Afterword to "Cruelty, Suffering, Imagination: The Lessons of J. M. Coetzee": Anthropologists as Public Intellectuals, Again

Anthropologists' interest in literature and novelists' interest in cultural criticism converge in J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003) and in these four "In Focus" responses to the book. Recent discussions of ethnographic writing seem to have prepared anthropologists for the generic innovations of the novel, leaving us free to take up the pressing moral problems that Coetzee rehearses. To speak to a broad public about such issues remains a challenge for anthropologists, who would do well to study the ways novelists have found to make their political voices heard.     

The Humanity of Animals and the Animality of Humans: A View from Biological Anthropology Inspired by J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello

In his novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), J. M. Coetzee's title character espouses philosophical perspectives on cruelty and the human condition in a series of fictionalized lectures. In particular, she takes on the question of human cruelty to animals. As novelist, Coetzee relies on lyrical statements about the nature of cruelty, analogies between the atrocities of fascism and factory farms, and ethical elitism to address these issues. In this article, I use anthropological data to investigate such constructed notions of "human cruelty" and "human nature." I end with a discussion of cross-cultural variation in animal use by humans and of the current animal rights movement. The goal of this article is to engage, anthropologically, perspectives on cruelty in human natures and our relations with other animals.     

Coetzee on South Africa's Past: Remembering in the Time of Forgetting

As an intellectual figure in South Africa, J. M. Coetzee has consistently engaged with the politics of the past, particularly the contemporary ethical ramifications of the colonial past, alongside the more recent and bitter history of oppression under apartheid. As archaeologists, we aim to excavate these engagements through his novels and essays, particularly his long-standing concerns with the Khoekhoe communities of the Cape. In South Africa today, the tensions between remembering and forgetting are palpable and, in the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), we suggest that not all forgetting can be cast as therapeutic. Throughout his complex relationships with the nation's history, Coetzee foregrounds the colonial past and reiterates the ethical responsibilities of remembering so that the patterns of the past are not repeated.     

The Twice-Killed: Imagining Protest Suicide

The inspiration I take from J. M. Coetzee's book Elizabeth Costello (2003) is his advocacy of imagining as an alternative to rational thought. Imagining, as I understand him, is mindwork that engages the body as an experiential and metaphorical site. I apply this notion of imagining to suicides conducted in the service of political protest: The fatal hunger strike of ten prisoners in Northern Ireland in 1981 and Jan Palach's self-immolation in Prague in 1969. Three questions direct the exploration of their trajectories: What feeds the hope for the effectiveness of protest suicides? How do they use the body as a performance site? Do such suicides call for an ethics of attentiveness?     

Introduction to "Moral Economies, State Spaces, and Categorical Violence"

By studying and writing about social revolutions and popular protest, James Scott has provided anthropologists and social theorists with a wide-ranging analytical vocabulary for speaking about peace and its inseparable twin—violence. His particular area of expertise has been the arts of repressive peace, and the artfulness of those who elude or defy such silencing technologies. The publication of The Moral Economy of the Peasant in 1976 initiated the first interactions between Scott's unique brand of political theory and anthropology in the shared topical space of peasant studies and the shared geographic space of Asian studies. The authors of this "In Focus" have assembled this special collection to celebrate and evaluate those and subsequent interactions covering a quarter of a century and spanning the publication of at least three other books: Weapons of the Weak (1985), Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), and Seeing Like a State (1998).     

Coetzee, Agamben, and the Passion of Abu Ghraib

In this article, I address J. M. Coetzee's chapter "The Problem of Evil" in Elizabeth Costello (2003); specifically, I discuss the danger of texts that attempt to represent evil letting loose that evil in the world. This insight is pushed by connecting it to the problem of sovereignty as put forth in Agamben's Homo Sacer (1998). To demonstrate the connection of evil and sovereignty, three different sets of images are analyzed that circulated in the global public sphere in 2004: frames from the Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ (2004); pictures of the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners from Abu Ghraib; and beheading videos of U.S. citizens and other nationals working for the U.S.-led occupation forces in Iraq. Different explanations have been given for their circulation, but it is argued, following Agamben's notion of "homo sacer," that they are contestations over sovereignty of Iraq and more widely of the Middle East.     

God,Fatherland, Home: revealing the dark side of our anthropological virtue

The article uses ethnographic research on right-wing anti-government movements in Bolivia conducted at the height of social conflict and cultural violence in 2008 and 2009 to reflect more generally on the relationship between anthropological research, ethical commitment, and the politics of knowledge. The article first describes the relevant epistemological and political contexts in which engaged anthropology emerged as an important disciplinary current. It then goes on to consider how and why the author's research on right-wing political practice in Bolivia diverged from the disciplinary expectations of engaged anthropology. After reflecting on the implications of this shift, the article concludes by arguing for a methodological recalibration that allows anthropologists to take seriously the ideologies and cultural logics of contemporary right-wing mobilization, particularly social and political movements that are animated by what Edmund Burke described as ‘just prejudice’.     

Lessons from Appalachia in the 20th Century: Poverty, Power, and the "Grassroots"

Through an exploration of settings in eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia, and western North Carolina, this article explores lessons that poor and working class people have to offer about grassroots activism in response to processes of economic restructuring and political disenf ranchisement. In addition to displacing simplistic perspectives on Appalachia, the purpose of this discussion is to consider how anthropologists might more effectively convey the insights of—not simply about—the peoples we study into public policy and debates on "the poor. [Keywords: Appalachia, activism, poverty, economic restructuring]     

Castration Anxiety Physicians, “Do No Harm,” and Chemical Sterilization Laws

Chemical castration laws, such as one recently adopted in the U.S. State of Louisiana, raise challenging ethical concerns for physicians. Even if such interventions were to prove efficacious, which is far from certain, they would still raise troubling concerns regarding the degree of medical risk that may be imposed upon prisoners in the name of public safety as well as the appropriate role for physicians and other health care professionals in the administration of pharmaceuticals to competent prisoners over the inmates’ unequivocal objections. This paper argues that the concerns raised by chemical castration are grave enough that, until they are adequately addressed by policymakers, physicians ought not to participate in the process.     

Vaccine mandates,value pluralism,and policy diversity

Political communities across the world have recently sought to tackle rising rates of vaccine hesitancy and refusal, by implementing coercive immunization programs, or by making existing immunization programs more coercive. Many academics and advocates of public health have applauded these policy developments, and they have invoked ethical reasons for implementing or strengthening vaccine mandates. Others have criticized these policies on ethical grounds, for undermining liberty, and as symptoms of broader government overreach. But such arguments often obscure or abstract away from the diverse values that are relevant to the ethical justifications of particular political communities’ vaccine‐mandate policies. We argue for an expansive conception of the normative issues relevant to deciding whether and how to establish or reform vaccine mandates, and we propose a schema by which to organize our thoughts about the ways in which different kinds of vaccine‐mandate policies implicate various values.     

Radical memories: an interview with John H. Moore and documents from a communist anthropologist’s past

Dialectical Anthropology - Though American anthropologists have long engaged in radical political activities, there remains a poorly documented history of American Marxist anthropologists’...     

Managing memories in post-war Sarajevo: individuals, bad memories, and new wars

In the wake of the 1992-5 war in Bosnia a number of anthropologists have written about the role of memory in creating and sustaining hostility in the region. One trend focuses on the authenticity and power of personal memories of Second World War violence and on the possibility of transmitting such memories down the generations to the 1990s. Another focuses less on memory as a phenomenon which determines human action than on the 'politics of memory': the political dynamics which play on and channel individuals' memories. In this article I use the example of three Sarajevo Bosniacs whom I have known since the pre-war 1980s in order to propose the merit of a third, additional, focus on the individual as an active manager of his or her own memories. I briefly consider whether work by Maurice Bloch on the nature of semantic and of autobiographic memory supports a strong version of the first interpretative trend, or whether, as I suggest, the conclusions of this work instead leave room for individual memory management and for change down the generations.     

Struggles for Indigenous Education and Self-Determination: Culture, Context, and Collaboration

These comments—by a Singaporean and an American—-focus on four themes: roles of anthropologists; the pedagogy of culture; challenges in combining Indigenous and mainstream epistemologies; and reciprocal influences between social and political contexts, and struggles for Indigenous education and self-determination.     

Equity, Utility, and the Marketplace: Emerging Ethical Issues of Umbilical Cord Blood Banking in Australia

Over the past decade, umbilical cord blood (UCB) has routinely been used as a source of haematopoietic stem cells for allogeneic stem cell transplants in the treatment of a range of malignant and non-malignant conditions affecting children and adults. UCB banks are a necessary part of the UCB transplant program, but their establishment has raised a number of important scientific, ethical and political issues. This paper examines the scientific and clinical evidence that has provided the basis for the establishment of UCB banks. We also discuss the major ethical issues that UCB banks raise, including ownership of cord blood, processes for obtaining consent for its collection and storage, and confidentiality. Finally, we review other concerns about commercial non-altruistic banking, including concerns about social justice, equity of access and equity of care.     

Bioethics for human geneticists: models for reasoning and methods for teaching.

The ethical issues raised by the Human Genome Project (HGP) and by human genetics in general are not entirely novel. In fact, the ethical issues surrounding genetic research and the provision of genetic services fit into the evolution of bioethics, a field of inquiry which has its roots in concerns of the 1970s, concerns about the dignity and self-determination of individuals and about the development of medical technologies. Although bioethics has been largely occupied with patient-centered concerns, attention is currently shifting toward socially oriented issues, such as the justice of the existing health-care system. Genetic counseling has already incorporated many of the lessons of early bioethics and, as a profession, adheres to a consultand-centered ethic which reflects the values incorporated into the doctrine of informed consent, which is a cornerstone of bioethics. The mandate of the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Program of the HGP--to anticipate ethical problems arising from advances in genetics and to educate the public about genetics--reflects not only the nonpaternalistic approach of early bioethics but also bioethics' increasing attention to the ethical import of systemic and institutional factors, as well as an anticipatory and preventive approach to dealing with ethical concerns. Because bioethics has so much to contribute to current consideration of ethical issues in human genetics, it is important to provide training in ethics to those working in the field. Guidelines for using a case-oriented approach are suggested.     

Believing in a secular age: Anthropology,sociology and religious experience1

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age generated a great deal of attention—and has stimulated important debates—among a diverse range of scholars in sociology, history, politics, religious studies and to a lesser extent, anthropologists. Much of the debate has focused on the implications of Taylor’s work for the so‐called secularisation thesis and the place (or non‐place) of religion in the so‐called public sphere. The essays in this volume arise less out of such concerns and more from Taylor’s discussion of secularism in a third, ‘experiential’ sense. Each paper addresses the question of what it is like to ‘believe’ (or not ‘believe’) in the modern world. Among other things the authors of the essays published in this Special Issue are concerned to develop better understandings of the conditions under which belief and unbelief may be experienced as open, rather than closed, to the possibility of other ontological construals, thereby building on Taylor’s insights into the phenomenology of modern secularism.     

The idea is to change the state,not the 'conceptual' terminology

'Transnationalism', 'globalization', etc. have been adopted by the postmodern anthropologists as providing conceptual evidence for a world that defies understanding in historical, political economy, or structural, terms. Thus, for Dan Rabinowitz (2001) ERS 24(1) 'subjectivity' reigns, transnationalism displaces the state in analysis, and the Palestinian citizens of Israel are discussed as 'a trapped minority'. I critique Rabinowitz's essentialist subjectivity which denies the Palestinian citizens rational, objective, comprehension of their situation, while emphasizing the key role of Israeli statism, alongside the state's welfare and citizens' rights components, and show that our common future lies in our joint, Jewish-Arab, active opposition to Israeli external and internal militaristic-nationalistic policies.     

"Race"—Still an Issue for Physical Anthropology? Results of Polish Studies Seen in the Light of the U.S. Findings

The racial paradigm, which became rooted in physical anthropology at its very beginning, was, for decades, treated as a concept needing no verification. It was only in the mid-20th century that the first attempts were made to question the usefulness of the race concept in describing our species variation. Since then, an ever growing number of anthropologists, particularly in the United States, have rejected the concept (nearly seventy percent in 1999). In Poland, the situation is different—in the 2001 study, the race concept was rejected by only 25 percent; the remaining respondents differing widely as to the accepted meaning of race. Unlike the U.S. anthropologists, Polish anthropologists tend to regard race as a term without taxonomic value, often as a substitute for population. The discrepancy may stem from differences in the traditions of anthropological schools, the differing sociopolitical histories, education, semantics, and possible attitudinal factors. [Keywords: race, human variation, subspecies, anthropological schools]     

How "Caucasoids" got such big crania and why they shrank. From Morton to Rushton

In the 19th century measurements of cranial capacity by Morton and others supported a "Caucasoid>Mongoloid>Negroid" hierarchy of intelligence. This continued through most of the 20th century but was challenged by a nonhierarchical view originating with Boas. Beginning in the 1980s Rushton correlated cranial and IQ measurements and presented a hierarchy with "Mongoloids" at the top. Each of these periods relates to its social context: the 19th-century hierarchy paralleled the height of European world domination; the nonhierarchy of the 20th century reflected world wars, worldwide depression, and the breakup of empires; the "Mongoloid>Caucasoid>Negroid" hierarchy followed the economic success of several Asian nations. Morton's cranial ranking was the result of his sampling error and his acceptance of the hierarchical thinking of his time. But how is it possible for Rushton to support the M>C>N ordering while using the data of several anthropologists who have rejected racial hierarchies on empirical grounds? The answer to this question involves a critique of Rushton's use of the race concept, his aggregation of diverse populations into three traditional races, his claim to explain differences in "cultural achievements" on the basis of variation in brain size, and a number of other problems. The study concludes by noting that the major consequence of these hierarchies is the apparent justification for the exploitation of those at the bottom.     

Developing drugs for the developing world: an economic,legal, moral,and political dilemma

This paper discusses the economic, legal, moral, and political difficulties in developing drugs for the developing world. It argues that large, global pharmaceutical companies have social responsibilities to the developing world, and that they may exercise these responsibilities by investing in research and development related to diseases that affect developing nations, offering discounts on drug prices, and initiating drug giveaways. However, these social responsibilities are not absolute requirements and may be balanced against other obligations and commitments in light of economic, social, legal, political, and other conditions. How a company decides to exercise its social responsibilities to the developing world depends on (1) the prospects for a reasonable profit and (2) the prospects for a productive business environment. Developing nations can either help or hinder the pharmaceutical industry's efforts to exercise social responsibility through various policies and practices. To insure that companies can make a reasonable profit, developing nations should honor pharmaceutical product patents and adhere to international intellectual property treaties, such as the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement. To insure the companies have a good business environment, developing nations should try to promote the rule of law, ethical business practices, stable currencies, reliable banking systems, free and open markets, democracy, and other conditions conducive to business. Overall, this paper advocates for reciprocity and cooperation between pharmaceutical companies and developing nations to address the problem of developing drugs for the developing world. In pursuing this cooperative approach, developing nations may use a variety of other techniques to encourage pharmaceutical companies to act responsibly, such as subsidizing pharmaceutical research, helping to design and implement research protocols, providing a guaranteed market, and bulk buying.