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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…

The globalisation of the Western conception of mental illness

Published on January 14, 2010 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, culture traditions, globalisation, medical anthropology / ethnobothany

(Links updated 1.2.2021) As Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology.net, I was kept awake until late at night by an article in the New York Times Magazine – yesterday for reading, today for writing. It is a fascinating article about a kind of globalisation that isn’t talked about much outside the university, written by Ethan Watters, author of Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, released two days ago. It’s about the globalisation of the Western conception of mental health and illness

“We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness”, he writes. “We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.” And the idea that our Western conception of mental health and illness might be shaping the expression of illnesses in other cultures is rarely discussed in the professional literature.”

Western conceptions of mental health? Well, as anthropologists stress, illness is not only about biomedicine. It’s not only about parts of the body that no longer work. Our brain is not a batter of chemicals that “needs a fine chemical balance in order to perform at its best” (advertisment for the antidepressant Paxil).

Illness, maybe especially mental illness, is also about culture:

(M)ental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host. (…)

What cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists have to tell us is that all mental illnesses, including depression, P.T.S.D. and even schizophrenia, can be every bit as influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations today as hysterical-leg paralysis or the vapors or zar or any other mental illness ever experienced in the history of human madness. (…)

In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.

Contrary to popular belief, “Western” biomedicine is not culturally neutral either:

The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection — a penchant for “psychologizing” daily existence. These ideas remain deeply influenced by the Cartesian split between the mind and the body, the Freudian duality between the conscious and unconscious, as well as the many self-help philosophies and schools of therapy that have encouraged Americans to separate the health of the individual from the health of the group.
(…)
“Western mental-health discourse introduces core components of Western culture, including a theory of human nature, a definition of personhood, a sense of time and memory and a source of moral authority. None of this is universal,” Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry in London observes.

Ethan Watters explains why have American categories of mental diseases become the worldwide standard:

American researchers and institutions run most of the premier scholarly journals and host top conferences in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Western drug companies dole out large sums for research and spend billions marketing medications for mental illnesses. In addition, Western-trained traumatologists often rush in where war or natural disasters strike to deliver “psychological first aid,” bringing with them their assumptions about how the mind becomes broken by horrible events and how it is best healed.

The export of Western biomedical ideas, Watters explains, can have “frustrating and unexpected consequences”, for example marginalization of people with “mental heath problems”. People with schizophrenia in some developing countries appear to fare better over time than those living in industrialized nations.

Several studies, Watters writes, suggest that we may actually treat people more harshly when their problem is described in biomedical disease terms, when we treat mental illnesses are “brain diseases” over which the patient has little choice or responsibility, when the disease has according this model nothing to do with factors in the outside world like unemployment, racism, larger societal structures that lead to loneliness, despair, depressions:

It turns out that those who adopted biomedical/genetic beliefs about mental disorders were the same people who wanted less contact with the mentally ill and thought of them as more dangerous and unpredictable. This unfortunate relationship has popped up in numerous studies around the world. (…) “irrespective of place . . . endorsing biological factors as the cause of schizophrenia was associated with a greater desire for social distance.”

In Zanzibar, in a group of people with “Swahili spirit-possession beliefs”, the illness was seen as the work of outside forces, it was understood as an affliction for the sufferer but not as an identity according to research by anthropologist Juli McGruder:

For McGruder, the point was not that these practices or beliefs were effective in curing schizophrenia. Rather, she said she believed that they indirectly helped control the course of the illness. Besides keeping the sick individual in the social group, the religious beliefs in Zanzibar also allowed for a type of calmness and acquiescence in the face of the illness that she had rarely witnessed in the West.

>> read the whole article in the NYT Magazine

>> Ethan Watters blog

The article was published last Saturday. The same day, Greg Downey wrote Exporting American mental illness, an example for great anthropology blogging. And the day after another fascinating blog post by Eugene Raikhel at Somatosphere: The globalization of biopsychiatry with lots of links to related medical anthropology studies.

Nearly at the same time, medical anthropologist Michael Tan has written about the same topic in his column Pinoy Kasi in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He writes about “special children”, children with what Americans call “global developmental delay” or GDD. This diagnosis does not make sense in the Philippines:

The problem here is defining a delay. (…) For example, around the area of language development, you will find books that say a child should have a vocabulary of around 200 words by the age of 2. I can imagine some of my readers beginning to panic now, as I did when I first heard that standard. Imagine me in the middle of the night doing an inventory of my son’s vocabulary and not even reaching 50 (…)
But the anthropologist in me protested that we don’t have studies in the Philippines that established the norm, and given that all our children are growing up in households with at least two, and often more, languages, there’s bound to be some “delay.” As you might have guessed, my son, who is now 4, cannot stop jabbering, and in three languages at that.

>> continue reading in the Philippine Daily Inquirer

Where shamans understand colonialism as sickness

Why anthropologists should politicize mental illnesses

The Anthropology of Suicide

(Links updated 1.2.2021) As Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology.net, I was kept awake until late at night by an article in the New York Times Magazine - yesterday for reading, today for writing. It is a fascinating article about a kind…

Ny blogg: Sosiologiske og antropologiske kjerring(t)råd

Published on January 11, 2010 by lorenz Posted in antropologi utenfor akademia, business antropologi, internett og nettkultur, sosialantropologi i Norge, Sverige og Danmark, teknologi

Hvordan er det å jobbe som antropolog i et konsulentselskap? Hva er innovasjon? Hvordan kommer ny teknologi til å endre hverdagen vår? Og hva har Mary Douglas med informasjonsarkitektur å gjøre?

“To kjerringer ved navn Lene Gulbrandsen og Lene Pettersen serverer sosiologiske og sosialantropologiske kjerring(t)råd”, er undertittelen på en ny blogg som heter Kjerring(t)råd.

Bloggen ser veldig spennende ut, det er bra at flere antropologer deltar i samtalene på nett! Du finner bloggen fra nå av også på bloggoversiktene på http://www.antropologi.info/blog/index-no.php og http://antropologi.info/feeds/no/antropologi

Bloggerne jobber i Bouvet som er “et skandinavisk konsulentselskap som leverer utviklings- og rådgivningstjenester innen informasjonsteknologi”. Lene Pettersen var månedens antropolog desember 2009 og har tidligere publisert teksten “The impact of social media for business“ her på antropologi.info.

SE OGSÅ:

For mer antropologi på blogger, YouTube og Twitter!

Thomas Hylland Eriksen: – Antropologer må bli flinkere til å bruke nettet

On fieldwork: “Blogging sharpens the attention”

Webutvikling: Antropologer sørger for vekst

– Antropologi er den nye frelsen innen forbrukerforståelse

Why the head of IT should be an anthropologist

Timo Veikkola – The Anthropologist as Future Specialist

Hvordan er det å jobbe som antropolog i et konsulentselskap? Hva er innovasjon? Hvordan kommer ny teknologi til å endre hverdagen vår? Og hva har Mary Douglas med informasjonsarkitektur å gjøre?

"To kjerringer ved navn Lene Gulbrandsen og Lene…

Leiesoldater som helter? Antropologer analyserer Kongo-dekningen

Published on January 10, 2010 by lorenz Posted in Afrika, media, nordmenn, sosialantropologi i Norge, Sverige og Danmark, vi og de andre

Nylig intervjuet jeg medieviteren og journalisten Marianne Mikkelsen. Hun skrev en masteroppgave om “flerkulturelle journalister”. Mange av dem har opplevd at deres “habilitet” i minoritetssaker blir trukket i tvil. De ble mistenkt for å være partisk når de skriver om “sine egne”. Bortsett fra at mistanken sannsynligvis har lite for seg kunne man jo si det samme om “etnisk norske” journalister? At de er like inhabile når det gjelder “norsk kultur”? “Det ser ut som om habilitetsreglene tolkes ulikt for majoritet og minoritet”, sa Mikkelsen.

Et godt eksempel på nordmennenes partiskhet er jo utenriksjournalistikken – og Kongosaken om de norske leiesoldatene French og Moland kanskje et av de beste eksemplene. De drapsdømte leiesoldatene som beundrer kolonialismen er blitt gjort til helter av et samlet pressekorps – bare fordi de er norske.

Nå har to antropologer analysert mediedekningen, melder HiO-nytt: Sindre Bangstad og Bjørn Enge Bertelsen. Resultatet vil bli publisert i Anthropology Today i februar.

Bangstad trekker blant annet en linje fra French og Moland til Norges deltakelse i kolonial utbytting i Kongo. I sin beundring for kolonialismen i Afrika er French og Moland “mer typisk norske enn mange av oss liker å tro”, mener han. Antropologen syns også det erinteressant at norske medier har hatt et overveldende fokus på livshistoriene til French og Moland. Til sammenligning har pressen ikke på langt nær vært så opptatte av borgerkrigen og den humanitære krisen i Kongo.

>> les hele saken på forskning.no/ HiO-nytt

Det har vært en del kritiske kommentarer om dekningen av Kongo-saken. Maren Sæbø, redaktør i Verdensmagasinet X, har skrevet flere gode innlegg, blant annet Journalister i Mørkets hjerte og Jungelfeber . Og Dag Herbjörnsrud skrev i Ny Tid Usivilisert fra Kongo . Kathrine Geard oppsummerer debatten på journalisten.no Dateline Kisangani

Forresten en av de siste saken om French og Moland er også typisk. NRK melder – Bør ha nordmenn rundt seg : Sjømannsprest mener det ikke er heldig for Moland og French å være alene i fengselet. Jeg ser også at NRK meldte om at de Delte ut julegaver i fengselet, mens VG skrev Dette ønsker Moland og French seg til jul

SE OGSÅ:

– Kolonitida lever videre i utenriksredaksjonene

“Statoil siviliserer Afrika?” eller “Vi trenger en ny Afrika-journalistikk!”

Primitive indianere eller primitive journalister?

Nylig intervjuet jeg medieviteren og journalisten Marianne Mikkelsen. Hun skrev en masteroppgave om "flerkulturelle journalister". Mange av dem har opplevd at deres “habilitet” i minoritetssaker blir trukket i tvil. De ble mistenkt for å være partisk når de skriver…

Ethnologe: Muslimhetze und Finanzkrise sorgen für Boom des Islamic Banking

Published on January 9, 2010 by lorenz Posted in Ethnologie Sozialanthropologie Kulturanthropologie, Islam, Politik / Oekonomie

Milliarden fliessen zu Banken mit Scharia-Garantie titeln mehrere Schweizer Zeitungen heute und verweisen auf die Forschung des Ethnologen Stefan Leins von der Uni Zürich.

Der hat nämlich auf der Webseite der Uni einen Artikel mit dem medienfreundlichen Titel Muhammad als formidabler Risikomanager verfasst. Da erklärt der Ethnologe den Boom des Islamic Banking.

Banken, die nach islamischen Prinzipien wirtschaften, haben von der Finanzkrise und der Diffamierung des Islams nach 9/11 profitiert. Zum einen weil diese Prinzipien die Banken krisenfester machten (u.a. Handel mit Schuldpapieren ist verboten), zum andern weil man durch islamische Investitionen “die Zugehörigkeit zum Islam auf moderne Art und Weise” demonstrieren kann.

In Europa gibt es immer mehr der Banken, die nach islamischen Prinzipien wirtschaften, besonders in Grossbritannien. In der Schweiz agiert die Faisal Private Bank seit dem Jahr 2006 als einziges Finanzinstitut vollständig nach den Regeln der Scharia. Daneben verfügen auch die UBS, die Credit Suisse und die Privatbank Sarasin über “islamkonforme Angebote für ihre Kunden”, so der Ethnologe.

Leins hat seine Lizarbeit über Islamic Banking geschrieben. Für seine Feldarbeit reiste er nach Bahrain sowie zu Konferenzen in London und Istanbul. Zur Zeit bereitet er seine Doktorarbeit zum islamischen Finanzmarkt vor. Im Frühjahrssemester 2010 leitet er an der Uni Zürich das Seminar “Anthropology of Finance – Der Finanzmarkt aus ethnologischer Sicht”.

>> Stefan Leins: Muhammad als formidabler Risikomanager

In Deutschland wird in diesem Monat die erste islamische Bank eröffnet – in Mannheim. Der konservative christliche deutsche Politiker Mann Löffler hat kürzlich islamische Banken gelobt. Die “ethische Verwahrlosung” der Bankenlandschaft erfordere neue Lösungen, meint er und da seien “Halal Banken” ein möglicher “dritter Weg zwischen Kapitalismus und Sozialismus”. Denn bei denen gebe es weder Zinsen noch Spekulation, siehe Artikel in der Sueddeutschen “Erste islamische Bank. Mit dem Segen Allahs im Ländle”.

SIEHE AUCH:

Wirtschaftswissenschaften haben versagt – Ethnologen in die Volkswirtschaft!

Used anthropology to predict the financial crisis

How anthropologists should react to the financial crisis

Anthropologist Explores Wall Street Culture

Financial crisis: Anthropologists lead mass demonstration against G20 summit

Milliarden fliessen zu Banken mit Scharia-Garantie titeln mehrere Schweizer Zeitungen heute und verweisen auf die Forschung des Ethnologen Stefan Leins von der Uni Zürich.

Der hat nämlich auf der Webseite der Uni einen Artikel mit dem medienfreundlichen Titel Muhammad als…