boston – somebody else's paradise

christians

two morning sessions of conference before nadia and jeanette and friends have their session. i actually start going to one of the sessions, on Lebanon. but i don’t make it through the first paper, time to escape again. there’s not much time though, and so it happens that i jump on one of these Old Town Trolleys that stop in front of the hotel and do a tour of the city. many places that i visisted yesterday, but also the harbor and Charlestown (US Constitution, Bunker Hill,..). heroic “cradle of liberty” stories alternated with trivia of various kinds.

i share the trolley with what on first sight seems a model hollywood family. very blond. and very loud – the woman has one of these high pitched voices that is difficult on the human ear. they display a great interest in what the driver/guide tells us, encourage the children to take it in and comment what a shame it is that this history is not taught in school in this country – the reason why their kids attend a Christian school, so that they would know about the history and values that found this country. at almost every stop the trolley makes they check with the driver if there is a McDonalds close by, despite him assuring them he would let them know.

it began with the driver making an allusion to me in relation to a piece of his narrative taking place in Europe. we had been talking before the family got on the trolley and he had wanted to know where i was from. the woman’s attention got fixed on me – where was i from, what was i doing in Boston. a conference, i reply, in middle eastern studies. in a split second i see her adopting a particular determined and complacent posture.
– “well sarah you must understand that when we go there, it is to spread the democracy and freedom that we have to places that don’t have it.”
i couldn’t think of an appropriate respons, baffled as i was, and it just somehow came out:
– “well it isn’t really working, is it… it seems that this country is good in making a big mess of many people’s lives.”
– “but you have to understand it is with the best of intentions. sometimes it’s difficult over there, you can’t always predict how things go. but you must keep confidence that good intentions will win in the end. that’s what built up this country.”

with every sentence we trap ourselves in continuing the conversation. soon we’re on the topic of the greatness and superiority of the U.S., “the best nation on earth” as she puts it. i challenge her. for some reason we get into education – i remember feeling i wanted to move on to health care – and i’m pulling together the evidence of how classist (no, don’t worry, i’ve learned, i didn’t actually use the word) it is. from all the things i list, she picks out the tuition fees.
– “but do you know why we have such high tuition fees? because we have all these international students coming here.”
with a nice and open and smiling face. i have a moment of just shaking my head which apparently she takes as a sign to continue:
– “and why do we have all the foreigners coming here? because our education is the best. everybody in the whole world knows it, and everybody wants it. they all want to get education in America.”

this conversation deterioriates at an amazing speed. some minutes later (in which we came back from standards of education, like levels of illiteracy, to the war in Iraq) i tell her i don’t want to have this conversation. yet the determination doesn’t suffice to break it off immediately. “okay,” she responds, “but take your time to discover our country and ask any American and he would tell you the same.” “how funny that you should mention that,” i reply, “as i just come from this conference with more than 2000 Americans and i can assure you their views are very different from yours. and given that they are actually informed about the Middle East, those views make much more sense than yours.”

sigh, another senseless conversation (10 more of these and i might start sounding like juan cole…). i’m actually saved by McDonalds, priorities are priorities, satisfied by some nuggets of independence history it is time for big burgers. from the corner of my eye i see the woman scribbling busily. before she gets off the trolley, she gives me a card – “please take this. i’ll pray for you.”

curiosity wins, as usual. (fieldwork material, as nadia says) the card reads:

We are believers in the faith that was the foundation of this most accomplished (for our age) nation on the planet. Our bravery, generosity and true love for all peoples has benefitted every nation on earth. God bless you.

they are from Riverside, California.

~~~when i get back to the Marriott it is time to pack and check out. in the elevator a conference participant is talking in arabic on her cell phone, but she loses reception. she seems distressed. she turns to us and asks who was assassinated? we haven’t heard anything. she insists, yes, somebody was killed, in Beirut. while entering the room i tell nadia to put on CNN, cause somebody was killed… nadia is packing in front of television – Pierre Gemayel, she responds. trouble. ~~~the session of nadia and friends is a fine one, that doesn’t get the context it deserves: scheduled in the very last slot of the conference means little audience, and the questions go off in strange directions (but here i should shut up cause i had a question, which moreover the friends liked, when i put it to them afterwards, but i didn’t ask it during the session…) a last drink in the lobby, and time to get ourselves back to New York.

oaxaca

it’s getting too much and i’m getting too cold and i feel like escaping this place, when i run into a demo that saves the day. around the Common, in peak hour traffic: a not so large group of people is effectively blocking the traffic. two giant puppets – a skeleton bride and groom. these are people who responded to the international day of action called for by the EZLN, in solidarity with the people of Oaxaca.

i’m surprised at how long it takes before police comes. they finally come with a brigade on motorbikes, and try to herd the crowd as if they were the sheppards. the body of the crowd makes sure it doesn’t work. then an officer comes up with another strategy.

standing with his arms crossed next to his parked motorcycle in the middle of the street, in front of the crowd, he speaks once the crowd is close enough to hear:

“Listen. You know that this march is totally illegal. You have no permit to be here. But then of course, you are anarchists and anarchists are all about ignoring laws. But i’ll make you a deal. You can go on with the march, but on one lane, so that the cars can pass. And we’ll drive next to you, for your safety.”

the guy is definately enjoying it – his savoir-faire of recognizing the “anarchists” in front of him and knowing what they are all about. feeling he is the master of the negotiation. as his confidence grows he ventures into a joke:

“Let’s do it like this: you just follow me, I’ll be your leader.” big grin on his face.

the crowd kind of says that it needs a moment to decide (“Ah yes,” the officer replies, “You need to do collective decision-making now.” god, somebody went to the “how to deal with anarchists” training and needs to show it…). but that doesn’t really happen because basically the crowd kind of ignores him without really making a point of refusing his deal. soon after that it becomes a bit of a cat and mouse game with the police, the body of the crowd all of a sudden makes a short-cut through the Common, the police speed up on their motorbikes around the Common. i’ve almost been an hour with these people (and the sympathetic french indymedia woman) when i’m starting to feel really cold, albeit revitalized. okay, i realize, in other circumstances i would not have considered this a particularly uplifting or effective action, but immersed in academic conference/Marriot/shopping mall/the academic elitism of the place, definately changes one’s perspective. i also found out that there was a big rally organized by Hotel Workers Rising in the city today. returning to the Marriott in higher spirits.

for a report on the action see
http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/190138/

new england

the second escapade, on my own. wandering through downtown Boston, i stumble upon the Old South Meeting House and it occurs to me that perhaps i should take yet another aspect of Boston’s reputation seriously and explore the “cradle of independence”. built in the early 1700s as a Puritan meeting house, the Old South Meeting House hosts the exhibition “Voices of Protest” which tells the story of the gatherings at the house that lead the settlers or colonists to challenge British rule: the house became an organizing point for the Boston Tea Party (1773), which was one of the events that sparked off the American Revolution. apart from brushing up my knowledge of American history, which definately needed some brushing up, the exhibit strikes me in the way it brands the spirit of liberty and independence. at some point i can’t help making an analogy – so wait, if those Belgians who went to colonize the Congo after some time decide to separate from the motherland and continue the colonization on their own – hell, all those taxes that we pay for the sake of an elite in Brussels – what kind of liberty and independence would that be? or better, whose story of independence would that be? the whole point of the story of Congo’s independence is about kicking Belgian rule out. ay this foundational myth of American independence…

explorations continue in Beacon Hill, with its 19th century row houses, brick sidewalks, cobblestone streets (or is that already my imagination…), gas street lamps,… very european in a sense, yet there’s a weird time wrap or gap. i realize it reminds me so much more of early medieval parts of cities back home (Brugge!), then of the 19th century houses and streets (like in Saint-Gilles…). something to do with a surreal quality of these hyperconserved places. and then there is obviously a lot of money in this neighborhood…

the Boston Common. the oldest city park in this country, since early 1600s. reminds me i want to read the book that Berna gave me about what happened to the commons in New England.

in all of my wanderings i stumble upon the cafe that is used for the outdoors shooting of Cheers, which i thought i should tell my dad, a big fan.

(a Cambridge view from Boston)

academic tourism

(a Boston view from Cambrigde)

so after a brief early morning session of conference, we escape. this first escapade takes place under the standard of what this place is famous for – education. perhaps appropriately we start from the motherchurch of the Church of Christ, Scientist, established by Mary Baker Eddy sometime in the second half of the 1800s, where the Christian Science Monitor is house, just besides our hotel. the way the impressive space is set up, it really seems that people walk on water…

we walk Massachusetts Avenue over the river, to Cambridge, and find ourselves in M.I.T. territory. before Massachusetts Avenue brings us all to Harvard, there’s glimpse of a terroritoy of warehouses that seem to lead to a different world than the overwhelmingly elist academic spaces. Harvard gets us a bit recalcitrant, this is where nadia does her Allahu Akbar video shot (and see, we keep on thinking Samuel Huntington… of course he’s able to come up with his wonderwarland fairy tale theories in this environment… where would he be now… if we dropped in his office and said, hey samuel, now listen to us…). David had insisted i should go to the Widener Library, but when we’re standing in front of it rickard tells us a story he just heard about a student who was asked to show his student card at the library entrance, and before he knew it he was shot down. (later we realize it was the story of the student who got tasered in the UCLA library that got modified along the way… watch the video here if you want to see images of the Patriot Act in action. disturbing in many ways, including the tone of the officer’s voice when he says “stop fighting us”) doesn’t encourage us to go in. (ay, thinking bad of Harvard, after we already got a bit worked up about the “M.I.T Police” and “Harvard Police” cars, when the violation took place at a University of California campus…).

we end up warming ourselves up in a Starbucks near Harvard Square.
hm, so what do we think about this place…

MESA

waking up in the hotel which is now our world for the next couple of days. this is where the Middle Eastern Studies Association conference takes place, from 8.30 am till 7.00 pm followed by evenings sessions, this is where we sleep, this is where we eat, if not in the hotel itself, then in the food corner of the shopping mall that flows in and out of the hotel, and lunch break is indeed too short to go very far. feels like a total institution. disciplined bodies doing the weird academic 20 minutes of reading a paper in a langauge which we never use to speak to each other (and the formalism and rhetoric of US academy), the shopping and consuming in the mall and the cosmopolitan thing of living in a hotel (at least in the Marriott that’s how it feels like). too much, over the threshold of tolerance.

happy to be at some of the panels. Lebanon: The Sixth War with As’ad Abu Khalil, Laleh Khalili, Kirsten Scheid. first nadia and i are delighted with how their visions on the war of this summer are more or less shared in this MESA environment: there is debate, but it takes place on much common ground. (after that first emotion it strikes us as an indication of how much of a bubble in US society this is.)

Gender-Based Violence: Prevention, Solidartiy and Transformation. focused on Turkey and seeing Turkish friends again. Cynthia Enloe, the discussant, opening with “i hope that anthropologists are studying the strange rituals of academic conferences”, is wonderful in bringing this meeting in awkward conditions back to what matters. in our brief conversation afterwards she insists on what Lieve had already told on the flemish Women’s Day: Cynthia Cockburn’s new book on Women in Black, coming out in spring next year, is a gem.

(by the way, from the programme we understand that the Middle East in this US acacemic context becomes: Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, Iran and Iraq.)

then there are the academic freedom sessions, with joan scott. it is a pleasure to hear her talk, perform, but especially in the second session – on the campaign to boycott of Israeli universities – she is not convincing. Omar Barghouti is. the more we hear her speak, the more a universalist (it is the principle of academic freedom that will redeem us…) and liberal “free speech” (answering the speech that we don’t like with more speech…) american bias becomes striking. in contrast, the strength of Omar Barghouti’s speech lies in how it is grounded and located, how it takes the audience back to Ramallah time and time again. (more speech?… but who has the resources to produce speech, to write and get published, to travel to conferences?…) and it strikes me that if only joan scott would have managed to speak more locally, more embodied (her investment in academic freedom comes from a history particular to the US, a national history that was an intimate one as her father was prevented from teaching in the era of McCarthyism), the conversation would have been more productive. now her position basically boiled down to freedom of speech in the face of Barghouti and others who sought to think about, and subsequently act upon, the position and accountability of the university as an institution in a situation of war. a brilliant intervention from the audience, from a young British guy, on how the academic freedom discourse presented by Scott runs offers no resistance against neoliberalism and the way it affects universities and the production of knowledge, and that this kind of liberal framework fails to take modes of production into account.

the rest of the first conference day just kind of slips by for me, as a repulsion against these conditions build up. if this is the academy (but i know it cannot be equated to this, only the “total institution” feeling dominates here), i want nothing to do with it. of course we go to the inaugural lecture by Juan Cole that evening. he is the new president of the MESA, and is announced as: if there is only one source you could consult about the war in Iraq in this country, it would have to be his blog. i’ve seen him once in action in my very first weeks in Santa Cruz, and was – to say the least – no impressed at all. he turns out to be more of the same thing. the content of his speech is filter thin, with nadia and jeannette we agree already half way through the talk that he has literally said nothing we don’t know yet. at the same time, his tone is all smugness and arrogance (met by much laughter in his audience) – all those other stupid americans out there who don’t have a clue about what is going on in this war, in the middle east, etc. which is true, but should be a source of modesty and dedication to transformation, not smug retreat in a bubble of cynicism. it’s all infuriating till nadia makes the remark that in fact he’s doing a stand-up comedy act. it is true, we put our notebooks and pens down and just keep on laughing, also in moments when the rest of the audience remains quiet. (funny how a sense of humour changes when the speech we hear is not qualified anymore as a lecture but as a comedy act.) an entertaining evening in the end, that shows when the worst of academy (not Juan Cole in himself, of course, the whole Annual Conference-Boston-Marriot-Copley Place-Mall-thing) is taken as stand-up comedy, laughter makes repulsion bearable.