Monday's Tidings

I was happy when I looked across the compound yesterday morning and saw Carine walking toward me, her small frame engulfed in a billowing West African boubou. I had thought of Carine and her sister, Berenice, often since I left CAR in December. Two of twenty-eight siblings, they were due to give birth within days of each other.

I asked first after Carine’s baby, who I’d heard had been sick last week. He’s doing better now, thankfully. Then I asked after Berenice. I’d only met Berenice a few times, but she’d quickly won me over with her vibrancy, generosity, warmth and smarts. I’d brought some baby board books for her and hoped to meet up with her soon.

“Elle est morte.”

Carine’s response made no sense to me. My first thought: she’s joking. My second thought: “morte” must have some alternate meaning that I’m not aware of. The idea that such a strong, healthy woman could just die seemed absurd.

Once I’d sat down, Carine explained. Berenice had gone into labor. At first, it seemed things were OK. But the doctor said she would need an operation. Sometime while she lay there, her abdomen gaping wide, she and the baby passed away.

I suppose I’m naive to be so shocked. CAR has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. But I realized that I had thought of those statistics as the statistics of other people, of people without access to doctors or people unable to take various precautions during pregnancy. When I last saw Berenice, a professor of geology at the University of Bangui, she explained how she was watching her diet and avoiding sugar and caffeine and visiting her physician regularly, all for the sake of her baby-to-be.

I had met her at a workshop of political “fragility”. Of the few women present, she spoke with the most passion. I’ll always remember her heartfelt monologue on the challenges of living with pervasive witchcraft. She joked comfortably with even the most senior people present. She had not just confidence, but confidence back up by intelligence. All that energy. Gone.

I went through the day with half a brain. The rest had clouded over, preoccupied and foggy. When I discussed Berenice’s passing with friends, many responded with some variation on “Si elle est morte, c’est que Dieu l’a voulu” (“If she is dead, it’s because God wanted it to happen”). I don’t buy it. But if I wanted to pull a shred of personal meaning from what was essentially a meaningless death -- that is, an unncecessary, preventable one -- I might take it as a stark reminder of the limits of anthropological values of relativism. I often find myself trying to explain -- to frustrated aid workers, for instance -- how people here aren’t just irrational or backward, and how their ways of life make sense if only you stop to try to understand the world from their perspective.* But deaths like this one are not to be understood. They are to be decried and abhorred and mourned.

* This is something of a caricature of both the aid workers’ and my own perspectives. For instance, recent anthropological work both important and fascinating (such as that of my adviser, Charles Piot) has tried to take the experience of radical uncertainty -- including the fragility of life in a place like Bangui -- seriously as a mode of sociality and understand the struggles it engenders.

Update: Bangui on the Potomac

Last week I trudged through the Washington humidity to embassy row. The facade of the CAR embassy looked even more derelict than usual. Some indeterminate building material (paint?) hung precariously, like the bark of a eucalyptus tree. A piece of paper was taped beside the door. It bore the handwritten message that “The Ambassy of the C.A.R. has moved.” Well, I thought, it has happened. It was only a matter of time.

The CAR government bought this prime real estate shortly after independence in 1960 and then left it to decay. From its innocuous beginnings, the building metamorphosed into a fun house of dangers: rusty springs booby-trapped chair seats, stairs warped so drastically they led climbers downward as they attempted to ascent, light fixtures sprouted colorful exposed wires. Staff learned to pick careful paths through the hazards. Instead of fixing the place up, the CAR government decided last year to put the building on the market. A private couple paid $1.099 million -- cash -- to purchase the house and will likely spend a similar sum to return it to the kind of habitable space they desire.

Meanwhile, nestled between the ‘Sandinista Safeway’ and Chief Ike’s bar, the new CAR embassy announces itself not with a flag (they moved in only a month ago), but with a gaggle of young men hanging out on the porch watching the world go by, just like in Bangui. Inside, employees debated the proper positioning of presidential portraits amid the plastic ficus plants and shiny, lightweight pleather couches. France 24’s talking heads blared from a small flatscreen. The government bought this 2704 Ontario Rd. edifice for $800,000, which, after adding a couple thousand dollars’ worth of furniture, still leaves a tidy margin. The new embassy is not without its oddities: the waiting area abruptly gives out onto a linoleum-floored space, the ghost of a kitchen or bathroom. And here, too, the gaping electric sockets spit wires.

Still, it was heartening to see the evident pride with which the receptionist inhabited his sprawling desk in the entryway. What would it take to transform that pride into a broader sense of responsibility for the building and the institution it represents? Regular cash flow would be an obvious factor; but if it were that simple one would think the $200 visa fee (a $50 hike since last time I checked) would help in that regard, and this doesn’t seem to be the case.

I managed, through no more nefarious means than a little pleasant schmoozing, to obtain my visa within an hour, rather than the official 48-hour processing time. And, by the time I post this, I will be back in Bangui la Coquette.

Dirt, etc.

My mental to-blog list -- on topics as varied as the fascinating books I've read lately (Lauren Benton's A Search for Sovereignty; Saibou Issa's Les Coupeurs de route; Edward Keene's Beyond the Anarchical Society; and, for lazy weekend reading, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin) to research anecdotes I'm mulling now as I write to observations during recent travels -- is starting to overflow my too-small head.

First up: the timeliest item. In early April I had the good fortune of spending a couple of weeks in London. Most of the time I spent holed up in the apartment pecking away at my keyboard, and much of the rest of the time I wandered around and gazed into the windows of too-expensive pubs and restaurants, like the grad student Oliver Twist, while nibbling a Sainsbury's pre-packed egg and cress sandwich (half price on its sell-by date!).

But the one place I felt rich was in museums. Many of London's best museums are free, making it easy to pop in and out as if the Dutch masters section of the National Gallery were actually your living room. I enjoyed the John Soanes Museum by candlelight (a special treat the evening of the first Tuesday of the month). Soanes was an architect, and his mansion -- now the museum -- is preserved in the overstuffed manner he designed with paintings, sculptures, and even a sarcophagus.

But the two museums I implore you to visit, if you happen to be passing through, both have an anthropological bent (surprise, surprise).

First up, the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford. Mostly housed in one large room full of dusty, dim glass cases, the displays of cultural artifacts at the Pitt-Rivers have changed little in the nearly 100 years since it was founded. I had expected a lot of "exotic" pieces from "native" cultures of the world (Ecuadorean shrunken heads being an obvious example), but I was surprised to find that the collection included many exotic pieces from England as well. Most interesting to me were the items related to witchcraft, and the fact that an Azande rubbing board shared pride of place with various British charms and spells, like preserved lemons stuffed with pins to ward off evil doers, or a bull's heart punctured by nails and needles. A beautiful silvered flask bore a faded type-writer-written tag:

"Small glass flask of bilobed shape, silvered over the inside and stoppered. This is reputed to contain a witch, and the late owner, an old lady living in a village near HOVE, Sussex, remarked, 'they do say there be a witch in it, and if you let un out there'll be a peck o' trouble'. It was obtained from her in 1915."

Exoticizing, Orientalist -- pick your cultural theory-derived insult, and the Pitt-Rivers Museum could make an easy target. But it's impossible to leave the place without feeling simultaneously overwhelmed and elated by the vast riches of human cultural production.

Whereas the Pitt-Rivers Museum is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future, the other expo I recommend will shutter in a few months. The Wellcome Collection, a wonderfully bizarre museum, is hosting an exhibit inspired by the outstanding Mary Douglas's argument that "dirt" is a socially constructed category. "Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life," is an exhibit too wide-ranging to capture successfully in just a few sentences, so I'll just say, if you pass through the city, Go! It combines fine art (seventeenth-century Dutch paintings linking sweeping and other chores of household cleanliness to Godliness); scientific discovery (the first microscope in the world and some of the things its inventor looked at -- first up: the "batter" full of "little animals" that he scraped from his teeth); public health, design (such as the architecture of hospitals) and the development of info-graphics (John Snow's gorgeous map showing cholera cases clustered around the Broad Street Pump -- a feat of visual communication impressive still today); installation art (I admit, I was less taken by the majorette dances in a London waterworks than by some of the other displays); diaries (including the amorous letters between a London photographer and his working class subjects, especially a maid named Hannah); maps depicting the plan to move Parliament far upriver to avoid the noxious sewage stench that pervaded London in 1850s summers...and on and on. I often find museums have a calming effect, encouraging slowing down to ponder the development of artistic technique and its relationship to beauty. "Dirt," in contrast, was quite simply hugely stimulating -- almost as if I could feel new synapses connecting previously dusty or shuttered off corners of my brain.

Now I'm in Berlin and can afford the cafes and bars but not the museums. Go figure.

Meeting Old Friends Anew

“The tidy, systematic and well-rounded texts written by anthropologists are more often than not the end-product of long periods in the field characterized by boredom, illness, personal privations, disappointments and frustration: few anthropologists can state squarely that their fieldwork was a continuously exciting journey of exploration, full of pleasant experiences.”

Those are Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s words, in his Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, which I came across while preparing to teach an intensive course on Anthropology and Development this May (suggestions for readings and lesson plans welcome).

Eriksen’s words rather neatly describe many of the feelings that dogged me during much of my time in CAR. I went to the dentist today for the first time since I began my fieldwork and learned that I had developed the bad habit of clenching my jaw so hard that I’ve worn through enamel and am now grinding down tooth. My life has none of the stress of, say, an investment banker’s, but I nevertheless think that fieldworkers can lay claim on a particular kind of anxiety (am I doing all that I can? What more should I be doing? Argh -- if I’m bored it means I’m slacking!).

But what an unalloyed pleasure it has been to re-acquaint myself with friends from Ndele and Tiringoulou and Kaga Bandoro and Bangui and beyond as I transform fieldnotes into dissertation text. Acquaintances, pestering youth, stonewalling functionaries, confidantes -- they all become friends in hindsight’s warm gaze. More importantly, there is something I find inexplicably satisfying about presenting a person in all his/her complexity. The other day I was writing about the Chef de Cantonment in the Ministry of Water and Forests in Ndele. He’s someone who, in the span of a couple-hour conversation, might explain Chadian gris-gris innovations; negotiate responsibilities with his boss in Bangui (his cell phone ring: “Appel en provence directe des Etats-Unis, ville de New York!”, layered over a siren); give a forehead kiss to his two-year-old daughter, who toddled into his office every day on her way home from nursery school; argue his theory of the symbiotic relationship between humanitarian aid and rebellion; and haggle over roadblock fees with passing Sudanese truckers. All this while also making peace when his subordinates fight (including with him). Even just re-reading these opinions and tales is a surprising, fascinating jaunt as unknown and known alternatingly intersect and then veer off from each other.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein describes a similar feeling as one of the things she had to get used to, and came to love, when she shifted from academic philosophy to fiction:
“The struggle for clarity doesn’t cease when you write fiction, but it’s a clarity that can’t be pursued to completion, or else the whole point is lost. Hammer home what you, the author, take its meaning to be, and you hammer the entrance closed. The shaping of a work of art means, paradoxically, preserving some space for ambiguity. … Characters let me know they’re becoming real when they start surprising me. Keep them one-dimentional and the deadliness of total control is yours. Give them many dimensions -- details suggestive of rich inner lives -- and a certain wildness takes hold.”

The people who fill my fieldnotes are just that -- living people. They’re not characters. I certainly don’t consider myself to be creating a work of art, but just a rather humdrum humanities-tinged social science text. Clarity must remain my watchword. I’m sure most of those complexity-indicating details will not survive once I turn to editing. (My adviser’s one entreaty was that I please not write a 600-page dissertation, and I’m happy to oblige.) But, oh, how lucky am I who got to meet these people, these endlessly surprising people! “Wildness” is an addictive privilege. Who cares about anxiety.

Rebels, Revolutionaries, Rappers

“Grinning, the rapper lays it down in a local Ugandan language: ‘I was given a knife/ I gave it to the people who harvested millet and they gave me the millet. I gave the millet to the cattle keepers, who in exchange gave me a cow.’ … To reach the farmer-youth vote bloc of this east African nation, Mr. Museveni, 65 years old, has channeled his inner MC: He has crafted his own brand of agri-rap to show he’s hip to young people’s concerns.”

So explain Sarah Childress and Nicholas Bariyo in their WSJ article about the Ugandan presidential campaign.

Hearing of Museveni’s musical strategy reminded me of a provocation launched by Jean-François Bayart that I always found searing. He argues that in Africa

“...democracy has shown its limits. It is, indeed, unable to incorporate either economically or institutionally, in terms of either education or ideology, the groups we have just mentioned, namely young people and rural communities, in spite of the fact that these two excluded categories actually compose the majority of the population. Too often it is war which has instead become the vector of their mobilization.”*

By rapping about cows and millet, has Museveni found a non-war solution to the problem of integrating youth and country folk into the Ugandan polity? The article suggests that Museveni’s raps are wildly popular, so the answer might well be yes. If so, the Ugandan case still does not disprove Bayart’s argument, for, Friday’s “elections” notwithstanding, it is certainly not democracy that has drawn in the dispossessed.

In the run-up to the Ugandan presidential elections, I read several accounts exploring the idea that Uganda might be the next to erupt in democratic protests -- 2011 could be the year of freedom in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya... and Uganda! I read those musings weighed down by a large dose of skepticism. “I doubt it,” I thought, and then immediately wondered why I lack faith in African capacity for peaceful revolution. After all, as recently as a month ago Egypt was notorious for its torpor, a characterization that today seems unfair at best -- perhaps even ludicrous.

Am I just another shill for the old Gluckmanian idea that “Africans are rebels, never revolutionaries”? That is, the idea that social structures in Africa are inherently unstable, but that that very instability and conflict is a functional means of re-establishing the system. Truly revolutionary change never occurs. (Bayart for one criticizes Gluckman for his “vulgar” emphasis on function -- efforts to prove the functionality of social practices often quickly become circular, and hence analytically shallow. But Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, avant garde post-structuralists though they might have styled themselves, had no apparent problem with it.) I hope not, but the idea remains lamentably seductive.

As I write, rumors place Gaddafi in Venezuela. The limits of his efforts to portray himself as an “African” leader have become exposed. Even his scores of African mercenaries (grisly footage here -- not for the faint hearted) seem not to have saved him. He is falling with the Arabs, while Museveni will rule on.

* Jean-François Bayart, “Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion,” African Affairs 99 (2000): 217-267; 227.

GFFL

Like Ronald Reagan, last week my grandfather would have celebrated his hundredth birthday. George F.F. Lombard devoted his professional life to the Harvard Business School. Since I'm temporarily in Cambridge, I decided to head over to the Business School to see if I could find any traces of him. I found far more than I could digest: carton upon carton of his correspondence, lecture notes, chapter drafts, dating from his days as a student to his tenure as a dean. He got involved with the Human Relations Group in the 1930s (famous in those early years for the Western Electric research) and remained in the field, specializing in organizational behavior.

I've tried to read some of Grandad's books but never made it very far into the dry, practical prose. But in the nests of correspondence, an intellectual life came alive in all its mundane excitements – thank you post cards from students now far afield; articles passed on by soon-to-be colleagues because they were curious to hear what you thought; conversations about ho to communicate theory so that students can put it in practice. Nothing earth-shattering, to be sure, but a satisfying life all the same, I thought as I browsed.

In addition to teaching a course with Robert McNamara (statistics and data management for air force officers), during WWII Grandad conducted research to help solve some of the “human and organizational challenges of the rapidly expanding Air Force” at a military base near Boston:

“Lombard made almost daily visits to the base over the span of six weeks, early in 1943. He tried to observe as much as possible about the human interactions at the base without disrupting normal routines. He recorded not only what various individuals said, but also what they did; and how what they did affected the work of others around them. This was a different kind of research, which drew upon the lessons of the Western Electric experiments of the 1930s to assess and depict the inherent complexities of a human organization. Lombard quickly perceived a collision of values and a pronounced incompatibility between old and new types of warfare...”*

Grandad, in other words, was an anthropologist! Who knows in what ways his life and studies have impacted the course I've taken. For all the time I knew him, Grandad was a spectral presence carefully mowing the lawn and oiling bike chains while his wife regaled and opined for the two of them. But I'd like to thank him nevertheless.

* Cruikshank, Jeffrey L. 1987. A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School 1908-1945. Boston: HBS Press. P 245.

Photos from the HBS library and the Harvard Gazette.

What I learned about fragility

While in Bangui a couple of months ago I participated in a workshop organized by the World Bank assessing the factors that make CAR “fragile.”

[An aside: The previous terminology to describe state dysfunctionality (failed/collapsed/failing) seems to have fallen out of favor with all but the gang at Foreign Policy. In addition to sounding rather, ahem, judgmental to development “partners,” “failed” isn't a very useful analytical category because it describes nothing about the ways in which politics work and only what they lack (see this Alex de Waal lecture for a typically erudite explanation of how this impoverishes analysis). But always the critic, I'm afraid I have a bone to pick with the new “fragility” lens as well. This is because many of those states labeled “fragile,” such as CAR, are in fact quite durable in their weakness. They remain mired in a position of low functionality, receiving just enough aid to prop up the status quo; their negative (externally-granted) sovereignty makes revolutionary, democratic change difficult if not impossible to achieve. For a much more eloquent and detailed explanation, see Pierre Englebert's latest book, in which he shows the surprising resilience of the state form in Africa.]

The workshop gathered Bangui 'intellectuals' (I use the term in the broad Francophone African way to refer to people with a level of education that differentiates them from those in the fields). In more and less heated tones, participants decried and celebrated aspects of sociality in their country. Occasionally, thanks to having spent a fair amount of time in provincial towns and villages, I knew that the statements of these cadres, who themselves rarely leave the capital, carried only partial truth.

One man finally highlighted the Bangui-centric nature of their polity. In Cameroon, he said, Douala and Yaounde are weekend ghost towns – all the well-off return to the village to seek the benediction of their communities. In contrast, in CAR, those who have left the village almost never return. Whether a university student or a minister, all fear the “jealousy” of their compatriots. The villages are home to strong powers of witchcraft. (The country's terrible road network and lack of transport options don't exactly facilitate travel, either.) Some in the audience chuckled at this statement. But a friend who lectures in geology at the University of Bangui became exercised – “People might say they don't fear sorcery, but they're lying! Everyone fears it!” She went on to relate several famous cases, and I saw heads nod in acknowledgment.

While in Ndele, I got to know a Chef de Quartier whose son had been Minister of Defense a decade previously; he lived in the same kind of house as all his neighbors and wore the same beat-up flip-flops. What about “wealth in people” – the idea that wealth in Africa is determined by the number of people you support – I wondered? Few to no traces of elite beneficence grace CAR's hinterlands (unless you count the villa the disarmament co-president is building himself, or the monument to his mother the president constructed – both, incidentally, paid for with DDR monies, now used up before the program could even start...but I digress). But elsewhere on the continent, scholars have shown how the return of the successful to the village is perhaps the main means of city/village redistribution.

Claudine Vidal analyzed city-village relationships in Côte d'Ivoire in her Sociologie des Passions (1991). Her perspective spans several decades, which lets her show how these relationships change through time, partly as a function of economic fluctuations and partly due to the changing nature of honor and shame. In something of a reversal of the current CAR dynamic, she found that in the post-independence decade rural relatives begged their city-successful offspring not to build them new villas for fear of neighbors' jealousy, which would manifest through sorcery.

In the following years, displays of wealth became more lavish. Funerals, a kind of theater for enacting relations of dependence and power, are one of the main occasions for such displays. And because people are buried where they were born, these often take place in the village. The increasing need for ostentatious displays went hand in hand with growing feelings of shame attached to coming from a village deemed backward. Qualifying someone's village became a way of describing the person him/herself. For instance, a village (and its progeny) could be described as “pretty” or “have everything one could need”, but it could also be “disgusting” or “have nothing at all”; it was understood that the descriptor held for the person as well. As a result, ministers worked harder to fix up their villages, sometimes even against residents' wishes. (Ivoirian President Houphouët-Boigny's build-your-village campaign, of which his own village, Yamoussoukro, was the never-imitable example, probably contributed as well.)

Vidal's argument reminded me of Kwame Anthony Appiah's new book, The Honor Code. I've only read the op-ed versions of it that he published around the time the book came out, but in those he argued that “moral revolutions” occur when people's ideas of what constitutes “honorable” behavior changes. From the op-eds, I got the sense that Appiah views moral revolutions as generally progressive, and he seems to think that it is possible to push the evolution of the concept of honor (for instance, he discusses the possibilities for approaching the eradication of “honor killings” in Pakistan). Would shaming CAR's intellectuals about their villages' appearance, an economic upturn and better roads lead them to transform their communities of origin with no consideration of jealousy and sorcery? I'm not sure human relations are that rational-functional. Still, even if not so predictable, I'd be curious to see the results.

p.s. I've heard that the magnitude of urban-rural redistribution by elites has been quantified in Côte d'Ivoire but haven't found the citation. If anyone knows the details of these studies, I'd be obliged if you could pass them on.