Brian McKenna, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan – Dearborn, has a great piece in the August 2010 newsletter of the Society for Applied Anthropology. Starting on p. 11 (the newsletter is a pdf), McKenna has a piece entitled “Doing Anthropology as an Environmental Journalist.”

He uses his 2002 article in City Pulse, Can Glory Days Return to Lake Lansing?, to discuss how he crafted a very effective piece of reporting that was also a very effective piece of public anthropology.

You just have to love how he uses a great hook at the beginning, and then seamlessly transitions to the broader “this is what this piece is about” while still maintaining relevance. Some great writing:

Lake Lansing just wants to be left alone. In the Prohibition Era, bootleggers raised hell in a house on stilts that sat in the belly of the lake – site of a men’s social club – while a lookout warned of an impending sheriff’s raid. By the time the police boat reached the moated fortress, all alcohol had been hurriedly dispatched into the lake through a trap door.

Over the years, the lake has imbibed more than its share of bad whiskey. Septage, arsenic, fertilizer, dog poop, gull dung, mercury and just about everything that people throw on the ground for miles around the 450-acre waterworld winds up in the lake. “If you spit on the sidewalk,” says Pat Lindemann, the Ingham County drain commissioner, “it goes into the lake.”

But what I really want to highlight in McKenna’s SFAA piece is how he demostrates how to connect core anthropological analysis with journalistic writing. He calls it using “The Anthropological Dozen.”

In every journalistic article I write I try to incorporate what I call “The Anthropological Dozen.” These questions help insure a muckracking result.

Very briefly, here they are: 1) holism (how do disparate phenomenon connect?); 2) fieldwork (from lab tests to participant observations); 3) What’s taken for granted (Did the Ojibwa help create this lake?); 4) culture (how is capital behind what’s behind); 5) cross-cultural justaposition (how did Indians and colonialists use the lake?); 6) Getting the native’s point(s) of view (Who are the natives? What are the ways in which the “native points of view” are ignored, omitted, or supressed?); 7) Contradictions and ideologies (Do people say one thing and do another? Are there dialectical tensions in the terrain of inquiry?); 8.) Origins and history (human origins, the origin of the state, the origin of a nation, the origin of a given institution, the origin of a name, the origin of a place. How have things transformed since the origin?); 9) epistemological critique (Begin with a “reification of names” in your analysis. Do names – like “Lake Lansing” in this instance – accurately capture the idea/object represented?); 10) conformity/resistance (what are the modes of resistance that the less powerful play?); 11) privilege the most powerless; and 12) analyze social change.

McKenna goes on in his essay to provide examples of these various techniques in action, and also to describe how he got the necessary information as journalist/anthropologist through interviews, library research, and the like. And all on a four day deadline!

Here is just one example, focusing on the writing part:

The colonialists originally called it Pine Lake for the stand of beautiful white pine trees on the east side of the lake – the largest stand in Ingham County. But the white pines were soon destroyed for their wood resources in the second half of the 19th century. According to Raphael, the biggest logging operation was conducted by a John Saltmarsh, whose name ironically revealed his intent. He “assaulted the ‘marsh’” in the winter one year, sending the logs over the lake ice on sled runners. They were stockpiled for export behind the new train depot. Saltmarsh also owned a picket mill, to make the fences that would set the enclosures around the new form of land division around Lansing: private property.

Notice how I translated academic parlance into civic voice. This is journalism as a public anthropology, a syncretism (McKenna 2010b). Think of it as converting ethnography into a good story. There are villains, dramatic tensions, metaphors and ample use of quotation to enliven the narrative.

Link to the City Pulse article, Can glory days return to Lake Lansing?

Link to the Society for Applied Anthropology August Newsletter

This collaborative film was shot in over 40 countries in under 9 weeks. Done on a shoestring budget, its main goal is to show the enormous diversity of places, faces and endeavors of humanitarian aid workers in 2010.

World Humanitarian Day was actually yesterday, so I just missed it. But here’s the info!!

Shannon Horst, the CEO of The Savory Institute, has a good editorial, Africa Needs a Brown (Not Green) Food Revolution, over at the Christian Science Monitor. Rather than more artificial fertilizer and genetically enhanced seeds, of exporting our industrial model to them, she argues for a more local model that improves soil and yields, and works with local environments and knowledge.

She’s definitely on the William Easterly side of things, and against a Jeffrey Sachs type approach – White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good over The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time.

Here’s the main part of Horst’s Green Revolution critique:

First, scientists are focusing on how to grow bigger, more, and disease- and pest-resistant plants. Their approach views the soil surrounding plants as a “problem” to overcome, rather than the very habitat in which they can thrive. The entire focus is on how to manipulate the plants rather than how to produce both healthy plants and healthy soil… Some 70 percent of Africa’s landscape is grassland – arid, semiarid, temperate, and some tropical. Kenya, for example, is 80 percent grassland. The practices and inputs required to use revolutionary seeds in these lands are destructive… Turning those lands into crop fields will have the same effect it produced on the Great Plains of the United States – the collapse of the grasslands and the soil, river systems, and the groundwater supplies that lie beneath them.

Horst also points out that human resources, embedded in cultures and specific histories, matter:

Most of Africa’s rural populations are pastoralists or agropastoralists who do not farm. Turning them into “productive farmers,” dependent on foreign seeds and other inputs, is not only destructive to their land, it is destructive to their culture. Millions have already been spent by US and European aid organizations throughout Africa on unsuccessful farming programs. Pastoralists in the Horn of Africa consistently say that these programs have also been culturally destructive.

In contrast, Horst and The Savory Institute push for a brown revolution, one that starts with increasing soil quality, and works with environmental and human resources on hand.

What Africa needs is a revolution that mobilizes people to focus on local inputs and practices that produce food that grows in healthy soil (maybe a “brown revolution”) and that enhances the social and economic fabric of the community and nation. Guess what? That brown revolution is possible and sustainable right now…

They have also achieved successful results over the past five years without spending one dime on expensive research into seeds, genetically modified organisms, root manipulation, climate change adaptation, herbicides, fertilizers, or pesticides, and without special planting or harvesting equipment.

Instead, they focus funds on educating local people in practices that blend some older pastoral knowledge and techniques of animal herding with new understanding of how grazing animals, soils, plants, and organisms coevolved and function in a healthy state. Savory’s approach also means building soils, using the seeds and simple tools already available to them, and enhancing the community’s social fabric.

A brown revolution resonates well with what I know of Lesotho, where development has had negative consequences (see James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine) and where a lack of local employment and farming opportunities, coupled with poor soil and arid conditions, means most Basotho men go to South Africa to work in mines. For more (including photos), see our post on food coping in Lesotho.

So, overall, a very good editorial. There will be roles for fertilizer to improve yields and for plant engineering for greater drought and insect resistance, but imposing such outside solutions simply on the idea that this is what we believe will work, is simply not good enough.

Link to lots of articles that detail the William Easterly vs. Jeffrey Sachs debates.

Link to The Savory Institute – “Leading the Brown Revolution”

Link to the editorial “Africa needs a brown (not green) food revolution”.