Keith Hart’s Astonishing Blog

Keith Hart “is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London and Honorary Research Professor in the School of Development Studies, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban.” He’s the author of many important contributions to anthropology, including his famous book The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World. He also co-founded Prickly Pear Press, which has now morphed into Prickly Paradigm Press, the works of which are truly important, and some of which available for free download.

You rarely get a chance to see the big famous names in acadmic disciplines in fora like blogs. But that’s not the reason why Keith Hart’s blog and website The Memory Bank, is so wonderful. Nope. Hart has been blogging for years now, but I have only sporadically checked in with his site, largely because I’m truly lazy, and until a recent update, I couldn’t locate an RSS feed for his site. I was redirected there by a post at Lorenz’ wonderful anthropologi site, where he reprinted excerpts from an article by Hart and Horacio Ortiz on “How anthropologists should respond to the economic crisis.”

The stuff at The Memory Bank has been universally fantastic and inspiring, but here are some examples from recent posts which demonstrate some of the style and content which can be found there. If you don’t need anyore convincing, go there now. Otherwise, more after the jump…

What has been accomplished?

I voted for the first time in eight years yesterday. I have no confidence that just because Obama won, the world will become a better place. I have every confidence that if McCain had managed to somehow swipe the election the world would have become a much much more dangerous place.

I am pleased beyond reason that the US managed to elect a black man as president. Hopefully we’ll stop imprisoning so many of them, but if I recall correctly, that issue never came up in the election campaign. More than half of my siblings are of African (and two with Asian) descent, and I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit that a large part of my decision to vote this year came out of the following self-assessment: I do not want to look my siblings (who are not anti-capitalists, anti-statists, or anarchists), my children, or my eventual (maybe) grandchildren in the eyes, and tell them that when given the opportunity to help vote a black man into the presidency, I abstained.

Friends and colleagues on the internets have written some important things on this win which I would like to recommend to my readers. These posts make the point to which I allude in the title of this post clear. As Obama himself said last night, “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change.” Perhaps. If an Obama presidency has the opportunity to make positive change, it will happen only insofar as he is held responsible for making the bold changes we all need.

We don’t need a new American century – the last one was terrible. We don’t need new American leadership. We do need some basic decency. We do need all sorts of things that would be called ’socialism’ by McCain’s campaign: national health care, job-creation, the production and expansion of our manufacturing base, the re-regulation of the financial industries, and much, much more.

Some thoughts from these good folks after the jump…

Favored Links for Friday

I won’t be online much, I hope, this next week. Here are a few links to tide you over:

Architecture for Humanity, and Lulan Artisans have a great-looking new project operating throughout mainland Southeast Asia that promises scalable support for traditional artisanal industries, in an effort to provide attractive and sustaining jobs for those who might otherwise be trafficked. They are applying for a grant from American Express, and could use your vote. You don’t need to be a member. Click here for information on the project. Click here to nominate the project for the grant. [via BB]

Here’s a fun quote on language in Old Cambodge, courtesy of New Mandala.

Lorenz of anthropologi.info has a good synopsis of the news that has begun changing the way archaeologists approach rainforest urbanism. The specific story is out of the Amazon, but the findings apply nicely to rainforest cities throughout the world.

Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog points to a map that shows how global ‘agriculture value added’ looks throughout the globe.

Sex Workers Unite

AP Press Photo

I don’t normally deal with sex work here, instead preferring to stick to areas somewhat closer to home. But, since I dumped on someone else’s laudable intentions to help sex workers in Cambodia recently, perhaps I’m due. Much more importantly, Cambodia Sex Workers took collective action the other day, in a courageous way that I hope foreshadows the future.

One of my constant frustrations in talking to Americans about Cambodia is the ubiquity of two particular stereotypes: First, that Cambodia is a land of trauma and skulls, and Second, that Cambodia is a land of ubiquitous sex for sale, especially sex with children.

Of course, there’s a fair amount of truth in both statements: Cambodia has, and continues, to experience a massive amount of trauma (of course, the secondary issue there is that the continuing and contemporary traumas receive almost no attention compared to historical traumas). Cambodia also has a booming and predatory sex work industry.

So, whenever I see stories like that from Kate Hardy on Sex Workers uniting in Cambodia to protest the recent police crackdowns, I’m thrilled. The United States has recently upgraded the Human Trafficking status of Cambodia for the first time since 2006, due to a massive and unrestrained police crackdown.

Body Worlds – Possession, Fetish, Education, and Controversy

This ranks, I believe, as the first mention here of grave-robbing and dead-body possession fetishism (my own phrase, please offer alternatives!). I began work on this theme (work that directly led to my current work in Cambodia) more than ten years ago. My partner had been working as a NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) officer, and I had begun to work through some of the issues of academic and ethical interest in a few papers, including one that was presented at several conferences. My specific argument then was that Native American bodies are the object of so much institutional and white-settler desire precisely as a fetish of legitimate possession of the land. That is to say, the grave-robbing and continued possession and display of Native American grave goods, including bodies, is itself an attempt to overcome an ethical objection to the oppression of Native America.

Native Americans were fetishized by early European settlers first as peaceful Rousseauean noble savages, then progressively as various forms of subhuman: savage (just not noble), ignorant, culturally and mentally and spiritually impoverished, uncivilized, &c. These transformations in the imagination of the Native American in the mentality of the white settler had everything to do with the expropriation of Native land.

To this day, people buy and sell the bodies of indigenous people around the globe. Do a search on eBay for “jivaro shrunken heads,” and among all the fakes, you will certainly find a few genuine ones. After NAGPRA, it was illegal for any museum that receives public funding to continue to hold on to these bodies, or associated grave goods, if their descendent communities wanted them back. [text of NAGPRA]It remains to be seen whether NAGPRA, which is no longer directly funded, to my knowledge, will have any lasting effect on the practices of museums – they have clearly not had as large an effect on private collectors.

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My experience with this line of reasoning in Cambodia will have to wait until another time – suffice it to say, my reasoning had to be revised for the new context. But what I want to point to here is the truly negligible attention paid to the Body Worlds business empire that has been making so much money worldwide.

Body Worlds is the roving Museum Exhibit – one of those multi-million-dollar superstar exhibits that Museums have been so dependent on in the past few years (as governments pull public funding, museums begin to do whatever it takes to keep the doors open) – that displays real human bodies, most of which have been flayed, and all organic parts of which have undergone a form of preservation called ‘plastination‘ by the originator of the technique, a German man named Gunther von Hagens

That’s not to say that no attention has been paid. Some has, and much of it has been quite decent. Such as this article over at Salon. But certainly not enough.

Some of the issues indicating that a more in-depth exploration might lead to a really horrendous story (possibly even a ‘funny’ one) are:

• He keeps calling himself “professor” though it is unclear he has a legal right to that title (in Germany, that’s a serious legal offense – really!). [1]
• He has a serious aversion to having the proper paperwork
• His former partner, who performs the same techniques and has a competing exhibit, called “Bodies – The Exhibit”, openly acknowledges that most of his corpses are purchased from the Chinese state – the bodies of prisoners, mental patients, etc. von Hagen refuses to open up his paperwork; although he claims to have enough papers for each body, the bodies are separated from the paperwork and rendered anonymous, so there is no way of confirming this.
• He apparently tried to buy a very tall man’s body from him before he died.[2]
• He’s ‘half scientist, half sideshow,’ in the words of some reporters, such as this one from NPR. He calls himself a “public scientist.” Which is what justifies a public autopsy, for example.
• This play with his identity and credential causes him to make, by his own admission, a number of outrageous ‘mistakes.’ Like when he announced that he thought it would be feasible to sell plastinated corpses as commodities, to private individuals. He had to take that one back.
• Perhaps most worriesome is the persistent idea that his bodies come from Chinese prisoners and patients. The German publication Der Spiegel has been most aggressive on the Body Worlds exhibit in general, though their considered outrage hasn’t translated elsewhere very well. And in 2004, they published evidence that some of the bodies in the exhibit were, in fact, executed Chinese prisoners. I cannot find the Spiegel piece, but this piece restates the main facts. As does this piece from NPR.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Few voices have been as consistent and eloquent in speaking out about the importance – indeed the centrality – of domains and spheres of labor that are presented to us as peripheral, as Mariarosa Dalla Costa. In her first essay (one of three in the latest issue of the wonderful journal The Commoner), she begins

I began to pose to myself the issue of the land as a crucial question at the end of the eighties, on the heels of a trajectory which, during the end of the sixties and seventies, had as its crux the factory as the space of waged labour and then the home as the space of unwaged labour within which the former finds its roots. The labour, therefore, involved in the production of commodities and that of the reproduction of labour power, the labour of the factory worker and the labour of the housewife within the Fordist organization of society. At that time we said that the employer with one paycheck in reality bought two people, the worker and the woman behind him. Agricultural labor, or the labour of the land, which reproduced life for everybody, remained in the shadows however.

I love reading Dalla Costa because of her ability to so concisely illuminate the interconnectedness and mutual penetration of different domains of oppression. Read the above again and note how she indicates that the exploitation of waged labour depends on the ability to further exploit unwaged labour. Capitalism depends, in that instance, on the further oppression of women by men, and farms that oppression out to male workers, some of whom accept the charge.

Similarly, in the industrial age, the focus on factory production has allowed the rulers to present agricultural production as a peripheral activity, rather than that which makes everything else possible. The regimes of monoculture which decimate local food security and render entire regions vulnerable to price shocks – followed by demands from the World Bank and others to engage in Structural Adjustment Programs and then to actually take over a country’s economic policy – oppress the farmers. The oppression of farmers, in turn, depends on the oppression of the land, and what I think of as theft from the future.

Economic News

Two pieces of economic news from Cambodia do little to assuage my nerves. A recent article in the Industrial Worker discusses the state of union activity and the challenges to the textile industry in Cambodia, after the demise of the Multi-Fiber (Trade) Arrangement (MFA or MFTA, depending on your acronymic preference). It’s a timely article for the paper, which has rarely covered Cambodian news, since we are now finally starting to see a serious and possibly devastating drop-off in textile exports from the textile industry. Early predictions of doom were staved off, strangely enough, by the Tsunami, which spared Cambodia and resulted in a region-wide US quota that preserved some of the existing arrangements even after the demise of the MFA.

It is common to claim that agriculture and textiles are the two most important sectors of Cambodian industry. However, this fact obscures that the Cambodian government is not truly dependent on these productive industries for its tax base. Although, as the IW article points out, “The only tax revenue for countries like Cambodia is income tax on the worker’s meagre wages,” the government relies much more heavily on non-productive sources of revenue, like foreign aid and loans. This is a vital piece of the analysis, since it is through these forms of income that the government is increasingly insulated from union and worker demands for organizing protection, and indicates the level of complicity between the givers and the takers of aid. As for the loans, we should remember what Cambodians know very clearly: debt equals a loss of sovereignty, such that the national government is not capable of calling the important shots. The price of regaining that sovereignty is likely to be too high for the future generations to ever pay off.

Not that any of this really matters to the people – within and without Cambodia – making the real economic decisions. For details on how they’re spending the largesse of their cronies in the international aid economies (one is tempted to write “the patron-client networks of the Foreign Aid-Industrial Complex, but see also John Perkins for a less fanciful take on the issue), check out Details are Sketchy.

Global Witness criticizes SGS

SGS, which took over the job of monitoring adherence to forestry laws in Cambodia after the government kicked contentious Global Witness out of the country, has by all accounts done a lousy job. Most importantly, they don’t initiate their own investigations, but merely collect complaints and process data.

Weirdly, they’ve also started attacking the credibility of Global Witness’ complaints against the Cambodian Government’s complicity in the ongoing pillage of Cambodian forestland. When Global Witness’ last report came out, pointing out the deep connections between family business interests and deforestation in Cambodia, the report was banned in the entire country.

But instead of attacking the government’s illegal ban, SGS has decided to attack GWs report.

GW has responded.

Great (Music) Video on your freaking life

[via Savageminds] The joke is supposed to be that our enormous earth-destroying system has resulted in a situation where we get to sit in front of computers all day, eat crap fast food that overprocesses ‘local milk,’ and reduces flirtation to a wink on a train or a wave on an escalator. It takes place in Britain, which means that it’s less effective for Americans, many of whom are undoubtedly angrily asking themselves why British workers get to leave the office at 4:30 PM, and don’t start until 9. Also could be more effective if Jill wasn’t the only character, but if we also saw some of the ladies who make her clothing, circuit boards, etc. Their lives are pretty different from Jill’s, if no less meaningless in form.

Rumors and Vampirism

Rumors are a major preoccupation in Cambodia, and are usually spread in the context of giving necessary advice to friends. During my three years doing fieldwork in Cambodia, the best ones I witnessed were the following:

• Don’t buy off-brand cooking oil in the markets, because the crematorium at a local temple was rendering human bodies into fat and selling it in the markets (instead of rendered pig fat).
• Don’t eat seafood (this was right after the tsunami), because many of the fish have been eating the corpses of those killed by the tsunami.

Over the last few days, a new rumor has been spreading among garment factory workers in Phnom Penh:

• Stay away from nightshift work, since powerful men are abducting workers during nightshifts and harvesting their organs (specifically corneas and kidneys) for sale to international clients.