Paul Schuller's Killing with Kindness, though well-intentioned, is by far the most careless and oversimplified, and least self-aware, book that we have read this semester. Parroting Farmer, Schuller writes that "structural violence depends on its invisibility." (28) The structural violence he refers to could very well be the structural violence of traditional anthropology, of the ethnography with the supposedly rational, objective, non-bodied author. Unlike Ulysse in Downtown Ladies, Lee in Adopted Territories, or Parreñas in Children of Global Migration, Schuller does not sufficiently display an understanding of his own privilege, his own subjectivity, for me to fully trust any single assertion he makes in the entire work. I know. That's unfair. He makes plenty of fair and even good claims. But my surprise at his lack of awareness remained in the front of my mind for my entire reading experience. First, Schuller offers superficial, and often irrelevant, glossings-over of such fundamental black and transnational feminist theorists as Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, or Chandra Talpade Mohanty. He often reduces their entire theoretical frameworks to a single, quotationed, word. Okay, I think, maybe he is trying to rush through the background to get to the good stuff. But everything is rushed, except for the moments where he relishes in his own privilege, such as when he writes that he accepts a neighbors generosity "although I am not a huge fan of cornmeal and despite the fact that it was cold." (15) I cannot fathom how this sentence is supposed to deepen my understanding of the urgent contemporary effects of neoliberal/neocolonial policies and theories. The sentence does not humanize Schuller for me, which, best case scenario, was his intention. Rather, it illustrates the extent to which he has internatlized his (invisible) privileges. He also neglects to draw a distinction between anthropological writing and fiction; he offers an excerpt from a Danticat novel as proof of an anthropological claim. (32) While I do think Schuller makes some valid arguments, they are not new, here, and nor are they better argued than elsewhere.
Excuse my annoyance with Schuller, but his work felt sloppy, and the subject(s) deserve better. I much preferred the Farmer, although it was limited by its length. I was most interested in Farmer's discussion at the beginning about the nature of suffering, but I was also interested in his broader discussion of structural violence, its omnipresence, its invisibility. Every time there is a disaster or a violent uprising, whether it be Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, Rwandan genocide, Cambodian genocide, or any one of hundreds of other examples, the United States media presents the events as tragic and, most importantly, out of the blue. It is not by chance that the causes of violence and suffering are hidden far away from the popular imagination--it has taken much hard work from many people to preserve our ignorance. But to what extent are the media, the politicians, the corporations, etc. to blame? If the general public were to understand the historical inequities that result in these tragedies, would it, in the end, even matter? For example: Most people in the United States have a basic understanding of where their meat comes from. They understand that their chicken nuggets or cheeseburgers come at the price of a lot of suffering. Every child in a meat-eating family at some point realizes that her/his food comes from animals that suffered so that s/he could eat it. But the simple knowledge of the fact does not mean that an understanding of that fact necessarily follows it. Most children continue to eat meat, and they turn into adults who continue to eat meat. Somewhere, they have an understanding of what their meat is. But that does not mean they truly understand the process through which it arrives in their stomachs. This may seem like a stretch, this metaphor, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is a willful ignorance in both cases-- it's much easier to understand that Hutus and Tutsis turned on each other out of some evil that existed in the individuals, or in their "culture," rather than to unpack the tortured history that resulted in the genocide. As Farmer writes of two cases in Haiti, "the 'exoticization' of surffering as lurid as that endured by Acephie and Chouchou distances it." (377)
The readings for this week reminded me of a book I read a few years ago called Dead Aid by Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo. While I find her argument (as I remember it, four years on), that we should stop all aid arrangements as they create dependence and inhibit "progress," extreme, I also find it compelling. I believe that the aid structures as they exist are an example of parodoxical participation (as Lee discusses), or "another state," as Schuller calls it, in which NGOs replace the state and its social responsibilities. They also create dependence. To refute Moyo's argument, though, I would argue that the long-term negative effects of aid programs have little relevance to the people who will not live long enough to see the long-term positive effects of economic growth if they do not receive the healthcare they need in the form of aid. I believe that there should be some forms of aid, but I also agree that micro-lending organizations, such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and the web-based Kiva, are good alternatives to the mammoth international aid organizations.
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