Hermes was a Bird and I Bit his Bowstring

A few weeks ago I was talking to the editor of an anthropological journal and I said that it’s interesting how my work was received very differently as a presentation than as a written text.  I was talking about the flow of the narrative, but the editor just said, “Yeah, they’re two different animals.  People can be more critical of written documents because they can go back over and read the parts again.”  That’s strange, I thought.  My impression was not that the reviewers of my manuscript were more critical than the audience of my presentation, but that they took it really literally (rather than thinking through the metaphorical elements that structured the argument).

What a non-anthropological thing for them to say.  Lol.  I guess in anthropology you don’t say that writing is inherently superior, you just kinda do it.

I have ethical issues.  At work I’m writing a benchmarking report retain recent college graduates.  The idea is that Miami (my city) needs to reverse the “brain drain” of smarties leaving the region and retain young professionals and entrepreneurs because the economy (specifically, the ongoing shift to the creative/information economy), so I’m researching initiatives developed in six other cities across the US that address this problem and writing a preliminary report.  My office was asked to do this by the Knight Foundation.  They’re kinda a big deal and we’re a new office, so I guess the thought process might be that it’s a good chance to get our name out.  So we’re doing this preliminary report and then we’ll ask Knight for the funds to do a full study – maybe even with surveys and focus-groups – that can made formal recommendations for the city.

The thing is, I tend to think in terms of colonialism and, well, this is pretty much what colonialism looks like.  The entire rational of the project is to raise Miami up within the economic hierarchy – to strategically engage in the old struggle if establishing a place as a metropolis within the world system (or, at least, closer to the core in relation to the periphery).  The goal, then, is to invest in (what will grow into) a stronger professional and elite class.  And we do that by making Miami more attractive for the young professionals. 

What does it mean to shift a city’s resources towards materializing an “attractive” social landscape targeted for a professional and entrepreneurial class of young people (and draining these “human resources” from other places)?  Well, I guess it just means that social reality continues to be enacted through a uneven process of history (or power) in ways that disenfranchise poor people, especially if they don’t have the same access to higher education.  Actually, one of the practices I’m finding in this benchmarking study is engaging students and young professionals through civic engagement (volunteering, service-learning, etc).  I have very little confidence that this will have positive social effect.  Rather, I would expect that the general thrust would be a playing out of class anxieties that effects a so-called “social justice” that ultimately reenacts and extends the process of privileged groups deciding what the lives of oppressed people should look like according to elite norms and assumptions about how reality happens.

But then again, what can Miami do besides compete to move towards the colonial core?  Wouldn’t the other option be decline?  As Judith Halberstam once said, ‘when I have only two options I try to think about what else might be possible’ (or something like that).  The entire orientation behind the “retaining graduates” concept/strategy betrays a fundamental lack of imagination – actually, scratch that, because this benchmarking study itself is an exercise in imagination – it is a flexing of a colonial imagination.  Sure, coming up with a radical alternative will probably require more work than this study and I’m not going to pretend I have “the” answer.  But the point is that desiring those radical alternatives is a feasible starting point for a process of collective imagination, just as much as this study is a process of collective imagination.  We might not have all the theories we need, but otherwise we’re working with ones that we know are violent, so we might as well try.

Anyway, as I said I’m writing this post because I have ethical issues.  Should I make the report bad?  Can I even make it bad without making it also look like I did it on purpose?  Could I even, on a basic emotional level, hand a bad paper in (I certainly was trained not to!)?  Ultimately, I don’t even think that would work because even if I did (and even if I got away with it), once it was in the hands of my very capable coworker and supervisor, they’d just make it good.  Should I turn the report in and just say, “I have major ethical issues with this document and fully believe that it is part of a colonial process?”

The other day, I asked my supervisor if anything could come out of this report other than gentrification.  He told me he would be surprised if even that came out of it.  So there’s that.

I said that there are subjected bodies of knowledge that reproduce themselves on the margins of colonial society that have important things to say about the dominant discourse.  I said that these social memories extend farther back in time than I would have thought imaginable.  I said that entire philosophies, frameworks for reality and society predicated on entirely different assumptions, have been maintained in these spaces.  I said that what we don’t know is far more important than what we do.

One person asks me how I know the people I work with are “authentic” Indians.

Another asks me about the “accuracy” of oral histories.

Whatever.

The other day a student at the university I work at called me “bro” in an email.  This is a marked escalation from the use of “my friend” in this students’ previous emails.  Just to be clear, I know I’ve met this student in person at one point because his name is on the sign-in sheet for an anti-oppression workshop my office ran- but otherwise I have no idea who this person is.

Oh, the life of a university administrator.

Today I workshoped a (very) small group about anti-racism at the private university I work at.  Two of the students were Australian.  I don’t know much about racism in Australia, but it’s definitely a settler state.

Although apparently Australia had a national “Sorry Day” to apologize for the historical mistreatment of Aboriginal peoples and in particular the attempted forced assimilation of the Aboriginal population.  It commemorates the “Stolen Generation.”

And afterwards when I looked up “Sorry Day Australia,” I pulled up a government website that began:

Warning. This article may contain the names and images of Aboriginal and Islander people now deceased. It also contains links to sites that may use images of Aboriginal and Islander people now deceased.

While its nice that they’re clearly engaging with Indigenous people on their own terms, I didn’t read the article because I figure if groups of people might have issues with the names of their deceased ancestors being read then I probably shouldn’t read it.

Oh man, did you hear about how the City of Berkeley is in the process of removing their $3 million in assets from Wells Fargo and relocating them into a local institution (either a credit union or a community-based bank)?  I mean, its kind of a bourgeoisie strategy but its neat that this is a conversation that’s happening within government.

I just wanted to point out a couple things about the article.  1) Wells Fargo’s defensive stance:

“Over the past three years, Wells Fargo has donated more than $3 million to 89 nonprofits in Berkeley… And less than two percent of homeowner-occupied loans in our servicing portfolio have proceeded to foreclosure sale,” said Wells Fargo spokesman Ruben Pulido.

Eff you Wells Fargo.  Nonprofits aren’t things outside of capitalism that accomplish some kind of class-neutral social justice if you only pump them full of money.  Most of them tend to mirror the organization of business and participate in the dislocation of control away from the community and into the hands of an elite class.  They reproduce dependency, by which I mean the process where communities’ resources and labor are exploited to the extent that said communities ultimately are not able to socially reproduce on their own.  In fact, the people who benefit the most from nonprofits (the CEO’s and other high level staff) are themselves most often outsiders to the communities that they work in.  So again, Eff you Wells Fargo for this weak-ass “but we’re the good guys!” argument.

2) Reinvesting in local institutions is a better thing, and it’s certainly a relatively simple and cost-effective thing, but its not necessarily enough.  The prime benefactors will still be the elite (albeit the local elite rather than the national or global elite) and continue to have the most impact within the higher echelons of society - that is, the people who stand to make the most money and be the least exploited.  The City of Berkeley needs to start talking about how this will benefit the general public, and especially the counterpublic (e.g., poor people).

3) “Remember to vote with your dollars”?  Right, because impoverished people already have too much of a vote as it is.  Voting with your dollars is a great way to think about how the political, social, and economic inequalities of society are interconnected and interdependent - but not a great way of practicing social justice.

Step 1: Strengthen local institutions

Step 2: Vote with your participatory democracy

Step 3: ????

Step 4: Community control!

The best kinds of “metaphors” are the ones that are literal:

State Bill Outlaws Use of Fetuses in Food Industry

So not exactly what I was writing about in my last post, but an interesting aside nonetheless.  Yay capitalism!

Some things I’ve been thinking about:

One thing that always bothers me about non-violence is that it’s not even a thing.  I want to say, “Do you just not respect what you eat?”

There is an anthropology book, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, which discusses (in part) Bolivian tin miners.  The miners often talk about a being that lives in the mines and consumes the workers.  The author of this book argues this belief arises because miners theorize the conditions of capitalism from the vantage point of their colonization and exploitation, then code these theories in their particular cultural idiom (in other words, that they communicate these ideas within a particular symbolic structure that is different from mine).

I was a vegetarian when I read this.  I didn’t eat meat because factory farms are wrong, because they mechanistically produce suffering and death both for the animals that are eaten and the people that work in them.  I was also struggling with what it means to try (and inevitably fail) to live ethically within colonial-capitalism.  I had read how people who go hungry, who die in famines, are often living in places that produce food for the global market.  But they cannot afford that food.  I had read about how Coke hired paramilitary forces to murder union organizers in Columbia.  I read about how clothes were produced in inhumane sweatshops, often with child labor.  Every day that capitalism continues, I figure, is more hunger, more violence, more death.

I can’t run from these realities because late capitalism itself can’t be escaped from in any meaningful way. So I spent a lot of time thinking about my basic, daily actions, like my subsistence, and how they reproduced suffering.

There is blood on everything you buy.  If you buy responsibly there might be less blood, and the stench might be faded, but it’s there.  A little rinsed off, maybe.  In the dominant culture in the US we’re trained to ignore blood, to remove ourselves from the process and pretend that it isn’t there while we consume it.

I could shop at farmers markets and buy fair trade.  But I don’t have a lot of money, so even when this is feasible it doesn’t have much impact.  And even if it did, I’m not sure that I would be resisting capitalism effectively or if I would just be buying my own morality, my own peace of mind.  I could live “outside” of capitalism, say in something like an ecovillage.  I could grow my own food.  I could live with people who make clothing.  But again, would that be an effective strategy for dismantling global capitalism or would it just be  a way to make myself feel better?

After I thought about The Devil and Commodity Fetishism for a long time I started eating meat again. I figured that although I had been vegetarian or vegan for five or so years, I had never actually ceased consuming the flesh of others – their blood and their labor.  Sometimes figuratively, other times less so.

When we eat, we put the death of things into our bodies.  As the dead things slide down our intestinal tracks, our bodies convert what they can into nutrients.  This is not a new idea.  There are Indigenous people in the US and I’m sure elsewhere as well who speak about life and death like this.

When we consume – not just food but goods as well – we build or stylize bodies and construct beings that can interact with others.  If you would believe queer or poststructural theory, there is no natural or pre-social “self” prior to this process.  It just so happens that in the US, our formation as social subjects is contingent upon capitalist consumption.

Cannibalism is an interesting construct.  Historically, I’ve been told, the idea was a label used to vilify groups of people, to make them into “savages,” generally with little if any regard to those peoples’ actual cultural practices.

Certain concepts that help us orient ourselves to reality, such as violence, oppression, murder, colonialism, racism, capitalism, become things that exists in our bodies. They are also social realities that organize our eating.  These ideas live in our bowels, in and all over our bodies.  We are the living, breathing creations of colonial-capitalism and we are bio-mechanical parts that keep it going.  We are the meat and the people that eat it – if disproportionately the latter.  The separation between what we are and what we eat is a social fiction that helps us preserve our sense of good and evil, our sense of right, and our ability to live with ourselves while we live in colonial-capitalism.

I try to think about that when I’m eating, especially meat.  When I’m dressing.  When I’m shopping.  When I’m watching television. When I’m sitting in a chair in front of a table with cups and paper and a computer. Like in most rituals, I don’t actually think of all these things all the time.  But it doesn’t really matter because it was already there to begin with.