I cannot think of a better place to write out my farewell to this community. Writing for anthro{dendum}/Savage Minds has been one of the highlights of my writing career – mostly because it always felt like it was a place I could come, sit, visit, and wonder about the world together with everyone. I started writing for Savage Minds in 2014, and continued with some regularity for quite a bit – until I was diagnosed with cancer in 2019, and then right on its heels, the world shut down as the pandemic took over in 2020. It was not just my world that was unwell, the whole world has not been well, and it has been difficult to wonder about the world together when so much was going wrong. So much more than usual. As I type this, I know that Gaza continues to be bombed: a genocide happening right in front of our eyes.

I sit to have tea with some elders from the village just southwest of MohenjoDaro, we can see some of their homes from the Stupa mound. They tell me about the news, about how many children are dying in Gaza, and they say they have never seen the world so sick and so consumed with money and power to allow children to die at such a scale. I agree with them. They don’t stop talking about it, and I don’t really want them to because it is important to witness the enormity of the atrocities happening in Gaza. The oldest gentleman sitting next to me turns to me and says, when we are asked if we knew, we must say, yes, we all knew. His tears make my throat constrict, and I am unsure of how to respond, except with tears and a nod.

And so we witness, hold, recount, cry, and promise to remember.

Over the past few years, our collective had been talking about whether or not to let go of this space: what feels to me like a comfortable, privileged space of articulation. This blog has created multiple communities, and many of us have been able to engage across our subdisciplines through this mode of writing, certainly in more ways than any academic journal might engender. I had been holding on to this space because I always knew there was a place for me to speak comfortably, where I had a community of writers and readers who understood an anthropological framing. However, a month ago, when the question of sunsetting the blog came up again, I felt like it was important to think more about why it might be the time to do just that. I think about our community of writers, and I think of what the world needs now … and I suspect it isn’t about writing in comfortable anthropological spaces, but rather, it is time for us to move into spaces that make us deeply uncomfortable, where it is difficult, but where it is very necessary for our voices to be heard, for justice to be centered, and where we might elicit change through our words. I’m not sure where that space is, or how I am going to transition into such difficult spaces; wherever it is though, I hope to see some of you there.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

Source

June 22nd, 2021 marked a year for the Black Trowel Collective (BTC) microgrants program, and in that time, BTC has distributed $43,500 USD to archaeological students in need from 22 countries, including India and Brazil. The latter two countries were recently centered due to the impact of COVID-19 in those regions. The total to students from India and Brazil since this push at the beginning of May to mid June 2021 has been $6,350 USD. Given this remarkable example of mutual aid within archaeology, I thought it important to talk to the collective about what it meant to set up something like this; what sorts of practices has the collective developed? How do they make it work? Most questions related to the BTC Microgrants, for example: what is a microgrant , how they work, who is eligible, and how to donate, are all answered and available on their website. This interview was conducted on a google document, over a couple of months, with multiple respondents from the collective. 

Uzma Rizvi (UR): First of all, thank you so much for all the labor that this collective is doing for the discipline and field. Thank you also for taking the time out to respond to some questions. There is no doubt in my mind that this microgrants program is one of the most important interventions by and for archaeologists that is available globally. Last year there was an increased awareness and development of mutual aid groups across the United States in response to COVID-19, mostly on the neighborhood level. Prior to BTC microgrants, I was most familiar with such solidarity work within activist circles, collectives who were engaged in mutual aid for the safety and well being of disenfranchised communities. Here, I’m thinking of Mariame Kaba’s and Dean Spade & Mia Mingus’s work on mutual aid, and the histories of where such movements come from within the context of the US. What does mutual aid mean to BTC? And what sorts of experiences or knowledge sharing was involved in creating a mutual aid program? 

Black Trowel Collective (BTC): The meaning of mutual aid probably differs depending on which Collective member you ask. The central idea for most is probably best highlighted through the now fairly ubiquitous tagline used by many mutual aid groups: “solidarity, not charity”. This essentially incorporates a lot of anarchist principles and practices. It means instead of waiting for a state or institution to address an issue, or trying to get them to take care of it, we’ll do it ourselves (direct action). It means coming together as a group and making decisions through consensus (discussion leading to full agreement). It means recognizing that charity often involves forms of violence that seem fine to folks who haven’t had to navigate the world by constantly having to prove they are valid to be recipients of help. Basically it means stripping away and radically undermining structures of violence to see the recipients of aid as equal to the people distributing that aid. No one makes charity committee members prove their qualifications to each recipient who asks for help. Why should we make each recipient have to prove they qualify? Particularly when the qualifications we enact replicate so many of the inequalities that are baked into our disciplines and institutions. That’s all wrapped up in the phrase, “solidarity, not charity”. In the end, mutual aid is about crafting and maintaining relationships and our relationships with our students are our main priority. We generally help them with whatever they need outside of the microgrants themselves as well. At least within our ability.

The Sportula microgrant project’s support and visible success organizing something similar in Classics was absolutely essential to helping us find our footing. As for experiences, many of the original Collective members who set up the microgrants program talked about how traumatic economic issues were/are for them as they tried to navigate the archaeological field as a student. One of the members relied heavily on dumpster diving for food to support their family while working as a PhD student in one of the top archaeology programs in the US. Some relied on state aid and were battered by the constant harassment, denigration, and structural violence that was applied to them to receive any sort of help. These types of conditions structurally reinforce who can become an archaeologist and so these experiences fed into the desire to start the program up and try and create a broader sense of solidarity within our field for folks that have not traditionally been supported by the field.

UR:  It is so important to amplify the significance of what it means to break down the hierarchies between donors and grantees in the name of solidarity. I would like to invite us to talk about process. Can we talk about how the idea first started, and what sorts of conversations were had in order to make this a reality? Can you also talk through the ins and outs of how such self organizing happens?

BTC:  The Black Trowel Collective began through conference sessions and conversations about the relationship between anarchist theory and archaeology, and anarchist archaeology, probably starting back in 2009 but really initiated by TK back in the 1990s. These all culminated with a funded Amerind workshop in 2016. During this workshop, archaeologists (and former archaeologists) from multiple continents (some explicitly anarchists, others more interested in the theoretical applications of anarchism), laid out a vision of what an anarchist archaeology might look like. This was also done in concert with a strong social media presence so that folks who were not able to attend because of space and financial limitations, could participate and direct the conversations of the in-person attendees.

The group published a manifesto on Savage Minds, an issue of the SAA Archaeological Record, and a volume of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. After this intense activity over three years, there was a pause in organizing as people moved to other projects. The original plan to maintain a website as a nexus for anarchist archaeologists never really worked. There were some attempts to create private groups through a couple of social media outlets, and a bit of organizing was sustained through this, particularly for Collective members from Spain and Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries in South America. Eventually, the Facebook space for the Collective was abandoned as so many members had fled that platform. A few members started talking about maintaining an anarchist archaeology bibliography because there had been so many publications in the last decade. After an early discussion about whether to establish a public Zotero bibliography or something a bit more accessible, a Google site was created in 2019. This was followed by a shift from the Facebook Group to a Whatsapp group, as many of the collective members were isolated in distributed locations.

In May 2020 on the Whatsapp group, Lewis Borck proposed that we start a Microgrants initiative, modelled on Sportula. We very rapidly got organized, meeting weekly, and launched on June 22, 2020. There were some teething pains, as we tried to understand international tax law, rogue t-shirt shops capitalizing on our designs, and the verification of the archaeology student status of applicants. All of this was during the COVID-19 pandemic and during the uprisings associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, when people were overwhelmed by the ongoing circumstances, and recognized the immediate need for mutual aid efforts. 

Eventually Whatsapp became too overwhelming for people to engage with 100s of linear messages, so we moved to Discord, where organizing different threads is easier. As the BTC has grown, this has led to an expansion of our activities and the attending organization of consensus and safeguarding, or creating a security culture for our many members who fear an affiliation with anarchism will negatively impact their career.

UR: Let’s talk a bit about the grants themselves. These are small grants – between 5-300 USD. How did BTC come up with that range and what was the thought behind the micro-ness of the grants?

BTC: We copied the amount from The Sportula, who had demonstrated the efficacy of small grants. People tend to ask for the maximum amount, which usually does not cover their entire need, such as rent. When they ask for lesser amounts, it is usually specific to need, such as the registration for a field school. Even when people ask for $300, we cannot usually provide that much, as there are many requests each month. At the year mark, we’ve distributed about $43,500, but in total folks have needed about $90,000.

UR: I know for collectives such as BTC, group decision making, consensus, and distributive and lateral leadership models are very significant. Can we talk a bit about how the grant works? How do you make the decisions? To be completely transparent, I am opening the door here to talk explicitly about how we can engage in anarchic praxis and the many benefits of such work.  

BTC: When an applicant submits their microgrant application, the Microgrants committee, a subset of seven members of the larger Black Trowel Collective who are accountable to the whole, take a few discrete steps. The applicant’s request is verified as coming from our intended community – archaeology students – by establishing communication with the applicant through their institutional email and verifying their payment details. Once their request is verified, as much of their request as can be covered is distributed to the applicant. Because this is a fully volunteer operation, funding disbursements generally only happens 1-3 times a month (although committee members are working every day monitoring email and verifying student status, etc.). Emergency disbursements, if necessary, will happen during this daily work.

Anarchist principles and praxis are manifested in how we frame our relationship to our applicants and their needs, as well as how we decide to disburse. Marginalized and historically excluded students are well accustomed to having to “perform their pain” and demonstrate how they are oppressed but still conforming to the values of the institution and groups oppressing them, and how their grant awards will be put to “proper” use – often a very restricted range of possibilities directly tied to their research. In contrast to this, Black Trowel Collective Microgrants follow an anarcho-feminist perspective where no such performance or justification is necessary. Finding and applying for the Microgrants is justification enough. Optional, additional comments can be made, and many of our applicants open up here about what they intend to use the money for (and while this may help us identify priority cases, the lack of additional comment has never stopped a grant award as long as we can verify they are students). These additional comments show the breadth of precarity that archaeology students are made to navigate: automobile repair in order to make it to fieldwork (or additional jobs); veterinary bills for cherished animal companions; required school textbooks; expensive testing requirements and graduate school applications; health costs for themselves and family members; testing fees; food bills, and many more.

Consensus practices are used to figure out how to most equitably disburse grant money which we receive from our donors (really our fellow travelers without whom this would be impossible). The Microgrants committee meets monthly to assess the ebb and flow of need; in the course of this discussion, priorities are made for emergency disbursements, for applicants from countries, or backgrounds, that the Microgrants are currently centering (such as India or Brazil, in response to the surge in COVID-19 cases that took place this past spring, Black students during the US originating uprisings during the summer of 2020 to help with anything from bail for protesting to rent). In the course of this discussion, the committee hears all proposals for how we make these prioritizing decisions, and will not come to a decision until all members of the committee agree on that course of action (full consensus). All meetings are open to the rest of the Collective and so the Microgrants committee is fully transparent and accountable to them. And we do monthly updates for the donors. Except for a few months, the incredible need that our applicants have had forced on them means that we do not typically have the ability to fully fund applicants. We often choose to help as many applicants as possible with partial funding instead of committing to a first come first serve basis, which may prioritize the needs of those with more available free time or access to the internet. Unfortunately, this may mean we still end up with more applicants than money, having exhausted our ability to fund applicants near the end of a given month. We encourage applicants who have not received money to reapply to the Microgrants; higher priority is given to students who have applied and not received money.

These practices are always up for discussion and re-discussion; the Microgrants, along with all of our practices and perspectives in the Collective are open-ended and can be brought back into consensus conversations by any Collective member that has concerns. The above decisions about how we prioritize need are re-evaluated every month, and have come about by arriving at consensus; they can and very likely will change in the future.

UR: What sort of future are we looking at for the BTC microgrants program? Is this a program that will run indefinitely? Does the collective have ideas for how long this will be in place? 

BTC: Simply, yeah. We hope to run for as long as we can still muster the money and the effort to distribute it. We don’t really see the need for these grants diminishing. The comments discussing specific needs that we sometimes publish on twitter, with permission, from the recipients of the microgrants really highlight how bad it is for many students who don’t come from economically privileged backgrounds. And these are often the more moderate comments as we don’t usually get permission to publish comments from applicants in absolutely terrible situations, or who have multiple, long-term barriers  to becoming professional archaeologists. It does take considerable time, effort and emotional labor to administer the grants. Distributing the microgrants, like most mutual aid projects, is incredibly rewarding, but taxing. Pushing against neoliberal models that create need and inequality for many to facilitate the success of a few is honestly exhausting, but we think it’s necessary. This balance between what needs to happen and who has the capacity to work on it can be difficult to navigate, but we do the best that we can. We have been trying to rotate our members through different committee roles, both to avoid burn-out and to combat issues of soft power collecting through long-term committee membership. 

UR: Thank you again for so much of your time, labor, and for all the work that BTC does to make archaeology a more equitable and just practice. As we near the end of our conversation, I wondered if there were any closing remarks the collective might want to make.

BTC: The Black Trowel Collective has made it obvious (to at least one of its members) how powerful and important it is to have communities that cross boundaries between institutions, countries, and academic and professional categories that are built on principles of mutual aid, radical egalitarianism, cooperation, consensus, and direct action. Even if you aren’t an anarchist, consider joining or forming a collective (maybe a union!), particularly if you want change. We are more powerful together, we protect us, and we can come together to make a new world in the shell of the old.  

Anarchist visions of collectivity and mutual aid are often ridiculed as impossibly utopian or only workable on the small scale. The futures we imagine–and which we attempt to prefigure through our actions–seem constantly to recede into the distance. As archaeologists, however, we know it can also be salutary to look to the past. Before capitalism, before states, before Homo sapiens and even mammals, there were stromatolites. Stromatolites are the first multi-celled organisms to thrive and colonize the hot salty seas of a young earth over a billion years ago. A stromatolite forms when various single-celled microbes, many of them cyanobacteria, become stuck in sediment; they grow together towards the sun, eating and excreting, forming a food-rich, sticky mat that other microbes settle on. Collectively they feed each other, build layers of mat upon mat, and create undulating underwater forests of pillars. Among their excreta was most of the oxygen in our planet’s atmosphere. At a fundamental level, our entire existence is possible because a bunch of different single-celled organisms formed an accretive collective and thrived. Collectivity, mutual aid, and peaceful coexistence are the farthest things from impossibly idealistic: they are, as the stromatolites remind us, at the very root of what it is to be a multi-celled organism; and they are by far the most proven strategies for making a future worth living in. More than a billion years after they first came together, there are still living, thriving stromatolite colonies, now sheltering fish but still pumping oxygen out for the rest of us to breathe as they grow, layer upon layer, towards the sun. 

UR: That is beautiful (sigh). Thanks to all of you for your time and for this interview.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

Source

On the morning of March 30, 2021, three articles on the culture of harassment within archaeology dropped. And it was epic. Across three articles, Barbara (Barb) Voss reviewed and analyzed current research about the prevalence and patterns of harassment within our discipline. Most useful was her list of proven interventions that have demonstrable results in reducing harassment. Most difficult and heart wrenching to read were her own personal accounts dealing with harassment and how it impacted her career decisions. 

Reading these articles was tough, as I knew it would be, and it occurred to me that there are so many of us who had nowhere to turn when this happened to someone we knew or even ourselves. When we reported an incident of harassment, we were told that we had to figure it out or get out. That is messed up. The significance of these sorts of articles has the immense potential to change how we do archaeology – it could fundamentally change how we could feel safe in our professional spaces.     

The three articles, Documenting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology (2021); Disrupting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology (2021); and Using Public Health Interventions to Prevent Harassment in Archaeology (2021) are all Open Access, and I cannot recommend them enough. Over the course of the last few months, Barb and I have been talking through the responses and through the articles themselves. Based on the significance of our discussions, the impact it could have, and her thoughtful responses, I thought it important to make it more formal, and so I requested an interview. The interview took place on a shared document, in comments, and with an abundance of trust. 

Also, just to say, these issues, as we all know, are not limited to archaeology, but are discipline wide concerns.

Uzma: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Your articles have already become touchstones for discussion around harassment in our discipline. And perhaps we should start there/here. In your article you mentioned you are using the broad term of  “harassment” in recognition that gender and sexuality are not the sole factors in professional abuses of power. Your examples span across decades — important decades in which much work around harassment and safety have happened. Could I ask you to speak broadly about the ways we understand “harassment” to have changed over time? 

Barb: I think it’s helpful to think of harassment is a useful umbrella term, one that describes behaviors that share four specific attributes: (1) they occur in work and educational settings; (2) they involve an abuse of power; (3) they are interpersonal; and (4) they convey hostility, exclusion, objectification, or second-class status based on the perceived identity of the target. 

When Kate Clancy – one of the leading researchers on harassment in field sciences – testified to Congress in 2018, she introduced a framing I find very helpful: “come-ons” and “put-downs.” 

“Come-ons” are unwanted sexual attention, while “put-downs” involve speech and actions that marginalize or exclude the target(s) by stigmatizing their real or perceived identity. While “come-ons” receive the most media attention, “put-downs” are the most common, and they can cause just as much emotional harm and career damage as unwanted sexual attention. So it is important to address all forms of harassment – sexual, identity-based, physical and non-physical, direct and indirect – to remove barriers to participation in archaeology and related fields.

Although harassment has been most commonly used to refer to abuses of power related to gender and sexuality, Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us that, “Anything that’s meant to address gender inequality has to include a racial lens, and anything that’s meant to address racial inequality has to include a gender lens.” The research conducted to date shows that BIPOC archaeologists, queer archaeologists, and archaeologists with disabilities are disproportionately affected by harassment.

Uzma: Can I ask you to speak a bit about the ‘barriers to change’ that you were able to identify, including the normalization, the exclusionary practices, gate keeping, etc.? 

Barb: In “Disrupting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology,” I identify normalization as one of five key barriers to harassment prevention (the other four are exclusionary practices, fraternization, gatekeeping, and obstacles to reporting).  

In survey research on harassment, respondents commonly described harassment as part of the culture of archaeology, something that is socially expected and that is “normal.” These findings should be a wake-up call for all archaeologists. 

From a trauma-informed perspective, this normalization of harassment is understandable. Survey research indicates that 15%–46% of men archaeologists and 34%–75% of women archaeologists have experienced one or more harassment events during their careers. It’s likely that even more archaeologists have witnessed harassment directly or know of harassment occurring through second-hand accounts.

The resulting collective experience of trauma in our discipline is staggering to contemplate. My hope is that the two-article series provides archaeologists and others in allied fields with tools for dismantling this normalization of harassment. 

Uzma: Significant for such work are the discussions of quantifiable survey results related to harassment in the field. Could you talk a bit about how you selected the surveys?

Barb: My primary objective in writing the first article, “Documenting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology,” was to aggregate and analyze the growing body of research about harassment in archaeology and related fields. There has been so much research done over the last ten years, but it is really hard to find it and some content is behind paywalls, which poses barriers to access, especially for early career and non-academic archaeologists.

Also, the sheer volume of new studies has made it difficult to keep up with the literature. I wanted to bring all that new information together in one place, so that if you are trying to make the case for better policies and procedures in your workplace – whether academia, museums, cultural resource management, or government and NGO – you can bring this one article to your dean or director or human resources manager and say, “Look, there is a real problem with harassment in archaeology. It has been verified through methodologically-sound, peer-reviewed research. And we need to take action now so that we protect our people and so that our department or company doesn’t become the next #metoo news story.”

Once I had gathered all the studies I could find, I used three criteria to select studies for analysis:  

1.     The study had to either focus exclusively on archaeology or present study findings in a way that allowed content related to archaeology to be disaggregated from general results;  
2.     The study followed an approved human subjects protocol or had equivalent procedures in place to protect research subjects’ well-being and anonymity; and
3.     The study had passed peer review or had been publicly presented in a juried venue such as a professional conference.  

During 2018-2020, I located twelve studies that met these criteria. Seven had robust quantitative components. Initially, I had hoped to be able to combine the results of these studies into a single set of metrics (what is often called a meta-analysis). However, it soon became clear that this would not be possible, because there was so much variation in survey methodologies and especially subject recruitment methods.

For example, many studies about harassment in archaeology recruited participants through social media, which raises questions about whether self-selection biases, technology access, and social network pathways influenced the composition of the study population. Other studies used professional society membership rosters to recruit participants, which on the surface might seem to resolve these issues. But, students, entry-level professionals, and other marginalized archaeologists tend to have low participation rates in professional societies. So it’s unlikely that membership-based surveys can fully capture the experiences of the most vulnerable archaeologists. So, both crowd-sourced and roster-based quantitative surveys have value, even if their results cannot be easily integrated.

The other problem is that very few of the studies published results for archaeologists of color, non-heterosexual archaeologists, archaeologists with disabilities, and trans, non-binary, and agender archaeologists. Several noted that this information was originally collected, but that because of the low number of participants in those categories, they could not disaggregate results by race or sexual orientation without potentially compromising the anonymity of the respondents. There’s a huge research gap as a result and we need to develop better methodologies that ethically document the experiences of archaeologists of color and other marginalized archaeologists.

While initially I planned to only focus on peer-reviewed or juried research, when these gaps became apparent, I expanded the paper in two directions. I added a very brief overview of the history of gender equity research in archaeology, which had tangentially addressed harassment as a mechanism for exclusion. Some of this equity research included a focus on class that was often missing from more recent surveys and interview studies. 

I also developed a section on grassroots activism: conference actions, ad-hoc groups, blogs, art installations, and journalism. This was one of the hardest sections to write because there is so much amazing stuff being done, and with the strict word limit in American Antiquity articles, I couldn’t include everything. I decided to focus on examples involving archaeology students, early career archaeologists, queer archaeologists, and archaeologists of color, because these are exactly the segments of our community that are underrepresented in formal research studies. 

Uzma: What were some of the surprises (or not) that emerged through analysis of the quantitative research?

Barb: Even as a survivor who has been intermittently involved in sexual violence prevention and activism for much of my adult life, I was still shocked by the high frequency of harassment in archaeology. Surveys results indicate that 15% to 46% of men archaeologists, and 34% to 75% of women archaeologists, have experienced harassment during their training and career, and that 5% to 8% of men archaeologists, and 15% to 26% of women archaeologists, have experienced unwanted sexual contact, including sexual assault. This high prevalence places archaeology in the same range as the military and the entertainment industry – two economic sectors that have notoriously high frequencies of harassment.

And I think we all should be shocked by this, because it’s absolutely horrific. No one should ever have to endure harassment to get an education or pursue a career. 

Some of the research in archaeology confirms well-documented patterns in educational and workplace harassment: harassers most commonly target early career archaeologists, archaeologists are most commonly harassed by other archaeologists (often members of their own research team), and archaeologists in marginalized groups experience harassment at higher-than-average rates.

One particularly interesting finding, which was consistent across many studies, is that there are specific gendered patterns to harassment in archaeology: women archaeologists are most commonly harassed by men and by superiors, while men archaeologists are more commonly harassed by peers of all genders.

It is also important to stress that while quantitative research reveals broad patterns, many people’s experiences of harassment do not conform to these dominant trends. This is why qualitative research – both open-ended survey responses and interviews – are so important, because they capture the full breadth of the problem.

Uzma: I found the section on interviews so revelatory after reading the survey results. One of the key points of analysis that you highlight from Laura Heath-Stouts work is how harassment places a ‘cognitive burden’ on those who have experienced it. Can I ask that you speak a bit more about that, in relation to (if you feel comfortable), your own experiences that you shared in the articles? In some sense, what I am asking is how do we work through the cognitive burden? 

Barb: Laura Health-Stout’s research, along with other studies, helps us understand why harassment has such a long-term negative impact on education and careers even when the harassment itself is short-lived or does not specifically pose a barrier of access to professional opportunities.

I understand this cognitive burden as having two components: one immediate, and the other quite long-lasting. To give an example from my own experience, in “Documenting Cultures of Harassment,” I describe a field project where a male colleague exposed himself to me in the shower facility. A few days later, while drunk, he tried to barge in on me when I was in the toilet. His behavior towards me was very aggressive and I feared it would continue to escalate. When I reported his behavior to my supervisor, she made it clear that she was not going to take any action to protect me from my colleague’s behavior.

For the remainder of that project, a huge amount of my mental energy was dedicated to tracking my colleague’s movements and his schedule. I was constantly performing this intricate calculus to avoid being caught alone with him: adjusting my paths of movement, timing my rest breaks and bathroom visits for times when he was occupied elsewhere, and isolating myself socially so that I would not be inadvertently drawn into meals or gatherings where he might show up. The archaeology work that I was there to do became secondary: I was counting days until the project was over and I could return home.

Afterwards, the mental calculus continued. Archaeology is a small field. I knew that I would not be able to completely avoid contact with him, so I strategized about how to minimize those interactions and ensure that I only saw him in public contexts with others present. I also carried a lot of anger against my project supervisor for disregarding my complaints. That lack of trust at times carried into other professional relationships and other projects.

When doing the research for these articles, it was so transformative to read similar accounts in the words of other survivors. Because harassment is by definition interpersonal, it is so easy to doubt yourself, especially when supervisors or other people senior to you disregard your concerns.

For me, healing from harassment is an ongoing process, one that is never truly finished. Having been victimized multiple times in archaeological settings, by other archaeologists, I walk with that personal history every day when I go to work, do field and research, attend a conference, or visit a museum. Usually it is in the background, but it is never fully out of sight. I have benefitted immensely from talking with other survivors (both informally and in organized groups) and from professional counselling. And I feel very fortunate and privileged that I am now in a professional role – tenured professor – from which I can talk openly about my experiences without fear of loss of employment.

Uzma:  I really appreciated the consideration of a trauma informed approach that you outline in your article, and I wondered if I might ask you to speak more about the importance of such an approach and what some key aspects might be to keep in mind, etc..

Barb: Trauma-informed approaches came out of grassroots activism in the 1970s and 1980s – early rape crisis centers, movements against domestic violence, sexual assault survivor networks, and veteran activist communities. They have now been validated by public health research, and have become the widely adopted standard of care endorsed by medical and legal associations as well as government health agencies. Trauma-informed care has also been slowly percolating into educational settings, and during COVID-19, we started to see this language being used more widely in academia.

The core principles of a trauma-informed approach are straightforward. First, an individual or group is more likely than not to have a history of trauma. We don’t need to ask about individual experiences, we can just assume that many people’s present-day experiences are shaped by their history.

Second, institutions and “business-as-usual” organizational procedures have the potential to retraumatize individuals. This is especially relevant to harassment, which occurs within an institutional context: workplace, school, organization, project, etc. So by definition, survivors experience harassment both as a result of the perpetrator’s actions and in relation to institutional culture and organizational responses.

Third, empowering survivors and other vulnerable members of organizations can transform these environments to deter further abuses of power and to support healing and recovery. General guiding principles include institutional transparency and honesty, including admitting when harm is done; building cultural competency; actively affirming that all members of an institution are valued; and fostering self-determination, privacy, and agency.

For myself, I try to bring these questions to my professional practice: What structures of power are at play at this moment? Who are the most vulnerable participants in this setting – are their needs being met, their voices heard, and their dignity respected? Who is empowered to make meaningful decisions, and who is being excluded? Can that be changed? Am I listening enough? Am I being honest about my actions and intentions, as well as my limitations and constraints? Am I willing to prioritize the well-being of others over my research and professional goals? Perhaps most importantly, what would be the more caring response to this situation?

Uzma: I think understanding the significance of interventions is really important. I invite you to close out our conversation with a list of what we can do and perhaps if there are one or two things you might want to highlight. 

Barb: The most important thing to do is to listen to survivors and other vulnerable members of your organization or research team. They will know where the problems are and what can be done to stop them. In addition to “open door” policies and transparent complaint procedures, regular confidential climate surveys can be especially important to identify problems as they are emerging.

Along with that, each of us can emphasize that reporting harassment is a courageous act that supports the health of the organization and the discipline.

On an organization level, every professional society, university, museum, research institute, and publisher needs to clearly state that harassment is a form of scientific and professional misconduct – similar to plagiarism, falsification of data, human subjects violations, embezzlement, and trafficking in antiquities – and will be treated as such.

For laboratories, field research projects, and other educational and training programs, codes of conduct with clear mechanisms of enforcement have been shown to dramatically reduce harassment.

Finally, prevent potential abuses of power by gatekeepers by establishing open and transparent procedures for advising, supervision, funding, permits, hiring, and other high-stakes career processes.

The details of these and other interventions will of course vary by context. For example, Carol Colannino and her colleagues are piloting a suite of interventions for field schools that specifically address the residential learning environment and faculty-student power differentials. The important thing to know is that whatever our roles in archaeology or in allied fields, there are actions each of us can take to prevent harassment before it starts and support survivors when it does.

Uzma: Thank you so much for this interview, for the work that you have done in bringing these articles into circulation, and for all the unseen labor that you do to keep our discipline equitable and just. 

Barb: Thank you for inviting me! And before we wrap up, I’d just like to mention one more thing – I’m currently working with an amazing team of translators to produce Spanish versions of both articles, which will also be released open access, hopefully later this year (2021).

Editorial Update: The Spanish version of both articles has been released open access.

Actualización: el 17 de noviembre de 2021, la revista académica Latin American Antiquity y Cambridge University Press publicaron las traducciones al español de una serie de dos artículos. Ambos artículos son de libre acceso.

Documentación de culturas del acoso en la arqueología

Contra las culturas del acoso en la arqueología

Whether you yourself are a survivor or whether you have—or someone you know has—witnessed harassment and sexual assault, you are not alone. Support is available. If you are not sure where to start, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) provides free and confidential support to survivors and to those who care about them. Support is available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week by phone (800-656-4673) and via live chat at https://www.rainn.org/. En español, llame al (800-656-4673) a la Línea de Ayuda Nacional Online de Asalto Sexual o comuníquese a través de la opción “Chat Ahora”: https://www.rainn.org/es.

Si tú eres un sobreviviente o si has sido testigo—o alguien que tú conoces lo ha sido—de acoso y agresión sexual, no estás sole. Existe ayuda disponible. Si no estás segure por dónde empezar, la  Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN) provee atención gratuita y confidencial a les sobrevivientes y sus seres queridos. La atención está disponible 24 horas del día, 7 días de la semana. En español, llame al (800-656-4673) a la Línea de Ayuda Nacional Online de Asalto Sexual o comuníquese a través de la opción “Chat Ahora”: https://www.rainn.org/es.

Barbara L. Voss is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and the incoming Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. She is a historical archaeologist who investigates the modern world through themes of colonization, diaspora, and sexuality.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

Source

This essay is about ice cream, beading, trust, friendship, and finding happiness in unexpected spaces while being an anthropologist. Collaboratively envisioned and written, we offer these reflections on praxis for a screen-bound contemporary moment, as well as an equitable and critical way to conceive of intellectual work in our future that feels like it engenders a space of happiness.

Setting the Stage
When the organizers (Uzma Z. Rizvi and Sarah Jackson) began planning an academic workshop, with funding from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, they envisioned a space of concentrated engagement for a group of anthropologists working on topics related to crafting and worldmaking in ancient contexts. They imagined intense, productive conversations, planned excursions that engaged with local experts and the landscape.

On the first Friday in October 2020, instead of meeting on Tohono O’odham land, the eleven of us found ourselves in a virtual space, located in Zoom boxes from our homes around the globe. The pandemic had changed our world. Instead of canceling, we had decided to imaginatively rethink the possibilities. We built in ways by which the engagement with the workshop was not bound by space or time, but rather through materiality and intentional gestures of community building that we borrowed from participatory and community-based archaeology, and from adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy (2017).

We met on the five Fridays in October, picking times that recognized our span of time zones. While we communicated a tentative plan for the meetings in advance, it evolved with group input over the month. The rhythm of the full-group meetings alternated between ones in which group members, their projects, and academic ideas took precedence, and two meetings in which we welcomed an honored guest, Krista Leddy, an expert Métis beader, who taught us beading techniques and told us stories to contextualize the significance of beading within Métis culture. This approach to crafting, learning, and being, fit beautifully within our concept of Crafting as Worldmaking. Between our weekly meetings, we hosted optional and agenda-less “coffee hours” — one per week — at various times. Alongside these synchronous, live contacts, we had a background infrastructure of multiple connections: group Dropbox folders to facilitate sharing of materials, and a Slack group with channels for both official and social exchanges.

At the end of October, we realized that none of us wanted to stop meeting, that we had made real, new friends, that our scholarly conversations had been some of the most productive and collaborative we had had. In the midst of unabashedly adverse circumstances, we had not only achieved success in carrying out our workshop, we had also found unexpected happiness. The larger context of the world was precarious, which made the connections we found particularly precious.

Our intention in writing this piece is not to share logistical best practices for successful or effective online meetings; rather, we wish to share what happened — how we found happiness and connection in an unlikely space of separate Zoom boxes, physical distance, and considerable disappointment — in order to think about how this experience can impact the ways we come together, to form and sustain communities, not only in pandemic contexts, but also in other moments of literal or metaphorical separation.

Building Trust
To gain trust you have to take a risk and open yourself up to others you do not know. This is not an easy thing to do even when you are meeting people in person. Being online takes it to another level as we cannot see or react to body language or cues of those with whom we are in conversation. It makes us think differently about how we engage and create trust with each other in this new reality. You are putting yourself out there, into a vulnerable place, trusting process. Without taking this risk we will not learn how to trust others in this new world of online convening.

We came together without most of us knowing each other beyond professional ties. We engaged in intentional, meaningful, and community building processes so that we could make our gatherings more than just a meeting. One of the significant ways we did this was through sharing parts of ourselves that we do not usually share in professional settings. A moment we all hold as significant is our first introduction with Krista Leddy; she asked us who we were, what kind of ice cream we liked, and how we came to like this type of ice cream. This simple yet important way to engage with each other created a place where we all have common ground, even sharing that some of us may not like ice cream. This exercise, facilitated by Krista, made her an important part of our group. She not only taught us how to bead together; through her teaching, we learned an archaeology of beads, histories, stories…ways of knowing about Métis life, and each other. Her framing allowed us to be heard as we started our conversations and not feel dismissed as we were talking.

In our meetings with Krista, we were taught a new skill — beading. Our vulnerability was inevitable as we all had the space to make mistakes. Interestingly, Krista made us feel like no mistake was ever irreversible nor was it something that could not be adjusted. That generosity of the craft and of her teaching created an energy of equitable exchange, a feeling that we were all in it together. It was also during this time we all became comfortable with silence on Zoom; when someone was ready, they shared.

Each part of this process allowed us to feel comfortable in taking a risk to engage with each other. As we shared and visited every Friday we started building trust in each other to follow through with what we were engaged with, and we learned how to think together.

Making Space
There is no one way that a virtual space has to be; because our meetings were mediated by Zoom did not mean that our interactions had to follow an established template. As the context for this workshop was during a period when we were all envisioning new ways of working, teaching, and collaborating, meant that we were all more open, willing and thus able to experiment. What we created together was a place for making mistakes; a space of vulnerability.

This space emerged from the framework and tone that the organizers established from the beginning, but it came alive through what we all brought to the space, and subsequently, what the space engendered. It began with the intentionality of the organizers to create a space that encouraged listening and engagement; one that eschewed hierarchy. For example, rather than facilitating discussion by calling on people, as a way to hear all voices and provide each voice with the vested position of directing our collective thoughts, whomever spoke would choose the next person to speak. This dismantled the hierarchy of conducting a conversation in a particular form and fashion.

As participants, we all found ourselves coming into a space that, therefore, was not strident or competitive; what we brought with us, and what was encouraged, was the ability and desire to be collaborative, open, and vulnerable. We found ourselves within our scholarship in new ways because we were in new spaces online, which in turn fostered a different engagement with texts, ideas, and our ways of sharing. We built together, adding bit by bit, and ensuring we did not tear things down. This became a clear ethos in the group – a generative, rather than destructive approach to knowledge sharing.

Moving beyond the visual-centered nature of Zoom created a different kind of space. Communal crafting engaged us tactilely while still allowing for conversation; our vision was engaged elsewhere, at a different focus; unexpectedly, we found that this more closely evoked in-person, comfortable encounters. This multi-sensory experience where the screen was de-privileged allowed for insights that would not have otherwise arisen.

Ultimately, the space was fluid in ways that mimicked in-person engagements but also took advantage of not being in one physical space for a continuous week. The virtual workshop was temporally spread out, allowing time to process ideas in ways that would not have been possible in the more intensive atmosphere of an in-person experience. A part of each participant’s physical space contributed to the collective virtual space of the workshop, and the interplay between the individual and collective spaces added to the productive and generative dynamic of the workshop.

Visiting, Not Meeting
Many of the virtual spaces we enter in our work are formal meetings or structured presentations, where our participation is determined by agendas or schedules. These spaces require us to interact in ways that conform to expectations of our workplaces and to come with our minds rather than our hearts. From the outset, however, it was clear in our crafting workshop that we were doing a lot more than meeting. Instead of the focus being on achieving some particular goal, our focus was on building connection. This shifted us from being in a meeting space to being in a visiting space. Indigenous scholar Cindy Gaudet writes about a visiting methodology as a means of building connection in her work with Métis women in Saskatchewan, where the emphasis is on spending time with one another.

Visiting centers reciprocity, respect, and relationality, rather than emphasizing the accomplishment of a specific outcome or producing a product. The outcome of the visiting space is actually the relationships built between the participants. In our context, we began each gathering in conversation with one another, inviting into the space something we were engaged within our lives. The prompt in our first meeting of what we have each been crafting or making, opened up the space where we entered into the fullness of each other’s lives. Krista’s ice cream inquiry created a visiting space as she led us through the process of learning to bead. Part of the beadwork teachings she shared with us emphasized the visiting nature of doing beadwork. She shared a story with us of when she first was learning to bead with her Métis relatives where they kept asking her to thread their needles as they beaded, drank tea, and visited. This story demonstrated for all of us the importance of visiting during the process of crafting or making.

We were not just visiting with each other, but we were also visiting with ideas. We would start with texts that we’d share with one another, readings that we found inspiring, or concepts that we wanted to discuss. In some of the small groups, we continued with our crafting work as we visited with ideas; in others, we shared our own writing as ‘crafted material.’ Out of these small groups came inspiration for work that we wanted to do, deep conversations about terms and concepts, and the forging of new relations between people as well as ideas.

Materializing Connections
In addition to the intentionality of building trust, creating space, and visiting, there were particular material connections we shared. This engagement came through boxes of materials that were mailed out by the organizers prior to the start of the workshop, which created and continue to create connections. Opening the box was like opening a delightful trove of presents on one’s birthday!

Archaeologically, it was an assembly of materials….but also a first step into the ethos of the meeting. The hosts had thought long and hard how to open the meeting and say, ‘trust us, these are places we are going to go’.

Some of the items were familiar residents of conferences: coffee, tea, a drip-coffee filter and mug, and to everyone’s glee, an assortment of gourmet, free-trade chocolate bars. Anthropologists have long recognized that commensality builds ties and makes communities. For us, the simple addition of a way to share in food and drink was one ingredient of intellectual sharing whereby taste and smell fed discussions, points of articulation between different research domains, and friendships between new colleagues.

The box included a suite of books on craft production, relationality, creativity and worldmaking from BIPOC, subaltern, queer, and feminist perspectives. The intent of the books was not to read each one cover to cover. Rather, participants dipped into different books before the meetings, read elements throughout at their leisure, and afterwards now have those books as points of reference – evoking other participants and recalling conversations.

Some of the other goodies in the box were meant to stimulate ideas through doing – a topic we as archaeologists are committed to in theory, but do not often engage with in practice. These included the bead-making kits, origami paper, watercolor markers and blank postcards. We might have been initially reticent, yet once everyone started, we realized that ‘doing’ opened up a creative outlet that had us ask new questions and allowed us to see craft production from new perspectives. The presence of these tools in our personal spaces throughout the month materialized the ongoing workshop. For some, the doing was therapeutic. For others, it was a way to share something with colleagues.  For all, it was good fun. We snail-mailed the watercolor postcards to each other with little hand-written notes at the end of the conference. These personalized notes and colored works are not just material mementos of the conference but are indeed gifts in the sense of the word by Marcel Mauss. They set up possibilities for reciprocity that so much of our participatory and community based archaeological work depends upon. They are points in a chain of reciprocal engagement that compel us to want to keep that conversation going.

Concluding thoughts

Now
make room in the mouth for
grassesgrassesgrasses

Layli Long Soldier begins Part 1 of her book of poetry, Whereas with these words. As one of the books in our box, we returned to her words in different ways during our sessions as we read her poems out loud to one another in our large group. These were emotional because we were reading out loud the violence of settler colonialism, not just citing it. These were not performative gestures or readings, rather, they became ways by which we were bringing each other closer; gentle and inclusive. We all shared the horror of the mass killing of the Dakota 38.  As we recognized parts of ourselves in each other through these feelings, there was an intimacy to scholarship and a focus on relationality among ourselves.

This relational aspect of togetherness as something we experienced, rather than just studied, shifts the ways by which we incorporate theory into our everyday research: we are not working on something but working with something. As we consider this experience, we feel it has pedagogical implications on how to teach and learn differently. Indeed, it has already shifted the ways by which we all engage in our academic spaces.

Finally, it is important to recognize the rigor and criticality that we imbued in our spaces — that criticality could be generative and not about tearing down arguments was a revelation for some of us, and became part of our ethos. We had come together not only to think about crafting as worldmaking, but in some part, we also redefined our own praxis as anthropologists. And it was there that we found our happiness – the ability to read, think, learn, make mistakes, bead, and visit theory in a just and equitable framework; where we were not asking the past in extractive ways to fuel our own professional goals, but where we brought respect and a different way of knowing to inform our workshop. In some manner of speaking, we enacted crafting as worldmaking as our experience beading made a new and different world for all of us, leading us to unexpected happiness in virtual spaces.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

Source

Quietly float.

Unobtrusively float.

Since 9/11, I could no longer float with a voice.

And so I left it to those who were too young to know what it meant to have that voice stripped and to be disappeared. And I watched as it became clear that if we critique the state, we are made to be at fault by the state, no matter how relevant our critique is.

And so I was quiet, my eyes dry, and determined to float.

Thoughtfully float.

Rigorously float.

When people asked me what I thought about what happened in New Zealand, I said the links between settler colonialism and white supremacy are deep and will only erupt in erasure of racialized others because constitutive to these states is such violence.

And they said, we’re talking about Islamophobia. To which I responded, so am I.

One floats without tears and without protest and some of us only allow ourselves to float as an academic with reason.

Intellectual reason.

Disciplinary reason.

And then I saw Hassan Ghani’s twitter post:

Members of Māori community perform #Haka in tribute to those murdered in #Christchurch. pic.twitter.com/YjhqdWtSHx

— Hassan Ghani (@hassan_ghani) March 17, 2019

And I cried. In these bodies, I saw the emotion and strength with the land, and how people I do not know, extended a fierce sense of solidarity, and in their movement, my tears were allowed to flow and found a place. I wanted to find out more about who these men were, websites claimed them as “biker gangs,” and then I found Robbie Shilliam’s response:

These are not random maori. Nor a “biker gang”. They are Mangu Kaha – the Black Power. There is a specific history which makes sense of their solidarity here. https://t.co/N8PE4KdQ2O https://t.co/QYdovaY9ym

— Robbie Shilliam (@RobbieShilliam) March 17, 2019

I realized that in their movement was a lesson of how to hold, center, and be in the face of erasure. It was a lesson of how to live in world.

In Robbie Shilliam’s tweet is also a link to his article, ‘The Polynesian Panthers and The Black Power Gang: Surviving Racism and Colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand.’ This chapter links the histories of racism and colonialism by pointing to the global significance of settler colonialism for the further study of black power. Shilliam’s chapter moves through the history of settler colonialism and its impact on New Zealand, specifically indigenous communities through the violence of assimilation and labor. Perhaps most importantly, Shilliam talks through the links between settler colonialism and continued discrimination against racialized others:

Under settler colonialism, the dispossession of land from indigenous peoples and its genocidal effect exists prior to and parallel to the exploitation of peoples based on racial exclusion from and discrimination within the civic sphere. This means that in most societies born from settler colonialism there exists distinct – albeit intimately related – sedimentations of land dispossession and labour exploitation that form the uneven ground of white supremacist rule in thought and practice. (pg 2)

I thought about the video, and the ways by which the Mangu Kaha came, full of emotion, intentional movement, and made explicit the knowledge of how such violence has linked our bodies. There was something fierce about this emotion, something powerful, and something about how they held space for tears and love. The Mangu Kaha brought back together the dispersed, disposed of, and assimilated social contract that holds us all together through love for others. As Shilliam points out in the section on ‘Black Power as Family Survival’:

No where was this effect more concentrated than in the breaking up of the extended family organization (whanau) and the dissolution of its cardinal ethics of care (manaaki), compassion (aroha), and relational reciprocity (whanaungatanga). In the early 1970s Hana Jackson, a Māori activist, summed up this effect of urbanization and assimilation passionately and acutely: “you are killing the basic human nature of the people – love for others.” (pg. 13)

And I felt, through their movement, the love and honor for those who were killed in their sanctuary. The Mangu Kaha built solidarity and respect between communities that have been pitted against one another, and there is power in that connection.

Many immigrant communities are told by authorized discourses of the state that the Mangu Kaha are “criminals.” As immigrants struggle to assimilate and find themselves on new landscapes, the production of ignorance around indigenous communities reinstates narratives in the service of the state. This complicates a simple story of solidarity. I can only imagine what sorts of negotiations of being and belonging might be taking place within those communities as there is a recognition of similar treatment across different histories… and a recognition of self in other.

When faced with a crisis, my instinct is to go to sayings my grandmother may have told me. It’s been so many years of my doing that, so many years since she has left us, that I can no longer remember if these are her words or mine, or maybe her mothers, or maybe my mothers. It seems relevant, but not really, because in such forgetting, I recognize how wisdom is a layering of many memories, a meshing of different modes of knowing, and weaving generations of experience.

This is not me claiming to be wise, just me claiming to recognize the process.

She said/I said/we said, accumulating experiences is not what it’s about, it’s about how you hold and care for them (sambhalou – to care for), and how one does that determines how we understand what is happening. I did not need to accumulate more experiences, more images, more likes, more, more, more… but I needed to know what to do with whatever arrived at my threshold (chaukat). Last week, I spent a lot of time thinking of my grandmother and other matriarchs of my family who have recently passed — all with their own ways of holding, centering and being.  And each one of these women, immigrants moving through spaces of violence in search of whatever home could mean, creating homes for all of us, and leaving within us senses of home as they pass.

I was holding all of this yesterday as I walked into Ishara Art Foundation‘s inaugural show, Altered Inheritances: Home is a Foreign Place, which brought together works by Indian artists, Shipa Gupta and Zarina Hashimi. Although these works and shows (as titles) had been seen before, there was something about how they were held and centered in this space that, as Yaminay Chaudhri said, left us trembling. Bumping into the Artistic Director, Nada Raza at the show, I was breathless from emotion as I congratulated her. “The show curated itself,” she said, referring to the fact that the works and title itself emerged through bringing together both women’s cohesive bodies of work.  A show like this, however, is a beautiful example of when curating is not just about accumulation, but rather how aesthetics, experience, histories, senses of home are held and centered. The works themselves critically, mathematically, architecturally, poetically, politically, and emotionally held, centered and became a way to engage with how we belong.

home is of course here—and always a missed land.
–Land, Agha Shahid Ali

The poignancy of how this show began with Agha Shahid Ali‘s poetry was not lost. Shahid, a poet from Kashmir, yet another home – land split through the violence of the nation state, and its lines. A show featuring two Indian women, brought together by a Pakistani curator, starting off with a line from a Kashmiri poet — perhaps this is only possible in Dubai — for as long as none of them claim belonging to the Emirates. The sheer contingency of belonging, the terror of trying, the violence of it being stripped away, the fractured nature of being — all of it was on display as we walked through narratives of migration, lines across landscapes as territory, and the ways by which embodied senses of being and belonging emerged through the violence of the nation state.

The gallery became the homespace, the nationspace, and …space. I was caught in one of  Hashimi’s piece: a mass of stars, the constellations, the immense-ness that one can see when one looks up on a dark night from a courtyard, and I thought of the speculative and her capacity to make us dream beyond what is right in front of us. And then how she grounds us, in this case, with her caption Sitarou Say Agay Jahan Aur Bhi Hai — a famous line from Allama Iqbal’s poetry which I translate to “There are more worlds beyond the stars.”

It is difficult to articulate the very fine line that Hashimi is treading here — it is simultaneously the recognition of utopia and dreamings of different kinds of future that Iqbal was alluding to in a pre-Partition (pre-1947) moment, while also drawing attention to how those dreams are what has led to violence and trauma in the nation state. It draws attention to how we have yet to dismantle the pain and suffering of the colonial state and how in this moment, we continue to replicate that same violence, exemplified by Gupta’s work in the show.

I left the show overwhelmed and a bit teary eyed. My visit and encounter with the work did not provide answers, but it did remind me of a larger context within which to hold and care for the trauma of knowing that a white supremacist could walk into a masjid and open fire on Jumma prayers. It gave me strength to pick up that information and feel the heft of knowing that he filmed it and put it on line to demonstrate to others how easy such a taking of life is, and it reminded me that when the world begins to hurt, we need to come together to take us beyond the information to the core of emotion — and I knew that as I moved into that space, I had the space to cry, and dream of different futures. And so, without any real answers, I, alongside others, will be with, hold and center the memory of the over 50 killed and 50 wounded in Christchurch, New Zealand. May you all rest in power and peace.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

Source

In a textured ethnography in guise as an ESPN feature by Sam Borden, The New Hooligans of Russia, one of the men interviewed, “believes fighting is a necessary part of dealing with the anger that grows out of life’s inevitable frustrations and disappointments.” The authorities in Russia are cracking down on these individuals, with some arrests and a general state of alertness. Borden’s article makes space for such fights to sound like a resurgence of an older tradition, a cultural artifact linked to heritage, not a practice that has emerged recently due to an erosion of civil society, class struggles, or some anarchic impulse, which many of the other reports suggest.

Within Anthropology, of course, we can look back to the literature related to war, aggression, and sports. As I have been reading the various reports on the Russian Hooligans, much of the analysis continues to feel settled (perhaps stuck) in early popular ideas related to combative sports. Even though as early as 1973 anthropologists like Richard Sipes argued that aggression is a learned cultural behavior pattern, we continue to see popular ideas of war, aggression and masculinity being linked, particularly in relation to sports.  We also know that the ways in which sports have been studied has changed and become more nuanced, but it continues to be talked about in public discourse in a way to suggest that it has not really moved beyond those early frameworks of aggression. In contrast, Sports (as an enterprise) is and has been trying to change the view that it is linked to masculinity and aggression. Just recently, FIFA Secretary General Fatma Samba Diouf Samoura claimed at the 2018 FIFA conference on Equality and Inclusion, that football can change the world; that it can be used as a tool for social change.

Utilizing her own appointment as the first female Secretary General at FIFA as an indicator, she seems to be leading change within the sport, increasing numbers of women administrators in FIFA from 32% in 2016 to its current 48%. But her claim is not just about hiring more women – it is about inclusion, it is about understanding and underscoring that football has the ability to transcend religion, race, and gender (for some critical reading on issues of race/gender, see The Place of Afro-Brazilian Women in the World Cup, by Melissa Creary and Erica L. Williams).

The Secretary General brings with her the postwar optimism that surrounded the UN – not surprisingly so, given that is her experience prior to FIFA. And in some measure, she is not wrong; there is certainly something about football that brings much of the world together, for example I’m thinking of all the neighborhoods, particularly in the postcolonies, that go all out and decorate their neighborhoods in team colors, like at Siddiq Goth in Malir, Karachi. In these neighborhoods, however, violence and aggression do not break out during the World Cup – at least they have not been reported as resulting from sporting aggression. Being a Baloch neighborhood, there are other issues of violence that continue to plague many of the residents, and it seems as if football provides some respite.

There is something familiar that Secretary General Samoura is trying to do that, at least from the outside, looks somewhat impossible, and yet necessary. She is attempting to un-do a system that was created to reflect (and maintain) a certain world order, a particular power structure that we all love and loathe simultaneously.

FIFA was founded in Paris in 1904, conceived of as an umbrella sports organization within Europe. With France leading the meeting, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland in attendance, and a remarkably absent Great Britain, FIFA was created. As FIFA’s history web-page (very pointedly) relates, “When the idea of founding an international football federation began taking shape in Europe, the intention of those involved was to recognise the role of the English who had founded their Football Association back in 1863.” Apparently the Football Association had been contacted, but there were delays in getting feedback from everyone involved to move it forward. But really, how could they have moved it forward? Great Britain and France were not really on good terms. In fact, the founding of FIFA happened a little over a month after the Entente Cordiale (April 8, 1904) — an Anglo-French agreement that ended (or started the end of) the antagonism between both powers primarily to grant freedom of action to Great Britain in Egypt and to France in Morocco. This agreement did not create an alliance, but it did set the stage for diplomatic cooperation that would help in their stance against the German’s leading up to WWI. Also part of this agreement, and arguably more significant, was France renouncing its exclusive right to certain fisheries off Newfoundland, and Great Britain ceding the Los Islands (off of French Guinea) to France. Moreover, Great Britain agreed to French control of the upper Gambia valley, defined the frontier of Nigeria in France’s favor, and zones of influence for the French and British in Thailand were outlined. Indeed, as Matisse was imagining how to represent a world in a particular manner and form in Paris, in just as vivid and non natural strokes, the colonial powers were distributing the world and its resources, and conjuring up new worlds within which football would bring people on the European landmass together.

I do applaud FIFA Secretary General Samoura’s efforts to transform a remarkably colonial, racist and misogynist organization, but I also want to draw attention to what happens when there are aggressive transgressions that contest the histories of power, its abuse, and how the bodies that perform them on the field are held to different standards. In this case, it is about the history of wars, aggression and sports that continues to play itself out on the field and in the stands. There are particular ways in which we see brown bodies claim their space on the field — where it becomes less about the patriotic jerseys and claims to nationhood that football teams obviously represent – and it becomes something slightly more nuanced, an historic global resistance that pulls people together because the tension of being pulled apart becomes obvious through some action done to that body as a power play. This can be done through the media and narratives spun around the players, or can be done by the powerful sports institutions themselves. It is the responses that those athletes have to such explicit racism that I am always watching for because it, in that moment, becomes emblematic of all of our struggles.

Gearing up for the World Cup, there is always a lot of activity in the football world. In particular, last week I read a headline about how Zinedine Zidane resigned as Real Madrid’s Head Coach. As ESPN’s Dermot Corrigan reported: “Zidane shocked the football world with Thursday’s snap decision to resign just days after securing a third Champions League trophy in just two and a half years as Madrid coach.” The mode by which many sports reporters articulate this decision is telling: they focus on the quickness of it, the knowing that he might be getting fired anyway, and the overall snappiness of it is reminiscent of the tone used after the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final. It was in that World Cup Final that Zidane, famously, ended his last game as Captain of the French Team by getting a red card in overtime after headbutting Marco Materazzi. At the time, his actions were called into question as unsportsmanlike and acts of a hooligan. What else could one expect, they asked us from their news rooms, from an Algerian Kabyle descent child who grew up in poverty in northern Marseille? Reporters continued to bring up Zidane’s childhood in order to explain his actions. He was cast as violent, unpredictable, and uncivilized.

Halfway around the world, however, in Brooklyn NY, the entire crew of football enthusiasts cheered for him. Caught off guard, we knew the headbutt was not just for whatever verbal altercation that had ensued. We raised our fists and yelled at the projection in the side room of a dingy restaurant in Williamsburg.

I cannot help but think of the many ways by which we love and loathe colonial structures (cough archaeology cough) and how these choices to decolonize or address issues of equity and inclusion are not limited to academic discourses but are emerging in multiple disciplines, and practices. Right now, because of how toxic the world has become, the academy is starting to feel like bare-knuckle fighting among ourselves – allies, accomplices, friends, and others. I wonder if our disciplines are ready for that change or if we will have to continue to slowly headbutt our way through, red card after red card.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

Source

Reflecting back on that and what it might mean for Anthropologists to find themselves on television, I thought of the many ways by which our work, our ideas, and even our presentation is often mediated and fit into what the public wants to see or expects to see. There are some moments when things shift and change, but even as those happen, they are often directed by, edited, and then re-presented to the world – and not by us. As an anthropologist who works with and within many distinct and overlapping publics, I thought I might try this venue out when the opportunity presented itself. What would it mean for me to be on TV and how might I react to this negotiation? Was my public anthropology public enough for television media consumption?

I was contacted in early 2017 by Wall-to-Wall, a production company that was interested in filming at the World Heritage site of MohenjoDaro (Pakistan) and they wanted me to work with them on a project for a series entitled, First Civilizations. After a series of long, thoughtful, and hesitant (on my part) discussions, I was won over by the public-ness of this project: this documentary was for PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service). PBS is our public outlet for TV in the United States. It is the only channel that continues to thank “Viewers Like You,” because it depends on all of us to continue to support it alongside the many grants and funding that they receive. I had grown up watching PBS, and was keen on it’s children’s programming for my own child, and so I felt generally good about the whole discussion, except for the explicit lack of control we would have over editing and content.

This lack of control is made explicit so that there is built in protection for the director and editors of the series and their creative and research rigor. We are then, as academics on the “show,” just one part of a larger story they want to tell. In some manner of speaking, it is as if they cite us in person, on film; and so the same way we have no control in the ways that the many worlds may cite us in text, we have little control over what they (directors/editors/etc) may chose to do with our sound and image.

This is simultaneously somewhat liberating, but mostly anxiety producing. There is something unsettling about having ones image and sound captured by another, particularly knowing you have no control over how it might be used. The irony of that statement is not lost on me when I think about the history of Anthropology and what our discipline has done to many around the world in an effort to learn about humanity.

To be honest, public presentations always have a bit of the adrenaline and exhilaration of things being out of ones’ control. My experience with this team was not unlike many of the other public lectures I’ve done in many different locations around the world. I may want to tell them about something specific, but the interest that is shown is in something completely different. And I have had to cater many a talk, and in particular, public/community workshops, to what was being asked of me. When I first started doing such work, the advice I had been given by senior researchers was, “make sure you get what you want out of it.” My experience however, has always proven the opposite. Public lectures, workshops, and meetings, have nothing to do with “what I want” in a research sense. But in terms of my ethics around public research, it is exactly what I want. What I want is to make my discipline, my work, my research more accessible – and what that means is making sure it finds its way into public discourse in responsible forms. It means conducting workshops that address different community’s curiosities around the ancient world and contemporary issues around heritage. Sometimes it might also mean how to teach people how to do research on different topics, how to write policy papers, how to revamp a syllabus, and now apparently it also means being filmed for TV — whatever form it takes, as long as it is informed by my work in Anthropology, I consider it to be part of my larger project as an anthropologist.

Beyond that ongoing ‘project’, what I did get out of it was another visit to one of my favorite ancient cities, another chance to get to know the men who work and live close to the site (see images below), and another chance to demonstrate to the American public (at least those who watch PBS) that there might be a different voice and vision of who does the knowledge sharing on TV.

The episode on Trade, as a part of the First Civilizations series aired May 15th, 2018. It was predictably awkward to see myself on TV, but my students (past and present) loved it. They felt like they were back in my classroom – many of them sent me emails after saying it reminded them of how important learning about anthropology was in their own practice and lives.

I may not agree with all of the ways in which the argument and premise of the show unfolded; I may not agree with all of their editing decisions; but I am glad I did it anyway. If nothing else, the negotiations we have to do with those creating, directing, editing and presenting the many publics we encounter and engage with, has become more clear.

Top image: Author being filmed at MohenjoDaro (image courtesy of Ibad Rahman). Bottom two images: Hanging out in DK-G Area, MohenjoDaro (images taken by author, with permission to publish by all present in image).

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

Source

For those of you who do not know Saba or her work, my hope is that the diversity of notes will help you gain glimpses of her person as a scholar and teacher. Please know that you, as a reader of this blog, are also invited to join us in this gesture – if you would like to leave a note commemorating Saba Mahmood, please feel free to do so in the comments section. The final note in this tribute has been reprinted from the official Obituary from the University of California, Berkeley website. I’ve included it because it came from Saba’s home department, and because it has a link for those wishing to make gifts in her memory.

On this chaleeswan (40th day), within this community, may our words have the strength to be our sentiments as well as our tribute to a brilliant, courageous and generous scholar, whose love, strength, laughter and ethics continue to inform our fields of practice and our lives.

-Uzma Z. Rizvi

It is difficult, if not impossible, to write about the loss of a friend. And this small memorandum will not attempt to do so. Instead, all that seems available is to gesture to Saba’s life as an exemplum, one which asks to be contemplated. For that is what defined her as a friend and mentor—a life that cannot be compassed by a discourse or a moral teaching but was lived as a teaching.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Saba’s work was at its most incisive precisely where this difference came to the fore. Conceptual and ethnographic inquiries concerning virtue, ethics, or even piety were, at their heart, a question about life itself. What is it, not to possess a virtue, but to live it? This question was as decisive for Saba in the realm of politics as in religious life. Politics must be understood to be, at its center, the capacity of shared lives oriented around shared forms, traditions, and practices. Tellingly, the question of politics and the collapse of shared forms of life in the wake of catastrophe became Saba’s chief concern after the publication of her second book. In much the same way that she had previously sought lived rather than possessed forms of virtuous practice, here she pursued the figure of hope, not as an analytic construct or an attitude, but as emergent in a way of living.

This is best evinced in a memorable moment where, in a seminar meeting with her students, Saba refused to read Beckett’s famous “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” as meaning, “I can’t go on, but I must go on”. For her there could be no insertion of exigency or need. Instead, the quote, in its parataxis, points us toward something beyond the economy of agency. It is a calling. It is a trial.

Saba’s lived response to this trial, to a call that demanded so much without apology, is the recapitulation of her entire teaching to us as her students. It reached across the boundaries of profession and personal proclivity to affirm the essence of our shared life together as friends and colleagues within the discipline. If anthropology is to have an ethics it can be nothing other than welcoming that for which we can give no account; the stranger knocking at the door.

It is fitting that pursuing this form of hope, as a “going on”, is what we who remain here bear as our inheritance of Saba’s teaching. For we too, perhaps having come to a moment of being unable to go on, are nevertheless already pulled along by the traces of her life. These traces, as inscriptions that twist about a hidden core, are to be found in her writings and teachings, and even more so in those lives by whom she constituted her own. They do not impress upon us an exigency to “go on” but bespeak a calling already onward.

Aaron Eldridge
April 2018

When Saba passed away I was in Amman doing fieldwork. I stayed home that day, feeling far away, and watched an outpouring of messages begin to sweep across my social media feed and inbox. Knowing that so many people around the world were touched by her was no consolation, of course, but it was something to hold onto. There will be more formal tributes to the importance of her scholarship (which continues to shape my work) and other testimonies about the warmth and care she expressed (certainly to me and my family). But in my small contribution to this online memorial, I want to linger with something apart from both her published writings and my own grief. This is something that struck me about her from my first campus visit to Berkeley, and something I don’t want to escape notice: her work as a teacher, her passion for anthropology in the public university as a discipline of teaching. On that initial visit, addressing a cohort of prospective graduate students, I remember her pride in remarking that Berkeley was still a university accountable in some fashion to a broader public (for all that it too has defaulted to the corporate form). She valued this accountability. She did not see anthropology as a refuge somehow beyond the economic logics that otherwise govern our lives. But she insisted that it was a space which can still be transformative in encountering the world, and a discipline that can teach a deep humility. (She had no patience for arrogance, and had the courage to face it: a rare combination anywhere, let alone academia.) ‘Accountability’ does not determine the course of analysis or politics. It might teach you to distinguish your analysis from your politics. But it requires sustaining a commitment to thought that is situated in a given place, against a given history, conditions that cannot be brushed away but must be thought through—however fraught the situation or cosmopolitan the anthropologist. And that is the beginning, not the end, of analysis. Heteronomy of criticism (though she would not put it that way).

I found a video online of her remarks to an anthropology undergraduate research symposium. There she describes anthropology as a discipline that allows creativity but holds one to rigor, and does not allow easy alibis. This was how she taught, and her undergraduates loved her for it. A few years ago I TA’d a class for her on “the Anthropology of the Middle East and Islam,” with a syllabus organized around colonialism and its legacy through the Arab uprisings and their unmaking. Before class began, a dozen students would cluster near the front of the lecture hall to tell her a joke or talk politics. Her lectures on Said and Alloula, Pontecorvo and Antoon, made complicated material clear without being pedantic. Creativity and rigor—she made it look easy, and came by their affection easily. One of those undergraduates wrote to me last month. She said, “I know her students will continue to hold her memory close to our hearts and hear her championing us forward when we have the courage to confront injustice, inequity, and cruelty.”

A couple of years later, her cancer advancing, she led a seminar for her graduate students on the analytic relationship between concepts and practices. Our sites of reflection were moments of catastrophe and dissolution. What social acts are viable in the loss of world, in the absence of future? We read Anthony Marra’s Constellation of Vital Phenomena. I wrote to her how moving I found the novel. She replied, “I have never been so stunned by a piece of writing in quite the same way. It made me realize the paucity of social scientific/analytic writing and the immensity of the human relations we so inadequately gesture to.” In seminar she led us to how hope is constructed in time, through the very events that were meant to jettison that hope, through the fabric of the relationships that endure the disaster, without the lure of transcending the present, where ethics is a simple capacity and where what hope there is is found in different temporalities and different spaces: where ends become beginnings. She taught this in her last year; this is what I will remember.

Basit Iqbal
April 2018

Saba Mahmood’s contributions to my own thinking were mostly through her writing. I did not know her as well as I would have liked, but her impact on my thinking was substantial. Like a good feminist, she put the body at the center of her analyses. Like a good ethnographer, she listened to her female interlocutors in Cairo when they told her that the path to salvation in the afterlife and to comfort in this life was in bodily discipline. She beautifully conveyed why those women chose to comport themselves in styles that nonetheless participated in a patriarchal system, and how they found satisfaction in ways that exceeded a simple binary of domination or resistance. As a result, the pious Muslim women she knew cultivated habits that might have seemed alien to secular liberal feminists, yet on some level they also resonated with each other, as both were committed to using the body to realize particular personal and social commitments.

Mahmood conveyed these sophisticated theoretical and philosophical arguments through vivid writing that conveyed how hard it could be to enact these habits. Small details captured how Cairene Muslim women were not simply born feeling pious. Rather, they sought expertise and community in creating their new norms. Central to this experience was experience itself: sensory, vibrant, emotional. Aesthetic perfection was therefore never superficial. It was the singular portal through which to enact transformation. Her eye for the array of ways that discipline could be enjoyable, even beyond the visual, was a technique for connection and understanding, what many of us hope the best anthropological work achieves. I return to this insight repeatedly in my own commitment to sharing the ways pious Muslim women in urban Indonesia enact their worship through appearance, a strategy that can be easily misread as ephemeral by their fellow citizens precisely because it is about appearance. Saba’s sensitive scholarship never dropped a tone, always aware of how Cairene women’s lives might be perceived at various scales, personal, national and transnational.

An intellectual life is, at minimum, a life of the mind. By challenging persistent Islamophobic assumptions about political subjectivity and femininity, Saba’s work conveyed the workings of a brilliant mind, but it also conveyed her own appreciation for elegance and humor. I am sad to have lost a gracious mind so soon, but I am grateful that we can revisit her work to rediscover her ideas, and perhaps more importantly, her spirit.

Carla Jones
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of Colorado Boulder

Doing Politics with Saba Mahmood
Arsalan Khan
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
Union College

I remember meeting Saba Mahmood for the first time at a conference on Pakistan at UC Berkeley in 2015. We had met once before, but I was too young to remember. In the early 1980s, Saba had attended a few Urdu poetry sessions that my parents hosted in our home in Karachi. When I mentioned this to Saba and told her that my mother recalled her being a sharp and spirited young woman, she seemed pleased to be remembered so fondly. Saba graciously agreed to read an article that I was publishing on pietist Tablighis in Pakistan, and we met again in Karachi on Eid of that year and spent many hours discussing our work and the growing anthropological scholarship on Pakistan. Saba was hoping to start a new project on Shia theology and politics in Pakistan and was excited about this intellectual return to a place that was very close to her heart. This work is sorely needed. The academic study of Pakistan has been dominated by a security studies paradigm that focuses primarily on the threat that Pakistan poses to international stability and the policies needed to manage this threat. While Pakistan has produced noteworthy historians and social scientists, there remains an acute need for ethnographic analysis and grounded theory. Saba’s loss will be deeply felt not only by those to whom she generously extended her time and energy but everyone invested in developing a critical scholarship on Pakistan.

But, Saba’s work was also controversial in Pakistan. She was routinely criticized in the Pakistani press by a small coterie of secular scholars and activists who felt that she was romanticizing Islamic groups and movements and undermining secular politics. Critics often grumbled that it is hypocritical to criticize secularism from the security and protections afforded by  “secular society.” An academic variant of this position suggested that she was treating the Islamic pietists as the only authentic voice in the Muslim world and therefore making a secular subjectivity impossible to conceive for Muslims. Others went further suggesting that she was reproducing the values of Islamists who condemn secularism as a Western perversion.  Under a video paying tribute to her work on a friend’s Facebook wall, one young commentator declared, “Alas she didn’t stop at nuance, and delved right into apologia–disarming an entire generation of Muslim critical thinkers.” More accustomed to indifference than hostility, most anthropologists would be surprised by such a hyperbolic attribution of power to an anthropologist. This understanding of Saba’s work is demonstrably false, and I will point to how her work provides crucial lessons for progressive politics, but before turning to this, it is worth considering the political context of this backlash.

Founded on the basis of Muslim identity, Pakistani nationalism posits Islam as a touchstone for national culture. Pakistan’s first constitution declared, “Sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to Allah Almighty alone and the authority which He has delegated to the state of Pakistan.” In the early decades after independence, Islamists had some success in their efforts to push for an Islamic state, but it was the military regime of Zia’ul-Haq (1977 – 1988) that deepened the link between Islam and state sovereignty. Zia’s Islamization had far reaching deleterious consequences for women and religious minorities (links).  The Pakistani military invokes Islam as a bulwark against the demand for recognition and autonomy coming from ethnic nationalist movements and therefore Islamization has been thoroughly entangled with state centralization. Moreover, Pakistan’s central role in the Afghan jihad created the conditions for the growth of militant sectarian Sunni groups that continue to plague Pakistan today. Islamists and powerful elements in the state routinely demonize “secularism” (ladiniyat) as a conspiracy against the nation. It is in this context that Saba’s work has become so politically charged. But, the conflation of Saba’s critique of secularism with that of Islamists only works by sidestepping how she theorizes the very concept of secularism.

The Politics of Piety is an ethnographic account of women’s participation in a Salafi piety movement based in mosques in the lower middle class neighborhoods of Cairo, spaces that are centers for Islamic Revivalist forces in many parts of the Muslim world.  These women are invested not in the vision of an Islamic state but in the cultivation of personal piety and interpersonal ethics.  Saba shows that liberal-secular conceptions of individual agency and autonomy fail to account for the moral framework of pietist women. From the vantage point of liberal-secular theory, these women are capitulating to the dictates of patriarchal society and therefore forsaking their own agency, but Saba shows the Salafi pietists believe that in enacting divinely sanctioned norms they are able to cultivate the pious virtues that inhere in those normative acts. Here we see anthropological relativism taken to the question of subjects and agency, but Saba’s work also shows how a particular conception of agency found in liberal-secularism is implicated in a project of regulating and remaking the world of pietist women. Saba’s focus may be the pietist Salafi women in Cairo, but the point holds up much more broadly for anyone who does not abide by the norms of liberal secularity.

Saba’s second book Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report focuses on the relationship between political secularism and the modern state, and particularly around the question of minority and women’s rights. Secularism’s principle claim to moral authority and universal applicability is that separating religion from politics secures the freedom of women and religious minorities. Religious Difference argues, however, that secularism, rather than being neutral towards religion, is in fact in the business of managing and creating religious difference. Saba argues that secularists and Islamists share in the assumption that secularism removes religion from public life, but secularism, actually expands religious difference and reifies religious communities, “enabling [the] conditions of religious conflict today” (2016: 22). Religious Difference shows how Coptic Christians were historically minoritized and how in the process religious difference was expanded and politicized. Anyone familiar with the history of British colonialism in South Asia will recognize how the colonial management of religion engendered religious communities and ultimately created the conditions for divergent Hindu and Muslim nationalisms. But Saba argues that this is not specific to the history of colonialism or a unique feature of the postcolonial state. Rather, it is inherent in the nature of secular governmentality. Saba asks provocatively, “how can secularism be called upon to solve the majority-minority problem when it is partly responsible for its creation?” (2016: 87).[1]

Saba does not explicitly outline how a critical approach to secularism can contribute to progressive political causes, but I think there is much to gain from thinking through the implications of these arguments for progressive politics. People often read Saba’s work as an effort to humanize Islam in a post 9/11 world in which Muslims are being demonized, but the aim of this work is not to humanize but to relativize and to displace the firm certainty that only one form of life, that of liberal or left secularism, is the universally desirable form of life. This anthropological relativism has immense value for those seeking to build broad coalitions for equality and justice across ethnicity, religion and class. This requires working through rather than against kinship and community institutions and networks and accepting that some forms of hierarchy and dependence are not antithetical to a vision of the common good. This does not mean adopting the Salafi model of virtue-politics or their particular understanding of gender hierarchy, as Saba’s critics claim she advocates, but it does mean recognizing the limits of and transcending a liberal-secular framework that finds agency only in the perceived breaking of “traditional” norms and relations. The second lesson drawn from postcolonial theory is that the legislating of group rights and group equality by the state carries the dangerous potential to proliferate and essentialize forms of difference pitting religious or ethnic communities against each other. Progressive politics that relies too heavily on legal and state intervention will find itself undermining the basis for collective life that is needed to create progressive coalitions and movements. This does not mean abandoning statist politics altogether, but it does mean recognizing the dangers of secular governmentality.

Far from undermining progressive politics, this is scholarship that can imbue it with new vitality. Those who are invested in left political projects must move away from empty Enlightenment universals and work with and through cultural and social difference rather than against it. The aim should be to pull diverse forms of life together towards the common good. Anthropologists, on the other hand, remain too wedded to the figure of a detached observer to draw out the political implications of our observations. But, in a world of deepening economic crises, endless wars, the spread of authoritarian populism, and the existential threat of climate change, we cannot limit ourselves to just describing the world. We must learn also to act in it.  Saba’s work points to how anthropology can contribute to the realization of a more just and equitable world and for that we owe her a great debt.

Mahmood, Saba. 2005. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mahmood, Saba. 2016. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[1] The point here is not to foreclose critical engagement with this scholarship but to engage with the effort to rethink dominant accounts of secularism. Two concerns that arise for me are whether Politics of Piety adequately addresses the world-making rather than just the self-making project of Salafi pietists and their own complicated relationship to religious difference and if Religious Difference accounts for the implications of different political stances relative to secular governmentality.

Dear all,

By now the news has spread quite widely that our esteemed and beloved colleague, Professor Mahmood, has passed away.

Collectively as a department, and as individuals, we are reeling. Saba was a bright light in our department, an intellectual force, a generous and demanding mentor, an inspiring teacher, and a strong voice in all parts of department matters. As was warmly remarked upon in a department gathering, Saba also possessed a singular, robust laugh that matched the energy and passion she brought to all things in her life. She was a caring friend to many of us across the campus. We hurt as well for our cherished colleague, Charles Hirschkind, and for his and Saba’s son, whose loss is profound.

The expressions of condolence and support that have come in from across the globe have been so appreciated and comforting; as a department, we thank you. We are working to set up a memorial site on which memories and comments can be shared, and we hope that many of you will choose to contribute to it.

Saba spoke of the time after her death as “when she was gone.” I contested her word choice with her at the time. Clearly Saba Mahmood has always been too firmly a force in the world to “be gone.” She endures in her many important contributions within and beyond anthropology. She endures in the lives and careers of her many undergraduate and graduate students. She endures in her and Charles’s extraordinary son, a warm and kind young man. And her raucous laugh echoes clearly in Kroeber Hall.

Thank you for your thoughts and memories,
Laurie A. Wilkie
Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology

For those wishing to make gifts in Saba’s memory, she expressed a desire for a fund in her name to support graduate study. Any gifts to the Anthropology department should clearly mark that they are made in memory of Saba Mahmood, and they will be used according to her stated desires. http://bit.ly/2F4QR2v

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

Source

And then I saw the smoke. And I saw the cars stopping. And I saw all the fast cars with their hazards on in a line in the front. And realized that they made and held a line for cars in motion so that the cars from their group could drift in line and in circles (in case you are interested in how to learn how to drift in a clockwise direction, there’s a video tutorial here). The smoke rising was matched by all the phones rising out of the cars. To be fair, it wasn’t just hands and phones visible, there were some classic tactics of folks sitting on windows, albeit with phones to capture the videos, which has become its own sort of classic.

The feeling of watching collective drifting is something akin to how mesmerizing murmuration can be. There’s something about how none of the birds bump into each other. Communication through motion requires such a heightened sense of self and surrounding, and to be able to allow a car to embody that, is remarkable. When these cars are working together, it’s smooth, flawless, and beautifully subversive. There are rules of the road and they are actively forcing us to question why we continue to follow without thinking. It makes me think of protest, it makes me think of how and why we stop traffic.

Such action feels like it belongs somewhere between enormous privilege or disenfranchisement as it makes us put our bodies and extensions at such clear risk. As with so many other aspects of subcultures of protest, or subversive action, taking over streets with bodies or cars is easily usurped by late capitalism and neoliberal forms of urban re-imagining, and ultimately made into genre (skateboarding would be another great example of this).

While watching the smoke and phones on I-95, I was reminded of a conversation I had earlier this year while in Dubai. I met a business man from Abu Dhabi who was, as he said, a drifting enthusiast and an avid follower of the Emirates drifting team. Our conversation focused in on how one could not think of drifting as a culturally unique phenomenon but rather a global phenomenon with local specificity to the expression – whether we think of Fast and the Furious franchise or music videos like M.I.A.’s Bad Girls (2010).

There are so many ways in which we might critically engage with this video or MIA’s oeuvre in general (such as Ronak Kapadia’s, Sonic Contagions) – but I thought of it in relation to the local specificity of drifting. There’s something culturally unique about what happens in the Arab world when it comes to contemporary drifting that highlights a different aspect of what is seen as subversive elsewhere. What reads subversive and sub-cultural in one context, can be read as heritage and privilege in the contemporary moment for another. Sitting on I-95, I felt transported to the Arab Gulf, specifically when I’ve seen such action in Dubai.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNwhe_HnLFo

In thinking more broadly about the heritage of public political expression in the UAE and the Arab Gulf, the ways and forms one might take to the streets and how that is co-opted is interesting. The history of what is commonly called Arab Drifting/Saudi Drifting in English and Tafheet or Hajwala in Arabic, can been dated back to the 1970s as a recreational form that seemed to have provided cross class activity that engaged racing with the development of masculinity (for a specific Saudi history, see Pascal Menoret’s Joyriding in Riyadh). It has also been argued that drifting in its more contemporary form seems to have started in Japan at the turn of the millennium, and transmitted via films. As the cities of the Arab Gulf shift and change with the worlds neoliberal infrastructure, drifting shifts from being a more local variety to taking on a global audience, indexing also a shift in the ways in which drifting and racing is linked to masculinities. By 2008, drifting in the Arab world moves into genre and is packaged for consumption by companies like Red Bull, and it ‘goes pro‘. And by 2012, the UAE has it’s own drifting team, the Toyota Emirates Drifting team (the same team my interlocutor mentioned above, is an avid fan of) – which is so much more about the car then the drift. The shift from what was a history and heritage of drifting, linked to speed, roads and subversive culture, is now framed within music videos, and on race tracks. It is contained.

The drive back and forth to the AAA’s made me think about how and why we break out of these containers. How bodies and cars as extensions of bodies, negotiate the ways in which we occupy space to bring attention to an issue. How this space of the road, the street, the urban interstitial spaces of interaction as places for publics to form as moving flash mobs that force all of us to stop and recognize our own complicity in these contained spaces.  And how that recognition, that moment of witnessing urban transgression can be transformative.

Perhaps the most poignant and striking such moment within recent memory for me was hearing about the protests in Ferguson and how protesters were standing on the highway to stop motorists. I was reminded of this a couple weeks ago when I watched the documentary “Whose Streets?” (released August 2017). For all of us who have forgotten the intensity of the struggle in Ferguson, this documentary is a powerful reminder. For those of us who cannot forget, this gives us some additional on the ground context of what was happening from the standpoint of local organizers.

It was not just on my way home that my movement was stopped by the presence of other cars. The reason the drifters resonated, the reason it made me think of protest, and local varieties of subversive action is because on my drive to the AAA’s, we had come to a standstill as the roads were blocked by police cars. It was not a protest, but a funeral. For over a half hour, we all sat in collective silence in our cars and watched a procession of flashing lights driving by on I-95.

The streets were closed for a funeral procession of Delaware State Police, Sergeant Rodney Bond, Jr. who died unexpectedly (video of the procession in the evening).

He was only 40 years old.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

Source