The PrecAnthro Collective
within EASA has shown staying power and bite. That is what the EASA precarity survey
demonstrates (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020). Mariya Ivancheva has turned
her elected stint in the Board of the European Association of Social
Anthropologists to good use. She, her co-authors, and her multiple
collaborators and supporters in and outside of EASA should be applauded. This
is Europe-wide anthropological collective action at work, and it goes far
beyond business as usual.
Every day across Europe hundreds
of social anthropologists wake up knowing that their precarious employment
conditions may one day force them to leave the discipline. Still, they keep the
discipline going across the continent by teaching, providing vital research
data for high-profile research projects and a substantial share of the annual
publication output. They also apply for grants and jobs while balancing the
tightrope of overtime work and personal life. All for the glimmer of hope of a
permanent position.
As Covid-19 has washed over Latin America
like a tsunami and the pillars of shaky economies have shuddered under
lockdowns, the priority of profits over public welfare stands out in starker
relief, restating the need for effective public policies and demanding
government intervention more than ever. Such an unprecedented moment poses
strong challenges for the left and Latin America’s social movements. Remobilizing
in the wake of Covid and building lasting, independent social movement power
are key tasks ahead.
During the lockdowns of spring 2020, short videos became a popular means of reflecting on new experiences of quarantine and social distancing. Passed around on social media platforms, downloaded in microseconds, and stored on smartphones where they became nested amidst other videos and photos, Corona videos brought about smiles amidst anxious circumstances and reflected meaningful forms of expert and folk knowledges about the pandemic. In this blogpost, the genre of the Corona video is approached from the perspective of anthropological filmmaking. Can anthropologists create their own cinematographic interventions into the pandemic, by joining these visual conversations while commenting on them at the same time?
On May 31, 2020, the US exploded in protest to address the super-exploitation of racism, which has uniquely scarred its history. This was followed by international demonstrations, including massive demonstrations in Paris against police brutality, a common theme of the Gilets Jaunes, a protest starting in November 2018 that I was studying. However, this time the Paris protests included the Gilets Jaunes but focused specifically on the brutality against youth and people of color. In these important new developments, we have seen an international mobilization which may now be breaking down, or breaking through, some of the fragmentations of the working class between so-called but no longer stable working classes, the imagined middle classes also at risk of instability, and the super-exploited subjects divided by racism, sexism, colonialism, citizenship and other forms of historical subordinations.
Here I consider long-term research among street protests in France in relation to the post-Covid outrage against police brutality. Austerity policies should be seen not simply as a consequence of the Great Recession in the wake of the financial crisis but rather as the latest most destructive stage of a neoliberal assault that began worldwide in the 1970s. My ongoing research in France suggests that the mass demonstrations which began with the French Occupy movement Nuit Debout (see Susser 2016, 2017) in 2016 and continued through a variety of strikes among students, transportation workers and others until the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations of fall 2018, and finally the massive pension demonstrations of 2019/2020, represent an effort to rebalance the pendulum in the struggles against the ever more virulent neoliberal assault. These are, in the end, international processes. I suggest that the kinds of demonstrations which were emerging powerfully in France before Covid-19, are now beginning to take place in the US and elsewhere. The disastrous inequalities that were massively exposed in the unequal fatalities and economic distress caused by the pandemic (see Focaalblog: Kalb 2020, Nonini 2020) have precipitated protests that can be seen as part of an ongoing formative process.
Long-term neoliberal assault, international dimensions
Long-term neoliberal assault has precipitated the widespread destruction of a particular kind of state (Smith 2011) as well as the restructuring of global power and networks (Nonini and Susser 2020). The industrial state underwrote the corporate world by subsidizing the education, health and stability of a large proportion of workers. Twentieth century workers’ struggles established the particular forms of social reproduction originally reified in the welfare state. The idea, for example, of ‘a fair day’s wage’ encompassed the costs of the patriarchal, heterosexual family for the reproduction of men with their wives and children. However, the stable working class emerged alongside and in interaction with lower and precarious standards of reproduction for minorities, migrants and other historically subordinate groups and women, as well as the uneven development of (post) colonialism. In other words, industrial capitalism included a super-exploited working class, marked by race and gender, citizenship rights and in many cases, indigeneity (Carrier and Kalb 2015; Kasmir and Carbonella 2014; Fraser and Jaeggi 2019, Steur 2015). These groups were the subjects of distinctive historically-defined processes of inequality and they were generally excluded, especially in the United States, from the benefits of the welfare state and the class compromise.
The massive assaults of neoliberalism of the past 50 years destroyed the lives of displaced industrial workers and further devastated minority, immigrant and native communities. Under Covid-19, both in France and more drastically the US, these losses, long manifested in differential mortality rates, among others, have become immediate life and death issues.
Image 1: French Riot Police at Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)
A new working poor of displaced industrial workers compounding the super-exploitation of historically subordinated groups has been recognized in the United States and Europe since the 1990s (Susser 1996). In the shifting global power configurations, contemporary nation-states no longer protect the stability of the traditional working class. The emergence of different forms of social movements can be seen as an attempt to redress the assault on customary living conditions, life cycle security and aspirations. I would suggest that this is also an attempt to redefine workers to include the previously neglected minorities as well as new family and identity configurations. New forms of worker protection will have to consider new forms of relationships within families and new kinds of work/leisure routines to address issues that some categorize as identity politics (such as feminism and LBGT rights).
From Nuit Debout to Gilets Jaunes
After Nuit
Debout, 2016-17 in France, which was largely a big city, youth led, leftist
Occupy movement, the next major mobilization was that of the Gilets Jaunes (2018-2019). The Gilets Jaunes were recognized as a
new phenomenon as they came from the urban peripheries of Paris and throughout
the provinces. Not regarded as cosmopolitan they included many teachers,
nurses, social workers as well as truck drivers, chefs, construction workers
and service workers in general. Many Gilets Jaunes were middle aged and
some were thought to be right wing.
Although perhaps not representative, it
should be noted that the woman who sent out the first call to protest the new
fuel tax implemented by President Emmanuel Macron was an educator of color from
the urban periphery of Paris. In addition, contrary to stereotype and the
government portrayal of the demonstrations, Gilets Jaunes insisted that they
did not object to environmental concerns. They objected to a measure that targeted
for extra tax the fuel that poor people in the urban peripheries were dependent
on for their daily commutes. Protests were organized in collaboration with
climate activists to demonstrate their common concerns and the support of the
Gilets Jaunes for the environment. A frequent chant and sign stated; we care
about “the end of the month and the end of the world”.
The first email call to protest the fuel tax was put out in September 2018 but by November, when the Gilets Jaunes began to block the highways and roundabouts and gather in thousands in the streets of Paris, they were objecting to much more than the fuel tax. They were concerned with the degradations of public services, the privatization of health care and their own daily challenges as well as what they saw as the decay of democracy. These protestersfrom the urban periphery frequently described the lack of investment in public transportation outside Paris and the declining support for provincial services as illustrating the “stealing of the state.” (Susser 2020). People regarded public services as a right and saw the services as belonging to the state as paid for by their tax money and therefore belonging to them. When the state privatized a service, it was seen as ‘stealing the public money.’ The destruction of the state is manifest not only in the privatization and dismantlement of public services, but also in the crisis of daily life, the family, education, health care, the aged, the handicapped (highly visible at protests on crutches and in wheelchairs) and the students, who feel they are “losing their futures,” as one protester said to me.
Continued Gilets Jaunes resistance
Until the pension strike, which began in
September 2019, the Gilets Jaunes were the most powerful, and most
supported of a variety of movements that had emerged in France since the
austerity policies imposed in the wake of the financial crisis. They linked
many of the uprisings and strikes from different sectors (such as railroads,
teachers and health workers) and the smaller uprisings among hospital aides or
the sans-papiers as well as the climate change activists and left-wing
organizations. Not concentrated in the workplace although participating in many
disparate strikes, the Gilets Jaunes invented new methods, such as the
occupation of the ronds-points, the
building of cabanas and the freeing of toll booths. In these ways, the Gilets
Jaunes were attempting to forge a new set of resistances and generating the
support of the public from the banlieues to the provinces. The movement
was both enraged and resilient: Enraged at the loss of community and public and
social services over time, and resilient in the commoning efforts to create a
new community (Susser 2020). The Gilets Jaunes, made up of working-class
people on the urban periphery, including many pensioners and families who could
not make ends meet, were crafting an emerging oppositional bloc.
The pension protests began in September
2019, when strikers closed down the metro and the buses for a day. A few months
later, different sectors from health care workers, legal professions, social
services, educators and others, organized massive strikes and demonstrations in
the streets that continued until they were shut down by the Covid 19 epidemic
in March 2020.
Gilets Jaunes among the grassroots union members, in many ways, had forced the unions to take up more militant positions against the pension changes. As health workers, lawyers and transportation workers marched in massive protests through Paris, Gilets Jaunes could be seen populating the street protests of every profession in their distinctive yellow jackets, personal statements written in black marker on their backs. The signature song of all the pension protests was that of the Gilets Jaunes, as were many of the chants and banners. Until Paris was closed down for Covid-19 in March 2020, the Gilets Jaunes and the massive pension marches combined in different, often conflicted, ways across France, in some cities with more cooperation in time and place than others.
Image 2. Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)
In France, Nuit Debout, the Gilets Jaunes, the pension strikers and many other movements represent transformative spaces where people in the current era of financialization and globalization are struggling to work out new strategies. Activists envision horizontalist movements as an effort to develop innovative forms of protest to counteract the increasing inequality, authoritarian tendencies and hardened boundaries of the new global regime. Such progressive representation strives for inclusivity and the breakdown and recognition of established hierarchies of gender, race, immigration and class, among others. Each of these groups has to be understood in the context of their own history and social movements. The participants in Nuit Debout were not the same as the Gilets Jaunes. However, in France and elsewhere, multiple subaltern groups may be beginning to recognize themselves as part of a larger political bloc in opposition to the destruction of the welfare state and degradation of democratic representation (Kalb and Mollona 2018). Such movements are contingent and contested, reflective of the same rage against the destruction of living standards and aspirations for a generation but offering hope for more inclusive solutions.
Image 3. Protests against police brutality in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)
Before the Gilets Jaunes, in 2016/7 activists from Nuit Debout had protested the police violence often focused on young men of color in the streets. The Gilets Jaunes protested the violence of the police against their own street demonstrations for over a year. It is a crucial development that in June 2020 the Gilets Jaunes joined ranks with the protests against police brutality and racism that were rocking the world. At this conjuncture, after the shocking Covid-19 shutdown and the disproportionate deaths of people of color in France as elsewhere, the displaced workers of the urban periphery joined directly with the superexploited immigrants, refugees and previously colonized people of color from the banlieues in several unprecedented massive demonstrations.
Image 4. Gilets Jaunes protester with Black Lives Matter support message (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)
As Polanyi knew, rage against the disastrous failures of (neo)liberalism could be expressed in brutal and fascist ways (see also Maskovsky and Bjork-James 2020, Kalb and Halmai 2011). However, the protests that we see today are a hopeful sign in their inclusive progressive moments bringing together many groups who are all at risk in different ways and at different levels or aspects of exploitation. They are demanding a rebalancing of the destructive neoliberal assault of the past 50 years. They are constructing an inclusive but uneven critical community which may serve as an antidote against the growing fury which is fueling nationalism and exclusivism (see also Kalb and Mollona 2018).
Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent book is The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, co-edited with Don Nonini.
References
Fraser, Nancy and Rahel Jaeggi. 2018. Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Medford, MA: Polity
Carrier, James and Don Kalb
(eds.) 2015. Anthropologies of Class:
Power, Practice and Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kalb, Don and G Halmai (eds.) 2011.
Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class:
Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe.
Vol. 15. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Kalb, Don and Massimilliano
Mollona (eds.) 2018. Worldwide
Mobilizations. New York: Berghahn Books.
Kasmir, Sharryn and August
Carbonella (eds.) 2014. Blood and Fire.
New York: Berghahn Books
Kalb, Don 2020. Covid, Crisis and the Coming Contestations. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/01/don-kalb-covid-crisis-and-the-coming-contestations/
Maskovsky, Jeff and S. Bjork-James (eds.) 2020.
Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism. Morgantown,
WV: West Virginia University Press
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The Tumultuous Politics of Scale. New
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Susser, Ida (2020, forthcoming). “They are stealing the state”: Commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France. In: Urban Ethics Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser (eds.). New York: Routledge.
Cite as: Susser, Ida. 2020. “Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries?” FocaalBlog, 3 December. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/12/03/ida-susser:-covid,-police-brutality-and-race:-are-ongoing-french-mobilizations-breaking-through-the-class-boundaries?/
The purpose of
this work is to examine and elaborate on the relationship between the people of
Native North America and the material and ideological content of
developmentalism as examined within the fields of anthropology and Native American
or Indigenous studies. I observe that Indigenous North American peoples are
frequently excluded from discussions of economic development within
anthropology. I try to reconcile this situation and reinsert native peoples
into the anthropology of development by demonstrating the historical and political
continuities between United States Indian Policy with the exported ‘development
apparatus’. In doing so, I follow Neveling (2017) and others in pushing back
against postdevelopment’s dematerialization of development and its emphasis on
development as discourse. Instead, I argue that a historical materialist or
political economic approach (Rose 2015, 2017, 2018) that conceptualizes
development in the terms of Neveling’s (2017) “political economy machinery”
better explains the situation of Indigenous North American peoples and the
processes that make and unmake their lives.
The
overall point here is that in order to properly understand the political
economic basis and ideological dimensions to the Post-War developmentalism
project it is necessary to understand and examine the history of those
political economic models and the history of those ideological dimensions.
While there likely were developmentalist antecedents in the policies of the
European empires, a major distinctive feature of post-war developmentalism is
that it was rooted in the political economy and hegemonic position of the
United States. As such, it is crucial to understand the local antecedents for
American developmentalist policies, which necessarily brings us to Indigenous peoples
as they were the early laboratories of these policies and political economic
models.
Contextual Disconnect
On
the global level, the sub-discipline of the anthropology of development has
flourished in the last half century, along with the interdisciplinary field of
development studies. In that time, prominent anthropological works have been
produced within the sub-discipline that have had a broad impact within
anthropology and influence beyond their own regional and disciplinary scope.
Some of these classics include the works of Arturo Escobar (1995), James
Ferguson (1990), Akhil Gupta (1998), David Mosse (2005), and Tania Murray Li
(2007). These works describe the transformative effects of ‘development’,
especially on the role of state policies, on the regions formerly grouped
together as the “Third World” (i.e. Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin
America), which are now more conventionally referred to as the global South. The
field of the anthropology of development, along with the interdisciplinary
field of development studies, has remained almost exclusively “Third World”
focused. Chibber (2013) observes that this isolation in the form of the lack of
thorough comparative engagement between capitalist development in Western
Europe and capitalist development in the Third World has led to an inaccurate
and romanticized portrayal of each in postcolonial studies of Third World
development. While I generally agree with Chibber’s critique, I wish to move
into a different context. The anthropological literature on development in the
global South is also disconnected from the anthropological literature on what
would otherwise be called ‘development’ in what was at one time called the “Fourth
World” (i.e. stateless nations), especially in regard to Indigenous peoples in
North America. This disconnect actually goes both ways. Jessica Cattelino’s
(2008) book is likely the most popular anthropological work on Indigenous
economic development in Native North America in the last several decades. Even
though her ethnography on (capitalist) economic development within the Seminole
Nation of Florida was published after the texts of those aforementioned
prominent anthropology of development authors, and deals with many similar
issues around development such as the intricacies and problematics of
sovereignty, governmentality, and possible alternative modernities, she does
not utilize them or the other work from this subfield. Furthermore, Tania Murray
Li’s (2010) comparative discussion of the relationship between capitalism and
dispossession in different regions does not include Native North America despite
the lengthy and ongoing history of dispossession of Indigenous peoples in North
America in relation to both colonial policies of the past as well as
contemporary processes of neoliberal capitalism and state (re)formation in the
United States and Canada. Instead of including Native North America as another
case study alongside Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, she mentions Indigenous
people in the Anglo settler states (i.e. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United
States) or CANZUS countries (Cornell 2015) only once and in passing, and does
so with the effect of driving a further wedge between them by saying that the
processes of class differentiation were different among Indigenous peoples in
those locations. Similarly, David Mosse’s (2013) summary article on the state
of the subfield is telling of its geographic orientation as there is no mention
of Indigenous North America at all and only a passing mention of development in
Europe. The point is that these works are not drawing from and are not in
dialogue with each other. There is a disconnect between anthropological studies
of development in the global South with those on the economics and development
of Indigenous people in the Anglo settler states even though (as I will argue) they
share certain commonalities and histories.
Developmentalism and Native North America
The
general scholarly consensus is that the modern ‘development apparatus’ and the pseudo-utopian
vision that is the modernist-developmentalist paradigm began with the Truman
administration after the Second World War, the emergence of the United States
as a superpower, and actions taken within the context of the Cold War in
needing to make capitalism more appealing for the (newly) former colonies in
comparison to the political economic model of the Soviet Union and then later
China (Ferguson 1990; Escobar 1995; Cowen and Shenton 1996; Rist 2008; Kiely
2007). As Escobar (1995: 3-4) states:
The Truman doctrine
initiated a new era in the understanding and management of world affairs,
particularly those concerning the less economically accomplished countries of
the world. The intent was quite ambitious: to bring about the conditions
necessary to replicating the world over the features that characterized the
“advanced” societies of the time—high levels of industrialization and
urbanization, technicalization of agriculture, rapid growth of material
production and living standards, and the widespread adoption of modern
education and cultural values.
The
disconnect between the subfields is especially problematic here because while the
Truman administration does mark a shift in global development policy, scholars
of Native North America would observe that the Truman administration also
constituted a dramatic (and infamous) shift in United States Indian Policy. These
two phenomena are not disconnected. When the Truman administration began
exporting this pseudo-utopian vision of the glories of capitalism, technology,
and Western modernity to the world, United States Indian Policy shifted away
from similar policies of bureaucratization, technicalization, and
industrialization for tribal governments. These policies were based around the
creation and support of local/Indigenous bureaucratic institutions that would
in essence aid internally in the development of Native American societies
toward a form of collectively managed capitalism, which was intended to bring
them as societies into the modern world. Although it had antecedents in United
States Indian Policy in the nineteenth century (Miner 1989) stretching back
even to the Jefferson administration’s ‘civilization’ program, this type of
internal developmentalism began in a comprehensive manner with the
administration of Franklin Roosevelt in the early 1930s and crystallized around
the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (Jorgensen 1978). The Act, as the
product of the political economy of the United States of the period, was
therefore in accordance with the interests of the American bourgeoisie
(Littlefield 1991), and brought about the transformation of Native American
societies by formally institutionalizing capitalism within bureaucratic tribal
governments. In many locations, it had the effect of solidifying political
power over Indigenous communities by the emergent Indigenous bourgeoisie (Schröder 2003; Nagata 1987; Ruffing 1979;
Rose 2014).
The Truman administration marked the shift in Indian Policy away from Reorganization and towards Termination (Duthu 2008; Fixico 1986). The Termination period involved a series of policies that sought to formally complete the integration or incorporation of Indigenous peoples into the American mainstream political economy by means of subjecting them to the authority of the States, physically relocating them off reservations and to urban areas, and ending—or terminating—the political and legal standing of Indigenous governments in the eyes of the United States (Duthu 2008). In short, the Termination era represents a shift in the orientation of developmentalism for native peoples: from one where their own local bureaucratic institutions were fostered as the means to bring native people into capitalist modernity, to one where these same institutions were viewed as the impediments to their achievement of modernity. It represents a shift from the policies of internal developmentalism to an external developmentalism.
The
internal developmentalist policies of Indian Reorganization bear a resemblance
to the modernist-developmentalism that the United States exported to the world
during the Truman administration. It is my contention that the development
apparatus and the modernist-developmentalist paradigm are direct successors to
the long history of United States Indian Policy and these efforts. The Truman
administration’s shift to a policy of global scope meant that they were to
export what is in essence the same civilizing project except they did so in the
language of development and modernity. However, by the 1970s, Indian Policy
would shift back toward internal developmentalism in the periphery except this
time under the label of self-determination (Duthu 2008). This represents an
oscillation of developmentalism in the center and in the periphery
corresponding to periods of expansion and contraction of American political
economy (Friedman 1994). For native peoples, internal developmentalism marks a
period of peripheralization as the center contracts, while termination and
assimilation mark a period of external developmentalism and reincorporation
into the center as it expands.
Similarly,
the geographic contexts must be comparatively examined to draw out these
historical parallels to better understand the historical and contemporary
dimensions of capitalist development. For example, at around the same time that
James Ferguson (1990) was famously discussing the “anti-politics machine” and
how development (even ‘failed’ development) is linked not simply to an
expansion of capitalism but to the expansion of state power, Marxist
anthropologist Alice Littlefield (1991: 219) was writing that
Studies and critiques of these major policy shifts [in US Indian Policy] have frequently noted that the assimilation policies often failed to assimilate, and that self-determination policies often failed to provide for meaningful self-determination. Looking beyond the discourse of the reformers who claimed credit for these policy shifts, it can be observed that material interests of various sectors of American capital were often well-served by the workings of particular policies.
While
I recognize and agree with Neveling’s (2017) critiques of the theoretical and
empirical dimensions of Ferguson’s work in his overemphasis on discourse to the
exclusion of political economic context, the crucial point here for me is to
understand that the underlying processes being described are not dissimilar.
These two works are describing a singular process or a singular political
economic machinery, except that it is occurring at different times and in
different places. Ferguson is describing “development” in Lesotho in the middle
to late twentieth century, while Littlefield is describing “civilization”,
“assimilation”, and “self-determination” in the United States as applied to
Native Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Further Research
We do not have the space here to delve into a detailed examination of each of the finer points. Rather, my purpose with this piece was to try to begin to connect these disparate areas and fields of study and put them into dialogue with each other. Further comparative study would better elucidate the parallels and lines of divergence in the operation of capitalist development and the experiences of peoples within this machinery. This would lead to a greater understanding and greater insights into the history and operation of capitalist development as a global project and singular machinery.
Samuel W. Rose is an independent scholar based in Schenectady, NY. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2017. His dissertation was entitled Mohawk Histories and Futures: Traditionalism, Community Development, and Heritage in the Mohawk Valley. His research has focused on the indigenous populations of eastern North America, community and economic development, political economy, and issues of race, identity, and the politics of history. His work has appeared in journals such as Anthropological Theory, Dialectical Anthropology, Critique of Anthropology, and the Journal of Historical Sociology.
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Schröder, Ingo W. (2003). The Political Economy of Tribalism in North America: Neotribal Capitalism?. Anthropological Theory 3(4): 435-456.
Cite as: Rose, Samuel W. 2020. “Disconnected Development Studies: Indigenous North America and the Anthropology of Development.” FocaalBlog, 17 November. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/11/17/samuel-w-rose-disconnected-development-studies-indigenous-north-america-and-the-anthropology-of-development/
Tiny bodies, the remains of little children entombed without name or mercy, are uncovered in Tuam, a small Irish town in Co. Galway in the west of Ireland, at the site of a former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in 2017. The excavation, part of a Mother’s and Baby’s Home commission of inquiry (set up in 2015), precipitated by the tireless research of a local historian Catherine Corless, uncovered an eerie underground structure demarcated into 20 chambers (possibly a sewage tank) containing the children’s remains. The commission stated that ‘multiple remains’ were found, but some estimates run as high as in the region of 800. The home was run by the Catholic Bon Secours order of nuns from 1925 to 1961, one of many on the island of Ireland at that time. Now in Oct 2020, even before the Commission of inquiry publishes their long-delayed report (original deadline Feb 2018 due now Oct 30th, 2020), the Irish State has stated it intends on sealing the Mother and Baby records for 30 years.
This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).
As a result of welfare reform and continuing budget cuts, social service agencies in the UK have struggled to make ends meet and match the still-growing demand on their services. Local councils and the voluntary sector have both suffered cuts. The former are increasingly looking to the voluntary sector for help, while the latter used to rely heavily on grants from statutory bodies and suffers from increased funding restrictions. In the context of welfare reform, a model of active citizenship and participation has emerged. This model focuses on decreasing citizen dependence on welfare and social services while encouraging the ‘responsibilisation’ of citizens (Verhoeven & Tonkens, 2013). This policy agenda, supported by successive UK governments, has painted a picture of the ‘active citizen’ as a solution and improvement to the budget cuts in the voluntary sector. Citizens are encouraged to ‘take more responsibility’ instead of ‘depending on remote and impersonal bureaucracies’. As part of this responsibilisation, volunteers have taken center stage and their positive impact on communities is emphasized and celebrated (Schinkel & Van Houdt, 2010). Volunteers play an increasingly crucial role in welfare provision and the welfare system relies heavily on their work.
The extent of
this reliance became clear during my fieldwork in Manchester in 2018 – 2019. I
conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Manchester for 16 months, during which I
worked with several advice centers in Greater Manchester. In November 2018, I
attended a ‘Volunteer Day’ organized by the advice center I had been
volunteering at for the past year. This annual event celebrates volunteers and
gives paid staff and management a chance to thank volunteers for their work and
commitment. The day was opened by a speech from Jack Puller, member of the
charity Manchester Alliance for Community Care (MACC), who ‘supports and
encourages local people to be active citizens through volunteering and other
forms of participation’. His speech focused on impact and how to measure
it. In numbers, he states that more than 110,000 people in Manchester
volunteer, putting in a total of 278,000 hours of work each week, and having a
total worth of 252 million pounds. Puller also mentioned that impact cannot be
measured in numbers alone. Volunteers are vital to social services, arguing
that they reflect the spirit of Manchester and are crucial to the existence of
places like the advice center.
While this still presents a positive image of the impact of volunteering, the reality is that many advice centers can no longer survive without volunteers and there is a constant need for more volunteers to fill the gaps in advice services. Advice centers, along with other social services, have suffered from a ‘double squeeze’: a withdrawal of public services has led to an increase in demand, while they simultaneously have to work with shrinking budgets (Evans, 2017). As a result, many depend on the work of volunteers more than before and even then, many fail to meet the demand and have to send people looking for their help away on a daily basis, as I experienced during fieldwork. Voluntarism in British welfare provision is thus not as straightforward and romantic as Puller depicted it, and both volunteers and paid advisers often struggle to navigate their workload and the relationship between them. The double squeeze on advice centers has not only made them more dependent on volunteers but has also changed the role of volunteers, who have become central more in the advice centers. In this contribution, I further analyze how the dependence on volunteers has changed their role within advice centers, showing how this affects the relationships between paid advisers and volunteers and analyzing how narratives of active citizenship often translate into different realities. Specifically, I lay bare how a politics of austerity has resulted in a paradoxical relationship with volunteers, where they are perceived as both a blessing and a burden.
Many social services, including advice centers, have aimed to bridge the growing gap between demand and capacity by relying more heavily on the work of volunteers, with some advice centers I worked with even being completely volunteer-run. This gap is usually characterized as a gap in more professional work, where paid advisers can no longer cover all their tasks due to lack of time and resources. As a result, the growing reliance on volunteers in the provision of social services is also characterized by the increasingly professional nature of the work volunteers do. As Verhoeven and Bochove note, volunteers are now expected to do more than provide complimentary work to the work paid advisers do, they are increasingly expected to take over parts of the paid advisers’ responsibilities, referred to as the ‘volunteer responsibilisation’ (Verhoeven & Van Bochove, 2018). However, my fieldwork showed that many volunteers are underprepared when they first start their work and are not able to carry out those responsibilities, which complicates the working dynamics at the center. At an advice center in the North of Manchester, where about two thirds of staff members are volunteers, all prospective volunteers must attend a training program to prepare them for volunteer responsibilities. I volunteered here as well and attended the 9-week training program, with one training day a week. The training aimed to prepare volunteers for both the practical and emotional labor ahead of them, but often proved insufficient once volunteers started their voluntary activities at the advice center. The large majority of volunteers felt underprepared for the complexities and intensities of advice work. For example, a former volunteer named Susan told me that she enjoyed helping clients with more straightforward form-filling, but struggled with more complex cases. For her, it resulted in high levels of anxiety and guilt, to the extent that she eventually stopped volunteering as an adviser. ‘It felt like I was just sitting there with my hands cut off, watching someone in front of me die’, she told me.
Figure 1: Volunteers during their weekly training on the welfare system and advice sector (photo: Janne Heederik, 2018)
Welfare advisers often have to deal with difficult and complex situations, with their clients struggling to make ends meet and often coming to the advice center feeling desperate and upset. It is the task of advisers to guide their clients through the welfare system, approach authorities on their behalf, and manage benefit outcomes to their best ability. However, the welfare system has grown increasingly complex, and advisers often have to engage in a ‘complex web of relations’ to assist their client (Forbess & James, 2014:80). For volunteers like Susan, the practical skills and emotional labor required to do good advice work, often feel like too big a responsibility to carry. Similarly, during my time as a volunteer at this advice center, I had to help clients who were about to be evicted, clients who had lost all their income, clients who had escaped abusive relationships, and clients who were depressed and sometimes even suicidal. While the training program provides basic information on how the welfare system operates and how advisers navigate it, these intricacies of advice-giving are too complex to teach in a course. Many volunteers, like Susan, are in need of more guidance, but more often than not volunteers are thrown into the deep-end and have to cover tasks previously done by professionals. Unlike their paid colleagues, however, they have to do without the financial or practical support: they do not receive monetary pay, nor do they receive the proper training to teach them how to deal with the complex client cases and the emotional labor that comes with it. In addition, the high demand and the lack of space, time, and resources, means that there is little time to process such events. Volunteers I spoke to often felt alone in dealing with some of the hardship they were faced with when seeing clients. One volunteer described how he often felt inadequate and how this resulted in him researching ongoing developments and policy changes at home:
I feel like I am always at the limits of my knowledge, and I already know a lot more than the average person. Volunteers like me have to put in a lot of time. You don’t just do your hours here. I often have to research stuff at home too.
Whilst active citizenship is thus envisioned as an enriching and fulfilling experience, for many volunteers this is only part of the story. The work they take on is more intense and demanding then initially anticipated and some volunteers struggle with the pressure they feel to respond to the demand adequately. These high expectations of volunteer work and the contradictory lack of training and preparation imply that volunteers can no longer be seen as amateurs supporting social services, but as professionals who deliver unpaid yet essential work (Coule & Bennett, 2018; Verhoeven & Van Bochove, 2018). It is an attempt for voluntarism to strengthen the welfare system despite reform and budget cuts, but it falls short in its assumption that welfare advice can be done by anyone at any time.
Advice centers thus need volunteers to fill certain gaps in their work capacity, but at the same time struggle with the knowledge that volunteers often cannot fill these gaps with the same level of professionalism as paid advisers. Volunteers often turn to paid advisers for both practical and emotional support. Advisers might have to jump in or even take over appointments from volunteers who are unable to help their clients sufficiently. The manager of one of the advice centers expressed her concern regarding the center’s reliance on volunteers, stating it worried her that ‘this type of work is done by volunteers. Such overly complicated issues like almost all benefit cases rely on volunteers’. She worried for the clients, who might not get the right help if volunteers tried to solve client’s cases on their own, but was equally worried about volunteers and whether they were able to cope. Furthermore, often having to rely on assistance from paid advisers, the use of volunteers within advice centers often leads to an increase in workload for paid advisers. This leads to a paradoxical situation, where advisers must rely on volunteers for the survival of the advice center, but at the same time experience an increase in their workload as many volunteers need guidance and training.
This paradox is
further complicated by the fact that relying on volunteers always comes with
certain levels of insecurity as volunteers are not bound to contracts and
employment conditions like paid advisers are. The turnover of volunteers was
high at all the advice centers I visited, with volunteers staying anywhere
between weeks and months, but rarely longer than a year. Additionally, coming
from a wide variety of backgrounds, volunteers often had a wide range of skills
and abilities, meaning not every volunteer could handle the same tasks and paid
advisers spent a lot of time figuring out what volunteer would cover which
task.
For permanent
staff and management, relying on volunteers is thus necessary for the survival
of the advice center, but never easy. And it can at times be burdensome. Volunteers
cannot fulfill certain roles and end up sitting around and doing nothing, while
at the same time there is never enough staff to do everything that needs doing.
As a result, staff end up having to spend more time helping volunteers then
they might gain form their presence. This situation forces paid advisers to
engage in ‘volunteer management’ (Verhoeven & Van Bochove, 2018). Volunteer management
involves the dividing of tasks among volunteers according to their skills and
abilities, keeping track of who will be present on what day and making sure
volunteers are spread out evenly across the week, checking in with volunteers
to make sure they can cope with the demand and emotional labor of their work,
and assisting volunteers in their work whenever necessary.
In addition, volunteer management also impacts the relationship between volunteers and advisers. Dividing tasks among volunteers often resulted in an unequal distribution of tasks, where more highly educated or experienced volunteers would be given many and more complex tasks, whereas other volunteers struggled to get any tasks at all. During a volunteer meeting at one of the advice centers, volunteers had the chance to raise any questions or issues they had. One volunteer mentioned an incident where she had been asked to see a client, but she did not feel comfortable taking on the tasks as she felt unqualified to deal with the complexity of the client’s case. Another volunteer had offered to step in, but the adviser assigning the task would not listen. ‘I was essentially told to just get on with it’, the volunteer said, adding that it had made her feel very uncomfortable and hesitant to ask the adviser for any tasks in the future. Volunteers who were given more complex tasks mentioned that they often felt they were not prepared for the difficulties of these cases, and struggled to deal with them emotionally and practically. On the other hand, volunteers who struggled to stay busy, mentioned that they were bored, could not develop their skills, and felt they could not help as much as they had wanted to. The paradox of volunteers being both a blessing and a burden resulted in difficulties for paid advisers and volunteers and affected their relationship. However, despite having tensions in the workplace, where advisers sometimes feel volunteers just add to their workload and volunteers feel left to their own devices, these tensions did not seem to translate into frustration with one another. Volunteers were always acutely aware of the workload that paid advisers had to carry and understood that they simply lacked time to train volunteers. Furthermore, whilst being aware that as volunteers they sometimes added to this workload, volunteers said they felt respected and accepted by their paid colleagues. Advisers were always grateful and positive about the volunteers, highly aware of the advice center’s dependence on their work: ‘We would be closing our doors without them’, one adviser said. Similarly, the manager of the advice center stated: ‘Volunteers have played more and more of a key role, they are at the front of our service’.
However, the paradox of the volunteer as a blessing and a burden remains, and many advisers felt frustrated with their working conditions. Rather than resulting in frustration towards volunteers, this frustration was predominantly aimed at the government, and there was a strong sentiment that the government had failed the voluntary sector while at the same time having offloaded its responsibility onto citizens under the banner of active citizenship. The key issue advisers pointed to was almost always funding. As one adviser stated:
If they want this [advice work] to be free, they need to provide the proper funding […] Look at us, advisers can’t help you properly because they are busy with five other cases, volunteers are taking on responsibilities they shouldn’t be, and we are all overworked. And it’s the government that is to blame.
These tensions between advisers and volunteers are therefore more than workplace quarrels; they are political. They reflect the everyday reality on the frontlines of a policy agenda of budget cuts and ‘citizen activation’. The responsibilisation of voluntary work is therefore problematic not just in the heaviness of the responsibilities that volunteers have to carry and its effect on their relationship with advisers, it also lays bare the problematic nature of a policy agenda that aims to offload government responsibilities onto the voluntary sector and citizens, without providing them with the necessary financial assistance and substantive support. The experiences of paid advisers and volunteers tell a clear story: advice services – among many other social services in the UK – are in crisis, but as important as volunteers are, it should not be their role to rescue these services. However, the outcry for change is still predominantly focused on those they are trying to help: they protest and advocate for the rights of welfare claimants, and in the process forget to advocate for their own rights. Individual voluntary commitment can be a blessing, but the overall use of voluntarism as a solution to budget cuts and welfare reform is a burden.
Janne Heederik is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University and a member of a ERC-funded research project on participatory urban governance. Based on ethnographic research in Manchester, UK, her research explores welfare, poverty, and brokerage in contemporary Britain.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679614).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Coule, T., & Bennett, E. (2018). State-Voluntary
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S. (2017). A Reflection On Case Study One: The Barriers to Accessing Advice. In
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Advice Agencies (pp. 23–27). Bristol: Policy Press.
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A., & James, D. (2014). Acts of Assistance: Navigating the Interstices of
the British State with the Help of Non-profit Legal Advisers. Social
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Verhoeven, I., & Van Bochove, M. (2018). Moving away, toward, and against: How front-line workers cope with substitution by volunteers in Dutch care and welfare services. Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, 47(4), 783–801. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279418000119
Cite as: Heederik, Janne. 2020. “The Voluntarisation of Welfare in Manchester: A Blessing and a Burden.” FocaalBlog, 2 October. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/10/02/janne-heederik-the-voluntarisation-of-welfare-in-manchester-a-blessing-and-a-burden/
This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).
On 1st March 2018, a group of protestors blocked a dual-carriageway in front of Acevedo Metro (and Metro cable line) Station in the North of Medellín, Colombia. Those who have read something about Medellín’s internationally acclaimed urban transformation in recent years will have almost definitely found their gaze drawn to the image of a cable car suspended above a tapestry of terracotta roofs that cascades down Medellín’s Aburra Valley. This image has become emblematic of a wondrous turning-point in Medellín’s contemporary urban trajectory. Once a hotbed of urban violence, state abandonment and spatial disconnection, these underprivileged peripheral neighbourhoods received state investment in bold infrastructural projects, and via the introduction of participatory governance mechanisms, now enjoy an empowering degree of protagonism in shaping Medellín’s urban future. Welcome to the ‘pro-poor’ city of Medellín.
The first two cases of COVID-19 in
Indonesia were announced on 2 March 2020, quite late compared to other
countries. The first patient was a 31-year-old woman who came into contact with
a Japanese citizen – who later tested positive – at a dance event in South
Jakarta. She then passed it on to her mother. Both women were hospitalized in
North Jakarta, which later became one of the referral hospitals for COVID-19
cases in the city. By early May, the number of confirmed cases nationwide had
reached 9800, including 800 deaths. While elsewhere around the world
governments are easing lockdown restrictions, in Indonesia there is still
minimal testing being undertaken and the COVID-19 pandemic is showing little
sign of decline.
As in many other nations, Indonesian
politicians have been accused of not recognizing the seriousness of the
situation early enough, and some eventually admitted to misinforming the public. Sophia
Hornbacher (2020) only recently highlighted the populist rhetoric and
neo-liberal policy of the Indonesian government, which once more illustrates
the country’s problems of social injustice and welfare. In a statement made in
early March, the health minister Terawan Agus Putranto said he was surprised by
the commotion arising from the spread of COVID-19, as in his perspective “flu is more dangerous than the corona
virus”.
In mid-April, 46 health workers at a
hospital in Semarang were infected after patients had not revealed their travel
history from areas with a high number of infections, or coronavirus red zones.
Six weeks after the first case of COVID-19 was announced and in the face of
what looked like becoming an uncontrollable pandemic in Indonesia, Lindsey and
Mann summed up what many Indonesia watchers around
the world and indeed Indonesians were feeling – that the government had been in
denial of the health threat for too long and a clearly structured approach on
how to handle infections and sources of these infections was still missing.
Crisis
in healthcare
For some time there has been rising
criticism of Indonesia’s public healthcare, including the closeness of
pharmaceutical industries to medical practitioners and related “unhealthy
practices” of corporate theft with government backing. Now,
the existing structural and personnel shortage in the public health system has
become glaringly stark due to the pandemic. The latest World Health
Organisation (WHO) data shows that Indonesia’s ratio of doctors per 10,000
people is 3.8, and it has 24 nurses and midwives per 10,000
people. This is well below Malaysia’s 15 doctors per 10,000 people and Thailand
and Vietnam’s eight. Besides this, questions about pharmaceutical monopolies and
cartel practices in the medical sector, and cases of malpractice and fraud at
the expense of patients, are mounting. Underlying this mood is a latent mistrust not only of the pharmaceutical
industries, the medical profession, and the medical structures of hospitals,
but of the national elites in general and the civil servants of health-related
authorities in particular (Weydmann 2019: 60).
Recent history offers some good reasons
for why medical professionals, patients and those watching Indonesia’s health
sector are wary. In 2006, during the H5N1 pandemic crisis, or bird flu as it
was commonly known, Indonesia claimed “viral sovereignty” and refused to
cooperate with the WHO, going against a 2005 international health regulation on
responsibilities and rights of national governments when dealing with a public
health emergency. The contentious issue was around samples of H5N1, which were
collected within Indonesia’s borders. In their analysis
of this debate, Relman, Choffnes and Mack observed that the government declared
“it would not share them until the WHO and high-income countries established an
equitable means of sharing the benefits (particularly, the vaccine) of the
sample collection” (Mack, Choffnes & Relman 2010: 27).
Against this background many have reservations about the level of cooperation
that can be reached between the WHO and Indonesia’s government in handling the
current pandemic.
Many parties in the weeks and months to
come have already criticized the emergency strategy of the government and the
national health care system. We want to shed light on another issue raised by
the COVID-19 pandemic, that of medical pluralism in Indonesia and different
approaches to illness and health, as the medical context is critical for
understanding the government’s response..
Jamu
will do?
During the initial phase of the
pandemic, some Indonesian policy makers claimed publicly that COVID-19
infections could heal without intervention, as long as a person’s body had a
strong resistance to disease. For this reason, they reminded the public to
maintain or boost levels of body immunity. President Joko Widodo supported this
assessment and recommended that citizens drink traditional herbal jamu remedies to prevent infections.
In order to understand the political
play on the role of jamu during the pandemic, it is important to know
that the consumption of herbal plants as medicine has been part of Indonesian
culture for thousands of years (Beers 2001), mainly based on oral traditions
and without systematic canonization. Jamu isoften produced by
households of jamu gendong sellers, who carry bottled remedies in baskets
or via bicycles or motorbikes to customers.
Today, however, jamu is no
longer the medicine of the poor but an economic sector with large international
companies such as Air Mancur, Djamu Djago or Nyonya Meneer producing a variety of
jamu remedies sold as instant powders, tablets or capsules. Street
vendors compete with big drugstores over jamu sales and the Indonesian
government campaign for jamu as a remedy against Covid-19 supported an
important “economic pillar for the nation” (Prabawani 2017: 81) that generated IDR
21.5 trillion (US$1.38 billion) in 2019; up 13.1 percent from Rp 19 trillion in
2018.
Image 1: Jamu Gendong with trademark label on her Caping Gunung (traditional hat) (Erny Mardhani, 2020)
As early as mid-March, the
Singapore-based newspaper The Straits Times reported that the President posted a statement on a government website
saying that he started drinking a mixture of red ginger, lemongrass and
turmeric three times a day since the spread of the virus and was sharing it
with his family and colleagues. He claimed he was convinced “that a
herb concoction can ward against being infected with the coronavirus”. His
statements on the use of jamu medicine contributed to a rapid
price increase so that prices of red ginger, turmeric and curcuma
multiplied.
Like Jokowi, other politicians have pointed to the benefits of traditional medicine
in the current crisis. The district health office of Situbondo in East Java invited members of his community to a public
event to drink jamu medicine. He also
involved hundreds of school students to further promote the benefits of the
traditional medicine for strengthening the immune system. The minister for
health also handed over jamu remedies
to the first three recovered COVID-19 patients.
The WHO has issued a list of
recommendations for handling the current pandemic, including
handwashing, following general hygiene and maintaining social distancing. The
early suggestions of Indonesian politicians to use herbal Jamu remedies as well
as their general assessment of COVID-19 as a harmless virus, has been in clear
contrast to the WHO assessment.
However, “healthcare” is not a singular
process but consists of a complexity of different medical traditions, external
influences and dynamics. As such, the ongoing COVID-19 challenge may call on
different medical approaches, which are not exclusive from one another. So,
whilst the WHO uses a biomedical understanding as the basis for assessing the
current pandemic, Indonesia’s politicians and many citizens are turning to
traditional Javanese medical paradigms. Rather than dismissing outright the
calls from Jokowi and others to use traditional medicine during the pandemic,
it is necessary to contextualize their calls within Indonesia’s corporate
health care market as much as within the nation’s medical pluralism and the
concept of traditional Javanese jamu medicine in particular.
Traditional Javanese medicine and the
pandemic
The
public provision of healthcare in Indonesia is almost exclusively based on
biomedical treatment approaches and corresponding
ways of defining health and disease. Each sub-district in Indonesia is expected
to facilitate one community health center (“Pusat Kesehatan Masyarakat”, acronym: puskesmas) in order to focus on preventing diseases and
promoting health. In the present COVID-19 outbreak, this has meant that puskesmas are key institutions for
public health treatment and also surveillance. It is expected that each center
will trace and monitor infections locally. However, puskesmas are mostly small medical units with perhaps only one
medical doctor on staff. In the current crisis, these small local centers are now required to split their limited teams in order to
provide public education about the pandemic, contact tracing of infected
persons, and treatment of COVID-19 patients in isolation from patients with
other diseases.
Indonesia,
like any other nation in the world, consists of an ethnically diverse society
and this social diversity is reflected in a pluralistic medical system. Large
parts of Indonesian society rely on traditional medical approaches. The use
of “traditional” medicine or a combination of biomedical treatment and
“traditional” medicine, is a common phenomenon all over Indonesia (Ferzacca 2001; Woodward 2011, among others). Relatively recently, more educated
urban households have also been found likely to use “traditional” rather than
biomedical healthcare. This vivid diversity of medical traditions is
represented not only in the supermarket shelves stacked with the jamu-style
soft drinks promoted by the government, but also in a large informal medical
market, though not in the national primary health care system.
Despite the dominance of biomedical
approaches in primary health care and the accompanying skepticism towards other
health etiologies, over the past 30 years the market for traditional and
complementary medicine in Indonesia has experienced a veritable boom. The use
of a whole range of over-the-counter (that is, non-prescription) medications,
pharmaceuticals, tonics and new forms of herbal or other mixtures has sprung up, with a wide spectrum of herbal
products and stamina remedies (Lyon 2005: 14).
As the COVID-19 crisis deepened, a new
market emerged offering “Corona Jamu” that
contains turmeric, ginger and other ingredients, in order to strengthen the
body’s immune system against viruses. An existing traditional remedy, Wedang
Uwuh – a herbal specialty in the region of Yogyakarta – is also being
promoted, as it is used to prevent colds, warm the body and boost immunity. The
remedy is composed of secang wood, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg
leaves, lemon grass roots and cardamom. The
Jakarta Post summarized several reports from
marketing and consumer research agencies, e.g. McKinsey, and emphasized that
a number of jamu producers have seen an increase in
revenue of up to 50 per cent and predicted that the habit of drinking jamu will be “a new normal”, claiming jamu as “the new espresso”. (However, no data on current
market shares of small-traders and corporations in the sector is available.)
Image 2: Homemade Corona jamu sold at the Beringharjo Market in Yogyakarta (Erny Mardhani, 2020)
Yet, from a medical anthropology
perspective, jamu consumption and
prescriptions are based on the principles of humoral medicine, which has a long
and sophisticated tradition. It identifies bodies as having four important fluids which are characterized as hot/cold and
wet/dry, and is based on the belief that a balance of these bodily fluids is
fundamental to good health. According to this understanding, a balanced unity
of body, mind and spirit are essential to withstand outside influences such as
viruses, evil spirits or social discrepancies (Weydmann 2019: 213ff.).
It is a long way to go for
anyone to provide academic evidence that jamu medicine helps against
Covid-19. And yet, some scientists now claim that the more-established
traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), both traditional and modern remedies,
strengthens the body’s immune system in ways that reduce viral pathogenic
factors (Zhou et al., 2020). As has been demonstrated by Hartanti et al. (2020),
jamu remedies promoted as Covid-19 prevention in Indonesia are adaptations
of the TCM formula which has been officiated in the Chinese National Clinical
Guideline as a means to prevent Covid-19 or treatment during severe and
recovery stages.
While such trials and debates continue,
one thing is certain. The current crisis of Covid-19 seems to be a big chance
for the jamu industries. Recently, the head of the Indonesian National
Agency of Drug and Food Control BPOM
(Badan Pengawas Obat dan Makanan) declared that from January to July 2020 new permits
have been distributed for 178 traditional medical remedies, 3 phytopharmaca,
and 149 local health supplements with properties to help strengthen the immune
system. BPOM also supports research on eight herbal products to combat symptoms
of Covid-19. And, as the Jakarta Post recently wrote that there will be
“a bright, post-pandemic future for Indonesian ‘jamu’” (Susanty 2020), it comes
as no surprise that the Indonesian herbal products manufacturer Sido Muncul is
expanding into the Saudi Arabian market as “an
opportunity amid the COVID-19 pandemic”.
However,
besides the economic opportunities, we also need to consider that the pandemic negatively
impacts the poorest sectors of the population. Even though the Indonesian
Supreme Court on the one hand annulled the increase of premiums for the
National Health Insurance System (BPJS Kesehatan), Indonesian politicians are now
asking the poor to spend money for jamu medications or ingredients in
order to cope with Covid-19.
Against this background, the current pandemic and emerging practices of healthcare are an economic question. In short, the Covid-19 crisis “turned out to be a capitalist thing” in Indonesia as much as elsewhere (see earlier blog contribution by Don Kalb). Herbal medicine offers economic opportunities in times of crisis and even though we may dream of a system that enables health seekers to freely decide on their healthcare – independent of their economical background – we realize the many obstacles that need to be overcome before such a system can become reality for everyone.
Nicole Weydmann
is postdoctoral researcher at the chair of Comparative Development and Cultural
Studies with a focus on Southeast Asia at the University of Passau, Germany and
works on the use of traditional and alternative medicine in Southeast Asia and
Europe.
Kristina Großmann is professor at the anthropology of southeast Asia at the University of Bonn, Germany.
Maribeth Erb is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology at
the National University of Singapore (NUS). Originally from the US, she has
worked and lived in Singapore since 1989.
Novia Tirta Rahayu Tijajacompleted her MA degree in Southeast Asian Studies at the
University of Passau and currently lives in her hometown, Jakarta.
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Cite as: Weydmann, Nicole, Kristina Großmann, Maribeth Erb, Novia Tirta Rahayu Tijaja. 2020. “Healing in context: Traditional medicine has an important role to play in Indonesia’s fight against the coronavirus.” FocaalBlog, 8 September. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/09/08/nicole-weydmann-kristina-grosmann-maribeth-erb-novia-tirta-rahayu-tijaja-healing-in-context-traditional-medicine-has-an-important-role-to-play-in-indonesias-fight-against-the-coronaviru/
