We have read with interest your responses to Jared Diamond’s book and TV series about Yali’s question and we thought in this first posting we could add to the conversation by telling you something about who Yali actually was and by beginning to tell you why we think Diamond got Yali’s question wrong. Although we never knew Yali ourselves, we worked in a part of coastal Papua New Guinea where he was politically active and, as well, read a lot about him in the anthropological literature (as he has long been a very famous man).
Some of what we have to say is inspired by Marilyn Strathern’s discussion of how Australian prospectors misunderstood the PNGuineans they met when they first entered the interior Highlands during the 1930’s. The Australians assumed that these PNGuineans were impressed with their complex technology -- for example, their guns and steel. However, in Strathern's view, possession of this novel technology initially marked these explorers as spirits, and from the perspectives of PNG Highlanders, the appearance of spirits among the living was extraordinary but ultimately not very important. Spirits, after all, would likely disappear without affecting social life very much. Only when Highlanders discovered that these Australians not only had large quantities of pearl shells but wished to transact with them did the Australians become plausibly human. Pearl shells, traded up from the coast, were for a long time central in the Highland exchanges through which marriages were contracted, compensation for death or injury was paid, and alliances were established. In other words, only when the Australians showed that they apparently valued what the Highlanders already valued and desired did the Highlanders regard them as interesting and socially significant. Only then could the Highlanders fit these otherwise strange and peripheral beings into their own ideas about full human beings: only then did they become persons with whom they could, and would want to, engage.
Of course, Yali's, and other coastal groups, had a much longer history of European contact (often dating from the latter part of the nineteenth century). Yali, himself, had especially extensive contact with Europeans. He served as a policeman in New Guinea's colonial administration before World War Two and as a member of the Allied Intelligence Service during the war. In fact, there is a photograph taken in 1944 in the Australian War Memorial archives commemorating his military service. In it, Yali is inside the Dace, an American submarine, together with other members of his company of intelligence-gathering "Coastwatchers." In advance of a major Allied landing, Yali's group of twelve -- seven Europeans, one Indonesian translator, and four PNGuineans -- was sent to Hollandia, then Dutch New Guinea, on a hazardous mission to gather strategic information. After the war, as a distinguished veteran, Yali embarked on a controversial political career, one which kept him in extensive contact with Europeans. Indeed, he was sent to Australia to learn European ways.
Yet, like for the Highlanders Strathern describes, Yali's life and aspirations remained largely PNGuinean. He remained concerned less about the material attributes of things themselves than about the social uses to which things were put. For him and many other PNGuineans both then and now, things have value because they can be used in transactions to establish relationships of recognition and respect. They are more like gifts than commodities. They are exchanged to establish relationships of obligation, alliance, and friendship rather than to get "good deals." Therefore, when Highlanders desired pearl shells, and they did desire them with a passionate intensity, it was not for the sake of the shells alone. Indeed, men acquired the coveted shells so as to be able to give them away at a later time.
Because the Highlanders were relatively inexperienced in European ways, they apparently thought that the prospectors were generous in offering them the coveted pearl shells that affirmed their fundamental worth -- their shared humanity. In contrast, Yali’s coastal peoples had long before learned that the colonists were stingy, offering them only meager wages (often for plantation labor) that denied a common humanity. More than lots of stuff, they wanted (just a little) respect.
More later – about “cargo” and “cults.”
Tag Archives: Culture Notes
Art Imitates Life?
Edmund Wilson has been much in the press lately, because of a new “biography”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0374113122/qid=1125531467/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-5680853-4509440?v=glance&s=books by Lewis M. Dabney. As it happens, I’ve been having an Edmund Wilson sort of summer. At the end of the spring semester I finally read To the Finland Station which was recommended to me years ago by my mom. I am ashamed to say I didn’t get around to reading it until I finally realized it was definitely not To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, which did not sound at all like my cup of tea (nor my mom’s, which made the recommendation seem all the more dubious and improbable). Result? A boffo point in the mater column and a big zero in the alma mater column. Years of graduate training laden with discussion of Marx and Marxism and nary a mention of Wilson’s amazing book on the man and his milieu! It’s true that Wilson doesn’t quite get Marx the theorist. But so what? Discussions of Marx the theorist are easily come by. What Wilson offers instead (and hoorah for that) is a hugely learned account of the social history from which Marxism emerged (ie, not the intellectual history of Hegel begat…) and of life as Marx and Engels and their families, friends, and lovers lived it.
Anyway, since then (and further inspired by some of the reviews of the new biography) I’ve gone on to O Canada (has an earning-his-keep magazine work feel throughout, unfortunately — but still interesting if you are interested in Canada of the 50s and early 60s) and Axel’s Castle in which I found these lovely paired descriptions, which brings me round again to anthropology:
“Anatole France was a popular writer: he aimed to be persuasive and intelligible – he used frankly to remind his secretary … ‘Leave to your reader the easy victory of seeing further than you.’ His books were sold on all the bookstalls of France and known all over the civilized world. …Whereas Paul Valéry disregards altogether the taste and intelligence of the ordinary reader: instead of allowing his reader the easy victory, he takes pride in outstripping him completely. And he is read chiefly by other writers or people with a special interest in literature… Paul Valéry has set himself … the task of reproducing by his very language all the complexities and confusions of our interacting sensations and ideas… When France turns away from literature, he occupies himself naturally with politics – he goes on the stump for Dreyfus, allies himself with the Socialist party, writes editorials for its paper, addresses meetings of working men and finally declares himself a Communist. But Valéry concerns himself little with politics… (1931: 88-89).
If a list of anthropologists scrolls through your mind at this juncture, you’ll probably be able to sort many of them into the “France” or the “Valéry” column. But not all of them, right?
Wilson sets up a compelling contrast between the two writers. You can feel that his sympathies are with France (and Wilson, who wrote widely and beautifully, is manifestly a writer of the France variety). But while Wilson condemns aspects of Valéry’s writing (and character), he also admires his artistic mission. It is clear, in fact, that Wilson thinks Valéry is the more important artist, even given that France and Valéry are very different kinds of writers. This is a small example of what is nice about Wilson’s writing –again and again, he takes apart a particular example in such a way that one is prompted to think about more general patterns. Isn’t this contrast between France and Valéry evocative of discussions we’ve had here about the public intellectual, the accessible writer, the spokesperson for anthropology versus the pointy-headed snoot, the abstruse theorizer, the politically ineffectual academic?
Wilson doesn’t say that one cannot choose between them — he suggests and in a way exemplifies that conclusion (thus giving the reader the “easy victory” of making the connection). While he writes as a France, he also generously acknowledges the accomplishments of Valéry, and thus makes room for both of their virtues. It’s a stance and a way of presenting that stance that is difficult to emulate, but always inspiring — in anthropology and outside of it.
Updates and Shorts
- The Meskwaki adoption case has been resolved with the decision by the mother, after three months of living with her child, to keep the baby.
- The NCAA has backtracked somewhat on its recent decision to disallow most Indian mascots, logos, and team names from post-season games. The newly released appeals process would allow colleges to cite the support of the Indian groups being represented — e.g. the Seminoles in Florida State University’s case — to strengthen their cases.
- In related news, USA Today has a round-up of editorial opinion on the NCAA’s new mascot policy.
- Also related, despite the current visibility of the mascot issue, the town of Fox Lake, Ill., is considering reviving the Indian-head logo they abandoned some 50 years ago. Fox Lake was once home to a community of Meskwaki, before the government pushed the Meswkaki west of the Mississippi River to their current homes in Iowa and Kansas. Says Meskwaki tribal historian and perhaps-too-nice-guy Johnathan Buffalo:
“We don’t want to berate this little town just because they want their Indian head back,” he said. “But they should remember us, that we used to live there and their houses might be built on our graves.”
If the village reverts to the logo, it should be reworked to reflect a correct image of the Meskwaki, who never wore the headdress depicted on the old logo, he said.
- In White County Arkansas, meth use is linked with arrowhead hunting. The sherriff, the improbably-named Pat Garrett, hypothesizes that arrowhead hunting gives the hyperactive and hyper-alert methheads something to do while they are tweaking, but there’s an economic angle as well — good collections can be worth good money, which can come in handy given the kinds of legal problems that can accompany meth use.
Brain Boy
When writing my previous post about the National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives, I came across the web page of the director, Robert Leopold. On his page he has a link to a page from the 1960s comic book, Brain Boy:
Here is Robert’s description:
He’s a dashing young man with extraordinary powers, an under-cover agent for a clandestine branch of the Secret Service called the Organization of Active Anthropologists. If you read comic books in the early ’60s, you know him as Brain Boy, the studious superhero who appeared in six full-length color comics published by Dell between 1962 and 1963.
Brain Boy was versatile, battling Latin American dictators and extraterrestrials between the covers of a single issue — and always in a suit and tie.
Sounds like the comic book version of “Anthropologists as Counter-Insurgents.”
UPDATE: The B-Log has more.
The Representation of Aborigines in Taiwanese Baseball
This is the third in a series of Savage Minds posts on sports and ethnic representation. The first was Oneman’s post on ethnic mascots, followed by my earlier post on ethnic soccer clubs in Australia.
This post draws on a 2000 paper (PDF) by Andrew Morris, presented at the conference Remapping Taiwan: Histories and Cultures in the Context of Globalization, as well a more recent (2004) version of Morris’ work, “Baseball, History, the Local and the Global in Taiwan,” which appeared in the book The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan.
Taiwan was a Japanese colony from 1895 till the end of World War, when the Nationalists (Guomindang, or KMT) took over. Baseball had become popular under Japanese rule, but managed to survive KMT efforts to de-Japanify the country.
Continue reading
Literary Kinship Studies
While there was once a time that anthropological theory influenced literary studies, lately it seems as if the trend has been the other way around; so, can we assume that when literary scholars turn their attention to kinship studies it will spark renewed interest in the subject among anthropologists? The book I’m referring to is: Novel Relations : The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748-1818. It was recently reviewed in a New York Review of Books article on Jane Austen, by Diane Johnson.
Perry’s book shows that Austen lived at a time when women’s status was shifting. While it had previously been defined by blood relations, making a woman’s relationship with her parents and siblings more important than who she married, by the end of the eighteenth century women’s status was increasingly defined entirely by the family she married into. This has important implications for literary studies, since sibling relationships are often overlooked in readings of Austen’s novels:
In Perry’s view, previous definitions of the family have been based on incorrect inferences from statistical norms and prescriptive conduct manuals. Statistics taken from public records of marriages and births ignore “many of the other filaments in the web of kinship that located people psychologically in the period,” because there are no published records of such filaments—a maiden aunt, like Austen living with the family, for example, would not appear in any record. And where modern readers assume that a novel will contain a love story, the main story the author had in mind might in fact be about a bad or good brother, a long-lost relative, fathers separated from daughters, a devoted aunt, or some other aspect of the birth family (with mothers often missing or unimportant, as in Austen). Such elements were more important than love stories in the novels Austen read, like Tristram Shandy or The Castle of Otronto.
… This loss of female authority was accompanied or explained by other social factors that were not in women’s interest: the growing “dispersion of communities, and the growing power of individualism,” and changes in property laws and marriage settlements that left sisters and daughters less well provided for than they had been, and with little legal leverage. Inheritance issues drive most of Jane Austen’s plots and subplots; and because she was on the cusp of changes that would increasingly commodify women and virginity for the marriage market, trends masked by conventions of romantic love, she came to seem to some later readers as somewhat hardhearted in the practicality of her views, for instance (in Perry’s example) her implicit mockery in Sense and Sensibility of Marianne Dashwood’s “ardent belief in a first and only love,” a belief that would have made no sense in an earlier period, when a third of all marriages were second marriages, after the death of a spouse, but was fashionably new in Marianne’s day.
Perry’s elucidation of the plots of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century novels in the light of these broad social changes goes a long way toward explaining why many of them do not move us today; the reunion of long-lost fathers and daughters, for instance, or the intense relation of brother and sister no longer seem especially affecting. The long-lost relative plot simply had more emotional force when the “consanguinal” family rather than the “affinal” family was the principle focus of emotional life (though, thinking of The Mill on the Floss or Silas Marner we can see that such consanguinal plots appear at least as late as George Eliot). It may be that the marriage plot itself has seen its day, and in these times of redefined families, plots will change—there is already a spate of family novels and novels about friendship that do not resolve in marriage.
This makes me think about the differences between Hollywood and Bollywood films. In the latter (although it is changing now) familial relations between siblings and between children and their parents are far more important than romantic relations between unmarried men and women. In fact, the main emotional relationship in many Hindi movies is between the male lead and his mother, not between him and the woman he is to marry at the end of the film. I wonder if this (even more than colonial history) explains the love so many Indian’s have of classic English literature?
“Savage” Mascots Take A Blow
In a somewhat surprising (and maybe confusing) development, the NCAA announced today that it would ban the use of “hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots, nicknames or imagery” at NCAA championships. (Apparently, the NCAA does not have the authority to impose regulations on regular season play.) This is a significant victory for anti-Indian mascot activists, who for years have been challenging the use of often denigrating Indian imagery by sports teams. Affected by the new guidelines are several different “Braves”, even more “Indians”, and one each of the “Chippewas”, “Seminoles”, “Utes”, “Redmen”, “Illini”, “Choctaws”, “Fighting Sioux”, and the “Savages”.
It’s easy to see why many American Indians are offended by the use of clear ethnic slurs like “Redmen”, “Savages”, and “Redskins” to describe a sports team. It also might be easy to imagine why some groups might be offended by the appropriation of their names to describe teams that they are in no way affiliated with. But these are not really the issues around which debate has focused — or, rather, they are just the shallowest and easiest-to-grasp points of what is a much deeper debate, one that focuses largely on representationand the question of who history and tradition belongs to.
Defenders of Indian team names and mascots obviously resist the charge of racism, but they do so in a way that, at first, seems surprising. They do not, for instance, question the significance of a team mascot in the face of systematic racism with much more far-reaching impacts — like forced sterilization of Indian women in the very recent past. One could imagine such a claim — “how much damage is this really doing?” they could ask — but don’t (at least not usually). In fact, they cling tenaciously to their mascots — as fiercely as any Indian nation ever clung to their own traditions and autonomy. Consoder, for example, this statement from the Honor the Chief group at the University of Illinois:
For 78 years, the Chief has been the symbol of the spirit of a great university and of our intercollegiate athletic teams, and as such is loved by the people of Illinois. The University considers the symbol to be dignified and has treated it with respect. His ceremonial dance is performed with grace and beauty.
Chief Illiniwek embodies the attributes valued by alumni, students, and friends of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The tradition of the Chief is a link to our great past, a tangible symbol of an intangible spirit, filled with qualities to which a person of any background can aspire: goodness, strength, bravery, truthfulness, courage, and dignity.
The Chief Illiniwek tradition can be transformed into an educational asset, to both the University and to the Native American community. Elevating the symbol of Chief Illiniwek provides an opportunity for the University to promote the attributes that have come to be identified with this tradition. Together, we can utilize our considerable strengths and resources to celebrate diversity—our growth as a human race—and create a true consensus for the future.
Put that way, it seems almost cruel to strip the University Illini of their tradition and their code of “goodness, strength, bravery, truthfulness, courage, and dignity”. Which is to say, the defenders of Chief Illiniwek have defined him as a symbol of a “lifeway” every bit as valuable — and valid — as that of the actual Illini themselves. What is at stake here is no longer a mascot, but a culture, of which Chief Illiniwek is only the most visible symbol.
While this positioning is not likely to impress most Indian activists — any more than arguments about the Confederate flag as a symbol of the pride and honor on Southern culture is likely to impress civil rights activists — it is the corrollary that really bothers them. Because the argument from tradition is often paired with an argument that essentially says that Indians should be honored by being chosen to represent such high ideals. What’s more, that they should be proud to be represented by such a fine and authentic mascot. So, for instance, another U of IL-based site, the Chief Illiniwek Educational Foundation (Ch.I.E.F.), puts forth as its mission:
…to utilize the presence of Chief Illiniwek to promote greater education and awareness of American Indian people, culture , tradition, and history to the students, alumni, and friends of the University of Illinois.
The Ch.I.E.F. site incudes an in-depth history of Chief Illiniwek, his regalia and dance, noting the authenticity of the representation (although it appears that, since his inception in 1926, Illiniwek has owed more to the Lakota than to more local Illinois tribal traditions).
As Philip Deloria has noted, the appropriation and enactment of Indian identities in “play” has a long history in the United States — essentially since there was a United States — and it is premised on the idea that Indian tradition and history could be claimed as non-Indian tradition and history.
Indianness offered a deep, authentic, aboriginal Americanness….To play Indian has been to connect with a real Self, both collective and individual… (Playing Indian, 1998, Yale University Press).
This “authentic Americanness”, though, is premised on the evacuation of real Indians, on their supplantation — in “playing Indian”, the new “authentic American” replaces the old one — so it makes sense that mascot defenders often claim that they are preserving Indian heritage when Indians themselves cannot or will not, as in this comment (scroll to 4th comment) left on a U of IL alumni discussion board:
Consider the irony that the tribes themselves were unable to perpetuate the traditional dance the Chief does at halftime; it took a bunch of “immature frat boys” to do so. Now, there will be NO living record of this element of Illinoisian culture….
Playing Indian legitimizes the displacement of aboriginal Americans by suggesting that the new Americans are the rightful inheritors of Indian tradition. At stake in the debate over Indian mascots, then, is not just school tradition, but the very right of the school, as an American institution, to exist in the first place. For if appropriating a mere image like that of Chief Illiniwek is wrong, then how much more wrong must be the appropriation of an entire continent from its “rightful” occumpants?
Bourdieu in Bollywood
No, not a post about French academics dancing in wet saris … In a post over at Sepia Mutiny, Amardeep Singh asks an interesting question about Bollywood* cinema:
Why is physical difference from Indian norms acceptable (or even desirable), while significant linguistic difference is an impossibility?
He is talking about Hindi film actress Katrina Kaif, whose voice has to be overdubbed to hide her English accent when speaking Hindi. This, in itself, is nothing new. In fact, Bollywood has long employed actors from various regions of India, using overdubbing to hide their regional accents. But Amardeep feels that this is different:
But why is Katrina Kaif in Bollywood to begin with? Why is she getting parts? It’s not for her acting ability, which seems pretty minor, at least in Sarkar. I believe she and others are being brought in because they look white.
I don’t hold that against them, but I do question why it’s such a commodity in Bollywood. … Indian actors have always tended to be much lighter-skinned than ordinary Indians, and the projection of ‘western lifestyle’ has been a part of Indian movie mythology for at least 40 years. And it’s always been somewhat troubling to me — a sign of a lingering colonial mentality.
The difference now, in this era of hybridity-globalization, is that the simulacrum of whiteness is approaching perfection.
The oddity is that what is wanted is the physical appearance of whiteness mixed with a classy, sometimes English-inflected, but still authentic Hindi-speaking capability. I find that to be an interesting paradox. The need for good Hindi can be explained as an issue of effective communication with mass audiences, but it doesn’t make the paradox any less real.
Vikrum Sequeira has more on the concept of fair skin in India, but I’d like to get back to Amardeep’s original question. What is the difference between looks and language?
I believe that the answer has to do with the way in which alternative symbolic markets are constructed. In her famous critique of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital, linguistic anthropologist Katherine Woolard pointed out that the official language of the state is not always the dominant language – that alternative linguistic markets can be created which oppose the state sanctioned hierarchy. She uses the example of Catalonia, Spain, where Catalan came to be valued over the dominant Castilian. As Wooldard points out, this is true even of the Castilian speaking workforce. For Woolard, the historical reasons for this lie in “the regional economic dominance of the Catalan bourgeoisie” which survived attempts by the Francoist government to impose “centralized (and increasingly multinational) finance capitalism over the Spanish economy.”
In Bollywood, the truly rich and powerful characters in most films have always spoken English. However, these characters have often been portrayed as untrustworthy. In the 70s they were villains who sold out the interests of their people to big business. Today they are often young people who have lost touch with their values. What we have is the classic case of an alternative linguistic market. While the dominance of English is recognized, a space has been created in which preferring English over Hindi is negatively sanctioned.
Interestingly, the Bollywood elites who make these films are largely cosmopolitan and English speaking. This is not an unusual phenomenon in postcolonial nations. In Taiwan I also found that many advocates for local language rights were similarly cosmopolitan and multilingual. Looking at race can help us better understand this phenomenon.
Amardeep’s question can be rephrased: Why has an alternative market developed in the linguistic sphere, but not in the sphere of personal beauty? I would argue that it is precisely because race is not something that one can so easily change. Sure, there are all kinds of beauty products one can buy to lighten one’s skin. (In Taiwan I have to go out of my way to avoid buying moisturizing cream with bleach in it.) But without Michael Jackson’s wealth, most people cannot change the color of their skin. Now, there have been attempts to create alternative markets in skin color. The whole “Black is Beautiful” movement sought to do just that. The problem such movements often face is that they tend to exclude the elite. India’s English speaking cosmopolitan elite can, if they want, have their children learn enough Hindi to maintain their power in such a marketplace. However, they cannot easily change the color of their skin – and India’s ruling class is still largely “wheatish” in complexion.
*See here for a post on the origin of the word “Bollywood.”
Inside/Outside Troubles
Three recent articles about blogging or otherwise posting personal thoughts online caught my interest. The first, which I commented on at my personal website is the Chronicle piece by "Ivan Tribble", "Bloggers Need Not Apply". Tribble, recently released from search committee duties at his school, rails against academics who blog, under the guise of "helpful advice" to job-seekers.
We all have quirks. In a traditional interview process, we try our best to stifle them, or keep them below the threshold of annoyance and distraction. The search committee is composed of humans, who know that the applicants are humans, too, who have those things to hide. It’s in your interest, as an applicant, for them to stay hidden, not laid out in exquisite detail for all the world to read. If you stick your foot in your mouth during an interview, no one will interrupt to prevent you from doing further damage. So why risk doing it many times over by blabbing away in a blog?
The second article is a NYTimes "Style Desk" piece entitled "The New Nanny Diaries Are Online" (this piece may have fallen behind the Times’ paywall; read the Village Voice’s take on the subject here or Bitch PhD’s take here). The author, one Helaine Olen, describes her growing discomfort with her nanny after reading about her private life on her blog (the nanny has since abandoned the blog, but not before writing a fairly extensive and humiliating rejoinder to Olen’s piece).
Yet within two months of my starting to read her entries our entire relationship unraveled. Not only were there things I didn’t want to know about the person who was watching my children, it turned out her online revelations brought feelings of mine to the surface I’d just as soon not have to face as well.
…
My husband thought her writing precociously talented but wanted to fire her nonetheless. "This is inappropriate," he said. "We don’t need to know that Jennifer Ehle makes her hot."
And, finally, a Boston University journalism professor was fired for making this comment about a student on an online sports board:
"Of my six students, one (the smartest, wouldn’t you know it?) is incredibly hot. … It was all I could do to remember the other five students."
I don’t want to defend or castigate any of the actors in any of these situations — I’ve said my piece about Tribble at One Man’s Opinion and am working up something more specific on the Boston University case (stay tuned, folks!); Olen’s case has been suitably discussed by both her nanny personally and a bevy of Internet commentators. Instead, I’m concerned here with how each of these pieces illustrates conceptions about the division of public and private life in American (North American? Western?) conceptions of the self, especially where work is involved. In each of the cases, the blogger/poster has committed a transgression, revealing his/her private life in a public forum (the Internet).
Modern American culture is structured around the hard division between public and private spaces, personaes, and expression. This division defines and bounds our behavior among every dimension — religion, gender, sexuality, class, economics (consider how improper it is to ask someone’s annual income!), politics, and so on. Each of us does a pretty remarkable job of adapting to the varying definitions of proper and improper behavior in each context we move through in the course of our daily lives. At the same time, these boundaries can become contested — consider the furor over the Supreme Court’s decision striking down Texas’ sodomy ban (in Lawrence et al. v. Texas). The advent of the Internet has posed one of the greatest challenges to these "hard" boundaries in recent years, confouding efforts to adequately define public and private spaces and often shifting behaviors that were once considered "private" into the "public" eye, and vice versa. It is telling that Tribble contrasts the public exposure gained from blogging with the "privacy" of face-to-face interactions in such public venues as cocktail parties and classrooms:
We’ve all done it — expressed that way-out-there opinion in a lecture we’re giving, in cocktail party conversation, or in an e-mail message to a friend. There is a slight risk that the opinion might find its way to the wrong person’s attention and embarrass us. Words said and e-mail messages sent cannot be retracted, but usually have a limited range. When placed on prominent display in a blog, however, all bets are off.
What seems to bother Tribble here is not so much the comments themselves (after all, one would think an academic would have a bit more worry about inane comments made in the classroom!), but their iterability — their capacity to be repeated and, in being repeated, to escape the control of their author. The appropriate public venue for academic speech is publication, after passing through layers of vetting and peer review to minimize the consequences of iterability. While off-hand comments made in person are, in the Derridean sense, iterable, their lack of a permanent material form somewhat limits their impact. By writing on a weblog, though, the author grants his/her comments the permancence of publication without the benefit of academic screening. (An argument that might seem surprising to anyone with any depth of experience on the web — pages come and go with a surprising suddenness! For example, in the post on "iterability" I just cited, a link is broken, and the post is less than a year old. Tribble answers this argument bypointing to mechanisms like Google’s cache: "Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up.")
Iterability seems to lay at the heart of Michael Gee’s case as well. Consider, for example, Robert MacMillan’s commentary at the Washington Post:
But just because his words are gone doesn’t mean they haven’t been preserved elsewhere… like right here in this column, and over at Boston Sports Media, where blogger David Scott posted them on July 15 so the rest of us could wonder at them…
A fellow BU prof, Michael Feldman (writing as "the Dowbrigade"), adds these comments in his own response:
As regular readers will note, the Dowbrigade also works at a Major Boston University, and over the years we have had our share of "hot" students, but we would never dream of saying so in a public posting.
Gee could not have been fired for having "hot" students — professors cannot very well have a policy forbidding attractive women from enrolling. He also could not have been fired for noticing the "hotness" of his student — unless a professor is blind, s/he is going to have students that s/he thinks are physically attractive, whether in relation to their own standards of physical beauty or to those of society at large. Where Gee transgressed was in letting it be known that he found a student attractive (Feldman highlights the "sloe-eyed Sabra" part of the comment as a racial slur, but I don’t think this is the primary reason for Gee’s dismissal)– that is, in exposing the always-present but always-suppressed private reactions of a professor to his/her students (on whatever grounds) to the public eye. We professors are supposed to be neutral with regard to our students, to judge each of them solely on their ability to master the material presented in the class, not on their physical attractiveness, political beliefs, personality quirks, financial status, or any other individual quality (except, maybe, inasmuch as it contributes to their greater or lesser mastery of the course material). By making his private reaction public, he made the illusion of professorial neutrality more difficult to perform not only for himself, but for academics in general.
Gee’s offense lies not so much in his private reaction as in the his public puncturing of his (and his professorial colleagues’) professional image — which is also the offense committed by Olen’s nanny Tessy. Time and again, Olen notes that there are "things I didn’t want to know" about her nanny, things that, eventually, so punctured Olen’s image of what a nanny is supposed to be that she ended up firing Tessy. Now, nannies already blur the line between public and private — they are employees who are paid to take care of their employer’s children and household, but they are also "part of the family", often living with "their" family and certainly privy to many of the most intimate details of the family’s life. For many women — especially, perhaps, of the New York liberal career-woman type — the illusion of "nanny as family member" is crucial to what is, after all, a rather exploitive work relationship. As long as Tessy could be viewed as "one of the family", Olen was comfortable with the arrangement; but when she started reading posts that described Tessy’s nannying as "work" and her employers as just that, "employers", Olen’s comfortable illusion was shattered:
Most parents don’t like to think the person watching their children is there for a salary. We often build up a mythology of friendship with our nannies, pretending the nanny admires us and loves our children so much that she would continue to visit even without pay.
Without that "mythology", Olen literally grew disillusioned with Tessy’s performance.
Each of these cases presents an act of discipline, in which a person is punished for their transgressions against the supposedly hard and fast boundaries between public and private expression — which Tribble and Olen, in their decision to "go public" and write about these punished transgressions, have made to act as a warning to the rest of us (Tribble’s weak objection that no candidate was passed over solely for blogging notwithstanding — the intent of his piece is clearly to warn would-be academic bloggers to keep their mouths shut). But what does this say about the nature of employment in today’s American society? With Tribble’s and Olen’s cases, the real discomfort came not so much in their employees’ (or prospective employees’) lack of qualification for the job at hand, but in their suspicion of an active life outside of work. Although Gee’s transgression touches more directly on his ability to do his job, it must be noted that there is little in his comments to suggest that Gee would be impartial in his grading practices or as a teacher — if anything, his post seems like the effort of a new professor (he had worked as a reporter the prior 17 years) to deal with the realities of his situation. How do you deal with a student whose physical presence is distracting?
In each of these cases, it seems to be the fact of merely having an "unauthorized" — that is, non-work-related — private life that is being punished, reflecting an effort to extend the discipline of the workplace — of public life — into the worker’s private life. The epitome of this attitude can be found in Henry Ford’s Dearborn, a model community where news, church, even appropriate recreation was provided by Ford’s agents — and where workers’ home lives were monitored as well. While ostensibly protecting the boundary between public and private, the employers in the cases mentioned above are all in effect defining what their workers’ appropriate private life should be.
In this respect, the act of blogging/posting becomes problematic not so much for the inability of the author to control the reception of his/her words, but for the inability of his/her employer to control the private life of the author. The act of posting becomes evidence of a deeper transgression than just misrecognizing or refusing to recognize the boundaries of appropriate public behavior; it shows the failure of the employer to adequately discipline his/her worker, or the failure of the worker to adequately conform to the expectations of his/her employer. In the end, though, both transgressions amount to the same thing — in the face of an employment regime determined to draw ever-smaller boundaries around the private, rejecting those boundaries is in itself evidence of an "unauthorized" private life. Which is why, I would venture, blogging has caught on in such a big way; in the face of greater and greater incursions on our private life — not just by employers, but by government, social advocates across the political spectrum, religious organizations, black-hat hackers and identity thieves, and ever-tightening security in retail facilities — blogging has provided a way to "push back", to assert a private life that nobody owns, ironically enough by making it public.
where the boys are
I don’t know if anyone else has heard this report, previously made and today vociferously defended on NPR and perhaps circulating elsewhere, about single moms producing fewer boys than partnered ones.
It seems a boffo exemplar of contemporary kinship anxiety.
The reported facts are as follows:
(1) Boys have always been born in slightly higher numbers than have girls
(2) Boy-baby pregnancies require a slightly higher energy investment on the part of the mother than do girl-baby pregnancies
(3) Recently, the boy/girl discrepancy has been dropping. There are still more boys born than girls, but not as many more
(4) Single moms contribute to this decline in the discrepancy — they are (supposedly) statistically less likely to have boys than are partnered moms.
The currently-circulating explanation is: somehow, humans are rapidly adapting to family instability; women’s bodies can “tell” if they haven’t got a male partner around to help out, they know it’s a big effort to produce a boy baby, and so they refuse to take any chances about male fetuses (or blastocysts, or implantation, or maybe even ovule friendliness toward Y chromosome sperm — the explanation part gets a bit hand-wavey here). To summarize: the bodies of single women are mysteriously inhospitable to male offspring.
The pop-cultural demographic take-home message, but of course, is: get out your tinfoil hats and await the parthenogenetic lesbian apocalypse.
But before we measure our heads for good fit, we might note that there is a gigantic black box in this explanation, capaciously enclosing the whole “how” part of the problem.
If all we need is an explanation that fits the available facts, with mystery clauses thrown in as necessary, I’ve got one, too — but I bet it won’t make the news.
It’s hard to see how energetics would operate any kind of constraining force, given that malnutrition is far less a problem for we moderns than it was for our ancestors. So let’s set the energetics aside. Although boy babies are energetically more difficult to carry to term than girl babies, they must be easier to successfully gestate in some other important ways — otherwise how to explain the ratio of boys to girls at birth, given the objectively 50/50 odds of conception? Working from this premise, one may as easily conclude (since we are unburdened by the need to offer any “how” account) that there is a positive rather than a negative message being received (mysteriously, of course) by single women’s bodies: “psst, you are in a position such that it is worth trying to bring off the rare girl rather than the more usual boy.”
Does this sound like a crackpot theory to you? Keep in mind it has as much to recommend it as does the reverse proposition, merely flipping the evaluative language.
The decline in boy babies is disturbing because of what it probably indicates about environmental contaminants. As for the single-mom part of the story, well — I can’t tell you why it is wrong, but I’ll happily offer a wager of $50 to the first taker that if will be thoroughly debunked within 5 years and probably much sooner. Unless that counts as internet gambling and could get Savage Minds in trouble, in which case I will satisfy myself with shaking my fist and intoning, Mark My Words. 😉
Non-Indian Indians and the People Who Fight Over Them
I think I’ll retreat from the global scale of my last couple posts and dwell in the details for a while with this story about an adoption dispute on the Meskwaki Settlement. The story: a Meskwaki woman had a baby by a non-Meskwaki father and put the child (named Braven) up for adoption. The couple that chose to adopt the child was also non-Meskwaki. When it came time to turn the baby over to it’s new parents, the Meskwaki tribal council invoked the Indian Child Welfare Act (hereafter ICWA; see an FAQ on the ICWA for a plain-language description) to prevent the adoption and to take custody of the child. A tribal judge has returned custody to the mother, but she must now petition the tribal council to pursue the adoption.
I find this story interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, it highlights several ongoing points of contention within the Meskwaki community about who is Meskwaki and what that means in today’s world. Also, it illustrates the assumptions that have informed US Indian policy, even well-intentioned policies like the ICWA. (There are a handful of other stories detailing the Meskwaki case here, here, and here; the details are pretty much the same. I’ve chosen to focus on the first story that emerged on the subject because of what I find to be an interesting, and probably unintended, editorial content.)
The Meskwaki face the same issue that other American Indian peoples do (which is shared by other American minorities as well): how to maintain some sense of boundedness in the context of a pluralistic society. In recent years, the question of identification has been compounded for many Meskwaki by the construction and subsequent success of a tribal casino. While the financial security afforded by the casino has given the Meskwaki the autonomy to protect their cultural patrimony — for instance, by allowing the construction of a bi-lingual school under Meskwaki control — it has also raised concerns among some Meskwaki about the possibility of remaining true to their heritage while acting as corporate capitalists. One of the ways that these concerns have expressed themselves is through concerns over tribal membership. While there have long been worries about “half-breeds” and non-Meskwaki living on the Settlement — the fieldnotes I have from the ’50s contain numerous references to the “half-breed problem” — the issue has taken on new valence with the success of the casino and the distribution of services and annuities made possible by the new source of income. Tribal enrollment is not just a matter of cultural belonging, it is now more profitable than ever to be a recognized member of the tribe.
But enrollment is not easy to achieve. Under the Meskwaki tribal constitution, and in keeping with the strong patrilineal kinship system, enrollment requires recognition by an enrolled Meskwaki father. This raises two concerns in the community. One is that when a Meskwaki man has a child by a non-Meskwaki woman, the child is eligible to enroll, even though it may never set foot on the Settlement and even though it may be wholly raised by its non-Meskwaki mother (which is not always the case, but is likely), which is to say raised as a non-Meskwaki. The other concern is the reverse: when a Meskwaki woman has a child by a non-Meskwaki man, the child is not eligible to enroll, even though it may be raised on the Settlement as an integrated part of the Meskwaki community. On the one hand, there is a growing resentment about enrolled Meskwakis who play no part in the social life of the community; on the other, there is growing concern about resources being used to support people who are not recognized members of the community and, because their children cannot be enrolled, will not contribute to the ongoing reproduction of the society. These concerns have given rise to a mounting pressure to reform the enrollment provisions — perhaps by adopting DNA testing to establish “Meskwaki-ness”, a troubling development in its own right — as well as efforts to further limit residency of un-enrolled persons on the Settlement. The child whose adoption is in question has been born into the middle of these conflicting viewpoints: as the child of a non-Meskwaki father, he cannot be enrolled, and yet as the child of a Meskwaki mother (in a family that has some prominence as keepers of Meskwaki tradition) he represents part of the future of the Meskwaki culture.
These concerns are highlighted because adoption and kinship have a special meaning in Meskwaki culture. The death of an individual is followed by special adoption ceremonies in which the kinship role that the deceased played is “passed on” to another person — who becomes one’s father, brother, or whatever. We recognize in funerary customs the attempt of a group of people to come to terms with the “hole” the death has left in their network of social relations; Meskwaki adoption practices clearly fit into this model. But there’s a secondary meaning, as well, one which has special weight given the Meskwaki’s history — the protection of kinship networks has been essential to the survival of the Meskwaki as a people. Several times in the last couple centuries, the Meskwaki have faced extinction as a result of warfare or of disease. At one point, the community was reduced to only a couple dozen members; the adoption or reintegration of Meskwaki who had married out of the tribe or been captured in battle and integrated into their captor’s tribe was essential to the continuation of the Meskwaki, and the elaboration of multiple kinship roles essential following the literal decimation of the people — when 9 of 10 roles are suddenly vacated, kinship takes on a rather profound meaning.
Into this mix comes the ICWA. Passed in 1978, the ICWA was intended to put a stop to the use of adoption to advance an assimilationist agenda. Historically, adoption agencies have consciously striven to place Indian babies with non-Indian parents, arguing that poverty and ill education made Indian parents unlikely candidates for adoption. Family service agencies have also contributed to the assimilative project, often removing children form Indian homes after observing local customs that they deemed “abusive”. The intent was clearly assimilative: if government policies could not force Indian peoples as a whole to assimilate into the “general population”, at least individual Indians could be “spared” the penalties of an Indian upbringing. The ICWA grew out of the greater empowerment of native peoples in the US following the rise of the American Indian Movement and the development of more sophisticated legal strategies built around the concept of sovereignty. Essentially, it allows tribal governments to intervene in the adoption process and to prevent the removal of Indian children to non-Indian adoptive or foster parents, keeping such children within the community. In this case, however, the enrollment standards of the Meskwaki mean that the child in question is legally not Meskwaki; any Meskwaki identity that can be ascribed to the child must necessarily be premised on standards that the Meskwaki do not recognize in their enrollment standards. The child both is and is not Meskwaki; the law does not apply because the child is not Meskwaki, yet the law’s intent is to protect Indian cultures of which the child may well grow to become an important part, even without enrollment.
Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the law has to cover all sorts of enrollment regimes. Many, perhaps most, tribes offer immediate recognition to anyone who can demonstrate a particular percentage of descent from recognized “full-blooded” members of the tribe. For instance, the local Paiute colony requires 1/8 descent from members of a list compiled in 1923, all of who are considered “full-blooded”. Meet the terms and you are Paiute. The Meskwaki system is unusual, though perhaps not unique, in requiring the father’s active involvement in recognizing the child. But more than the need to accommodate different and sometimes conflicting enrollment regimes, confusion arises from the underlying premise of the law, a long-standing idea in American thought — that “Indian-ness” is inborn, that children are either born Indian, or they are born non-Indian. If they are born Indian, then they “belong” with the Indian tribe they were born into; if not, then they “belong” with non-Indians. A child like Braven challenges this assumption, because although he was born non-Indian (in the legal sense) he was also born Indian (in the sense of his potential to take part in and enrich Meskwaki culture).
The article I’ve cited is interesting in its own right for the assumptions about individual rights and cultural identity it reveals. The story portrays the mother as the “good guy”, motivated only by the assessment of what would be best for the child — an assessment which she is entitled to make both by virtue of her motherhood and by virtue of her right to individual freedom and choice. Opposed to her is not so much the tribal council, but rather the mother’s cultural identity itself: “…when it came time to turn him over to the couple that wanted to give Braven a home, his heritage got in the way” (emphasis added). The tribal council, as embodiments of that “heritage”, is seen as interfering with “the [mother’s] right to say who should raise [her child].” It is only decent, the article seems to suggest, to protect the mother’s and child’s rights from the tyranny of “heritage” — exactly the kind of thinking that the ICWA was drafted to oppose in the first place. Where the ICWA privileges cultural identity (as determined by affiliation), the article privileges individual identity (as determined by individual decision-making). And, of course, neither perspective can resolve the ambiguities presented by a non-Indian Indian like Braven.
Levisprout, the Anthropomon
After the rekindled debate over anthropology’s moral core, the erudite discussion about the politics of recognition, and the fascinating report on the genealogy of racial categories, here is a bit of fun.
Reported by Boing-boing, Tyler Bletsch has posted a new breed of pokemon-like characters called “Philosophomons.”
Among the pokemonized philosophers are Decartes, Nietzsche, Kant, Rousseau, and Thoreau.
These philosophomons may remind SM readers of the caricatures of animals as humans printed in our namesake book, Claude Levi-Strauss’s Savage Mind. In it he explores “the totemic logic of classification” and looks at how totems line up with social categories in a given community.
I wonder if the creator of these philosomons had in mind of trying to match philosophical temperament of the thinkers to the structural position of the creatures in the pokemon pantheon. Decartes is a bit slow in moving but very powerful like a Squirtle, and Aquinus, as Aquinix, I guess is huge, rocky, and earthen like an Onix.
Anyway these humanized animals (or the other way around?) bring Levi-Strauss to a discussion about individual names, in which he stretches the Saussurean theory of signs to its very limit: that proper names, even of individuals like Decartes or Nietzsche, has inherited the the way “primitive” classificatory systems work. His argument I think prefigures that of Barthes and Foucault who both in different ways ring the death knell of “the author.”
Here is what Levi-Strauss says:
Insofar as [individual names] derive from a paradigmatic set, proper names thus form the fringe of a general system of classification: they are both its extention and its limit. When they come on to the state the curtain rises for the last act of the logical performance. But the length of the play and the number of acts are a matter of the civilization, not of the language. The more or less ‘proper’ nature of names is not intrinsically determinable nor can it be discovered just by comparing them with the other words in the language. It depends on the point at which a society declares its work of classifying to be complete. To say that a name is perceived as a proper name is to say that it is assigned to a level beyond which no classification is requisite, not absolutely but within a determinate cultural system. Proper names always remain on the margins of classification. (215)
I had always been puzzled by this passage, because he seems to want to go in opposite directions. Persons (especially famous ones) are like totems in that both enjoy a special “beyond compare” status yet they have to be somehow classified so that the individual becomes “proper,” that is, to gain some sort of a proper-ness and become a sacred symbol. Yet this kind of having to want both ways has, at least for me, some frightening consequences: the only kind of society that “declares its work of classifying to be complete” would be a totalitarian one with a cultural-nationalist bent.
Perhaps this gloomy conclusion about the fallen state of our civilization is what Levi-Strauss was pointint to.
So in the spirit of bricolage and savage thinking, and in the hopes of bringing some light-heartedness to the structural weight of classificatory systems, here is my first anthropomon, called Levisprout.
Levisprout is like a Bellsprout, except instead of the vine whip he lashes his opponents with repeating narrative structures and binding incest taboos.
Levisprout, I choose you!
Now anyone have suggestions for other anthropomons?
Look on the bright side of life?
I haven’t followed the case so I don’t know its outcome — perhaps some UK commentators can update us? — but an anthropological essay I find I have on the brain a lot these days is one written in 1999 by British anthropologist Alison Spedding. The full reference is at the end of this post; it was in Anthropology Today and I am not sure how to provide a universally accessible link.
At any rate, Spedding was writing from a Bolivian prison where she had been incarcerated (for 6 months at that point) on drug charges. Somehow under the conditions she managed to produce an amazingly thoughtful piece on the peculiarities of fieldwork. She writes of the “screen personality” we tend to adopt in the field — eating lamb flaps we don’t like, going to religious services we don’t believe in, nodding sympathetically to accounts of gender relations we’d condemn if they came from friends back home — and how impossible it was for her to maintain such a screen while in prison.
From there, she goes on to discuss the standard modality of ethnographic explanation: that “the apparent superstition is a reasonable way to understand the world, that what seems irrational is in fact entirely rational when one comprehends its context”. At the time of her writing, this mode wasn’t really working for her — when her fellow prisoners spent money on llama sacrifices and the like to influence the outcomes of their trials instead of using whatever funds they possessed to hire lawyers, she couldn’t help feeling it was basically counter-productive. And when women prisoners eagerly participated in the gender regimes of the prison routine she couldn’t help finding it, well, upsetting. The article ends on a rather despairing note (understandably). I can’t recreate its whole arc in this space but I highly recommend it.
So anyway — I thought about this article occasionally when I was writing my thesis, especially the bits on witchcraft. For all the structural rationales I could tease out about witchcraft discourse in the Bolivian community in which I carried out fieldwork, part of what motivated it seemed to be a kind of malicious glee. But mostly I ended up in the standard anthropological mode of explaining its relationship to social structure and so forth. Whatever, right? In the end I didn’t live in Isoso and neither I nor my loved ones would ever face witchcraft accusation.
However, living in the States the past few years I’ve started to get a bit of that ol’ Bolivian prison feeling. Of course my existence is quite cushy. But I mean in terms of hearing and being forced to live with rhetorics, discourses, regimes, practices — the lot — that I don’t want merely to understand/explain/analytically dissect. I don’t have a “screen personality” here — I’m me, and a lot of what is around me looks like flat-out meanness and stupidity. Are anthropologists allowed to say that? and having said it, then what?
article ref: Dreams of Leaving: Life in the Feminine Penitentiary Centre, Miraflores, La Paz, Bolivia, by A. L. Spedding
Anthropology Today (1999)
Star Trek: Four Fields in Space
My vote for the most “anthropological” pop culture phenomenon goes to Star Trek. They collect biological, historical, political and cultural data on each society. And they even have a running debate between scientific empiricism (Spock) and humanistic interventionism (McCoy). While the “prime directive” prohibits interference with the “primitive” societies they encounter on other planets, they never seem to actually abide by this rule. Especially Kirk, who seems keen to write an interplanetary update to the Sexual Life of Savages.
The Indiana Jones Thing
When I tell most people that I am an anthropologist, the most common response is “ah… dinosaur bones. Fascinating.” But, as “Kerim points out”:/2005/06/21/no-shamans-here/ many focus on the Indiana Jones thing as well. This isn’t surprising. As a kid I loved Indiana Jones flicks as much as anyone else, but I never went into anthropology because of them (how that happened is a longer story!). But truth be told, I am genuinely shocked at how many anthropologists I know got into the business as a result of Indiana Jones — and if people were willing to admit it, the numbers would rise even higher.
In fact, I’ve even noticed a subsection of these Indiana Jones devotees who started doing archaeology, then realized the sociocultural types got to do all the ‘Indiana Jones type fieldwork’, and switched over the sociocultural anthropology. These poor sods are usually disappointed because in fact the intense community and general joie de vivre of digs is a lot more fun than disconsolately gnawing away at some lamp flaps in the west end of Enga province and contemplating another exciting round of delousing shampoo. Trust me.
In fact the Indiana Jones movies reflects very poorly on our discipline. Ever notice how the first film begins with him runing away after stealing an obviously sacred object from indigenous people? Or how the second features him selling human remains to a crimelord? And this is not to mention whole scenes that revolve around messages like “look at all the creepy food Indian people eat” or “South Asian spirituality consists of ripping the hearts out of peoples’ chests.” Or perhaps I’m being unfair? After all, we learn in Temple of Doom that there are ‘good villagers’ out there who are opressed by the evil aorta-excavators. GOOD THING THAT POWERFUL WHITE MAN IS AROUND TO PROTECT THE PASSIVE AND HELPLESS BROWN PEOPLE. How did they ever get along before we took them over? So no, in fact, sometimes people do not want their history and heritage excavated and hauled off to some museum in whichever country decided to take them over in the name of some ‘civilizing’ mission, thank you very much.
I think the Indiana Jones flicks are a classic example of incredibly successful, tightly-constructed popular cinema, and I love them as much as anybody else. But, pace Indiana Jones’s frequently intoned manta that “that belongs in a museum” sometimes things just don’t. God knows this. That’s why she made all those Nazis melt.