Saakashvili speaks with Al Jazeera - 15 Aug 2008

I've been frustrated by what I've heard in the media here on what is happening in Georgia, which tends to be repetitive, shallow, and lacking a sense of historicity. Georgia is a place I haven't paid a lot of attention to up until recently, but any changes in the role of Russia in the lives of its neighbors to the west attracts my interest. So this lengthy interview with President Saakashvili was quite fascinating to me. So was this BBC report about Ukraine extending a technological helping hand to the West, presumably for potential future Russian "adventures" (to use Sakashvili's language).

For a blogger recap of what's been going on, check out Shashalnikya on livejournal.

Trans-american children

I tuned in partway through the rebroadcast of Barbara Walters' 20/20 report last year on transgendered children and their parents tonight.

Watching the report was interesting to me in part because it reinforced the point we try to nail home for the anthropology 101 students about gender as a social construction, and how gender is enculturated. It's amazing how attached parents are to the ideas of what a boy is, or what a girl is, and that they can mourn the loss of that boy even when they still have the transgendered child who is alive and well and insisting that the world recognize her as a girl. I'm not meaning to dismiss the pain that these families experience, because it is real, but I just mean to say that culture is a profoundly powerful force in building our understandings of the world and the way it ought to be.

Maybe this was out of context, since I tuned in late, but I was also struck by the fact that Walters initially seemed stubbornly to return to the pronoun that anatomy declared rather than the one the child -- and, in most cases, the families too -- used for himself or herself. This shifted over the course of the broadcast, and by the end she seemed generally to use the pronoun used by the family.

Another thing that I can't help but notice in American journalism is the isolationist kind of approach to the subject of gender, as if the US is the only country in the world where this could happen*, and that given the biologically driven theories that many people currently believe, there's no room for talking about culture. Even the explanation Walters offers of this theory belies the American cultural framing of science, where anatomy = biology. She explains that many believe that a hormone surge during pregnancy results in "the wrong gender" for these children. Why "wrong"? Because a penis necessitates male gender identity, a vagina female gender identity? The orientation is puzzling to me, for sure. We know that dark matter populates the universe with far more than we know how to identify in cosmology; why is there the popular assumption we have biology all figured out?

I've seen the interesting film No Dumb Questions a couple of times in social work classes taught by Liz Gershoff, which also deals with children and their conceptualizations of gender and gender identity, but from the point of view of children watching their relative transition from being Uncle Bill to Aunt Barbara, rather than a child experiencing a transgendered identity himself or herself. Though it's rougher in its production, I think it's somehow more intelligent in certain ways than Walter's piece, because its absence of an omnicient narrator leaves more room for interpretation and self-discovery, rather than pronouncement.

One thing that Walters does do really nicely, though, is capture (ethnographically) the parents' varied reactions to their own children's declarations of alternate gender, and given the large audience of its mainstream broadcast, it has the potential to have a huge impact on people who share exactly the same assumptions that she herself falls into at times in the documentary. As she claims in the final moments of the one-year-later broadcast, there has been an enormous rise in the number of trans-identified children participating in conferences since the initial airing of the episode, and there's been a great deal of attention given the show by internet readers as well as schools.

Even with the faults in the program, I'm thrilled to see this topic being talked about in mainstream media with a fair amount of sensitivity. Hooray for Barbara Walters.

*The wonderful French film Ma Vie en Rose (1997) deals with just this topic from the child's perspective.

I heart the interwebs -- alternative news round-up

One thing I like about reading my news from a custom-designed list that makes use of RSS feeds of a variety of international sources (NPR, New York Times, Al Jazeera, BBC, etc. . ) is that I'm able to see a lot more variation in the top stories than you do if you read the top US newspapers. It's even more interesting than the days when I read the World Press Review magazine.

Case in point: Although the New York Times is reporting on the German dairy strike, the US seems oblivious to the fishermen's work stoppages in Spain in protest of rising fuel prices: "'Compliance is total. The entire Spanish coast is at a halt," Jose Caparros, of the fishermen's co-operative in the major northeastern port of Barcelona, said." Apparently Portugal has already seen similar action and Italian and Belgian fishermen are expected to follow suit, according to Al Jazeera and the BBC.


Of course, I personally am interested to see social work and anthropology and Eastern Europe in the mainstream news today, and Roma in the international press.

First off, social work: The Supreme Court has ruled that child welfare workers in Texas overstepped their bounds in their removal of the children from the polygamist compound outside Eldorado last month.

Next, Eastern Europe: Croatia has jailed a war crimes general following his conviction in the Croatian court. As the BBC reports, "The UN war crimes tribunal's decision to transfer the case to Zagreb was in recognition of the progress Croatia had earlier made in dealing with war crimes investigations, the BBC's Balkans analyst Gabriel Partos said."

And finally, anthropology gets its five minutes in the spotlight. The secret to Stonehenge finally been uncovered (and now reported all over the mainstream press). My favorite commentary on the recent discoveries at Stonehenge has to be the interview with Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap.

Meanwhile, in northern France, archaeologists are "seeking to uncover a suspected mass grave of hundreds of Australian and British troops from World War I."

Also, there's also been yet another "uncontacted tribe" 'sighted' in the Amazon by Brazil's National Indian Foundation (Fundacao Nacional do Indio, whose website was down last I tried). True to the form of salvage ethnography, there are folks convinced we need to save them.

CNN reports:"'These pictures are further evidence that uncontacted tribes really do exist,' said Stephen Corry, director of Survival International. 'The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct.'" I just wonder how long it'll be before they send in a translator to communicate with them.

© Gleison Miranda/FUNAI

On the other hand, in the international press, there are some new, disturbing reports on Roma. One of the oldest Romani populations in the world, that of Istanbul, is experiencing dislocation due to urban renewal in Sulukule. Human rights advocates are very concerned for the Romani families who have been living in the neighborhood for centuries. There are allegations that illiterate families have been asked to sign papers they don't understand, and that "tenants in Sulukule were left on the streets as the houses they resided in were sold and then destructed by the municipality."

In Italy, meanwhile, schoolchildren's drawings are telling a frightening tale of xenophobia and violence underlying the recent firebombing of a Romani camp outside Naples, according to the Daily Mail.

"Burning the houses of the Roma is justified," wrote some children. Another said, "They steal babies and use them for begging or sell their organs for transplants." The frightening messages of hatred communicated without filter through the words and images of children give startling insight into the dangerous social situation for Roma in Italy.