Multiplying and Dividing - The University of Auckland

During the four years since our project began, similar ideas have been expressed by publicfigures in the national media. A recent example came from the pen of a former Member ofParliament in the ACT party, Deborah Coddington, who became a senior writer for themonthly magazine, North and South (2006:39-47). In an article titled on the cover page,“Asian Angst: Is It Time to Send Some Back?”, Coddington (2006:39) adopted theunmistakable stance of “national manager” (Hage 1998:42) which Peters also espoused. Sheargued that “Asian immigration” has brought “murder, extortion, kidnapping, assassinationsand disease” into New Zealand. She particularly referred to a recent school outbreak of TBwhere the initial case was a school boy who had been in New Zealand with his family for fouryears before being diagnosed with tuberculosis. She appeared to assume that a TB ‘test’ in2002 would have prevented the boy developing TB late in 2005 or early 2006 and also wouldhave prevented the transmission of TB to his school mates (Coddington 2006:45).Hage’s (1998) work on the way in which “others” are incorporated into the national space aspeople who are under constant suspicion of destroying or interfering with the way of life ofthose entitled to membership by birth, provides a framework of analysis for these publicstatements. He uses the term “national managers” to refer to those who imagine that theyhave an entitlement to include or exclude others and to define the terms of others’ acceptancewithin the national space. Embedded in these TB and immigration discourses is a metaphorequating bodily and national margins: a version of the body politic as theorised by Lock andScheper-Hughes (1987), who built on the earlier work of Mary Douglas (1966, 1973).Refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in general are seen as having the capacity to invadethe nation, the body politic, in the same way that TB invades the personal body. As aconsequence, attention to control of both TB and migration is directed to the borders:dangerous and ambiguous margins as Douglas demonstrated.As social scientists who are interested in the critical evaluation of appeals to xenophobia, andracism and discrimination against immigrant groups, as well as in understanding why NewZealand has almost twice the TB notification rate of Australia or Canada, we wished to gobeyond the headlines and summary statistics to research the relationships betweenimmigration and tuberculosis. This goal led us in several different research directions. Ledby Jody Lawrence, we undertook a systematic survey of tuberculosis in the media (Lawrenceet al. 2008). We planned studies with communities classified as ‘other’, specifically of Asianand African origins, as well as with Pacific peoples. We wished to explore their experience ofTB and settlement in New Zealand (see Anderson, Lawrence, and Ng Shiu et al., thisvolume). We undertook a review of the international and New Zealand data on immigrationand TB to investigate the relationship between them (Littleton et al. 2008). As a result of this,and provoked by the theme “Beyond Ethnography” for the November 2005 Association ofSocial Anthropologists of Aotearoa New Zealand Conference, Park and Littleton (2007)argued that, although ethnography is pivotal to our research on tuberculosis, we needed to gobeyond some narrower conceptualisations of ethnography in order to sort out the relationshipsbetween tuberculosis and immigration and to investigate the social justice issues involved.We argued that we needed a multi-disciplinary, multi-level approach, which we haveattempted through the framework of political ecology, and we needed to ensure our researchresults were addressed to specific public audiences: to engage in public anthropology. Thisbrief chapter draws on and summarises all of this work. This task has been made a great dealeasier with the publication, late in 2006, of two key New Zealand public health epidemiologypapers (Das et al. 2006, Das, Baker and Calder 2006).55