I. Paul Farmer and Structural Violence

A. Medical anthropologist (MD, PhD), co-founder of Partners in Health
B. AIDS and Accusation: Why was Haiti so vulnerable to HIV/AIDS?
C. History

1. 1664: Saint-Domingue becomes colony of France
2. Sugar production, enslaved African labor
3. 1791: slave revolt
4. 1804: Independence (first in Latin America)
5. 1825: Haiti pays 150 million francs in reparation to French slaveholders in exchange for recognition of independence, freedom from French aggression (amount reduced to 60 million in 1838)
6. 1900: Haiti spending about 80% of its national budget on loan repayments
7. 1911: another revolution
8. 1915: US President Wilson sent marines to Haiti; remained for 19 years
9. US supported regime of Papa Doc Duvalier and his son Baby Doc: economic polarization

D. Aid projects

1. Dam (USAID supported)
2. Pigs

E. Farmer: Haiti is vulnerable because of its proximity to and dependence on the US
F. Structural violence: Diseases and natural disasters have political, economic, and social causes

 

II. Class and Economic Insecurity in the US

A. Christine J. Walley. 2017. "Trump's election and the "white working class": What we missed." American Ethnologist 44(2): 231-236.
B. Since 1970s: economic insecurity, neoliberalism, growing inequality

1. 1965: CEOs earned 20 times more than workers
2. 2013: CEOs earned 295 times (Davis and Mishal 2014, cited on page 232)

C. What does class mean?
D. 2016 election: bachelor's degree used as proxy for class
E. Southern conservatives
F. Rust belt
G. "demographic reductionism that distracted attention from other competing factors at play and from the multiple ways that class is constituted" (235).

 

III. Financialization

A. Karen Ho. 2018. "Markets, myths, and misrecognitions: Economic populism in the age of financialization and hyperinequality." Economic Anthropology 5: 148-150.
B. Precarity, growing class inequality, loss of social contract and family wage
C. Financial elites surround economic policies and corporate practices with rhetoric of cosmopolitanism, meritocracy, and multiculturalism
D. Economic anthropology: trace effects of economic practices, ideologies
E. Housing market: racial segregation shapes property values
F. Shareholder value: "that the singular and primary purpose of the firm is to create value (in the form of a rising stock price) for its shareholders, who are problematically conceptualized as 'the owners'" (149).
G. Different ways to measure health of the economy

1. Financialization: rising stock market, short term shareholder value
2. Most people: jobs, job security, wages
3. Result? Jobless recoveries

H. Ho's argument: Markets are not neutral. Neoliberal policies are not multicultural.

 

For more information, contact:  aleshkow@holycross.edu