Stanford University Press

Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China

tina — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Heroin. AIDS. Migration. Development programs. Gender roles. In Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China, Shao-hua Liu examines each of these issues and how they relate to Nuoso youth. An anthropological researcher, the author delves into how China’s evolution from the traditional to the modern intersects with drug use, disease, and development. The book focuses on the Nuoso, a poor and marginalized group in southwest China that has been disproportionately affected by the drug trade and HIV/AIDS.

The author does a commendable job of stressing the interconnected nature of migration, gender, drug use, and political economies. While these issues are naturally linked, too many authors focus on one of these aspects while ignoring the myriad forces that shape cultures and communities. Passage to Manhood features a fresh approach to understanding why heroin use and HIV took over the Nuoso to such a great extent. The author presents an answer that relies on the intersection of marginalization, stigmatization, modernization, and power dynamics within communities.

The author’s honest approach to gender stood out in the book. Instead of making sweeping generalizations about gender politics among the Nuoso, the author explains how she approached the subject and details the difficulties she had using male translators to interview women.

Acknowledging that her access to information was limited, the author conveys the basic framework of what she found. While drug use and HIV/AIDS shaped the entire community in some way, it affected men and women differently. The author explains that young men were first drawn to heroin because it was fashionable and demonstrated a particular social status. Drug use overlapped with the definition of masculinity among the Nuoso, which was based on a desire for adventure and mobility. The gender hierarchy, which placed women subordinate to men, played out in heroin politics: Women encountered the drug trade through small dealings and followed their husbands or partners, who were responsible for the larger trades.

The author is careful to note that gender dynamics not only shaped the details of the drug trade among the Nuoso, but also determined the effectiveness of state-managed intervention programs to combat drug use and HIV/AIDS. In a careful dissection of the failures of these intervention programs, the author examines how the program administrators viewed cultural taboos about sex as barriers to their work. Instead of acknowledging the fluidity of cultural norms, state-managed interventions overlooked honest sex education and contributed to misinformation about HIV/AIDS. By ignoring the unique cultural context of the Nuoso and using global AIDS messages from elsewhere, the architects of these programs inadvertently instilled a stigma about AIDS where one previously did not exist. This case study presents a sobering lesson for those working on global AIDS prevention programs; such interventions must be designed as a cooperative exercise between local groups and the program implementers, not cookie-cutter programs delivered from above.

It is difficult to pluck one nugget of information from the author’s interconnected web, but perhaps the greatest take away from the book is that AIDS and drug use do not exist in a vacuum. Gender politics, economics, migration, and urbanization each exact pressure on people’s actions and perceptions. A thorough understanding of drug use and HIV/AIDS within a community must begin with an expansive interpretation of how individuals, families, and societies grapple with these ever-changing forces.

Written by: Andrea Gittleman, February 25th 2011

Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Michael Rothberg

Stanford University Press

In Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg offers an alternative to competitive memory, or the idea that the capacity to remember historical injustices is limited and that any attention to one injustice diminishes our capacity to memorialize another. Rothberg also disputes the idea that comparisons between atrocities erase differences between them and imply a false equivalence. In focusing on the Holocaust, Rothberg navigates between two extremes: the tendency to proclaim the Holocaust so distinct that it should not be compared to anything else, and the tendency to universalize the Holocaust, turning it into an abstract lesson about good and evil that can be applied to any and all atrocities. His solution is “multidirectional memory,” which describes collective memory as “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing and borrowing; as productive and not privative.” In other words, comparisons can both aid in understanding and illuminate differences.

In part one, Rothberg explores the idea of “boomerang effects” found in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Aimé Césaire’s works on colonialism and genocide. Through these works and many others, Rothberg examines how, prior to a full accounting for the Holocaust and its reinvention as a historically unique event, scholars such as Arendt and Césaire were constructing the Holocaust and totalitarianism as colonial practices, ideas and structures brought to Europe from the colonies. While Rothberg does a serviceable job of explaining and justifying the productive nature of the comparisons in the abstract, he glosses over the unfortunate concrete relationship between colonial genocides and the Holocaust, specifically Hitler‘s modeling of concentration camps after the North American reservation system and his co-opting of the language and tactics of the so-called Wild West. He mentions these links briefly, but so vaguely as to conceal them from any reader not familiar with the historical facts.

In part two, Rothberg focuses on the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, André Schwarz-Bart, and Caryl Phillips as they explore the light the Holocaust and anti-Semitism shed on the Black experience in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. Here, the comparisons are limited to the abstract connections between the historical oppression of people of African descent (including slavery, colonialism, segregation, and genocide) and the Nazis’ racialization, ghettoization, and extermination of the Jews. This section also emphasizes both peoples’ histories with “ghettos, ruins, and other diasporic spaces.” This is perhaps the best example of multidirectional memory in the book.

In parts III and IV, Rothberg explores various works (both literary and cinematic) to examine the connections between the Holocaust and the Algerian War in the waning days of French colonialism and the opening days of the Eichmann trial that would transform the public discourse surrounding the Holocaust. Here, Rothberg does a better job of distinguishing the abstract connections between colonialism, racism, and the Holocaust from the concrete connections between French treatment of the Algerians and French complicity in the Holocaust. Perhaps most disturbing is the implication that a timely attempt to address French complicity in the Holocaust may have prevented many if not all of the atrocities committed against the Algerians, as both involved the same people, places, and tactics.

Overall, Rothberg does a decent job of showing how multidirectional memory can improve understanding through comparison; however, the book fails in a few places. By limiting himself to elite discourse, Rothberg underestimates the public’s capacity to undermine or diminish memory of one atrocity through competition with another as part of the self-fulfilling nature of competitive memory. He also doesn’t seem to fully explore how the taboo against comparisons in general and certain comparisons specifically undermines attempts to make such comparisons productive. Finally, his language is often so stereotypically academic that it may be inaccessible to non-experts. In the end, I am left uncertain whether to recommend the book or suggest that readers attempt to find some other work that addresses these concepts more clearly and completely.

Written by: Melinda Barton, February 12th 2010

"What is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays

admin — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:44:00 +0000

By Giorgio Agamben

Stanford University Press

"What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays, is a collection of three essays by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Although only fifty pages, this collection is quite difficult for the reader unfamiliar with Agamben's work.

In the first essay, “What is an Apparatus,” the author engages with Foucault’s concept of the apparatus (_dispositif _in French). Defining the meaning of apparatus is one of the main points of the essay and difficult to convey here, but to give a brief definition, it is what Foucault conceptualized as a network established between various forms of power, institutions, and ideologies. Agamben outlines a genealogy of the evolution of Foucault’s interest and utilization of this concept, arguing that it is one of his most essential. He also expands the definition of an apparatus to include “anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.” Agamben then briefly provides suggestions as to how we should attempt to combat apparatuses, given the fact that they are so ubiquitous at this stage of history.

The second essay, “The Friend,” is about the philosophy of friendship and the way that philosophers have tended to theorize friendship. “What is the Contemporary?” is the third and final essay, and ultimately deals with the task of trying to understand the meaning of time.

Agamben has written on a variety of issues, and has been an especially harsh critic of the U.S. response to 9/11, particularly speaking out against the U.S. treatment of prisoners. He also provides an interesting critique of modern society as a whole, continuing in the Foucauldian tradition. Although this collection of essays isn’t necessarily suitable as an introductory text, the reader who is unfamiliar with Agamben is likely to appreciate some of his insights, particularly those who have read Foucault and are familiar with other classic philosophers.

Written by: Liz Simmons, November 13th 2009

Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil

admin — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:52:00 +0000

By Stanley R. Bailey

Stanford University Press

Legacies of Race answers many of my personal questions about a strict notion of racial identification among the “black and white” in Brazil. When I visited Rio de Janeiro for the first time in 1993, I was intrigued by the notion of the “Afro-Brazilian” population who viewed themselves as “mixed race” rather than the distinctive “white” or “black” of the United States. As Professor Bailey indicates in this excellent book, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics employed five categories in “a color-race” data research question in 1991. These were: branco (white), pardo (brown), preto (black), amarelo (of Asian ancestry) and Indigena (Indigenous). According to the 2000 census, Brazil’s racial or color composition is approximately 54% branco, 39% pardo, 6% preto, 0.5% amarelo and 0.4% Indigena. The census question of race was added in 1991 after over 100 years of asking only about color.

Bailey delivers a wealth of data on legacies of race in his solidly reasoned and impeccably researched book on racial attitudes in Brazil. He also argues that North American theories of racial identity and racial group interests find little support in Brazil where the population of African origin is nearly three times as large as that of the United States. Bailey reasons that the strict notion of racial identification as black or white cannot be labeled “universal.”

His research reveals that color or race is not a significant predictor of beliefs concerning Brazilian racial disadvantage. “Culture wars” are nearly non-existent in Brazil in comparison to the United States. Racial attitudes in Brazil appear to embrace “racial ambiguity and mixing” as the very essence of Brazilian people. The great majority of non-white Brazilians prefer the term “intermediate” or “mixed-race” claiming to be neither “white” nor “black.” Bailey argues that only through disposing of many of the U.S. racial assumptions, a general theory that originated in the United States of racial attitudes can emerge.

It is my hope that in the writer’s future studies we will find a chapter or two on the racial relations between women and their role in the political and social life in Brazil.

Written by: Anna Hamling, October 23rd 2009