The Anthropology of Blame

An Inquiry into Social Resilience in Five Steps

I'm an anthropologist who works on governance and development problems around the world. Using my personal experiences and observations I write about how economic processes and human relationships build (or destroy) social systems and the institutions of governance.

Which communities will succeed, and which are failing? Many lines of inquiry claim to come to their own conclusions. Do they differ from each other? My own line of inquiry concluded that in order for a community to succeed (i.e. be “resilient”), nature must be understood as an integral part of its governance. My line of inquiry as an anthropologist concludes that nature cannot coexist in a resilient governance model alongside social exclusion and corruption.

First step: My introduction to the anthropology of agriculture.

I was transfixed as I left Professor Boyd’s class. In that very first lecture he combined everything that fascinated me—anthropology, geography, ethics, law, political science, agriculture, economics, humor, mythology, philosophy. He even passed around a small paper bag of what I assumed were salted nuts; someone later told me they were salted insects, but I didn’t believe him. He had just returned to the United States from fieldwork in Papua New Guinea (“God’s country,” he called it) and he was bursting with stories about the isolated Stone Age communities he had left behind. People there had been living, fighting, loving, dying, and creating for thousands of years in majestic thatch-roofed villages in the clouds, without formal currency, legal systems, or institutions—relying instead on the honor and trust each person built. Every aspect of their lives wove myths, fear, bravery, fellowship, gardening, camaraderie, debt, wealth, birth, and death into interlaced concepts, spoken and sung in a thousand languages and scattered over nine hundred and eighty mountaintops.

In subsequent classes he revealed the magic, horror, and elation of a faraway world where people were constrained less by institutions than by fear, hunger, and one another. Though everything in their lives seemed tethered to the forces of nature and the spirit world, his course focused on how people produced food, and on the social economy that grew around that labor. I was especially drawn to pigs, because beyond providing the family’s largest source of protein, pigs were prolific breeders and a preferred medium of exchange in a world where currency did not exist. What little written work I could find about the economics of animal production in Papua New Guinea (PNG) appeared in short, obscure references that were often buried in accounts of intertribal conflict. Much of it framed livestock as social capital in moneyless communities. Some compared the birth of piglets to yields in what economists in my western world would call interest-bearing accounts.

As one of the first students in agricultural anthropology at Columbia University back in the seventies, I was excited by a torrent of follow up questions, with which I engaged professors in other courses. The economists I consulted struggled with my insistence on trying to define value without the concept of price. And the sociologists I consulted struggled with my preoccupation with the economics of social standing. I talked with psychologists about individualism and group cohesiveness. I read and interviewed as much as I could on the economics of barter and social capital, but my questions were pushing beyond labor and agricultural economics into models where the acquisition and consumption of protein were central to rural labor, exchange, and political relationships. In PNG responsibilities for pig production were shared in mutual or reciprocal interdependence, in which every task was strictly assigned, so that each person’s work was necessary for the other’s to matter. As in many other agricultural societies, farm responsibilities were divided either into mutually interdependent roles where farming families relied on each other to achieve their outcomes, or into reciprocally interdependent roles where their work flowed back and forth. Most of the tasks in family farm food production are reciprocally interdependent, so that each family member’s output becomes the others’ input in iterative cycles, with each one’s role being complementary to those of the others. In PNG as in other societies the roles were more than simply raising a pig and producing meat.

Second step: Differences over resource management pressures creates political conflicts between entire communities.

After graduate school and a few years in an international education job I joined the Peace Corps to manage a rural development program in Mali. Though the main sources of animal protein in Mali are sheep, cattle and goats, all livestock are windows into family status and relationships. Age old politics and social issues, which have contributed to today’s full-fledged war, were important even back then. Nomadic herders in northern Mali clashed with settled farmers in ways that echoed the cattle-and-fence wars of the nineteenth-century American West. In each place, - whether PNG with pigs, Mali with sheep and cattle, or the American West with cattle, - people’s social conflicts were expressed through economic assets on four legs. Favors and grudges were enflamed or placated over access to water and grazing rights; livestock was traded, pledged, or withheld to establish or change political and security relationships. Mali is a living laboratory where one can see how livestock-related resource management pressures can affect political and social conflicts between people as well as between entire communities.

Third step: Being one of man’s earliest domesticated food animals, the pig became a social symbol and economic asset ever since the dawn of society. So the pig has been a natural candidate to be society’s first and most enduring scapegoat. An excellent proxy for the evils in society, the pig has been blamed for social and governance shortcomings.

A few years later, I was transferred to Haiti as the Peace Corps’ first Country Director. Soon after I settled in and began traveling, one fact stood out: Haiti’s food self-sufficiency was under siege. African Swine Fever (ASF) had appeared next door in the Dominican Republic in 1978. With a strong ministry and trained animal-health services, the DR announced eradication within two years, sadly at the price of slaughtering nearly half a million pigs. The ASF virus crossed into Haiti, where the government aimed for a similarly swift victory despite having twice the population, half the agricultural infrastructure, and a fraction of the budget. But in 1982, just a year before I arrived, Haiti’s then “President-for-life” smugly declared the virus vanquished.

For such a triumph, achieved with so few resources, one might expect a national celebration of sorts. Instead, there was a quiet uneasiness. Agronomists I met avoided discussing their roles in the eradication of the virus. It had involved culling of tens of thousands of pigs killed in gruesome pits beside rural markets. Farmers were angry: pigs had been their savings accounts, the mainstay of household investment; often their route to school fees or emergency cash. Besides the different levels of efficiency of the two countries’ institutional responses to the ASF problem, the social impact of their eradication experiences differed like night and day. In the Dominican Republic not all the pigs were owned by small peasant farmers. Many were owned by agricultural businesses, and so the culling program had an effect in rising prices rather than a social disaster in the peasant economy. To make things worse, in Haiti when success was declared, the agency created to cull infected pigs was quietly and quickly shut down. In many communities its staff simply disappeared overnight. There was no budget for monitoring or social-impact measurement, or after-action review and, as far as I could tell, hardly any baseline data had been collected at the start. Donor agencies that had funded the slaughter retreated behind opaque statistics. Discussions were rife that a modern swine industry could soon be built, but planning was not being publicly discussed. The Agriculture Ministry created a “sentinel” herd to watch for reappearance of the virus. The problem had entered the realm of politics and social trust.

The economic consequences unfolded quickly. The rural economy slid into depression. Young, broke farmers migrated to cities not prepared to receive them. Labor and capital fled the countryside. The sentinel program eventually declared the country virus-free, and a small, U.S.-funded, stopgap repopulation project began, distributing virus-free piglets to cooperatives under strict conditions. The team was capable; targets were met. But the design had blind spots. Beneficiaries needed bank accounts to prove they could buy commercial feed before they could receive piglets. Banks, however, opened accounts only for men, excluding women from legal ownership of the new pigs, even though women had long been central to pig production. Imported feed was expensive; local mills were unreliable in times of unrest. The repopulation program’s reports ticked off kilograms of feed and workshop counts, but rarely addressed governance and inclusion. Volunteers and extension agents saw the truth on the ground: pigs had never been just meat; they were family economies, gendered labor, and community trust made visible.

In the absence of data and fueled by a growing sense of schadenfreude directed against the aid sector, conspiracy theories flourished. It was quickly amplified by chatter on the internet, a nascent medium, and the small swine repopulation project became a lightning rod online. By the time I completed my post in Haiti, the President-for-life had fallen to a movement fueled in large part by rural anger carried into the cities by displaced youth. It was clear that modernizing the swine sector would take more than technical fixes. It would require confronting governance, equity, and an understanding of the social meaning of livestock.

The pig, as an animal, was not complex; the economic role and social meanings layered upon it, though, were. Years later, Dudley Alexis, the renowned Haitian documentary film maker, would stitch together much of the story for a highly acclaimed PBS documentary and I was honored to share my observations as one of the film’s key interviewees. The film can be viewed online at “YouTube: The Creole Pig”.

Fourth step: Increasingly, human society is incorporating nature into governance to the point where nature is no longer blamed for society’s shortcomings.

My next assignment took me to Senegal to manage a rural credit project and bring it to scale. My colleagues and I eventually privatized it into a highly successful cooperative institution that now operates across multiple countries. Back in a Sahelian sheep-and-cattle country, livestock were everywhere in my work and my thoughts. I paid attention not just to how people related to their animals, but to how they related to each other through those animals. Religious calendars, marriages, circumcisions, these events set the rhythm of buying and selling as surely as rainfall and pasture. In Haiti, as in Senegal, Mali, and PNG, livestock was mapped onto social time and political life.

I developed a way to assess the economic and social realities of communities when making village visits. This enabled my project to determine not only the real economic health of the community but also its resilience. This was eventually the basis of the credit program’s success and enabled it to eventually scale up from a donor-funded project into a borrower-owned firm. The method was straightforward: besides the health of the livestock and the way families shared in production, the number and ages of the animals would signal whether the family was preparing for trade, for celebrations, for lean seasons and Harmattan winds, for displacement, or for civil strife. Everywhere, livestock were proxies for wealth, identity, and order. It didn’t have to be pigs. Whether sheep, goats, or cattle, they played the same role in managing risks and constraints.

A fortunate assignment then followed to manage a grant-making program in Madagascar to build local private sector support for environmental conservation. Stunning cases of destruction of fragile natural resources due to poor governance and corruption made it impossible for conservation initiatives to gain popular support. Every review of past efforts at creating sustainable and resilient systems consistently showed in order for a community to be resilient, nature had to be inclusively managed. And in order for nature to be inclusively managed, governance and corruption had to be addressed. Our success in laying the groundwork for establishment of the Masoala National Park, Madagascar’s largest protected area, was only possible because where Malagasy traditions and ethics prevailed, conservation simply became part of good governance. It was clear that in many societies, the relationship with nature and poor environmental management are issues of governance and power.

Eventually I returned to Haiti, this time to direct another grant management project that had a strong civic development component. It was the perfect suite to the Madagascar program. As I reconnected to old colleagues I learned that though the economy had not recovered and consumer purchasing power had not increased a great deal since the eradication program, pigs had once again become available in village markets. Local feed producers, who had been competing against imported feed to set their prices, found that they could not compete against farm scraps. Farmers resumed feeding pigs as before: field scraps in the countryside, garbage heaps in towns. Litter sizes fell; free-ranging pigs returned. The crisis and its “solution” had come full circle, and the lessons were not agricultural so much as institutional.

Fifth Step: I had gone beyond the anthropology of agriculture into the anthropology of governance.

Our relationships with nature are changing, and our need for scapegoats from nature are diminishing. We no longer need to explain our differences or justify our conflicts or social ills by placing blame on animals or the natural world. The complexities of pig production that I first studied in Professor Boyd’s classroom were the first step in a series of explorations into how nature is being incorporated into governance.

Looking back over my notes, I realized that the pig, being one of humanity’s earliest domesticated food animals, has long served as a ready scapegoat for social blame. Before governance systems were robust enough to confront wrongdoing and social conflict, we assigned to nature the blame we were unwilling to assign to ourselves. At the national level, relationships with nature are now encoded in park systems, animal cruelty laws, rules for lab use, fair use laws, even in the constitutional legal personhood for natural features in some countries.

I curated my notes into a book, “Who Put the Devil in the Pig?” (published on both Barnes & Noble and on Amazon). The title is a play of words and images. The “devil” stands for the many collective failures of human society through time. And the “pig”, being our oldest domesticated food animal, stands for society’s relationship with nature. To “put the devil in the pig” is to export our guilt onto the natural world, thereby absolving ourselves.

The answer to the question in the title, of course, is: We all did.