think1

think 1

excerpts to stir thoughts on anthropology - ethnographic writing and social analysis

December 2008 • Anthropology News, pages 56-7 Society for Medical Anthropology

"SMA Notes from the Field: The Health of War Studies" By Matthew Gutmann (Brown U)

[thought prompt: At what local, regional, national and trans-national facts can we usefully offer our social commentary? And what may we expect to come of that framing, perspective and voicing?]

Most members of the SMA and the AAA are based in the United States, a country that routinely carries out armed invasions and occupations of foreign lands, backed up by a military budget as large as those of all other countries combined. The US military is the largest US employer, and continues to spend at least $10 billion each month on the Iraq War, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over 4,000 US troops to date. Almost 200 million people died in wars in the twentieth century, most of them civilians. According to some estimates, by 2020 war will be the eighth leading cause of death in the world. Between the dislocation of entire populations (as many as four million Iraqis since 2003), communicable diseases, gender-based violence and “gendercide,” landmines and military toxins like depleted uranium, casualties and disabilities like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to say nothing of the destruction of health care, social, economic and political infrastructures of societies around the world, many SMA members have been doing vital work in these areas, and many more are justifiably impatient to find more ways to better document, teach about, and write against state-sponsored violence. As a new member of the SMA Executive Board, I hope to expand how those of us who study health might incorporate militarization and war into our research and activism.

...Do the troops hunker down and learn contempt for the people they were supposed to “liberate”? Do they focus just on the survival of their buddies and themselves? Do they go mad in the attempt to understand the moralityof their participation in the invasion and occupation of Iraq?

...Whether we study PTSD, other war diseases, war refugees, ecodisasters or military institutions— such as asking why the Defense Department is responsible for determining and ameliorating the injuries and diseases of war, rather than Health and Human Services—there are ways both numerous and urgent to incorporate militarization and war into our medical anthropology.

[thought prompt: Using this same yardstick of Writer as Mouthpiece - il traduttore, traditore, The Translator is Traitor- look back at classic ethnographic monographys or vignettes, whether in text or images, and comb out instances of (unintential) framing things in the author's terms, not necessarily congruent to the informant's terms or purposes.]

December 2008 • Anthropology News, page 52 Society for the Anthropology of Work

"Anthropologists, Journalists, Drug Traffickers and Others" By Howard Campbell (U Texas-El Paso)

...My reflections emerge out of research for a forthcoming book Drug War Zone: Voices from the US-Mexico Border. As a result of this work and the growing drug violence in the Ciudad Juárez/El Paso area, I began to receive frequent requests from journalists for interviews about the drug business and my ethnographic work. After several dozen such interviews— which resulted in articles that ranged from the nuanced and subtle to the absurdly simplistic and sensationalistic—I began to realize that I had allowed reporters to turn anthropology on its pointy academic head. I had become the informant, not the ethnographer, and I realized that all the power to represent my ideas and research, for better or worse, lay in the hands of the interviewer. Such a reversal of power is probably a healthy lesson for anthropologists in general. In spite of our obsession with issues of power, inequality and representation, we may forget the extent to which we shape how our informants (or whatever we call them) and their thinking are viewed in the larger world.

...Journalists, like ethnographers, spontaneously or suddenly contact informants and encourage them to explain their thinking. Such requests come out of the blue.

...The generally fleeting, ephemeral journalist-informant (or ethnographerinformant) relationship provides little protection for the informant. I learned this the hard way as I tried to convey a sophisticated understanding of the border drug wars to journalists interested in publishing spicy, iconic articles on short notice.

...One may carefully conceal the identity of one’s informants and still make waves when someone mistakenly identifies themselves with the person in question. One may clearly articulate a broad, balanced view of the sources of drug violence and conflict and still offend one side or the other. One may simply be misquoted or have one’s ideas grossly ripped out of context.

[thought prompt: although written of doing fieldwork and commentary of one's fellow citizens in the industrialized, university-equipped societies, really how different should one's approach and self-awareness be for fieldwork elsewhere?]

December 2008 • Anthropology News, page 50 Society for the Anthropology of Europe

"Provocation: Embracing Marginality" By Susan Carol Rogers (New York U)

...What does it mean to work in a context where there is a surfeit of information and opinion about our objects of study, readily available to us and to our audiences alike? How do we manage our relationships to our audiences and to our subjects when the former may easily come see for themselves where we have been, and the latter are potentially interested consumers of our research? How do we engage with substantial quantities of scholarship generated within other disciplinary or national traditions, by local scholars as well as those in our home institutions? What, in the end, is more marginal than a cutting edge?