Anxious politics in postcolonial Europe

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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGIES

Foreword

Special Section on Nativism, Nationalism, and Xenophobia:

What Anthropologists Do and Have Done

Virginia R. Dominguez

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Associate Editor for World Anthropologies

Emily Metzner

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Editorial Assistant for World Anthropologies

T

he World Anthropologies section in this issue consists of essays written fairly quickly by anthropologists in various places in the world who responded to our request in early December 2016 for short- to medium-length essays due January 20. We thought the topic was clear, but it was apparently too broad for some and too daunting for others.

We were, therefore, delighted with the number and range of essays we received and include here. Poland, Greece, India, Brazil, Argentina, the Netherlands, and Japan feature quite visibly, but so does most of Europe, the United States (even if backgrounded here), and many other contemporary societies and countries around the world.

Here is what we wrote—and what went out through the WCAA (World Council of Anthropological Associations) and the AA editorial board in early December:

The WORLD ANTHROPOLOGIES section of AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST invites anthropologists living and working amid any of the growing nativist/nationalist/xenophobic/

protectionist movements in various parts of the world, outside of the United States, to submit short- to medium-length pieces (anywhere from 1200 to 2000 words) to a special section planned for the September 2017 issue of American Anthropologist. Essays in this planned World Anthropologies section of AA may address how anthropologists respond to, interpret, analyze, engage with, resist, and/or teach about these movements, or how anthropologists in the past have responded to the rise of similar movements in their societies.

We added that we welcomed essays written in languages other than English, though we explained that they would have to be translated into English before appearing in the journal.¹We asked colleagues interested in contributing an essay to this special section to let us know as soon as possible that they were planning to submit, especially if their essays were not going to be in English, so we would have the necessary time to translate them or get them translated.

We approached certain individuals we knew were working on related issues and received some commitments that way, but we also sought to reach far and wide by sending

the call out through the WCAA (and its heads of over forty anthropological associations around the globe) and through the journal’s editorial board, which has many members outside the United States. The ten scholars who committed to writing essays for this special section (though not all came through) were a mix of those approached by Virginia individually and anthropologists who heard about it in one of these other ways. Indeed, half were people we approached individually and half were people who heard or read the call and approached Virginia directly.

The end result is suggestive, not exhaustive, but it doc- uments developments in many countries, in the recent past as well as in the contemporary moment, where anthropologists have had to live and work in environments that most found too nativist, too nationalist, too protectionist, and downright xenophobic and intolerant. Put differently, most colleagues included here describe periods, actions, practices, activities, representations, and/or rhetoric they find antithetical to anthropology.

We have copyedited the essays but have otherwise given the authors wide berth to address or focus on an issue or a place to the best of their abilities and with arguments that are fully their own. We recognize that other anthropologists living and working in those countries or settings might prefer to stress a different phenomenon or offer a different inter- pretation than the ones found here, but our aim is to broach the topic rather than provide closure, and we will welcome future essays (short or medium in length) that critique one or more of these essays, offer alternative arguments, or stress something else altogether.

Many of our colleagues around the world have bravely taken up this topic with respect to the present, and not just with respect to the past. But others have been admonished to be less public, less visible, and less vocal in their criticism if they want to keep their jobs or have any hope of making inroads or providing continuous alternative, dissident visions.

Anthropology is not a homogeneous field, but it does tend to see itself as standing for equality, human rights, social justice, respect for diversity, and indeed even fighting for the underdog. When so many of our colleagues around the world tell the stories of incidents they have witnessed that go against those widespread anthropological values, it is time for us to pause and contemplate our response(s). Perhaps Sarah

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Green (Helsinki) was the bravest of all contributors when she mentioned how she did not respond to the perpetrators in Greece in 2012 and how she remembers wondering why.

Together, these essays point to important questions and considerations for anthropologists who want to attenuate these movements and discourses, diversely characterized as racist, xenophobic, far right, and nationalist in this collec- tion of essays. Whether the movements (or governments) are driven by a smaller sector of elites, as in Argentina, or the majority, as Michał Buchowski tells us is the case in Poland;

whether they claim to speak on behalf of “the people” or a Judeo-Christian god or some other symbol of what is taken to be good and righteous, as Tuhina Ganguly asks, to which audiences must we address our scholarship to make an impact, and in what languages must we speak and write? What analytical tools can we bring to bear on this discussion? Can we broaden our scope of understanding by working with the knowledge produced across the four fields of our discipline (as defined in the United States) as well as the knowledge produced by scholars working on related phenomena in different geopolitical and sociocultural contexts, as Yasuko Takezawa advises? Is nationalism always and necessarily repressive, and how are we to differentiate between various movements for autonomy and national identity? Sarah Green suggests we distinguish an inward-looking, separatist, “eth- nicist” nationalism based on origins from a “kinship vision of belonging” that maintains the potential for inclusion.

Carmen Rial and Miriam Grossi make it clear that anthropology can indeed matter (which is also the theme of

the 2017 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association) and can build disciplinary strength in times of great repression. As Mariano Perelman suggests, anthropologists are uniquely poised to better understand these movements beyond the purely economic realm and to extend the public narrative about them with questions about what it means for people to live with dignity and about how people imagine their past and future horizons.

Also stressing the affective and phenomenological forces behind such political projects, Anouk de Koning and Wayne Modest suggest that we historicize the “anxious politics”

they see—and feel—in the Netherlands as well as other Western European countries and perhaps the United States, and recognize their ties to legacies of colonialism. All of these authors emphasize the personal and professional dangers anthropologists face when our work challenges such powerful and repressive political configurations, but all seek out paths for anthropologists to do so. Our hope is that their bravery will serve as inspiration to those among us who seek to join them in whatever creative ways we can muster.

NOTE

1. Virginia R. Dominguez served as translator of the essays by Carmen Rial and Miriam Grossi, and by Mariano Perelman for this issue. Emily Metzner has translated works in previous issues, such as in the September 2015 and September 2016 issues. We will strive to consistently attribute translation from now on.

Essay

A New Tide of Racism, Xenophobia, and Islamophobia in Europe: Polish Anthropologists Swim Against the Current

Michał Buchowski

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland, and European University Viadrina, Germany

I

n the early weeks of 2017, while living in Japan doing almost a year of research on immigrants, I found myself reading the news from Poland, my homeland, and getting increasingly upset. I read that people celebrated New Year’s Eve as usual in Poland. They watched fireworks, attended parties and public gatherings, and many got drunk. I read that in Ełk, a small town in northeastern Poland, two ine- briated young Polish men shouted slurs and epithets at the Algerian and Tunisian owners of a kebab shop (Fejfer 2017).

When the two Poles (a population long seen as white and Catholic and accustomed to seeing itself that way) attempted to take two bottles of Coke without paying for them, a scuf- fle ensued, and one of the young men was killed (Wilgocki, Rozwadowska, and Orłowski 2017). Following this tragic

incident, between two and three hundred people gathered outside the shop. “At some point, bottles and stones were thrown from the crowd” toward the shop. A window was broken, a firecracker was thrown inside, and within just a few minutes, the shop was demolished (Orłowski 2017).

I read that the crowd applauded. Skirmishes with the police erupted and twenty to thirty rioters were detained.

When a local bishop appealed to stop the violence during a mass, some attendees left the church in protest, a very rare act in this Catholic country. On the very same night, at the opposite, southeastern end of the country, in Lubin, nearby Wrocław, vandals destroyed another kebab shop owned by an Indian man and spray-painted “Fuck ISIS [in Polish], fuck Islam [in English]” across its facade (EW 2017). In the days following New Year’s Eve, another kebab shop, this one operated by a Kurdish man, was attacked in Wrocław, and an Indian restaurant was attacked in Szczecin, a city in northwestern Poland on the German border.

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Almost simultaneously, a Bengali man was beaten in Legnica, another city close to Wrocław, and a Pakistani was assaulted in Ozork´ow, nearby Ł´od´z in central Poland (Ko˙zyczkowska 2017). In only four days, six apparently xenophobic attacks had been reported across the country (Wo´znicki 2017).

One could say that things like this happen everywhere, that these were scattered incidents, and that for such an enor- mous carnival celebrated by a nation of more than thirty- eight million, they are unremarkable. But the fact that such occurrences are becoming increasingly common is sufficient reason for us, as anthropologists, to be appalled, alarmed, and ready to react publicly. Their universality and popularity are not proof that they should be tolerated. Diseases, pollution, smog, droughts, poverty, corruption, child abuse, rapes, injustice, tax avoidance, and many other criminal acts, as well as wars institutionalized and waged by states, most often superpowers sitting on the United Nations Security Council (what an irony!), as the ultimate, annihilative form of violence, are also widespread. But the majority of human- ity does not accept them and, at least officially, condemns them. Events similar to those in the aftermath of New Year’s Eve in Poland are beads of a long rosary that entwines our world. They illustrate a serious problem currently pene- trating Europe, including former communist countries, and Poland in particular. People partaking in these kinds of actions openly and boldly express chauvinistic, bigoted, and prejudiced beliefs. We already know that they share them not only with ordinary people in Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Dresden (the “den-city” of the German Pegida movement), with Golden Dawn supporters in Greece, Brexit enthusiasts ready to chase out foreigners in the United Kingdom, Andreas Behring Brevik in Norway, and policemen in Ferguson, Missouri, or St. Paul, Minnesota, but also with mighty state leaders, presidential candidates, political parties, journal- ists, and, what shocks most, academics. For sure, attack- ers in Ełk, Lubin, Legnica, Wrocław, and Ozork´ow, as well as in thousands of other places in Poland and around the world, do not dislike kebabs—nowadays one of the most popular fast foods in the country—but they dislike or even hate Others, in particular those who are (very often mistakenly) associated with Islam. It is enough to have darker skin, to be metonymically linked with Muslims, or to use foreign language on the street to become an object of verbal attack, discriminatory slurs, and brutal physical assault.

Between 2013 and 2015, the number of legal investi- gations of racially and ethnically motivated verbal (mostly online) or physical violence in Poland doubled. In 2013 there were 835 such legal actions filed, in 2014 there were 1,365, and in 2015 there were 1,548. Legal steps reveal just the tip of the iceberg because the vast majority of occurrences are not reported. Many prosecutors or judges dismiss accusa- tions on ridiculous grounds by claiming, for instance, that the swastika is an Aryan symbol of joy (Buchowski 2016a, 59–

60) or that freedom of speech protects outright expressions of prejudice and antipathy, including shouting the pejorative

slur ciapaki (Pakis, wogs) at Muslims or those perceived to be Muslim (Siedlecka 2016).

Attitudes toward “culturally distant strangers,” be they immigrants or exiles, categories repeatedly confused, have been radicalized since the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, during which well over one million people from war-stricken Syria, the Middle East, and Northern Africa managed to enter

“Fortress Europe.” Most Poles (between 55 and 76 percent) approve of violent solutions toward asylum seekers, such as deportation, detention, border closing, and other forms of control or persecution (´Swiderska, Winiewski, and Hansen 2016, 7). As Public Opinion Research Center data indicate, the number of those refusing refugees in Poland increased from 21 percent in May 2015 (CBOS 2015, 1) to 61 percent in April 2016, and fell down to 54 percent in October that year (CBOS 2016, 2). Approval for refugees dropped in the meantime, from 72 to 40 percent. Those ready to receive and allow refugees to settle in Poland range from 2 to 5 percent. Socially structured differences in these opinions are predictable. Poles who are better educated, richer, and living in big cities are more welcoming toward immigrants and refugees than the less-educated and poorer residents of small towns and the countryside.

What is surprising is the increase criminal acts against foreigners in a country that is for the most part ethnically and religiously homogeneous. Presently, the odium falls above all on Muslims, who are barely present in Poland. There are altogether about thirty thousand Muslims living throughout Poland, less than 1 percent of the population, and this figure includes small communities of Tatars, a people who have lived in the country for centuries (Buchowski 2016a, 55–56). Four out of five people do not know any Muslims personally (Stefaniuk 2015, 22). Even if one operates within the logics of “cultural wars” or “economic precariousness,”

Muslim immigrants pose no credible threat to the Polish economy or “culture.” The fear is generated discursively.

But the negative attitude toward Islam has a tradition reaching back long before the “refugee crisis.” As Agata Marek (2008) indicates, at least since September 11, 2001, Poles have associated Islam not only with religion but also with terrorism, violence, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, fundamentalism, and fanaticism. Only 2 percent of Poles have any positive associations with Islam (38). Various historical, psychological, sociological, and anthropological interpretations can be given (Buchowski 2016; Cervinkova 2016; P˛edziwiatr 2015), but just like there has been anti-Semitism without Jews (Hafez 2016), there is now

“phantom Islamophobia” (Włoch 2009, 65)—that is, a “phenomenon of strong anti-Muslim sentiments in the absence of a significant Muslim minority” (P˛edziwiatr 2015, 145).

The role of all sorts of media in stirring Islamophobia—

from television and radio to newspapers and social network- ing and the blogosphere—is hardly deniable. However, mainstream media also often coagulate opinions already present in the society. In this respect, media, public opinion, and politics mutually reinforce each other. Anti-Islamism

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based on the Orientalist image of a barbarous, anti-Christian enemy of Western civilization has been perpetuated in Europe for a long time. The Muslim Other has once again become an iconic symbol of cultural fears concomitant with neoliberalism and its globalization from above, income inequality, and social injustice, as they are perceived by a systematically decaying middle class and even more impoverished poor. Terrorist attacks and refugees have been mentally glued together in popular attempts to explain everyday hardships, disintegrating social cohesion, and eroding collective identities. Immigrants, most of all Muslims, but also other ethnic and religious groups, including those who set off from postcommunist countries to Britain, are victims of a type of handy populism that is fed by the predicament of neoliberal capitalism with its job insecurity, its slogans of flexibility, its unequal distribution of wealth, and its ensuing social and regional inequalities. This is why I hold that this is not a “refugee crisis” but a crisis of a dominant economic sys- tem that prompts people to blame some other people. This is also connected to liberal democracy, with its values of tolerance and political correctness. Populists deny liberal tenets by making the claim that they are “implementing the will of the majority,” the wish of the nation, the ultimate sovereign.

Majority rule stands above law. Historical circumstances have made racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia an integral part of this complex “antiliberal” worldview.

Multiculturalism is bashed as a leftist disease, a bastard child of political correctness, preventing people from voicing their true opinions. Both authorities and ordinary people ride on the wild horse of hatred toward others. While it is often said that the rot starts at the top, the top needs its base.

In the Polish case, images of refugees reinvigorated the rhetorical power of the rightist political camp. Pictures of war victims, miserable folks wandering from the south of Europe up north, appeared alongside news of terrorist attacks in Nice, Paris, and Brussels, and the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne, feeding these rightist political formations like manna from heaven. Some experts claim that extremist anti-immigrant rhetoric decisively tipped the scales for the Law and Justice party in the 2015 elections. The former government, far from friendly to immigrants, took a thumping from the then oppositional and now ruling Law and Justice party for agreeing at the European Union summit to receive seven thousand relocated refugees, a promise that remains unfulfilled. Resonating with the majority’s fears, heated by lurid, sensationalist media, rightist leaders re- lentlessly frightened people with pictures of Muslim hordes that would bring terrorism, rape women, forcefully convert Poles to Islam, and impose sharia law. Arguments were con- cocted in the “postfact” paradigm. In a parliamentary speech in 2015, shortly before the elections, Jarosław Kaczy´nski, Law and Justice chief, invented stories about fifty-four “sharia zones” in Sweden where the state has lost control, where citizens are afraid to hang the Swedish flag and Swedish girls are afraid to wear short skirts. He told of churches in Italy being used as toilets. He even warned that the potential mi-

grants posed a biological threat to Europe: “There are cases of diseases that have not been witnessed in Europe for long, cholera on Greek islands, dysentery in Vienna, different parasites, protozoa” (Kaczy´nski 2015). After Law and Justice’s victory, Islamophobia was ostensibly elevated to an official philosophy of state authorities. It is freely expressed on the streets during radical nationalists’ demonstrations, in Inter- net forums, in urban graffiti, and at soccer games (Buchowski 2016b, 60–61). Law enforcement authorities disregard and diminish Islamophobic acts of violence. The minister of in- terior affairs repeats his mantra that acts of violence against foreigners are a marginal problem and that his party’s anti- immigrant policy grants security to Poles, including from sharia law (Minister Błaszczak 2016). The minister of science and higher education, publicly a devout Catholic, denounced Pope Francis’s stance on immigrants and declared “receiving refugees from Syria is a mistake.” In such a political milieu, xenophobic and racial crimes proliferate, and the “incidents”

of violence this essay opened with seem to fit the picture and represent a gloomy forecast for the future.

Polish ethnologists as a collective were not politically engaged in the communist past, which some perceived as a good strategy that allowed scholars to focus on research topics considered by the authorities to be marginal. In official rhetoric, but not necessarily in actual politics (e.g., the ugly anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, which resonated with the opinion of many Poles), communist authorities have generally declared a stance that is antiracist (e.g., black Americans were invariably presented as victims of the racial conflicts of the United States), antinationalist, antidiscriminatory, and anticolonial. Nazism became the ultimate point of reference for racism and nationalism, and

“never again” was an obligatory catchphrase. Religion was considered the “opiate of the masses.”

In the years after the collapse of “really existing socialism,” as Bahro (1978) called it, anthropologists, both individually and in professional associations, took an active part in the debates about social issues, and occasionally protested against violations of minorities’ rights, social injustice, and racist and xenophobic incidents. For the last quarter of a century, anthropologists in Poland have worked through multiple grassroots and everyday activities continuously toward a better and more open society. These efforts have included public lectures, training sessions for teachers and administrators, multicultural education through performances, museum and art exhibitions, promotion of active tolerance, monitoring of human rights violations and hate speech, socially engaged research projects, and participation in NGOs that help the poor, minorities, and immigrants in Poland and elsewhere.

But it was taken for granted that in a society that under- went Nazi German occupation, issues of racial and ethnic hatred could not flourish. It was taken for granted that with a large diaspora throughout the world, both historical and contemporary, anti-immigrant sentiments could not become popular among the Polish people. What has been happening

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around the “refugee crisis” since 2015 has come as a shock to many of my colleagues, is a sour lesson of history that nothing is obvious or inevitable, and that the past cannot fully explain present-day processes. With regard to issues that are so fundamental and crucial to our discipline and to us as heirs of the work of Franz Boas and many others, another conclusion needs to be that the battle with racism and xenophobia never ends. They are like hydra whose heads keep regenerating.

Since 2015, open xenophobia and racism have prodded us to act more collectively and publicly. As a community of anthropologists, we have attempted to respond in timely and adequate ways. The first official statement that I am aware of, titled “Poland, your resistance towards refugees is shameful,” was published by the Center for Migration Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna´n in the middle of the “refugee crisis,” on Sept. 9, 2015, when the more liberal government was still in power (O´swiadczenie 2015a, 2015b). The center also organized a citywide demonstration under the banner “Refugees are welcome,” which attracted the participation of hun- dreds of people. Soon after, on September 25, 2015, at its annual meeting, the Polish Ethnological Society put out its “Position Statement of the Polish Ethnological Society on Expressions of Xenophobia and Intolerance in Poland.”²

With authorities both tacitly and openly approving (and even strengthening) xenophobic and racist attitudes and behaviors, the feeling that something else had to be done was growing. A group was formed in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna´n and called for a special convention of Polish Ethnologists and Anthropologists. The meeting was held in Pozna´n on November 23, 2016, with virtually unanimous support from the anthropological community.

Officially, twenty-five anthropological institutions co- organized it. Due to space limitations registration had to be closed well ahead of time; still, almost four hundred anthropologists from all over the country attended. Although the size of the convention may not impress the American anthropological public, it was the largest meeting ever of the anthropological community in Poland. We also managed to attract media attention, including a major Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, and the weekly Polityka, as well as some television news programs. The convention also received international publicity. Letters of support were sent from all over the world from anthropological associations, such as the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA), the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), and the American Anthro- pological Association (AAA), anthropology departments, and prominent individual scholars. As a strongly united community of anthropologists, we expressed our decisive condemnation of all forms of discrimination and intolerance toward others, particularly immigrants and refugees. The

“Anti-Discrimination Manifesto of Anthropologists and

Ethnologists” (see Nadzwyczajny Zjazd 2016) was accepted by acclamation.³ We resolved to better coordinate our dispersed antidiscriminatory activities. In the aftermath of the meeting, further initiatives have already been undertaken to put a stop to acts of xenophobia and racism.

My colleagues and I realize that organizing events and making public statements is not enough. We are convinced that systematic and more intense daily efforts described in the paragraphs above, educating the public, and dialogue with those who think differently are substantial. No doubt, this work—the work of changing minds—is strenuous. But we who oppose the current racist trend have many allies with whom to collaborate. In a period of rising xenophobia, such clear statements and meetings, even if ritualistic, make sense.

They mobilize the community and make people conscious of the dangers brought by the xenophobic tsunami rolling around the world. After all, as we know, words have real power. A clear message that no individuals or social groups can be discriminated against on any grounds has to be stated and it has to be defended unwaveringly. Even if we believe in democracy, we do not subscribe to the maxim vox populi, vox dei, that the voice of “the people” is the voice of God.

NOTES

Acknowledgments. I have written this text as a visiting overseas professor at National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, in the academic year 2016–2017. I thank my hosts for their support of my research.

1. http://en.ptl.info.pl/news/89,Position-statement-of-the- Polish-Ethnological-Society-on-expressions-of-xenophobia- and-intolerance-in-Poland.html.

2. http://zjazd.weebly.com/english.html.

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Wilgocki, Michał, Adriana Rozwadowska, and Maciej Orłowski.

2017. “Zamieszki w Ełku. Policja postawiła zarzut zabójstwa Tunezyjczykowi i Algierczykowi. Kto´s usiłował podpalić mieszkanie jednego z domniemanych sprawców” [Riots in Ełk.

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Essay

Anxious Politics in Postcolonial Europe

Anouk de Koning

Radboud Universiteit, The Netherlands Wayne Modest

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

As we write this essay, Donald Trump has been inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States, it is just six months after the Brexit vote, and just two months before the Dutch elections. Many commentators connect Trump’s win with looming electoral victories by Far-Right parties in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy. We argue that this particular moment in Europe is one of an anxious politics that testifies to a struggle with how to deal with the consequences of earlier colonial histories in contemporary society. This anxious politics “is characterized by heightened anxieties about the fate of the different nation-states that constitute Europe, and based on a projection of the ills currently imagined to face Europe . . . on to specific subjects, often racialized Others” (Modest and De Koning 2016, 98).

RISING NATIONALISM

After both Brexit and Trump’s wins at the polls, the United Kingdom and the United States saw a surge in claims to the nation by many who saw in immigrants and Muslims (among other minority groups) not just a burden to the nation but also a threat to its security and to its future. A virulent nationalism manifested itself. This nationalism is echoed across continental Europe in the rising popularity of extreme-right parties that have unified on an anti-immigration, anti-Islam, and anti-European Union platform.

The Netherlands is no exception. Geert Wilders’s Free- dom Party has had growing support and is predicted to garner the most votes in the March 2017 elections. The nationalist sentiments he propagates have long since become mainstream. In an open letter published in major Dutch daily newspapers on January 23, 2017, Dutch Prime Minster Mark Rutte addressed all Dutch people with a plea against “loutishness” (hufterigheid) that “screws up our neat [gaaf] country.” The crucial passage in his short letter focuses on people from outside the Netherlands. An article in The Guardian aptly summarizes its core:

People who “refuse to adapt, and criticise our values” should

“behave normally, or go away,” Rutte said in a full-page newspaper message seen as a bid to win over voters drawn to Geert Wilders’s anti-immigration, anti-Muslim Freedom (PVV) party. He said the Dutch were “increasingly uncomfortable” with those who abused the freedoms they enjoyed after coming to the Netherlands, who

“harass gays, or whistle at women in short skirts, or brand ordinary Dutch people racists.” (Henley 2017; emphasis added).

Rutte rehearses Dutch nationalist rhetoric that relies on shifting arrangements of race, culture, and sexuality to draw

lines of inclusion and exclusion (Balkenhol, Mepschen, and Duyvendak 2016; Essed and Hoving 2014). By adding a note on people who “brand ordinary Dutch people racists,” Rutte also incriminates the increasingly vocal antiracist activism that has emerged in the Netherlands in recent years.

Focusing on what we call anxious politics helps us bring Trump’s victory, David Cameron’s loss, the popularity of Europe’s Far Right, and Rutte’s open letter together in a single analytical space to think about some of the shifts that are happening today across Europe, the United States, and elsewhere.

ANXIOUS POLITICS

Over the past decades, anxieties around presumed invasions of those conjured as foreign, alien, or non-European have been on the rise in many European societies. This has resulted in a foregrounding of questions of belonging and of how to live together with difference. Such anxieties have articulated with and given fodder to an anxious politics that thrives on images of a beleaguered nation. The recent tensions across Europe of the alleged burden posed by asylum seekers, whether in terms of security, welfare provisions, or national values, exemplify such anxious politics. Such fears, however, are not restricted to asylum seekers but extend to multiple Others: to Muslims and people with migrant backgrounds, especially if they are not white. Our contention is that these anxieties draw from and reinforce exclusionary notions of the nation and help frame the presence of those defined as Other as a threat to its purported cultural and racial homogeneity, contributing to fears of social and moral unraveling (cf. Silverstein 2005; Vertovec 2011).

Such anxieties feed on and articulate with anxieties over welfare state resources and national sovereignty. This as- semblage of anxieties emerges and manifests itself in the interactions between politicians, policymakers, media, and variously positioned publics. It is exactly around these anxieties that various parties congregate to outline and produce ideas of a new Europe.

“Multiculturalism backlash” and “new realism” have become the dominant analytical frameworks to understand this mood, which direct attention to ubiquitous claims of irresponsible multiculturalism blind to the presumed problems that immigrants represent (Prins 2002; Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010). Similarly, for many scholars in the Netherlands, the culturalization of citizenship has taken on significant academic purchase (Duyvendak, Geschiere, and Tonkens 2016). While acknowledging the importance of these analyses, we prefer to speak of anxious politics; it captures the intensely affective and personal nature of this political moment and demands that we attend to the larger anxieties regarding the changing character of the imagined

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community of the nation, including visible transformations in, for example, appearance, uses of public space, and even parenting styles that are read as indications of these changes.

Such fears have been co-opted by Far Right figures and parties that profile themselves as opposed to “mass immigration” and the “Islamization” of Europe. As such parties seem to gain popularity in the polls, major political parties feel the need to take up the tropes of this anxious politics. In ad- dition, numerous measures, some symbolic and some more hard hitting, are implemented with the intention to signal that governments take seriously the concerns articulated by disaffected citizens, such as the alleged unwillingness to in- tegrate on the part of people with migrant backgrounds or their lack of identification with national values. Within the context of this anxious politics, exclusionary notions of national identity and belonging serve to marginalize, regulate, and discipline those defined as Other.

A CHANGING EUROPE

Europe’s anxious politics has to be situated in the context of a longer history. By the mid-twentieth century, Europe’s formal colonial dominance was disappearing. The creation of the European Union just after World War II resulted in the fashioning of a new Europe as an increasingly unified space. As time passed, this resulted in greater porosity of internal borders, allowing freedom of movement for the different citizens of participating states while hardening the borders to those outside. “Fortress Europe” took shape.

This same period saw the development and expansion of welfare states centered on the idea that states should provide for the basic needs of their citizens, especially their most vulnerable.

Over a similar period, Europe’s polity started to change, resulting from increased migration of people from

“outside.” This included migrants from the then colonies of the different European colonial powers and “guest workers”

from Southern Europe, Morocco, and Turkey. These streams of migrants transformed many European cities, giving birth to a new, more diverse Europe. The empire, previously elsewhere, had come home, reshaping Europe’s metropolitan polity.

These migratory movements coincided with industrial expansion and economic boom, which produced a strong demand for labor. With later deindustrialization and various economic crises, these migrants and their children, rather than becoming incorporated into the national narrative, were increasingly regarded as burdens to the nation. Questions started to emerge about who should be understood as a citizen and be able to benefit from the state’s welfare provisions. In this context, several scholars have pointed to the ways in which Europe sought to forget the imperial histories and histories of labor migration that had resulted in a now changed European citizenry (Bhambra 2009). This forget- ting, or, to use Ann Stoler’s (2011) term, “colonial aphasia,”

helps delegitimize the presence and claims of those who are framed as “foreigners,” “immigrants,” “allochthones” (a

term, which literally means “from other soil” and was intro- duced in the Netherlands in the 1990s to describe first- and second-generation migrants but has become a stand-in for raced, postcolonial Others), or “new Europeans.”

POSTCOLONIAL EUROPE

Bringing back these histories is crucial to understand the present moment. We suggest that employing a postcolonial lens helps situate the affectively charged narratives about the nation that form the basis of today’s anxious politics. We use the term postcolonial while being cognizant of earlier debates about the term. Yet, it illustrates the need for more historically grounded, ethnographically informed investiga- tions into the afterlives of the colonial in Europe today.

Paul Gilroy (2005) and Ghassan Hage (2000, 2016) ask us to attend to the particular affective mood that marks the present postcolonial moment: a mourning for lost greatness, a nostalgic desire for hegemony and homogeneity. This affectively laden narrative conjures strongly racialized notions of the nation that call into question who belongs, framing particular groups as newcomers, outsiders, and interlopers.

This overarching imaginary creates both a sense of loss and of being beleaguered.

Current tensions and anxieties regarding the nation are understood in a culturalized frame, where assumed cultural difference, which is often also read as “backward- ness,” is seen to clash with European values or the En- lightenment project. Such framings of the nation are, more- over, strongly racialized, with legitimate European nation- als imagined as white and others, with less legitimacy, as nonwhite or black. They constitute Europe as white and white Europeans as those who can command a governmen- tal belonging (cf. Hage 2000). In this mode of belonging, white Europeans are construed as having more rights to the nation and as the ones who can decide, among other things, who is admissible and what can be tolerated. Eu- rope’s nations, with their provisions of housing, jobs, and even heritage, come to be seen as owned by their white citizens. These distributions of belonging evoke Europe’s colonial history and imperial ambitions and imaginations (Jones 2016). For nonwhite citizens, always regarded as migrants, to make claims to these goods contributes to fashioning anxiety.

Today’s anxious politics, we argue, grows out of the contestation and dislodging of these same colonial legacies.

In articulating claims of majority displacement and besiege- ment, it tellingly echoes familiar colonial sentiments (Hage 2016).

MAKING IT PERSONAL

We are both located in the Netherlands, a country where Geert Wilders retains his steady—even growing—

popularity. Over the past few years, debates about Dutch society have heated up, as vocal activism around the racial figure of Black Pete (the blackface helper of Sinterklaas, or Saint Nicholas), ethnic profiling, and racial discrimination

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are answered by virulent racist attacks on social media and often dismissive and disparaging reactions in public media.

This is a highly personal moment for those who seem to identify with a national cause articulated in culturalist and racist terms as well as for those who are problematized by such discourses and find they have no place in the imagined community of the nation. It is personal for us, as academics working in and on this racialized, fearful, and acrimonious moment in the Netherlands, and as Dutch citizens, who feel we and people around us are targeted as not (or not quite) belonging, and as causes for concern. Bringing anxious politics and the postcolonial together, as we have done in this essay, invites us to understand the deeply personal and affective nature of this moment as part of a longer history of changes across the world that only now seems to be coming home to continental Europe.

REFERENCES CITED

Balkenhol, Markus, Paul Mepschen, and Jan Willem Duyvendak.

2016. “The Nativist Triangle: Sexuality, Race and Religion in the Netherlands.” In The Culturalization of Citizenship, edited by Jan Willem Duyvendak, Peter Geschiere, and Evelien Tonkens, 97–112. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2009. “Postcolonial Europe, or Understand- ing Europe in Times of the Postcolonial.” In The SAGE Handbook of European Studies, edited by Chris Rumford, 69–85. London:

SAGE.

Duyvendak, Jan Willem, Peter Geschiere, and Evelien Tonkens, eds.

2016. The Culturalization of Citizenship: Belonging and Polarization in a Globalizing World. London: Springer.

Essed, Philomena, and Isabel Hoving. 2014. Dutch Racism. Amster- dam: Rodopi.

Gilroy, Paul. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hage, Ghassan. 2000. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge.

Hage, Ghassan. 2016. “´Etat de Si`ege: A Dying Do- mesticating Colonialism?” American Ethnologist 43 (1):

38–49.

Henley, John. 2017. “Netherlands PM Says Those Who Don’t Respect Customs Should Leave.” The Guardian, January 23. https://

www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/23/netherlands-pm- mark-rutte-dutch-citizens-open-letter-pvv. Accessed February 1, 2017.

Jones, Guno. 2016. “What Is New about Dutch Populism? Dutch Colonialism, Hierarchical Citizenship and Contemporary Pop- ulist Debates and Policies in the Netherlands.” Journal of Inter- cultural Studies 37 (6): 605–20.

Modest, Wayne, and Anouk de Koning. 2016. “Anxious Politics in the European City: An Introduction.” Patterns of Prejudice 50 (2):

97–108.

Prins, Baukje. 2002. “The Nerve to Break Taboos: New Realism in the Dutch Discourse on Multiculturalism.” Journal of International Migration and Integration 3 (3–4): 363–79.

Silverstein, Paul A. 2005. “Immigrant Racialization and the New Savage Slot: Race, Migration, and Immigration in the New Eu- rope.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34:363–84.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2011. “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled His- tories in France.” Public Culture 23 (1): 121–56.

Vertovec, Steven. 2011. “The Cultural Politics of Nation and Migra- tion.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40:241–56.

Vertovec, Steven, and Susanne Wessendorf. 2010. The Multicultural- ism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and Practices. New York:

Routledge.

Essay

Academic Freedom and the Future of Anthropology in India

Tuhina Ganguly

University of Canterbury, New Zealand

W

ith the rise of nationalistic and xenophobic movements in different parts of the world today, it is important to question the role and ability of anthropologists to offer critical insights into the workings of the larger society.

Several scholars have pointed to the need for anthropologists to “step up” and produce incisive analyses of contemporary sociopolitical trends. For instance, Paul Stoller (2016) called on ethnographers to contribute their “anthropological impute to combat the coming onslaught of Trumpism,” including “racial and religious intolerance” (Henrietta Moore, in a Huffington Post blog [2016], has written on the need for Trump to look at internal socioeconomic problems in America rather than targeting migrants); and Brexit saw anthropologists demand of each other more vocal treatment

of issues of ethnocentrism, racial prejudice, and immigration (Stein 2016). In all these calls, a central theme has been the need to address audiences beyond the confines of academia, interlinked with the question of language, both in the sense of medium of instruction (an issue particularly relevant in the context of postcolonial, multilingual nations such as India where English is the official medium of instruction and preferred by academic elites) and as a discursive space of engagement between anthropologists and their audiences.

This essay questions anthropologists’ need and ability to engage with the public in India in the context of growing religious nationalism that claims to express majoritarian interests. What are the implications of growing religious nationalism for scholarly pursuits in India and the ways in which we as anthropologists from or living in India grap- ple with the challenges posed to us in the form of rising

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anti-intellectualism? This is an important question to ask because the extent to which anthropology in India can and/or should address nonacademic audiences depends on the avail- ability of a dialogic space to articulate these views without fear of repercussions. I ask if we ought to pay more attention to the political opinions of the urban, upwardly mobile middle classes of India and their reaction to academic work that is seen as “insulting” to majoritarian ideology. In particular, the language of anthropological work needs to be more mindful of its readership and its audiences’ contestation of academic authority.

As part of my doctoral research, I did ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2015 in Puducherry, India, among primarily Western spiritual practitioners. Many of them are members of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, a hermitage founded on the spiritual and philosophical tenets of Sri Au- robindo Ghose, an Indian nationalist turned guru, and his

“spiritual collaborator,” the French woman Mirra Alfassa.

In 2008 a long-term member of the Ashram, Peter Heehs, an American citizen and independent historian, published a biography of Sri Aurobindo, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. The bi- ography painstakingly details Sri Aurobindo’s life, including his early years in England, nationalist activities upon return- ing to India, and subsequent life as a “yogi” in Puducherry.

The book was well received in the academic community but soon ran into troubled waters. It seemed to offend both Indian members of the Ashram and nonmember devotees, including a group of Indian devotees from Orissa who filed a writ petition in the High Court of Orissa in 2008 (Heehs 2015). The petitioners claimed that the book had misrepre- sented Sri Aurobindo’s teachings and presented him in a bad light, consequently hurting the “Indian psyche” (Gleig 2012;

Heehs 2015). The same year, the High Court of Orissa issued a temporary injunction against the publication of the book in India until the Home Ministry decided whether the book was

“non-objectionable” (Heehs 2015). However, Heehs notes that “as of May 2015 the Home Ministry has expressed no interest in the matter, the High Court has issued no final order, and the temporary injunction remains in force” (76).

How long the matter will remain sub judice is anybody’s guess.

In the course of fieldwork, I found that opinions about Heehs and his biography were divided. It was not a sim- ple case of Indians versus Westerners. Several Indians held that the book was not offensive in any way, while several expatriate members of the Ashram were critical of Heehs and his work.¹ Nevertheless, the petitioners against Heehs and the many blog articles denigrating his work,² reflect chauvinistic religious nationalism, intolerant of anyone who they deem to have insulted their religion (see also Gleig 2012).

Heehs is but one in a long line of academics and writers in general, Western and Indian, who have come under fire for their work. For instance, Jeffrey Kripal’s Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (1995), a psychoanalytic analysis of the Bengali mystic

Ramakrishna, angered several members of Ramakrishna Mis- sion as well as the Hindu community at large for his emphasis on purported homoeroticism in the mystic’s relation with young boys.³More recently, Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus:

An Alternative History (2009) drew the ire of Dinanath Batra, a member of the Hindu right-wing organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), demanding the book be banned in India (it also drew the ire of others, such as the Hindu American Foundation). Doniger’s publisher, Penguin, sub- sequently decided to withdraw the book from circulation in India. Not incidentally, the Indian historian A. K. Ramanu- jan’s essay, “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation” (2000), was removed from the syllabus of an undergraduate history course at the Uni- versity of Delhi following a court case Batra filed in 2008 because the work highlights multiple versions of the Hindu epic.

The cases against Heehs, Doniger, Kripal, and Ramanu- jan are symptomatic of growing right-wing nationalism that is highly suspicious of intellectual pursuits in general and af- fects Indians as much as others writing in/of India.⁴Further, it is not only government, political parties, or RSS that drive a Hindutva agenda behind intellectual censorship. Public support, indeed enthusiasm, for anti-intellectualism, fueled by majoritarian religious nationalism, is something that needs careful scrutiny and response by anthropologists in India. As Palshikar (2015) notes, “India’s public opinion seems to be veering quietly towards a more sympathetic predisposition towards various forms of majoritarianism. Avoiding blaming the perpetrators of group violence, insisting on strict group boundaries, and mild approval of explicit majoritarianism are increasingly in evidence” (733).

Public support for the castigation of critical intellectual thought surfaced in February 2016 when the student-union president of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Kanhaiya Kumar—along with a few other students—was arrested on charges of sedition for organizing a rally protesting state actions (specifically in relation to Kashmir and the hang- ing of Afzal Guru). Several academics and students from India and abroad condemned the arrests, and rightly so.

However, amid strong critiques of state censorship of uni- versities, teachers, and students, there needs to be more focus on the extent of public opinion supporting the arrests of “antinationals” and by extension the support for academic censorship. In my Facebook posts condemning the arrests, several friends from my school and college days—many of them engineers, doctors, and managers in multinational companies—expressed their disbelief at my encouragement of “antinational” activities. In the cases of Heehs, Doniger, and Kripal, several people took to expressing their criti- cisms of the writers and the texts in blog articles, providing a strong platform for public counternarratives of the authors’ academic work. It is not through social media alone that public criticism has surfaced; the Indian Medical Asso- ciation, for instance, condemned the “antinational” activities of JNU students in a letter to the home minister (Kannabiran

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2016). Admittedly, the extent of public opinion in favor of majoritarian politics is very difficult to discern from these examples, but they do point to an important question: Have we ignored the impact of the politics of the urban, Indian middle classes on our work?

I deliberately point to urban, middle-class Hindus for two reasons. First, the rhetoric of a strong nation-state, that is, India as a global power, has become strongly interlinked with the aspirations of urban Indian middle classes. In particular, Narendra Modi’s (and consequently the Bharatiya Janata Party’s) voter base since the time he was Gujarat chief minister has consisted of a significant urban population (Chhibber and Verma 2014; Jaffrelot 2013). India’s utopian future of becoming a global power, it seems, must be real- ized in the here and now through assertions of the infallibility of the nation-state, any critique of which is branded “antinational.” Yet, “the virtues of capitalism” are to be played out within a “socially conservative Hindu cultural matrix,” com- bining economic “development” with religio-cultural majoritarianism that has little sympathy (forget empathy) for the demands of those on the margins (Nanda 2011).⁵Second, the public reception of our work and opinions must factor in the urban middle classes given that most anthropologists in India, certainly those in and from premier academic insti- tutes, write and teach in English. The bulk of the readership then derives from the urban middle classes, and it is impera- tive that we know our (potential) audience to better address them and perhaps even preempt their possible responses, factoring these already into our work (not to dilute our critical arguments but to direct them to wider responses). As stated in a newspaper article in the wake of the controversy surrounding The Hindus, Doniger is quoted as saying, “The books I have been working on since then, are far more aware of the public ramifications of the subjects I write about; so I am writing them in a different way, reaching out to a much broader public” (Nadadhur 2015).

The question of audience, raised by Doniger’s statement acknowledging the impact of public opinion on her work, is inextricably linked with language, in the narrow sense of the medium of instruction and the broader sense of the discipline’s “terms of engagement with others outside it”

(Baviskar 2008, 431). Indian anthropologists who strive to or have achieved (relative) international repute, who teach in Indian metropolitan cities and publish in international journals, communicate in English by necessity. English has become so mandatory—so doxic, even—that it is difficult for many of my generation to formulate arguments in the vernacular. Historically speaking, many early Indian anthropologists, despite their competence in English, also wrote articles for the general public in vernaculars (Sundar 2014).

Among the early pioneers, Irawati Karve wrote in English as well as Marathi; A. R. Desai published articles on the struggles of peasants, workers, and women, among others, in Gujarati; and Saurabh Dube’s later texts on culture and politics were written in Hindi. Yet, Dube, for instance,

“came to be considered a second grade intellectual” in the academic world dominated by the English language for his

increasing propensity to write in Hindi (Dube 2010, 288);

and English continues to be hegemonic in Indian anthropological writings produced in metropolitan Indian cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, and Pune.

With the limitations imposed by academically hegemonic English, how can Indian anthropologists engage with Indian publics and their research “subjects,” which more often than not entails communicating not only across languages but also class differences? Several Indian anthropologists have noted the urgent need to develop and encourage a rigorous body of social scientific thought in the vernaculars within metropolitan Indian academia in order to engage with the wider, non-English-speaking public (Deshpande 2001;

Sundar 2014). However, even as Indian anthropologists need to expand their discursive and pedagogical repertoire beyond English, simultaneously we need to analyze the opinions and politics of the English-speaking urban Indian middle classes to whom our writings can and do reach out. What should our terms of engagement be with an audience that is not the Other to us but rather wields considerable power over our work, its reception, and indeed its “shelf life”? How should we merge the language of our written work in the narrow sense of English as the medium of instruction with the wider sense of a dialogic discursive space, when the choice to speak critically is contested by (members of) the audience, threat- ening democratic dialogism by labeling critical thinkers as

“antinational”? A middle-class urban audience is slowly but steadily influencing who has the privilege to articulate critical opinions. Further, while it is not English as the medium of instruction and academic writing, per se, that is generally viewed as antinational, critical academic perspectives are seen to pander to “nonreligious/secular” and “Western”

audiences, betraying nationalistic interests (as in the case of Heehs; see Ranade 2010). Rather than dismiss this outright, perhaps we must ask: Are we indeed more cognizant of Western audiences than audiences “back home,” and if so, how should we engage with our domestic audience without giving in to majoritarian impulses?

The lasting impact of popular opinion on academic work challenges and compels us to actively frame and direct our studies and our language of analysis to a much wider audience than usually anticipated. Whether or not we can do so without compromising academic integrity, and with what degree of success, may very well be one of the most challenging issues facing us, as anthropologists and academics, in India today.

NOTES

1. Although outside the scope of this paper, it needs to be asked if non-Hindu yoga practitioners are, unintentionally, feeding into Hindu religious nationalism.

2. See http://savitri.in/library/resources/lives-of-sri-aurobindo/

aug-07-2010. Also see http://hindureview.com/2014/09/15/

response-intellectual-aggression-peter-heehs/ and views expressed on this blog: https://livesofaurobindo.wordpress.com/.

3. Critiques of the book were not limited to Hindus in India nor to Hindus alone. One of the earliest nonacademic critiques of