Engseng Ho has written that “nationalism is easily considered a subfield of kinship studies” (Ho 2002: 215). I love this line, and think of it often. The reversal here is important. Where most nationalist imaginings would have us understand the family unit as nested within, contained by, the nation, Ho posits nationalism as the subfield of kinship: the big political concept enveloped by the personal, the relational, the familial, not the other way around.

I have always been curious about notions of racial/ethnic/religious mixing, which alliances with “others” are forbidden, which are encouraged, and which are tacitly tolerated.*  I remain fascinated by the extent to which, even among critical social scientists, the types of people who are supposed to be well-versed in such matters, there is still a fundamental need to categorize people – colleagues, students, superiors, etc. – based on ethnicity/race, and simultaneously an inability to grasp half-ness, mixed-ness, complicated lineages, in day-to-day interactions.  These thoughts tend to haunt me most, for reasons I will make clear in this post, around April every year, when the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide takes place. Rather appropriately, I began reading Lerna Ekmekcioglu’s monograph on the Armenian community of Istanbul in early April, after months of owning it in its e-version.

Lerna Ekmekcioglu’s recent book, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2015), captivates me because it manages to address a complicated, difficult set of historical questions in spare, elegant, and accessible writing. Recovering Armenia is an investigation of the immediate aftermath of the Armenian Genocide among bolsahays (Istanbul Armenians); by focusing on bolsahays, Ekmekcioglu rectifies a tendency in studies of Armenian-ness to focus on diasporic and refugee subjects, as opposed to those who chose to stay in Turkey following the events of 1915-1918. But it is not only the location of her subjects that makes Ekmekcioglu’s research unusual. There is a further layer of complexity here in her decision to focus on gender relations, to highlight the struggles and contradictions experienced by Armenian women, a subordinated social group within a minority community. Ekmekcioglu manages to present the challenges facing both the Armenian community as a whole while also attending to the gendered dimensions of violence, recovery and ethnic identity.

What is “difficult” about Ekmekcioglu’s inquiry relates both to the content of her argument and its implications. By bringing a feminist perspective to bear on the immediate aftermath of the Armenian Genocide, Ekmekcioglu does an admirable job of bringing to life an understudied period in time, and understudied subjects (bolsahay feminists).   At the same time, the feminist analysis of this book troubles many heroic, simplistic narratives of the genocide by calling attention to the way that unequal gender relations were in fact at the foundation of the Armenian nationalist project. Armenian women, Ekmekcioglu argues, were actually at the center of the post-Genocide veraganknum (restoration) ethos because it was thought they could transmit and nurture Armenian-ness. As Armenian subjects in the new Turkish Republic faced increasing restrictions on their ability to express their non-Turkish, non-Muslim identities in the public sphere, the private sphere of the family became the appropriate, necessary site for cultural “preservation” and “restoration.” Like many women of marginalized communities, Armenian feminists in the immediate post-Genocide moment thus had to choose between continuing their fight for gender equality and emancipation and the welfare of their larger ethnic group, whose leaders were men, and not totally sympathetic to feminist goals.

Poignantly, Ekmekcioglu makes clear in the conclusion that such conflicts are not relegated to distant history but were in fact part of her own experiences growing up as a woman and scholar in the contemporary Istanbul Armenian community. Describing an encounter with an Armenian Orthodox Patriarch she describes a public speech of his:

He singled out girls. Because girls were continuing their education into universities and thus postponing marriage, this was taking a toll on the community as a whole since it was leading young men to marry non-Armenians. Girls had to be tamed into marrying early. Our young and passionate hearts were infuriated by this expression of misogyny and the double standards in the patriarch’s ideology. (Ekmekcioglu 2015: 163).

That is Ekmekcioglu speaking of herself in the year 2000, not relating the speech of a Patriarch in the 1920s.

Never having been sure to what extent calling myself “Armenian” was appropriate, I find Ekmekcioglu’s look at kinship interesting in that it illuminates Armenian-ness as being both a social/political claim as well as one based on lineage. And yet what is social/political should not be confused with what is more noble. Ekmekcioglu makes clear that efforts were made to convince female Armenian genocide survivors to carry children of their rapists to term, even when the women themselves did not want to keep or raise these children. The shift from an understanding of Armenian heritage from one based on paternal descent to one based on maternal descent was not so much a radical re-thinking of women’s roles in the community, but rather a move to boost Armenians’ numbers in the wake of near extermination:

Demographic and other sorts of anxieties reached such levels that the Bolsahay elite found it justifiable to ignore paternity in determining a baby’s ethnic and religious origins. Despite the established patrilineal logic of both Armenian canonical law and sharia, the patriarchate and its vorpahavak agents decided that anyone with an Armenian mother, regardless if the father was a Muslim, would be officially considered a full-fledged Armenian. As such they would be eligible for a place in the orphanages and shelter homes run by Armenians and for Armenians (Figure 6). The Armenian Church baptized babies (of Muslim fathers) who would have been considered full Muslims in the pre-genocide era. (Ekmekcioglu 2015: 35)

The shift from paternal to maternal sources of Armenian identity came about in response to the horrific realities of the day. Armenian women were often targets for sexual violence at the hands of Turkish men and the pregnancies arising from rape posed pragmatic, ethical and even ontological questions about what it meant to be Armenian. I am torn still, even after reading Ekmekcioglu’s arresting work, as to how one can process this, a move towards greater inclusivity and re-thinking of patriarchal kinship brought about through the cruelest of circumstances.

***

Without wishing to make this essay overly personal, some biographical – genealogical – information should make it clear why Ekmekcioglu’s book is fascinating to me. Of my four grandparents, three were ethnically Italian though one, my maternal grandmother, was born in Romania and lived there until she was around 30 years old. My remaining grandparent, my maternal grandfather, was Turkish-Armenian, born and raised in Istanbul until age 20, in a family of wealthy bolsahays who chose to stay on in Turkey well beyond the genocide. My maternal grandfather’s family would thus have experienced many of the events and debates that Ekmekcioglu describes in her study. While I do not know much about the political leanings of my great-grandparents and their assorted relatives, I do know that the question of recovering a female genocide survivor was very real for them (a cousin of my grandfather’s was the only surviving family member outside of the city of Istanbul, and was brought back to live with them after having been found in the household of a Turkish family).

The proportion of grandparents I list above, three-to-one, makes me one-quarter Armenian. I recall a few times in college introducing myself this way to members of the Armenian Students Association, which led to the inevitable question: “so, what’s the rest of you?” And yet in California, home to so many immigrants and a major part of many diasporic networks, such articulations of belonging – half this, one quarter that – are hardly rare. And indeed, given that only one quarter of me – 25 percent – counts as Armenian, I was surprised by the extent to which “real” “fully Armenian” Armenians seemed to welcome my presence at cultural events and encouraged me to talk and learn about my grandfather’s upbringing.

In Ho’s concluding sentence to the article “Names Beyond Nations” he speaks of the Hadramis saying “they appeared to be local because they were fragments, but their capacity for reconstitution proved that they had always retained their larger connections beyond states and nations, their cosmopolitanism” (Ho 2002: 229). A few weeks after the 101^st anniversary commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, I read these words and can’t help but think of a favorite slogan at both Genocide commemoration events and other kinds of demonstrations in the US: “they tried to bury us, they did not know we were seeds.”

Another memory comes to the surface, of waiting at the on-campus bus stop at UCSD one sunlit afternoon when a man approached me and a few other students waiting there with some aggressive questions: “what are you? what are you guys?” he wanted to know. Was he deranged, or a white supremacist, or both? I couldn’t tell you now. But this unexpected encounter resulted in me learning the ethnic make-ups of the other passengers at the bus stop and, funnily enough, one of the young men who initially identified as “Syrian” eventually admitted to being “one quarter Armenian.” “Just like me!” I recall saying, a big astonished smile on my face – “what are the chances?!” I exclaimed. He shrugged, and got on the bus.

Notes

*Nowhere are such concerns more beautifully explored, I think, than in Jacqueline Brown’s ethnography of race and gender politics in Liverpool (2005).  Indeed, a whole other blog post could (and maybe will) be written about feminist and critical race perspectives on such matters from other regions, but I ran out of space to include more discussion here.

References:

Brown, Jacqueline. 2005.  Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool, Princeton University Press.

Ekmekcioglu, Lerna. 2015. Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey, Stanford University Press.

Ho, Engseng. 2002.  “Names Beyond Nations: The Making of Local Cosmopolitans” Etudes Rurales No. 163/164 pp. 215-231

A few months ago, I read the obituary of a prominent Lebanese Marxist in which one of the people who knew him commented that he was a Marxist because he “cared about day to day life.” This prompted me to think about what it means to live in a society in which the banal-seeming act of caring about “the everyday” is in fact radical. What kinds of things do we usually care about, if not “daily” things?

This line of questioning made me think also about other categories, besides that of “Marxist” that might mean one cares about “day to day life.” The first that came to mind was about gender; women are people who, because of how historical and social structures define their role and appropriate realm of activity, care about day-to-day life. Because we have to. The second thing that came to mind, a few weeks later, was “anthropologist”: an anthropologist should, ideally, take in interest in her informants’ day-to-day lives. We value ethnography because it usually shows us in some rich detail the daily lives of real people. You can of course take a critical view of who does the showing, and who the people being shown typically are, but the “everyday” quality of the anthropological perspective is what makes the discipline so unique.

The association of women with the everyday seems like an important insight for comprehending the beauty industry and women’s magazines, things I’d love to study in another academic life. What makes something a “women’s magazine” as opposed to just a magazine? It doesn’t talk about “big” things. A women’s magazine focuses on “women’s issues” but we all implicitly know, when we use this label, that that does not mean women’s human rights, global debates about feminism, abortion access, etc. “Women’s magazines” are about a very specific kind of everyday life – shopping, sex, makeup, bargains, tips for how to get ahead at your job. I do not consider these trivial concerns at all. Instead, I see them as part of what George Saunders has called “the endless cycle of meaningful activity” that characterizes contemporary capitalism.

Part of this association of the feminine with the “everyday” could be fruitfully studied, I think, through an ethnographic investigation of advice-giving. Someone who writes an advice column is called an “agony aunt” in British English – note the gender associations of this term. An “advisor” is a powerful person. But to give “advice,” one need not be powerful – exchanging advice is simply part of the everyday practice of a lot of people, many of whom happen to be women. Women’s magazines traffic in advice – from the absolutely ridiculous (I am thinking here of Cosmos’ sex tips) to the do-you-really-think-I-didn’t-already-know-that variety (“always pay off your credit card balance to avoid paying interest!”).  I myself see the exchange of frank, down-to-earth practical advice as integral to my friendships with other women.

As the thing called a “woman’s magazine” has largely morphed from a glossy, printed-on-paper object to a digital platform, I have noticed a very interesting shift in the advice-giving practices they include. Refinery 29, a site I read fairly regularly, now seems to qualify its makeup and beauty advice with statements like “of course, we’re not saying you need to improve how you look at all, but if you want some ideas on how to X, then click here…” Some might construe this as a step forward for feminism, as it cannot be bad that these women’s blogs are paying greater attention to the wide variety of bodies and modes of appearance that were studiously excluded from their glossy-page older sisters. It has become cool to be a feminist, to talk of intersectionality, to use political hashtags, and to be passionate about social issues. The topics I alluded to above as not being appropriate for the women’s magazines of old – abortion, human rights, inequality – are slowly becoming more than acceptable things to discuss in the otherwise “apolitical” realm of digital platforms for women. I am ambivalent about this development because I have some problems with the direction this kind of feminism is taking, and what it ignores. (That would be the subject for a much longer essay that it would take more courage to write!)

This has all been a collection of rather loosely assembled thoughts and ideas, which have been swirling around my head for months. There is no grand point to be made, other than the fact that there would seem to be something important about a link between the feminine and the everyday, and it could be productive to think about how this maps onto other kinds of concerns with “the everyday,” such as those of Marxists and others who care about the welfare of the working classes. If those who care (are forced to care, or are expected to care) about “the everyday” are typically in some way marginal – what does this say about the powerful? What have they overlooked which might productively be reclaimed?

As the year comes to a close, I find myself thinking about everything I’ve learned over the course of 2014.  Crafting my research proposal, going through the curiously-named “upgrade” process at LSE, attending two academic conferences, conducting preliminary ethnographic research and organizing a workshop in my department were rich experiences – by turns stressful, exciting, overwhelming and instructive.

I find myself at a stage in my academic career where I value concrete, practical advice for going about different tasks.  Of course, everyone does things differently, but I am struck by how much academia reproduces certain values and hierarchies based on implicit rules that students have to learn through trial and error.  I appreciate when things are spelled out a little more clearly, so I am listing here some lessons I learned this past year in the hopes that they may be of value and use to others.

1. Keywords are everything.  The two or three words and phrases you use to describe your research when someone asks are of huge significance.  They are more than labels, because as you internalize these words they start to dictate what literature you consult, how people categorize you and respond to your ideas, etc.  I found that because I fixated on certain words (i.e. “technology”) early on in my proposal writing process, I was swept up in literature that was certainly interesting but maybe not getting to the heart of what I really wanted to study (in my case, not the technology itself, but the social relations it produces and ideas of modernity and progress).  It is worthwhile to check in with yourself constantly and re-evaluate what words you are using, and if they are still meaningful to your research project.

2. Unpack, unpack, unpack: I attended a workshop at the AAA in Washington DC on ethnographic writing, and I asked one of the speakers a question about how to make content from social media posts evoke the same excitement that comes with describing “real life” events can.  His answer was simple: “try to explain what’s going on.” That sounds so basic and obvious it’s funny to me that I never considered it.  But he was right.  Instead of constantly assuming that things are obvious to your readers, remember that much of what you have to say might actually need further explanation, and this is a good thing because it gives you the chance to show what you know about a particular topic, place or theme.  When I read something, even if it’s a topic I’m very familiar with, I always enjoy seeing how another scholar explains what he or she finds to be the critical points.

3. Say it first, cite later: The hardest part of writing my proposal was figuring out a way not to bore my readers with lengthy summaries of what other authors said about various topics.  Perhaps a testament to the negative approach to knowledge production that graduate school instills, I find I have become a better critic of my own writing but not necessarily a better writer – in other words, I started to realize I was boring myself in my own literature review, but didn’t know how to change it.  I took the topic to multiple people and online threads, and everyone reminded me that a literature review or theoretical portion of a paper is about your take on an issue, backed up with what other people have said.  It’s very simple: instead of the formulation, “As X says in his 2012 book YYY….” you can just state that “A has been shown to be related to B (X, 2012).  The in-text citation is your best friend – it allows you to declare things upfront and show where you got the idea from later, thereby making your writing crisper and more exciting to read.

4.  You really do have to work a little each day: This is perhaps a matter of personal preference and not a real rule, but it was one of the lessons of 2014 for me.  When I began my PhD program at LSE, our program director told us the PhD is something you do every single day, even if it’s just for 30 minutes.  I didn’t take it seriously at the time, imagining that this would only be the case when I was writing up, but I see the value of this approach more clearly now.  The reality is that you do have to practice consistency in your intellectual life; even just reading and taking notes on something academic is a way to keep your mind working if you haven’t got writing to do.  The reality of the PhD in the UK system is that there are long periods of unstructured time, when you could be doing just about anything.  It’s good to take breaks and vacations, but at other times, a little intellectual engagement each day keeps you in good mental shape.

2014 was a great year for me on many levels, but far from easy with regards to my academic pursuits – it’s a constant challenge to stay motivated, fresh and, dare I say, positive about your work.  I hope some of these observations help with that.  And I wish everyone a wonderful new year!

The Honourable Woman, the BBC’s summer hit about a British family and their entanglements with Israeli and Palestinian politics, is supposed to be happening now, as in today. It is a contemporary show in all the key indicators: the technology, the fashion choices, the dialogue. The show hops between different time periods, but only in reference to our contemporary moment (for example, the opening shots of episodes will specify “seven years ago” or “one year later” but not give a date). But by definition, the world the characters inhabit cannot be happening now. Because now is September 2014, the end of one of the most brutal summers in living memory. Specifically, now, Gaza lies destroyed, bombed-out, nearly obliterated, with no clear sense of when the next horrific period of “mowing the lawn” may come to pass.

Needless to say, they picked a hell of a summer to run The Honourable Woman.

I am stuck on the dates and timelines of the show, the irony that it has been aired during this particular moment in time, because I think the discrepancy between the realities of today and the world of The Honourable Woman may contribute to what I perceive to be the show’s shortcomings. Who knows what it might have felt like to watch it before the carnage of Operation Protective Edge? Before the editorials and op-eds in Israeli press calling for rape, for ethnic cleansing, for mass murder? The Honourable Woman, in trying to call out the slippery nature of concepts like “reconciliation,” “justice” and “balance,” falls prey to its own cynical politics. It’s not just that “both sides” are presented as being equally at fault, a reliable piece of liberal fantasy. The Honourable Woman makes the viewer think it is smarter than that, by showing rather thoroughly how misguided the main characters who attempt to remain “neutral” truly are. But in the end this “everyone gets their hands dirty” ethos actually ends up accomplishing the same thing as the “both sides” fallacy: it glosses over Israeli atrocities and lets liberal onlookers off the hook when it comes to their own countries’ role in underwriting the occupation.

The main characters of The Honourable Woman exist in a sleek, elegant, utterly generic London, running around major cultural institutions and engaging in darkly witty exchanges in glassed-in government offices. There is a lot of overwrought music and there are many pregnant pauses. Nessa Stein, played by Maggie Gyllenhall, is the head of a world-renowned company, the Stein Group, trying to make a difference in “the Middle East,” a reversal of the vision of her father, a staunch Zionist, known as the “Sword of Israel,” whom we see die a gruesome death in the show’s first episode. Young Nessa witnesses the murder, as does her brother Ephra; fast-forward to today and the pair are running the company. There’s a whole cast of characters in addition to the Steins, including Atika (Ephra’s Palestinian housekeeper, and, we discover, Nessa’s confidante regarding her deepest secret), Israeli businessmen and government officials, British and American intelligence folks, etc. The variety could have made for a rich tapestry, but instead it falls flat, as if the creators of the show came up with too many potentially interesting threads and then never figured out how to weave them back together.

Ephra and Nessa’s relationship is more complex than one might expect, and as we are given glimpses into the past decade of these characters’ lives, some interesting dynamics come up: Nessa’s idealism, which puts other people in danger; Ephra’s willingness to compromise the company’s ideological purity and the tenuous idea of that very “purity”; the experience that Nessa and Atika had in prison in Gaza, etc. Unfortunately, the way the show ultimately handles these potentially fascinating relationships leaves a lot to be desired (also, the dialogue falters badly in some places – Atika and Ephra whispering “shalom” and “salaam” to each other in bed was vomit-inducing). You can find out more about the specific plot points over at the Guardian’s Culture page (needless to say, they loved the show).

I didn’t walk away from The Honourable Woman particularly caring about any one of the characters which, it should be said, is pretty troubling for a show that traffics in all sorts of images of suffering, betrayal, loss, etc. I didn’t care so much as I was abstractly disturbed, a different emotion altogether. And a lot of my being disturbed centers on the use of women’s bodies, especially Nessa’s, as vehicles for the political objectives of men. The Honourable Woman certainly depicts female bodies as especially vulnerable to rape and sexual assault – a perfectly valid point of view, but one that is not elaborated upon sufficiently, thereby making the scenes of sexual violence feel pointless and cheap.

Coming back to an earlier point, I emphasize that the show is about a British family as a way to counter the notion that it has anything to do with the Middle East. “That’s how things work in the Middle East” is one of the reliable refrains of The Honourable Woman. I want to take the “Middle East” ambitions of this show down a peg or two. Why can’t the characters ever say “in Israel?” or “in the West Bank” or “here” or “over there”? Why must the viewer be beaten over the head with the reminder that this show has important things to say about the region called “the Middle East” as opposed to specific places within that region, or within Britain itself? At first, The Honourable Woman seems like a thinking person’s Homeland, a much more realistic, intellectual, and generally British take on world affairs. But in the end, I see a similar exoticization of Arab/Muslim/Middle Eastern “others” and perhaps a more dangerous faux-intellectualism which reveals the show to be just as empty and dishonest as the Stein Group itself.

Early on in the story, Nessa is appointed to the House of Lords. She is shown having a phone interview with a journalist who questions her dual loyalties to Britain and Israel. We hear her voice over the radio as she debates others in the upper house of parliament about the situation in Israel and Palestine and is accused of sitting on the fence while others actually take a stand. The Honourable Woman might have been a lot more believable, and a lot more profound, if the writers had bothered to actually delve more deeply into these tensions between Nessa’s identity as a Jewish woman, a British public figure and the daughter of one of Israel’s most formidable businessmen. The Honourable Woman eschews the questions of British Jewishness brought up so memorably in Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question in favor of a slicker, sexier idea of some place called “the Middle East” where women don funky hipster eyewear one minute and headscarves the next; where Nessa Stein speaks not a word of Hebrew but the Palestinians all speak Arabic; and where drone strikes ordered by foreign governments heroically save the day.

The question of Britishness with regards to The Honourable Woman – that is, the show’s representation of the British government and the British media’s unbridled adoration for the show – is an important one. American militarism abroad does not render Britain a friendlier, gentler kind of imperialist, no more than American racism should make British xenophobia, anti-semitism and racism suddenly palatable. British foreign policy on a number of issues, including and perhaps especially in the Middle East, has been closely tailored to fit American objectives. So when The Honourable Woman suggests that the US government would for some reason support Palestinian statehood at the expense of their relationship with Israel, and when the loveable British intelligence agent who has discovered this American duplicity sends a drone to kill an American agent as well as dying Atika in a dramatic finale, I am left somewhat perplexed. Who is served by this fanciful imagining of nefarious US motives and British heroism? That the plot of The Honourable Woman turns on a totally unbelievable, unexplained bit of foreign policy is questionable enough. But the fact that this fictional foreign policy also works to sever ties between the British and American governments (and throws the Palestinian cause under the bus in the bargain, by associating it and not Israeli Zionism with American empire) is truly shocking in its mendacity and bad faith. No doubt this is why liberal publications like The Guardian can’t stop writing accolades for The Honourable Woman – it serves up a convenient view of Britain’s own role in the Middle East of today, right at a time when most British liberals can’t seem to reconcile their chafing at American policy with their own government’s support of the cruelty and slaughter in Gaza.

Perhaps I am being too hard on The Honourable Woman but it is difficult not to be when the program takes such an inflated view of its own importance and believes so wholeheartedly in its own sophistication. A truly groundbreaking show would have placed emphasis on British complicity in Palestinian suffering. It would have offended a lot more people, and it would have been much more honorable.

Nationalism and ethnic conflict are some of the grand old themes of social science research. “Nationalism and ethnic conflict” rolls off the tongue, and immediately calls to mind the great classics like Imagined Communities, or Nations and Nationalism; the phrase makes sense and has become a powerful analytic category. I myself frequently list “nationalism” or “nationalism and ethnic conflict” among my research interests, and obviously this is the rubric under which the realities of Sri Lanka in particular (and much of the developing world in general) are commonly understood. This post not in any way intended to be a criticism of those whose research agenda falls into this category, but rather a way to question the effects that an uncritical “nationalism and ethnic conflict” worldview may have for policy.      

It seems to me that it is worth asking: is “nationalism and ethnic conflict” the best overall framework for understanding some of the phenomena happening in the world at this very moment? Is the relentless focus on ethnicity/ethnic identity/nation harmful in some way? And is it perhaps obscuring other things that underpin human realities, like ideology, class, economics, affinity groups, etc.?

These questions take on specific importance, and I have been inspired to ask them once again, because of their ramifications for policy. Specifically, I am interested in what is currently happening in Iraq. With the rise of the group known as ISIS/ISIL/the Islamic State, there has been a lot of soul-searching in the western media, both mainstream and alternative, about what led to this moment, in which thousands are fleeing for their lives and the US is once again sending troops and weapons to the country it invaded in 2003. My main question is: did the neoconservative vision of the world create the conditions of possibility for a group like ISIS to come to power? To what extent is that neoconservative vision premised upon an understanding of “ethnicity” or “religion” that is overly rigid and insufficiently nuanced?  

It’s hardly groundbreaking to point out that categories and intellectual constructs matter in the crafting of policy. Anyone with some social scientific background can tell you that the way experts are trained to think about things shapes how things actually play out “on the ground,” especially when those experts are funded and backed by powerful western interests. Starting in the colonial era, Europeans came up with categories of race and ethnicity to divide and regulate the populations they sought to rule. Mahmood Mamdani has tackled this head-on in his work on various African states, and other examples abound (see, for instance, John Rogers’ 1994 article on “post-orientalism” and identity in Sri Lanka).  

The title of this post, “a ready-made approach to the world,” is from Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq (2005), by George Packer. Packer is himself a rather problematic figure (a self-described “pro-war liberal”) but the book is a fascinating account of neocon circles in Washington and elsewhere, and of the way they viewed the Middle East. For example, neocons’ dubious understandings of history led them to espouse what was called the “everybody move over one” theory, in which “Israel would annex the occupied territories, the Palestinians would get Jordan, and the Jordanian Hashemites would be restored to the throne of Iraq” (Packer 2005: 31-32). Many hard-right foreign policy experts believed this scenario would work out just fine because Shia Muslims in Iraq would welcome the Sunni monarchy due to their unstinting “veneration” of the Prophet and by extension King Hussein (Packer 2005: 30). The book explains in detail the relations between Washington and various dissident Iraqis during the lead up to the invasion in 2003 – the fascinating thing is not just the blindness and arrogance of these policy architects, but the way in which they were arrogant and blind. Essentialist, reductionist views of Muslims and Arabs underpinned the ways neocons and so-called “Middle East experts” viewed the political landscape of Iraq in the early 2000s. These beliefs also infected some parts of the left, most notably figures like Christopher Hitchens.    

A statement by the Federation of Worker’s Councils and Unions in Iraq posted on Jadaliyya.com in June 2014 powerfully called out foreign powers – including the US – for their role in creating the sectarian divisions that have aided the rise of ISIS:

 “Iraqis generally reject ISIS, whether in the central or southern regions of Iraq or in parts of the country that are no longer under government control: the so-called “Sunni” areas or the “Sunni Triangle”, a term that intelligence services, particularly the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), devised as part of a plan to engineer sectarianism in Iraq.” (Jadaliyya, June 2014)

 Here, the Federation makes it quite clear, through the use of quotation marks and qualifiers like “so-called,” that Iraq’s sectarianism and Sunni vs. Shia conflict is not at all a natural, ancient, unchanging divison but one that was cultivated by the CIA and other actors. Basically, they are inviting us to consider that religious/sectarian tensions (which are treated in this case like ethnic divides) might not be the only thing characterizing social relations in Iraq. Of course, Americans don’t hear about groups like the Federation of Worker’s Councils regularly because we are trained to believe that in other countries, big monolithic ethnic groups (who either hate each other or perhaps hate us) are busy fighting existential battles to the death. These strange, exotic others don’t get to have unions, political parties, community organizations, different media outlets, all the things that actually make up the fabric of day-to-day life. For all the lip service paid to “civil society” among westerners, we have remarkably little regard for how multi-faceted and complex “civil society” is in other places, just as it is so in the US, Great Britain, Canada, etc. (As an aside, the best example of this attitude is the way the US State Department phrases warnings to US citizens in foreign countries, overwhelmingly non-western ones. When the warning is about protests, it just says to avoid a given area at specific times. There is never any mention of what the protests might be about, since it is assumed that the US citizens concerned wouldn’t want or need to know. The substance and content of protests is immaterial).

Intellectual dishonesty, muddled thinking and racism have been part of US foreign policy for a long time, much before the rise of the neocons under George W. Bush. Can this be countered in any way? I don’t know. It has been the life’s work of people far more brilliant than I to think about and tackle that question. But I do wonder if the way we introduce students of social science to “nationalism and ethnic conflict” could be changed to make them better prepared to challenge dominant ideologies. In undergrad I took a course called, you guessed it, “Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict” and it was taught by an amazing professor. But in retrospect, I see that there were limitations as well. As was all too common at my undergrad institution, we were taught about the big theories of ethnic conflict – primordialism, institutionalism and constructivism – as if they were all equally valid, discrete and mutually exclusive ways of viewing the world (this in and of itself merits a separate blog post). One of our assignments was to take a fictional country with a given percentage of people of made-up ethnic groups (the proportions were loosely based on Sunnis, Shias and Kurds in Iraq) and asked to come up with a “solution” for how this country should be governed. There you have it – regime change and nation-building, all done on paper for your senior year poli sci class final. The danger of this kind of thing is that it risks naturalizing the very idea of “ethnic conflict” and presents quite dangerous – and already thoroughly discredited ideas – as worthy of legitimate discussion in the classroom. A responsible approach to the teaching of “nationalism and ethnic conflict” should include some level of meta-commentary on theories on nationalism and ethnic conflict themselves, and efforts at impressing upon students the real power that certain theoretical frameworks have had in shaping politics.

 In his introduction to The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand writes “I don’t think books can change the world, but when the world begins to change, it searches for different books.” I hope that the what is going on today in Iraq might compel us to seek out different books.

Pleased to announce that I will be attending the 2014 meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) this December in Washington DC. It will be my first visit to DC in about 18 years, and hopefully a great chance to connect with friends and fellow anthropologists. I will be presenting some of my research on Twitter and Sri Lankan politics on a panel entitled “Media and Mobility” chaired by Dr. Sahana Udupa of the Max Planck Institute.

A good friend recently sent me this map depicting the main countries and states of origin of Silicon Valley’s tech workers.

It’s interesting to note the small size of both western European countries and African countries next to the comparatively much larger Asian countries.  (You could be forgiven for responding “duh” to that statement).  Given my research, I can’t help by notice that Sri Lanka is lumped in with “other Asia” for now.  It’s no surprise that US states like New York, Texas and Illinois are shown to send significant amounts of workers, given their sizable populations.

I do find myself wondering about exactly what data went into this visualization; how are “brains” and “talent” defined for the purpose of surveys such as these? Are we looking at a map that covers all types of labor performed in the tech industry, from cleaning to driving to serving food to programming to marketing? Or does the data compiled here represent only those workers who are considered to be the “intellectual” driving force behind apps and other innovations?

Venturebeat says this map shows why so many entrepreneurs care about immigration reform.  I’m sure that’s true, since we all know the Silicon Valley couldn’t survive without foreign workers.  However, I’d caution against drawing any overly optimistic or feel-good type conclusions from that.  As Kate Losse pointed out in her memoir The Boy Kings, there was a racialized (and gendered) hierarchy at the core of the start-up scene around the time when Facebook was still the new kid on the block, and white men were at the top of it, with men from South and East Asian countries performing much of the mid-level labor.  Perhaps the factoid presented here that a third of start-ups were founded by Indian-Americans represents a change since the time that she wrote her book – but it would be interesting to know more about who founded the other two thirds, and what percentage of the Indian-American community as a whole the founders represent.

Finally, given what I am researching, it would be interesting to see a visualization of the other side of this equation: where Silicon Valley is sending jobs and where outsourced labor is performed.  (I’m sure such a thing must exist).