February 2006 vol 22 no 1

every two months ISSN 0268-540X

anthropology today
Front cover caption (page 29)

at

Riots in France and silent anthropologists

Guest editorial by Didier Fassin

CoMMent niel sebag-Montefiore, David Price 21 Anthropology and spying Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Carl McCabe 22 Whatever happened to human sociobiology? nArrAtive nigel rapport 23 Anthropology as cosmopolitan study ConFerenCes Clare Melhuish 24 Interior insights P.-J. ezeh 25 Tradition embracing change
CAlenDAr 27 neWs 28 ClAssiFieD 30

DiDier FAssin 1 Riots in France and silent anthropologists CeCil HelMAn 3 Why medical anthropology matters JAson HArt 5 Saving children: What role for anthropology? JeAn & JoHn l. CoMAroFF 9 Portraits by the ethnographer as a young man: The photography of Isaac Schapera in old Botswana C.s. vAn Der WAAl & vivienne WArD 17 Shifting paradigms in the new South Africa: Anthropology after the merger of two disciplinary associations

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In a 1991 article, Orin Starn wondered how hundreds of anthropologists could have been working in the Andes during the 1970s without realizing that a major insurgency was about to detonate . Questioning why anthropologists had missed the gathering storm of the Shining Path, he asked his colleagues the searching question: How do events in Peru force us to rethink anthropology on the Andes? As riots flared in the banlieues (poor suburbs) of Frances principal cities in October and November 2005, I could not help asking myself why anthropologists in France had failed to foresee these events, and why even afterwards they had nothing to say about them. What sort of epistemological or ideological reasons could explain such difficulty in analysing what is going on so close to us? How could we miss what was about to happen in the banlieues? *** These questions arose as I was doing fieldwork on relations between police and youth in the suburbs, going out at night with the crime prevention squad into the quartiers a designation used to cover all difficult neighbourhoods, the historical product of economic segregation of mostly immigrant families. Since the riots were principally limited to these areas, most French people remained physically untouched by events, experiencing them mainly through television and the press, which offered dramatic live pictures of fire and mayhem and detailed maps of the geography of the burning suburbs. This media coverage contributed to the generation of fear rather than to an understanding of the facts. Let us consider how it all started. On 27 October 2005, three youngsters spent the afternoon playing football. As they returned home, the police received a call about a break-in at a nearby barracks, and proceeded to chase the boys. The boys fled, climbing the high wall of a power plant where they thought they could find a refuge. Two, aged 15 and 17 respectively, died. The third, aged 21, suffered severe burns. All three were Arabs, the children of immigrants from North Africa, and they lived in a cit (housing estate) in Clichy-sous-Bois. During the hours following the incident the Minister of Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, accused the three youngsters of involvement in a burglary but denied that they had been chased. Three days earlier, visiting Argenteuil, another town of the banlieue, he had declared he would rid them of the racaille (riff-raff), employing a term youths would use to insult each other. A few months before, commenting on the death of a child shot dead by a youth in the infamous Cit des 4000 in La Courneuve, Sarkozy had brutally announced that he would cleanse the neighbourhood with a Krcher (high-pressure hose). The minister continued to provoke by repeating his unfounded accusations against the boys, denying any police responsibility for this episode. It has now been officially recognized that there was no attempt at burglary, that the police had chased the youths by mistake and that they knew the boys had entered the power plant but did nothing to prevent the accident. Neither the government nor the police made any gesture of compassion or respect towards the grieving parents and relatives of the boys. This was the spark that set off over three weeks of urban rioting throughout France, during which 10,000 cars were burnt (compared with the monthly average of 3000 over the rest of 2005), 233 public buildings were

Didier Fassin is professor at the Universit de Paris Nord and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and co-ordinator of the research programme The new frontiers of French society. His email is dfassin@ehess.fr.

Just call me Zero, Zero Tolerance. French Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, in a cartoon by Kiro published in Le Canard Enchan, 2 November 2005.

Amselle J.L. 1990. Logiques mtisses. Paris: Payot. Aug M. 1994. Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains. Paris: Aubier. Starn, O. 1991. Missing the revolution: Anthropologists and the war in Peru. Cultural Anthropology 6(1) : 63-91.

damaged (mostly schools and gymnasiums), 4770 people were arrested (half of them after the riots), and 217 police were injured (including 10 who were on sick leave for 10 days or more as a result). With the burning of cars and public institutions in the news on a daily basis, the world discovered that France was experiencing what the economist Jean-Claude Casanova, a member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, presented as a civil war. In response to these events, the government declared a state of emergency, using a 1955 law originally passed during the war in Algeria: the symbolism could not have been clearer for the population of African origin. *** This response to the unrest was however somewhat excessive. When I asked the chief superintendent of police in the dpartement with the second highest number of incidents in the country about the current violence, he replied: Which violence are you talking about? If youre thinking of burned cars, we did indeed have many. If youre referring to physical confrontations, we had none. When I later asked him what he thought about police pressure on the youth (almost exclusively Arab and Black) of the cits, he initially protested that there was no racism among his staff. Eventually, however, he admitted that the groundless identity checks and body searches carried out systematically (he could have added illegally) in the streets were both ineffective and a source of resentment. In fact, having borne uncomfortable witness to this everyday discriminatory violence, I had long been convinced that retaliatory violence was inevitable, as I noted a growing sense of injustice among the youth. Having spent time a few months before investigating youth revenge against the police followed by police retaliation against the inhabitants of a quartier, the explosion and spread of violence was therefore no surprise to me. Nor was the draconian reaction of the government and the massive support it received from the population: 73 % declared they were in favour of the curfew and an unprecedented 67% supported Sarkozys actions. What was unexpected, however, was the opportunity the riots gave French society for a public confession of the long-denied policies of economic inequality, residential segregation and racial discrimination towards a part of itself not recognized as entirely French. Suddenly, a previously unacknowledged colour bar was discovered. The word ghetto, previously banned from French vocabulary on the grounds that it reflected a specifically American reality, became common in editorials. Newspaper articles and television reports revealed how difficult it was for Arabs or Black people to get a job or a flat, how they were stigmatized at school and humiliated by the police. Alain Badiou, professor of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Suprieure, published a deeply moving letter in Le Monde (16 November 2005), in which he recounted the life of his adopted son, arrested six times in 18 months, often insulted, sometimes beaten up, simply because he was black. France has the riots it deserves, he concluded. What thousands of pages of academic and administrative literature failed to do, a few thousand burned cars made possible. France was at last beginning to admit that its Republican model was not working, that its integration

paradigm had become a cover for the denial of its institutional racism. Though long evident to many foreign scholars working on France, this realization finally entered the French public sphere. For the first time the French started to consider theirs a post-colonial society only a few months after a law had been passed, in February 2005, asserting the positive effects of the colonization. Remarkably, French anthropologists were the last to realize what was happening. During and after the events historians, sociologists, demographers, writers and intellectuals intervened in the public sphere, expressing comprehension if not of the rioters actions then at least of the problems they experienced (Grard Noiriel, Stphane Beaud, Patrick Simon, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Emmanuel Todd among many others) or, conversely, giving vent to hatred of the Blacks and Arabs with a Muslim identity accused of perpetrating Republican pogroms (Alain Finkelkraut). Anthropologists remained peculiarly silent. Just as we had done during the impassioned debate on the prohibition of the Islamic veil, we kept quiet when the historian Hlne Carrre dEncausse, permanent secretary of the Acadmie Franaise, suggested that the main cause of the riots was polygamy in African families a proposal subsequently reiterated by right-wing political leaders. The academically marginal but professionally dynamic Association Franaise des Anthropologues organized two meetings a few weeks after the events, but significantly invited sociologists to speak. Anthropologists had little to say on these subjects for two reasons: first, because very few were working on the banlieues, on immigration or inequality, or on religious or racial questions, and secondly because many found their beliefs and ideals uncomfortably challenged by the issues emerging. *** So why did French anthropologists fail to address the riots? What does this tell us about the discipline, and the lessons we are to draw for the future? These are pressing questions for anthropology in France. One explanation relates to the history of the discipline in France and its predominant epistemological position. Marc Aug (1994) suggests that anthropology is above all the study of the present of remote societies: from this perspective, the strength of area studies, on the one hand, and the focus on structures and invariants on the other, have left little space for the ethnography of nearby, heterogeneous, changing societies like those which have grown up on the outskirts of French cities. Even when French anthropologists became interested in their own society, they tended to analyse its traditional aspects, such as rural marketplaces or popular beliefs on disease. When a few of us turned to the study of politics, most described it in terms of rituals and institutions, comparing them with the display and organization of power in African societies. Scientific analyses have certainly been rich and sometimes innovative, but seldom related to the issues that we face in our own societies today. To take the question of race as an example, it is as if Lvi-Strauss Race et histoire (1961) was the last word in the debate, condemning racism on conceptual grounds and thus rendering superfluous the empirical study of its contemporary forms. And with regard to the colonial legacy, it seems that Georges Balandiers Sociologie actuelle de
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lAfrique noire (1955), which deconstructed the classical image of the colonized continent, has not been followed by a symmetrical anthropology of post-colonial France, which the riots now reveal as so necessary. The second explanation may be even more painful to examine because it concerns an ideological bias in the invisible framework that supports anthropological thought. The Enlightenment ideals of universalism and secularism, and the Republican model of integration, have laudably impregnated our discipline. However, in this context it has been difficult to criticize these ideals and this model on the grounds not of what they proposed, but of what they allow to go unseen. As Jean-Loup Amselle (1990) writes, the Republic has always got on well with Race and its institutions are grounded in unavowed catholicism. The reluctance of anthropologists to recognize the existence of racial and religious discrimination in France is thus as problematic as the paradigms they do engage with. Indeed, colour blindness and secularism become more difficult to defend as the evidence of racist practices and anti-Muslim reflexes increases, but also at a time when

a Black organization, the Conseil Reprsentatif des Associations Noires, is set up to assert an identity based on the historical experience of domination. Nevertheless, many still resist acknowledging this reality and prefer to ironize about what they see as an excessive display of victimhood, which they interpret as the unfortunate influence of American scholars. It is therefore not surprising that, although the book was initially published in French, discussions of Achille Mbembes On the postcolony (2001) take place on the other side of the Atlantic. *** In some ways, banlieues and cits seem today more exotic for French anthropologists than African cities, Amazonian villages or Indian temples. Racial and religious issues remain difficult for many of us to raise when it comes to actual practices because they confront our values with a reality we would rather avoid. Let us hope that the riots of 2005 where violence derived less from the youth than from society itself will open new spaces for research and debate in French anthropology, as they have already done in the French public sphere at large. l

Why medical anthropology matters

Guest editorial by Cecil Helman
Cecil Helman is Professor of Medical Anthropology at Brunel University. He was awarded the 2005 Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology. His email is c.helman@pcps.ucl.ac.uk.

Medical anthropology as a separate field of study is only about 30 years old. Yet it is today one of the most vibrant and successful of all the branches of anthropology, attracting large numbers of students, grants and the interest of other professions. The integration of medical anthropology into mainstream North American anthropology was comparatively rapid, and today it is one of the most popular choices among graduate students in anthropology. However, in the United Kingdom it has taken many years for it to become part of the anthropological mainstream. Here, many anthropology departments have regarded applied anthropology as a contradiction in terms, putting the emphasis more on observing than on participating. Applied anthropology was seen as not pure scholarship, but rather as contaminated by its close engagement with practical and policy issues. *** As an increasingly confident sub-discipline medical anthropology has a lot to offer not only because of its applied approach, but also because it has already contributed an enormous amount to the theoretical basis of anthropology. It is an eclectic discipline, drawing its ideas and research methodologies not only from anthropology itself, but also from epidemiology, genetics, medical history, literary criticism and semiotics, as well as from clinical medicine and psychiatry (see Helman 2001). In recent years applied anthropology has been moving steadily towards centre stage in anthropology for a variety of reasons, among them the disappearance of the disciplines traditional field bases: small-scale, bounded societies are no longer small-scale, nor are they quite as bounded as before. As anthropologys core field of study diminishes, and new social issues emerge much closer to home, there has been a growing need to embrace the various forms of applied anthropology (Mars 2004). Population movements worldwide have generated many millions of migrants and refugees, resulting in an increasing mix of cultures and social groups. Populations (as well as languages and ideas) that were once over there are now over here. For example, a survey in 2000 found that only two-thirds of London schoolchildren had English as a home language, and they now speak a total of 307 different languages

(Baker, Eversley and Lam 2000). The situation is similar to that found in many other cities in Western Europe and North America. This diversity in mother tongues spoken in any one place is parallelled by a diversity of views held about health and illness, and by a proliferation of alternative healing sub-cultures, each with its own particular view of how illness (and other forms of suffering) should be explained, and then dealt with. Many of these therapeutic approaches, like acupuncture, shiatsu and ayurveda, are based on traditional healing systems borrowed from other countries, though often practised here in a syncretic form. At the same time, hundreds of traditional healers have been imported into Britain from abroad to serve different ethnic communities: vaids and hakims from south Asia, marabouts and obeah men from parts of Africa, spiritual advisers from the Caribbean, practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine from Hong Kong and elsewhere, not to mention the many West African churches that practise religious healing. All of this means a growing number of interfaces, and potential conflicts, between different therapeutic systems, but it also opens up a new set of opportunities for anthropologists: to act as brokers or cultural interpreters between health professionals and their clients, and between national health systems and local communities. In medical and nursing education anthropologists could help to promote cultural competence, but could also counteract some of the simplistic doctrines of the new ethnic minority medicine, with its stereotypes, static view of identity, and neglect of the social and economic contexts of health and illness. These are exemplified by the growing number of cultural recipe books directed at health professionals, which include long lists of supposedly fixed cultural attributes (Muslims always believe X, Hindus always do Y), but take no account of personal, regional, class or generational variations within a community. Understanding this increasingly complex medical pluralism requires a rather different, less traditional, way of carrying out research, especially in urban environments (cf. Mars 2004). We need this research, though, not only to understand the variety of syncretic healing forms now


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