poverty | antropologi.info

Haiti Earthquake: Worldwide solidarity, a common humanity? (updated)

Published on January 15, 2010 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, Caribbean, development empowerment, medical anthropology / ethnobothany, poverty

(Hatiain Children up in the mountains. Image: Matt Dringenberg, flickr)

(post in progress about anthropological perspectives in Haiti and how to help) “Anthropology to me is all about human connexions, about a common humanity”, said Dai Cooper from the Anthropology Song. “Being an anthropologist means that when a natural disaster occurs somewhere in the world, a friend may be there”, is a quote I found on the blog by urban anthropologist Krystal D’Costa.

“The recent catastrophic earthquake in Haiti has turned my thoughts to our global levels of connectivity”, she writes and adds:

Web 2.0 technologies have been activated to create impromptu support networks and share what little information people may have heard. They are proving integral to the management of disasters. And perhaps creating a global community so that when natural disasters strike, anthropologists aren’t the only ones wondering and worrying about the fate of friends.

I had similar thoughts today: First, on facebook, lots of friends posted stories about the earthquake and explained how to help. Browsing the web, it is overwhelming and touching to read about all the activities by people who help. Even without web2.0, people care for each other. True everyday cosmopolitanism.

GlobalVoices – my favorite source for international news – has lots of great overviews, among others about help from the region around Haiti (Dominican Republic / Caribbean) where many bloggers have been active. The Haitian Diaspora has also been active.

This kind help is often invisible in mainstream media. Here in Norway, the focus is of course on Norwegians (or Americans) or other rich countries’ help.

José Rafael Sosa for example writes (translated by Global Voices):

The Dominican people have bent over backwards to help Haiti. What happened in Haiti has no precedent. There is too much pain. Too much suffering. The absurd differences stop here and solidarity is imposed, pure and simple, openly and decidedly. This is the right moment to help our brother nation. Let’s give our hand and our soul to a people that do not deserve so much suffering.

Anthropologists have also contributed online. At Somatosphere, medical anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer explains why helping through Partners in Health might be a good idea. One of the founders of Partners in Health is another medical anthropologist: Paul Farmer who currently is the U.N. Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti.

One year ago, Farmer was interviewed about the hurricane disaster in Haiti where as many as 1,000 people have died and an estimated one million left homeless. Farmer stresses that natural disasters are not only natural but also social or political disasters, they are partly man-made. He addresses Haitis ecological crisies and the way the US has destabilized Haiti. In another interview he challenges Profit-Driven Medical System (more see <a href="wikipedia and videos below).

Yes, why is Haiti so poor? Why is Haiti one of the poorest countries on this planet and therefore more vulnerable to disasters like earthquakes? Two anthropologists answer this question. They suggest links between the disaster and colonialism.

Haiti actually has been a rich country, Barbara D Miller at anthropologyworks explains. Haiti produced more wealth for France than all of France’s other colonies combined and more than the 13 colonies in North America produced for Britain. So why is Haiti so poor:

Colonialism launched environmental degradation by clearing forests. After the revolution, the new citizens carried with them the traumatic history of slavery. Now, neocolonialism and globalization are leaving new scars. For decades, the United States has played, and still plays, a powerful role in supporting conservative political regimes.

James Williams at Discovery News interviews anthropologist Bryan Page. Page gives a similar explanation.

After 1804, Haitians were discriminated against by not only the United States, but all the European powers, he says:

That discrimination meant no availability of resources to educate the Haitian population, no significant trade with any polity outside of Haiti. Also, the break up of the plantations into individual land parcels meant there’s no longer a coherent cash crop activity going on within Haiti.

These conditions persisted into the 20th Century:

You still have a population that was 80-90% illiterate — a population that didn’t have any industrial skills, a population that wasn’t allowed to trade its products with the rest of the world in any significant way.

What that isolation essentially meant was that Haiti never had a chance to progress alongside the surrounding civilizations in the region. Complicating the picture even more was a series of despotic rulers that added to the country’s struggles.

[Haiti was] seen increasingly as a benighted, terrible place, in part also because of the collective racism of the white-dominated nations that surrounded them, including Cuba, the United States and the Dominican Republic which occupies the other side of Hispanola.

Check out the Global Voice Special Report on Haiti and The Help That Haiti Needs: New York Times has asked several researchers.

UPDATE 1: More on Haiti, colonialism and racism on the blog The Cranky Linguist by anthropologist Ronald Kephart

UPDATE 2: Statement by the American Anthropological Association (AAA): The Haitian Studies Association has begun to develop strategies to help Haiti, Haitians, Haitians in the diaspora, and the Haitian academic community. The AAA will provide more information about how to respond to the disaster and ask the Haitian anthropological community for advice.

Amid Rubble And Ruin, Our Duty To Haiti Remains is the title of an article by Haitian anthropologist and artist Gina Athena Ulysse on NPR. She writes:

Hope is not something that one often associates with Haiti. An anthropologist and critic of representations of the island, I have often questioned narratives that reduce Haiti to simple categories and in the process dehumanize Haitians. Yes, we may be the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, but there is life there, love and an undeniable and unbeatable spirit of creative survivalism.
(…)
I am worried about Haiti’s future. In the immediate moment we need help, rescue missions of all kinds. I am concerned about weeks from now when we are no longer front-page news. Without long-term efforts, we will simply not be able to rebuild. What will happen then?

UPDATE 3: Great post by Kerim Friedman at Savage Minds where he explains why New York Times columnist David Brooks is wrong who claims that “Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences.”

UPDATE 4: Haiti: Getting the Word Out – Janine Mendes-Franco at GlobalVoices gives an overview over bloggers in and around Port-au-Prince who “are finding the time to communicate with the outside world”.

UPDATE 5 (16.1.10): Anthropologist Johannes Wilm: Who really helps Haiti? An overview of money given to Haiti: While USA give most per person affected, Norway, Canada and Guyana give most per citizen and (again) Guyana gives most in percentage of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). His main message is that the aid from Western countries is “close to nothing”.

Alert by Naomi Klein: “We have to be absolutely clear that this tragedy—which is part natural, part unnatural—must, under no circumstances, be used to, one, further indebt Haiti and, two, to push through unpopular corporatist policies in the interest of our corporations. This is not conspiracy theory. They have done it again and again.”

UPDATE See also post by Keith Hart: Is Haiti to be another victim of disaster capitalism?

UPDATE 7: GlobalVoices: Instances of “Looting,” but Little Confirmed Evidence of Post-Quake Violence: When the media reports on disasters, they’re inevitably going to focus on the dramatic and antisocial, even if it’s one percent of the population committing these acts.”

UPDATE 8: anthropologyworks on What low-income Haitians want: lessons for aid-givers:

Here is what poor Haitians define as elements of a good society:
1. relative economic parity
2. strong political leaders with a sense of service who “care for” and “stand for” the poor
3. respe (respect)
4. religious pluralism to allow room for ancestral and spiritual beliefs
5. cooperative work
6. access of citizens to basic social services
7. personal and collective security

UPDATE 9:
(via AAA-blog) The Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA) has launched a “Focus on Haiti” page with a large collection of news about Haiti, especially anthropologists on Haiti!

UPDATE 10: Harvard and Haiti: A collaborative response to the January 12 earthquake: Video with Paul Farmer and his colleagues from Harvard Medical School, Partners In Health
and Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Videos

And here an overview about the current situation:

Haitians struggle to cope amid aftermath of earthquake

and a lecture by Paul Farmer (first introduction, lecture starts after 8 minutes):

Paul Farmer on Development: Creating Sustainable Justice

SEE ALSO:

Why we need more disaster anthropology

When applied anthropology becomes aid – A disaster anthropologist’s thoughts

“Disasters do not just happen” – The Anthropology of Disaster (2)

Katrina disaster has roots in 1700s / Earthquake disaster in South Asia man-made

Anthropology News October: How Anthropologists Can Respond to Disasters

Earth Hour – The first globalized ritual?

Keith Hart and Thomas Hylland Eriksen: 21st century anthropology: What holds humanity together?

Owen Sichone: Poor African migrants no less cosmopolitan than anthropologists

(Hatiain Children up in the mountains. Image: Matt Dringenberg, flickr)

(post in progress about anthropological perspectives in…

Fieldwork among homeless heroin and crack users – new book by Philippe Bourgois

Published on June 7, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, fieldwork / methods, Northern America, politics, poverty

“In Search of Respect. Selling Crack in El Barrio” is one of my favorite ethnographies. Now, Philippe Bourgois, is out with a new book. In “Righteous Dopefiend“, he looks at the clients of the dealers, the University paper Penn Current reports.

The paper published a interesting interview with him that also touches the popular topic “anthropology at home”. Bourgois conducted his fieldwork among homeless heroin and crack users a mere six blocks away from his San Francisco home. He spent lots of time with them, and even slept outside in homeless encampments to gain a true sense of what life is like for the addicts.

What happened? People in the neighborhood began to think that the anthropologist must be one of the addicts as well:

During the intense years, when I’d be hanging out on the corner, people in the neighborhood just took for granted that I was either a drug addict or someone about to fall into drug addiction.

I remember being embarrassed in front of my son’s friends, because my son at this time was about seven years old when I started the project, and so all of his friends lived in the neighborhood and would say, ‘I saw your father hanging out on the corner where all the drug addicts are.’ I was worried about my son’s friends’ parents, because they were seeing me.

But although the addicts lived so close to the neighborhood, they were invisible. It was “mind-boggling”, he says, that he literally had to walk not more than six meters through a little thicket in order to enter a totally separate universe:

You can hear all these people, I mean, literally, hundreds of people at rush hour, walking to the bus stop, and you’re in this separate universe, and the two don’t touch. You can spend several hours in this separate universe listening to people go by and they don’t look through the bushes and notice these people. You almost feel falsely protected in this cocoon.  People don’t want to see it, either, and the point of my book is to make it visible.

Bourgois connects the daily life in the thicket with larger structures in the society:

(W)hat is terrifying is seeing – and this is in a sense what the book is about – how structural forces beyond our control, historical forces, shifts in the economy, shifts in the political organization of public policy, come crashing down on vulnerable sectors of the population and basically shove them around in very unpleasant ways.

These are the people who weren’t able to recover from the downsizing of the industrial sector in the United States. A bunch of other types of industries arose in place of that, but those people who aren’t able to make that adjustment, those people who don’t have the education to shift from being a factory worker to being an information technology processor, are people who fall into indigent poverty.

The guys that we studied – their parents were the people who lost their jobs working on the docks of San Francisco, working in the steel mills, working in the warehouses that were serving the active factory sector of San Francisco as a port industrial city.  These are forces that are much larger than the will of any individual or the moral ability of any individual to act in a way that’s going to make them a productive member of society. The book is trying to show those dynamics and when you dig deeper you then see these other patterns, that whites are affected by this very differently than African Americans.

Over half of his informants have passed away during the study and in the two years since the end of the actual field work.

>> read the interview in the Penn Current

>> download the first chapter of the book

On his website, he has published lots of papers!

UPDATE Long article about the book in The Chronicle Review: An Anthropologist Bridges Two Worlds. See also the comment by Eugene Raikhel at Somatosphere

SEE ALSO:

The most compelling ethnographies

Is the anthropologist a spy? New Anthropology Matters about fieldwork identities

Study: Drug smuggling as vehicle for female empowerment?

"In Search of Respect. Selling Crack in El Barrio" is one of my favorite ethnographies. Now, Philippe Bourgois, is out with a new book. In “Righteous Dopefiend", he looks at the clients of the dealers, the University paper Penn Current…

The last days of cheap oil and what anthropologists can do about it

Published on March 30, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, ecology nature, food and drink, politics, poverty

Oil is vital to our growth economy. Yet, our need for continued access to fossil fuels drives many of today’s conflicts. And we are in the last days of cheap oil and need alternatives. In his guest editorial in the new issue of Anthropology Today (subscription required unfortunately), Thomas Love encourages anthropologists to examine the complex relationship between our lives and fossil fuels.

What are the consequenes of rising oil prices? Rising energy prices may prolong availability for those who can afford it, but will will cause uneven economic development and contribute to the deterioration of labour conditions in sweatshop economies, he writes.

A quick search reveals following news: Rwanda: High Oil Prices Make Essential Commodities Costly (allAfrica 28.3.08), Higher petrol costs ‘act like a tax on consumption’ (CNN, 7.8.06) Food prices are rising worldwide. Weather, oil costs among factors (Boston Globe 30.3.08), Oil prices hit hard on Asia’s poor. UNDP report ranks countries according to a new Oil Price Vulnerability Index (UNDP 25.10.07), and “What about the poor?”, askes the Energy report (1.8.07).

Thomas Love proposes following research questions:

How does this crisis resemble previous ones? What metaphors and symbols do people use to make sense of it all? To what discursive structures will people turn to make sense of the potential unravelling of their worlds? (…) How has the fossil-fuelled growth system already affected the lives of people in producing areas?
(…)
We need cross-cultural perspectives and commitment to ethnography to understand how such large-scale forces play out on the ground in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Detailed grasp of the non-fossil-fuelled ways of living of pre- and non-industrial peoples will convey to interested publics and policy-makers alternative ways of organizing human society. We can help understand how humans might manage to power down without precipitating collapse.

Malaysia: Penan people threatened by demand for “green” bio-fuels

Dissertation: Survival in the Rainforest

Arctic refuge saved from oil drillers – Inuit divided

Indigenous Russians Unite Against Oil and Gas Development

Long battle between Argentine oil company and Ecuadorian indigenous community

A Solar power equipped school as gift to the Maasai: Good or bad?

Oil is vital to our growth economy. Yet, our need for continued access to fossil fuels drives many of today's conflicts. And we are in the last days of cheap oil and need alternatives. In his guest editorial in…

What anthropologists can do about the decline in world food supply

Published on February 18, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, food and drink, journal articles / papers, poverty

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warns ominously of an ‘unforeseen and unprecedented’ decline in world food supply. Anthropologists should contribute their expertise and knowledge to this emerging problem, Solomon H. Katz writes in the current issue of Anthropology Today (accessible for subscribers only).

First, anthropologists are often on the ground in remote places in societies which should, but often do not, figure in the mainstream of news stories about food problems. By the nature of our work, anthropologists are often close to the centre of the most desperate problems. We need to report these problems, especially through blogs, wikis and other instant communications within our means.

Second, anthropologists need to communicate beyond our own field about these food problems – with other scientific disciplines, the media, public policy advocates and elected officials who can help implement corrective change. The economic community has begun to focus on the micro level, which is consonant with the anthropologist’s study of problems at the local level.

In the case of food problems, for example, we can share our knowledge of how households, villages and communities are being affected and are coping with the rapidly increasing price of food throughout the world, and we can do so without delay.

Third, anthropologists need to be fully involved in building increased lines of communication that represent their collective perspectives more effectively, and can provide new insights for the media and policy-makers and help change the way societies think and act on problems of global concern.
(…)
Finally, we need to help develop a systematic way for government policy affecting the human food chain to be tested before it is adopted, in order to avoid unintended consequences.

The anthropologist is mentioning an online wiki web page and database of reports from the field as part of a new ‘world food problems’ wiki that he launched in December 2007 at http://wfmo.pbwiki.com Unfortunately, it seems he has taken it down already as it is password protected.

Katz has organized a panel entitled ‘Food to Fuel’ that I organized for the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington in December 2007.

He writes that the food crisis is the result of the sharp rise in competition between food and fuel, together with the higher costs of energy to produce and transport foods, the increased use of maize as animal feed in China and elsewhere, and the rapid changes in climate and rainfall patterns:

Last winter, within a month of Felipe Calderón taking office as the new president of Mexico, there were so many protests over the rise in corn prices induced by the US corn-to-ethanol policy that Calderón had to reverse his free trade philosophy and immediately fix corn prices or risk further street violence during the opening days of his presidency.

Similarly, the wheat price crisis has sparked street protests in Italy and Russia. In Africa there have been major protests, and the real spectre of food shortages this year resulting from prohibitively high prices looms in at least 37 countries.

UPDATE: The Guardian (26.2.08) reports Feed the world? We are fighting a losing battle, UN admits

Dissertation: Survival in the Rainforest

Global Migrants For Climate Action – Migrants organize to fight climate change

Thesis: How does EU influence the life of farmers in Finland?

Anthropology of Food – one more Open Access Journal!

Really an ethnic conflict? An anthropologist on the Kenya-crisis

Published on January 28, 2008 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, politics, poverty, Us and Them

Both in Norwegian and international media, the recent crisis in Kenya has often been described as an ethnic or an tribal conflict. But is this a correct view? “There is a tendency in media in the West to portray Africa as a place where tribal rivalries inevitably and almost naturally yield conflict and violence, and that is fairly misleading”, says anthropologist Angelique Haugerud in a The Real News Network radio interview:

It’s clear that ethnicity is a part of this picture, but it is only one piece of it. And the conflict in Kenya is as much due to political party competition, modern efforts at democratization, and the kinds of political dynamics we see anywhere in the world.

The kind of anger that’s boiling over now has also to do with economic inequalities:

The U.S., like the World Bank, the IMF, and European donors have over the years emphasized neoliberal economic policies—privatization, user fees for health care, and so on. That’s a set of policies that were, of course, widely implemented in Africa by these international financial institutions, as well as through bilateral aid. In Kenya, those have accentuated economic inequality and poverty.

>> view and read a transcript of the interview

In an article in OpenDemocracy, the anthropologist gives us an optimistic buttom-up-perspective. The way Kenyan citizens are living out and working through their country’s crisis offers insight into how boundaries of ethnicity, clan and class can be overcome, she writes:

Yet such hardening of ethnic boundaries, even four weeks into the crisis, is by no means pervasive or irreversible. 23-year-old Muthoni, for example – a Nairobi resident whose parents are from Embu district and thus again perceived as nearly Kikuyu – traveled with her church group to assist Luo people who had taken refuge at a police station in the nearby town of Limuru, whose population is predominantly Kikuyu. She comments: “we are all Kenyans…it’s a mixed brew; we can’t live without the other….it’s not logical to kill your neighbour; you were in agreement before.”

(…)

In spite of today’s newly charged ethnic identities and growing mistrust, now (as in the past) mutual assistance and other social bonds soften boundaries of ethnicity, neighborhood, clan, and class.

>> read the whole story in OpenDemocracy

I wish she’d elaborated more on this issue. But several excellent round-ups over at GlobalVoices provide us with useful links.

Rebecca Wanjiku writes:

After a week of killings, looting and the political madness witnessed in Kenya after last month’s general elections, Kenyan Bloggers are at the forefront of reconciliation, urging people to reach out, regardless of their ethnic background

>> read Kenya: “Bloggers seek to heal a wounded nation” and Kenya: Moving images of unrest and hope by Juliana Rincón Parra and Kenya: Cyberactivism in the aftermath of political violence by Ndesanjo Macha

A similar perspective can be found in the analysis by media researcher George Ogola:

A week prior to the election, only Al-Jazeera had taken some trouble to tell the Kenyan story. Reuters Africa proved another notable exception. But the familiar would soon follow, vicious and unrelenting.

When protests met the announcement of the presidential results, CNN, BBC 24 and Sky News sent some of their finest to Nairobi. But the frame of reference had been pre-determined. A narrative had been established. Kenya had descended into tribal anarchy reminiscent of the Rwanda genocide. Neighbours had turned onto each other just because they belonged to different tribes. ‘Tribal violence’ became the definitive mantra and was the basis for reports across the world.

(…)

It was equally about a western anthropology that figures conflict in Africa only in tribal terms; an Africa whose existence is so basic it must not be understood beyond the discourse of the tribe. I witnessed the power of a selective morality that tends to view Africa from a paradigm of difference, a unique rationality that embraces the kind of savagery the world was witnessing.

(…)

Amid this, the obvious was deliberately being negated. Why was violence in Nairobi largely restricted to the slums of Kibera and Mathare? Was it possible that the Kenyan poor were at war with the rich and with themselves? (…) Was it really possibly that because of disputed presidential elections, Kenya would suddenly implode? Was there a historical trajectory to this conflict?
(…)
The assumption that informs the continent’s interpretation is that this is a continent whose civilisation cannot be so sophisticated as to have class wars; neither can it justifiably fight for anything remotely democratic.

>> read the whole comment in AfricanPath

See also comment by Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian: “The west’s exotic fantasy of Africa means we fail to understand the real reasons for conflict in developing countries”, she writes.

>> read the whole comment “The violence in Kenya may be awful, but it is not senseless ‘savagery'”

UPDATE: Anthropologist Miroslava Prazak agrees: “Economic difference is truly at the heart of what is happening,” she said. “… It’s not about ethnic clashes. It’s about a political process that has gone wrong.” >> full story in the Bennington Banner (link updated)

Turning away from ethnicity as explanatory model

Seeing Africa as exceptional underestimates common experience of globalisation

Conflict Resolution and Anthropology: Why more scholarship on violence than on peace?

Both in Norwegian and international media, the recent crisis in Kenya has often been described as an ethnic or an tribal conflict. But is this a correct view? "There is a tendency in media in the West to portray Africa…