Carol Bohmer and Amy Shuman. Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century. London: Routledge, 2007. 304pp. $39.95 (paper), ISBN: 0415773768.

Citizenship is a tricky concept rooted in the relationship between the individual and her or his government. Citizens have a responsibility to respect the state and what Max Weber called its “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force”; in return, the state guarantees individual rights and respects the right of citizens to participate peacefully in self-government. However, while there is widespread international agreement expressed in human rights treaties that this is the way things ought to be, this is not always the case. Refugee law emerged to protect citizens fleeing persecution by a government which has reneged on this responsibility.

Refugees themselves are of course an age-old phenomenon—after all Moses and the Israelites were once refugees from Egypt. But international law about asylum, and refugees is a relatively new thing. Modern laws about refugee asylum have roots in the oft-told story of the St. Louis, which sailed from Germany in 1939 with over 900 Jews fleeing Hitler. Despite widespread publicity, and attempts by Roosevelt’s White House to strong-arm Cuba into accepting the refugees, in rapid succession Cuba, the United States, and then Canada each denied requests for the refugees to land, and the St. Louis ultimately sailed back to Europe. After the United Kingdom accepted a small proportion of the fleeing Jews, the majority were delivered back to continental Europe, which was shortly thereafter conquered by Hitler’s armies. Several hundred of the refugees from the St. Louis ultimately perished in the Nazi concentration camps.

After the Holocaust and World War II, experiences like that of the St. Louis refugees were highlighted when diplomats created international laws promising that anyone fleeing a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a “social group” has a right to asylum. Beginning in 1951, versions of this guarantee were inserted into international treaties, and the laws of many nations.

But of course as is the case with any new legal doctrine, the devil is in the details. Concepts like “well-grounded fear” and “social group” have ample maneuvering room for legal experts to argue both on behalf of people making asylum claims, and government officials seeking to protect modern welfare states from fraud. This is why Carol Bohmer and Amy Shuman wrote Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century. Bohmer is a lawyer and sociologist who has worked with asylum seekers in Ohio to develop the stories which, in the context of the courtroom, they hope become literal ‘passports to freedom.’ For her part, Shuman’s background as a folklorist is particularly helpful as the authors analyse how refugee claims for asylum rights emerge. Rejecting Refugees, then, is about the interactions between asylum applicants, and the cases they present to asylum judges in the United States, and to the Secretary of State for the Home Department in the United Kingdom. As the authors point out, these stories emerge in the interaction between mutually distrustful asylum seekers and the immigration bureaucracies enforcing laws created for conservative risk-averse publics. The result is a strange dance in which stories emerge about why, how, and for whom asylum claims should be granted. Thus, Bohmer and Shuman aim to untangle how the creation of stories exposes the injustices in the asylum systems of the United States and United Kingdom, particularly for the many impoverished asylum seekers.

The Dance between Asylum Lawyers, Asylum Judges, and Refugees
Refugee claims and counter-claims begin with the memories of the Holocaust, and the context of the Cold War. However while embarrassment about the failure the Allies to protect fleeing Jewish refugees, like those of the St. Louis, provided the initial impetus for refugee law, the Cold War was the political context for the manner in which asylum law developed. Pointedly, refugees escaping from behind the Iron Curtain highlighted the righteousness of the West’s political cause as a guarantor of human rights. As a result, refugees, many of those who were skilled and middle class when they fled Communist Bloc countries, were welcomed in the 1950s and 1960s using the legal instruments of the new asylum laws. The refugees from behind the Iron Curtain, then, were a low-cost way for the democratic west to underscore the centrality of the human rights narrative in their confrontation with the Communist east. Low cost because ultimately between the 1940s and 1970s, the walls and gun towers of the Soviet Bloc effectively bottled up potential refugees from Eastern European and the Asian Communist regimes.

By the 1970s, however, refugee flight shifted from Europe to the decolonized countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This shift posed an unexpected legal conundrum for the administration of asylum law because, rights established in the context of the Cold War were applicable to new situations, including the flight of masses of poor Indochinese at the end of the Vietnam War, and others fleeing the wars of de-colonization in Africa and Asia. This created a legal-ethical trap for how asylum laws of both the US and UK were administered.

But these new refugees were more expensive for host country budgets. First there were more of them, and secondly many had been rural peasant farmers. Poor and unskilled in the ways of the West, they presented an ethical dilemma which was quickly framed as a legal issue for asylum cases: Were refugees fleeing “persecution,” or were they fleeing “economics?” If the former, they would be granted asylum, a residence permit, and temporary welfare benefits. If the latter, they would be summarily deported. And a second issue was raised by those sceptical of asylum claims, particularly those who fled after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. Maybe, they reasoned, asylum seekers were fleeing “prosecution” by a legitimated non-Communist government which was simply cracking down on criminal activities, and therefore subject to extradition rather than asylum.
The needs to address such dilemmas quickly became the basis upon which refugees shaped their pleas. And in response, bureaucratic rules were created by legal minds to accommodate the tension between a sceptical Western public, and the legitimate claims of asylum seekers. The narratives that the refugees constructed to meet the bureaucratic rules resulted in patterned explanations for how refugee stories are presented.

The Structure of Refugee Stories
As Bohmer and Shuman relate, the stories refugees tell in asylum hearings are structured by the intricate bureaucratic regulations which demand coherence, rationalized explanation, and documentation. But as the interviews described by Bohmer and Shuman demonstrate, authentic refugee stories about killings, amputations, escapes, betrayals, rapes, and shootings are rarely coherent, rational, or documented. In fact authentic refugee stories are often quite incoherent. Questions about the status of family members who have died or disappeared produce the ramblings of the traumatized. Refugees also have doubts about their culpability in their misfortunes, and wish to hide embarrassing deceptions undertaken to facilitate escape.

For example, Mustapha escaped from Sierra Leone on a ship in 2000, and described his travails to Bohner in the following fashion:
Mustapha: The rebels were killing them, cut hands, that’s why I left the country. They cut hands when you catch the person. These people were just doing things.

Carol: How did you get out?

Mustapha: I was working at the port. I took a Greek ship. I got a ship.

Carol: How did you do that?

Mustapha: I was working on the inside of the ship…When they catch me the other time, they shot me.

Carol: So you’ve been shot by the rebels?

Mustapha: Yes. This was even for nine months. This happened when they came to the city. They ruled for nine months. There was one man, his name was Johnny Koroma. He was in prison, when they came they took him out of prison (p. 44)

Such stories are inherently emotional, confused, and at first glance often seem irrational. But the legalistic asylum system does not recognize confusion and emotion, preferring verifiable facts (this means government issued documents typically by the home country), which can be tested against the law itself, and in the case of Common Law countries like the US and UK, case precedent.

As asylum cases have become more difficult, a cottage industry in the generation of logical stories to match the odd documents available has emerged. But, as the authors note, in the world of asylum seekers, the logical effectiveness of a story is still the only equivalent of a passport asylum seekers have. Thus these stories are carefully developed in a legalistic environment dominated by asylum lawyers, who shape stories to match the expectations of sceptical asylum judges. This of course requires expensive legal counsel which is accessible primarily to the well-heeled and well-connected, whose cases in turn shape the expectations and evaluations of asylum judges for all refugees. Notably, such procedures are much less accessible to the masses of poor traumatized refugees like Mustapha. Caught in-between are the very few lawyers like Shuman, who attempt to bridge this cultural gap pro bono. The result is that refugees who should be granted asylum frequently are not, and those who should not be, may well gain the sympathy of judges because they create the documented rational story and paper trail demanded by the legal system.

Asylum seekers are thus caught in a legalistic Catch-22. Legitimate asylum seekers almost by definition are outside the legal system of at least their home country, and do not have the legitimate travel documents expected by immigration officers. Their story may be their passport to freedom; but the passport works only if it fits the contours of opaque pre-existing case law.

The Unfortunate Hole in Rejecting Refugees
But if the benefit of the doubt goes to the state in asylum cases, what does the state think about this? What are the immigration judges, and the mysterious “Secretary of State,” who writes the UK’s formal asylum letters in the third person, actually thinking when they request police records from despotic countries, upbraid an asylum seeker for traveling on false papers, or deny the claims of a woman fleeing domestic violence because she cannot produce a police report?

Rejecting Refugees does an excellent job in describing the asylum system from the perspective of the social workers and attorneys who represent asylum seekers, and effectively describes the confusions of refugees themselves. As the authors demonstrate well, the system comes across as opaque and arbitrary to legitimate asylum seekers, with its obvious biases toward the well-heeled and well-lawyered.
But the hole in Bohner and Shuman’s story is that there is not similar data from the side of the asylum judges in the US, or the adjudicators of the

Secretary of State in the UK. In large part this is due to the fact that the story they are telling is from the side of the pro bono lawyers, and their asylum seeking clients—implicit is the fact that the quick facile judgments made in the popular press, and presumably by immigration bureaucrats, are over-simplified. But, presumably the system itself is not so opaque to the bureaucracies, judges, and prosecutors processing asylum claims. So, the unanswered question in the book is ultimately, what information and assumptions structure the truth claims of asylum judges, prosecutors, and those who write in the name of the mysterious British Secretary of State for the Home Department when they render a decision? Applying Bohmer’s skill as an interviewer, and Shuman’s skill as a folklorist could do much to assess how the legitimacy of the judges’ experience develop, and shape asylum decisions.

In the inherently adversarial legal systems of the US and UK, the lawyers, social workers, and refugees defending their cases assume a certain level of incompetence, cruelty, and malevolence by the immigration officials making difficult decisions. But this view is necessarily distilled from the hyper-formalized interactions undertaken in legal hearings, and formal documents. Missing in Rejecting Refugees, though, is a sense of how the decisions asylum seekers receive “make sense” in the narratives told from behind the bench.

The question of “What was the judge thinking?” is perhaps beyond this book, which is by itself a solid contribution to the legal sociology of asylum cases. But understanding the asylum judges as human beings is a circumstance crying out for evaluation.

What Kind of Legal Asylum Regime is Really Possible?
As Bohmer and Shuman illustrate, the roots of international asylum law were in World War II, and the failure of Western democracies to recognize the threat totalitarian regimes posed to middle class citizens in German-occupied Europe, and later behind the Iron Curtain. But with first the arrival of peasant refugees from Communist countries in the 1970s, and then the end of the Cold War in 1989, asylum law became more complicated. No longer were refugees convenient chess pieces in the Cold War to be exploited by the West; and no longer were they middle class and ready to adapt to the ways of the West. What Bohner and Shuman in fact describe is a democratization of asylum law that has occurred since the 1970s as Vietnamese peasants fleeing to the United States, Haitian refugees to Canada, Timorese to Australia and a host of other groups showed up on foreign shores asserting recognition from the legal regime established after World War II for Europeans. As became well-established, they too were also victims of persecution, and therefore eligible for asylum protection from forcible repatriation.

Then the broader question left only partly answered by Rejecting Refugees is, what kind of modern asylum system is really possible? Certainly, refugees can expect more protection from forced repatriation from the international refugee relief law, and governments like the US and UK, than Moses and the Israelites did while in the Sinai. But there are still limitations to what the international asylum system can or will do to protect refugee rights. What is more there are clues in Bohmer and Shuman’s book. Most obviously, they point to the need for the state to provide legal advice to refugees who by themselves cannot navigate the morass of laws, regulations, rules, forms, and procedures created by lawyers for other lawyers. But perhaps most critical is the failure of the democracies like the United States and United Kingdom to establish for prosecutors and asylum judges clear and transparent standards of due process, including the provision of legal counsel. Asylum seekers—both those with legitimate claims, and those without—must meet the demands of Western legalism as a prerequisite to establishing a “well-founded fear of persecution.” But as the authors demonstrate well, the system as currently constituted is inherently biased toward the wealthy and well-lawyered, irrespective of the legitimacy of asylum claims.

More importantly, the fact of the matter is that were another St. Louis ever to arrive on the shore of the United States or United Kingdom, coming from, say, Iran, China, Pakistan, or Haiti it would still be routinely turned back in the interests of protecting domestic political concerns, and not on the merits of the individual asylum cases. Indeed, this may have already happened below the radar of the press. But even were the press to intervene as it did with the St. Louis, national interests and diplomatic niceties would probably still prevail, and if it were to arrive in the home country just before another calamity struck, it is still likely that the deportees would disappear, just like the passengers on the St. Louis did in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Day by day, the peasants make the economists sigh, the politicians sweat, and the strategists swear, defeating their plans and prophecies all over the world—Moscow and Washington, Peking and Delhi, Cuba and Algeria, the Congo and Vietnam (Shanin 1966:5)

Economists, politicians, and strategists since at least the end of World War II dream of the world’s rural farmers becoming a wealthy, healthy, and modern middle class.  Implicit to this dream is peasants moving off the farms of China, India, Africa, and Latin America to staff factories in an ever-wealthier world.  When this doesn’t happen, the Ph.D.s do indeed sigh, sweat, and swear not at themselves, but at the peasants that frustrate the models on which their development plans are based.  In the process though, they forget one thing: the very nature of the world’s subsistence peasants.  Subsistence peasants farm, feed themselves, build their own houses, have children, grow old, while producing little for the world markets that the economists celebrate.  In short, peasants resist the siren song of the economists’ models, no matter how effectively it might be packaged by cheerleaders for globalization and free markets including U2 frontman Bono, UN Secretary Generals, US Presidents, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, or economist Jeffrey Sachs.

The Two Great Transitions in Human History

Anthropologists and historians talk about the two great transformations in human organization.  The first began 8,000-10,000 years ago when Neolithic farmers emerged from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers.  During the following millennia they became clans who as a small unit together tilled the earth, raised animals, built permanent houses invented village life, and even at times created empires.  The economists dream though of a second transition begun only about 400 years ago, and continuing today.  In this transition, the same farmers—heirs to the Neolithic—are moving into a modern market economy in which tasks are highly specialized, and trade in the global marketplace is key.  In this transition there are governments and banks gambling big money that millennia are not needed before a world-straddling market economy emerges.  Indeed, economist William Easterly estimates that since World War II over $2.3 trillion was spent to entice these farmers into the new global marketplace by the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development, European Community Humanitarian Organization, and so forth.

So why didn’t such a big investment necessarily work during the five and ten year plans of the economists?  Simply put it is because subsistence farmers of the Neolithic are outside the ethic of the economist’s modern marketplace, and relatively immune to its enticements.  Subsistence farmers traditionally grow most of what they eat, build the houses they live in from local materials, and make the clothes they wear independently from the marketplace.  Their small surpluses go to harvest celebrations, or as tribute to the chief, prince, king, or other leader who provides relief supplies in the event of famine.  Indeed, what is produced by subsistence farmers never even has a market price put on it.  But life was good for farmers with access to hoes, plows, unclaimed arable land, and rainfall; in good years there was enough food to support a rapidly expanding population.  In better years there was something left over that could be traded for minor luxuries, or offered as tribute to a potentially rapacious warlord. And so, across the millennia, values, norms, and culture emerged to justify and accommodate the nature of subsistence farming.  First was loyalty to kin, and tribute to a feudal leader who maintained the famine socks and organized defense.  The abstract nation-states, citizenship, and market principles of the economists and politicians were yet to be invented as the organizing principle for larger societies.

In short, subsistence peasants, while vulnerable to catastrophe, were more independent of the marketplace than we moderns.  If markets failed, life on the farm was more uncomfortable, but there was still food to eat, and a place to live.  In the modern market though, market failure means that unpaid workers are evicted from their houses or unable to buy food.  Subsistence farmers, when viewed from this perspective, had it quite good as long as land was plentiful and rains came.  Indeed, this is why Karl Marx when dreaming of world revolution, compared France’s unrevolutionary nineteenth century subsistence peasants to an inert sackful of potatoes.  Marx complained that like potatoes in a sack, no peasant household was much different from any other.  The French peasants contributed little to the efficient globalized markets emerging in Europe’s cities: a potato was always just a potato, each pretty much like the other.

Nineteenth century European factories initiated this transition by hiring masses of former peasants to work in textile mills, meat packing plants, mono-crop agriculture, and the other specialized assembly lines of the Industrial Revolution in which skilled workers do a single simplified task, but do it efficiently.  This transition is what development agencies like the World Bank call ‘development’.  Given that this is such a massive project, it is perhaps surprising that it occurred in many countries in only a matter of decades or a century, rather than the millennia of the first transition from hunter-gatherers to settled agrarian populations.  Nevertheless, this transition is not yet over.  It is continuing in the third world today, as the subsistence peasants continue to defeat the plans and prophecies of hyper-educated economists, politicians, and planners.

The Long Successful Run of the World’s Peasants

The world’s subsistence peasants had a long and successful run.  Emerging out of scattered hunter-gatherer communities 8,000-10,000 years ago, they settled down in fertile river valleys where they raised more human food per hectare than nature had ever produced for their forbearers.  As hoe wielding farmers cleared the land, rapid population growth resulted from the increases in food production. Surpluses, though small by modern standards, still eventually supported great empires in places like Ancient Egypt, Rome, China, Europe, and the Americas.   True, a “terrible compromise” in which freedom and liberty were traded for the protection of a tribute-seeking King often emerged.  But life and culture were similar for the vast majority who remained on the farm, growing and consuming what they needed to eat, building housing, producing clothing, and having children.  In this context, rarely did more than ten or twenty percent of all production enter the marketplace—the bulk of consumption remained on-farm where peasant families, each doing the same thing as the other, continued to resemble that unrevolutionary sack of potatoes which so frustrated Marx.

Take a potato out of the sack, and the bag is still a sack of potatoes, just a little lighter.  Take a smaller specialized piece out of a specialized machine, and not only is the machine only a little lighter, but it also might not work.  This is why peasantries are so resilient when compared to a system of differentiated economy organized by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and the principles of supply and demand.  The problem is that from the retrospective and comfortable position of today’s economists, this change appears magical and painless in societies celebrating individual achievement, and the accumulation of capital.  But it is not painless for the peasant whose old way of life is slowly destroyed, family loyalties dissipated, land appropriated, clans disrupted, and replaced too often with life in the urban slums of modern industrial cities.

Scotland’s subsistence peasantry is a good example.  Scotland’s clans from time immemorial occupied the hills and glens where they farmed, raised livestock, built stone houses, and paid in-kind tribute to patron clan chiefs.  However, following English military victories in 1748, a new way of looking at the land emerged.  Clan chiefs siding with the British were granted personal title to the clan lands, while at the same time new factories demanded wool, flax, and labor. The Scottish highlands provided an excellent place to graze sheep and raise fields of inedible flax for the textile mills of the growing cities, and Scotland’s peasantry provided laborers who could work in the newly industrialized economy as wage laborers.  In modern words it was a “win-win” for the “Clan Chiefs” who could now sell or rent “their” personal lands in the free land market, and the expanding industrialist class which needed cheap labor.  But left out of course were the peasants who lost uncommodified traditional rights and privilege to use the land their ancestors had, the right to the famine stocks kept by the clan chief, who now preferred the global market’s measure of productivity, i.e. hard cold cash.

In this context, expropriation of Scottish peasant lands occurred by hook and by crook across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Threats of famine pushed former peasants into factory towns where they became the new urban working class.  When the bright lights of the labor market were not alluring enough, sheriffs and military often played a prominent role.  And as the survivors gained market skills needed in the rough urban environment, they lost subsistence skills and the old way of life: No longer could they grow their own food, or build their own stone houses even had they been so inclined.   The lucky survivors after a few generations were though able to serve the needs of the world-straddling labor market, and become the middle class consumers which today’s economists celebrate.  But this was not the only strategy of Europe’s eighteenth and nineteenth century peasants.

For a time Europe’s subsistence farmers had another strategy to deal with the disruptions coming with the transformation to market society: They could flee to places like North America where arable land was available after the native population died from European contact. And so when the European peasants arrived in North America in the eighteenth century, many left for the nearby forest where it appeared they might resume life as a subsistence peasantry.  In fact in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not only the Scottish peasantry fled to the North American forest, but also English, German, French, and others displaced European peasants.  Hacking, clearing, hunting, and fighting their way across the North American continent, Europe’s subsistence peasantry peopled the land east of the Mississippi between about 1750 and 1850.  The expansion was one rooted in the conservative subsistence peasantry’s greatest traditional strengths, especially the ability to have many children, organize social life around clan-based loyalties, and a penchant to clear land for new farms.  This happened across decades (rather than millennia), as the United States and Quebec experienced one of the highest population growth rates ever-recorded: Populations of North America’s subsistence farmers doubled every 20-30 years.

A paradigmatic example of the consequences of such rapid demographic growth is the frontiersman Daniel Boone.  In his long life (1734-1820), Boone hunted, and cleared farms across Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Missouri along with his 13 siblings, 10 children, and more than 60 grandchildren.   For a time of course, subsistence farmers like Boone even made it in the rough land markets of Kentucky where he settled in the 1770s.  But like millions of other rural peasants dabbling in the unfamiliar impersonal marketplace with its emphasis on cash rather than the handshakes, Boone was conned by land speculators from the city.  Fortunately for him, there was still land left further west in Spanish Missouri, to where he moved his clan in 1799.

Neither Daniel Boone, his extraordinary clan, nor Europe’s peasants prospered for more than a few decades whilst hacking, clearing, and hunting—the modern industrial world was too close.  And as in Scotland, the actual profits, and the land itself, slowly but surely made its way into the hands of the newly emerging investors who controlled the government, banks, law firms, and land offices.  So in a slow but recurrent fashion, the United States’ Northwest, settled by prolific hunters and farmers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, passed into the modern global land market.  Most dramatically, what was in 1830 a remote trading village for hunters—Chicago—by 1870 was a large modern industrial town, coordinating the production of maize, wheat, lumber, cattle, and hogs across several states. Just like in Scotland, in North America the peasants were slowly but surely moved onward—into factories, production for the market, or further west.  As in Scotland, the movement was facilitated by urban market power in the form of land speculators and bankers—whose eviction notices were backed up by the sheriff.  And so, North America’s subsistence peasantry faded into history as the land they cleared passed out of their hands whether violently, or through the maneuverings of mortgage bankers.

It will be no surprise to readers of Current Intelligence that markets are enormously successful in concentrating and increasing economic productivity.  But I doubt that any of Current Intelligence’s readers, myself included, can raise what they eat, build their own house, and make their own clothing like Daniel Boone, a Scottish clan, or an African subsistence farmer today.  We are very much part of the finely-tuned world in which labor is specialized, and worldwide trade is critical.  But even Bono, Thomas Friedman, and Jeffrey Sachs likely have ancestors who in the recent past were such self-sufficient farmers.

In place of subsistence farms are the large corporate and government bureaucracies who use the invisible hand of the marketplace to produce for the world. But to say that this happened, is not to say the process was just, nor came without suffering.  Nor was it necessarily welcomed by the world’s peasants whose passive resistance to market incentives still throw askew econometric forecasts. And if more evidence is needed of this conflict, one need look no further than  Africa today, where vast numbers of subsistence peasants continue to live, farm, and resist government attempts to exclude them from lands reserved for cash-generating timber reserves, hunting blocks, plantations, or national parks even as promises of cash for wage labor entice them into the cities.

Africa’s Peasants Confront Markets and Its Bureaucrats

In pockets of Asia, Latin America and especially Africa peasant clans are still often like those Marx compared to a bag of potatoes: similar to each other, and not particularly suited to a fine division of labor. Perhaps all that is particularly new is that they have access to clothing purchased from the bales of the wealthy world’s cast-offs.  But like the peasants in Scotland or even Daniel Boone, they resist with the tools of the subsistence peasant: high birth rates, clearing land, reliance on clan loyalty, and demands for relief commodities when crops fail.

The problem is that few development bureaucrats or businessmen see Africa in terms familiar to its subsistence peasantry, i.e. as a conservative, well-tested, and secure way of life.  Rather they see it in terms of its incapacity to produce for a global marketplace in which land and labor are capital.  Thus African development programs are typically about the tools and measures of the marketplace, like trade balances, currency stability, mineral production, agricultural extension, clothing manufacture, and oil.  Unseen in such analyses are the subsistence peasants who are effectively invisible because they primarily produce outside the global market.  In this context, they will always frustrate the highest ideals of the development agencies.  The way they frustrate the modern marketplace is through the same messiness seen in eighteenth century Scotland, and nineteenth century North America.  They have babies who as young men and women eventually push into forest reserves, national parks, and other cash-producing concessions only lightly policed by the central government.  And when these traditional strategies no longer work, the survivors demand relief supplies from their patrons, just as surely as Scottish peasants asserted rights to famine relief from patron clan chiefs in the eighteenth century Highlands.  And perhaps most threatening, when land does indeed run out, the peasantry creates vast numbers of youth who no longer have access to land for a subsistence life, and few market skills of interest in urban labor markets.  And ominously, these displaced youth are the targets of extremists seeking to create the militias needed for the type of revolution Marx dreamed of.  Or in a post Cold War world, they are susceptible to the ethnic ideologies found in places like Rwanda, Congo, Colombia, Afghanistan, The Middle East, and elsewhere.

The Limits of Modern Economics for Understanding Peasant Life

There are of course advantages to modern neo-classical economic models: They do predict how people embedded in the marketplace respond to incentives.  Today though, the trick is knowing which farmer is embedded in the marketplace, and which in older persistent ways of thinking about economic life.  The former will respond to incentives in manners development bureaucrats will understand.  But for those still embedded in older subsistence ethics, the bureaucrats encounter people who do not remain at factory benches consistently, hire based on clan loyalties, appeal to personal relationships in the awarding (and repayment) of loans, lose their land to hucksters, and withdraw from confrontation when working conditions become onerous.  Most frustrating for the bureaucrats are the emphases on the age-old method of resistance; especially having more children than the development bureaucrats think economically wise.  And of course when food shortage looms, they look to the new patrons in the aid bureaucracies for relief supplies.

Such techniques, whether called peasant stubbornness, resistance, weapons of the weak, or simple laziness are in fact the old means used to resist the intrusion of the outside world into the older world of the subsistence peasant.  But after $2.3 trillion spent in development assistance to change the peasantry into the finely tuned producer in a market economy directed by the guiding spirit of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, you would think something else might be tried.  There are rational reasons the world’s subsistence peasants avoid capture by the world market—and unless these reasons are evaluated, not even another $2.3 trillion will provide the alchemy needed to transform Marx’s bag of potatoes into a finely tuned watch.  And as long as this happens, the sighing of the economists, and sweating of the politicians will continue.

Tony Waters

Chico, California

Call for Videos–Applied Video Festival at the Society for Applied
Anthropology, Seattle 2011

The Society for Applied Anthropology will hold a one-day Applied Video
Festival at the 71st Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington. The
festival is on April 1, 2011. One video producer will win a cash prize
of $250 and free registration ($120) to attend the conference.

This open call for video submissions welcomes all genres ranging from
the ethnographic to the expository and experimental. We welcome
submissions that address in form or content the mission of the SfAA.
The awardee will have produced a video that deftly balances applied
investigations with provocative videographical storytelling. To enter
the competition, please submit a short or long format video on DVD to
the address below. The winner must be present at the conference to
collect the award and be available for a question and answer session
after the screening of the film. There is no student award. Videos
will have been finished after 2009.

Along with your DVD submission please send an email with a 100 word
abstract to Adam Fish at rawbird@gmail.com and Darby C Stapp at
dstapp@pocketinet.com with the subject heading: SfAA Video Festival.
The deadline to submit the video is February 1, 2011. Individuals who
have submitted a paper/poster abstract for the Program, may also
submit a video for the Applied Video Festival.

Conference Location:
Hyatt Regency
Society for Applied Anthropology
71st Annual Meeting
March 29-April 2, 2011

Conference information is found at http://www.sfaa.net/sfaa2011.html
Please send DVDs here:
Darby C. Stapp, PhD
Seattle 2011 Program Chair
P.O. Box 1721
Richland, WA 99352

ETHNOGRAPHER

Description

The Concept Studio is a customer-centered innovation group with the mission of providing Pitney Bowes with rich customer and market insights to discover new business opportunities and guide decision-making.

Our multi-disciplinary team of designers, strategists and technologists collaborate with Pitney Bowes business units in fast-paced projects, to identify unmet needs and market opportunities and to shape those insights into tangible B2B product and service innovations.

We currently have an opening for a social scientist with expertise in the anthropology of work, ethnographic research, and data analysis and synthesis. If you are a highly motivated researcher who can apply qualitative data to business design and development, we would like to hear from you.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop research plans and materials including participant criteria and screeners, discussion guides, behavioral analyses, usability protocols, visual diaries, etc.
• Conduct customer-centered research with the purpose of understanding the unmet needs of customers (articulated and un-articulated) and validating product and solution offerings
• Analyze and generate insights from both primary and secondary research
• Create representations of customers’ needs and everyday practice including user / buyer personas, use scenarios, workflows etc.
• Create low-fidelity prototypes e.g. mock ups, sketches, storyboards and design experiments for the purpose of testing new product concepts and validating customer need
• Articulate market and customer insights through written and visual means to feed conceptualization and development of products, communicating process and actionable findings to clients
• Engage with product managers, strategic marketers and cross-functional teams focused on building businesses
• Develop / adapt / research novel customer research techniques that add greater depth, breadth, and speed to the Pitney Bowes product development process
• Contribute to the consolidation and dissemination of market and customer insights (i.e. knowledge management) across the company

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in a social science, such as anthropology, or human centered design, is required
• Two or more (2+) years real-world experience in applying various research methodologies (e.g. ethnographic observation, customer interviews) in a business context, ideally as part of a multi-disciplinary team
• Demonstrated ability to translate field data to real business problems is required. Experience in representing ethnographic data in visual forms a distinct plus
• Requires excellent analytic, communication and interpersonal skills, and ability to work in a variety of customer environments

Location: Southwestern Connecticut (Greater New York area)

The Concept Studio is located in Southwestern Connecticut overlooking the Housatonic River Valley, 30 minutes from New Haven, CT and 90 minutes from New York City.
Please submit your application online at PB.com
Questions? Please contact wayne.pethrick@pb.com

For those of you that are AAA members, or participate in those conversations:

The AAA is posting proposed rewrites to the Code of Ethics, section by section, to their blog for discussion and comment. The first topic being hashed out is “Do no harm.” If you want to observe or participate, click on over to http://blog.aaanet.org/ethics-task-force/