Tag Archives: North America

Reading Ward Churchill After Eichmann

In the wake of Ward Churchill’s firing from Colorado University and his subsequent decision to sue for reinstatement, I’ve been thinking a lot about how (and, I admit, whether) to read Churchill’s work in the wake of revelations (or allegations, depending on your point of view) of academic dishonesty including plagiarism, fraudulent claims of Indian identity, and shoddy use of (or misuse of) historical sources. Some of the claims lodged against Churchill push to the edge of absurdity, including the use of articles ghostwritten by himself to support claims made in other articles.

For those who have been sleeping off a bender these past few years, here’s the story. Continue reading →

Social Life of Swimming Pools

Anyone whose flown over the US has seen the sight: rows of houses each with their own little swimming pool in the back. I was particularly struck by this after I returned from a trip to Iceland which has an amazing system of public pools and hot springs. I’ve heard Germany’s system is also very good. At the time I chalked it up to American individualism and suspicion of anything “communal,” (hence potentially communist), but what I didn’t know at the time was the role played by racism. I discovered this connection via an NPR story about the book Contested Waters, a social history of community swimming pools in several northern cities in the US.

At its heart, this book answers that question. It explains how and why municipal swimming pools in the northern United States were transformed from austere public baths—where blacks, immigrants, and native-born white laborers swam together, but men and women, rich and poor, and young and old did not—to leisure resorts, where practically everyone in the community except black Americans swam together.

But the story does not end there. A second social transformation occurred at municipal swimming pools after midcentury. Black Americans challenged segregation by repeatedly seeking admission to whites-only pools and by filing lawsuits against their cities. Eventually, these social and legal protests desegregated municipal pools throughout the North, but desegregation rarely led to meaningful interracial swimming. When black Americans gained equal access to municipal pools, white swimmers generally abandoned them for private pools.

Slightly related: even though Taiwan is an island with numerous rivers and streams and even public swimming pools, many people can’t swim. Each year many drown as a result. I know many girls don’t like to swim because they don’t like to spend too much time in the sun, which could “ruin” the pale white complexions they work so hard to maintain, and if the girls aren’t swimming I suppose the boys are much less interested as well… (Many of my female students also equate getting muscles from exercise with getting “fat.”) So I was glad to hear that my university instituted a policy requiring all students to pass a swimming test in order to graduate.

Joseph Masco’s Nuclear Secrets

In my constant search to find that book I can hand to students and say: here is anthropology, I am two books richer in 2007. The second book (the first I reviewed below (above?)) is Joseph Masco’s Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, Princeton University Press, 2006. Whereas Xiang’s book was excellent for its simplicity, Masco’s is excellent for its controlled complexity. Masco seems to have taken to heart the tension between anthropology and science studies: on the one hand science studies too often fails in its understanding of what long-term intensive fieldwork can do; on the other anthropology too often fails to get directly into the heart of science and technology the way it always has language, spirituality and economy. Masco’s book is fusion (that impossible goal of our nuclear culture) of the best kind.

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In some ways, in keeping with the various “posts” of the book (Post-Cold War, Post-9/11) this is post-multi-sited ethnography. The focus on New Mexico is inevitable: it is the site of Los Alamos National Labs. And while the nuclear weapons industry is huge and spread around the globe, LANL is the defacto, iconic, and central entity. But Masco’s book is not really about the nuclear weapons industry, nor about LANL per se, nor is it only about the impact of the lab on the people who live around it. Nuclear Borderlands is a frankly cosmological book; it is about how the bomb makes us who we are today. The naive anthropology student might approach New Mexico as a place with many different populations: anglo scientists, pueblo indians, neuvomexicanos, hippie anti-nuke activists–each with their own distinctive lifeworld and worldview. But Masco is having none of that: for him, the bomb is the bomb. It has determined nearly every aspect of our lives (and “our” means basically everyone on the planet) for 50 years… to say nothing of our futures. Thus, in the chapters that explore the lives and thoughts of these different groups, the same cosmological questions about the impact of Nuclear Weapons and the Cold War keep coming up–and keep providing ways to connect these seemingly diverse groups to each other: through the lab, through secrecy and hypersecurity measures, and through politics of race and sovereignty.

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What F(l)ags Engender

bush.jpgWould it be unfair to say that this image basically sums up the content of mainstream U.S. politics and culture since “9/11”? Where does this picture fit amidst arguments about the clash of civilizations, the politics of oil, the legality of torture, secularism, multiculturalism, or the exercise of sovereign power? Does the image of George W. Bush as a roided-out Uncle Sam basically iconize the post-millenial U.S. zeitgeist?

I have felt since 9/11 that the U.S. is best understood through the psychology manifested in this image, a psychology dominated by the fragile and wounded ego of a national subject understood as ‘white’ and ‘male.’ I see U.S. politics as dominated by the mentality of the grade school playground, where argument takes the form of “I know you are but what am I?” and the insecure bully goes around whopping on whimps because he is afraid that no one loves him. I see U.S. culture in the last several years as fundamentally authoritarian. It doesn’t take a professor of anthropology to argue that “9/11” has catalyzed a backlash against all that ails the modern white male ego. U.S. culture appears fundamentally motivated by a need to build up and defend the poor, damaged male self after decades of onslaught by the feminists and the gays, the intellectuals, the Europeans, the immigrants, whatever. Though the wound that motivated much of the defensive political posturing and putsches of the last several years resulted from the spectacular humiliation of “9/11,” the abject failure of the Iraq war as a demonstration of U.S. prowess has only deepened the cut. The prospects are frightening.

Countless moments in recent memory have contributed to my gut feeling that the whole U.S. thing can best be explained as a Tough Guy response to the sucker punch on 9/11, but none to me revealed the basic psychology underlying U.S. political ideology better than when Ann Coulter called U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards a fag. Continue reading →

A note on the Eskimo snow thing

I did a satisfying little bibliography crawl recently to track down some references on the wrong-but-ubiquitous idea that ‘Eskimo have 100/354/1,000 words for snow’ which I thought I’d share here for people’s convenience. Most of the work done on this topic comes from Laura Martin’s “‘Eskimo Words for Snow’: A Case Study in the Growth and Decay of an Anthropological Example”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7294%28198606%292%3A88%3A2%3C418%3A%22WFSAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A (aka American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 88, No. 2 (Jun., 1986), pp. 418-423). The more accessible and well-known publication is Geoffrey Pullum’s “Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/k0h25l886617384u/?p=cbd1112e3d4a4a848723659c1522cf4a&pi=1 (Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 7, 275-281). It’s been published in several other places (you can check out his “publications list”:http://people.ucsc.edu/~pullum/publications.html). The way that some universities are today, though, you may have an easier time getting a PDF off of Springer than tracking “the eponymous paperback”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0226685349&id=jp5JCaP_xpIC&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&ots=50UblijtvM&dq=geoffrey+pullum&sig=Tf-xoYyRCVhcG7BvdzGAC-nIbm8&hl=en. Finally, there is also a brief comment on “Snowing Canonical Texts”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7294%28198706%292%3A89%3A2%3C443%3ASCT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P by Stephen O. Murray (American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 89, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 443-444) which comments on Martin’s use of Boas’s original brief mention of snow. Anyway I thought it would be useful to have all this digested here.

The short version — for people who didn’t get the memo — is that the Eskimo do not have 100/354/1,000 words for snow.

Architecture, Rationalization, Codes, Power

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Continuing themes raised in my previous post, I’d like to present another riddle of rationalization and reflect on its meaning and impact.

As part of the planning process for the building project in which I’m involved, I joined my colleagues in various fieldtrips to other institutions. In the course of those travels I saw and heard about many odd cases in which codes of various sorts, complicated by their local interpretation, had a significant role in shaping architectural decisions. The example that I wish to consider could have happened anywhere, so its precise location doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that the buildings in question are located at an American institution of higher education.

The institution built an addition that links two late 19th-century buildings. At the time of construction, local authorities said that only two of the four entrances on one side of the complex had to meet the accessibility standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Since the average distance between the entries is only slightly more than 50 feet, this seemed sensible. Adding two more large ramps would raise costs significantly and, more important, deface the historic buildings. (Although they are historic, they aren’t on the state or federal historic register, an issue I’ll get to in a second.)

A couple of years after the building was opened, though, the local code official, apparently under pressure from higher-ups elsewhere, reversed the earlier decision. Now all four doors either had to be made ADA-compliant or the two non-compliant ones had to be decommissioned as public entries.

The institution, like virtually all American colleges and universities, is committed to the letter and spirit of the ADA. But absent a budget for the addition of two substantial concrete ramps and a willingness to compromise the look of handsome old buildings, the institution removed exterior handles from the doors in question. Continue reading →

Anthropology does IPR, Part 1

I’m flattered to have been given a guest-worker permit at Savage Minds. I was invited to comment especially on the intersection of anthropology and intellectual/cultural property. But since my work is now moving in new and different directions, I’ll also have a few posts on other issues before management yanks my login rights toward the end of the month.

The more I track anthropological work in intellectual property rights (IPR), the more it seems that as a discipline we’ve leveraged ourselves into a strange and contradictory place. On the one hand, many of us enthusiastically support the idea of open access (see Rex’s recent post, for example, or check out the website of the Alexandria Archive Institute). On the other, anthropologists are collaborating with indigenous organizations to create more robust controls over access to indigenous knowledge in the interest of discouraging various forms of cultural appropriation (often described as creating a form of “cultural copyright”). Those controls are likely to have a profound impact on how and what we publish–they already have, in fact–and even on the accessibility of work published decades in the past.

In theory, the two opposed goals are not irreconcilable. In practice, I’m not so sure. After reading Jeffrey Toobin’s recent New Yorker article about Google’s ongoing efforts to upload millions of books to the web, I trolled Google Book Search (still way in beta) and was blown away. I typed in “Moyobamba,” the name of a Peruvian town not far from where I did fieldwork in the 1970s and 80s, and immediately found a half dozen travelers’ descriptions of the town from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. OK, most of these works are obscure for good reasons, but I might never have encountered them otherwise. Once every ethnography is available to everyone with a computer, what chance do indigenous people have of limiting access to information increasingly defined by them as “sacred” or “sensitive”?

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Clans in the News (Again); Plus, When Informants Embrace Research

William Finnegan’s ‘Letter from Maine’ on ‘the Somalis of Lewiston’ (The New Yorker, December 11, 2006 — sorry I can’t find it online), revisits the issue of the contemporary relevance of both anthropology in general and of the anthropology of kinship (or perhaps I should say the anthropology of clans) in particular. He writes:

People [Somali immigrants] are loath to talk, at least to outsiders, about the clan system in Somalia, whose rivalries have helped fuel the civil war there. But it survives in the diaspora, and it continues to divide expatriate communities, where different groups scramble for access to resources. (A young Somali social worker told me that he’d stopped going to the Lewiston mosque, because it was dominated by members of the Ogaden clan. ‘I refuse to pray next to someone who sees me first as an Isaaq, nost as a Muslim,’ he said.)

The article pictures not a monolithic block of refugees composed of a phantom ‘nationality,’ but rather a set of people from diverse backgrounds, with different interests, histories of conflict and movement, experiences of oppression. The article focuses mainly on Somali Bantus, and their position vis-a-vis other Somalis both in Lewiston and back home. The article also features the work of Colby College anthropologist Catherine Besteman, work that has been important for Bantus in recovering and remembering their past(s). At a panel discussion on refugees in Lewiston, Besteman was amazed to meet some of her very own informants — they had been children when she first met them in the field. Besteman subsequently organized a slide show (with photos taken by her husband Jorge Acero). In the New Yorker, Besteman recalls the scene:

Most of those who made it over here [to the U.S.] were babies then. They never knew their parents. People in the audience were seeing their moms and dads for the first time. It was very, very moving. There were a lot of stories being shouted out about the people in the slides… Even the pictures of the fields, they were just incredibly excited to see. People went crazy over [a chart of census data]. They could account for everyone on the chart. This guy was shot in his field by a Somali. This guy was hacked with machetes and died of infected wounds. This woman was taken by militiamen from a fleeing group, right near the Kenyan border, never seen again.

The incredible trauma noted here and the lingering wounds of war notwithstanding, I find stories like these heartening. I think they demonstrate the continuing relevance and importance of anthropological research (in a way quite different, and in some sense, complementary to a relevance that would attach ‘local knowledge’ to the ‘security’ apparatuses of states that wage war but make the victims of their violence invisible). Who else but an anthropologist is going to spend two years recording lifeways, taking census data, learning stories of people in an out-of-the-way place? Sure, journalists will helicopter in for a few days, a few weeks, even months. But who is going to do the patient work of sitting on the flatbed truck and chatting with folks about their kin, about their hopes and fears?

Also, stories like these I think make a compelling case for a truly public anthropology. For the data that we anthropologists collect (whether we are from the U.S., Brazil, Finland, or Papua New Guiena) has value and meaning — above all for those people with whom we work.

Thinking about diversity in the aftermath of Michael Richards

A lot has been said about Michael Richards’ (AKA “Kramer”) meltdown in which he used the “N-word” and suggested that lynching was an appropriate response for hecklers in his audience. (For those who missed out, you can watch the meltdown on Google Video.) The most anthropological response I’ve seen was by Six Apart’s Anil Dash who argues that the incident was partially about the “mismatch between white and black culture in regard to social standards in public settings”:

Put more succinctly, Michael Richards lost his shit for the same reason white people always get mad when black people talk at the movies. It’s about control, and who sets the standards, and clearly Richards is someone who gets filled with rage when he’s not in control.

… there’s a significant tradition in many African American communities to see entertainment venues as a forum for interaction, as a place for dialogue and conversation inspired by, or even directly in response to the performance. Whether it’s call-and-response in church or at a hip hop show, it’s not merely acceptable to be talking or reacing, it’s expected. Would showtime at the Apollo be as fraught without that expectation?

Conversely, a lot of white culture places an expectation on respect for the performance. There’s a standard of reverence for the person on stage, or the film being screened. And there’s an underlying sense of value: Hey, we all paid to be here, so be quiet!

It is an important insight because I think a lot of liberals think that a genuinely inclusive society will be the same as what we have today, just with more colorful faces; but that can’t be the case. As one of my college professors put it: “Some people think that diversity just means inviting more African Americans into their houses. They don’t anticipate that these African Americans might want to rearrange the furniture.” Many Americans seem to feel that while Richards’ outburst was unfortunately worded, he was in his right to defend himself against audience hecklers. This position ignores the way in which those very social norms are themselves racialized.

Notes Towards An Anthropology of Burning Man

In the course of advising a student the topic of Burning Man came up. The folk-notion guiding burning man, of course, is that it is a total revolt against our empty modern age and that it provides an opportunity for people to experience ‘their real selves’ and otherwise recover the authentic core of human experience — found, for instance, in primordial ‘tribal’ activities like fire eating and dancing without your shoes on — which has been denied to them by the commodity-padded iron cage of modernity that they live in.

As the following paragraph might suggest, I think of Burning Man as the ultimate in bourgeois extravagance — building a space complete with cars and water and music in the desert like that requires a mastery of technology which is nothing if not modern. Enthusiasm for all things “tribal” seems to me to invoke the most exoticizing of ‘noble savage’ tropes. And of course these days Burning Man requires a ticket, has a department of -motor- mutant vehicles, and even has Burning Man Cops. Worst of all it sinks people’s energy into endeavors which are often politically quietistic. Painting yourself blue and taking a lot of acid and then going back to your day job does not count as smashing capitalism, at least not to me.

That said, I think doing an ethnography OF ‘the Burning Man theory of subjecitvity’ — the culturally specific notions of authenticity and revolt that it embodies — would be fascinating. The entire thing is extremely Durkheimian both in its ‘annual collective effervesence in the outback’ sense but also in the sense that the US alterno scene has a genealogies connection to Durkheim (via notions of potlatch, the college de sociologie, etc. etc.).

But whatever. Perhaps its unfair of me to have this opinion of Burning Man. To each his own. But in my support I offer a random smattering of links to help deflate the tendency to write Burning Man as the Ultimate Postmodern Revolt:

*Here’s a “Bad Subjects”:http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1995/21/wray.html article on Burning Man from 1995 — very early.

*”Achtung Hippie!: Reflections On The Burning Man Scam”:http://blog.hisnameistimmy.com/?p=12 and a “follow up article”:http://blog.hisnameistimmy.com/?p=14 from the same blog.

*”Confessions of a Burning Man”:http://www.burningmanconfessions.com/ is a new documentary I’d be interested in seeing — has anyone else seen this?

More links or ideas would be great — feel free to let me (or Burning Man) have it!

UPDATE: Here are some links from readers —

  • “Burning Man: A Working-Class, Do-It-Yourself Affair”:http://www.processedworld.com/Issues/issue2005/burningman.html by Chris Carlsson, Processed Worlds 2.005 04/05
    *”Many More Films About Burning Man”:http://euroburners.org/filmfestival/films.html our commenter rachel reccomends ‘Dust Devils’

(Non)infection as a Social Relation

This summer marked the passing of a birthday of sorts, the 25th anniversary of the first identification of AIDS in the United States. Although there is conclusive and still-emerging evidence that people died of AIDS at least as early as the mid-twentieth-century in Africa, it was the appearance of a rare form of pneumonia in otherwise healthy young men in Los Angeles that began to concern the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in 1981. National attention focused on “AIDS at 25,” as for example on the cover of Newsweek.

In San Francisco’s legendary Castro neighborhood, year 25 of the epidemic was recognized by community organizers with a banner mounted on the side of a Bank of America building at the corner of 18th and Castro. (The same site became a make-shift memorial to Princess Diana when she died; it was also the site of a little noticed memorial to both Jacques Derrida and Rodney Dangerfield the week that they died.) Organizers created large papier mache flowers that drooped over the Castro for a week or so. But though the gay community was ‘officially’ remembering this tragic event in its history, no one I know in my clique of thirtysomething denizens of the gay ghetto actually talked about it. The flowers just hung there and then went away.

HIV/AIDS is in the public eye again, in part because of the 2006 international AIDS conference in Toronto, which just ended. Reports from the conference indicate that the big ‘Double Bill’ session, featuring two of the world’s most famous and powerful men — Bill Gates and Bill Clinton — was standing room only. News is hopeful: antiretroviral drugs have dramatically transformed the disease from a terminal syndrome to something like a manageable chronic illness. These drugs reduce fatality, they can reduce infection, and they are very expensive. Massive funding will be needed to get these medications to the people in poor places who badly need them, and these include parts of the United States. Controversy swirls around whether or not U.S. initiatives aimed at Africa are constrained by the moralistic and inefficacious imperatives of the Bush regime. The consensus appears to be that because the means to hasten an end to the epidemic are now available, there is now a collective moral burden to make these means available to those whose lives they could save.

Meanwhile, in the United States, recent developments in HIV, law, and public health may be of interest to social anthropologists, especially those who work at the interstices of government, public health, medical technologies, and kinship. Reasons are manifold (AIDS disproportionately affects marginalized people, policy sometimes depends on knowledge of sexual practices and social networks that ethnographic methods uniquely reveal, the epidemic of its very nature mobilizes complex inter-connected/sometimes fractious social relations of vastly different orders [between sex partners, between ‘North’ and ‘South’]). I am am presently trying to think through some aspects of HIV/AIDS from a social perspective. I am interested in how different kinds of persons and publics are summoned by HIV. An example:He Knows

This image is from a pervasive social marketing campaign in the United States. You can see it, and similar ads, on the sides of buses or trams, in subway stations, on billboards, all over major urban areas. This year, I noticed several of these advertisements in San Francisco that were timed to coincide with National HIV Testing day. Here is an abundantly happy couple: attractive, apparently quite in love. The ‘know’ — knowledge of HIV status — the campaign assures us, is ‘spreading,’ to my mind an unfortunate metaphor in the context of an epidemic. Who is hailed in this call to gain self-knowledge? What indeed does this couple know? What is implied about the relationship between them? What does the advertisement ask its viewers to do? What does it promise them?

In upcoming posts, I will hazard an analysis of some current U.S. HIV prevention strategies, paying attention especially to ways that they construct ‘the public’ and its good. Recent emphasis on individual HIV testing, combined with legal decisions that criminalize the transmission of HIV between persons (and that problematize the status of one’s self-knowledge in the context of HIV), raise vital questions about individual agency and community responsibility. A provocation: suppose the person who responds to the “Know HIV/AIDS // No HIV/AIDS campaign” tests positive for HIV. How will this advertisement and ones like it frame the experience, its meanings, its psychological effects, its social entailments?

In an era in which biomedical interpellation is a pervasive and over-riding fact of life, the means and meanings of medical testing bear ethnographic inspection and social reflection.

Dangers of the Mail

BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder writes about a disturbing mural which is on the wall of a federal building in Washington D.C. He quotes a Washington Post article about the 1937 painting:

Check out the big mural on the fifth floor, a friend told Myrna Mooney one day last August, shortly after Mooney and fellow employees of the Environmental Protection Agency moved into new headquarters in the Federal Triangle complex. A Native American from the Blackfeet Nation in Montana, Mooney was “flabbergasted” by what she saw:

Splashed across a 13-foot-wide canvas in the Ariel Rios Building was a graphic scene of Indians attacking and scalping white people. Called “Dangers of the Mail,” the 1930s-era painting included half a dozen naked white women being assaulted by Indians and an Indian stabbing a white man in the back.

“It portrays Indians as cowardly. It’s an insult,” said Mooney. “When you come from the reservation, these kinds of images make you physically ill.”

It looks like the painting is currently strategically hidden behind a bulletin board.

While I don’t think it is appropriate to have such racist images on the walls of government buildings, I also worry that simply removing such a painting will only sweep our racist past under the rug. A more creative solution might be to invite Native American artists to paint over the painting or submit other proposals for what to do with the space. Unfortunately, we do not seem to live in an era which encourages creative solutions to problems, so perhaps removing it entirely is more expedient.

Ranchers and John Muir’s Universal

Since we are all reading Friction together, I thought I’d share one of those moments of recognition – when you have just been reading about something that happened a long time ago and it suddenly seems very immediate and present. Tsing, discussing the creation of “Nature” as a universal and the history of nature loving in the United States, brings up John Muir. On page 99 she writes:

Ranchers were Muir’s most explicit enemies; ranchers used the wilderness rather than experiencing or studying it. They were cut off from the universal; they destroyed it through inattention.

That passange had stuck in my mind, and so when I heard this NPR story about contemporary conflict between naturalists and ranchers it caught my attention. Here is the same story as written up in the Washington Post:

A conservationist group is asking a federal court to block new grazing regulations that it contends would give ranchers more water rights and control over public lands.

The Bureau of Land Management announced the final rules Wednesday, and they are to go into effect next month. First proposed in December 2003, the regulations would increase collaboration between the agency and ranchers whose livestock graze on 160 million acres of the nation’s public lands.

John Muir would roll over in his grave!

The End of Marriage

The idea that marriage is under attack and needs defending is a central tenet of the so-called “culture wars”. The meaning and importance of marriage is central not only to efforts to ban same-sex marriage, but to pro-life politics, father’s rights advocacy, abstinence-only sex education, the “mommy wars”, and pretty much the entirety of contemporary conservative politics. The (wholly imaginary) good old days that conservatives want to conserve is essentially a time when (straight, lifelong, twin-bedded) marriage was the fount of all that is good in society. And everything that is bad about today’s society – teen pregnancy, street violence, welfare dependency, the spread of STDs, sexual predators roaming the Internet, even terrorism, is traced by said conservatives, directly or indirectly, to the decline and degradation of the institution of marriage.

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

I once read, though I forget where, that being Jewish consists mainly in asking what being Jewish means. As the somewhat frequent displays of Jewish anxiety here at Savage Minds might suggest, this isn’t too far off the mark. Many contemporary Jews face an identity crisis, or rather several identity crises, as they grapple with the meaning of a label that encompasses both Paul Wolfowitz and Jerry Seinfeld, Superman and Benny Goodman, Albert Einstein and Harvey Weinstein, Matisyahu and Ariel Sharon, muscle-bound Israeli soldiers and hide-bound New York accountants, rock stars and astrophysicists, atheists and mysticists and regular synagogue-goers and High Holiday Jews and hannukah bushes and $50,000 bar mitzvahs and poetry slams and klezmer and…

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

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