Seriously? Prospective tourism development at Chichen Itza

Another example of "sustainable" tourism, right?

power/anthropology

"Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society."

-Michel Foucault

Examples: A large ship sitting on a body of water that has the ability to launch missiles at a group of people at a moment's notice: that's power. A person who holds an armed weapon amidst unarmed bystanders: power. A judge who holds the ability to decide the fate of a fellow human based upon a certain set of philosophical and legal guidelines: power. A person from an incredibly wealthy nation who has the ability and/or desire to cross international borders for purposes of travel and leisure: power. A politician who can decide whether or not knowledge and resources should or should not be used to save lives: power. A person who lives in a politically and economically dominant society who has the ability to choose whether or not she/he should be concerned with the war of the week: power.

And anthropology? Where does anthropology fit in all of this? The ability to produce a collection of information about people that will then be disseminated as a source of "truth" about said people: power. The ability to promote and re-create a longstanding project of knowledge production that casts itself as one of the main protagonists: power, again.

The ability to imagine some kind of alternative course of action to some of the above "situations"? Well, that's power too. Right?

"Voice of a Mountain" film

Sometimes the most powerful aspects of history are those that are left out entirely. How many people in the US have heard very much about the histories of the civil war in Guatemala? How can these kinds of stories simply slip past so many of us? Why does this happen?

Here is a short film about one community in Guatemala, and some of their experiences. during the civil war. Just one more fragment out of a multitude of experiences and perspectives:



The rest of the film can be seen on the website for Voice of a Mountain, here.

Coca Cola & Global Harmony

Wow, life sure looked good back in 1978...

anthropology/war/power

This is a trailer of the film about the Human Terrain System project. Here is the website for the film. And here is a recent post by Max Forte that discusses this film, among other things.

Here is what the American Anthropological Association says about HTS.

Here is what HTS says about HTS.

Here is what Wikipedia says about HTS.

Here is one example of what John Stanton says about HTS.

And here is a September 2009 piece on HTS from Foreign Policy.

So what do YOU think about HTS?

photography/poverty/development

This image is from Cordaid, which is an international development organization. According to the organization's web site:

"Cordaid combines more than 90 years’ experience and expertise in emergency aid and structural poverty eradication. We are one of the biggest international development organisations with a network of almost a thousand partner organisations in 36 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America."

Any thoughts?

Hat tip: Lisa at Sociological Images (a few more images from this series can be found on this post).

Mitla Columns

Mitla, 1862, by Désiré Charnay. Image from the New York Public Library, here.

Mitla, 2008, by Ryan Anderson (me).

Mitla, 2005, by V. Fowler, image found here.

there are only questions and more questions

...as a graduate student in anthropology, is it my job to simply reproduce the system that i am a part of? or is there some other possibility?

Beatriz Manz on anthropology, relevance, and advocacy

"Are all bystanders equal? US academics occupy a privileged position and should be willing to expose human rights abuses, injustice, degrading poverty, and exploitation. If we want to be relevant, anthropologists should shape the public debate, reframe the issues and perceptions, and provide new insights. In a globalized world, our subjects and our audience are not discounted, as Clifford Geertz (1988) noted. Our audience should not just be informed, he asserted, they need to be implicated...In the 'hard' sciences, researchers share findings about a problem and present research results as to causes of the problem and, even better, if they find solutions for it. In our discipline, those steps have the maligned name of 'activism', and their practitioners become denigrated and shunned. Have we ever heard of a 'cancer cure activist'? Why do we tend to be so timid about finding solutions for those who suffer and live in human-made scarcity and injustic? What specific results are we providing? Why are we not advocates?"

-from "The Continuum of Violence in Post-War Guatemala" (2008: 158).

man with beard

today i came across a photograph that was posted on an online anthropology site. it shows a man, sitting in beautiful light, looking calmly at the photographer. snap. it is presented in black and white. there are people behind him, holding hands for some reason. the only information reads:

"Man with beard in Diphu, Karbi Anglong district, December 2005."

what does this mean? is this anthropological? why?

i have spent plenty of time somewhat intertwined with the "art" of photography, but i am pretty ambivalent about it in many ways. how should photography be used? what does it mean to take photographs of people and place them in books, online, or in galleries? for what purposes should photographs of people be used? when she they NOT be used? is the whole world a subject, or are there limits?

reactions:

man with beard, no less, no more. granted, from a photographic perspective you have some good images here. but photographs like this--no name, no real context, no background--what do they mean? who is this person? does he know that his face is now posted online for everyone to see and comment on? does he have a story, a family, a life? or is he a symbol of something, of himself, of anthropological travel? is this "ethnographic"? is he a symbol of cross-cultural knowledge? of poverty? of conflict? how did this photograph happen? how did he agree to sit there and wait for you to focus, compose, and shoot? what was this moment like? did you pay him to pose, or did he volunteer? did this man happen to be sitting in this strong side lighting? why did you choose black and white film? what happened before this was taken, and after? were you talking to him, or just passing through? where is this man now? does this photograph depict a momentary relationship, a photo-op, or do you still know him?

de-contextualized, what purpose does this photograph serve? what does it tell us? is it art, or anthropology? is it art for the man in the photograph, or just for us?

photographs always leave me with so many questions.

are we all merely subjects, just waiting for the chance to be photographed and documented?

The Human Terrain System, anthropology, and the sounds of silence

"If we know anything it is that most anthropologists have remained perfectly silent and uninvolved in the debates surrounding HTS."

-Max Forte, here.

After spending my weekend reading about Franz Boas--including the 1919 censure by the American Anthropological Association (which was finally rescinded in 2005)--the above post by Forte reminds me that these sorts of problems aren't anything new. Hardly. The whole HTS debacle is just one of the latest manifestations of a certain mindset about the role of anthropology and the state.

Should anthropology be used in the military? Should ethnography be co-opted as a kind of counterinsurgency method? My answer to both is a categorical NO.

But what aren't more people talking about this? And why haven't more anthropologists even heard about this?

Progress

and progress is not intelligently planned
it's the facade of our heritage
the odor of our land
they speak of progress
in red, white and blue
it's the structure of the future
as demise comes seething through
it's progress 'til there's nothing left to gain
as the dearth of new ideas
makes us wallow in our shame
so before you go to contribute more
to the destruction of this world you adore
remember life on earth is but a flash of dawn
and we're all part of it as the day rolls on

-"Progress," by Bad Religion.

Development: definitions, histories, meanings

Development is an elusive topic, process, word, concept, idea discourse, or philosophy. I hear people talk about development often, and I read about it constantly, but a singular meaning is difficult to track down. Does development mean any one thing? Or is it a concept, like many other human concepts, that has a life of its own? Even today, various people—whether academics, development professionals, volunteers, or politicians—use the term in a myriad of ways. Defining development is no easy task. However, since the term is loaded with so many social and political undertones and meanings, exploring what it means today—and what it has meant historically—is a vital endeavor. This paper is one step toward trying to gain a better understanding of one seemingly simple, yet incredibly unwieldy, concept.

I have worked on development projects, or at least projects that played a role in what many call “development.” But this had nothing to do with the “Third World,” or international aid, or the global North vs. the global South. I worked for about four years in an industry called Cultural Resource Management (CRM). I found myself staying in hotels all across the state of California for the purpose of completing “projects.” CRM is, in many ways, applied archaeology. Developers call CRM archaeologists not out of interest in history or archaeology, but to adhere to state and federally mandated guidelines. Working as a CRM archaeologist, I was often on the front lines of development, helping to document, catalogue, and analyze archaeological sites in a timely manner so that the development process could proceed.

We mapped sites, excavated units, collected 6,000 year-old fragments of shell, wrote up site reports, and archived artifacts so that power lines, houses, roads, and golf courses could be constructed. Development, in that sense, meant overtly changing landscapes that had been used in certain ways for a few thousand years and re-shaping them for new public and private uses. Land that was once a village site in the late prehistoric period was “developed” into a golf course in the early 21st century. That is just one aspect of development, and it has given me a very specific and personal definition of what development means. There are, of course, many more meanings.

In a very rough and inexact sense, development can be defined as change, whether social, political, or economic. As Roderick P. Neumann writes, “Development, among other connotations, means transformation, embracing a new way of being and thinking and leaving the old ways behind” (2005: 81). These connotations often involve transformations of landscapes, institutions, and social structures. According to one perspective, the ‘age of development’ began on a specific date: January 20, 1949. This was when Harry S. Truman, then President of the United States, declared that over two billion people in the global South were “under-developed” (Ferguson 1999: 246; Neumann 2005: 82). From that perspective, development was something that was created, almost out of thin air, in the mid 20th century. It was a new veil that was cast over history and reality.

Neumann argues, however, that while Truman’s proclamation may have announced “the global post-war order of American hegemony, it did not mark the beginning of the North’s attempts to carry development to the South (2005: 82). Development, as James Ferguson points out, did not create anything new; instead it provided a means for organizing, managing, and legitimating global inequalities that were already in place (1999: 248). This is a key point. Development is not a 20th century invention. Instead, it is the progeny of centuries of social, political, and economic thinking that stems back to the European Enlightenment, if not further. Development is also deeply tied to conceptions about social evolution that pervaded the 19th century, as well as European colonialism (Gardner and Lewis 1996: 4-6).

Progress, for one, continues to play a role that underpins contemporary development discourse. This is an idea that has considerable roots in Western thought, as Stephen Jay Gould has noted (1996: 189). Human progress was one of the foundational ideas of the Enlightenment; it was attained by the application of scientific reason toward social problems (Erickson and Murphy 2006: 9). Progress was also pervasive in the thinking of 19th century social scientists such as Karl Marx, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Herbert Spencer, among others. As Adams writes, “By the start of the nineteenth century, development had become a linear theory of progress, bound up with capitalism and Western cultural hegemony, and advanced through mercantilism and colonial imperialism” (2007: 6-7). Contemporary manifestations of the idea of progress can be seen, for instance, in the World Tourism Organization’s 2008 report, which states that international tourism development is “turning modern tourism into a key driver for socio-economic progress” (World Tourism Organization 2008). Narratives such as this persist, despite the actual results of development projects throughout the past five decades.

Development plans in the mid 20th century often resulted in frustration and outright disaster because the expected “progress” never materialized the way it was supposed to (Adams 2007: 8; Gardner and Lewis 1996: 7, 11). In fact, in many cases, progress never really came about at all (Ferguson 1999). Regardless of massive investment, international aid, and optimistic narratives about impending success, the expected progress of modernity was not as easily attained as Truman and his contemporaries had imagined. What happened? First of all, modernist ideas about development were based upon the assumption that all countries would be able to experience economic growth, and that such a process would be relatively straightforward (Gardner and Lewis 1996: 13). Progress was measured in economic terms, which were in many cases highly reductive. This means that the “success” of so-called underdeveloped countries was based upon systems of evaluation and measurement that came from the global North. As Adams explains,

Developmentalism suggested that countries developed through different stages, on ‘a linear path towards modernization’…and that progress down that path could be measured in terms of growth of the economy, or some economic abstraction such as per capita gross domestic product (2007: 7).

Early development thinking assumed that following the basic formula of the Marshall Plan would result in the same success that occurred in post-war Europe (Adams 2007: 7). Of course, foreign aid and capital investment came along with an associated “hegemony of values,” whether they were welcomed or not (ibid). Non-Western people, who were the under- or undeveloped traditional “others” of the world, were not seen as collaborators, but instead as targets or subjects to be acted upon. The modernist hope was that a collection of newly labeled Third World nations would suddenly respond to investment and rational planning, as if the previous centuries of colonial domination and conflict had simply lost their meaning. The power dynamics, despite a plethora of independence movements, had changed little between North and South. The wars and struggles over resources were not distant memories. Yet, development was supposed to erase all inequality with a rhetorical twist of meaning. It did not happen. Maybe, as some argue, development never was about challenging inequality or assisting non-Western nations toward the path to progress.

There are several ways of looking at what development is. Mainstream literature characterizes development as an attempt to solve international social and political problems, not create them (Neumann 2005: 92). Development, for some, is cast as an almost heroic international effort that seeks to bring about equality and progress for the impoverished. Other scholars, following approaches taken by Foucault, see development as little more than a discourse designed to subjugate, control, and exploit Third World populations. The latter approach is infused with discussions about power and politics, and presents a radical challenge to the economically focused narratives that are promulgated by many development organizations. Arturo Escobar argues that “development can best be described as an apparatus that links forms of knowledge about the Third World with the deployment of forms of power and intervention, resulting in the mapping and production of Third World societies” (Escobar 2007: 342). From this perspective, “development” is little more than a thinly disguised version of the older colonial order, with a few modern adjustments and alterations.

Scholars such as Escobar insist that the concept of development is something that needs to be abandoned, and that we should find a way to imagine a post-development era (Escobar 2007). Others, such as Gardner and Lewis, argue that anthropologists should find ways to critique development yet still work within its frameworks (1996: 153). The latter point is that the radical deconstruction of the discourses and meanings of development will not simply erase all of the projects, NGOs, institutions, and agencies that are part of the larger process. Escobar’s argument, as I understand it, is that there is no need to accept development as a reality that cannot be avoided. His point is that development is an imposed set of realities, and one that can be either avoided or rejected outright. For Escobar, the possibilities for resistance within “social movements,” which might be able to lead the way to a post-development world (Escobar 2007: 349).

In the end, the concept of development continues to present challenges for anyone who seeks to understand what it entails. It is, as Adams concludes, a “political and indeed moral minefield (2007: 6). Yet another difficulty is the fact that development discourses, at least certain versions of them, have been supported and disseminated through powerful scientific discourses. Such discourses play an immense role in shaping and influencing society by legitimizing certain ways of thinking (Fairhead and Leach 2003). Development discourse seems to obscure as much as it explains, and the wide semantic and conceptual meanings that are attached to it only complicate matters further. Sustainable development, a term that gained wider use in the early 1970s, is one of the “new” development discourses that has achieved widespread acceptance and praise (Adams 2007: 1, 54).

While the term “sustainable development” sounds scientific, rational, and straightforward, it is a concept, like development itself, that has seemingly created as many questions as answers (Stone 2003). If the whole idea of development itself has not been defined, then exactly what is being sustained? As Fratkin argues, “sustainable development” has in fact become firmly entrenched in development discourses, “but it offers little practical guidance for tackling diverse problems in specific places” (2003: 112). While the 1987 Brundtland Report did provide a reasonable explanation of what sustainability is, it was still vague enough to engender of whole series of conceptual and methodological issues for anthropologists who engage with sustainable development. One of the main questions was exactly what different communities were trying to sustain in the first place (Stone 2003). But are discourses about “sustainable development” actually useful and viable, or are they merely another rhetorical sleight of hand that recasts development in more positive and scientific terms? These questions remain unanswered at present, and are part of the vigorous debates that development discourses are currently enmeshed in.

This short investigation only covers a superficial reflection of how development has been used, constructed, acted upon, and understood by a broad cadre of individuals over time. I have a great deal of work ahead in trying to pull apart and understand where ideas about development have come from, how they have changed over time, and where they are heading in the future. Development is one part modernist dream, one part colonialist narrative, one part Enlightenment survival, and one part imperialist nightmare. While many ideas about development are bound up in notions of progress, there is no guarantee that any sort of real progress will actually come to fruition. Development is as much a guess and a prediction as it is anything. It is an absolute failure, and at the same time, a vast international industry. It is something we should cast aside into the colonial fires of history, and it is something that we cannot avoid. It is all about progress, and disaster. Development is 17th century philosophy, and 21st century reality. Can development be defined? Or is it yet another concept, like culture, that has run wild despite all attempts to control its meaning?

References

Adams, W.M., 2007. Green Development, 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge.

Erickson, Paul A., and Liam D. Murphy, 2006. Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Escobar, Arturo, 2007. “Imagining a Post-Development Era,” in The Anthropology of Development and Globalization, Marc Edelman and Angelique Haugerud, eds. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.

Ferguson, James, 1999. Expectations of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fratkin, Elliot, 2003. Sustainability and pastoral livelihoods: Lessons from East African Maasai and Mongolia. Human Organization, Vol. 62(2): 112-122.

Gardner, Katy, and David Lewis, 1996. Anthropology, Development, and the Post-Modern Challenge. Chicago: Pluto Press.

Gould, Stephen Jay, 1996. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Leach, Melissa, and James Fairhead, 2003. Sciency, Society, and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Neumann, Roderick P, 2005. Making Political Ecology. London: Hodder Education.

Stone, M. Priscilla, 2003. Is sustainability for development anthropologists? Human Organization, Vol. 62 (2): 93-99.

Progress/development

So, dictionary.com defines "development" as:

"the act or process of developing; growth; progress."

That would mean that "international development" means something like "international growth and progress". Right?

Interesting:

Limits

Everything that we use to investigate, catalog, record, document, analyze, and describe the world ends up—in some way or another—shaping the final product. Whether we are talking about language, digital voice recorders, cameras, or archaeological flotation machines. Everything reduces the complexity of the world and gives us only a sample of reality. Photographs, despite their clarity and power, are simple and highly limited reproductions/reflections of dynamic process and experiences. Photographs really look nothing like three-dimensional situations that they are copies of. A photograph is a fragmentary moment that is created within a series of choices and editorial decisions by a photographer: lens choice, angle, exposure, framing, depth of field, shutter speed, and so on. The same goes for the concepts that we use to explain and talk about the realities we live in: power, gender, agency, discourse, structure, practice, and so on.

So what now? Is the answer that we should find way to work within the limits of our analytical tools? Should we accept the fact that a photograph is little more than a shadow of reality, but also use it for what it CAN tell us about the world around us? Should we realize that words like "gender" are often heavily constrained by present meanings, but still use them anyway? The other option is to ditch these tools altogether. But, what does that mean? Should a photographer who is frustrated with the limits of his/her medium simply ditch the camera? Or should they find ways to acknowledge and work within the explanatory, analytical, and documentary limits of the equipment at hand?