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THE MORAL BORDERSOF SELF AND OTHER:
MIGRATION, RECONCILIATION, AND HUMAN WELLBEING
MONTE VERITA ASCONA, SWITZERLAND
JUNE 3-4, 2011
C e n t ro I n c o n t r i U m a n i A s c o n a
Conveners: David NapierAngela Hobart
THURSDAY, 02.06.2011
19:00 Registration
19:30 Dinner at Monte Verità
FRIDAY, 03.06.2011
MORNING 09:00 Coffee
09:15 Greetings: Angela Hobart00:00 Introduction: David Napier
Panel 1: Migrating Bodies
10:00 Christos Lynteris, University of St Andrews, Scotland
From Coolies to Floating Population:Migrant Workers as the Biopolitical Other in Chinese Epidemiology
10:30 Discussion
10:40 Coffee Break
11:00 Ur!ula Lipovec Čebron, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Bodies of Erased as a Record of Exclusion and Resistance
11:30 Discussion
11:40 Nick Mai, London Metropolitan University, UK
Embodied cosmopolitanisms: the ambivalently queer subjective mobility of migrants working in the global sex industry.
12:10 Discussion
12:20 Respondents: Rodney Reynolds, University College London, UK Frans van Doorne, University of Tilburg, Netherlands
12:45 Lunch Break
PROGRAMME
AFTERNOON
Panel 2: Risk, Migration and Wellbeing
14:00 Paul Clough, University of Malta, Malta
Conflict Resolution Among African Irregular Immigrants in Malta: the Micro-Politics of Inter-Cultural Respect
14:30 Discussion
14:40 Peter Loizos, London School of Economics, UK
The “medicalisation of suffering” problem: towards situated analysis
15:10 Discussion
15:20 Paul Stoller, West Chester University, PA, USA
Yaya’s Story: Negotiating Wellbeing Among West African Immigrants in New York City
15:50 Discussion
16:00 Coffee Break
16:15 Respondents: Caroline Ifeka, University College London, UKStudent Group University College London, UK:Daniele Stolfi, Joanna Stronach-Lenz, Victoria Sultana, Francesca Zanatta
16:45 End of First DayEVENING
19:00 Dinner at Monte Verità
20:30 Visit to Ascona
PROGRAMMESATURDAY, 04.06.2011
MORNING 09:00 Coffee
Panel 3: Hegemonies of Migration
09:15 Angela Hobart, University College London, UK/Centro Incontri Umani, Switzerland
After the Massacre in Indonesia 1965-1966: Political Art and Regeneration Rituals
09:45 Discussion
09:55 Jasmin Tahmaseb McConatha, West Chester University, PA, USA
My days in solitary confinement: The burdens of care-giving and the well being of older immigrant women.
10:25 Discussion
10:35 Coffee Break
10:50 David Nugent, Emory University, GA, USA
The Migration of Sovereignty: Surveillance, Identity and Well-Being in the Northern Peruvian Andes
11:20 Discussion
11:30 Respondents: Daniela Cerqui, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Tanya Zivkovic, University of Adelaide, Autsralia
12:00 Lunch Break
AFTERNOON
Panel 4: Migration and Morality
13:30 Jerome Lewis, University College London, UK
Migrating moral values, and their consequences for hunter-gatherers’ well-being in Congo.
14:00 Discussion
14:10 Richard Rechtman, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, France
The psychological border of morality
14:40 Discussion
14:50 Coffee Break
15:10 David Napier, University College London, UK
An Epidemiology of Moral Uncertainty
15:40 Discussion
15:50 Respondent: Theodor Itten, R.D. Laing Institute, Switzerland Michael Adelberg, Sacramento, CA, USA
16:20 Conclusion: David Napier
16:30 End of Conference
EVENING
19:00 Dinner at Monte Verità
20:30 Concert “Resonance/ Dissonance” Khyam Allami and Vasilis Sarikis, Sala Balint, Monte Verita
ABSTRACTSUr!ula Lipovec Čebron, University of Ljubljana
Bodies of Erased as a Record of Exclusion and Resistance
The Erased or “Izbrisani” are a group of 25,671 individuals, who were taken off the register of permanent residents in the aftermath of Slovenia's independence in 1991. The paper will discuss how Erased came to be and its consequences. The plight of those Erased who are without legal status even today is discussed with regard to issues concerning health and access to health services from which they are excluded through a nationalist and neo-liberal policies. Moreover, the paper will set forth certain aspects of economic, political and social exclusion of the Erased, as well as the impact of the said exclusion on their state of mind. Amongst others, the incidence of "!ivci" ("upset nerves") and "!ivčnost" ("nervousness") as the embodied metaphor of socio-political and economic inequality brought about by the erasure is analyzed through a medical anthropological perspective.
Paul Clough, University of Malta, Malta
Conflict Resolution Among African Irregular Immigrants in Malta: the Micro-Politics of Inter-Cultural Respect
" This paper focuses on a single case study of the management of conflict among African immigrants in an open centre established by the Government of Malta. It is offered as an analysis of management success. But it is written from a very particular standpoint – that of part-time research. Because, in 2006, at the time of the study, I was heavily committed to full-time teaching and administration in the anthropology department of the University of Malta, I had limited time to observe or question all parties in the conflict. Indeed, the reader will see that I probe conflict management largely through the eyes of the two managers involved. For that was the vantage point available to me. Thus, this study is very different from the full-time research done by those who have time off from their normal work. In consequence, this analysis does not claim to achieve that holistic picture of all factors which I regard as normally desirable in anthropological research. Furthermore, I would claim that this analysis falls in the domain of ‘applied’ anthropology, or the ‘anthropology of advocacy’, in the very specific sense that I was there, at the centre of the conflict, because I saw my role as one of long-term assistance to Africans living in difficult conditions. In that sense, it is partly a record of anthropology in action. Readers are invited to judge what, if any,
epistemic value emerges from an analysis based on part-time research with a practical orientation." My argument in this paper is that the ethical motivations of the actors are essential to understanding the conflict and its resolution; and that ethical motivation has been under-theorized in anthropological or sociological studies of conflict. Most conflict studies dwell on the material interests or ideological preoccupations of the actors. Or, they invoke network analysis. All such analyses presume that the ‘formal’ or the ‘substantive’ rationality of the actors (Weber) is the key to the conflict. In contrast, this paper attempts a phenomenological analysis of ethics.
Angela Hobart, University College London, UK /Centro Incontri Umani, Switzerland
After the Massacre in Indonesia 1965-1966: Political Art and Regeneration Rituals
In order for humans to recover after mass killing special attention must be given to violent, ‘unjust death’. In this paper I focus on Indonesia, with specific reference to Bali, after the genocide of 1965-1966 when one to two million alleged communists (PKI) were killed. I will explore how these troubled, wandering spirits, migrants between this world and the next, are purified, appeased and commemorated in the community. Political art, initiated during and after the genocide by the Institute LEKRA and death rituals were and still are crucial, I contend, in this process, especially as the Truth and Reconciliation Committees established, were unsuccessful.
I will concentrate on one case study, that of Anak Agung Suteja (1923-166?). President Sukarno appointed Suteja in 1985 as first governor of Bali. By all accounts he was a remarkable leftist idealist. In 1965 he was summoned to Jakarta to meet Sukarna, but he tragically vanished during the purges that accompanied Suharta’s ‘New Order’. His funeral only took place in 2006. Why did a masked figure of the mythic monkey general Hanuman lead the funeral procession? How did his descendants, whom I met last year during fieldwork, cope with the violent past, which was ever present in image and shadow?
In recent decades, young activists organised workshops and exhibitions primarily in Java to create a discursive space where youngsters could debate freely about the mass killings and their aftermath when the New Order erased thousands of voices. The simple artistic objects evoked memories of human anguish, pain and bewilderment when death was terrifyingly close at hand. ultimately these artistic configurations emphasise the ambiguity inherent in boundaries, frontiers, and thresholds, irrespective of whether they are territorial, cultural, economic or cosmological.
ABSTRACTSJerome Lewis, University College London, UK
Migrating moral values, and their consequences for hunter-gatherers’ well-being in Congo.
Ekila is a polysemic word used to describe a range of phenomena that are central to the gendered organisation of Bayaka society in Congo. In an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society where overt instruction is frowned upon, ekila serves to establish a moral universe that ensures people experience the forest as a place of abundance by defining how things must be properly shared. In this sense it serves as a forest management regime.
In the past decade three types of migrants have arrived in Bayaka forest in increasing numbers: loggers, commercial traders and conservationists. Loggers have been systematically opening up remote forest areas to extract valuable trees. The road networks they build have provided open access to forest resources by commercial traders. The consequences of this ‘economic development’ is used by conservationists to justify enforcing exclusion zones in the best forest areas using para-military units.
The Bayaka value the forest for its abundance. When they managed it accordingly, it was abundant. Now that the migrants’ models of forest management based on calculating value according to scarcity dominate, so forest resources have become scarce. The consequences for the hunter-gatherers is their increasing concentration in ‘super-camps’, the proliferation of alcoholism and disease, and their increasing resentment of conservationists.
Peter Loizos, London School of Economics, UK
The “Medicalisation of Suffering” Problem: Towards Situated Analysis.
The epidemiology of conventional illness and disease has been about specifiable and measurable conditions, with biomedical indicators. But there have been areas which have vexed mainstream medicine because assessing such conditions as severe #back pain have less clear-cut #medical criteria. Social attitudes to a person’s claim to have suffered clearly vary in both time, and positions in a social system. It might be an appropriate task for professional philosophers# to discuss an epidemiology of moral concern in the abstract, but for social researchers, [historians, anthropologists, sociologists and others] discussions about specific societies, times, classes, and categories with common shared experiences will be more accessible. It is also necessary to sketch in the historical development of
international human rights law, the decontextualised# diffusion and dilution of the PTSD diagnosis, the growth# of the professional of clinical psychology and its readiness to propose “trauma therapies”, and various other institutional and specific# changes in the world since 1945.
For illustration, consider the ways in which Greek Cypriot society since 1974 has responded at various levels, to two structural and hard-to-manage changes:
1] a large-scale internal forced migration problem: #During this period, Greek Cypriot society legitimated a narrative of collective social suffering by and about the Greek Cypriot IDPs, in which the concepts of “trauma” and injustice# were# central.# # Questions of reconciliation with the Turkish Cypriots were indefinitely postponed by the political leadership because the idea of reconciliation had become cognitively confusing and politically dissonant, but a quiet minority of younger and more educated people# attempted practical steps towards reconciliation, and formal peace-making.
##2] Since the mid 1980s there has been rapid and numerous entry of labour migrants from LDCs, as more and more young Cypriots became educated away from low-skill service sector work. #The key distinctions for mapping the range of attitudes will be about political and religious allegiances, age and education. Collective sympathy has not been generally extended to foreign citizens making asylum claims, in spite of the fact that many Greek Cypriots have been labour migrants in their time. However for younger and better educated Greek Cypriots, it is unacceptable to treat asylum seekers harshly. The entry of Cyprus into the EU in 2003 has brought new energy to those seeking to implement various international conventions on the human rights of migrants.
Christos Lynteris, University of St Andrews, Scotland
From Coolies to Floating Population: Migrant Workers as the Biopolitical Other in Chinese Epidemiology
At the turn of the 20th century the foundations of Chinese hygienic modernity lay with the transformation of migrant workers, conceptualised as ‘coolies’, from an economic to a biopolitical category. Late imperial medical elites approached the great Manchurian pneumonic plague of 1910-11 as an event caused by unskilled marmot-hunting coolies, thus laying the basis for an epidemiology focused on controlling the bodies of migrant others. Bridging Confucian notions of lacking self-cultivation and Social Darwinist fears of racial decay, ‘coolies’ functioned as the projected void, the symptomal wound from which oozed the twin pathology of the collapsing empire: degeneration and disorder. One hundred years later,
ABSTRACTSduring the SARS crisis of 2003, the Chinese public health apparatus resurrected the notion of migrant worker pathogeny, so as to target the one hundred million strong population of ‘roaming peasant migrants’ as the cause of the outbreak. Treated as a pestilent ‘floating population’ causing epidemic chaos across the country, migrant workers thus became the cause celebré of epidemiological control and surveillance in China. Far from a mere coincidence, my paper will argue that this return of the migrant other at the epicentre of epidemiological problematisation in China is a result of its function as a unique biopolitical switch between two registers of otherness. On the one hand, Confucian notions of the self, which have been object to a systematic and selective promotion by the Chinese Party-State in the last two decades. And on the other hand, immunological notions of the self, which have witnessed a proliferation within post-socialist China, as a naturalist basis of neo-liberalist transformation. My paper will thus argue that, conceived as both a cultural and natural other to the ‘harmonious society’ put in place by the Communist Party, migrant workers embody the threat of ‘infectious degeneration’, necessitating the imposition of states of exception for their control and containment.
Nick Mai, London Metropolitan University, UK
Embodied cosmopolitanisms: the ambivalently queer subjective mobility of migrants working in the global sex industry.
Anti-trafficking rhetoric and policies emphasise the extent of exploitation and coercion of (female) migrant sex workers and obfuscate the shared ambivalences and contradictions experienced by migrant female sex workers and their male agents and partners. However, anthropological research focusing on migrants’ emic perspectives shows that a small minority of women working in the sex industry feel coerced and abused. By engaging in the global sex industry, both young men and women negotiate their ambivalently queer aspirations to cosmopolitan late modern lifestyles against the prevalence of essentialist patriarchal gender values and sexual mores at home. In the process, established gender normativities and the related dynamics of domination and resistance are both reproduced and challenged.
Hegemonic understandings of migrants’ involvement in the global sex industry in terms of ‘trafficking’ erase these important dynamics and dimensions, which underpin intricate feelings and experiences of advantage, disadvantage and exploitation. By obfuscating these meaningful complexities and ambivalences anti-trafficking rhetoric and social
intervention demarcate moral, economic and geopolitical forms of subalternity. They enforce of forms of solidarity and support which appeal to the minority and harm the majority of the people they are supposed to help. In the process, the nexus between migration and the sex industry is pathologised as inherently exploitative, in order to defensively displace citizens’ attention from their (our) increasing exploitability and commoditisation in neoliberal times.
Jasmin Tahmaseb McConatha, West Chester University, PA, USA
My days in solitary confinement: The burdens of care-giving and the well being of older immigrant women.
This presentation will address the health and well being of older immigrant women who are providing care for a family member with dementia. Their circumstances highlight many of the stressors associated with aging and care-giving in contemporary western societies. For women, aging is often accompanied by a degree of freedom, freedom from household responsibilities and parenting, however in 21st century an increasing number of women (according to statistics 8.9 million adults, mostly older women), are providing regular on-going care for an older relative with dementia. The burdens associated with this care threaten their health and well being. This presentation, which is based on 3 years of extensive interviews with care givers, will address the existential, social, and psychological burdens and resources of older immigrant care givers. I will discuss how caregivers confront choices between personal satisfactions, freedom, and obligation. Their narratives are full of resilience, hope, sadness, repressed desire, and difficult choices. Their stories illuminate the complex nature of contemporary aging immigrant women.
David Napier, University College London, UK
An Epidemiology of Moral Uncertainty
Epidemiology is the study of the transmission, origins, and causes of disease in a population or culture, and particularly of specific diseases, their vectors, modes of proliferation, and treatment.
As distress becomes medicalized, so too are the social conditions (e.g., the destabilizations of warfare, natural disaster, and alien migration) that underlie it. Today we hear not only about collective trauma, social depression, mass hysteria, and “sick” societies, but now also witness the
ABSTRACTSsocial increasingly being described through medical categories. Schopenhauer’s moral imperative to behave compassionately (understood as an altruistic social obligation), is now increasingly replaced by the individual’s clinical search for normality. What was once social and moral is often now biological and medical, even depending crucially at times on pharmaceutical intervention.
Indeed, the “normal” has become a category to be achieved through the assistance of clinicians, therapists, and surgeons who reshape us--no longer perceived as a baseline condition. The now longstanding idea that society is not healthy has come back to roost on the consciousness of all who believe they are deeply wanting of an elusive normalness. The perception that society is sick, one might argue, has finally produced a predominantly sick society in which we all require treatment.
David Nugent, Emory University, GA, USA
The Migration of Sovereignty: Surveillance, Identity and Well-Being in the Northern Peruvian Andes
In the middle decades of the 20th century government officials in the department of Amazonas, in the northern Peruvian Andes, experienced a crisis of rule. They came to view themselves as incapable of carrying out even the most basic of government functions. They were being prevented from doing so, they believed, by APRA—a political party they themselves had forced underground, by means of the most brutal repression. In accounting for the failure of their own efforts to govern, officials attributed to APRA a party apparatus with all the powers of state that their own regime lacked—and then some. They came to view their administration as a pale imitation of a sophisticated, complex state structure located in some carefully concealed, subterranean domain. As the regional population witnessed the migration of sovereignty from the institutions of government to the political underground, state officials responded by indulging in the darkest of fantasies about APRA. They couldn’t actually see the subterranean APRA party state to which they attributed such power and influence. They were certain it was there. But because APRA insisted on remaining hidden from view—on remaining precisely where government officials had left it—the authorities couldn’t actually find APRA. As a result, they were left to imagine the contours of their invisible enemy.
Richard Rechtman, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, France
The Psychological Border of Morality
It seems clearly established, as the focus of the seminar shows, that ideas of wellbeing, health, psychological suffering contribute to the new definition of what is or what is not acceptable for human being. In the context of global migration, health awareness for example has gained a new visibility to give a kind of legitimate vocabulary for social interventions regarding the fate of those populations. But beside the political focus on psychological suffering, that we will discuss, this paradigm also draws the new borders of subjectivity as if political subjectivity and psychological subjectivity were synonymous. We will discuss the implication of this modern collusion between this two different conceptions of subjectivity, that nevertheless gives psychological boundaries to the classical conceptions of morality.
Paul Stoller, West Chester University, PA, USA
Yaya’s Story: Negotiating Wellbeing Among West African Immigrants in New York City
In this paper, I present the case of Yaya Hamidou, a citizen of the world, who spent much of his adult life traveling the contemporary trade routes that today connect remote places like Balayara, Yaya’s home town in Niger to New York City and Paris. Yaya, whose success as an antiquities trader enabled him to make the pilgrimage to Mecca as a relatively young man, began selling African art in New York City in the 1990s. He specialized in antique silver jewelry crafted by Tuareg smiths and terra cotta burial objects, many of which are more than 800 years old, which can be traced to Bura in Western Niger. In the summer 2008, Yaya became ill and was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Far from home, friends, and family, he began a painful journey into a surreal medical world of blood work, CT scans, and long treatment sessions during which a “curative” poison was systematically dripped into his body. The chemotherapy made him sick, weak and despondent. Despite these physiological and psychological difficulties Yaya persevered for more than two years of treatment. In New York and suffering, he had no direct support from his family—brothers, sons, daughters—and missed the camaraderie of friends, clients, and cronies in Niger
In Niger Yaya was seen as an important man who had made a go of it in America. In New York City, he was a man living in SRO hotel on the Upper
ABSTRACTSWest Side of Manhattan who, due to his illness, had neither the time nor energy to visit his trader friends, to attend the Friday mosque or to tend adequately to his trading enterprises. In the fall of 2010, he decided to return to Niger—to die at home among his friends and family. He died on New Year’s Day 2011. Before he left, we had a long talk about the meaning of life, death and wellbeing. Yaya’s story, the kind of tale told more and more often in the West African community of New York City, highlights the existential dimensions of wellbeing. In telling Yaya’s story, I reflect those themes—love and hate, health and illness, courage and fear, fidelity and betrayal-- that define the human condition. In telling Yaya’s story, I also ponder our obligation to think hard about what we do as scholars, writers and human beings.
PARTICIPANTS
SPEAKERS:
Ur!ula Lipovec Čebron, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Paul Clough, University of Malta, Malta
Angela Hobart, UCL & Goldsmith College, UK/ Centro Incontri Umani, Switzerland
Jerome Lewis, University College London, UK
Peter Loizos, Prof. Em. London School of Economics, UK
Christos Lynteris, University of St. Andrew’s, UK
Nick Mai, London Metropolitan University, UK
Jasmin Tamahseb McConatha, West Chester University, PA, USA
David Napier, University College London, UK
David Nugent, Emory University, GA, USA
Richard Rechtman, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, France
Paul Stoller, West Chester University, PA, USA
Tanya Zivkovich, University of Adelaide, Australia
DISCUSSANTS:
Tom Kennedy, Centro Incontri Umani, Switzerland
Pauline Napier, Independent Clinical Psychologist
312 Western Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15215, USA
Daniele Stolfi, University College London, UK
Joanna Stronach-Lenz, University College London, UK
Victoria Sultana, University College London, UK/ University of Malta
Anna-Maria Volkmann, University College London
Francesca Zanatta, University College London
RESPONDENTS:
Michael Adelberg, Adelberg Associates, Sacramento, CA, USA
Daniela Cerqui, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Caroline Ifeka, University College London, UK
Theodor Itten, R.D. Laing Institute St. Gallen, Switzerland
Rodney Reynolds, University College London, UK
Frans van Doorne, University of Tilburg, Netherlands
NOTES
NOTES
ABOUT THE FONDAZIONE CENTRO INCONTRI UMANI ASCONA
The Cross Cultural Centre, Ascona - Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona - is a recognized Swiss Foundation. It was set up by Dr. Angela Hobart, London, in the memory of her parents, Dr. Edmund and Margiana Stinnes-von Gaevernitz.
The aim of the Centre is to encourage u n d e r s t a n d i n g , r e s p e c t a n d p e a c e internationally, which is especially important in our contemporary era, beset by natural disasters and widespread human conflict. The Centre addresses issues of cross cultural concern in the domains of society, politics, philosophy, art, religion and medicine.
By encouraging exchange among scholars, students, artists and laypeople of different countries and disciplines, the Centre seeks to honour the capacity of humans to revitalize consciousness and remake their lived realities.
CONTACT AND ADDRESS CIU, Via Signor in Croce 9, CH-6612 Ascona, www.ciu-ascona.org
Secretariat: c/o Laura Simona, Vicolo St. Antonio 38, 6618 Arcegno
Tel/ Fax: (0041) 91 791 88 41, [email protected]