By Donya Alinejad In her latest speech on internet freedom, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared the internet the “town square” of the 21^st cen­tury. Clinton seized on the wide­spread atten­tion for Facebook during the Egyptian rev­o­lu­tion and used the oppor­tu­nity to reit­erate internet-oriented US for­eign policy. Just days ear­lier the Egyptian people had ousted Hosni Mubarak, their dic­tator of 30 years. Cairo’s Tahrir Square had been occu­pied by pro­testers, stained with the blood of the revolution’s mar­tyrs, and gained iconic status as the center of the 21^st century’s most pop­u­lous rev­o­lu­tionary move­ment. Soon after, pro­testers in Libya named the Northern Court in Benghazi “Tahrir Square Two.” If these events show us any­thing, it is that the town square of the 21^st cen­tury is still, simply, the town square.

Internet Hyperbolae

It is not the first time Clinton’s lan­guage has hyper­bolized the role of the internet, thus making her appear sev­ered from reality. Author and scholar, Eyvgeny Morozov, skill­fully rebutted her first major speech on internet freedom given in January 2010 on these very grounds, expressing unease at the Cold War imagery she evoked in warn­ings that “a new infor­ma­tion cur­tain is descending.” Clinton’s latest speech reminds us that the power struggle over new tech­nolo­gies is not lim­ited to the bat­tles over who uses and con­trols the internet and how. It includes the bat­tles over who gets to define and frame the internet through dom­i­nant nar­ra­tives, and who chal­lenges them.

Perhaps the most wide­spread and heated con­tes­ta­tion of an internet nar­ra­tive is that of the “Twitter Revolution.” Although it was first used with ref­er­ence to Moldova, this term enjoyed its peak during the tumul­tuous after­math of the Iranian pres­i­den­tial elec­tions of June 2009. With his piece, The Revolution will be Tweeted, Andrew Sullivan was quickly estab­lished as a leading pro­po­nent of the hype. He eagerly com­pared the power of the Iranian pro­testers to the elec­toral suc­cess of President Barack Obama the year prior. The only link seemed to be some broad asso­ci­a­tions with demo­c­ratic change and pop­ular asso­ci­a­tions with social media appli­ca­tions such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, but it cer­tainly caught on.

Down with the “Twitter Revolution”!

Unfortunately, Sullivan not only jumped the gun on Iran, his per­spec­tive also obscured the ways the Obama cam­paign had effec­tively hijacked users’ online social net­works, rather than building them, as doc­u­mented in Eric Boehlert’s Bloggers on the Bus. Even though Iran’s case was still devel­oping at the time, tech jour­nal­ists, blog­gers, activists, and independent/public news media imme­di­ately poked the “Twitter Revolution” nar­ra­tive full of holes. These skep­tics chal­lenged the notion that tech­nolo­gies rather than people are deci­sive for social move­ments, and con­tinue to argue for placing new media impacts within wider, offline (socio-economic and polit­ical) con­texts, stressing that the new tech­nolo­gies are “tools” that are used for oppres­sion as well as liberation.

Although Iran’s case car­ried the Twitter Revolution nar­ra­tive to new heights, it also played a part in main­streaming its counter-narratives. Sullivan him­self was soon among those “cured” of the “Twitter obses­sion,” as Morozov put it. And notwith­standing the unfor­tu­nate irony about the “town square” metaphor, Clinton’s latest speech reflected ele­ments of this more bal­anced counter-narrative when she said of Egypt and Tunisia:

People protested because of deep frus­tra­tions with the polit­ical and eco­nomic con­di­tions of their lives. They stood and marched and chanted and the author­i­ties tracked and blocked and arrested them. The internet did not do any of those things; people did. In both of these coun­tries, the ways that cit­i­zens and the author­i­ties used the internet reflected the power of con­nec­tion tech­nolo­gies on the one hand as an accel­erant of polit­ical, social, and eco­nomic change, and on the other hand as a means to stifle or extin­guish that change… We realize that in order to be mean­ingful, online free­doms must carry over into real-world activism.”

Gone is the empow­er­ment of tech­nolo­gies over people. Despite the con­tested “Twitter rev­o­lu­tion” narrative’s par­tial revival through these recent rev­o­lu­tions, we all seem to be sobering up more and more from the new media cel­e­bra­tions. It looks like the counter-narrative has per­me­ated the main­stream, bal­anced the scales, and even pro­nounced the debate around the “Twitter Revolution” dead.

What next?

Perhaps looking back on the rise of this par­tic­ular nar­ra­tive can shed some light on the path for­ward, including how to approach its more subtle but per­sis­tent vari­ants such as “the Wikileaks Revolution” (Tunisia) and “Revolution 2.0” (Egypt). In Iran’s case, techno-utopianism in inter­na­tional cov­erage boomed due to for­eign jour­nal­ists being banned, cred­ited Iranian jour­nal­ists being restricted, and a young, mobile, tech-savvy, and highly edu­cated pop­u­la­tion being at the ready. Certainly, the Western audience’s recog­ni­tion of social media net­working sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as pop­ular, Western, youth-oriented, and benign also played a part. But the “Twitter rev­o­lu­tion” also caught on due to a number of nar­ra­tives that, in the Western con­scious­ness, pre-existed the uprising.

One of them was the idea, cul­ti­vated since the early 2000s, of Iranian dis­si­dent blogger-journalists being driven to the free spaces of the internet in region­ally dis­pro­por­tionate num­bers, and expe­ri­encing per­se­cu­tion for their online, anti-régime endeavors. The sto­ries of per­se­cuted blog­gers like Sina Motallebi and Hossein Derakhshan (still in jail today) come to mind, as does that of Omid Reza Mir Sayafi, the first Iranian blogger to die in prison. In the same period, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion pushed the Iran Freedom Support Act, which was passed in September, 2006. The serendip­i­tous overlap between the rise of the internet’s role in Iranian civil society and the US régime-change agenda seemed to strengthen both. An addi­tional nar­ra­tive, pur­port­edly repro­duced his­tor­i­cally by Iranian dias­pora in the West, was one of Iranians (or “Persians”, rather) as intel­lec­tu­ally and cul­tur­ally advanced, sim­ilar to Westerners, “civ­i­lized,” and proud.

But there was also a deeper story about the internet itself as a vehicle of gen­uine demo­c­ratic change that may have tipped the scales from bal­anced online/offline inter­na­tional sol­i­darity towards over-enthusiasm about internet tech­nolo­gies. Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture traces internet nar­ra­tives from the technology’s begin­nings, and shows that the inter­sec­tion between the internet and visions of utopian soci­eties is as old as the Net itself. Could this utopian gen­esis nar­ra­tive be at the root of today’s internet-boosting?

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Donya Alinejad is a PhD student at the department of Social and Cultural Anthropology (VU University). For Standplaats Wereld, she co-authored another article (in Dutch) about the educational reforms in the Netherlands. She also wrote about the media coverage of the Haiti earthquake and the Iranian elections of 2009, including the protests that followed.

hoofddoeken (door Reemer)

Door Ton Salman Het is een hard gelag: vroeger kon je je als antropoloog in alle onschuld beperken tot de prototypische thema’s van je eigen regio. Je deed wat hekserij in Afrika, of wat heilige koeien en Boeddhisme in Azië, of een beetje indianenrituelen in Latijns Amerika. En je luisterde respectvol maar met een waterige blik in de ogen naar de verhalen van de collega’s die altijd een ander vliegtuig namen. Die onnozele tijd is voorbij. Eerst waren er de kritische stokebranden die de antropologie uit het exotisme en de dweperij met my village losweekten, toen kwamen er de masochistische etnografieën over de biased sociotopen van de postkoloniale antropoloog zélf, en daaroverheen kwam de globalisering. Het gevolg is dat we nu uitgenodigd worden over hoofddoekjes in Bolivia te schrijven.  

 Ja, u leest het goed. Bolivia, dat land van de lama’s, de coca en de bolhoedjes, van de Aymara’s en dat huzarenstukje van de uitverkiezing van die linkse indiaanse president Evo Morales. Gelegen in Latijns Amerika, dat continent dat steeds moet worstelen om aandacht in de internationale media omdat het geen atoombom en geen internationaal terrorisme heeft. En ook geen hoofddoekjesdebat. Kwade tongen zouden kunnen beweren dat het motief precies dát was: een poging om opgemerkt te worden. Want hoofddoekjes, ja, dáár haal je de International Herald Tribune, de BBC-World en CNN mee. Als dat al het motief was, is het echter mislukt: het debat flakkerde even op, maar te kort om de aandacht van de internationale correspondenten te trekken. Het is alweer voorbij. 

Wat wás er dan met hoofddoekjes in Bolivia? Dit: geïnspireerd door nogal bedenkelijke geopolitieke motieven hebben landen als Venezuela en Bolivia de laatste jaren de banden met 

Protest tegen Ahmadinejad's bezoek aan Zuid-Amerika, foto genomen in Brazilië (door Globovisión)

Iran aangehaald. Immers: de vijand van mijn vijand moet wel mijn vriend zijn. Die ‘vijand’ betreft de USA. Daarom kwam over de afgelopen jaren de Iraanse president Ahmadinejad  maar liefst twee keer op bezoek in beide landen. En in het kader van haar goodwill-politiek schonk Iran Bolivia een ziekenhuis, in de arme stad El Alto. Dat ziekenhuis is onlangs geopend. Tijdens die opening, waarbij Ahmadinejad aanwezig was, droegen de –Boliviaanse!–vrouwelijke verpleegsters en artsen een hoofddoek. Die zouden de medewerksters binnen het ziekenhuis vanaf nu steeds moeten dragen.

De vlam sloeg onmiddellijk in de pan.De critici, niet zelden van oppositionele (en dat is in Bolivia: rechtse) huize, voerden verschillende dingen aan: dit zou een affront zijn jegens de ‘waardigheid’ en ‘trots’ van de Boliviaanse vrouwen, en een knieval voor een ‘vreemde’ religie en een vreemde mogendheid. Dit laatste punt werd dubbel ingepeperd omdat één van de centrale lemma’s van de huidige regering de ‘nationale soevereiniteit’ is – na, zo stelt deze regering, jarenlang gekoeioneerd en uitgebuit te zijn door buitenlandse krachten. De critici refereerden verder aan de spreekwoordelijke ‘terugval in de Middeleeuwen’, de islamitische misogynie, en de tegenstelling tussen Morales’ vrouwvriendelijke wetswijzigingen en deze ‘aberratie’. Kritieken, dit terzijde, die nogal vreemd klonken uit de monden van hen die noch van de Boliviaanse soevereiniteit, noch van de vrouwenemancipatie in het verleden veel werk hebben gemaakt.

Het verweer van regeringszijde –het moet gezegd– was niet sterk en niet coherent. Dat viel des te meer op omdat ‘authentieke culturele identiteit’ één van speerpunten van het huidige beleid is: de indiaanse eigenheid, eeuwenlang onderdrukt, staat in de spotlights. Enerzijds werd door ziekenhuisdirectrice Paola Antezana, werkgelegenheidminister Calixto Chipana, en gezondheidsminister Ramiro Tapia gesteld dat de informatie dat de hoofddoeken een vaste dracht zouden worden, onjuist was; het was slechts voor de éne dag, uit respect voor het hoge buitenlandse bezoek.

Maar andere regeringswoordvoerders gingen daar blijkbaar niet van uit en verdedigden de hoofddoek; zij meenden dat het dragen ervan in het ziekenhuis te maken had met hygiëne en respect voor de cultuur van Iran. Regeringsgezind kamerlid Gustavo Navarro ging verder en stelde dat het ziekenhuis eigenlijk een stukje Iran was en dat er dus andere regels golden. De mooiste reactie kwam van kamerlid Gustavo Torrico  die verklaarde dat, in het hypothetische geval dat Bolivia een ziekenhuis zou schenken aan de USA, de medewerkers daar ook verplicht zouden worden een Boliviaanse lluch’us (een veelkleurige gebreide muts met oorkleppen) te dragen.

Op dit moment is onduidelijk óf, en hoe consequent, de hoofddoek in het ziekenhuis gedragen wordt. Uit dit curieuze verhaal kunnen we echter leren a) dat aparte culturele/politieke/religieuze ‘universa’ met eigen, onafhankelijke logica’s niet meer bestaan; b) dat inspanningen voor verschillende idealen door verschillende mensen op verschillende plekken en gericht op verschillende terreinen zoals het socio-economische, het religieuze, de mensenrechten en de culturele identiteit, bij hun onderlinge ontmoeting onverwachte en kleurrijke kakofonieën opleveren; c) dit alles de wereld voor antropologen weliswaar veel complexer maar ook verrassender en fascinerender maakt; en d) dat in veel ziekenhuizen in onze wereld het personeel hoofddoeken, verpleegsterkapjes, haarnetjes, kanten mutsjes of zelfs modieuze petten draagt. Of niet.

Ton Salman is universitair hoofddocent bij de afdeling Sociale en Culturele Antropologie (VU).  Hij houdt zich onder andere bezig met sociale bewegingen en burgerschap. Zijn regionale specialisatie is Latijns Amerika. Op Standplaats Wereld schreef  hij onder meer over burgerrechten en gemeenschapsrechten en de impact van de financiële crisis (in het Engels) in Bolivia.

Foto door Pazarm

Ook vandaag een bericht over de situatie in Iran, al weer van een antropoloog die de situatie van binnenuit kent. Deze keer laten we onze collega Halleh Ghorashi aan het woord. Zij is zelf twintig jaar geleden uit Iran gevlucht en is momenteel bijzonder hoogleraar Diversiteit en Integratie aan onze Faculteit. Zij schrijft in een ingezonden brief in Trouw waarom ze voor het eerst is gaan stemmen, waarom het een historische keuze is en hoe de huidige situatie in Iran haar doet denken aan de revolutie van 1979. Lees verder op de website van Trouw.

In het televisie programma Vrouw en Paard vertelt Halleh Ghorashi over de belangrijke rol die vrouwen en jongeren spelen in het protest. Het interview wordt voorafgegaan door een boeiend filmpje over de protesten van vrouwen waarvoor nog weinig aandacht is geweest in de Nederlandse media.

This raises important questions for anthropologists. What role can new media play in making political agitation effective? How do these new media give people opportunities to change their world? (Recall Moussavi’s statement in the video: ‘One person=one broadcaster’!) To what extent may the digital revolution transform traditional social and political relationships? Does it change the relation between ‘ordinary’ people and those in power? May the use of internet even affect relationships in the family and those between men and women?

More and more anthropologists are studying the role of new media in people’s lives. In our department for example, Lenie Brouwer looks at Internet use among migrants in the Netherlands, and Donya Alinejad at that among Iranian migrants in the US. Birgit Meyer studies the role of new media in religious practices. Indeed, anthropology has long moved away from the stereotype of studying tribes and clans as isolated groups in exotic places. Instead, it focuses on the very ways people’s lives are changing in the modern world.

By Daan Beekers, PhD student at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology (VU University).

Photo by: Hapal

Color has never before played such an important part in an election campaign in Iran. As the country’s election developments are watched closely by the likes of Netanyahu, the Whitehouse, and other international powers with diplomatic stakes in the outcome, Iran’s bulging youth population have their own concerns in mind as they hit the streets in green. This is especially significant in a country where brightly colored clothing, especially when worn by women, is considered a breach of the Islamic dress code and frowned upon by the ruling mullahs.

Presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, front-runner from the reformist camp, started the color trend that has taken Iran’s urban spaces by storm. Originally, Mousavi supporters displayed the bright green color to represent their candidate’s Sayyedi bloodline (as a descendent of the Prophet Mohammad). But since then, the seas of green that formed at rallies and demonstrations in Tehran in the past weeks clearly came to represent a more political message: opposition, reform, and above all, change.

The trend has also spread to higher levels, with some parliamentarians donning colored ribbons to show support for their respective candidates. Mousavi’s fellow reformist, Karrobi’s color claimed the color white, another color from the Iranian national flag. Once this caught on, it was clear the only color left between the two other candidates, Ahmadinejad and Rezai, was red. When asked what his color was, Ahmadinejad responded by denouncing the use of colors as political symbols, stating that he was represented only by the colors of peace and justice – but later he claimed all the colors of the flag, red, white, and green, were the colors of his campaign.

Conservative (or “principalist”) supporters warned of this use of color as a method for inciting revolution, similar to the ways velvet revolutions in the former soviet countries were led. Mousavi and his supporters denied any relation, stating that it was simply meant to get more people to “vote green.” Some criticized the use of the sacred Islamic color, green, in partisan politics. Others dismissed this color-trend in general as an excuse for young males and females to mix publically. But supporters challenged this, stating its significance was much more than that. It could help limit rigging, as the approximate numbers of green-wearers in the streets could be compared with the numbers of votes for Mousavi.

The use of color is indicative of the many red lines that have been crossed in the lead-up to this election. Another broken taboo has been the open talk and accusations of corruption and deceit between candidates. Yet another includes the unprecedented interest in the elections from the Iranian diaspora, who are usually more inclined to boycott the elections. Finally, the rise in the significance of facebook, blogs, and other online social networks and spaces that have helped inform and organize citizens.

For instance, Mousavi’s campaigners and supporters provide online information when they consider state television to be biased against them, or when their public events are impeded because the sitting government will not issue permits required or provide the electricity needed. Through facebook and mobile phone messaging they organize massive political gatherings on short notice. They put green photos on their profiles to show their political views, and they distribute the videos of the rallies they attend.

Regardless of the differences between those who feel threatened by the use of color in this campaign, and those who feel empowered by it, the shifts that this colorful statement points to are unique in the history of the Islamic Republic. This year’s participants have made it clear that they will make their voices count, and a high turnout has, in the past, meant a reformist victory. But even in the event that this green fever is severely limited to the capital, Tehran, and it fails to raise a reformist candidate to power, the winner will not be able to lead these hungry green masses in the same way they have been ruled until now.

By Donya Alinejad, PhD student at the department of Social and Cultural Anthropology (VU University). Donya is currently staying in the United States where she is conducting fieldwork among Iranian migrants.