At this year’s Taiwan’s annual anthropology conference, the Taiwan group anthropology blog Guava Anthropology hosted a public event where blog members were invited to give five minute “lightning talks” on the topic of cultural policy. In May, Taiwan’s new Minister of Culture Cheng Li-chun 鄭麗君 announced plans to hold a national conference with the aim of establishing a “Basic Cultural Law” for Taiwan.¹ These talks were to reflect on both the role of the government in shaping cultural policy and the role of anthropologists in shaping government policy. Below is the English version of the talk I gave in Chinese.²

The State must “see” culture

The central problem facing state cultural policies is the need to make culture visible to the state. After all, if the state can’t “see” culture, how can it regulate it? Post-war Taiwan saw tremendous changes in cultural policy: from promoting China-centric cultural nationalism to embracing multiculturalism. But whether it is mono-culturalism or multiculturalism, whether the state wants to suppress or encourage the development of local cultures, it must first be able to “see” them.

Seeing Culture Changes It

But here’s the thing, the act of making culture visible changes it. How does culture become visible? At the most basic level it gets written down, recorded, and photographed. This act of recording can permanently fix cultural traits that had previously been fluid. When the British did the first census of India they recorded everyone’s caste, in doing so they turned a system which had been much more flexible and fluid into something rigid and fixed. Even the process of recording caste was fraught with conflict as groups petitioned the government to change their caste listing.

How do governments “see” culture when it doesn’t want to be seen?

But sometimes it is difficult for the state to see culture. When Taiwan’s government wanted to suppress the use of local languages in favor of Mandarin it found a way to make students spy on each other. If a student was caught speaking a local language they had to wear a sign saying that they had wear a sign saying “I won’t speak the local language”. The only way to get rid of this sign was to catch another student speaking the local language and make them wear the sign instead.

How does the state see culture that wants to be seen?

Today the policy is reversed, the state wants to encourage the preservation of local languages. There are even funds to support families that use endangered languages in the home. But how to know if the recipients of these funds are actually using the target languages? Early on they would do this by giving written tests, requiring the family to prove that they had learned 300 new vocabulary words each month. But this caused problems because people focused on learning to write and spell new words rather than actually speaking the language in their homes. So they switched to having inspectors make video recordings of the family speaking in their mother tongue. But this hasn’t worked either. Families have taken to memorizing dialogs — little plays they perform for the video cameras.

Visible to whom?

Making culture visible to the state is an act of violence. Whether the government is trying to suppress culture or promote it, it must see it first. So what is the answer? One answer might be to leave the government out of it altogether. But I don’t think that is right. Government is involved whether or not it wants to be. The choices individuals make about their own cultural practices aren’t made in a vacuum, but are shaped by the wider cultural environment and the state has a big say in shaping that environment.

But there are ways of seeing culture that don’t do as much violence to the cultures under observation. It is a lot easier for members of a culture to see their own culture than it is for an outsider. Giving communities greater autonomy over their own cultural policies doesn’t require ripping that culture out of its context in order to be seen. It isn’t enough to simply switch from suppressing a culture to promoting it. The very nature of the relationship between the state and cultural practitioners has to change as well.

The US cannabis landscape is shifting quickly, and so is the way we talk about the plant and its uses. The push to end its prohibition has entailed a proliferation of stakeholder groups, each with its own labeling preferences. Interviews with Southern Californian parents using marijuana medically for children with intractable epilepsy (pharmaceutically uncontrolled seizures) taught me that what’s in a name matters—a lot. How it matters differs depending on who is talking, and what he or he seeks to accomplish when it comes to this plant and its products.

Cannabis—marijuana—has many medical applications, including for epilepsy. Parent interest in this rose sharply when CNN profiled its success with a child in Denver. However, little scientific research has been done with the plant (its legal classification makes that tricky), so doctors generally will not assist parents proactively in regard to its use. Word of mouth, online resources, and purveyor promises are often all that parents have to go by as they work out dosage and other aspects of their child’s cannabis regimen. My research explores how they manage this, which has implications for our understanding of how regular citizens contribute to biomedicine’s knowledge base and therapeutic tool kit. Findings also may be used to help improve service provision for these vulnerable families.

In pressing their case for access, most parents prefer the plant’s scientific name over lay terms. Cannabis, technically the genus label, sometimes is accompanied by species information too (i.e., Cannabis sativa or Cannabis indica). Many refer just to the key phytochemical CBD (cannabidiol); some talk also of other components of the plant (e.g., CBN, THC, THCA, and various terpenes).

Some parents advocate a whole plant approach, seeking to leverage what experts call the ‘entourage effect,’ in which plant chemicals act synergistically with one another. Such parents generally also prefer local or home grown raw materials and homemade or artisanal products. They tend to call the plant by its popular names (e.g., marijuana, pot). CBD, when referenced, is spoken of as part of a whole.

Yet most parents prefer scientific, medicalized rhetoric even when more generic terms would do. Cannabis, for them, is always capitalized and italicized. CBD and so forth are spoken of as isolates or molecules. In this discourse parents praise the regularity and predictability of big pharma’s highly systematized but reductionist production regimes.

Language is power

Through medicalized speech choices, parents proclaim themselves as knowledgeable insiders who belong in conversation with medical experts. It is the case that their children are often medically unique; parents often do know more about their children’s conditions than their doctors; they certainly know more about pot: they have to. But to get doctors to acknowledge this, parents cannot speak in lay terms. By calling pot Cannabis, using chemical names, and so on, parents assert their right to participate in discussions with authorized experts as more than ‘just’ parents.

They also assert their difference from casual or recreational users by refusing terms (e.g., weed, pot) that others associate with, as one mom put it, Cheech and Chong. Not all parents frowned on recreational use automatically. Some saw the medication–recreation binary as clearly prejudicial. But the primary aim of getting children high was not something with which any parent wished to be associated.

It is no coincidence that parents initially prefer low or no-THC formulations; they also prefer cannabis oils, dropped under the tongue or into a feeding tube, rather than inhalation or having the actual herb in the house. Their children’s medicine looks how medicines are ‘supposed’ to look; and it is treated accordingly.

Of course, recreational users also deploy medical language—at least in states where the only legal way to purchase cannabis is with a doctor’s referral. These are notoriously easy to get and people continue the charade in ‘dispensaries,’ which are used not so much by sick individuals (who favor home delivery) as by a young and healthful crowd that talks about ‘medicating’ rather than ‘partying’ or ‘getting high’ (terms that I am told are used where doing so is legal)..

The recreational market has invented new terms too. For instance, ‘dispensary’ sales clerks are ‘budtenders.’ In so obviously equating pot to alcohol, this term’s use may be read as a raspberry blown to law enforcers; or it may be an optimistic and celebratory disavowal of the need for subterfuge given changes in legalization that appear to be on the horizon. It certainly acknowledges the ludic side of leisure use.

It is not that parents are overly sober: laughter and ironic humor infused many an interview. But having a sick child is no game. Having to call one’s provider a ‘budtender’ is degrading to medical customers who deeply desire authentic, recognized legitimacy—not a nod and a wink. This need is one reason some parents were willing to wait up to one year to be seen by one of the region’s few well-reputed cannabis-approving physicians instead of using a fly-by-night referral mill. The need for real medical advice, and concern about cannabis’s interaction with their children’s other medications, also came into play.

Use of cannabis slang also was seen by some as degrading, implying likewise that one’s turn to the drug or drugs that this plant produces is neither medically indicated nor necessary. Take the term ‘weed,’ which suggests that cannabis should not be considered a legitimate cultivar. Silly strain names such as AC/DC and Sour Tsunami connote a kind of playfulness that may be seen as inappropriate when it comes to serious illness. Some terms even are—or at least were, originally—xenophobic or racist. For instance, the word ‘Marijuana’ was promoted purposefully by US anti-drug interests in the 1930s specifically because it sounded Spanish and thus provoked or leveraged, in some Euro-Americans anyhow, anti-Mexican or Hispanic sentiment. Associations of the older argot with criminality also are rife. Indeed, based mostly on this history, some activists have chastised the media for using lay terms and puns (e.g., “high time”) in cannabis-related headlines and reporting.

Using the language of science instead highlights the legitimate medical potential of the cannabis plant. It helps parents gain credibility with (other) experts by giving a ring of legitimacy to their claims. In the short term this may help speed access to pharmaceutically manufactured cannabis medicines by increasing the publicly perceived legitimacy of this need. As an added plus, pharmaceutical manufacturing processes help in the regulation of dosing and they insure consistency across batches, and purity, reducing the necessity that parents send what they buy out for testing to find out what it really contains. For such reasons, using scientific terms and referencing chemicals makes good sense.

Must we choose?

Yet, history suggests that overly-insistent medicalization will have costs. It may support a transfer of all authority over cannabis to the mainstream healthcare system, disenfranchising parents—whose empiricism and perseverance helped open the healthcare industry’s eyes to the plant’s promise to start. Resulting dependence on corporations and expert systems could foreclose the option of growing and preparing treatments oneself despite the relative ease of doing so. Some parents fear loss of access to the entourage effect because isolated compounds like CBD are being favored over whole-plant products in pharmaceutical processes; price hikes also could occur. For reasons such as these some activists say that at least high CBD strains of cannabis (also known a hemp) and CBD-based medicines, which have no psychoactive component, should be left out of the debate; there is a bill making its way through congress right now (H.R.5226) that would reclassify these as non-drugs, making them as legal to possess or prepare as sauerkraut.

Whether or not that happens, whole-plant language reminds us that cannabis-based drugs come from a flowering herb. It also can help consumers retain some authority over their use of that herb for health and healing. Preserving consumer rights is particularly important in regard to conditions such as intractable epilepsy, which by definition mainstream medicine cannot treat.

This is not to say that medicalized rhetoric is wrong and whole-plant language is right. Rather, we must preserve a context-sensitive combination of ways of talking about pot. In parallel with the entourage effect, each mode of expression, taken together, may well be more effective in fostering human health than a single discourse used in isolation.

Elisa (EJ) Sobo is a professor of anthropology at San Diego State University and President of the Society for Medical Anthropology. She is on the editorial boards of Anthropology & Medicine and Medical Anthropology and she is the Book Reviews Editor for Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Dr. Sobo has written numerous peer-reviewed journal articles as well having authored, co-authored, and co-edited twelve books, the most recent of which are: Dynamics of Human Biocultural Diversity: A Unified Approach (2012), The Cultural Context of Health, Illness, and Medicine (2010), and Culture and Meaning in Health Services Research (2009). Her current research includes not only parent use of Cannabis for children with intractable epilepsy or seizures but also cultural models of child development in Waldorf or Steiner education, and parental thinking on pediatric vaccinations and herd immunity. Interviewers for the Cannabis project include MarkJason Cabudol, Tiyana Dorsey, and Gabriella Kueber.

We mourn the loss of her brilliant mind, quick smile and mischievous humor. She was known for incisive scholarship on politics and social justice. She wove a keen artistic sense for poetics into her ethnographic observations, as evident in her 2013 book Political Oratory and Cartooning: An Ethnography of Democratic Processes in Madagascar. Her eye-opening insights into the language of American politics were featured in national media. Jennifer served the American Anthropological Association, first on the Executive Board’s student seat then the Society for Linguistic Anthropology’s Executive Board.

There will be a memorial in her honor at the AAA in Denver. I didn’t know her personally, but here in Taiwan we are honoring her by reading her ethnography. It is a great book and well worth reading for many reasons, but I especially loved her description of the discipline of linguistic anthropology in the introduction (pp. xxiii-xxv). (It’s a long quote, but I couldn’t see anything in it that I would want to cut.)

what we do as linguistic anthropologists, in particular as ethnographers of speaking/communication/communicative interaction/ social interaction or all of its variants. We generally leave behind the classroom, the textbooks, the grande no-fat no-whip soy lattes, the complacent gaze at familiarity that comes from being completely “at home” in a place, and we head for places that look, feel, sound, smell different. Even if this is within our same home country, the subtle suddenly appears more obvious. We engage deeply and over a long period of time with people in their everyday lives in order to observe language in its context of action. We yearn to know how people use words, gestures, grunts, and even silence and to what effect; what they think and say about those acts and the people who do them; and how this all changes over time, space, or other context. These everyday micro-practices – little acts of talking, writing speeches, drawing cartoons, talking about doing these things, interacting with one another at the dinner table, buying rice at the marketplace – may appear as stand-alone practices by separate individuals; however, each of these tells us something about patterns of social life over time and across populations. The patterns are what is key. Each choice in word, tone, prosody, order, the way someone might recall or reenact a story, hearkens to those patterns. These are ways of doing things that are shared among communities of speakers, point to something beyond the speech act itself, and they generally sit just below the threshold of awareness. But they are there, very much there, and they “mean” something out there in the world they reflect and shape. In fact, this is generally where meaning in language is located, some-where other than the linguistic act itself. Syntax no longer means just word order in a sentence but an index of social discrimination. Phonemes are no longer minimal units of sound but sound patterns that point to a river or mountain that creates just enough physical distance between speakers to account for an accent or dialect difference. And out of this difference grows evaluations about who says what and how. Each of these individual moments in the everyday reflects these patterns while also tugging on them just a bit, sometimes a lot, to the extent that either they reinforce situations and the social roles in them, or they change. And we have to be there, long enough and with a steady handle on the social, historical, and political forces that prevail, to reckon with the ways in which these patterned micro-practices come together as shared, tacit understandings of ways of doing and being that combine to shape macro -orders, such as institutions, laws, belief systems, and language itself. It is a constant trip between the everyday and the over-the-long-term, from the individual speech to the institutionalization of, say, class hierarchies, the reproduction of some standard of speaking across multiple contexts over time – in other words what happens right here and now with some larger issue or institution out there we might otherwise think of as a black box, a “they,” the work of some invisible hand. We bring the practice of words into abstract social categories and constructs such as colonialism, gender, the state, and civil society, to activate them, unpack-ing and reframing them not as things but as existing insomuch as they manifest through practice. We make these connections between micro-practices and macro-institutional orders so that nothing gets away without an explanation of its creation, its shape, its reproduction, its growth, its death through social change. For all of these reasons linguistic anthropology, particularly through its ethnography, to my mind, is both methodologically and theoretically grounded to go after both realms of human activity – from chunks of the obvious to the grains of the subtle – and to show their connection and the ways in which they articulate with various social, cultural, and political dynamics. It heads straight for the voices of the everyday to see the ways in which their talk and talk about talk coalesce otherwise disparate signs to produce new signs that look like, point to, and symbolize grander, momentous frameworks for organizing experience. And we locate the character and movement of power embodied, the power to create, to constrain, to convince, to erase as predicated on this continual discursive production and reproduction of signs culminating in the semiosocial matrix in which we all live. In a sense, we show our readers how the rabbit got put in the hat in the first place, exposing the location of the seeming illusiveness of power as embedded in the semiotic practice of social actors. Doing things this way, that is, reading social phenomena as founded in practice and ideologies about those practices and the people who do them, allows us not only to describe what is going on across a broader scale of social life, but to show to what end and what is at stake that things are the way they are.

The question is not that Boas was wrong about culture. It is rather that he told anthropologists that they are the only ones who are right.

This quote is from the conclusion to the penultimate chapter of Bauman and Briggs’ award-winning book Voices of Modernity. The book employs a Foucauldian genealogical approach to trace the development of folklore studies from its roots in the Scottish Enlightenment, through its development under German Romanticism, ending up with Boas and the birth of anthropology. In doing so the book focuses on a number of interrelated ideas about culture, language, and modernity as well as methodological issues in the creation of texts from oral traditions. When they awarded the book with the Edward Sapir Book Prize the Society for Linguistic Anthropology wrote:

Bauman and Briggs argue that contemporary efforts to make schemes of social inequality based on race, gender, class and nationality seem compelling and legitimate, rely on deeply rooted ideas about language and tradition. Showing how critics of modernity unwittingly reproduce these foundational fictions, they suggest new strategies for challenging the undemocratic influence of these voices of modernity.

While these themes run throughout their book, they sometimes seem to have only historical importance. After all, scholars like Herder or the Grimm brothers are associated with the rise of nationalism and so there doesn’t seem much that is “unwitting” in their reproduction of these ideologies. It is only in the penultimate chapter on Boas, a scholar known for his critiques of racism and nationalism, that the relevance of these earlier scholars (and the importance of the genealogical method) really becomes clear to the reader. In this genealogy Boas is “ego,” but before this chapter he has been absent from the story.

To understand their critique of Boas it is necessary to first understand Boas’s theory of culture and this is best approached (they argue) by understanding his theory of language. Boas in many ways presaged contemporary Chomskyan linguistics. He made charts showing the articulation of vowel sounds, and was one of the first to anticipate the distinction between phonemic and phonetic analysis (from which the terms “emic” and “etic” come from). Just as it is hard to learn to distinguish the phonemes in a foreign language once one is already an adult, Boas came to think of culture as a set of practices into which people are socialized early in life, able to deploy at will but largely unaware of the underlying rules.

This view of language, grounded in his “universal, objective phonetic grid” and internalized as a set of subconscious practices was an important step in moving Boas away from Herderian evolutionary approaches which saw contemporary language as a degenerative form of a once-pure folkloric forms.

Folklore enabled Boas to attack evolutionism by rejecting degenerative bias of traditional philological approaches and countering E. B. Tylor’s view that each folk element is a survival from a previous social form, one that was rational in its origins but became increasingly irrational. For Boas, folklore was deeply embedded in culture, and it was irrational all the way down.

In his view of language and culture as irrational (non-rational might be a better way of putting it) Boas nonetheless held on to another evolutionary theory, one “inherited from Aubrey and Locke” in which “tradition limits progress towards enlightenment and rationality”

He accordingly constructed culture as a force that limits individual freedom through the pervasive influence of “the fetters of tradition.”¹

Racism, nationalism, colonialism, etc. were, for Boas, not so much political-economic phenomenon as they were the result of culture and tradition. This created a contradiction for Boas, for while culture defined the object of anthropological study, it was also an obstacle to the cosmopolitan form of knowledge anthropologists hoped to produce.

Anthropologists must indict a phenomenon that only they can represent authoritatively, and they stake their claim to authority on the broader public and political stage by promising to help rationalize the very cultural (traditional, unconscious) patterns of which they are supposed to be the visionaries and spokespersons. Fully realizing Boas’s utopian vision of cultural enlightenment would eventually put anthropologists out of a job…

For Boas, only anthropologists could cultivate “a ‘purely analytic’ approach to the study of particular languages and cultures” which enabled them “to circumvent the natural tendency to project one’s own categories onto others.” Bauman and Briggs find this view particularly troublesome. Not only do they see it as promoting forms of inequality in which anthropologists and other experts know best what is in other people’s best interests, but they also see it as legitimating certain forms of neo-racism.

Boas’s theoretical move thus dehistoricizes and depoliticizes imperialism by reducing it to general effects of a universal process of reifying unconscious categories when applied to cross-linguistic and cultural encounters. Balibar (1991) argues that this sort of reasoning provides neo-racists with a cultural logic that naturalizes racism. Although he seems to suggest that this trope constitutes a neo-racist distortion of anthropological constructions, we would argue that it follows from Boas’s own culture theory.

This is not to say that Boas was a racist. Too often (especially on the internet) there is a tendency to oversimplify any argument which discusses the links between racism and certain representational or theoretical practices, boiling it down to “X was a racist.” This would be especially unfortunate in the case of Boas whom the authors acknowledge as a champion of anti-racism. As they conclude:

Boas’s attempt to fashion anthropology as a cosmopolitan discipline deserves broader appreciation. The difficulty is that the fundamental modernist move of claiming consciousness and rationality for oneself and one’s followers and denying it to others was embedded deeply within the concept of culture that lay at the heart of this project.

I would like to think that contemporary anthropological theories of culture, especially those grounded in practice theory avoid many of these problems, but I think that this view of culture is still widespread outside of anthropology. The proponents of the New Atheism movment and their ilk strike me as especially prominent examples of this modernist move, especially when they talk about Islam. It seems strange to me to associate Boas with Islamophobia, and I think he would be more careful not to pick out any particular culture for derision, but in the way he dehistoricized and depoliticized these issues, he would perhaps have had a difficult time articulating a coherent critique.

That Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview in Chinese was big news this week. You can see the start of the interview here:

http://youtu.be/n_168pH9GJk

As you can hear, Zuckerberg’s performance was greeted with “repeated cheers and applause by the assembled students and faculty members.” I don’t want to pick apart Zuckerberg’s Chinese – he only started learning a few years ago, but still did better than some people I know who have lived in Taiwan for over a decade. Nor do I want to focus on the mixed reactions he got on the internet later on. Rather, I want to engage in a thought experiment. Can you imagine a Western audience cheering and applauding a Chinese CEO for speaking in English?

Pierre Bourdieu uses the term “strategy of condescension”¹ to refer to the “act of symbolically negating” the power relationship between two languages. He argues that such a strategy ultimately serves to strengthen the hierarchy between the two languages in question. He compares the excessive praise given to a mayor speaking “good quality Béarnais” with much more fluent Béarnais coming from the mount of a peasant. Unlike the Mayor’s speech, that of the peasant would not only be “totally devoid of value” but “would be sociologically impossible in a formal situation.” Indeed, a Chinese CEO speaking English in public at the level displayed by Mark Zuckerberg in Chinese would be a source of considerable embarrassment to all around.

What is interesting about this, however, is that Chinese is not Béarnais. China’s economy is on the verge of surpassing the size of the US economy and the Chinese language is one of the most important world languages, with the number of Westerners studying Chinese as a second language rising fast. So what is happening? I think there are several factors at work here. One is China’s self-image as the underdog. Pointing out insults to China’s “national dignity” is a frequently used tactic in Chinese foreign policy. Another is the extent to which access to English-medium higher education in the UK or America is still a status marker for the Chinese elite. And a third is a legacy of thinking about Chinese language ability in racial terms. This last one is true in Taiwan as well, as I documented in my tongue-in-cheek post on “Seven Ways to Talk to a White Man.” I haven’t been in China recently, but from what I’ve heard, it is even more unusual for foreigners to speak Chinese well there than it is in Taiwan.

In this regard it is interesting to compare Chinese to French. French was once the language of international relations and the cosmopolitain elite. It still holds on to that status in certain realms, but not to the same extent it once did. French people still expect foreigners to at least make an effort to speak some French, and don’t bat an eye if they speak it well. They certainly don’t cheer and applause. French attitudes towards English may have changed over the years, but a rather blasé attitude towards foreigners speaking French still seems to be the norm. One comparison I like to make is between the Taipei and Paris metro systems. While both the Parisian and Taipei systems have multilingual announcements², with one of the languages being English, the English announcements in Taiwan are unusual, to say the least. Many of the stops have no official English name. Instead, the announcements deliberately mispronounce the Chinese name the way they guess a non-Chinese speaking foreigner might. I certainly can’t imagine the French mutilating their own language to make it easier for Americans who can’t be bothered to pronounce it correctly! Again, this is Taiwan, not China, but I think there is a shared insecurity about the status of Chinese in the two countries, especially with regard to English as a global language.

It is true that Chinese is a hard language for non-native speakers to learn, but it is also hard for Chinese speakers to learn English. I think we can imagine a day when Chinese-speakers expect foreigners to display competence in Chinese equivalent to that they are expected to display in English when abroad. A day when fluency in Chinese goes without cheers and applause. But, for all of the reasons I’ve listed above, it probably won’t happen anytime soon.

UPDATE: Completely re-wrote the section on the Paris metro to reflect the corrections in the comments. (I don’t recall hearing multilingual announcements in Paris this summer, but the sound system on the metro isn’t always working that well.)

UPDATE II: Added a link to an interview with Zheng Wang about his book Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations.

More after the jump.

This short film is a fun example of a somewhat reverse situation. “Yu ming is ainm dom” is about a Chinese man who works on his foreign language skills before taking a trip to Ireland.

Finally, when I posted the first clip on Facebook David Leitner recommended this clip from the British comedy show, “Goodness Gracious Me.”

The photo, by Min Hong (敏紅), is of well known Taiwanese historian and political activist, Su Bing. A long time opponent of the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) who once plotted to assassinate Chiang Kai Shek, it isn’t surprising that he is sitting in front of a poster demanding independence for Taiwan (台獨). What is a little surprising is the use of the English suffix “ing.” The phrase on the bottom is “全民革命ing.” Without the “ing” it is a call to revolution. Actually, the entire banner is the name of an organization which has been translated by Su Bing’s biographer as “Taiwan Independence Citizens Revolution.”

全民革命ing is an ongoing campaign advocating Taiwan’s independence through nonviolent means. The group produces daily web TV shows and participates in rallies against the Republic of China, a regime in exile, which occupied Taiwan after loosing the civil war in China to the Chinese Communist Party. The goal of 全民革命ing is to summon at least 20,000 protesters to call for Taiwan’s independence.

This use of the “ing” was discussed on Language Log back in 2008 where it was noted that this use of “ing” is “apparently the derivational noun-forming -ing, not the inflectional gerund-participle -ing — though it’s hard to tell, in the cases where the words have no real English counterpart.” They also note that it was done by students (largely on Taiwan’s still-active BBS community) long before politicians started to do so.

But how do you pronounce it? As far as I know, you don’t. It seems to be largely a written convention that isn’t really used in speech (although I’m sure there are exceptions). But in this charming music video (which I always use to great effect in my linguistic anthropology class) the letters are spelled out “i, n, g.” (The title of the song translates as “loving”):

For more on creative Chinese borrowings and other aspects of Chinese writing, be sure to read the Victor Mair archives on language log, including this post on “er”.

UPDATE: Over at Language Log Victor Mair has a followup post where he “asked several native speakers how they would say “全民革命ing” purely in Chinese.”

In my first post, I proposed that anthropology might be particularly well suited to thinking through the concept of empathy. In North America, “empathy” has come to be a prominent term across the caring arts. In areas ranging from self-help to health care, empathy seems to be something that can and should be cultivated. In 2006, President Obama declared that an “empathy deficit” was more pressing than a federal budgetary deficit. The scale of this claim reflects an increasingly popular view of empathy as producer of solutions to large, complex issues. In his 2010 bestseller Empathic Civilization, American social theorist Jeremy Rifkin argued that “global empathic consciousness” could restore a global economy and solve climate change.

Last weeks’ commentators aptly pointed out that “empathy” has become a gloss for broader concerns. Its implementation from the perspective of those of you working with social workers, health care professionals and so on made it clear that institutionalized empathy is a downloading of problems onto already thinly stretched personnel. As a former pubic schoolteacher, I can agree that it is tempting to dismiss empathy as a smoke screen for troubles of our times. Yet, I keep coming back to anthropology’s shared principles with empathy—specifically perspective taking, withholding judgment, and dwelling with the people we work with. I am not arguing ‘for’ or ‘against’ empathy. Frankly, I am curious. What meanings has this term come to hold in the context of North America, and what very real kinds of ways of relating to Others has empathy been trying to capture but somehow can’t?  Puzzled by the empathy boom, I went to a good friend for insights. As an analytic philosopher specializing in emotions and emotion history, she had a lot to teach me about the crooked conceptual path of the term. She was so generous in sharing what she knows, I thought I’d share what I’d learned here. From Einfühlung to Empathy

In 1909, Edward Titchener coined the English “empathy” while working on the psychology of perception at Cornell. “Empathy” was a translation of the German “Einfühlung,” and Titchener’s account of the term is quite convoluted.  Einfühlung had been used since the second half of the 18th century to explain how spectators perceive aesthetic objects.  The idea was that aesthetic perception involves projection of the spectator’s kinaesthetic experience into the object of perception.  As in, as I approach a mountain, I experience sensations of rising and expansion, and project these feelings into the mountain.

The 19th century German psychologist Theodor Lipps provided the most thorough account of Einfühlung.  Lipps was a translator and fan of the work of 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, which includes some of the most well known writing on sympathy in Western intellectual history.  Although Lipps’ account of Einfühlung does not refer directly to Hume, it is hard to deny a connection. Lipps first used Einfühlung to theorize optical illusions, but extended the concept to interpersonal perception.  For example, as I see you extend your arm, I might experience a sensation of forward movement, and project that feeling into you.

The concept of Einfühlung has influenced thought on a variety of intellectual problems, in a variety of contexts, but in most cases has not inspired the kind of grand claims we see in contemporary talk about empathy.  Early 20th century phenomenologists invoked Einfühlung to address the philosophical problem of solipsism: How do I recognize that there are minds besides my own?  Einfühlung also played a role in the development of the hermeneutic tradition in the human sciences.  In these and other discursive contexts, Einfühlung has been a source of fruitful ideas, but has not generated grand claims.

Empathy’s Clinical Crossover

Grand aspirations for empathy seem tied to more recent developments in Anglo-American psychology. Freud greatly admired Lipps, and initially discussed Einfühlung to explain the psychology of jokes.  Later, Freud viewed Einfühlung as central to rapport in clinical contexts.  The idea of empathy as useful to psychotherapy developed importance, notably through Carl Rogers after the 1930s and Heinz Kohut after the 1960s.  Both use the English “empathy” to describe a principle that facilitates helpful response to emotional suffering.  However, for Rogers, empathy is tied to unconditional positive regard.  Kohut, on the other hand, vehemently criticizes equation of empathy with kindness or love, arguing that, although empathy is the root of good, it can equally be used for ill.

We are now closer to the views of empathy in Brown, Obama, and Rifkin. In Anglo-American psychology and neuroscience of the past 60 years, we find the following:

• The idea of empathy as a general principle of positive relationships. From the 1960s onward, developmental psychologists have promoted the biologized psychoanalytic idea that the quality of infants’ interactions with caregivers predicts normal development.  Positive quality includes perspective-taking and emotional attunement, now considered basic components of empathy.

• The idea of empathy as a principle of helping. From the 1980s onward, some social psychologists have defended the controversial theory that empathy makes altruistic motivation possible.

• The idea that empathy is brained-based.  In the early 2000s, neuroscientists discovered the “mirror neuron,” and presented it as the basis of empathy.  Although disputed within neuroscience, mirror neuron theory is widely endorsed in other academic domains and in popular culture.

Brown, Obama, and Rifkin rely on ideas that present empathy as a biological human capacity, associated with concern for distress, connection, and helping. But such ideas are neither ahistorical nor universal, and they do not reflect the entire conceptual history of empathy.  What then are the contexts of contemporary Western assumptions around empathy, and how could they lead to grand claims and phrases like “empathy deficit” and “global empathic consciousness”?  These questions seem appropriate to anthropology. As a discipline that hinges on things like attunement and perspective taking, I think we may have something valuable to add to these conversations.

In the last few weeks, social work scholar turned pop-psychology web superstar Brené Brown came out with a short animated video summarizing much of her writing on empathy. It opens by drawing a distinction between empathy and sympathy.  According to Brown, empathy fuels connection while sympathy drives disconnection. For those of you who are expert in the area of the anthropology of emotions, I am guessing it would be fairly easy to come up with cross-cultural scenarios that put this pop-psych in its place (and please do!). That sympathy has become the bad guy in US self-help genres isn’t all that surprising.  In psychology and analytic philosophy, empathy and sympathy are part of a larger cohort referred to as “other regarding emotions”. Debating the appropriateness of the other regarding emotions—from pity to compassion to sympathy to empathy—lends itself to prescriptive ways of being the world.  This short video presumes that we can know what will feel good to others. In this case empathy feels good, and sympathy feels bad.

In the video, Brown lists four qualities of empathy

1.     Perspective taking, recognizing that someone else’s perspective is their truth

2.     Staying out of judgment

3.     Recognizing emotion in other people and then communicating that

4.     Feeling with people

The empathy list above implies concepts of the self, society and personhood that we may not like. Yet, these list items do seem to be part of the anthropological tool kit. As people who excel in perspective taking, I wonder what anthropology might make of a growing interest in empathy?  Anthropology seems to me to be great place to think through empathy’s merits and limits.

In the worlds of counselling, education and social work, empathy is experiencing a mini boom. Brown’s video is only a snippet of the empathy industrial complex. Ok, that is gratuitous use of ‘industrial complex’, but hear me out. A good philosopher/friend of mine recently took a job with a non-profit that purports to bring lessons in empathy to schoolchildren across Canada and increasingly around the world. The program rests on the premise that developing empathy is a universal human trait, which reduces conflict. Indeed, the program is typically promoted in terms of its self-identified power as a “universal preventative intervention.” However, it gained international attention when, following the London riots, Cameron’s Tory government responded by stating that rioting was a result of a “lack of empathy”. He quickly moved to introduce a pilot version of the empathy curriculum in the city’s “troubled” neighbourhoods.

I will share my own thoughts and struggles with empathy in a subsequent post. To start, I will say that I sometimes wonder if the current ontological questions are meant to unshackle us from the empathy anchor. Anthropology is other-regarding. Its emotional state is far less clear. Is anthropology with or without empathy?

This point was really hit home to me when I was discussing with another student that I would like to have better communicative competence. It took a long time for me to explain what I meant, and it slowly dawned on me that other students really had no expectation of being able to use the language in such a way.

So I was very happy that the Hualien Tribal College and the College of Indigenous Studies at NDHU were able to arrange for two Maori language activists, Hana O’Regan [PDF] and Megan Grace, both affiliated with the center for Māori and Pasifika studies at Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, to come to Hualien and share their thoughts and experiences. Hana and Megan have a very different approach to language revitalization – one which emphasizes building a living language. For this reason the focus of their work is in homes, not (just) in the classroom.

From the South Island iwi of Ngāi Tahu, the variety of Maori Hana and Megan speak was erroneously considered extinct in 1979. In fact, the last elder native-speaker of the language died just a few years ago. But it was true that the language was severely endangered. In Hana’s family there had been no native-speakers of Maori for five generations (113 years). But today Hana speaks Maori to her children and they speak Maori to each other. Doing so isn’t easy. Because everyone in the family is bilingual in English, it would often be easier for them to use English instead of Maori. Yet they remain ever vigilant. Her children came with her to Taiwan and I only ever saw them speak English when speaking to non-Maori.

It has now been 13 years since they launched Kotahi Mano Kaika, Kotahi Mano Wawata.

This translates to 1000 Homes, 1000 Dreams and refers to the vision of having 1000 Ngai Tahu homes speaking Maori by the year 2025.

When she spoke, Hana admitted that they were overly ambitious when they first launched the program. They are still far from having 1000 homes. They made a mistake by thinking it would be enough to simply offer the resources for language learning and assume that there would be enough interest that the program would take off on its own. After a few years they switched focus to instead helping a few, highly dedicated, families start using Maori in the home. They provide materials and training to help these families learn the skills necessary to use the language in the home. (Hana, herself a Maori teacher, had found that the existing textbooks were of little use in the homes.) As a result of their efforts there are now about 50 children being raised as native-speakers of Southern Maori.

Hana and Megan spoke about the kind of training and resources families needed to begin using Maori in the home, as well as some of the principles underlying their approach to language revitalization. I’ve tried to quickly summarize some of the key points:

• The language used in schools, between a teacher and a student, is not appropriate for the home. They needed to develop and model linguistic resources so that non-native-speakers could use Maori with their children. In doing so they focused on daily activities, such as bathing, nursing, cooking, or getting ready for bed.
• Young people also need language that they can use with other young people. This might include “cursing” (although they tried to create curses that “sound good” and respect traditional culture).
• They constantly need to coin new words. While traditionally many Maori had borrowed words using Maori pronunciations of foreign words, they worked hard to re-coin many of these loan words. For instance, “lightening-mind” for “computer.” (They even held workshops to coin new Maori idioms.)
• They worked hard to create fun activities for all the families and children engaged in the program, so that the children’s fondest memories would be associated with Maori. This also helped encourage other people to join the program.
• They emphasized that it is very hard to change the language you use with someone after you initially establish a relationship with that person. For this reason they try to create activities whereby people establish new relationships with their peers in Maori.
• They also developed a map where you can find schools, businesses, and services with Maori speakers. Hana described driving past four markets in order to take her kids shopping at one where they could speak Maori. This also encourages the employment of Maori speakers.

The highlight of their visit (for me anyway) was a demonstration class they gave at the Tribal College. Readers of this blog are probably quite familiar with emersion language learning in which the target language is also the language of instruction, but it is still quite rare in rural Taiwan. (Although wealthy kids in urban areas can afford high-quality emersion English programs.) Whether studying English or indigenous languages, most language instruction here takes place in Chinese. So it was really great for me to see a roomful of teachers, government officials, and language activists having such a good time learning Maori without any translation whatsoever.

As inspiring as all this was, there are still a lot of obstacles for implementing these ideas in Taiwan. That’s one of the subjects of my ongoing research project, and something I hope to write more about sometime soon.

UPDATE: Thanks to DJ Hatfield, there is now a Chinese translation of this post.

UPDATE 4/17/2014: Title and series numbers updated.

Above is a picture of my student ID from the “Hualien Tribal College.” Actually the official English name on their web page is “Hualien Indigenous Community College” which sounds better to my anthropological ears. Indigenous Community Colleges in Taiwan are not degree granting institutions. Courses tend to be short-term classes focused on indigenous culture, although they offer subjects like documentary filmmaking to help students learn to document their own culture. I’ve enrolled in an eight week course in the Amis language. (At the same time I’m continuing to audit indigenous language classes at my own university.)

While these classes have been great for my research, I still don’t feel I’ve made much progress with my language skills. Unlike DJ, who recently spent half a year living in a village with a large number of old people who still are able to speak Amis, I spend most of my time with young students who have very little competence. But more than that, I’ve come to realize that my research focus on official language revitalization efforts is actually something of a handicap when it comes to language learning. This is what I wanted to write about today.

In many ways it reminds me of my time in Hebrew School when I was preparing for my Bar Mitzvah. Although Hebrew is now a living language, in Hebrew School in NY, at my reform synagogue in the late seventies and early eighties, it was taught as one might teach a dead language. There was no expectation that we would go on to actually use the language in daily life. It was enough to be able to pronounce the words and be able to translate some simple prayers into English so we knew what we were saying when we read it aloud.

This point was really hit home to me when I was discussing with another student that I would like to have better communicative competence. It took a long time for me to explain what I meant, and it slowly dawned on me that other students really had no expectation of being able to use the language in such a way. They were interested in using language learning as a way of learning more about their own culture, and the course is perfectly set up for such goals. Each week we read a text which is transcribed from oral interviews with Amis elders. We then learn a number of vocabulary words and proceed to translate the text. Finally, the class recites the text in unison. There is no expectation that students will construct their own grammatically correct sentences.

The students in the class are from a wide variety of backgrounds. There is a village headman and some older women who speak the language quite well already but can’t read or write very well and then there are grade school and college students, some of whom know even less Amis than I do. The teaching method adopted in the community college has the distinct advantage of working for everyone despite their level, although very little is expected of them. But basically the language is being taught as a dead language, not a living one, and I worry about the implications of that.

On a side note, another thing which reminds me of Hebrew School is that most of the Amis teachers are priests. They also all seem to have a deep interest in Judaism. I’m not really sure what that is about. It is something I have to investigate further… But I think it is different from what this reporter experienced in China.

UPDATE 4/17/2014: Title and series numbers updated.

Video link.

[Unfortunately, embedding is disabled for this video, if anyone knows of a different version we can use, please let us know in the comments. -the editors]

I want to take the elevator girl seriously as part of a larger effort to reclaim women’s cultural history. In a forthcoming book chapter I track the history and representation of this feminized occupation, as well as the training and experiences of contemporary elevator girls. For example, the high-pitched voice that so irritates foreigners is intentionally fake. As part of their training elevator girls practice speaking in a crafted vocal performance in order to alert customers that they are not available for chatting up: they are on duty in their professional roles. The pre-determined announcements, delivered in the Tokyo-based “standard” dialect, also allow women from diverse regional and class backgrounds an opportunity to work in elegant surroundings in a desired urban location. The work and the uniform strip elevator girls of individuality, thus allowing the observer to imagine their own fantasies about these women (not surprisingly, elevator girls figure prominently in fantasy media and pornography). But for the elevator girl herself, the vulnerability she might experience working in such a public service job is protected by the uniform and scripted speech.

The graduate student curator assigned to talk to us about the oracle bones was smart and conscientious. When asked “Doesn’t the Field Museum have any of these?” he sneered, “Oh no, those are ridiculous fakes,” which for me was the most interesting thing he said. What he didn’t know about is my quest to find appropriated and pseudo writing. The counterfeit oracle bones I eventually photographed at the Field Museum of Natural History are now among my prized items. My students have also contributed great finds to my growing collection: a pair of Wisconsin socks woven with fabricated Egyptian hieroglyphics (lots of birds!), a coin purse with gibberish Chinese characters embroidered on it, and a gorgeous azure silk-screened T-Shirt with an upside down Japanese poem.

My project on nonlinguistic uses of borrowed script and pseudo script has been interesting because it complicates any simple notions about appropriation. I’m finding that scripts from other languages are borrowed or approximated not only to defraud, as in the fake oracle bones case, but also for symbolic, aesthetic, indexical, decorative, iconographic and satirical purposes. Many writers have already ranted about the popularity of Chinese character tattoos, and how often these have been botched in their application. [Character goofs here.] I asked some of my students who had ill-considered tattoos if they cared that the writing was, well, mangled? Nope, most didn’t think it mattered since they can’t read it in any case, it just “looks cool.” This cool factor (or Orientalist exoticization) is condemned when young people do it, but for some reason the running, meaningless Japanese katakana syllabary, presented in columns of reverse mirror-image flowing green lines in The Matrix films, was not similarly subjected to negative censure.

It is easy for us to snicker at occasions when we see people playing with writing they can’t read, but Chinese artists themselves do it when they create nonexistent graphs for aesthetic and intellectual reasons. The artist Xu Bing, for example, made up thousands of  unreadable characters and printed them in ersatz books and on yards of white cloth draped from the ceiling, confounding and greatly irritating his audiences. There are also, of course, numerous examples of  script used in religious or cultural settings in which people are unable to read or pronounce it, but nevertheless, such writing has great symbolic value. Siddham script can’t be read by most Japanese but nevertheless it adorns much Japan-made Buddhist art. Fake oracle bones, bogus Mayan glyphs, and other types of unreadable writing have no value to epigraphers, but they tell us about the concerns, understandings and assumptions current among the people who make or consume them.

Of course, this happens in the US as well. I once read of a study where different groups of students were played the same audio lecture but with different photographs of the supposed speaker. When the photograph was of an Asian person the students performed worse on the test, actually retaining/understanding less of the lecture than when the photograph was of a white person. I don’t know if this study has been replicated, but I do think that expectations of communication problems are a self-fulfilling prophecy and result in reduced comprehension. This problem is compounded in a society like Taiwan which has relatively few non-Asian immigrants. But not everyone responds to a foreigner in the same way, and over the years I’ve compiled a mental inventory of the various ways in which people respond to the challenge of having to talk to a foreigner. What follows is a list of seven ways strangers react when they have to talk to me.

First, there’s “foreigner panic” which is often evidenced when dealing with service people who fear having to use English in order to do their job. I’ve seen salesgirls hide behind coworkers who speak better English. I’ve had people standing right next to me turn around as if looking for signs of intelligent life because the very idea that they might be able to talk directly to me never crossed their mind. And I’ve seen people practically bang their heads on the ground apologizing for not speaking better English. Fortunately, a few words in Chinese, no matter how badly pronounced, is usually enough to calm the panic and establish a more routine service encounter (when dealing with young women, this is usually only after some giggling and additional apologies).

Of course “speak in English” is a common strategy as well. Many Taiwanese have lived and studied abroad and speak excellent English. Unlike other countries I’ve been too, like Indonesia, where people often jump at the chance to improve their English by practicing with a foreigner, Taiwanese tend to shy away from speaking English unless it is already at a certain level. But not always, sometimes one is stuck in a conversation that would go much quicker in Chinese but the other person refuses to switch. In such cases I’ve learned a trick, which is to compliment the person on their English in Chinese, asking them how it got so good, etc. I find that this effectively allows the conversation to switch to Chinese.

“The compliment” is actually a technique I picked up from being on the receiving end. This happened to me much more when I was first starting to learn Chinese, but it still often happens that one can barely get three words in before the person you’re talking to compliments you on how well you speak Chinese, asks you where you learned it, how long you’ve been in Taiwan, what you are doing here, etc. Some people view such behavior as a form of “microagression,” but I don’t see it that way. Of course, it does sometimes feel like that—especially after the 10th conversation of the day gets derailed by having to explain why a person who looks like me can speak Chinese—but I think people are usually just expressing genuine surprise and curiosity, no matter how ill-mannered it might seem.

What I think is a genuine form of microagression is what I call “foreigner talk” which is when people talk to you using a parody of a foreign accent. Usually only done by young boys (even students), this involves flattening out one’s tones, a trick that the boy doing this thinks will be noticed by their friends but not by the foreigner. They are also usually unaware of the long history of racist caricatures of Chinese accents in the United States, like this one from Rush Limbaugh.

Fifth is “disbelief.” Sometimes one’s interlocutor is so convinced that they won’t be able to speak to you that even evidence to the contrary doesn’t help. Sometimes, after about five minutes the realization that you might be speaking Chinese will slowly dawn and the person will look at you and ask: “Do you speak Chinese?” as if you’ve been talking to them in English all this time. I once heard a story of a scholar in China in the 80’s who was fluent in Cantonese and asked two farmers in Guangzhou for directions to XX village. They just stared at him, silent. Eventually he gave up and walked away, only to hear one farmer say to the other: “Funny, it sounded just like he was asking directions to XX village!”

“Look at the Asian” is a variety of disbelief. It is when, even though you are the one talking, the other person insists on replying to the Asian person sitting next to you, even going so far as to refer to you in the third person. In some cases this has been particularly absurd, since the Asian sitting next to me didn’t have sufficient Chinese ability to understand what was being said to them. But when they are a native speaker it can be very difficult to get them to look at you while talking. (Female friends have described something similar happening to them. Not in Taiwan, but with particularly patriarchal men who will insist on talking to the man they are with rather than replying directly to them.)

The seventh and final strategy, is “baby talk”—the one most common in rural areas like where I live. Baby talk is when your anticipated lack of Chinese ability is assumed to mean that you are also suffering from a mental handicap. It is often accompanied by the assumption of your complete incapacity to perform the most basic daily tasks, such as eating with chopsticks, and genuine surprise when you perform such miraculous feats. I totally understand why some might experience such behavior as a form of microagression, but in my experience here in Taiwan it is usually the least educated and least likely to encounter foreigners in their daily life who act in such a way. Still, when this happens I think I understand a little what it’s like to be at the other end of “mansplaning.” Although I readily admit that being a white male in Asia is associated with certain kinds of privilege as well, it can also teach you a little bit about what it is like to be patronized just because of the way you look.

UPDATE: Added link to study I couldn’t find earlier. Thanks Matt!

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

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

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