‘Franz Freaking Fanon?!’*

Found this draft from last year.  Not sure why I never published it.

Yes, I can now say that I’ve finally actually read him. So far I’ve only read Toward the African Revolution, but intend to read A Dying Colonialism or Black Skin, White Masks eventually, although I’m looking forward to it much less than I was.

It’s not that Fanon is a bad writer; he’s often compelling, in no small part because his writing has the rhythm of poetry. Many of his essays include such sections. One of my favorites is “Letter to a Frenchman,” the entirety of which consists of drumbeat lines such as these:

Remember Setif! Do you want another Setif?
They will, but we won’t.
All this you told me, laughing.
But your wife wasn’t laughing.
And behind your laugh I saw.
I saw your essential ignorance of this country and its ways.
I’ll tell you what I mean.

…….

And you mingling with those:

Who have never shaken hands with an Arab.
Never drunk coffee.
Never exchanged commonplaces about the weather with an Arab.
By your side the Arabs.
Pushed aside the Arabs.
Confined the Arabs.
Native town crushed.
Town of sleeping natives.
Nothing ever happens among the Arabs.
All this leprosy on your body.

No matter your feelings on his politics, at some level his prose grabs hold.

Anthropology in Language

Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution has an interesting post about the use of ‘loan words’ – words borrowed from another language for a variety of reasons. 

My closest brush with linguistics in college was the ‘historically speaking’ interludes told by my Russian professor about reforms and reductions in the alphabet.  The Russian alphabet used to have even more letters than the 33 it currently has, and editing down that number is part of the reason why the words for peace and for world share the same word (MUP) – the vowel in one of them was done-away with (which, I can’t remember). 

I pretty much suck at learning languages, but I’ve always been fascinated by the stories they tell about the people and cultures that use them.  The adoption of certain words and phrases can signify a lack in the borrowing language, or even just trends in fashion.  I think the Russian incorporation of French words is an example of both – the need for more modern words, and also a fascination with the French court during the 1800s. 

Check out the post, and definitely read the comments.  MR’s readers are pretty smart to begin with, and there are some great insights as well as funny stories to be read. 

AFRICOM Articles

Two interesting articles about AFRICOM from Stars and Stripes (hat tip: Small Wars Journal for both).

The first talks about the difficulties of setting up an African command situation.

From the sound of it, one of the biggest problem is settling ‘caffeine-fueled’ American soldiers and DoD personnel into ‘African time’.  Other differences include demographics, history, culture, infrastructure – not simply between the US and ‘Africa’ but between African countries.  Unfortunately for the military, ‘cookie cutter’ approaches won’t work. 

The second article looks at the controversy surrounding AFRICOM’s openness to working with China.  China is expanding its influence in Africa, looking for oil and food resources.  It is accomplishing this partly through trade, and partly through no-strings-attached, no-questions-asked, no-morals-necessary aid, including weapons. 

The latter, particularly, aggravates human rights activists and others, as the recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Africa Relations Subcommittee “China in Africa: Implications for U.S. Policy” hearings demonstrate.

I include myself in the groups upset by the arms-dealing, but I also recognize that the realities of development, particularly in Africa, and of diplomacy, especially with China growing in its power, are not conducive to cutting it out of any arrangements on the continent.  Clearly, the US shouldn’t simply accept China’s role in supporting Mugabe or the government of Sudan, but that doesn’t necessitate cutting diplomatic ties or outright condemnation, as some would suggest.

When Things Fall Apart in the Heart of Darkness

It’s ironic that Things Fall Apartby Chinua Achebe, a book important for its rejection of a stereotype, has become the shorthand for that very stereotype. I’m talking about our common (mis)conceptions about Africans.

Two of the most common themes in writing about Africa are ‘things fall apart’ and some variation on ‘darkness’: the ‘Dark Continent’, the Heart of Darkness. I’ve noticed this before, but it came to mind recently when Chris Blattman complained about the quality of writing on Africa.

The Future of Development Economics

It almost makes me want to study economics! (almost):

The emerging “consensus” revolves not around a specific list of policies, but around how one does development policy. In fact, practitioners of this “new” development economics—whether of the “macro” type or “micro” type—tend to be suspicious of claims to ex ante knowledge about what works and what does not work.

*******

What is required instead is recognition of the contextual nature of policy solutions. Relative ignorance calls for an approach that is explicitly experimental, and which is carried out using the tools of diagnostics and evaluation. Old dichotomies between states and markets play little role in this worldview and pragmatism reigns. The proof of the pudding is in the eating: if something works, it is worth doing.

Rodrik’s conclusion:

So my bottom line is that the practice of development economics is at the cusp of a significant opportunity. We have the prospect not only of a re-unification of the field, long divided between macro- and micro-development economists, but also of a progression from presumptive approaches with ready-made universal recipes to diagnostic, contextual approaches based on experimentation and policy innovation. If carried to fruition, this transformation would represent an important advance in how development policy is carried out.

He does say, however, that we need more work. He means that

Macro-development economists will have to recognize more explicitly the distinct advantages of the experimental approach and a greater number among them will have to adopt the policy mindset of the randomized evaluation enthusiasts

and that

Micro-development economists, for their part, will have to recognize that one can learn from diverse types of evidence, and that while randomized evaluations are a tremendously useful addition to the empirical toolkit, the utility of the evidence they yield is restricted by the narrow and limited scope of their application.

I would agree. My primary quibble is with the contextual side of things. Yes, experiment with methodologies and diagnostic tools. But why not also bring the anthropologists in? Even economics is influenced by culture. People everywhere make rational economic decisions, yes, but culture, norms, and values are often what determine parameters for rational action. What is rational to me as a 24 year-old white American female is not the same as a 56 year-old Venda man (surprise!). The study of economic systems and choices is a growing field of study within anthropology. I think development economists would be pleased with what it has to offer.

For an excellent study of capitalism, see Jean and John Comaroff’s Millennial Capital and the Culture of Neoliberalism, which they edited and contributed to. They are two of my favorite anthropologists, and I would highly recommend anything they’ve written.

Anthropology in Affirmative Action

Really, I’m at a loss to explain this headline: “Low-caste tribe riots in Delhi for right to be ‘untouchable’“.

India’s centuries-old controversy over caste and discrimination brought parts of Delhi to a halt yesterday as thousands of members of an ethnic group demanded that their official status be lowered in order to provide them with better access to jobs and education.

I thought that being an untouchable was so horrid that someone would do anything to escape that designation (not that it was really possible).  But the status of ‘untouchable’ seems to imply a lack of humanity, and indeed, my understanding is that that’s how the higher classes treated the untouchables; as if they were lower than animals.  From what I know about human psychology (not much), people need to have a base level of dignity in order to have any chance of success.  This is sometimes cited by sociologists as the ‘culture of poverty’ – a theory to explain the perpetuation of poverty between generations.  I think some iterations of it can be a little patronizing, but that there is a core of truth, and I’d like to (but can’t, definitely) say that I’ve seen work on the psychology of refugees that makes a similar argument.

So, with all of that in mind, does this protest

1. Disprove the importance of dignity (and, you know, being recognized as a fellow human)
2. Demostrate that actual economic earnings is more important than social status? 

If no. 2 is true, is that because that’s how things always are (again, dignity isn’t that important) or are economic earnings more important BECAUSE social status is now less important; in part due to the Indian government’s promotion of all of the castes?  In other words, if the Indian government hadn’t promoted the untouchables, so that being a member of that caste means less in terms of earnings (and I’m sure, socially as well), would a group be so inclined as to become a member of that caste again? 

Or did I just fall down a big rabbit hole?

Anthropology in the Military

One of the central tenets of my thesis was that anthropology and ethnography are vital to the formulation of effective policy, particularly with regards to development, but to a lesser extent in all areas of foreign affairs. While I was in college, despite pursuing an IR degree, and taking both International Security and Religion and Warfare, I paid very little attention to defense, the military, terrorism, and all other security issues. So it was not until I read a New Yorker profile of David Kilcullen that I realized I was missing out on some interesting applications of anthropology.

Kilcullen is a pretty fascinating guy. His thesis “applied ethnographic fieldwork methods and involved extended residential fieldwork that focused on the political power-diffusion effects of successful and failed counter-insurgency operations on traditional societies in Indonesia and East Timor.” Basically, anthropology in the military. His reasoning is essentially the same as mine (or mine is the same as his; although independently derived, he is older): both development and counterinsurgency require detailed understanding of local geography, history, customs and norms. In Kilcullen’s words (he refers to 9/11) “It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate.”

I’ve tried to keep tabs on Kilcullen’s work (he writes occasionally for Small Wars Journal) since he’s the only one I knew writing about anthropology in the military. Interestingly enough, I mentioned all of this to a friend over dinner the other day. The next day, my friend was doing research on an unrelated topic, and stumbled across the work of a woman named Montgomery McFate. McFate seems to be in the same line of business as Kilcullen. Her bio states:

A cultural anthropologist by training, Montgomery McFate’s work emphasizes the importance of sociocultural knowledge in the formation of national security priorities.

My friend also forwarded me two links. The first is “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship”. The other, The Cultural Knowledge Gap and Its Consequences for National Security, was an event at USIP where McFate was a fellow.

Both are fairly interesting, even if the second is only a brief summary. The thesis of the first is this sentence:

The curious and conspicuous lack of anthropology in the national-security arena since the Vietnam War has had grave consequences for countering the insurgency in Iraq, particularly because political policy and military operations based on partial and incomplete cultural knowledge are often worse than none at all.

So if the military can get this concept, then why can’t the rest of the international relations field?