#sjsci

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What's so POST about COLONIALISM?

This week, we're thinking postcolonial thoughts with Kavita Philip (Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India).

Philip writes that practices and institutions that set up a mutually reinforcing dyad between colonialism and nineteenth century science have, in many instances, been carried over by postcolonial states, 'along with the foundational assumptions of scientific modernity', into structures of post-independence government and popular culture (pp 2-4). 

Challenged to think about my own approach to 'postcoloniality' as a South African, a white woman, and a scholar grappling with notions of the sexed body, 'other' bodies, in spaces thought of as 'other' (e.g. Africa), I came across this site: http://zeroanthropology.net/about/

Zero Anthropology is about interrogating what is arguably one of the 'colonial' sciences. In its most basic sense, it is

a project of decolonization, growing out of a discipline with a long history and a deep epistemological connection to colonialism. The aim is to transform anthropology into something that is neither Eurocentric nor elitist. 

It is about 'unthinking' anthropology, and 'opening up' anthropology. 

If anthropology claimed the world for study by Europeans and Americans, ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY is (also) about “the world” reclaiming anthropological knowledge for its own self-understanding, self-expression, and self-identification, or better yet, recognizing that it always had “anthropological” knowledge of its own.

Here is an approach, by a group of diverse scholars and thinkers, which does not try to dismantle, but interrogate colonial epistemological foundations and find what radical possibilities these offer for generative, productive and transformative outcomes today. It is an interesting approach, which works at while recognizing, rather than only critiquing and shutting down, the challenges inherent in any of our approaches to knowledge and/or representation. 

It’s About Neocolonialism

We all struggle with these overlapping, mutually complementing cognate terms that refer to mutually reinforcing processes, terms such as imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. We’ve been through this already, in the first part of the Zero Series (to be continued, I promise). The sense one gets of neocolonialism from all of the above, scattered across blogs, YouTube, and Twitter, and spread among commentators and repeaters from Canada, Trinidad,  Curaçao, Afghanistan, and Australia–is that neocolonialism is internalized and localized, a variant and complement of global imperialism. It’s what makes imperialism work, at the local level, a way of articulating two distinct arenas and fields of interest. The prime actors in the neocolonial setting are not necessarily foreign (though they can be, in the case of imported experts, visiting IMF delegations, and over-sized foreign embassies), nor are the nation-states in question any longer formal political colonies (in terms of tissue thin charters and conventions). They are now post-independent, in more ways than one. The critique of neocolonialism is about a vision of self-rule that is more like management of locals on behalf of foreign interests, with some locals of course benefiting immensely from such arrangements. Ultimately it is about the continuation of colonialism by other means, a force felt, observed, and spoken about worldwide.

Read more here

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Growing up poor and stressed impacts the brain in adulthood

This week, an article in Science Daily discusses further evidence that our socio-economic realities have material impacts on our health as adults. As we saw in the film Unnatural Causes, findings like these unravel the mythic notions of racial difference in health, pointing to the myriad interwoven social environment which impacts on our overall wellbeing.

Read more here: Science Daily

Image: Childhood poverty impacted how much the two regions of the prefrontal cortex (as shown in orange circles) were engaged during emotion regulation. (Credit: University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine)

This article also reminded me about work by a colleague in South Africa. Prof Mark Tomlinson develops a theory of 'toxic poverty' which has a range of implications during pregnancy: for the fetus, the child after birth, as well as the pregnant woman. Prof Tomlinson's work shows the social causation pathways of mental distress among pregnant women (that is, 'toxic' poverty) and the impacts of this particular cause of mental distress. Depression or anxiety can lead to compromised caregiving capacity, which in turn has repercussions for the child. 

The image below shows the brain sizes of 2 different 3-year-old children. The one on the left is an average sized brain for a 3 year old. The image on the right is of a child who had experienced extreme neglect. This is another example of how socio-economic experiences can shape biological difference. 

A summary of Prof Tomlinson's upcoming article can be read here: http://blogs.health24.com/blog/2013/08/

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This article delivers a biopsychosocial take on eating disorders. Instead of relying only on social/media factors, biology, or psychological factors, this article ties them all together.

[sjsci]

The other day we discussed the colonial project of naming and how that project was part of larger goal of determining the difference between men and animals.  For European colonizers, that line of distinction often fell on the bodies of people of color, sometimes thought to be a kind of "missing link" in the chain between animal and man.  This understanding resulted in people of color being treated like animals, examined, measured, displayed, etc.  One prominent case of this was "the Hottentot Venus" - Saartje Baartman.  Baartman was essentially captured, measured, and displayed around Europe and after her death her body was cut up and put on show in a museum in Paris until as recently as 1974, when her body was repatriated.

On World Art Day this past year, this history was called up when the Swedish Minister of Art, Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth cut into a cake created by the Afro-Swedish artist Makode Aj Lindes.  The cake was constructed around Lindes, who had darkened his face to match the cake, and who pretended to scream in pain as the cake was cut and then fed to him.  While the piece was quickly decried as racist, that isn't the whole story.  In this case, we can see the ways in which science has piled racism onto the bodies of black women.  Historically, those bodies have been subject to mutilation as part of a modern progress narrative, and the way in which this racist past was reenacted on World Art Day serves only as a reminder that POC bodies remain vulnerable to exploitation and unethical science.

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Association for Molecular Pathology et al v. Myriad Genetics Inc et al, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 12-398

women's bodies raising questions around bioethics 

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Civilizing Natures as well as Terrall's "Heroic Narratives of Quest and Discovery" made me think of the rhetoric found in this portion of the WWF website.  This could be a productive site for my final which will explore a feminist postcolonial critique of western narratives of conservation:  How does approaching conservation through the framework of "priority places"  and "ecoregions" engage colonial legacies about responsible land management and resource use?  How does the rhetoric here situate biodiversity as a resource that is most productively managed by western ideas about conservation?  

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"[W]e can see an immediate relationship between commodity fetishism and stranger fetishism.  First, the object comes to be valued (is 'enigmatic') only through a prior act of detachment from the social relationships of labour and production that produced it.  Second, the object is invested with meaning by being associated with the figure of the stranger: indeed, the object becomes the stranger; it is consumed as that which contains the 'truth' of the strange or exotic.  The fetishism of the commodity becomes displaced onto the fetishism of cultural difference: we calue the lost object by assuming it contains differece in its own form (a containment which is enabled by a double concealment of the history of its production and the history of determination that allows the stranger to appear). - Sara Ahmed, Strange Encouters, (from chapter 6, "Going Strange, Going Native")

In her book Strange Encounters, Sara Ahmed engages the allure of the Oriental to explain the relationship between the consuming colonizers and the producing colonized.  Products that promise us the allure of the strange, that conjure the tropes Edward Said illuminates, are desirable by foreign markets because they allow for a safe engagement with the "strange" or unknown.  This safety is produced by the active alienation of production processes, such that the consumer does not need to acknowledge the bodily fact of the other.

The body of the other is always dangerous, hence why the British colonial projects in India placed so much emphasis on the control of the body through law, work, and religion.  Today, we marginalize and abuse the body of the other by means of inhumane working conditions as well as culturally and environmentally destructive relief work and structural adjustment policies.  The global north can participate in these practices, Ahmed suggests, because while we desire the other only as the final link in "a series of metonymic associations" that bind that stranger to a consumable product.  Only when the body is reduced to characteristics, to some vague Orientalist allure, is that body manageable and desirable.

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Folks! Blog announcement!

So, as a handful of you know, I have been working on a side project with my feminist science and technology studies class and that project is finally ready to go live.  The group of us, as well as a few other students in the field, have been working on a science and social justice tumblr.  It's called SJSci and you should all check it out!