For my anthropology book review, I decided to read and analyze The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail by Jason de Leon. Jason takes a look at U.S.-Mexico immigration policies from a holistic anthropological view that includes forensic science, linguistics, ethnography, and archaeology. The book’s main argument about immigration is the Sonoran Desert is used by the United States government as a cruel and harsh method of border enforcement. After reading this text, I would highly recommend it to be used as a required course reading because it provides an honest and realistic description of the conditions immigrants face when trying to relocate to the United States.
The first section of this ethnography is titled “This Hard Land”, so I predicted it would be about the geographical challenges that immigrants face coming to America. De Leon and his friend Bob Kee start the first chapter (Prevention Through Deterrence) by walking through the 100-degree Sonoran Desert in search of remains of “illegal” immigrants that the police overlooked in their search. The author talks briefly about how the police and sheriff departments are highly unmotivated to do anything regarding the matter because of the immense heat and the fact that they consider the people to be “illegal”. The book says, “… if they can keep calling them “illegals,” they can avoid speaking their names or imagining their faces. “ (De Leon 66). It also brings up the idea of historical amnesia which is the concept of people forgetting that this nation was founded by immigrants in the 1700s. The book also brings up the idea of Agamben’s State of Exceptions and Space of Exceptions.
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Agamben’s State of Exception is “…the process whereby sovereign authorities declare emergencies in order to suspend the legal protections afforded to individuals while simultaneously unleashing the power of the state upon them.”. From a personal analysis, I can deduct that this is the reasoning authorities give to treat certain groups of people inhumanely and unjustly. On a similar note, a Space of Exception as defined in the book is a , “physical and political location where an individual’s rights and protections under law can be stripped away upon entrance.”. These are most often found in border cities and are cited as matters of “national security”. De Leon says that, ““Having your body consumed by wild animals is but one of many “exceptional” things that happen in the Sonoran Desert as a result of federal immigration policies.”. After his brief narrative about finding human remains in the desert, the author goes on to talk about the immense amount of people that have died due to harsh conditions in the Sonoran Desert.
Over a 14-year span, more than 2,500 bodies have been recovered In the Sonoran and more than 800 remain unidentified. I believe the author uses these statistics to show that although a large number of immigrants are dying, there is little rush or importance placed on identifying these bodies which shows the inhumane procedures in place by the United States government. Chapter 2 of the book is largely composed of a narrative that the author calls a “semi fictionalized ethnography”. In this narrative he uses information from actually stories and accounts to dramatize the difficulties people face . Chapter 3 of the book is the chapter that I took the most out of. If this chapter were to be on its own, I think that would be fine because the main idea of this chapter is a huge deal.
Prior to reading this ethnography I had never heard of the term used before. I had heard of the prefix “necro” and root word of “violence”, but never used together. Necroviolence as described by Mr. De Leon is the mistreatment of dead bodies which in this case are those of migrants. The chapter starts off by describing an experiment Mr. De Leon conducted to see how fast bodies compose in the desert conditions. He did this by killing three pigs and dressing them up in clothing that might be typical of a migrant. His observations determined that after a few days of being deceased, birds and other carnivorous animals would tear these bodies to shreds. Necroviolence and the idea of necropolitics are displayed by the American government as justification for people dying in the Sonoran Desert. He relates this idea to how lynching and other forms of body mutilation were used in the segregated southern United States.
As displayed by the amount of analysis I have on it, the first part of this book, This Hard Land, is the most informational piece of the ethnography. This being said, the other sections of the book also touch on some really important ideas.
El Camino, starts off with the narrative of Memo and Lucho. The story of Memo and Lucho added to the quality of the book because it described the harsh conditions of the Sonoran Desert based on accounts of actual survivors. When talking about the deportation process, De Leon formally states his opposition to how Homeland Security handles immigrant situations.
Perilous Terrain, focuses on the unfortunate story of Marciela. Marciela was an immigrant from Ecuador who died crossing the Sonoran Desert and wound up as a victim of necroviolence. The author along with other anthropologists searched to find her brother in New York and met with Marciela’s family in Ecuador. The lasting idea that De Leon leaves us with is how the United States uses the cruel and harsh Sonoran Desert to hide behind and justify poor mistreatment of migrants.
An issue that I found with this book was that at no point in it did the author give any potential solutions to the issue of the Sonoran Desert. I understand that he is simply an anthropologist, but I think that the problem will continue to persist if we keep waiting for the “next person” to find a solution.
Overall, I found this book to be really insightful into the conditions that a lot of immigrants have to face when trying to find a better life in the States. I think a common misconception is that all immigrants get to this country by “jumping a fence” or “swimming across a river”, when in reality, the trek to America is dangerous and causes a lot of people to lose their lives. I would highly recommend this book to be read by future anthropology classes; specifically, the first section because it is very descriptive as to the conditions in the Sonoran Desert. The following sections are also beneficial to supporting the author’s argument by providing real world examples to personalize ideas with the audience.
Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Care
Through Instagram Direct Messages, I was pestering my cousin brother for an exchange of books (him, obviously being the one with a greater and better library of books), which is when I became aware of the existence of the novel with no simple story, named “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert M. Pirsig. It does not cease to amuse me how its inception in my mind was from a virtual world, and with my brother’s grace, when I had this book in my hand soon enough, it showed me just about everything I exactly needed to at that very moment. I was not reading the book, the book was reading me.
Published in 1974 after being turned down by more than 100 other publishers, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is an unforgettable narration of summer motorcycle trip executed by a father and his son across the western United States. Almost autobiographical, it entails a flashback to a period in which the author Robert Pirsig was diagnosed as schizophrenic. He inherited a high IQ, and graduated high school at the age of 15; he was later merited with a degree in philosophy. He then was employed as a technical writer and instructor of English until his schizophrenic episode. His philosophical thinking and personal experiences during these years, including a 1968 motorcycle trip across the US West with his only son, Christopher, formed the core of the narrative of the novel.
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For me, subjectively, its meandering philosophical flow captured the imagination. Literally, the book’s “Zen” is a beacon of the hippie movement while “motorcycle maintenance” has schemes of technology and the “Art” is represents the contradictions; it is the part where it gets indefinite correlating with its subtitle, “An Inquiry into Values” which also seems at variance with these definite themes. Analogically, it can be understood in all the deep ends that do not stick to one genre, which is beautiful and horrific at the same time.
It is reading it in the quiet moments where you are, to an outsider, present, but inside your head, there is a volcano erupting due to the given theories that attack your beliefs and destabilize them. Usually, there are books that provide you with a story and you attempt to read it as soon as you can, but this story is one such where you need to tread slowly and delve deeper as you do.
What has stuck with me the most is his discussion of knowledge as a spatial entity. Knowledge is narrated by Pirsig as a landscape painting of peaks and valley. The terrain can be rough or easy-going. It can be well-traveled or seldom seen. Changing by the forces of mind themselves, the landscape figure up and erodes over time. Numerous times throughout the book, Pirsig uses this intellect landscape treatment directly as metaphor in narration and dialogue. But the treatment is deeper than just quotable details – it focuses on Zen and the entire structure of Art. The story of his motorcycle /hiking journey with his son in latitude with his intellect journey (comprised of his chautauquas and his past as Phaedrus). Intricately, throughout, law of similarity between those two journeys is absolutely uncanny. (This is worth essays, but here’s a taste.) Each of the follow gearing points are an attempt to appearance just a few law of similarity between the physical and intellectual landscape as told by Pirsig: As the motorcycle political party traverses the well-traveled, low altitude Yellowstone Valley , the reader learns about Phaedrus’ human relationship to conventional Western thought. Both landscapes (physical and intellectual) are well-worn paths of past. Both landscapes are uneven and untraveled, and both are unsafe because of the long distance to fall before reaching established, populated ground.
Let me explain. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance interweaves two parallel plots: the first is the road trip undertaken by the narrator (author himself) and his son Chris. The second plot discusses the life and thoughts of a solitary, intellect-obsessed Phaedrus, with a philosophical concept named Quality, with a capital Q. At the beginning of the story, the narrator and Chris leave Minneapolis on a motorcycle trip with their friends, John and Sylvia Sutherland. As the group travels, the narrator intersperses accounts of the trip with philosophical discourses that he calls Chautauquas.
The narrator is brilliant, has pursued Eastern and Western philosophy and spirituality, and is grounded in scientific intellection and technological understanding, too. He has served in the armed military unit , been a university professor, and writes technical documents for a living. He is preoccupied with thinking, and that trait reveals something unresolved in his personality. It has resisted him from connecting to his life roles as fully as one might wish, particularly when it comes to being an emotionally healthy father who is representing parenthood fairly. He has developed a unique perspective toward motorcycle sustainment, and riding round is one of his briny pursuits. He embarks on this journeying as a seeking for some resolution to his ongoing life angst. (*Spoiler Alert*) This angst, is his Previous- Phadreus, which is transparent, and transparently a ghost to Pirsig, which is “haunting” him and his son. The very first appearance of this ghost leaves the reader bound in a spell in the most terrified way possible. It is quoted as follows:
“And in the fog there appears an intimation of a figure. It disappears when I look at it directly, but then reappears in the earner of my vision when I turn my glance. I am about to say something, to call to it, to recognize it, but then do not, knowing that to recognize it by any gesture or action is to give it a reality which it must not have. But it is a figure I recognize even though I do not let on. It is Phaedrus.
During the writing process of this review, I found that the author died on April 24, 2017 which is strangely also the time I started reading it. I learned that there is a fine line between genius and mad, but this line is not always visible to the onlooker, it shifts in phases and ideas. Robert Pirsig had been diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia but one fine day, he waved a gun to his wife’s face and was institutionalized after that and not post the diagnosis.
Another significant part of the book is the stark division of a romantic and a classicist. The author identifies himself as a classicist, but the labeling itself is romantic, ironically. Layman terms like technophiles or technophobes can be casually used in place of classicists and romantics. Coincidentally, classification is the very of heart of Aristotelian philosophy.
The book was rejected by a hundred publishers, but once it was published, it received acclaim, both commercial and critical, all over the world. For normies, the book may be tedious. But the key is to stick to the analogies and not give up no matter how slow you read. For hippies, the book may be quasi-bible. For philosophers, it may be collection of what Plato and Aristotle have already questioned. But in his defense, he was just trying make peace with himself.
