I want to talk about the role of ethnic difference in narrative, but since Rex brought up the issue of bodies, let me first note that one of the interesting things about The Culture is that unlike the many other “highly advanced alien species” discussed by Rex in his post, bodies are very important to The Culture. In this post-singularity world people can back themselves up or choose to live entirely virtual lives, but most choose to have bodies anyway. These bodies are enhanced, to be sure: they have neural laces to tie them to the co-evolved artificial Minds which run their space ships, and they have extra glands which give them whatever drugs they might like at a mere thought, but they are still bodies. Over their long lifespans they can choose to be male or female at will, and many go through several changes over a lifetime. The Minds too can take on human avatars, and the nature of these avatars is an important reflection of their personalities, although we are frequently reminded that they are not human. For instance, they can eat and defecate, but they don’t have to and the food which is passed through their bodies is still edible since it hasn’t really been digested. We are even told that some humans like to eat avatar-digested food. But then who understands humans?

Getting back to ethnicity and narrative… let me start with Special Circumstances, an organization which figures prominently in The Culture novels. Here’s an explanation from Wikipedia:

Special Circumstances is part of a larger fictional Culture organization called Contact, which coordinates Culture interactions with (and in) other civilizations. SC exists to fulfill this role when circumstances exceed the moral capacity of Contact, or where the situation is highly complex and requires highly specialized skills… Special Circumstances also does the ‘dirty work’ of the Culture, a function made especially complicated by the normally very high ethical standards the Culture sets itself. SC acts in a way that has been compared with the democratizing intentions of real-world liberal intent on overcoming the world’s (and especially other nation’s) evils by benign interference.

One of the things that makes The Culture books so interesting is the deep ambivalence Banks has for his Special Circumstances heroes. While they have no material interest in delving into the affairs of other societies, it is clear that their motivations are not entirely selfless. They are driven in equal parts by a desire to “improve” these other cultures as well as their own boredom. Yes, they usually win in the end, for the betterment of all concerned. One could thus argue that SC is an argument for liberal interventionism. But I think it is much more about the need for good stories.

SC is important to The Culture novels because the world of The Culture is a rather boring utopia. There is no money, no discrimination, no real politics, etc. For this reason, for anything interesting to happen it must happen at the fringes of Culture, at the point of contact with other (usually less developed) civilizations. This interests me because it makes clear how important contact (or Contact) is for narrative. I also think it explains why people get so defensive when anthropologists point out the underlying racism implicit in various fictional worlds.

Take, for example, the Dothraki of Game of Thrones:

The Dothraki are dark, with long hair they wear in dreadlocks or in matted braids. They sport very little clothing, bedeck themselves in blue paint, and, as depicted in the premiere episode, their weddings are riotous affairs full of thumping drums, ululations, orgiastic public sex, passionate throat-slitting, and fly-ridden baskets full of delicious, bloody animal hearts. A man in a turban presents the new khaleesi with an inlaid box full of hissing snakes. After their nuptials, the immense Khal Drogo takes Daenerys to a seaside cliff at twilight and then, against her muted pleas, takes her doggie-style.

Now, I think a lot of the problem is that the Dorthraki are intentionally a “hodgepodge creation”:

George R.R. Martin has written , “I have tried to mix and match ethnic and cultural traits in creating my imaginary fantasy peoples, so there are no direct one-for-one correspodences [sic]. The Dothraki, for example, are based in part on the Mongols, the Alans, and the Huns, but their skin coloring is Amerindian.”

I think a lot of the problem is Martin’s reliance on the worst stereotypes about nomadic peoples rather than more historically accurate accounts. For instance, one popular history of Genghis Khan emphasizes the importance of the Mongols in the creation of the “modern world.”

But I don’t want to talk about what is wrong with Martin’s Dorthraki so much as why so many people get upset when scholars point out these problems. I think it is because of a feeling that good stories need good “others” and that without difference, including different levels of civilization, one can’t have a good narrative. The anthropologist in me wants to reply that recreating Tylor and Morgan’s stages of civilization in narrative form serves to reproduce the ideological foundations of racism is even if it isn’t directed at any particular ethnic group, but the fan of science fiction and fantasy novels in me understands that such is the stuff that (most) fantasy worlds are made of. Fictional others allow us to explore the limits of our own humanity. Still, I think The Culture novels show that we can do better, that we can ask more of our imagined worlds. But even Banks’ novels still rely upon a social darwinian view of galactic development, with each civilization necessarily going through the various stages of development, with only minimal interference by the more developed societies. I say this not so much to criticize Banks but to point out how hard it is to escape from such narrative frameworks, even in (or especially in?) stories that otherwise push the boundaries of what it means to be human.

Addendum: I posted it to Twitter, but I wanted to link again to a recent interview in Wired with anthropologist Kathryn Denning who “studies the very human way that scientists, engineers and members of the public think about space exploration and the search for alien life.” I think she has some really interesting things to say about our discourses about contact with alien life.

Growing up in Texas I always had trouble keeping Cinco de Mayo and Diez y Seis straight. To my mind the former was in commemoration of a colonial event, the defeat of Spain maybe, and the latter marked the date of the Mexican Revolution. Or maybe I had it backwards? And while Diez y Seis might warrant a baile folklorico demonstration or a performance from the high school mariachi band in the state capital, Cinco de Mayo was marked by the ritual of going out to a Mexican restaurant for dinner.

In college in Florida the Caribbean immigrants and the children of immigrants I came to know were just learning about Mexican American culture, so the observation of Cinco de Mayo was novel to them. All we needed was an excuse to drink margaritas and we were on our way! By the time I got to North Carolina for grad school the holiday had gone mainstream. I couldn’t help but be a little bit proud, like when salsa surpassed ketchup as America’s number one condiment. Imagine my joy when I learned that the 2005 annual meeting of SANA and CASCA would be held at UADY in Merida over Cinco de Mayo. AMAZEBALLS!! Spend Cinco de Mayo in Mexico? Hells to the yeah!

It turns out Mexicans don’t really give a shit about Cinco de Mayo.

I did host a party. All my peops from SANA were there. I have photos of people wearing hats that they shouldn’t be wearing. But this is not the place for that, now is it? Yet even though the party was a success, even though that moment of negotiating an enormous bar tab is probably the crowning achievement of my use of the Spanish language, I was still secretly disappointed because that’s when I learned that Cinco de Mayo is actually an American holiday. Sure, its important in Puebla where the historic battle was actually fought but otherwise its mostly a tourist thing.

As an American holiday Cinco de Mayo is doing some important work bringing Hispanics greater visibility, negotiating their acculturation into mainstream pop culture, and selling a lot of Corona beer and tacky t-shirts. In these respects its somewhat similar to St. Patrick’s Day.

Now I realize that St. Patrick’s Day is a global holiday and that it holds a sacred place on some religious calendars. What I’m talking about here is the way the holiday is typically observed in the United States, either as a moment of ethnic pride or an excuse to drink Guinness and Jameson. There is of course the unfortunate stereotype of the Irish drunk and all those decades the Irish spent on the bottom rung of acceptable society, but hey, let’s not bring that up tonight. Tonight we’re going to have fun!

Similarly Cinco de Mayo is both a commemoration of the past and a strategic forgetting.

The time when the Irish were despised as the lowest of the low has long since passed. Through generations of acculturation and through marking the boundaries of Black racial difference the Irish became White to paraphrase Noel Ignatiev. St Patrick’s Day helps us put that old history to rest through a healing application of mass quantities of alcohol, Kiss Me I’m Irish t-shirts, and bright green Dollar Store disposable fun. This is perhaps because taking a too sour view of history flies in the face of the whole light-hearted spirit of the holiday.

You don’t even have to be Irish to celebrate it! No one will be checking your ethnic ID at the door, so put on your leprechaun hat and toss back another car bomb. Even if you’re just being ironic playing at ethnicity is part of the fun and makes difference seem less threatening.

Cinco de Mayo does this too.

As a springtime holiday nestled between Easter and Mother’s Day, Cinco de Mayo heralds the coming of summer, the end of the college semester, and the promise of tourist friendly beaches or at least friendly waiters at your local Mexican restaurant. Unlike religious holidays (Easter, Passover), national holidays (4th of July, Thanksgiving), or Hallmark Holidays (Mother’s and Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day), Cinco de Mayo like St Patrick’s Day, New Years Eve, and Halloween is decidedly a “fun” holiday; four days that all offer us a license to behave in ways we wouldn’t ordinarily and to consume ritualized foods and beverages.

Both Cinco de Mayo and St Patrick’s are highly commodified. I think this says something about the way in which one may claim ethnic identity in the United States. If you’re going to be a hyphenated American then you’re going to have to buy something. American capitalism vets ethnic minorities through a ritual of consumerism. What’s interesting is that even if you’re an unhyphenated American then you’re going to buy something too. Maybe that’s where we can find our common ground? In the seasonal aisle at Wal-mart.

Arlene Davila writes about this in Latinos, Inc. Part of claiming a Latino identity in the United States is buying certain products, watching certain TV shows, and being the subject of targeted advertising. Through Goya products, Univision, and imported beers Latinos consume commodified representations of themselves. I think Cinco de Mayo is part of this too. Its a marketing ploy really, to get people to spend their money at restaurants and buy alcohol. But what might be the long term consequences of this holiday for the next generation of Latinos coming to understand their place in America?

Mexicans occupy a political and cultural space similar to the historic Irish prior to their admission into mainstream acceptable society. If the moral panic surrounding their immigration to the US is to be believed then they are truly despicable. The perceived threat is manifold. They hold our laws in contempt, they steal our jobs, they’re a threat to our youth, they refuse to speak English, they refuse to adopt American culture, and the young men form gangs. Oh yeah, and they’re brown. Never mind that some of them are literally putting the food on our tables (see Ann Aurelia Lopez’s brilliant The Farmworker’s Journey and the produce section of your grocery store will never look the same).

Arguably what the Irish faced was even more horrible than what Latinos have to deal with now. Time will tell whether they are capable of undergoing a similar racializing transformation and whether it will take place via the continued subordination of Blacks as it was for the Irish. I’m quite optimistic really, for once neoliberalism might truly come to the rescue. After all, there’s a whole hell of a lot of us. And if there’s anything capitalism likes its a market. Money talks and now its speaking Spanish.

The New Yorker describes how Lin, a Harvard graduate, and Landry Fields “a Knicks guard from Stanford, have developed a handshake: put on spectacles, flip through a textbook—Organic Team Chemistry, we presume—take the glasses off, and stick ‘em in your pocket.” You can see this ritual here:

It used to be, before the GI Bill radically changed American higher education after World War Two, that it was common for the top athletes to come from the top schools. Now I believe it is more the exception than the rule.

The second group to lay claim to Lin are Christians, as seen in this New York Times piece:

From talking to people who knew him through the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Christian Fellowship, and watching his interviews, I have the sense that his is a quieter, potentially less polarizing but no less devout style of faith.

Not just any Christians, but Asian American Christians. And (as we will see in a moment) not just Asian-American, but Taiwanese-American. There is actually an ethnography about Taiwanese-American Christians: Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience I haven’t read it, but it looks interesting.

What does becoming American have to do with becoming religious? Many immigrants become more religious after coming to the United States. Taiwanese are no different. Like many Asian immigrants to the United States, Taiwanese frequently convert to Christianity after immigrating. But Americanization is more than simply a process of Christianization. Most Taiwanese American Buddhists also say they converted only after arriving in the United States even though Buddhism is a part of Taiwan’s dominant religion. By examining the experiences of Christian and Buddhist Taiwanese Americans, Getting Saved in America tells “a story of how people become religious by becoming American, and how people become American by becoming religious.”

About the Taiwanese bit, you really don’t need to look beyond NMA, the famous purveyors of Taiwanese animated news. There is no doubt that Lin’s Taiwaneseness is front-and-center in their take on the story, which ends with him throwing flaming basketballs at Yao Ming, who is standing in front of a PRC flag, and then cuts to Lin in front of the ROC flag.

This brings to mind the story of Michael Chang whose parents “grew up in Taiwan (though were born elsewhere) and were educated in the United States, where they met.” Also a devout Christian, Chang was similarly claimed as a hero by Taiwan. I can’t find any references to it on Google, but I believe he once caused a small storm by saying he was American, not Chinese. That didn’t stop anyone, and I see on Google that he later became involved in promoting Tennis in China. (There is also this Slate piece about how Chang “Chang didn’t defy Chinese stereotypes; he simply ushered them into the arena. He was hardworking, intelligent, humble, forever prepubescent.”)

From a Taiwanese perspective, it is notable that Lin’s Taiwaneseness is mentioned in a number of news stories, as previously he would have just been called Chinese-American. Part of this is due to a push by Taiwanese-American organizations to have people write in “Taiwanese” on the 2010 census. But the more generic Asian-American is also quite ubiquitous. I have no idea how Lin views his Taiwanese identity, but I do know that he is likely to remain front page news here for as long as he’s scoring points.

UPDATE: Two new links. First is a WSJ article: China, Taiwan Both Lay Claim to Jeremy Lin. And the second is the “Racial Draft” skit from thw Chappelle show (although this may not stay up on YouTube for long).

UPDATE: The NY Times with a piece focusing on China’s claim to Lin (through his mother’s family). More links from Michael Turton.

UPDATE: More links from James Fallows, including a link to an article remembering “the days when basketball was considered a Jewish sport.”

UPDATE: Harvard, Hoops, Hope, and Hype: America’s Lin-fatuation // ESPN Racist Jeremy Lin Headline: Network Apologizes For Insensitive Headline For Knicks Loss // Jeremy Lin! Why the Knicks’ New Star Is Not the New Tebow

UPDATE: This:

The title of this post comes from a 1930 article in Man which discusses the superiority of such tops over various other ways to measure skin color, such as Broca’s skin color charts. While I knew anthropologists had used Broca’s charts, I don’t recall reading about the use of color tops, which was apparently quite common. The tops used were actually by Milton Bradley, but as best I can tell they were quite similar to the Bauhaus design pictured above. [Can anyone find a picture of the actual Milton Bradely tops?]

The colour top is a device made by the Milton Bradley Company, of Spring- field, Mass., U.S.A., a firm which manufactures kindergarten supplies. It is, primarily intended for teaching children the principles of colour blending. The first investigator to use it for recording skin-colour was Davenport, who employed it in his study of the heredity of skin-colour in Negro-White crosses in Jamaica (1913). The principle is one with which we were all familiar in our childhood. The apparatus consists of a small top, of the disc variety, spun by means of a wooden spindle kept in place by a nut. On this basal disc, which is of cardboard, are placed paper discs of various colours. When the top is spun the colours blend… The proportion of each colour which goes to the make-up of this composite surface can be varied at will, by merely moving the discs round upon the spindle… By suitable adjustment of these four discs, the spinning surface can be made to reproduce,with a considerable degree of exactitude, the colour of human skin of all shades and gradations that may be met with.

Be warned, however,

The judgment must always be made while the top is rotating at full speed. Even slight slackening of speed renders matching difficult and the records unreliable.

I learned of the use of these tops from an interview with Michael Keevak, author of Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking. It sounds like another interesting book from the man who wrote The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax, which I blogged about back in 2006.

The robots, which display an avatar face of a Caucasian woman, are controlled remotely by teachers of English in the Philippines — who can see and hear the children via a remote control system.

Cameras detect the Filipino teachers’ facial expressions and instantly reflect them on the avatar’s face, said Sagong Seong-Dae, a senior scientist at KIST.

“Well-educated, experienced Filipino teachers are far cheaper than their counterparts elsewhere, including South Korea,” he told AFP.

It would be a lot easier to just have a direct video feed of their Filipino teachers, but why do that when the magic of virtual reality can give you a white teacher? And unlike real white teachers “they won’t complain about health insurance, sick leave and severance package, or leave in three months for a better-paying job in Japan.”

(Via Roy Berman on Twitter)

His focus is on Southeast Asia, specifically a region he calls “Zomia” which, to quote Martin Lewis:

denotes the mountainous areas of mainland Southeast Asia, along with adjacent parts of India and China, that have historically resisted incorporation into the states centered in the lowland basins of the larger region.

In chapter after chapter he lays out his argument, showing how virtually every aspect of Zomia hill society exists as a means of resisting state authority: If states like the flat plains, people move to the hills to avoid the state. If states like cultivating rice because it concentrates much needed manpower where it can easily be tapped, people adopt shifting cultivation for the very same reason. If states employ writing as a way of keeping track of who’s who, people ditch their books and rely upon easily modified oral genealogies instead. If states like organized religion, people engage in heterodox traditions that defy centralized control. And, perhaps most strikingly, if the state wishes to impose a shared ethnic identity upon its subjects, people choose “tribal” identities as a way of avoiding such ethnic ties.

This last one is likely to draw the most attention (although I personally found the brief section on orality the most provocative – perhaps I’ll write more about that later), although few anthropologists will have a problem with his view of ethnicity as socially constructed. Still, it is worth quoting him at length:

There is, clearly, no such thing as a “tribe” in the strong sense of the word — no objective genealogical, genetic, linguistic, or cultural formula that will unambiguously distinguish one “tribe” from another. But, we might well ask, who is confused? The historian and the colonial ethnographer might be mystified. The mixed villages in northern Burma were “anathema to the tidy bureaucratic officials” who, until, the last moment of imperial rule, were still trying in vain to draw administrative lines between the Kachins and Shans. But hill people were not confused; they were in no doubt who they were and who they were not! Not sharing the researcher’s or administrator’s mania for mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories, hill people were not paralyzed by identities that were plural and variable over time. On the contrary, as we shall see, the ambiguity and porosity of identities was and is, for them, a political resource.

Nor does Scott wish to limit his argument to Zomia. Throughout the book he makes comparisons to indigenous people in Latin America, Gypsies, Cossacks, Afghans, and other tribal and semi-nomadic populations. In an interview with the Boston Globe Scott “cheerfully” conceded “the possibility that he may have overgeneralized in the pursuit of a cohesive argument.” Yet he is careful to restrict his argument to the pre-modern era, saying “if my analysis does not apply to late-twentieth-century Southeast Asia, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” It would be interesting to compare this book with Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject which discusses the role of Colonialism in constructing African ethnic identities. Whereas Scott treats all “states” as essentially the same, Mamdani draws interesting distinctions between French and English strategies of rule, arguing that they led to very different dynamics of ethnic formation.

Of course, much of what Scott says is not new. Anthropologists will be especially aware of the tremendous debt to Edmund Leach and Pierre Clastres, both of whom are cited at length throughout the book. Here’s what he says about Clastres:

The French anthropologist Pierre Clastres was the first to argue that many of the hunting-and-gathering “tribes” of South America, far from being left behind, had previously lived in state formations and practiced fixed-field agriculture. They had purposely given it up to evade subordination. They were, he argued, quite capable of producing a larger economic surplus and a larger-scale political order, but they had chosen not to so as to remain outside state structures.

And Regarding Leach’s classic text, he writes:

Nothing in this distinguished critical literature, however, questions the fact that there are important differences in the relative openness and egalitarianism of various Kachin social systems or that there was, near the close of the past century, something like a movement to assassinate, depose, or desert the more autocratic chiefs. At its core, Leach’s ethnography is an analysis of escape social structure—a form of social organization designed to thwart capture and appropriation either by Shan statelets or by the petty Kachin chiefs (duwa) who attempt to mimic Shan power and hierarchy.

What Scott has done is woven together a huge literature on Southeast Asia and the Chinese border regions into a sweeping (if occasionally repetitive) narrative about the strategies hill people use to resist state power. If I have any reservations about his argument it is that, as someone who spends a lot of time looking at how specific state formations have led to the development of specific ethnic formations, it is more than a little disconcerting to take such a “long view” of history where these details seem so unimportant.

The government of Papua New Guinea recently amended the country’s Environment Act to make it illegal to appeal permitting decisions made by the minister. The immediate reason for this change is clear — the national government relies on large, internationally-financed resource developments to fund it budget. The Ramu NiCo mine in Madang province, majority-owned and operated by a Chinese firm, is planning to dispose of tailings by dumping them into the sea — a move that many, many people in Madang oppose. When anti-mining groups got an injunction against the mine, the government responded by making it illegal to oppose their decision to let the mine go ahead.

The issue is actually more general than this. Landowner groups and others who oppose mining and petroleum developments often challenge environmental permitting in order to pressure or halt operations. Mining leases are rarely reviewed and renewal is largely a matter of course, but water use permits (for toilets on site, for instance) more regularly come up for renewal — and miners need toilets. The Ramu case is just one instance of a much broader tactic used by people opposed to mining.

The big picture is that Papua New Guinea is torn — between politicians in Moresby who are want to use mining revenue to enrich and develop the nation, and grassroots Papua New Guineans who don’t see why they should suffer so others can gain the benefits of mining revenue. When Papua New Guinea became independent in 1975, the country inherited the benevolent paternalism and technocratic confidence of its colonizers — the first generation of educated Papua New Guineans were going to lead the country forward and help develop the grassroots in the name of national progress. Now the worm has turned and Papua New Guinea’s leadership seems to see Papua New Guineans as ungrateful and stubborn — after a peaceful protest organized by Transparency International outside parliament, the prime minister called those who participated “satanic and mentally insane”.

In an article I am working on right now, I examine newspaper coverage of these issues in order to understand contemporary transformations of nationalism in Papua New Guinea. My conclusion – which at this rate will not be published until my kids head off to college! — is that Papua New Guinea is torn between two different idioms to express this conflict between grassroots and the political elite. Within the country, the language used is that of the nation: ironically, the nation-making project of the independence period was so successful that many Papua New Guineans now see themselves as uniting against the state in the name of national unity. Externally, however, the language used to describe these conflicts is that of indigeneity. Coverage of recent events by a UN-sponsored website, for instance, describe the problem as one in which “indigenous people lose out on land rights”.

What I do not say in the article — since it is all scholarly and everything — is how incredibly disappointed I am in the government of Papua New Guinea. Democracy is not fun or easy, and the paralysis induced by lawsuits can be a huge pain, but the solution to these problems is not and can never be removing people’s rights to participate in the processes that will affect their lives. This is particularly true in the case of Ramu, where environmental concerns are justified and deeply felt, not simply cynically used as tactics in a political process. Transparency, accountability, and participation are all incredibly stupid and ridiculously ineffective ways to run a government — but we chose them because democracies put people’s rights ahead of convenience or practicality.

Additionally, I am very uncomfortable with labelling this as a conflict featuring ‘indigenous’ people — despite the fact that I know appealing to international forces using the idiom of indigeneity is often yields useful leverage in political contests like the one at Ramu. But in fact Papua New Guineans are indigenous only in the (often oppressive) eco-authentic sense: they are brown, they have ‘exotic’ languages and cultures, and they live in a place full of endangered species of animals. They are not, however, ‘indigenous’ in the much more important political-emancipatory sense: there is (and was) no real settler colonialism in Papua New Guinea, no large scale expropriation of land, and not even an ethnic majority to oppress minority groups. Despite how easy it is for outsiders to shoe horn Papua New Guinea into popular and easy paradigms of indigenous struggle, such a construal of Papua New Guinea’s story does not do the country justice.

Eco-authentic definitions of indigeneity perpetuate stereotypes of Papua New Guinea as savage backward by giving them a positive moral valuation. They obscure from sight the large number of educated Papua New Guineans, and they stigmatize Papua New Guineans’ decisions to take part in urban, cash-based economies as an abandonment of precious indigenous heritage.

Most importantly, however, these idioms tempt Papua New Guineans to give up on their country and its  government. With corruption in the civil servant rampant and elections in Papua New Guinea too-often a mere shadow of genuine democracy (there is video footage of political henchmen unapologetically — and literally — stuffing ballot boxes), it is easy these days for Papua New Guineans to opt out, to declare the government an illegitimate opponent of the grassroots rather than to hold it to account as the voice of the people. Perhaps they do not need the ‘indigenous alternative’s’ help in abandoning any conception of state legitimacy. But I think Papua New Guinea loses something important when it gives up on its dreams of independence and self-government. Even though it may require people to dig deep, I would urge Papua New Guineans not to give up on the light at the end of the tunnel, and to insist that they are citizens, not indigenes, of Papua New Guinea.

HB 2281:

Prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that:

Promote the overthrow of the United States government.

Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.

Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.

Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.

This is not a new development — I first wrote about this on Savage Minds almost a year ago, although I figured it was the kind of right-wing looniness that makes great theater but never gets through the legislative process.

Arizona clearly has a hard-on for its Hispanic population, citizens and non-citizens alike, and this law combined with its other recent laws targeting Hispanics certainly makes White Arizona’s intentions against Hispanic Arizona crystal clear. The specific target of HB 2281, as I noted last year, is a set of programs offered in Tucson high schools that teach the history of La Raza, but the wider importance is a sort of forced and simple-minded assimilationism that lacks even the nuance of early- and mid-20th century “melting pot” models. Arizona is going on record saying there is one way of life, and one way only, that can be called “American”, and that way involves whiteness, English-speaking, and a subscription to the kind of bogus faux-historical mythical charter that makes up high school US history curricula nation-wide (and which, thanks to near-neighbor Texas, is about to get boguser).

But here’s the rub: what happens when the Texas curriculum — which, if allowed to stand, will shape history textbooks, and thus history curricula, throughout the nation — comes into conflict with Arizona’s HB 2281? Texas’ standards — and I’d venture the standards Arizona’s legislature wants to see imposed state-wide — are explicitly designed to promote resentment towards non-white and poor people (q.v. the exclusion of labor union history, the downplaying of the anti-slavery and ethnic civil rights movements, the excision of folks like Cesar Chavez as “irrelevant”) and, even more clearly, are designed to promote ethnic solidarity. In fact, HB 2281 itself is designed to promote ethnic solidarity, and quite openly so — the fact that Arizona’s legislators don’t recognize their own whiteness as an ethnicity, and their assimilationism as a way of advocating white ethnic solidarity, does not make it not so.

There’s plenty of case law, including Brown v. Board itself, that demonstrates that exclusion leads to stigmatization and therefore is not allowable in public education. Arizona may get rid of the ethnic studies classes it’s white, conservative leaders despise so much, but it’s white history, white literature, and white social studies classes — which is to say, virtually the entire curriculum outside of ethnic studies courses — is clearly illegal under the tenets of the new law.

And in fact, since the law’s main goal seems to be to eliminate courses whose enrollment is restricted by ethnic requirements, all those ethnic studies programs need to do is demonstrate that their courses are open to all. The state would have a hard time showing that any of them violate the principles listed above — teaching about Mexican history and the history of Mexicans in the US is not the same as teaching Hispanic kids to overthrow the government or hate white people. It would be easier, I think, for a Hispanic or African-American to prove that the traditional US history, literature, or civics class — especially one using materials shaped by Texas’ guidelines — violates those restrictions than for a white conservative to demonstrate the same for an ethnic studies class.

This is the blind spot in today’s resurgent assimilationism. Because American whiteness is seen (especially by white people) as a lack of race or ethnicity, and because American white supremacy works well to make itself invisible (again, especially to white folks) and thus “natural” and “normal”, white conservatives are unable to reflexively consider their own chauvinism, even as they target the supposed chauvinism of any other group that dares to claim a different identity. In fact, the same principle is at work in the labeling of same-sex marriage rights as “special privileges” when clearly it is straight people who enjoy a privilege denied to non-straight people.

There’s a good chance all this is moot, that HB 2281 will be overthrown in court or rescinded by a future, less loony state legislature, but I’d love to see activists grab onto this law and the leverage it gives to challenge the teaching of white supremacy, Christian ideology, and English Firstism in Arizona schools and, by extension, throughout the US educational system before HB 2281 goes away.

[Comments closed 5-10-10 due to off-topic posts and flaming.]

The film states several times that one reason the story of failed to become popular in Belgium is that the residents of Flanders don’t see Flanders when they read the book or watch the films, or the TV show. Rather, what they see is Holland. This isn’t surprising, since visiting filmmakers will find little pastoral beauty in modern day industrial Flanders, and Holland is just a twenty minute drive away. But while foreigners might not be able to tell the subtle differences in dress, or even the color of stones used in the streets and buildings, the people who live there are very, very aware.

I probably would not have thought twice about this, except I have also been reading China Mieville’s surreal crime-story, The City & The City. Here is how the Guardian describes the book’s central premise:

the city of Beszel exists in the same space as the city of Ul Qoma. Citizens of each city can dimly make out the other, but are forbidden on pain of severe penalties (administered by a supreme authority known simply as Breach) to notice it. They have learned by habit to “unsee”. The cities have different airports, international dialling codes, internet links. Cars navigate instinctively around one another; police officers cooperate but are not allowed to stop or investigate crimes committed in the other city.

The novel takes a trick or two from my favorite writer, Bruno Schulz, imagining twin cities occupying the same physical space. A situation reminiscent of another enjoyable film from the TIEFF festival, Jerusalem(s), which follows Jewish, Muslim, and Christian tour guides around Jerusalem. Constantly cutting to the numerous surveillance cameras which are also watching. But the book captures something which is not just true of divided cities like Jerusalem or cold-war Berlin, it is also of Flanders. In order to “unsee” someone from Ul Qoma, the residents of Beszel must be alert to subtle signs of dress and manner, just as the residents of Flanders would never be mistaken for Dutch.

I believe manner of seeing is something we don’t just learn, it is something we cultivate. We are proud of our ability to (un)see differences. Every once in a while I meet a Taiwanese, usually someone who lives abroad, or has travelled widely. They peg me for Jewish, but don’t want to broach the topic directly, so the usually ask me if I might not be French. When I insist that I am not, however, they usually garner up the courage to pursue the question until they’ve established that they were correct to begin with. I also know my friends of mixed ancestry (which, of course, is all of us – but you know what I mean) can cause tremendous significant discomfort in random strangers, simply because they are difficult to peg. A Japanese-Afghan friend gets asked: “What are you?” by total strangers on the subway. Once they know “what” she is, they can go back to unseeing her.

UPDATE: Some slight corrections made.

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.

Yes, [Samuel Alito] takes his life experiences into account, but he does it neutrally! So why is he neutral, and not Sotomayor? It’s because Alito is white.

Via Sociological Images, where you can read a full transcript of the segment.

Image via Wikipedia

Legislation that will end ethnic studies programs in Arizona high schools looks set to be signed into law by the state’s governor. Promoted by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, the law will deprive public schools that do not eliminate ethnic studies courses of 10% of their state funding.

The target of the bill appears to be Tucson Unified School District, whose Raza Studies program serves some 1,200 Latino students. Interestingly, students involved in this program show a marked improvement over the state average on the state’s standardized testing (which goes well with other evidence that students involved in bilingual education, as well as students given access to electives like art, photography, and creative writing perform better on standardized tests – they tend to be more focused on and more engaged with school overall than students who are deprived of these “optional” courses).

Exempted from the law are Native American-focused courses that are protected by federal law, and English Language Learner courses.

Attacks on courses that teach parts of American history that deviate from the traditional, conservative narrative of America’s greatness are not new, of course. When then-chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lynne Cheney commissioned a panel to develop national history standards in the early 1990’s, she was shocked by the results. In a piece published in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The End of History”, she railed against “an academic establishment that revels in the kind of politicized history that characterizes much of the National Standards” – history that includes Native Americans and the Underground Railroad as part of the American story, as well as the embarrassments of McCarthyism (this was a time when conservatives were still embarrassed about McCarthy) and the Ku Klux Klan. (So infuriated was Cheney by the standards that in 2004 she had a pamphlet for parents called “Helping Your Child Learn History” pulped and re-printed because it included references to the standard!)

At risk for conservatives like Cheney is not history, per se. After all, the Massacre at Sand Creek happened, the Constitution really did set black people’s worth at 3/5 that of white people’s, and police and militia really did attack the children of striking workers in Lawrence, MA, as they approached the train station en route to lodging away from the hunger and violence of the strike. In a place like Tucson, which was after all part of Mexico until the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, the history of “la Raza” is particularly relevant.

What is at risk is the notion that American history should not be just (or even in many cases) the facts of our past but should be a story that edifies national citizenship. In her response to the National History Standards, published as American Memory, Cheney wrote that:

Knowledge of the ideas that have molded us and the ideals that have mattered to us functions as a kind of civic glue. Our history and literature give us symbols to share; they help us all, no matter how diverse our backgrounds, feel part of a common undertaking (Quoted in Symcox, Linda, [2002] Whose History?  P. 85).

In other words, there is a narrative of history that Americans should share, and this narrative is one that celebrates the triumphs and high values of our nation while downplaying the embarrassments and shortcomings.

In Arizona, and in the Southwest in general, this narrative takes on special importance as an assimilative tool, because for the most part, it is not the history of the people who live there. Latino children in traditional US history classes get the dubious pleasure of sitting through months of a history that, unless by some miracle the teacher manages to get up to the 1960s  and the agricultural worker strikes led by Cesar Chavez, is unlikely to contain a Latino name except as enemies. This narrative that largely excludes the Latino experience form American history defines our history largely as the history of white folks, predominantly male. (It is probably not coincidental that more-assimilated Hispanics in the US tend to identify themselves as “white” on the Census, while less-assimilated Hispanics tend to identify racially as “other”.)

Ethnic Studies (along with Women’s Studies, another pet peeve of Arizona’s education superintendent) challenges this narrative, which is why it is a favorite target of conservatives. We saw, for example, how the Ward Churchill affair quickly and easily spilled over into a condemnation of the entire field of Ethnic Studies. (Consider Don Feder’s contribution at Horowitz’s Frontpagemag.com, in which he places the term “ethnic studies” in shudder-quotes in the first line, to suggest that it’s not a “real” academic discipline.) In the wake of 9/11, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni rushed into print a pamphlet called “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It” [links to PDF file] which complained that after 9/11,

…instead of ensuring that students understand the unique contributions of America and Western civilization—the civilization under attack—universities are rushing to add courses on Islamic and Asian cultures (Martin, Jerry and Anne D. Neal [2002] P. 6).

(I quote from the 2002 version; an earlier version published in 2001 included the names of the academics and students in the Appendix who had dared to utter statements in the wake of the attacks that ACTA deemed “anti-American”; it was taken down from ACTA’s website and replaced with a version that identified speakers only by social role.)

Of course, with it’s anglo-centrism and privileging of the doings of white elites, American history as preferred by Cheney and her ACTA cohorts, and by Feder and Horowitz, and so many others is as much an “ethnic study” as Tucson’s La Raza program. It will be interesting to see what happens when some smart activist gets it into his or her head to challenge the inclusion of traditional US history in the Arizona high school curriculum. The law in question prohibits the teaching of classes that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals“ – by the same standards that would forbid the teaching of Latino history and culture, the teaching of Anglo history and culture is also prohibited by this law.

(The issue of treatment “as individuals” is a complex and troubling one, but one which I don’t understand well enough to comment on – I think the argument is that treating students as “Latinos” somehow deprives them of their individuality. Again, by that standard, treating them as “Americans” would also be prohibited, but I feel like there’s something deeper and more disturbing at work in this language.)

Meanwhile, though, students in Arizona will be deprived of history in exchange for a fairy-tale version of history that pretends to be their story. If successful, I would expect to see similar laws passing in any state that offers programs like Tucson’s La Raza program – and state legislators being who they are, attempts to impose similar restrictions on public universities and colleges as well.

I just wonder how it is that Apple finds an application in which people can throw shoes at a virtual Bush unacceptable, but find the virtual torture of Pacific Islanders perfectly OK? And how is it that after weeks of being one of the bestselling iPhone games, hardly anyone has commented upon the game’s racism? Just imagine, for instance, a game in which one were presented with a virtual shtetle filled with Jews one could torture, or a plantation full of African slaves? How is it that such applications would certainly be rejected by the Apple Store, and yet Pocket God does not even provoke controversy?

I suppose that most people who play this game think of the island’s inhabitants as fictitious primitives, rather than representatives of a particular ethnic group. I doubt people playing the game bear any hatred towards Pacific Islanders. And yet, I can’t help but see our inability to view cartoonish depictions of indigenous peoples, such as sports mascots, as representations of living peoples as problematic. In particular, I feel it ties in with the myth of a vanishing race, of a people who, defined in terms or their primitivism must have already given way to the forces of modernity, their very existence denied.

UPDATE: I don’t personally think Apple should be in the business of censoring applications based on content, but here is another story that is relevant to the current discussion:

The release (and subsequent removal) of an iPhone app called Baby Shaker this week has Apple in hot water with angry parents and children’s groups, who are demanding answers from Apple.

UPDATE: Seems that Canterbury University Lecturer Malakai Koloamatangi is now raising a stink about the game. See here and here (via Indigeneity)

UPDATE: Looks like the developers are going to make some changes in response to criticisms. (They are also hiring a PR firm.)

I’m glad to see that the book also covers the various incarnations of “Chinese Food” around the world. I had a chuckle when the Indian post-docs at my university served “Gobi Manchurian” as part of an “Indian” meal they cooked for their Taiwanese colleagues in the chemistry department. Lee’s book might be a fun counterpoint to Golden Arches East.

In a similar vein, I recommend Kenneth Guest’s article, in AnthroNow, on the labor relations which keep America’s Chinese food economy afloat (PDF download).

And finally, in the spirit of the holidays, here’s a link to one of my favorite holiday songs.

This view is based on a very nineteenth century vision of unilinear social evolution, in which human beings gradually progress from the most primitive state of hunter-gatherers, up through simple agricultural societies, on to early kingdoms, and cumulate in the wonder that is modern Western democracy.

The problem with this view is that it overlooks important exceptions in the archaeological record. There we find a different story, where complex societies can occasionally move in the other direction. I don’t know the current state of research which first made a splash in 2003, but then there was a spate of news coverage about the “Lost cities of the Amazon” discovered by Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida and his colleagues:

Heckenberger’s team has found 19 settlements to date, at least four of which were major residential centers. The settlements were built around large, circular plazas, with roads leading out from them at specific angles, repeated from one plaza to the next.

Heckenberger, who collaborated with two Kuikuro chiefs on the Science study, believes the engineered features of the landscape all involved elements of the Kuikuro’s understanding of the entire cosmos. Road directions and the orientations of other structures are keyed to the directions of the sun and stars, for example. Today, the Kuikuro continue this sort of “ethnocartography,” as Heckenberger calls it.

Roads in the ancient settlements were up to 165 feet (50 meters) wide, the width of a modern-day four-lane highway, and flanked by large curbs. The researchers report that the roads linked settlements, every two to three miles (three to five kilometers), along an extensive grid. This kind of planning would have required the relatively sophisticated ability to reproduce angles over large distances, according to Heckenberger.

Where the villages converged on wetlands, the researchers discovered the remains of ancient bridges, moats and canals. The Kuikuro still use many such structures today.

The entire area in between settlements was carefully engineered and managed, according to the researchers. It was likely either cultivated, or maintained as a sort of parkland — a managed area, rather than wild or pristine forest. Satellite images reveal that the vegetation now growing in these areas looks quite different from older forest.

This suggests that today’s hunter-gatherers might be descended from the builders of four-lane highways, bridges, moats and canals….

Read the article in Science.

More news stories.

Earlier on Savage Minds