Kay Warren

WARREN'S RESEARCH PROJECTS:

(A) FOREIGN AID IN LATIN AMERICA: JAPANESE, EUROPEAN, AND AMERICAN SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVES AND PRACTICES
In anthropological parlance, this research is formulated to "study up" in order to understand how major international donors such as the governments of Japan, the E.U., and the U.S. create knowledge about important world regions and how they act on these understandings. Anthropological critiques of development have rarely examined international donors, the social history of their engagements with different world regions, the ways state politics and bureaucratic culture structure development activities, and the meaning that transnational engagements have for professionals involved in implementing development policy. Rather, anthropologists have focused on project outcomes, the restructuring of societies as a result of World Bank and IMF initiatives, and the history of local and regional resistance to development projects. By contrast, this research project aims to ethnographically examine the production of knowledge about Latin America, Africa, and East Asia by the regions' major foreign aid donors. Given that Japan was the largest donor to Latin American countries from the mid-1980s to 2000, and that Warren is a Latin Americanist by training, she has started there.

Warren is interested in: (a) debates over the "rank of the rich" foreign aid donors; (b) the shift in Japan from large infrastructure projects to the current agenda of "global issues," "millennium development goals," and, under Dr. Ogata's new leadership, "human security" – which involves peace building, democratization, education, and gender/women in development, and poverty alleviation; (c) debates over economic growth versus social development; and (d) the way Japan's social development and training agency, JICA, constructs its mission as avoiding what it construes as politicized ODA projects, at the same time that the Koizumi government appears to be rethinking its political goals and intervention strategies in the post-9/11 world order as a militarized coalition partner to the U.S.

This research is also concerned with the way the Japanese state grapples with the waves of transnationalism that break back on Japan's shores. The Koizumi administration's privatization drive and recent recessionary pressures have put pressure on the development bureaucracies to sell "efficient" spending for international projects to the Japanese people through the mass media, documentary films, and regional activities. The government has had to respond to a series of politically charged issues, including immigration and refugees, the trafficking in persons, and domestic security in the face of the war on terrorism.

Warren tested the feasibility of this project with the support of an Abe Fellowship from the Japan Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies, which funded three short trips to Japan in 2000 and 2001. She then pursued interviews and archival research in Japan with a Senior Research Fulbright Fellowship that funded five months of research in 2003 and a return trip for an additional four months in 2004. She began to present her research results in Europe and Japan during her Olof Palme Professorship at the University of Stockholm in 2004 and her Morgan Lectures and other conferences and lectures in Japan, Sweden, Canada, and the U.S. in 2005 and 2006.

Warren is working on three projects related to this research:

Remaking Transnationalism: Japan, Foreign Aid, and the Search for Global Solutions is a volume Warren is editing with political scientist and Japan scholar, David Leheny from the University of Wisconsin. They convened an international network of 12 Japanese and North American-based social scientists which met at Brown University for three days in 2005 and in Japan for three day in 2006 to discuss our research findings. Members of the group are analyzing different case studies of Japanese foreign aid in practice and its global circulation and local appropriation. Other case studies are also considering the waves of transnationalism that flow back on Japan's shores from different parts of the world. The manuscript will be completed and submitted to publishers for review by the end of August, 2006.

Human Trafficking and Transnationalism: Global Solutions, Local Realities elaborates themes from the Morgan Lectures which Warren gave in 2005. This work considers the development of global norms to define human trafficking, the enforcement of these norms through the U.S. Department of State's TIP Reports, which rank compliance, the development of transnational anti-trafficking campaigns in different regional contexts, and the trafficking of women and minors from Colombia and the Philippines to Japan. At issue are Japan's responses to global pressures for legal and policing reforms.

Politics, Culture, and Identity Abroad and at Home: A Multi-sited Ethnography of Japanese Social Development Policy and Practice involves a Pacific Rim examination of Japan's relation with Latin America, the way "social development" agendas intersect with Latin American realities, and how Latin American governments, movements, and communities market themselves to attract this funding. This research builds on three decades of Warren's work in Guatemala and Peru and involves new research on Bolivia and Colombia.


(B) VIOLENCE, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Warren has long been interested in how politically marginalized communities develop knowledge about themselves and their social, moral, and political environments through a variety of cosmological, political, and historical narratives, and through activism in local, national, and transnational organizations. The comparative aspect of this research focuses on (a) indigenous and class activism in the context of counterinsurgency states in Latin America, and (b) cross-regional studies of conflict, peace processes, and social instability.

For the ethnographic aspect of this research, Warren worked in Guatemala in 1970-72, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2001 on studies of culture, conflict, and ethnic resurgence among rural and urban Mayans. Her first book, The Symbolism of Subordination: Indian Identity in a Guatemalan Town (1978), focused on racism, religion, and social change. Subsequently, Warren examined the militarization of community life, the dramatic surge of pan-ethnic movements to challenge state repression, the focus on cultural rights, language and educational issues, and activist history across generations in Maya communities. Her book on war, peace, and the political movements is entitled Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala (1998). To comparatively explore indigenous resurgence across Latin America, Jean Jackson and Kay Warren edited Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America (2002), which examines indigenous mobilization and state politics in Guatemala, Colombia, and Brazil. Warren continued that collaboration with a major comparative essay on indigenous politics in Latin America for Annual Reviews of Anthropology (2005).

Warren has pursued comparative research on violence in three wider comparative projects. Her first edited collection, The Violence Within: Cultural and Political Opposition in Divided Nations (1993), provides case studies of national conflict, identity politics, and local culture, based on her work – funded through an institutional MacArthur grant – with anthropologists and comparative political scientists who did field projects in Brazil, Northern Ireland, Iran, Egypt, Israel, the Philippines, and South Africa. Most recently, Carol Greenhouse, Beth Mertz, and Kay Warren edited a collection Ethnography in Unstable Places (2002) that deals internationally with state instability and with post-cold war transitions that have radically altered social fields, power structures, and cultural frames for social action in Europe, Russia, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Finally, Warren has written two essays (2006; in press) and planned a third on Begoña Aretxaga's representational strategies in her field notes and published works on Northern Ireland.


(C) GENDER, COMMUNITY, AND CHANGE IN THE PERUVIAN ANDES From 1974 to 1985, Kay Warren collaborated with Susan Bourque on studies of social change in rural Peru. This field research focused on the social construction of gender, and on the formulation by agriculturalists and urban migrants of social ideologies and strategies for development in the face of national economic and political crises, from the Peruvian revolution to the rise of the Shining Path guerrilla movement. This research involved joint fieldtrips to Peru in 1974, 1975, 1978, 1981, and 1983.

Publications resulting from this research included articles on the interplay of gender and class in agrarian economics and community politics, the politics of communication, ethnicity, the influence of revolutionary and post-revolutionary national policy on rural settlements, and the impact of state expansion on ethnic, class, and sexual stratification. The major findings were presented in Women of the Andes: Patriarchy and Social Change in Rural Peru (1981), an award winning ethnography. This is a comparative study of gender relations, economics, and politics in the agrarian community of Mayobamba and the neighboring commercial town of Chiuchin on the western slopes of the Andes. In response to the militarization of the countryside in the mid-1980s, we concluded our research on Peru with an examination of the economic crisis of the 1980s and the Shining Path guerrilla movement.