalating inflation.
It is these conditions that prompted the workers—from the industrial and service sector—to stage strikes and sit-ins over the past ten years. These workers were an integral part of the demonstrations over the past two weeks in Egypt; various unions formally joined the protests in the days immediately preceding Mubarak’s resignation, prompting some to suggest that this was a turning point in the evolution of the protest.
The role the US government plays will be “enormously consequential”:
While the Obama administration has reluctantly yielded to the demands for democratic reform, it is highly doubtful that this administration will tolerate any restructuring of US economic interests in Egypt and in the region more generally.
Egypt was governed as a private estate, explains political scientist Salwa Ismail in the Guardian. Under sweeping privatisation policies, Mubarak and the clique surrounding him appropriated profitable public enterprises and vast areas of state-owned lands.
Protests were according to him the culmination of a wave of much smaller and more localised strikes and demonstrations that had been taking place across the country since 2006.
Saba Mahmood agrees. She goes in her account back to 2004. In The road to Tahir, another prominent anthropologist, Charles Hirschkind, gives us a comprehensive introduction in the history of the Egyptian revolution, starting with the Kifaya movement, that “brought together Islamists, Muslim Brothers, communists, liberals, and secular-leftists, joined on the basis of a common demand for an end to the Mubarak regime and a rejection of Gamal Mubarak’s succession of his father as president”. Many of the bloggers who helped promote the Kifaya movement have played key roles in the events of the past two weeks, he writes. (A longer version is available in the Open Access journal Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares.)
Political scientist Moataz A. Fattah lists in the Christian Science Monitor five reasons why Arab regimes are falling. Major societal and demographic factors are at play that in his view won’t go away with a new government, he argues.
Egypt: Rise to Freedom by Basha Beats and Natacha Atlas ناتاشا اطلس
Rise to Freedom by Basha Beats and Natacha Atlas
One of the best sources about the current Arab revolutions is the blog Closer. Anthropologist Martijn de Koning is regularily posting round-ups and recruites guest writers as for example Samuli Schielke, anthropologist at Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin.
“Compared to our governments with their lip service to democracy and appeasement of dictators, Egyptians have given the world an example in freedom and courage which we all should look up to as an example. This sense of admiration and respect is what has drawn so many foreigners to Tahrir Square in the past days, including myself.”
Several anthropologists commented on the rape story where CBS correspondent Lara Logan had been sexually assaulted while covering the Egyptian protests. “Two disturbing lines of commentary have emerged: one that cites irrelevant details about Logan’s beauty or her past sexual history, the other blaming Muslims or Egyptian culture for the assault”, anthropologist Racel Newcomb comments in the Huffington Post:
Rather than blaming religion, we should work to end underdevelopment, poverty, and a lack of education, problems whose eradication is crucial to a prosperous and healthy society anywhere, whether in Egypt or here at home.
In Empire and the Liberation of Veiled Women, anthropologist Maximilian Forte deconstructs the popular narrative of the West bringing freedom to the women of the non-West.
Local protesters were elated by the photo of an Egyptian engineer named Muhammad Saladin Nusair holding a sign in Tahrir Square saying “Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers—One World, One Pain.” The signs by protesters in Madison include “Welcome to Wiscairo”, “From Egypt to Wisconsin: We Rise Up”, and “Government Walker: Our Mubarak.” The banner I brought directly from Tahrir Square saying “Solidarity with Egyptian Workers” has been hanging from the balcony of the Capitol alongside solidarity messages from around the country.
She quotes Muhammad Saladin Nusair who wrote these wonderful lines:
“If a human being doesn’t feel the pain of his fellow human beings, then everything we’ve created and established since the very beginning of existence is in great danger. We shouldn’t let borders and differences separate us. We were made different to complete each other, to integrate and live together. One world, one pain, one humanity, one hope.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CojujCER5Vw
Voice of Freedom / Sout Al Horeya by Amir Eid ft. Hany Adel
(post in progress) While the revolutions in Northern Africa and the Middle East are spreading and the Libyan people managed are trying to get rid of another dictator,…
More than one million Egyptians protesting for democracy. Photo: Al Jazeera, flickr
(last updated 6.2.2011, 21:30 – updates in bold – check also new post: Saba Mahmood: Democracy is not enough – Anthropologists on the Arab revolution part II 22.2.2011 ) “The government would come down hard on even the smallest protest, and everyone would be arrested. Now, it’s as if the people are saying, ‘We’re not going to be afraid anymore.’ “I am very, very happy for the Egyptian people. I really am. It’s a wonderful development for the Egyptian people.”
That’s how anthropologist Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban comments the recent protests in Egypt. She has spent six years since 1970 living and conducting research in the Sudan, Egypt and Tunisia and is currently teaching “Arab-Islamic Culture and the West”.
In contrast to Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan is worried.
She claims that “Mubarak is not a despot” and that he is “considered a very honorable man”. In her opinion, Mubarak “did well / prove worthy of the situation in not giving in to the peoples’ voices on the streets”. People – especially the poor she has studied for decades – don’t care for democracy. They want stability! Without Mubarak, the “criminal mob on the streets” would lead the country into chaos, she writes. Even today, when more than a million people protested in Cairo and other cities in Egypt, she insisted that Mubarak has the peoples’ support.
Of course, her article “traveled”, among others to the Lebanese-American professor of political science As’ad AbuKhalil at at California State University, who posted a Google translation of her article and comments: “I suspect that you will both laugh and cry while reading this piece of rubbish”.
UPDATE: Comment by anthropologist David H. Price in Counterpunch: “We can expect Wikan’s incredible claims to be paraded out by Fox News and CNN as part of a distortion campaign to support Mubarak’s efforts to cling to power, all in the name of balance.”
Forte quotes Hillary Clinton who said that ”our assessment is that the Egyptian Government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”
“Let’s be really clear about what is happening in Tunisia, Egypt, perhaps soon Israel/Palestine, and now Lebanon and Yemen”, he states. “A wall of U.S. supported dictatorships and clients is collapsing.”
UPDATE: How should the West react? “The discussion in the West should focus on the factor we are responsible for and we can influence – the role our governments have played in suppressing the Egyptian people, writes Johann Hari in Huffington Post. “Your taxes have been used to arm, fund and fuel this dictatorship.”
Meanwhile, over 150 academics have signed an Open letter to President Barack Obama, calling on Obama to support Egypt’s democratic movement. (You see the irony here of course… Western leaders fearing for a democratic Middle East. “The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned”, writes Slavoj Žižek in the Guardian).
UPDATE: Maximilian Forte ay Zero Anthropology criticizes the AAA statement. Archaeologist Rosemary Joyce addresses the issue “valuing things over people” in a very interesting post. She also questions protection of Egyptian antiquities out of concern for their status as “global cultural heritage”.
The keys to understanding what has driven millions of citizens to the streets are the tragic circumstances surrounding the deaths of two young men, writes anthropologist Linda Herrera in her text Two Faces of the Revolution at the blog Closer.
She tells the story of Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunesia who “overwhelmed by the burden of fines, debts, the humiliation of being serially harassed and beaten by police officers, and the indifference of government authorities”, set himself on fire” and the Egyptian Khaled Said who was brutally murdered by Police.
She stresses that “contrary to a number of commentators in news outlets in North America and parts of Europe the two revolutions overtaking North Africa are not motivated by Islamism.” “These are inclusive freedom movements for civic, political, and economic rights” as this video below shows as well and is described in Robert Fisk’s report in the Independent: Secular and devout. Rich and poor. They marched together with one goal
UPDATE: In the Western hype about Islamists the Muslim Brotherhood, who denounced violence a long time ago has been demonized for too long”, says anthropologist Petra Kuppinger. “While militant Islamist groups exist, they are increasingly marginal. The Brotherhood is certainly not one of them.”
“It is a revolution without a leader”, says Adrienne Pine from the Department of Anthropology at the American University in Washington in the interview below. But that does not mean chaos. She’s blogging at http://quotha.net/
He gives us the bigger picture, conntects the local with the global:
Revolutions don’t happen out of the blue. It’s not because of Tunisia yesterday that we have one in Egypt mechanically the next day. You can’t isolate these protests from the last four years of labour strikes in Egypt, or from international events such as the al-Aqsa intifada and the US invasion of Iraq.
UPDATE: Anthropologist Karl Lorenz from Shippensburg University agrees. He’s not surprised about the protests. He believes that it is too late for reforms from Mubarak, because the people have wanted it for 30 years and it has not been done.
UPDATE: Anthropologist Farha Ghannam writes about the rich symbolism of the Tahrir Square: “In a society sharply divided by class and gender, the square has been a place where all feel comfortable – young and elderly, rich and poor, men and women, Muslim and Christian.”
The Truth Behind The Egyptian Revolution 2011. Protesters Singing. World MUST MUST Watch!
When looking for scientific publications, I made the same experience as Barbara Miller at anthopologyworks. Most articles deal with the (very distant) past. Miller concludes:
Clearly, you will have a better chance of finding out about early cat domestication, prehistoric ships, vessel residue analysis and even infant weaning during Roman times than you will have of learning about the social dimensions of today’s street protests.
(…)
I used the single search term “Egypt,” and I chose the publication dates of 2000-2010. Nearly 400 articles popped up. In scanning through them, I found that only 10 percent were related to contemporary social life. The other 90 percent of the references are dominated by archaeology with a sprinkling of biological anthropology as well as some non-anthro sources.
Mats Ivarsson from the University in Lund (Sweden) has written a paper that sounds interesting: Impact of authoritarian pressure on the political blogosphere in Egypt. He “proposes the hypothesis that an authoritarian state actually will strengthen the quality of the information disseminated in the blogosphere” (pdf)
This is just a small selection of texts about the ongoing revolution in Egypt and around.
Maybe the best and most comprehensive round-up with links to tons of articles (and less chaotic than this one here) can be found at the blog Closer, compiled by anthropologist Martijn de Koning: Closing the week 5 – Featuring the Tunisia & Egypt Uprising
Riz Khan - Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Zizek on the future of Egyptian politics
“Stupid multiculturalism, no clash of civilisations: When we’re fighting tyrants we’re universalists and building global solidarity. I’m proud of the Egyptians! They understand democracy better than we in the West (Zizek) – “This is the time to support Egypt” (Ramadan)
More than one million Egyptians protesting for democracy. Photo: Al Jazeera, flickr
(last updated 6.2.2011, 21:30 - updates in bold - check also new post: Saba Mahmood: Democracy is not enough - Anthropologists on the Arab revolution part II 22.2.2011 )…
