ANTHROPOLOGY Chapter Showcase | 2021 LEXINGTON BOOKS An Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield LEXINGTON BOOKS CHAPTER SHOWCASE FROM THE EDITOR Anthropology at its best can act as a beacon, bringing unity in these trying times marked by a global pandemic, civil unrest, and political polarization. Lexington’s dynamic and diverse community of authors explore not only how people have lived and adapted to their environments but how we continue to do so, asserting the crucial role of human culture, language, and adaptation in our survival from prehistory to the modern day. Lexington Books is proud to publish academic books that feature trailblazing research and absorbing analysis, engage with diverse methodological and theoretical frameworks, and highlight under-represented voices. The selected chapters included in this showcase exemplify this tradition and are timely reminders of anthropology’s notable contributions to conversations within academia and the public arena. These chapters examine how the process of compensating fieldwork participants can be complicated by race and history; analyze the effects of violence on mental health and activism in Black and Latinx LGBT communities; explore the relationship between food, debt, and survival in the Dominican Republic; investigate leftist challenges to LGBT+ mainstreaming in Ukraine; and determine what can be inferred from human skeletal data about the cultural and behavioral changes that occurred from the collapse of the Wari civilization in the Andean Middle Horizon period (AD 500–1000) to the formation of the Huaro and Pinagua societies. I invite you to publish your next scholarly book with Lexington Books. We publish monographs, edited collections, revised dissertations, and ethnographies by emerging and established scholars, including interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary works. While we publish many standalone titles, we also publish books in series that bring together incisive scholarship around a key subject, such as Crossing Borders in a Global World; Culture, Humanity, and Urban Life; Issues in Southwest Archaeology; the Anthropology of Kinship; the Anthropology of Tourism; and the Anthropology of Well-Being. Click here to see a full list of our series. Lexington Books offers an expedited decision-making process, peer review, and a rapid production process to ensure that your research is published quickly. We publish high-quality books with full-color covers, and we market our new titles aggressively around the world. Our titles are regularly reviewed in scholarly journals and have received significant awards and honors for academic scholarship. To submit a proposal for a book project, please review our submission guidelines and email a full prospectus to me at [email protected]. Or, if you prefer to discuss your project with me first, please email me to set up a time for a phone call. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, KASEY BEDUHN Acquisitions Editor LEXINGTON BOOKS contents 4 - 20 Carolyn M. Rouse, “Existential Debt: How Race and History Complicate the Legibility of the Gift” in Reciprocity Rules: Friendship and Compensation in Fieldwork Encounters, ed. Michelle C. Johnson and Edmund (Ned) Searles 21 - 29 Siobhan Brooks, “Impact of Violence on Mental Health and Activism,” in Everyday Violence against Black and Latinx LGBT Communities 30 - 55 Christine Hippert, “‘Everything Is Cheaper at the Supermarket, but I Can’t Afford It’: Colmados as a Total Social Phenomenon” in Not Even a Grain of Rice: Buying Food on Credit in the Dominican Republic 56 - 75 Emily Channell-Justice, “LGBT+ Rights, European Values, and Radical Critique: Leftist Challenges to LGBT+ Mainstreaming in Ukraine” in Decolonizing Queer Experience: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia, ed. Emily Channell-Justice 76 - 89 Valerie A. Andrushko and Viviana Sanchez-Chopitea, “The Bioarchaeology of Wari Collapse in Cuzco, Peru: A Study of Health and Trauma from the Middle Horizon to Late Intermediate Period Transition at Cotocotuyoc” in The Wari Civilization and Their Descendants: Imperial Transformation in Pre- Inca Cuzco, ed. Mary Glowacki and Gordon F. McEwan The pagination of the original chapters has been preserved to enable accurate citations of these chapters. These chapters are provided for personal use only and may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. Carolyn M. Rouse, “Existential Debt: How Race and History Complicate the Legibility of the Gift” in Reciprocity Rules: Friendship and Compensation in Fieldwork Encounters, ed. Michelle C. Johnson and Edmund (Ned) Searles (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 39–55. All Rights Reserved. Chapter 3 Existential Debt How Race and History Complicate the Legibility of the Gift Carolyn M. Rouse PAN-AFRICAN GLOBAL ACADEMY In 2008, I started building a high school on the western edge of Accra, Ghana. I was asked by the chief, elders, and many members of the community to build it. While designing this research project, which doubled as a gift, many anthropologists felt a need to warn me about how misdirected I was. The idea that an anthropologist with power (me) would build a school for those without power (Ghanaians) was a prima facie case of neocolonialism. People asked me, “Haven’t you read James Ferguson, Arturo Escobar, and other scholars who have shown that by participating in international development you are complicit in forms of imperialism?” ‟Yes,” I would tell them. ‟I have read the anthropological critiques, love the work, and have taught numerous books and articles challenging foreign aid.” They would sometimes continue their criticisms by noting that being an American in Ghana, I was, by definition, a destructive force. Building a high school in Ghana was certainly the most difficult project I have ever undertaken, and I unwittingly became entangled in community destruction and violence because of the land occupied by the school. The land issues I faced were tied to a chieftaincy dispute in Oshiyie that started long before I got there, a dispute that continued well after my involvement with the school diminished to working with the headmaster on schooling data. Despite the early difficulties, the high school is doing well more than a decade later and has graduated more than 150 students in seven classes. Many are now attending college. 39 4 Lexington Books Anthropology Chapter Showcase Johnson and Searles_9781498592949.indb 39 24-10-2020 14:08:40 40 Carolyn M. Rouse I start my chapter with an elliptical narrative of a very complicated story of reciprocity. I do so because the details of what some might call my (mis) adventure include politics, land appropriation, and violence. Elsewhere I have written about how my gift produced unintended consequences, but the land issues and cyclical community violence were only my fault in the sense that I chose to work with a community that had these issues (Rouse, 2014). At the time, my lawyer estimated that 80 percent of court cases in Ghana involved land disputes. That said, I certainly was not free of blame. Responding to my anthropologist critics, I would typically state that I was aware of my indeterminate subject position(s) while engaging in a “develop- ment” project. I certainly had forms of power that my interlocutors did not have. I took their images at moments of vulnerability. My Ghanaian research assistants sometimes logged interview numbers on the walls of their houses in charcoal. I encouraged fisherman and poor petty traders to give up their children’s day labor for a future with few guarantees. I questioned their use of time and their choice of exchange practices. Regardless of my race and gender, I was privileged by my citizenship and relative wealth; two of many unavoidable power differentials in the field. In“ Processing Privilege: Reflections on Fieldwork (Early, and otherwise) among Beng Villagers of Cote d’Ivoire,” Alma Gottlieb (2018) details the near impossibility of down- playing one’s privilege in the field. The fact that I even felt entitled to try to “save the world” speaks to power inequities between me and my interlocutors. At the same time, I did all of this while building a high school at their request. I would argue, in fact, that my interlocutors also had forms of power that I did not; an observation articulated by anthropologist Jennifer Nourse (2002) in “Who’s Exploiting Whom? Agency, Fieldwork, and Representations among Lauje of Indonesia.” What I struggled to get across to my anthropologist critics is that I agreed with them on many levels. But characterizing contemporary foreign aid, char- ity, and NGO non-profit work in formerly colonized countries as neocolonial or neo-imperial is too facile. Of course, many projects have been carried out in bad faith, and failure has been the norm (Ferguson, 2006; Escobar, 1995; Karim, 2011; Easterly, 2006; Moyo, 2009; Munk, 2013). That said, sub- Saharan Africa is radically different now than it was sixty years ago, which means that development is happening in ways that the critics and the metrics are unable to capture (Zeleza, 2019). Through the experience of building a school, I wanted to reconcile the divide between the quantitative metrics and the experience of living in an increasingly “developed” West Africa. Another way of looking at building the school is that rather than (or per- haps in addition to) being a neo-imperialist project, it simply flipped the act of reciprocity. I paid my debt up front knowing that it is impossible to conduct long-term anthropological research without being obliged to give back. The Lexington Books Anthropology Chapter Showcase 5 Johnson and Searles_9781498592949.indb 40 24-10-2020 14:08:40 Existential Debt 41 difference in my case was the size of the gift, and the fact that the gift was also my object of study. This doubling of gift/project infuriated one anony- mous reader of my book manuscript, who said, “Given all the terrible things done in the world based on this kind of logic, perhaps this is the real hubris alluded to in the book’s title.” In many ways, this chapter is my attempt to think more deeply about development hubris and reciprocity in light of this criticism.