gender

“Even a Dog Understands No” – An Update on the Harvard Abuse Case

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

Harvard students enter the classroom to protest. Notice the posters.

Last February, almost a year ago, we published a long read about the struggle of three anthropology graduate students and their union against alleged sexual harassment at Harvard by Professor John Comaroff. (You can find that article here.) This is a short update.

The students, fed up with stonewalling by the university administration, sued Harvard a year ago. They are still waiting for their day in court.

Harvard had investigated and then suspended Comaroff from teaching for a year. Now he is back, teaching one course. Three quarters of his colleagues in the anthropology department have signed a joint letter asking Harvard to stop him teaching.

This week an alliance of students took action. More than a hundred walked into his classroom and asked anyone who objected to his abuse to leave. Every student walked out.

The campus is covered in posters with Comaroff’s picture and the hashtag firecomaroff. The action was organised by an alliance of organisations, including the graduate students union local and the campaign for disinvestment from fossil fuels.

Our favourite handmade poster is one that says “Complicity – Even a Dog Understands No”. But we also like “Resign Asshole” and “Keep Your Dick in Your Pants.”

One of the three graduate students, Lilia Kilburn, wrote on Twitter:

“When I saw what Harvard undergrads did today, I wept. Because no one should have to go through what I went through with John Comaroff to get an education.

“Because Harvard was warned about Comaroff and did nothing, but these students are making sure that warnings reach everyone.

“Because I am afraid of that man, but these students can act where I cannot. I see them acting with courage and love and humor, wishing no harm, making space for healing and safety on this campus. It brings meaning to what we’re been through. I want his harm to end with me now.

“There are posters about him everywhere. I hate seeing them!. But I also cannot tell you how many times I have cried on the phone to other women talking about what he has done. Our lawsuit details allegations going back to 1979. I want to be the last one he’s hurt. I have to be.”

For more on this case, do go to our long read on Harvard, Sexual Politics, Class and Resistance. That piece also tries to explain why almost all senior managers like those at Harvard, in all countries, almost automatically support bosses and professors  who commit sexual violence and harassment. And it includes an account of the long graduate student strike at Columbia in 2021 to win a proper arbitration process for grievances about sexual harassment.

Related Post: Me Too: The Economists Organize

Afghan Women, Universities, Hunger and Climate Change

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

On Dec 19th the Taliban government announced that women would no longer be allowed to attend universities. On Dec 24th they announced that women would no longer be allowed to work for foreign funded NGOs. These are ugly developments.

As so often before, both the Taliban and the Western powers are playing with women’s lives for their own political ends. This note explains how and why.

First, there is an increasingly bitter debate going on inside the Taliban. Once the Americans were driven out, the Taliban divided over the question of women’s education.

The traditionalists were led by Haibatullah Akhundzada. The two previous leaders of the Taliban, both assassinated by the Americans, had been village mullahs who were grassroots leaders in the armed resistance to the Russian invasion. Akhundzada was a more highly educated cleric, a senior judge in the Taliban court system.

The government is in Kabul. Akhundzada remains in Kandahar, largely in hiding to foil assassination. He acts as the spiritual leader of the movement. In other words, his task it to look after religion. From the beginning, he was hostile women’s education.

The Taliban people who head the government in Kabul have different priorities. From Day One they were acutely aware that they faced a difficult economic situation. The withdrawal of foreign soldiers and foreign aid meant a collapse in employment and incomes. On top of that, the country was suffering from a bitter drought caused by climate change.

In this dire situation, the Taliban in government knew that they absolutely had to have large amounts of foreign aid, and foreign grain, from the United Nations, the United States and the western powers. They told Akhundzada in Kandahar that if he banned all education for women, the Western powers would cancel the aid.

Akhundzada and his supporters took heed. They waited for the Taliban in government to get the West to deliver.

Continue reading →

Putin, Modi and Trump: Ukraine and Racist Right-Wing Populism

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

The invasion of Ukraine is appalling. The resistance is heroic. The situation is moving fast, and each step is politically revealing. There remains a great deal of confusion about Putin and Ukraine in the United States and Britain. This long read aims to unpack some of that confusion and to explain Putin’s rise, how he fits into the global racist right, and his reasons for invading Ukraine.

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Women in Afghanistan / Frauen in Afghanistan / An Interview with Nancy Lindisfarne

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Katharina Anetzberger

This interview was first published in the Austrian socialist magazine Linkswende as Frauen in Afghanistan. You can read it in German here.

LINKSWENDE: Since the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan, the situation of Afghan women has come back into focus. How does this situation look like at the moment concretely?

NANCY LINDISFARNE: I think a place to start is that we need to understand what does actually happen with the Taliban and the actual defeat of the US, militarily and politically. So we’ve got a group pf people who have fought a guerrilla war and they have actually taken over a government with the idea of continuing to be not democratic but ruling a state. And they couldn’t have done this without – nobody wins a guerrilla war, certainly not one where the two sides are so disproportionately powerful and weak – without popular support. And that means that people all over the country have decided that the Taliban are a better deal than either the occupation government or the warlords.

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Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: A lot of nonsense about Afghanistan is being written in Britain and the United States. Most of this nonsense hides a number of important truths.

First, the Taliban have defeated the United States.

Second, the Taliban have won because they have more popular support.

Third, this is not because most Afghans love the Taliban. It is because the American occupation has been unbearably cruel and corrupt.

Fourth, the War on Terror has also been politically defeated in the United States. The majority of Americans are now in favor of withdrawal from Afghanistan and against any more foreign wars.

Fifth, this is a turning point in world history. The greatest military power in the world has been defeated by the people of a small, desperately poor country. This will weaken the power of the American empire all over the world.

Sixth, the rhetoric of saving Afghan women has been widely used to justify the occupation, and many feminists in Afghanistan have chosen the side of the occupation. The result is a tragedy for feminism.

This article explains these points. Because this a short piece, we assert more than we prove. But we have written a great deal about gender, politics and war in Afghanistan since we did fieldwork there as anthropologists almost fifty years ago. We give links to much of this work at the end of this article, so you can explore our arguments in more detail.[1]

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My First Day in Camp with the Piruzai – Afghanistan, 1971

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Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper

My friend Maryam

In 1971 and 1972 Richard Tapper and I lived with Afghan villagers for nearly a year. The Piruzai, some 200 families, lived in two small settlements near the town of Sar-e Pol in northern Afghanistan. They were Pashtu-speakers, pastoralists and peasant farmers, poor people, working very hard to survive in a vicious feudal system.

The people, the setting, and even the division of labour between Richard and myself seemed to conform to every stereotype about the Middle East. There were veiled women, men on horseback, camel caravans, stunning scenery and dramatic lives. These were stereotypes shared by the Afghan officials, politicians and urban professionals we met in Kabul. But the people we met were not two dimensional.

They were warm, funny, clear-thinking and tough. They understood we were doing research – anthropology – insanshenasi – and they wanted to help us ‘write a book’. They wanted their words to be heard and written down. Living with the Piruzai was an immense privilege and our obligation to tell the story of the Piruzai is on-going. Continue reading →

The Roots of Sexual Violence

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale  write: Lurking behind any discussion of men and masculinities is a deep presumption that men are aggressive sexual predators disposed to raging violence, while women are passive victims good only for reproduction. If this binary construction is ‘natural’, if it is our DNA as a species, then what is the point of asking ‘Why are men and women unequal?’ ‘Why are lesbians and gays oppressed?’ ‘Why are many men violent?’ ‘Why is sexual violence so common?’

Yet these are old, very important questions. For thousands of years the most forceful answers have come from the people who dominate society. Continue reading →

Defending Abortion: Lessons from US History 1964-1980

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Judith Widdecombe, abortion pioneer in MIssouri

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

This is the first of two posts looking to the history of abortion rights in America. Both focus on lessons learned that we can use in the fight for abortion rights in the future.  We make two central points in this post. Abortion rights were won by a mass movement, not the Supreme Court. Second, the abortion wars continue because abortion has come to stand for women’s equality,  sexual freedom and desire. Continue reading →

Thinking about Feminism and Islamophobia (2): ‘Traditional’ and ‘Modern’ in Turkey

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By Nancy Lindisfarne

Ataturk1

Kemal Atatűrk -Founding Father of the Turkish Republic

There is a lot to be learned when a society is changing rapidly and radically. This blog is an excerpt from Thank God, We’re Secular: Gender, Islam and Turkish Republicanism, published in Turkish in 2001.  This is a piece about Turkish Islamophobia, and about the class divide between Turkish elites and the working class. Continue reading →

A Valentine’s Day Story

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For Valentine’s Day, here is something light – a story by Nancy Lindisfarne from DANCING IN DAMASCUS, her collection of short stories about Syria in the 1990s (SUNY, 2000).

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LOVELY TITS

‘Come on. I’ll help you if you want.’ Rana grinned. She was lively, shiny, like her curly dark hair. And she was a gorgeous shape. So he didn’t really mind that she was also saying he was hopeless, the kind of guy who didn’t have the gumption to buy a Barbie doll for his kid. Continue reading →