Front and Back Covers,Volume 27, Number 3. June 2011

Front and back cover caption, volume 27 issue 3 Front cover ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND ADVOCACY Insecurity is a major concern for mobile pastoralists in many regions of the world. In this issue, Mark Moritz and Paul Scholte discuss their involvement with mobile pastoralists in the Far North Region of Cameroon, where insecurity has long been a major concern, with children commonly being kidnapped and held for ransom by heavily armed criminal gangs. Should anthropologists engage in advocacy in cases where the peoples they research suffer in this way? It may not immediately seem problematic to advocate for more security and safety for mobile pastoralists in this case. However, advocacy is not without its problems; acting on behalf of one's research subjects can have adverse consequences for others. Although many anthropologists feel a moral responsibility towards the people they work with, their engagement in advocacy is fundamentally different from that of human‐rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which are committed to protecting human rights irrespective of cultural identities. By contrast, anthropologists are committed first and foremost to particular peoples, which brings ethical predicaments of its own. The authors urge the need to draw public attention to the plight of mobile pastoralists, while simultaneously pressuring governments and their international partners to protect the human rights of all. Back cover 9/11 HUMAN REMAINS Construction workers remove a manhole cover along a service road at Ground Zero in a renewed search for human remains in 2006. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the human remains of 41% of the victims have yet to be identified. Many remains were lost when the wreckage of the World Trade Center was brought to the Fresh Kills Landfill, a vast waste dump operated by the City of New York on Staten Island. In the rushed clean‐up effort, some of the cremated remains were eventually recombined with waste and some portions were even used as fill for road construction. Through the years, human remains have continued to be recovered from around Manhattan and at Fresh Kills. Today, more than 9,000 fragments of unidentified remains are in temporary premises controlled by the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). These unidentified remains are slated to be soon transferred to an OCME facility within the National September 11 Memorial and Museum complex. Four grassroots 9/11 family advocacy groups oppose this latest move, arguing over issues of access to the remains, and what they see as a lack of open and ongoing consultation with them. In this issue, Chip Colwell‐Chanthaphonh looks at the gap between the shared heritage of 9/11 as a collective memory and the individual claims of American citizens to care for their deceased kin, to which Alice M. Greenwald, Director of the National September 11 Memorial Museum complex 9/11, replies.     

Anthropology in the news? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

It is part of our informal culture of anthropology to complain about the way the media portray us, and yet there has been little systematic analysis of media representations of anthropology. I look at stories about anthropologists, stories that quote anthropologists and opinion pieces by anthropologists over a six‐month period in The New York Times. I conclude that biological anthropology and archaeology are over‐represented in these stories, and that the media portrays anthropologists primarily as authorities on exotic others abroad, or ritual behaviour at home. Anthropologists who write about neoliberalism and militarism have had difficulty getting into the high‐end mainstream media, where it is economists rather than anthropologists who are seen as experts on general human nature.     

Nudging Bentham: indirect legislation and (neo-)liberal politics

SUMMARY

The debates over Sunstein and Thaler’s Nudge oppose libertarianism and paternalism, or defend the authors’ proposed manipulation of individuals’ ‘choice architectures’ as a consistent system of libertarian paternalism. My essay looks beyond the terms of this debate and revisits Bentham’s ‘Indirect Legislation’ in order to excavate the issues raised by the deployment of technologies of behavioural economics in schemes of government. On the one hand, nudging is nothing other than a mild and carefully considered mode of indirect legislation, and the authors are right to join Bentham in pointing out that the landscape they seek to improve is always with us; we are always already governed and governing others, and we might as well govern and be governed better than we do/are. On the other hand, nudge-like innovations reveal the extent to which Bentham’s insights have been captured by a disciplinary orientation that removes its subjects from political space. Put differently, the issue with this kind of government is not that it interferes with our liberty so much as that it presumes our lack of political orientation and efficacy. Bentham’s liberal subjects inhabit a public and even republican space that Sunstein and Thaler’s neo-liberal subjects have long since abandoned.     

Rural China in ruins: The rush to urbanize China's countryside is opening a moral battleground (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

China has officially become a predominantly urban country, with over 50% of the population now registered as urban residents. Its urbanization process has been described as the most managed in human history. The Chinese government manages the building of new cities, regulates the housing of displaced people and controls squatters. As an historically poorer area, the west of China has been the target of ongoing efforts at infrastructural development. Describing urbanization as managed however masks the conflicts and contradictions involved in a process which is far from smooth. Although villagers are usually seen to be largely the powerless victims of these initiatives, it is clear that many try to take advantage of the situation, while others are unable to do so. Based on recent fieldwork and eight years of visits to one village undergoing urbanization, this article looks at the complex dynamics involved and at the moral battleground which they lay bare.     

Property,rights ans community in a South African land‐claim case (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In the context of South Africa's land reform programme, the concepts of ‘property’ and ‘rights’ carry a heavy ideological baggage. This is evident in the country's land reform policies, which have sought to reach a compromise between differing and often contradictory histories involving both rights and property. A shift in government policy, from treating land reform as a question of rights to a question of the transfer of land, has been accompanied by a reification of the idea of community. The result is a policy that is seriously out of touch with the complex legacy of dispossession that the land reform programme was meant to address. As shown by the case presented in this article, these problems become exacerbated when the land in question is part of a conservation area.     

The Kilosa Killings: Political Ecology of a Farmer–Herder Conflict in Tanzania

Farmer–herder conflicts in Africa are often presented as being driven by ‘environmental scarcity’. Political ecologists, however, argue that these conflicts should be analysed within a broader historical and policy context. This article presents a case study of a local conflict in the Kilosa District in Tanzania that tragically culminated in the killing of thirty‐eight farmers on 8 December 2000. To understand the conflict, the authors argue that it is necessary to study the history of villagization and land use in the District, as well as national land tenure and pastoral policies. Attempts at agricultural modernization have fostered an anti‐pastoral environment in Tanzania. The government aim is to confine livestock keeping to ‘pastoral villages’, but these villages lack sufficient pastures and water supplies, leading herders to search for such resources elsewhere. Pastoral access to wetlands is decreasing due to expansion of cultivated areas and the promotion of agriculture. The main tool that pastoralists still possess to counteract this trend is their ability to bribe officials. But corruption further undermines people's trust in authorities and in the willingness of these authorities to prevent conflicts. This leads actors to try to solve problems through other means, notably violence.     

The Electoral Politics of Economic Reform in Australia: The 1998 Election

Like many other advanced industrial democracies, Australia has experienced major and ongoing economic reform over the last two decades, the pace of which has, if anything, increased since the election of the Liberal‐National government in 1996. These developments have led to a growing sense of economic insecurity among many voters. Many of these concerns were focused on the 1998 election, when the Liberal‐National Coalition advocated the introduction of a goods and services tax. This paper uses the 1998 Australian Election Study (AES) survey to examine the impact of economic evaluations, economic insecurity and economic issues on voting in the election. The results demonstrate the existence of widespread economic concerns across the electorate, but that the Coalition gained a marginal electoral advantage on the tax reform issue. Economic issues were also a cause of defection to the new One Nation Party, although further analysis reveals that its support was motivated more by race and ethnic concerns than by economic discontent.     

‘Death to Sarts’: History,injustice and a complex insult in Central Asia (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Recently published independent inquiries and detailed chronologies of the violence that occurred in the southern Kyrgyzstan city of Osh in 2010 noted the frequent and threatening use of ‘Sart’ against Uzbek residents in the city's mahallas. This article explains the significance and potency of this insult as the confluence of perceived historical injustices, iniquities in post‐independence land privatizations, and current hardships of food insecurity and poverty. It considers the significance of narratives of ‘Soviet injustice’ (outlawing of pastoralism, collectivization, and land confiscation) for contemporary nationalist agendas which emphasize Kyrgyz harm. With increasing political fragmentation and social disunity, the fear of further inter‐communal violence is ever present, and it is suggested that twenty years on from independence the Kyrgyzstan government will need to find ways of openly debating such interpretations of the past without undermining national reconciliation.     

Avoiding Disaster: Diversification and Risk Management among East African Herders

This article addresses processes of livelihood diversification among pastoralists in the rangelands of northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. The objectives of the article are threefold: (1) to suggest a theoretical framework for addressing income diversification among pastoralists with reference to current literature and databases; (2) to present a case study on pastoral income diversification based on preliminary field research in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia; and (3) to summarize current understandings of pastoral diversification while pointing to additional empirical research needs. By showing how comparative analyses in the region have been constrained by theoretical and data deficiencies, the article explores ways in which income diversification differs by what are termed conditional, opportunity, and local response variables. Climate, distance to market towns, gender, wealth, and education are attributes covered by these variables and discussed in the article. The conceptualization and case study provide useful bases for conducting comparative research on pastoral diversification in East Africa specifically, and in sub‐Saharan Africa generally.     

BEYOND THE FOOD DESERT: FINDING WAYS TO SPEAK ABOUT URBAN FOOD SECURITY IN SOUTH AFRICA

Urban food security is a significant development challenge in sub‐Saharan Africa. However, the field is currently under ‐researched and under‐theorized. Urban food insecurity, where it is considered, has been viewed through a development studies lens that views food insecurity as a household‐scale problem. There has been significant focus on food deserts in developed countries as one way of engaging with such insecurity. The food deserts research views food insecurity through a social exclusion and food justice lens. This article introduces the food desert concept to provide a conceptual tool to begin to understand the spatial determinants of urban food insecurity, which are not well captured by the existing framings of food security in the region. Using data from a 2008 household food security survey conducted in Cape Town, the paper highlights gaps in the food deserts approach, most significantly its neglect of non‐market sources of food and of household decision‐making processes. The paper therefore concludes by suggesting a new approach which takes the household's assets, abilities and decision‐making as the starting point and overlays this with the market and non‐market foodscapes accessed by these households.     

Politics Within and Without — The Origins and Development of a Rangelands Landcare Group

The 1990s saw a resurgence of interest in land‐use reform in the arid and semi‐arid rangelands of Australia. Scientists and conservationists called for a reassessment of land use in areas now used for extensive grazing of cattle and sheep. Landcare groups formed by pastoralists were criticised for deflecting resources away from questions of land‐use reform. While Landcare groups in agricultural regions of Australia have been subject to considerable assessment, analysis of rangelands Landcare has tended to revolve around questions of land use to the neglect of analysis of the operation of the groups themselves. Based on a case study of a pastoral Landcare group in the rangelands, the research reported in this paper found that pastoral Landcare in the rangelands has comparable outcomes to Landcare elsewhere in terms of the creation of opportunities for improved communication and learning among landholders. In addition, this group has developed from an emphasis on single‐issue projects towards multi‐faceted projects focussed on social as well as ecological sustainability. The analysis also found that political considerations were significant in the forma‐tion of the group and remained important for some pastoralists at the time of fieldwork. Finally, rangelands Landcare in this case study has provided a vehicle for reformist pastoralists and their associates to work actively towards influencing their peers to acknowledge land management problems and to reflect on their management practices.     

Who we are at work: millennial women,everyday inequalities and insecure work

Based on research with millennial women in Canada, this article examines the process of workplace identity, or (un)conscious strategies of identity management that young women employ at work. First, despite increasing labour market participation from women, young women’s experience of the workplace can be one of precarity and insecurity. Many millennial women have responded with a ‘positive front’ – saying yes to all work tasks while highlighting their likability and acceptance of the status quo. This is not seen as a permanent strategy, but rather one that gets you into the workplace and ‘liked’ until your work speaks for itself. Second, and operating at the same time, young women also use tactics to confront intersections of ageism/sexism in the workplace. While some employ conscious strategies to be ‘taken seriously’ through dress, small talk, even taking on stereotypical traits of masculinity to be recognized as competent, others explicitly confront inequality through ‘girlie feminism’ with a pro-femininity work identity that challenges the masculine-coded norms of how a successful workplace operates and what it looks like. In jobs of all types, who we are at work is a constantly shifting negotiation between how we are treated and seen by others, the workplace as a social space, our past experiences and our own expectations. Considering young women’s work identities reveals how power and privilege operate in the workplace, and the possibilities of young women’s agential challenges to inequitable workplace norms and a precarious labour market.     

The many faces of food security

Food insecurity occurs when people do not have secure access to food necessary for a healthy life. The food‐insecure are typically the poor, and the traditional focus of food insecurity thinking has been the global poor. Increasingly, it is being recognized that in the rich world, food insecurity manifests itself in calorie‐rich but nutrient‐poor diets, leading to the linkage between poverty, obesity and its associated health problems. Furthermore, the historical link between income and diets, when projected forwards, shows a growth in demand that would be extremely challenging to meet with sustainable production. This is especially true given that emissions from the food system are significant contributors to climate change, perhaps more so than any other sector; and yet, probably less than half the world's calories are used directly for healthy diets (over half of agricultural production is lost or wasted, fed to animals or consumed in excess of healthy requirements). This review article, of a suite of four books, covers the way the food security argument is framed and how this is changing, food politics and justice and why our food system is as it is. The overall conclusion is that our food system is placing unsustainable demands on the planet, as well as creating injustice and inequity. The ‘productivist paradigm’ of growing ‘ever more, ever more cheaply’ while relying on international commodity trade and markets to solve the distributional issues, is unlikely to create a sustainable, just and food‐secure world.     

Decolonising methodologies: Emergent learning in island research

This article documents an attempt to decolonise our approach to methodology to explicitly show respect for islands and their islanders. Our twin starting points are an awareness of a turn to the Anthropocene in studies related to islands and an appreciation of the imperative to think outside colonial frames. The Anthropocene has been conceived as both an enduring colonising force and a significant moment in decolonisation, and islands have been viewed as emblematic of the Anthropocene, so the relationship between them is complex. These dynamic conceptions raise dilemmas for those wanting to apply methodologies to island research and negotiate ethical relations across multiple geographies and knowledge systems. For those whose cultures have been subjected to colonial oppressions, there are emotional and material costs and varied risks in participating in attempts to decolonise island research. Settler researchers seeking to ally themselves with others to advance such agendas and aspirations may slow or damage decolonising practices if they act without appropriate permissions, respectful commitments to support and understand decolonisation, and preparedness to engage in deep learning about what decolonisation of knowledge means. With these challenges in mind, we detail an approach to decolonising one of our own island research projects in ways that are enriched by a Tuvaluan concept, Fale Pili, which means treating a neighbour’s problems as your own.     

Not Learning from the Past: Adaptive Governance Challenges for Australian Natural Resource Management

Australia's governance arrangements for natural resource management (NRM) have evolved considerably over the last 30 years. The impact of changes in governance on NRM planning and delivery requires assessment. We undertake a multi‐method programme evaluation using adaptive governance principles as an analytical frame and apply this to Queensland to assess the impacts of governance change on NRM planning and governance outcomes. Data to inform our analysis includes: (1) a systematic review of 16 audits/evaluations of Australian NRM over a 15‐year period; (2) a review of Queensland's first‐generation NRM plans; and (3) outputs from a Queensland workshop on NRM planning. NRM has progressed from a bottom‐up grassroots movement into a collaborative regional NRM model that has been centralised by the Australian government. We found that while some adaptive governance challenges have been addressed, others remained unresolved. Results show that collaboration and elements of multi‐level governance under the regional model were positive moves, but also that NRM arrangements contained structural deficiencies across multiple governance levels in relation to public involvement in decision‐making and knowledge production for problem responsiveness. These problems for adaptive governance have been exacerbated since 2008. We conclude that the adaptive governance framework for NRM needs urgent attention so that important environmental management problems can be addressed.     

What Lula lacks: Grappling with the discourse of autism at home and in the field (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This paper examines the discourse of autism as we have experienced it as parents of an autistic six year‐old girl. Because both authors are anthropologists, we were professionally trained to understand something of what discourses are and do. However, our training did not necessarily help us blunt the original force of the diagnosis. Over time we have come to understand both our daughter and the discourse that is said to define her differently, and these understandings have fed back into our understanding of our discipline. One key transformative event occurred when we took our family to live in a village where we had done previous research. This reminded us of the conceptual power of discourses: we put the discourse of autism to work for our own purposes, but at the same time it works on us, shapes us in ways we do not always realize.     

Struggling for food in a time of crisis: Responsibility and paradox

Struggling for food in a time of crisis: responsibility and paradox. Responsibility is a useful lens through which to examine the current state of food poverty in the UK in the context of the Covid-19 crisis, noting that this concept contains several paradoxes. Currently, responsibility involves the voluntary sector, the food industry and the state, a situation which the author has been exploring for the last five years in an ethnographic study of food poverty and food aid in the UK. Food aid organizations, especially food banks, have mushroomed during the period of austerity. This reveals the first paradox: namely, that the existence of food banks conveys the message that ‘something is being done’, but in actuality this is very far from being sufficient to meet the needs of either the ‘old’ or ‘new’ food insecure. The second paradox is that at the onset of the crisis, a government which had been responsible for inflicting austerity on the country for 10 years, dramatically reversed some of its policies. However, predictably, this did not change the situation vis-à-vis food insecurity. The third paradox is that the frequent rhetoric invoking the two world wars has not resulted in lessons being learned – notably, the creation of a ministry to deal with food and rationing, as in the Second World War. The final paradox relates to Brexit and its likely deleterious effects on food security, particularly if no ‘deal’ is achieved with the European Union, as seems likely. The voluntary food aid sector, try as it may, cannot possibly assume responsibility for the long-standing and now hugely increased problems of food insecurity. That belongs to the state.     

Finding a middle ground: Conservation challenges among stakeholders in coastal Tanzania (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Recently, evictions associated with climate change mitigation in the Rufiji Delta of Tanzania sparked intense debate about the ethics of coastal conservation between academics, NGOs (non‐governmental organizations) and government officials working in the region. Some actors argue that environmental change is a myth used to wrest control of natural resources from local communities, while others point to the urgency of environmental protection and action on climate change. Insights gleaned from interviews with multiple government officials, NGO employees, academics, and coastal village residents in Pangani, however, reveal a more complex and perhaps less contentious situation in coastal Tanzania. Although they often proffered different solutions, different stakeholder groups articulated the same key challenges in nuanced ways that shed a more hopeful light on currently heated conservation and development issues.     

Explaining the Intensity of the Arab Spring

Politicians and pundits are quick to say that the Arab Spring has been caused by everything from an ominous “youth bulge” in the region's population to the spread of social media like Facebook and Twitter. Other observers blame the recent unrest on high levels of unemployment or on the government corruption endemic to the region. While there is a certain logic or intuitive sense to any or all these explanations, they have yet to be rigorously tested. Moreover, we do not know if these same factors explain intraregional variation in levels of unrest, or if, instead, factors specific to each particular country have caused some regimes to succumb to the violence while others have emerged unscathed. This article tests the conventional wisdom of the Arab Spring. We find some support for the notion that perceptions of government corruption and sudden price increases correlate with higher levels of unrest, although our confidence in these findings is limited by the small number of countries in our sample. Meanwhile, we find almost no evidence that population pressure or other forms of economic hardship are significant causes of intraregional variation in the intensity of unrest. Most strikingly, despite being touted as the “Twitter Revolution,” we find no evidence that unrest correlates with Internet access, cell phone use, or the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. These findings, such as they are, invite political observers and social scientists to search for other, case‐specific causes of civil unrest and regime instability.