A ‘Hybrid Community’ under Stress:
Success or Failure for the American Model?
Jennifer Brickey
ANTH 350
Classroom across the Pacific
Team Humanity
The College of William and Mary
Professor Hamada
May 11, 2006
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Comparing Community Resilience: New Orleans vs. Hong Kong in Crisis, Papers of Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
The response of 'hybrid communities' or 'ethnically pluralistic societies' to highly stressful events, using the examples of hurricane katrina in new orleans and the anti-wto protests in hong kong. The author, jennifer brickey, explores how these communities cope with crises and the role of civil society in providing aid and support. The document also touches upon the historical context of new orleans and its unique cultural mix.
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A ‘Hybrid Community’ under Stress: Success or Failure for the American Model? Jennifer Brickey ANTH 350 Classroom across the Pacific Team Humanity The College of William and Mary Professor Hamada May 11, 2006
A ‘Hybrid Community’ under Stress: Success or Failure for the American Model? The barrage of images in newspapers and on television tested the nation’s collective sense of reality. There were men and woman wading chest-deep in water—when they weren’t floating or drowning in the toxic whirlpool the streets of New Orleans had become. When the waters subsided, there were dead bodies strewn on curbsides and wrapped in blankets by fellow sufferers, who provided the perished their only dignity. There were unseemly collages of people silently dying from hunger and thirst---and of folk writhing in pain, or quickly collapsing under the weight of missed medicine for diabetes, high blood pressure, or heart trouble. Photo snaps and film shots captured legions of men and women huddling in groups or hugging corners, crying in wild-eyed desperation for help, for any help, from somebody, anybody, who would listen to their unanswered pleas. --Michael Dyson, Come Hell or High Water Team Humanity members focused individually on the community, individual, state power and animal welfare of American and Hong Kong civil society in crisis situations, such as the anti-WTO demonstrations in Hong Kong and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. According to Thomas Janoski in Citizenship and Civil Society: A Framework of Rights and Obligations in Liberal, Traditional, and Social Democratic Regimes , “civil society represents a sphere of dynamic and responsive public discourse between the state, the public sphere consisting of voluntary organizations, and the market sphere concerning private firms and unions.”^1 Further, Janoski noted that “there are at least five types of voluntary associations operating in the public sphere: political parties, interest groups, welfare associations, social movements, and religious bodies.”^2 The main question explored by Jennifer Brickey as a member of Team Humanity in relation to community was “how do ‘hybrid communities’ or ‘ethnically pluralistic societies,’ such as New Orleans or perhaps America in general, respond to highly stressful events, such as Hurricane Katrina?” Other analytical questions come from trying to piece together the (^1) Thomas Janoski, Citizenship and Civil Society: A Framework of Rights and Obligations in Liberal, Traditional, and Social Democratic Regimes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 12. (^2) Janoski 14.
Orleans residents and volunteers could prove problematic. Newspaper accounts supposedly contain many rumors on the disaster that have never been confirmed or were found to be false in the months following the event. Dyson noted that “there would be many unfounded allegations circulated in the media, testimony to the strange brew of selective paranoia and stereotyping that floated in the toxic waters of New Orleans and the mainstream press.”^4 But, I believe that individual accounts of volunteers and residents have proven reliable to a certain extent. As to verification, I have had to take people at their word and trust in the honesty of humanity. Yet, a student may say that x was her motive for volunteering when it was really y, and I would have had a hard time discovering the true or false motive. Professor Hamada introduced the Classroom across the Pacific class to the young Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy in America early in the course. Tocqueville visited New Orleans in his exploration of America in the early 1830s. Tocqueville observed in the nineteenth century that “they say that in New Orleans is to be found a mixture of all nations.” Tocqueville’s informant, Etienne Mazureau, commented: “That is true; you see here a mingling of all races. Not a country in America or Europe but has sent us some representatives. New Orleans is a patch-work of peoples.”^5 Although he never found an answer to the question, Tocqueville also wondered about the large differences in outcome of the French experience in Canada and Louisiana. Revisiting the site of Tocqueville’s inquiry, already a “hybrid community” in the early nineteenth century, was a compelling idea. Tocqueville concluded that democratic revolutions were generally followed by an increase in individualism. Does individualism (^4) Dyson 91. (^5) Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1992) 7.
mean that there is no idea of community in America? Is America a place where everyone man must strive for himself or herself and can rely on no one to come to his or her aid in a time of need? Have non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as the Red Cross, bridged the gap between the community and the individual in America? How did American society transition from the communalism of colonial America to Jacksonian individualism and pluralism? These questions were raised in my mind by Professor Hamada’s discussion of Tocqueville. Hopefully, a close analysis of the functioning of American civil society under the stressor of Hurricane Katrina as well as historical research into New Orleans’ past can provide an answer. My initial hypothesis was that hybrid communities responded well to stressful events if certain mechanisms, such as representative government and respect for the differences of other groups, were in place. In the sense that New Orleans failed to respond well to the disaster, I believed that I would see problems with America’s civil society that needed to be addressed if American civil society could continue to be viable. Volunteer impulses, through the organizing lens of NGOs, have proved more efficient and speedy in New Orleans than top-down government response. Animals appeared to be a vital part of the community in some situations, but not in others. For example, rescue societies had a highly visible presence in New Orleans but the federal government did not allow pets to be evacuated on buses with their owners. The differences between Hong Kong and the United States in terms of civil society are far less than imagined at first as explained later in the paper. My project fulfilled the course objective, exploring the meaning and future of civil society in America and Hong Kong, by focusing on major stressor events in civil
Pacific provided a wonderful opportunity to study the differences between Hong Kong, an Asian city, and New Orleans, an American city, under a stressor event. I at first thought that I would be able to find major differences between Hong Kong and the United States. I held a preconceived notion of Asian societies as more group-oriented and lacking in community diversity. Popular culture presents an image of the gap between the American and Asian mind as vast and almost insurmountable. Sociologist Jean Twenge in Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before remarks that “asking young people today to adopt the personality and attitudes of a previous time is like asking an adult American to instantly become Chinese.”^6 In the end, I found a remarkable amount of Western influences in Hong Kong as Hong Kong civil society has been exposed for decades to outside influences. The psychologist Jean Twenge remarks in Generation Me that “the more exposure kids get to American culture, the more they will rebel against the family-first, group-oriented ethos of many cultures around the world.”^7 The city focuses on the gaining of wealth by the individual more than even American civil society. Residents of Hong Kong increasingly come from diverse backgrounds with differences in how they see civil society ideally functioning. The idea of change over time in a community should also be considered for New Orleans. Hirsch and Logsdon in Creole New Orleans note that “if New Orleans was culturally, demographically, and economically part of the French and Spanish empires during its formative years, it was legally and institutionally part of the United States during the nineteenth centuries.”^8 Traditionally, New Orleans society recognized the need (^6) Twenge 8. (^7) Twenge 8. (^8) Hirsch and Logsdon 189.
for both individuality and community. According to Hirsch and Logsdon in Creole New Orleans , “Senegambia had long been a crossroads of the world where peoples and cultures were amalgamated in the crucible of warfare and the rise and fall of far-flung trading empires.” Further, they noted that “an essential feature of the cultural materials brought from Senegambia as well as from other parts of Africa was a willingness to add and incorporate useful aspects of new cultures encountered. New Orleans became another crossroads, where the river, bayous, and the sea were open roads, where various nations ruled but the folk continued to reign.” Hirsch and Logsdon note in Creole New Orleans that to the Bambara, an African tribal grouping common to those of New Orleans background, badenya meant “literally mother-childness, which is also the term for the family compound, represents order, stability, and social conformity centered around obligations to home, village, and kind. Yet the community recognizes that it cannot survive without the innovator: the individual who breaks social bonds (fadenya ).”^9 Hirsch and Logsdon commented on the issue of race and community historically in Creole New Orleans. A powerful family network united maroons and plantation slaves, including the free blacks and mixed-bloods, most of whom, it was claimed, actively aided the maroons, or at least feared them and their relatives enough that they were unlikely to pursue the maroons. This is another example of the permeability of the society, which contradicts the idea that there was deep conflict and hostility between the slave and emancipated black and mixed-blood population or between mixed- blood and black. This permeability extended to relations among peoples of all races, classes, and nationalities in New Orleans, producing a culturally open and profoundly Africanized milieu. Michael Eric Dyson in Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster provided a shocking statistic of the disparity existing in attitudes toward Hurricane Katrina according to race. Dyson stated that “a CNN/Gallup poll found (^9) Hirsch and Logsdon 80.
Meanwhile, a new generation of Americans is withdrawing from the concept of pure individualism without concern for the community. However, the new genearation has certainly not replaced individualism with communitarianism. Thomas Janoski in Citizenship and Civil Society pointed out that in communitarianism “the good society is built through mutual support and group action, not atomistic choice and individual liberty.”^14 Drew Lichtenberger, a career counselor at Virginia Tech, noted that in Generation Me that “individualism and serving yourself are dead ends. Service to others and leaving a lasting legacy is really at the core of the deepest human needs. Strong relationships and community keep us true to who we are and help us see what our lives are meant to be.”^15 The numerous examples of students at William and Mary that volunteered in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or spent countless hours raising money to aid the survivors shows how true Lichtenberger’s words are today. However, Ann Simmons of the Los Angeles Times noted that “many New Orleans residents are determined to be more self-sufficient than they were when Katrina struck, because they think authorities failed them.” For example, she described how Lauren Sweeney refused to open a care package received after the hurricane as “that’s my hurricane basket. I'm accumulating cash a little at a time, and I have a new credit card just for gas.” The failure of the state has both created the impulse for both individual and community to take control in future disasters. Individuals are more likely to rely on close neighbors and friends in addition to themselves to take care of their lives and property instead of waiting for the state or federal government to arrive weeks too late with help in the form of bureaucratic forms and long lines. Phyllis Parun described the situation to Ann (^14) Janoski 18. (^15) Twenge 240.
Simmons, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times best. The community activist that organized a workshop on hurricane preparedness in her Bywater neighborhood sadly noted that "people are doing themselves a disservice if they think the government is going to take care of them. It's fend-for-yourself time." The Gulf Coast was not merely separated into black and white. Nearly 50, Vietnamese fishermen worked in Louisiana in addition to the oldest Filipino community in North America. New Orleans has gained more diversity after Katrina. Latinos made up 3 percent of Louisiana’s pre-Katrina population. Penny Roberts notes in The Advocate that Our Lady of Guadalupe church in New Orleans has become increasingly Latino. Living in relatively small numbers in Louisiana before the storm, Latino workers have come to the city to find jobs in construction and clean-up after the storm. Roberts commented that “the congregation has always been predominantly African-American, counting Fats Domino among its faithful. Much of the music is gospel, distinguished by heavy drum beats pounded on wooden pews and sometimes solos by Aaron Neville. The only language ever spoken is English.” She went on to note that “Sunday after Sunday, brown hands now link with black or white ones as the Lord’s Prayer is recited moments before communion. And the Rev. Anthony Rigoli — the parish pastor — is pleading with the Catholic Diocese of New Orleans to send a bilingual priest so Guadalupe can add a Spanish-language Mass.” We determined those sources to be interviewed and surveyed in the collection of primary data for the experiment. Then, we collected primary and secondary data from written sources, concerning the definitions and prevailing popular American concepts of the sociological constructs that compose the civil society. Next, we analyzed the data
knew, he told me that he would be happy to help me with my project. I at first hesitated to ask him, but then realized that he was truly one of the most qualified people in emergency management in the state of Virginia and had worked in conditions similar to those in New Orleans in the past. Also, I knew that he would answer questions fully and to the best of his ability. People that had a hand in the New Orleans event might not speak candidly on the topic as it was so close to them and they might not like to admit what they did wrong. A question that I asked both the Tulane ESL director and the VA emergency manager concerned the role that race played during Hurricane Katrina. Both of my interview subjects felt that poverty, not race specifically, caused African American communities to be heavily hurt by the storm. Also, Cake reminded me that many middle- class white communities, such as her own, also suffered heavily during the storm and that their plight has often been overlooked in the media. The final question that I asked both interview subjects was the role that animal welfare played in New Orleans. I have felt for some time after talking with Dawn, a member of Team Humanity, that since I am discussing community I really have to know what community includes. Are animals a part of the community? Can society safely consider only humans to be worthy of consideration during major disasters? Both interview subjects believed that animal welfare must be taken into account in emergencies. Cake described how hotels and motels in her state allowed people to bring pets. This was a lesson learned after Hurricane George when people did not evacuate because their pets would not be accepted by hotel owners. The Virginia emergency manager described shelters taking care of pets and how animal welfare has increasingly become a part of emergency plans.
It was regrettable, but we were not be able to do too many site visits together as New Orleans is a long distance from Williamsburg and even D.C., where policy experts reside, was too far for the very short amount of time that we had to prepare for our presentation on Thursday. Thus, we spent most of our time as a team trying to combine research from both sides of the Pacific instead of visiting new sights and taking in more information. As a team, we did generally ask questions for each others part of the project to interview subjects. For example, Jennifer (community) asked about animal welfare to help out with Dawn’s reach and vice versa. Team Humanity met together through a web camera conference on March 30th^ at 9:00 PM. Although an attempt was made to schedule another conference on April 7th, the meeting fell apart because of conflicting group schedules. After e-mailing back and forth, the team decided that they did not really need to do another web camera conference for a few weeks. The time before Andy’s arrival in Williamsburg was used to complete our individual papers so that we can combine ideas to make an excellent PowerPoint presentation during our few short days together. As we would included images in our presentation, each team member found a certain number of pictures, say five or ten, which dealt with their part of the project to include in the group presentation. Of course, we did not use all of the pictures but we did have a variety to choose from and this lessened the work involved when the team was together. After talking with Professor Hamada, I decided to amend my poor knowledge of the World Trade Organization and international trade protests in Hong Kong. Of course, I had taken International Trade Integration and International Trade Theory, both 400-level Economics courses at William and Mary. In fact, my mid-term presentation was on the
our group. However, Andy had an impromptu interview with Professor Fischer of the Anthropology Department at William and Mary. Dean had been working on questionnaire surveys, but these had only gone out to a few people and were not a mass mailing which was probably beyond our humble ability to complete at least in the amount of time available. We did visual materials to illustrate our research, such as photographs of events during Hurricane Katrina or the WTO protests. We did not do any participant observation, although this could have changed if an opportunity presented itself. We had no plans to use cultural artifacts or life histories, but we would have if we could have found them and worked them into our papers and presentation in a useful and coherent way. We did use historical documents, but they were documents from the recent past. We worked on the basic layout of the PowerPoint presentation on Wednesday. We divided the slides used in the presentation. For example, Jennifer had four slides along with sound effects and Andy had five slides and formatting the pictures onto the slide show. We then completed the parts while working side by side in a quiet group study room in Swem. On May 11th, we put the parts that we had worked on alone together. Then we ran through the PowerPoint presentation together a few times. I was disturbed by Todd Oppenheimer’s assertion in The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology that “highly self-directed students, particularly those who like working alone, did very well with online distance learning.”^17 In his mind, distance learning works well only in the sense of a traditional correspondence course with a motivated but isolated student blindly receiving and returning facts to a faceless professor hundreds or thousands of miles away. Oppenheimer (^17) Todd Oppenheimer, The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology, (New York: Random House, 2004)108.
appears to totally discount the power of cultural interaction and independent group research projects, a powerful theme in Classroom across the Pacific. A class taught at the same time in Hong Kong and Williamsburg would be truly impossible without the wonders of modern technology. I feel that much of the criticism leveled at classes like Classroom across the Pacific should be qualified with the pedagogical improvements shown by Tomoko Hamada and Kate Scott in “Anthropology and Interactive Education via the Internet: Collaborative Learning Model.”^18 The independent research design of the class required students to be self- motivated yet work together. Admittedly, I dislike working as part of a team if I feel that I am doing all the work or do not know what task I have been assigned in a project. Once I know what I need to do, I become much happier with my allotted tasks. Instead of a professor saying what exactly I needed to do step-by-step, I had only a rough outline and a team with sometimes highly divergent ideas of where the project was headed. I felt that the independent research project would surely require cross-cultural communication to work as well as mental gymnastics to put individualism, community, animal welfare, and police brutality into one final PowerPoint presentation. Attempting to lessen the confusion meant countless e-mails back and forth clarifying what exactly everyone was doing. I will admit to being confused more than half the time with what was occurring with the project and amazed at the research skills and humor of my partners in both Williamsburg and Hong Kong. I believe that in the end Team Humanity’s project was a modest success, but I do feel that we did too many things at the last possible minute. (^18) Tomoko Hamada and Kate Scott, “Anthropology and Interactive Education via the Internet: Collaborative Learning Model,” Classroom across the Pacific Website, 5 April 2006, <http://www.wm.edu/ cap/explorations/hamadascott.htm>.
Dyson. Michael Eric. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. New York: Perseus Book Group, 2006. Hirsch, Arnold and Joseph Logsdon. Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1992. Janoski, Thomas. Citizenship and Civil Society: A Framework of Rights and Obligations in Liberal, Traditional, and Social Democratic Regimes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Jimenz, Mary. “Many FEMA Mobile Homes Being Used, but Some May Never Be.” Shreveport Times. 2 May 2006. <http://www.shreveporttimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060502/NEWS 1/60502323/1002/NEWS>. Littwin, Mike. “Littwin: City Remains a Shell, and ‘Canes are a-comin.’” Rocky Mountain News. 29April2006. <http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DR MN_86_4660312,00.html>. McConnaughey, Janet. “Thousands of Hispanics Rally in New Orleans.” Nola.com. 1 May 2006. <http://www.nola.com/newsflash/louisiana/index.ssf?/base/news- 24/1146515056279260.xml&storylist=Louisiana>. Moyer, Susan M. Hurricane Katrina: Stories of Rescue, Recovery, and Rebuilding in the Eye of the Storm. New York: Spotlight Press LLC, 2005. Oppenheimer, Todd. The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology. New York: Random House, 2004. Quinones, Sam. “Migrants Find a Gold Rush in New Orleans.” Chicago Tribune. 4 April
<http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/la-na- labor4apr04,1,6408691.story?coll=chi- business-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true>. Roberts, Michelle. “Families Live in Crowded Spaces.” Star-Telegram. 1 May 2006. http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/nation/14471699.htm. . Simmons, Ann M. “In New Orleans Self-Sufficiency is the Theme.” Los Angeles Times. 21 April 2006. <http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na- hurricane21apr21,1,3026496.story?track=crosspromo&coll=la-headlines- nation&ctrack=1&cset=true>.
Strom, Stephanie. “Qatar Grants Millions in Aid to New Orleans.” New York Times. 2 May 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/us/02charity.html. Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Mass Market Paperback Edition. New York: Signed Book, 2001. Twenge, Jean M. Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Wallach, Lori and Patrick Woodall. Whose Trade Organization?: A Comprehensive Guide to the WTO. New York: The New Press, 2004. “William and Mary’s Response to Students Affected by Hurricane Katrina.” William and Mary News. 1 Sept 2005. http://www.wm.edu/admission/?id=5039. Van Heerden, Ivor. Hurricane Katrina: CNN Reports: State of Emergency. New York: Andrew McMeel Publishing, 2005.