Take for example this letter from Mohit Chandra, a partner with KPMG, to “India’s Graduating Classes.” Many of his complaints would be just as valid of students I’ve met in Philadelphia as they are of students I’ve met in Ahmedabad or Taipei. It seems to me that there are two possible explanations for this failure. The first is that the institutions of global higher education are particularly unproductive and inefficient at producing the type of students they wish to produce. The second is that they don’t actually wish to produce such students in the first place. I’d like to argue that the latter statement is closer to the truth.

Let us look at the skills that Chandra wishes to find in new employees: “language skills, in thirst for knowledge, in true professionalism and, finally, in thinking creatively and non-hierarchically.” In reading this list I can’t help but think of Bourdieu and Passeron’s argument that education primarily serves to cultivate a

misrecognition of the truth of the legitimate culture as the dominant cultural arbitrary, whose reproduction contributes towards reproducing the power relations.

The skills Chandra lists are elite skills largely cultivated in the home long before arriving at the university. Bourdieu and Passeron argue that schooling exists largely to “inculcate the fait accompli of the legitimacy of the dominant culture” rather than actually training students to cultivate these skills.

I think this tension explains the tremendous popularity of the Bollywood Film 3 Idiots.

Almost every single Taiwanese person I know has seen this film, which was also a huge hit in India. The film is about three engineering students at a highly competitive university who refuse to learn the official curriculum, instead evidencing those skills which Chandra claims KPMG is looking for. My point being that there is a certain recognition in the success of this film that the skills being taught in universities are not the skills people really need to compete in the new economy.

When my wife and I were shooting our last documentary in India we sometimes stayed in a guest house on the campus of an engineering school. Some of the students there knew that there was a visiting anthropologist and they would wait outside our guest house late at night when we got back from shooting, wishing to talk until I could no longer keep my eyes open. Like the “3 idiots” in the film, they were desperate to get the education they feel they needed rather than the official education being provided by the university.

One often reads that high end management companies and the like (places like KPMG) like students with advanced degrees in anthropology. While few people with advanced degrees in anthropology are interested in working in management, I think one could make a good argument that an anthropology degree is much closer to the kind of training Chandra is looking for than that provided by the engineering and management schools which train most of his actual employees.

I think Bourdieu and Passeron do a good job describing the problem, but I don’t think they adequately explain how such institutional failure continues to be reproduced on an ever-expanding global scale. It might be that KPMG is the exception and that there really is a huge need for low level technocrats of the kind actually produced by most schools and that elite skills would actually be a problem for the companies seeking to hire these workers. But I find such a market-driven answer equally unconvincing. I tend to feel that there is a contradiction between the needs of employers qua employers and the needs of employers qua capitalists. As employers they need these skills, but as capitalists too many people with these skills would be a threat. I think that the current state of global higher education is the result of the working out of these contradictions.

As these creased and dog-eared magazines get passed back and forth at our family dinner table I had my brilliant wife (a real scientist) on hand for questioning.

“So is this telomere stuff for real?” I asked her.

“Mmm-hmm,” she said with a shrug. “It looks that way.” So there you have it, from the seat of authority.

Let’s refer to the Science journalist here:

Telomeres are repetitive sequences of DNA that prevent the ends of chromosomes from unraveling, much like the plastic tops on the ends of shoelaces. As cells divide and replicate, telomeres get shorter and eventually can no longer prevent the fraying of DNA and the decay of aging. Recent studies have found a link between living to 100 and having a hyperactive version of telomerase, an enyzme that keeps telomeres long.

If you’ve got long telomeres on your chromosomes then genetically speaking this is beneficial and improves your chances at living a long life. But what factors determines telomere length?

The results of some very interesting new research (cf. Science vol.336, pg.539) suggest that telomeres in sperm cells are proportional in length to the age of the man. Thus the older the father is at conception, the longer the telomeres of his offspring. The researchers found that this effect extended to grandfathers as well, passing on their telomeres to their son’s children but not their daughter’s children.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that older dads have great genetic advantages. In fact as we age our gametes are more likely to contain mutations, so there are definitely some benefits to having younger parents. But I couldn’t help but be prompted to reflect how reproductive advantages of older men might have had an impact on the organization of society.

Certainly when it comes to mothers, experience pays serious dividends in terms of reproductive fitness. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy writes in Mother Nature, among primates first time mothers are generally less successful but since mothering is learned behavior this can improve with time. Thus:

Given a choice between two sexually swollen females, male chimps invariably choose the older one. It is interesting to speculate why men in some societies differ from other primates in this respect, placing so much emphasis on youth. One reason, I suspect is that these men are in a position to monopolize access to their mate and to literally possess her long-term. (186)

So human sexuality, as we can observe it today, is always already in the context of patriarchal relations. This may even extend to the cultural valuation placed the beauty of youth, which is desirable not because young people make better parents but because young women yield long term benefits for older men.

On the theme of “interesting to speculate” we might question whether older men hold some benefits in terms of the reproductive fitness of younger women. There is after all this ubiquitous pattern, seen around the world, of older men shacking up with younger women. This is readily observed in the age difference between spouses, with the male partner typically older than the female partner. What is the basis for this? How far back in human history does this pattern extend?

One outcome of this pattern is that from the beginning of the affinal relationship the male is in a privileged position as the elder. Of course, there are other factors that may be more relevant than the age difference of the spouses when it comes to understanding household micropolitics. For example, there are social and cultural reasons why a woman might choose an older man to be her mate. An older man might have command of more economic resources, or he might have more clout and authority in the community — things that can make a big difference when it comes to raising offspring to reproductive maturity.

Now perhaps we can count another “pro” in the advantages of older male spouses: longer telomeres. Because men and women have different reproductive strategies, a man who can sire children well into his maturity can have additional opportunities to enhance his fitness unavailable to his shorter lived peers. And this trait of longevity may be passed down to his offspring, and his son’s offspring.

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.

Take a second to think about it: why do we assume that the more advanced you get, the less body you will have?

Star Trek is a product of its time featuring all the teleological unilinear evolution you could shake a stick at — more Leslie White and Herbert Spencer than Julian Steward and Charles Darwin. I understand that it views all life-forms as being located on a Victorian continuum with Papua New Guinea on one end and NASA on the other. But even in a world obsessed with technological improvement, since when did the body become something that, technically, it would be better for us to get rid of? I really want to hammer home the incredibly non-obvious nature of this question in: what is technologically backwards about having a body?

The answer, of course, is that contemporary Eurochristian cultures have a long history of viewing the body as the dirty, uncontrolled, appetitive fleshvelope that our pure, divine souls have been crammed into. All of the Star Trek tropes of floating pools of light entering our bodies to possess our engineers and lieutenant commanders; their need to lower themselves by using physical speech to communicate; the promise that someday we might be able to comprehend the infinite majesty of the universe once we’ve joined them…. totally different from angels, amirite?

One of the oddities of anthropology is that once you’ve tuned into a cultural pattern, you see it everywhere — that’s how you know you’ve gotten your analysis right. But for most Americans, say, it takes quite a lot of exposure to American and British culture to see the big picture. Not just because you are too close (although that is a problem) but because you spend most of your life going to work, cooking dinner, etc. and not reading Sacvan Berkovitch and Perry Miller. Or for that matter Madame Blavatsky.

And yet it is a strange, very culturally specific idea that we are more truly ourselves when we are out of our bodies rather then when we are in them. Many people in other cultures think that they are their bodies — a very sensible proposition indeed given the available evidence. It takes analysis and comparison to understand this, even though the examples of the pattern occur regularly on Netflix. 

We spend some time doing kinship diagrams. I show them my family and lead them through exercises where they chart their own families. Such diagrams are passe I guess, but for me they hold quirky charm not unlike the lost art of diagramming sentences. I can throw them up pretty quickly on a white board and we use them in class to help visualize social relationships.

Students find patrilineal descent, which flows from fathers to offspring, to be somewhat intuitive. After all they behave in a similar way to our tradition of passing down surnames and students can anticipate how patrilineality might coincide with a a socio-economic system that favors powerful fathers and husbands. But matilineal descent which flows from mothers to offspring are strange to them, its illogic manifest most clearly in the responsibilities for discipline granted to resource providers such as uncles and brothers, with weaker bonds ascribed to biological fathers.

Matrilineality seems exotic to students, but in fact some examples of it can easily be found in one of the most ancient charter documents of “Western Civilization.” Bereishit (Genesis), the first book of the Torah (Old Testament).

I don’t know if you’ve ever just sat down and read a whole lot of the Bible. My knowledge of it is fairly limited. I am familiar with Genesis which is distinguished by its engaging mythic narratives that rewards rereading. These incredibly evocative and powerful stories caught the imagination of underground cartoonist R.Crumb and inspired him to complete a fully illustrated Book of Genesis. The Crumb illustrations, thick and fleshy, help out to humanize the characters especially for people who aren’t already familiar with the stories.

Now granted, what I’m about to do is not the usual way one reads Genesis. I’m only doing this in order to make some points about matrilineality, not to claim some sort of religious insight.

 
Overview

Some scholars estimate that the Old Testament was first written down in 1000 BCE. Prior to that the stories almost certainly existed as oral traditions, so their true age is unknown. According to some they may have roots in ancient Summerian myths. Genesis covers a lot of ground that is outside our scope. What we’re focusing on here is the middle portions of the Book which follows the lives of one family all descended from a man named Abraham.

As you might guess the stories mostly focus on the men of the family: Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph. Simply put there are not very many female characters. But if you read Genesis from the point of view of the few females that are there some remarkable similarities to matrilineal kinship patterns arise.

I already told you I’m not a Biblical scholar, okay?

 
The original love triangle: Sarah gives Hager to Abraham

Abraham’s wife, Sarah, cannot have children and so she gives her slave girl, Hager, to her husband. Predictably this ends in tragedy as Sarah grows jealous of Hager for giving birth. She chases Hager off, but she promptly returns after an angel of the Lord directs her to do so.

Later there is a miracle and Sarah does conceive despite her old age. This son is to be Isaac. Ultimately Sarah instructs Abraham to banish Hager and his first born son Ishmael. This is the mythic fission of the Abrahamic religions as Ishmael becomes the ancestor of many Islamic prophets, including Mohammed. The line that issues from Sarah through Isaac becomes the Hebrews. So the Muslims and the Jews have the same father but different mothers!

In fact Abraham outlives Sarah and after her death he has many other wives. And although children by these women are descended from Abraham, Abraham’s wealth and God’s blessing go to Isaac. Thus the chosen people, the Jews, are – following a matrilineal pattern – the descendents of Sarah. Others who are the descendants of Abraham by other women are excluded.

 
Rebekah’s Bride Price

In the next story Abraham wants to find a suitable wife for his son Isaac. He doesn’t want Isaac messing around with any of the local girls, so he sends one of his servants back to his homeland to the family of his brother, Nahor. The servant returns with Rebekah, technically Isaac’s first cousin once removed. What’s interesting to us in this context is how he acquires her.

So Abraham’s man makes this long journey until he finally arrives at Nahor’s compound. There’s this pretty young woman at the well and she shows her hospitality by drawing water for him and his camels. Abraham’s servant is impressed with her kindness and gives her gifts which she immediately takes back to show to her mother and brother.

Laban, Rebekah’s brother, is intrigued that there’s some rich stranger on the outskirts of town giving gifts to his sister so he goes to check it out. It’s the brother that negotiates the terms of marriage for his sister, the father is nowhere mentioned. Abraham’s servant pays Laban and Rebekah’s mother with more gifts and they reciprocate with a feast in celebration of the arrangement.

This is very much in keeping with matrilineal kinship patterns because the brother is in a position of authority relative to the sister and the bride’s mother is the recipients of the bride price. For those familiar with the patrilineal tradition of the father giving away the bride this is an interesting reversal.

 
Shit gets too heavy for Jacob

In the next story Rebekah gives birth to twins Esau and Jacob.

Twin brothers Esau and Jacob are like perfect opposites. Esau is big and burly, he’s covered in manly body hair and is a successful hunter. Jacob is a mild mannered kind of guy, he spends a lot of time indoors working with his mom. The parents play favorites too. Isaac has a taste for game so he loves the first born Esau best, but Rebekah loves Jacob and together they hatch this elaborate plan to divest Esau of his father’s inheritance and God’s blessing.

Once Esau discovers what Jacob is up to, that he has successfully stolen his father’s blessing, he is pissed. He threatens to kill Jacob, which we have to suspect would be no match – this big strapping hunter against mama’s boy. What do you do when things get too hot around the patrilineage? Go take refuge with your mother’s brother!

As members of the same matrilineage Laban graciously receives Jacob as if he were his own son. Laban also appears to be the primary property owner in this land and is probably overjoyed to have gained a new employee for his ranching operation.

 
Jacob scores a threesome
So Jacob goes to work for his mother’s brother while things cool off back at his dad’s place. Laban asks him “What should your wages be?” when Jacob really has his eyes on Laban’s daughters (his first cousins). There’s Leah who has pretty eyes and then there’s Rachael, who has everything else.

I really like how Crumb draws her with some va-va-voom!

Jacob strikes a deal with Laban. He will work for seven years to pay Rachael’s bride price.

Seven years pass, the wedding is held and Lo! That’s not the woman I thought I married! Are we to take it that the bride’s face was veiled? At any rate it seems Laban has pulled a fast one on his nephew.

Laban feeds Jacob a line about how it is their tradition that the younger daughter should not be married before the elder and he swallows it. Still his love for Rachael is so great that he’s willing to work another seven years to marry the other sister! This double cross comes back to haunt Laban in the next story.

Now Jacob is nestled in real tight with this matrilineage. Having married sisters this insures that all of his children from either wife will be on the same team.

 
The sisters side against the father

It seems like things are going pretty well for Jacob now. After overcoming some trickeration from his uncle/ father in-law, Jacob’s wives are blessed with many children. He even seems to benefit from a little sibling rivalry between the sisters as they give to him their handmaiden’s much as Sarah gave Hager to Abraham.

By this point in the story Jacob has been in Laban’s house for many years and the fact is not lost on him that his labor is making his uncle wealthier at his own expense. Not unlike the plot to defraud Esau of his inheritance Jacob conceives of an elaborate conspiracy to fleece Laban of his flock and then flee back to the land of his father, Isaac. And just as he needed his mother Rebekah to execute the last heist, he needs the assistance of Leah and Rachael. When he shares his plans with them Jacob finds he has no trouble at all turning the sisters against their father.

So the plan is put into action and Jacob looks to make off with most of Laban’s herd. When Laban discovers the deal is going down he runs out into the field to try to put a stop to it. With Laban out of the house Rachael sneaks back in and steals some of his household idols. This only infuriates Laban more and Jacob gives him permission to search their tents to recover his idols unaware that his own wife has taken them.

Then there’s this fascinating scene where Laban storms into Rachael’s tent. Taking the idols and hiding them under some blankets Rachael sits down on top of them and pretends to be on her period. Laban retreats. The matrilineage has succeeded in appropriating the domestic gods.

 
Dinah is raped and the matrilineage sides against the father (again)

Like I said there’s not a whole of stories in Genesis with prominent female characters, but there is one more that will serve our purposes here. After Jacob deserts Laban and reconciles with Esau he becomes a successful patriarch and keeper of flocks.

Being that he’s married to sisters all of his offspring would belong to the same matrilineage. Here we are interested in how Dinah’s brothers react to her assault by Shechem Prince of the Hivites

Not cool Shechem. You’re supposed to marry the girl and then take her virginity. Not the other way around!

Hamor, his father, knows he son has screwed up and so the two of them head out to Jacob’s camp to tray and make amends. But in the story Jacob the father of Dinah “keeps his peace” and instead her brothers take charge.

I love this scene because its like something right out of Levi-Strauss. Here are two groups of men engaged in politics using women as a tokens of exchanges.

Dinah’s brothers have other ideas, however. Remember, these guys are Hebrews. Its unacceptable to them that Shechem would be uncircumcised. Eew, gross! There is no way you are touching our sister. Unless… snip snip.

Have you guessed that this is leading up to an elaborate conspiracy whereby one group exacts revenge on another? Good for you! The brothers convince Hamor and Shechem that they will exchange women and build up their alliances if they have all the men of their village circumcised simultaneously. Then while the Hivites are convalescing from their wounds Dinah’s brothers come in and KILL THEM ALL!!

When Jacob hears about this he is pissed.

Guys, he seems to be saying, you’re making me look really bad here. But its too late. The matrilineage has sided against the patrilineage yet again.

I hope you enjoyed this. My plane is boarding so I’ll have to leave it here. Happy Mother’s Day! I love you mom!

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.

As described in my last post, listening to lots of audio in the target language is a key part of my approach to language learning. For that reason I needed a good field recorder app for my iPhone. I spent a lot of time and (because you can’t demo most apps without buying them) money searching for a workflow which would let me record, edit, and listen to audio within the same application. I wanted it all in one application because I find that I sometimes want to go back and re-edit a file. It is also currently difficult to send files to iTunes without going through the desktop. In the end, I found a wonderful app that did exactly what I wanted: FiRe2 Field Recorder.

FiRe2 has some really great features that I find particularly useful. First of all, it shows a waveform of the audio. When you are trying to edit an audio file, or listen to it for language practice, having a visual representation of the audio is very useful. Secondly, you can easily mark the audio during recording or playback for easy navigation or editing. While I found other waveform editors, none were as easy to use for playback and language practice. In FiRe2 it is very easy to jump back to the previous mark or the beginning of an audio file with the tap of your thumb. Third, it is easy to sync the audio to the desktop in a number of formats via Dropbox. Forth and most importantly, if you turn the phone sideways it gives you an intuitive and easy to use waveform editor which allows me to easily extract the bits of speech I want to listen to for my language practice.

Of course, FiRe isn’t perfect. I wish it was easier to edit and see text labels for the markers. But FiRe is not meant to be used for transcription. In another post I will talk about transcription software – an essential part of my language learning workflow. I also wish it supported the “open in” feature of iOS which allows apps to send and receive files from other apps. (They say they are working on it.) I should also add that while I find the built-in microphone is good enough for my needs, there are a number of external mics you can buy if you need better sound quality.

I am not this guy:

Or this guy:

Then he dived into Russian, Italian, Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi, Ojibwe, Pashto, Turkish, Hausa, Kurdish, Yiddish, Dutch, Croatian and German, teaching himself mostly from grammar books and flash card applications on his iPhone. This in addition to a more formal study of French, Latin and Mandarin at the Dalton School, where he is a sophomore.

I suspect some people are wired differently, like this RadioLab episode about a ragtime musician who can play four concerts in his head at the same time and keep track of what any instrument in each of the four orchestras is playing at any given time.

This is a post about language learning for the rest of us. But first, a little throat clearing. While I have read a few books summarizing contemporary research on language learning, I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject. That means I make some scientific claims without backing them up. Caveat emptor.

1. If you are having difficulty learning a foreign language, it might not be your fault.

There is significant debate over the concept of “learning styles.” Some researchers argue that different students learn things in different ways, while others argue that this theory is simply an excuse for coddling the lazy and stupid. I personally believe that our education system trains us to learn in certain ways and that after a certain age it is hard to learn in new ways. So, if you are a Taiwanese student you are probably pretty good at memorizing large chunks of information because your schooling has taught you how to do so. But if you are an American, you probably don’t have the same memorization skills.

Being good at memorization (like the folks listed at the top of this post) is useful for learning vocabulary, but it isn’t sufficient, nor is it necessary in the strictest sense. By that I mean that being able to provide the English term for a word is not the same thing as being able to use that word in a conversation. There are lots of words I know and can use in Mandarin conversation which I would not be able to provide upon demand if you asked me how to say the Chinese equivalent of some English word. These are different mental skills. I do believe having a good memory can help, but only in the sense that being a good long distance runner means you probably are in better shape and less likely to get winded when doing sprints. The training for one is very different from the training for the other and they shouldn’t get confused.

I realized this very late in my training. I was doing horribly at my intensive Chinese classes and was beginning to despair of ever having the language skills necessary to do ethnographic fieldwork. Every day we had to memorize nearly a hundred Chinese characters and familiarize ourselves with the new grammar patterns in the book. I just couldn’t do it. Moreover, I was becoming sleep deprived and I now know that sleep deprivation makes it harder to learn a foreign language (or anything else for that matter). Luckily, one of our teachers Ms. Chen, was studying at a program which was teaching new methods in language learning and she asked if I would be a guinea pig in her new class. Despairing of anything else working, I agreed. I will explain why in the next section.

2. Learn a foreign language like you learned your mother tongue.

It is true that children are naturally wired to learn a foreign language. We loose a lot of that when we grow up, so there are good arguments to be made for using a different approach when learning a new language. Above all, we can apply our literacy skills to learning the new language – something we can’t do as infants. Nonetheless, I firmly believe that, like infants, we learn a lot just by sheer exposure to a foreign language. Exposure isn’t enough on its own, but we need a lot more exposure than we realize. Listening to a language for half an hour a day in addition to your classes will make a huge difference. Watch TV, read books, read comic books, listen to the radio, eavesdrop, do whatever it takes to increase your exposure to the target language. Like a baby, I believe you need thousands of hours of exposure to achieve basic competence. But unlike a baby we have to work to get that exposure.

What Ms. Chen did that was so different from my previous teachers was to have us first spend lots of time listening to audio of the new lesson. Doing this before we had studied the vocabulary or the grammar. Just listen. Use our knowledge of the language to try to guess the meaning. Like a baby. Only after we had listened numerous times, tried to write down what we heard, and tried to guess the meaning, did we get to look at the grammar patterns. Then we listened again. Guessed again. Then, and only then, did we get to see the new vocabulary list. This worked for me in a way that my previous classes had not. One of the problems, I believe, is that if you learn the vocabulary first, you “hear” the English word instead of the word in the target language when you study the lesson. This way, you really hear the word in the target language and then when you learn the English it helps you to make sense of that word rather than replacing it with the translation.

3. Become the master of your domain.

One of the hardest things about learning a new language – especially if you don’t have a particularly good memory – is that there is simply so much vocabulary to learn, but you need a minimum amount of vocabulary to learn the language. Without that vocabulary you can’t really learn new words or grammar because you don’t have a framework upon which to hang the new information. The solution is to focus on a few domains that interest you. To this day I am much better at talking about politics and social theory in Chinese than I am at talking about sports. Not surprising as I’m pretty much the same way in English. By playing on your strengths you can quickly reach the minimal threshold necessary to begin learning new words “in the wild” (as opposed to what you see in textbooks).

Similarly, if you want to read fiction in another language, or watch a TV show, pick something with numerous volumes or episodes. It will be hard at first, but soon you will know the characters and the basic vocabulary associated with that world. I read all seven Harry Potter books in the Mandarin translation (see this great website comparing Harry Potter in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese). Doing so was very hard at first, but by the third volume I was familiar with most of the terms associated with the Harry Potter universe, and I could increasingly guess the meaning of words I didn’t know (or at least the general outline of the plot) without recourse to a dictionary. I have also watched every single episode of Doreamon in Chinese (but not the specials or the films, I prefer the TV show). The musically inclined seem to do very well learning songs in the target language – unfortunately that has never worked well for me.

4. Learn like a linguistic anthropologist.

This is even more true for learning an endangered language that might not be as well documented, but I think it is true of all language learning. Ms. Chen’s teaching method taught me the importance of transcription as a teaching method. Trying to transcribe unfamiliar speech makes one a keen observer of the nuances of a language and turns one into a better listener. I know several linguistic anthropologists who have told me that they only really began to get good at a language when they returned home from the field and began to transcribe the tapes they had collected in the field. In essence, this approach combines elements of all the previous rules I’ve mentioned above.

Conclusion: Application of these rules for learning an endangered language.

These rules are not easy to apply to endangered languages. Native speakers are likely to be old and trained in grammar-translation approaches to language teaching, or they might lack any training whatsoever. You have to teach them how to teach you. It is also going to be hard to get lots of exposure to the language if it isn’t being used much anymore. Nor will you find much in the way of TV shows and books in that language. Where there is a lot of material, it may be in an area outside of your domain (in my case: the Bible). You will have to use #4 to create the materials and texts that you need for study. In a later post I will talk more about specific tools one might use to implement such an approach.

Also worth mentioning here: In the end of January Zotero released version 3.0 of Zotero, which finally introduced a “standalone” version of Zotero that doesn’t require Firefox to run. IMHO, it still has a ways to go before it can catch up to Sente, but there are two areas where it is ahead of the game: (1) It has plugins for Chrome which allow you to save citations directly from your browser. (Sente still awkwardly requires you to open its own browser and copy your link before you can save a webpage.) And (2) it has a AAA format built-in.

Finally, on the iOS front, I still find GoodReader + Dropbox + Evernote to be my best mobile reading workflow. But it is worth mentioning that in addition to Sente’s excellent iOS app which I reviewed earlier, there is now an unofficial iOS app for Zotero. There is also a new iOS app from the makers of Bookends, and a new version of Papers as well.

The Nation states that the GOP’s 2013 budget or the “Ryan Plan” helps the very wealthy, corporations, Pentagon, and health insurance companies while forcing the poor, elderly, disabled, and middle class to sacrifice (Zornick 2012). President Obama called the budget “social Darwinism.” A great term, curiously investigated by the Washington Post. Back in February, 2011, during the last federal budget battle, the New York Times claimed that the GOP targeted to slash funding for job training, environmental protection, disease control, crime protection, science, technology, education, and public media (Editorial 2011). It is a theory of classical liberalism that as these issues of national importance are proposed and debated it is fundamental to the workings of democracy that citizens have diverse information options. This is the job of journalists, newspapers, television news — “the media” — whose investigate capacities have been gutted by parent companies’ market fundamentalism and whose federal funding, when it barely existed, is under attack. Six bills were proposed in 2011 to eliminate federally funding PBS (Tomasic 2011). In this neoliberal media logic, if it fails the single criteria of increasing capital, it misses the cut.

The same week the draconian 2013 Ryan Plan was revealed saw the elimination of two paternalistic guardians of the “American public sphere” –the Media Access Project (MAP), a public interest law firm and 40-year veteran resisting the deregulation and privatization of public media resources. And, most dramatically, Keith Olbermann was fired from Current, a cable television news network. Like him or hate him, he is one of the few television newscasters willing to bluntly critique such instances of neoliberal governmentality on that most hegemonic if media systems: television. As both private public interest and not-for-profit public interest media institutions falter, and federally funded public media systems are assaulted, how will diversity in the American public sphere survive?

I need to briefly address the following normative notions: neoliberal governmentality and the hegemonic or American public sphere.

MAP and Olbermann focused on diversifying the programming within the hegemonic public sphere. They see themselves, their work, and their information as central to dominant national issues within a single American public sphere. They are not interested in producing the conditions for a subaltern counterpublic as Nancy Fraser (1992) describes. Their interest is in competing on a national-level with the likes of Fox News, MSNBC, and other media giants. MAP and Olbermann sought to contribute diverse voices into a single, national, or American public sphere. Does it exist? No. Fraser is right. There are overlapping fields of public spheres. But the hegemonic public sphere is a type of emic model or frame, non-existent on the level of day-to-day discourse, that these media reform broadcasters draw from. More abstract and less polemical, yet comparable with the concept of the “mainstream media,” the hegemonic public sphere is a goal or target for the progressive cultural interventions of these media reform broadcasters.

Foucault provides a cogent definition of neoliberal governmentality in his exquisitely readable lectures at the College de France in 1978-1979. “What is at issue” said Foucault, “is whether a market economy can in fact serve as the principle, form, and model for a state” (Foucault 2008: 117). The result is market statism, or corporatism, which, in an extreme version, is fascism. This is diametrically opposed to the social liberalism advocated by Olbermann and MAP in which the state is focused on non-market social projects. It isn’t corporate liberalism either where the government in public discourse supports social liberalism but that practice is performed by subsidized corporations (Streeter 1996). An example of corporate liberalism comes from the presumed GOP candidate for the 2012 presidential election. Governor Mitt Romney addressed a crowd at a primary campaign stop in Iowa in November. At this event Romney says he won’t gut the Corporation for Public Broadcasting but he will require it to “have advertisments.” Romney doesn’t want to “Kill Big Bird” he just wants it to be on life-support from American corporations. Rather, the Ryan Plan is neoliberal governmentality where social liberal projects are negated and replaced by market fundamentalism. It is this reduction of government functions to market logic that Olbermann and MAP once raged against.

So with the departure of Olbermann and MAP the monolithic American public sphere is less diverse and less capable of engineering the conditions for access for diverse voices. Nick Couldry’s Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism (2010) directly addresses how neoliberal governmentality dampens voice through looking at US and UK television. He defines voice as referring to the process of individuals or communities using media to build reflexive and historical stories. Voice, for Couldry, is socially grounded, provides for reflexive agency and is an embodied force. Voice can be injured or denied by rationalities that perceive voice as an externality of market logic. Thus “valuing voice means valuing something that neoliberal rationality fails to count; it can therefore contribute to a counter-rationality against neoliberalism” (Couldry 2010: 12-13). Without Olbermann’s voice and MAP protecting the legal and political conditions for voicing, how will the American public sphere survive this assault by the flexible tactics of neoliberal governmentality?

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Now, dear Reader, to reward you making it this far here are some hilarious videos that illustrate my points from the comic geniuses of Mitt Romney, President Obama, Cenk Uygur! Cue the laugh track after each video. 

Yuck it up with Mitt!

Cenk Uygur, a host of the show the Young Turks on Current, a for-profit television network with the mandate to diversify the hegemonic public sphere with progressive voice, responds by describing the fraction of the federal budget spent on NPR, PBS, and the CPB.

President Obama bring the crowd to its knees by calling the 2013 Ryan Plan “social Darwinism:”

A similar issue has arisen in anthropological research on Muslims in North America. In the conclusion to Katherine Pratt Ewing’s edited volume, Being and Belonging (2008), Andrew Shryock called for greater attention to “the immediate and mediated worlds…articulated in everyday life” (206). So, how should one strike a balance between studying media and the everyday? One could study the everyday dimensions of production practices, or how the reception of media is incorporated into people’s everyday lives, or how and why media producers construct the everyday in certain ways.

This issue is especially relevant to many members of the Muslim community in North America and those who conduct research on/with them. Last year I attended two large conferences: The American Academy of Religion (San Francisco, November 2011) and the Islamic Society of North America (Chicago, July 2011). Religious adherents, spokespersons and academics all converged on the notion that engaging with media (news, entertainment, and social media) was the most vital means to influence public opinion about Muslims. I heard numerous panels where professors, journalists, filmmakers, writers, students, etc. discussed the benefits and pitfalls of media activism. Such a large degree of interest solidified my focus on the anthropology of media and Islam by generating more questions than answers. But what about the everyday?

I share Shryock’s view that ethnographies of the everyday lives of Muslims in North America could add texture to our understanding of post-9/11 Muslim identity formations, while also humanizing the Muslim ‘Other’. Yet, television shows about everyday Muslim lives have reached more Muslim and non-Muslim American homes than any ethnography could dream of. Even though an ethnography of actual lives could provide a much needed point of comparison with televisual representations, it seems just as pressing to ethnographically research the construction and reception of the everyday in tv programs.

An ideal approach would analyze the relationship between the everyday in televisual media and lived realities. But, there is no guarantee that such moments would arise during fieldwork and would probably have to be one dimension of a larger study. For this reason, internet sites could prove useful for analyzing how Muslims discuss such shows and apply them to life situations (more on this in the next post), as well as understanding how non-Muslims make sense of them. Another possibility would be to approach the relationship between the everyday and media in a sideways manner (see my last post). This would entail interpreting one in light of the other without positing an underlying unity.

How do you perceive the relationship between media and the everyday? What are some other fruitful directions to pursue?

This is a true labor of love, rendered mostly in Adobe Flash, by the artist and cartoonist Nina Paley. Paley has made the complete feature available for free under a Creative Commons license. Now that the music rights have cleared for Annette Hanshaw’s soundtrack the film is also available on DVD and if you like what you see there’s merchandise for sale so appreciative audiences can support the artist.

The story unfolds in multiple layers, each taking place at divergent moments in history and represented with its own animated style. We begin in present-day San Francisco, portrayed here in squigglevision, with the couple, Nina and Dave, in domestic bliss. Dave’s sudden departure for a new job in India foreshadows the impending end of their relationship. Paley juxtaposes this with the epic myth of Sita and Rama, presented as gouache paintings come alive. Interrupting or narrating the story is a third form, a trio of shadow puppets commenting on the myth. These characters exist out of time. Finally the signature sequences are done with computer animation as a cartoonish Rama and Sita act out their story with Sita singing the words of Annete Hanshaw’s blues. Although visually set in the myth the audience is experiencing creative expressions from the early twentieth century America and encouraged to note the similarities between the two.

“I never knew how good it was to be a slave to one who means the world to me,” she sings.

We learn from the mythic segments that Rama is noble and good, the embodiement of righteousness. The ideal man. The shadow puppets explain to us that Rama’s father, Dasharatha, had planned on crowning him king until one of his scheming wives, Keikeyi, invokes an old debt to force him to banish Rama to the forest instead. Sita, his devoted and beautiful wife follows him. Meanwhile the evil king of Lanka, Ravana, is persuaded by his sister, Suruphanaka, to steal Sita away.

Even with her husband gone Ravana cannot violate Sita’s chastity. Later, aided by his half monkey sidekick Hanuman, Rama finally discovers Ravana’s castle, slaughters his demons and wins Sita back. However Sita has now lived in another man’s house and Rama, having avenged the insult of having his wife stolen, no longer desires her. She must prove her purity to him first in a trial by fire, but before the pyre can harm her gods descend and spirit her away.

With her purity beyond dispute Rama returns to his kingdom to accept his rightful position as king. Then in a chance encounter, Rama observes one of his subjects, a laundryman beating his unfaithful wife. He scolds her: “Do you think I am like Rama?” Now the king feels his wife’s reputation is costing him the loyalty of his subjects, so he banishes her even while she is pregnant with his sons.

Back in the real world Nina follows Dave to India, but the passion of their romance is gone. When she receives an invitation to attend a conference in New York City Dave dumps her by email. In an utterly humiliating scene Nina tearfully begs Dave to take her back when obvious he’s the one doing her wrong.

As Wynton Marsalis describes it, the blues is down home sophistication and it shows in Hanshaw’s numbers. This is a truly adult musical form. “What wouldn’t I do for that man,” she croons as the cartoon Rama literally walks on Sita or sits on her back to drink tea so devoted she is to him. While held captive by Ravana she sings, “Daddy won’t you please come home.” And when Rama rejects Sita after the rescue its, “You love to see me cryin’. I’m left alone singing the blues and sighin’.”

Annette Hanshaw in her vocal performances is really like another character in the story, one which shares with Sita certain idealized qualities of womanhood – a point hammered home by the Betty Boop like proportions of Sita the blues singer with huge bosoms, a tiny waist, and flirty eyelashes. They are both women who define themselves through their romantic relationships with men, in particular men who are blameless. Through all the hardships Rama puts Sita through her devotion to him remains unwavering just as the woman portrayed by Hanshaw’s lyrics continues to love her man no matter how mean he might treat her. Paley clearly identifies with both of these characters. Even as Dave treats her like dirt, she can’t bare to let him go. “Am I blue? You’d be too.”

It is only through the shadow puppets that Paley can bring herself to criticize her own behavior. These characters are really my favorite part of the movie. Depicted in royal or mythological garb the shadow puppets are voiced to sound like modern South Asian Americans and they comment on the myth of Rama and Sita from an alienated, “born confused” perspective. Throughout the feature they interrupt the proceedings to explain the myth but just as often they bicker among themselves, offer competing versions of the story, screw up, questioning the characters’ motivations and cracking jokes at the authority of myths and the powers they hold over our lives.

Late in the movie, Nina calls Dave to beg him, “Please take me back.” This time the puppets stop the action in the modern world outside of mythic time. They explain how as unfair as it might seem that Rama is remembered as a benevolent king while he treats Sita so badly it cannot be that Sita is without fault. After all she’s the one who keeps putting up with his behavior. They make her unquestioning devotion, a virtue under patriarchy, into a character flaw. “Listen he doesn’t like you! You’ve got to move on. C’mon!” That’s her mistake. You shouldn’t love someone who treats you so badly. As Hanshaw sings, “Love had its day. That day has passed. You’ve gone away,” Sita the cartoon character literally cries a river.

Sita Sings the Blues makes clever use of irony, crossing over between multiple timelines to give us a portrait of women – across cultures and through time – being mistreated by men and not having the sense to do anything but put up with it. While the patriarchy of ancient Hindu myth may be readily apparent to us and their congruence with early American popular culture unsettling, Paley urges women to be cognizant of its unconscious internalization. Our romantic proclivities are part of tacit culture.

In the fairy tales we all know so well and which Disney re-presents for our children time and again the man comes to the rescue of the fair maidens whose only aspirations, like Sita, is to be the perfect mother and wife. Such stories contribute to our socialization and enculturation, reflecting the values of the societies that reproduce and repeat them like a broken record playing the blues. This time around, Paley seems to be saying, women need to save themselves.

Things get interesting quickly because it becomes obvious that the subject of the documentary is not the interviewees but the interviewer: Shattner’s real intention is clearly to make a documentary about himself and the long road he’s trod in life, and particularly to let the entire world know that he was once a classical thespian in the mould of Olivier and Gieldgud. The other major theme is how ennobled and wise he has become being forced to carry the entire weight of the Star Trek franchise on his back across the course of his career.

As a result the show focuses prominently on the fact that the other captains also started out in theater, mostly so Shattner can ask tell them about his time treading the boards. He asks them how Star Trek has changed them, so he can tell them how it has changed him. He asks them their views on life after death and the nature of infinity so that he can brood over his inevitable mortality. It is, in short, a clinic on how not to interview people, with special focus on the preoccupied and narcissistic interviewer. Absolutely fascinating to watch.

Actually, at times, the movie is almost unwatchable — most notably when Shattner asks Kate Mulgrew how women can realistically expect to be considered for leadership positions given the fact that they menstruate. But a lot of the time Shattner gets it right: his interviewees are seasoned respondents, indeed they are people whose lives importantly revolve around talking over and over again about their experience on Star Trek. As a result, it is very easy for them to slip into well-established stories and self narrations. But Shattner doesn’t give in, ‘probing’ (as we say in the business) for real answers in a way that is both boorish, but often get results.

Normally, of course, you can’t expect to get much fieldwork done when you ask blunt questions about people’s divorces or act like a raging misogynist. But it is the wider psychodrama of these interviews that is so interesting: clearly, each of the people interviewed pretty much had no choice but to participate. I’m not sure why, but I have this strange sense that in the world of Trek when Bill wants to make a documentary about the captains, you pretty much have to talk to him. As a result, the interviews have a strong flavor about them of captive respondents doing their best to contain the interviewer, knowing that their throw-away 90 minute meeting will eventually appear on the big screen and, like what they had for breakfast, be canonized in the Trekverse forever. Talk about prolepsis.

And contain him they do, largely because each of the people being interviewed are obviously amazing. Especially — and I don’t mean to be cruel here, but it’s true — especially when compared to Shatter. I had never watched Voyager before, but I was simply amazed by Kate Mulgrew’s charisma, articulateness, and intelligence as she attempts to deal with Shattner at what is probably his worst. Although perhaps that award goes to the interview with Avery Brooks, who when not being a star fleet officer is apparently a combination of Miles Davis, Paul Robeson, and Wittgenstein. Brooks is so gnomic that it is difficult to say, but he appears to be a total genius and also the only respondent who really seems to be trying to teach Shattner, to draw him out of himself. But what we get instead is a bizarre improvised jazz crooning session between the two of them reminiscent of the beatnik scenes that appeared in sixties surf films.

The other captains play things closer to their chests, but you can see their obvious intelligence: Bakula is too good at being disarmingly charming to not be one of the sharpest knives in the drawer, and Patrick Stewart does a superb job of both providing candor and removing himself from the interview when Shattner wants to grandstand. Even Chris Pine, the youngest and most vulnerable member of the franchise, is up to the task of being forced to respond to the man whose role he shares. Between the arm wrestling (yes, Shattner makes him arm wrestle) and other indignities, Pine puts up a professional front, and only occasionally lets something slip to show that he’s quite a thoughtful person. “I like how ephemeral theater is,” he muses even as he steps into a fan community that will preserving every iota of the material he will produce.

I’m not a huge trekkie, but I think any anthropologist who has thought a lot about the dynamics of interviewing will find Captains absolutely fascinating. It’s the sort of thing that I’d show in a field methods class to begin sensitizing students to give and take of interviewing. If you have Netflix or can find it in other locations, I’d highly encourage you to watch, even if the going isn’t always that easy.

Why is this statement so hard to write? Well, for one thing, I think it makes us painfully aware of the gap between our teaching ideals and our actual classroom practices. We can talk all we want about various teaching philosophies, but much of what most teachers do in the classroom is essentially the same. Even Mike Wesch, who wrote here about his theory of anti-teaching, has more recently written about “why good classes fail“:

In fact, the few truly fantastic classes I have stumbled into were just as likely to be “sage on the stage” lectures as they were to be based on more participatory methods. And the disheartening reality has been that a really bad lecture doesn’t fail as badly as a really poorly executed participatory class. Many of these professors seem to do everything “right.” They ask their students questions, pause and let them discuss with their neighbors, show YouTube videos that relate to their own experience, and invite discussion. But disinterest and disengagement still reign. Why?

I appreciate Wesch’s thoughts on this, and I strongly recommend reading the whole piece. (And look forward to his forthcoming book on teaching.) There is also an article about his re-think in the Chronicle. I mention it because it gives me comfort in the more modest approach I’ve taken in my own statement of teaching philosophy. I talk, for instance, about making my goals explicit. This may not seem like much, but in practice I’ve found that it is very difficult to do well and also very helpful to students when done properly. It isn’t the kind of thing that gets one written up in the Chronicle, but it is something I’ve thought long and hard about. It isn’t just about writing a good syllabus, but about spending time in class teaching one’s expectations and the reasons behind them. (In my case we actually created a whole new course to accomplish this goal.)

I hope my document is useful for others working on articulating their own teaching philosophy. I also think it highlights some of the unique challenges I face teaching here in Taiwan and might be interesting even for those not planning on writing such a statement anytime soon.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Throughout my teaching career, whether as an adjunct professor at Temple University, a visiting professor at Haverford College, or as an assistant professor at Dong Hwa University’s College of Indigenous Studies, I have sought to develop my teaching skills in such a way so as to keep students with divergent backgrounds and skill levels engaged and challenged by the same class. One way I’ve found to do that is to articulate a range of goals I wish students to acquire, and to articulate those goals clearly to students. Not only does this give the less well trained students something to work towards, but because goals are not necessarily acquired sequentially, even the more advanced students are able to discover gaps in their training which they should focus upon. This approach has two advantages. First of all, being explicit about one’s goals helps compensate for the way educational institutions tend to unfairly advantage students from privileged backgrounds. As Bourdieu and Passeron famously noted, educational institutions often indirectly reward practices which the privileged members of society have already inculcated in the home: language, self-presentation, literacy practices, etc. By clearly defining expectations, and by breaking these skills down into their component parts, I believe I am able to create a more equitable classroom environment. Because a single class is insufficient to compensate for the marked differences , I also worked with my colleagues at Dong Hwa to develop a class in “Basic Study Skills” which is now required for all first year students in my department.

The second advantage to defining a broad range of goals for student performance is that it allows for students to engage with the material in different ways. While I strongly believe in the central importance of reading and writing in developing critical thinking, I have found that many students who have difficulty engaging with the written word can perform very well in other kinds of exercises: oral presentations, oral exams, group discussions, and even producing short plays or films for class. Inspired by Howard Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences,” I try to ensure that students who might otherwise feel shut-out have a chance to engage with the class material in ways best suited to their own style of learning. Many of our students at the College of Indigenous Studies come from rural areas where they lacked access to the cram schools so common in Taiwanese urban environments. Many have spent a lot of time engaged in church activities, where there is often a more performative approach to learning. By valuing orality and performativity within the classroom , these students are at less of a disadvantage. Having a wide-range of goals can be just as important for Ph.D. students as it is for undergrads, albeit for different reasons. Graduate students tend to have strong reading and writing skills, but can often lack the performative skills which make for an effective teacher or communicator. Working on these skills is an essential part of their professional training.

As a foreigner in Taiwan, I’ve faced some unique challenges. The poor English ability of many of our students has meant that I’ve had to become an effective lecturer in Chinese. I’ve long prided myself on my ability to explain complex concept in simple, direct, language, but I’ve had to complement that by working hard at creating visual presentations which help illustrate my ideas so as to avoid any chance of confusion. I’ve also had to become a keen student of popular culture so as to find examples students can relate to. But lecturing has been only part of the challenge. Classroom practices which had been effective in American classrooms did not work as expected with Taiwanese students. Students here are often far more reluctant to express strong views or ask questions in class. I’ve dealt with this in several ways: I assign groups to come up with questions collectively, so no one student is put on the spot, I ask students to talk about the topic in terms of their own experience, so that they don’t feel there is a chance that they will make a mistake in public, and I’ve created online discussion groups for all my classes so that students can say things in writing that they might not feel comfortable saying in the classroom.

Social science requires learning how to see one’s own society as an outsider might see it, and to attempt to think about other societies as a local might think about them. For students who have little experience traveling outside their own country this can be a difficult challenge, but the best ethnographies and documentary films are designed to accomplish just such a task. Unfortunately, much of this work is produced with an American or European audience in mind. I have worked hard over the past five years, constantly revising my syllabi so as to select the materials which accomplish this goal while remaining accessible to my students. I’ve discovered that a well written English text can sometimes be more useful than a poor Chinese translation. And I’ve learned where students need some historical or ethnographic context in order to be able to meaningful engage with the material. Following my emphasis on clearly articulated goals, I also work hard to break down the process of reading an academic text into a series of smaller steps by asking students to identify the main themes of a text, the nature of the data and the methodology used. At the same time, especially when using English texts, I try to move students away from doing word-by-word translations by teaching them how to approach the text as an organic whole. I firmly believe that there is a direct correlation between the skills developed by doing close critical readings of texts, and the ability to think critically about society.

Anyway, I’m hard at work on this again, so here’s a roundup of the previous posts on the topic: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, as well as a more general post on my decision to teach in Taiwan.

Looking back at my previous posts, I realize there is much I never wrote about. So in a series of future posts I hope to write more about (1) my thoughts about language learning in general, (2) specific thoughts on strategies for learning an endangered language, (3) iOS tools for language study and (4) some of the themes of my research relating to the role that language preservation efforts play in the construction of indigenous identity in Taiwan. I hope that this time I get a little further than I did in 2009. In the meantime, leave a comment if you have any thoughts of your own, or specific questions you’d like me to address in future posts.