A World of Insecurity

Anthropological Perspectives on Human Security

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ellen Bal, Oscar Salemink

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2010
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783713721
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Human security is a key element in the measure of well-being, and a hot topic in anthropology and development studies. A World of Insecurity outlines a new approach to the subject. The contributors expose a contradiction at the heart of conventional accounts of what constitutes human security, namely that without taking non-material considerations such as religion, ethnicity and gender into account, discussions of human security, academically and in practical terms, are incomplete, inconclusive and deeply flawed. A variety of compelling case studies indicate that, in fact, material security alone cannot adequately explain or fully account for human activity in a range of different settings, and exposed to a variety of different threats. This forceful book will expand and deepen the entire concept of human security, in the process endowing it with political relevance. It is an essential read for students of development studies and anthropology.

1

Human Security and Social Anthropology

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Theoretical concepts go in and out of fashion so discreetly as to be almost unnoticed in the social sciences. For a hundred years, Herbert Spencer’s conceptual pair, structure and function, was de rigueur, even if the definition shifted somewhat, although not as much as the term ‘race’. Spencer’s pair of concepts can now finally be proclaimed dead as a dodo, half a century after the fruition of Talcott Parsons’ ambitious structural-functionalist theory of society – at the time familiar to every sociologist and many other social scientists, today ignored by everyone except the historians of the discipline. The 1960s and 1970s saw the phenomenal resuscitation of the entire menu of century-old Marxist terms – surplus value, infrastructure, contradiction, Asian mode of production and so on – but apart from a handful of Marxist words which have deservedly entered the everyday language (such as ideology and exploitation), this jargon has become virtually obsolete again. ‘Culture’, used in the anthropological sense, has been with us for over 130 years now, since Tylor, but many shift uneasily in their seats whenever it is used without a ritual invocation of inverted commas.

THE CONCEPT OF HUMAN SECURITY

The key concept in this book, ‘security’, is not a technical term and can therefore, being part of everyday language, be expected to outlive most more specialised terms. Even with the rather vacuous qualifier ‘human’ ahead, the term is almost impossibly vague and wide-ranging. Introduced as an applied social science term by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in one of its annual Human Development Reports (UNDP 1994), the term ‘human security’ is meant to humanise strategic studies, to anchor development research in locally experienced realities, and to offer a tool to gauge the ways societies function seen from the perspective of their inhabitants.

Attempts to clarify the meaning of the concept, to operationalise it for use in empirical research, have been met with hostility and scepticism among some scholars, while others defend its place in the analytical vocabulary of the social sciences (see Alkire 2002, and the debate in Security Dialogue 2004). Some deem it hopelessly fuzzy and impossible to use in actual research; others have claimed that it adds little to extant terminology. It could nonetheless be argued, and in this book we do argue, that the term ‘human security’ has an important job to do in reorienting social theory and building bridges between the different social sciences. In social anthropology, it may in fact turn out to be a concept which has been needed for some time, a concept that can enable anthropologists to update and rephrase some of the classic problems of the subject without bringing in the excess baggage from functionalist thinking, notably the problems to do with social cohesion and integration, stability and collective identity. The eclectic methodology of contemporary social anthropology moreover makes it eminently suited to grapple with a multi-stranded concept like the one of human security. Anthropologists collect their data in both systematic and unsystematic ways, and may regard a passing anecdote or a chance event as being just as valuable as the results of structured interviews. We relate to media, statistics and history writing; we collect life stories and sit in at public meetings and rituals; and we do our best, within the bounds of ethical guidelines and common decency, to peek over our informants’ shoulders to see what they are up to when they think nobody is watching. Unlike many other scientists, anthropologists impose rigour on their material largely during analysis, not during data collection. As the late Eric Wolf famously said, anthropology is ‘the most scientific of the humanities, the most humanist of the sciences’ (1964: 11).

What anthropologists look for when they sift and sort their diverse materials, are indications of patterns and regularities which can enable them to weave their strands into a tapestry. Asking for the ways in which people under different circumstances strive for security, and conversely identifying the factors that render them insecure, may offer a promising framework for future anthropological research. Using human security as a unifying concept for a variety of research projects, which we have endeavoured to do in this book, can help to counter internal fragmentation and to redirect theory in necessary directions. Donna Winslow notes that: ‘the human security approach parallels the shift in economic development and international law from instrumental objectives (such as growth, or state rights) to human development and human rights’ (2003: 5). From the viewpoint of the anthropologist, this reads like a shift from the harder sciences of economics to the kind of qualitative approaches we represent.

Although the concept of human security, as it is currently used in the worlds of development studies and peace and conflict research, was introduced as late as the mid 1990s, it can be used to address questions which are as old as the social sciences themselves. The modern social sciences grew out of the frictions and tensions arising from the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, and questions to do with insecurity were at the core of the early grand theories. Marx famously spoke of alienation under capitalism, and Ferdinand Tönnies introduced the dichotomy between the tight moral community – the Gemeinschaft – and the loose, anonymous society – the Gesellschaft. Almost every leading theorist had his own foundational dichotomy between traditional or collectivist societies on the one hand, and modern or individualist societies on the other. The human security theorist par excellence was nevertheless Émile Durkheim, whose entire oeuvre gravitates around a deeply seated anxiety that modernity may entail a loss of societal cohesion because of its pluralism, individualism and fast pace of change.

The first generations of social scientists, especially those lacking first-hand knowledge, portrayed traditional societies in a somewhat romanticising, stylised way owing much to Rousseau, assuming that life in closely knit, kinship-based societies was predictable and stable, unburdened with existential doubt and disruptive challenges to tradition and authority. However, already the first generation of fieldworking anthropologists, who began to publish just after the First World War, described societies which did not seem to fit this view. Life in the Melanesian societies studied by the likes of Bronislaw Malinowski and Reo Fortune seemed profoundly insecure; people appeared to live in perennial fear of either witchcraft attacks or witchcraft accusations, and there were status anxieties associated with political power, gifting obligations towards relatives and economic uncertainties. Anthropologists describing the lives of small, tightly knit groups in Africa, Melanesia and South America show, sometimes inadvertently, that they live in a state of almost continuous anxiety. Anything from warring neighbouring tribes to poisonous snakes or crop failure could put their lives in jeopardy any day of the year.

If we move to more hierarchical, complex societies of the kind customarily studied by anthropologists, they also seem to offer little more in the way of security for their members. It is sometimes said of Egyptians that they tend to die of anxiety in middle age, usually connected with money problems, more specifically an almost chronic inability to look after their relatives economically. Ethnographies from India show that many Indian women live in constant fear of male violence, men worry deeply about dowry payments for their daughters and a thousand lesser expenses, and that everybody fears downward mobility, whether individual or collective.

Security naturally refers to much more than this – and this could be said to be the strength and the weakness of the concept. Most individuals are, presumably, secure in some respects and insecure in others. In official documents from the UN Commission for Human Security, ‘freedom from want and freedom from fear’ are stressed as common denominators of the concept (UNDP 1994, cf. Alkire 2002). However, if we are to take this delineation in a literal sense, it must in all fairness be pointed out that every society – even the most stable and well-organised one – has its own wants and fears.

Every society, group and individual on earth has its way of dealing with questions of human security. Nobody is immune. Non-believers often assume that religious people have a greater existential security than they do themselves, but such a generalisation is unwarranted. If one belongs to a religion with a notion of hell, or divine intervention, or both, then one had better mind one’s step.

Moreover, it is often assumed that insecurity is more pronounced in the global era than it was formerly, given the fundamental vulnerability, the proliferation of risks, the environmental crisis, AIDS, the alienating individualism of neoliberalism, fears of terrorist attacks or outbreaks of war, or the loss of faith in canonical tradition, including religious salvation and protection from supernatural entities, that are assumed to accompany this era. A cursory look at the historical and ethnographic records does not support this view. The risk of being the victim of a terrorist attack for a citizen of Amsterdam in the early twenty-first century can safely be assumed to be much less than the risk of being bitten by a poisonous snake for an Azande in the 1920s. The threats of starvation, disease and war in the poorer countries, horrible as they are, were unlikely to be much less in pre-modern times than is the case today, although their impact was for obvious reasons different.

THIS BOOK

This volume engages with two distinct bodies of literature, one of which is limited in volume and recent in history, while the other is huge and has a long, distinguished past. The first is, of course, the restricted, but growing literature on human security. Most writings on human security tend to be narrowly policy-oriented and strongly focused on insecurities rather than security itself. Moreover, in spite of programmatic statements about placing people first, analyses of human security – often written by political scientists and macro-sociologists – tend to focus on the national and international levels. This book, by contrast, directly addresses questions concerning how people create a situation of (relative) security, and how various dimensions of human security – economic, political, existential, environmental – interact.

The anthropology of human security, as it is developed in this book, aims to combine the classic concerns of anthropology with cohesion, agency and power, with an appreciation of the transnational dimension in contemporary lives. The contributors thereby move beyond both the nostalgia implicit in some of the globalisation literature, as well as the old-style cultural relativism which tacitly assumes that wholly traditional lives are preferable to partly modernised ones.

Creating secure lives in a complex, turbulent world entails hard work. Security-building activities are confronted with risks, some of them transnational; with insecurities associated with war, environmental problems, crime, etc.; and also with individualisation and ideological tendencies favouring individual freedom at the expense of sacrificing security (see Bauman 2001). However, unlike comments on the ‘postmodern condition’, which argue that contemporary lives are bound to be fragmented and ‘liquid’, this book shows how much people are willing to invest in security.

The contributors to this book also indicate a wide range of factors militating against security and, accordingly, the many ways in which people living under different circumstances make efforts to strengthen their sense of security.

For convenience, this book has been divided into three parts, although themes necessarily interact and overlap. The first four chapters, following this introduction, concentrate on the political economy of human security, indicating a framework where state politics, popular resistance, market forces and the material struggle for survival interact. The next four chapters focus on the existential dimensions of human security, often summarised under the general heading of identity, looking largely but not exclusively at majority/minority relationships. The final section, comprising three chapters, emphasises the varying role of state power and social planning in creating conditions for (in)security.

In the opening chapter of Part 1, Ton Salman, writing about popular protests in Bolivia, describes a common dilemma: although public protest was risky in Bolivia before the election of Evo Morales in 2006, it was nonetheless perceived as a ‘lesser evil’ when compared to the government’s policies, which placed much of the population in an extremely precarious economic situation. Salman thus shows that people are not necessarily obsessed with security in the sense of safety, but may expose themselves to considerable dangers in order to enhance their long-term security.

Writing from Morocco, Bernhard Venema analyses the economics of ethnicity and state power. The development of a capitalist market for land and produce in the Middle Atlas has made the local Berbers’ economic situation precarious and unstable. Venema shows how appeals to religion and tradition have strengthened the local communities, often in ways inimical to the state’s aims, and rarely with clear economic benefits, but giving the tribal members a sense of continuity and belonging.

Concluding Part 1 on the political economy of human security, Marjo de Theije and Ellen Bal argue, in their chapter about Brazilian goldminers in Suriname, that while taking apparently extreme physical risks, the goldminers nonetheless make short-term investments in trust and, in the longer term, believe in material security as a compensation for the risks taken.

The second part on security, identity and belonging opens with Ellen Bal and Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff’s chapter about the reflexive identity work engaged in by Hindustanis (local term for people of Indian descent) in Suriname and in the Netherlands. The Dutch-Hindustanis are doubly removed from their ancestral land, having undertaken two intercontinental migrations in historical memory. The chapter is about existential security, threatened by alienation and a sense of insecurity.

Edien Bartels and her co-authors, also writing from the Netherlands, continue the discussion of cultural identity as a dimension of security, showing how minority identities may enhance the internal sense of security in the group, but may lead to anxieties and (subjectively experienced) insecurity in greater society. Both majorities and minorities are inclined to feel insecure about their belonging and sense of identification in contemporary Western European societies.

Lenie Brouwer’s field is a working-class and minority-dense area in Amsterdam, where local authorities have set up Internet and other computer facilities for the citizens in an effort to empower them and facilitate their participation in the wider society. By discussing how the clients at a digital centre use ICT to enhance their integration in Dutch society, Brouwer shows how security and freedom (in the sense of autonomy) can be two sides of the same coin, even if in other contexts they may be mutually opposed.

With André Droogers’ chapter on Pomeranian Lutheran migrants in Brazil, the focus moves away from Western Europe, but the issues of identity and existential security remain salient. Working with historical as well as contemporary materials, Droogers demonstrates the crucial role of the German Lutheran Church in creating a sense of cultural continuity for the ‘Teuto-Brazilians’ historically, and how the group has tried to find new sources of collective identity when the German identity became politically problematic during the twentieth century. Like several of the other contributors, Droogers emphasises belonging and collective organisation as conditions for security.

Opening the third part on states of (in)security, Marion den Uyl analyses policy and ethnicity in Bijlmermeer, an Amsterdam neighbourhood built in the 1970s as a ‘model suburb’ but today largely inhabited by minorities and seen by the city authorities as a problem area. Drawing on the concepts of trust and social capital, den Uyl suggests that security is unevenly distributed in Bijlmermeer, and that the character of the social networks inside and outside of the area, not the built environment itself, account for the high levels of insecurity. Demolition and rebuilding is, in a word, unlikely to help.

Sandra Evers, writing about the precariousness of everyday life in the Seychelles, is concerned with the ways in which the Seychellois state has used an official security discourse as a pretext for limiting people’s personal freedom, and how the result has in fact been an extremely insecure situation for most Seychellois. The government, she writes, has even tried to monopolise Seychellois memory and history. Evers’ analysis shows how limitations on individual freedom may threaten security, and is complementary to Salman’s perspective in illuminating ways.

Dick Kooiman’s chapter about the precarious situation of princely states in India on the eve of Independence (1947) shows, as a useful contrast to Evers’ analysis of an omnipresent political power, how former rulers deprived of polit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Preface
• 1. Human Security and Social Anthropology
• Part I The Political Economy Of Human Security
• Part II Security, Identity And Belonging
• Part III: States Of (In)Security
• Notes on Contributors
• Index