It’s big news (in anth circles) right now.  The business meeting of the AAA voted by about 1000 to 150 to put a motion on the ballot of the general membership supporting BDS this spring. It really was the talk of the meetings.  Every where I went friends and colleagues were discussing it. They weren’t unanimous in the positions.  Some were opposed to it, others were unconditional in their support, still others took the hold your nose and vote yes approach. I opted out of participating in the vote.

I find much to agree with Maximilian Fortes‘ position on the AAA resolution. Here’s a key quote from his detailed blog post:

My point is that there is a surplus of misdirection, mendacity and hypocrisy at work among AAA members who support the academic boycott of Israel, and that the boycott is being supported using not just specious reasoning, but also by endorsing imperial political and moral narratives. The wrong conclusions are being drawn from preceding AAA actions, so as to better take the AAA on a new turn: international arbiter of human rights and protector of endangered others (and only those who are endangered by others). The same logic used in the pro-boycott petition could justify calls for regime change and sanctions against other nations that are the targets of US imperialism. All of the markers of an imperial narrative of protection and intervention are present in the motion to boycott Israel: support for “civil society” (thus reinforcing the neoliberal undermining and bypassing of Palestinian national authorities); and, asserted universals about “human rights”. The notion that violations of Palestinian rights can be traced to the work of Israeli universities—while downplaying the role of the US universities in the same endeavour—is fraudulent. I am also accusing the AAA of serving not just as an agent for imperialism, but as an agent of imperialism in its own right—by reasserting the US’ neo-feudal hold over Israel (and reminding its leaders of their proper place in the international hierarchy), and by validating US anthropology’s sense of its own superiority and indispensable centrality. The exercise is ultimately one of legitimating “American Exceptionalism,” and it almost certainly has nothing to do with concern over “human rights violations”.

. . .

“I think the AAA has damned itself, and its supposed support and solidarity for Palestinians. Dishonest gestures guided by ulterior motives hardly serve Palestinians, at least not as much as they may insult their struggle. What is best served by this motion, however, are (neo)liberal politics and a vindication of “American Exceptionalism”. The motion is effectively and primarily one that expresses US solidarity with US anthropology.”

Fortes’ critique is direct, definitive, and damning. The issue lurking beneath the AAA resolution (one that did not really come out in the discussions reported by colleagues and through social media) is that this is really more about a variant of US Imperialism.

In the early 1980s central american support activities were a big issue amongst leftist activists in Vancouver. We were all familiar with groups like the FMLN (El Salvador) or the FSNL (Sandinistas, Nicaragua). The actions of the US government in supporting the contras  and fueling counter revolution were soundly decried. We saw in this class struggle a clear and obvious set of choices: either support or struggle against US imperialism and destruction of the lives of working people and agrarian poor. This sense of the struggle manifest itself in the brief emergence of a home-grown militant group, Direct Action (also known as the Squamish Five).  At least two milieu activists also ended up joining the struggle directly and were sentenced to long jail terms for their efforts. The underling idea for all of us was that real social transformation included social justice struggles at home (to change local exploitative settings) and political campaigns of support for fellow militants in theatres of armed and intense social struggle. Boycotts were conceived as a weak and low order tactical choice. More direct engagements, focussed in sites of production and at locales of governance were considered the more strategically appropriate approach.

This was also the moment in which the South African divestment and boycott campus movement started up. While the underlying issues were similar – local struggles against oppressive situations- the support movement activities were of a different order.  Whereas the central american support activities were based in a shared idea of class struggle at home and away, the campus south african divestment/boycott movement elided concerns with class struggle and focussed instead upon moral issues and an inherently anomic tactic of corporate divestments and individualized consumer boycotts.

In the contemporary BDS debates the south african example is held up as an example of a successful deployment of tactics like divestment and symbolic boycotting. Such a conclusion is curiously ahistorical. The role played by the collapse of the Soviet Union , the rising tide of neo-liberal austerity measures and liberalizing of international trade and capital flows is quite likely a far more reasonable explanation for the end of minority rule in South Africa. While correlations can be made between south african capital and US university divestment the overall set of causes can not be strongly linked to the divestment campaign.  Though, the story of divestment leading to majority rule in south africa is an elegant tale that gives juice to current fiscal activists who find it easier to support neo-liberal economics than getting their hands dirty in real social struggles that build better social just communities.

The current BDS campaign simplifies the issue into a narrative of two great actors: the Imperialist Israeli State and the Oppressed Palestinian. The antagonists are reified and held in an almost ahistorical amber of cultural entrapment.  Much like an old style anthropology monograph on a ‘village’ the only possibility of change is seen to come from outside.  Thus enters the possibility of a white crusader from the west.  This is a strange parody of a fight within the semitic family: Jew/Muslim/Christian. The reality lives far away from this simple story spun by BDS advocates. To a large extent the possibility of their being both an Israeli and a Palestinian identity has only conceivable in recent centuries. These modern fraught social identities are ones that have emerged  out of a common historical moment and they seem to rely upon the continuation of the other for their own existence. Perhaps the only real solution is to transform these separate identities into one common identity, one nation without religion?

There is much that is wrong with our world. There are a great many people who will stand up to say that this struggle, that concern, is the most important. What I have seen as I move through my life is that the further away – socially, intellectually, geographically, etc- an issue is then the more intense the rhetoric around it. At least that’s what it looks like from my vantage point.  Point is we can’t solve every problem everywhere.  We need to focus, to select, to be discerning.  Ideally we should also be consistent. For me that leads to focusing on community activism at home and within arenas that I have some small modicum of potential in making what I hope are positive changes.

So when a major national professional association makes a decision with potential global reach we need to think very carefully about this. At the most simplistic, if it is right to divest from Israel and to boycott Israeli cultural and academic institutions why not other nations as well? One also needs to ask if the tactic that is being advocated will have the desired outcome. What are the underlying principles that are being activated to make all of these decisions?

My sense is that a vague combination of liberal guilt (the worry that despite being progressive one is also implicated in oppression), a desire to be ‘on the right side of history,’ and a sense of wanting to do something that might ‘make a difference,’ came together in a room in which 1000+ members of the U.S. Association of Anthropologists voted to initiate a boycott and divestment campaign.  I’m not convinced BDS is the elixir that will make our world a better place.

The following comment  is forthcoming in Re-Storying Indian Residential Schools in Times of Reconciliation in Canada, (Eds) Capitaine, B.; Vanthuyne, K., Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press.

“… colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country. Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963:210).

Fanon was writing about the critical relevance of a resurgent national culture in the context of revolutionary struggles for political independence from colonialism in Africa. Despite having been written more than 60 years ago these words speak with prescience and immediacy here today, in Canada. Indigenous peoples have been engaged in a permanent struggle for autonomy practically since the first settlers arrived on our shores. The struggle has waxed and waned. Over the course of the twentieth century the colonists appeared to take the upper hand. However, a renewed and resurgent Indigenism is reverberating throughout Canada. From the decentered politics of Idle No More to legal victories and government apologies history is being re-storied as Indigenous peoples compel settlers to take note.

Our history can no longer be ignored. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) findings were stark: Canada committed cultural genocide through the systemic support of Indian Residential Schools (IRS) over the course of more than one century. These schools took children from their homes, maltreated them, abused them, and did all of that under a cultural framework of white supremacy and a political framework of colonialism. As Fanon notes in regard to Africa, colonialism is an active process by which a people’s sense of self, of one’s sense of dignity, one’s very sense of self-worth is deliberately and directly diminished and attacked: “The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the natives’ heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality” (1963:211). There is no other way to comprehend the objectives, processes, and outcomes of Canada’s IRS system.

The findings from the TRC provide the empirical evidence of the depravity of Canada’s colonialism: “For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide” (TRC 2015:1). Central to the displacement of Indigenous peoples from our lands was the programme of silencing us; and the attempt to take away our memory and knowledge of our land, of our history, and of our possibility to enact jurisdiction over these same things. The residential schools played their part in trying to reconstruct memories, histories, and stories that prioritized the assumed racial superiority of the colonizing elite. Fortunately the policy was not as successful as its architects may have hoped.

This volume resonates with Fanon’s call to pay attention to the role of culture, history, and Indigenous intellectuals. The editors deploy the idea of “re-storying,” a process that questions the imposition of colonial narratives. This notion places the emphasis upon the active work of confronting colonial narratives. While there are problems inherent to re-storying (if the practice remains locked in the arcane world of letters), the contributors to this volume offer up the possibilities of a future beyond re-storying. There is a call to act embedded at the heart of this volume. Here too we find an echo of Fanon’s description of the Indigenous intellectual’s path toward joining in the liberation struggle.

Fanon, in discussing the role of intellectuals in the struggle for political liberation outlines three phases through which the native intellectual must pass. I would suggest that the non-Indigenous fellow traveler intellectuals might well find themselves in a similar trajectory. Fanon’s phases are: (1) “the period of unqualified assimilation. . . . [Here] the native intellectual gives proof that he is assimilated to the culture of the occupying power” (1963:222); (2) the period during which the intellectual “decides to recognize what he is. … But since the native is not a part of his people, since he only has exterior relations with his people, he is content to recall their life only. Past happenings of the bygone days of childhood will be brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted in the light of borrowed estheticism and of a conception of the world which was discovered under other skies” (1963:222), and; (3) Finally, in “the fighting phase, the native, after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people, will on the contrary shake the people. Instead of according the people’s lethargy an honoured place in his esteem, he turns himself into an awakener of the people” (1963: 222-23). Fanon cautions the Indigenous intellectual that “it is not enough to try and get back to the people in that past out of which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving a shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called into question (1963:227).

This volume is located somewhere between Fanon’s phase two and phase three. There are aspects of the chapters that reveal a self-awareness of one’s place in the colonial moment (for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors). Some of the chapters are clearly placed in the fighting phase linking experience, history, and an articulation of a possibility to finally reconcile the colonial state to the Indigenous Nations (rather than the reverse). This constitutes a call to action that echoes Fanon but is rooted in our current Canadian context.

This call to action has a long history within anthropology as well. Kathleen Gough, then a professor at Simon Fraser University, exhorted her colleagues in the late 1960s to join with the liberation struggles of her day as allies in struggle (1968). For non-Indigenous intellectuals Gough’s call and Fanon’s analysis remain relevant and pressing. It is important to understand the intellectual currents of the contemporary struggle, to see the importance of re-storying and rejecting the colonial narrative. The papers in this volume all achieve this end. But that in and of itself is not enough. We must also take action.

“The colonized man who writes for his people ought to use the past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis of hope” (Fanon 1963:232). This volume draws from the past and goes beyond the disempowering stories of victimhood. In the artful, poignant, and perceptive analysis presented there is a modicum of hope. To ensure we do not squander the possibility we must all transform the ivory tower and join with the Indigenous struggle for liberation and autonomy.

References Cited

Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth: The Handbook for the Black Revolution that is Changing the Shape of the World. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.

Gough, Katleen. 1968. “Anthropology and Imperialism.” Monthly Review. 19(11, April):12-27.