Experiences of continuous structural violence

Antjie Krog followed the Truth and Reconciliation processes in South Africa during the mid-90s as a reporter. In her book Country of My Skull she tells about her embodied experiences of listening to the violent stories of oppression and violence almost beyond what is comprehensible, and how she starts to get physical symptoms of her reaction to what she hears. While I’m looking out at the beautiful and peaceful garden that surrounds the house where I’m living in Santa Cruz, I am thinking about the continuous violence, direct and structural, that surrounds us in the world, and what mechanisms that we use to keep on living with this knowledge in order not to get insane. This was emphasized specifically during this week’s Israeli government violence against the activists at the Ship to Gaza convoy. I look for answers in the book Precarious Lives: the power of mourning and violence by Judith Butler. She considers the means by which some lives become grief-worthy, while others are perceived as undeserving of grief or even incomprehensible as lives. What Butler argues is thus that in order to keep on living our ’good’ lives knowing that other people are suffering form war and environmental deterioration, is to make these very same people undeserving of grief. Since I am interested in what mobilizes people to act on injustices, instead of looking the other way, this is vital information.

I would like to connect this to the rage that I feel when reading the commercial slogans by the agribusiness companies Syngenta and Monsanto, and GM researchers. My experience makes me think about being emotionally polluted. How do we deal with these experiences of direct violence, structural violence and mental violence? How do we engage with these experiences without letting them consume us, and inform our political practices instead? Someone has actually suggested that it is more difficult to reconciliate experiences of loss caused by human factors, than those caused by “natural” factors. This do of course neglect that people who live with structural inequality like poverty or marginalization are more likely to suffer from the ”natural” disasters like floods, earth quakes or drought. Thus, when people start to conceptualize environmental deterioration as caused by other humans, they are likely to start to feel ‘violated’.

A Crude reality – oil, environmental responsibility and global commodity chains

On Swedish TV citizens can view the damage being caused by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the waters of the Mexican gulf. Ironically, it says at the website for Deep Water Horizon that it is “capable of operating in harsh environments and water depths up to 8,000 ft”. Well, it was, and that might be the problem now. The disaster has provoked very interesting questions about environmental responsibility, some Americans for example question whether the citizens should be allowed to veto against off shore drilling off their coast. U.S. President Obama has stated that British Petroleum BP is not only liable for what happened, but has to cover all the economic costs for stopping the spill, and all the damage on nature, humans, life and local economy that the incident causes. This will likely imply a legal act, which in turn brings in another set of actors, lawyers and courts. The role of courts and lawyers is documented in the documentary CRUDE, which follows the law suit of indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Amazonas against the corporation Chevron. My sister who is at home with her newborn son asked me what she can do from her suburban home in a small Swedish town. Use less petrol would be an immediate answer. Simultaneously I have read No Logo by Naomi Klein who tells the story of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the writer and environmental activist who was executed by the Nigerian government in 1995 after having fought against the crude oil extraction by Shell. In total they make up a thought provoking backdrop about environmental responsibility for me.

While Klein reflects on the need to “brand” the struggle against transnational corporations,
I think about the fact that the Swedish householders that I interviewed in 2005-2006 expressed that the most difficult everyday activity for them to change was the transports with their private car. There is little incentive to boycott petrol, I take it. Running the risk of reaching too far in my attempt to reveal global connections and commodity chains I think about the campaign that Solidarity Sweden – Latin America is running with the slogan ”it is better with soup in the stomachs than in the engines” – a slogan which need some explanation since ”soup” is slang for gas in Swedish. The focus of the campaign is to question the use of land in Latin America to produce fuel for Swedish cars, a policy supported by the EU, instead of producing food for the local population, or food sovereignty as it is expressed by Via Campesina.

In attempting to disentangle the assemblage around oil we can thus follow a set of actor groups who are involved – the transnational corporations, individual citizens, nation states and environmental justice NGOs, and media. Here I want to reflect on what a single event of an environmental crisis means with the attraction of journalists and photographers and TV channels waiting for oil smeared birds to represent in picturesque forms, before moving on to the next crisis, and the more continuous crises that the use of petrol implies.

Thinking of environmental justice and action competence, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s brother said to Naomi Klein that ”It is important not to make people feel powerless. After all, they need to fill their cars with something. If we tell them all companies are guilty, they will feel they can do nothing. What we are trying to really do, now that we have this evidence against this one company, is to let people have the feeling that they can at least have the moral force to make one company change.” (quoted in Klein 2000:423) Klein herself reasons as follows: ”Since resource companies don’t sell directly to the public, they barely have to worry about their public image – a factor that brings up what is perhaps the most significant limitiation of brand-based campaigns: they can be powerless in the face of coprorations that opt out of the branding game. So all over the world children work in fields with toxic pesticides, in dangerous mines and rubber and steel factories where small fingers and hands are sliced off or mangled in heavy machines. Many of these children are producing goods for the export market: canned fish, tea, rice, rubber for tires. But their plight has never captured the world’s imagination like that of the kids who make soccer balls with swooshes on them or clothing for Barbie dolls, because their exploitation is unbranded, and therefore less identifiable, less visible, in our image-obsessed world … When brand image is the weapon, an unbranded company can get off the hook entirely … but why single out Nike or Michael Jordan when the U.S. government itself is implicated in the same sickness?” (Klein quotes William Greider from his book One World, Ready or Not 2000:421, 424-5)

I would argue that the above quotations place the attention on the issue of how to make the problem comprehensible, and the pedagogical challenge inherent in transforming the problem description into a manageable solution i.e. what should I answer my sister when she asks me what she can do to act on the oil spill in the Mexican Gulf, or when motivating myself to think that another world is possible, and that the 30,000 Davids can fight Goliath in Ecuador.

Global (colonial?) knowledge structures

A week ago I arrived at the San Fransisco International airport with two suitcases packed with books, field notes and clothes. This could be the opening of an anthropological “arrival story”, with the aim to show that I was “actually there”, and to give legitimacy to my account of how the Nacirema lives. In December last year I received a note from the Swedish Research Council that I had been awarded a post-doc scholarship to go to the University of California at Santa Cruz in the U.S. Apart from analyzing my ethnographic material, I will participate in a graduate seminar called “Multispecies Storytelling: Diversities, Histories, Comparisons” organized by Professor Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway. The aim of a post-doc study is to “deepen expertise in a specialist subject, including necessary skills and methods” and is “expected to produce relevant publications accordingly”. My thought wanders to the idea of being able to absorb some of the fame that surrounds the University of California, where the highest number of Nobel laureates has been fostered. I know that anthropology is not among the Nobel Prize categories, but these prizes are commonly used as a reference for the level of top notch knowledge production at a university. The decision to contact a U.S. researcher to plan my post-doc application was thus a strategic attempt. U.S. universities are widely considered as important knowledge centers. It might be pure incidence, but I consider the fact that I did not receive funds for a similar project when placing it in Argentina. I tried trice, and then I applied my new strategy. The statistical proof is meager, I know. And these reflections should of course not be interpreted as if I am not incredibly happy about the scholarship, or that I have any doubt that I will learn a lot from the researcher that I contacted. It is just a reflection on the power structures that influence ideas about whose knowledge counts, what research projects that receive funds, and who produces valuable knowledge.

Not even bread crumbs from the Sandwich (Islands) – disputes over common goods

The conflicts between Argentina and U.K. over the Malvinas, or the Falkland and Sandwich Islands as the Brits call them, didn’t end when the war between the countries was over in 1982 after two months of fighting (and when 907 soldiers and 3 locals had died). Recently the U.K. initiated oil extraction in the off shore area, which is considered an aggression towards the Argentine nation. The claim to the islands was incorporated in the Argentine Constitution of 1994, so the oil extraction is thus a violation of the Argentine Constitution from their perspective. However, the case raises issues of national claims to natural resources, or “common goods” - common goods is a concept that several of the environmental activists whom I have spoken to prefer instead of resources - and the involvement and responsibilities of transnational companies. Ever since the case of las Malvinas started to be mobilized a couple of months ago in the multitude of Argentine environmental e-mail lists that I belong to, I’ve been reflecting on the public discourse by the President Christina Kirschner. What I have found interesting is the relationship between the way she has been talking about the Malvinas (the Falklands) in terms of violation of national sovereignty, while she has not – to my knowledge – talked about, for example, the mining industry taking place in Argentina in similar terms. Would it be equally possible to talk about the extraction of minerals in the mountains by transnational companies (TNCs) in the same manner, as a violation of sovereignty? Several segments of the environmental movement certainly express themselves in this way. They would explain that the president doesn’t discuss mining in the same way as a result of having vested interests in the business, expressed for example in her veto against the Law of Glaciers. I am aware of the fact that the mining companies pay (or at least are expected to pay) tributes to the Argentine government, and that this makes the two cases of the British oil extraction and the mining business somewhat different. Yet, while the president is questioning the oil extraction by the Brits, the locals of Andalgalá, a village in the Argentine province Catamarca, is questioning the mining business by Agua Rica through their Citizen Assembly Algarrobo. This Assembly is far from the only one in Argentina. In March the Assembly premiered a documentary. On a webpage [1] they connect the topic with the upcoming Bicentenary, and thereby colonialism, what’s considered as “progress” or “development”, and nation building. They say:

“The documentary gives account of the struggle by the Andalgalá community, Catamarca province, from the initial struggle against the looting by the Minera Bajo La Alumbrera, to the current struggle against the exploitations by Agua Rica. The community resists the continuous and savage looting that contaminates, the repression and impunity by which the large transnational companies manage to exploit the common goods, and the complicity by the provincial governments and the nation state. The documentary intents to contribute to a reflection on the two hundred years of nation building.”

In the documentary their main arguments: “yes to life” and “water is more worth than gold” are repeated. Thereby their arguments are not only based on the economic injustice i.e. that they hardly even get some of the economic bread crumbs from transactions by the TNCs, but that on top of being cheated economically, they are left with contamination and environmental devastation. Due to complex ways of organizing fees for the TNCs for water and electricity (that are vital for the extraction technology), another of the arguments by the Assembly is that they, the local citizens, even have to pay for being contaminated [2]. So, what do I make of all these multifaceted issues that are assembled in the mentioned conflicts over access to and control of common goods/ natural resources [3]? Just recently I came across the book Territories of Difference by Arturo Escobar, where he discusses “uneven geographies” [4]. He confronts the dynamics of globalization, and how the environment (or life as he conceptualizes it), capitalism, politics and knowledge production are interwoven in highly complex ways. There is not enough space here to delve on his and his colleagues’ valuable contribution to ethnographic studies of environmental movements. But still I want to mention the book since it contains important tools for my analysis of how the Argentine environmental activists make sense of these complex issues, and how I can make sense of their sense making. For further information of what Escobar and colleagues call World Anthropologies Network, or Red de Antropologías del Mundo, visit their web site [5]. For an interesting account of the relationship between Argentine petroleum companies, and oil extraction in las Malvinas, read the blog entry at Permahabitante [6].

References:
1. http://www.taringa.net/posts/solidaridad/4974367/Pido-Stiki-por-Andalgal%C3%A1-Festival-y-Estreno-de-Documental.html
2. Pardo, Javier Rodriguez (2009) Vienen por el oro, vienen por todo: las invaciones mineras 500 años después. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Ciccus.
3. Martínez Alier, Joan (2002) The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. London: Elgar. Cited in Escobar, Arturo (2008) Territories of Difference: place, movements, life, redes. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
4. page 5, Escobar (2008).
5. http://www.ram-wan.net/html/home.htm
6. http://www.permahabitante.com.ar/malvinas-ypf.php

Creative and pedagogical anthropologists

At the annual conference for the Swedish Association for anthropologists (SANT), with the theme “Culture, power and environment”, this last weekend, a discussion was raised about the role of anthropological knowledge. This is an interesting topic in itself. However, I was struck by the distinction made by one of the participats, between anthropologists at the one hand, and people with “creative work” at the other. What is anthropology if not a creative work? Would we have considered the work by for example Donna Haraway as ”outstanding” or ”brilliant” (see the Foreword for her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women – The Reinvention of Nature), if she had not been just that - creative? The role of creativity has been given extensive attention by eco-feminists, and by historians of science, who use creativity to deconstruct categories.

Another discussion that made me think about the relationship between the research process and creativity, was the defense of a dissertation by a colleague. The discussant asked her whether the research process and analysis had really been performed in such a neat and organized manner as presented in the methodological chapter of the dissertation. Her reply was no. I believe that the desire to describe the research process as an orderly and linear practice, is an example of the overarching goal of science where facts (or reality) are discovered. We seldom write that we got ideas for pedagogical metaphors to make our arguments and findings understandable when presenting them in text or speech. Here I want to get back to the initial question – what is the role of anthropological or other sociological knowledge? I argue that in order to make our findings, conclusions and arguments understandable we need to be creative and pedagogical. My point of departure is that the role of anthropological knowledge is that it should attempt to “do something” with the audience, and that conclusions and arguments should be thought provoking since we are part of a world in the making. Then it is vital to consider research practices as highly creative.