AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY Dialogic Reviews

Terror in Norway Sindre Bangstad University of Oslo, Norway

We have all heard the story by now. At 3:25 p.m. on the afternoon on July 22, 2011, a bomb exploded at Government Headquarters in Oslo, the capital of Norway, leaving the building in ruins and killing eight people. At 5:22 p.m. the first shots in an hourlong shooting spree were fired on the small island of Utøya, some 40 kilometers north of Oslo where the Labor Party’s Youth Organization (Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking [AUF]) was holding their annual political summer camp. That mass murder at Utøya left 69—people from all over Norway and of various backgrounds, most of them in their teens—dead, and many others maimed or scarred for life. From traces left on the Internet in the form of numerous postings and a 1,500-page cut-and-paste tract titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, we know that Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year-old white Norwegian from Oslo West who confessed to both acts of terror on July 23, 2011, was inspired by the profoundly Islamophobic literature promoted by popular authors such as Bat Ye’or (Gis`ele Littman), Robert Spencer, Bruce Bawer, and the Norwegian blogger Fjordman (Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen). The so-called “Eurabia” literature basically contends that Muslim immigration to Europe is part of a conspiratorial plot to turn Europe into a Muslim-dominated “Eurabia” governed by the shari‘a. We also know that in targeting Norwegian social democrats for their supposed support for “multiculturalism,” the Norwegian mass murderer wanted to instigate a continent-wide war aimed at effacing the presence of Muslims in Norway and Europe by 2083— 400 years after the defeat of the Ottomans at the Gates of Vienna. In a 234-page report to the prosecuting authority in Norway, the conclusion of which was made public on November 29, 2011, two senior Norwegian psychiatrists tasked with assessing Breivik’s mental state concluded that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and had been psychotic when executing his terror attacks. Should this conclusion, which has already been contested from a number of very senior Scandinavian psychiatrists and psychologists, be upheld, it means that Breivik will be sentenced to psychiatric care rather than imprisonment. However, the finding that Breivik may be clinically insane does not detract from the

fact that while he may have been alone in his violent deeds, he is unfortunately not alone in the ideas that he holds. On Monday, November 29, 2010, the private Norwegian TV channel TV2, established in 1992, and Norway’s second-most-viewed TV channel, screened the documentary Freedom, Equality and the Muslim Brothers [Frihet, Likhet og Det Muslimske Brorskap] written by the Iraqi-born e´ migr´e author Walid al-Kubaisi (Magnus 2010). Financed by the prestigious Norwegian freedom of expression foundation Fritt Ord, Vestnorsk Filmsenter, and TV2, and directed by Per Christian Magnus, the documentary alleged a plot directed by the Islamist Muslim Brothers in Cairo, Egypt [al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin] to establish an Islamic caliphate in Europe and Norway, through the use of “baby trolleys, the hijab, democracy and freedom of expression.” Al-Kubaisi, who arrived in Norway in 1987 as a defector from the Iran–Iraqi War (1981–88) and was given leave to stay on humanitarian grounds, had until the year 2009 described himself as an atheist but was now all of a sudden writing in the name of “Muslims.” Few Norwegian Muslims were inclined to believe in his conversion, though, as al-Kubaisi had a long track record of casting aspersions on Norwegian Muslims (who make up about three percent of the population) and cultivating friendships with the same kinds of right-wing blog-activist networks in Norway who also attracted Breivik. This included contact with the precursor to the virulently Islamophobic organization Stop the Islamization of Norway (SIAN) (al-Kubaisi 2005), which featured old Norwegian volunteers to the German Nazi Waffen SS during World War II as well as old Norwegian supporters of South African Apartheid. Al-Kubaisi is cited with approval on three occasions in Breivik’s tract. He is also referred to approvingly in Bruce Bawer’s Eurabia tract, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2006). Al-Kubaisi has often portrayed himself as something of a martyr for freedom of expression in Norway: the fact of the matter is that he has extremely powerful backers in Norwegian academia, media, and intellectual life. Al-Kubaisi’s documentary was launched amid much media fanfare, which is partially attributable to al-Kubaisi’s long-standing cultivation of friendship with Norwegian media editors and reporters. In a carefully orchestrated debate on TV2’s debate program Tabloid on the night of the launch (al-Kubaisi 2010), for which al-Kubaisi had been allowed

c 2012 by the American Anthropological AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 114, No. 2, pp. 351–358, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433.  Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01430.x

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by TV2 to handpick his interlocutors, al-Kubaisi charged that two of Norway’s most prominent public intellectuals of Muslim background were “secret members of the Muslim Brothers in Norway.” The blurring of the lines between ordinary practicing Muslims and “Islamists” had in fact been a strategy of al-Kubaisi and his cohort for years, as had the strategy of labeling anyone who opposed him publicly as an “Islamist sympathizer.” In Norway, many social anthropologists have a long history as public intellectuals, and it would seem that their public interventions have a greater impact on public debates than is the case elsewhere (see Howell 2010). For example, one may refer to Professor Arne Martin Klausen’s (1968) critique of failed Norwegian development-aid projects in Kerala in India in the 1950s or Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s (1993) contributions to Norwegian debates on Norway as a multicultural society and on multiculturalism since the 1990s. Klausen’s critique was an early example of what has become part of common knowledge in political and bureaucratic circles since then—namely that successful development aid requires intimate knowledge of local contexts and situations. Eriksen’s contributions to Norwegian debates on multicultural society and multiculturalism—while often stereotyped as a defense of multiculturalism tout court— has contributed to the liberal critique of multiculturalism in Norway. I knew quite well what I was getting into when I decided to make a public intervention on this issue in the form of participation in at NRK’s Sunday show on radio, writing an op-ed in the leftist newspaper Klassekampen refuting al-Kubaisi’s many spurious claims, and collaborating on a coauthored scholarly article for a Norwegian academic journal. What I was unprepared for was the intensity of the vitriol that this would unleash from newspaper reporters, editors, and right-wing activists sympathetic to al-Kubaisi’s agenda and claims. Seen as most provocative was my pointing out the structural resemblances between al-Kubaisi’s documentary as an articulation of Eurabia literature and anti-Semitic tracts and fabrications such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Anonymous 1920). In addition, I have had to live with various kinds of hate mail and abuse on right-wing blog sites ever since this public intervention. But this, after all, pales in comparison with the death threats and abuse that a number of politicians and intellectuals on the social-democratic Left in Norway have faced after July 22, 2011. Among these are even young survivors from the massacre at Utøya, and parents who lost their children there. The Danish social anthropologist Peter Hervik has analyzed how Danish media editors came to play a crucial role in the mainstreaming of Danish neoracism, populism, and Islamophobia (Hervik 2011). What marks Scandinavian countries—including Norway—is a tendency for many of

their citizens to regard their societies as the embodiment of virtue and universalistic values. This tendency often renders them unwilling to face the realities of neoracism and Islamophobia in these societies (see Gullestad 2006 for cases in point from Norway). Although the Norwegian media often sees itself as a corrective to power, my experience as an anthropologist in the public sphere provides some lessons as to the Norwegian media’s penchant for siding with powerful and popular stereotypes when it comes to Islam and Muslims. It remains to be seen whether what happened in Norway on that fateful day in July 2011 will change any of this in the future.

Sindre

Bangstad

Postdoctoral

Fellow,

Department

of

So-

cial Anthropology, University of Oslo, 0317 Blindern, Norway; [email protected]

REFERENCES CITED

Al-Kubaisi, Walid 2005 Norge for nordmenn [Norway for Norwegians]. Klassekampen 05.02.05. 2010 Debate with Unni Wikan. Tabloid. TV2, November 29. Anonymous 1920 The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion. New York: Beckwith. Bawer, Bruce 2006 While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. New York: Doubleday. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland 1993 Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto. Gullestad, Marianne 2006 Plausible Prejudice: Everyday Experiences and Social Images of Nation, Culture and Race. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Hervik, Peter 2011 The Annoying Difference: The Emergence of Danish Neonationalism, Neoracism, and Populism in the Post-1989 World. New York: Berghahn. Howell, Signe 2010 Norwegian Academic Anthropologists in Public Spaces. Current Anthropology 51(2):269–277. Klausen, Arne Martin 1968 Kerala Fishermen and the Indo-Norwegian Pilot Project. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Magnus, Per Christian 2010 Frihet, likhet og det muslimske brorskap [Freedom, equality and the Muslim brotherhood]. 52 mins. Agitator Films. Bergen.

Public Anthropology

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The Political Anthropology of Scandinavia after July 22, 2011 Heiko Henkel University of Copenhagen

The bomb attack by Norwegian Anders Breivik that on July 22, 2011, killed seven people and destroyed much of Oslo’s government district, and his massacre later that day of 69 participants of a youth camp organized by Norway’s governing Labor Party came as a devastating shock to the Norwegian public. But also in neighboring Denmark and Sweden the impact of Breivik’s attacks reverberated in the public commentary: with one terrible stroke, the killings recast the ongoing public debates in Scandinavia regarding the “Muslim question.” Previously for most Scandinavians the questions had been whether or not Norway—and Scandinavia more generally—was too welcoming to Muslim immigrants and where the limits of tolerance should be drawn. Breivik’s massacre dramatically unsettled the intuitive lines dividing “us” from “them” as it pointed with terrible clarity to unresolved tensions within Norwegian majority society itself. Although a number of recent publications show that anthropology is well equipped to shed light on the background of the event, the attacks also highlight significant challenges for a political anthropology of Scandinavia. Scandinavian societies are not easy places for newcomers to arrive in and thrive. Closely knit social and professional networks and broadly shared notions that as Dane, Swede, or Norwegian one shares a broad set of values, histories, and formative experiences with fellow citizens provide little incentive to reach out to newcomers. And long histories of social integration engineered by welfare states, leaving little unsupervised space for ways of life outside fairly narrow horizons of civility, expose at almost every turn the newcomer’s diverging intuitions and sensibilities.1 Since the mid-1990s, Muslim immigrants and their children have found themselves under particular scrutiny, especially when seeking to affirm lifestyles outside established codes of civility. Over the years, a strong public critique of “Islam” has become the way many Scandinavians formulate their concerns vis-`a-vis the Muslim presence.2 Sometimes these concerns are formulated in ethnonationalist terms, chiding Muslims for not living up to the particular standards of Norwegian, Danish, or Swedish culture. At other times, they are articulated in universalist or multiculturalist terms, denouncing what is seen as Muslims’ unwillingness or inability to accept liberal values like religious tolerance, gender equality, and democracy. Differently grounded as these criticisms are, they converge on the more or less explicitly stated suspicion that religious Muslims remain outside of a civility shared by majority society, and by the same token

such claims reemphasize alliances across Scandinavian majority society. Although these concerns are only occasionally formulated in explicitly Christian terms, they are underwritten by Scandinavia’s (post-) Protestant heritage.3 Lutheran Protestantism has merged to such an extent into the fabric of Scandinavian society that both for insiders and outside observers it is difficult to delineate its distinctive moral project and even its institutional base. In Norway and Denmark, the Lutheran Church is an integral part of the state bureaucracy with a cabinet minister as its administrative head and reigning monarchs as ex officio members (Sweden separated church and state in 2000). Membership in the Lutheran–state church today ranges from around 70 percent in Sweden to 84 percent in Norway, although regular church attendance is between two and four percent. The “Scandinavian model” is thus a particularly dramatic variant of what Talal Asad has suggested for the Western perception of Islamic traditions more broadly: for many Scandinavians, Islam is not simply another religious tradition but a provocation to institutionally embedded notions of proper secular—that is, national—civility.4 Given the widespread suspicion against the Muslim minority it was therefore perhaps unsurprising that immediately after the twin attacks on the very center of Norwegian society many commentators assumed that Muslim militants were behind the atrocities. When it became clear that the perpetrator was an ethnic Norwegian from an affluent urban background with conservative Christian and nationalist persuasions, the anguish over the vulnerability of Norwegian society (broadly shared across Scandinavia) was coupled with the shock that the assault had come from within Norway’s majority society itself. Breivik declared that his victims had to be sacrificed to awaken Norway to the mortal danger of Islam. Although leading protagonists of Scandinavia’s anti-Muslim movement were quick to denounce Breivik’s murderous attacks as those of a “madman” and “psychopath,” it was patently clear for most observers that his “madness” was not merely an individual condition. It was nourished, energized, and quite literally scripted by an international network of anti-Muslim and “antimulticulturalist” activists and bloggers.5 And it was embedded in a climate of public debate marked by widespread suspicion toward the Muslim minority in which vitriolic verbal attacks on both Muslims and proponents of (even mildly) multiculturalist policies had become normal and widely acceptable. Norwegian anthropologists, most prominently Thomas Hylland Eriksen and the late Marianne Gullestad, were among the first to point out that anti-Muslim sentiments

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were not simply caused by “problems” within the Muslim community but that they reflect the difficulty that established society had in embracing new ways of life as legitimate elements of the nation. Gullestad’s seminal study Plausible Prejudice: Everyday Experiences and Social Images of Nation, Culture and Race (2006), for instance, shows how these patterns of identification and world knowing undergird prejudice and hostility toward newcomers to Norwegian society.6 Gullestad and Hylland Eriksen’s perspective is echoed by other Norwegian anthropologists (e.g., Andersson 2005; Gressg˚ard 2010; Jacobsen 2011). The center Cultural Complexity in the New Norway (CulCom) at Oslo University, which operated between 2004 and 2010, led by Hylland Eriksen, and the International Migration and Ethnic Relations Research Unit (IMER) at Bergen University and the Uni Rokkan Center in Bergen, Norway, which has operated since 1996 and is currently led by Christine M. Jacobsen, became important venues where graduate students and academics from different disciplines could discuss these issues and present their research in public events. They were contributing to an influential—albeit, prior to the Breivik attacks, often subdued—opposition to the climate of antiMuslim sentiment. Since the July of 2011 events, their voices are more in tune with the public mood and, hence, carry more weight. This echo is by no means unanimous, however. Unni Wikan is a high-profile dissenting voice in Norwegian anthropology who is much more critical both of Norway’s Muslim minority and of “multicultural” policies. In Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe (2001), Wikan suggests that these policies have fostered patriarchal and illiberal tendencies in the Muslim community at heavy costs, especially for Muslim girls and women. Wikan’s stance has often been taken up in Norwegian public debates as proof for the incompatibility of Islam and Muslim culture with Norwegian society.7 For those of us who share Gullestad and Hylland Eriksen’s perspective on Scandinavia’s “Muslim question,” the “22/7 attacks” confirm that to understand the conflict, the searchlight must be turned on Scandinavian societies themselves. But Breivik’s massacre, and his 1,500-page dossier that the massacre was meant to advertise, also highlight enormous challenges ahead for a political anthropology of Scandinavia.8 These go well beyond explaining Scandinavian societies’ apparent homogeneity and their difficulties with their Muslim minorities. Allow me to suggest three related areas that call for attention. 1. Breivik’s attacks highlight just how closely the antiMuslim groundswell is intertwined with deep tensions within Scandinavian societies that are not yet well understood. Some of these tensions are linked to the rivalry of older social and political projects that were usually seen as having been contained by Scandinavia’s postwar nation states. Breivik, after all, chose as victims for his killing spree members of the Labor Party’s youth wing, and he identified himself to the police as an

“anticommunist.” A political anthropology of Scandinavia will have to focus more assertively on the diversity of worldviews and political projects across Scandinavian societies.9 It should be wary of convenient shorthands for ascribing “Muslim” and “Danish” (or Norwegian or Scandinavian) positions and instead explore the mechanisms by which heterogeneous discourses and ways of life within Scandinavian societies are (or are not) incorporated into national civilities. In particular, it should investigate how contestations around the Muslim question in Scandinavia have rearticulated and transformed older political projects. 2. The contestations over the futures of Scandinavian societies, including those over the place of Muslims within them, are fought within distinct social configurations: highly integrated societies, the interventionist welfare state, particular formations of civility that emerged in distinct historical trajectories, and so forth. But at the same time, the arguments employed draw freely on transnationally circulating discourses and connect with political networks. This is the case for the Scandinavian anti-Muslim scene, whose polemics often resemble those of tea-party activists in startling ways, but it is also the case for liberals, multiculturalists, and anthropologists. A political anthropology of Scandinavia will have to consider carefully how these ideological seepages and borrowings interact with the particular social and institutional situatedness of the actors involved. 3. Anthropologists have to come to terms with the fact that there is no easy “outside” position from which these conflicts can be analyzed. Indeed, anthropologists (and anthropology) have become part of the conflict in at least two ways. First, and most straightforwardly, anthropologists are implicated in ideological terms. Many anti-Muslim and antipolitically correct critics explicitly attack that political common sense on which much current anthropology is built: a broadly humanist account of society wedded to a critique of Eurocentrism and ethnonationalism. This is particularly striking in Breivik’s dossier, which devotes its entire first part to outlining the political genealogy (from Marx to Freud, the Frankfurt School, Raymond Williams, and gender and postcolonial studies to current anthropology) that Breivik sees as his own project’s mortal enemy. Secondly, and more problematically, anthropologists are involved in institutional terms. In contemporary Scandinavian societies, the nation-state plays an encompassing role in regulating society and the legitimate limits of national civilities. The battle over the future of Scandinavian society is, more than elsewhere, a battle over the control of the state, its institutions, and the way they should intervene to regulate society. Anthropologists and other social scientists analyzing the rise of popular xenophobia—and its correlate, the critique of “politically correct” elites—are tied to this institutional framework and its future in multiple ways: as employees, as respected commentators,

Public Anthropology

as policy advisors, and not least as citizens whose lives are closely regulated by this state. This profound embeddedness of anthropology in Scandinavia within the object of its study makes the political anthropology of Scandinavia particularly relevant—and challenging. One way of addressing this challenge would be to make a new political anthropology of Scandinavia part of a broader comparative and collective endeavor exploring the particularities of Scandinavian civilities and their convergences across Europe and beyond.

Heiko

Henkel

Department of Anthropology, University of

Copenhagen, 1353 Copenhagen K, Denmark

NOTES

1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

The collection Likhetens paradokser [The paradoxes of sameness] gives a perceptive account of some of the issues (Vike et al. 2001). Hervik 2011 provides a highly critical account of Danish “neonationalism.” Andrew Buckser provides valuable insights into the emergence of Danish secularism in his books (1996, 2003). See Asad 2003. On November 29, 2011, Breivik was declared “insane” (utilregnelig)—and thus not legally responsible for his actions—by two psychiatrists reporting to the Norwegian authorities who were preparing Breivik’s trial. Although this assessment is probably not the last word in the case, it raises unsettling questions about guilt and responsibility. It calls to mind the widespread attitude in postwar Germany of explaining the Third Reich as the result of a temporary descent to insanity by the German people. See Gullestad 2006; Hylland Eriksen 2006, 2010; Hylland Eriksen and Naess 2011. For an insightful discussion of these divisions, see Lithman 2004. The dossier, entitled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” was sent to 1,003 e-mail addresses across Europe shortly before Breivik’s killing spree and was, shortly afterward, widely available on the Internet (Taylor 2011). In the document, Breivik unfolds the disturbing vision that motivated his massacre. The text contains referenced and unreferenced excerpts from numerous anti-Muslim and right-wing blogs and websites (for a brief but useful mapping of these references, see Brown 2011). The dossier also contains detailed tactical and practical advice for a campaign of killings of Muslims and “communists” across Europe. For a selection of studies that move into this direction, see Social Analysis volume 55, issue 2: “The Concern for Sociality: Practicing Equality and Hierarchy in Denmark.”

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REFERENCES CITED

Andersson, Mette 2005 Urban Multi-Culture in Norway: Identity Formation among Immigrant Youth. New York: Edwin Mellen. Asad, Talal 2003 Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brown, Andrew 2011 Anders Breivik’s Spider Web of Hate. The Guardian, September 7. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ 2011/sep/07/anders-breivik-hate-manifesto, accessed January 11, 2012. Buckser, Andrew 1996 Communities of Faith: Sectarianism, Identity, and Social Change on a Danish Island. Oxford: Berghahn. 2003 After the Rescue: Jewish Identity and Community in Contemporary Denmark. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gressg˚ard, Randi 2010 Multicultural Dialogue: Dilemmas, Paradoxes, Conflicts. Oxford: Berghahn. Gullestad, Marianne 2006 Plausible Prejudice: Everyday Experiences and Social Images of Nation, Culture and Race. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Hervik, Peter 2011 The Annoying Difference: The Emergence of Danish Neonationalism, Neoracism, and Populism in the Post-1989 World. Oxford: Berghahn. Hylland Eriksen, Thomas 2006 Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence. Oxford: Berg. 2010[1993] Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto. Hylland Eriksen, Thomas, and H. E. Naess, eds. 2011 Kulturell kompleksitet i det nye Norge [Cultural complexity in the New Norway]. Oslo: Unipub. Jacobsen, Christine M. 2011 Islamic Traditions and Muslim Youth in Norway. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Lithman, Yngve G. 2004 When Researchers Disagree: Epistemology, Multiculturalism, Universities and the State. Ethnicities 4(2):155–184. Taylor, Matthew 2011 Breivik Sent “Manifesto” to 250 UK Contacts Hours before Norway Killings. The Guardian, July 26. http://gu. com/p/3vzt4, accessed March 23, 2012. Vike, H., M. Lien, and H. Liden, eds. 2001 Likhetens paradokser: Antropologiske undersøkelser i det moderne Norge [The paradoxes of sameness: Anthropological studies in modern Norway]. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Wikan, Unni 2001 Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

Reviews

The Public Archaeology of Class Warfare: The Colorado Coalfield War Project David A. Gadsby University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Since the 1990s, Dean Saitta, Randall McGuire, Phillip Duke, and others have been excavating archaeological sites associated with the Colorado Coal Field War. The researchers advocate an activist archaeology of class and labor (Duke and Saitta 1998). The project was meant to redress a strong middle-class bias in archaeological theory and practice (McGuire and Walker 1999) and to render archaeology as an emancipatory source of knowledge about the past (Duke and Saitta 1998). Saitta’s website, a product of the long-term project, illustrates one way public archaeological research can amplify its reach (Saitta 2000). The website interprets the results of the Colorado Coal Field War Project, which explored the archaeological remains of the Ludlow Tent Colony Massacre of 1914 in southwestern Colorado. The massacre was a major event in the Colorado Coal Field War of 1913–14. Although mining concerns prevailed in the immediate conflict, the war became a nationwide controversy that ultimately led to improved working conditions for miners. The archaeologists have sought members of the organized labor movement as a public constituency, heirs to the achievements of the Ludlow strikers. The first section of the site is devoted to a Colorado Endowment for the Humanities–funded Teacher’s Institute program conducted in 1999–2000, which introduced K–12 teachers to historical archaeology as a way to explore forgotten history. Saitta conducted the workshops to better incorporate the Ludlow story into Colorado school curricula. The page includes a series of lesson plans addressing such topics as the music of the Coal Field War, the social context of the Progressive Era, and a history of the massacre itself. The site’s “History” section provides a compelling, accessible narrative of the Coal Field War. Photographs of National Guard machine-gun emplacements, with barrels pointed at the strikers’ camp, and the “Death Special,” an improvised armored car used by private detectives to harass the camp with machine-gun fire, are especially effective. A protracted stalemate at Ludlow lasted from September of 1913 until April 20, 1914. On that day, the Colorado Minefield War reached a catastrophic climax when gunfire broke out between strikers and the National Guardsmen. Most strikers and their families were able to escape the worst of the ensuing melee, but the battle resulted in 25 casualties, including two strike leaders and three from

the militia. Eleven women and children hiding in a cellar suffocated to death when militia members burned the tent above them. The site’s “Archaeology” section interprets the material remains of these events. The researchers conducted their study from 1997 through 2002 at both Ludlow and the nearby company town of Berwind. The website lays out, clearly and carefully, their research goals and methods. The page also details their public interpretation efforts, which include lectures, a museum exhibit, traveling exhibits, and “classroom trunks” for K–12 students. A curated online exhibit of historic photographs of the Coal Field War illustrates the events of the war and its aftermath. Especially chilling is a “Black Hand” letter to one strike sympathizer: “You had better leave this part of the country as . . . God hates a squealer . . . it is the Last chance you will have[.] Take my advice or take a traitors chance.”1 The final section of the website, a historical atlas of the Coal Field War, compares archaeological and historical maps with accompanying essays. The maps provide another visual means for the authors to communicate the results of their study. The current public discourse about class in the United States is incoherent at best, so an activist public archaeology of class conflict presents considerable challenges. Such work must use material remains to cast light on the current situation. Saitta’s work does this by presenting intersecting lines of evidence about the Coal Field War that illustrate an important chapter in the nation’s long history of class conflict. To be effective, the work must reach enough people to have the possibility of changing public knowledge or consciousness. To this end, it may be worth time to update the organizational scheme and general look and layout of the website, which is more than a decade old. For instance, it is difficult to see why the first section, which describes the teachers’ institution in detail, lies before the contextual sections on archaeology and history. The entire site would benefit from an introductory summary. The look and feel of the website might be updated to better fit the expectations of contemporary users and to allow more efficient navigation. Because the site aims to effectively communicate with the public, such modifications would further its purpose by drawing and retaining visitors. Despite this, the website remains a valuable interpretive work and a useful source of information for those interested in the history of class struggle in the United States.

Public Anthropology

Radical studies of the past such as the Coal Field War project must seek to change contemporary consciousness by illuminating the origins of contemporary inequalities that seem, on their face, to be natural and ahistorical. To be effective, the practitioners must be sure that the message reaches enough people to justify the effort. Although the Colorado Coal Field War project may not have the reach of a television cable-network news show, where it seems much of the contemporary public discussion of class does (or does not) take place, the project has maximized its reach by presenting its material to important audiences. These include an adopted descendant community of mine workers, a cadre of Colorado teachers who will communicate these ideas to hundreds or thousands of students over the course of several years, and schoolchildren themselves, who receive instruction through classroom trunks and other outreach media. By highlighting the stories of the people of Ludlow who fought and died to win workers’ rights, the Colorado Coal Field War Project illustrates not only the depth of the struggle for workers’ rights in the past but also the lingering peril of losing those hard-won rights for those who labor in late capitalism.

David A. Gadsby

357

Department of Sociology and Anthropology,

University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21250; [email protected]

NOTE

1.

See http://www.du.edu/ludlow/gallery2.html.

REFERENCES CITED

Duke, Philip, and Dean J. Saitta 1998 An Emancipatory Archaeology for the Working Class. In Assemblage (4). http://www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk/4/ Accessed November 29, 2011. McGuire, Randall A., and Mark Walker 1999 Class Confrontations in Archaeology. Historical Archaeology 33(1):159–183. Saitta, Dean 2000 The Colorado Coal Field War Project. http://www. du.edu/ludlow/, accessed September 10, 2011.

A Review of Towson University’s “Anthropology by the Wire” Course and anthropologybythewire.com Elizabeth Greenspan Harvard University

Over the past decade, the HBO television series The Wire has become part of numerous course syllabi in anthropology, sociology, urban studies, and film studies. Likewise, debate has flourished about the merits and consequences of this trend. Harvard sociology professor William Julius Wilson, whose students watch four of the show’s five seasons as they read academic texts for his Wire course, is one of the show’s greatest defenders. He argues that the series, which tells intertwining tales about cops, drug dealers, and politicians in contemporary Baltimore, “has done more to enhance both the popular and the scholarly understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality than any other program in the media or academic publication we can think of” (Chaddha et al. 2008). The anthropology and sociology students and faculty behind “Anthropology by the Wire,” a research course and website at Towson University in Baltimore, may not disagree. At least not completely. They know the power of The Wire first hand. Rather, they aim to push back against what they call the “representational burden” that The Wire has created for the city’s residents by practicing a multimedia, public anthropology—or, as they put it, anthropology

“executed literally through ‘the wire’ via digital media” (Anthropology by the Wire n.d.a.). The course website, anthropologybythewire.com, provides a model for a new type of public, urban anthropology. It documents the students’ ethnographic research on the streets of Baltimore and, moreover, shows how video and photography, as well as graphics and PowerPoint, serve as powerful methodological tools, alongside or even in lieu of traditional field notes and interviews. And it raises a number of possibilities for faculty and students embarking on fieldwork in the digital era. During the summer of 2011, Matthew Durington and Samuel Collins, professors in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice at Towson, led 12 community college students as they conducted fieldwork in Baltimore and posted their digital results online. The website features an assortment of edited and unedited video clips and blog posts chronicling the lives of Baltimore residents and workers, artfully arranged for easy viewing. A video overview of the project, which was funded by a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates grant, sits on the top row, in the center, of the site. Images from the students’ research scroll past as Durington describes the community activism, or “direct community projects,” that served as the foundation for student’s

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ethnographies, including urban food initiatives, maintaining public spaces, and oral histories. The site’s greatest contribution comes from its raw, mostly unedited form. Ethnographic films are increasingly common. By contrast, “Anthropology by the Wire” highlights how digital media can also serve as a methodology. One clip, found in the archive, shows two students approaching an interview subject on the street, hastily explaining their project, and trying to conduct an interview as the subject grows distracted. Even a video of less than a minute enables the viewer to absorb multiple layers of meaning: we simultaneously learn about the nature of the research, see the busy street scene, observe the personality of the subject, and get a glimpse of an emerging relationship between interviewer and interviewee. Although the material brings to life a Baltimore that extends beyond The Wire’s likeable dealers and compromised cops, it also, and perhaps more powerfully, captures the challenges of doing ethnographic research in ways that texts, and polished film, almost always edit out. For faculty and students of ethnographic research, the website could serve as an invaluable teaching tool. Likewise, the videos document the distance between theory and data. In a clip posted on June 25, 2011, two students interview Theresa Christian, a black salon owner (Anthropology by the Wire n.d.b.). Christian sits in front of the camera as the salon bustles behind her. The interviewers, invisible but audible, try to prompt Christian to reflect on markers of class in the neighborhood, which Christian resists. They ask her who customers are, whether they are “from the neighborhood,” and to describe her “relationship to the community.” This last question generates the most uncertainty and a long, blank stare. Watching the subtle frictions and unexpected responses, I imagined students analyzing both the interview strategies and the data collected. The rawness of the material also means, however, that it lacks analysis. Many students supplemented their visual anthropology with blog posts drawing links between social theory and observations. In one, dated June 25, 2011, and titled, “Signifiers of the Subaltern in West Baltimore Neighborhoods,” the author employed postcolonial theory to analyze the streets and sidewalks he traveled (Anthropology by the Wire n.d.c.). These written observations were perceptive, but they rarely correlated to the visual anthropology nearby. After viewing an interview, I wondered what the researchers thought and why they posted this particular five-minute segment. This may be a weakness of a digitally

informed methodology: it enables researchers to sidestep reflection more easily than text. But it’s not unfixable. A researcher could turn the camera onto him- or herself, at the end of a video perhaps, to offer commentary and deepen the material’s insights. “Anthropology by the Wire” students have spent the past year making sense of their data and producing longer videos to share with students, faculty, and the groups with whom they worked. Presumably, some of this work will appear online. The raw material is invaluable, though, precisely because it does not (yet) tell a neat story with a beginning, middle, and end, as The Wire does. The website is a bit chaotic, as are cities—and as are cultures, too. Critics of the television series argue that its characters, particularly the drug dealers, reinforce stereotypes of a poor, black United States. The website certainly challenges these depictions, introducing us to young people who volunteer and community groups that improve their neighborhoods. But the bigger contribution of “Anthropology by the Wire” is its use of “the wire” literally—that is, in its practice of a digital, public anthropology. It is becoming increasingly fashionable to send students out on the street with a camera instead of a notebook, and this website offers a model of what students can do. That the website is somewhat unfinished is fitting: digital media’s impact on anthropology, like everything else, is just beginning.

Elizabeth Greenspan

Harvard College Writing Program and

Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

REFERENCE CITED

Anthropology by the Wire N.d.a. Guiding Document. http://anthropologybythewire.com/ post/6254471711/guiding-document, accessed January 6, 2012. N.d.b. June 25th interview. http://anthropologybythewire. com, accessed January 6, 2012. N.d.c. Untitled IV: Signifiers of the Subaltern. http:// anthropologybythewire.com/post/6914795214/untitled-ivsignifiers-of-the-subaltern-in-west, January 6, 2012. Chaddha, Anmol, William Julius Wilson, and Sudhir A. Venkatesh 2008 In Defense of The Wire. Dissent, Summer:83–86.