Mersigns: 2006-05-07

The Anthropologist
©Melina Magdalena 2006

REPORT: Meeting with Hon. Sharman Stone, Federal Minister for Workforce Participation, Adelaide, April 2006

WAITING TO ARRIVE

I saw the Anthropologist arrive, as I waited outside the building on Grenfell Street. She was keyed up, excited, and looking forward to this meeting. Her two young male minions trotted beside her. It was obvious she enjoyed having them at her beck and call. What woman wouldn’t?

I stood and watched, as Adelaide’s morning traffic trundled past, all eyes to the front, a parade of respectable propriety. She was dressed in a classy frock; hair, makeup, shoes, handbag, a middle-aged woman like many others I’ve never met.

I followed them up in another lift, sure now, that those I was supposed to have met outside must be waiting for me inside. Sure enough, they were. I joined them. We sat around for another ten or fifteen minutes, waiting for the Anthropologist and her assistants to make their brief, public appearance.

ANTHROPOLOGIST OR ECONOMIC RATIONALIST?

Was it she who introduced herself as an anthropologist? I can’t remember. Though her identity as anthropologist has been captured in my mind, a brief search on the web reveals a very different person. Maybe she was an anthropologist as an undergraduate, but her PhD is in Economics and Business.

From what I can discern, no anthropological studies are being conducted of her own community in Canberra, either. She has a husband and several children. Perhaps she has divested her professional training for the Party line? To some degree, most of do this, in one way or another. The sense I got of her was ordinary – a middle-aged white Australian rural woman, with a narrow range of experience and worldly concerns.

Her electorate is in rural Victoria. To its shame, it has the second highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the nation, with a large proportion of these pregnancies amongst the Aboriginal girls in the community. The Anthropologist’s platform became obvious during the course of our meeting: only certain kinds of women should be having children.

Someone told me later that the Anthropologist was the instigating force behind the push by women politicians for RU486 to be made available and accessible in Australia. While I support this move and see the merit behind it, I question some of her motives. The scenario could also read like a recipe for disempowerment. Handing out a ready-made solution to bandage symptoms doesn’t fit with an objective ideal of self-determination; of the right for a particular community to go on evolving, transforming, growing and existing for its very own sake and not only by the beneficence of some higher power that be. Does she think it would solve everyone’s problems to be able to shove the drug into the mouths of girls every time they have sex? Ought they to have better things to do with their time than raise children?

HOSPITALITY

No participant-observer phenomenon was in evidence on this occasion. The anthropologist had erased herself entirely from the picture. We, and not she, were the objects under scrutiny.

Her attitude reminded me of all the nasty stories I have heard about anthropologists and linguists, and their removal of cultural intellectual and spiritual property. Such appropriation may be done in the name of science and academia for the betterment of humankind (better to have the knowledge conserved preserved distilled for the future when nothing is certain to last beyond tomorrow and the people whose culture is thus recorded are not doing anything with it anyway; change and growth are not natural processes, but taints which stain and obscure the otherwise naked truth). The perversion of intellectual study comes when observations are transformed into information and labelled knowledge. Whose knowledge? What meanings are imposed upon it by the eyes of its beholders? Whose name is given as the owner of this knowledge? Who has permission to study it and use it?

I was invited to attend as an unsanctioned representative of my kind. I had a specific role to play, but no authorised voice and no legitimised position to take. As soon as the Anthropologist entered the board room and directed her minions to pour the morning coffee, I perceived the need to hold fast to my power, lest it be drained just like the coffee, in several thirsty gulps. I felt under subtle scrutiny, but she seemed way beyond above board and way beyond question.

That the Anthropologist had agreed to be there was a victory for those who invited me to the meeting – her predecessor dodged every opportunity to make himself available to consult with the stakeholders at the grassroots of this community.

None of us wished to partake of morning coffee or tea. This might have been a mistake. We’d all been up and about for hours, it’s true, but it’s hardly polite to refuse hospitality.

Perhaps we were a little carried away by the moment? The life and death urgency with which we conduct our daily lives could not, after all, be temporarily excised from our beings. A portion of our apprehensions necessarily leaked out, like milk from an overfull, compassionate breast – is this cause for apology? How could we be certain of any future opportunities to make known the issues that fuel our concerns and our actions?

STUDENTS OF CULTURE
We feel most personally injured and aggrieved by those who approach with open hands and then steal what we give them. At least through this trauma of loss we learn to see ourselves from without as well as within. This tool of self-evaluation enables us to articulate our pain and rage for what has been taken from us.

The worst students of culture, whether they call themselves missionaries, linguists or anthropologists, are those who arrive with their minds already closed, opinions already formed. Those who offer us their poison in the form of sugar-coated set solutions and beliefs that are designed to solve all our problems in this world and the next, worm their thinking into our minds like a virus that corrupts whatever it encounters, at those times when we are most desperate to help ourselves. They present a delicate and seductive peril which is calculated to destroy, dismantle and reconstruct bit by bit, our self-belief and most fundamental understandings of our places in the world.

The Anthropologist was not interested in what any of us had to say about ourselves. Like my local MP before her, she met my story as though she were insulated in a cocoon of several insulating layers of spider silk, protected from those shards of verbal insult, the continual ache of stigma which lingers in my underbelly, the stabbing throb of my chronically empty bank account, the flickering shiny migraines of stress that threaten to overwhelm me almost daily if I pay too much attention to what I need to provide and the disparity between this need and my ability to fulfil.

As far as she is concerned, none of this is significant. None of this is even real. It’s some primitive superstition which I and all of those like me could choose to give away, if we would only listen to her and do as she says. She would gladly replace our superstitions with a more suitable set of beliefs and practices and then reward us with right and proper places in society.

WIFE OR WHORE?

No wonder I felt my power being tugged by her magnetic pull. No wonder I felt my self-belief slip into oblivion. No wonder I felt myself being dragged under, under, under. I was fixated by her fundamentalism to the extent that I had to firmly instruct myself to remember why I was there, and what I needed to tell her. And then it all came out wrong. Of course it did. What choice was left to me, but to play the part of the shrew, the nag, the complainer, the victim?

Given the Anthropologist’s dichotomy of choice, between wife and whore, I could only choose the latter.

In the Anthropologist’s world, the whore is every woman without a husband. Whether she has a career, studies, sells, creates, struggles to survive, volunteers, is an addict, is unwell, is childless or a mother, she has no entitlement and no right to claim that she is a productive member of society. A wife, on the other hand, is entitled to see herself as a productive and economic unit of society because no matter what else she does in her life, she has a husband who confers his legitimacy upon her.

The Anthropologist no more looks at the reality of my world than at the world of my children. Under her gaze, I feel like an ant or a bug being viewed by some enormous creature whose vision is blurred and distorted. The lack of recognition on her part feels all the more offensive because of the points of commonality that I can see from where I stand and look at her. It’s bewildering to speak to this woman and feel no connection with her. She is armoured, invincible, fortified and smug.

I did not expect this to be the outcome of our meeting. I had hoped to meet her on common ground, to exchange experiences, share ideas, and open avenues for further discussion and action. I did not expect to agree with her about everything, but to find no connection at all has numbed me for the last few weeks. I haven’t known quite how to respond. In analysing the situation, and acknowledging that for the Anthropologist each of the women who sat at that table with her, is a whore, I can begin to react.

It’s not about the label or the connotations of the word, but about how much its designation omits. The narrow definition allows no room for the parts of me that are most important to how I interact with the wider world community. The designation ‘whore’ admits my sexuality only so far as the intercourse I might or might not have with men. How then, can it so blatantly omit the products of this intercourse – my children?

My identity as mother is what led me to sit around the table with the Anthropologist. As a mother with no husband, she relegates me to a specific role within my community. Not quite the third wheel, but most definitely the odd one out.

Rather than the busy, productive, creative, inventive, contributing, nurturing human being that those close to me perceive me to be, I am a whore – a grasping, whinging, draining, undeserving, unmotivated burden on the so-called taxpayer and the Australian Government, which she represents.

WORKFORCE PARTICIPATION

The beliefs and values that guide me in my life are more than the strings of a marionette that manipulate my movements according to the whims and desires of someone else. They are formed from teaching and experience, and they bear intrinsic meaning. At times, they are fragile, impacted by the cruelty and ignorance of others, whose values, beliefs and experiences are different from my own.

The Anthropologist has an excuse for neither apathy nor ignorance. As my outrage stems from my core belief that what I do in my life counts for something, her apathy reflects her beliefs and values that a woman without a husband should get one, or get a job.

As representative of my kind, I do in fact, have a paid job. In the mind of the Anthropologist, I can only be anomalous, a round peg in that square square hole, though evidence clearly shows I am one of the majority of single mothers. Most of us work very hard to juggle multiple commitments. We work to maintain our households, our extended families and our neighbours. We do everything that is necessary to nurture ourselves and our children. We enter the workforce and we volunteer widely in various capacities to better the lives of our children and their extracurricular activities, as well as to help society as a whole.

This is of course the case for most women in the world today, whether we be wives or whores. Unless we are seriously damaged, addicted or disillusioned, most women engage with the world and participate in life and work. Our level of participation in the paid workforce ebbs and flows, determined by far more than our individual motivation and circumstances. Job availability, conditions, provision of childcare, training, and transport are all determining factors, as well as overall stress levels, our individual circumstances, wider social and environmental issues, the lingering effects of relationship breakdown, the health and needs of our children, convictions and beliefs about how best to parent.

The Anthropologist is Sharman Stone, Federal Minister for Workforce Participation. She came to Adelaide in April to meet the former and current directors of the NCSMC (National Council for the Single Mother and Her Child), Director of SPARK (Single Parent Resource Centre) and me, single mother of two. The meeting was a preliminary meet and greet, at which we were to explore where we could go from here, to improve conditions for single parents in Australia.

I was briefed before the meeting to present my case of government-enforced and sponsored poverty as a personal experience with which I have struggled over many years, and which impacts daily on my ability not only to parent my children well, but on my ability and willingness to maintain my participation in the paid workforce.

The central issue for me, as it is for most sole parents, is the combination of taxation and taper rates which affect our income, meaning that unless we work full-time and thereby disqualify ourselves for the government assistance in terms of welfare and concessions, 70% of what we earn is retained by the Government, thereby trapping us into an endless cycle of poverty. It’s a straightforward calculation, callously and strenuously maintained by the Australian Government. No one can seriously deny its detrimental impact upon sole parents and our children.

The situation could be easily fixed, if the Government cared. If the Government cared to take a longer term view, it would see that mothers generally live longer than the seven years now allotted us to parent. Single mothers need time and assistance to achieve some level of financial independence from welfare not only as our children grow up, but as we ourselves grow older.

Personally, I don’t mind being poor. The reality for me though, is that I empty my bank account each week in order to pay for the things that keep my children and me alive. This makes me destitute.

The Government has no excuse for keeping me in this position. The Anthropologist’s stated position is that the Government cannot afford to keep such a large proportion of the population on welfare payments. This is a lie.

The Anthropologist’s claim that “A job is more than just about financial rewards and economic independence”* is apologist rhetoric. I wonder just what she means by ‘a job’? It doesn’t sound like she wants us to make serious career choices that will assist us to grow as engaged, contributing and valued Australians who participate in the workforce because this enhances our well being and self-image, but rather to be the slag who takes any old work that’s going, because no one else wants to do it.

And let’s face it – with the breaching regimes that are being set up right now, surely we would rather take whatever work is offered to us, than see our children starve? That’s certainly the message I got, when the Anthropologist told us that getting that a job must come before training or education. Sole parents who wish to study are welcome to make that choice, so long as they also fulfil their obligations to the Government to maintain their jobs.

At the moment, working sole parents pay for our own pensions, as well as paying all the taxes paid by every other Australian consumer, and all other workers. Working sole parents and working people on Disability Support Pensions are the most highly taxed and marginalised Australians.

To live in this absurd situation is like being imprisoned in a labour camp where we are to free ourselves by digging a tunnel that each night is refilled with the excreta of every prisoner and every guard. It feels like being in a trap, where our choice is to continue to struggle in excruciating pain, or to chew off our own leg to obtain some degree of freedom.

This protectionist style of government claims to know best what I need, and refuses to listen to me despite the fact that I am a member of the voting community. I feel it edging ever closer to fascism. It’s frightening to reflect upon the RU468 debate and what the drug represents as far as regulating the fertility of Australia’s unmarried women. It’s beyond me how public opinion now sees the raising of children as a luxury and not a normal part of the lifecycle. Aren’t human beings supposed to live in families? The Government’s attitude renders the work of a mother meaningless and valueless, unless she is also nurturing an adult male – her husband.

The choice of the Anthropologist and her Government to continue to punish single mothers with this taxation regime is the choice to bind me and my children to poverty, and deny us the opportunity to normalise our lives and struggle to better our future position and standing within our communities.

I cannot deny the products of my own fertility, whether my children came out of a legally-sanctioned heterosexual relationship or whether I chose some other means of reproduction. I cannot unmake the bed I lie in. I am a mother and I am not a wife. If that makes me a whore, than I ought at least to be able to make a living.

*Media Release, Dr. Sharman Stone (11/4/2006) “What July 1 really means for welfare recipients”, URL http://www.sharmanstone.com/media06/06-04-11a.htm viewed on-line, 13/5/2006.

Mersigns

Saturday, May 13, 2006

The Anthropologist

Monday, May 08, 2006

These old doldrums