The affective loop is dizzying as it moves us between distant places and local homes, political upheavals and natural disasters, raging storms and individual stories, the serious and the absurd. Unable to catch my breath between blows or steady myself according to some sense of scale, I feel like so much has happened since the tsunami struck. And yet, I don’t know what to make of any of it.  Are we just bracing ourselves for the next thing?

In an April article entitled “The Half-life of Disaster” Brian Massumi discusses how this media cycle leads us into a perpetual state of foreboding that brings together natural, economic and political threat perception in a configuration that fuels what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism”. The horror is never resolved or replaced; rather, it is archived, infinitely accessible over the Internet.  Cast into the web of other events, the unendurable tragedy of a particular event dissipates, or as Massumi says, “it decays”.  In today’s catastrophic mediashpere, observes Massumi, the half-life of disaster is at most two weeks.

Why have we let the situation in Japan recede into the background of other “big news”?  Massumi and others suggest that this “post-shock pre-posturing” increasingly delegates collective response to the national security apparatus, obscures the structural causes of “natural” disaster (Katrina as well as Fukushima illustrate this point well), and feeds the increasingly centralized global economy which capitalizes on the instability created by the very disasters it helps potentiate.

While I discussed responsibility and resistance in relation to mass-mediated affect in my last post, here I want to offer another mode of response: stepping out of the affective loop.  While feeling with others in the context of suffering is perhaps the only appropriate response when faced with the immediacy of another’s pain, undoing the social causes of suffering requires a continuously engaged critical perspective. I’d like to offer that the ongoing events in Japan are terribly important to us right now in an unfolding global context.

What’s perhaps most important about the aftermath of the disaster was not what happened in the first two weeks, but what is happening twelve weeks out.  Not only does the US public need to step out of the media-driven affective whirlpool, but we need to step back into the global conversation about energy sustainability and the political, social, economic, and environmental disasters brought about in the effort to maintain the current levels of profit.

The meltdowns at Fukushima temporarily unmask the social and environmental dangers always present in nuclear power.  Likewise, the uprisings in the Middle East reveal the grave economic disparities and instability generated in oil-based economies.  We mustn’t let these revelatory and revolutionary moments pass away.

As proposed by Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis in a letter addressed to Japan, the “international capitalist power-structure” is terrified that the disempowered will seize upon the explosive political potential of these moments.  Their letter suggests that if disaster capitalism runs on an ever-present low-level threat perception, its leading industrial sector—energy—runs on the public’s perception that everything is fine and dandy:

Company men and politicians are aware that the disaster at Fukushima is a tremendous blow to the legitimacy of nuclear power and in a way the legitimacy of capitalist production. A tremendous ideological campaign is under way to make sure that it does not become the occasion for a global revolt against nuclear power and more important for a process of revolutionary change. The fact that the nuclear disaster in Japan is taking place in concomitance with the spreading of insurrectional movements throughout the oil regions of North Africa and the Middle East undoubtedly adds to the determination to establish against all evidence that everything is under control.

Claims like these and others (insert link) about “ideological campaigns” in the name “global revolt” may be motivated by a romantic view of political agency. But the history of nuclear power in the US and Japan suggests that Federici and Caffentzis are right to expose the neoliberal interests that inform the framing of recent events.

Historically, the nuclear-friendly PR machine (with Eisenhower and the “Atoms for Peace” campaign at the helm) played a huge role in Japan’s acceptance of nuclear power.  Of course it did.  How in the world, we might ask, would a country like Japan—the only country ever gutted by a nuclear weapon—come to accept nuclear powered energy at the behest of the very country that dropped the bomb??

Historian Peter Kuznick answers precisely this question and explains the process of propaganda and acceptance in a recent essay.  Putting Japan’s nuclear history Pointo perspective, Kuznick writes: “their nuclear program was born not only in the fantasy of clean, safe power, but also in the willful forgetting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the buildup of the US nuclear arsenal.”  While the human scale of suffering and loss initiated in northeastern Japan will always remain incomprehensible, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown are being fashioned at this very moment into historically comprehensible events. The social, political and economic stakes in these repertoires of fantasy and forgetting are high.

Most blatantly, perhaps, we find these repertoires rehearsed in mainstream media stories about Fukushima.  Last week President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea and Chinese premiere Wen Jiabao visited Japan to speak with Prime Minister Naoto Kan in a tripartite summit in order to discuss Japan’s handling of the nuclear crisis and foster trade relations.  The conservative Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan’s most widely circulated paper, and one with long-held stakes in the nuclear industry…from the time it conspired with the CIA to promote nuclear development in Japan in the 1950s up until the present day) wrote:

Kan was particularly enthusiastic about realizing the visit by the three leaders to a quake-hit area… Some in the government expressed anxiety over security for the leaders. But Kan said: “The sight of us three eating produce from Fukushima Prefecture will definitely be reported overseas. That’d be the best protection we can get against harmful rumors,” and the plan went forward.

Kan links “security” to “protection … against harmful rumors” and asserts that foreign press coverage will provide the protection. One must assume that these “rumors” consist of statements about the ongoing harm by radioactive materials to people in the area of Fukushima and the hazards of all forms of nuclear energy more broadly.  By using the term “rumor” Kan is delegitimizing these claims, while simultaneously taking them seriously enough to situate their threat within the discourse of national security.  Regarding the stakes at play in controlling this information dissemination, Japanese scholar Yoshihiko Ikegami writes:

The government calls the information shared on the internet “rumors” and repeatedly urges the public not to believe them. In addition, a public advertising organization called Advertising Council Japan is airing a TV commercial asking people not to believe rumors and not to buy-up. (The head of the organization is the president of TEPCO.) The commentators in news programs single-mindedly repeat similar messages.

These widespread attempts to dismiss information circulating in the public sphere as “rumors” has led some anti-nuclear activists to re-appropriate the term in explicit calls for revolution.

The linking of rumor and revolution, however, is probably not the most pertinent point about Kan’s statements.  By shifting the role of “security” from that of protecting individual human bodies (Lee and Wen) to that of protecting the nuclear industry—and by exposing these same bodies to potentially poisonous produce—Kan’s statements foregrounds the devaluation of human life that Federici and Caffentzis attribute to capitalism: “What we are witnessing, most dramatically, in the response to the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, especially in the US, is the beginning of an era in which capitalism is dropping any humanitarian pretense and refusing any commitment to the protection of human life.”

If supporting Japan and Fukushima means eating poisoned produce, it is because maintaining current economic trajectories and the continued use of nuclear energy has become more important than the well-being of individual bodies.

At the time of the meeting between the three leaders, the Japanese government had raised acceptable levels of yearly radiation exposure for children from 1 mmSv (the limit set by the WHO) to 20mmSv and was failing to pay for removal of contaminated topsoil at schools.  Children were regularly being exposed to levels of radiation allegedly higher than Chernobyl and traces of radioactive material were being found in the breast milk of women as far away as Chiba and Ibaraki.

Like those displaced by the tsunami, many of the 80,000 evacuees from the 20km radius around Fukushima lacked adequate shelter and provisions.  What’s more, if human life has been undervalued, non-human animal life even more so.   Evacuees were not allowed to take their animal companions with them when they evacuated.  Despite appeals that intensified during the weekend of the summit (and continue thousands of cats and dogs, and ten thousands of farm animals have been starving to death.  Meanwhile, according to prejudices (with historical precedent) about nuclear contamination, people with license plates from Fukushima are being refused service at gas stations and turned away from hotels. Coding discrimination as “reputation damage,” the government is able to claim that supporting the people of Fukushima means ignoring exposure and buying their products rather than worrying over their exposure and accepting them into our communities.  (Japanese Political scientist Chigaya Kinoshita writes about these dual modes of containment in an essay about the uglier aspects of civil society.) In the midst of all this, the three leaders chewed their veggies and posed for the press.

On cue, as if obliging Kan’s earlier statements and this perverse show of solidarity, the first paragraph of the New York Times’ brief coverage of the meeting reads: “The leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea publicly munched on farm produce grown near the stricken Japanese nuclear plant on Saturday in a show of solidarity with Japan’s recovery efforts.”  Nowhere mentioning that this was the fourth in a series of annual meetings since 2008 intended to foster economic relations between the three countries, the article eventually continues, “Before entering the shelter, a converted gymnasium, Mr. Kan steered the group to a table displaying strawberries, cucumbers and other produce grown in Fukushima Prefecture. The leaders, who did not appear to have been surprised by the photo op, smiled and nibbled gamely. “Very delicious,” Mr. Wen said.”

The tone of the Times’ article seems slightly bemused as it acceptingly acknowledges, along with the Chinese and Korean leaders, that this was a highly choreographed theatrical spectacle. What’s troubling in such a tone, however, is the implication that an acknowledgement of posturing somehow exempts the reporting from any responsibility to analyze the scene—both what it stages and obscures.

Why doesn’t the New York Times explain exactly how munching on cucumbers displays solidarity with the people who can’t get the government to clear away debris, rescue their animals, and remove dangerous dirt from children’s playgrounds? Of course these are the very things obscured in the staged scene.  The Times seems to capitulate to the regime of “everything’s fine” that ensures Kan’s “security”.  No matter how ironic the tone, this article portrays solidarity as participating in an anti-panic business-as-usual patriotism, exactly the sort critiqued by Kinoshita in the essay mentioned earlier. While catastrophe and panic were appealing headlines in the initial weeks of the disaster, now in the moment’s fading half-life, they seem to have no place.

Addendum:

Since writing this piece the New York Times has just published an article that exposes the government’s exploitation of poor rural towns and the means through which it makes them financially dependent on nearby reactors.  Although this coverage finally starts uncovering the secrets silence hides, the emphasis on “a lack of widespread grass-roots opposition in the communities around [Japan’s] 54 nuclear reactors” fosters the impression that there isn’t much in the way of anti-nuclear activism taking place in Japan.  Hopefully, the New York Times will start covering the massive demonstrations (of scales rarely seen in contemporary Japan) like the one on April 10^th that brought more that 17,500 people onto the streets of Tokyo.  Cries of protest from the public have brought a halt to development of the Hamaoka Nuclear Plant, and forced the government to revoke the change in acceptable radiation levels for children.  Until these stories earn headlines in mainstream media, I ask you to find projects like Japan – Fissures in the Planetary Apparatus which is translating critical essays by Japanese activists and intellectuals about the ongoing situation in Japan.

As the contours of the disaster accrete into what is undoubtedly a pivotal event, the larger frameworks within which meaning hinges are highly contested.  How the disaster, now officially called the Great East Japan Earthquake, gets spun will depend on which historical and political contexts are acknowledged, and which are ignored.

The Henry Louis Gates Jr. affair (“gatesgate”) seems to be some kind of national rorschach test. Gates has portrayed it “as a modern lesson in racism and the criminal justice system.” Or as put more eloquently by Stanley Fish: “The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?” (Fish also ties this question to the media frenzy over Obama’s birth certificate.) But others have seen it as a class issue: “He isn’t outraged because he feels he was the victim of racial profiling by the police… He’s outraged because he was the victim of class profiling.” Rush Limbaugh takes a similar approach, as does the National Review. Or even (albeit much less convincingly) gender: “would any of this have happened if the major players had been women?” (Um, don’t you watch COPS?)

But it doesn’t stop with class/race/gender. It is also an issue of civil liberties: “the thing about all of this that creeps me out the most is that so many people are willing to defend this officer who…arrested a guy because he didn’t like his attitude.” Or, “professionalism“: “By telling Gates to come outside, Crowley establishes that he has lost all semblance of professionalism. It has now become personal and he wants to create a violation of 272/53 [the statute authorizing prosecutions for disorderly conduct].”

As mentioned above, most mainstream right-wing pundits seem to be taking the “elitist” tact on this case, but some go even further, arguing that it is reverse-racism: “All he has is a collection of prejudices about the group to which the officer belonged: white police officers. And based on that collection of prejudices, Gates leapt to a conclusion — this police officer is a racist.” Others on the right seem eager to reduce the story to a personal narrative, emphasizing how the cop, “James Crowley has taught a class about racial profiling for five years…”

I don’t get the impression that it is a case which has attracted quite as much attention outside the United States, certainly not here in Taiwan, but I could be wrong. I’d be very curious to hear from our readers how this incident has been portrayed elsewhere.

(Thanks to Carole McGranahan for pointing out the “personal narrative” angle.)

UPDATE: Charles Blow has more on the different experiences of race in the United States and how they affect how one is likely to interpret this story:

Whether one thinks race was a factor in this arrest may depend largely on the prism through which the conflicting accounts are viewed. For many black men, it’s through a prism stained by the fact that a negative, sometimes racially charged, encounter with a policeman is a far-too-common rite of passage.

UPDATE: Another “professional” frame, this one saying that shooting someone for asserting their constitutional rights (instead of obeying immediately) is, in fact, what one should expect from a well-trained police officer:

He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

UPDATE: Over at anthropoliteia, a blog devoted to the anthropology of policing, Jeff Martin says this is a teachable moment:

To focus discussion of the event onto the cultural dynamics by which larger issues are made relevant to social action, we can usefully borrow Marshall Sahlins’ concept of the “symbolic relay,” i.e. symbols which are deployed to “endow the opposing local parties with collective identities and the opposing collectives with local or interpersonal sentiments.

Whereas Radly Balko says “If there’s a teachable moment to extract from Gates’ arrest, it’s that arrest powers should be limited to actual crimes.” And Tenured Radical says that what he learned living in an integrated neighborhood “is that white people put black people in danger every day.” Meanwhile, the police released a recording of the phone call to the police placed by the white neighbor.

I don’t really know enough to evaluate all the elements of the plan — from a cursory glance, it looks like it will be a helpful in certain areas, overall doing little but doing little harm, as well. It’s not the kind of massive educational reform we need at the community college level (and even more at the university level, and still more at the K-12 level), but I see little reason to be against it.

Except for this: David Brooks supports it. And David Brooks’ track record is perfect: he’s never been right about anything. I mean, he gets details right here and there — there is a president named “Obama”, there are community colleges, students do indeed exist — but not always (e.g. the famous “you can’t get a meal over $20 in this small town” deal, to which the town’s residents replied “well, you could try one of the restaurants”) and on the Big Picture he is just stunningly, spectacularly… off. Now wrong, per se, just off.

Don’t get me wrong — I like David Brooks. He makes me laugh. He has never had a conversation with a working class person that hasn’t made him an expert on all things working class (which is probably why he has limited his interaction with real working class people to just one or two — he doesn’t need any more!). He writes with verve and style and a kind of friendly helpfulness that I find endearing. Just because the man’s wrong about everything doesn’t mean he’s not likable.

Here’s the nugget of Brook’s argument:

Nor is increased student aid fundamentally important. I’ve had this discussion with my liberal friends a thousand times, and I have come to accept that they will never wrap their minds around the truth: lack of student aid is not the major reason students drop out of college. They drop out because they are academically unprepared or emotionally disengaged or because they lack self-discipline or because bad things are happening at home.

Affordability is way down the list. You can increase student aid a ton and you still won’t have a huge effect on college completion.

Now there are a couple of uncharacteristically correct observations here. Poor academic preparation, emotional disengagement, lack of self-discipline, and difficult home lives are all factors in poor community college outcomes. But he’s wrong, dead wrong, in assuming these things have nothing to do with student aid and affordability — or in seeing Obama’s plan as somehow alleviating any of them. And he’s also wrong in looking to college completion rates as an indicator of community college success or failure.

Taking this point by point, then:

• Academic preparation: It’s no good presenting students’ lack of academic preparation as a failure of the community college. Making up for lack of academic preparation is part of the community college mission. And it’s part of that mission because of massive failures in the K-12 education system. Accomplishing this mission is hard because remedial education is one of the first cuts community colleges make in the face of inadequate budgets.
• Emotional disengagement: It’s rare to find students who are deeply invested in education as education because of the economic realities that drive them into the community college. While community colleges serve many diverse communities, the largest are the young, working- and lower-middle-class students for whom education is not a “ticket out” but a requirement to achieve the cultural capital they need just to stay in place. In the choice between college — with all its opportunity costs — and joblessness, students choose college, but its lesser-than-two-evilism is hardly emotionally compelling.
• Lack of self-discipline: This is a problem community colleges share with their peers at the university, but it’s effect is vastly amplified by the economic situation most community college students live in. The vast majority of my university students are full-time students; only a handful work full-time or even part-time. In contrast, from 60 to 100 percent of my community college students hold down full-time jobs. The inability to manage their time, maintain their focus, and prioritize their educations that university students compensate for by pulling all-nighters and the occasional guilt-driven week-long “buckle down” session leaves community college students falling further and further behind with no way to catch up.
• Difficult home lives: Again, in contrast to many university students, community college students have home lives. Some live with (and take care of) their parents and siblings; others live with their spouses and children. Some endure abusive relationships, others have been on the run from gangs — gangs either they or their siblings have had past dealing with — for years. Many dropped out of school to support their families before gaining their GEDs and enrolling at the community college. In They are, by and large, poor. And that means they often lack the economic resources to cope with the demands of community college — the cost of classes, books, supplies (like PCs) — and also lack the social resources to cope with job challenges like shifting schedules and family challenges like sick children.

All of these problems then are, if not caused directly by economic hardship, at least exacerbated by them. Although community college is, relative even to public universities, fairly cheap, relative to the incomes of poor students it is expensive.Three-credit classes at my community college run $160-200(summer courses and distance-ed courses have a premium), putting a full-time semester in the range of $1000; add books and supplies for another $500, and you’re looking at a few thousand dollars a year to take classes tucked around a difficult work-and-commute schedule and potentially a difficult family schedule. Measuring student outcomes better — which Brooks advocates — is not going to solve that.

If I had infinite power over the reform of higher education in our country, I’d look to the British system, whereby students receive government grants to cover not only tuition and books but living expenses, too. And I’d make sure that every community college established a high bar for entry into 100-level courses and offered sufficient remediation — also funded — to achieve it. (That’s a stop-gap measure, though — I’d be chatting with my infinitely-empowered colleague in K-12 about making sure students don’t graduate high school unprepared in the first place!)

Pipe dreams aside, though, the bottom line for poor students is that education is not a luxury, it’s an expensive necessity just to maintain their already-low standards of living. Making community colleges into better vocational-training institutions — that is what all the talk about “partnership with businesses” is all about — only reinforces that, which means it does nothing to address the lack of emotional attachment and self-discipline that concerns Brooks, nor the outside pressures that make education a low-priority for many community college students.

Which is also why the emphasis on completion rates is misguided. First of all, not all community college students are degree-bound. In my six years as a community college professor, my best students have been olders tudents who are taking a class or two for their own interest, to further job-related skills in hopes of a promotion or transfer, to make up for opportunities missed when younger, and so on. Many of them have no interest in a degree, which frees them up to engage the educational process itself. Mind you, many of them are as unprepared for college-level work as their 18-year-old peers — and are often less prepared, having received poor educations to begin with and now being 10, 20, or more years removed from their last classroom experience. The advantage they have is that they are generally more financially secure than their younger counterparts, and better able to balance their coursework against their other obligations. Plus, they have a kind of confidence thatcomes of not necessarily having succeeded but of having at least supported themselves as adults, an prospect that my younger students often find terrifying — and with good reason, as they see their friends, families, and peers ground further into poverty around them.

Focusing on graduation rates does nothing to address the challenges that face community college students — it’s a measure that encapsulates nothing of what makes my non-degree students perform better than my degree-seeking ones. I teach at one of the nation’s largest community colleges, where we have one of the lowest completion rates (the national avergae is around 50%; ours is in the low single-digits). We have fine modern facilities, more than adequate computer resources, campuses placed conveniently around the Las Vegas valley, and motivated, creative instructors.

Yet, every semester I see 1/3 to 1/2 of my students disappear over the course of the semester. And I’m not alone, judging from the gradual emptying out of parking lots that overflowed at the beginning of the semester. In contrast, I rarely lose even one or two students from my university courses — even when I teach the exact same course. (For two years, I taught “Gender, Race, and Class” at both schools, using the same books, same syllabus, same assignments, and of course same me — a pretty good control situation for a postmodernist like myself!) The difference is not in the schools (or not primarily in the schools), it’s in the students and the environment they live in — an environment that’s overwhelmingly friendlier to white, middle-class students than to poorer students and students of color.

So, I’m sorry Mr. Brooks, but affordability and lack of student aid are, indeed, central factors in the failures of community colleges. Improving educational resources is great, but if it doesn’t address the financial reality of poor students’ lives, I wouldn’t expect much of an improvement, however you measure outcomes. Obama’s plan might well do some good — it’s part of a larger plan that does address college affordability — but on its own, it’s more likely to provide benefits for businesses and college administrations than for community college students — students who, ultimately, deserve a lot better than just job training. They deserve an education!

In re-reading the following passage I found myself thinking about the whole Reverend Jeremiah Wright kerfuffle.

in spite of many years of empirical study which is established AAVE as a normally functioning spoken human language, its very existence is often doubted and denied by African and European-Americans alike. The real trouble with black English is not the verbal aspect system which distinguishes it from other varieties of US English, or the rhetorical strategies which draw such a vivid contrast, it is simply this: AAVE is tangible and irrefutable evidence that there is a distinct, healthy, functioning African-American culture which is not white and which does not want to be white. This is a state of affairs which is unacceptable to many. James Baldwin who wrote and spoke so eloquently on the issues at the heart of the racial divide in this country, put it quite simply: “the value [of] a black man is proven by one thing only – his devotion to white people”

At its heart, this book answers that question. It explains how and why municipal swimming pools in the northern United States were transformed from austere public baths—where blacks, immigrants, and native-born white laborers swam together, but men and women, rich and poor, and young and old did not—to leisure resorts, where practically everyone in the community except black Americans swam together.

But the story does not end there. A second social transformation occurred at municipal swimming pools after midcentury. Black Americans challenged segregation by repeatedly seeking admission to whites-only pools and by filing lawsuits against their cities. Eventually, these social and legal protests desegregated municipal pools throughout the North, but desegregation rarely led to meaningful interracial swimming. When black Americans gained equal access to municipal pools, white swimmers generally abandoned them for private pools.

Slightly related: even though Taiwan is an island with numerous rivers and streams and even public swimming pools, many people can’t swim. Each year many drown as a result. I know many girls don’t like to swim because they don’t like to spend too much time in the sun, which could “ruin” the pale white complexions they work so hard to maintain, and if the girls aren’t swimming I suppose the boys are much less interested as well… (Many of my female students also equate getting muscles from exercise with getting “fat.”) So I was glad to hear that my university instituted a policy requiring all students to pass a swimming test in order to graduate.

Much of his work has opposed the idea that we are limited by arbitrary facts of identity –race, sexual orientation, and so on — which tend to become dictates; instead, he asserts the individual’s freedom from all imposed categories. From the perspective of individual liberty, I agree.

… But in his Times essay, Appiah elaborates an entire cultural policy based on nothing more than the individual’s right to make his own path by walking through the cultures of the world.

The Appiah article is an extended attack on UNESCO’s “Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.”

Appiah sets up a straw man to stand in for those who endorse the Convention. He calls them purists and compares their relationship to cultures under pressure from globalization to the anxious “assistant on the film set who’s supposed to check that the extras in a sword-and-sandals movie aren’t wearing wristwatches.” He says (without a shred of evidence) that those concerned to preserve cultures want to force people to “maintain their ‘authentic’ ways,” a goal I have never heard anyone espouse (and I am moderately well-informed on this subject). And he dismisses those who feel their own cultures are threatened by globalization as merely expressing discomfort with change: “[T]he world, their world, is changing, and some of them don’t like it.”

What Goldbard finds so disturbing about this approach is Appiah’s trivializing of the important ways in which economic inequality limits the choices people can make, and I think she is right to focus on these issues. Unfortunately, however, her criticism falls flat. While she exposes a fundamental flaw in Appiah’s cosmopolitan individualism, she never really makes it clear how cultural rights can serve to help those who have been dealt cards from the bottom of the pile. What is missing here is a sense of history.

Globalization is not a new phenomenon. In fact, there are good arguments that today’s globalization is far more limited than what the world witnessed at the peak of the colonial era. What Appiah is noticing is not so much the product of the integration of the world’s economies as it is the rise of a cosmopolitan global elite. The second part of this historical comparison is to remember for a second what cultural imperialism actually looks like. While today’s cultural imperialism may seem mild, we mustn’t forget what real cultural imperialism entailed: people being forcibly removed from their homes to be raised in Western families, people punished in school for speaking their own language, people forcibly converted to Western religions, etc. The damage done from real cultural imperialism has a direct impact on how people are affected by cultural imperialism “lite.”

Appiah’s article suggests a world in which people can choose freely to mix and match between various cultural forms, but this ignores how colonialism has already depleted the cultural store from which people can pick and choose. If your mother tongue was banned for two generations, it isn’t exactly easy to pick and choose your language. Cultural rights are intended to level an already uneven playing field and to right past wrongs.

Which is not to say that there aren’t problems with the UNESCO convention. I believe its quasi-ecological language misconstrues what “culture” is, but this is not the argument Appiah is making. He essentially accepts this reified notion of culture, even as he celebrates cultural hybridity. For Appiah, cultural death is ultimately a natural process, akin to Darwinian natural selection. Who are we to interfere? Only buy understanding the political, economic, and historical dimensions of culture can we begin to see what is wrong with both UNESCO’s conservation efforts and Appiah’s critique of them.

NOTE: I made a similar argument in an Anthropology News piece [PDF] three years ago. Also in relation to a New York Times article. I had better start getting ready for 2009…

Fat in Western societies is not, however, primarily a health issue — “unhealthiness” is merely a justification for attitudes like those expressed in response to an experiment described at fatty mcblog. The author, fatty mcgee, put an ad in the personals section at Craigslist New York asking men if they would date a woman who was ideal in every way but was significantly overweight. This is not a particularly scientific study, but the responses are interesting nonetheless. Although a few men responded positively to the scenario fatty mcgee outlined, most respondents described fatness in moralistic, negative terms, with health being raised only as part of an overall point along the lines of “a woman who doesn’t take care of her own body doesn’t respect herself and therefore won’t respect me”. Fat women were described as messy, selfish, childish, unable to take care of themselves, lacking in confidence and self-esteem, lazy, and neurotic (almost all exact quotes). What a bind, then, for fat people — to have their social standing depend on their willingness and ability to lose weight, while research suggests that for most people, losing weight in any meaningful way is not a possibility even if it were medically desirable.

One line in Ampersand’s post strikes me as particularly interesting (from the first block quote in section 2):

[I]n a study of mortality risks among 16,936 Harvard alumni, Paffenbager at al. not only found that the highest mortality occurred in those with the lowest body mass index (below 32), but also that those who had gained weight since college had a significantly lower mortality risk compared to those who had minimal weight gain since college.

Apparently, not only is losing weight unhealthy, but even not gaining weight as one gets older is unhealthy! I think it’s fairly well-established that metabolism slows as we get older; it would seem almost common sense that to maintain the same weight in the face of a slowing metabolism means not simply maintaining dietary practices but steadily and gradually reducing our intake of calories as we get older — in effect, multiplying the overall reduction of capability due to aging.

Now, most Americans have some vague sense that “in the past” fatness was prized as a sign of affluence. In several societies, including our own European forebears, a large body was a powerful body — leading those not blessed with girth to pad themselves to appear more regal, as for instance Louis XIV did. Now it seems that the equation of fat with power may not have been simply about access to more and richer foods — if the well-functioning body is the body that grows larger with time, it would make sense to find privilege associated with size, and thinness a sign not of healthfulness but of an inability to maintain healthiness, an inability related not to willpower or self-discipline but to disempowerment. Which is to say that if fat people are more likely to live longer, than the people we expect to live longer — the rich and powerful — are more likely to be fat.

The American reversal of what seems to be a deeply-embedded biological tendency takes on a different character in light of the research presented by Ampersand. While it is still curious that working- and middle-class Americans have become significantly heavier over the last several decades, this may not be the sign of impending epidemic unhealthiness that it’s often made out as. Americans have long been bigger than their Old World counterparts — immigrants are quite often dwarfed by their American-bred progeny. Perhaps American fatness is simply the further elaboration of the same trend — the body achieving its ideal form in an environment characterized by abundance, both natural and political. The thinness of American elites, then, may not be so much a matter of being better able to afford to be healthier, but rather the reverse — being more able to afford being less healthy. Poor health as conspicuous consumption of the self. It will be interesting to see, as our conception of the ideal physical form is challenged by the weight of accumulating research, how and if obesity comes to be regarded as a norm rather than a deviation. In a society where the norm is already at odds with its own conception of normality — well over half of us are clinically overweight — it is hard to imagine that a continued belief in the immorality of fat is sustainable.

I like the idea of a Mintz-esque study of the political economic transformation that Starbucks has wrought–to say nothing of their successful introduction of real coffee to the furthest reaches of America–but I guess I’ll have to wait, or do it myself. But even when I was contemplating such a project, I ultimately decided that if one were serious about a corporate anthropology, or an anthropology of corporations, one would proceed directly to Wal-Mart, without passing go, without collecting $200. Where else could one satisfy one’s pleasure in discovering the exotic in 1300 locales in 10 countries?

Of course, as far as I can tell, there’s no anthropologists on Edge’s “council” of scientific thinkers (I may have missed one or two — there’s a lot of people associated with Edge), and the handling of culture overall tends to be a little sloppy, with a lot of reductionism and not a lot of nuance. Which is maybe why it makes sense that Steven Pinker would think his contribution — “Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments” — might actually be a dangerous idea. Pinker notes that ideas relating to sex and race differences are widely perceived to be dangerous, citing for example the villification of Harvard president Larry Summers after last year’s comments on women’s under-representation in the sciences. However, I don’t find this to be a very dangerous idea at all — an uncomfortable one, perhaps, but one that most people hold to some degree or other. I would consider dangerous an idea whose ramifications had the potential to drastically alter the way society is structured, and I don’t see that the assumption of innate differences between groups would have that effect. Given the centrality of such assumptions in the history of the modern world, I think it’s fair to say that Pinker’s “dangerous idea” fits quite comfortably with the status quo — it is after all the idea that many of our social institutions are built on.

In fact, I think a far more dangerous idea is that people do not differ genetically on a group basis, at least not in any significant way. Of course, I side with the effort Pinker dismisses with his straw man description of those who would “reengineer” the “intellectual landscape” to rule out hypotheses about race, intelligence, innate predelictions, and so on a priori. But consider the ramifications of an absolute equality of talent, potential, temperament across the human species: if all humans are innately equal in their potential to succeed and to make meaningful contributions to their societies, then the fact of poverty, of small-mindedness, of difference itself has to be explained as cultural, which is to say it has to be considered as something that we create ourselves. The infant with the potential to become a great doctor, physicist, peace activist, parliamentarian, anthropologist, designer, artist, parent, urban planner, minister, author, friend, diplomat, geologist, therapist, singer, gardener, athlete, or diviner but instead ends up dead at 18 of drug overdose or gang shooting or collateral damage or murder conviction or disease or suicide bombing or knife fight or suicide or car accident is our collective fault. And if we are serious about the commitment to “political equality”, to “universal human rights, and to policies that treat people as individuals rather than representatives of groups” as Pinker claims to be, then the ramifications of the prospect that differences in station cannot be attributed to differences in biological makeup implies a radical restructuring of our societies, institutions, and thought patterns. And if we are not committed to equality on these terms, it implies an ever-increasing dissonance between the ethical precepts that supposedly guide our social and institutional efforts and the reality we embrace, or the outright abandonment of those precepts.

That’s what I consider dangerous!

Faculty Democracy is a broad-based association of NYU faculty dedicated to bringing transparency and accountability to decision making at the university.

One of their first acts has been to come out in support of the striking graduate students. In this statement in support of GSOC, they emphasize the importance of graduate student’s right to express their opinions:

Regardless of our individual opinion about unionization for graduate assistants, we (the undersigned NYU faculty members), believe that in order to protect academic freedom and to maintain an open and collegial atmosphere at the university, graduate students should be free to express and follow their beliefs about unionization without any fear of reprisals. At a time when this institution is under heightened public scrutiny, it is all the more important to preserve this enviable tradition of freedom at NYU.

I counted fourteen anthropology professors among the over two hundred signatures.

Faculty Democracy have also posted this letter to NYU’s undergraduates responding to comments by the school president:

we think it is important for you to know that ultimately, the disruptions in your education that might occur in the next few weeks are not the fault of the graduate student union. GSOC repeatedly indicated its willingness to meet and negotiate with the Administration until the very last minute. The rights of the graduate students to organize, and to strike if necessary, are an ethical matter not a financial one. Indeed, if we are going to talk money, it should be noted that the Administration employed high-priced lawyers to fight the unionization effort. Its decision not to bargain with a legally recognized union, overruling the objections of faculty, has no doubt generated astronomical legal costs. We believe, and we hope you do too, that the university’s financial priorities should not include the disenfranchisement and intimidation of its teachers.

For those of you attending the AAA, there will be an AAA Public Policy Forum on “Organized Labor”, organized by Paul Durrenberger, with Neal Kwatra, Sheldon Friedman (no relation), Robert O’Brien, and Suzan Erem. I imagine the NYU situation will be one of the topics under discussion. It is currently scheduled for Thursday, Dec. 1, at 10:15 am.

Elsewhere on the web (to be updated):

• Blogger Majikthise has a strike photo gallery.
• The blog, NYU Inc. has a strike journal
• And for those not going to the AAA, there is a big day of protest planned for November 30th.

This isn’t a subject I know anything about, but if you have suggestions for a disaster anthropology reading list please leave them in the comments. (Ragout already suggested one such article in the comments to a previous post.)

I did begin collecting some articles about the impact of race and class on both the disaster and the media coverage afterwards. I think this is another area where anthropologists can offer some insights, as geographer Craig E. Colten did on NPR.

UPDATE: Here is Craig Colten’s web page, and his new book: An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. From Amazon.com:

Colten shows how every manipulation of the environment made an impact on the city’s social geography as well—often with unequal, adverse consequences for minorities—and how each still requires maintenance and improvement today.

UPDATE: Here is a web site from the SSRC titled, “Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences.” (Vis Anthropologi.info, where more links can be found.)

Many of you know the 13,000 years of human history that Diamond sets out in response to Yali’s question – and so we won’t repeat it here. In telling this history, readers learn that Yali’s circumstances did not reflect any lack either in his intelligence or in that of other PNGuineans (and, of course, we agree). Rather, we learn that Yali was poor and relatively powerless in his own domain because his ancestors lacked access to the mineral resources, domesticable animals, and the other advantages that allowed some to conquer others. He was born, in terms of the luck-of-the-environmental draw, on the wrong side of the great geographical divide.

Yet neither Yali nor most of the other PNGuineans we have known over our years in PNG would be satisfied with the inexorability of Diamond’s luck-of-the-draw sort of answer, with the implications of his “that’s-just-the-way things-were (and must-be)” sort of response. Such an answer would strike them as a perverse justification of colonial forms of inequality, part of a story that denied them moral worth in the past, to say nothing of the future. However, it is just this sort of answer, just this sort of invocation of historical inevitability, that tends to satisfy those who are already the haves. In this regard, the ideology inherent in Diamond’s reasoning goes well beyond the particulars of the history he presents. This ideology supports the status quo, the interests of the already powerful. For them, the inevitable and the inexorable are readily synonymous with the interests of the haves over the have-nots.

More broadly, the ideology inherent in Diamond’s reasoning is one we confront as teachers and scholars dealing primarily with the haves. Students tell us that their parents encourage them to read Diamond’s book, finding it invigorating. The (former) president of Fred’s college urged his faculty to read it. In fact, he sent copies of Guns, Germs, and Steel to members of the faculty as a model of the kind of book he admired. All over the United States, we learned, deans and presidents of other pricey institutions applaud the book. At Cornell, it became assigned reading for all freshmen. Moreover, many institutions pay Diamond generously to summarize his views in person, generally in packed lecture halls. And, of course, there is his National Geogoraphic series. We think such educated haves like the book so well because it resonates so much and so easily with their own concerns — in effect, because it so readily sustains them. They come away from the book (or lecture, or TV show) feeling pretty good about themselves — both enlightened and open-minded. They come away seeing the world without racial prejudice and having learned some important new facts and connections. Furthermore, and significantly, they come away comfortably convinced that they have their cargo (unlike Yali and his people) for inevitable and impersonal geographic reasons. No one is to blame for the fact that some people are, and no doubt will continue to be, the haves and that others are, and will continue to be, the have-nots. Thus, Diamond’s history is not only the delineation of an inexorable and inevitable trajectory. It is, as well, both retrospective and prospective. His depiction of the past provides a far from disinterested model for understanding the present and for shaping the future. This is to say, he presents the world as one in which the have-nots, whether in PNG or elsewhere, must (seemingly) forever deal with the haves under conditions of fundamental disadvantage.

But, what exactly is wrong with the history that Diamond presents? Didn’t the events Diamond relates really happen? Must a history necessarily be disqualified because it conveys the perspectives and interests of the victors, of the haves? Isn’t Diamond’s view simply informed by hard-headed realism about the way the world works?

We certainly do not deny that certain forms of power had a significant role in effecting the kinds of historical events that Diamond delineates. Diamond’s depiction of the role that guns, germs, and steel played is often plausible. What we do challenge is his conflation of the necessary with the sufficient. This is to say, just because guns, germs, and steel were necessary to make certain historical outcomes possible, including those so upsetting to Yali, we do not have to assume that their possession was sufficient to explain these outcomes. Just because sources of power are available, we cannot conclude that the power will be used for certain ends, or even that it will be used at all. And, simply because European colonists had the power to pursue their interests at the expense of Yali and other PNGuineans, does not fully explain – or justify – the ways in which they chose to use this power. More later…….

The bottom line for the AAA leadership was simple: AAA members could not again be subjected to an eleventh hour change that would jeopardize their annual meeting – the signature event on the Association calendar. The labor dispute in San Francisco, now moving into its second year, continues to pose such a threat.

This makes the AAA the fourth academic association to relocate its annual meeting because of the ongoing labor dispute, as Robert O’Brien, a member of the recently appointed AAA Labor Relations Commission pointed out in a recent e-mail:

The American Sociological Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Political Science Association moved out of San Fran altogether. The American Educational Research Association is remaining in San Francisco, but has moved all of its events to the Moscone Center, which is not involved in the dispute.

More information on the ongoing strike in San Francisco can be found on the Unite Here! web site.

I’ve been looking at this issue because four of the top political bloggers (Atrios, De Long, Kevin Drum, and Matt Yglesias) have ganged up on Andrew Sullivan for his recent endorsement of the central tenants of The Bell Curve. As a result of all these posts we get a great list of online articles debunking the book, to which I’ve added a few more and grouped them all here for your reference. The critiques vary in whether or not they accept the notion of I.Q.. Some accept it, but claim it isn’t genetic, others accept a genetic component, but deny that this correlates with race, while others (like Howard Gardner and Stephen Jay Gould) are more critical of the very notions of intelligence that are supposedly being measured in the first place.

• Thomas Sowell’s American Spectator article, in which he discusses the “the work of James R. Flynn, who found substantial increases in mental test performances from one generation to the next in a number of countries around the world.” Findings which disprove any link between genetics and I.Q. (originally linked in this DeLong post, and metioned in Matt’s post as well.)
• Nicholas Lemann’s debunking in Slate: “What Herrnstein and Murray used to measure IQ is actually a measure of education as well as intelligence.” (also from Matt.)
• “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns.” The report by the American Psychological Association which I make fun of above, but which is well worth reading – especially with regard to whether there is any link between intelligence and race. (via Kevin Drum.)
• Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis 2002 paper, “The Inheritance of Inequality” [PDF] which debunks the notion that social inequality is genetic. (via Brad DeLong, who has a summary of the findings.)
• Howard Gardner’s critique of The Bell Curve in The American Prospect, in which he elaborates on the limitations of I.Q.
• Two defenses of I.Q.: One by Linda S. Gottfredson in Scientific American, and another by Christopher F. Chabris in Commentary.
• Responses by Flynn, Gardner, and others to the article by Chabris.
• Wikipedia pages on The Bell Curve, Race and Intelligence, IQ, the Flynn Effect, Gould’s book, The Mismeasure of Man, and Howard Gardner’s concept of Multiple Intelligences.