Author Archives: B Merritt

Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala

This post was contributed by Dr Silvia Posocco of Birkbeck’s Department of Psychosocial Studies.

December 2016 will mark the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Guatemalan Peace Accords that ended thirty-six years of conflict. The roots of the Guatemalan conflict lie in a history of colonial conquest and US imperialism. In 1954, a CIA-sponsored coup d’état overthrew the democratically elected government of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. The coup sought to shore up US economic interests and specifically protect the operations of the United Fruit Company – a corporation trading in bananas and other tropical fruit. During this 36-year-long conflict, a succession of US-sponsored Guatemalan governments waged a structural assault against indigenous Maya communities, the poor, and those associated with left-wing and social justice activism, and armed struggle. From the mid-twentieth century, these individuals, groups, and communities with historical experiences of violent exploitation, racist domination, and dispossession were progressively marked as subversive and deemed to be ‘internal enemies of the state’ within the counterinsurgency logics of anticommunism and Cold War geopolitics.

Children were engulfed in the violence that swept over the country. One in every five persons killed by ‘ejecución arbitraria,’ or ‘arbitrary execution,’ during the conflict was a child. One in every 10 persons forcefully disappeared was a child. Not all forcefully disappeared children were killed; rather, many were internally displaced. Some were institutionalized and eventually adopted transnationally. Among those who were internally displaced and those who crossed the Guatemala–Mexican border as refugees during the conflict, children made up the majority of those who died. The conflict left over 200,000 people dead, the majority Maya, and the United Nations-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification concluded that ‘agents of the State of Guatemala, within the framework of counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, committed acts of genocide against groups of Maya people’ in four specific regions of the country (Maya-Q’anjob’al and Maya-Chuj in Barillas; Nenton and San Mateo Ixtatán in North Huehuetenango; Maya-lxiI in Nebaj, Cotzal, and Chajul, Quiché; Maya-Kiche’ in Joyabaj, Zacualpa, and Chiche, Quiché; and Maya-Achi in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz).

I have conducted research in Guatemala as an anthropologist since 1999, where I first worked with ex-combatants of one of the four guerrilla groups operating in the country up to December 1996 – the Rebel Armed Forces, who were part of the umbrella organization Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity. Since 2009, I have been researching transnational adoption circuits and the movements of Guatemalan adoptees to the Global North. I have found transnational adoption networks to be intertwined with the history of political violence and the multiple dynamics of structural and military assaults against Maya communities. At the ‘Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala’* conference in September, I will be presenting a paper focussing on the case of a group of Maya children forcefully removed from their families and communities in the region of Alta Verapaz in 1983. The case helps us to understand the nexus between transnational adoption and genocide.

The conference will be a remarkable event that will bring together scholars whose work has been immensely influential in drawing public attention to events in Guatemala. Their work with individuals and communities over time has also shaped and sustained an agenda for a politically and ethically committed anthropology.

*In September 2016, the Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in collaboration with the USC Latino Alumni Association and the USC School of International Relations, will host the international conference ‘Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala’. The conference is organised by, Professor Victoria Sanford (Lehman College, CUNY) and Professor Wolf Gruner (USC).

Training mental health professionals in China

Is there a culture for psychotherapy in China?

The radical and rapid social change which China has experienced since the 1980s has undoubtedly created psychosocial stresses impacting on families. There has been large-scale internal migration. Social security has ended and there has been a breakdown of traditional family structures. Parents born during the one child policy (1979-2016) are now a ‘squeezed middle’, caught between ageing parents on the one hand and their child on the other. The one child policy, in the Chinese view, has created a generation of ‘little Emperors’ – children with more limited social adaptive capacities. There has been an increase in individuality, with young adults torn between conformity and autonomy. Increasing levels of anxiety among ‘anomic’ youth and overstretched parents struggling to make ends meet may have created the conditions ripe for a psychodynamic approach to flourish.

What are the challenges for the British teachers and the Chinese students?

Students are highly motivated with a traditional deep respect for teachers. They come with varying depth of understanding and experience. Sometimes a wide gap reveals itself between the ‘cognitive’ level and clinical understanding. A good deal of basic thought has to be given to how to ‘teach’ students to really listen and reflect without stepping in with ‘solutions’.

The challenge in teaching students who have long been involved in a highly competitive, structured, formal chalk/talk educational system that stresses achievement is how to foster peer group learning where peer group engagement is valued. It has meant explicitly avoiding stepping into the role of ‘expert’ and inviting participants to develop their thoughts or seek out the views of others in the group.

Is a psychodynamic approach founded on a Eurocentric model relevant to a Chinese context?

We are all aware that our model is Eurocentric and this is particularly apparent in the mother-infant observation seminars, where the observations are usually of a child growing up in a three generation household. Grandparents are omnipresent and often offer the childcare while both or one of the parents is at work. The particular dynamics between mother/father and paternal or maternal grandparents are part of the fabric for consideration. We are also aware how this affords a child an unusual degree of emotional investment.

A core question both at the level of theory as well as clinical practice is how we think about the self. Is the individuated self, where it is deemed a healthy norm to gain independence from the family of origin, one which needs recasting in the Chinese context, where instead of an ‘ego’ there is an embedded ‘wego’?

In moving between the ‘universal’ (i.e. we are all social beings with a mind and a developmental timetable which unfolds) and the ‘particular’ (the specific ways in which a culture may draw up the lines of internal conflict) we are in a process on-going learning from our students. It is in the relative safety of the smaller group clinical and mother-infant observation seminars that we get a more ‘intimate’ sense of what profoundly concerns the students and also what sparks lively debate, for example a sense that having been born a girl rather than boy can carry a sense of disappointment.

Looking to the future

The programme has clearly flourished since 2012 with the first cohort having graduated and a second cohort having completed their first year. The next steps needed to secure its future include the development of a framework for formal accreditation, identifying clinical competencies and embedding the programme in a university context, to give it greater sustainability.

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Guilt, pity and shame in humanitarian and human rights communications

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This post was contributed by Dr Bruna Seu from Birkbeck’s Department of Psychosocial Studies

You have just sat down for lunch. You switch on the TV and you are confronted with the image of a malnourished child. Somebody is measuring their arm with a tape and the appeal asks you to donate £3. It’s simple: you have your lunch, they don’t. You feel guilty and you give.

This guilt-inducing formula raises much-needed revenue for NGOs and humanitarian organisations, so it is understandable why they return to it time and again. However, my research into the way the public responds to information about human rights violations and humanitarian crises suggests that using guilt as a fundraising tool is problematic.

The problem with guilt in humanitarian fundraising

The pain of guilt inspires in people a new capacity for reparation and the desire to right the wrong. While a monetary donation can momentarily alleviate the guilt inspired by humanitarian appeals, for many it does not constitute a sufficiently reparative action.

A more desirable aim than finding a way to momentarily alleviate guilt is to develop a feeling of connectedness with those suffering. Development of a meaningful understanding of the issues at play is hindered by narrow, racially-stereotyped portrayals of developing countries, which ignore the role of domestic actors in the global South and reinforce the perception that more charity is required rather than fundamental political and economic change.

A further problem is that the sheer volume of these guilt-inducing messages leads to a sense of hopelessness and helplessness that shuts down routes to improved understanding and connectedness, creating a vicious cycle where we feel guilty, donate to alleviate guilt, and then ignore the suffering other until we are bombarded by further guilt-inducing messages. This cycle leaves no room for alternative thinking that would increase awareness of development issues or behavioural engagement in the form of volunteering and campaigning.

Participants in my studies have shown awareness of guilt being part of their immediate reaction and that when ‘it wears off’, as they put it, they are left with nothing to hang onto. So we have a self-perpetuating cycle whereby people donate partly because they feel pity, compassion, guilt and they want to help; partly because they don’t know what else to do; and partly, as a consequence of these two. Donating is a way of ‘switching off with a clear conscience’.

Shame vs guilt

My research is now beginning to consider the experience of shame as opposed to guilt, and whether this would lead to more meaningful engagement in the issues. There are many potential problems to invoking feelings of shame. However, while guilt is related to an action – something we did or didn’t do, shame is about the whole of ourselves. Yet, precisely because it is personal, rather than relating to a bad action, it rests on relationality – what needs repairing is the link with the other. Let’s say if guilt messages are of the kind ‘skip lunch – save a child’ and a child dies because you did not skip lunch, of course you give – you ‘did the right thing’. But what if messages prompted reactions such as: ‘I don’t want to be the kind of person who is informed of such horrors and doesn’t do anything.’?

Contrary to guilt, regulated by the world of norms and laws which is the territory of the superego – the self I ought to be, the referent in shame is the ego ideal – the self I wish I could be. It might seem a small difference, but one that shifts the terrain from the transactional to the relational. I am no longer saving the other, but on the contrary it is with the other that I can be saved. When the bond between self and other is intact we feel pride and harmony. Maybe such a relational mode could return dignity and power to the other and make us agents not of hand downs but of our own betterment as human beings.

This article is based on a talk that Dr Seu gave recently at the Dartington Centre for Social Research

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Researching History of Art in Venice and Padua

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This post was contributed by Dr Laura Jacobus, senior lecturer in the Department of History of Art.

Sitting at my desk squinting at indecipherable medieval documents, I’m suddenly transported to the near-future and the summer term at Birkbeck, when I’ll be sitting at my desk squinting over indecipherable exam scripts. Academics take research leave in order to refresh their thinking and inform their teaching, keeping up at the cutting-edge of knowledge, so that we can then deliver that to our students and to the wider world of scholarship. But from students’ point of view our disappearances may be less explicable. So I thought I’d write a bit about what I’m doing.

I’ve been using this term to pull together research that I began many years ago on the Arena Chapel in Padua. It’s a fourteenth-century building, with practically every surface decorated with stunning frescoes by Giotto. I have already published a book on it, but I’d found a great deal of material which was still of interest, and it didn’t belong in that book because it had nothing to do with Giotto. This term is an opportunity to pull that material out of the filing cabinet (yes, some of it goes back that many years) and try to make sense of it, getting an overview of what needs to be done and doing some of it.

Before my leave started I’d booked a two-week research trip to Venice and Padua, and over Christmas I planned that meticulously. I had nine different archives and specialist libraries that I wanted to visit, some of them with quite short and irregular opening times. As things turned out I only managed seven of them, and in one of those the specialist collection I needed to see wasn’t available, but this is quite a high success rate for a research trip, and I may be able to go back for a few more days before the end of my leave. And, I have to say, some of those libraries were a pleasure! I’m including a photograph (below) of one, the seventeenth-century library of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, designed by Longhena and still with all its original furnishings. I was very lucky to be staying in a newly-opened research centre in the former monastery there, so this was my local library during my stay. Before anyone gets too envious, I should also say that one of the other libraries was in a below-sea-level 1960s basement. Still, there’s no denying that doing research on Italian medieval and renaissance art has its attractions.

The seventeenth-century library of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, designed by Longhena and still with all its original furnishings

The trip to Italy allowed me to find and photograph around twenty documents that should help fill some of the gaps in my evidence, but first I have to read, transcribe, translate and edit them. I returned to London three weeks ago, and have spent much of the time since then doing just that. It will take many more weeks to do it (more weeks than I have leave), and I am including photographs of some of them so that you can see why. A few are rather beautiful – such as this copy of a letter from Maddalena Scrovegni, the first female humanist, to the Duke of Milan in 1389…

…but most are definitely not. This is the copy of her brother’s will, written at a time when the family had lost everything in 1435.

I’m interspersing the work on these transcriptions with drafting sections of the next book, treating one kind of work as a break from the other. It sounds like a messy process, and in many ways it is, but the shape of the book is gradually emerging from these parallel processes of thinking, writing and evidence-gathering. If you happen to be working on a dissertation or thesis, this may sound familiar- as will the feeling of time running out! One day, a book called ‘The Afterlife of the Arena Chapel’ will appear, but probably not before I’ve marked quite a few more medieval-looking exam scripts.

Birkbeck Research Blog

Academics share insights into their research as they push the limits of knowledge across science, art, law, social science and business.