In the summer of 1999, with his friends and co-workers, Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist, is walking to the border between Mexico and Guatemala. It is a heavily militarized frontier, a condition that we all know in our region. The group is on the way to meet a respondent, Julia. She has lost her husband, a health worker, described as having been “disappeared” by the Guatemalan security forces. She has also a 19-year old brother, tagged as a rebel soldier, who had been killed in combat. The brother’s body was displayed by the Guatemalan soldiers as trophy.
The purpose of the group is not to visit the phenomenon of the “desaparecidos’ (the vanished ones) but to look into a health project. Being in the area, and with some nongovernment developmental units there, the group of Dr. Farmer is invited to attend a workshop. The topic is gender relations. The pupils are “natives” and the two instructors are young women. The anthropologist describes them as speaking the “language of U.S. universities, or its echoes in foundations and international bureaucracies. To Farmer, the facilitators “sounded a lot like us, too.”
The gender-sensitivity workshop is asking those present to draw a scene from childhood. The participants – all adult pupils – are using children’s desks and crayons. Observing, the anthropologist wonders how the session is being received. The participants are seen as “impassive,” not showing any emotion at all. There is another thing that pushes the topic of gender relations out of the spot: in that village are “dramatic biographical events” that have to do with violence and even death.
The workshop continues, framed by a silence that is at best stilted. The awkwardness, Farmer notes, is all coming from the exercise (the session) that is demeaning. The workshop is addressing individuals who have survived genocide and displacement and now they are in a touchy-feely exercise conducted by facilitators coming from their comfort zone of academe and knowledge as well as academic knowledge. This people who have gone through hurts bigger than a migraine are now being treated like children.
The narrative I related is from the book Pathologies of Power. Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor. The author is Paul Farmer, a Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School. The author is also a practitioner of this relatively new field called Public Anthropology, a field that sees individuals trained in very specific disciplines that have the tendency to remain in the realm of the esoteric and the elite exploring the “applied” in those intellectual desires. The public anthropologist realizes that what he is writing about can only be consummated – as in reaching fruition – perfectly with the communities from which those data came from.
Think of all those researchers – linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, folklorists, musicologists – who have conducted their fieldworks in the Bikol region and have gone on to make monographs, ethnographies, and books back in the confines of their academic world. Back in the field, the people whose cultures have been documented, problematized, and analyzed wonder what the long fieldworks were all about. If they get hold of the book, they look at the interpretations within the covers and experience the reverse of the shock of recognition: they do not recognize their community. .
The book Pathologies of Power, however, goes beyond the classic confines of the academic exercise versus the total social facts. Farmer talks about research that is able to help the community in the practical sense of it. Specifically, he underscores our collective failure to end the suffering and the poverty. Significant in the book is the notion that attending to the medical problems of the “poor” is not merely a medical concern but also a matter of human rights.
Farmer talks about structural violence and his concern about the forms in which the most basic right of human groups, which is to survive, is not upheld in an age that talks about its uplift. For him human rights “are not accidents… but symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm.”
Pathologies of Power is published by the University of California Press in Berkeley.