Ethics Forum: September 11 and Ethnographic Responsibility

Ethics of the War on Terrorism

• The article explores the ethics of the "War on Terrorism" and whether anthropology can provide critical insights into the justifications for American intervention in Afghanistan, particularly concerning the liberation or saving of Afghan women.

Dangers of Reifying Culture

• There are dangers in reifying culture, such as using cultural icons like the "Muslim woman" to represent complex historical and political dynamics.

Resonances of Contemporary Discourses

• Contemporary discourses on equality, freedom, and rights echo earlier colonial and missionary rhetoric on Muslim women.
• Develop a serious appreciation of differences among women in the world, recognizing them as products of different histories, expressions of different circumstances, and manifestations of differently structured desires.

Alternative to Saving Others

• Instead of seeking to "save" others, consider:
  • Working with them in situations that are always subject to historical transformation.
  • Addressing global injustices that shape their worlds.

Limits of Cultural Relativism

• The arguments about the limits of "cultural relativism" are developed through a consideration of the burqa and the meanings of veiling in the Muslim world.

Anthropology's Role and Complicity

• Anthropology's role is to understand and manage cultural difference.
• It's important to be critical of anthropology's complicity in the reification of cultural difference.

Cultural Explanations and the Mobilization of Women

Skepticism about Focus on Muslim Women

• Skepticism is warranted regarding the focus on the "Muslim woman" in the U.S. public response.

Analysis of Public Response

• Analysis includes conversations with a reporter from PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and First Lady Laura Bush's radio address on November 17, 2001.

PBS NewsHour Interaction

• The presenter's questions were general, such as: "Do Muslim women believe 'x'?" "Are Muslim women 'y'?" "Does Islam allow 'z' for women?"
• Substituting "Christian" or "Jewish" for "Muslim" reveals the absurdity of these questions.

Striking Resort to the Cultural

• There was a consistent resort to the cultural, as if knowing about women and Islam or the meaning of a religious ritual would help one understand the tragic attack on New York's World Trade Center and the U.S. Pentagon.
• Knowing about "culture" was prioritized over exploring the history of repressive regimes and the U.S. role in this history.

Cultural Framing

• Cultural framing prevented serious exploration of the roots and nature of human suffering in the region.
• Experts were asked to give religio-cultural explanations instead of political and historical ones.
• Questions artificially divided the world into separate spheres, recreating an imaginative geography of West versus East and us versus Muslims.
• The Muslim woman, particularly the Afghan woman, was crucial to this cultural mode of explanation.

Laura Bush's Radio Address

• The address collapsed distinctions between the Taliban and the terrorists.
• It blurred the causes of women's malnutrition, poverty, ill health, and exclusion under the Taliban.
• The speech reinforced divides between the "civilized people throughout the world" and the Taliban-and-the-terrorists.
• Women were enlisted to justify American bombing and intervention in Afghanistan.

Resonances of Colonial History

• The words have haunting resonances for anyone who has studied colonial history.
• British colonialism in South Asia used the woman question to justify rule.
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: white men saving brown women from brown men.

Colonial Feminism in Egypt

• Leila Ahmed (1992) described "colonial feminism" in Turn of the Century Egypt which selectively focused on the plight of Egyptian women concerning the veil, without supporting women's education.
• Lord Cromer opposed women's suffrage back home.

French Colonialism in Algeria

• Marnia Lazreg (1994) offered examples of how French colonialism enlisted women to its cause in Algeria.
• Example: Unveiling ceremony on May 16, 1958, where Algerian women were unveiled by French women to show Algerians' agreement with France.
• Skits at the Muslim Girls' School in Algiers in 1851 and 1852 invoked the gift of a share of this world where freedom reigns under Christian skies.

Suspicion of Cultural Icons

• Be suspicious when cultural icons are plastered over messier historical and political narratives.
• Be wary when figures like Lord Cromer, French ladies in Algeria, and Laura Bush claim to be saving or liberating Muslim women with military troops behind them.

Politics of the Veil

Afghan Women and Liberation

• Look more closely at those Afghan women Laura Bush claimed were "rejoicing" at their liberation by the Americans.
• Discuss the veil or burqa because it is central to contemporary concerns about Muslim women.
• Anthropologists, feminist anthropologists in particular, contend with the problem of difference in a global world.

The Burqa

• The burqa is seen as the ultimate sign of oppression of Afghan women under the Taliban-and-the-terrorists.
• Liberals are sometimes surprised that women do not seem to be throwing off their burqas after liberation.

Basic Points about Veiling

• The Taliban did not invent the burqa. It was the local form of covering that Pashtun women in one region wore when they went out.
• The burqa, like some other forms of "cover," has marked the symbolic separation of men's and women's spheres.

Portable Seclusion

• Hanna Papanek (1982) described the burqa as "portable seclusion".
• These enveloping robes are "mobile homes;" signifying belonging to a particular community and participating in a moral way of life.

Continuity of Modesty

• Why would women suddenly become immodest and throw off markers of respectability?
• These forms of dress had become so conventional that most women gave little thought to their meaning.

Social Norms and Dress

• People wear the appropriate form of dress for their social communities, guided by socially shared standards, religious beliefs, and moral ideals.
• The "tyranny of fashion" also exists in the U.S.

Imposition of One Style

• In Afghanistan under the Taliban, one regional style of covering or veiling was imposed on everyone as religiously appropriate.
• Previously, there had been many different styles.

Afghan Women Refugees

• The majority of women left in Afghanistan were the rural or less educated, from nonelite families.
• If liberated from the enforced wearing of burqas, most of these women would choose some other form of modest headcovering.
• Examples include rural Hindu counterparts in the North of India and Muslim sisters in Pakistan.

Local Status

• The burqa is for good respectable women from strong families who are not forced to make a living selling on the street.

Dr. Suheila Siddiqi

• Dr. Suheila Siddiqi, a respected surgeon in Afghanistan, refused to wear the burqa but wore the chador or scarf.

Crucial Point about Veiling

• Veiling itself must not be confused with lack of agency.
• Pulling the black head cloth over the face in front of older respected men is a voluntary act by women who are deeply committed to being moral and have a sense of honor tied to family.

Modern Islamic Modest Dress

• Modern Islamic modest dress publicly marks piety and can be read as a sign of educated urban sophistication.
• Saba Mahmood (2001) showed that this new form of dress is perceived by many of the women who adopt it as part of a bodily means to cultivate virtue.

Two Points on Veiling

• Work against the reductive interpretation of veiling as the quintessential sign of women's unfreedom.
• Don't reduce the diverse situations and attitudes of millions of Muslim women to a single item of clothing.

Dealing with Cultural Others

Dealing with Cultural Others

• How to deal with difference without accepting the passivity implied by cultural relativism.
• Cultural relativism is an improvement on ethnocentrism and the racism, cultural imperialism, and imperiousness that underlie it.
• The forms of lives we find around the world are already products of long histories of interactions.

Feminist Anthropologists and Political Bedfellows

• Feminist anthropologists must consider what to do with strange political bedfellows.
• Concern about the provenance of campaigns in defense of Afghan women under the Taliban, such as Hollywood celebrities.

Suspicion and Global Redistribution of Wealth

• How many feminists who felt good about saving Afghan women from the Taliban are also asking for a global redistribution of wealth?
• Universal human right: freedom from structural violence of global inequality and from the ravages of war.

Acceptance of Difference

• Can we only free Afghan women to be like us, or might we have to recognize that even after "liberation" from the Taliban, they might want different things than we would want for them?
• We need to be vigilant about the rhetoric of saving people because of what it implies about our attitudes.
• Recognizing and respecting differences as products of different histories, expressions of different circumstances, and manifestations of differently structured desires is important.

Bonn Peace Conference

• Reports from the Bonn peace conference revealed significant differences among the few Afghan women feminists and activists present.
• Most women activists agreed that Islam had to be the starting point for reform.
• They looked to Iran as a country in which they saw women making significant gains within an Islamic framework.

Islamic Feminism

• The concept of an Islamic feminism itself is also controversial.
• Avoid polarizations that place feminism on the side of the West.
• Be aware of differences and respectful of other paths toward social change that might give women better lives.

Other Desires

• Might other desires be more meaningful for different groups of people? Living in close families? Living in a godly way? Living without war?
• Women they tend to perceive as bereft of community, vulnerable to sexual violence and social anomie, driven by individual success rather than morality, or strangely disrespectful of God.

Political Demands

• There seems to be a difference in the political demands made on those who work on or are trying to understand Muslims and Islamists and those who work on secular-humanist projects.
• We need to have as little dogmatic faith in secular humanism as in Islamism, and as open a mind to the complex possibilities of human projects undertaken in one tradition as the other.

Beyond the Rhetoric of Salvation

Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

• The discussion of culture, veiling, and how one can navigate the shoals of cultural difference should put Laura Bush's self-congratulation in a different light.
• It is deeply problematic to construct the Afghan woman as someone in need of saving.
• What violences are entailed in this transformation, and what presumptions are being made about the superiority of that to which you are saving her?
• Projects of saving other women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners.
• Be wary of taking on the mantles of those 19th-century Christian missionary women who devoted their lives to saving their Muslim sisters.

Our Moslem Sisters

• One of my favorite documents from that period is a collection called Our Moslem Sisters, the proceedings of a conference of women missionaries held in Cairo in 1906 (Van Sommer and Zwemer 1907).
• The subtitle of the book is A Cry of Need from the Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It.
• The missionary women spoke of their responsibility to make these women's voices heard.

Medecins du Monde/Doctors of the World (MdM)

• An invitation to a reception honoring an international medical humanitarian network called Medecins du Monde/Doctors of the World (MdM) was received in February 2002.
• The reception was to feature an exhibition of photographs under the title "Afghan Women: Behind the Veil."
• The invitation included the text: "Please join us in helping to lift the veil."

Beyond Veils

• Could we not leave veils and vocations of saving others behind and instead train our sights on ways to make the world a more just place?
• The reason respect for difference should not be confused with cultural relativism is that it does not preclude asking how we, living in this privileged and powerful part of the world, might examine our own responsibilities for the situations in which others in distant places have found themselves.

Contributing to a More Just World

• A more productive approach is to ask how we might contribute to making the world a more just place.
• Where we seek to be active in the affairs of distant places, can we do so in the spirit of support for those within those communities whose goals are to make women's (and men's) lives better?
• Can we use a more egalitarian language of alliances, coalitions, and solidarity, instead of salvation?

RAWA's Opposition

• Even RAWA, the now celebrated Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, has opposed the U.S. bombing from the beginning.
• They do not see in it Afghan women's salvation but increased hardship and loss.
• They have long called for disarmament and for peacekeeping forces.
• A first step in hearing their wider message is to break with the language of alien cultures, whether to understand or eliminate them.

Conclusion

• Missionary work and colonial feminism belong in the past.
• Our task is to critically explore what we might do to help create a world in which those poor Afghan women, for whom "the hearts of those in the civilized world break," can have safety and decent lives.