At Edge, Lea Boroditzky makes the compelling case that the language we use effectively determines how we perceive the world around us. It’s a fascinating article with many  illuminating examples:

Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. [...] Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities.

Even what might be deemed frivolous aspects of language can have far-reaching subconscious effects on how we see the world. Take grammatical gender. [...] In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures).

Shocking revelations emerged yesterday from an interview with the head of the Israeli forensic institute. In the interview, he admits systematic organ harvest by Israel from dead palestinian bodies (more information here).

The statements were made during an interview with Nancy Sheper-Hughes – a fantastic anthropologist whose work has inspired many (me included) for the field and the ethics of anthropology. She deserves a mention in this debate for her investigations in the global network of organ trafficking.

In years of research, Sheper-Hughes shed light on the global relations of organ donors, smugglers, doctors and recipients. A focus of her work is on global power relations that enable this illegal industry. She writes about the marginalized in the global economy from places like South Asia, Latin America or Eastern Europe, who are willing to sell parts of their body to support their families or simply to be able to afford status symbols and satisfy consumption needs. Many others have their organs removed without consent – the revelations about organ theft in Palestine is a remarkable case there. Sheper-Hughes says:

“I was confused, because there were so many forms of real violence; [...] but what they [people in the community in Brazil] wanted to talk about was their incredible fear that their bodies were at risk, or those of their children, of being kidnapped by an organ mafia.”

Sheper-Hughes traced the path of trafficked organs through places like India, China, South Africa or – prominently – Israel:

“I found out from the transplant surgeons that these weren’t just allegations but that they were true, and that organ trafficking amongst living people was spreading. [...] I began by following the rumours, before I started following the bodies. My primary aim is to disabuse the world of the notion that this is just a rumour.”

At the end of the global “supply chain” or organs are mostly recipients from industrialized parts of the world, usually Europe or the US.

“I worry about the politics, the bio-politics in a global sense, of the people who are resisting the getting of an organ through a waiting list or through friends or family, and would rather get a poor and anonymous person. It’s easier. You don’t have to deal with them after the fact.”

Sheper-Hughes calls her method ‘militant anthropology’, which means that it is prepared to take on a political or moral engagement with its subjects rather than merely engage in academic analysis. In the course of her work, she founded a small NGO called Organs Watch who acts as a pressure group to spread the word, build alliances, and push for legislate response to the injustice.

“Much as I feel for the recipients, for their pain and their suffering, they are represented and visible. They have surplus empathy, they’re in the newspapers and everybody’s heart goes out to them. Nobody’s heart goes out to the sellers, because they’re the riff-raff of society, and not people you naturally want to embrace, but they’re human beings – they need to be represented. Their body is precious to them. We talk about the gift of life. I talk about the gift of the body – instead of ‘I think therefore I am’, you can say ‘I’m embodied therefore I am’. To have to plunge in to yourself and sell that through which you have a personhood, and to think of your only resource as being your organs is so tragic.”

Quotations taken from an interview with Three Monkeys Online.

The latest Theory Talk features an interesting interview with James Ferguson, Stanford political anthropologist and outspoken critic of the “development” doctrine. In the talk, he offers insights to his work and vita, but he also talks more generally about social science approaches to global studies:

One of the things that bothers me about a lot of what I read the in social sciences that’s, as you say, ‘globally oriented’, is that it seems to start with a bunch of certainties, a bunch of assumptions – a kind of Western liberal common sense – that we know how countries ought to be organized. They ought to be democracies; they ought to respect human rights; they ought to guarantee the rule of law; they ought to be at peace with their neighbors. And then you look at, say, a country in Africa and all you’re able to see is a series of lacks – of things that should be there but aren’t. And you end up constructing huge parts of the world as just sort of empty spaces where things ought to be there but aren’t. And it leads to a kind of impoverished understanding, I think, because you don’t really understand what is going on here. How do people conduct their affairs? How is legitimate authority exercised? How are rules made and enforced? You know, all the kinds of questions that ought to be the starting place tend to disappear or recede into the background. So, I think the real challenge is to approach this whole question with a sense of openness, a willingness to be surprised and learn something new and not to be so deductive.

This is pretty much the criticism of “development” and the subsequent category of “development countries”, which was discussed here before. From this angle the analysis of social relations — using the analytical unit of the state — focuses on an abstract ideal that reality is supposed to be molded into. The strategy can be likened to a literature critic who trashes a novel because its is different from what the critic had expected. Such linear concepts often blur one’s vision on what’s crucial.

The term “Third World” is the issue of a post in an interesting new blog I recently discovered. Author Mar writes:

Hate the state in which your office bathrooms are kept? Liken it to a Third World country. Annoyed that your hotel only offers three varieties of cream cheese at breakfast? Call it a Third World diet. It’s an exaggeration, see? So it’s funny! Lawl and stuff!

Implicit in these comparisons is the realization that the speakers not only have no idea about the reality of life in the so-called Third World, but further, don’t give a crap. They’re able to so flippantly refer to the poverty and lack of opportunity in some of these nations because they’re comfortable – not with the actual state of things, of which they have only a vague knowledge, or none – but with the fabled state of things.

While I agree with much Mar says, I differ with her in that I think the generalisation ‘Third World’ is often used with apparent positive intentions, by politicians, aid advocates or in every other Sunday’s sermon. The inherent negative, patronizing and racially charged character of the word, however, is all the same.

Its division of the globe into three distinct “worlds” makes it particularly ugly. But replacing “Third World” with “Global South” or “underdeveloped countries” doesn’t make things much better.

One might wonder which term to use instead, and it seems like there is no solution because the problem is not the term itself but how it is charged. If a new, “politically correct”, term might arise of the discussion over the word “Third World”, it will soon be charged with the same demeaning and orientalist stereotypes as the former.

Is a generalisation like “Third World country” really necessary? There is no homogenous group of countries that can be classified with such a term. Countries with, say, a comparable GDP level, differ fundamentally based on their region, their political system, their cultural history, even their economic structure.

Writing a comparative macroeconomic study, it makes sense to group countries in relation to the indicator used: HDI, GDP, GNH, any other index (which all reveal quite different results, by the way). “An analysis of countries with HDI indicators between 0.35 and 0.40 reveals…” – this sounds like a promising start of a sentence. Using the term “developing countries” instead would be a pretty arbitrary step away from the former set.

From the perspective of dependency theory, it appears that “underdeveloped” vs. “developed” is a necessary dialectic to describe world systems. Yet it seems to me that it would make much more sense to focus on the system parameters that create dependency (terms of trade, political and military power) than to use detached and de-politicised language such as “Third World” or “Global South”.

To me, such a distinction is utterly useless for anything beyond grossest economic theory . There is no essential cultural, political or historical insight that can be derived from such a terminology. What’s the similarity between North Korea, Botswana and Colombia, please?

In the end, the classification of “Third World countries” or “developing countries” does not evoke anything more useful than obscure colonialist fantasies. So let’s drop it altogether.

You might say that that in-group bias isn’t necessarily a bad thing – after all, it’s what keeps us together with the ones that are closest to us. Except, it makes us think that all our problems are despite out efforts, while all their problems are because of their inability, which is a real problem once we try to talk to a person outside our in-group.

That’s why it is good to be reminded sometimes of how random group identities are anyway.

Cartoon by xkcd.
Thanks to lisa.

Update: You can find a good social psychological overview of “the rules that govern groups” here.

I came across the wonderful website www.theory.org.uk today that I think everyone interested in social theory and media studies should check out. It has resources on general social theory, gender, media effects. It has creative stuff on Web 2.0, tipps for media students, an art lab and lots of other stuff. My favourite: social theory trading cards.