digital emunction

Tracey Rosen forwarded me her very smart response to an article in last week’s NYT that reports the U.S. Army’s use of anthropologists in Afghanistan. (It should be obvious, but Tracey is not the Tracy of the article.) Her response was originally addressed to her colleagues (of whom the B. in the last paragraph is one), but she’s agreed to let me post an excerpt below.

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I’d like to bring up a couple of articles that have stuck with me as I begin to encounter my own political/existential dilemmas that get raised by fieldwork because I think that they are also relevant to this discussion.

The first is by one of our (controversially) activist brethren, David Graeber, who wrote a piece in last January’s edition of Harpers. The title: “Army of Altruists: on the alienated right to do good,” and the link.

His basic point can be gleaned from the title: viz., the “right” for Americans to engage themselves in the socially oriented “good” has been alienated from most of the population. [Read more]

Fire alone can be fed, kept captive
like a vestal helpmeet, lady or return it to the wild
let fly from canisters a living payload
to prowl the brush bury in an acreage
whose future growth it claims by tender.
—Andrea Brady, “Tracking Wildfire”

Tracey Rosen, our intrepid correspondent in Athens, filed this report last evening:

So, the fires here have been quite remarkable, thanks for asking. I myself am not actually burnt, per se—but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel the scorch in my ears as gaia cries out in pain! All seriously, though…it has been rather inconvenient because I’ve had to spend a whole afternoon cleaning ash off of my balcony. Overall, I’ve been doing my best to get footage of the madness and to compile a list of theories explaining their cause. The most colorful include:

And of course, the nebulous “they” that everyone keeps referring to, beginning sentences with the agentive subject: “THEY burned us” (as opposed to the passive voice which would allow room for natural disaster: i.e., “we’ve been burned”).
[Read more]