Arquivo da categoria: Uncategorized

Seca no Nordeste afeta 10 milhões de pessoas (Agência Brasil)

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JC e-mail 4677, de 05 de Março de 2013

A baixa temperatura dos oceanos Pacífico e Atlântico é a causa da falta de chuva em seis estados nordestinos

Seis estados do Nordeste brasileiro ainda sofrem com a seca, que afeta 10 milhões de pessoas. Na Bahia, em Alagoas, Sergipe, Pernambuco, na Paraíba e no Rio Grande do Norte chove apenas em pontos isolados, o que não resolve a situação, segundo o Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia (Inmet). A baixa temperatura dos oceanos Pacífico e Atlântico é a causa da falta de chuva na região.

No Recife, mesmo com a chuva na noite de domingo (3) o racionamento nas áreas planas começou na sexta-feira (1°) e 82 bairros da região metropolitana são afetados. De acordo com a Secretaria de Recursos Hídricos e Energéticos de Pernambuco, a medida foi adotada porque uma das barragens opera com apenas 19% da capacidade.

O sistema prevê que as áreas planas do Recife terão 20 horas com água e 28 horas sem. Nas áreas de morro, o racionamento já era a medida utilizada como prevenção. O rodízio foi adotado levando em consideração a situação dos principais reservatórios de água que abastecem a região, já que no mês de fevereiro choveu apenas 30% do esperado.

O índice de chuva abaixo da média nesses estados é 75%. O restante corresponde à quantidade igual ou acima da média. De acordo com o Inmet, não há previsão de chuva para os próximos cinco dias em Alagoas, Sergipe e na Bahia, que estão com o maior número de municípios ainda em situação de emergência.

No sul dos estados do Maranhão e do Piauí a chuva tem sido constante desde outubro. No Maranhão choveu 190 milímetros (mm) dos 230 mm esperados para todo o mês de fevereiro. Em Teresina, choveu mais que o esperado, 200 mm. Para o Inmet, esses dados indicam que “a situação nesses estados está se normalizando”. No litoral entre Natal e o Recife também chove, mas ainda é muito pouco para abastecer a população.

David Graeber: Some Remarks on Consensus (Occupy Wall Street)

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Posted on Feb. 26, 2013, 3:37 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt 

the medium is the message

As part of our recent series on Occupy and consensus, we are posting this timely piece by David Graeber, originally published at OccupyWallStreet.net

There has been a flurry of discussion around process in OWS of late. This can only be a good thing. Atrophy and complacency are the death of movements. Any viable experiment in freedom is pretty much going to have to constantly re-examine itself, see what’s working and what isn’t—partly because situations keep changing, partly because we’re trying to invent a culture of democracy in a society where almost no one really has any experience in democratic decision-making, and most have been told for most of their lives that it would be impossible, and partly just because it’s all an experiment, and it’s in the nature of experiments that sometimes they don’t work.

A lot of this debate has centered around the role of consensus. This is healthy too, because there seem to be a lot of misconceptions floating around about what consensus is and is supposed to be about. Some of these misconceptions are so basic, though, I must admit I find them a bit startling.

Just one telling example. Justine Tunney recently wrote a piece called “Occupiers: Stop Using Consensus!” that begins by describing it as “the idea that a group must strictly adhere to a protocol where all decisions are unanimous”—and then goes on to claim that OWS used such a process, with disastrous results. This is bizarre. OWS never used absolute consensus. On the very first meeting on August 2, 2011 we established we’d use a form of modified consensus with a fallback to a two-thirds vote. Anyway, the description is wrong even if we had been using absolute consensus (an approach nowadays rarely used in groups of over 20 or 30 people), since consensus is not a system of unanimous voting, it’s a system where any participant has the right to veto a proposal which they consider either to violate some fundamental principle, or which they object to so fundamentally that proceeding would cause them to quit the group. If we can have people who have been involved with OWS from the very beginning who still don’t know that much, but think consensus is some kind of “strict” unanimous voting system, we’ve got a major problem. How could anyone have worked with OWS that long and still remained apparently completely unaware of the basic principles under which we were supposed to be operating?

Granted, this seems to be an extreme case. But it reflects a more general confusion. And it exists on both sides of the argument: both some of the consensus’ greatest supporters, and its greatest detractors, seem to think “consensus” is a formal set of rules, analogous to Roberts’ Rules of Order, which must be strictly observed, or thrown away. This certainly was not what people who first developed formal process thought that they were doing! They saw consensus as a set of principles, a commitment to making decisions in a spirit of problem-solving, mutual respect, and above all, a refusal of coercion. It was an attempt to create processes that could work in a truly free society. None of them, even the most legalistic, were so presumptuous to claim those were the only procedures that could ever work in a free society. That would have been ridiculous.

Let me return to this point in a moment. First,

1) CONSENSUS IS “A WHITE THING” (OR A MIDDLE CLASS WHITE THING, OR AN ELITIST FORM OF OPPRESSION, ETC)

The first thing to be said about this statement is that this idea is a very American thing. Anyone I mention it to who is not from the United States tends to react to the statement with complete confusion. Even in the US, it is a relatively recent idea, and the product of a very particular set of historical circumstances.

The confusion overseas is due to the fact that almost everywhere except the US, the exact opposite is true. In the Americas, Africa, Asia, Oceania, one finds longstanding traditions of making decisions by consensus, and then, histories of white colonialists coming and imposing Roberts Rules of Order, majority voting, elected representatives, and the whole associated package—by force. South Asian panchayat councils did not operate by majority voting and still don’t unless there has been a direct colonial influence, or by political parties that learned their idea of democracy in colonial schools and government bodies the colonialists set up. The same is true of communal assemblies in Africa. (In China, village assemblies also operated by consensus until the ’50s when the Communist Party imposed majority voting, since Mao felt voting was more “Western” and therefore “modern.”) Almost everywhere in the Americas, indigenous communities use consensus and the white or mestizo descendants of colonialists use majority voting (insofar as they made decisions on an equal basis at all, which mostly they didn’t), and when you find an indigenous community using majority voting, it is again under the explicit influence of European ideas—almost always, along with elected officials, and formal rules of procedure obviously learned in colonial schools or borrowed from colonial regimes. Insofar as anyone is teaching anyone else to use consensus, it’s the other way around: as in the case of the Maya-speaking Zapatista communities who insisted the EZLN adopt consensus over the strong initial objections of Spanish-speaking mestizos like Marcos, or for that matter the white Australian activists I know who told me that student groups in the ’80s and ’90s had to turn to veterans of the Maoist New People’s Army to train them in consensus process—not because Maoists were supposed to believe in consensus, since Mao himself didn’t like the idea, but because NPA guerillas were mostly from rural communities in the Philippines that had always used consensus to make decisions and therefore guerilla units had adopted the same techniques spontaneously.

So where does the idea that consensus is a “white thing” actually come from? Indigenous communities in America all used consensus decision-making instead of voting. Africans brought to the Americas had been kidnapped from communities where consensus was the normal mode of making collective decisions, and violently thrust into a society where “democracy” meant voting (even though they themselves were not allowed to vote.) Meanwhile, the only significant group of white settlers who employed consensus were the Quakers—and even they had developed much of their process under the influence of Native Americans like the Haudenosaunee.

As far as I can make out the ideas comes out of political arguments that surrounded the rise of Black Nationalism in the 1960s. The very first mass movement in the United States that operated by consensus was the SNCC, or Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, a primarily African-American group created in 1960 as a horizontal alternative to Martin Luther King’s (very vertical) SCLC. SNCC operated in a decentralized fashion and used consensus decision-making. It was SNCC for instance that organized the famous “freedom rides” and most of the direct action campaigns of the early ’60s. By 1964, an emerging Black Power faction was looking for an issue with which to isolate and ultimately expel the white members of the group. They seized on consensus as a kind of wedge issue—this made sense, politically, because many of those white allies were Quakers, and it was advantageous, at first, to frame the argument as one of efficiency, rather than being about more fundamental moral and political issues like non-violence. It’s important to emphasize though that the objections to consensus as inefficient and culturally alien that were put forward at the time were not put forward in the name of moving to some other form of direct democracy (i.e., majority voting), but ultimately, part of a rejection of the whole package of horizontality, consensus, and non-violence with the ultimate aim of creating top-down organizational structures that could support much greater militancy. It also corresponded to an overt attack on the place of women in the organization—an organization that had in fact been founded by the famous African-American activist Ella Baker on the principle “strong people don’t need strong leaders.” Stokely Carmichael, the most famous early Black Power advocate in SNCC, notoriously responded to a paper circulated by feminists noting that women seemed to be systematically excluded from positions in the emerging leadership structure by saying as far as he was concerned, “the only position for women in SNCC is prone.”

Within a few years SNCC began to splinter; white allies were expelled in 1965; after a brief merger with the Panthers it split again, and dissolved in the ’70s.

These tensions—challenges to horizontalism and consensus, macho leadership styles, the marginalization of women—were by no means peculiar to SNCC. Similar battles were going on in predominantly white groups: notably SDS, which ultimately ditched consensus too, and ended up splitting between Maoists and Weathermen. This is one reason the feminist movement of the early ’70s, which within the New Left began partly as a reaction to just this kind of macho posturing, embraced consensus as an antidote. (Anarchists only later adopted it from them.) But one point bears emphasizing. It’s important. None of those who challenged consensus did so in the name of a different form of direct democracy. In fact, I’m not aware of any example of an activist group that abandoned consensus and then went on to settle on some different, but equally horizontal approach to decision-making. The end result is invariably abandoning direct democracy entirely Sometimes that’s because, as here, that is explicitly what those challenging consensus want. But even when it’s not, the same thing happens, because moving from consensus sets off a dynamic that inevitably leads in a vertical direction. When consensus is abandoned, some are likely to quit in protest. These are likely to be the most dedicated to horizontal principles. Factions form. Minority factions that consistently lose key votes, and don’t have their concerns incorporated in resulting proposals, will often split off. Since they too are likely to consist of more horizontally oriented participants, the group becomes ever more vertical. Before long, those who never liked direct democracy to begin with start saying it’s what’s really to blame for all these problems, it’s inefficient, things would run far more smoothly with clearly defined leadership roles—and it only takes a vote of 51% of the remaining, much more vertical group, to ditch direct democracy entirely.

Obviously, the widespread perception of consensus process as white isn’t just be a hold-over from events that took place forty years ago. A lot of the problem is that, since the ’70s, consensus process has largely been developed among direct-action oriented groups, and, while there are certainly African-American-based groups operating in what might be called the Ella Baker tradition, most of those groups have been largely white. The reasons are pretty obvious. Those lacking white privilege face much higher levels of state repression, and (unlike, in say, Mexico, or India, where those who face the most repression are generally speaking already organized in semi-autonomous communities that operate at least partly by consensus), in the US, this limits the degree to which it’s possible to engage in creating experimental spaces outside the system. Communities face immediate such practical concerns so pressing many feel working outside the system would be irresponsible. Those who don’t often feel they have no choice but to adopt either strict, rigorous, MLK-style non-violence, or adopt revolutionary militarism like the panthers—both of which tend to lead to top down forms of organization. As a result, the culture of consensus, the style in which it’s conducted, the sensibilities surrounding it, inevitably comes to reflect the white middle-class background of so many of those who have created and shaped it, and the result is that those who do not share these sensibilities feel alienated and excluded. Obviously this is something that urgently needs to be addressed. But the problem here is not with the principles underlying consensus (that all voices have equal weight, that no one be compelled to act against their will), but with the way it’s being done—and the fact that the way it’s being done have the effect of undermining those very principles.

2) RULES VERSUS PRINCIPLES

I think the real problem here is a misunderstanding about what we’re basically arguing about. A lot of people on both sides of the debate seem to think “consensus” is a set of rules. If you follow the rules, you’re doing consensus. If you break the rules, or even do them in the wrong order it’s somehow not. I’ve seen people show up to meetings armed with elaborate diagrams or flow-charts for some kind of formal process downloaded from some web page and insist that only this is the really real thing. So it’s hardly surprising that other people put off by all this, or who see that particular form of process hit some kind of loggerhead, say “well consensus doesn’t work. Let’s try something else.”

As far as I’m concerned both sides completely miss the point.

I’ll say it again. Consensus is not a set of rules. It’s a set of principles. Actually I’d even go so far to say that if you really boil it down, it ultimately comes down to just two principles: everyone should have equal say (call this “equality”), and nobody should be compelled to do anything they really don’t want to do (call this, “freedom.”)

Basically, that’s it. The rules are just a way to try to come to decisions in the spirit of those principles. “Formal consensus process,” in is various manifestations, is just one technique people have made up, over the years, to try to come to group decisions that solve practical problems in a way that ensures no one’s perspective is ignored, and no one is forced to do anything or comply with rules they find truly obnoxious. That’s it. It’s a way to find consensus. It’s not itself “consensus.” Formal process as it exists today has been proved to work pretty well for some kinds of people, under some circumstances. It is obviously completely inappropriate in others. To take an obvious example: most small groups of friends don’t need formal process at all. Other groups might, over time, develop a completely different approach that suits their own dynamics, relations, situation, culture, sensibilities. And there’s absolutely no reason any group can’t improvise an entirely new one if that’s what they want to do. As long as they are trying to create a process that embodies those basic principles, one that gives everyone equal say and doesn’t force anyone to go along with a decision they find fundamentally objectionable, then what they come up with is a form of consensus process—no matter how it operates. After all, it a group of people all decide they want to be bound by a majority decision, well, who exactly is going to stop them? But if they all decide to be bound by a majority decision, then they have reached a consensus (in fact, an absolute consensus) that they want to operate that way. The same would be true if they all decided they wanted to be bound by the decisions of a Ouija Board, or appointed one member of the group Il Duce. Who’s going to stop them? However, for the exact same reason, the moment the majority (or Ouija board, or Il Duce) comes up with a decision to do something that some people think is absolutely outrageous and refuse to do, how exactly is anyone going to force them to go along? Threaten to shoot them? Basically, it could only happen if the majority is somehow in control of some key resource—money, space, connections, a name—and others aren’t. That is, if there is some means of coercion, subtle or otherwise. In the absence of a way to compel people to do things they do not wish to do, you’re ultimately stuck with some kind of consensus whether you like it or not.

The question then is what kind of decision making process is most likely to lead to decisions that no one will object to so fundamentally that they will march off in frustration or simply refuse to cooperate? Sometimes that will be some sort of formal consensus process. In other circumstances that’s the last thing one should try. Still, there’s a reason that 51/49% majority voting is so rarely employed in such circumstances: usually, it is the method least likely to come up with such decisions.

Think of it this way.

Imagine the city is about to destroy some cherished landmark and someone puts up posters calling for people to meet in a nearby square to organize against it. Fifty people show up. Someone says, okay, “I propose we all lay down in front of the bulldozers. Let’s hold a vote.” So 30 people raised their hands yes, and 20 people raise their hands no. Well, what possible reason is there that the 20 people who said no would somehow feel obliged to now go and lay in front of the bulldozers? These were just 50 strangers gathered in a square. Why should the opinions of a majority of a group of strangers oblige the minority to do anything—let alone something which will expose them to personal danger?

The example might seem absurd—who would hold such a vote?—but I experienced something almost exactly like it a few years ago, at an “all-anarchist” meeting called in London before a mass mobilization against the G8. About 200 people showed up at the RampArts Social Center. The facilitator, a syndicalist who disliked consensus, explained that another group had proposed a march, followed by some kind of direct action, and immediately proceeded to hold a vote on whether we, as a group, wanted to join as. Oddly, it did not seem to occur to him that, since we were not in fact a group, but just a bunch of people who had showed up at a meeting, there was no reason to think that those who did not want to join such an action would be swayed by the result. In fact he wasn’t taking a vote at all. He was taking a poll: “how many people are thinking of joining the march?” Now, there’s nothing wrong with polls; arguably, the most helpful thing he could have done under the circumstance was to ask for a show of hands so everyone could see what other people were thinking. The results might even have changed some people’s minds—”well, it looks like a lot of people are going to that march, maybe I will too” (though in this case, in fact, it didn’t.) But the facilitator thought he was actually conducting a vote on what to do, as if they were somehow bound by the decision.

How could he have been so oblivious? Well, he was a syndicalist; unions use majority vote; that’s why he preferred it. But of course, unions are membership-based groups. If you join a union, you are, by the very act of doing so, agreeing to abide by its rules, which includes, accepting majority vote decisions. Those who do not follow the group’s rules can be sanctioned, or even expelled. It simply didn’t occur to him that most unions’ voting system depended on the prior existence of membership rolls, dues, charters, and usually, legal standing—which in effect meant that either everyone who had voluntarily joined the unions was in effect consenting to the rules, or else, if membership was obligatory in a certain shop or industry owing to some prior government-enforced agreement, was ultimately enforced by the power of the state. To act the same way when people had not consented to be bound by such a decision, and then expect them to follow the dictates of the majority anyway, is just going to annoy people and make them less, not more, likely to do so.

So let’s go back to Justine’s first example,

the first time I saw a block used at Occupy was at one of the first general assemblies in August 2011. There were about a hundred people that day and in the middle of the meeting a proposal was made to join Verizon workers on the picket line as a gesture of solidarity in the hope that they might also support us in return. People loved the idea and there was quite a bit of positive energy until one woman in the crowd, busy tweeting on her phone, casually raised her hand and said, “I block that”. The moderator, quite flabbergasted asked why she blocked and she explained that showing solidarity with workers would alienate the phantasm of our right-wing supporters. Discussion then abruptly ended and the meeting went on. The truth was irrelevant, popular opinion didn’t matter, and solidarity—the most important of all leftist values—was thrown to the wind based on the whims of just one individual. Occupy had to find a new way to do outreach.

Now, I was at this meeting, and I remember the event quite vividly because at the time I was one of the participants who was more than a little bit annoyed by the block. But I also know that this is simply not what happened.

First of all, as I remarked, OWS from the beginning did not have a system where just one person could block a proposal; in the event of a block, we had the option to fall back on a 2/3 majority vote. So if everyone had really loved the proposal, the block could have been simply brushed aside. While many felt the woman in question was being ridiculous (most of us suspected the “national movement” she claimed to represent didn’t really exist), the facilitator, when she asked if anyone felt the same way, was surprised to discover a significant contingent–some, but not all, insurrectionist anarchists–did in fact object to holding the next meeting at a picket line, since they didn’t want to immediately identify the movement with the institutional left. Once it became clear it was not just one crazy person, but a significant chunk of the meeting—probably not quite a third, but close (there weren’t really a hundred people there, incidentally; more like sixty)—she asked if anyone felt strongly that we should move to a vote, and no one insisted. Was this a terrible failure of process? I must admit at the time I found it exasperating. But in retrospect I realize that had we forced a vote, the results might well have been catastrophic. Because at that point we, too were just a bunch of people who’d all showed up in a park. We weren’t a “group” at all. Nobody had committed to anything; certainly, no one had committed to going along with a majority decision.

A block is not a “no” vote. It’s a veto. Or maybe a better way to put it is that giving everyone the power to block is like giving the power to take on the role of the Supreme Court, and stop a piece of legislation that they feel to be unconstitutional, to anyone who has the courage to stand up in front of the entire group and use it. When you block you are saying a proposal violates one of the group’s agreed-on common principles. Of course, in this case we didn’t have any agreed-on common principles. In cases like that, the usual rule of thumb is that you should only block if you feel so strongly about an issue that you’d actually leave the group. In this sense I suspect the initial blocker was indeed being irresponsible (she wouldn’t have really left; and many wouldn’t have mourned her if she had.) However, others felt strongly. Had we held a vote and decided to hold our next meeting at a picket line over their objections, many of them would likely not have shown up. The anti-authoritarian contingent would have been weakened. Had that happened, there was a real chance later decisions, much more important ones, might have gone the other way. I am thinking here in particular of the crucial decision, made some weeks later, not to appoint official marshals and police liaisons for September 17. Judging by the experience of other camps, had that happened, everything might have gone differently and the entire occupation failed. In retrospect, the loss of one early opportunity to create ties with striking unionists now seems a small price to pay for heading off on a road that might have led to that. Especially since we had no trouble establishing strong ties with unions later—precisely because we had succeeded in creating a real occupation in the park.

There are a lot of other issues that one could discuss. Above all, we desperately need to have a conversation about decentralization. Another point of confusion about consensus is the idea that it’s crucial to get approval from everyone about everything, which is again stifling and absurd. Consensus only works if working groups or collectives don’t feel they need to seek constant approval from the larger group, if initiative arises from below, and people only check upwards if there’s a genuinely compelling reason not to go ahead with some initiative without clearing it with everyone else. In a weird way, the very unwieldiness of consensus meetings is helpful here, since it can discourage people from taking trivial issues to a larger group, and thus potentially waste hours of everyone’s time.

But all this will no doubt will be hashed out in the discussions that are going on (another good rule of thumb for consensus meetings: you don’t need to say everything you can think to say if you’re pretty sure someone else will make a lot of the same points anyway). Mainly what I want to say is this:

Our power is in our principles. The power of Occupy has always been that it is an experiment in human freedom. That’s what inspired so many to join us. That’s what terrified the banks and politicians, who scrambled to do everything in their power—infiltration, disruption, propaganda, terror, violence—to be able to tell the word we’d failed, that they had proved a genuinely free society is impossible, that it would necessarily collapse into chaos, squalor, antagonism, violence, and dysfunction. We cannot allow them such a victory. The only way to fight back is to renew our absolute commitment to those principles. We will never compromise on equality and freedom. We will always base our relations to each other on those principles. We will not fall back on top-down structures and forms of decision making premised on the power of coercion. But as long as we do that, and if we really believe in those principles, that necessarily means being as open and flexible as we can about pretty much everything else.

Online Records Could Expose Intimate Details and Personality Traits of Millions (Science Daily)

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Mar. 11, 2013 — Research shows that intimate personal attributes can be predicted with high levels of accuracy from ‘traces’ left by seemingly innocuous digital behaviour, in this case Facebook Likes. Study raises important questions about personalised marketing and online privacy.

Research shows that intimate personal attributes can be predicted with high levels of accuracy from ‘traces’ left by seemingly innocuous digital behaviour, in this case Facebook Likes. Study raises important questions about personalised marketing and online privacy. (Credit: Graphic from mypersonality app, Cambridge Psychometrics Centre)

New research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that surprisingly accurate estimates of Facebook users’ race, age, IQ, sexuality, personality, substance use and political views can be inferred from automated analysis of only their Facebook Likes — information currently publicly available by default.

In the study, researchers describe Facebook Likes as a “generic class” of digital record — similar to web search queries and browsing histories — and suggest that such techniques could be used to extract sensitive information for almost anyone regularly online.

Researchers at Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre, in collaboration with Microsoft Research Cambridge, analysed a dataset of over 58,000 US Facebook users, who volunteered their Likes, demographic profiles and psychometric testing results through the myPersonality application. Users opted in to provide data and gave consent to have profile information recorded for analysis.

Facebook Likes were fed into algorithms and corroborated with information from profiles and personality tests. Researchers created statistical models able to predict personal details using Facebook Likes alone.

Models proved 88% accurate for determining male sexuality, 95% accurate distinguishing African-American from Caucasian American and 85% accurate differentiating Republican from Democrat. Christians and Muslims were correctly classified in 82% of cases, and good prediction accuracy was achieved for relationship status and substance abuse — between 65 and 73%.

But few users clicked Likes explicitly revealing these attributes. For example, less that 5% of gay users clicked obvious Likes such as Gay Marriage. Accurate predictions relied on ‘inference’ — aggregating huge amounts of less informative but more popular Likes such as music and TV shows to produce incisive personal profiles.

Even seemingly opaque personal details such as whether users’ parents separated before the user reached the age of 21 were accurate to 60%, enough to make the information “worthwhile for advertisers,” suggest the researchers.

While they highlight the potential for personalised marketing to improve online services using predictive models, the researchers also warn of the threats posed to users’ privacy.

They argue that many online consumers might feel such levels of digital exposure exceed acceptable limits — as corporations, governments, and even individuals could use predictive software to accurately infer highly sensitive information from Facebook Likes and other digital ‘traces’.

The researchers also tested for personality traits including intelligence, emotional stability, openness and extraversion.

While such latent traits are far more difficult to gauge, the accuracy of the analysis was striking. Study of the openness trait — the spectrum of those who dislike change to those who welcome it — revealed that observation of Likes alone is roughly as informative as using an individual’s actual personality test score.

Some Likes had a strong but seemingly incongruous or random link with a personal attribute, such as Curly Fries with high IQ, or That Spider is More Scared Than U Are with non-smokers.

When taken as a whole, researchers believe that the varying estimations of personal attributes and personality traits gleaned from Facebook Like analysis alone can form surprisingly accurate personal portraits of potentially millions of users worldwide.

They say the results suggest a possible revolution in psychological assessment which — based on this research — could be carried out at an unprecedented scale without costly assessment centres and questionnaires.

“We believe that our results, while based on Facebook Likes, apply to a wider range of online behaviours.” said Michal Kosinski, Operations Director at the Psychometric Centre, who conducted the research with his Cambridge colleague David Stillwell and Thore Graepel from Microsoft Research.

“Similar predictions could be made from all manner of digital data, with this kind of secondary ‘inference’ made with remarkable accuracy — statistically predicting sensitive information people might not want revealed. Given the variety of digital traces people leave behind, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for individuals to control.

“I am a great fan and active user of new amazing technologies, including Facebook. I appreciate automated book recommendations, or Facebook selecting the most relevant stories for my newsfeed,” said Kosinski. “However, I can imagine situations in which the same data and technology is used to predict political views or sexual orientation, posing threats to freedom or even life.”

“Just the possibility of this happening could deter people from using digital technologies and diminish trust between individuals and institutions — hampering technological and economic progress. Users need to be provided with transparency and control over their information.”

Thore Graepel from Microsoft Research said he hoped the research would contribute to the on-going discussions about user privacy:

“Consumers rightly expect strong privacy protection to be built into the products and services they use and this research may well serve as a reminder for consumers to take a careful approach to sharing information online, utilising privacy controls and never sharing content with unfamiliar parties.”

David Stillwell from Cambridge University added: “I have used Facebook since 2005, and I will continue to do so. But I might be more careful to use the privacy settings that Facebook provides.”

Journal Reference:

  1. M. Kosinski, D. Stillwell, T. Graepel. Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1218772110

Entrevista sobre empreendedorismo e pacificação (Cirandas.net)

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11 de Março de 2013, por Celso Alexandre Souza de Alvear

No início de março a jornalista Bruna Cerdeira do portal das UPPs me pediu uma entrevista sobre empreendedorismo e pacificação, devido a nosso projeto RioEcoSol. Quando liguei para saber se ela tinha recebido minha resposta, ela disse que não teve como usá-la, pois demorei muito (acho que demorei uns 3 dias pra responder) e que já tinha feito a matéria. Mas acho que minha resposta não agradou muito ela não… Pedi para ela me informar quando entrasse no ar, porém até hoje não tive resposta e não vi nada no site da upps. Assim, estou publicando minha resposta. Acho importante desmistificar um pouco essa visão acrítica que depois da pacificação aumentou o empreendedorismo nas favelas. Abaixo minhas respostas:

Repórter: Fui informada que o senhor foi o responsável por uma pesquisa sobre empreendedorismo em 4 comunidades pacificadas: Cidade de Deus, Complexo do Alemão, Manguinhos e Santa Marta.

Na verdade, não fui responsável por uma pesquisa sobre empreendedorismo em 4 comunidades pacificadas, mas sim pelo livro  resultante da pesquisa sobre economia solidária e economia popular nas 4 favelas (conhecida como RioEcoSol). Diferentemente da maior parte das abordagem de empreendedorismo, que prezam pela competição e pela individualidade dos empreendimentos (sob uma ótica capitalista de quanto mais lucro melhor), a economia solidária preza por uma relação de trabalho sem chefes e empregados (numa cooperativa todos os trabalhadores são donos do empreendimento) e numa lógica de cooperação e solidariedade entre os empreendimentos e entre esses e seu território.

De qualquer jeito, espero que possa te ajudar com sua pesquisa. Seguem minhas respostas.

1) Como a pacificação está ajudando a transformar as comunidades em ambientes favoráveis ao empreendedorismo e a fomentar o consumo dos produtos dos negócios locais pelos moradores?

O programa de pacificação ajudou na vida dos moradores e dos empreendimentos dessas favelas com a possibilidade de um transito mais livre no território e com uma diminuição de uma estigmatização negativa dessas favelas e dos empreendimentos localizados nelas (principalmente aqueles que vendem para pessoas de fora de suas favelas). Porém, com a repressão da polícia a diversas atividades culturais na favela (como no caso dos bailes funks), muitos empreendimentos relatam uma grande diminuição de suas vendas, pois essas atividades culturais geravam uma dinâmica econômica endógena. Outro problema é que muitos empreendimentos relatam que, com o programa de pacificação, muitos empreendimentos familiares vêm sofrendo coerção para se formalizarem (alguns empreendimentos populares, familiares, ou coletivos não tem capacidade para se formalizarem no momento).

Por fim, com o livre transito nesses territórios, a tendência é que os grandes empresários entrem nesses territórios acabando com todo o comércio local (assim como os de Barra/Jacarepaguá tem feito na Cidade de Deus, de botafogo e da zona sul estão fazendo no Santa Marta etc.). Existem vários exemplos de rádios comunitárias que foram fechadas depois da pacificação e de tvs comunitárias que fecharam pois as teves a cabo não tiveram interessem em colocar na grade. No alemão, também temos o exemplo de um empreendedor que comercializava internet (de forma regular e legal) antes da pacificação, mas que agora, com a entrada de velox, tem dificuldades para competir com essas grandes empresas. A pergunta seria então quais estratégias podem evitar a morte desses empreendimentos locais? Consideramos que só com políticas públicas e investimento do Estado pode-se evitar isso (e não com programas como pretendem casar a demanda desses territórios com o que o mercado pode ofertar). Uma política que deveria ser mais estimulado são os bancos comunitários e as moedas sociais. Isso porque, com a moeda social, por exemplo, você favorece a que se compre no comércio local, por conta do desconto.

2) Qual faixa etária (jovens, adultos) está se tornando a principal característica do empreendedorismo nas comunidades?

Todos os dados de nossa pesquisa são estáticos, então não podemos afirmar que é algo de agora ou uma tendência. Os dados detalhados estão no arquivo em anexo.

3) Que tipo de empreendimento mais cresce nessas 4 comunidades pacificadas e qual o perfil do empreendedor? (se tiver um dado mais geral, que englobe outras comunidades pacificadas)

Todos os dados de nossa pesquisa são estáticos, então não podemos afirmar que é algo de agora ou uma tendência. Os dados detalhados estão no arquivo em anexo.

4) Que cursos e/ou oficinas podem contribuir para a formação empresarial dos moradores com vocação para abrir seus próprios negócios?

Além de formações técnicas que possibilitem melhorar seus produtos e gerirem melhor seus empreendimentos, consideramos fundamental formações que desenvolvam a consciência crítica desses empreendedores, sob uma ótica de economia solidária, que permitam refletir seu empreendimento em relação a seu território. Sobre formação empresarial, não fizemos nenhuma pesquisa.

A Scientist’s Misguided Crusade (N.Y.Times)

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OP-ED COLUMNIST

By JOE NOCERA

Published: March 4, 2013 

Last Friday, at 3:40 p.m., the State Department released its “Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement” for the highly contentious Keystone XL pipeline, which Canada hopes to build to move its tar sands oil to refineries in the United States. In effect, the statement said there were no environmental impediments that would prevent President Obama from approving the pipeline.

Two hours and 20 minutes later, I received a blast e-mail containing a statement by James Hansen, the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA — i.e., NASA’s chief climate scientist. “Keystone XL, if the public were to allow our well-oiled government to shepherd it into existence, would be the first step down the wrong road, perpetuating our addiction to dirty fossil fuels, moving to ever dirtier ones,” it began. After claiming that the carbon in the tar sands “exceeds that in all oil burned in human history,” Hansen’s statement concluded: “The public must demand that the government begin serving the public’s interest, not the fossil fuel industry’s interest.”

As a private citizen, Hansen, 71, has the same First Amendment rights as everyone else. He can publicly oppose the Keystone XL pipeline if he so chooses, just as he can be as politically active as he wants to be in the anti-Keystone movement, and even be arrested during protests, something he managed to do recently in front of the White House.

But the blast e-mail didn’t come from James Hansen, private citizen. It specifically identified Hansen as the head of the Goddard Institute, and went on to describe him as someone who “has drawn attention to the danger of passing climate tipping points, producing irreversible climate impacts that would yield a different planet from the one on which civilization developed.” All of which made me wonder whether such apocalyptic pronouncements were the sort of statements a government scientist should be making — and whether they were really helping the cause of reversing climate change.

Let’s acknowledge right here that the morphing of scientists into activists is nothing new. Linus Pauling, the great chemist, was a peace activist who pushed hard for a nuclear test ban treaty. Albert Einstein also became a public opponent of nuclear weapons.

It is also important to acknowledge that Hansen has been a crucial figure in developing modern climate science. In 2009, Eileen Claussen, now the president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, told The New Yorker that Hansen was a “heroic” scientist who “faced all kinds of pressures politically.” Today, his body of work is one of the foundations upon which much climate science is built.

Yet what people hear from Hansen today is not so much his science but his broad, unscientific views on, say, the evils of oil companies. In 2008, he wrote a paper, the thesis of which was that runaway climate change would occur when carbon in the atmosphere reached 350 parts per million — a point it had already exceeded — unless it were quickly reduced. There are many climate change experts who disagree with this judgment — who believe that the 350 number is arbitrary and even meaningless. Yet an entire movement,350.org, has been built around Hansen’s line in the sand.

Meanwhile, he has a department to run. For a midlevel scientist at the Goddard Institute, what signal is Hansen sending when he takes the day off to get arrested at the White House? Do his colleagues feel unfettered in their own work? There is, in fact, enormous resentment toward Hansen inside NASA, where many officials feel that their solid, analytical work on climate science is being lost in what many of them describe as “the Hansen sideshow.” His activism is not really doing any favors for the science his own subordinates are producing.

Finally, and most important, Hansen has placed all his credibility on one battle: the fight to persuade President Obama to block the Keystone XL pipeline. It is the wrong place for him to make a stand. Even in the unlikely event the pipeline is stopped, the tar sands oil will still be extracted and shipped. It might be harder to do without a pipeline, but it is already happening. And in the grand scheme, as I’ve written before, the tar sands oil is not a game changer. The oil we import from Venezuela today is dirtier than that from the tar sands. Not that the anti-pipeline activists seem to care.

What is particularly depressing is that Hansen has some genuinely important ideas, starting with placing a graduated carbon tax on fossil fuels. Such a tax would undoubtedly do far more to reduce carbon emissions and save the planet than stopping the Keystone XL pipeline.

A carbon tax might be worth getting arrested over. But by allowing himself to be distracted by Keystone, Hansen is hurting the very cause he claims to care so much about.

Bem-vindos ao mundo dos adultos. Ou não? (Canal Ibase)

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http://www.canalibase.org.br/bem-vindos-ao-mundo-dos-adultos-ou-nao/

11/03/2013

Renzo Taddei
Colunista do Canal Ibase

O texto abaixo é uma reflexão sobre o que significa hoje, em face às crises globais –  política, econômica e ambiental -, atravessar a fronteira que separa o mundo dos jovens do dos adultos. Foi escrito por ocasião de minha indicação a paraninfo da turma de formandos do curso de Comunicação Social da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, e lido em cerimônia de colação de grau, no dia 2 de março de 2013. O texto, no entanto, fala não apenas aos graduandos da referida turma, mas a todos os jovens que se acham de alguma forma interpelados pelas exigências do mundo adulto, interpelação esta que se dá na forma de pressão para que tais jovens se conformem e se adequem às estruturas e formas de organização social existentes. Por essa razão, decidi reproduzi-lo nesta coluna. O texto foi mantido tal qual foi apresentado.

 

Foto: adam.declercq/Flickr

Inicialmente não posso deixar de agradecer a minha indicação a paraninfo da turma, coisa que verdadeiramente me emocionou. Essa é a primeira vez que isso me acontece. E como seria de se esperar de um paraninfo de primeira viagem, fui pesquisar do que se trata. A rigor, o paraninfo é um padrinho ligado à identidade profissional dos formandos, alguém de quem se espera que diga algo no rito de passagem da formatura que seja ao mesmo tempo uma última aula – mas não exatamente, porque nesse momento vocês não são mais estudantes -, e que seja também o primeiro conselho profissional – mas não exatamente, porque nesse momento vocês ainda não estão formados. Vocês estão, nesse exato instante, em processo de transformação. Entraram nesse auditório como estudantes, e vão sair como bacharéis. Por isso a colação de grau é um rito de passagem: vocês saem diferentes do que entram, alguma coisa se transforma no processo. Nesse meu discurso, quero falar um pouco sobre isso que muda, que se transforma. E como isso se transforma, em que direção, pra onde vai.

Alguns de vocês certamente devem estar se perguntado se eu não vou simplesmente congratular os formandos e dizer que o Brasil precisa deles, que se esforcem para fazer desse um país melhor, que agora eles tem uma responsabilidade para com a sociedade, etc.– o discurso padrão, pré-formatado, disponível na Internet. Pois é, não vou. Isso seria perder o tempo de vocês e o meu. Se vocês me elegeram paraninfo – eu, que não sou jornalista, publicitário, editor, produtor, diretor, apresentador ou locutor; eu, que nem sequer sou professor das habilitações profissionais da Escola de Comunicação, mas ao invés disso sou um humilde professor de disciplina do ciclo básico, antropologia -, alguma razão deve haver. Nem que ela seja apenas certo gosto por viver perigosamente (dado que quem teve aula comigo sabe que eu tenho certa tendência a ser provocador e subversivo).

De qualquer forma, não posso evitar certo ponto de vista antropológico. Então, gostaria inicialmente de dizer que vocês são privilegiados. Já foram mais longe do que o Bill Gates e o Steve Jobs – ambos abandonaram os estudos universitários, e, portanto, não viveram esse rito de passagem que vocês vivem aqui hoje. Mas obviamente não é disso que quero falar. De certa forma, se há uma equivalência ou continuidade entre esse rito de passagem, a graduação universitária, e os ritos de passagem vividos por outras coletividades e grupos sociais, essa equivalência existe nos rituais nos quais um indivíduo passa a desempenhar, de forma integral, papéis de adulto. Esses são tradicionalmente chamados ritos de puberdade. “Mas a puberdade já passou faz tempo!”, vocês me dirão. Pois é aí mesmo onde reside o privilégio: entre deixar de ser criança e passar à condição de adulto, de forma integral, nossa civilização criou a adolescência, esse período que não acaba nunca, e onde tudo é mal definido, esquisito, tudo está de alguma forma fora do lugar, sem que se saiba exatamente o porquê. Em geral, a adolescência não existe nas culturas não ocidentais, e não existia no mundo ocidental até por volta da década de 1880. Na visão de muitos povos não ocidentais, o que nós ocidentais fazemos é infantilizar os indivíduos por quase uma década, e depois exigimos maturidade, como se ela surgisse num passe de mágica. Mas sabemos que as coisas entre nós não se dão exatamente dessa forma.

Ou seja, se vocês fossem índios – isto é, se não forem; quem sabe alguém aqui seja – já teriam passado pelo ritual que faz de alguém um adulto há muito tempo. Como vocês podem ver, não há qualquer relação entre ser adulto, no sentido que estou usando aqui, e uma determinada idade cronológica. Em algumas sociedades pode-se ganhar o status de adulto aos 7 anos; em outras,  como no mundo acadêmico em que eu vivo, por exemplo, a cidadania integral só se consegue com a obtenção do título de doutor, e a vida adulta raramente começa antes dos 30 anos. Tomemos então o conceito de adulto como equivalente a estar integrado de forma plena à ordem social vigente, às instituições centrais do meio social em que o indivíduo vive.

Voltando ao rito de passagem, um rito que funcione como tal não é apenas uma formalidade. Ele opera uma certa mágica, algo que efetivamente transforma quem por ele passa. A famosa frase “eu vos declaro marido e mulher”, ou a temida “eu declaro o réu culpado”, tem o poder de operar uma transformação real na identidade do sujeito; transformação que não ocorreria sem a existência do rito. Infelizmente, grande parte dos nossos ritos se burocratizou. O que os exemplos antropológicos mostram é que os ritos de passagem mais eficazes são aqueles em que o simbolismo associado à transformação da identidade é vivido materialmente, através de objetos capazes de grande mobilização emocional – como a hóstia, as alianças, o anel de formatura, o diploma, os trajes especiais -, e mais ainda quando essa materialidade é vivida no corpo – como as distintas formas de circuncisão, as escarificações (a produção de cicatrizes), tatuagens específicas, o corte dos cabelos, os estados de transe e outras práticas que envolvem alguma forma de dor. Numa conhecida prática que é parte do ritual de puberdade dos índios Maués e de outras tribos amazônicas, por exemplo, os jovens são levados a inserir uma das mãos em uma luva cheia de formigas tucandeiras, e devem suportar, por 15 minutos, a dor das ferroadas. Em nossa sociedade há muitos rituais que deixam marcas no corpo e que envolvem sofrimento: sem mencionar o “pede pra sair” do Capitão Nascimento, outro exemplo talvez igualmente chocante – pra quem não é da nossa tribo, obviamente – é o fato de que muita gente acha que antes de aparecer nas fotos de celebrações como essa, é preciso deformar o corpo de alguma forma: suando muito nas academias, submetendo-se a dietas alimentares agressivas, e até a cirurgias plásticas. Perto disso tudo, a monografia de graduação parece moleza.

Mas qual a necessidade disso tudo? Por que a transição à vida adulta não ocorre de forma gradual, sem que um ritual marque o momento, produzindo uma singularidade no transcorrer da vida que desordena e reordena as coisas? Num texto publicado há alguns anos no Brasil, Levi-Strauss narra e analisa um fato ocorrido na cidade de Dijon, França, no ano de 1951, que pode nos ajudar a entender essa questão. Mais precisamente no dia 24 de dezembro daquele ano, padres promoveram o enforcamento da figura do Papai Noel, que posteriormente foi queimado, em frente à catedral da cidade. A acusação: paganizar o Natal. No dia seguinte, o velhinho foi ressuscitado pela prefeitura da cidade, e apareceu no topo do prédio do governo municipal, falando às crianças, como fazia tradicionalmente. Essa sequência de eventos naturalmente gerou um intenso debate, que se espalhou por toda a França. Na opinião de Levi-Strauss, no entanto, mais importante do que discutir se se deve dar cabo ou não do Papai Noel, ou porque as crianças gostam tanto dele, é tentar entender por que é que os adultos o criaram, em primeiro lugar. Afinal, o Papai Noel não é invenção das crianças; estas são levadas a acreditar nele, por influência direta dos adultos. A resposta é bastante óbvia: o Papai Noel é um instrumento através do qual os adultos exercem controle sobre as crianças. “Só ganha presente quem se comportar bem, deitar-se quando mandado, comer tudo”. Levi-Strauss segue adiante para mostrar que os dados antropológicos são abundantes em relação ao fato de que os adultos temem as crianças, ou os não-ainda-plenamente-adultos.

E por que é que os adultos temem as crianças e os jovens, os não-ainda-plenamente-adultos? Porque esses têm o poder de bagunçar a vida adulta, desorganizar a ordem estabelecida, são subversivos por natureza – e, em muitas tradições, inclusive a nossa, isso literalmente é entendido como uma questão de natureza, em oposição à sociedade: as crianças são parte do mundo da natureza, mundo esse que é ao mesmo tempo uma ameaça ao mundo social, essencialmente dos adultos (e, frequentemente, dos homens), e precisa ser conquistado por este. Esse medo resulta na criação de personagens como o Papai Noel e o bicho papão, apenas para mencionar dois exemplos mais familiares; resulta também na necessidade de submeter os ainda-não-adultos a ritos de passagem psicologicamente intensos, de modo a construir, através do rito, um novo adulto, desnaturalizado e socializado.

E aqui estamos chegando ao que interessa. O que eu acabo de dizer é que todo ritual tem um duplo efeito: por um lado, transforma a identidade de quem passa por ele, de modo que o indivíduo interiorize os valores da sociedade e localize-se, de forma produtiva, nela; por outro, o ritual promove a ratificação dos poderes instituídos, o reforço das estruturas de poder, do status quo. Nesse mesmo ritual que vivemos aqui, no momento em que cada um de vocês ganha a credencial de bacharel, renova-se a sacralidade da universidade enquanto poder instituído legitimamente, com autoridade para traçar a linha dos que têm e dos que não têm acesso aos privilégios trazidos por tal credencial. Renova-se também a sacralidade da autoridade dos professores – vejam só como estamos em posições espaciais diferentes aqui hoje, vocês mais embaixo, os professores mais acima, vocês aqui para receber algo, os professores para dar algo. O mesmo ocorre num tribunal, em uma cerimônia de casamento ou em um batismo: ao mesmo tempo em que alguém é condenado ou absolvido, ou casado, ou batizado, é reforçado o poder do Estado ou da instituição religiosa.

Até aqui, tudo certo: não é difícil encontrar livro de introdução à antropologia que diga, ou pelo menos dê a entender, que as sociedades sempre se organizaram dessa forma, de modo que esse é um fato da realidade. O problema é que, na minha visão, isso existe em contradição com a ideia, tão repetida em discursos de paraninfo mundo afora, de que os formandos devem contribuir na construção de um mundo melhor. Trata-se de um problema de incompatibilidade entre forma e conteúdo: falar em mudanças, ou seja, na construção de um mundo melhor, num ritual que promove a reprodução das coisas como elas são, que coopta mentes e corações jovens e os coloca no centro das estruturas sociais que criaram e mantém em funcionamento o mundo que se pretende mudar. Talvez, se vivêssemos em um mundo com problemas menores, precisando de pequenas reformas aqui e ali, mas no qual o estado geral da vida fosse o de plenitude e alegria, esse fosse o caso.

Mas não há nada mais radicalmente oposto à realidade na qual nos encontramos. O mundo não precisa de pequenas reformas; os problemas da atualidade são estruturais e profundos. Aproveitando que estamos aqui, no Centro de Tecnologia, coração da engenharia da UFRJ, eu diria que, se perguntarmos a um engenheiro civil o que se deve fazer com um edifício com problemas estruturais profundos, ele diria: é preciso demolir o edifício, e fazer outro, sobre base mais sólida, com estrutura mais adequada. Mas quais são esses problemas, tão sérios, no mundo em que vivemos? Eu certamente não precisaria (nem conseguiria, se quisesse) listar os problemas que temos diante de nós, dado o fato de que vocês talvez estejam entre as pessoas mais bem informadas do planeta. Mas permitam-me citar apenas alguns, de modo a colocar recheio no argumento que estou construindo aqui. O mundo vive, já há cinco anos, uma crise econômica global sem precedentes, crise na qual ficou claro o quanto os Estados nacionais funcionam para manter o mercado mundial em funcionamento, atendendo a interesses das grandes corporações, e em detrimento de suas próprias populações (basta analisar a relação entre governos, bancos e a população, em países como os Estados Unidos, Inglaterra, Itália e Espanha, para se ver isso com clareza; ou a relação entre governos, empreiteiras, mineradoras e a população, no caso do Brasil).

Além disso, o mundo vive há pelo menos trinta anos uma crise ambiental sem precedentes, e continuamos ouvindo dos governos americano e chinês a mensagem de que sua produção econômica no curto prazo é mais importante do que a vida no planeta no futuro. Isso dá certo alívio ao governo brasileiro, que pode apenas entrar no vácuo dos gigantes americano e chinês, sem ter que declarar explicitamente que tem a mesma posição. Ao mesmo tempo, vemos grande parte da Europa trabalhando na transição de suas matrizes energéticas em direção a fontes de energia que não agridem os ecossistemas locais (como a energia solar; detalhe que não estou falando de energias supostamente “limpas”, mas das que não agridem os ecossistemas. As hidrelétricas, por exemplo, não apenas são grandes agressoras dos ecossistemas, como alimentam a perversão política que é o papel das grandes empreiteiras no financiamento das campanhas políticas nesse país); enquanto isso o Brasil trabalha para tornar-se o sexto maior produtor de petróleo do mundo! Nada como ser capaz de mobilizar um time excelente de publicitários para ser capaz de andar na contramão do bom senso e ainda ter apoio popular. E some-se a isso tudo o fato de que no Brasil, os 20% mais ricos detém 60% de toda a riqueza nacional; metade da população economicamente ativa, mais de 50 milhões de pessoas, trabalha de sol a sol para o enriquecimento de duas ou três centenas de famílias.

E eu nem mencionei a política. Alguém acha que as estruturas políticas brasileiras funcionam bem? Ninguém sabe, porque ninguém sabe como elas funcionam!

Enfim, esse é o mundo dos adultos em que vocês são, agora, admitidos de forma integral. Não é de se estranhar que um bocado de gente jovem resista a esse processo, muitas vezes entendido, literalmente, como um processo ilegítimo de cooptação. O mundo dos adultos – ou seja, do status quo, das instituições de poder que nos trouxeram até aqui – está moralmente falido. Construir um mundo melhor, em qualquer sentido que não seja apenas a reprodução de retórica vazia, é tarefa necessária, mas que não vai deixar os adultos felizes. Ou seja, para que os jovens efetivamente construam um mundo melhor, o que se vislumbra não é a paz entre adultos e jovens, paz supostamente produzida pelos ritos de passagem mencionados por mim anteriormente; ao invés disso, o que se pode esperar é a espada, para usar termos bíblicos.

E, vejam só, não estou falando de algo – jovens comprometidos com a criação de um mundo melhor – que não esteja, já, acontecendo: a única novidade política interessante, na última década, é a novidade produzida por movimentos jovens, em reação à falência moral e material do mundo dos adultos: estou me referindo aos muitos movimentos de ocupação, como o Occupy Wall Street, que se multiplicou e se espalhou pelo mundo todo; às manifestações juvenis contra os partidos do status quo no México (o PAN e o PRI), além do movimento zapatista no estado de Chiapas; ao movimento Idle no More no Canadá, que, como o movimento zapatista, uniu a juventude às lideranças indígenas locais; ao 15-M, na Espanha; à participação dos jovens nos eventos ligados à chamada Primavera Árabe; à importância da Cúpula dos Povos, na Rio+20, onde se articularam ações políticas mais interessantes que a prevista paralisia política dos diplomatas que participaram da reunião oficial. Ainda no Brasil, está claro que podemos, através de movimentos descentralizados, combinando manifestações públicas e petições pela Internet, forçar o governo a ações específicas, como ocorreu no movimento em apoio aos índios Guarani Kaiowá do Mato Grosso do Sul.

Ou seja, a boa novidade é que não é necessário inventar as soluções e ferramentas para um mundo melhor a partir do zero; muitas coisas interessantes já estão em movimento. Basta que vocês sejam conscientes e autônomos para decidir como vão se posicionar no mundo. Achar que as sociedades sempre se organizaram integrando os jovens às estruturas existentes, e que, portanto, não há nada a fazer a esse respeito, é discurso dos que tem interesse em manter os jovens sob controle, ou seja, é discurso de quem efetivamente tem medo dos jovens – porque tem algo a perder com qualquer mudança no status quo.

“Mas esses movimentos que você mencionou não foram capazes de se constituir como alternativa política efetiva!”, dirão alguns. Esse tipo de afirmação revela, por parte de quem a enuncia, a dificuldade em pensar um mundo efetivamente diferente; é como se a única política possível é aquela que toma o poder, e não aquela que transforma o próprio poder em alguma outra coisa. O que é radicalmente interessante nesses movimentos jovens é a recusa que têm em querer tomar as estruturas de poder existentes. O poder, da forma que este se constitui e manifesta no âmago das sociedades ocidentais, é herança do mundo adulto falido, que a juventude não quer. O que os movimentos juvenis querem é construir um outro mundo, um outro poder, um  mundo que, inclusive, não está predefinido, não existe ainda – e tais jovens não tem medo de viver em incerteza e ambiguidade, posto que estas são marcas de todo momento de transição. Isso, aliás, é uma das coisas que gera ansiedade no mundo dos adultos, porque pode desorganizar o processo através do qual Estados e corporações criam riscos, incutem nas pessoas níveis elevados de medo, e apresentam-se, então, como protetores. Como a história não cansa de mostrar, gente sem medo é um atentado à soberania de Estados fundados no medo.

Enfim, o que eu estou propondo aqui não é que todos rejeitem esse ritual, que desistam do título de bacharel, mas, ao invés disso, que vocês tomem controle sobre a mágica do ritual. Que o título de bacharel não seja uma forma de anular a sua capacidade de efetivamente transformar o mundo, mesmo que à revelia do que querem seus pais, professores, patrões, médicos, juízes, o Estado. Ao contrário, que vocês, ao invés de serem vítimas do título de bacharel, ou seja, de terem que se transformar para caber na persona social com direito oficialmente ratificado de usá-lo, tomem para si a missão de definir o que será ser bacharel, em suas vidas, e na sociedade que irão criar.

Ou seja, e para finalizar, o que eu quero propor de forma substantiva aqui são duas coisas, que considero fundamentais para que vocês estejam preparados para participar na criação de um mundo efetivamente, e não apenas retoricamente, melhor. A primeira é: não acreditem em identidades. Ou, pelo menos, não sejam vítimas delas. Nunca se deixem reduzir a uma ou a um número restrito de possibilidade de ser e estar no mundo: vocês nunca serão apenas jornalistas, publicitários, editores, produtores, diretores, apresentadores ou locutores. Vocês sempre serão muito mais do que isso. As identidades têm o potencial de se transformar em uma forma de tirania, de fascismo, mesmo quando isso se manifesta na forma de conflitos psicológicos internos ao indivíduo. Cada um de vocês não é um, são muitos. As possibilidades para o futuro são infinitas; nunca se deixem convencer, com ou sem rito de passagem, do contrário.

O segundo conselho: não vivam com medo. Do Papai Noel e bicho papão em diante, o mundo adulto administra quem pode efetivamente transformar a sociedade usando o medo. O medo é paralisante, algo que não convém quando o objetivo é mudar algo, e muito menos quando se quer mudar algo grande, como o mundo. A obra de construir um mundo melhor passa, necessariamente, pela desarticulação da grande burocracia do medo que nos controla a todos. Nesse sentido, o trabalho de vocês não será fácil, dado que tal burocracia tem na mídia uma de suas principais ferramentas.

Uma decorrência prática destes dois conselhos – não se deixar levar pela ilusão das identidades ou pelo discurso paralisante do medo -, é que vocês devem estar prontos para enfrentar resistência. Ou seja, não é possível querer mudar o mundo e, ainda assim, viver buscando aplausos; quem efetivamente mudou o mundo, no passado, enfrentou desafios homéricos. A boa notícia é que ninguém mais precisa ser um Ulisses ou um Aquiles; ninguém está sozinho, o movimento já está em curso, e, como diz um dos seus principais expoentes, “somos legião”. Basta a cada um escolher como irá participar: como agente, participante efetivo, ou como observador distante, alguém que, mais tarde, será inevitavelmente arrastado pela corrente.

Sismógrafos inaudibles de sociedades cambiantes (Afkar/Ideas)

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Driss Ksikes – Afkar / Ideas 34 – /06/2012

La escena artística árabe rebosa de experiencias marginales, erigidas en torno a una idea simple: devolver el arte al corazón de la ciudad, para liberarla de politicastros.

Louis Ferdinand Céline los denomina “los perros nobles”. Se refiere a esas criaturas robustas que tiran de los trineos en el Polo Norte, las únicas capaces de oler a 20 leguas una zanja oculta bajo la superficie glacial aparentemente dura y plana. Por su parte, Edgar Morin habla de “topos” (no en el sentido de agentes secretos), tan enclavados en el propio suelo que notan las sacudidas, apenas perceptibles, sordas, que se producen a lo lejos. Estas metáforas animales subrayan la hipersensibilidad de unos seres que sienten la insidia en la distancia, intuitivamente, sin ninguna ciencia ni modelo de racionalidad reconocible y transmisible a los demás. Es del todo posible, si pensamos en la literatura telúrica del gran poeta marroquí –y sobre todo en sus textos, Agadir y Le déterreur–, hablar de sismógrafos que detectan, mucho antes que los demás, la próxima sacudida social, política, colectiva, que se avecina.

Los antiexpertos

Con ocasión del 2011 árabe, he leído muchos artículos que dan vueltas y más vueltas a la misma letanía: “No vimos venir nada”. Es innegable que los llamados “expertos”, acostumbrados a clasificar la realidad y formatearla en cómodos recuadros de lectura no han hecho precisamente gala de una lucidez excepcional. Los hay que llegaron a errar completamente el tiro, al prever una resistencia donde el derrocamiento de un rais era casi inminente (muy especialmente en el caso de arabistas y otros orientalistas que se expresaron antes de la caída de Hosni Mubarak, negando cualquier similitud entre El Cairo y Túnez). Al basar sus lecturas en los movimientos políticos visibles o en las interacciones geopolíticas, les faltó una perspectiva sociológica y antropológica para ver lo que se tramaba en los intersticios de nuestras sociedades. Hubo artistas y escritores que, libres de los cánones de la ciencia, tuvieron más clarividencia. Sin pretender otorgarles la categoría de adivinos, en este artículo propongo un breve repaso a tres “sismógrafos” prácticamente inaudibles para la multitud, que vislumbraron una nueva pauta o quisieron tomar el pulso a una era agitada.

Un regicidio en escena

Empecemos por Fadhel Yaibi, director y dramaturgo tunecino que, en cuatro décadas, se ha impuesto como uno de los creadores iconoclastas más atinados de la sociedad árabe. En 2010, ya fuera por un arranque de lucidez o por casualidad sincrónica, alumbró, con la complicidad de Yalila Baccar, una obra premonitoria, Amnesia. Un dictador, Yahya Yaich, adulado y alabado por sus cortesanos, se viene abajo y es objeto de humillaciones y torturas en un hospital psiquiátrico, rodeado de sus perros guardianes, transformados en carroñeros. Hasta llegan a rogarle, cuando corre a coger el avión, que dé media vuelta. La obra, representada meses antes de la marcha de Ben Alí, gozó de un gran éxito, sobre todo por su fuerza estética y por revelar, por medio del arte, un hartazgo generalizado. Su extrema afabilidad impide al sismógrafo tunecino, Yaibi, atribuirse ningún rol que no sea el de artista, entremetido, escéptico, humanista, sensible a lo que se cuece en su entorno, deseoso de mostrar otra faceta de los acontecimientos. La de una realidad política insoportable sublimada por un regicidio en escena es necesariamente imperceptible para los estrategas e inaudible para las instituciones, incluso académicas, que subestiman la inteligencia emocional. No obstante, nos remite a algo que cada vez más pensadores, como Bruno Latour, consideran urgente: la reconexión del arte con la política, no como su valedor, sino para tener presente que el arte es en esencia un acto político, bello por su gratuidad, su altruismo y, sobre todo, por su resonancia social, más allá de los muros convencionales del establishment.

Contra el patriotismo de los ‘secretas’

En Egipto se ha impuesto otra figura, a través de textos y otros medios, en la vida literaria cairota, hasta el punto de considerarla uno de los amuletos de la revuelta de la plaza Tahrir. Me refiero al novelista Alaa el Aswany. Tras su superventas, El edificio Yacobián, pasando por Chicago, el dentista y escritor tardío destaca por su aversión al patriotismo de “los secretas” y al islamismo literal que encorsetan a la sociedad egipcia. En 2010, toma carrerilla y publica una serie de relatos cortos de título provocador, ¿Por qué los egipcios no se rebelan? Al explicar lo poco que tardó en desprenderse del dogmatismo marxista sin enterrar a Marx, deconstruye el molde identitario que mantiene a un pueblo sometido a su dictador. Cliente habitual de El Cairo, un café literario muy querido, El Aswany pudo, en los dos años previos a la revolución, afincarse como humanista contestatario, como autor escuchado y ampliamente citado. En Tahrir, tuvo el papel del sabio a quien acuden jóvenes desorientados. Inspirado en las cinco fases de caída del dictador predichas por Gabriel García Márquez (negación, patriotismo de recuperación, concesiones a medias, confesión tipo “os he entendido” y huida), fue capaz de convencerlos de que, aunque pretendiera resistir, Mubarak acabaría escapando. Está claro que la conciencia de este hombre honesto tuvo más peso que centenares de informes de desarrollo humano que, aun tocando a muerto, no calaban en los actores. Ahí reside también la fuerza de un sismógrafo, en su proximidad al terreno, tan alejado de los burócratas.

Zonas Temporalmente Autónomas

El rasgo que comparten estas experiencias es, sin duda, la subversión. Como en tiempos de la generación beat en Estados Unidos, donde nacieron las Zonas Temporalmente Autónomas, hace años que la escena artística árabe rebosa de experiencias, marginales, erigidas en torno a una idea simple: devolver el arte al corazón de la ciudad, para liberarla de politicastros. El sublime escritor alemán Friedrich Hölderlin lo llamaba “hacer el mundo poéticamente habitable”. Tras esta utopía, hay dos experiencias dignas de mención. La primera, alumbrada en Túnez en 2008, se llama Dream city. No se trata de arte callejero, sino de la calle puesta a disposición de los artistas. Por espacio de una semana, la ciudadanía se enfrenta a lo imprevisible, lo improbable, para vivir de otra manera en sus espacios cerrados. Fue una de esas raras ocasiones, inesperadas en la época de Ben Ali, en que el pueblo se reunía y dialogaba libremente.

La segunda experiencia, DABATEATR ciudadano, vio la luz en Rabat en 2009. En ella, el teatro se retoma como lugar público de controversia. Se revisitan las distintas artes, para devolver al público a la raíz del cuestionamiento ciudadano. Y la dramaturgia revisa la actualidad para sacar a relucir la universalidad que anida en las noticias. Antes de su nacimiento, los activistas del Movimiento 20 de Febrero se encontraban de algún modo en este espacio, discutiendo libremente entre blogueros. No hizo falta gritar mucho para que surgiera la ola de indignación.

Estas experiencias insólitas, singulares, pero escasas, no emergen ni en la universidad ni en lugares convencionales. Son fruto de las tentativas y de la experimentación de artistas que siguen conectados a la realidad sin perder de vista la utopía.

Big military guy more scared of climate change than enemy guns (Grist)

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By Susie Cagle

11 Mar 2013 6:13 PM

Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, chief of U.S. Pacific Command, doesn’t look like your usual proponent of climate action. Spencer Ackerman writes at Wired that Locklear “is no smelly hippie,” but the guy does believe there will be terrible security threats on a warming planet, which might make him a smelly hippie in the eyes of many American military boosters.

13-03-11AdmSamuelLocklear
Commander U.S. 7th Fleet

Everyone wants him to be worried about North Korean nukes and Chinese missiles, but in an interview with The Boston Globe, Locklear said that societal upheaval due to climate change “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen … that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’

“People are surprised sometimes,” he added, describing the reaction to his assessment. “You have the real potential here in the not-too-distant future of nations displaced by rising sea level. Certainly weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past. We are on super typhoon 27 or 28 this year in the Western Pacific. The average is about 17.”

Locklear said his Hawaii-based headquarters — which is … responsible for operations from California to India — is working with Asian nations to stockpile supplies in strategic locations and planning a major exercise for May with nearly two dozen countries to practice the “what-ifs.”

Locklear isn’t alone in his climate fears. A recent article by Julia Whitty takes an in-depth look at what the military is doing to deal with climate change. A 2008 report by U.S. intelligence agencieswarned about national security challenges posed by global warming, as have later reports from the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. New Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel understands the threat, too. People may be surprised sometimes, Adm. Locklear, but they really shouldn’t be!

Will not-a-dirty-hippie Locklear’s words help to further mainstream the idea that climate change is a serious security problem? And what all has the good admiral got planned for this emergency sea-rising drill in May?

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for Twitter.

Terra se aproxima de maiores temperaturas em 11 mil anos; Derretimento no Canadá pode ser irreversível (Folha de São Paulo)

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JC e-mail 4680, de 08 de Março de 2013.

Salvador Nogueira

Pesquisa reuniu dados de 73 localidades ao redor do mundo para estimar a temperatura global (e local) no período geológico conhecido como Holoceno

Um novo estudo conduzido por pesquisadores da Universidade Estadual do Oregon e da Universidade Harvard, ambas nos EUA, reconstruiu a temperatura média da Terra nos últimos 11,3 mil anos para compará-la aos níveis atuais.

A boa notícia: a Terra hoje está mais fria do que já esteve em sua época mais quente desse período. A má: se os modelos dos climatologistas estiverem certos, atingiremos um novo recorde de calor até o final do século.

O trabalho, publicado na revista “Science”, reuniu dados de 73 localidades ao redor do mundo para estimar a temperatura global (e local) no período geológico conhecido como Holoceno, que começou ao final da última era do gelo, há 11 mil anos.

Depois de consolidar todas as informações, em sua maioria provenientes de amostras de fósseis em sedimentos oceânicos, num único quadro –além de usar técnicas matemáticas para preencher os “buracos” encontrados nas diversas fontes usadas para estimar a temperatura no passado–, os cientistas puderam recriar uma “pequena história da variação climática da Terra”.

Diz-se pequena porque os resultados não permitem enxergar a variação ocorrida em uns poucos anos. É como se cada ponto nos dados representasse a temperatura em um período de 120 anos.

A HISTÓRIA

Os dados confirmam uma velha desconfiança dos cientistas: a de que a Terra passou por um período de aquecimento que começou cerca de 11 mil anos atrás. Em 1,5 mil anos, o planeta esquentou cerca de 0,6ºC e assim se estabilizou, durante cerca de 5.000 anos.

Então, 5,5 mil anos atrás, começou um novo processo de esfriamento –que terminou há 200 anos, com o que ficou conhecido como a “pequena era do gelo”. O planeta ficou 0,7ºC mais frio.

Entram em cena a industrialização acelerada e o século 20. O planeta volta a se esquentar. No momento, ele ainda não bateu o recorde de temperatura visto no início do Holoceno, mas já está mais quente que em 75% dos últimos 11 mil anos.

Assim, o estudo confirma que a temperatura da Terra está subindo em tempos recentes e mostra que a subida é muito mais rápida do que se pensava.

“Essa pesquisa mostra que já experimentamos quase a mesma faixa de mudança de temperatura desde o início da Revolução Industrial que foi vista nos 11 mil anos anteriores da história da Terra –mas essa mudança aconteceu muito mais depressa”, comenta Candace Major, diretor da divisão de Ciências Oceanográficas da Fundação Nacional de Ciência dos EUA, que financiou o estudo.

Por outro lado, a baixa resolução temporal do estudo (é impossível distinguir efeitos de poucos anos) dificulta a comparação com o atual fenômeno de aquecimento.

Para a mudança climática atual se tornar relevante na escala de tempo analisada pelo modelo de reconstrução dos últimos 11 mil anos, ela precisa continuar no próximo século. Segundo os modelos do IPCC (Painel Intergovernamental para Mudança Climática), da ONU, é isso que vai acontecer.

Contudo, ainda há incertezas sobre a magnitude do fenômeno. De toda forma, mesmo pelas estimativas mais otimistas, quando chegarmos a 2100, se nada for feito, provavelmente estaremos vivendo o período mais quente dos últimos 11 mil anos.

* * *

JC e-mail 4680, de 08 de Março de 2013.

via Reuters

As geleiras canadenses, terceiro maior depósito de gelo depois da Antártida e da Groenlândia, podem estar sofrendo um derretimento sem volta que deve aumentar o nível do mar, afirmaram cientistas

Cerca de 20% das geleiras no norte do Canadá podem desaparecer até o fim do século 21, num derretimento que pode acrescentar 3,5 cm ao nível do mar.

Segundo artigo na revista “Geophysical Research Letters”, o derretimento de geleiras brancas exporia a tundra escura, que tende a absorver mais calor e acelerar o derretimento.

A ONU estima um aumento do nível do mar entre 18 cm e 59 cm neste século ou mais se a cobertura de gelo da Antártida e da Groenlândia começar a derreter mais rápido.

A projeção de perda de 20% do volume de gelo no Canadá se baseou em um cenário com aumento de temperatura médio de 3ºC neste século e de 8ºC no Ártico canadense, dentro das previsões da ONU.

The Crisis in Climate-Change Coverage (Truth Out)

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Sunday, 03 March 2013 07:23

By Josh Stearns, Free Press

Climate activist Bill McKibben speaking at the San Francisco Bay Area's Moving Planet rally. (Photo: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/6186391697/sizes/m/in/photostream/" target="_blank"> 350.org / flickr</a>)Climate activist Bill McKibben speaking at the San Francisco Bay Area’s Moving Planet rally. (Photo: 350.org / flickr)

Fifty-thousand people recently marched in Washington, D.C., calling on President Obama to fulfill his recent promises to take immediate and meaningful action to address the looming climate crisis.

And just days before, a group of environmental journalists, scientists and activists came together in a Web chat to discuss the state of climate-change coverage in America.

The event, organized by Free Press andOrion Magazine, featured Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones; Bill McKibben, author and 350.org founder; Wen Stephenson, writer and climate activist; M. Sanjayan, CBS News contributor and Nature Conservancy scientist; Thomas Lovejoy, chief biologist at the Heinz Center and creator of the PBS show Nature; and reporter Susie Cagle of Grist.org.

Here’s what they had to say. (You can listen to the entire discussion here.)

Structure Versus Culture

A complex mix of structural and cultural factors has affected climate-change coverage in the U.S. The forces that shape U.S. media have not been kind to environmental reporting. Years of media consolidation have led to dramatic layoffs in commercial newsrooms, and environment and science desks are often the first to go. In addition, M. Sanjayan noted that media consolidation has had an echo-chamber effect: All climate stories sound the same and they lack depth, specificity and connection to place.

The U.S. also under-funds noncommercial alternatives, like public media, where climate-change reporting should thrive. The best environmental writing is happening at the margins of our media at longtime nonprofit magazines and new online startups. In contrast, mainstream outlets have tended to legitimize climate-change deniers in the face of widespread scientific consensus about the effects of global warming.

Wen Stephenson argued that journalists have been reticent to raise the alarm about climate change. “The mainstream media has failed to cover the climate crisis as a crisis,” he said.

Empathy Versus Objectivity

A repeated theme of the conversation was the line between advocacy and journalism. There was disagreement about where the line should fall. Kate Sheppard said she was disappointed that coverage of the BP oil spill didn’t inspire more sustained activism on climate change, but noted that it wasn’t her job to organize, only to inform.

Stephenson, on the other hand, argued that when it comes to climate change, journalists need to find their moral bearings. Acknowledging the limits of objectivity, Stephenson discussed the value of empathy and the need to understand the true human and natural stakes of this debate.

Telling a More Human Story

The panelists agreed that climate-change reporting needs to get personal. Journalists need to better connect climate change to people’s lives, their homes, their families and their everyday concerns. Susie Cagle said that when she reports on climate change she does so through the lens of cities, rivers and food.

Bill McKibben pointed to the way 350.org activists have shifted the narrative — literally putting their bodies on the line by holding protests and other events around the globe. McKibben also noted the importance of people making their own media — with photos, videos and blogs —especially when there are fewer and fewer local media outlets willing to take on the work.

Sanjayan said we need a better way to frame climate-change reporting. The Keystone XL Pipeline story has gained so much traction in part because there is a clear bad guy, a clear target and clear actions people can take. Those elements aren’t always present, so journalists need to find different ways to reach their audiences. We need to be aware of who is telling the story. Sanjayan noted that all too often, climate-change reporting is too U.S.-centric and doesn’t tell the full global story.

Quality and Quantity Versus Reach and Impact

Thirty-two years ago television offered nothing of substance about the natural world or the threats it faced. This was the inspiration for Thomas Lovejoy, the scientist who coined the term “biodiversity,” to pitch a new kind of show to New York public TV station WNET.

Since PBS’ Nature first aired, a lot has changed. Now, Sheppard said, there is a ton of great environmental reporting, but it’s not always easy to find and it’s not always seen by the people who need to see it. One way to foster better coverage, Sheppard said, is to support what’s already out there by sharing it, funding it and subscribing to those doing it.

Panelists acknowledged that many publications — like this Web chat itself — end up speaking to the choir when we desperately need to get beyond it. For Sheppard, one way of doing that is through journalism collaborations that help get content out to new audiences and on different platforms.

For Cagle, the platform piece is key. She talked about the need to get beyond the “wall of text” and tell more immersive stories about climate. For her, the use of audio and illustrations helps bring readers into the story. “Art can make stories more accessible and personal,” said Cagle.

Sanjayan discussed the potential for cable TV to be a powerful messenger. For example, he is working on an in-depth series for Showtime on climate change.

Next Steps

The discussion offered few cut-and-dry prescriptions for concrete changes that need to happen to embolden and expand climate coverage. Panelists agreed that we need a journalism of solutions, not just a journalism of problems. For newsrooms and journalists, the first step is to begin to understand the scope and scale of this crisis, and write as if your life depended on it.

The interspecies internet: Diana Reiss, Peter Gabriel, Neil Gershenfeld and Vint Cerf at TED2013 (TED)

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Posted by: Kate Torgovnick 

February 28, 2013 at 8:13 pm EST

Photos: James Duncan Davidson
Photos: James Duncan Davidson

The internet connects people all over the world. But could the internet also connect us with dolphins, apes, elephants and other highly intelligent species?

In a bold talk in Session 10 of TED2013, four incredible thinkers come together to launch the idea of the interspecies internet. Each takes four minutes to talk, then passes the metaphorical baton, building the narrative in parts.

The talk begins with Diana Reiss, a cognitive psychologist who studies intelligence in animals. She shows us a video of an adorable dolphin twirling in the water. But the dolphin isn’t spinning playfully for the camera — the dolphin is watching itself in a two-way mirror.

“A dolphin has self-awareness,” says Reiss. “We used to think this was a uniquely human quality, but dolphins aren’t the only non-human animals to show self-recognition in a mirror. Great apes, our closest relatives, also show this ability.” Ditto for elephants and even magpies.

Reiss shares her work with dolphins — she’s been teaching them to communicate through an underwater keyboard of symbols that correspond to whistles and playful activities. Through this keyboard, the dolphins learned to perform activities on demand, and also to express their desire for them. (For more on how a similar dolphin keyboard works, read up on Denise Herzing’s talk from earlier today.)

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“You can’t get more alien than the dolphin. We’re separated by 95 million years of divergent evolution. These are true non-terrestrials,” says Reiss. “This self-organized learning, the same thing we heard from TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra. I’m suggesting this is our Hole in the Water.”

Reiss was conducting this work on her own. And then she got a call from iconic musician Peter Gabriel.

“I make noises for a living, and on a good day it’s music,” says Gabriel. He has always looked into the eyes of animals and wondered what is going on inside their heads, he says, soe excitedly read about research, like Reiss’, examining communication with animals.

“What was amazing to me was that [the animals] seemed a lot more adept at getting a handle on our language than we were at getting a handle on theirs,” says Gabriel. “I work with a lot of musicians from around the world. Often we don’t have any common language at all. We sit behind our instruments and it’s a way to connect.”

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So Gabriel started cold-calling scientists to see if he could be a part of this work. His goal: To try writing music with an animal. And he got his chance.

In a video clip that raises oohs and ahhs from audience, Gabriel shares a video of a bonobo with a keyboard. While bonobos had been introduced to percussion instruments before, and bashed them with their fists, this was the first time this bonobo had ever seen a keyboard. And with accompaniment, she played truly amazing music.

“She discovers a note she likes. She finds the octave,” says Gabriel, narrating the beautiful melody in the video. “We began to dream … What would happen if we could somehow find new interfaces – visual, audio — to allow us to communicate with the remarkable beings we share the planet with.”

Gabriel brought the video of this unusual jam session to Neil Gershenfeld, the Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms.

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“I lost it when I saw that clip,” says Gershenfeld, stepping up to the stage. “I was struck by the history of the internet, because it started as the internet of middle-aged white men … I realized that we humans had missed something — the rest of the planet.”

At this point, Gershenfeld video-conferenced in animals live — including orangutans in Waco, Texas, dolphins at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, and elephants in Thailand.

Gershenfeld is known for his work in the internet of things. And he thinks animals can be a part of it, too. ”We’re starting to think about how you integrate the rest of the biomass of the planet into the internet,” he says.

Which brings us to Vint Cerf, who helped lay the foundations for the internet as we know it and is now vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for  Google.

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“Forty years ago we wrote the script of the internet. Thirty years ago we turned it on,” says Cerf. “We thought we were building a system to connect computers together. But we quickly learned that it’s a system for connecting people.”

“You know where this is going,” Cerf continues, to a laugh, bringing it back to research in communicating with animals. ”What’s important about what these people are doing: They’re beginning to learn how to communicate with species that are not us, but share a sensory environment. [They’re figuring out] what it means to communicate with something that’s not a person. I can’t wait to see these experiments unfold.”

So what’s next? The internet of things, yes, and the ability for us to communicate with computers without keyboards and mice. And in addition to the internet of species, he even imagines an interplanetary internet.

“These interactions with other animals will teach us, ultimately, how we might interact with an alien from another world,” says Cerf. “I can hardly wait.”

Appeals court rules U.S. whaling foes are ‘pirates’ (USA Today)

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Michael Winter, USA TODAY- 7:35p.m. EST February 27, 2013

Sea Shepherd activists have collided with Japanese ships in campaign to halt whale hunts.

A federal appeals court has declared the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to be modern-day pirates and ordered the anti-whaling activists to stop confronting Japanese ships in the waters off Antarctica.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed and rebuked a lower-court judge in Seattle, who had sided with Washington state-based Sea Shepherd and dismissed a lawsuit filed by Japanese whalers seeking to halt the protests. An international treaty allows governments to kill whales for research.

In its ruling late Monday, the appeals court also ordered U.S. District Judge Richard Jones removed from the case, saying “numerous, serious and obvious errors identified in our opinion raise doubts as to whether he will be perceived as impartial.”

Sea Shepherd ships, sailing from Australia, often block or harass whaling vessels from the Institute of Cetacean Research, sometimes resulting in collisions. During the past week, two of the group’s vessels were damaged while trying to prevent Japanese whaling vessels from refueling.

In the appellate court’s ruling, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote that the activists were threatening the lives of whalers, calling their tactics “the very embodiment of piracy.”

Here’s how he began the 18-page opinion:

You don’t need a peg leg or an eye patch. When you ram ships; hurl glass containers of acid; drag metal-reinforced ropes in the water to damage propellers and rudders; launch smoke bombs and flares with hooks; and point high-powered lasers at other ships, you are, without a doubt, a pirate, no matter how high-minded you believe your purpose to be.

Kozinski wrote that Jones was “off base” when he concluded that the protesters’ tactics were nonviolent because they did not target people, just ships and equipment.

Jones also ruled that the hunters were violating an Australian court ban and therefore could not pursue their lawsuit in the United States. The appeals court rejected that argument, saying the whalers’ lawsuit could proceed in U.S. courts under international maritime law.

An attorney representing Sea Shepherd told the Associated Press he would ask an 11-judge panel of the appeals court to review the three-judge opinion.

A Sea Shepherd official told KIRO Radio on Tuesday that because the U.S. branch had separated from its Australian counterparts, the ruling had no bearing.

“What Sea Shepherd Australia is doing with Australian flagged vessels and Dutch flagged vessels down in the Australian Antarctic territory is outside of any sort of control of the courts in the United States,” said Scott West, director of investigations for Sea Shepherd. “We have yet to hurt anybody, we have yet to plunder any gold or do anything that would fit within the definition” of piracy law.

Sea Shepherd Australia released video that it said showed a Japanese whalerramming two of its ships last week. Tuesday, the ICR countered with video that it claims shows Sea Shepherd “sabotage” by ramming a whaling vessel.

Sea Shephred’s efforts have been featured on Animal Planet’s Whale Wars.

Anthropology Inc. (The Atlantic)

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MARCH 2013 – ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Forget online surveys and dinnertime robo-calls. A consulting firm called ReD is at the forefront of a new trend in market research, treating the everyday lives of consumers as a subject worthy of social-science scrutiny. On behalf of its corporate clients, ReD will uncover your deepest needs, fears, and desires.

By GRAEME WOOD

Viktor Koen

On a hot Austin night last summer, 60 natives convened for a social rite involving stick-on mustaches, paella, and a healthy flow of spirits. Young lesbians formed the core of the crowd. The two organizers, who had been lovers for a couple months, were celebrating their birthdays with a Spanish-themed party, decorated in bullfighting chic. It was a classic hipster affair, and everyone was loose and at ease, except for one black-haired interloper with a digital camera and a tiny notepad.

This interloper was Min Lieskovsky, a 31-year-old straight New Yorker who mingled freely and occasionally ducked into a bathroom to scribble notes. She’d left a Ph.D. program in sociocultural anthropology at Yale two years earlier, impatient with academia but still eager to use the ethnographic skills she’d mastered. Tonight, that meant she partied gamely and watched her subjects with a practiced eye, noting everything: when the party got started and when it reached its peak, who stuck mustaches on whom—and above all, what, when, and how people drank.

For Lieskovsky, it was all about the booze. The consulting firm she worked for, ReD Associates, is at the forefront of a movement to deploy social scientists on field research for corporate clients. The vodka giant Absolut had contracted with ReD to infiltrate American drinking cultures and report back on the elusive phenomenon known as the “home party.” This corrida de lesbianas was the latest in a series of home parties that Lieskovsky and her colleagues had joined in order to write an extended ethnographic survey of drinking practices, attempting to figure out the rules and rituals—spoken and unspoken—that govern Americans’ drinking lives, and by extension their vodka-buying habits.

“There’s a huge amount of vodka that’s sold for drinking at home,” Lieskovsky says. “But no one knew where it was really going”—apart from down someone’s throat eventually, and on a bad night perhaps back up again. Was it treated as a sacred fluid, not to be polluted or adulterated except by an expert mixologist? Some Absolut advertising and iconography suggested exactly this, assuming understandably that buyers of a “premium” vodka would want laboratory precision for their cocktails. Another possibility was that the drinkers might not care much about the purity of the product, and that bringing it to a party merely lubricated social interaction. “We wanted to know what they are seeking,” Lieskovsky says. “Do they want the ‘perfect’ cocktail party? Is it all about how they present themselves to their friends, for status? Is it collaboration, friendship, fun?”

Over the course of the company’s research, the rituals gradually emerged. “One after another, you see the same thing,” Lieskovsky told me. “Someone comes with a bottle. She gives it to the host, then the host puts it in the freezer and listens to the story of where the bottle came from, and why it’s important.” And then, when the bottle is served, it goes right out onto the table with all the other booze, the premium spirits and the bottom-shelf hooch mixed together, in a vision of alcoholic egalitarianism that would make a pro bartender or a cocktail snob cringe.

What mattered most, to the partygoers and their hosts, were the narratives that accompanied the drinks. “We found that there is this general shift away from premium alcohol, at least as it’s defined by price point, toward something that has a story behind it,” Lieskovsky says. “They told anecdotes from their own lives in which a product played a central role—humorous, self-deprecating stories about first encountering a vodka, or discovering a liqueur while traveling in Costa Rica or Mexico.” The stories were a way to let people show humor, or to declare that they’re, for instance, the kind of Austin lesbians who, upon finding exotic elixirs in far-off lands, are brave enough to try them.

ReD consultants fanned out and shadowed drinkers at about 18 different parties, trying to see which drinking practices held constant, whether in Austin, New York, or Columbus. This is one that did. Which meant that if a premium vodka brand tried to market itself solely as a product with chemistry-lab purity, it risked misunderstanding the home-party market and leaving money on the table.

The corporate anthropology that ReD and a few others are pioneering is the most intense form of market research yet devised, a set of techniques that make surveys and dinnertime robo-calls (“This will take only 10 minutes of your time”) seem superficial by comparison. ReD is one of just a handful of consultancies that treat everyday life—and everyday consumerism—as a subject worthy of the scrutiny normally reserved for academic social science. In many cases, the consultants in question have trained at the graduate level in anthropology but have forsaken academia—and some of its ethical strictures—for work that frees them to do field research more or less full-time, with huge budgets and agendas driven by corporate masters.

The world of management consulting consists overwhelmingly of quantitative consultants, a group well known from the successes of McKinsey & Company, the Boston Consulting Group, and Bain & Company. ReD’s entry into consulting represents an attempt to match the results of these titans without relying heavily on math and spreadsheets, and instead focusing on what anthropologists call “participant observation.” This method consists, generally, of living among one’s research subjects, at least briefly. Such immersive experiences lead not only to greater intimacy and trust, but also to a slowly emerging picture of the subjects’ everyday lives and thoughts, complete with truths about them that they themselves might not know.

Absolut, which paid ReD to observe home parties, is using both quantitative analysis and this new form of ethnographic research. “We are intensive consumers of market research,” Maxime Kouchnir, the vice president of vodka marketing for Pernod Ricard USA, which distributes Absolut, told me. “The McKinseys and BCGs of the world will bring you heavy data. And I think those guys sometimes lack the human factor. What ReD brings is a deep understanding of consumers and the dynamics you find in a society.” That means finding out not only what consumers say they want in a liquor, but also what their actions reveal about the social effect they crave from bringing it to a party. “If you observe them, they will be humans, exposed with all their contradictions and complexities,” Kouchnir says. “At the end of the day, we manufacture a spirit, but we have to sell an experience.”

The method dates back nearly a century in academic anthropology, though its pedigree in the business world is somewhat more recent. Xerox PARC, the legendary Palo Alto think tank that birthed many of the ideas that made the personal-computing revolution possible, employed anthropologists as early as 1979. Leslie Perlow, a Harvard Business School professor who has applied participant observation in corporate environments, says, “There is a long history of doing this in the study of organization—taking the ethnographic method from anthropology and, instead of taking it to faraway places, trying to understand the culture of our own work worlds.”

Now a handful of consultancies specialize in ethnographic research, and many companies (including General Motors and Dell) retain their own ethnographers on staff. Microsoft is said to be the second-largest employer of anthropologists in the world, behind only the U.S. government.

Tech firms, certainly, appear to be major consumers of ethnographic research. “Technology companies as a whole are in danger of being more disconnected from their customers than other companies,” says Ken Anderson, an ethnographer at Intel. Tech designers succumb to the illusion that their users are all engineers. “Our mind-set is that people are really just like us, and they’re really not,” Anderson says. Ethnography helps teach the techie types to understand those consumers who “aren’t living and breathing the technology” the way an Intel engineer might. (A curious exception to this cautious embrace of ethnographic methods is Apple, whose late co-founder, Steve Jobs, trusted his designers—and especially himself—more than he trusted consumers or researchers. “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want,” he famously said.)

Min Lieskovsky, the ReD consultant on the Absolut project, has been a friendly acquaintance of mine for nearly a decade. Christian Madsbjerg, a co-founder of ReD, gave me access to ReD consultants on two other projects, one on home appliances and the other on health care, and allowed me to tag along while they did their research. I agreed not to disclose the clients behind these two projects, and to change the names of the two women whose households the company was studying. In each case, ReD paid the households a nominal amount to answer its consultants’ questions.

Microsoft is said to be the second-largest employer of anthropologists in the world.

Both interviews I attended felt unusually intrusive. As a journalist, I’ve interviewed people about sensitive topics, such as their murderous past, or their fondness for sex with children. But a six-hour ethnographic interview felt in many ways even more intimate. After all, the corporate clients who commissioned these studies already knew the type of consumer information they could get through phone or Internet surveys. They knew everything except their customers’ naked, innermost selves, and now they wanted ReD’s ethnographers to get them those, too.

The first ReD anthropologist I went into the field with was Esra Ozkan, an MIT Ph.D. who had joined the company less than a year earlier. She wrote her dissertation on the study of corporate culture in the U.S., but she was a trained ethnographer, and spoke fluently about how Michael Fischer, a cultural anthropologist at MIT, and Joseph Dumit, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis, had influenced her work. By birth a Muslim from eastern Turkey, Ozkan is married to an American Jew, whose family provided the connection to the woman she’d be interviewing.

The household we were about to visit was in Forest Hills, New York, and Ozkan said it was a home kept so strictly kosher that it had two kitchens, one for daily use and another, ultraclean one for Passover. The plan, she said, was to ask the ranking female, a 50‑something working mother I’ll call Rebecca, how she and her family used their living space—how they negotiated the kitchens, the bedrooms, the living rooms; what rules they followed and, more important, which ones they sometimes broke. “We want to hear them describe their homes, both for functionality, but also to hear what emotion they use to describe places,” Ozkan said.

She said much of her method involves noting which objects are assigned special importance. Interviewees carefully select the parts of their lives they exhibit to an ethnographer, and sometimes they will pause over a certain item—say, a kitchen utensil that cost $5 at Walmart, but that carries with it the memories of 30 Passovers—indicating that the object’s meaning is greater than its utility. “Those moments, when something is more than itself, are the ones I pay attention to,” Ozkan told me.

We drove to the house, a detached two-story Tudor in a quiet wooded neighborhood, and parked on the street. Upon exiting the car, Ozkan immediately whipped out an iPhone and began photographing everything, from the front lawn to the windows to the mezuzah on the doorjamb. Rebecca answered the door before we had a chance to knock, and introduced her poodle—a little yapper named Sir Paul—before introducing herself.

We walked into the house, where the children’s photos and religious decorations—every room in the “public” areas of the house showed signs of Jewish practice—gave a clear sense of self-presentation and values. Upstairs, away from the area most visitors would see, she showed us her room-size shrine to the Beatles, packed floor-to-ceiling with concert posters, guitars, and other memorabilia.

Rebecca sat us down in a slightly messy dining room adjoining a large and well-used kitchen, and Ozkan set up a camera to record everything. Our host dove right in, pointing to various appliances and explaining what each one meant to her, and where it fit in with kosher law. For every note I made, Ozkan made two. Although she knew Jewish practice well through her husband and past research, Ozkan asked Rebecca to explain the holidays and purity laws, just to see how she talked about them.

Rebecca confessed without any prompting that she would occasionally let her kosher vigilance slip slightly when she ate out, and that her husband, also Jewish, would drop the kosher thing entirely without her. “He’d eat a bacon cheeseburger if I weren’t around,” she said, perhaps half-joking. But Rebecca also said that inside the house itself, and especially around the inner-sanctum Passover kitchen, she never considered defying kosher law. “It’s like breathing, for us,” she said.

Over lunch the next day, I asked Ozkan what she had concluded from the visit. She noted all the things that Rebecca had never stated explicitly, but that were clearly what mattered most in her life. “She treats the kitchen as a holy place,” Ozkan said. That made three holy places in the house, if you count the two kitchens separately, and the Beatles shrine upstairs. Her deviance on the outside was, Ozkan said, a point well worth noting. “If you listen really carefully, you’ll find some things that don’t quite match the super-ideal framework of kosher,” she said. “And it’s always great to see that. It’s a way to see how people deal with practicalities and challenges in life, and how they choose to break that ideal image.” Listen to people talk about how they break the rules, in other words, and you’ll figure out what they consider the important rules in the first place.

Ozkan’s questions had hinted at product ideas that ReD’s client, a home-appliance maker, was considering. Would Rebecca contemplate buying an automated fridge that would advise her when she was running short on orange juice? And as Rebecca responded, her implicit consecration of her kitchen became evident. She seemed to care less about whether her kitchen remained well stocked or running smoothly than whether it remained her sacred space, controlled by her for her family, and not by, say, a talking robot. As with the vodka drinkers, the key elements were emotional ownership and connection.

The client’s goals were, in this case, never made fully clear to me. But Rebecca’s was only one of 21 homes the consultants would visit, and the only kosher one on the list. The visit would, however, begin to tell a story about Americans who love and hate their own kitchens, fetishizing some gadgets while simultaneously viewing them as instruments of their own enslavement.

If you’re selling a personal computer in China, the whole concept of “personal” is culturally wrong.

If the lessons were indistinct, they were deliberately so. ReD is gleefully defiant of those who want clear answers to simple questions, and prefers to inhabit a space where answers tend not to come in yes/no formats, or in pie charts and bar graphs. “We know numbers get you only so far,” the company’s Web site announces. “Standard techniques work for standard problems because there’s a clear benefit from being measured and systematic. But when companies are on the verge of something new or uncertain … those existing formulas aren’t easily applied.”

Jun Lee, a ReD partner, says that when clients are confronted with the company’s anthropological research, they often discover fundamental differences between the businesses they thought they were in, and the businesses they actually are in. For example, the Korean electronics giant Samsung had a major conceptual breakthrough when it realized that its televisions are best thought of not as large electronic appliances, measurable by screen size and resolution, but as home furniture. It matters less how thoroughly a speaker system rattles the bones and eardrums of its listeners than how these big screens occupy the physical space alongside one’s tables, chairs, and sofas. The company’s project engineers reframed their products accordingly, paying more attention to how they fit into living spaces, rather than how they perform on their technical spec sheets.

Christian Madsbjerg co-founded ReD almost a decade ago, after a brief stint in journalism. He dresses the part of the Nordic intellectual, alternating slick minimalist threads (think Dieter fromSaturday Night Live’s “Sprockets”) with modish Western wear that no American could really pull off. After more than 30 years in London and his native Denmark, he fled for New York, where ReD operates out of a wood-paneled Battery Park office once occupied by John D. Rockefeller.

The founding story of ReD sounds more like the genesis of a doctoral dissertation than of a multimillion-dollar company. Madsbjerg says he became enamored first with post-structural theory, and then with the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argued that the distinction between objects and their beholders needed to be effaced. When we consider a hammer, we might naturally think of its objective scientific properties: a certain weight and balance, a hardness, a handle with a rubber grip that has a particular coefficient of friction. What Heidegger posited is that these objective attributes are in fact secondary to the hammer’s subjective relationship with the person wielding it. The hammer has uses (a weapon, a tool), meanings (a symbol on the Soviet flag), and other characteristics that do not exist independently of the meeting of subject and object. A common mistake of philosophers, he claimed, is to think of the object as distinct from the subject. If all of this sounds opaque, I can assure you that in the original German it is much, much worse.

NowThisNews explores how Heidegger’s philosophy helps drive American marketing.

But before long, Madsbjerg had a list of clients desperate for Heideggerian readings of their businesses. The service he provides sounds even more improbable to a scholar who knows his Heidegger than to a layperson who does not. Many philosophers spend their lives trying and failing to understand what Heidegger was talking about. To interest a typical ReD client—usually a corporate vice president who is, Madsbjerg says, “the least laid-back person you can imagine, with every minute of their day divided into 15-minute blocks”—in the philosopher’s turgid, impenetrable post-structural theory is as unlikely a pitch as could be imagined.

But it’s the pitch Madsbjerg has been making. The fundamental blindness in the sorts of consulting that dominate the market, he says, is that they are Cartesian in their outlook: they view objects as the sum of their performance and physical properties. “If you are selling personal computers, you look at the machine and say it’s this many gigahertz, this many pixels,” he says. And you then determine whether a potential new market needs computers that perform faster than the ones currently on offer, and how big that market will be.

These specs, as well as data about how many households in, say, China will reach income levels that will allow a personal-computer purchase, fit nicely into spreadsheets and graphs. But they overlook human elements that exist in plain sight, the things the Anglo-Polish founder of the ethnographic method, Bronisław Malinowski, called “the imponderabilia of actual life.” These are, he wrote, “small incidents, characteristic forms of taking food, of conversing, of doing work, [that] are found occurring over and over again.”

These imponderabilia turn out to have huge consequences if you want to sell a personal computer in China. “We find that these objects have meanings, not just facts,” Madsbjerg says, “and that the meaning is often what matters.” So to sell a personal computer in China, for example, what matters is the whole concept of a “personal” computer, which is culturally wrong from the start. “Household objects don’t have the same personal attachment [in China as they do in America]. It has to be ashared thing.” So if the device isn’t designed and marketed as a shared household object, but instead as one customized for a single user, it probably won’t sell, no matter how many gigahertz it has.

China is a huge potential market, and every corporation with any ambition wants its piece of that pie, on the idea that if you make a dollar off each man, woman, and child in China, you’ve just made $1 billion. A source told me, for instance, that Coca-Cola approached ReD after years of trying and failing to sell bottled tea in China. (ReD would not confirm that the client in question was Coca-Cola.) The beverage company had imagined that this would be a simple variant on the fizzy-sugared-water business that had made it a global icon. Instead, it failed to seize a respectable market share, even though it was competing with lightweight local competitors.

Long-term observation revealed that when it comes to tea in China, what is for sale isn’t merely a tasty beverage. Instead, the consumption of tea takes place in a highly specific web of cultural rules, some of them explicit but many others not. For instance, you might serve strong tea to close friends, or to people you want to draw closer. But you would never serve strong tea to new acquaintances. That meant that no tea, however tasty, would sell if its strength was uniform. Let the consumer choose the strength, however, and you may be able to sell the product within the culture. Coca-Cola’s Chinese tea products are now on course to change accordingly.

To sell the ReD idea—that products and objects are inevitably encrusted with cultural meaning, and that a company that neglects to explore social theory is bound to leave profits on the table—Madsbjerg has evangelized with great success, giving what are surely the only successful corporate sales pitches salted with words like hermeneutics and phenomenology. Most of his consultants don’t have the usual business pedigree; M.B.A.s are very scarce (“tend not to fit in,” he says). Rather, many employees come from academia, and some from another interview- and observation-based realm: journalism. (I came to know the firm first through Lieskovsky—the former anthropology student on the Absolut project—and through another employee, who is a former editor at GQ.)

The second consultant I followed, Rachel Singh, also came from academia. A native of Manitoba, she’d joined ReD a year and a half earlier, after doing ethnographic work for Intel’s Ireland office and attending graduate school in digital anthropology at University College London.

We met a few blocks from the apartment of the day’s interview subject, at a café in the Los Angeles suburb of Tarzana—a concrete jungle named after the principal literary creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs, an early celebrity resident of the area. It occurred to me that in a previous era, before anthropologists discovered that their own societies were as irrationally rule-bound as so-called primitive ones, Singh might have aspired to perform fieldwork in actual jungles, and to study actual Tarzans.

The view of anthropologists as tourists in exotic lands is old and tired, which is not to say dead. Singh surprised me with her candor several times over the course of the day, but the first occasion was when she described her entry into the world of anthropology, which sounded to me like exactly that sort of romantic vision. “I came to university as a premed, and one day I just wandered into a lecture hall and heard a guy giving a lecture about his fieldwork with the Kwakiutl of British Columbia. He went on a ‘vision quest,’ and after falling asleep on a secluded beach, he woke up surrounded by seals. He returned to the village and was told by an elder that he had found his guardian animal.” Then, she said, the lecturer hiked up his sleeve to reveal a seal tattoo. Singh was hooked on the study of culture. She changed her major, and she sees continuity between her academic work and what she does now as an ethnographic hired gun.

In Tarzana, Singh was scheduled to meet, on behalf of a ReD client in the health-care field, a woman I’ll call Elsie. It was 10 a.m. on a beautiful Southern California Sunday—a perfectly awful time to sit inside and discuss the day’s topic, the visible precancerous skin lesions from which Elsie suffers. “It makes me feel like a leper,” Elsie confided after we began, and Singh nodded sympathetically, like an old friend. “It makes me feel like hiding.”

The interview started much the same way the previous one had, with the anthropologist documenting the setting in minute detail. With her iPhone, Singh snapped shots of the street, the parking garage, the squares of grass and the tropical trees in the neighborhood. Once inside, her eyes darted over every surface, and she noted the vacuum track marks on the floor; the drawers full of tubes of prescription creams; the European posters. Singh set up a video camera to record every minute of the six-hour interview—the better to capture the moments when Elsie’s responses revealed traces of unexpected emotion or meaning. Singh asked Elsie, a hefty, sun-spotted redhead of 52, about her medical regimen, then about the basic details of her life—what her childhood had been like, where she had lived, when she woke up every morning, what she ate, and whom she spoke with.

Singh unpacked Elsie’s responses methodically, adding an occasional compassionate or sympathetic word. When Singh asked about Elsie’s lesions, she phrased the questions carefully, suggesting that she could feel Elsie’s pain. “How would I get this condition?” she asked. “What would be the symptoms?”

Elsie’s was the first of perhaps two dozen similarly in-depth interviews, Singh told me later. The client had created a product to treat one of Elsie’s conditions. The company knew very well what would happen to a lesion if it were frozen, zapped, or rubbed with cream. But what about the person attached to the lesion? A simplistic model of patient behavior might say that patients want whatever the most effective treatment is. But the conversation with Elsie revealed a much more fraught human experience. She had her taboos, such as being forced to even say the word lesion. She wanted to escape not just her lesions, but the shame they brought on.

Once Singh had completed the interview, before we parted ways, she made clear that there was at least one argument within anthropology that she was tired of hearing about: “Just don’t make this another story about the clash between practicing anthropologists and academics.”

The politics of anthropologists in academia tends to the Marxist left, even more so than the politics of academics in general. And to many of them, the defection of young scholars to the corporate world looks like a betrayal at best, and a devil’s bargain at worst. I told Singh that academic anthropologists had already shared some harsh words for their applied-anthropology brothers and sisters. “Well, they’re endangered,” she said of the academics, a little snootily. “We’re doing work that’s needed. We’re dealing with human issues.”

ReD offers businesses Heideggerian analysis, which sounds even more improbable to a scholar than to a layperson.

The corporate anthropologists I met generally come across as people who acknowledge the limits of what they do. Ken Anderson, the Intel ethnographer, co-founded a conference called EPIC for corporate ethnographers. Over the phone, he was warm and jokey, seemingly without rancor when he told me about his failed quest for an academic job out of graduate school (“At the time, the employment opportunities for white guys in academic anthropology were pretty darn slim”). He found instead a corporate career that has encouraged anthropological work—as long as it could hold relevance to the corporation at some point. He has spent weeks in London hanging out with bike messengers for Intel, and hunkered down in the Azores as digital technology reached remote settlements. Sure enough, his research sounds very blue-sky, and on a recognizable continuum with the anthropological research cultivated in the groves of academe.

A few years ago, he conducted an ethnographic study of “temporality,” about the perception of the passage and scarcity of time—noting how Americans he studied had come to perceive busy-ness and lack of time as a marker of well-being. “We found that in social interaction, virtually everyone would claim to be ‘busy,’ and that everyone close to them would be ‘busy’ too,” he told me. But in fact, coordinated studies of how these people used technology suggested that when they used their computers, they tended to do work only in short bursts of a few minutes at a time, with the rest of the time devoted to something other than what we might identify as work. “We were designing computers, and the spec at the time was to use the computer to the max for two hours,” Anderson says. “We had to make chips that would perform at that level. You don’t want them to overheat. But when we came back, we figured that we needed to rethink this, because people’s time is not quite what we imagine.” For a company that makes microchip processors, this discovery has had important consequences for how to engineer products—not only for users who constantly need high-powered computing for long durations, but for people who just think they do.

Among the luxuries of working for a corporate master is, of course, deliverance from the endless hustle to find funding. My partner is an academic anthropologist, and she goes from year to year having to pull together funding for trips to field sites in the Central African Republic—which, unlike China, is not a hotbed of corporate interest. (By contrast, Madsbjerg told me, “Our resources are not infinite. But almost.”)

But the bigger issue for academics is the fear that corporate anthropology is an ethical free-fire zone. “If there isn’t an IRB [institutional review board], a sort of neutral third party that watches out for the interests of those who are being researched, then obviously there is cause for concern,” says Hugh Gusterson, a George Mason University professor who has led anthropologists in opposing cooperation with certain U.S. military projects. He pointed to fury among his colleagues a few years ago, when it became known that Disney had paid ethnographers to study teenagers’ spending habits, the better to sell them Disney products. “They were learning about people—and not just any people, but minors—so they could exploit them, for profit.”

To get a research project approved at a modern university, a researcher faces a review board of professors commissioned to scrutinize the proposal and check for ethical sticking points—ways the project could hurt the people it studied, disrupt their lives, or take advantage of them. ReD, meanwhile, is bound only by the sense of decency of its senior partners. Luckily, they are Danish. I asked Madsbjerg if he had ever turned away a contract on account of scruples, and he told me the military of a South American country had approached him to discuss an ethnographic project on weapons design. He refused, on the grounds that helping people shoot other people wasn’t what ReD was about. Nor would he do work for a company that wanted to sell junk food to children. On the other hand, even contracts that are less obviously perilous, ethically speaking, could raise the hackles of an academic review board. Helping Coca-Cola feed sweetened beverages to 1.3 billion Chinese, for example, will probably not have a healthy impact on that country’s incidence of diabetes.

Roberto González, a cultural anthropologist who teaches at San Jose State University, goes so far as to argue that those who don’t follow the American Anthropological Association’s code of ethics should no longer be considered anthropologists at all. “Part of being an anthropologist is following a code of ethics, and if you don’t do that, you’re not an anthropologist”—just as you’re no longer fit to call yourself a doctor if you do unauthorized experiments on your patients. “Of course,” Hugh Gusterson adds, “we don’t license anthropologists, so we can’t un-license them either.”

Some anthropologists caution against assuming that the work done by ReD consultants and their corporate brethren is really ethnography at all. During the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army convened a team of purported ethnographers to staff a group called the Human Terrain System, which was tasked with producing militarily significant ethnographic reports and providing cultural advice. Professional anthropologists raised hell, condemning the participants for using their training inappropriately, but in time it became clear that there weren’t many anthropologists on the HTS staff at all. (One team member I knew had a doctorate in Russian literature.) The civilians on the staff were, for the most part, just a bunch of well-educated people reading up on Iraqi and Afghan tribes and writing reports that were quasi-anthropological at best.

That, it seems to me, is probably the best way to view much of what ReD does as well. The value the firm brings to clients comes partly from anthropology, practiced in a way that may or may not please those still in academia. But the value is also just an effect of putting an impressive ethnographic sheen on the work of many smart, right-brained individuals in a sector that overvalues quantitative research. Much of what I encountered while shadowing ReD’s consultants seemed like the type of insight that any observant interviewer might have produced, with or without an anthropology degree or a working knowledge of Heidegger.

Madsbjerg’s admiration for Heidegger does, however, show something of his genius for self-marketing. Many consulting firms plot growth curves and recommend efficiency strategies, but few offer the kind of research ReD does. Still fewer firms immerse themselves so happily in academic language, and only Madsbjerg has the cojones to walk into a corporate boardroom and tell his audience that the impenetrable works of a long-dead German philosopher hold the keys to financial success.

I asked Madsbjerg how he would sell his firm to a potential employee currently teaching at a university, and he leaned toward me with a smile, slipping comfortably into the Marxist lingo of academia. “Do you want to sit and write about the world,” he asked, “or do you want to do something in it?”

I couldn’t help but think of Steve Jobs’s famous entreaty to John Sculley, then the president of PepsiCo, asking him to join Apple in 1983 as CEO. “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?,” Jobs asked. “Or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

The irony, of course, is that ReD is changing the world in part by helping a global beverage company sell more sugared water.

Graeme Wood is an Atlantic contributing editor.

Nobel de Química fala sobre a ‘magia da ciência’ em São Carlos (Fapesp)

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Na palestra de abertura do simpósio em homenagem ao professor do MIT Daniel Kleppner, Dudley Herschbach, ganhador do prêmio de Química em 1986, apresentou parábolas para ilustrar o que a química é capaz de fazer (foto:Silvio Pires/FAPESP)

28/02/2013

Por Karina Toledo

Agência FAPESP – Com uma palestra intitulada “Glimpses of Chemical Wizardry” (Vislumbres da Magia da Química), o norte-americano Dudley Herschbach – ganhador do prêmio Nobel de Química de 1986 – deu início às atividades de um simpósioque reúne esta semana grandes nomes da ciência mundial em São Carlos, no interior de São Paulo.

A um auditório repleto de estudantes, principalmente dos cursos de Física, Química e Ciências Biológicas da Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar), Herschbach apresentou três “parábolas moleculares” com o intuito de mostrar algumas das coisas espetaculares que a ciência é capaz de fazer.

Em uma das histórias, intitulada “A vida em turnê no interior das células”, Herschbach falou sobre técnicas avançadas de microscopia com super-resolução desenvolvidas por Xiaowei Zhuang, pesquisadora da Universidade Harvard, que permitem, por exemplo, estudar a interação entre células e a expressão de genes em tempo real.

“A ciência faz coisas que realmente pareciam impossíveis antes de acontecerem. De vez em quando, alguém, em alguma parte do mundo, faz algo mágico e muda as coisas. É maravilhoso saber que você faz parte disso. É parte da recompensa da ciência que você não tem na maioria das profissões”, disse Herschbach à Agência FAPESP.

Graduado em Matemática pela Universidade Stanford, Herschbach fez mestrado em Física e em Química, além de doutorado em Físico-Química pela Universidade Harvard, onde hoje é professor.

“Fui o primeiro da minha família a ir para a universidade. Ofereceram-me uma bolsa para jogar futebol [norte-americano], mas acabei trocando por uma bolsa acadêmica, pois o técnico havia me proibido de frequentar as aulas de laboratório para não me atrasar para os treinos. A verdade é que eu achava a ciência muito mais fascinante”, contou.

Nos anos 1960, o cientista conduziu experimentos pioneiros com a técnica de feixes moleculares cruzados para estudar reações químicas e a dinâmica dos átomos das moléculas em tempo real. Por suas pesquisas nesse campo, recebeu em 1986 – junto com o taiwanês Yuan Lee e o canadense John Polanyi – o Nobel de Química.

Os resultados foram de grande importância para o desenvolvimento de um novo campo de pesquisa — o da dinâmica de reação — e proporcionaram um entendimento detalhado de como as reações químicas acontecem.

“Quando olho no espelho, ao me barbear, percebo que ganhar o Nobel não mudou nada em mim. A única diferença é que as pessoas ficaram mais interessadas no que tenho a dizer. Convidam-me para palestras e entrevistas. E isso acabou me transformando numa espécie de embaixador da ciência”, disse Herschbach.

Poesia em sala de aula

Durante toda a apresentação, Herschbach combateu o mito de que ciência é algo muito difícil, reservado para os muito inteligentes. “Costumo ouvir pessoas dizendo que é preciso ser muito bom em matemática para ser um bom pesquisador, mas a maioria dos cientistas usa a mesma matemática que um caixa de supermercado. Você não precisa ser bom em tudo, apenas em uma coisa, achar um nicho”, afirmou.

Ao comparar a ciência com outras atividades humanas, Herschbach disse que, em nenhuma outra profissão, você pode falhar inúmeras vezes e ainda ser aplaudido quando consegue fazer alguma coisa certa. “Um músico pode tocar quase todas as notas certas em um concerto e ser criticado por ter errado apenas algumas”, comparou.

Herschbach contou que costumava pedir a seus alunos que escrevessem poemas para lhes mostrar que é mais importante se preocupar em fazer as perguntas certas do que encontrar a resposta certa.

“Isso, mais do que resolver equações, é como fazer ciência de verdade. Ninguém diz se um poema está certo ou errado e sim o quanto ele é capaz de abrir seus olhos para algo que parecia ordinário, fazer você enxergar aquilo de outra forma. É assim com a ciência. Se você faz pesquisa de fronteira, coisas novas, é muito artístico. Quero que os estudantes percebam que eles também podem ser feiticeiros”, concluiu.

O Simpósio em Homenagem ao Prof. Daniel Kleppner “Física atômica e áreas correlatas”, que termina no dia 1º de março, é promovido pelo Centro de Pesquisa em Óptica e Fotônica (Cepof) de São Carlos, um dos Centros de Pesquisa, Inovação e Difusão (CEPID) financiados pela FAPESP.

O objetivo do encontro é prestar uma homenagem ao físico norte-americano Daniel Kleppner, do Instituto de Tecnologia de Massachusetts (MIT), que receberá o título de professor honorário do Instituto de Física de São Carlos, da Universidade de São Paulo (IFSC-USP).

Além de Herschbach, amigo de Kleppner desde os tempos da graduação, outros quatro ganhadores do Nobel também participam do evento: Serge Haroche (Nobel de Física 2012), David Wineland (Nobel de Física 2012), Eric Cornell (Nobel de Física 2001) e William Phillips (Nobel de Física 1997).

Indígenas ameaçam guerra para barrar hidrelétricas no rio Tapajós (Valor Econômico)

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JC e-mail 4671, de 25 de Fevereiro de 2013.

Um grupo de líderes de aldeias localizadas no Pará e no norte do Mato Grosso esteve em Brasília para protestar contra ações de empresas na região

Não houve acordo. O governo teve uma pequena amostra, na semana passada, da resistência que enfrentará para levar adiante seu projeto de construção de hidrelétricas ao longo do rio Tapajós, uma região isolada da Amazônia onde vivem hoje cerca de 8 mil índios da etnia munduruku. Um grupo de líderes de aldeias localizadas no Pará e no norte do Mato Grosso, Estados que são cortados pelo rio, esteve em Brasília para protestar contra ações de empresas na região, que realizam levantamento de informações para preparar o licenciamento ambiental das usinas.

Os índios tiveram uma reunião com o ministro de Minas e Energia (MME), Edison Lobão. Na mesa, os projetos da hidrelétricas de São Luiz do Tapajós e de Jatobá, dois dos maiores projetos de geração previstos pelo governo. Lobão foi firme. Disse aos índios que o governo não vai abrir mãos das duas usinas e que eles precisam entender isso. Valter Cardeal, diretor da Eletrobras que também participou da discussão, tentou convencer os índios de que o negócio é viável e de que eles serão devidamente compensados pelos impactos. Os índios deixaram a sala.

Para o cacique Arnaldo Koba Munduruku, que lidera todos os povos indígenas da região do Tapajós, o resultado do encontro foi negativo. “Nosso povo não quer indenização, nem quer o dinheiro de usina. Nosso povo quer o rio como ele é”, disse Koba ao Valor. “Não vamos permitir que usinas ou até mesmo que estudos sejam feitos. Vamos unir nossa gente e vamos para o enfrentamento. O Tapajós não vai sofrer como sofre hoje o rio Xingu”, afirmou o líder indígena, referindo-se às complicações indígenas que envolvem o licenciamento e a construção da hidrelétrica de Belo Monte, em Altamira (PA).

Numa carta que foi entregue nas mãos do secretário-geral da Presidência, ministro Gilberto Carvalho, os índios pediram “que o governo brasileiro respeite a decisão do povo munduruku e desista de construir essas hidrelétricas”. No mesmo documento, os índios cobram agilidade na investigação da morte de Adenilson Kirixi Munduruku, que foi assassinado com três tiros em novembro do ano passado, na região do Teles Pires, rio localizado no norte do Mato Grosso e que forma o Tapajós, em sua confluência com o rio Juruena.

Os índios se negaram a assinar um documento apresentado pela Presidência, que previa compromissos a serem assumidos pelo governo, por entenderem que se tratava de uma consulta prévia já atrelada ao licenciamento das usinas do Tapajós. “Viemos até aqui para cobrar a punição pelo assassinato de nosso irmão, mas vimos que a intenção do governo era outra. Ele queria mesmo era tratar das usinas, mas não permitimos isso”, disse o líder indígena Waldelirio Manhuary Munduruku. “Não vamos nos ajoelhar. Não haverá usinas, nem estudos de usinas. Iremos até o fim nessa guerra.”

No balanço do Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC) divulgado na semana passada, o cronograma de São Luiz do Tapajós e de Jatobá estabelece o mês de setembro para conclusão dos estudos ambientais das usinas. O levantamento de informações na região começou a ser feito pela Eletrobras há pelo menos um ano e meio. Analistas ambientais e técnicos da estatal têm enfrentado resistências na região para colher informações dos moradores.

O grupo de empresas que o governo reuniu em agosto do ano passado para participar da elaboração dos estudos dá uma ideia do interesse energético que a União tem no Tapajós. Com a Eletrobras estão Cemig Geração e Transmissão, Copel Geração e Transmissão, GDF Suez Energy Latin America Participações, Endesa do Brasil e Neoenergia Investimentos.

Com as usinas de São Luiz e Jatobá, o governo quer adicionar 8.471 megawatts de potência à sua matriz energética. O custo ambiental disso seria a inundação de 1.368 quilômetros quadrados de floresta virgem, duas vezes e meia a inundação que será causada pela hidrelétrica de Belo Monte. O governo diz que é pouco e que, se forem implementadas todas as usinas previstas para a Amazônia, menos de 1% da floresta ficaria embaixo d”água.

(André Borges – Valor Econômico)

The Politics of Disimagination and the Pathologies of Power (Truth Out)

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Wednesday, 27 February 2013 00:00

By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis

Eye reflecitng TV(Photo: tryingmyhardest). You write in order to change the world knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that [writing] is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter even by a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” – James Baldwin

The Violence of Neoliberalism

We live in a time of deep foreboding, one that haunts any discourse about justice, democracy and the future. Not only have the points of reference that provided a sense of certainty and collective hope in the past largely evaporated, but the only referents available are increasingly supplied by a hyper-market-driven society, megacorporations and a corrupt financial service industry. The commanding economic and cultural institutions of American society have taken on what David Theo Goldberg calls a “militarizing social logic.”[1] Market discipline now regulates all aspects of social life, and the regressive economic rationality that drives it sacrifices the public good, public values and social responsibility to a tawdry consumerist dream while simultaneously creating a throwaway society of goods, resources and individuals now considered disposable.[2] This militarizing logic is also creeping into public schools and colleges with the former increasingly resembling the culture of prison and the latter opening their classrooms to the national intelligence agencies.[3] In one glaring instance of universities endorsing the basic institutions of the punishing state, Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, concluded a deal to rename its football stadium after the GEO Group, a private prison corporation “whose record is marred by human rights abuses, by lawsuits, by unnecessary deaths of people in their custody and a whole series of incidents.” [3A] Armed guards are now joined by armed knowledge.  Corruption, commodification and repressive state apparatuses have become the central features of a predatory society in which it is presumed irrationally “that market should dominate and determine all choices and outcomes to the occlusion of any other considerations.”[4]

The political, economic, and social consequences have done more than destroy any viable vision of a good society. They undermine the modern public’s capacity to think critically, celebrate a narcissistic hyperindividualism that borders on the pathological, destroy social protections and promote a massive shift towards a punitive state that criminalizes the behavior of those bearing the hardships imposed by a survival-of-the-fittest society that takes delight in the suffering of others. How else to account for a criminal justice stacked overwhelmingly against poor minorities, a prison system in which “prisoners can be held in solitary confinement for years in small, windowless cells in which they are kept for twenty-three hours of every day,”[5] or a police state that puts handcuffs on a 5-year old and puts him in jail because he violated a dress code by wearing sneakers that were the wrong color.[6] Why does the American public put up with a society in which “the top 1 percent of households owned 35.6 percent of net wealth (net worth) and a whopping 42.4 percent of net financial assets” in 2009, while many young people today represent the “new face of a national homeless population?”[7] American society is awash in a culture of civic illiteracy, cruelty and corruption. For example, major banks such as Barclays and HSBC swindle billions from clients and increase their profit margins by laundering money for terrorist organizations, and no one goes to jail. At the same time, we have the return of debtor prisons for the poor who cannot pay something as trivial as a parking fine. President Obama arbitrarily decides that he can ignore due process and kill American citizens through drone strikes and the American public barely blinks. Civic life collapses into a war zone and yet the dominant media is upset only because it was not invited to witness the golf match between Obama and Tiger Woods.

The celebration of violence in both virtual culture and real life now feed each other. The spectacle of carnage celebrated in movies such as A Good Day to Die Hard is now matched by the deadly violence now playing out in cities such as Chicago and New Orleans. Young people are particularly vulnerable to such violence, with 561 children age 12 and under killed by firearms between 2006 and 2010.[8] Corporate power, along with its shameless lobbyists and intellectual pundits, unabashedly argue for more guns in order to feed the bottom line, even as the senseless carnage continues tragically in places like Newtown, Connecticut, Tustin, California, and other American cities. In the meantime, the mainstream media treats the insane rambling of National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre as a legitimate point of view among many voices. This is the same guy who, after the killing of 20 young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, claimed the only way to stop more tragedies was to flood the market with more guns and provide schools with more armed guards. The American public was largely silent on the issue in spite of the fact that an increase of police in schools does nothing to prevent such massacres but does increase the number of children, particularly poor black youth, who are pulled out of class, booked and arrested for trivial behavioral infractions.

At the same time, America’s obsession with violence is reinforced by a market society that is Darwinian in its pursuit of profit and personal gain at almost any cost. Within this scenario, a social and economic order has emerged that combines the attributes and values of films such as the classics Mad Max and American Psycho. Material deprivation, galloping inequality, the weakening of public supports, the elimination of viable jobs, the mindless embrace of rabid competition and consumption, and the willful destruction of the environment speak to a society in which militarized violence finds its counterpart, if not legitimating credo, in a set of atomizing and selfish values that disdain shared social bonds and any notion of the public good. In this case, American society now mimics a market-driven culture that celebrates a narcissistic hyperindividualism that radiates with a new sociopathic lack of interest in others and a strong tendency towards violence and criminal behavior. As John le Carré once stated, “America has entered into one of its periods of historical madness.”[9] While le Carré wrote this acerbic attack on American politics in 2003, I think it is fair to say that things have gotten worse, and that the United States is further plunging into madness because of a deadening form of historical and social amnesia that has taken over the country, further reproducing a mass flight from memory and social responsibility. The politics of disimagination includes, in this instance, what Mumia Abu-Jamal labeled “mentacide,” a form of historical amnesia “inflicted on Black youth by the system’s systematic campaign to eradicate and deny them their people’s revolutionary history.”[10]

America’s Plunge Into Militarized Madness

How does one account for the lack of public outcry over millions of Americans losing their homes because of corrupt banking practices and millions more becoming unemployed because of the lack of an adequate jobs program in the United States, while at the same time stories abound of colossal greed and corruption on Wall Street? [11] For example, in 2009 alone, hedge fund manager David Tepper made approximately 4 billion dollars.[12] As Michael Yates points out: “This income, spent at a rate of $10,000 a day and exclusive of any interest, would last him and his heirs 1,096 years! If we were to suppose that Mr. Tepper worked 2,000 hours in 2009 (fifty weeks at forty hours per week), he took in $2,000,000 per hour and $30,000 a minute.”[13] This juxtaposition of robber-baron power and greed is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media in conjunction with the deep suffering and misery now experienced by millions of families, workers, children, jobless public servants and young people. This is especially true of a generation of youth who have become the new precariat[14] – a zero generation relegated to zones of social and economic abandonment and marked by zero jobs, zero future, zero hope and what Zygmunt Bauman has defined as a societal condition which is more “liquid,”less defined, punitive, and, in the end, more death dealing.[15]

Narcissism and unchecked greed have morphed into more than a psychological category that points to a character flaw among a marginal few. Such registers are now symptomatic of a market-driven society in which extremes of violence, militarization, cruelty and inequality are hardly noticed and have become normalized. Avarice and narcissism are not new. What is new is the unprecedented social sanction of the ethos of greed that has emerged since the 1980s.[16] What is also new is that military force and values have become a source of pride rather than alarm in American society. Not only has the war on terror violated a host of civil liberties, it has further sanctioned a military that has assumed a central role in American society, influencing everything from markets and education to popular culture and fashion. President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office warning about the rise of the military-industrial complex, with its pernicious alignment of the defense industry, the military and political power.[17] What he underestimated was the transition from a militarized economy to a militarized society in which the culture itself was shaped by military power, values and interests. What has become clear in contemporary America is that the organization of civil society for the production of violence is about more than producing militarized technologies and weapons; it is also about producing militarized subjects and a permanent war economy. As Aaron B. O’Connell points outs:

Our culture has militarized considerably since Eisenhower’s era, and civilians, not the armed services, have been the principal cause. From lawmakers’ constant use of “support our troops” to justify defense spending, to TV programs and video games like “NCIS,” “Homeland”and “Call of Duty,” to NBC’s shameful and unreal reality show “Stars Earn Stripes,” Americans are subjected to a daily diet of stories that valorize the military while the storytellers pursue their own opportunistic political and commercial agendas.[18]

The imaginary of war and violence informs every aspect of American society and extends from the celebration of a warrior culture in mainstream media to the use of universities to educate students in the logic of the national security state. Military deployments now protect “free trade” arrangements, provide job programs and drain revenue from public coffers. For instance, Lockheed Martin stands to gain billions of dollars in profits as Washington prepares to buy 2,443 F-35 fighter planes at a cost of $90 million each from the company. The overall cost of the project for a plane that has been called a “one trillion dollar boondoggle” is expected to cost more “than Australia’s entire GDP ($924 billion).”[19] Yet, the American government has no qualms about cutting food programs for the poor, early childhood programs for low-income students and food stamps for those who exist below the poverty line. Such misplaced priorities represent more than a military-industrial complex that is out of control. They also suggest the plunge of American society into the dark abyss of a state that is increasingly punitive, organized around the production of violence and unethical in its policies, priorities and values.

John Hinkson argues that such institutionalized violence is far from a short-lived and aberrant historical moment. In fact, he rightfully asserts that: “we have a new world economy, one crucially that lacks all substantial points of reference and is by implication nihilistic. The point is that this is not a temporary situation because of the imperatives, say, of war: it is a structural break with the past.”[20] Evidence of such a shift is obvious in the massive transfer upward in wealth and income that have not only resulted in the concentration of power in relatively few hands, but have promoted both unprecedented degrees of human suffering and hardship along with what can be called a politics of disimagination.

The Rise of the “Disimagination Machine”

Borrowing from Georges Didi-Huberman’s use of the term, “disimagination machine,” I argue that the politics of disimagination refers to images, and I would argue institutions, discourses, and other modes of representation, that undermine the capacity of individuals to bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance.[21] The “disimagination machine” is both a set of cultural apparatuses extending from schools and mainstream media to the new sites of screen culture, and a public pedagogy that functions primarily to undermine the ability of individuals to think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue: put simply, to become critically informed citizens of the world.

Examples of the “disimagination machine” abound. A few will suffice. For instance, the Texas State Board of Education and other conservative boards of education throughout the United States are rewriting American textbooks to promote and impose on America’s public school students what Katherine Stewart calls “a Christian nationalist version of US history” in which Jesus is implored to “invade” public schools.[22] In this version of history, the term “slavery” is removed from textbooks and replaced with “Atlantic triangular trade,” the earth is 6,000 years old, and the Enlightenment is the enemy of education. Historical figures such as Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, considered to have suspect religious views, “are ruthlessly demoted or purged altogether from the study program.”[23] Currently, 46 percent of the American population believes in the creationist view of evolution and increasingly rejects scientific evidence, research and rationality as either ‘academic’ or irreligious.[24]

The rise of the Tea Party and the renewal of the culture wars have resulted in a Republican Party which is now considered the party of anti-science. Similarly, right-wing politicians, media, talk show hosts and other conservative pundits loudly and widely spread the message that a culture of questioning is antithetical to the American way of life. Moreover, this message is also promoted by conservative groups such as The American Legislative Exchange Council, (ALEC) which has “hit the ground running in 2013, pushing ‘model bills’ mandating the teaching of climate change denial in public school systems.”[25] The climate-change-denial machine is also promoted by powerful conservative groups such as the Heartland Institute. Ignorance is never too far from repression, as was recently demonstrated in Arizona, where State Rep. Bob Thorpe, a Republican freshman Tea Party member, introduced a new bill requiring students to take a loyalty oath in order to receive a graduation diploma.[26]

The “disimagination machine” is more powerful than ever as conservative think tanks provide ample funds for training and promoting anti-public pseudo-intellectuals and religious fundamentalists while simultaneously offering policy statements and talking points to conservative media such as FOX News, Christian news networks, right-wing talk radio, and partisan social media and blogs. This ever growing information/illiteracy bubble has become a powerful force of public pedagogy in the larger culture and is responsible for not only the war on science, reason and critical thought, but also the war on women’s reproductive rights, poor minority youth, immigrants, public schooling, and any other marginalized group or institution that challenges the anti-intellectual, anti-democratic worldviews of the new extremists and the narrative supporting Christian nationalism. Liberal Democrats, of course, contribute to this “disimagination machine” through educational policies that substitute critical thinking and critical pedagogy for paralyzing pedagogies of memorization and rote learning tied to high-stakes testing in the service of creating a neoliberal, dumbed-down workforce.

As John Atcheson has pointed out, we are “witnessing an epochal shift in our socio-political world. We are de-evolving, hurtling headlong into a past that was defined by serfs and lords; by necromancy and superstition; by policies based on fiat, not facts.”[27] We are also plunging into a dark world of anti-intellectualism, civic illiteracy and a formative culture supportive of an authoritarian state. The embrace of ignorance is at the center of political life today, and a reactionary form of public pedagogy has become the most powerful element of the politics of authoritarianism. Civic illiteracy is the modus operandi for creating depoliticized subjects who believe that consumerism is the only obligation of citizenship, who privilege opinions over reasoned arguments, and who are led to believe that ignorance is a virtue rather than a political and civic liability. In any educated democracy, much of the debate that occupies political life today, extending from creationism and climate change denial to “birther” arguments, would be speedily dismissed as magical thinking, superstition and an obvious form of ignorance. Mark Slouka is right in arguing that, “Ignorance gives us a sense of community; it confers citizenship; our representatives either share it or bow down to it or risk our wrath…. Communicate intelligently in America and you’re immediately suspect.”[28] The politics and machinery of disimagination and its production of ever-deepening ignorance dominates American society because it produces, to a large degree, uninformed customers, hapless clients, depoliticized subjects and illiterate citizens incapable of holding corporate and political power accountable. At stake here is more than the dangerous concentration of economic, political and cultural power in the hands of the ultrarich, megacorporations and elite financial services industries. Also at issue is the widespread perversion of the social, critical education, the public good, and democracy itself.

Toward a Radical Imagination

Against the politics of disimagination, progressives, workers, educators, young people and others need to develop a a new language of radical reform and create new public spheres that provide the pedagogical conditions for critical thought, dialogue and thoughtful deliberation. At stake here is a notion of pedagogy that both informs the mind and creates the conditions for modes of agency that are critical, informed, engaged and socially responsible. The radical imagination can be nurtured around the merging of critique and hope, the capacity to connect private troubles with broader social considerations, and the production of alternative formative cultures that provide the precondition for political engagement and for energizing democratic movements for social change – movements willing to think beyond isolated struggles and the limits of a savage global capitalism. Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis point to such a project in their manifesto on the radical imagination. They write:

This Manifesto looks forward to the creation of a new political Left formation that can overcome fragmentation, and provide a solid basis for many-side interventions in the current economic, political and social crises that afflict people in all walks of life. The Left must once again offer to young people, people of color, women, workers, activists, intellectuals and newly-arrived immigrants places to learn how the capitalist system works in all of its forms of exploitation whether personal, political, or economic. We need to reconstruct a platform to oppose Capital. It must ask in this moment of US global hegemony what are the alternatives to its cruel power over our lives, and those of large portions of the world’s peoples. And the Left formation is needed to offer proposals on how to rebuild a militant, democratic labor movement, strengthen and transform the social movements; and, more generally, provide the opportunity to obtain a broad education that is denied to them by official institutions. We need a political formation dedicated to the proposition that radical theory and practice are inextricably linked, that knowledge without action is impotent, but action without knowledge is blind.[29]

Matters of justice, equality, and political participation are foundational to any functioning democracy, but it is important to recognize that they have to be rooted in a vibrant formative culture in which democracy is understood not just as a political and economic structure but also as a civic force enabling justice, equality and freedom to flourish. While the institutions and practices of a civil society and an aspiring democracy are essential in this project, what must also be present are the principles and modes of civic education and critical engagement that support the very foundations of democratic culture. Central to such a project is the development of a new radical imagination both through the pedagogies and projects of public intellectuals in the academy and through work that can be done in other educational sites, such as the new media. Utilizing the Internet, social media, and other elements of the digital and screen culture, public intellectuals, cultural workers, young people and others can address larger audiences and present the task of challenging diverse forms of oppression, exploitation and exclusion as part of a broader effort to create a radical democracy.

There is a need to invent modes of pedagogy that release the imagination, connect learning to social change and create social relations in which people assume responsibility for each other. Such a pedagogy is not about methods or prepping students to learn how to take tests. Nor is such an education about imposing harsh disciplinary behaviors in the service of a pedagogy of oppression. On the contrary, it is about a moral and political practice capable of enabling students and others to become more knowledgeable while creating the conditions for generating a new vision of the future in which people can recognize themselves, a vision that connects with and speaks to the desires, dreams and hopes of those who are willing to fight for a radical democracy. Americans need to develop a new understanding of civic literacy, education and engagement, one capable of developing a new conversation and a new political project about democracy, inequality, and the redistribution of wealth and power, and how such a discourse can offer the conditions for democratically inspired visions, modes of governance and policymaking. Americans need to embrace and develop modes of civic literacy, critical education and democratic social movements that view the public good as a utopian imaginary, one that harbors a trace and vision of what it means to defend old and new public spheres that offer spaces where dissent can be produced, public values asserted, dialogue made meaningful and critical thought embraced as a noble ideal.

Elements of such a utopian imaginary can be found in James Baldwin’s “Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Davis,” in which he points out that “we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal.”[30] The utopian imaginary is also on full display in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” where King states under the weight and harshness of incarceration that an “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere … [and asks whether we will] be extremists for the preservation of injustice – or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?”[31] According to King, “we must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy.”[32] We hear it in the words of former Harvard University President James B. Conant, who makes an impassioned call for “the need for the American radical – the missing political link between the past and future of this great democratic land.” [33] We hear it in the voices of young people all across the United States – the new American radicals – who are fighting for a society in which justice matters, social protections are guaranteed, equality is insured, and education becomes a right and not an entitlement. The radical imagination waits to be unleashed through social movements in which injustice is put on the run and civic literacy, economic justice, and collective struggle once again become the precondition for agency, hope and the struggle over democracy.

Endnotes

1.
David Theo Goldberg, “Mission Accomplished: Militarizing Social Logic,”in Enrique Jezik: Obstruct, destroy, conceal, ed. Cuauhtémoc Medina (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2011), 183-198.

2.
See, for example, Colin Leys, Market Driven Politics (London: Verso, 2001); Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Pierre Bourdieu, Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2. Trans. Loic Wacquant (New York: The New Press, 2003); Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston, Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader (London: Pluto Press, 2005); Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Gerad Dumenil and Dominique Levy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Henry A. Giroux, Twilight of the Social (Boulder: Paradigm, 2013); Stuart Hall, “The March of the Neoliberals,” The Guardian, (September 12, 2011). online at:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/sep/12/march-of-the-neoliberals

3.
See most recently  Kelly V. Vlahos, “Boots on Campus,” Anti War.com (February 26, 2013). On line: http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2013/02/25/boots-on-campus/ and David H. Price, Weaponizing Anthropology (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011).

3A. Greg Bishop, “A Company that Runs Prisons Will Have its Name on a Stadium,”New York Times (February 19, 2013). Online:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/sports/ncaafootball/a-company-that-runs-prisons-will-have-its-name-on-a-stadium.html?_r=0

4.
Ibid. Goldberg, pp. 197-198.

5.
Jonathan Schell, “Cruel America”, The Nation, (September 28, 2011) online:http://www.thenation.com/article/163690/cruel-america

6.
Suzi Parker, “Cops Nab 5-Year-Old for Wearing Wrong Color Shoes to School,” Take Part, (January 18, 2013). Online:http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/01/18/cops-nab-five-year-old-wearing-wrong-color-shoes-school

7.
Susan Saulny, “After Recession, More Young Adults Are Living on Street,” The New York Times, (December 18, 2012). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/us/since-recession-more-young-americans-are-homeless.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

8.
Suzanne Gamboa and Monika Mathur, “Guns Kill Young Children Daily In The U.S.,” Huffington Post (December 24, 2012). Online:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/24/guns-children_n_2359661.html

9.
John le Carre, “The United States of America Has Gone Mad,” CommonDreams (January 15, 2003). Online: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0115-01.htm

10.
Eric Mann Interviews Mumbia Abu Jamal, “Mumia Abu Jamal: On his biggest political influences and the political ‘mentacide’ of today’s youth.” Voices from the Frontlines Radio (April 9, 2012).

11.
See, for example, Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America (New York: Random House, 2012).

12.
Michael Yates, “The Great Inequality,” Monthly Review, (March 1, 2012).

13.
Ibid.

14.
Guy Standing, The New Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).

15.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

16.
This issue is taken up brilliantly in Irving Howe, “Reaganism: The Spirit of the Times,” Selected Writings 1950-1990 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), pp. 410-423.

17.
I take up this issue in detail in Henry A. Giroux, The University in Chains: Challenging the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007).

18.
Aaron B. O’Connell, “The Permanent Militarization of America,” The New York Times, (November 4, 2012). Online:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/opinion/the-permanent-militarization-of-america.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

19.
Dominic Tierney, “The F-35: A Weapon that Costs More Than Australia,” The Atlantic (February 13, 2013). Online:http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/03/the-f-35-a-weapon-that-costs-more-than-australia/72454/

20.
John Hinkson, “The GFC Has Just Begun,”Arena Magazine 122 (March 2013), p. 51.

21.
Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 1-2.

22.
Katherine Stewart, “Is Texas Waging War on History?”AlterNet (May 21, 2012). Online: http://www.alternet.org/story/155515/is_texas_waging_war_on_history

23.
Ibid.

24.
See, for instance, Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality (New York: Wiley, 2012).

25.
Steve Horn, “Three States Pushing ALEC Bill to Require Teachng Climate Change Denial in Schools,”Desmogblog.com (January 31, 2013). Online:www.desmogblog.com/2013/01/31/three-states-pushing-alec-bill-climate-change-denial-schools

26.
Igor Volsky, “Arizona Bill to Force Students to Take a Loyalty Oath,” AlterNet (January 26, 2013).

27.
John Atcheson, “Dark ages Redux: American Politics and the End of the Enlightenment,” CommonDreams (June 18, 2012). Online:https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/06/18-2

28.
Mark Slouka, “A Quibble,” Harper’s Magazine (February 2009).

29.
Manifesto, Left Turn: An Open Letter to U.S. Radicals, (N.Y.: The Fifteenth Street Manifesto Group, March 2008), pp. 4-5.

30.
James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis,” The New York Review of Books, (January 7, 1971). Online: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1971/jan/07/an-open-letter-to-my-sister-miss-angela-davis/?pagination=false

31.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” (1963), in James M. Washington, The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), pp.290, 298.

32.
Ibid, 296.

33.
James B. Conant, “Wanted: American Radicals”, The Atlantic, May 1943.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission of the author.

A tinta vermelha: discurso de Slavoj Žižek aos manifestantes do movimento Occupy Wall Street (Boitempo)

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http://www.comunistas.spruz.com/pt/A-tinta-vermelha-discurso-de-Slavoj-Zizek-aos-manifestantes-do-Occupy-Wall-Street/blog.htm

Oct 9, 2011

Não se apaixonem por si mesmos, nem pelo momento agradável que estamos tendo aqui. Carnavais custam muito pouco – o verdadeiro teste de seu valor é o que permanece no dia seguinte, ou a maneira como nossa vida normal e cotidiana será modificada. Apaixone-se pelo trabalho duro e paciente – somos o início, não o fim. Nossa mensagem básica é: o tabu já foi rompido, não vivemos no melhor mundo possível, temos a permissão e a obrigação de pensar em alternativas. Há um longo caminho pela frente, e em pouco tempo teremos de enfrentar questões realmente difíceis – questões não sobre aquilo que não queremos, mas sobre aquilo que QUEREMOS. Qual organização social pode substituir o capitalismo vigente? De quais tipos de líderes nós precisamos? As alternativas do século XX obviamente não servem.

Então não culpe o povo e suas atitudes: o problema não é a corrupção ou a ganância, mas o sistema que nos incita a sermos corruptos. A solução não é o lema “Main Street, not Wall Street”, mas sim mudar o sistema em que a Main Street não funciona sem o Wall Street. Tenham cuidado não só com os inimigos, mas também com falsos amigos que fingem nos apoiar e já fazem de tudo para diluir nosso protesto. Da mesma maneira que compramos café sem cafeína, cerveja sem álcool e sorvete sem gordura, eles tentarão transformar isto aqui em um protesto moral inofensivo. Mas a razão de estarmos reunidos é o fato de já termos tido o bastante de um mundo onde reciclar latas de Coca-Cola, dar alguns dólares para a caridade ou comprar um cappuccino da Starbucks que tem 1% da renda revertida para problemas do Terceiro Mundo é o suficiente para nos fazer sentir bem. Depois de terceirizar o trabalho, depois de terceirizar a tortura, depois que as agências matrimoniais começaram a terceirizar até nossos encontros, é que percebemos que, há muito tempo, também permitimos que nossos engajamentos políticos sejam terceirizados – mas agora nós os queremos de volta.

Dirão que somos “não americanos”. Mas quando fundamentalistas conservadores nos disserem que os Estados Unidos são uma nação cristã, lembrem-se do que é o Cristianismo: o Espírito Santo, a comunidade livre e igualitária de fiéis unidos pelo amor. Nós, aqui, somos o Espírito Santo, enquanto em Wall Street eles são pagãos que adoram falsos ídolos.

Dirão que somos violentos, que nossa linguagem é violenta, referindo-se à ocupação e assim por diante. Sim, somos violentos, mas somente no mesmo sentido em que Mahatma Gandhi foi violento. Somos violentos porque queremos dar um basta no modo como as coisas andam – mas o que significa essa violência puramente simbólica quando comparada à violência necessária para sustentar o funcionamento constante do sistema capitalista global?

Seremos chamados de perdedores – mas os verdadeiros perdedores não estariam lá em Wall Street, os que se safaram com a ajuda de centenas de bilhões do nosso dinheiro? Vocês são chamados de socialistas, mas nos Estados Unidos já existe o socialismo para os ricos. Eles dirão que vocês não respeitam a propriedade privada, mas as especulações de Wall Street que levaram à queda de 2008 foram mais responsáveis pela extinção de propriedades privadas obtidas a duras penas do que se estivéssemos destruindo-as agora, dia e noite – pense nas centenas de casas hipotecadas…

Nós não somos comunistas, se o comunismo significa o sistema que merecidamente entrou em colapso em 1990 – e lembrem-se de que os comunistas que ainda detêm o poder atualmente governam o mais implacável dos capitalismos (na China). O sucesso do capitalismo chinês liderado pelo comunismo é um sinal abominável de que o casamento entre o capitalismo e a democracia está próximo do divórcio. Nós somos comunistas em um sentido apenas: nós nos importamos com os bens comuns – os da natureza, do conhecimento – que estão ameaçados pelo sistema.

Eles dirão que vocês estão sonhando, mas os verdadeiros sonhadores são os que pensam que as coisas podem continuar sendo o que são por um tempo indefinido, assim como ocorre com as mudanças cosméticas. Nós não estamos sonhando; nós acordamos de um sonho que está se transformando em pesadelo. Não estamos destruindo nada; somos apenas testemunhas de como o sistema está gradualmente destruindo a si próprio. Todos nós conhecemos a cena clássica dos desenhos animados: o gato chega à beira do precipício e continua caminhando, ignorando o fato de que não há chão sob suas patas; ele só começa a cair quando olha para baixo e vê o abismo. O que estamos fazendo é simplesmente levar os que estão no poder a olhar para baixo…

Então, a mudança é realmente possível? Hoje, o possível e o impossível são dispostos de maneira estranha. Nos domínios da liberdade pessoal e da tecnologia científica, o impossível está se tornando cada vez mais possível (ou pelo menos é o que nos dizem): “nada é impossível”, podemos ter sexo em suas mais perversas variações; arquivos inteiros de músicas, filmes e seriados de TV estão disponíveis para download; a viagem espacial está à venda para quem tiver dinheiro; podemos melhorar nossas habilidades físicas e psíquicas por meio de intervenções no genoma, e até mesmo realizar o sonho tecnognóstico de atingir a imortalidade transformando nossa identidade em um programa de computador. Por outro lado, no domínio das relações econômicas e sociais, somos bombardeados o tempo todo por um discurso do “você não pode” se envolver em atos políticos coletivos (que necessariamente terminam no terror totalitário), ou aderir ao antigo Estado de bem-estar social (ele nos transforma em não competitivos e leva à crise econômica), ou se isolar do mercado global etc. Quando medidas de austeridade são impostas, dizem-nos repetidas vezes que se trata apenas do que tem de ser feito. Quem sabe não chegou a hora de inverter as coordenadas do que é possível e impossível? Quem sabe não podemos ter mais solidariedade e assistência médica, já que não somos imortais?

Em meados de abril de 2011, a mídia revelou que o governo chinês havia proibido a exibição, em cinemas e na TV, de filmes que falassem de viagens no tempo e histórias paralelas, argumentando que elas trazem frivolidade para questões históricas sérias – até mesmo a fuga fictícia para uma realidade alternativa é considerada perigosa demais. Nós, do mundo Ocidental liberal, não precisamos de uma proibição tão explícita: a ideologia exerce poder material suficiente para evitar que narrativas históricas alternativas sejam interpretadas com o mínimo de seriedade. Para nós é fácil imaginar o fim do mundo – vide os inúmeros filmes apocalípticos –, mas não o fim do capitalismo.

Em uma velha piada da antiga República Democrática Alemã, um trabalhador alemão consegue um emprego na Sibéria; sabendo que todas as suas correspondências serão lidas pelos censores, ele diz para os amigos: “Vamos combinar um código: se vocês receberem uma carta minha escrita com tinta azul, ela é verdadeira; se a tinta for vermelha, é falsa”. Depois de um mês, os amigos receberam a primeira carta, escrita em azul: “Tudo é uma maravilha por aqui: os estoques estão cheios, a comida é abundante, os apartamentos são amplos e aquecidos, os cinemas exibem filmes ocidentais, há mulheres lindas prontas para um romance – a única coisa que não temos é tinta vermelha.” E essa situação, não é a mesma que vivemos até hoje? Temos toda a liberdade que desejamos – a única coisa que falta é a “tinta vermelha”: nós nos “sentimos livres” porque somos desprovidos da linguagem para articular nossa falta de liberdade. O que a falta de tinta vermelha significa é que, hoje, todos os principais termos que usamos para designar o conflito atual – “guerra ao terror”, “democracia e liberdade”, “direitos humanos” etc. etc. – são termos FALSOS que mistificam nossa percepção da situação em vez de permitir que pensemos nela. Você, que está aqui presente, está dando a todos nós tinta vermelha.

*   *   *

Slavoj Žižek speaks at Occupy Wall Street: Transcript (Impose)

BY SARAHANA » Don’t fall in love with yourselves

Posted on October 10, 2011

slavoj zizek speaking at occupy wall street

Yesterday at noon, this blog’s trusty mentor, the Slovenian philosopher-scholar Slavoj Žižek, spoke at Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street protests are being held. Here is a full transcript of his speech. Update: Transcript of the Q&A portion of the talk has been posted as well.

Made some corrections, Oct 25, 6:30PM EST

— TRANSCRIPT —

They are saying we are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by billions of our money. We are called socialists, but here there is always socialism for the rich. They say we don’t respect private property, but in the 2008 financial crash-down more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare.

We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons. The cat reaches a precipice but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath this ground. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street, “Hey, look down!”

In mid-April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. These people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dreaming. Here, we don’t need a prohibition because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like “Oh. we were young and it was beautiful.” Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?

Remember. The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system. It forces you to be corrupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat, they will try to make this into a harmless, moral protest. A decaffienated protest. But the reason we are here is that we have had enough of a world where, to recycle Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy a Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes to third world starving children is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after marriage agencies are now outsourcing our love life, we can see that for a long time, we allow our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back.

We are not Communists if Communism means a system which collapsed in 1990. Remember that today those Communists are the most efficient, ruthless Capitalists. In China today, we have Capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American Capitalism, but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize Capitalism, don’t allow yourself to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over. The change is possible.

What do we perceive today as possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little bit for the rich. They tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for health care, they tell you, “Impossible, this means totalitarian state.” There’s something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare. Maybe we need to set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standard of living. We want a better standard of living. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this, and only for this, we should fight.

Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not American here. But the conservatives fundamentalists who claim they really are American have to be reminded of something: What is Christianity? It’s the holy spirit. What is the holy spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the holy spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostaligically remembering “What a nice time we had here.” Promise yourselves that this will not be the case. We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much.

— END OF TRANSCRIPT —

Here’s Astra Taylor, who made the documentaries Zizek! and An Examined Life. (She also happens to be married to Jeff Mangum, who performed earlier in the week for the protestors.)

Free training included how to undo a handcuff:

– See more at: http://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/slavoj-zizek-at-occupy-wall-street-transcript#sthash.XOa1Suzj.dpuf

Edward O. Wilson: The Riddle of the Human Species (N.Y.Times)

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THE STONEFebruary 24, 2013, 7:30 pm

By EDWARD O. WILSON

The task of understanding humanity is too important and too daunting to leave to the humanities. Their many branches, from philosophy to law to history and the creative arts, have described the particularities of human nature with genius and exquisite detail, back and forth in endless permutations. But they have not explained why we possess our special nature and not some other out of a vast number of conceivable possibilities. In that sense, the humanities have not accounted for a full understanding of our species’ existence.

So, just what are we? The key to the great riddle lies in the circumstance and process that created our species. The human condition is a product of history, not just the six millenniums of civilization but very much further back, across hundreds of millenniums. The whole of it, biological and cultural evolution, in seamless unity, must be explored for an answer to the mystery. When thus viewed across its entire traverse, the history of humanity also becomes the key to learning how and why our species survived.

A majority of people prefer to interpret history as the unfolding of a supernatural design, to whose author we owe obedience. But that comforting interpretation has grown less supportable as knowledge of the real world has expanded. Scientific knowledge (measured by numbers of scientists and scientific journals) in particular has been doubling every 10 to 20 years for over a century. In traditional explanations of the past, religious creation stories have been blended with the humanities to attribute meaning to our species’s existence. It is time to consider what science might give to the humanities and the humanities to science in a common search for a more solidly grounded answer to the great riddle.

To begin, biologists have found that the biological origin of advanced social behavior in humans was similar to that occurring elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Using comparative studies of thousands of animal species, from insects to mammals, they have concluded that the most complex societies have arisen through eusociality — roughly, “true” social condition. The members of a eusocial group cooperatively rear the young across multiple generations. They also divide labor through the surrender by some members of at least some of their personal reproduction in a way that increases the “reproductive success” (lifetime reproduction) of other members.

Leif Parsons

Eusociality stands out as an oddity in a couple of ways. One is its extreme rarity. Out of hundreds of thousands of evolving lines of animals on the land during the past 400 million years, the condition, so far as we can determine, has arisen only about two dozen times. This is likely to be an underestimate, due to sampling error. Nevertheless, we can be certain that the number of originations was very small.

Furthermore, the known eusocial species arose very late in the history of life. It appears to have occurred not at all during the great Paleozoic diversification of insects, 350 to 250 million years before the present, during which the variety of insects approached that of today. Nor is there as yet any evidence of eusocial species during the Mesozoic Era until the appearance of the earliest termites and ants between 200 and 150 million years ago. Humans at the Homo level appeared only very recently, following tens of millions of years of evolution among the primates.

Once attained, advanced social behavior at the eusocial grade has proved a major ecological success. Of the two dozen independent lines, just two within the insects — ants and termites — globally dominate invertebrates on the land. Although they are represented by fewer than 20 thousand of the million known living insect species, ants and termites compose more than half of the world’s insect body weight.

The history of eusociality raises a question: given the enormous advantage it confers, why was this advanced form of social behavior so rare and long delayed? The answer appears to be the special sequence of preliminary evolutionary changes that must occur before the final step to eusociality can be taken. In all of the eusocial species analyzed to date, the final step before eusociality is the construction of a protected nest, from which foraging trips begin and within which the young are raised to maturity. The original nest builders can be a lone female, a mated pair, or a small and weakly organized group. When this final preliminary step is attained, all that is needed to create a eusocial colony is for the parents and offspring to stay at the nest and cooperate in raising additional generations of young. Such primitive assemblages then divide easily into risk-prone foragers and risk-averse parents and nurses.

Leif Parsons

What brought one primate line to the rare level of eusociality? Paleontologists have found that the circumstances were humble. In Africa about two million years ago, one species of the primarily vegetarian australopithecine evidently shifted its diet to include a much higher reliance on meat. For a group to harvest such a high-energy, widely dispersed source of food, it did not pay to roam about as a loosely organized pack of adults and young like present-day chimpanzees and bonobos. It was more efficient to occupy a campsite (thus, the nest) and send out hunters who could bring home meat, either killed or scavenged, to share with others. In exchange, the hunters received protection of the campsite and their own young offspring kept there.

From studies of modern humans, including hunter-gatherers, whose lives tell us so much about human origins, social psychologists have deduced the mental growth that began with hunting and campsites. A premium was placed on personal relationships geared to both competition and cooperation among the members. The process was ceaselessly dynamic and demanding. It far exceeded in intensity anything similar experienced by the roaming, loosely organized bands of most animal societies. It required a memory good enough to assess the intentions of fellow members, to predict their responses, from one moment to the next; and it resulted in the ability to invent and inwardly rehearse competing scenarios of future interactions.

The social intelligence of the campsite-anchored prehumans evolved as a kind of non-stop game of chess. Today, at the terminus of this evolutionary process, our immense memory banks are smoothly activated across the past, present, and future. They allow us to evaluate the prospects and consequences variously of alliances, bonding, sexual contact, rivalries, domination, deception, loyalty and betrayal. We instinctively delight in the telling of countless stories about others as players upon the inner stage. The best of it is expressed in the creative arts, political theory, and other higher-level activities we have come to call the humanities.

The definitive part of the long creation story evidently began with the primitive Homo habilis (or a species closely related to it) two million years ago. Prior to the habilines the prehumans had been animals. Largely vegetarians, they had human-like bodies, but their cranial capacity remained chimpanzee-size, at or below 500 cubic centimeters. Starting with the habiline period the capacity grew precipitously: to 680 cubic centimeters in Homo habilis, 900 in Homo erectus, and about 1,400 in Homo sapiens. The expansion of the human brain was one of the most rapid episodes of evolution of complex organs in the history of life.

Still, to recognize the rare coming together of cooperating primates is not enough to account for the full potential of modern humans that brain capacity provides. Evolutionary biologists have searched for the grandmaster of advanced social evolution, the combination of forces and environmental circumstances that bestowed greater longevity and more successful reproduction on the possession of high social intelligence. At present there are two competing theories of the principal force. The first is kin selection: individuals favor collateral kin (relatives other than offspring) making it easier for altruism to evolve among members of the same group. Altruism in turn engenders complex social organization, and, in the one case that involves big mammals, human-level intelligence.

The second, more recently argued theory (full disclosure: I am one of the modern version’s authors), the grandmaster is multilevel selection. This formulation recognizes two levels at which natural selection operates: individual selection based on competition and cooperation among members of the same group, and group selection, which arises from competition and cooperation between groups. Multilevel selection is gaining in favor among evolutionary biologists because of a recent mathematical proof that kin selection can arise only under special conditions that demonstrably do not exist, and the better fit of multilevel selection to all of the two dozen known animal cases of eusocial evolution.

The roles of both individual and group selection are indelibly stamped (to borrow a phrase from Charles Darwin) upon our social behavior. As expected, we are intensely interested in the minutiae of behavior of those around us. Gossip is a prevailing subject of conversation, everywhere from hunter-gatherer campsites to royal courts. The mind is a kaleidoscopically shifting map of others, each of whom is drawn emotionally in shades of trust, love, hatred, suspicion, admiration, envy and sociability. We are compulsively driven to create and belong to groups, variously nested, overlapping or separate, and large or small. Almost all groups compete with those of similar kind in some manner or other. We tend to think of our own as superior, and we find our identity within them.

The existence of competition and conflict, the latter often violent, has been a hallmark of societies as far back as archaeological evidence is able to offer. These and other traits we call human nature are so deeply resident in our emotions and habits of thought as to seem just part of some greater nature, like the air we all breathe, and the molecular machinery that drives all of life. But they are not. Instead, they are among the idiosyncratic hereditary traits that define our species.

The major features of the biological origins of our species are coming into focus, and with this clarification the potential of a more fruitful contact between science and the humanities. The convergence between these two great branches of learning will matter hugely when enough people have thought it through. On the science side, genetics, the brain sciences, evolutionary biology, and paleontology will be seen in a different light. Students will be taught prehistory as well as conventional history, the whole presented as the living world’s greatest epic.

We will also, I believe, take a more serious look at our place in nature. Exalted we are indeed, risen to be the mind of the biosphere without a doubt, our spirits capable of awe and ever more breathtaking leaps of imagination. But we are still part of earth’s fauna and flora. We are bound to it by emotion, physiology, and not least, deep history. It is dangerous to think of this planet as a way station to a better world, or continue to convert it into a literal, human-engineered spaceship. Contrary to general opinion, demons and gods do not vie for our allegiance. We are self-made, independent, alone and fragile. Self-understanding is what counts for long-term survival, both for individuals and for the species.

Edward O. Wilson is Honorary Curator in Entomology and University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University. He has received more than 100 awards for his research and writing, including the U. S. National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize and two Pulitzer Prizes in non-fiction. His most recent book is “The Social Conquest of Earth.”

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Interview with Edward O. Wilson: The Origin of Morals (Spiegel)

February 26, 2013 – 01:23 PM

By Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle

American sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson is championing a controversial new approach for explaining the origins of virtue and sin. In an interview, the world-famous ant reseacher explains why he believes the inner struggle is the characteristic trait of human nature.

Edward O. Wilson doesn’t come across as the kind of man who’s looking to pick a fight. With his shoulders upright and his head tilting slightly to the side, he shuffles through the halls of Harvard University. His right eye, which has given him trouble since his childhood, is halfway closed. The other is fixed on the ground. As an ant researcher, Wilson has made a career out of things that live on the earth’s surface.

There’s also much more to Wilson. Some consider him to be the world’s most important living biologist, with some placing him on a level with Charles Darwin.

In addition to discovering and describing hundreds of species of ants, Wilson’s book on this incomparably successful group of insects is the only non-fiction biology tome ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. Another achievement was decoding the chemical communication of ants, whose vocabulary is composed of pheromones. His study of the ant colonization of islands helped to establish one of the most fruitful branches of ecology. And when it comes to the battle against the loss of biodiversity, Wilson is one of the movement’s most eloquent voices.

‘Blessed with Brilliant Enemies’

But Wilson’s fame isn’t solely the product of his scientific achievements. His enemies have also helped him to establish a name. “I have been blessed with brilliant enemies,” he says. In fact, the multitude of scholars with whom Wilson has skirmished academically is illustrious. James Watson, one of the discoverers of the double helix in DNA is among them, as is essayist Stephen Jay Gould.

At 83 years of age, Wilson is still at work making a few new enemies. The latest source of uproar is a book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” published last April in the United States and this month in a German-language edition. In the tome, Wilson attempts to describe the triumphal advance of humans in evolutionary terms.

It is not uncommon for Wilson to look to ants for inspiration in his writings — and that proves true here, as well. When, for example, he recalls beholding two 90-million-year-old worker ants that were trapped in a piece of fossil metasequoia amber as being “among the most exciting moments in my life,” a discovery that “ranked in scientific importance withArchaeopteryx, the first fossil intermediary between birds and dinosaurs, and Australopithecus, the first ‘missing link’ discovered between modern humans and the ancestral apes.”

But that’s all just foreplay to the real controversy at the book’s core. Ultimately, Wilson uses ants to explain humans’ social behavior and, by doing so, breaks with current convention. The key question is the level at which Darwinian selection of human characteristics takes place. Did individuals enter into a fight for survival against each other, or did groups battle it out against competing groups?

Prior to this book, Wilson had been an influential champion of the theory of kin selection. He has now rejected his previous teachings, literally demolishing them. “The beautiful theory never worked well anyway, and now it has collapsed,” he writes. Today, he argues that human nature can only be understood if it is perceived as being the product of “group selection” — a view that Wilson’s fellow academics equate with sacrilege. They literally lined up to express their scientific dissent in a joint letter.

Some of the most vociferous criticism has come from Richard Dawkins, whose bestselling 1976 book “The Selfish Gene” first introduced the theory of kin selection to a mass audience. In a withering review of Wilson’s book in Britain’s Prospect magazine, Dawkins accuses a man he describes as his “lifelong hero” of “wanton arrogance” and “perverse misunderstandings”. “To borrow from Dorothy Parker,” he writes, “this is not a book to be tossed lightly aside. It should be thrown with great force.”

SPIEGEL recently sat down with sociobiologist Wilson to discuss his book and the controversy surrounding it.

SPIEGEL: Professor Wilson, lets assume that 10 million years ago some alien spacecraft had landed on this planet. Which organisms would they find particularly intriguing?

Wilson: Their interest, I believe, would not have been our ancestors. Primarily, they would have focused on ants, bees, wasps, and termites. Their discovery is what the aliens would report back to headquarters.

SPIEGEL: And you think those insects would be more interesting to them than, for example, elephants, flocks of birds or intelligent primates?

Wilson: They would be, because, at that time, ants and termites would be the most abundant creatures on the land and the most highly social creatures with very advanced division of labor and caste. We call them “eusocial,” and this phenomenon seems to be extremely rare.

SPIEGEL: What else might the aliens consider particularly interesting about ants?

Wilson: Ants engage in farming and animal husbandry. For example, some of them cultivate fungi. Others herd aphids and literally milk them by stroking them with their antennae. And the other thing the aliens would find extremely interesting would be the degree to which these insects organize their societies by pheromones, by chemical communication. Ants and termites have taken this form of communication to extremes.

SPIEGEL: So the aliens would cable back home: “We have found ants. They are the most promising candidates for a future evolution towards intelligent beings on earth?”

Wilson: No, they wouldn’t. They would see that these creatures were encased in exoskeletons and therefore had to remain very small. They would conclude that there was little chance for individual ants or termites to develop much reasoning power, nor, as a result, the capacity for culture. But at least on this planet, you have to be big in order to have sufficient cerebral cortex. And you probably have to be bipedal and develop hands with pulpy fingers, because those give you the capacity to start creating objects and to manipulate the environment.

SPIEGEL: Would our ancestors not have caught their eye?

Wilson: Ten million years ago, our ancestors indeed had developed a somewhat larger brain and versatile hands already. But the crucial step had yet to come.

SPIEGEL: What do you mean?

Wilson: Let me go back to the social insects for a moment. Why did social insects start to form colonies? Across hundreds of millions of years, insects had been proliferating as solitary forms. Some of them stayed with their young for a while, guided them and protected them. You find that widespread but far from universal in the animal kingdom. However, out of those species came a much smaller number of species who didn’t just protect their young, but started building nests that they defended …

SPIEGEL: … similar to birds.

Wilson: Yes. And I think that birds are right at the threshold of eusocial behaviour. But looking at the evolution of ants and termites again, there is another crucial step. In an even smaller group, the young don’t only grow up in their nest, but they also stay and care for the next generation. Now you have a group staying together with a division of labor. That is evidently the narrow channel of evolution that you have to pass through in order to become eusocial.

SPIEGEL: And our ancestors followed the same path?

Wilson: Yes. I argue that Homo habilis, the first humans, also went through these stages. In particular, Homo habilis was unique in that they already had shifted to eating meat.

SPIEGEL: What difference would that make?

Wilson: When animals start eating meat, they tend to form packs and to divide labor. We know that the immediate descendants of Homo habilis, Homo erectus, gathered around camp sites and that they actually had begun to use fire. These camp sites are equivalent to nests. That’s where they gathered in a tightly knit group, and then individuals went out searching for food.

SPIEGEL: And this development of groups drives evolution even further?

Wilson: Exactly. And, for example, if it now comes to staking out the hunting grounds, then group stands against group.

SPIEGEL: Meaning that this is the origin of warfare?

Wilson: Yes. But it doesn’t take necessarily the forming of an army or a battalion and meeting on the field and fighting. It was mostly what you call “vengeance raids”. One group attacks another, maybe captures a female or kills one or two males. The other group then counterraids, and this will go back and forth, group against group.

SPIEGEL: You say that this so called group selection is vital for the evolution of humans. Yet traditionally, scientists explain the emergence of social behavior in humans by kin selection.

Wilson: That, for a number of reasons, isn’t much good as an explanation.

SPIEGEL: But you yourself have long been a proponent of this theory. Why did you change your mind?

Wilson: You are right. During the 1970s, I was one of the main proponents of kin selection theory. And at first the idea sounds very reasonable. So for example, if I favored you because you were my brother and therefore we share one half of our genes, then I could sacrifice a lot for you. I could give up my chance to have children in order to get you through college and have a big family. The problem is: If you think it through, kin selection doesn’t explain anything. Instead, I came to the conclusion that selection operates on multiple levels. On one hand, you have normal Darwinian selection going on all the time, where individuals compete with each other. In addition, however, these individuals now form groups. They are staying together, and consequently it is group versus group.

SPIEGEL: Turning away from kin selection provoked a rather fierce reaction from many of your colleagues.

Wilson: No, it didn’t. The reaction was strong, but it came from a relatively small group of people whose careers are based upon studies of kin selection.

SPIEGEL: Isn’t that too easy? After all, 137 scientists signed a response to your claims. They accuse you of a “misunderstanding of evolutionary theory”.

Wilson: You know, most scientists are tribalists. Their lives are so tied up in certain theories that they can’t let go.

SPIEGEL: Does it even make a substantial difference if humans evolved through kin selection or group selection?

Wilson: Oh, it changes everything. Only the understanding of evolution offers a chance to get a real understanding of the human species. We are determined by the interplay between individual and group selection where individual selection is responsible for much of what we call sin, while group selection is responsible for the greater part of virtue. We’re all in constant conflict between self-sacrifice for the group on the one hand and egoism and selfishness on the other. I go so far as to say that all the subjects of humanities, from law to the creative arts are based upon this play of individual versus group selection.

SPIEGEL: Is this Janus-faced nature of humans our greatest strength at the end of the day?

Wilson: Exactly. This inner conflict between altruism and selfishness is the human condition. And it is very creative and probably the source of our striving, our inventiveness and imagination. It’s that eternal conflict that makes us unique.

SPIEGEL: So how do we negotiate this conflict?

Wilson: We don’t. We have to live with it.

SPIEGEL: Which element of this human condition is stronger?

Wilson: Let’s put it this way: If we would be mainly influenced by group selection, we would be living in kind of an ant society.

SPIEGEL: … the ultimate form of communism?

Wilson: Yes. Once in a while, humans form societies that emphasize the group, for example societies with Marxist ideology. But the opposite is also true. In other societies the individual is everything. Politically, that would be the Republican far right.

SPIEGEL: What determines which ideology is predominant in a society?

Wilson: If your territory is invaded, then cooperation within the group will be extreme. That’s a human instinct. If you are in a frontier area, however, then we tend to move towards the extreme individual level. That seems to be a good part of the problem still with America. We still think we’re on the frontier, so we constantly try to put forward individual initiative and individual rights and rewards based upon individual achievement.

SPIEGEL: Earlier, you differentiated between the “virtue” of altruism and the “sin” of individualism. In your book you talk about the “poorer and the better angels” of human nature. Is it helpful to use this kind of terminology?

Wilson: I will admit that using the terminology of “virtue” and “sin” is what poets call a “trope”. That is to say, I wanted the idea in crude form to take hold. Still, a lot of what we call “virtue” has to do with propensities to behave well toward others. What we call “sin” are things that people do mainly out of self-interest.

SPIEGEL: However, our virtues towards others go only so far. Outside groups are mainly greeted with hostility.

Wilson: You are right. People have to belong to a group. That’s one of the strongest propensities in the human psyche and you won’t be able to change that. However, I think we are evolving, so as to avoid war — but without giving up the joy of competition between groups. Take soccer …

SPIEGEL: … or American football.

Wilson: Oh, yes, American football, it’s a blood sport. And people live by team sports and national or regional pride connected with team sports. And that’s what we should be aiming for, because, again, that spirit is one of the most creative. It landed us on the moon, and people get so much pleasure from it. I don’t want to see any of that disturbed. That is a part of being human. We need our big games, our team sports, our competition, our Olympics.

SPIEGEL: “Humans,” the saying goes, “have Paleolithic emotions” …

Wilson: … “Medieval institutions and god-like technology”. That’s our situation, yeah. And we really have to handle that.

SPIEGEL: How?

Wilson: So often it happens that we don’t know how, also in situations of public policy and governance, because we don’t have enough understanding of human nature. We simply haven’t looked at human nature in the best way that science might provide. I think what we need is a new Enlightenment. During the 18th century, when the original Enlightenment took place, science wasn’t up to the job. But I think science is now up to the job. We need to be harnessing our scientific knowledge now to get a better, science-based self-understanding.

SPIEGEL: It seems that, in this process, you would like to throw religions overboard altogether?

Wilson: No. That’s a misunderstanding. I don’t want to see the Catholic Church with all of its magnificent art and rituals and music disappear. I just want to have them give up their creation stories, including especially the resurrection of Christ.

SPIEGEL: That might well be a futile endeavour …

Wilson: There was this American physiologist who was asked if Mary’s bodily ascent from Earth to Heaven was possible. He said, “I wasn’t there; therefore, I’m not positive that it happened or didn’t happen; but of one thing I’m certain: She passed out at 10,000 meters.” That’s where science comes in. Seriously, I think we’re better off with no creation stories.

SPIEGEL: With this new Enlightenment, will we reach a higher state of humanity?

Wilson: Do we really want to improve ourselves? Humans are a very young species, in geologic terms, and that’s probably why we’re such a mess. We’re still living with all this aggression and ability to go to war. But do we really want to change ourselves? We’re right on the edge of an era of being able to actually alter the human genome. But do we want that? Do we want to create a race that’s more rational and free of many of these emotions? My response is no, because the only thing that distinguishes us from super-intelligent robots are our imperfect, sloppy, maybe even dangerous emotions. They are what makes us human.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Wilson, we thank you for this conversation.

Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle

The Destruction of Conscience in the National Academy of Sciences (Counter Punch)

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FEBRUARY 26, 2013

An Interview With Marshall Sahlins

by DAVID H. PRICE

Last Friday, esteemed University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins formally resigned from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the United States’ most prestigious scientific society.

Sahlins states that he resigned because of his “objections to the election of [Napoleon] Chagnon, and to the military research projects of the Academy.” Sahlins was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991.  He issued the below statement explaining his resignation:

“By the evidence of his own writings as well as the testimony of others, including Amazonian peoples and professional scholars of the region, Chagnon has done serious harm to the indigenous communities among whom he did research.  At the same time, his “scientific” claims about human evolution and the genetic selection for male violence–as in the notorious study he published in 1988 in Science–have proven to be shallow and baseless, much to the discredit of the anthropological discipline. At best, his election to the NAS was a large moral and intellectual blunder on the part of members of the Academy. So much so that my own participation in the Academy has become an embarrassment.

Nor do I wish to be a party to the aid, comfort, and support the NAS is giving to social science research on improving the combat performance of the US military, given the toll that military has taken on the blood, treasure, and happiness of American people, and the suffering it has imposed on other peoples in the unnecessary wars of this century.  I believe that the NAS, if it involves itself at all in related research, should be studying how to promote peace, not how to make war.”

Napoleon Chagnon rose to fame after his fieldwork among the Yanomami (also known as Yanomamo) in the rainforests of northeastern South America’s Orinoco Basin in the 1960s and 70s.  He wrote a bestselling ethnography used in introductory anthropology classes around the world, describing the Yanomami as “the fierce people” because of the high levels of intra- and inter-group warfare observed during his fieldwork, warfare that he would describe as innate and as representing humankind in some sort of imagined natural state.

Chagnon, is currently basking in the limelight of a national book tour, pitching a memoir (Nobel Savages) in which he castes the bulk of American anthropologists as soft-skulled anti-science postmodern cretins embroiled in a war against science.

The truth is that outside of the distortion field of the New York Times and a few other media vortexes, there is no “science war” raging in anthropology.  Instead the widespread rejection of Chagnon’s work among many anthropologists has everything to do with the low quality of his research.  On his blog, Anthropomics, anthropologist Jon Marks recently described Chagnon as an “incompetent anthropologist,” adding:

“Let me be clear about my use of the word “incompetent”.  His methods for collecting, analyzing and interpreting his data are outside the range of acceptable anthropological practices.  Yes, he saw the Yanomamo doing nasty things.  But when he concluded from his observations that the Yanomamo are innately and primordially “fierce”  he lost his anthropological credibility, because he had not demonstrated any such thing.   He has a right to his views, as creationists and racists have a right to theirs, but the evidence does not support the conclusion, which makes it scientifically incompetent.”

The widely shared rejection of Chagnon’s interpretations among anthropologists comes from the shoddy quality of his work and the sociobiological nature of his analysis, not with an opposition to science.

Among Chagnon’s most dogged critics was my dissertation chair, anthropologist Marvin Harris, himself an arch positivist and a staunch advocate of the scientific method, yet Harris rejected Chagnon and his sociobiological findings in fierce academic debates that lasted for decades, not because Harris was anti-science, but because Chagnon was a bad scientist (I should note that Harris and Sahlins also famously feuded over fundamental theoretical differences; yet both shared common ground objecting to the militarization of the discipline, and rejecting Chagnon’s sociobiological work).

I suppose if there really were battles within anthropology between imagined camps embracing and rejecting science, I would be about as firmly in the camp of science as anyone; but if such divisions actually existed, I would be no closer to accepting the validity and reliability (the hallmarks of good science) of Chagnon’s findings than those imagined to reject the foundations of science.

In 2000, there was of course a huge painful crisis within the American Anthropological Association following the publication of Patrick Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado, in which numerous accusations of exploitation (and worse) were leveled against Chagnon and other anthropologists working with the Yanomami (see Barbara Rose Johnston’s essay on the José Padilha’s film, Secrets of the Tribe). Without detailing all the twists and turns involved in establishing  the wreckage of Chagnon and the paucity of his claims, suffice it to say that the choice of offering one of the select seats in the National Academy of Sciences’ Section 51 to Dr. Chagnon is an affront to a broad range of anthropologists, be they self-identified as scientists or not.

Marshall Sahlins’ resignation is an heroic stand against the subversion of science to those claiming an innate nature of human violence, and a stand opposing the increasing militarization of science.  While Sahlins’ credentials as an activist opposing the militarization of knowledge are well established—he is widely recognized as the creator of the “teach-in,” organizing the February 1965 University of Michigan teach-in—it still must have been difficult for him to resign this prestigious position.

In late 1965 Sahlins traveled to Vietnam to learn firsthand about the war and the Americans fighting it, work that resulted in his seminal essay “The Destruction of Conscience in Vietnam.”   He became one of the clearest and most forceful anthropological voices speaking out against efforts (in the 1960s and 70s, and in again in post-9/11 America) to militarize anthropology.

In 2009 I was part of a conference at the University of Chicago critically examining renewed efforts by U.S. military and intelligence agencies to use anthropological data for counterinsurgency projects.  Sahlins’ paper at the conference argued that, “in Vietnam, the famous anti-insurgency strategy was search and destroy; here it is research and destroy.  One might think it good news that the military’s appropriation of anthropological theory is incoherent, simplistic and outmoded – not to mention tedious – even as its ethnographic protocols for learning the local society and culture amount to unworkable fantasies. ”

Yesterday, Sahlins sent me an email that had been circulated to NAS Section 51 (Anthropology) members, announcing two new “consensus projects” under sponsorship of the Army Research Institute.  The first project examined “The Context of Military Environments: Social and Organizational Factors,”  the second, “Measuring Human Capabilities: Performance Potential of Individuals and Collectives.”   Reading the announcement of these projects forwarded by Sahlins, it is apparent that the military wants the help of social scientists who can streamline military operations, using social science and social engineering to enable interchangeable units of people working on military projects to smoothly interface.  This seems to be increasingly becoming the role Americans see for anthropologists and other social scientists: that of military facilitator.

Below is the exchange, I had with Sahlins yesterday discussing his resignation, Chagnon’s election to the National Academy of Sciences, and the Academy’s links to military projects.

Price:  How has Chagnon so successfully turned numerous attacks on his ethically troubling research and scientifically questionable methods and findings into what is widely seen as an attack on science itself?

Sahlins: There has been no address of the issues on Chagnon’s part, notably of the criticism of his supposed empirical results, as in the 1988 Science article, and the numerous criticisms from Amazonian anthropologists of his shallow ethnography and villainously distorted portrayal of Yanomami.  These Cro-Chagnon scientists simply refuse to discuss the facts of the ethnographic case.  Instead they issue ad hominem attacks–before it was against the Marxists, now it is the ‘fuzzy-headed humanists.’ Meanwhile they try to make it an ideological anti-science persecution–again ironically as a diversion from discussing the empirical findings.  Meanwhile the serious harm, bodily and emotionally, inflicted on the Yanomami, plus the reckless instigation of war by his field methods, are completely ignored in the name of science. Research and destroy, as I called the method. A total moral copout.

Price: Most of the publicity surrounding your resignation from the National Academy of Sciences focuses either exclusively on Napoleon Chagnon’s election to the Association, or on the supposed “science wars” in anthropology, while little media attention has focused on your statements opposing the NAS’s increasing links to military projects.   What were the reactions within NAS Section 51 to the October 2012 call to members of the Academy to conduct research aimed at improving the military’s mission effectiveness?

Sahlins: The National Association of Science would not itself do the war research. It would rather enlist recruits from its sections–as in the section 51 memos–and probably thus participate in the vetting of reports before publication.  The National Research Council organizes the actual research, obviously in collaboration with the NAS. Here is another tentacle of the militarization of anthropology and other social sciences, of which the Human Terrain Systems is a familiar example. This one as insidious as it is perfidious.

Price: Was there any internal dialogue between members of NAS Section 51 when these calls for these new Army Research Institute funded projects were issued?

Sahlins: I was not privy to any correspondence, whether to the Section officers or between the fellows, if there was any–which I don’t know.

Price: What, if any reaction have you had from other NAS members?

Sahlins: Virtually none. One said I was always opposed to sociobiology

Price: To combine themes embedded in Chagnon’s claims of human nature, and the National Academy of Sciences supporting to social science for American military projects; can you comment on the role of science and scientific societies in a culture as centrally dominated by military culture as ours?

Sahlins: There is a paragraph or two in my pamphlet on The Western Illusion of Human Nature, of which I have no copy on hand, which cites Rumsfeld to the effect (paraphrasing Full Metal Jacket) that inside every Middle eastern Muslim there’s an American ready to come out, a self-interested freedom loving American, and we just have to force it out or force out the demons who are perpetrating other ideas [see page 42 of Sahlins; The Western Illusions of Human Nature].  Isn’t American global policy, especially neo-con policy, based on the confusion of capitalist greed and human nature? Just got to liberate them from their mistaken, externally imposed ideologies. For the alternative see the above mentioned pamphlet on the one true universal, kinship, and the little book I published last month: What Kinship Is–And Is Not.

Price: You mention a desire to shift funding streams from those offering military support, to those supporting peace.  Do you have any insight on how we can work to achieve this shift?

Sahlins:  I have not thought about it, probably because the idea that the National Academy of Sciences would so such a thing is essentially unthinkable today.

There is a rising international response supporting Sahlins’ stance.  Marshall shared with me a message he received form Professor, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, of the National Museum, Rio de Janeiro, in which de Castro wrote,

“Chagnon’s writings on the Yanomami of Amazonia have contributed powerfully to reinforce the worst prejudices against this indigenous people, who certainly do not need the kind of stereotyping pseudo-scientific anthropology Chagnon has chosen to pursue at their cost. The Yanomami are anything but the nasty, callous sociobiological robots Chagnon makes them look – projecting, in all likelihood, his perception of his own society (or personality) onto the Yanomami. They are an indigenous people who have managed, against all odds, to survive in their traditional ways in an Amazonia increasingly threatened by social and environmental destruction. Their culture is original, robust and inventive; their society is infinitely less “violent” than Brazilian or American societies.

Virtually all anthropologists who have worked with the Yanomami, many of them with far larger field experience with this people than Chagnon, find his research methods objectionable (to put it mildly) and his ethnographic characterizations fantastic. Chagnon’s election to the NAS does not do honor to American science nor to anthropology as a discipline, and it also bodes ill to the Yanomami. As far as I am concerned, I deem Chagnon an enemy of Amazonian Indians. I can only thank Prof. Sahlins for his courageous and firm position in support of the Yanomami and of anthropological science.”

We are left to wonder what is to become of science, whether practiced with a capital (at times blind) “S” or a lower case inquisitive variety, when those questioning some its practices, misapplications and outcomes are increasingly marginalized, while those whose findings align with our broader cultural values of warfare are embraced.  The NAS’s rallying around such a divisive figure as Chagnon, demonizing his critics, claiming they are attacking not his practices and theories, but science itself damages the credibility of these scientists.  It is unfortunate that the National Academy of Sciences has backed itself into this corner.

The dynamics of such divisiveness are not unique to this small segment of the scientific community. In his 1966 essay on, “The Destruction of Conscience in Vietnam,” Sahlins argued that to continue wage the war, America had to destroy its own conscience—that facing those destroyed by our actions was too much for the nation to otherwise bare, writing: “Conscience must be destroyed: it has to end at the barrel of a gun, it cannot extend to the bullet.  So all peripheral rationales fade into the background.  It becomes a war of transcendent purpose, and in such a war all efforts on the side of Good are virtuous, and all deaths unfortunate necessary.  The end justifies the means.”

It is a tragic state of affairs when good people of conscience see the only acceptable act before them to be that of resignation; but sometimes the choice of disassociation is the strongest statement one can courageously make.

David Price a professor of anthropology at Saint Martin’s University in Lacey, Washington. He is the author of Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State published by CounterPunch Books.

‘Noble Savages’: Chagnon’s new book triggers resignation and protests (Survival International)

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http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/8997

26 February 2013

Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami spokesperson and shaman, has spoken out against Napoleon Chagnon's new book 'Noble Savages'.

Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami spokesperson and shaman, has spoken out against Napoleon Chagnon’s new book ‘Noble Savages’. © Fiona Watson/Survival

A new book by controversial American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon has triggered a wave of protests among experts and Yanomami Indians:

  • Marshall Sahlins, ‘the world’s most respected anthropologist alive today’, has resigned from the US National Academy of Sciences in protest at Chagnon’s election to the Academy. Sahlins previously wrote a devastating critique of Chagnon’s work in the Washington Post.
  • Davi Kopenawa, a spokesman for Brazil’s Yanomami and President of the Yanomami association Hutukara, has spoken out about Chagnon’s work: ‘[Chagnon] said about us, ‘The Yanomami are savages!’ He teaches false things to young students. ‘Look, the Yanomami kill each other because of women.’ He keeps on saying this. But what do his leaders do? I believe that some years ago his leader waged a huge war – they killed thousands of children, they killed thousands of girls and boys. These big men killed almost everything. These are the fierce people, the true fierce people. They throw bombs, fire machine guns and finish off with the Earth. We don’t do this…’
  • A large group of anthropologists who have each worked with the Yanomami for many years have issued a statement challenging Chagnon’s assessment of the tribe as ‘fierce’ and ‘violent’. They describe the Yanomami as ‘generally peaceable.’
  • Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry has said, ’Chagnon’s work is frequently used by writers, such as Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker, who want to portray tribal peoples as ‘brutal savages’ – far more violent than ‘us’. But none of them acknowledge that his central findings about Yanomami ‘violence’ have long been discredited.’

Napoleon Chagnon’s autobiography ‘Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes – the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists’, has just been published. His 1968 book ‘Yanomamö: The Fierce People’ portrayed the Yanomami as ‘sly, aggressive and intimidating’, and claimed they ‘live in a state of chronic warfare’. It is still a standard work in undergraduate anthropology.

The Yanomami live in Brazil and Venezuela and are the largest relatively isolated tribe in South America. Their territory is protected by law, but illegal goldminers and ranchers continue to invade their land, destroying their forest and spreading diseases which in the 1980s killed one out of five Brazilian Yanomami.

Napoleon Chagnon's view that the Yanomami are 'sly, aggressive and intimidating' and that they 'live in a state of chronic warfare' has been widely discredited.Napoleon Chagnon’s view that the Yanomami are ‘sly, aggressive and intimidating’ and that they ‘live in a state of chronic warfare’ has been widely discredited. © Fiona Watson/Survival

Chagnon’s work has had far-reaching consequences for the rights of the Yanomami. In the late 1970s, Brazil’s military dictatorship, which was refusing to demarcate the Yanomami territory, was clearly influenced by the characterization of the Yanomami as hostile to each other and in the 1990s, the UK government refused funding for an education project with the Yanomami, saying that any project with the tribe should work on ‘reducing violence’.

Most recently, Chagnon’s work was cited in Jared Diamond’s highly controversial book ‘The World Until Yesterday’, in which he states that most tribal peoples, including the Yanomami, are ’trapped in cycles of violence and warfare’ and calls for the imposition of state control in order to bring them peace.

Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘The greatest tragedy in this story is that the real Yanomami have largely been written out of it, as the media have chosen to focus only on the salacious details of the debate that rages between anthropologists or on Chagnon’s disputed characterizations. In fact, Yanomamö: The Fierce People had disastrous repercussions both for the Yanomami and tribal peoples in general. There’s no doubt it’s been used against them and it has brought the 19th century myth of the ‘Brutal Savage’ back into mainstream thinking.’

Note to editors:
The full statements and additional information about the controversy can be found here.

Ao menos 70% das espécies da Terra são desconhecidas (Fapesp)

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Dando início ao Ciclo de Conferências 2013 do BIOTA-FAPESP Educação, Thomas Lewinsohn (Unicamp) falou sobre o tempo e o custo estimado para descrever todas as espécies do planeta (foto:Léo Ramos)

25/02/2013

Por Karina Toledo

Agência FAPESP – Embora o conhecimento sobre a biodiversidade do planeta ainda esteja muito fragmentado, estima-se que já tenham sido descritos aproximadamente 1,75 milhão de espécies diferentes de seres vivos – incluindo microrganismos, plantas e animais. O número pode impressionar os mais desavisados, mas representa, nas hipóteses mais otimistas, apenas 30% das formas de vida existentes na Terra.

“Estima-se que existam outros 12 milhões de espécies ainda por serem descobertas”, disse Thomas Lewinsohn, professor do Departamento de Biologia Animal da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), durante a apresentação que deu início ao Ciclo de Conferências 2013 organizado pelo programa BIOTA-FAPESP com o intuito de contribuir para o aperfeiçoamento do ensino de ciência.

Mas como avaliar o tamanho do desconhecimento sobre a biodiversidade? “Para isso, fazemos extrapolações, tomando como base os grupos de organismos mais bem estudados para avaliar os menos estudados. Regiões ou países em que a biota é bem conhecida para avaliar onde é menos conhecida. Por regra de três chegamos a essas estimativas”, explicou.

Técnicas mais recentes, segundo Lewinsohn, usam fórmulas estatísticas sofisticadas e se baseiam nas taxas de descobertas e de descrição de novas espécies. Os valores são ajustados de acordo com a força de trabalho existente, ou seja, o número de taxonomistas em atividade.

“No entanto, o mais importante a dizer é: não há consenso. As estimativas podem chegar a mais de 100 milhões de espécies desconhecidas. Não sabemos nem a ordem de grandeza e isso é espantoso”, disse.

Lewinsohn avalia que, para descrever todas as espécies que se estima haver no Brasil, seriam necessários cerca de 2 mil anos. “Para descrever todas as espécies do mundo o número seria parecido. Mas não temos esse tempo”, disse.

Algumas técnicas recentes de taxonomia molecular, como código de barras de DNA, podem ajudar a acelerar o trabalho, pois permitem identificar organismos por meio da análise de seu material genético. Por esse método, cadeias diferentes de DNA diferenciam as espécies, enquanto na taxonomia clássica a classificação é baseada na morfologia dos seres vivos, o que é bem mais trabalhoso.

“Dá para fazer? Sim, mas qual é o custo?”, questionou Lewinsohn. Um artigo publicado recentemente na revista Science apontou que seriam necessários de US$ 500 milhões a US$ 1 bilhão por ano, durante 50 anos, para descrever a maioria das espécies do planeta.

Novamente, o número pode assustar os desavisados, mas, de acordo com Lewinsohn, o montante corresponde ao que se gasta no mundo com armamento em apenas cinco dias. “Somente em 2011 foram gastos US$ 1,7 trilhão com a compra de armas. É preciso colocar as coisas em perspectiva”, defendeu.

Definindo prioridades

Muitas dessas espécies desconhecidas, porém, podem desaparecer do planeta antes mesmo que o homem tenha tempo e dinheiro suficiente para estudá-las. Segundo dados apresentados por Jean Paul Metzger, professor do Instituto de Biociências da Universidade de São Paulo (USP), mais de 50% da superfície terrestre já foi transformada pelo homem.

Essa alteração na paisagem tem muitas consequências e Metzger abordou duas delas na segunda apresentação do dia: a perda de habitat e a fragmentação.

“São conceitos diferentes, que muitas vezes se confundem. Fragmentação é a subdivisão de um habitat e pode não ocorrer quando o processo de degradação ocorre nas bordas da mata. Já a construção de uma estrada, por exemplo, cria fragmentos isolados dentro do habitat”, explicou.

Para Metzger, a fragmentação é a principal ameaça à biodiversidade, pois altera o equilíbrio entre os processos naturais de extinção de espécies e de colonização. Quanto menor e mais isolado é o fragmento, maior é a taxa de extinção e menor é a de colonização.

“Cada espécie tem uma quantidade mínima de habitat que precisa para sobreviver e se reproduzir. Não conhecemos bem esses limiares de extinção”, alertou.

Metzger acredita que esse limiar pode variar de acordo com a configuração da paisagem, ou seja, quanto mais fragmentado estiver o habitat, maior o risco de extinção de espécies. Como exemplo, ele citou as áreas remanescentes de Mata Atlântica do Estado de São Paulo, onde 95% dos fragmentos têm menos de 100 hectares.

“Estima-se que ao perder 90% do habitat, deveríamos perder 50% das espécies endêmicas. Na Mata Atlântica, há cerca de 16% de floresta remanescente. O esperado seria uma extinção em massa, mas nosso registro tem poucos casos. Ou nossa teoria está errada, ou não estamos detectando as extinções, pois as espécies nem sequer eram conhecidas”, afirmou Metzger.

Há, no entanto, um fator complicador: o período de latência entre a mudança na estrutura paisagem e mudança na estrutura da comunidade. Enquanto as espécies com ciclo curto de vida podem desaparecer rapidamente, aquelas com ciclo de vida longo podem responder à perda de habitat em escala centenária.

“Cria-se um débito de extinção e, mesmo que a alteração na paisagem seja interrompida, algumas espécies ficam fadadas a desaparecer com o tempo”, disse Metzger.

Mas a boa notícia é que as paisagens também se regeneram naturalmente e além do débito de extinção existe o crédito de recuperação. O período de latência representa, portanto, uma oportunidade de conservação.

“Hoje, temos evidências de que não adianta restaurar em qualquer lugar. É preciso definir áreas prioritárias para restauração que otimizem a conectividade e facilitem o fluxo biológico entre os fragmentos”, defendeu Metzger.

Colhendo frutos

Ao longo dos 13 anos de existência do BIOTA-FAPESP, a definição de áreas prioritárias de conservação e de recuperação no Estado de São Paulo foi uma das principais preocupações dos pesquisadores.

Os resultados desses estudos foram usados pela Secretaria Estadual do Meio Ambiente para embasar políticas públicas, como lembrou o coordenador do programa e professor do Instituto de Biologia da Unicamp, Carlos Alfredo Joly, na terceira e última apresentação do dia.

“Atualmente, pelo menos 20 instrumentos legais, entre leis, decretos e resoluções, citam nominalmente os resultados do BIOTA-FAPESP”, disse Joly.

Entre 1999 e 2009, disse o coordenador, houve um investimento anual de R$ 8 milhões no programa. Isso ajudou a financiar 94 projetos de pesquisa e resultou em mais de 700 artigos publicados em 181 periódicos, entre eles Nature e Science.

A equipe do programa também publicou 16 livros e dois atlas, descreveu mais de 2 mil novas espécies, produziu e armazenou informações sobre 12 mil espécies, disponibilizou e conectou digitalmente 35 coleções biológicas paulistas.

“Desde que foi renovado o apoio da FAPESP ao programa, em 2009, a questão da educação se tornou prioridade em nosso plano estratégico. O objetivo deste ciclo de conferências é justamente ampliar a comunicação com públicos além do meio científico, especialmente professores e estudantes”, disse Joly.

A segunda etapa do ciclo de palestras está marcada para 21 de março e terá como tema o “Bioma Pampa”. No dia 18 de abril, será a vez do “Bioma Pantanal”. Em 16 de maio, o tema será “Bioma Cerrado”. Em 20 de junho, será abordado o “Bioma Caatinga”.

Em 22 de agosto, será o “Bioma Mata Atlântica”. Em 19 de setembro, é a vez do “Bioma Amazônia”. Em 24 de outubro, o tema será “Ambientes Marinhos e Costeiros”. Finalizando o ciclo, em 21 de novembro, o tema será “Biodiversidade em Ambientes Antrópicos – Urbanos e Rurais”.

Programação do ciclo: www.fapesp.br/7487

India’s rice revolution (The Guardian)

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In a village in India’s poorest state, Bihar, farmers are growing world record amounts of rice – with no GM, and no herbicide. Is this one solution to world food shortages?

John Vidal in Bihar, India

The Observer, Saturday 16 February 2013 21.00 GMT

Sumant Kumar

Sumant Kumar photographed in Darveshpura, Bihar, India. Photograph: Chiara Goia for Observer Food Monthly

Sumant Kumar was overjoyed when he harvested his rice last year. There had been good rains in his village of Darveshpura in north-eastIndia and he knew he could improve on the four or five tonnes per hectare that he usually managed. But every stalk he cut on his paddy field near the bank of the Sakri river seemed to weigh heavier than usual, every grain of rice was bigger and when his crop was weighed on the old village scales, even Kumar was shocked.

This was not six or even 10 or 20 tonnes. Kumar, a shy young farmer in Nalanda district of India’s poorest state Bihar, had – using only farmyard manure and without any herbicides – grown an astonishing 22.4 tonnes of rice on one hectare of land. This was a world record and with rice the staple food of more than half the world’s population of seven billion, big news.

It beat not just the 19.4 tonnes achieved by the “father of rice”, the Chinese agricultural scientist Yuan Longping, but the World Bank-funded scientists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, and anything achieved by the biggest European and American seed and GM companies. And it was not just Sumant Kumar. Krishna, Nitish, Sanjay and Bijay, his friends and rivals in Darveshpura, all recorded over 17 tonnes, and many others in the villages around claimed to have more than doubled their usual yields.

The villagers, at the mercy of erratic weather and used to going without food in bad years, celebrated. But the Bihar state agricultural universities didn’t believe them at first, while India’s leading rice scientists muttered about freak results. The Nalanda farmers were accused of cheating. Only when the state’s head of agriculture, a rice farmer himself, came to the village with his own men and personally verified Sumant’s crop, was the record confirmed.

A tool used to harvest riceA tool used to harvest rice. Photograph: Chiara Goia

The rhythm of Nalanda village life was shattered. Here bullocks still pull ploughs as they have always done, their dung is still dried on the walls of houses and used to cook food. Electricity has still not reached most people. Sumant became a local hero, mentioned in the Indian parliament and asked to attend conferences. The state’s chief minister came to Darveshpura to congratulate him, and the village was rewarded with electric power, a bank and a new concrete bridge.

That might have been the end of the story had Sumant’s friend Nitish not smashed the world record for growing potatoes six months later. Shortly after Ravindra Kumar, a small farmer from a nearby Bihari village, broke the Indian record for growing wheat. Darveshpura became known as India’s “miracle village”, Nalanda became famous and teams of scientists, development groups, farmers, civil servants and politicians all descended to discover its secret.

When I meet the young farmers, all in their early 30s, they still seem slightly dazed by their fame. They’ve become unlikely heroes in a state where nearly half the families live below the Indian poverty line and 93% of the 100 million population depend on growing rice and potatoes. Nitish Kumar speaks quietly of his success and says he is determined to improve on the record. “In previous years, farming has not been very profitable,” he says. “Now I realise that it can be. My whole life has changed. I can send my children to school and spend more on health. My income has increased a lot.”

What happened in Darveshpura has divided scientists and is exciting governments and development experts. Tests on the soil show it is particularly rich in silicon but the reason for the “super yields” is entirely down to a method of growing crops called System of Rice (or root) Intensification (SRI). It has dramatically increased yields with wheat, potatoes, sugar cane, yams, tomatoes, garlic, aubergine and many other crops and is being hailed as one of the most significant developments of the past 50 years for the world’s 500 million small-scale farmers and the two billion people who depend on them.

People work on a rice field in BiharPeople work on a rice field in Bihar. Photograph: Chiara Goia

Instead of planting three-week-old rice seedlings in clumps of three or four in waterlogged fields, as rice farmers around the world traditionally do, the Darveshpura farmers carefully nurture only half as many seeds, and then transplant the young plants into fields, one by one, when much younger. Additionally, they space them at 25cm intervals in a grid pattern, keep the soil much drier and carefully weed around the plants to allow air to their roots. The premise that “less is more” was taught by Rajiv Kumar, a young Bihar state government extension worker who had been trained in turn by Anil Verma of a small Indian NGO called Pran (Preservation and
Proliferation of Rural Resources and Nature), which has introduced the SRI method to hundreds of villages in the past three years.

While the “green revolution” that averted Indian famine in the 1970s relied on improved crop varieties, expensive pesticides and chemical fertilisers, SRI appears to offer a long-term, sustainable future for no extra cost. With more than one in seven of the global population going hungry and demand for rice expected to outstrip supply within 20 years, it appears to offer real hope. Even a 30% increase in the yields of the world’s small farmers would go a long way to alleviating poverty.

“Farmers use less seeds, less water and less chemicals but they get more without having to invest more. This is revolutionary,” said Dr Surendra Chaurassa from Bihar’s agriculture ministry. “I did not believe it to start with, but now I think it can potentially change the way everyone farms. I would want every state to promote it. If we get 30-40% increase in yields, that is more than enough to recommend it.”

The results in Bihar have exceeded Chaurassa’s hopes. Sudama Mahto, an agriculture officer in Nalanda, says a small investment in training a few hundred people to teach SRI methods has resulted in a 45% increase in the region’s yields. Veerapandi Arumugam, the former agriculture minister of Tamil Nadu state, hailed the system as “revolutionising” farming.

SRI’s origins go back to the 1980s in Madagascar where Henri de Laulanie, a French Jesuit priest and agronomist, observed how villagers grew rice in the uplands. He developed the method but it was an American, professor Norman Uphoff, director of the International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development at Cornell University, who was largely responsible for spreading the word about De Laulanie’s work.

Given $15m by an anonymous billionaire to research sustainable development, Uphoff went to Madagascar in 1983 and saw the success of SRI for himself: farmers whose previous yields averaged two tonnes per hectare were harvesting eight tonnes. In 1997 he started to actively promote SRI in Asia, where more than 600 million people are malnourished.

“It is a set of ideas, the absolute opposite to the first green revolution [of the 60s] which said that you had to change the genes and the soil nutrients to improve yields. That came at a tremendous ecological cost,” says Uphoff. “Agriculture in the 21st century must be practised differently. Land and water resources are becoming scarcer, of poorer quality, or less reliable. Climatic conditions are in many places more adverse. SRI offers millions of disadvantaged households far better opportunities. Nobody is benefiting from this except the farmers; there are no patents, royalties or licensing fees.”

Rice seedsRice seeds. Photograph: Chiara Goia

For 40 years now, says Uphoff, science has been obsessed with improving seeds and using artificial fertilisers: “It’s been genes, genes, genes. There has never been talk of managing crops. Corporations say ‘we will breed you a better plant’ and breeders work hard to get 5-10% increase in yields. We have tried to make agriculture an industrial enterprise and have forgotten its biological roots.”

Not everyone agrees. Some scientists complain there is not enough peer-reviewed evidence around SRI and that it is impossible to get such returns. “SRI is a set of management practices and nothing else, many of which have been known for a long time and are best recommended practice,” says Achim Dobermann, deputy director for research at the International Rice Research Institute. “Scientifically speaking I don’t believe there is any miracle. When people independently have evaluated SRI principles then the result has usually been quite different from what has been reported on farm evaluations conducted by NGOs and others who are promoting it. Most scientists have had difficulty replicating the observations.”

Dominic Glover, a British researcher working with Wageningen University in the Netherlands, has spent years analysing the introduction of GM crops in developing countries. He is now following how SRI is being adopted in India and believes there has been a “turf war”.

“There are experts in their fields defending their knowledge,” he says. “But in many areas, growers have tried SRI methods and abandoned them. People are unwilling to investigate this. SRI is good for small farmers who rely on their own families for labour, but not necessarily for larger operations. Rather than any magical theory, it is good husbandry, skill and attention which results in the super yields. Clearly in certain circumstances, it is an efficient resource for farmers. But it is labour intensive and nobody has come up with the technology to transplant single seedlings yet.”

But some larger farmers in Bihar say it is not labour intensive and can actually reduce time spent in fields. “When a farmer does SRI the first time, yes it is more labour intensive,” says Santosh Kumar, who grows 15 hectares of rice and vegetables in Nalanda. “Then it gets easier and new innovations are taking place now.”

In its early days, SRI was dismissed or vilified by donors and scientists but in the past few years it has gained credibility. Uphoff estimates there are now 4-5 million farmers using SRI worldwide, with governments in China, India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam promoting it.

Sumant, Nitish and as many as 100,000 other SRI farmers in Bihar are now preparing their next rice crop. It’s back-breaking work transplanting the young rice shoots from the nursery beds to the paddy fields but buoyed by recognition and results, their confidence and optimism in the future is sky high.

Last month Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz visited Nalanda district and recognised the potential of this kind of organic farming, telling the villagers they were “better than scientists”. “It was amazing to see their success in organic farming,” said Stiglitz, who called for more research. “Agriculture scientists from across the world should visit and learn and be inspired by them.”

A man winnows rice in Satgharwa villageA man winnows rice in Satgharwa village. Photograph: Chiara Goia

Bihar, from being India’s poorest state, is now at the centre of what is being called a “new green grassroots revolution” with farming villages, research groups and NGOs all beginning to experiment with different crops using SRI. The state will invest $50m in SRI next year but western governments and foundations are holding back, preferring to invest in hi-tech research. The agronomist Anil Verma does not understand why: “The farmers know SRI works, but help is needed to train them. We know it works differently in different soils but the principles are solid,” he says. “The biggest problem we have is that people want to do it but we do not have enough trainers.

“If any scientist or a company came up with a technology that almost guaranteed a 50% increase in yields at no extra cost they would get a Nobel prize. But when young Biharian farmers do that they get nothing. I only want to see the poor farmers have enough to eat.”

Janet Chernela Interview with Davi Kopenawa (Affinities Blog)

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Published 23 FEBRUARY 2013

Janet Chernela Interview with Davi Kopenawa
Recorded in Demini, Parima Mountain Range, Brazil
June 7, 2001

This interview was conducted June 7, 2001, in the Yanomami village of Demini, Parima Highlands, Brazil. I had known Davi, who is a recognized spokesperson on indigenous affairs, through prior meetings in New York and in Brazil. Arrangements for the interview were made through CCPY, a Brazilian non-governmental organization working on behalf of the Yanomami. In this I relied on long-term contacts with CCPY and their abilities to reach Davi by radio. (Individuals who provided assistance included Marcos Wesley de Oliveira, Bruce Albert, Gale Gomez, and Ari Weidenshadt.) Although Davi now lives in Demini, he is from Totoobi, where, as a child of 9 he was vaccinated by the Neel team. Davi’s comments about the period of the Neel collections must be understood as childhood recollections. In the measles epidemic of 1968 Davi lost his mother and siblings. He and his older sister are the only remaining members of his immediate family. Both recall having supplied blood to the researchers. As you will see in the interview, they are not concerned with the whereabouts of their own blood as they are the whereabouts of the blood of their deceased relatives.

I invited Davi to participate in what I call “reciprocal interviewing” — that is, he could interview me as I could interview him. You will see that he exercises his privilege toward the end of the interview. He understood that he was invited to speak to the American Anthropological Assocation in this interview, and refers to the Association in the course of his talk.

Davi and I spoke in Portuguese. The interview was recorded on audio and video-tape, and later translated from tapes into English. Paragraphs, titles, and bracketed comments were added. Since Portuguese is not first language to either of us, it is not clear that the word choices were ideal. In some cases I included Davi’s choice of Portuguese term.

The publication of Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado is dated Jan. 17, 2002; an English-language copy was circulating on the internet about six months prior to its publication. At the time of the interview no Spanish or Portuguese version yet existed. A number of anthropologists had discussed the Tierney book with Davi before my arrival. Among these were Bruce Albert, Leda Martins, and an anthropologist whose name Davi could not recall. That anthropologist may have been Javier Carrera Rubio, a Venezuelan anthropologist who worked briefly for CCPY. I was accompanied in this interview by Ari Weidenshadt of CCPY, who participated actively in the discussion. For an understanding of events in 1968 the interview should be evaluated in light of documents that have been released since it was conducted. The words of Davi Yanomami, however, continue to have resonance beyond the past to include the enterprise of anthropological research, in general. The implications for globalization, cultural rights, and morality, are far-reaching.

“RECIPRICAL INTERVIEWS”

While walking to the shabono, a circular, thatch-roofed communal dwelling, I can overhear Ari speaking to Davi in the distance. Through my tape-recorder, I first hear Davi:

Davi: “hunt, tapir, monkey…bringing relatives together…call together people to kill the guy who killed own member…remembering, crying, everyone is angry..ai…Everyone goes there, they paint themselves. Prepare arrows. Get together alot of people — 50 Yanomami. They go to another shabono. Bring food, arrows, sleep in the forest. Next day get closer, and sleep close to the shabono. So they know..they will be avenged. At dawn, the enemy approaches. While people are sleeping inside, they wait…then when people go out to urinate — tchong! They strike with arrows. Arrows. Everyone wakes up, grabs his bow and arrows [and flees]. Everyone is running. They run out another exit, shootong as they go. There are three types of fighting. This is the third. THIS is war.

Janet: Does this actually happen?

Davi: Yes.

Janet: Did it happen in your lifetime?

Davi: Yes. I know about it because when I was small my uncle carried out alot of wars like this.

Janet: So it no longer occurs?

Davi: No, no one does this anymore. The warriors died. We are their children and we don’t make war. You can’t fight any more.

Janet: Is that group in Surucucú fighting?

Davi: Yes, they are fighting there. Because there they killed alot of people — they killed the headman of Surucucú so they [group from Surucucú] went over to Moxavi and killed the headman over there. The headman of Surucucú was a valiant warrior and a hard worker. He was an honest person. So his children avenged his death and killed the headman of Moxavi. Now it’s calm.

Janet: Where are the children today?

Davi: They are over there in Surucucú — Xerimú, Vinice, Hakoma, Tarimú Davi’s comments about the period of the Neel collections must be understood as the recollections of a child at the time., they are in Surucucú — enemies of Moxavi. Three groups are friends: Piris, Surucucú, Arawapu.

Janet: How many people live in Surucucú Davi’s comments about the period of the Neel collections must be understood as the recollections of a child at the time?

Davi: Thirty-something people, divided. The group that is making war is four hours walk away. They stopped fighting — they had to go back to work in their gardens. Food began to run out — there were no more bananas because they were afraid to leave the house to work in the gardens. They were afraid that people from Moxavi would attack. They are using fire arms over there at Surucucú [army post in Brazil near Venezuelan border].

Janet: How did they get these fire arms?

Davi: They got them from the goldminers who invaded our land.

Janet: Are there Yanomami in the army base at Surucucú Davi’s comments about the period of the Neel collections must be understood as the recollections of a child at the time?

Davi: No. In the beginning they [government] wanted that. They called Yanomami to serve in the army base. But no. Life in the armed forces isn’t a good thing. It’s very bad. It’s another kind of work — another fight. So they went back. They continue to be Yanomami. You must be who you are, the way you are. If not, you will suffer alot. It will be wrong. You will do many things wrong.

Janet: In Homoxi do they have war?

Davi: I don’t know. The Escurimuteri were allies of the Wahakuwu and they are enemies of people of Thirei and Homoxi [villages I visited in 2000].

Janet: Do people of Thirei use shotguns?

Davi: Yes.

Janet: From where did they get them?

Davi: From the miners.

Formal Interview: Davi on the book Darkness in El Dorado by Patrick Tierney

Davi: An anthropologist entered Yanomami lands in Venezuela. Many people know about this. …This book told stories about the Yanomami and it spread everywhere. So I remembered it when our friend [unnamed anthropologist] mentioned his name. When that young man spoke the name I remembered. We called him Waru. He was over there in Hasabuiteri… Shamatari…A few people — Brazilian anthropologists — are asking me what I think about this.

Anthropologists who enter the Yanomami area — whether Brazil or Venezuela — should speak with the people first to establish friendships; speak to the headman to ask for permissions; arrange money for flights. Because nabu (the white) doesn’t travel without money. Nabu doesn’t travel by land. Only by plane. It’s very far. So he’s very far away, this anthropologist who worked among the Shamatari. Those people are different.

He arrived, like you, making conversation, taking photos, asking about what he saw. He arrived as a friend, without any fighting. But he had a secret. You can sleep in the shabono, take photos, I’m not saying no. It’s part of getting to know us.
But, later what happened was this. After one or two months he started to learn our language. Then he started to ask questions, “Where did we come from, who brought us here?” And the Yanomami answered, we are from right here! This is our land! This is where Omam placed us. This is our land. Then the anthropologist wanted to learn our language. I know a little Shamatari, but not much. So, he stayed there in the shabono, and he thought it was beautiful. He thanked the headman and he took some things with him. He brought pans, knives, machetes, axes. And so he arrived ready, ready to trick the Yanomami. This is how the story goes. I was small at the time…[pointing to a boy] like this..about nine. I remember. I remember when people from there came to our shabono. They said, “A white man is living over there. He speaks our language, he brings presents, hammocks.” They said that he was good, he was generous. He paid people in trade when he took photos, when he made interviews, [or] wrote in Portuguese [likely Spanish], English, and Yanomami, and taperecording too. But he didn’t say anything to me. [tape changes here]

An anthropologist should really help, as a friend. He shouldn’t deceive. He should defend…defend him when he is sick, and defend the land as well…saying “You should not come here — the Yanomami are sick.” If a Yanomami gets a cold, he can die. But he didn’t help with this. The first thing that interested him was our language. So today, we are hearing — other Yanomami are talking about it — people from Papiu, Piri, and here. People of Tootobi — my brothers-in-law — they also are talking about the American anthropologist who worked in Hasabuiteri. He wrote a book. When people made a feast and afterward a fight happened, the anthropologist took alot of photos and he also taped it. This is how it began. The anthropologist began to lose his fear — he became fearless. When he first arrived he was afraid. Then he developed courage. He wanted to show that he was brave. If the Yanomami could beat him, he could beat them. This is what the people in Tootobi told us. I am here in Watorei, but I am from Tootobi. I am here to help these people. So I knew him. He arrived speaking Yanomami. People thought he was Yanomami. There was also a missionary. He didn’t help either. They were friends. That’s how it was. He accompanied the Yanomami in their feasts…taking [the hallucinogen] ebena, and after, at the end of the feast, the Yanomami fought. They beat on one anothers’ chests with a stone, breaking the skin. This anthropologist took photos. And so he saved it, he “kept” the fight. So, after, when the fight was over, and the Yanomami lay down in their hammocks, in pain, the anthropologist recorded it all on paper. He noted it all on paper. He wrote what he saw, he wrote that the Yanomami fought. He thought it was war. This isn’t war, no! But he wrote without asking the people in the community. You have to ask first. He should have asked, “Yanomami, why are you fighting? You are fighting, hitting your very brother.” He should have helped us to stop fighting. But he didn’t. He’s no good.

I will explain.

The nabu [whites] think that every type of fighting is war. But there are three kinds of fighting [as follows].

Ha’ati kayu [titles were added later]: the chest fight to relieve anger. Let’s say your relatives take a woman. So you get angry. The Yanomami talk and form a group to fight against the other group that took the woman. So they make a feast. They call him [the relative that took the woman.] They hold him and use this club [gesturing to indicate a length about a foot long] to hit him on the chest. This club-striking is not war. It’s fighting. So, let’s say this guy took my woman. I become his enemy. So I hit him here [pointing to chest]. I want to cause him pain. He can hit me too. This club is not war. It’s to get rid of a mess in the community. Then there’s the headman. What does the headman do? He says, “OK, you have already fought. Now stop this.” So they stop. This fight doesn’t kill anyone.

Xeyu. There’s another kind of fight, Xeyu. Let’s say I have a friend who speaks badly of me. He might say I’m a coward, or he might say I’m no good. So he has to fight my relatives, my family. I have ten brothers. So I can decide whether he’s a man, whether he has courage. So we call friends from other shabonos and set a date. We go into the forest and make a small clearing for the fight, so people can see that we are angry. We take this weapon — it’s a long stick — about 10 ms long. So everyone is there. I’m here, and the enemy is there. Everyone is ready to hit. When I hit the enemy he hits me as well. My brother hits his brother and his brother hits mine back. This is how we fight [two lines with people fighting in pairs].

Janet: How does it end?

Davi: When everyone is covered with blood — heads bloodied, everyone beaten. So the headman says, ‘OK, enough. We’ve already shed blood. So, it’s over. This isn’t war either, no.

Janet: It’s not war. But it includes one group lined up on one side, and another on the other — yes?

Davi: Yes. One group of brothers or the members of a shabono in one line and the other brothers in another line.

Davi: Then there is another kind of fight with a club that’s about a meter long — Genei has one. Everyone gathers and stands in the center of the shabono. The enemy comes over. But again the headman is there. He says, ‘you can’t hit here, you can’t hit here [gesturing] — you can only hit here — in the middle of the head. It doesn’t kill anyone.

Yaimu, Noataiyu, Nakayu, Wainakayu, Bulayu. But if you hit in the wrong place, he can die. So, if this happens, a brother will grab an arrow and go after the one who killed his brother. They will both die — the first with club, the second with arrow. So, what happens? The relatives of the man killed with the club carry the body to the shabono. They take it there. They put it in the fire, burn it, gather the ashes and remaining bones and pound them into powder. They put the ash in a calabash bowl. His father, his mother, his brothers, all of his relatives sit there at the edge of the fire, crying. So the warrior thinks. If they have ten warriors, all angry, they are going to avenge the death. So the father may say, “Look, they killed my son with a club, not with arrow.” He can stop the fighting right there and then. Or, he can say, “Now we will kill them with arrows.” Then they would get all their relatives and friends from the shabono and nearby communities. They make a large feast, bringing everyone together. We call this Yaimu, Noataiyu, Nakayu, Wainakayu, Bulayu. Then they get manioc bread [beiju] and offer food to everyone. Everyone is friends — the enemies are way over there. Then they leave together. The women stay in the house, and the warriors leave to make war. They cover themselves in black paint. This is war. This is war: Waihu, Ni’aiyu. Waihu, Ni’aiyu, Niaplayu, Niyu aiyu. Then, at about nine or ten o’clock at night they start walking. These warriors are going to sleep at about 5 AM. In the forest they make a small lean-to of saplings. The next day they leave again. They are nearing the enemy. After tomorrow they are there. They don’t arrive in the open — they sneak up on the shabono. They move in closer about 3 or 4 in the morning. The enemies are sleeping in the shabono. The warriors arrive just as the sun is coming up. This is ‘fighting with arrows’ — Waihu, Ni’aiyu, Niaplayu, Niyu aiyu. These are war — war with arrows, to kill. He [the enemy] can be brother, cousin, uncle.

Janet: Is it vengeance?

Davi: It is vengeance.

Davi: So this Chagnon, he was there; he accompanied it. He took photographs, he recorded on tape, and he wrote on paper. He wrote down the day, the time, the name of the shabono, the name of the local descent group. He put down these names. But he didn’t ask us. So we are angry. He worked. He said that the Yanomami are no good, that the Yanomami are ferocious. So this story, he made this story. He took it to the United States. He had a friend who published it. It was liked. His students thought that he was a courageous man, an honest man, with important experience.

Janet: What is the word for courageous?

Davi: Waiteri. He is waiteri because he was there. He is waiteri because he was giving orders. He ordered the Yanomami to fight among themselves. He paid with pans, machetes, knives, fishooks.

Janet: Is this the truth or this is what is being said?

Davi: It’s the truth.

Janet: He paid directly or indirectly?

Davi: No, he didn’t pay directly. Only a small part. The life of the indian that dies is very expensive. But he paid little. He made them fight more to improve his work. The Yanomami didn’t know his secret.

Janet: But why did he want to make the Yanomami fight?

Davi: To make his book. To make a story about fighting among the Yanomami. He shouldn’t show the fights of the others. The Yanomami did not authorize this. He did it in the United States. He thought it would be important for him. He became famous. He is speaking badly about us. He is saying that the Yanomami are fierce, that they fight alot, that they are no good. That the Yanomami fight over women.

Janet: It is not because of women.

Davi: It’s not over women that we go to war.

Janet: It’s not over women that one goes to war with arrows?

Davi: It’s not over women that we go to war with arrows. It is because of male warriors that kill other male warriors.
Janet: to avenge the death?

Davi: [Yes,] to avenge. I no longer think that the Yanomami should authorize every anthropologist who appears. Because these books come out in public.

I ask if he has message.

Davi: I don’t know the anthropologists of the United States. If they want to help, if …you whites use the judicial process ..
Janet: Would you like to send a message to the American Anthropological Association?

DAVI’S MESSAGE TO THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

Davi: I would like to speak to the young generation of anthropologists. Not to the old ones who have already studied and think in the old ways. I want to speak to the anthropologists who love nature, who like indigenous people — who favor the planet earth and indigenous peoples. This I would like. This is new, clean, thinking. To write a new book that anyone would like, instead of speaking badly about indigenous peoples. There must be born a new anthropologist who is in favor of a new future. And the message I have for him is to work with great care. If a young anthropologist enters here in Brazil or Venezuela, he should work like a friend. Arrive here in the shabono. He should say, “I am an anthropologist; I would like to learn your language. After, I would like to teach you.” Tell us something of the world of the whites. The world of the whites is not good. It is good, but it is not all good. There are good people and bad people. So, “I am an anthropologist here in the shabono, defending your rights and your land, your culture, your language, don’t fight among yourselves, don’t kill your own relatives.”

We already have an enemy among us — it is disease. This enemy kills indeed. It is disease that kills. We are all enemies of disease. So the anthropologist can bring good messages to the Indian. They can understand what we are doing, we can understand what they are doing. We can throw out ideas to defend the Yanomami, even by helping the Yanomami understand the ways of the whites to protect ourselves. They cannot speak bad of the Yanomami. They can say, “The Yanomami are there in the forest. Let’s defend them. Let’s not allow invasions. Let’s not let them die of disease.” But not to use the name of the indian to gain money. The name of the Indian is more valuable than paper. The soul of the Indian that you capture in your image is more expensive than the camera with which you shoot it. You have to work calmly. You have to work the way nature works. You see how nature works. It rains a little. The rain stops. The world clears. This is how you have to work, you anthropologists of the United States.

I never studied anything. But I am a shaman, hekura. So I have a capacity to speak in Yanomami and to speak in Portuguese. But I can’t remember all the Portuguese words.

Ari: You have to be clear, this is important.

Davi: To repeat, Chagnon is not a good friend of our relatives. He lived there, but he acted against other relatives. He had alot of pans. I remember the pans. Our relatives brought them from there. They were big and they were shallow. He bought them in Venezuela. When he arrived [at the village], and called everyone together, he said, [Yanomami]…”That shabono, three or four shabonos,” as if it were a ball game. “Whoever is the most courageous will earn more pans. If you kill ten more people I will pay more. If you kill only two, I will pay less.” Because the pans came from there. They arrived at Wayupteri, Wayukupteri, and Tootobi. Our relatives came from Wayupteri and said, “This Chagnon is very good. He gives us alot of utensils. He is giving us pans because we fight alot.”

Janet: They killed them and they died?

Davi: Yes. Because they used poison on the point of the arrow. This isn’t good. This kills. Children cried; fathers, mothers, cried. Only Chagnon was happy. Because in his book he says we are fierce. We are garbage. The book says this; I saw it. I have the book. He earned a name there, Watupari. It means king vulture — that eats decaying meat. We use this name for people who give alot of orders. He smells the indians and decides where he will land on the earth. He ordered the Yanomami to fight. He never spoke about what he was doing.

Davi: And, the blood. If he had been our friend he would not have helped the doctor of the United States. He would have said, you can go to the Yanomami. The Yanomami don’t kill anyone — only when you order them to. Chagnon brought the doctors there, he interpreted because the Yanomami don’t speak English. When the doctor requested something he translated it. So when the doctor wanted to take blood, Chagnon translated it. But he didn’t explain the secret. We didn’t know either — no one understood the purpose of giving blood; no one knew what the blood had inside it. …

After, the missionaries who lived in Totoobi spoke to my uncle, my father-in-law. He said, “Look, this doctor would like to take your blood; will you permit it?” And the Yanomami said, “Yes.” He agreed because he would receive pans — pans, machetes.

Janet: But he didn’t explain why?

Davi: The Yanomami was just supposed to give blood and stand around looking. He didn’t talk about malaria, flu, tuberculosis, or dysentery. He said nothing about these things. But he took alot of blood. He even took my blood. With a big bottle like this. He put the needle here [pressing the veins of his inner arm]; put it here, the rubber tube over here. He took alot! I was about nine or ten. He arrived there in Totoobi with the doctor. Chagnon translated. The missionaries, Protestants, lived there in Totoobi. They camped there. They slept there. And they ordered us to call other relatives: there were three shabonos. They called everyone together. Husband, wife, and children, altogether. They always took the blood of one family together. They took my mother’s blood. They took my uncle’s blood. My father had already died. And me. And my sister. She remembers it too. It was a bottle — a big one — like this. He put a needle in your arm and the blood came out. He paid with matihitu– machete, fishhooks, knives. The doctor asked him to speak for him. He translated. He would say, “Look, this doctor wants you to allow him to take your blood.” And the Yanomami understood and allowed it. The missionaries who lived there hardly helped. They were mimahodi, innocents.

Janet: The law controls this now.

Davi: Nobody can do this anymore. So now we are asking about this blood that was taken from us without explanation, without saying anything, without the results. We want to know the findings. What did they find in the blood — information regarding disease? What was good? Our relatives whose blood was taken are now dead. My mother is dead; our uncles, our relatives have died. But their blood is in the United States. But some relatives are still alive. Those survivors are wondering — “What have the doctors that are studying our blood found? What do they think? Will they send us a message? Will they ask authorization to study and look at our blood?” I think that Yanomami blood is O positive. Is it useful in their bodies? If that’s the case, and our blood is good for their bodies — then they’ll have to pay. If it helped cure a disease over there, then they should compensate us. If they don’t want to pay, then they should consider returning our blood. To return our blood for our terahonomi. If he doesn’t want to return anything, then lawyers will have to resolve the issue. I am trying to think of a word that whites do…sue. If he doesn’t want to pay, then we should sue. If he doesn’t want a suit, then he should pay. Whoever wants to use it, can use it. But they’ll have to pay. It’s not their blood. We’re asking for our blood back. If they are going to use our blood then they have to pay us.

Janet: I don’t know where it is. It may be in a university.

Davi: The blood of the Yanomami can’t stay in the United States. It can’t. It’s not their blood.

Janet: So this is a request for those who have stored the blood?

Davi: I am speaking to them. You take this recording to them. You should explain this to them. You should ask them, “What do you Nabu think?” In those days no one knew anything. Even I didn’t know anything. But now I am wanting to return to the issue. My mother gave blood. Now my mother is dead. Her blood is over there. Whatever is of the dead must be destroyed. Our customs is that when the Yanomami die, we destroy everything. To keep it, in a freezer, is not a good thing. He will get sick. He should return the Yanomami blood; if he doesn’t, he [the doctor] and his children will become ill; they will suffer.

Janet: Were there repercussions in the area of medical services after this book came out?

Davi: No. FUNAI used to bring in vaccines. When they stopped the government health agency, FUNASA, took over. Now it’s [the NGO] URIHI. They have ten posts in the region and bring vaccines to all the villages. Each post has an employee.

Janet: Are these services only on the Brazilian side of the border?

Davi: Only in Brazil.

Janet: Is that why Yanomami from Venezuela frequent the URIHI posts?

Davi: Yes. Here we have a chief. The president of Brazil. He is bad, but he is also good. He provides a little money for us to get medicines. He provides airplanes and nurses to bring vaccinations and treatments from Boa Vista all the way here. The Brazilian government is now helping — somewhat. It’s not very much, but it is something. We in Brazil are very concerned about our Venezuelan relatives. Because over there people are dying — many people — from malaria, flu.

Ari: I am talking about the epidemic of measles in 1968. I am asking Davi if this began before or after the arrival of Neel and Chagnon.

Davi: I think it began before their arrival. Many were dying. After they took blood, many died. So this missionary, Kitt, went to Manaus. He went to Manaus and there his daughter became ill with measles. She picked up measles in Manaus. At first they didn’t know it was measles. They took a plane from Manaus to Boa Vista and from there to Totoobi. She arrived sick there, all three — father, mother and child. Then they realized that it was measles. So they asked us to please stay away from them. He said, “If you get measles you will all die. Please stay far away.” They had no vaccine in those days. A Yanomami entered to greet her and he ordered the Yanomami to leave. But he had already caught it. So then the missionary spoke to us all, saying, “Look, you can’t come to our house because my daughter is ill with measles. Stay in your house.” It didn’t accomplish anything. The disease spread. It went to the shabono. Everyone began to get sick, and to die. Three nearby shabonos — each of them with people ill and dying. My uncle was the first to die. Then my mother died. Another sister, uncle, cousin, nephew. Many died. I was very sick but I didn’t die. I think Omam protected me to give this testimony. My sister and I remained.

Janet: Your uncle died, your nephew, your mother…

Davi: uncle, nephew, mother, relatives…So, later [when the road opened], we died also. This place was part of Catrimani. When the road [BR 210, Perimetral Norte] was open, there were MANY people here. Most died then of measles. Only a few survived [he recalls the names of the survivors] — only ten men survived. I was here [working with FUNAI at the time], we brought vaccines for the measles epidemic then. These things happened in our land…FUNAI didn’t take care of us before the road opened.

Janet: What years are we discussing?

Davi: 1976, no 1975.

Ari: The road went from the Wai Wai to the mission at Catrimani.

Davi: They had roads BR 210-215.

Ari: After it was closed the forest reclaimed the road.

Janet: When was it closed?

Davi: After the invasion of the garimpeiros.

Janet: Did the garimpeiros come in this far by road?

Davi: Yes. We would try to stop them. I once got everyone together to go to the road with bows and arrows to block the entrance. I said, this isn’t a place for miners. We won’t allow it. I said if you want to mine, it had better be far from here, because if you stay here you will die here. Our warriors are angry. So they left. I invented all that so they would leave and they did. So they passed by. There were more than 150 — more people than we had.

Janet: Is there a word for “warrior” in Yanomami?

Davi: Yes, waiteri.

Janet: Waiteri means warrior.

Davi: Yes; waiteri is courageous, brave. Those that aren’t are horebu.

Janet: And that means..?

Davi: Scared, fearful, weak.

Janet: Do these concepts have power still today?

Davi: No. This fight isn’t going on any more. But we are still waiteri. No one controls us. Here, we control ourselves. And there are some warriors. There’s one over there in Ananebu. A waiteri is over there in Ananebu, in the forest. Here at home, in THIS shabono, we are all cowards [chuckles].

Davi Interviews Janet

Davi: I want to ask you about these American anthropologists. Why are they fighting among themselves? Is it because of this book? Is this book bad? Did one anthropologist like it and another one say it’s wrong?

Janet: First, in the culture of anthropologists there is a type of fighting. This fight comes out in the form of publications. One anthropologist says, ‘things are like this,’ the other one says, ‘no, things are like this.’ So, after Chagnon’s book came out he received many criticisms from other anthropologists. Some said, this should not be called war. Just as you said. But Chagnon provided a definition of war and continued to use that word. This was one of the criticisms made by anthropologists. After this there were others, and these debates went on in the publications and in conferences. In the year 1994 there was a conference in which anthropologists debated the anthropology of Chagnon and others among the Yanomami. In 1988-89, when there was a struggle over demarcation of Yanomami lands and the Brazilian government favored demarcation in island fragments, the anthropologists of Brazil criticized Chagnon’s image of the Yanomami as “fierce,” saying it served the interests of the military in limiting Yanomami land rights. At that time the American Anthropological Association did not have explicit ethical guidelines. At that point they formed a committee to develop guidelines for ethical fieldwork and a committee of human rights. Now, with the book by Tierney and the support of anthropologists who have had criticisms of Chagnon, the issue was brought before the Association. This raises questions about the ethical conduct of anthropologists.

Davi: But will the anthropologists resolve this problem?

Janet: They will demand that anthropologists conform to the norms of the newly revised ethics. They will explicitly clarify the obligations of the anthropologists.

Ari: In 1968 when Chagnon worked, there was no code of ethics of the Association.

Davi: What about the taking of blood?

Janet: Performing any experimentation has been controlled by the medical profession since 1971. It is now prohibited to involve people in experiments without their explicit authorization. They must be made completely aware of the advantages and disadvantages, and all purposes. They must decide whether they will agree or disagree to participate. Nowadays, this consent has to be in writing or taped.

Davi: This Yanomami blood is going to stay there? Or will they return the blood?

Janet: I don’t know. It must be in a blood bank, perhaps at the University of Michigan.

Ari: Chagnon [once] proposed an exchange between the Universidade Federal of Roraima and the University of California at Santa Barbara. He was proposing a collaboration in human genetics with a graduate student in biology. She worked with DNA. He invited her there. Her name is Sylvana Fortes. She is now doing a doctorate at FIUCRUZ in Rio de Janeiro. Another issue in this dispute is Darwinian evolutionism. Is this the idea of the impact of the environment on man?

Davi: I don’t like this, no. I don’t like these anthropologists who use the name of the Yanomami on paper, in books. One doesn’t like it. Another says its wrong. For us Yanomami, this isn’t good. They are using our name as if we were children. The name Yanomami has to be respected. It’s not like a ball to throw around, to play with, hitting from one side to another. The name Yanomami refers to the indigenous peoples of Brazil and Venezuela. It must be respected. This name is authority. It is an old name. It is an ancient name. These anthropologists are treating us like animals — as they would fish or birds. Omam created us first. We call him Omam. He created earth, forest, trees, birds, river, this earth. We call him Omam. After him, he called us Yanomami [Yan-Omam-i]. So it must be respected. No one uses it on paper to fight — they have to respect it. It is our name and the name of our land. They should speak well of us. They should say, “These Yanomami were here first in Brazil and Venezuela.” They should respect us! They should also say that we preserve our land. Yanomami know how to conserve, to care for their lands. Yanomami never destroyed the earth. I would like to read this. Speaking well of Omam, and of the Yanomami. This would be good. But if they are going to go on fighting like this–I think that the head of the anthropologists has money …

Ari: But Tierney’s book, even as it criticizes Chagnon, has become a major seller. He is earning money selling his book because of the theme. …

Davi: Bruce Albert, Alcida Ramos are not Yanomami. You have to call the very Yanomami, to hear them speak. Look, Alcida speaks Sanuma. Chagnon speaks Shamatari. And Bruce speaks our language. So there are three anthropologists who can call three Yanomami to speak at this meeting. The anthropologists should ask us directly. The Yanomami can speak his own language. These anthropologists can translate. They have to hear our language. They have to hear us in our own language. What does the Yanomami think? What does the Yanomami think is beautiful? You have to ask the Yanomami themselves. These people are making money from the Yanomami name. Our name has value. They are playing with the name of an ancient people. I don’t know alot about politics. But I see and hear that an anthropologist is becoming famous. Famous — why? Some think its good. So he became famous, like a chief. So among them nothing will be resolved. One becomes famous, the other one [his critic] becomes famous, and they go on fighting among themselves and making money…

Janet: Did you know Tierney?

Davi: I met him in Boa Vista. I went to his house. He didn’t say anything to me about what he was doing. So, Chagnon made money using the name of the Yanomami. He sold his book. Lizot too. I want to know how much they are making each month. How much does any anthropologist earn? And how much is Patrick making? Patrick must be happy. This is alot of money. They may be fighting but they are happy. They fight and this makes them happy. They make money and fight.

Janet: Yes; the anthropologists are fighting. Patrick is a journalist.

Davi: Patrick left the fight to the others! He can let the anthropologists fight with Chagnon, and he, Patrick, he’s outside, he’s free. He’s just bringing in the money — he must be laughing at the rest. Its like starting a fight among dogs. Then they fight, they bark and he’s outside. He spoke bad of the anthropologist — others start fighting, and he’s gaining money! The name Yanomami is famous [and valuable] — more famous than the name of any anthropologist. So he’s earning money without sweating, without hurting his hands, without the heat of the sun. He’s not suffering. He just sits and writes, this is great for him. He succeeded in writing a book that is bringing in money. Now he should share some of this money with the Yanomami. We Yanomami are here, suffering from malaria, flu, sick all the time. But he’s there in good health — just spending the money that he gained in the name of the Yanomami Indians.

Ari: One American had patented the name Yanomami on the internet.

Davi: She was using our name for an internet site or to write a book and earn US$20,000. A Canadian working for CCPY discovered this. My friend explained that they are using the name of the Yanomami without requesting authorization. I said I didn’t like it. So I sent her a letter. She was an American journalist. So she stopped. So I was able to salvage the name of the Yanomami. … They have alot of names. They don’t know the trunk and the roots of the Yanomami. They only know the name. But the trunk and the roots of the Yanomami, they don’t know. They don’t know where we were born, how we were born, who brought us here. Without knowing these things, no one can use the name.

I am speaking to the American Anthropology Association. They are trying to clean up this problem. They should bring three Yanomami to their meeting. There are three anthropologists who understand our three languages: Chagnon, Alcida, and Bruce. These anthropologists could translate. We could speak, and people could ask questions of us. I could go myself, but it would be best to have three from Venezuela, or four, perhaps one from Brazil. They need to see our faces. Alcida doesn’t look like a Yanomami. Nor do Bruce or Chagnon. They don’t have Yanomami faces. The Americans will believe us if they see us. I went to the United States during the fight against the goldminers. They believed me. For this reason, I say, it’s important to go there and speak to them. … This is a fight between men who make money.

I ask what the appropriate form of compensation for an anthropology interview, and he says money. “That way he can buy what he wants — pan, machete, axe, line, fishing hooks. It is good to speak to Yanomami. If you give money to the whites, they put it in their pocket. Nabu loves money. It’s for this reason that the nabu are fighting. Its not for him, for friends, its for money.”

Jungle Fever: Marshall Sahlins on Napoleon Chagnon and the Darkness in El Dorado controversy (The Washington Post)

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Internet Source: The Washington Post, BOOK WORLD; Pg. X01, December 10, 2000

Jungle Fever

Marshall Sahlins

DARKNESS IN EL DORADO
How Scientists and Journalists
Devastated the Amazon
By Patrick Tierney
Norton. 417 pp. $ 27.95

Guilty not as charged.

Well before it reached the bookstores, Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado set off a flurry of publicity and electronic debate over its allegations that, at about the same time American soldiers were carrying out search-and-destroy missions in the jungles of Vietnam, American scientists were doing something like research-and-destroy by knowingly spreading disease in the jungles of Amazonia. On closer examination, the alleged scientific horror turned out to be something less than that, even as it was always the lesser part of Tierney’s book. By far the greater part is the story, sufficiently notorious in its own right, of the well-known anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon: of his work among the Yanomami people of Venezuela and his fame among the science tribe of America.

The pre-publication sound and fury, however, concerned the decorated geneticist and physician the late James Neel–for whose researches in the upper Orinoco during the late 1960s and early 1970s Chagnon had served as a jungle advance man and blood collector. Sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Neel’s investigations were designed to establish mutation rates in a population uncontaminated by nuclear radiation for comparison with the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But according to Tierney, Neel also had another agenda: He wanted to test an original theory of immunity-formation in a “virgin soil” population, exposed for the first time to a devastating foreign disease. Hence the sensational chapter on “The Outbreak,” where Tierney alleges that Neel abetted, if not created, a deadly measles epidemic by inoculating Yanomami Indians with an outmoded type of vaccine known to cause severe reactions. Or so it says in the original review galleys of the book.

But by the time Darkness in El Dorado was published, it was already in a second, revised edition, one that qualified some of Tierney’s more sensational claims in the galley proofs of “The Outbreak.” Tierney is an investigative journalist, and critical aspects of his original indictment of Neel took the form of well-documented speculation, leaving plenty of space for the heated exchanges by e-mail and Internet that ensued among respectable scholars who for the most part hadn’t read the book. These hasty incriminations and recriminations created their own versions of what Neel had done–and, accordingly, criticisms of Tierney that had nothing to do with what he had said. Still, it became clear enough that Neel could not have originated or spread genuine measles by the vaccine he administered. Tierney then revised the conclusion of the relevant chapter in the published version, making the vaccine issue more problematic–and to that extent, the chapter self-contradictory. Other issues, such as whether Neel was doing some kind of experiment that got out of hand, remain unresolved as of this writing.

The brouhaha in cyberspace seemed to help Chagnon’s reputation as much as Neel’s, for in the fallout from the latter’s defense many academics also took the opportunity to make tendentious arguments on Chagnon’s behalf. Against Tierney’s brief that Chagnon acted as an anthro-provocateur of certain conflicts among the Yanomami, one anthropologist solemnly demonstrated that warfare was endemic and prehistoric in the Amazon. Such feckless debate is the more remarkable because most of the criticisms of Chagnon rehearsed by Tierney have been circulating among anthropologists for years, and the best evidence for them can be found in Chagnon’s writings going back to the 1960s.

The ’60s were the longest decade of the 20th century, and Vietnam was the longest war. In the West, the war prolonged itself in arrogant perceptions of the weaker peoples as instrumental means of the global projects of the stronger. In the human sciences, the war persists in an obsessive search for power in every nook and cranny of our society and history, and an equally strong postmodern urge to “deconstruct” it. For his part, Chagnon writes popular textbooks that describe his ethnography among the Yanomami in the 1960s in terms of gaining control over people.

Demonstrating his own power has been not only a necessary condition of Chagnon’s fieldwork, but a main technique of investigation. In a scientific reprise of a losing military tactic, he also attempted to win the hearts and minds of the people by a calculated redistribution of material wealth, and in so doing, managed to further destabilize the countryside and escalate the violence. Tierney quotes a prominent Yanomami leader: “Chagnon is fierce. Chagnon is very dangerous. He has his own personal war.” Meanwhile, back in California a defender of Chagnon in the e-mail battles has lauded him as “perhaps the world’s most famous living social anthropologist.” The Kurtzian narrative of how Chagnon achieved the political status of a monster in Amazonia and a hero in academia is truly the heart of Darkness in El Dorado. While some of Tierney’s reporting has come under fire, this is nonetheless a revealing book, with a cautionary message that extends well beyond the field of anthropology. It reads like an allegory of American power and culture since Vietnam.

“I soon learned that I had to become very much like the Yanomami to be able to get along with them on their terms: sly, aggressive, and intimidating,” Chagnon writes in his famous study Yanomamo: The Fierce People. This was not the usual stance toward fieldwork in the 1960s, when the anthropologist already enjoyed the protection of the colonial masters. Chagnon was working in the Amazonian Wild West, populated by small, independent and mobile communities in uneasy relations of alliance and hostility that could readily escalate to death by poisoned arrow. Moreover, when Chagnon began to collaborate with biological scientists, his fieldwork became highly peripatetic itself, and highly demanding of the Yanomami’s compliance. By 1974, he had visited 40 to 50 villages in less than as many months, collecting blood, urine and genealogies–a tour punctuated by stints of filmmaking with the noted cineaste Timothy Asch. Hitting-and-running, Chagnon did fieldwork in the mode of a military campaign.

This helps explain why many other anthropologists who have done longer and more sedentary work in particular Yanomami villages, including former students and colleagues of Chagnon, have disavowed his one-sided depiction of the Yanomami as “a fierce people.” “The biggest misnomer in the history of anthropology,” said anthropologist Kenneth Good of Chagnon’s use of that phrase in the title of his popular textbook.

Good and other Yanomami specialists make it clear that the supreme accolade of Yanomami personhood–the term waiteri that Chagnon translates as “fierce people”–involves a subtle combination of valor, humor and generosity. All of these, moreover, are reciprocal relations. One should return blow for blow, and Chagnon is hardly the only male anthropologist to get into dust-ups with Yanomami warriors. But according to his own account, while Chagnon readily joined the negative game of holding one’s ground, he knowingly brought contempt on himself by refusing to be generous with food. Continuous food-sharing is a basic criterion of humanity for Yanomami, the material foundation of their sociality.

Needing blood and information quickly, Chagnon would announce his visits to a village in the guise of a Yanomami warrior: dressed only in loincloth, body painted red, feathered–and carrying a shotgun. His field kits have been known to contain chemical mace and an electric stun gun. He tried to cultivate a reputation for dangerous magical power by engaging in narcotic shamanistic seances. When someone stole from him, he got children to inform on the thief; then he returned the favor by carrying off the latter’s hammock until he got his stuff back. But when it came to the reciprocity of food sharing, he protested that he could not feed the whole village. On the contrary, he disgusted curious Yanomami by telling them the canned frankfurters he was eating were animal penises, and peanut butter likewise was just what it looked like. Unselfconsciously, he acknowledges that his unwillingness to share food generously or widely made him “despicable in their eyes.”

“The next morning,” he writes, “I began the delicate task of identifying everyone by name and numbering them with indelible ink to make sure that everyone had only one name and identity.” Chagnon inscribed these indelible identification numbers on people’s arms–barely 20 years after World War II.

But he indeed had a delicate problem. He badly needed to know the people’s names and their genealogies. This information was indispensable to the AEC biological studies. He was also engaged in an absurdist anthropological project, which he took seriously, of finding ancestor-based lineage institutions among a people who by taboo could not know, could not trace and could not name their ancestors–or for that matter, could not bear to hear their own names. To utter people’s names in their presence is the gravest offense, a horror: “In battle they shout out the name because they are enemies.” As for the dead, they are completely excluded from Yanomami society, ritually as well as verbally, as a necessary condition of the continued existence of the living. But for the sake of science, Chagnon had to know–and so set in motion an opposition between their humanity and his epistemology that developed progressively through his professorial career.

Chagnon invented draconian devices for getting around the name taboos. He exploited animosities within the village to induce some people to tell on others. He “bribed” (his quotation marks) children to disclose names when their elders were not around. Most productive of all, he went to enemy villages to get people’s genealogies, and then confirmed the information by seeing if they got angry when he recited the names to their faces. By the early 1970s Chagnon had collected some 10,000 Yanomami names, including 7,000 names of the dead. It must have caused a lot of pain and hate.

Collecting names and blood was destabilizing not only for the insults it required, but because Chagnon was buying these with large payments of machetes, axes, utensils and other steel trade goods. These were prize objects of Yanomami desire, but not simply because of their economic advantages. The history of native Americans is too often written as if there had to be a white man behind every red man. Incorporating the foreign technology in their own cultural order, the Yanomami became the authors of its distinctive historical effects. They placed imported steel in the highest category of their own hierarchy of values, together with their most precious things, a position to which the foreign objects were entitled because of their analogous associations with marvelous powers–in this case, European powers. Surely steel was useful, but its utility was transcendent, beyond the ways Yanomami knew of making or controlling things. And as signs and means of power, the foreign goods were engaged in the fundamental transactions of a native Yanomami system of alliance and competition. They were materials of feasting, marriage payments, trading, making alliances, attracting followers, sorcerizing and much more. More than producing food, trade goods produced and reproduced Yanomami culture, hence every kind of satisfaction the Yanomami know. Accordingly, the foreign goods themselves became objects of native competition–as did their human sources, notably Napoleon Chagnon.

Chagnon was not the only outsider whose distribution of steel goods plunged him in a maelstrom of Yanomami violence, although it’s doubtful that any other anthropologist became so involved in participant-instigation. “The distribution of trade goods,” as Chagnon observed early on, “would always anger people who did not receive something they wanted, and it was useless to try and work any longer in the village.” Yet moving could only generate further contention, now among the villages so favored and disfavored by Chagnon’s presence. Hostilities thus tracked the always-changing geopolitics of Chagnon-wealth, including even pre-emptive attacks to deny others access to him. As one Yanomami man recently related to Tierney: “Shaki [Chagnon] promised us many things, and that’s why other communities were jealous and began to fight against us.”

Movie-making was an additional mode of provocation, especially when Chagnon and Timothy Asch used wealth to broker alliances among previously hostile groups for that purpose. The allies were then disposed to cement their newfound amity by combining in magical or actual raids on Yanomami third parties. Deaths from disease were also known to follow filming, prompting Tierney to observe that Chagnon and Asch were being awarded prizes for “the greatest snuff films of all time.”

Over time, the demands on Chagnon’s person and goods became more importuning and aggressive, to which he would respond with an equal and opposite display of machismo. (“He glared at me with naked hatred in his eyes, and I glared back at him in the same fashion.”) Soon enough he had good reason to fear for his life, by magical as well as physical attack–including the time when some erstwhile Yanomami friends shot arrows into an effigy of him. Yet Chagnon also knew how to mobilize his own camp. Early on, he fostered what was to become a life-long sociology of conflicts whose “basic logic,” as Tierney put it, saw “Yanomami villages opposed to Chagnon attacking those villages that received him.”

By 1976, however, Chagnon’s ethnography had cost him official anthropological support in Caracas, and for nearly a decade he was unable to secure a permit to resume fieldwork. In 1985, when he did return, in the company of one of his students, the latter reported they were greeted by a crowd of Indians shouting the Yanomami version of “Chagnon go home!” In 1989 Chagnon was again kept out because the law required that foreign researchers collaborate with Venezuelan scientists, and, as he complained to a missionary whose help he sought, “the local anthropologists do not like me.” Bereft of legitimate support, Chagnon returned in 1990 under the dubious aegis of Cecelia Matos, the mistress of then-president of Venezuela, and one Charles Brewer Carias, a self-proclaimed naturalist, known opponent of Indian land rights and entrepreneur with a reputation for illegal gold mining. The trio had concocted a scheme to create a Yanomami reserve and scientific biosphere in 6,000 square miles of the remote Siapa Highlands, to be directed by Brewer and Chagnon and subsidized by a foundation set up by Matos. According to Tierney, Brewer had his eye on rich tin resources in Yanomami territory. In an intensified repetition of a now-established pattern, the huge amount of goods that military aircraft ferried in for the project helped set off the bloodiest war in Yanomami history, with Chagnon’s people pitted against a coalition of Yanomami opponents, directed by a charismatic leader of their own.

In three years, the scheme collapsed. Matos was eventually indicted for corruption, in part for her role in commandeering military support for the reserve caper, and she remains a fugitive from Venezuelan justice. In September 1993, in the wake of huge protests that followed from their appointment as administrators of the reserve, Chagnon and Brewer were expelled from Yanomami territory by judicial decree. (Among the protesters were the 300 Indians representing 19 tribes at the first Amazon Indian Congress, who took to the streets against Chagnon and Brewer in the town of Porto Ayachuco.) An army colonel escorted Chagnon to Caracas and advised him to leave the country, which he did forthwith.

In America anyhow, he suffered no such indignities. On the contrary, the more unwanted Chagnon became in the Venezuelan jungle, the more celebrated he was in American science. The day before his last expulsion from Yanomami land, the New York Academy of Sciences held a special meeting devoted to his work.

In the course of Chagnon’s career, the further away he got from any sort of anthropological humanism, the more he became a natural scientist. (This could be a lesson for us all.) Whatever the accusations of ferocity and inhumanity made against his ethnography, he increasingly justified it by claims of empirical-scientific value. So he was able to answer his growing chorus of critics by the scientific assertion that they were “left-wing anthropologists,” “anti-Darwinian romantics” and other such practitioners of the “politically correct.” One might say that Chagnon made a scientific value of the belligerence in which he was entangled, elevating it to the status of the sociobiological theory that human social evolution positively selects for homicidal violence. Whatever the other consolations of this theory, it brought Chagnon the massive support of prominent sociobiologists. The support remained constant right through the fiasco that attended his attempt in 1988 to prove the reproductive (hence genetic) advantages of killing in the pages of Science.

The truth claims of the argument presented by Chagnon in Science may have had the shortest half-life of any study ever published in that august journal. Chagnon set out to demonstrate statistically that known killers among the Yanomami had more than twice as many wives and three times as many children as non-killers. This would prove that humans (i.e., men) do indeed compete for reproductive advantages, as sociobiologists claimed, and homicidal violence is a main means of the competition. Allowing the further (and fatuous) assumption that the Yanomami represent a primitive stage of human evolution, Chagnon’s findings would support the theory that violence has been progressively inscribed in our genes.

But Chagnon’s statistics were hardly out before Yanomami specialists dismembered them by showing, among other things, that designated killers among this people have not necessarily killed, nor have designated fathers necessarily fathered. Many more Yanomami are known as killers than there are people killed because the Yanomami accord the ritual status of man-slayer to sorcerers who do death magic and warriors who shoot arrows into already wounded or dead enemies. Anyhow, it is a wise father who knows his own child (or vice versa) in a society that practices wife-sharing and adultery as much as the Yanomami do. Archkillers, besides, are likely to father fewer children inasmuch as they are prime targets for vengeance, a possibility Chagnon conveniently omitted from his statistics by not including dead fathers of living children. Nor did his calculations allow for the effects of age, shamanistic attainments, headship, hunting ability or trading skill–all of which are known on ethnographic grounds to confer marital advantages for Yanomami men.

Supporters of Chagnon, and lately Chagnon himself, have defended his sociobiology by referring to several other studies showing that men who incarnate the values of their society, whatever these values may be, have the most sex and children. Even granting this to be true–except for our society, where the rich get richer but the poor get children–this claim only demonstrates that the genetic impulses of a people are under the control of their culture rather than the other way around. For dominant cultural values vary from society to society, even as they may change rapidly in any given society. There is no universal selective pressure for violence or any other genetic disposition, nor could genes track the behavioral values varying rapidly and independently of them. It follows that what is strongly selected for in human beings is the ability to realize innate biological dispositions in a variety of meaningful ways, by a great number of cultural means. Violence may be inherently satisfying, but we humans can make war on the playing fields of Eton, by sorcery, by desecrating the flag or a thousand other ways of “kicking butt,” including writing book reviews. What evolution has allowed us is the symbolic capacity to sublimate our impulses in all the kinds of cultural forms that human history has known.

In time, Chagnon became a legend of ferocity in the Amazon. Representations of him grew more monstrous in proportion to the scale of the struggles he provoked, and even his trade goods were poisoned with the memories of death. Tierney reports that shamans now portray his cameras, guns, helicopters and blood-collecting equipment as machinery of black magic, the products of a factory of xawara wakeshi, the deadly smoke of disease.

Yet in America, the scientific doctors accord the sociobiological gases emanating from this same technology the highest esteem, worthy of hours and hours of inhalation in the rooms of the New York Academy of Sciences. On college campuses across the country, Chagnon’s name is a dormitory word. His textbooks have sold in the millions. In the huge undergraduate courses that pass for education in major universities, his prize-winning films are able to hold late adolescents spellbound by primitivizing, hence, eternalizing, their own fascination with drugs, sex and violence. America.

Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the just- published essay collection “Culture in Practice.