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- A Day on the Hill
(Note: This piece was first published in the student-run journal, Vera de Nobis, at Utah Valley University. It has been revised and edited to fit this format.)
In the book Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, global circumstances are such that all animal life is infectiously deadly to humans. With this now highly restricted food source, cannibalism has become not only legalized but institutionalized. Special language is expected regarding any of the practices surrounding the farming of humans. This fictional world would even consider speaking as plainly as I am now highly taboo.
“They gave human meat the name ‘special meat.’. . .He doesn’t call it special meat. He uses technical words to refer to what is a human but will never be a person, to what is always a product. . . .No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity.”
As I stood at the foot of the Utah State Capitol, surrounded by fellow Utahns who want better for our trans kinsmen, I became aware of just how directly this can be understood as a war of bodies. No more and no less, but never-endingly complex. The message from the speakers was an overwhelming message of getting to know your fellow protestors. However, the nameless nature of my experience that day highlights my aforementioned “war on the body”. We were here to show up, and to represent, to use our bodies in an act of defiance against harmful, fear-based legislation against the bodies of others. It sends a message of malicious compliance, ‘If you want to see us as bodies to mandate and legislate, then that’s what we’ll be: bodies.’
It isn’t hard to see how protesting is deeply entwined, and almost synonymous with, activist research. As a nameless participant in the mass of people, as LGBTQ-adjacent, or as an ally, your job is to listen; support, and cheer on the liberation of the bodies of the marginalized: trans bodies, colored bodies, and disabled bodies. These are bodies that make ‘those in power’ uncomfortable, and the same bodies we can use to show up and make those who try to control others uncomfortable for once.
I also found utility in seeing protests as a beating heart that gives the community life and as a nervous system that connects and organizes different teams or functions. It’s a place of networking and connection, socially and emotionally. Participating in a protest like this allows one to use one’s body to form a greater collective body that can wage war against the larger monstrous systems at play.
We voluntarily give up our identity in an act of solidarity, to be seen instead as the unified bodily identity of one people. In her piece “The Primacy of the Ethical”, Nancy Scheper-Hughes recounts a story of how she mediated a quarrel between her research assistant and her local collaborators. Their main (justified) gripe was, “Why had I refused to work with them when they had been so willing to work with me? Didn't I care about them personally any more [sic]-- their lives, their suffering, their struggle?” Perhaps the stance anthropologists today need to take is one of, ‘How can you do proper anthropology without suffering and working alongside your research community?”
Utahns standing at the bottom of the steps of the state capitol in the rain
1 Bazterrica, A. (2020). Tender Is the Flesh [Kindle]. Scribner. pp. 7-8
2 Scheper‐Hughes, N. (1995). The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology. Current Anthropology, 36(3), 410. https://doi.org/10.1086/204378