Princeton University Press

"If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die": How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor

admin — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

In 1999, twenty-four years after the original invasion and occupation by Indonesia into the former Portuguese colony, 1,500 East Timorese were killed after a referendum in which the majority voted in favor of independence. Under the Indonesian occupation, hundreds of thousands of East Timorese had already been murdered, debatably, as an act of genocide. That independence was desirable was obvious, yet Indonesian paramilitary groups worked with oppressive diligence to incite fear into hopeful hearts after the country’s landmark referendum. During the outbreak of violence that followed the vote, a significant portion of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed and 400,000 people abandoned their homes.

Geoffrey Robinson—a history professor, scholar of the islands, former Amnesty International principle researcher, and former UN officer based in East Timor during the 1999 conflict—is arguably one of the most informed, compassionate outsiders to tell the story of the violence in the small island nation. In “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die”, Robinson frames the struggles of East Timor as emblematic of struggles against colonization worldwide. He also explores how Cold War politics impacted nations like East Timor, the intersections of militarism and extreme nationalism, and the overlap in debates over humanitarian aid and intervention.

Unlike some scholars, Robinson posits the theory that the violence in East Timor was neither spontaneous nor a final result of the long-standing ethnic tensions between the Portuguese, Indonesians, and East Timorese. Instead, he makes the case for larger international political and cultural relations that supported Indonesia’s militaristic actions and ideology, tracing several decades of history that led up to the violence of 1999.

In his writing, Robinson mixes historical fact with his own truth, careful to separate but respect both. He explains a complicated past in linear form and displays empathy for people with whom he shared such a life-altering experience. Even if you don’t have much baseline knowledge about the conflicts between these Southeast Asian islands, this book will illuminate the complicated history is accessible terms. Robinson offers crucial perspective on modern colonialism and explores issues of accountability and justice with aplomb.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, April 17th 2010

American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Christine Stansell

Princeton University Press

Occasionally, in 'getting to know you' circles, the question of what period you would have most liked to have lived in is brought to the table. Granted, for many, these are not quite as appealing as banally declaring mint chocolate chip is the finest of the flavors, in your humble opinion, but I think the prior question may be more telling about a person. Christine Stansell’s newly revised American Moderns has changed my response to this telling question. For a long time my semi-automated, ice cream flavor-style response would have been the late '60s, specifically 1968: the birth of Hair, the Chicago 10, and all around political radical goodness. Now, it is 1914 and the original teens, if you will: the birth of modern feminism, the New Woman, and all around political radical goodness.

The book sweeps the reader far away to a Greenwich Village full of poetry and literature and so much love, something lost now to NYU bars on McDougall and overpriced faux French bistros pretending to be forbidding and tucked away. Perhaps walking along a brownstone block on a very snowy day, with no one around, you can begin to imagine what it was like back then: cafes brimming with radical thought and discussions of masculinities and feminities, what love means, why we express it the way we do. Maybe that image can stay with you as you walk east to a village that used to be full of immigrants exporting ideas of anarchism and free speech, not a place where CBGB is replaced by John Varvatos, and it is seen as a lesser of possible evils.

Unfortunately, I have found that nearly impossible in the real world, but steeped in the pages of this book that world is real again. Emma Goldman runs from Rochester to the safety of the immigrant bohemia in the East Village and moves from immigrant to anarchist to feminist to patriot, all the while freely falling in and out of love with prisoners and hobos. Margaret Sanger takes on the Comstock laws and fights for free speech and access to information on birth control. (Perhaps one of the few remaining vestiges of this time is the Margaret Sanger Center, still next to the very first Planned Parenthood.) Mabel Dodge returns from years in Italy to cast her husband aside and take on New York society while adopting artists one-by-one. And so many stories of women and men that we never hear of: the writer couples, the forgotten lovers, and the revolutionaries who never made the history books.

The book raised questions about the past and future of feminism, with this striking quote: “Older women's rights leaders had been formed by nineteenth-century notions of sex as fundamentally dangerous to women and were repelled by the new ideas.” Over a century later and we're facing the same exact battles. What kind of movement are we fighting for really? Are the New Women a lost vestige? Is the future of feminism a doomed cycle of repetition until it dwindles to nothing? Magical and immense, this book can stand simply on the surface, but it speaks to the third wave in such a poignant way that it cannot be ignored.

Written by: Nicole Levitz, March 21st 2010

No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admissions and Campus Life

admin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Thomas J. Espenshade, Alexandria Walton Radford

Princeton University Press

No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal is a thorough and accessible study of race- and class-based dynamics at elite American colleges and universities. Sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford report on the racial and class makeup of student populations at top U.S. schools at various stages of their college careers, and conclude with suggestions for closing the racial academic achievement divide in American society more broadly. The result is a lucid and informative analysis that will benefit students, parents, admissions officers, teachers, and anyone interested in how race and social class come to bear on prestigious campuses.

The first six chapters of No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal analyze patterns of application, admission, scholarly performance, financial aid, and other factors among Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian students at America's most selective undergraduate programs. However, non-specialists and readers most interested in the potential applications of Espenshade's and Radford's research may wish to concentrate on the final chapters, which consider both affirmative action and class-based admissions procedures. Because elite colleges have more financial wherewithal than public universities, the authors charge top schools with the responsibility of recruiting, admitting, and graduating more low-income students. Especially rousing is the authors' call for the establishment of an American Competitiveness and Leadership Project (ACLP), which would work both to identify causes of the racial academic achievement gap between Black-White and Hispanic-White students and work to combat this gap on a national level.

As a first-generation college graduate from a poor family, I found this book both tremendously interesting and, sometimes, a bit at odds with my own college experience. While the authors rightly make the point that on-campus jobs identify less affluent students to their wealthier peers, it seems to me that class divisions among college students can be apparent in much more entrenched and longstanding ways—from clothes to vocabulary, from parental involvement to extracurricular activities—for work-study to be of so much significance as a class identifier. The authors' suggested substitution for work-study, however, is exciting. Noting that students who have on-campus jobs tend to interact more often with people from different backgrounds, Espenshade and Radford propose mandatory campus-wide "community service activity" initiatives that would replace work-study programs and bring together students of diverse backgrounds. Such a program would benefit both campus life and community outreach.

Another drawback is the book’s reliance on four broad racial categories, White, Black, Hispanic, or Asian. The authors are quick to acknowledge the different multiracial, immigrant, and descendant identities that comprise these categories, but at times the groupings still feel a bit reductive. This is especially evident in the book’s treatment of Native American and Pacific Islander students. While “American Indian/Native American/Alaska Native” and “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander” were options along the other categories on the student survey the authors used, these results are not discussed at length. The authors explain that “There was an insufficient number of individuals responding to the NSCE survey who listed Native American/Alaska Native to constitute a meaningful analysis category.” It didn’t seem to me that the authors spent any sustained part of their study focusing on Native American or Pacific Islander students, and some further elaboration of why not would have been helpful.

I have no background in sociology, so I was pleased with the readability of_No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal_. Espenshade and Radford demystify elite university admissions procedures and analyze the current state of racial and socioeconomic diversity at selective institutions, all in clear prose and with abundant statistical detail. Should universities implement class-based admissions? What roles should top schools play in eliminating racial inequality across generations of students? Not only does this book offer some answers to these questions, even more importantly, it will give you the tools you need to decide for yourself.

Written by: Barbara Barrow, January 27th 2010

Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Ayala Fader

Princeton University Press

A “mitzvah” is colloquially translated as “a good deed,” but this Hebrew word actually means “commandment,” and observant Jews believe in 613 “mitzvot.” The commandments structure daily life and religious rituals, such as prayer, dietary habits, and romantic and sexual relationships. When a young woman becomes a Bat Mitzvah she is responsible for practicing and adhering to commandments outlined in the Torah.

Mitzvah Girls is Ayala Fader’s ethnographic study of young Hasidic girls becoming adults in a deeply structured religious community in Brooklyn, New York. There’s been almost no scholarship on this particular demographic, although as an anthropologist Fader understands that women are often responsible for bearing and reproducing culture. By studying children and young adults becoming women, Fader in effect presses the pause button and allows the reader to observe the moment girls become Jewish women.

Fader’s rich ethnographic research takes her into the homes, synagogues, and schools of Boro Park, a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn. She is especially interested in the history, structure, and use of Yiddish, and in how linguistics shape and reflect everyday Jewish life. Fader explores words themselves to illustrate how meaning shifts in relationship to religion and gender.

Hasidic Jews are stereotypically right wing, one of the guaranteed Republican voting blocs in New York City, and gender roles are rigidly defined in Hasidic communities. Women are expected to raise large families, keep kosher households, and visit the Mivkah—or ritual bath—after menstruation. Looking into the Hasidic world from the outside, I confess that it’s quite easy to judge, to assume that these women are victims. Mitzvah Girls challenges that assumption, and Fader’s in-depth study foregrounds Hasidic women’s agency. She demonstrates how young women and girls negotiate the secular world, its modern temptations, and even feminism. Mitzvah Girls is an extraordinarily fascinating read.

Written by: Jeanne Vaccaro, December 31st 2009

Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women

admin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:53:00 +0000

By Marnia Lazreg

Princeton University Press

We are not [wo] men for whom it is a question of either-or. For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but go beyond it. _ — Aime Cesaire, _Discourse on Colonialism

These are the words that begin the autobiographical journey Questioning the Veil, where Marnia Lazreg, an Algerian-American professor of sociology at the City University of New York, touches on one of the most sensitive strings of Islam, the hijab.

Is veiling mandatory for all Muslim women or is it a cultural, political, or a social practice? Lazreg presents her research in the form of a collection of letters, where each letter analyzes interviews with several Muslim women combined with Lazreg’s personal experiences growing up in a Muslim family. From modesty and sexual harassment to cultural identity, Lazreg distills the very many explanations used in adorning the veil to deconstruct its religious substantiation.

Lazreg further analyzes modesty and its association with the veiling practice. She poses questions: if modesty is a prime explanation given for wearing the veil, would a woman who does not wear a veil, but dresses conservatively be considered immodest? Similarly, what if a woman wears the veil, but is immodest in her mannerisms. As more and more prepubescent girls are being made to wear the veil based on the notion of modesty, Lazreg points out some of the mind-boggling questions that had disturbed her back in the days when she was coerced to adorn the veil upon reaching puberty.

As a child, Lazreg often questioned the partial adoption of the veil amongst the global Muslim women. As she grew older and sexual harassment was revealed to be another factor leading to the hijab, she often questioned the men who continued to harass women wrapped up in hijabs.

From the ‘reveiling’ trend in the West to the imposition of veiling laws in Islamic countries, Lazreg reveals how coercion more often than choice or faith ultimately results in veiling. Yet, using the veil to strike against anti-Muslim prejudice in the West or rejuvenate the Muslim civilization is not a means to women’s liberation. Ultimately, Lazreg’s research depicts how the practice of veiling is constructed out of reasons external to what a Muslim woman really wants to do. Until states mandate veiling by law, as in the Islamic Republic of Iran, or prohibit veiling by law, as in France, Muslim women will never realize the meaning of autonomy and choice. Their human rights will remain marginalized.

Wearing the veil is not the triumph of Islam over its detractors. At the present historical conjuncture, it degrades Islam to the level of a creed and impoverishes its humanistic import. This is time for women to free themselves of it and by the same token free men, too.

Cross-posted with Gender Across Borders

Written by: Maria Khan, October 17th 2009

Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival

admin — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:39:00 +0000

By João Biehl

Princeton University Press

Ethnographers, novelists, and prisoners write heart-wrenching books because they present simple truths. Will to Live is a powerful, at points searing ethnography of HIV antibody surveillance systems in Brazil and pharmaceutical industry influence in bringing forth new relations of politics and health care. It tells of the bodily suffering of Brazilians who contract, and eventually die from, AIDS - and of those who fear such diagnoses, although they are HIV antibody negative.

It demonstrates the varying degrees of access that Brazilians have to highly active antiretroviral therapies (HAART) and that track along the fault lines of social structure. That HAART works for many (but not others) or that it comes too late (or too early or is engaged too haltingly) signifies the contradictions and paradoxes of culture and social structure that are usually revealed in epidemics. Although it is filled with positive stories and better outcomes (HAART brings many back from the brink of death), Will to Live is as painful to read as Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Death Without Weeping, also about Brazil but in context of infant mortality; Paul Farmer’s AIDS and Accusation, also about AIDS but set in Haiti; and Begonia Aretxaga’s Shattering Silence, about Northern Ireland women who deploy their incarcerated bodies and even bodily fluids in political protest.

Will to Live shows that the national and international response to HIV and AIDS has in Brazil “shifted from controlling the epidemic to controlling individualized disease.” “Yes,” the author writes, “distribution programs make antiretroviral therapies accessible, but they are one element in the full treatment of a disease that... remains a matter of a regional politics of nonintervention.” “It’s a shame what is happening to AIDS” is the direct utterance of an otherwise well-intended caregiver, suggesting just how much the cart has been put before the horse and what the public health costs can be of imagining only a pharmaceutical response.

João Biehl is a Brazilian anthropologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University who has a long time studied the conceptualization, implementation and evolution of the Brazilian AIDS Control Program (BACP). Multi-sited in location, multi-method in logistics, multi-voiced in narrative, and multi-purpose in scope, Will to Live unravels and critiques the ways in which NGOs (non-governmental organizations), churches, the Ministry of Health, pharmaceutical industry representatives, gender and sex work activists, and those suffering from HIV or AIDS mounted a “national” response to HIV and AIDS that is anything but. “A central concern of my ethnography,” the author notes, “has been to produce alternative epidemiological evidence and to generate some form of visibility and accountability for the abandoned subjects with AIDS.”

A site of Biehl’s particular focus is Caasah, a part-community house, part-hospice, part-pharmacy, part-training ground in advocacy. Caasah was formed in 1992, “when a group of homeless AIDS patients, former prostitutes, transvestites, and drug users squatted in an abandoned maternity ward in the outskirts of Salvador” and turned it into a care center. He returned to Caasah in 2001 to find a near-complete turnover there of patients and staff and a reorientation of service provision and funding source. As such, Caasah well represents both the protean nature of AIDS and the constraints upon and conditions under which local-level responses to it were mounted.

All but a very few pharmaceutical industry representatives, health authorities, and politicians talk in double-speak. Many exacerbated cleavage between rich and poor, politically visible and not:

As with all things political and economic, the reality underlying the AIDS policy is convoluted, dynamic, and filled with gaps. The politicians involved in the making of the AIDS policy were consciously engaged in projects to reform the relationship between the state and society, as well as the scope of governance, as Brazil molded itself to a global market economy. One of this book’s central arguments is that on the other side of the signifier _model policy _stands a new political economy of pharmaceuticals, with international and national particularities. As NGO activism converged with state policy making, and as the public health paradigm shifted from prevention to treatment access, political rights have moved toward biologically based rights.

Comprising eight chapters including Introduction and Conclusions, Will to Live is equally heavy and light, grim and hopeful, ethnographic and theoretical. The Introduction (“A New World of Health”) bookends painful personal stories and broadly sweeping discussion of the political-economy of pharmaceuticals. Rhetorical and other slippage in the overly optimistic assessments of AIDS bureaucrats and pharmaceutical representatives is revealed in stories of busted aid posts, iatrogenic illness, and social structures that sicken people. Chapter One (“Pharmaceutical Governance”) discusses the complexities of state-local, transnational-NGO and doctor-patient relations. Biehl writes perceptively about the successes of Brazil in manufacturing generic drugs that challenged patent rights granted by the WTO.

The particular successes and failures of Caasah are scattered in discussion throughout the book, but Chapter Two (“Circuits of Care”) looks intently at the new subjectivities (e.g., patient-citizen, “risk group” member, the “worried well”) that arise in social, technical and economic relations brought to bear by HIV, HIV antibody testing and AIDS. The failures of the surveillance system – but also its tremendous promise – are shown acutely in the next chapter, “A Hidden Epidemic,” which reveals the biases in public health and society at large with regards to surveillance, treatment and counseling. Chapter Five, “Patient-Citizenship,” examines the Phoenix-like rise from the ashes of imminent death that has been occasioned in many of those who have responded particularly well to HAART. Many have resumed reasonably normal sexual and political lives relatively free of the anxieties and technoneuroses brought on by the antiretrovirals themselves and the HIV antibody testing and counseling regime. The first section of Chapter Six, “Will to Live,” is appropriately titled “Lifelong AIDS,” for it reveals the stark contours of the limits and promises of a largely biomedical “fix” for what is clearly and also about sickness in the social-structure.

There is little for a reader about which to complain. A quotation is repeated and some Index entries are incorrect, but there are extremely few typos or grammatical infelicities. I want to highlight one particular kind of problem that mars Biehl’s presentation at many points, however. Biehl claims that “Epidemiological surveillance services registered the first HIV/AIDS cases in 1982.” This conflates HIV and AIDS, as he does ad infinitum, and HIV hadn’t yet been identified, either. It doesn’t excuse him to say that everyone else does, too - for real damage is done in such conflation, for example, that “HIVab+” means a death sentence and a rhetorical slide to “AIDS” to “contagious” to social leperhood.

Moreover, “AIDS” had not yet congealed into a biomedical category, either. This leads him at many, many points to confuse cause and effect, vector and pathogen, infection and antibody, for example, when he says that “the homosexual/bisexual mode of transmission accounted for less than thirty percent of the total number of AIDS infections.” Ontologically, epidemiological notions do no counting; epidemiologists do. Logically, “bisexual” mode of transmission (of HIV) has also to mean “heterosexual,” which then must be explained anew for its expanded and more complicated, often hidden properties. Empirically, the “total number of AIDS infections” would multiply the epidemiological categories of “HIV antibody positive” and “AIDS diagnoses” by at least five-fold if not twenty-fold, that is, in terms of pulmonary tuberculosis, cryptosporidium, toxoplasmosis, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, persistent diarrhea, anaemia, and so on. As well, this undercuts the force of Biehl’s informants who rightly point to the endemic state of such infections and problems prior to the arrival of HIV and AIDS. Further, it suggests that these individual infections or pathogens are sexually transmitted and that there are characteristic differences along the lines of sexual identity (i.e., “heterosexual” transmission of this, “homosexual” transmission of that).

The lengthy discussion of subjectivity comprising Chapter Four is difficult to follow and jargony, although its theorization of “technoneurosis” (and elsewhere, of “auto-bioadministration”) is spot-on. Biehl argues from the standpoint of careful analyses of case studies that the “confused and painful experience of Oxygen [the pseudonym of a sick and anxious woman repeatedly testing HIVab negative] was somewhat technically engineered. This testing apparatus played a determinant role in the emergence of a socially visible imaginary AIDS.”

Nevertheless, this and other chapters exemplifies well the Foucaultian thesis that discourse about subjects (in this case, about the technical aspects of an HIV antibody test and about what constitutes “good” and “bad” sex) creates new subjects: the worried well, the sick and the anxious, the promiscuous and the guilt-ridden. The algorithm of HAART adherence is predictable on sociological grounds. “Failures” are on blamed on the individual, not the system; not the social structure; not the lack of housing, food, education, and employment. Nor was the HAART roll-out so universal and stable as its proponents claimed

Laid atop an already struggling public health system, Biehl found that “the universal availability of essential medicines has been subject to changing political winds; treatments are easily stopped, and people have to seek more specialized services in the private health sector or, as many put it, ‘die waiting in overcrowded public services.” The meaning of “primary care” has changed to mean selective targeting of those more likely to live, and triage has replaced universality as a metaphor of coverage. Clients become clinical trial subjects. Treatment trumps prevention. Risk becomes individualized instead of increasingly social. Infection becomes increasingly moral and subject to religious edict. HIV antibody test counselors compete with one another not to be the one to read the positive bands. Social scientific insights are swept aside.

This newest addition to Princeton University’s (In)Formation Series, edited by Paul Rabinow, is a sober but accessible and extremely humane text, just as well constructed as attractively presented. The black-and-white photographs taken by Torben Eskerod are arresting and invite commentary, speculation and, in my case, envy. Around this exciting new work could be wrapped all manner of upper-division or graduate-level courses in anthropology, public health, medicine and even political-economy. Like too many countries and cultures to count, ill-tempered politicians, cynical epidemiologists and overburdened healthcare workers in Brazil have contributed to an official portrait of HIV transmission dynamics, infectious burden and prevention efforts that often bears little resemblance to reality. Once again, the inequalities of social structure get off scot-free. This ethnography is a major contribution to social theory and justice.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., June 14th 2008