Bertha Parker, the first Native American archaeologist, taught herself how to excavate a site
▻https://massivesci.com/articles/bertha-parker-pallan-archaeology-native-american-abenaki-seneca
What she found in tiny crevice in Gypsum Cave rewrote the history of humans in North America
In the desert near Las Vegas, Nevada, Bertha Parker completed her daily tasks of cooking, cleaning, and organizing the day’s finds from the Gypsum Cave excavation and stole away from her role as expedition secretary. She put on a dust-mask and head-lamp, and went exploring. Being small, Parker was able to sneak through a small opening others on the archaeological team couldn’t. There, under a slab of rock, she uncovered the most important discovery of the Gypsum Cave Expedition: An intact skull of a long-extinct giant ground sloth, sitting near man-made artifacts. Her find of these two artifacts, so close together, was compelling evidence that about 10,000 years ago, the sloth and tool-wielding humans had lived in the cave at the same time. It was the earliest record of human inhabitance in North America at the time.
It was lauded as “the most outstanding anthropological find ever made in the United States.
After this groundbreaking discovery in 1930, Parker gained wide acclaim as the first Native American archaeologist. Not only was she one of the first women to achieve such success in the field, she followed a non-traditional path to get there.
Parker was literally born into archaeology—her father, Arthur C. Parker, was an archaeologist and anthropologist from the Seneca tribe, and Parker was reportedly born in a tent at one of his dig sites. But she was never formally trained in the field. She accompanied her father to excavations as a child, but this apprenticeship ended when her parents divorced, and Parker moved with her mother to Los Angeles when she was only seven years old. There, Parker and her mother worked in show business, performing in films and as a part of the “Pocahontas” show with the Ringling Brothers, Barnum, and Bailey circus.
Parker met her first husband, Joseph Pallan, on a Hollywood set and the two had a daughter they called Billie. But Pallan became abusive, and when Parker tried to get a divorce, Pallan kidnapped her and Billie, taking them across the border to Mexico. Parker was rescued by her uncle and famed archaeologist, Mark Raymond Harrington, who rode after them and brought them back to a dig site in Nevada.
A picture of Bertha Parker, anthropologist of Abenaki and Seneca descent.
Matteo Farinella
There, Harrington and his wife offered Parker and Billie a place to stay, hiring Parker as the secretary and cook for the expedition. While she had no formal education or training, she enjoyed being in the field, and had a keen eye for discerning man-made objects from surrounding natural features—a skill that made her a valuable member of the team. While working with Harrington, she learned excavation techniques, and frequently spent her free time helping at the dig.
Parker eventually found several archaeological sites, including the Scorpion Hill pueblo site—which she discovered, named, excavated, and documented completely on her own. One such find, the Corn Creek Campsite, she discovered after noticing fossilized camel bones in a lake bed. But by far her most notable discovery was that of the ground sloth skull in Gypsum Cave. It was lauded as “the most outstanding anthropological find ever made in the United States. Harrington recognized it as the most important discovery of his expedition, and it secured funding for further field work.
While older sites have since been found, Gypsum Cave remains an important archaeological site and expeditions in the area are ongoing.
When Parker found the skull, the idea of human migration into North America via the Bering Strait land bridge was still highly debated. Her Gypsum Cave excavation placed early humans in North America at the same time as the ancient ground sloth (Nothrotherium shastense)—in the Pleistocene, nearly 10,000 years before present. This supported the contentious idea of an earlier migration into the Americas. In fact, at that time, the Gypsum Cave artifacts were the oldest human artifacts found in North America. While older sites have since been found, Gypsum Cave remains an important archaeological site and expeditions in the area are ongoing.
The Gypsum Cave excavation is also where Parker met her second husband, a fellow archaeologist named James Thurston. The marriage was short lived, however, after Thurston died tragically only a year later from a heart attack at the site in 1932. Parker herself fell ill shortly after his death and left Nevada to return to Los Angeles.
Parker’s reports gave a voice to often overlooked people.
In California, Parker was appointed a position at the Southwest Museum, first as a secretary, where she documented the findings collected during the Gypsum Cave expedition, and later as an assistant archaeologist and ethnologist. In this role, she was able to make a series of trips to visit the indigenous peoples of California, including individuals from the Maidu, Paiute, Pomo, and the Yurok tribes. She was able to document important records of the culture, traditions, history, and folklore of these tribes, which she preserved in detailed notes and published in numerous reports for the Southwest Museum’s journal, Masterkey. Due to her heritage, she was more sensitive than many other academics to tribal concerns, redacting people’s names from reports when desired, but giving editorial or co-authorship credits to many of her interviewees. Parker’s reports gave a voice to often overlooked people.
In 1936, Parker married her third and final husband, the acclaimed actor Iron Eyes Cody. With Cody, she returned to the film industry, where she advocated for and helped to support Native American actors. Alongside her husband, she worked as a consultant to ensure respectful representation of Native Americans in TV and film. The couple also hosted a television series in California on the history and folklore of the Native American peoples.
Her gravestone is engraved only with the words “Mrs. Iron Eyes Cody.
Parker died in 1978, and the fame and recognition she had gained in the archaeological community during her lifetime quickly faded. Years after her death, Iron Eyes Cody published an autobiography, in which he falsely described his relationship with Parker and marked her as a partier and a drunk. But this isn’t the only thing that’s kept Parker out of history books. Even though Parker published often in Masterkey, the legacy of her work is almost completely tied to the men in her life. Even in her obituary, she was named as “Arthur Parker’s daughter,” “M.R. Harrington’s niece,” and “Iron Eyes Cody’s wife.” Her gravestone is engraved only with the words “Mrs. Iron Eyes Cody.”
Perhaps her achievements were hard to track due to the numerous name changes over the course of her three marriages , or because her more notable accomplishments are encompassed in the writings of the men she worked and lived with—who refer to her as a “daughter” or “wife,” rather than by her own name. Whatever the reason, it is time that Bertha Parker—the self-taught archaeologist and ethnologist, who gave a voice to the overlooked and under-represented indigenous peoples in America—receives recognition for her role as a trailblazer.
James Charles and the Odd Fascination of the YouTube Beauty Wars | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-odd-fascination-of-the-youtube-beauty-wars
Watching Westbrook’s video, I might have felt boredom (forty-three minutes?), but, instead, I felt the excitement that must overwhelm an anthropologist discovering a lost culture, obscure but oddly fascinating, with its own dramas, alliances, and enmities. Added to this effect was the comedy of the gaping chasm between the flimsiness of the conflict and its melodramatic presentation. Speaking directly to the camera, her hair and skin smooth and gleaming and her legs drawn up to her chest, Westbrook’s tone often seems more appropriate for a bereavement support group than a skirmish kindled by a supplement sponsorship. At one point, she claims that she feels betrayed because she and her husband helped Charles with business decisions for years, without expecting payment in return. “Life will never stop being painful,” she says. “No matter where in the world you are, no matter your circumstances, you are always going to experience heartbreak, and that’s part of being human.” Viewers responded enthusiastically. “Tati is no longer a beauty guru… she’s a freaking legendary life guru,” a fan wrote, in a comment that received a hundred and seventy-four thousand likes. In response, Charles came out with his own YouTube statement, in which he appears weepy and makeup-less, apologizes in vague terms to Westbrook and her husband for “everything I have put you through over the last few weeks,” and promises, in possibly even vaguer terms, to “continue to learn and grow every single day.” (He also said that he didn’t receive any payment for his SugarBearHair promotion and instead did it as a favor to the company; SugarBearHair, he said, had recently given him an artist pass when he felt “unsafe” in the less secure V.I.P. area at the Coachella music festival—the traditional ground zero for influencer drama.)
In an Instagram post from the Met Gala earlier in the week, Charles had written, “Being invited to such an important event like the ball is such an honor and a step forward in the right direction for influencer representation in the media and I am so excited to be a catalyst.” His suggestion that influencers are a marginalized group that deserves affirmative-action-style media attention was justifiably met with derision, but it did evoke the strange, liminal position that they occupy. On the one hand, people like Charles and Westbrook—so-called civilians who have amassed millions of followers through a combination of relentless vlogging and a savvily fashioned persona—now wield enormous financial power by using their accounts to promote brands. (One report predicts that the influencer economy will be worth ten billion dollars by 2020; Instagram recently partnered with several prominent influencers to test out a program that would enable direct sales on the social-media platform.) On the other hand, influencers’ power relies on their relatability. (“I want to show you guys that, no matter who you are, you can make it,” Westbrook says, feelingly, toward the end of her “Bye sister . . .” video. “I had freaking nothing, nothing, when I started out.”) Traditional celebrities serve as powerful marketing tools precisely because, though we are enticed by the fantasy that they offer, we understand that we could never really be like them. With influencers, conversely, it feels like, with a little help and a little of their product, we could be. Influencers: they’re just like us.
An influencer is, by definition, a creature of commerce. Unlike with a traditional celebrity, there is no creative project necessary to back up the shilling of products (say, a movie franchise used to promote merchandise)—the shilling is the project. But, paradoxically, the commercial sway that influencers hold over their fans depends on their distinctive authenticity: the sense that they are just ordinary people who happen to be recommending a product that they enjoy . Charles’s sin, according to Westbrook, was trading their friendship for lucre (or at least a Coachella pass). “My relationship with James Charles is not transactional,” Westbrook says in her video. “I have not asked him for a penny, I have never been on his Instagram.” Railing against Charles’s SugarBearHair sponsored post, she continues, “You say you don’t like the brand. You say that you’re the realest, that you can’t be bought. Well, you just were.” Later in the video, she takes on a Holden Caulfield-like tone: “You should have walked away. You should have held on to your integrity. You’re a phony.” She, herself, she claims, would never pay anyone to promote her beauty supplement in a sponsored post: “My product is good enough on its own. We’re selling like hot cakes.” Indeed, one shouldn’t underestimate the value that authenticity, or at least a performance of it, carries in the influencer marketplace. Since “Bye sister . . .” was posted, it has been viewed a staggering forty-three million times, and Westbrook has gained three million subscribers. Charles has lost roughly the same number.
BBC - Future - The tricks of airport design
How they keep travelers calm, quiet and... ready to shop !
▻http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190430-psychological-tricks-of-airport-design
From a terminal’s colours to the security queue, here’s how airports are designed to keep travellers calm, quiet – and ready to shop.
By Addison Nugent
1 May 2019
In 1995, French anthropologist Marc Auge categorised the airport as a “non-place”. Found the world over, non-places are devoid of identity – uniform structures (think Starbucks or McDonalds) that remain the same no matter where they are. By his definition airports are architectural machines, designed with the express purpose of moving people efficiently from one place to another.
How land grabbers co-opt indigenous ritual traditions in Papua: Q&A with anthropologist Sophie Chao
▻https://news.mongabay.com/2019/03/how-land-grabbers-co-opt-indigenous-ritual-traditions-in-papua-qa-with-anthropologist-sophie-chao/?n3wsletter
Industrial-scale agriculture poses considerable risk to the indigenous peoples of Papua, whose culture and livelihoods are closely linked to the region’s extensive rainforest.
Last November, Mongabay and The Gecko Project published an investigative article exposing the murky dealings underpinning a mega-plantation project in Papua, as part of our series Indonesia for Sale.
Anthropologist Sophie Chao has studied the often fraught relationship between Papuans and plantation firms, and the mechanisms through which indigenous people are compelled to give up their land.
#papouasie_nouvelle_guinée #peuples_autochtones #terres #industrie_palmiste
UM exhibit to showcase human toll of U.S.-Mexico border crossings
University of Michigan anthropologist #Jason_De_León and a few students were doing field work in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert seven years ago when the group stumbled upon the corpse of a woman.
For years, De León had been studying undocumented migrants crossing the Mexico border into the U.S. through the desert, so he was aware of the thousands of people who died in the desert because of the perilous terrain.
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2019/03/22/PDTN/4d6f7186-23e7-48bc-91db-fd4de43a5f58-Hostile-Terrain.JPG?width=1080&quality=50#.jpg 
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2019/03/22/PDTN/3f689592-2ec6-421d-9b59-9a26fb5331a4-Hostile-Terrain-2.JPEG?width=1080&quality=50#.jpg
Jason De Léon qui a écrit ce très bon livre:
The Land of Open Graves. Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail
Where Not to Travel in 2019, or Ever | The Walrus
Remote Community Faces Biological Terror Threat From U.S.
Religious Extremist Killed by Local Authorities.
▻https://thewalrus.ca/where-not-to-travel-in-2019-or-ever
My name is John!” shouted John Allen Chau from his kayak in November 2018 as he paddled toward strangers on the beach of North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal. “I love you and Jesus loves you!” In response, the people on the remote Indian island strung arrows in their bows. The twenty-six-year-old American missionary and self-styled explorer had elected himself saviour of the souls of the Sentinelese, an Indigenous tribe that aggressively resists contact with the outside world.
Save for sporadic visits from an anthropologist with India’s Ministry of Tribal Affairs in the 1960s to ’90s, and two Indian fishermen who were killed in 2006 for venturing too close, the Sentinelese have rarely interacted with outsiders over the past century, making them immunologically vulnerable. Unfazed by the genocidal threat his germs posed and fresh out of missionary boot camp, Chau made repeated attempts to land—ignoring arrows and Indian law—in an effort to bring the Gospel to the Sentinelese. He didn’t survive.
That he’s since been celebrated online as a martyr by Christian fundamentalists is sad but not surprising. More alarming is that Chau has been recognized, in profaner circles, for his spirit of adventure.
...
As someone who has been called an adventurer before, I feel more of a sense of kinship with the person on Twitter who suggested this fix for the Times headline: “Remote Community Faces Biological Terror Threat From U.S. Religious Extremist Killed by Local Authorities.” To extol or glamorize any aspect of what Chau did risks condoning a brand of colonialism that should be anachronistic by now, and not just among missionaries. In fact, Chau’s evangelism is too easy a target, and it’s one that eclipses his more fundamental transgression.
So imagine that Chau wasn’t a missionary.
...
New report exposes global reach of powerful governments who equip, finance and train other countries to spy on their populations
Privacy International has today released a report that looks at how powerful governments are financing, training and equipping countries — including authoritarian regimes — with surveillance capabilities. The report warns that rather than increasing security, this is entrenching authoritarianism.
Countries with powerful security agencies are spending literally billions to equip, finance, and train security and surveillance agencies around the world — including authoritarian regimes. This is resulting in entrenched authoritarianism, further facilitation of abuse against people, and diversion of resources from long-term development programmes.
The report, titled ‘Teach ’em to Phish: State Sponsors of Surveillance’ is available to download here.
Examples from the report include:
In 2001, the US spent $5.7 billion in security aid. In 2017 it spent over $20 billion [1]. In 2015, military and non-military security assistance in the US amounted to an estimated 35% of its entire foreign aid expenditure [2]. The report provides examples of how US Departments of State, Defense, and Justice all facilitate foreign countries’ surveillance capabilities, as well as an overview of how large arms companies have embedded themselves into such programmes, including at surveillance training bases in the US. Examples provided include how these agencies have provided communications intercept and other surveillance technology, how they fund wiretapping programmes, and how they train foreign spy agencies in surveillance techniques around the world.
The EU and individual European countries are sponsoring surveillance globally. The EU is already spending billions developing border control and surveillance capabilities in foreign countries to deter migration to Europe. For example, the EU is supporting Sudan’s leader with tens of millions of Euros aimed at capacity building for border management. The EU is now looking to massively increase its expenditure aimed at building border control and surveillance capabilities globally under the forthcoming Multiannual Financial Framework, which will determine its budget for 2021–2027. Other EU projects include developing the surveillance capabilities of security agencies in Tunisia, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Iraq and elsewhere. European countries such as France, Germany, and the UK are sponsoring surveillance worldwide, for example, providing training and equipment to “Cyber Police Officers” in Ukraine, as well as to agencies in Saudi Arabia, and across Africa.
Surveillance capabilities are also being supported by China’s government under the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ and other efforts to expand into international markets. Chinese companies have reportedly supplied surveillance capabilities to Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador [3]. In Ecuador, China Electronics Corporation supplied a network of cameras — including some fitted with facial recognition capabilities — to the country’s 24 provinces, as well as a system to locate and identify mobile phones.
Edin Omanovic, Privacy International’s Surveillance Programme Lead, said
“The global rush to make sure that surveillance is as universal and pervasive as possible is as astonishing as it is disturbing. The breadth of institutions, countries, agencies, and arms companies that are involved shows how there is no real long-term policy or strategic thinking driving any of this. It’s a free-for-all, where capabilities developed by some of the world’s most powerful spy agencies are being thrown at anyone willing to serve their interests, including dictators and killers whose only goal is to cling to power.
“If these ‘benefactor’ countries truly want to assist other countries to be secure and stable, they should build schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure, and promote democracy and human rights. This is what communities need for safety, security, and prosperity. What we don’t need is powerful and wealthy countries giving money to arms companies to build border control and surveillance infrastructure. This only serves the interests of those powerful, wealthy countries. As our report shows, instead of putting resources into long-term development solutions, such programmes further entrench authoritarianism and spur abuses around the world — the very things which cause insecurity in the first place.”
▻https://privacyinternational.org/press-release/2161/press-release-new-report-exposes-global-reach-powerful-governm
#surveillance #surveillance_de_masse #rapport
Pour télécharger le rapport “Teach ’em to Phish: State Sponsors of Surveillance”:
▻https://privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/2018-07/Teach-em-to-Phish-report.pdf
ping @fil
China Uses DNA to Track Its People, With the Help of American Expertise
The Chinese authorities turned to a Massachusetts company and a prominent Yale researcher as they built an enormous system of surveillance and control.
The authorities called it a free health check. Tahir Imin had his doubts.
They drew blood from the 38-year-old Muslim, scanned his face, recorded his voice and took his fingerprints. They didn’t bother to check his heart or kidneys, and they rebuffed his request to see the results.
“They said, ‘You don’t have the right to ask about this,’” Mr. Imin said. “‘If you want to ask more,’ they said, ‘you can go to the police.’”
Mr. Imin was one of millions of people caught up in a vast Chinese campaign of surveillance and oppression. To give it teeth, the Chinese authorities are collecting DNA — and they got unlikely corporate and academic help from the United States to do it.
China wants to make the country’s Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, more subservient to the Communist Party. It has detained up to a million people in what China calls “re-education” camps, drawing condemnation from human rights groups and a threat of sanctions from the Trump administration.
Collecting genetic material is a key part of China’s campaign, according to human rights groups and Uighur activists. They say a comprehensive DNA database could be used to chase down any Uighurs who resist conforming to the campaign.
Police forces in the United States and elsewhere use genetic material from family members to find suspects and solve crimes. Chinese officials, who are building a broad nationwide database of DNA samples, have cited the crime-fighting benefits of China’s own genetic studies.
To bolster their DNA capabilities, scientists affiliated with China’s police used equipment made by Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts company. For comparison with Uighur DNA, they also relied on genetic material from people around the world that was provided by #Kenneth_Kidd, a prominent #Yale_University geneticist.
On Wednesday, #Thermo_Fisher said it would no longer sell its equipment in Xinjiang, the part of China where the campaign to track Uighurs is mostly taking place. The company said separately in an earlier statement to The New York Times that it was working with American officials to figure out how its technology was being used.
Dr. Kidd said he had been unaware of how his material and know-how were being used. He said he believed Chinese scientists were acting within scientific norms that require informed consent by DNA donors.
China’s campaign poses a direct challenge to the scientific community and the way it makes cutting-edge knowledge publicly available. The campaign relies in part on public DNA databases and commercial technology, much of it made or managed in the United States. In turn, Chinese scientists have contributed Uighur DNA samples to a global database, potentially violating scientific norms of consent.
Cooperation from the global scientific community “legitimizes this type of genetic surveillance,” said Mark Munsterhjelm, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario who has closely tracked the use of American technology in Xinjiang.
Swabbing Millions
In Xinjiang, in northwestern China, the program was known as “#Physicals_for_All.”
From 2016 to 2017, nearly 36 million people took part in it, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency. The authorities collected DNA samples, images of irises and other personal data, according to Uighurs and human rights groups. It is unclear whether some residents participated more than once — Xinjiang has a population of about 24.5 million.
In a statement, the Xinjiang government denied that it collects DNA samples as part of the free medical checkups. It said the DNA machines that were bought by the Xinjiang authorities were for “internal use.”
China has for decades maintained an iron grip in Xinjiang. In recent years, it has blamed Uighurs for a series of terrorist attacks in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China, including a 2013 incident in which a driver struck two people in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
In late 2016, the Communist Party embarked on a campaign to turn the Uighurs and other largely Muslim minority groups into loyal supporters. The government locked up hundreds of thousands of them in what it called job training camps, touted as a way to escape poverty, backwardness and radical Islam. It also began to take DNA samples.
In at least some of the cases, people didn’t give up their genetic material voluntarily. To mobilize Uighurs for the free medical checkups, police and local cadres called or sent them text messages, telling them the checkups were required, according to Uighurs interviewed by The Times.
“There was a pretty strong coercive element to it,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies the plight of the Uighurs. “They had no choice.”
Calling Dr. Kidd
Kenneth Kidd first visited China in 1981 and remained curious about the country. So when he received an invitation in 2010 for an expenses-paid trip to visit Beijing, he said yes.
Dr. Kidd is a major figure in the genetics field. The 77-year-old Yale professor has helped to make DNA evidence more acceptable in American courts.
His Chinese hosts had their own background in law enforcement. They were scientists from the Ministry of Public Security — essentially, China’s police.
During that trip, Dr. Kidd met Li Caixia, the chief forensic physician of the ministry’s Institute of Forensic Science. The relationship deepened. In December 2014, Dr. Li arrived at Dr. Kidd’s lab for an 11-month stint. She took some DNA samples back to China.
“I had thought we were sharing samples for collaborative research,” said Dr. Kidd.
Dr. Kidd is not the only prominent foreign geneticist to have worked with the Chinese authorities. Bruce Budowle, a professor at the University of North Texas, says in his online biography that he “has served or is serving” as a member of an academic committee at the ministry’s Institute of Forensic Science.
Jeff Carlton, a university spokesman, said in a statement that Professor Budowle’s role with the ministry was “only symbolic in nature” and that he had “done no work on its behalf.”
“Dr. Budowle and his team abhor the use of DNA technology to persecute ethnic or religious groups,” Mr. Carlton said in the statement. “Their work focuses on criminal investigations and combating human trafficking to serve humanity.”
Dr. Kidd’s data became part of China’s DNA drive.
In 2014, ministry researchers published a paper describing a way for scientists to tell one ethnic group from another. It cited, as an example, the ability to distinguish Uighurs from Indians. The authors said they used 40 DNA samples taken from Uighurs in China and samples from other ethnic groups from Dr. Kidd’s Yale lab.
In patent applications filed in China in 2013 and 2017, ministry researchers described ways to sort people by ethnicity by screening their genetic makeup. They took genetic material from Uighurs and compared it with DNA from other ethnic groups. In the 2017 filing, researchers explained that their system would help in “inferring the geographical origin from the DNA of suspects at crime scenes.”
For outside comparisons, they used DNA samples provided by Dr. Kidd’s lab, the 2017 filing said. They also used samples from the 1000 Genomes Project, a public catalog of genes from around the world.
Paul Flicek, member of the steering committee of the 1000 Genomes Project, said that its data was unrestricted and that “there is no obvious problem” if it was being used as a way to determine where a DNA sample came from.
The data flow also went the other way.
Chinese government researchers contributed the data of 2,143 Uighurs to the Allele Frequency Database, an online search platform run by Dr. Kidd that was partly funded by the United States Department of Justice until last year. The database, known as Alfred, contains DNA data from more than 700 populations around the world.
This sharing of data could violate scientific norms of informed consent because it is not clear whether the Uighurs volunteered their DNA samples to the Chinese authorities, said Arthur Caplan, the founding head of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s School of Medicine. He said that “no one should be in a database without express consent.”
“Honestly, there’s been a kind of naïveté on the part of American scientists presuming that other people will follow the same rules and standards wherever they come from,” Dr. Caplan said.
Dr. Kidd said he was “not particularly happy” that the ministry had cited him in its patents, saying his data shouldn’t be used in ways that could allow people or institutions to potentially profit from it. If the Chinese authorities used data they got from their earlier collaborations with him, he added, there is little he can do to stop them.
He said he was unaware of the filings until he was contacted by The Times.
Dr. Kidd also said he considered his collaboration with the ministry to be no different from his work with police and forensics labs elsewhere. He said governments should have access to data about minorities, not just the dominant ethnic group, in order to have an accurate picture of the whole population.
As for the consent issue, he said the burden of meeting that standard lay with the Chinese researchers, though he said reports about what Uighurs are subjected to in China raised some difficult questions.
“I would assume they had appropriate informed consent on the samples,” he said, “though I must say what I’ve been hearing in the news recently about the treatment of the Uighurs raises concerns.”
Machine Learning
In 2015, Dr. Kidd and Dr. Budowle spoke at a genomics conference in the Chinese city of Xi’an. It was underwritten in part by Thermo Fisher, a company that has come under intense criticism for its equipment sales in China, and Illumina, a San Diego company that makes gene sequencing instruments. Illumina did not respond to requests for comment.
China is ramping up spending on health care and research. The Chinese market for gene-sequencing equipment and other technologies was worth $1 billion in 2017 and could more than double in five years, according to CCID Consulting, a research firm. But the Chinese market is loosely regulated, and it isn’t always clear where the equipment goes or to what uses it is put.
Thermo Fisher sells everything from lab instruments to forensic DNA testing kits to DNA mapping machines, which help scientists decipher a person’s ethnicity and identify diseases to which he or she is particularly vulnerable. China accounted for 10 percent of Thermo Fisher’s $20.9 billion in revenue, according to the company’s 2017 annual report, and it employs nearly 5,000 people there.
“Our greatest success story in emerging markets continues to be China,” it said in the report.
China used Thermo Fisher’s equipment to map the genes of its people, according to five Ministry of Public Security patent filings.
The company has also sold equipment directly to the authorities in Xinjiang, where the campaign to control the Uighurs has been most intense. At least some of the equipment was intended for use by the police, according to procurement documents. The authorities there said in the documents that the machines were important for DNA inspections in criminal cases and had “no substitutes in China.”
In February 2013, six ministry researchers credited Thermo Fisher’s Applied Biosystems brand, as well as other companies, with helping to analyze the DNA samples of Han, Uighur and Tibetan people in China, according to a patent filing. The researchers said understanding how to differentiate between such DNA samples was necessary for fighting terrorism “because these cases were becoming more difficult to crack.”
The researchers said they had obtained 95 Uighur DNA samples, some of which were given to them by the police. Other samples were provided by Uighurs voluntarily, they said.
Thermo Fisher was criticized by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, and others who asked the Commerce Department to prohibit American companies from selling technology to China that could be used for purposes of surveillance and tracking.
On Wednesday, Thermo Fisher said it would stop selling its equipment in Xinjiang, a decision it said was “consistent with Thermo Fisher’s values, ethics code and policies.”
“As the world leader in serving science, we recognize the importance of considering how our products and services are used — or may be used — by our customers,” it said.
Human rights groups praised Thermo Fisher’s move. Still, they said, equipment and information flows into China should be better monitored, to make sure the authorities elsewhere don’t send them to Xinjiang.
“It’s an important step, and one hopes that they apply the language in their own statement to commercial activity across China, and that other companies are assessing their sales and operations, especially in Xinjiang,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch.
American lawmakers and officials are taking a hard look at the situation in Xinjiang. The Trump administration is considering sanctions against Chinese officials and companies over China’s treatment of the Uighurs.
China’s tracking campaign unnerved people like Tahir Hamut. In May 2017, the police in the city of Urumqi in Xinjiang drew the 49-year-old Uighur’s blood, took his fingerprints, recorded his voice and took a scan of his face. He was called back a month later for what he was told was a free health check at a local clinic.
Mr. Hamut, a filmmaker who is now living in Virginia, said he saw between 20 to 40 Uighurs in line. He said it was absurd to think that such frightened people had consented to submit their DNA.
“No one in this situation, not under this much pressure and facing such personal danger, would agree to give their blood samples for research,” Mr. Hamut said. “It’s just inconceivable.”
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/business/china-xinjiang-uighur-dna-thermo-fisher.html?action=click&module=MoreInSect
#USA #Etats-Unis #ADN #DNA #Ouïghours #université #science #génétique #base_de_données
Democrats’ ‘smart border’ technology is not a ‘humane’ alternative to Trump’s wall
In response to President Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion for a physical barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border, and his threat to shut down the government again on Feb. 15 if Congress doesn’t provide it, Democratic Congressional leaders are promoting an alternative they refer to as a “smart border.” This is essentially an expansion of existing technologies like remote sensors, integrated fixed-towers, #drones and other #surveillance assets.
On Jan. 29, Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the third-ranking Democrat in the House, wrote an op-ed in The Hill arguing that this kind of “smart border” is preferable to a physical wall because it will “create a technological barrier too high to climb over, too wide to go around, and too deep to burrow under,” resulting in an “effective, efficient and humane” alternative to Trump’s border wall. Meanwhile, the “opening offer” announced on Jan. 31 by the Democrats in bipartisan budget negotiations included $400 million for this “smart border” surveillance package.
In a recent peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Borderlands Studies, we raised fundamental questions about these kinds of “smart border” technologies, including their humanitarian implications. Using geospatial modeling and statistical analysis, we show how previous “high-tech” border solutions failed to deliver on their operational objectives; instead of preventing unauthorized crossing, the surveillance network simply shifted migration routes into much more difficult and remote terrain, with a measurable impact on the geography of migrant deaths in the southern Arizona desert.
From 2006 to 2011 the United States appropriated $3.7 billion for the SBInet system, intended as a high-tech network of ground sensors connected to integrated fixed towers mounted with infrared, high-resolution cameras and motion-detecting ground radar. Experimentally deployed southwest of Tucson, Arizona, the surveillance network aimed to provide the Border Patrol “complete situational awareness” through the real-time, automated integration of multiple sources of surveillance data.
The outcomes delivered by the SBInet program fell well short of these aspirations, however. In 2010 the Government Accountability Office concluded that the Department of Homeland Security had “yet to identify expected benefits from the [program], whether quantitative or qualitative.” After continuous operational shortcomings and delays, in 2011 the Obama administration quietly canceled the program.
Simultaneously, the area where SBInet was deployed has become a “land of open graves,” according to anthropologist and 2017 MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Jason De León. From 2006 to 2011, at least 1,267 people died in southern Arizona attempting to cross the border. A significant majority of these deaths were the outcome of exposure to the elements: dehydration, hyperthermia and exhaustion. Meanwhile, during this same period the rate of death (the number of deaths / 100,000 Border Patrol apprehensions) skyrocketed, nearly tripling between 2008 and 2011 alone.
These deaths are the result of many factors. But our research shows that significant among these has been the expansion of border surveillance technology. Using Geographic Information Science, we analyzed the mapped location of human remains pre- and post-SBInet. We then plotted the visual range of the SBInet system using publicly-available information on the location of the towers and the operational reach of their various components.
Next, we created a model using variables like vegetation, slope and terrain to measure the physiological difficulty associated with pedestrian transit along different routes of travel. We found a meaningful and measurable shift in the location of human remains toward routes of travel outside the visual range of the SBInet system, routes that simultaneously required much greater physical exertion, thus increasing peoples’ vulnerability to injury, isolation, dehydration, hyperthermia and exhaustion.
Our research findings show that in addition to its monetary cost and its questionable operational efficacy, the “smart border” technology presently being promoted by the Democratic congressional leadership contributes to deadly outcomes.
Based on these findings there is a need to reconsider the premise that surveillance technology and infrastructure can provide a “humane” alternative to Trump’s border wall (a proposal we also consider to be wasteful and destructive). Instead, we’d like to see a shift in U.S. border policy that genuinely prioritizes the protection of human life, regardless of a person’s citizenship or immigration status.
This kind of shift, of course, would require reforms not just to the Border Patrol and its enforcement strategy, but to U.S. immigration policy overall, allowing people to seek safety or reunite with family and loved ones without risking their lives crossing through the desert.
▻https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/429454-democrats-smart-border-technology-is-not-a-humane-alternative-to-tru
#frontière_intelligente #alternative (?) #murs #barrières_frontalières #frontières #smart_border #smart_borders #technologie #mourir_aux_frontières #morts #décès
En gros:
Our research findings show that in addition to its monetary cost and its questionable operational efficacy, the “smart border” technology presently being promoted by the Democratic congressional leadership contributes to deadly outcomes.
Fires in the Void : The Need for Migrant Solidarity
For most, Barcelona’s immigrant detention center is a difficult place to find. Tucked away in the Zona Franca logistics and industrial area, just beyond the Montjuïc Cemetery, it is shrouded in an alien stillness. It may be the quietest place in the city on a Saturday afternoon, but it is not a contemplative quiet. It is a no-one-can-hear-you-scream quiet.
The area is often described as a perfect example of what anthropologist Marc Augé calls a non-place: neither relational nor historical, nor concerned with identity. Yet this opaque institution is situated in the economic motor of the city, next to the port, the airport, the public transportation company, the wholesale market that provides most of the city’s produce and the printing plant for Spain’s most widely read newspaper. The detention center is a void in the heart of a sovereign body.
Alik Manukyan died in this void. On the morning of December 3, 2013, officers found the 32-year-old Armenian dead in his isolation cell, hanged using his own shoelaces. Police claimed that Manukyan was a “violent” and “conflictive” person who caused trouble with his cellmates. This account of his alleged suicide was contradicted, however, by three detainees. They claimed Alik had had a confrontation with some officers, who then entered the cell, assaulted him and forced him into isolation. They heard Alik scream and wail all through the night. Two of these witnesses were deported before the case made it to court. An “undetectable technical error” prevented the judge from viewing any surveillance footage.
The void extends beyond the detention center. In 2013, nearly a decade after moving to Spain, a young Senegalese man named #Alpha_Pam died of tuberculosis. When he went to a hospital for treatment, Pam was denied medical attention because his papers were not in order. His case was a clear example of the apartheid logic underlying a 2012 decree by Mariano Rajoy’s right-wing government, which excluded undocumented people from Spain’s once-universal public health care system. As a result, the country’s hospitals went from being places of universal care to spaces of systematic neglect. The science of healing, warped by nationalist politics.
Not that science had not played a role in perpetuating the void before. In 2007, during the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, #Osamuyi_Aikpitanyi died during a deportation flight after being gagged and restrained by police escorts. The medical experts who investigated Aikpitanyi’s death concluded that the Nigerian man had died due to a series of factors they called “a vicious spiral”. There was an increase in catecholamine, a neurotransmitter related to stress, fear, panic and flight instincts. This was compounded by a lack of oxygen due to the flight altitude and, possibly, the gag. Ultimately, these experts could not determine what percentage of the death had been directly caused by the gag, and the police were fined 600 euros for the non-criminal offense of “light negligence”.
The Romans had a term for lives like these, lives that vanish in the void. That term was #homo_sacer, the “sacred man”, who one could kill without being found guilty of murder. An obscure figure from archaic law revived by the philosopher #Giorgio_Agamben, it was used to incorporate human life, stripped of personhood, into the juridical order. Around this figure, a state of exception was produced, in which power could be exercised in its crudest form, opaque and unaccountable. For Agamben, this is the unspoken ground upon which modern sovereignty stands. Perhaps the best example of it is the mass grave that the Mediterranean has become.
Organized Hypocrisy
Its name suggests that the Mediterranean was once the world’s center. Today it is its deadliest divide. According to the International Organization for Migration, over 9,000 people died trying to cross the sea between January 1, 2014 and July 5, 2018. A conservative estimate, perhaps. The UN Refugee Agency estimates that the number of people found dead or missing during this period is closer to 17,000.
Concern for the situation peaks when spectacular images make the horror unavoidable. A crisis mentality takes over, and politicians make sweeping gestures with a solemn sense of urgency. One such gesture was made after nearly 400 people died en route to Lampedusa in October 2013. The Italian government responded by launching Operation #Mare_Nostrum, a search-and-rescue program led by the country’s navy and coast guard. It cost €11 million per month, deploying 34 warships and about 900 sailors per working day. Over 150,000 people were rescued by the operation in one year.
Despite its cost, Mare Nostrum was initially supported by much of the Italian public. It was less popular, however, with other European member states, who accused the mission of encouraging “illegal” migration by making it less deadly. Within a year, Europe’s refusal to share the responsibility had produced a substantial degree of discontent in Italy. In October 2014, Mare Nostrum was scrapped and replaced by #Triton, an operation led by the European border agency #Frontex.
With a third of Mare Nostrum’s budget, Triton was oriented not towards protecting lives but towards surveillance and border control. As a result, the deadliest incidents in the region’s history occurred less than half a year into the operation. Between April 13 and April 19, 2015, over one thousand people drowned in the waters abandoned by European search and rescue efforts. Once again, the images produced a public outcry. Once again, European leaders shed crocodile tears for the dead.
Instead of strengthening search and rescue efforts, the EU increased Frontex’s budget and complemented Triton with #Operation_Sophia, a military effort to disrupt the networks of so-called “smugglers”. #Eugenio_Cusumano, an assistant professor of international relations at the University of Leiden, has written extensively on the consequences of this approach, which he describes as “organized hypocrisy”. In an article for the Cambridge Review of International Affairs (▻https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0010836718780175), Cusumano shows how the shortage of search and rescue assets caused by the termination of Mare Nostrum led non-governmental organizations to become the main source of these activities off the Libyan shore. Between 2014 and 2017, NGOs aided over 100,000 people.
Their efforts have been admirable. Yet the precariousness of their resources and their dependence on private donors mean that NGOs have neither the power nor the capacity to provide aid on the scale required to prevent thousands of deaths at the border. To make matters worse, for the last several months governments have been targeting NGOs and individual activists as smugglers or human traffickers, criminalizing their solidarity. It is hardly surprising, then, that the border has become even deadlier in recent years. According to the UN Refugee Agency, although the number of attempted crossings has fallen over 80 percent from its peak in 2015, the percentage of people who have died or vanished has quadrupled.
It is not my intention, with the litany of deaths described here, to simply name some of the people killed by Europe’s border regime. What I hope to have done instead is show the scale of the void at its heart and give a sense of its ruthlessness and verticality. There is a tendency to refer to this void as a gap, as a space beyond the reach of European institutions, the European gaze or European epistemologies. If this were true, the void could be filled by simply extending Europe’s reach, by producing new concepts, mapping new terrains, building new institutions.
But, in fact, Europe has been treating the void as a site of production all along. As political theorist #Sandro_Mezzadra writes, the border is the method through which the sovereign machine of governmentality was built. Its construction must be sabotaged, subverted and disrupted at every level.
A Crisis of Solidarity
When the ultranationalist Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini refused to allow the MV #Aquarius to dock in June 2018, he was applauded by an alarmingly large number of Italians. Many blamed his racism and that of the Italians for putting over 600 lives at risk, including those of 123 unaccompanied minors, eleven young children and seven pregnant women.
Certainly, the willingness to make a political point by sacrificing hundreds of migrant lives confirms that racism. But another part of what made Salvini’s gesture so horrifying was that, presumably, many of those who had once celebrated increasing search and rescue efforts now supported the opposite. Meanwhile, many of the same European politicians who had refused to share Italy’s responsibilities five years earlier were now expressing moral outrage over Salvini’s lack of solidarity.
Once again, the crisis mode of European border politics was activated. Once again, European politicians and media talked about a “migrant crisis”, about “flows” of people causing unprecedented “pressure” on the southern border. But attempted crossings were at their lowest level in years, a fact that led many migration scholars to claim this was not a “migrant crisis”, but a crisis of solidarity. In this sense, Italy’s shift reflects the nature of the problem. By leaving it up to individual member states, the EU has made responding to the deaths at the border a matter of national conviction. When international solidarity is absent, national self-interest takes over.
Fortunately, Spain’s freshly sworn-in Socialist Party government granted the Aquarius permission to dock in the Port of #Valencia. This happened only after Mayor Ada Colau of Barcelona, a self-declared “City of Refuge”, pressured Spanish President Pedro Sánchez by publicly offering to receive the ship at the Port of Barcelona. Party politics being as they are, Sánchez authorized a port where his party’s relationship with the governing left-wing platform was less conflictive than in Barcelona.
The media celebrated Sánchez’s authorization as an example of moral virtue. Yet it would not have happened if solidarity with refugees had not been considered politically profitable by institutional actors. In Spain’s highly fractured political arena, younger left-wing parties and the Catalan independence movement are constantly pressuring a weakened Socialist Party to prove their progressive credentials. Meanwhile, tireless mobilization by social movements has made welcoming refugees a matter of common sense and basic human decency.
The best known example of this mobilization was the massive protest that took place in February 2017, when 150,000 people took to the streets of Barcelona to demand that Mariano Rajoy’s government take in more refugees and migrants. It is likely because of actions like these that, according to the June 2018 Eurobarometer, over 80 percent of people in Spain believe the country should help those fleeing disaster.
Yet even where the situation might be more favorable to bottom-up pressure, those in power will not only limit the degree to which demands are met, but actively distort those demands. The February 2017 protest is a good example. Though it also called for the abolition of detention centers, racial profiling and Spain’s racist immigration law, the march is best remembered for the single demand of welcoming refugees.
The adoption of this demand by the Socialist Party was predictably cynical. After authorizing the Aquarius, President Sánchez used his momentarily boosted credibility to present, alongside Emmanuel Macron, a “progressive” European alternative to Salvini’s closed border. It involved creating detention centers all over the continent, with the excuse of determining people’s documentation status. Gears turn in the sovereign machine of governmentality. The void expands.
Today the border is a sprawling, parasitic entity linking governments, private companies and supranational institutions. It is not enough for NGOs to rescue refugees, when their efforts can be turned into spot-mopping for the state. It is not enough for social movements to pressure national governments to change their policies, when individual demands can be distorted to mean anything. It is not enough for cities to declare themselves places of refuge, when they can be compelled to enforce racist laws. It is not enough for political parties to take power, when they can be conditioned by private interests, the media and public opinion polls.
To overcome these limitations, we must understand borders as highly vertical transnational constructions. Dismantling those constructions will require organization, confrontation, direct action, sabotage and, above all, that borderless praxis of mutual aid and solidarity known as internationalism. If we truly hope to abolish the border, we must start fires in the void.
▻https://roarmag.org/magazine/migrant-solidarity-fires-in-the-void
#solidarité #frontières #migrations #réfugiés #asile #détention_administrative #rétention #Barcelone #non-lieu #Espagne #mourir_en_détention_administrative #mort #décès #mourir_en_rétention #Alik_Manukyan #renvois #expulsions #vie_nue #Méditerranée #hypocrisie #hypocrisie_organisée #ONG #sauvetage #sabotage #nationalisme #crise #villes-refuge #Valence #internationalisme #ouverture_des_frontières #action_directe
signalé par @isskein
The End of Trust (McSweeney’s 54) | Electronic Frontier Foundation
▻https://www.eff.org/the-end-of-trust
https://www.eff.org/files/banner_library/54_banner_eff2.jpg 
https://www.eff.org/files/2018/10/02/54-spread-small.gif 
anthropologist Gabriella Coleman contemplates anonymity; Edward Snowden explains blockchain; journalist Julia Angwin and Pioneer Award-winning artist Trevor Paglen discuss the intersections of their work; Pioneer Award winner Malkia Cyril discusses the historical surveillance of black bodies; and Ken Montenegro and Hamid Khan of Stop LAPD Spying debate author and intelligence contractor Myke Cole on the question of whether there’s a way law enforcement can use surveillance responsibly.
The End of Trust is available to download and read right now under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.
‘Why should we speak with you?’
▻https://africasacountry.com/2018/09/why-should-we-speak-with-you
Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist and associate professor at Oxford University who works on migration, borders
Revue « Territory »
SIgnalé par @fil ce matin
Issue X - Extremes - Preview — Territory
▻http://themapisnot.com/issue-x-extremes-preview
In theory, extremes are rarities. At any given moment, there can only be one of each superlative—smallest, tallest, fastest, farthest, deepest, darkest, brightest—but, as the saying goes, records are meant to be broken. The indivisible atom was split. Infinity has been proven to come in many sizes and shapes. An extreme is a record of limit, but also a series, a narrative of revision. It is never singular, a datum. As psychonaut Terence McKenna was fond of saying, “the bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.”
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Issue 11 - Twins - Preview — Territory
▻http://themapisnot.com/issue-11-twins-preview
Roughly 1 in every 30 births is a pair of twins. Uncommon yet not rare, there’s an ambivalence to twinness, what anthropologist Philip Peek terms the “centrality of liminality.” Twins are both one and two, and this logical ambiguity can be the source of harmony, as with the yin-yang duality, or evidence of a disturbing glitch, as in the uncanny of the doppelgänger.
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Issue 12 - Alaska - Preview — Territory
▻http://themapisnot.com/issue-12-alaska-preview
On most maps, Alaska is an outlier. Separated by land and sea from the “lower 48” and skewed by the distortions of the Mercator-derived projections that most popular maps default to, Alaska doesn’t easily fit within the image of the United States. Cartographers seem to be at a loss as to where to put it. On some maps, the state is packed into its own little box and shipped south to warm up next to Hawai’i. On others, it’s not even present at all. Then, when granted its own map, Alaska receives almost compensatory treatment. It is painted pictorially as larger than life, an Arctic Treasureland or The Far North Frontier, a land of opportunity for those rugged enough to brave its harsh conditions, native and colonial alike.
#cartographie #cartoexperiment #territoire #géographie
Projet cartographie expérimentale
Tags généraux : #cartoexperiment #biblioxperiment
Tags particulier : #visualisation #complexité_visuelle
Opinion | How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’ - The New York Times
▻https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html
In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of “black.” In the United States, historically, a person is “black” if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not “black” if he is known to have any European ancestry. If “black” refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?
Beginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven “races” — West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians — and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of “differences between individuals.”
In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Instead, it was argued, race is a “social construct,” a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.
It is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view.
But over the years this consensus has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy. The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored.
The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations. The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews.
I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”
Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.
Recent genetic studies have demonstrated differences across populations not just in the genetic determinants of simple traits such as skin color, but also in more complex traits like bodily dimensions and susceptibility to diseases. For example, we now know that genetic factors help explain why northern Europeans are taller on average than southern Europeans, why multiple sclerosis is more common in European-Americans than in African-Americans, and why the reverse is true for end-stage kidney disease.
I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.
This is why it is important, even urgent, that we develop a candid and scientifically up-to-date way of discussing any such differences, instead of sticking our heads in the sand and being caught unprepared when they are found.
To get a sense of what modern genetic research into average biological differences across populations looks like, consider an example from my own work. Beginning around 2003, I began exploring whether the population mixture that has occurred in the last few hundred years in the Americas could be leveraged to find risk factors for prostate cancer, a disease that occurs 1.7 times more often in self-identified African-Americans than in self-identified European-Americans. This disparity had not been possible to explain based on dietary and environmental differences, suggesting that genetic factors might play a role.
Self-identified African-Americans turn out to derive, on average, about 80 percent of their genetic ancestry from enslaved Africans brought to America between the 16th and 19th centuries. My colleagues and I searched, in 1,597 African-American men with prostate cancer, for locations in the genome where the fraction of genes contributed by West African ancestors was larger than it was elsewhere in the genome. In 2006, we found exactly what we were looking for: a location in the genome with about 2.8 percent more African ancestry than the average.
When we looked in more detail, we found that this region contained at least seven independent risk factors for prostate cancer, all more common in West Africans. Our findings could fully account for the higher rate of prostate cancer in African-Americans than in European-Americans. We could conclude this because African-Americans who happen to have entirely European ancestry in this small section of their genomes had about the same risk for prostate cancer as random Europeans.
Did this research rely on terms like “African-American” and “European-American” that are socially constructed, and did it label segments of the genome as being probably “West African” or “European” in origin? Yes. Did this research identify real risk factors for disease that differ in frequency across those populations, leading to discoveries with the potential to improve health and save lives? Yes.
While most people will agree that finding a genetic explanation for an elevated rate of disease is important, they often draw the line there. Finding genetic influences on a propensity for disease is one thing, they argue, but looking for such influences on behavior and cognition is another.
But whether we like it or not, that line has already been crossed. A recent study led by the economist Daniel Benjamin compiled information on the number of years of education from more than 400,000 people, almost all of whom were of European ancestry. After controlling for differences in socioeconomic background, he and his colleagues identified 74 genetic variations that are over-represented in genes known to be important in neurological development, each of which is incontrovertibly more common in Europeans with more years of education than in Europeans with fewer years of education.
It is not yet clear how these genetic variations operate. A follow-up study of Icelanders led by the geneticist Augustine Kong showed that these genetic variations also nudge people who carry them to delay having children. So these variations may be explaining longer times at school by affecting a behavior that has nothing to do with intelligence.
This study has been joined by others finding genetic predictors of behavior. One of these, led by the geneticist Danielle Posthuma, studied more than 70,000 people and found genetic variations in more than 20 genes that were predictive of performance on intelligence tests.
Is performance on an intelligence test or the number of years of school a person attends shaped by the way a person is brought up? Of course. But does it measure something having to do with some aspect of behavior or cognition? Almost certainly. And since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too.
You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work. Indeed, the study led by Dr. Kong showed that in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century.
To understand why it is so dangerous for geneticists and anthropologists to simply repeat the old consensus about human population differences, consider what kinds of voices are filling the void that our silence is creating. Nicholas Wade, a longtime science journalist for The New York Times, rightly notes in his 2014 book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” that modern research is challenging our thinking about the nature of human population differences. But he goes on to make the unfounded and irresponsible claim that this research is suggesting that genetic factors explain traditional stereotypes.
One of Mr. Wade’s key sources, for example, is the anthropologist Henry Harpending, who has asserted that people of sub-Saharan African ancestry have no propensity to work when they don’t have to because, he claims, they did not go through the type of natural selection for hard work in the last thousands of years that some Eurasians did. There is simply no scientific evidence to support this statement. Indeed, as 139 geneticists (including myself) pointed out in a letter to The New York Times about Mr. Wade’s book, there is no genetic evidence to back up any of the racist stereotypes he promotes.
Another high-profile example is James Watson, the scientist who in 1953 co-discovered the structure of DNA, and who was forced to retire as head of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in 2007 after he stated in an interview — without any scientific evidence — that research has suggested that genetic factors contribute to lower intelligence in Africans than in Europeans.
At a meeting a few years later, Dr. Watson said to me and my fellow geneticist Beth Shapiro something to the effect of “When are you guys going to figure out why it is that you Jews are so much smarter than everyone else?” He asserted that Jews were high achievers because of genetic advantages conferred by thousands of years of natural selection to be scholars, and that East Asian students tended to be conformist because of selection for conformity in ancient Chinese society. (Contacted recently, Dr. Watson denied having made these statements, maintaining that they do not represent his views; Dr. Shapiro said that her recollection matched mine.)
What makes Dr. Watson’s and Mr. Wade’s statements so insidious is that they start with the accurate observation that many academics are implausibly denying the possibility of average genetic differences among human populations, and then end with a claim — backed by no evidence — that they know what those differences are and that they correspond to racist stereotypes. They use the reluctance of the academic community to openly discuss these fraught issues to provide rhetorical cover for hateful ideas and old racist canards.
This is why knowledgeable scientists must speak out. If we abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing differences among populations, we risk losing the trust of the public and we actively contribute to the distrust of expertise that is now so prevalent. We leave a vacuum that gets filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly.
If scientists can be confident of anything, it is that whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong. For example, my laboratory discovered in 2016, based on our sequencing of ancient human genomes, that “whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today.
So how should we prepare for the likelihood that in the coming years, genetic studies will show that many traits are influenced by genetic variations, and that these traits will differ on average across human populations? It will be impossible — indeed, anti-scientific, foolish and absurd — to deny those differences.
For me, a natural response to the challenge is to learn from the example of the biological differences that exist between males and females. The differences between the sexes are far more profound than those that exist among human populations, reflecting more than 100 million years of evolution and adaptation. Males and females differ by huge tracts of genetic material — a Y chromosome that males have and that females don’t, and a second X chromosome that females have and males don’t.
Most everyone accepts that the biological differences between males and females are profound. In addition to anatomical differences, men and women exhibit average differences in size and physical strength. (There are also average differences in temperament and behavior, though there are important unresolved questions about the extent to which these differences are influenced by social expectations and upbringing.)
How do we accommodate the biological differences between men and women? I think the answer is obvious: We should both recognize that genetic differences between males and females exist and we should accord each sex the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences.
It is clear from the inequities that persist between women and men in our society that fulfilling these aspirations in practice is a challenge. Yet conceptually it is straightforward. And if this is the case with men and women, then it is surely the case with whatever differences we may find among human populations, the great majority of which will be far less profound.
An abiding challenge for our civilization is to treat each human being as an individual and to empower all people, regardless of what hand they are dealt from the deck of life. Compared with the enormous differences that exist among individuals, differences among populations are on average many times smaller, so it should be only a modest challenge to accommodate a reality in which the average genetic contributions to human traits differ.
It is important to face whatever science will reveal without prejudging the outcome and with the confidence that we can be mature enough to handle any findings. Arguing that no substantial differences among human populations are possible will only invite the racist misuse of genetics that we wish to avoid.
David Reich is a professor of genetics at Harvard and the author of the forthcoming book “Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past,” from which this article is adapted.
The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s. It Just Surfaced - History in the Headlines
▻https://www.history.com/news/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-slave-clotilda-survivor
Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.
Hurston, a known figure of the Harlem Renaissance who would later write the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, conducted interviews with the survivor but struggled to publish them as a book in the early 1930s. In fact, they are only now being released to the public in a book called Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” that comes out on May 8, 2018.
Asifa: A Story of Militarisation, Violence and Justice | The Polis Project, Inc
▻http://www.thepolisproject.com/asifa-a-story-of-militarisation-violence-and-justice
▻https://i1.wp.com/www.thepolisproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/kathua3.jpg?fit=1024%2C724
Scholars, Writers, Artists and Citizens respond:
Ather Zia, Anthropologist, Writer, Poet and Activist
The murder-gang rape of a minor child Asifa from Kathua is soul crushing. It must not be seen as a social-sexual crime but one that is deeply political and tied to the larger issue of the militarization, occupation and systematic use of rape as a weapon of war in the region. This case involves a premeditated plan to strike fear in the Gujjar-Bakerwal (migratory pastoralist) community and the crime branch has proved this. Such extreme violence on a young child is incomprehensible. The charge sheet is filled with the savage acts that were meted on the body of the young child who was chosen because she was a soft target. This gang-rape murder cannot be treated as apolitical since it is proven beyond doubt that it was planned to drive out the Gujjar-Bakerwals who are a marginalized Muslim community. Their presence has been a matter of growing strife for the local Hindu community. Sanji Ram who is now proven the main mastermind has a clear track record of inciting sentiments against the Muslim community and it is reported he has even been harassing their women in the past. Sanji Ram groomed his nephew to kidnap the Asifa. In this they were aided and abetted by Deepak Khajuria an SPO in the local police force who is also the mastermind and has a track record of spewing hate against the Muslim community. It has been proven that he along with the members of police and other men (currently 8 in total) tried to cover up the case. They received clear political patronage to get the community activist Talib Hussain detained and cause impediments in the investigation. The advocate for Asifa, Deepika Singh continues to be harassed to drop the case by the Bar Association of Kathua. In an unprecedented turn of events, the Bar has mobilized in favour of the rapists and have caused impediments in filing the charge sheet against the accused. The Hindu community, under the banner of Hindu Ekta Manch, continues to protest and strike demanding the rapist-murderers be released. While showing extraordinary strength in face of immense adversity, Mohammad Yusuf Pujwala Asifa’s father along with his family has fled the area due to threats. It must be noted that the Hindu community did not allow Asifa to be buried in the area even though the family lawfully own space for burial. In 1947 Jammu region became dominantly Hindu after a large scale Muslim massacre was carefully orchestrated during the partition. While this shameful history is carefully hidden from common view, Asifa’s case brings back the horrors of a communal past, and the potential for no doubt mindless but orchestrated violence that Indian settler colonialism is capable of bringing back or rather has brought back.
Four facts about Jane Goodall, primatologist, anthropologist, and activist
▻https://massivesci.com/articles/jane-goodall-science-heroes-chimpanzees
Her unorthodox research showed us that chimpanzees are far more human than we thought
Why do some Chinese funerals involve strippers? - BBC News
▻http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43137005
Music blaring through loudspeakers, strippers dancing to the beat and audiences whistling along. In some parts of China, this is what you would see during a funeral procession.
Earlier this year, China renewed a clampdown on strippers performing at funerals, wedding and temples, calling it “obscene and vulgar”.
This isn’t the first time authorities have tried to get rid of the practice but it has proven resilient. Why do people hire strippers at funerals?
According to one theory, strippers are used to boost funeral attendances because large crowds are seen as a mark of honour for the deceased.
Another states the practice could be linked to a “worship of reproduction”. “In some local cultures, dancing with erotic elements can be used to convey the deceased’s wishes of being blessed with many children,” Huang Jianxing, a professor of Fujian Normal University told state-media outlet the Global Times.
One practical theory is that the hiring of strippers could be seen as a sign of wealth.
[…]
“The practice of funeral strippers first caught widespread public attention in Taiwan in 1980,” University of South Carolina anthropologist Marc Moskowitz told the BBC.
“It has become fairly common in Taiwan but in China the government has been more restrictive so many people have never even heard of this.”
Un article de 2011 à propos de ce dernier chercheur.
Strip-teaseuse pour enterrement — Chine Informations
▻https://chine.in/actualite/culture-taiwanaise-des-stripteaseuses-pour-les_32401.html
Mark Moskowitz, un anthropologue américain, a révélé dans un reportage, une pratique courante et surprenante lors des enterrements à Taïwan : les danses funéraires de stripteaseuses.
Les danses funéraires de stripteaseuses font parti de la culture populaire taïwanaise, en particulier dans les zones rurales.
Ce genre de danse sexy est apparue dans les années 1980 un peu partout sur l’île, et même dans la capitale Tapei. Mais après que le gouvernement ait voté des lois à leur encontre, elles ont disparu des villes pour se retrouver dans les campagnes où les lois sont plus difficilement applicables.
Des jeunes femmes chantent, exécutent des démonstrations de pole dance la plupart du temps sur des camion-podiums et descendent parfois pour interagir avec les spectateurs…
[…]
Si devant les caméras des journalistes, les filles ne dansent pas nues, ne nombreux témoignages anonymes rapportent que la danse nue est très répandue.
“Hate Speech” Does Not Incite Hatred - Quillette
▻http://quillette.com/2018/01/18/hate-speech-not-induce-hatred
The United States Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed that “[s]peech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground” is protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. However, the protections of the First Amendment extend only to government efforts to punish or censor speech. Private entities remain free to take action against people who engage in speech which ostensibly demeans others, and private actors from Harvard University to Facebook and Twitter have punished or censored individuals whose speech they have found to be “hateful.”
Those who advocate the censorship of so-called “hate speech” claim that it causes various ills, but perhaps the most common claim is that “hate speech” engenders hatred towards particular groups, and thereby causes violence against members of those groups. Such claims have been particularly common in recent years, and have included allegations that “anti-police hate speech” on the part of Black Lives Matters supporters has led to violence against police officers; that Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric has led to an increase in hate crimes; and that anti-Muslim hate speech on the Internet can motivate some people to commit acts of violence against Muslims.
The claim that “hate speech” causes hatred, and thereby causes violence, is superficially appealing, but the more one thinks about it, the less sense it makes. Is it really likely that otherwise reasonable people will be driven to hate others, and to violently attack those others, simply because they were exposed to hate speech? The proponents of that view rarely, if ever, offer direct evidence for that claim. There is a simple explanation for that failure: such evidence does not exist.
At first blush, that would seem to be an outlandish claim. What about the infamous “hate radio” in Rwanda? Doesn’t everyone know that those broadcasts caused people who had peacefully coexisted with their neighbors to engage in genocide? Well, in fact, there is no evidence that that is true. This common understanding of the role of “hate radio” overlooks basic facts of Rwandan history, including the fact that the genocide took place in the midst of a Tutsi-dominated insurgency that had begun in 1990, and which had resulted in hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Rwandans as insurgent forces approached the capital in 1993, just a year before the beginning of the genocide. Thus, the myth that Rwanda was an Arcadia of ethnic harmony before the “hate radio” broadcasts began is just that: a myth.
A father in Rwanda searches for his lost child. ©ICRC/Benno Neeleman
Perhaps more importantly, the popular narrative regarding the role of “hate radio” ignores twenty years of scholarship which finds little evidence that the radio broadcasts caused people to engage in genocide. For example, a 2017 study published in Criminology found no statistically significant relationship between radio exposure and killing.1 Moreover, the anthropologist Charles Mironko interviewed one hundred convicted perpetrators and found that many either did not hear the “hate radio” broadcasts or misinterpreted them, and University of Wisconsin political scientist Scott Straus found that peer pressure and personal appeals, not hate radio, is what motivated most perpetrators.2 Similarly, political scientist Lee Ann Fujii’s book-length study of the Rwandan genocide found that those who participated in the genocide did not show unusual levels of fear or hatred of Tutsis. Instead, they participated through personal relationships with local elites, often because they feared repercussions if they did not participate. Hate had nothing to do with it.
Professor Fujii’s findings are consistent with a recent study that was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which found that villages with better radio reception had higher levels of participation in the genocide, but which credited that effect not to the creation of hatred, but rather to the fact that the broadcasts told those who were already willing to participate how to coordinate with others, and assured them that the government supported the killing and hence that they would not be punished.
At this point, an alert reader might object that several “hate radio” executives were convicted of genocide-related offenses, and might also point to the well-known claim that some of the killers “had a radio in one hand and a machete in the other[.]” That is true, but it is also true that immediately after the assassination of the Rwandan president, the “hate radio” broadcasts shifted from general propaganda to broadcasting specific advice and instructions to those already participating in the genocide regarding who to kill and where to find them.3 It was for only those post-assassination broadcasts that radio executives were convicted, rather than for the pre-genocide, more generalized “hate speech.”
Finally, these findings regarding the role of “hate radio” in the Rwandan genocide is consistent with what we know about the effects of propaganda in general. Contrary to popular belief, there is little evidence that propaganda is able to change minds; rather, it is generally effective only among those who already agree with it, and counter-productive among those who disagree.4 That was true even of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda, which decreased denunciations of Jews by ordinary people in areas which had not historically been anti-Semitic.5
Therefore, the scholarly consensus is clear: “Hate speech” does not engender hatred. Rather, to the extent that is has any effect on violence at all, it makes it somewhat easier for those already inclined towards violence to act, largely by placing an imprimatur of official approval on acts of violence, and thereby making people who are already hateful and prone to violence believe that they can get away with acting violently.
This implies that censoring “hate speech” by ordinary persons is pointless – it is only “hate speech” by elites that can be dangerous (and even then not by creating hatred). There is no evidence that “hate speech” by ordinary persons has any effect on violence whatsoever. Thus, the efforts of such private actors as Facebook and Twitter to scrub the internet of what they deem to be “hate speech” by ordinary persons are, at best, misguided. But such efforts can also be dangerous because they help create excuses for governments to use allegations of “hate speech” to silence ideas that they dislike. Indeed, Freedom House has noted that that has already occurred in Russia, French courts have upheld “hate speech” convictions of advocates of the BDS movement to boycott of Israel, and in Spain, Catalan separatists who burned photographs of the Spanish monarch were fined on the grounds that they had incited violence and promoted hate speech.
Finally, efforts to censor extremists can backfire by causing them to see themselves as a persecuted minority who are justified in using violent means to be heard. Therefore, as painful as American law’s protection of “hate speech” can be, the alternative is almost certainly worse. In addition, given that even the Supreme Court recognizes that, in the contemporary world, “the most important places … for the exchange of views … is cyberspace …, and social media in particular[,]” Twitter, Facebook, and other private actors should resist calls to censor hateful speech; they might believe that doing so serves the public interest, but in fact it does quite the opposite.
Gordon Danning is History Research Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He has published a law review article on the free speech rights of high school students and conducted research on political violence.
References:
1 Hollie Nyseh Brehm. 2017. Subnational Determinants of Killing in Rwanda. Criminology, 55(1): 5-31. ▻http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9125.12126/full
2 Scott Straus, 2007. What is the relationship between hate radio and violence? Rethinking Rwanda’s “Radio Machete”. Politics & Society, 35(4): 609-637. ▻http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0032329207308181
3 Richard Carver. 2000. Broadcasting and Political Transition: Rwanda and Beyond. African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition, edited by Richard Farndon and Graham Furniss, 188-197. Oxford: James Currey 190.
4 Hugo Mercier. 2017. How Gullible Are We? A Review of the Evidence from Psychology and Social Science. Review of General Psychology, 21(2): 103-122. ▻http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/gpr/21/2/103
5 Maja Adena, Ruben Enikolopov, Maria Petrova, Veronica Santarosa, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. 2015. Radio and the Rise of The Nazis in Prewar Germany. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(4): 1885–1939. ▻https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/130/4/1885/1916582?redirectedFrom=PDF
Our Addiction to Economic Growth Is Killing Us - We Need Degrowth Now
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/our-addiction-to-economic-growth-is-killing-us-we-need-degrowth-now
In this Viewsnight, anthropologist Jason Hickel asks if economic growth really makes our lives better. He is the author of The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions.
Yemenite babies who disappeared in 1950s Israel were sold to U.S. Jews, new film claims - Israel News - Haaretz.com
▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.787519
U.S. Jews believed children were orphans, that money would help new Jewish state, researcher says in ’Lost Children,’ which claims WIZO played role in sending infants to U.S.
Judy Maltz May 05, 2017 10:50 PM
In 1994, a few dozen armed Yemenite Jews barricaded themselves in a home in the central Israel city of Yehud. They would not leave, they warned, until an official investigation was launched into allegations that Yemenite children had been systematically abducted and handed over to Ashkenazi families – sometimes in exchange for money – in the early years of the state. Their leader was a radical rabbi named Uzi Meshulam, who threatened bloodshed. The standoff lasted seven weeks, and Meshulam ended up serving nearly six years in prison.
But by drawing public attention to their cause, he and his followers were able to force the government’s hand. A year after the standoff, a commission of inquiry was established to determine the fate of hundreds of Yemenite babies and toddlers who had gone missing in the 1950s, not long after they and their families arrived in the recently established state. Did they die of illness, as two previous investigations had found, or had they been abducted and handed over to childless couples in Israel and the United States in exchange for money, as Meshulam and his followers insisted?
A new documentary recently aired on Israel’s Channel 2 TV suggests Meshulam may not have been as crazy as many in Israel believed. Relying on fresh testimonies, rare footage of the commission hearings and recently declassified documents, “Lost Children” presents considerable evidence to support his claims.
“I was also one of those people who thought these were wacko claims and that Uzi Meshulam and his followers were all wackos,” says Prof. Meira Weiss, an Israeli anthropologist interviewed in the hour-long documentary.
Years later, intrigued by new evidence that had emerged to support the abduction theory, Weiss proceeded on her own quest to discover the truth. On a trip to New Jersey, where she had heard that several of the missing Yemenite children ended up, she says her suspicions were confirmed.
“What I was told is that these families had heard through the Jewish community that they could adopt orphans in Israel in exchange for money that would be used to help the new Jewish state get on its feet and purchase weapons,” she says in the film. “So they came and took these children they believed were orphans. As they saw it, they were doing a mitzvah and were very proud of that. When they heard later on that there might be parents who were still alive and that the money they gave didn’t all go to buy weapons, they were genuinely shocked.”
Weiss says her investigation led her to believe that the stories she had heard about children being handed over for adoption without their parents’ consent were not isolated cases. “It was a phenomenon,” she says.
Last December, the Israel State Archives released more than 200,000 previously classified documents pertaining to this decades-long affair that has come to symbolize the grievances of Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern or North African origin) against the establishment. They include testimonies of parents who searched in vain for their missing children and their graves for decades; of hospital nurses who witnessed children being given away without permission; and of children sent off for adoption who later tried to reconnect with their biological parents. However, the documents provided no outright proof of an organized and institutionalized abduction campaign.
The newly declassified papers also include minutes from the hearings of the commission of inquiry established in 1995. Like the two previous commissions that investigated the affair (the most recent being by Justice Moshe Shalgi in 1988), this one also found that most of the Yemenite children who disappeared had died of illness. While the fate of several dozen children is still unknown, the most recent commission of inquiry determined that none of the children had been kidnapped.
The new documentary challenges these findings. A key testimony is provided by Ami Hovav, who worked as an investigator on two of the three commissions of inquiry. In an interview with Rina Matzliach, the Channel 2 correspondent who made the film, Hovav addresses the role of machers, or middlemen, in the disappearance of several children. As part of his duties on the commissions, Hovav had been asked to investigate reports, published as early as 1967, that Yemenite children had been abducted and sold to wealthy Jews abroad for $5,000 a head.
Interviewed in the film, Hovav relays that many of the Yemenite babies and toddlers were put in child-care centers run by the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO), one of the largest Jewish women’s organizations in the world.
“There was a rule at the time that if the parents didn’t show up within three months to reclaim their children, the kids would be sent off for adoption,” he states. “So there were these machers who would come and get $5,000 for each child that was adopted.”
But it would be wrong, he says, to describe such transactions as sales: “This was a commission they took, just like real estate agents. This was their job.”
The film provides never-before-seen footage, shot by Meshulam’s followers, of the 1995 commission of inquiry hearings. At one point, Sonia Milstein, the head nurse at the Kibbutz Ein Shemer absorption center, recounts how Yemenite children were systematically separated from their parents and put in childcare centers. When asked to explain why no records of their whereabouts were ever kept, she responds: “That was the reality then. It was what it was.”
In more rare footage, a former doctor at a WIZO center in Safed tells her interrogators at the commission hearings she has no recollection of what happened to the Yemenite children housed at her facility. Commenting in the documentary, Drora Nachmani – the lawyer who interrogated the doctor and other witnesses – notes that this sudden loss of memory among WIZO staff members was not uncommon.
“Some of the WIZO witnesses didn’t want to come to the hearings, and we would have to chase after them,” she tells Matzliach. “Often, they would insist we come to them rather than they come to us, as if they were afraid of something. And sometimes they said one thing to one investigator and something else to another.”
According to Nachmani, the WIZO day-care centers “were often the last stop or the second-last stop in the whole chronology of events” surrounding the disappearance of the Yemenite children.
“They were a central junction in this whole story,” she states.
The documents recently declassified by the Israel State Archives were meant to stay under wraps for another 15 years. But in response to public pressure, the government decided to release them sooner.
Mizrahi activists had been urging the government to open the state archives for several years, arguing that the various commissions of inquiry whitewashed the affair. A driving force behind the campaign has been an organization called Amram.
Interviewed in the film, founding member Shlomi Hatuka notes that out of more than 5,800 Yemenite babies and toddlers known to have been alive during the first years of the state, 700 disappeared. “That is one out of eight children,” he tells Matzliach. “And if you take into account those parents who didn’t report their missing children, it’s probably closer to one out of seven, or one out of six.”
The irony, he notes, is that families were told their children were being moved from absorption centers to child-care centers for reasons of health and sanitation, but many became ill there, ending up in hospitals from which they never returned.
To illustrate the atmosphere of mayhem in those early days of the state, Hovav recounts a story he heard from Milstein, the head nurse, about what would happen when sick babies were taken to the hospital. “An ambulance driver would pick them up and the babies would be put in cardboard boxes that had been used to transport fruit, bananas or apples,” he relays. “And there would be five or six of these boxes in the back.”
Each carton, according to his account, had a little note attached to it bearing the child’s name, address and destination. “When it would get very hot,” he recounts, “the ambulance driver would open the window and a huge blast of wind would come in. What would happen then is that all those little notes would start flying in the air. They would stop the ambulance on the side of the road, but they had no idea after that which note belonged where.”
Asked to comment on the allegations raised against WIZO in the film, a spokeswoman issued the following statement: “The process by which children were admitted or left our facilities was handled exclusively by the certified state authorities, while WIZO’s role was restricted to caring for their health and welfare. The allegation that the organization played a central role in transferring the children to adoptive families is erroneous and is merely someone’s personal interpretation of events. The same is true about allegations raised by some of the interviewees in Rina Matzliach’s film.”
WIZO’s spokeswoman said her organization knew of no pressure put to bear on former staffers to refrain from cooperating with the commission of inquiry. “The reverse is true. WIZO handed over all the information it had, and the commission of inquiry not only found nothing wrong with the way it behaved, but recently the government even decided to publish this information on the internet.
“As a social organization,” she added, “WIZO supports all efforts to shed light on this affair, which has caused such great pain to many in Israeli society.”
Suite d’une affaire ici avec d’autres liens :
Israël instamment prié de présenter ses excuses pour les bébés disparus
Jonathan Cook, Al Jazeera, le 1 janvier 2017
►https://seenthis.net/messages/559618
#enfants_placés #enfants_volés #enfants
#bébés #israel #yéménites
What Are Borders? (1/2) | Pick-Me-Up Tonic
▻https://pickmeuptonic.wordpress.com/2013/10/09/what-makes-frontiers-very-special-spaces
https://pickmeuptonic.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/ethnicconflictmap.png?w=282&h=365 
https://pickmeuptonic.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/conflictsbystatet.png?w=282&h=365 Limits between territories are not the exclusivity of human beings, as most animals do have territorial behaviours. However, political frontiers are what makes us different. Political borders reflect the evolution of populations, identities, cultures and political forces over time. They are artificial lines socially and politically built that move along eras, ideologies and dominant powers. They are not just about keeping competitors away or making sure to have enough hunting and fishing resources to survive (which is what an animal territory is about). Political borders are also symbolic constructions people rely on to build their identity as a group (today we’d say, as a nation).
–---
African Conflict and the Murdock Map of Ethnic Boundaries | Freewheel Burning
►https://peterslarson.com/2011/01/19/african-conflict-and-ethnic-distribution
would like to turn something like this into a publishable paper. If there is anyone who would wish to collaborate, please feel free to write me.
In 1959, the renowned American anthropologist, George Murdock, published “Africa: Its peoples and their culture history.” Despite having little experience in Africa, Murdock used available resources to create a comprehensive picture of the distribution of ethnic groups throughout Africa.
#cartographie #visualisation #représentation #frontières #murs
’Exceptional’ student faces deportation three months before graduation
Shiromini Satkunarajah, who has lived in the UK since the age of 12, was arrested on Tuesday and taken to Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre
▻http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/exception-student-deportation-three-months-before-graduation-sri-lank
#détention_administrative #rétention #étudiants #migrations #université #renvois #expulsions #UK #Angleterre
#it_has_begun #régression
EXCLUSIVE: Married Durham academics given 14 days to leave UK
Two Durham University academics face being deported within the next fortnight, Palatinate can reveal.
Dr Ernesto Schwartz-Marín and Dr Arely Cruz-Santiago, a married couple, failed in their appeals for a visa renewal because they had spent too long out of the country conducting humanitarian fieldwork.
The anthropologist and human geographer, whose 10-year-old daughter is also being forced to leave, are both Mexicans who have lived in the UK for years.
The pair spent 270 days between June 2014 and July 2015 in Mexico, working with victims of gang related violence and building a DNA database to help locate the missing.
Under Tier 2 visa guidelines, non-EU migrants in the UK cannot spend more than 180 days outside the country, unless they are “attending to a national or international humanitarian or environmental crisis”.
▻https://www.palatinate.org.uk/exclusive-married-durham-academics-given-14-days-leave-uk
The Rituals That Ward Off Bad Luck Aren’t Arbitrary - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/the-rituals-that-ward-off-bad-luck-arent-arbitrary
Launch Ritual: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a tradition of eating peanuts during big, risky spacecraft events, such as Mars rover landings. Photograph by Kevin Baird / FlickrFor the last two years of his baseball career, George Gmelch didn’t eat pancakes. Playing in the Detroit Tigers minor league system in the 1960s, two disappointing post-pancake games were enough to make him swear off hot cakes altogether. That wasn’t the only superstition he adopted. “Somehow, I decided that holding the ball during the national anthem gave me bad luck,” recalls Gmelch, who was a first baseman. “From that point on, for the rest of that season and maybe beyond that, when the ball came to me I would quickly toss it so that I wouldn’t have it in my glove or my hand.” Gmelch, now an anthropologist at (...)
Human Infanticide Signals a Lack of Social Support - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/human-infanticide-signals-a-lack-of-social-support
There’s something morbidly fascinating about animals that seem to behave pathologically: The female praying mantis engaging in sexual cannibalism, the fish eating its own fry. It was this sort of twisted behavior that first drew anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Sarah Hrdy (pronounced Hur-dee) to study langurs in Mount Abu, in India. The males among these large, gray-haired monkeys were killing their own colony’s infants; at the time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, researchers thought the pressures of overcrowding were the cause. What Hrdy found, however, was that these langurs’ infanticidal tendencies were actually adaptive behavior—behavior that, she argues, one can also see in humans. In the langur colonies she observed, infanticides were hardly indiscriminate, which is (...)
Congolese Refugees in Rwanda Battle Hunger
Congolese refugees in Rwanda’s #Gihembe camp have complained for years that U.N. food rations are making them sick. Emily Lynch, an anthropologist at Marquette University, describes how the refugees cope with hunger and sickness in the first of a two-part story.
How Rwanda can do a better job of supporting refugees
One year ago 11 Congolese refugees were killed as they demonstrated against reductions in food aid in Rwanda’s Kiziba refugee camp. As fresh calls mount to prosecute the police officers who used force against the refugees grow, we spoke to #Evan_Easton-Calabria about Rwanda’s refugee operations and the challenges host countries face.
