TH #8 Applying Anthropology
Towards Home #8
Applying Anthropology
November, 2000
The public writer … is someone who knows how to write and who lends his talent to others so that they can express the things they know, on one level, far better than the person who writes them down. Sociologists are in a position that is unique. They are not like other intellectuals; they are primarily -- though not always -- people who know how to listen, how to decipher what they hear and how to transcribe and transmit it.
- Pierre Bordieu in The Nation
Say “anthropologist” and usually what comes to most minds is a white guy in a jungle hat, venturing out among the non-white natives to learn about how all the weird things they do don’t seem weird to them at all. I decided to get a graduate degree in anthropology when I learned that today’s anthropologists don’t necessarily fit the stereotype. Two newspaper articles in particular influenced that decision because they described the various ways people were using traditional anthropological methods (especially long interviews and “hanging out” with people, a.k.a. participant observation) and theories (cultural relativism, like the above weird-things example, political economic theories of power) to do some very practical, helpful things in the world.
The first article was about an anthropologist doing research among welfare recipients in New York. Doing her research, she stood in welfare lines and talked to people. She got to know the system so well that she would assist the people she’d talk to in the waiting rooms, advising them about how to navigate the bureaucracy. Besides this personal, one-on-one assistance, she used the reports to advocate on a policy level, addressing the larger, root-of-the-problem issues. The other article was about an anthropologist who organized seminars between Russians and people in the former Soviet states after the Soviet Union split apart. The seminars were designed to give participants a chance to air their grievances and talk about stereotypes and prejudices, a first step toward resolving some of the on-going conflicts among the people. These images of anthropologists doing very practical work challenged my ivory-tower perception of the field, and the education I received at American University helped me understand a very wide range of applications for anthropological work as well as the accompanying complexities and complications of doing this type of work.
Perhaps one of the most important lessons I learned while studying at AU was recognition of the outsider’s role in someone else’s struggle. In some cases, the analysis of the anthropologist’s role became overly self-conscious (e.g. post-modernism) for my taste, but other cases exposed me to examples of anthropologist-as-activist, researcher-as-advocate.
In some ways, my current role with EarthRights International (ERI) fits this model of applied anthropologists; in other ways, it is a long way off. The fact is, I haven’t felt very anthropological for a while. When I picture myself as an anthropologist, I envision “joining” a community, perhaps living in a rural village, participating in the villagers’ daily life. The choices of communities to work with in the Burmese democracy movement are more diverse than the languages of a New York City ATM. We often joke that it is the “alphabet revolution” because of the abundance of acronym-ed organizations involved [ERI, ABSDF, NLD (including NLD-LA, NLD-Youth, and the allied but unaffiliated SNLD), KSNG, OSI, ECHRE … you get the point.] The work I now do with ERI depends on our close ties to three of the major ethnic groups, and loose ties to a dozen others.
I am working among this flurry of identities, and my geographical location, doing Burma-focused work from across its border in Thailand, further muddles my attempt to “adapt culturally” to my adopted setting – a long way from the relative simplicity of dropping into an isolated village. Thus much of my social life has led to a focus on Thailand. I have learned Thai language rather than any of the languages of Burma (e.g. Burmese, Karen, or Shan), and the daily life issues like food, pedestrian norms, and polite public interaction (such as knowing the importance of social status and the accompanying appropriate behavior) are necessarily Thai-focused. On the other hand, almost all of my work-related interaction is with exiled women and men from Burma, and their lives and the lives of their loved ones are at stake, imposing a constant urgency to every aspect of our work.
Sometimes I feel like I am drifting smoothly among these identities; at other times I feel tossed about – something like a fabric softener dryer sheet might feel. Over this last year, that tossed-about feeling has decreased. When I moved from BurmaNet to ERI in January, I shifted from being a generalist –BurmaNet attempts to cover all aspects of Burmese politics – to more of a specialist – ERI has focussed, location-specific projects like a pipeline or a dam. The result has been more intense relations with fewer communities.
Prospects for future anthropological work have been opening up for the past couple of months. In the next few months, I hope to decrease the work I’m doing on the dam project (the topic of my previous Towards Home) and start working on the issue of transitional justice – what will happen to the military personnel in Burma when there is a transition to democracy, e.g. trials, truth commissions, investigations into abuses and corruption, etc.. A recent trip to Mae Sot on the Thai-Burma border gave me the opportunity to start doing interviews with some Burmese folks about the issue. True to the example of the welfare anthropologist mentioned above, I was able to do some long interviews while also helping out with some everyday needs of the people I was interviewing.
I timed my trip to Mae Sot to coincide with a conference attended by a medical doctor from South Africa who has a critical perspective on the transition to democracy in her home country. I learned a lot from her, and I also took the opportunity to interview a friend and colleague who I thought would have unique insight on this topic. Sit Naing Thu (not his real name – I didn’t ask him permission to talk about him in this newsletter) was very active in the student demonstrations in 1988, and over the decade that followed he was detained as a political prisoner on two occasions for a total of seven years. Immediately following both arrests he was severely tortured, and he still suffers physically and emotionally from the brutality of the military intelligence personnel. We talked about his years in prison over the course of a three hour interview as well as more informally during group discussions with other activists visiting for the conference. Sit Naing Thu’s attitude toward transitional justice is complex, and he said at the end of his interview that he wanted me to give him some time to think over these issues that he had not considered so thoroughly before and get back to him. That response corresponds to one of my first goals: to generate more discussion and debate about these issues.
I extended my trip to Mae Sot for a couple of days at the end of the conference for another task. ERI was putting together a report to submit to the International Labor Organization about the Burmese military’s continued use of forced labor. I learned that three deserters from the Burmese army had recently snuck into Thailand and were in Mae Sot. Deserters are generally hard to get access to because they are very scared of being returned to Burma. However, the information they are able to provide about the military’s abuses are helpful for human rights reports because their testimony from the “abuser” perspective often confirms the information from the villager, or “abused” perspective. All three deserters confirmed that forced labor is, indeed, on-going, despite the Burmese regime’s claim that all forced labor was stopped in June.
One of my favorite anthropological truths is that the most insightful information frequently arrives unexpectedly. In my mind, I did not relate these interviews with army deserters with transitional justice, the focus of the rest of my trip to Mae Sot. However, at the end of the second interview, I asked Aung Kyaw (also not his real name) the standard exit question, “is there anything you want to tell me that I didn’t ask about?” His answer surprised me.
“Yes,” he said. “I want revenge for the beatings I endured.”
And the interview ended there. I’d never had any other response besides, “no, nothing” to that question in other interviews. I was caught off guard and did not think quick enough to follow up with further questions that would have given me good insight into the issue of transitional justice. Listening again to the tape recording, I realize that I compartmentalized my role in these interviews with army deserters, limiting myself to the task of getting information about forced labor for the ILO report. In his concluding statement, Aung Kyaw reminded me of the interrelatedness of so many of the issues I am addressing, and the need to be prepared to make those connections on the spot.
The public writer … is someone who knows how to write and who lends his talent to others so that they can express the things they know, on one level, far better than the person who writes them down. Sociologists are in a position that is unique. They are not like other intellectuals; they are primarily -- though not always -- people who know how to listen, how to decipher what they hear and how to transcribe and transmit it.
- Pierre Bordieu in The Nation
Say “anthropologist” and usually what comes to most minds is a white guy in a jungle hat, venturing out among the non-white natives to learn about how all the weird things they do don’t seem weird to them at all. I decided to get a graduate degree in anthropology when I learned that today’s anthropologists don’t necessarily fit the stereotype. Two newspaper articles in particular influenced that decision because they described the various ways people were using traditional anthropological methods (especially long interviews and “hanging out” with people, a.k.a. participant observation) and theories (cultural relativism, like the above weird-things example, political economic theories of power) to do some very practical, helpful things in the world.
The first article was about an anthropologist doing research among welfare recipients in New York. Doing her research, she stood in welfare lines and talked to people. She got to know the system so well that she would assist the people she’d talk to in the waiting rooms, advising them about how to navigate the bureaucracy. Besides this personal, one-on-one assistance, she used the reports to advocate on a policy level, addressing the larger, root-of-the-problem issues. The other article was about an anthropologist who organized seminars between Russians and people in the former Soviet states after the Soviet Union split apart. The seminars were designed to give participants a chance to air their grievances and talk about stereotypes and prejudices, a first step toward resolving some of the on-going conflicts among the people. These images of anthropologists doing very practical work challenged my ivory-tower perception of the field, and the education I received at American University helped me understand a very wide range of applications for anthropological work as well as the accompanying complexities and complications of doing this type of work.
Perhaps one of the most important lessons I learned while studying at AU was recognition of the outsider’s role in someone else’s struggle. In some cases, the analysis of the anthropologist’s role became overly self-conscious (e.g. post-modernism) for my taste, but other cases exposed me to examples of anthropologist-as-activist, researcher-as-advocate.
In some ways, my current role with EarthRights International (ERI) fits this model of applied anthropologists; in other ways, it is a long way off. The fact is, I haven’t felt very anthropological for a while. When I picture myself as an anthropologist, I envision “joining” a community, perhaps living in a rural village, participating in the villagers’ daily life. The choices of communities to work with in the Burmese democracy movement are more diverse than the languages of a New York City ATM. We often joke that it is the “alphabet revolution” because of the abundance of acronym-ed organizations involved [ERI, ABSDF, NLD (including NLD-LA, NLD-Youth, and the allied but unaffiliated SNLD), KSNG, OSI, ECHRE … you get the point.] The work I now do with ERI depends on our close ties to three of the major ethnic groups, and loose ties to a dozen others.
I am working among this flurry of identities, and my geographical location, doing Burma-focused work from across its border in Thailand, further muddles my attempt to “adapt culturally” to my adopted setting – a long way from the relative simplicity of dropping into an isolated village. Thus much of my social life has led to a focus on Thailand. I have learned Thai language rather than any of the languages of Burma (e.g. Burmese, Karen, or Shan), and the daily life issues like food, pedestrian norms, and polite public interaction (such as knowing the importance of social status and the accompanying appropriate behavior) are necessarily Thai-focused. On the other hand, almost all of my work-related interaction is with exiled women and men from Burma, and their lives and the lives of their loved ones are at stake, imposing a constant urgency to every aspect of our work.
Sometimes I feel like I am drifting smoothly among these identities; at other times I feel tossed about – something like a fabric softener dryer sheet might feel. Over this last year, that tossed-about feeling has decreased. When I moved from BurmaNet to ERI in January, I shifted from being a generalist –BurmaNet attempts to cover all aspects of Burmese politics – to more of a specialist – ERI has focussed, location-specific projects like a pipeline or a dam. The result has been more intense relations with fewer communities.
Prospects for future anthropological work have been opening up for the past couple of months. In the next few months, I hope to decrease the work I’m doing on the dam project (the topic of my previous Towards Home) and start working on the issue of transitional justice – what will happen to the military personnel in Burma when there is a transition to democracy, e.g. trials, truth commissions, investigations into abuses and corruption, etc.. A recent trip to Mae Sot on the Thai-Burma border gave me the opportunity to start doing interviews with some Burmese folks about the issue. True to the example of the welfare anthropologist mentioned above, I was able to do some long interviews while also helping out with some everyday needs of the people I was interviewing.
I timed my trip to Mae Sot to coincide with a conference attended by a medical doctor from South Africa who has a critical perspective on the transition to democracy in her home country. I learned a lot from her, and I also took the opportunity to interview a friend and colleague who I thought would have unique insight on this topic. Sit Naing Thu (not his real name – I didn’t ask him permission to talk about him in this newsletter) was very active in the student demonstrations in 1988, and over the decade that followed he was detained as a political prisoner on two occasions for a total of seven years. Immediately following both arrests he was severely tortured, and he still suffers physically and emotionally from the brutality of the military intelligence personnel. We talked about his years in prison over the course of a three hour interview as well as more informally during group discussions with other activists visiting for the conference. Sit Naing Thu’s attitude toward transitional justice is complex, and he said at the end of his interview that he wanted me to give him some time to think over these issues that he had not considered so thoroughly before and get back to him. That response corresponds to one of my first goals: to generate more discussion and debate about these issues.
I extended my trip to Mae Sot for a couple of days at the end of the conference for another task. ERI was putting together a report to submit to the International Labor Organization about the Burmese military’s continued use of forced labor. I learned that three deserters from the Burmese army had recently snuck into Thailand and were in Mae Sot. Deserters are generally hard to get access to because they are very scared of being returned to Burma. However, the information they are able to provide about the military’s abuses are helpful for human rights reports because their testimony from the “abuser” perspective often confirms the information from the villager, or “abused” perspective. All three deserters confirmed that forced labor is, indeed, on-going, despite the Burmese regime’s claim that all forced labor was stopped in June.
One of my favorite anthropological truths is that the most insightful information frequently arrives unexpectedly. In my mind, I did not relate these interviews with army deserters with transitional justice, the focus of the rest of my trip to Mae Sot. However, at the end of the second interview, I asked Aung Kyaw (also not his real name) the standard exit question, “is there anything you want to tell me that I didn’t ask about?” His answer surprised me.
“Yes,” he said. “I want revenge for the beatings I endured.”
And the interview ended there. I’d never had any other response besides, “no, nothing” to that question in other interviews. I was caught off guard and did not think quick enough to follow up with further questions that would have given me good insight into the issue of transitional justice. Listening again to the tape recording, I realize that I compartmentalized my role in these interviews with army deserters, limiting myself to the task of getting information about forced labor for the ILO report. In his concluding statement, Aung Kyaw reminded me of the interrelatedness of so many of the issues I am addressing, and the need to be prepared to make those connections on the spot.
Maybe my situation is not so unique. We all are members of diverse communities, and we are different people in each of them – one person can be a mom in the family, a comic among the euchre-playing crowd, a student among a Spanish-speaking group of friends. My own seemingly disparate identities – anti-dam activist, volleyball player, office DJ, Thai language student, editor – all contribute to the local knowledge I’m gaining here and providing me with unexpected and unique perspectives on the issues of transitional justice that will increasingly become my focus over the next year.
posted by PeaJayPee @ 6:15 PM
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