She is Freedom

For philosophers, sociologists and historians, freedom is a concept exquisitely defined and heroically distinguished. There are the familiar distinctions like positive and negative liberty (Isaiah Berlin), there is the long tradition of thinking freedom togther with sovereignty, government and arbitrary power (sp. the newly reinvigorated “civic republican” tradition from Machiavelli to Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit); there is the question of free will and determinism (a core Kantian Antimony that generates both moral philosophy and philosophy of science debates seemingly without end); there is the question of freedom and the mind (the problem of the “contented slave” or the problem Boas raised in arguing that freedom is only subjective); the question of coersion, of autonomy, of equality and of the relationship to liberalism and economic organization. Within each of these domains one can find more and less refined discussions (amongst philosophers and political theorists primarily) oriented towards the refinement of both descriptive and normative presentations of freedom as a concept and as a political ideal. And then there is Sartre.

As I mentioned in the first post, anthropologists have been nearly silent on the problem, while philosophers, political theorists and historians have not. There are shelves and shelves of books in my library with titles like A Theory of Freedom, Dimensions of Freedom, Freedom and Rights, Liberalism and Freedom, Political Freedom, etc. There are readers and edited volumes and special issues of journals to beat the band. In history there is Orlando Patterson and Eric Foner, and a 15 volume series called The Making of Modern Freedom that includes books on Freedom from the medieval era to the present, and includes books on China, Asia, Africa, slavery, migration and fiscal crises (!).

If anthropologists find the concept of freedom distasteful, how then do they organize their concern with things and issues related to what political philosophers or historians approach via freedom? What concepts stand in, challenge or reframe that of freedom? Here is a long list (which could no doubt be longer):

agency, authority, bare life, biopower, biopolitics, citizenship, civil society, colonialism, consent, contract, development, domination, empire, exclusion, governance, governmentality, human rights, humanitarianism, interests, interest theory, in/justice, kingship, neoliberalism, obligation, oppression, precarity, resistance, secularism/secularity, security, social control, sovereignty, suffering, territoriality and violence.

Note that this list concerns terms also familiar to North Atlantic political philosophy, which is to say, this is not a list of “indigenous” or ethnographically derived concepts of/related to freedom. That would constitute yet another distinct question (and a separate post, to follow).

Most of the concepts in that list are closer to the empirical than the theoretical, and I suspect this is why they are preferred to manifestly abstract ideal like freedom. Humanitarianism for instance, has seen a wealth of great work over the last couple of decades for the concrete reason that it is a practice, a domain of law, a set of international economic imperatives as a well as an ideal. Precarity nicely captures a particular economic condition and the effects that has on well-being, etc.

Perhaps most central to the anthropologist’s suspicion around freedom is its inherently individualist bent. The problem of freedom can be construed (though it needn’t be) as one of the free acting, willing or thinking of an individual. It might be safe to suggest that anthropologists, being constitutionally sensitive to the limits of individuals and individuality, see the concept as failing in places where social relations take precedence, and take unfamiliar forms. In this the socialist (perhaps even the anarchist?) traditions of anthropological theory are clear: a tendency at least, if not a commitment to thinking individuality as a feature of social relations rather than the reverse. But even a cursory familiarity with the concept of freedom shows that it is not always about individuality, nor is every philosophical or political theoretical take committed to a version of methodological individualism. A thinker like C.B. MacPherson for instance, very clearly recognizes that there are individual-based theories of liberty, and then there are theories that start from Marxist, socialist or anthropological bases that give primacy to social relations. Dewey ditto. And even in the theory of negative liberty, the problem it identifies is not just that individual liberty is freedom from restraint, but that restraint is the result of the actions of others, and that the fundamental problem of political liberty is that of “harmonizing” interests and actions. This is also why the economic model of freedom is so appealing to so many of our colleagues in the social sciences: freedom is a complex problem of balancing plural social and individual interests, and one that requires sophisticated techniques in order to do so. Insofar as this is about the design of social relations, it concedes the point that freedom is a result of social relations.

Anthropologists might also look to freedom’s opposites, since there are so many more examples of that in the world. Slavery for instance. Curiously, anthropologists seem to have been just as uninterested in slavery as in freedom. Igor Kopytoff noted as much in a 1982 review of anthropology of slavery: “Simply stated, the problem is this: why has modern anthropology, which claims that nothing human is alien to it, consistently ignored so widespread a phenomenon? (207)” Kopytoff suggests that slavery is not a concept, but a name for various phenomena in the world, also a bit of an umbrella term. But the same is not quite true of freedom; which does not pick out any particular arrangements or institutions in quite the way that slavery does. Slavery is something that might exist as an institution or a custom, and yet have an unrecognizable social and moral justification in different societies (and thus shade into the general problem of diverse forms of political institutions; see e.g. Pierre Clastres, Max Gluckman, Edmund Leach, George Balandier, Meyer Fortes and EE Evans-Pritchard). Freedom, however, is a concept that draws together cosmological issues (free will/determinism) with political ones (sovereignty/arbitrary power) with individual action (restraint/autonomy). There is no apriori reason to suspect that other cultures wouldn’t have an equivalent concept, or at least a comparable set. As I say, there are a lot of candidates.

The most well-worn freedom-related concepts in anthropology have got to be those of resistance and domination: the long tradition of “peasant studies”; the figure of the “subaltern,” colonial and post-colonial contexts, peaceful and violent revolution, oppression, the impoverished, the lower status, the exploited etc. Domination is a clear problem of at least some aspects of political freedom; and I think anthropologists rightly start from the assumption that the opposite of domination is not necessarily freedom, which appears ethnocentric at best. Certainly the current mode of thinking about the issue (dominated by the language, if not exactly the concepts, of governmentality) suggests that domination produces culture and that resistance is about remaking it for diverse purposes, few of which are likely to appeal directly to the abstract ideal of freedom. Feminist anthropology also clearly brought attention to questions of domination, resistance, abuse of status, autonomy, and violence, and it would no doubt be insane to suggest that “freedom” or “liberty” were not motivating concerns throughout… nonetheless, it’s hard to find much in terms of explicit engagement in anthropology, compared to, for example, political theory. In most cases, the concept of freedom is either uncritically used as an ultimate human value, or it is ignored or rejected as a narrow, ethnocentric conception of the good. Freedom in this sense is just one value among others, and not a particularly accessible one for most people in the world.

Agency holds a respectable second to domination and resistance, especially in terms of language, linguistic action, speech act theory and so forth, where it serves to link hypotheses about language to social situations were constraint and liberty are at stake. A 2001 review (Ahearn) notes the ways in which this conception of agency overlaps with the concept of resistance, the domain of gender, and the articulatio of “practice theory.” Agency is (or at least should be) directly engaged with the antimonies of free will and determinism that constitute the more ontological philosophical questions about freedom; secondarily, agency is also about autonomy, in the sense of recognizing one’s own control over action and speech. Most often, however, it is used loosely to refer to varieties of effectiveness in the world, or more precisely, those places where that effectiveness is curtailed or repressed. Much of the work in feminist anthropology must (for better or worse) engage the concept of agency and its relationship to politics, to language or media, and to resistance.

Other problems and concepts are more recent; sovereignty, governmentality, biopolitics, bare life, or territoriality are all centrally concerned with problems of long pedigree in political philosophy, but approach them through a series of displacements initiated by Foucault primarily (Foucault on freedom is no doubt a separate post), and taken up in Agamben and crew. Here again, the central problem is not freedom but power. Power remains the central mystery around which these investigations cluster, and even though in Foucault “ethics as a practice of freedom” is central, most work in anthropology places domination in the central position, or sometimes hegemony, or sometimes consensus (as in “neoliberal consensus”), as an effect of power. It might be more accurate to say, however, that power is an effect of freedom, but that, again, will have to wait for another post, or another poster.

Finally, perhaps the work most directly relevant to questions of freedom has been the recent vogue for “anthropology of secularism” which has returned questions about the relationship between freedom and religion to the center of attention (see e.g. Fenella Cannell’s 2010 review of the subject). The work of Talal Asad and his students (esp. Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind) exemplify a certain concern with the triad of religion, freedom and community. Mahmood especially engages critically with political theorists like Charles Taylor in her work (whose mammoth Age of Secularism also remixes political philosophy under this new label). What role “freedom” plays here is less certain than it might seem at first with chapter titles like “The Subject of Freedom.” I certainly don’t think these works are centrally concerned with the problem of freedom; rather it is a kind of environment or background that cannot be ignored–somewhat like Charles Taylor’s notion of a “social imaginary”– concepts and arguments that circulate both in academic language and in popular sentiment and discourse. What this work does do is to point out that things which appear at first sight to be manifest cases of domination or restraint (the veil, pietist movements, severe forms of religious observance) actually satisfy some of the conditions for freedom–or at least, represent a kind of agency in the service of values that we associate with the results of freedom. Again, not the same thing as approaching freedom directly, but an oblique critique nonetheless.

What I think a lot of anthropologists (would like to) believe, however, is that there is a world of “indigenous” or at least diverse, conceptions of freedom in different cultures that it has been our work and duty to explore. It is this that makes Boas’ claim that “primitive peoples” do not have a concept of freedom so puzzling, and if I can sustain this little investigation, the subject of part 3… to be continued.

Via the PostSecret website, it is unclear whether the poster intentionally picked a photo of Sikhs or if this was unintentional irony. Not that the sentiment would have been any less offensive if the person wearing a turban was actually a Muslim. It certainly didn’t matter to the families of victims of post 9-11 hate crimes whether the victim was Muslim or not. I bring this up because William Dalrymple has an op-ed in the NY Times about the proposed Islamic center planned for lower Manhattan (for those living under a rock, see William Saletan’s piece in Slate for a good roundup of the issues surrounding the center):

The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion. Most of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world. The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn’t mean he’s in league with Irish Republican Army bomb makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murderers of abortion doctors. Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith.

Dalrymple’s main point is that the Sufis behind the Cordoba Initiative are themselves “infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate[s]” in the eyes of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. We’ve been here before:

In 2006, the investigative reporter Jeff Stein concluded a series of interviews with senior US counterterrorism officials by asking the same simple question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia?” He was startled by the responses. “One’s in one location, another’s in another location,” said Congressman Terry Everett, a member of the House intelligence committee, before conceding: “No, to be honest with you, I don’t know.” When Stein asked Congressman Silvestre Reyes, chair of the House intelligence committee, whether al-Qaeda was Sunni or Shia, he answered: “Predominantly – probably Shia.”

Clearly the United States would be better off if our leaders, journalists, and citizens knew a little more about Islam. But there are also some lessons here about the semiotics of racism which I would like to think offer some insights beyond the 24 hour news cycle.

A Liverpool working-class accent will strike a Chicagoan primarily as being British, a Glaswegian as being English, an English southerner as being northern, an English northerner as being Liverpudlian, and a Liverpudlian as being working class. The closer we get to home, the more refined are our perceptions.

The above quote is taken from a discussion in Asif Agha’s masterful book Language and Social Relations. Agha’s focus here is on the limits of of performativity. By pointing out that the hearer’s own prior socialization provides an important context for the successful performance of identity, Agha sets the stage for one of the book’s central themes: that identity is not only mediated by discourse, but also requires a process of negotiation between speaker and hearer—and that this process of negotiation can be transformative, changing the possible range of identity positions available to both parties as well as society at large.

I quite like Agha’s argument, and in chapter after chapter he makes a convincing case for it. Particularly interesting is his discussion of kinship terms, in which he shows how a mother might refer to her in-laws using terms which, taken literally, would place her in the role of her own child vis-a-vis her relatives, but are nonetheless lexically differentiated from the terms a child might use. In doing so she claims her rights as the mother of the child without reducing herself to the status of a child.

While the discussion of a Liverpool working-class accent shows that Agha is aware of the limits to such performativity, I would have liked to see more discussion about situations where one party refuses to negotiate. Agha’s approach to limits implies that performativity might fail because of one party’s lack of socialization, but what about if one party has a will to ignorance? I think such willful ignorance is behind much American confusion with regard to Muslims, and so I’m not sure how much use historical, ethnographic, or journalistic accounts of the various divisions within Islam can help.

It seems to me that part of the problem derives from the very idea of a “just war.” As Judith Butler argues, such a concept requires the “division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war.” For some section of humanity to remain “ungrievable” requires a willful ignorance which refuses to engage in the kind of dialog which would allow for negotiated meanings to emerge. Thus, Islamophobia is in some ways a prerequisite for waging a global war on Terror, even as our leaders insist otherwise.

Just mentioning people likeRichard Dawkins is likely to draw tons of aggro to this blog, so I will keep it short: most commenters on the cage match between the rabid evolutionist-cum-atheists and the rabid evangelical christians-cum-creationists imagine this conflict to involve two separate groups. The genius of the hair-dryer ritual is that it demonstrates so clearly that what we actually have here is a case of what Simon Harrison calls ‘mimetic conflict’ — two groups competing to occupy a single identity. The opposition is not one of Christian versus non-Christian, but rather a conflict between two different permutations of protestant culture.

Consider: one side believes it possesses an infallible book written by an omnipotent author with a huge beard with completely explains the dynamics all living things on earth. The other side believes in the literal truth of the bible. One side believes it will go to heaven, the other advocates a space program to achieve “Mars in our time” as a mission to direct and shape human aspiration. Atheist parodic appropriation of Christian identity even comes with (according to the article) a ritual officiant who “doned a monk’s robe and said a few mock-Latin phrases” before the drying began — and of course there is nothing more protestant than damning your opponent for their popery.

This de-baptism makes clear in a single ritual what is at the heart of much of this debate: that within American culture, science and religion are two different things but two versions of the same thing, both of which rely in shared, rather intellectualist understandings of human nature and the role of the bible/Darwin: humans attempt to ‘find meaning in the universe’, explain natural phenomenon, and live regenerated lives free of the corrupting influence of earlier, false doctrine. These are notions that are, in general, not shared by members of other religions.

Partially is a way of saying that the anthropological notion of culture often cuts across what other people’s ‘ethnocultural’ notions — we see a single system made of oppositions where others see two discrete ‘cultures’ or groups. But mainly this is just a way to give props to atheists for such a well-designed ritual. I’m not particularly big on running other people’s beliefs down, but setting aside the mean-heartedness that comes across in the interview with the atheists, I have to say as a piece of cultural practice the ritual is superbly imagined.

So, what to make of Blair’s course? The topics are interesting and are exactly those topics which concern many anthropologists: faith, globalization, identity, etc. (Blair recently “came out” as a Catholic.) Unfortunately, I can’t imagine any student staying awake in this class. Neither Volf nor Blair seems to have much to say about these topics except for vague platitudes. I thought that watching this would give me an opportunity to say something interesting and/or critical about Blair’s take on these topics from an anthropological point of view – but I honestly didn’t hear anything worth commenting on. He sees globalization as a force which “opens up” society and religious faith as capable of either aiding or hindering that opening up … depending (not quite sure on what).

I almost deleted this post, but then I thought it might be worth posting it to see if anyone has anything more insightful to say about it than I do. And who knows, maybe the course will get more interesting later on…

So I was happy to see that a publication I had never heard of before— “The Global Spiral: A Publication of the Metanexis Institute”— has published a series of articles by scholars in science studies, philosophy and literature (Andy Pickering, Don Ihde, Katherine Hayles and others) about transhumanism (volume 9, Issue 3). Unfortunately, they are all pretty un-anthropological in their approach, preferring to criticize transhumanism rather than engage it. I know why… extreme versions of transhumanism can be pretty unctuous, raising specters of race-purity, eugenics, bad technological determinism etc. However, I for one am pretty surprised by the continued growth of this “movement” (what makes it a movement?) and lately, I’ve started to think that it might well move into a more mainstream light as there are people like Nick Bostrom (an Oxford Ph.D.) and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies gaining attention and authority… Wait a minute, ethics and emerging technologies? Isn’t that what I study?!? Quick, freeze my head!

In any case, I think this is yet another place where there is the possibility for an interesting dialogue. Most of the critiques of transhumanism center around its more speculative aspects, like the notion of the singularity, the emergence of artificial intelligence etc. But I think there is increasingly an opening here for thinking about what we do and what we do not have control over as humanity evolves. Most transhumanist rhetoric seems to imply that there is no control—it’s just the next stage of evolution—but when push comes to shove, whatever “evolution” means to them, it isn’t simply your basic genetic-species evolution, but involves culture and technology as well. And there are some interesting bridges between transhumanism and anthropology as well. I often wonder what transhumanists would think of Carl Elliot’s Better than Well as a kind of middle ground between transhumanism and Foucault… especially since the motto of the World Transhumanist Organization is… “Better than Well.” More generally, I think the transhumanists could do with some more rigorous historical work on the relative importance of figures like Nietzsche, Julian and Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapeldon or Teilhard de Chardin—to say nothing of outsiders like FM-2030, an Iranian exile who wrote novels and lectured and created the core of the movement in the only obvious place in the world for transhumanism to begin: Los Angeles. Most of what is written so far is just a lining up of “father figures” rather than any careful attempt to think about the differences and their social impact on thought in general… a little careful history goes a long way.

In any case, i think that transhumanists will increasingly come to dominate discussions about the controlability of technology and its effects on people and their potential. But more than that, I think anthropologists are already interested in transhumanism, we just don’t call it that because we’ve given up (or just studiously avoid) trying to define the human. So, I wonder, once more, if our ability to participate in such public discussions will be any better in this case than it is in others

Consider a few examples where the issues of transhumanism might be relevant:

1) corn, high fructose corn syrup and ethanol: Corn is domesticating us as we monoculture it beyond all reasonable limits. It’s changing our bodies, it’s changing our ecosystem, it’s changing our technology, and it itself is becoming unrecognizable (i.e. most of it is no longer edible off the stalk, but has to be processed to be used). This is transhumanism, no?

2) the pharmaceutical industry. It’s all well and good to dream of drugs that modify our bodies and minds at will, but we hardly need speculation… it’s in the water, literally. The explosive growth of the number of different prescribed drugs is a massive collective experiment, whether it’s obese kinds on statins, Viagra in the water supply, an entire population on mind-and-mood-altering drugs… we’ve already gone transhuman in this respect.

3) Exercise fads. Bring out your Marcel Mauss (Techniques of the Body) and talk to me about the cultural variation of bodies today— perhaps it seems too silly, but between yoga and pilates, soloflex machines, extreme sports (to say nothing of professional sports and doping, where this issue came up before), and the various medical interventions one can have after injury (or before, depending on when you get your hips and knees replaced), what more speculation do we need to think that we haven’t already started well down the path of evolution in whatever sense transhumanists think they mean?

I like to think that anthropologists would develop better bio-cultural models and explanations of these kinds of things than the current crop of transhumanists will… but I’m not sure I think that anyone other than anthropologists will listen, and perhaps this is the most important part of why transhumanism is so appealing, and why it is so hard to distinguish it from religion: it makes promises about the future.

The once vibrant Sephardic and Mizrahi of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt, were established in North Africa approximately two millennia ago, but since 1948, the vast majority of North African Jews emigrated, settling in France, Israel, and the United States.

Now, in contrast to these communities, the Abayudaya, which means “Jewish people of Uganda,” proudly reference their conversion to Judaism in the 1920s, stating that they were drawn to Jewish practice by the truth of the Torah, the five books of Moses. Their founder, Semei Kakungulu, was a powerful Ganda leader, and he considered Christianity and Islam, and then according to community elders, said, “Why should I follow the shoots when I could have the root.”

Read the whole thing.

For those of us trained in linguistic anthropology none of this is new, but I think we tend to forget just how little other people are aware of this research. The linguistics section of most bookstores is one of the smallest, and the anthropological sub-section is usually confined to one or two readers on language and gender. But what struck me about this post is that the same kind of thing could easily be written for any subject where scientists gripe about people not understanding their work, whether it is evolutionary theory or climate change, etc.

Take Richard Dawkins book, The God Delusion for instance. The rational argument against the existence of god has been around a long time, and it hasn’t made much headway for a reason. Those reasons are complex, to be sure, but there is a large literature in anthropology that can help us at least begin to understand the continuing appeal of a divine creator.

The trick is to assume that people say and believe the things they do not simply out of error or ignorance, but because within the world in which they live these beliefs make sense and are actually helpful to them. The very fact that church attendance is so much more a part of people’s lives in the US than in Europe should clue us in to the fact that there are important sociological factors going on here. While American’s may not fair as well in math and science as Europeans, I don’t think that math and science education alone can explain these differences.

UPDATE: I forgot to plug the prescriptivism page on my wiki!

Central to Stoler’s argument is the claim that colonial policy towards marriages between colonial officers and native wives changed when the mixed-race children began to blur the color line that legitimated European rule. She looks at how in Indonesia, India, and elsewhere, the colonial governments began a policy of encouraging officers to bring wives from home, and how the presence of these wives then created new tensions as a result of the perceived need to protect these women from sexual assault. (The number of people executed for attempted rape does not match any changes in the number of such assaults actually reported.)

It was with this discussion in mind that the following account of changes in Indian colonial rule from William Dalrymple caught my eye:

During the 18th century it was almost as common for westerners to take on the customs, and even the religions, of India, as the reverse. These white Mughals had responded to their travels in India by shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin, adopting Indian dress, studying Indian philo sophy, taking harems and copying the ways of the Mughal governing class they came to replace – what Salman Rushdie, talking of modern multiculturalism, has called “chutnification”. By the end of the 18th century one-third of the British men in India were leaving their possessions to Indian wives.

In Delhi, the period was symbolised by Sir David Ochterlony, the British Resident, who arrived in the city in 1803: every evening, all 13 of his Indian wives went around Delhi in a procession behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant. For all the humour of this image, in such mixed households, Islamic customs and sensitivities were clearly understood and respected. One letter, for example, recorded that “Lady Ochterlony has applied for leave to make the Hadge to Mecca”. Indeed, Ochterlony strongly considered bringing up his children as Muslims, and when his children by his chief wife, Mubarak Begum, had grown up, he adopted a child from one of the leading Delhi Muslim families.

Dalrymple’s account of the reasons for this change are not at odds with those of Stoler, but the emphasis is different. On the one hand he attributes it to the “rise of British power” which “quickly led to undisguised imperial arrogance,” but he also attributes it to the “ascendancy of evangelical Christianity, and the profound change in social, sexual and racial attitudes that this brought about”:

The wills written by dying East India Company servants show that the practice of cohabiting with Indian bibis quickly declined: they turn up in one in three wills between 1780 and 1785, but are present in only one in four between 1805 and 1810. By the middle of the century, they have all but disappeared. In half a century, a vibrantly multicultural world refracted back into its component parts; children of mixed race were corralled into what became in effect a new Indian caste – the Anglo-Indians – who were left to run the railways, posts and mines.

The focus of Dalrymple’s article is actually on the 1857 mutiny and the parallels to the current situation in Iraq. It is a taste of his new book The Last Mughal.

(via Arts and Letters Daily)

Rich said a couple of things that made sense to me (and I am, of course, tripping so incredibly hard right now that this might not come through): one was that the research on psychadelics intitially assumed that it was useful for treating madness, but that through experimentation it became clear just how “tunable” psychadelics are–how “dependent on initial rhetorical conditions they are” was how Rich put it. The fact that they figure in ritual and ceremony makes perfect sense: because ritual and ceremony are the context and fuel for the experience induced by the medicine. The fact that people don’t use them, or have bad experiences also makes sense: in a context of paranoia, fear, criminalization and hatred, it’s hard to imagine psychdelics not amplifying that.

Because of this, Rich suggests that they are (not ‘are like’ but ‘are’) information technologies: tools for hooking up the tubes in new ways, to put it in terms Senator Stevens would clearly understand. The claim is a curious one–Rich defends it by pointing to research at UC Berkeley on the “amount” of information in the world: if we’ve produced double the amount of information in the last 4-5 years that we had in the previous 800,000 years, then one might expect there to be, at the very least, some “interesting” effects. One of those interesting effects is precisely, and simply, the effect of enormous amounts of information on consciousness–and that interest somehow… connects to psychadelics… I kind of lost Rich there. But in any case I have to stop here because if I keep talking about how “tunability” is a way of exploring the role of context and language as it shapes the consumption/ingestion/permeation of human bodies with information, then I am in danger of being dismissed as a kooky mystic.

But this made me think: as with so many areas of anthropology, I don’t really know much about the status of research into ritually consumed psychadelics, or whether it even gets much of a hearing in mainstream anthropology, but as Rich also pointed out, psychadelics are an excellent candidate for multi-sited ethnography. But seriously, folks… I’m curious about the line in anthropology between acceptable research into psychadelics, anthropology of conciousness, medical anthropology etc. and the unacceptable associations with mysticism, transcendance etc. that inevitably invoke folks like Eliade and Castaneda? What’s the state of the art in psychadelic anthropology?

Now, to anthropologists, the way marriage is discussed and deployed in these debates is laughable. We know that marriage as conceptualized by the American religious right at the dawn of the 21st century is neither the only – or even a particularly common – form of marriage in the world, nor the way marriage has always been in our own society. The Biblical marriage that religious conservatives hold up as their example and guiding principle would be (and is) almost universally condemned by today’s Christians. Jacob, the central patriarch of the Biblical Hebrews, would be jailed as a bigamist today; the acceptance of Utah into the Union on the condition that they outlaw polygamy is demonstration enough that we view Biblical marriage norms as literally un-American. Marriage today is drastically different than it was even a century ago, even a half-century ago. A small extremist fringe contingent apart, few Americans would consider the marriage-as-property-arrangement attitude of the 19th century to be truly reflective of our modern notions of freedom and individual fulfillment. And hardly anyone would advocate a return to the way marriage was in the 1950′s, when teen pregnancy was at its peak and fully 1 of 3 marriages involved a pregnant bride. Whatever one thinks of single parenting, I find it unlikely that most Americans would prefer marriage to be thought of primarily as something teenagers do when they get knocked up.

Be that as it may, I think conservatives are right about one thing: if the institution of marriage is going to survive, it does need defending. Not because marriage is the only or best source of truly moral living, but precisely the opposite: marriage is increasingly irrelevant in modern society. In the absence of many good reasons for marriage to even exist, those who value it as a tradition are going to be more and more hard-pressed to perpetuate it.

To understand what I mean here, it might be instructive to look at the kinds of societies where marriage is most relevant and enduring. For the most part, marriage is meaningful in societies where food-production is labor-intensive and dependent on carefully-monitored social rules, which means mainly agricultural and pastoral (herding) societies. Examples include rural Indians and Chinese, Pale of Settlement-era Jews, Central Asian tribalists, and pre-Industrial Europeans and Americans – it is probably not a coincidence that Christianity, and Christian notions of marriage, evolved in a largely peasant population. Marriage in such societies is generally not, as today’s formulation has it, a “relationship between a man and a woman”, but a relationship between extended families in which the relationship between the particular people married is secondary at best – and often simply irrelevant. Thus, in many societies (such as the Biblical Hebrews), the practice of levirate (in which a man marries his brother’s widow) or sororate (in which a woman marries her sister’s widower) allow the kinship bond between families to remain unbroken regardless of the death of a spouse – structurally equivalent, siblings become interchangeable in marriage because their function is identical. Most agricultural and pastoral societies also practice arranged marriage, which generally involves the mobilization of the entire kinship network to locate and secure a suitable mate – with suitable generally defined as having an upright, respectable family. While some effort goes into making sure the personalities of the prospective spouses mesh well, the overall goal is to make sure their families are well-matched – the fit between the spouses then acts as insurance against the dissolution of the inter-familial bond.

Marriage is so important in these kinds of society because the need for social networks through which labor and trading can be arranged is so important. A large extended family might be allied by marriage with a dozen or more other extended families. This pool of contacts gives one: resources to call on in case of natural or human-created disaster; a trading network; a body of closely-bonded men to provide defense; a labor reserve for building, planting, or harvesting; and the emotional well-being that comes of social solidarity. With stakes so high, divorce – while often allowed – is greatly discouraged, and problem resolution in marital relations becomes the business of the entire extended family. (In theory this would protect both spouses, though given the strong tendency towards patriarchy in such communities, an undue burden is often put on women to endure in silence, while men often enjoy much more freedom to divorce as well as the use of prostitutes as a source of emotional and sexual solace when there is trouble at home.)

It’s easy to see, then, why marriage is so important in this kind of society. What is difficult is to understand what function it retains in a society such as ours (“we” here being post-Industrial Westerners, especially urban Westerners) where labor and trade are organized through market, not kin, relations. Under the logic of industrial capitalism, marriage is not only unnecessary in many ways but can even be counter-productive. Unlike the agricultural and pastoral societies I discussed above, where people’s relationships to their kin remain strong throughout their lives, in Western industrial nations (and perhaps especially in the United States) a good part of the enculturation process is directed towards preparing children to eventually separate from their kin, with the end of childhood marked by leaving our parent’s houses to strike out on our own. Marriage obviously does not function to bond families together in this setting; in fact, much of our popular culture is dedicated to the proposition that in-laws are a pain in the ass, a proposition that obviously has great resonance.

Close bonds between families are precisely what you do not want in an industrial society dependent on the mobility of labor to survive. Anthropologists have long noted that modern Westerners have much more similarity to foragers such as the Ju’/huansi and Hadza of Africa than we do to our pre-industrial ancestors of just a few generations ago. Foragers are typically organized into small, highly mobile groups whose membership fluctuates as the availability of resources changes – groups may swell during times of plentiful resources, and break up into smaller when resources get scarcer. I once read (though I forget where) that a typical Ju’/huansi group might have a completely different membership when they rejoin their tribe for their annual coming-together than they had when they left the previous year’s.

Like contemporary foragers, people in modern industrial societies live in a world where resources (in our case, jobs) are in constant flux. Consider the city I live in, Las Vegas. About half the current population of Las Vegas has come here in the last 10 years, as a new wave of mega-resorts sprang up offering hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Now, when people move to Vegas or anywhere else in search of work, they don’t bring their aunts and uncles and their cousins and their in-laws and their grandparents and their uncles’ spouses’ in-laws and… No, they come alone, or with their spouses and children. The small nuclear family is well-suited to the need for mobility in search of resources.

Time was when the nuclear family – a man, his wife, and their 2 – 3 children – was the natural ideal for life in an industrial society. The needs of the household – income, procurement of goods, child-rearing, food-preparation, social involvement, housekeeping – were split up between the husband and wife, allowing the man to participate as fully as possible in the labor market while passing the responsibility for reproduction of both his labor (feeding, clothing, and taking care of him so he can go back to work the next day) and of society as a whole (creating a new generation of labor so the society can continue to function) to the woman. But this ideal was scarce – peaking at just over 50% of American households in the ’50s and ’60s and accounting for only a quarter of US households today – and dependent on a whole range of social, economic, and political interventions in the operation of the market that today are branded by many “un-American”: strong labor unions, strong government regulation of business practices, heavy government investment in education, legal limitations on divorce and adultery, government-subsidized housing development and welfare systems, and so on.

The nuclear family, propped up by New Deal-era legislation and older notions about women’s place and propriety, made industrial capitalism livable for many (though by no means all; minorities in general were largely excluded from this living standard, and it was, as noted, not particularly easy on women, either). But it was a fleeting, almost accidental configuration – America’s post-War prosperity being largely contingent on the economic and political vacuum left by the destruction of European infrastructure in WWII – and it was somewhat against the grain of the logic of capitalism (which explains why workers had to fight so hard for the supports that made it possible). Within a couple of decades these supports began to be eroded away, generally at the request of business-owners, for whom the notion of paying both wages high enough to feed a family and taxes high enough to provide the services that held everything together was considered an excessive burden on business, an obstruction to the free functioning of the market.

As wages fell or stagnated, the feminist movement experienced a victory by default: where a generation earlier women fought for the right to enter the labor force, by the ’80s women’s work had become a necessity. At the same time, the nature of work itself was changing, as our economic base shifted from industrial production to one based on information and services. Where particular regions once offered a steady supply of work – Detroit’s auto plants, Pennsylvania’s steel mills, New England’s textile mills, West Virginia’s coal mines, etc. – the information and service economy is scattered and constantly recentering (again, consider Las Vegas, whose growth is dependent on changing ideas about tourism and leisure; should those notions shift – maybe Bible Belt tourism takes off next year – then jobs will quickly dry up in Vegas while a new wave of movement to the South takes off).

In this new economy, even the minimal tie of one worker to another is beginning to seem too limiting. As academics of my generation have discovered, all-too-painfully, marriage may not just limit one’s prospects but eliminate them altogether. I’ve known a fair share of married academics that live across the country from each other, sometimes for years, as they wait for positions to open up for them. This isn’t limited to academics, though – married couples across the professional spectrum are finding that limiting one’s job search to the city in which one’s spouse lives is a sure path to frustration. Anyone with any degree of specialization may find their career needs and marriage needs at odds. Marriage is, ultimately, a limit on the free movement labor, and in the battle between emotional satisfaction and economic need, doesn’t seem like much of a long-term contender.

If we run down the functions that anthropologists typically cite for marriage, we see that other institutions in our society meet nearly all of them, often better than marriage itself does. For instance, establishing paternity is done with almost no margin of error today thanks to fairly simple DNA comparisons. Although our legal system provides a loose framework for inheritance, this can be rather sloppy and most people who have anything worth inheriting choose to dictate inheritance via a will, rather than counting on the institution of marriage to make inheritance flow smoothly. The huge number of single mothers (and much smaller number of single fathers) show that child-rearing can be performed quite effectively outside of marriage, and much of our child-rearing is handled by schools and other institutions anyway. Sexual access has already moved far beyond the bounds of marriage, with nearly every American having sexual relations outside of marriage at some point in their lives. Finally, the emotional satisfaction and sense of security that can be provided by marriage is apparently fleeting, with half of all marriages ending in divorce, and a goodly number of marriages harboring psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. Many people today find just as satisfying relationships with partners to whom they are not married, whether by legal restriction (e.g. same-sex partners) or by choice.

It is telling that few mainstream defenses of marriage appeal to any necessary function they see marriage performing; rather, the appeal is almost always a symbolic appeal to “tradition”. For instance, in his speech earlier this month backing the drive for a Constitutional amendment banning “gay marriage”, George Bush said

Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and a wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society… Marriage cannot be cut off from its cultural, religious and natural roots, without weakening this good influence on society.

I’m reminded of a joke that went around during the Internet bubble:

1. Give stuff away
2. ? ? ?
3. Profit!

Bush’s promotion of “loving and serving” each other sounds similar:

1. Defend marriage
2. ? ? ?
3. Good influence on society!

Bush’s appeal is not to how “the commitment of a husband and a wife” might “promote child welfare and the stability of society” but rather to the idea that it should, because in days of yore, it did.

The symbolic value of marriage is, I grant you, still very strong (obviously, or “protecting it” wouldn’t be a tried and true election-year gambit). And there’s certainly something to be said for holding onto practices and institutions simply because they are our traditions, because they provide us with some kind of meaning. I’m not arguing against that – I just don’t think it will work. Marriage – and probably any long-term commitment – is more and more an empty form at odds with the needs of both individuals and of our society as a whole. I’m not arguing that marriage will disappear this year, or even in my lifetime, but I don’t see much future for the institution in the long-term. Stripped of any function, it is possible that people will continue going through the motions for a while, but eventually I can’t see marriage holding onto its significance, especially as it interferes with individual and group survival. And I can’t see people getting too worked up over an empty ritual that provides little or nothing of value.

One final note: None of this is meant to belittle the efforts of same-sex marriage advocates to legalize marriage for all Americans regardless of sexual orientation. That battle has an importance quite distinct from the question of what marriage does or does not do in our society.

Gaiman and Rogers track the appeal of Superman, the mythic quality, to the “internal war between Superman’s moral obligation to do good and his longing to be an average Joe” – a tug-of-war between doing the right thing and playing along, embodied respectively in Superman and his nebbishy alter ego, Clark Kent.

Other heroes are really only pretending: Peter Parker plays Spider-Man; Bruce Wayne plays Batman. For Superman, it’s mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent that’s the disguise – the thing he aspires to, the thing he can never be. He really is that hero, and he’ll never be one of us. But we love him for trying. We love him for wanting to protect us from everything, including his own transcendence. He plays the bumbling, lovelorn Kent so that we regular folks can feel, just for a moment, super.

I disagree, though. OK, in Superman II he falls in love with Lois Lane and rejects the difference that sets him apart, but more often what really plagues Superman is not that he is not like other humans but that he’s not unlike enough, not super enough. In many of the comic book cycles (as well as the first Christopher Reeve movie) Superman’s defining moment is his inability to save his adoptive parents from death, despite all his powers. In Superman: The Movie he is driven by his need to save both the world and the woman he loves.

What sets Superman apart from most superheroes is not, I think, his relationship with his alter ego but both the nature of his super-ness and his relation with the rest of us. Batman, Spiderman, Hulk, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Wonder Woman, and most other superheroes became what they are; Superman just is super. It’s his nature. There is no childhood trauma that drove him to fight crime, no nuclear or genetic accident that warped him, no pre-super Superman taunting him with lost normality. In this, Superman is more like a god than a prophet – his powers are his nature, not his gift. He am that he am.

Unlike other heroes, too, Superman is not so much defined by his opposition to super-villains. As Gaiman and Rogers note, there’s “bitter, bald Lex Luthor”, but Superman seems oddly untouched by his battles against Luthor’s schemes – unlike, say, the mutually defining opposition between Batman and the Joker. Luthor is, after all, just an incredibly smart human, rarely much of a match for Superman; his only real weapon against Superman is kryptonite, which is basically an accident of Superman’s nature, rather than the kind of moral or psychic flaws other super-villains exploit.

Superman’s real function is not protecting us against super-villains but protecting us from the worst aspects of our own nature. Superman catches thieves and spies, fights Nazis and Commies, and when a piece of technology goes awry – when lightning strikes a plane or a dam is about to burst – Superman is there to prevent the worst. Gaiman and Rogers see Superman standing “between humanity and a capricious universe” but I see him standing between humanity and itself, both its conscious evils and its mistakes.

As myth, Superman holds a unique place among superheroes. Other superheroes play out anxieties about science in our society – many of them are the products of Cold War nuke fears, acting out a decidedly Derridean deconstruction of the ambiguous nature of new technologies like nuclear power and genetic science – and about the loss of connection inherent in the shift towards an urbanized, anonymized society. Many superheroes live in worlds that are inherently chaotic, inherently threatening. Superman’s world, though, is inherently orderly. The government is fair, the newspapers are filled with hard-working journalists devoted to “the story”, science promises unlimited potential. Superman is there to assure that order is kept – he protects his orderly world from the chaos of technological failure and, more importantly, from the occasional misfit who simply cannot conform, cannot fit in.

Like Luthor. Or, indeed, like himself. Gaiman and Rogers miss the other great super-villain in Superman’s world – Superman himself. Or, rather, the negative potential inherent in anyone so far removed from the ordinary human realm, embodied by Superman’s other alter ego, his true alter ego: Bizarro Superman. In battling Bizarro – as with catching thieves and defeating Nazis – Superman wrestles with his, and our, worst tendencies.

In this sense, maybe he, too, helps us deal with anxieties over the dual nature of modern technology – like nuclear science, Superman’s awesome power can both save and destroy. But Superman is not as easily made into a template for the technological anxieties that plague us as other superheroes. Rather, Superman takes on our innermost fears about human nature. Not the everyday fears that hang on our consciousness, but the moral fears that hang on our consciences. At the end of the day, Superman is incorruptible, in a way that humans are not. For all his super powers, Superman’s ultimate strength is moral, not physical. Unlike the Fantastic Four or Daredevil or Spiderman or the X-Men, Superman stands for something. That’s right: Truth. Justice. And the American Way.

Seriously!

Tiffany Shlain’s short film The Tribe, now available on the TriBeCa Film Festival’s website, explores the sense of membership in, exclusion from, and indifference to that shape modern notions of Judaism, particularly in the US. Shlain takes as her central focus the figure of Barbie, the Grand Poobah of shiksas conceived by American Jewess Ruth Handler and named after her equally Jewish daughter Barbara (do I need to mention her son’s name was Ken?)

Of course, Barbie is not Jewish. Not even remotely Jewish. She is, like Marilyn Monroe (who actually was Jewish), the antithesis of Jewishness — the negation of Jewishness, even. For the Jewish student of popular culture, then, the question is: why did a Jewish women design a doll that is so un-Jewish? If Barbie stands as a role model for young girls, why set the Ideal so very far from the way Jewish women look? Blonde where Jewish women are dark-haired; straight-haired where Jewish women are curly-haired; button-nosed where Jewish women… aren’t; svelte where Jewish women are zaftig. To create an America where Barbie was the norm would require the literal erasure of Jewishness.

In this light, Barbie stands as the assimilative dreams of the peak of modernist Jewish identity. Barbie wasn’t alone in the erasure of Jewishness; Anne Frank had suffered the same indignity at the hands of the theater and film directors who brought her to stage and screen at the end of the ‘50s, choosing to “de-Jewify” both Frank and the Holocaust in favor of a “universal” message against intolerance. And, of course, a generation of Jewish actors like Kirk Douglas (née Issur Danielovich Demsky) and Tony Curtis (née Bernard Schwartz) had erased any trace of Jewishness from their public personae.

Looked at through the lens of 20th century assimilation, though, Barbie’s Jewishness is more apparent. She was un-Jewish, just like most Jews of her generation. Long before plastic surgery to attain Cosmo-cover glamour became mainstream for teenage girls, teenage Jewish girls were having their noses done as part of their Sweet 16 coming-of-age. Like Barbie, Jewish women were flexing their newfound, post-War whiteness in the department stores and realtor’s offices, drowning their Jewishness in Malibu dream houses and flashy clothes. Barbie lived the life that Jewish women like Betty Friedan held up as the feminist dream – do you think Barbie ever found herself stagnating in a suburban tract house, numbed by repetitive housework? No, she was a woman of the world – a flight attendant, an office worker, a beauty queen, even a presidential candidate from time to time!

The “non-Jewish Jew” Barbie thus stands as the ideal figure through which to explore contemporary Jewishness (see Isaac Deutscher’s “Message of the Non-Jewish Jew” for background on that tricksy concept, though I’m using it somewhat differently than Deutscher does). What’s more, contemporary Jewishness as represented in The Tribe shows a lot not just about Jewishness but about ethnicity as a whole and the paradox of a multicultural society in which organized difference (“tribes”) and organized similarity (“nations”) rub shoulders, often in the same cultural acts or artifacts. I often find myself surprised at the exclusion of Jewish Studies from anthropology (there are a few exceptions, like Matti Bunzl and Jonathan Boyarin, though Boyarin teaches in a Jewish Studies department; I myself was warned away from pursuing Jewish topics as I entered my doctoral studies) as if the study of Jewishness had little to offer us, less than saythe study of the Nuer or the Ojibwe or the Nambikwara or Chinese working women or the Mexican migrant workers or World Bank employees or corporate managers.

The Tribe worries at the edges of anthropological theory, especially the concept of culture (the “small c, plural s” concept described by Geertz) that allows us to say things like “the Nuer” and believe we are saying something meaningful. Without offering any simple answers, The Tribe riffs on the diversity of Jewish experience and the notion that all of this difference can be wrapped up in a single “tribe”, calling into question the very notion of similarity and difference as organizing principles. Starting with a deceptively simple question, “what can Barbie explain about how the current generation of Jews feels about being Jewish?”, The Tribe ends with an even more deceptively simple question: “What does it mean to be a member of any tribe?”

Actually what I really need to read more about is ancient Israel, which is not my area of specialty. I was doing some research on anthropological accounts and in addition to the usual (Mary Douglas on the abominations of Leviticus, Edmund Leach on Genesis, bits of Peter Brown) I came across “The Savage in Judaism”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0253205913/104-3116847-3170343?v=glance&n=283155 by the wonderfully-named Howard Eilberg-Schwartz. Schwartz was just another innocent Rabbinical student until he read _The Savage Mind_ and was almost thrown out of yeshiva for attempting an analysis of regulations about semen in Leviticus and Deutoronomy. Since then he’s gone on to produce “other work”:http://books.google.com/books?q=eilberg-schwartz&btnG=Search+Books&as_brr=0.

_The Savage in Judaism_ actually has two parts. The second half of the book is a very anthropological analysis of ancient Jewish practice (however one determines what that might have been) which looks to be quite good. The first half focuses on the situation of Judaism in European (i.e. Christian) approaches to studying other societies. Why wasn’t Judaism compared to other so-called ‘savage’ religions that Europeans discovered in their colonies? And where was it positioned vis-a-vis the study of the classics or ‘oriental’ texts? A big part of the answer, of course, is that even thought Judaism was one dispensation away from The Real Deal that Christianity represented, it remained a source of ‘Western Civilization’ different from the legacies of Greece and Rome. Very interesting.

I’m not very far in the book yet, however I also “recently reccomended”:http://savageminds.org/2006/03/11/from-orifice-all-to-double-entry-bookkeeping/ James Aho’s little book on double-entry bookkeeping without having read much of it and it ended up being just wonderful, so I won’t hesitate to reccomend this book as well.

“He seems really smart,” my ex said, somewhat surprised.

“Of course he does,” I half-jokingly replied. “He’s Jewish.”

She was surprised to hear that The Tongued One was Jewish. Pressing my case, I continued: “Of course, most of your major rock stars are Jewish.”

Now, I’m known to BS a little. OK, a lot. You can imagine that any girlfriend of mine would be aware of that, and you’d be right. Bemused, she called me on it, asking me to name some other Jewish rock stars.

Of course, my mind went blank. But blank minds are what Yahweh created the Internet for, so I was soon googling up a passel of Jewish rockers.

Ah, yes. “Who’s Jewish”, the old favorite pastime of the American Jew. “You know who’s Jewish?” someone would ask around the archetypical Jewish-American dinner table. “Kirk Douglas! Tony Curtis! Paul Newman!” Some smart-ass would cry out “Marilyn Monroe” – she converted when she married Arthur Miller – and someone would reply “Elizabeth Taylor”.

By the 1950’s, as Jewish racial Otherness faded into generic whiteness, it was harder and harder to identify Jews. Their beloved and despised Yiddish has gone all but extinct, their clothes, homes, and lifestyles were indistinguishable from those of their goyishe neighbors, and the two defining elements of today’s Judaism – the Holocaust and Israel – had yet to enter the public consciousness in any major way. “Who’s Jewish” allowed increasingly non-descript Jewish families a way to act out the ambiguous nature of post-War American Jewishness, the simultaneous apart-from-ness and a-part-of-ness that made up the assimilated, modernist Jewish identity.

Although googling phrases like “Jewish rock stars” tends to pull you deep into the netherworld of Aryan conspiracy sites – alas, with the apparent death of Jewhoo.com, the one-stop directory of everyone Jewish, there’s no obvious reference for Internet-age “Who’s Jewish” players – I soon uncovered an assortment of reasonably famous Jewish rock musicians, from the obvious Dylan and Diamond to the not-so-obvious Perry Farrell and members of the Bad Livers.

As I looked over the list, I got to thinking: what’s Jewish about these musicians, about their music? It’s easy to see what’s Jewish about jazz – when Hitler singled the genre out as “Jewish music” (even going so far as to host “Entarte Musik” concerts of degenerate Jewish music, complimenting his “Entarte Kunst” exhibitions of Jewish art begun the year before) he virtually guaranteed a thousand dissertations – and volumes have been written on Jewish classical music from Mahler to Phillip Glass. So is there anything comparable to say about Jews in rock?

Well, it depends on when. The heyday of Jewish rock was the ‘70s: before that there’s some scattered Jewish major players, mostly behind-the-scenes – Phil Spector comes to mind, as do the Chess brothers and Alan Freed, the disc jockey – but nothing you could recognize as a distinct Jewish movement; after that, Jews are pretty widely dispersed and, again, there seems to be no major centers of Jewish rockfulness.

But in the ‘70s, Jews really shined. Literally, in some cases, with Jews playing a major role in the glam period, with strong outposts in bands like KISS (Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley [note: apparently not], and Bruce Kulick), the New York Dolls (Syl Sylvain and possibly Arthur Kane), T. Rex (Marc Bolan), and early Twisted Sister (John Segal and [half-Jewish] Dee Snider), along with soloists like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop (née James Newell Osterberg). As glam and other proto-punk styles graded almost imperceptibly into punk, Jews remained highly visible, especially among the CBGB set – Richard Hell of Television, Lenny Kaye of Patti Smith’s group, Joey Ramone, Chris Stein of Blondie, and across the pond, Mick Jones of the Clash, 3 of the 4 members of 10cc (Lol Crème, Kevin Godley, and Gouldman), and from backstage Malcolm McLaren who gave us the Sex Pistols, and Nancy Spungen who took them away.

These men (well, Nancy excepted) were the inheritors of a generation of Jewish masculinity defined by men like Arthur Miller, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer – tough guys who lived hard, loved baseball, and married America’s sexiest sexpots. Karen Brodkin writes in How Jews Became White Folks (Rutgers: 1999) that by the end of the ‘50s, the ideal of masculinity defined by post-War Jews had become the normative masculinity in American culture – especially defined in opposition to normative Jewish femininity, the Jewish American Princess stereotype of the voracious shopper/consumer emptying the Jewish male provider’s wallet.

Jewish men’s ambivalence revolved around the promise and the reality of patriarchal domesticity, upon which so much of 1950s white masculinity depended… Jewish wives… became Jewish American Princesses in the 1970s, as Jewish men confronted the hollowness of the materialist they had achieved and projected it onto their wives.(161)

The role of the “tough Jew” was solidified in the wake of the Six-Day War in1967. In the face of stereotypes of weak, bookish Jewish men, Israeli soldiers strode forth and kicked ass, landing them a place in Jewish-American consciousness. Being Jewish in American among the strapping gentile lads with their broad chests and gleaming white teeth was no longer something to be ashamed of; Israel’s muskeljudentum showed that Jews, too, could hack it in the modern militarized world.

Is it any coincidence that within a few short years, Jewish rock stars were crawling through broken glass and breathing fire to the amazement of their fans?

But glam and punk caught Jews at the breaking point of Jewish toughness; Israel had arrived on the global scene just as assimilated American Jews were beginning to worry at the edges of the prosperity post-War whiteness had brought them. As Brodkin noted above, out in suburbia these concerns were wrapped up into the JAP stereotype – but the CBGB crowd were of a different breed than the suburban Jews of Long Island. Intensely urban and wedded to nascent sexual liberatism and the avant-garde bohemianism of the late ‘60s art scene, these Jews dealt with the hollowness of consumerist prosperity in a rather more claustrophobic way. Rather than projecting their dissatisfaction onto the female Others with whom they shared their domestic emptiness, the rockers of the early ‘70s crawled inside of the female Otherness their suburban counterparts were rejecting. Wearing high heels, dresses, and lipstick, they blunted the Jewish masculinity of their fathers by becoming their mothers – and then pummeling their pseudo-female forms with drugs, violence, hard living, alcohol, promiscuity.

Punk wasn’t the only home Jewish musicians were making for themselves in the ‘70s, though. Strangely, the other center of Jewish musical activity was across the dial in soft rock – about as anti-punk as you can get. Simon and Garfunkel, Billy Joel, Randy Newman, Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka, Carly Simon, Barry Manilow, Barbara Streisand, Better Midler, Carly Simon, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, Phil Ochs, Jim Croce (a convert), Janis Ian, and Leonard Cohen all followed in some degree the trail blazed by Dylan, merging folk and rock traditions mostly as that most ‘70s of troubadours, the singer-songwriter.

With a few exceptions (Neil Diamond’s leather pants, Leonard Cohen’s blowjobs amid disarrayed sheets in Chelsea) these weren’t tough Jews acting out an ambiguously rewarding masculinity. In fact, unlike the early punkers, a lot of them were women. Like the glam rockers, some of the soft rockers were also theatrical in style and inspiration, although for folks like Manilow, Streisand, and Midler it was Broadway, not Kabuki, that inspired them.

The quieter sound of the am radio set expressed a discontent not totally unlike the punkers, though – a search for meaning and connection in an increasingly alienating world. Manilow, who supported himself writing commerical jingles, included them in his concerts (and popular live album) as “VSM (Very Strange Medley)”, both celebrating and mocking the consumerism that nipped at the heels of the arts. Midler took a page from her Jewish sistren blazing the feminist trail, putting her sexuality front-and-center, offering to “drop my dress for Israel” for a $5,000 pledge during a televised 1973 telethon. Midler’s persona both embraced and rejected the JAP stereotype – one got the impression that Midler did more than drop her nail file when she got off. Neil Diamond dived deep into the ambivalence of assimilation in his remake of The Jazz Singer, the main character attempting and ultimately failing to reconcile the conflicting demands of Jewishness and Americanness. The Jazz Singer, recall, ends with the pseudo-triumphant concert performance of “Coming to America” – Diamond finding connection with his country only in the fact of his and other immigrants’ and immigrants’ children’s shared Otherness.

Male soft rockers also expressed an uneasiness with the tough Jew role left them by their fathers, though not as spectacularly. The epitome is Paul Simon’s role in Annie Hall, a nebbishy materialistic Jewish womanizer who acts as the foil for Woody Allen’s tortured grappling with the emptiness of the contemporary Jewish legacy. In his music, Simon and partner Art Garfunkel spun delicate, “womanly” melodies (even as Better Midler was belting out raucous double entendres – sometimes single entendres). Wrapped in this sweet candy, though, was bitter medicine – songs like “Mrs. Robinson”, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, and the unreleased “Cuba Si, Nixon No” drew their inspiration from the same well as Dylan’s early protest music and angry denunciations of the state of the world (as later Jewish punks like Mick Jones, Jello Biafra, Joey Ramone, the Circle Jerks — all Jewish — and the Dictators — also all Jewish — would do).

By the end of the ‘70s, these “clumps” of Jewish involvement would be dispersed throughout pop music. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Jews would be involved in practically every genre of music, from the New Wave of the Bangles (Susanna Hoffs), Souixsie Sioux, and Depêche Mode (Martin Gore) to the hair metal of Def Leppard (Joe Elliott) and David Lee Roth to the top-40 tunesmithing of Pat Benatar, Melissa Manchester, and Paula Abdul to the hip-hop of the Beastie Boys (Mike Diamond, Adam Youch, and Adam Horowitz) to the hard rock of Guns ‘N’ Roses (Slash, née Saul Hudson) to the retro-rock of Lenny Kravitz (half-Jewish) to the neo-punk of Jane’s Addiction (Perry Farrell), Courtney Love (disputed), Elastica (Justine Frischman), and Veruca Salt (Jim Shapiro and Nina Gordon) to the heavy metal of Anthrax (Scott Ian) and Megadeth (Marty Friedman) to the neo-funk of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (original guitarist Hillel Slovak) to the neo-soft rock of Lisa Loeb, and beyond (Matisyahu, members of Jamiroquai and Phish, Rick Rubin whose behind-the-scenes work brought us Johnny Cash’s late-life revival).

This scattering of the tribes suggests an ever-increasing success of the Jewish assimilative drive whose uncertainties peaked in the punk and anti-punk of the early ‘70s. There’s nothing particularly Jewish about Elastica or Phish or Depêche Mode, but maybe that in itself is particularly Jewish. Meanwhile, it is in Jazz where, once again, Jews are pushing a uniquely Jewish expression, largely through the work of John Zorn and other klezmer-influenced players, many of whom – like Don Byron and Dave Douglas – are not Jewish at all. Whether this shift reflects the need for a more complex medium to express the subtleties of contemporary Jewishness or because rock music has moved so far from the urban avant-gardism of the early ‘70s I cannot say. And I‘m not sure I’m particularly worried; seems Muslims like Rachid Taha and Natacha Atlas are making interesting noises out of their own ambiguous relationships with their adopted Western European homes…

I particularly enjoyed reading of one difference between Rex and myself which seems to go a long way towards explaining why he seems to take the whole Jewish thing a lot more seriously than I do:

As a Jewish professor from California, dealing with these stereotypes is even more difficult because I lack recourse to the solution favored by many colleagues: acting as if the complex negotiation of my identity can be accomplished simply by assuming that “Jewish” means “from New York” and leaving it at that.

Like the Hawaiian students Alex discusses, Taiwanese don’t really think of me as anything other than “American.” However, I’ve noticed that some particularly cosmopolitan Taiwanese take it as a matter of pride that they can identify my ethnicity. For them it is a sign that they’ve been to NY and know what a bagel is. Although sometimes they wrongly guess that I’m French…