There is much to be said, and felt, about the shootings at Ft Hood on November 5th.

As a socio-cultural and linguistic anthropologist whose dissertation fieldwork was on a military base (I worked mostly at Walter Reed with a brief stint at Ft Dix), and who writes about the dissonance that emerges when discourses of the ‘war on terror’ and soldiers’ experiences collide, I’ve been feeling the need to say a few things myself.

I think we need to be paying close attention to the ideologies of language that are emerging in media coverage and online chatter about the apparent shooter, Maj. Nadal Hasan. Those who have been following the coverage will be aware that people are obsessed with how to name (or nominate) Hasan.

Call him Crazy

One set of names at stake has to do with being crazy.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, commentators rushed to the figure of the PTSD suffering soldier, invoking exactly the stereotype of the ‘crazy vet’ that Ken MacLeish has written about here, reinforcing the myth that PTSD makes people (or perhaps just soldiers?) kill other people.

As it became clear that Hasan had not been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and had not been in an active war zone, this category morphed into another one that, as far as I know, was newly coined: that of “secondary-PTSD” caused by the assumption of his repeated exposure to the first hand accounts of soldiers’ combat trauma while Hasan was working as a psychiatrist at Walter Reed.

As the night of the shooting wore on, and more information about Hasan found its way to news outlets like the New York Times, the category of mental illness took on another shape: Hasan’s supervisors at Walter Reed and at a Masters’ program at Uniformed Services University of the Health Science had apparently been concerned that he might be psychotic in some more run of the mill, non-service connected way.

The ‘T’ Word

There is also the parallel, and more heated, discussion about whether or not to call Hasan a terrorist. The cover of the November 23rd issue of Time Magazine which features Hasan’s face with “Terrorist?” across his eyes (which are rendered in negative) is perhaps the most iconic iteration of this question.

The question about whether or not to call Hasan a terrorist is not especially concerned with his motives (which is perhaps the only unifying thread of the plethora of definitions of terrorism I’ve seen). The ‘T’ word is on the table because of Hasan’s middle eastern sounding name and because he is a practicing Muslim. If you think this is too simplistic, imagine that his name was John Smith and that he was an Episcopalian, and ask yourself if the ‘terrorist’ moniker would have been on the tip of everyone’s tongue within hours of discovering these facts (though, come to think of it, if he was John Smith we probably wouldn’t even have found out that he was Episcopalian.).

New outlets quickly went to work blurring the lines between Islam and international conspiracy: By the time I got home from a long day of teaching (an introduction to linguistic anthropology, as it happens) and turned on CNN, we were already hearing details about a neighbors’ description of the “Muslim looking inscriptions” on Hasan’s front door, and Anderson Cooper was informing us about de-contextualized emails with unspecified “radical Muslim clerics” in Yemen and de-contextualized online postings about something to do with ideas of Jihad, the historical case of Kamakazi soldiers in WWII, and suicide bombing (which reminds me: I wonder if Talal Asad has made a watch-list yet). The significance of these communications has yet to be clarified.

What’s in a Name?

This consternation about naming indexes the common misconception that language simply and straightforwardly reflects and refers to the world, thus proving once and for all that if a linguistic anthropologist explains the Sapir-Worf Hypothesis to their students or the public, it doesn’t actually make a sound. It also demonstrates for us that these questions about the nature of the relationship between language and the world have real and dramatic consequences.

The discussions about whether or not to call Hasan a terrorist, or a victim of secondary trauma, or psychotic are conflated with the discussion of whether or not he is a terrorist or a victim of secondary trauma, or psychotic.

But if ever there were a case that ought to complicate these simple referential categories it was this. Hasan was a psychiatrist and potentially psychotic, he is Muslim and American, he is a soldier and is opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afganistan, he is an officer and he is (apparently) a murderer, he has three degrees and was a very poor student. I could go on, but I think you get the point.

What’s more, these various categories can’t just be mixed together in some additive way to explain some integral ‘identity’, ‘personality’, or ‘self’ and they certainly can’t be mobilized to explain the things they claim to name—If we read an argument like that in one of our students’ papers, we’d mark it with a big X and scribble “tautological” in the margins.

A Speaking Subject

The point here is that ideas about language are central to this very visceral event.

Those of us who have been following the coverage have heard a lot of people call Hasan a lot of things, we’ve read some of the things he’s written and things people have written about him. And all of this hearing and reading has been narrated for us in a way that implies that words have simple, referential meaning.

But there is one bit of language that is not a name that has become an intense site of elaboration about Hasan. It is said that, just before he started shooting he yelled out the takbir, the article of faith that translates into English as “God is great” or “God is the greatest.” It’s usually rendered in the roman alphabet as “Allahu akbar.” The question of whether or not he yelled it out is itself unsettled, and you can trace the dissemination of it pretty precisely online. Here’s how I’ve been mapping it: start with post commander Lt. General Cone the morning after the shootings, then to an AP story and the rapidly developing Wikipedia page, then a Yahoo news report the night of the 6th, and then to a CNN interview with an injured soldier on the 9th and then a complaint about that CNN report, then to the comments in this Politico post on the 11th, and then here to Bill O’Reilly on the 12th.

There is much to be said about the various attempts to pronounce, spell, and punctuate the utterance, all of which gets at the emergence of language use as a way of indexing expertise and community membership and all of which pushes us beyond the reality principle that operates in the ideology of language as naming.

What is even more compelling, and disturbing, to me is the fact that this utterance, something that must be spoken out loud as a declaration of faith, has come to be heard as indexical of membership in a global terrorist network.

This tells us something powerful about practices of speaking and hearing as acts of social construction of selves and others. Assuming that Hasan did indeed make this utterance (if he “shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!’” or “Allauh akbar […] which terrorists have used as a battle cry” or “ALLAH AKHBAR!!”), the conversation has not been about what he meant (was it intended to claim his actions in the name of God? Was it a confession of faith in the face of imminent death?).

The meaning has already been determined before the utterance is made: the utterance is understood to be a declaration not of faith, but of membership in a diffuse, global, radical, anti-American, terrorist network associated with a particular politicization of Islam and rooted in the middle east. It’s become a site of elaboration because if he made this declaration than it would seem we don’t need to worry about what to call him: We’ll finally have the expressive truth, straight from the horse’s mouth.

The thing I’ll be most interested in is what happens when we finally get to hear from Hasan, that is, when we hear the sound of his voice. I’m not that interested in what he’ll say. I’m more interested in what people will think when they hear the sound of this potential terrorist speaking like what he is: a 39 year old from suburban Virginia.

• I’ve put together a couple of anthropology 2.0 resources. The first is a Twitter list of anthropologists on Twitter. The second is a .Collected list of anthropology blogs. Sort of a mash-up blog of anthropology blogs. You can suggest additional blogs directly via the .Collected interface. If you want to be added to the list of anthropologists on twitter, let me know by sending a tweet to @kerim.


• The AAA has discovered the power of having a Twitter backchannel at the AAA meetings. If you’ll be blogging or Tweeting the AAA Annual Meetings, read this. (But will there be WiFi and plug points in all the meeting rooms? Last year you had to go to a special spot to get wifi and there were few plug points available even there…)


• Ethnographic Terminalia is a group exhibition of installation works timed to coincide with the AAA meeting in Philadelphia: “The works presented in ethnographic terminalia in their various ways address the possibility of showing and interpreting cultural worlds outside of the traditional cinematic and textual frameworks.”


• Most newspapers write obituaries for people before they pass away. But it seems the major papers weren’t prepared for the passing of Dell Hymes, as it took them quite a while to post something. However, finally they are slowly catching up. Here are obits from the Washington Post and the New York Times.


• And, for all the Chinese speakers out there, I’m happy to announce a new blog: Guava Anthropology. It is a group blog by many of Taiwan’s up-and-coming anthropologists, and is already off to a strong start.


• “After seven years’ work the first 100 years of the Journal of the Polynesian Society have been completely digitised and are now available online.”


• And, finally, dimwit of the week: “David Brooks thinks “Asians” are better suited to a service economy. No, really.”

Last Friday our distinguished colleague Dell Hymes passed away peacefully in his sleep.

It hasn’t yet been reported in the newspapers, but Jason Baird Jackson has a post speaking to Hymes’ contribution in the fields of anthropology and folklore:

Dell Hymes was a amazingly influential folklorist, anthropologist, and linguist who revolutionized the study of language in (/and) culture in general, and of Native American narrative traditions in particular. He made important contributions to the history of anthropology, to descriptive and theoretical linguistics, to sociolinguistics, to folkloristics, and to Native American studies. He essentially created the areas on inquiry known as (1) the ethnography of speaking and (2) ethnopoetics and he played a key role reshaping linguistic anthropology from the 1960s onward.

For those at the AAA in Philadelphia, there will be a memorial Saturday December 5, 2009 from 7:30-9:30 in Grand Ballroom III at the courtyard Marriott.

This week I was teaching Lévi-Strauss who speaks frequently about his love of Rousseau, so I was interested to here the latest Radio Lab which investigates the question of animal (including human) nature and change. What does it take for a population to change, whether it be baboons, small town USA, or wild foxes? Particularly interesting is the suggestion, by biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham, that humans may have domesticated ourselves.

One question raised, but not answered, by the show is why Dr. Dmitry K. Belyaev, who did the research on the domestication of foxes, had to hide his work from Stalin? It turns out that “Belyaev and his brother … believed in Mendelian theory despite the domination of Soviet science by Trofim Lysenko, who rejected Mendelian genetics.” Lysenko rejected Mendel (and Darwin) because he was a Larmarkian:

The little scientific theory absorbed by Lysenko came by way of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the early–19th-century French biologist who promulgated the theory, later refuted by Darwinism, that acquired characteristics could be passed from one generation to the next. This fit neatly with the Stalinist idea that nature could be manipulated to suit the needs of man.

Lysenko was hot-tempered, and he brooked no criticism of himself or his work. Legitimate Soviet geneticists and other scientists who dared oppose him often learned this hard truth with a one-way ticket to the gulag. Lysenko, in fact, despised his more-learned colleagues in a way that only a complete fraud with near-absolute power can.

RELATED: When Species Meet

By Dai Cooper.
Lyrics after the jump.

UPDATE: Lorenz interviews Dai Cooper

Hey Mom & Dad, I’ve got to come out and say,
I’ve got to tell you, it’s the only way
Something I’ve learned about myself since I was away (at college)
I really think that I might be a little bit—of an Anthropologist

Mom & Dad, I’ve been led astray,
I’ve been experimenting with archaeolog(a)y
On an excavation, tried C-14 dating
And ground penetrating radar for the first time—(if you know what I mean)

I see the visions in your head of me digging up dino bones
Or do I study insects in a laboratory all alone?
But I’m just looking for the story of our people as a whole
Wanting to learn about and understand all cultures as our own …

[Chorus]
The World seems to increasingly need, Anthropology
Now we’re exploring, asking Who Why and How we be People
The difference between us, is not so much
Tell me your story, your piece of what is Humanity.

Mom & Dad, I think you should know,
I do fieldwork, everywhere I go
I want to travel, see Peru and Vietnam
My heroes are Margaret Mead and Barack Obama’s mom —(did you know she was an Anthropologist?)

If you think of natives on an island painted up singing war songs
It’s misleading though historically you’re not totally wrong
But you can do Anthropology reading graffitied bathroom stalls
Or in a war zone … or a December shopping mall.

Then there’s Linguistics—I think that’s how we use our tongues;
Physical Anthro says what body parts we all have in common,
You can even study monkeys, I hear that part’s really fun
All these fields tell us part of what it means to be human …

[Chorus]

Hey Mom & Dad, it wasn’t how you raised me.
Anthro professors, they’re all kinda crazy
Got their agendas, trying to recruit our P-O-Vs
Deep down inside they’re all in love with—Malinowski

At the same time, I think it’s what my heart has always known
Do you remember Hallowe’en when I was Indiana Jones?
The other kids they stopped coming around, I had to play alone
I guess they didn’t like my kinship charts, of all their homes.

Some cross-cultural connexions might just help us all relate
Misunderstanding’s at the root of so much global hate
How many wars, metaphors or literally,
Could be avoided if the world was “us”, instead of “you” and “me”?

[Chorus] x2

Despite how beneficial it has been for me personally, I am troubled by GTD and the cult of efficiency which surrounds it. Foucault talks about “technologies of the self” by which he means those “technologies imbued with aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects and averting certain undesired ones” (Rose, 1999, cited in Wikipedia). At the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Taylor developed the theory of “scientific management” which is one of the quintessential technologies of power. GTD is both scientific management for the digital age and a technology of the self for the IT crowd.

He chose twelve “large, powerful Hungarians,” observed them for an hour, and calculated that, at the rate they were working, they were loading twenty-four tons of pig iron per man per day. Then he handpicked ten men and dared them to load sixteen and a half tons as fast as they could. They managed to do it in fourteen minutes; this yields a rate of seventy-one tons per man per ten-hour day. Taylor inexplicably rounded up the number to seventy-five. To get to forty-seven and a half, he reduced seventy-five by about forty per cent, claiming that this represented a work-to-rest ratio of the “law of heavy laboring.” Workers who protested the new standards were fired. Only one…loaded anything close to forty-seven and a half tons in a single day, a rate that was, in any case, not sustainable. After providing two years of consulting services, Taylor billed the company a hundred thousand dollars (which works out to something like two and a half million dollars today), and then he was fired.

This week I’m teaching Gramsci who, along with Lenin, believed that scientific management (which he called “Fordism”) would bring great benefits to the working class, giving them time to read Marxism. In this he was perhaps closer to Lillian Gilbreth, one of the early advocates of scientific management, who mothered twelve children while running a business, getting her Ph.D. and publishing several books. Gilbreth believed that “the whole point of efficiency, she said, was to maximize ‘happiness minutes.’” I’m sure that for Gramsci time spent reading Marx counted as “happiness minutes.” I know I personally would like to spend less time “getting things done” and more time on the couch reading…

Update: Added missing link.

The film states several times that one reason the story of failed to become popular in Belgium is that the residents of Flanders don’t see Flanders when they read the book or watch the films, or the TV show. Rather, what they see is Holland. This isn’t surprising, since visiting filmmakers will find little pastoral beauty in modern day industrial Flanders, and Holland is just a twenty minute drive away. But while foreigners might not be able to tell the subtle differences in dress, or even the color of stones used in the streets and buildings, the people who live there are very, very aware.

I probably would not have thought twice about this, except I have also been reading China Mieville’s surreal crime-story, The City & The City. Here is how the Guardian describes the book’s central premise:

the city of Beszel exists in the same space as the city of Ul Qoma. Citizens of each city can dimly make out the other, but are forbidden on pain of severe penalties (administered by a supreme authority known simply as Breach) to notice it. They have learned by habit to “unsee”. The cities have different airports, international dialling codes, internet links. Cars navigate instinctively around one another; police officers cooperate but are not allowed to stop or investigate crimes committed in the other city.

The novel takes a trick or two from my favorite writer, Bruno Schulz, imagining twin cities occupying the same physical space. A situation reminiscent of another enjoyable film from the TIEFF festival, Jerusalem(s), which follows Jewish, Muslim, and Christian tour guides around Jerusalem. Constantly cutting to the numerous surveillance cameras which are also watching. But the book captures something which is not just true of divided cities like Jerusalem or cold-war Berlin, it is also of Flanders. In order to “unsee” someone from Ul Qoma, the residents of Beszel must be alert to subtle signs of dress and manner, just as the residents of Flanders would never be mistaken for Dutch.

I believe manner of seeing is something we don’t just learn, it is something we cultivate. We are proud of our ability to (un)see differences. Every once in a while I meet a Taiwanese, usually someone who lives abroad, or has travelled widely. They peg me for Jewish, but don’t want to broach the topic directly, so the usually ask me if I might not be French. When I insist that I am not, however, they usually garner up the courage to pursue the question until they’ve established that they were correct to begin with. I also know my friends of mixed ancestry (which, of course, is all of us – but you know what I mean) can cause tremendous significant discomfort in random strangers, simply because they are difficult to peg. A Japanese-Afghan friend gets asked: “What are you?” by total strangers on the subway. Once they know “what” she is, they can go back to unseeing her.

UPDATE: Some slight corrections made.

Living with the Invisibles (Vivre les Invisibles) [2003, 53’]

Filmmaker Dirk Dumont teamed up with anthropologist Philip Hermans to explore how two Moroccan women living in Europe attempt to rid themselves of problems caused by jinn. The jinn, the “invisibles” of the film’s title, live alongside people and live their own parallel lives. However, some jinn can cause problems, attacking people and causing illness, mental distress, and numerous other kinds of suffering. In the film we follow the women as they seek assistance from traditional healers in both Europe and Morocco. Dealing as it does with the overlapping themes of immigration, religion, and medicine, this film is well suited for classes on any of those topics.

The Sixth Resettlement [2009, 55’]

Ouyang Bin’s documentary is so named because it documents the sixth effort by the Chinese government to resettle the Kucong out of the mountains where they live (near the border between China’s Yunnan province and Vietnam). Unlike the previous five attempts, the subjects of this film seem eager to move into a new government settlement, but the one cash crop they have access to, cardamom, has fallen in price, making it difficult for them to raise the necessary funds to secure a house. The film makes extensive use of an ethnographic film made in the fifties about the same community. The film’s focus on the difficulty of transitioning to a money economy make this an excellent choice for classes on economic anthropology.

Suddenly Sami [2009, 50’]

The official blurb for the film says: “During the director’s childhood and youth in Oslo her mother never told her about her indigenous Sami background in the Arctic area of Norway. Why didn’t she? And how can the director suddenly become Sami in the middle of life? And does she really want to?” But Ellen-Astri Lundby’s delightful film is much more than a personal documentary. What makes this film stand out from the perspective of someone teaching a course on ethnicity and identity politics is the way the director ties her own personal narrative to the larger shifts which have taken place in Norway through dialog with politicians, anthropologists, family members, etc.

In Search of the Hamat’sa: A Tale of Headhunting [2004, 33’]

Aaron Glass made this film as a graduate student at NYU, while working on his anthropology dissertation. As Alexander King says in his review of the film, “Glass introduces two leading questions that guide most of the narrative: 1) ‘How did this once secret and restricted dance become their most visible image?’ and 2) “’Why, then, did a dance prohibited by the government come to be claimed by the nation a century later?’” Both excellent questions for discussion in an undergraduate class on material culture, performance studies, etc.

At the end of July this year, media outlets all over the country picked up a story from Colorado Springs, home to the U.S. Army’s Ft. Carson, about a spate of violent crimes committed by soldiers. Most of the soldiers were from a single infantry battalion that had served two arduous tours in Iraq and had seen some of the bloodiest (for U.S. forces) fighting of the war—in Ramadi in 2004 and Baghdad in 2006. Between these two tours, the 3,700-person brigade to which the battalion was attached sustained over half of all the casualties of all units at Ft. Carson. The crimes include ten arrests for murder or manslaughter, along with kidnapping, rape and other violent crimes. There were also suicide attempts, some of them successful. Many of the soldiers who were charged had engaged in excessive or indiscriminate violence against civilians in Iraq and also demonstrated dire combat stress reactions both in Iraq and at home. But the stories gathered by Colorado Springs Gazette reporter Dave Phillips suggests that the unit commanders were interested neither in punishing the soldiers nor in helping them. They were indifferent or even hostile to parents, wives, and girlfriends and to soldiers themselves who sought assistance. So they languished without help, self-medicated with drugs and alcohol, and went on to commit more violent acts, Phillips writes.

The story is familiar: young men are trained to kill, sent to war, produce and are exposed to brutal levels of violence for long periods, and then return home traumatically altered by that training, action and exposure with only a neglectful and ill-prepared institution to turn to for help. The news stories focus on the excessive, random and sometimes intimate nature of the violence: a gun held to a girlfriend’s head, a drug dealer repeatedly tased and then shot, an anonymous passerby run over with a car and then stabbed to death. They link the violence it directly back to excessive, shocking and randomly targeted behavior in Iraq: soldiers killing Iraqi livestock, shooting unprovoked and indiscriminately at civilians, and equipping themselves with non-regulation tasers and hollow-point ammunition. And ultimately the stories root the violence in the trauma glossed as the “horror” and “hell” of war, trauma that left these particular soldiers unable to return to “normal” life back at home. And they criticize the Army for its mercenary neglect of troubled soldiers, for the blind eye it turned to the people in Iraq and in the U.S. who were harmed by them, and for its internal culture that stigmatizes as weak soldiers who seek help for combat trauma.

This is not a criticism of the journalism that broke the story. Phillips’ article [audio] is a striking piece of writing: nuanced, provocative, exhaustively reported, and over 15,000 words long. It captures the chains of tribulation that make up each individual case, highlighting the way that soldiers were caught in the cumulative effects of battlefield violence on the one hand, and an institutional indifference and instrumentality on the other. But as the story re-ran in capsule form on NPR, the New York Times, CNN, etc., and 15,00 words shrank to a few hundred, and the editing collapses Phillips’ breadth and depth, perhaps inevitably, into stereotype—or so it sounded to my cynical ear. In the headlines and ledes and pull quotes, but also more diffusely, in the cultural logic in which the stories are embedded, the soldiers appear as both horrific monsters and pitiable victims—“crazy vets,” as a friend of mine, an Iraq vet and a veterans advocate, likes to say. The emphasis on the concentration of the crimes within a particular unit groups the individual perpetrators into a single class of actors—Amy Goodman, for instance, reported that the battalion had a murder rate 114 times that of the city of Colorado Springs. My own quantitative chops are a little shaky, but since murder rates typically involve incredibly steep ratios—single- or double-digit quantities per 100,000—a figure like that does far more to shock than it does to inform. More to the point, it (inadvertently) casts the taint of murder over the entire unit, and arguably, over all combat vets. A similar and much more involved quantification of soldiers connected to violent crimes in the New York Times’ January 2008 series “War Torn” attracted bitter criticism from veterans’ groups for precisely this reason.

The dilemma of the “crazy vet” stereotype is this: even as it can be deployed to draw critical attention to the dire structural conditions and damaging and unfair stigma faced by traumatized soldiers, its elaborate and horrifying imagery cannot help but confirm stereotype and increase stigma. Again, this is not to pick on the journalists and commentators doing the crucial work of bringing the difficult circumstances of soldiers to public attention. For indeed, soldiers and their advocates also invoke the “crazy vet” stereotype among themselves all the time. A Veterans Affairs service officer I knew emphasized the urgent need for PTSD screening, treatment resources and disability compensation via the image of “PFC Joe Snuffy going postal in Wal Mart.” Soldiers would joke about pulling out their “Crazy Card” or “TBI [Traumatic Brain Injury] Card” as an excuse or explanation for odd or erratic behavior—mouthing off too much, getting lost or distracted, or falling into black moods. Such antisocial actions are all symptoms of TBI; these soldiers were not exploiting their diagnosis, I think, but rather ironizing and acting back on the inhuman instrumentality to which they felt their condition had been reduced.

And sometimes, and more poignantly, they would cut right to the heart of their own sense of psychic injury. “I am a totally different person,” one acquaintance told me. What soldiers “like him” wanted, said—those with physical injuries or PTSD or TBI, or suffering more diffuse, less official forms of bodily and mental wear and tear—all they wanted was to get the care they felt they needed and then be left to themselves. “Guarantee you, dude, that’s exactly what we want. Let me go raise my children. I’m gonna go and I’m not gonna bother you anymore, just leave me the fuck alone.” In these kinds of statements, talk of being “messed up” performs work with its wry and macho tone, claiming ownership of the feeling of being damaged on its own terms rather than submitting to the role of monster or victim.

The crazy vet stereotype is both pernicious and culturally productive, a highly effective vehicle for anxieties about the contamination by violence of those whose job it is to officially produce it, as if killing and dying are a contagion contracted on a foreign battlefield that threatens the nominally non-violent homefront and its “civilized” social life (see, e.g., Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites or Catherine Lutz’s discussion of the figure of the soldier in Homefront). Americans in particular, I think, are accustomed to thinking of war and the wounds it produces as a literally foreign entity. Thus the language of the “hell” and “horror” when war “comes home”—a place where hell and horror presumably don’t belong. This sense of the foreign or the exceptional is reinforced by sensational media accounts of damaged soldiers. And this is a second paradoxical quality of the “crazy vet.” Even as the stereotype pathologizes all soldiers, it focuses attention on a very narrow range of extreme behaviors, making it actually harder to see the broad and far subtler range of burdens that war—waged in Americans’ name, whether we like it or not—inevitably lays on those whose job it is to produce it. Regardless of one’s perspective on this war or war in general, the “crazy vet” can both confirm our worst fears about war and justify our outrage about it without prompting us to face these more everyday violences. So in the end, the critical use of the “crazy vet” may be as a sign that there is no separating out “normal” social life from the illegitimate excesses of the legitimate violence that sustains it, and that all efforts to sort out that violence are caught up in that tension.

Another motivation for doing this is that I hate survey courses. I love teaching theory, but I prefer to do it around a coherent set of questions motivated by a research topic, or by undertaking a semester-long close-reading of a single scholar’s work. However, the syllabus for this class is set by committee and it isn’t easy to make more than superficial changes in the content (i.e. substituting one book for another on a similar topic, or changing the order of the readings). That means that it the class tends to lurch around from week to week as we jump from one scholar to the next. My thought was that a series of debates like this (one at midterm, and another at finals) might help bring together some of the disparate readings into a more focused discussion. That’s the hope anyway. We’ll see how it turns out in practice!

UPDATE: I should add that one reason for using “formal” debating, with rules, as opposed to other forms of debate/discussion, is that, in my experience, Taiwanese students are extremely reluctant to argue strongly in public for views which differ from those from their peers. This may be true of all students, but in my experience it is much more pronounced here in Taiwan than it was among my students in the US. (Although that may just be because of my own ignorance as to the social norms regarding how such discussions should be conducted.) It is my hope that giving them both roles (a specific scholar we have studied), as well as rules will facilitate a more lively discussion than we might have otherwise.

There has been something of a debate among the American Left as to the true nature of the anti-healthcare reform movement. One position is that while there have always been crazies on the Right, the current era represents something new, in which the crazies have taken over the party, backed by unprecedented amounts of money, not to mention the corporate support provided by FOX News. Krugman, wistful for the Nixon era, when “leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy” puts it this way:

the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence.

A key part of this argument is that White racism against Obama is behind the crazy. From another Paul Krugman column:

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

The other side of the debate emphasizes the similarities rather than the differences. For instance, Rick Perlstein, in the piece Krugman refers to, asks “crazier then, or crazier now?” Answering, that “the similarities across decades are uncanny.”

Before the “black helicopters” of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a “civil rights movement” had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would “enslave” whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn’t lack for subversives — anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and ’50s.

Perlstein here must be referring to the classic 1964 article by Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in which Hofstadter argued that the crazy of McCarthy, Goldwater supporters, and the John Birch Society wasn’t anything new.

In May 1798, a minister of the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the country should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about the rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse’s sermon with a Fourth-of-July discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he held forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them.

More recently, Glenn Greenwald compares the current crazy to that of the Clinton era, and finds that not much has changed:

Clinton was relentlessly accused by leading right-wing voices of being a murderer, a serial rapist, and a drug trafficker.

At one level, this debate seems to simply be a glass half-empty, glass half-full type of argument, with more than enough evidence for either side to choose from. Both sides agree that the Right has long used similar strategies, and both sides agree that the contemporary media environment has made it harder to ignore the crazies. But at another level there is an important difference in focus. By emphasizing the uniqueness of the contemporary situation critics simultaneously over-emphasize both the craziness of the protesters and the power of the corporate media. By focusing on the similarities of the current situation to what we have seen in the past, commentators like Hofstadter, Perlstein, and Greenwald allow us to focus on crazy as a political strategy and to begin to think about the best ways to combat it. Writing on this topic, Gary Younge says “we can beat them“,

These people gain the kind of purchase that shifts them from an irritant to an obstacle only when there is a vacuum of leadership and the absence of good alternatives. It is only under these conditions that they are able to cast unreasonable doubt in the reasonable minds of those who seek clarification, encouragement or a stake in any substantive change. This is precisely what has happened with the healthcare debate over the past few months.

Obama’s Health Care speech was a good start, but much more remains to be done.

By the time I’m done adding the citation I’ve forgotten what I was researching in the first place. Or I just don’t do it because it is too much of a pain. I want to be able to save that citation right then and there – in my browser, while I’m doing whatever it was I’m doing, without missing a beat.

Up till now there were two ways I could do this. The first was to use CiteULike, a long time favorite here at SavageMinds. But then I have the problem of merging my CiteULike collection with my Sente collection. It never works quite as well as I would like. I wish there was something like what I can do with my Bank website: “download all activity since your last download.”

Another option is the wonderful Zotero plugin for Firefox. Zotero gives you full fledged citation management software built into your browser. There is even a web service where you can sync your citations and share groups etc. There are also plugins for OpenOffice to help you format your bibliography as you write. Sounds perfect, but it has never worked for me. The biggest problem is that Firefox is already a little slow and buggy, and when I’m using Zotero it is even worse. On top of that, the sync and online features never quite worked for me. But an even bigger problem is that I’d like to be able to use Safari or Chrome as my browser as well, I don’t want to be stuck in Firefox just because of Zotero.

Finally we get to the subject of this post: Mendeley. Mendeley is still in development and I can’t recommend you use it as your main bibliographic software just yet, but of all the programs I’ve looked at and tried it is the one that fits best into my actual workflow. Mendeley is both a web application and stand alone desktop software. The two stay in perfect sync. Anyone who uses Evernote (another favorite) will be familiar with this model. That means that all you need to “install” in your web browser is a single javascript bookmarklet you can click whenever you see a citation you want to save. The bookmarklet is powerful enough that on a page of Google Scholar results you can import all the items at once (similar to how Sente works). Like Zotero, Mendeley also offers an OpenOffice plugin to create bibliographies and properly formatted in-text citations. I tested it out and it works pretty well, except that you are limited in the citation formats and there is so far no way to edit them or create your own.

While Mendeley is still a work in progress, it is already a very powerful research tool, and I have a feeling that, over time, it will eclipse the competition. At least I hope it does, because it is the first software of its kind which seems to fit perfectly into my workflow. Now if we could only get the AAA to fix AnthroSource …

Dr. Harper says that in early June, the University of Tennessee’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) revoked her standing research clearance on the grounds that the police and FBI investigations and the seizure of her research materials exposed her informants to risks. She was told that she “could not use my data until I had assurance from the FBI and university that I was no longer under surveillance.” As these investigations continued, however, they found nothing to indicate that she had made threats or was somehow building a hydrogen bomb. Yet, Dr. Harper was caught in a classic double-bind. Although the FBI did not find that she had done anything wrong, she could not complete her work simply because this investigation had opened her private research records up to FBI scrutiny. This, of course, seriously imperiled her professional activity and development. Last fall, Dr. Harper learned that the faculty in her department voted to deny her tenure application.

There is a petition on her behalf.

(Thanks to the many, many, people who sent this our way. Server was acting sluggish so apologies for the delay.)

Over at BoingBoing Carrie McLaren points us to the Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement. Despite its annoying flash-based interface, the site is a useful resource.

It’s hard to believe eugenics was as popular here as it in fact was without seeing the visual evidence. The images here include Fitter Family contests, where white Americans competed at state fairs—much like cattle—to determine who had the best breeding. (Make sure to check out this traveling exhibit.) Also, lots of documents and flyers linking criminality to immigrants and heredity. (Oh, the irony of using the swastika to indicate the racial inferiority of Germans!) The interface is pretty clunky but it’s worth pecking around.

For background on the early 20th century American eugenics movement, you could do worse than [Carrie’s] interview with historian Daniel Kevles.

Activist and playwright Dakxin Bajrange was arrested on May 11th, 2003 for allegedly assaulting Prahlad Chhara. The real reason? Performing plays critical of the police. News of his arrest motivated Shashwati and I to go to India and make the documentary film, Acting Like a Thief. That trip changed our lives – and while Dakxin has gone on to become an award winning documentary filmmaker, even as he continues his work in the community, his case has not gone away. For years the case has dragged on through India’s notoriously slow legal system. Until now. I’m happy to say that today I received word that Dakxin’s case has finally been settled and he has been cleared of all charges. For a member of a community once declared “Born Criminals” this means a lot.

Our new film, with brings the viewer much deeper into the life and work of Budhan Theatre members and their families, including Dakxin, will be completed later this year. To stay up to date, please sign-up for our newsletter and stay tuned for major website updates later this summer.

Want to help Chhara kids? Help sponsor the Chharangar Library!

Photo by Ereine

Former Clinton White House adviser and prominent blogger, Brad DeLong says: “We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to revive our economy, or do we want to punish the bankers?” But critics of the Geithner plan are not saying he’s being too soft on the bankers because they want to see blood. They are saying it because the bankers are the problem and as long as they are calling the shots we won’t be able to revive the economy. Take a look at the following charts:

The charts come from an excellent article by Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, who blogs at Baseline Scenario. If you are still trying to make sense of the financial crisis I recommend starting with his Financial Crisis for Beginners page (the radio programs he links to now have their own page as well). When Johnson worked for the IMF it was his job to tell countries what they had to do to get out of a financial crisis:

But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work…

No, the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis.

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders… They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

In short, the real solution to each of these crisis was to make sure the people who were responsible for getting the country into the crisis weren’t the same people put in charge of digging them out. DeLong’s stark choice, which implies that those who want to see the bankers punished should wait until the adults do their work and get the economy running again, is a choice which ignores the role of power in derailing the economy in the first place.

Anyone who wants to know how we got into this mess should read Robert Weissman’s article “12 Deregulatory Steps to Financial Meltdown” which lays down, step-by-step, the process by which deregulation paved the way to ruin. A bit of this history can be found in this NY Times piece on the 1999 decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which (after the Great Depression) had set up a barrier between banks and financial institutions. The late Senator Paul Wellstone, commented that Congress ‘’seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes,” but good old Lawrence Summers insisted it would “better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.” Does Summers get anything right?

The problem isn’t just that these are the same people who got us into this mess – its that the plan to get us out of the mess is based on the faulty logic that the all we have here is a crisis of confidence in the financial system. In other words, the government’s plan is based on the assumption that the bankers really do know what they are doing, and that the problem is with the rest of us who’ve lost faith. As Krugman puts it:

If you think it’s just a panic, then the government can pull a magic trick: by stepping in to buy the assets banks are selling, it can make banks look solvent again, and end the run. Yippee! And sometimes that really does work.

But if you think that the banks really, really have made lousy investments, this won’t work at all; it will simply be a waste of taxpayer money. To keep the banks operating, you need to provide a real backstop — you need to guarantee their debts, and seize ownership of those banks that don’t have enough assets to cover their debts; that’s the Swedish solution, it’s what we eventually did with our own S&Ls.

What we are essentially doing is encouraging these bankers to continue to make bad investments:

In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem. Or to put it another way, Treasury has decided that what we have is nothing but a confidence problem, which it proposes to cure by creating massive moral hazard.

And now here’s the thing: Despite all this, the economy might still recover. Not as quickly as it would if the administration had taken real leadership – but is still might recover in the end. Lets say in ten years instead of five, and after millions more jobs have been lost than might have otherwise, and after, when all is said and done, the government finally does what it has to do and takes over the banks. Maybe under President Palin. Doug Henwood believes this is a serious possibility:

There’s a more sinister possibility: the bailout will be funded by an austerity program. That is, all the trillions being borrowed to spend on bailouts and stimuli will save the financial elite, but at the costs of a fiscal crippling, and instead of raising taxes on the very rich to pay down the debt, there will be deep cuts in civilian spending. With the economy remaining weak, employment would stagnate and real wages fall—a prospect that would, by restricting consumption and therefore imports, bring the U.S. international accounts close to balance. Then we wouldn’t be dependent on Chinese capital inflows anymore—and the overprivileged wouldn’t have to give up lunching on $400 stone crabs.

Back in January 2008 it became clear that my candidate of choice, John Edwards, wasn’t going to win the primary. At that time I began to think about why his populist message didn’t have more resonance. Looking back in history to the Bonus Army of unemployed veterans who helped get F.D.R. elected I realized that even Edwards would only have offered token progressivism if there wasn’t a genuine grassroots movement pushing politics to the left. More recently, in response to the current crisis, Immanuel Wallerstein said something very similar:

In my view, the only sensible attitude is that taken by the large, powerful and militant Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil. The MST supported Lula in 2002, and despite all he failed to do that he had promised, they supported his re-election in 2006. They did it in full cognizance of the limitations of his government, because the alternative was clearly worse. What they also did, however, was to maintain constant pressure on the government–meeting with it, denouncing it publicly when it deserved it and organizing on the ground against its failures.

The MST would be a good model for the US left, if we had anything comparable in terms of a strong social movement. We don’t, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to patch one together as best we can and do as the MST does–press Obama openly, publicly and hard–all the time, and of course cheering him on when he does the right thing. What we want from Obama is not social transformation. He neither wishes to, nor is able to, offer us that. We want from him measures that will minimize the pain and suffering of most people right now. That he can do, and that is where pressure on him may make a difference.

In his article Simon Johnson called for change, citing Schumpeter to the effect that while “everyone has elites; the important thing is to change them from time to time.” It is very clear that the shift from Bush to Obama has changed a lot of things for the better, but one of them has not been a change in our elites. We are very much still in the hands of the same financial elite who have been in power since the eighties, and we stand at a crossroads: we can see the economy recover on the backs of American workers, or we can kick out the financial ruling class. It’s our choice.

UPDATE: Another chart, courtesy of 538.com:

In this clip ’self-hating Jew’ Jon Stewart points out the obviously one-sided and mobius-strip like quality of mainstream American news coverage of the war in Gaza. Together with help from Kiven Strohm and other friends on Twitter and Facebook, I’ve compiled a list of resources about Gaza, with the aim of providing an alternative view. You don’t have to agree, but please take the time to look through the resources on our site.

Shashwati and I finally got to the Taipei Biennial, on the last weekend before it closed. That means we missed most of the site-specific pieces around Taipei, but we did get to the main exhibit at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which was surprisingly busy – perhaps because admission was free.

The highlight of the show was a film about a portrait of Stalin by Picasso by Lene Berg. The film is based on a handmade book she made about the subject (also on display at the exhibit). The caption for the above photo says: “If they had been here I would have looked down on both of them – even without heels.” The film can be watched online on Vimeo.

My second favorite piece was “Undercooled,” a photography project by Onejoon Che, who took some amazing portraits of military installations hidden or buried in the modern cityscape.

There were lots of video installations, many of which were interesting as ideas but poorly executed. However a few stood out from the rest. Tsui Kuang-yu’s (崔廣宇) “Invisible City: Taipari York” (隱形城市：台八里‧約克) was a humorous look at cosmopolitanism in which tricks of scale played on our expectations. Lovers kissing in front of the Eiffel tower turn out to be an owner petting a dog, a couple sipping wine in front of the New York skyline turn out to be waiters cleaning up at a Taipei restaurant in front of a wall-sized photo, etc. Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova had fun with Dialectics of Subjection #4 (available on YouTube) in which two women engage in pillow-talk about the relative attractiveness of various world leaders. More seriously, Liu Wei spent the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre asking people in Beijing “Do you know what day it is?” in his film A Day to Remember / 忘卻的一天 and in “Rocks Ahead” Yochai Avrahami created art out of the no man’s land between West Bank checkpoints in Israel. There was also a good Yes Men display, including my favorite, the SurvivaBalls.

I wrote my first serious research paper in high school; about ethnographic film. In 1988 the only way to see many classic ethnographic films was on film. You know, the kind of thing which comes in big metal canisters and has to be fed through a movie projector. It would snap and break on occasion, in which case you had to splice it back together with tape. It was scratchy and noisy, and more to the point: incredibly expensive. I simply would not have been able to do such a project if it wasn’t for the Donnell Library across from the Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan.

I remember the small viewing rooms, the helpful librarians, and the thrill of treating film like it was a book: rewinding, viewing scenes over and over, taking notes. Nothing you couldn’t do at that time with a VHS tape, but one rarely got a chance to handle a film reel in the same way. I was pleasantly surprised that the city of NY would allow me to do so. It allowed me to overcome the awe of being a spectator in order to critically examine these films in a way that, in those days, would not otherwise have been possible.

I read about the Donnell closing its doors nearly a year ago, but the above picture, taken by an archivist who worked there during the library’s last days, of those film canisters being packed up gave the story added poignancy.

(via BoingBoing)

Each year we raise $1000 to help fund the Chharanagar library. This library is much more than a library, its a community center and an informal school as well. But its first and foremost a library – and a very good one at that! It houses a large collection of (mostly donated) books in three languages: English, Hindi, and Gujarati.

We’ve already raised $700 towards this year’s goal. Please help us raise the last $300 before new year by using the widget below. Thank you!

In my last post I attempted to make sense of the origins of the current economic crisis in the subprime mortgage debacle. In this post I look at the solutions being offered and ask: Why do we need a bailout?

As explained in the last post (make sure to view the cartoon slideshow on the subprime lending crisis) the current scandal is the product of banks packaging bad loans as AAA quality securities which could be resold in a deregulated financial marketplace. As a result, the entire financial system is now based on a lot of bad paper. The technical term for this is “toxic sludge.”

The problem is that nobody, not the banks, not the government, knows how much of this toxic sludge they own. And they don’t know how much the other banks own either. So nobody can trust anyone else. As a result banks are unwilling to lend money to each other. That’s why the government needs to step in and buy up this toxic sludge.

That’s why having the Treasury Department buy up all those toxic assets is probably a good idea. Recapitalization isn’t enough if it leaves banks still owning securities with values so variable that it’s too risky to lend to them anyway. We need to get that stuff off their balance sheets in order to make their financial position more transparent and we need to increase their capital base (which the Paulson plan accomplishes by paying above-market prices for the toxic sludge in return for a guarantee of equity down the road if the sludge eventually has to be sold at a loss). That combination has a better chance of working than either one alone.

And why is the toxic sludge so hard to value? Can’t we just make banks open their books and provide detailed information on all this stuff? Sure. But you’ve still got two problems. First, in the later days of the mortgage free-for-all, mortgages were packaged up with no documentation at all. So no one, not even the banks, knows for sure just how good or bad their mortgage portfolios are. Second, even if we knew that, their value would still depend on how much farther down home prices have to go. And that’s anyone’s guess.

Where will the money come from?

Paul Krugman put it best: “it doesn’t have to come from anywhere. Ultimately, the Paulson Plan will move money in a circle.”

James Gailbraith elaborates:

Despite the common use of language, the capital cost of this bill does not involve “taxpayer dollars.” It authorizes a financial transaction, exchanging good debt (U.S. Treasury bills and bonds) for bad debt (the “troubled assets”). Many of those troubled assets will continue to earn income for some time, perhaps a long time. The U.S. Treasury commits itself to paying the interest on the debts it issues. The net fiscal cost — which is also the net fiscal stimulus — of this bill is the difference between those two revenue streams.

In a more recent post Krugman explained further:

The effect would be that if the financial firms did well, taxpayers would share in their good fortune via those stock holdings; if firms did badly, they could meet their obligations by selling some of those bonds, which would cut into the value of all their stock, including the stuff Uncle Sam owns. So as in the case of Wachovia, what’s really happening is that the taxpayers are taking on some of the risk.

How much risk?

The answer is that we really don’t know. James Gailbraith suggests that it will cost about $50 billion a month, and so $700 billion just buys us about a year’s worth of time.

But it isn’t going to be enough, not even by a long shot. Structural changes are needed and everyone’s best hope is that we can simply keep the system going until we elect someone competent who can restore trust in the system.

That person is not John McCain whose main economic policy advisor is Phil Gramm, “the arch-deregulator, who took special care in his Senate days to prevent oversight of financial derivatives — the very instruments that sank Lehman and A.I.G., and brought the credit markets to the edge of collapse.” Just take a look at McCain’s economic policies and you’ll see how beholden he is to the whole conservative orthodoxy which got us into this mess.

The original bailout plan was based on the idea that the toxic sludge is undervalued and that, in the long run, it will be worth what it was originally worth. But almost every leading economist said this was simply not the case – that invariably some of it will be undervalued and we will loose money.

the plan does nothing to address the lack of capital unless the Treasury overpays for assets. And if that’s the real plan, Congress has every right to balk.

In other words, its not exactly a full circle as the above diagram suggests – but we simply don’t know what the difference between the two revenue streams will be. Its possible the government/taxpayers will even make some money in the deal – if its written correctly. That’s why there was a call to redo the plan with some protections for the tax payers. The Dodd-Frank bailout offers some of those protections. Here is James Gailbraith on the strengths and weaknesses of the plan.

There is no question that the current bailout bill represents an enormous improvement over the original Treasury proposal. Unlike the original proposal, this bill protects the public interest with requirements for disclosure and audit, for reporting to Congress both on procedures and results, and with protections against arbitrage, conflict of interest, and fraud, with provisions requiring the secretary of the treasury to try to minimize foreclosures, to acquire warrants, and with limitations on executive compensation, especially golden parachutes.

In several respects, the language could still be improved. …

So that’s where we are now. It isn’t the plan most people think would be ideal, but it is much better than nothing and it seems most (sane) people agree it is sorely needed. I strongly recommend you look at this chart to see how your representative voted. If they voted “No” on the Dodd-Frank plan, give them a call and ask them to change their minds. I did.