The Cranky Linguist

The CNN Republican debate is starting...

2012-01-26T20:12:00.013-05:00

I may or may not throw up some comments, depending on what transpires.
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Gingrich wants English to be "the official language of government."
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Santorum clams that the US supports leftist governments in Central and South America. What planet is this guy living on? Paul on the other hand wants to back off supporting governments militarily and instead use "free trade" to develop relationships.

Of course this is one of maybe two things a reasonable person might agree with Paul on; otherwise, he's a racist social darwinist sociopath.
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A break. I don't know if I can keep taking this at all seriously.
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Gingrich wants the Tea Party's "flat tax," maybe at Romney's 15%, to apply to everyone. Gingrich wants 0% on capital gains. Paul wants to eliminate all federal tax (get rid of the 16th Amendment).
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Gingrich's call to "repeal Obamacare" just got a pretty healthy round of applause. Who are these nitwits in the audience?
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Romney: "Obamacare takes over health care." He also wants to repeal "Obamacare."

Paul: Get government out completely, turn it all over to individual decisions.
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Gingrich hints that he might recruit Marco Rubio, another Tea Party dick, as VP.
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Turning to Cuba. Santorum wants the US to "stand with the Cuban people" by, essentially, siding with the south Florida terrorists. Paul wants to end the sanctions (Cuba is "not going to invade us") and encourage trade with Cuba. Romney wants to end Cuban remittances. Gingrich wants to stick with Helms-Burton, which as Paul points out hurts the people more than the government.
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Question from a Palestinian-American. Uh-oh... Romney doubles down on support for Israel. Gingrich sticks to his "Palestinians are an invented people," says he will move US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
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Religion. Oh, gods... Paul suggests that religion would not enter into his functioning as president. Romney OTOH thinks that the US was founded on Judaeo-Christian principles. Gingrich: "war on christianity." Santorum: rights are "god-given."
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Signing off.

Summing up the previous post

2012-01-22T13:49:00.000-05:00

Random thoughts on the presidential candidates

2012-01-22T13:40:00.000-05:00

I know I've been lazy, but it's really just that so many insane things have been flying through the air for a while now that it's been hard to focus on just one. Catching up a little, with a bit of anthropological spin here and there...

Marriage is a 3,000 year-old sacrament
Candidate Newt Gingrich said, in the "debate" on January 7: "The sacrament of marriage is based on a man and woman; has been for 3000 years."

Now, Gingrich likes to present himself as an "intellectual," after all he does have a PhD in history from Tulane. He even taught history and geography for a while at West Georgia College, but he was denied tenure in 1978. One wonders how much human history he really learned in his academic wandering, if he thinks that the "sacrament" of marriage, which refers primarily to the Christian/Catholic ceremony, is 3,000 years old, since the religious cult of Christianity is barely 2000 years old. If he means "sacrament" in a more general, as simply a ceremony in which supernatural beings are presumed to participate, he's still off by at least tens of thousands of years. Anthropologists regard marriage, i.e. the ritual uniting people and defining their rights of sexual access to each other, as a human cultural universal. As such it must have existed for at least the last 50-100 thousand years, maybe longer, but the point is made.

Furthermore, even within the last 3,000 years, marriage has not always been stipulated as only between a female and a male. Gingrich the historian might have read or heard at some point about the berdache or two-spirit people among Native Americans. These were women or men who elected to play the opposite gender role in their society, including marrying people of the same sex. They were generally respected, and sometimes revered as having special spiritual powers, among Native Americans, until of course the European Christians came along.

Life begins at conception
Back in August candidate Rick Santorum stated in an interview on CNN: "I shouldn’t say I believe it, it’s a biological fact that life begins at conception."

Apparently Santorum missed as many high school biology classes as Newt missed in history. If he had been paying attention, he would know that "life" cannot possibly "begin at conception" because the egg and sperm that come together to produce a zygote are already alive! If either is dead, nothing happens. As philosopher George Carlin has pointed out, life began a couple of billion years ago and has never stopped.

Of course, and to be charitable, by "life" Santorum may or may not mean "human life." But that too is wrong: all modern humans can trace their ancestry back to a small group who were (apparently) "alive" in Africa some 100,000 years ago. There is, from then to now, a continuous, never extinguished thread of "human life." Then again, maybe he means "an individual human life": the particular genome resulting from the unification of a particular sperm with a particular egg. This ground is still shaky, since that genome doesn't actually become a pregnancy until it implants itself in the uterus (many don't make it to even this point; is each one of them a murder? So maybe he means "fertilized egg implanted in the uterus"; but I doubt it, because Santorum is insane.

The anthropologist notes in passing that people in different cultures have different notions of when "life begins." Some separate biological personhood from social personhood, which in some places begins when children are given a name, or begin to use language.

You're envious if you even mention the One Percent

Our third contestant, Willard "Mitt (Corporations are People my Friend)" Romney, told Matt Lauer on NBC's Today what he thinks about people calling attention to the increasingly and grotesquely uneven distribution of wealth in the US: "I think it's about envy. I think it's about class warfare." When Matt gave him the opportunity to soften his message, he doubled down. He suggested that issues of class and wealth should be talked about only in "quiet rooms," presumably out of hearing by the envious public.

Again, anthropologists and other social scientists have no problem demonstrating the nature of the US class system, as well as the ways in which that class system had become ever more rigid and punishing over the last thirty or so years. Romney would prefer to ignore this reality. After all, he pays about 15% in taxes on his income, which he "earns" by producing absolutely nothing but rather extracting wealth from other people. His paid speeches brought in about $374,000 in pocket change last year, an amount he considers "not very much" (I have to work full-time for over six years to earn this amount; a median wage earner in the US, at around $20K, has to work full-time for nearly nineteen years!).

What we see here is a collection of willfully ignorant, plutocratic numbnuts. And that's without mentioning the vicious racism of Paul and Gingrich, the hypocrisy of Gingrich's history with women, or Santorum's desire to ban all contraception and make raped women who become pregnant bear their rapists' babies.

The scariest thing of all: with a little electoral shenanigans like those of 2000 or 2004, one of these creosoids could end up in the White House.

Objectivity revisited

2012-01-03T17:42:00.002-05:00

Back in July of last year I wrote a post about objectivity. In that post, I complained about the general misunderstanding of the term, and also about how that general misunderstanding plays into the hands of people who want to bash science. I was particularly hard on cultural anthropologists Emily Schultz and Robert Lavenda:

...let me call your attention to Schultz and Lavenda's textbook, Cultural Anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition (Oxford 2012). This book is written largely from the perspective of non-scientific, postmodern, and interpretivist anthropology. On page 44, they define objective knowledge as: Knowledge about reality that is absolute and true.

I went on to explain how this is a bad definition of scientific (or, really, any other) objectivity, and I offered a more appropriate one:

[Knowledge] is objective in the scientific sense of the term if it is both publicly verifiable and testable.

Well, now they've gone and done it again. In their new edition of Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human? (Oxford University Press 2012), they offer this in their glossary (p. 474):

Objectivity: The separation of observation and reporting from the researcher's wishes.

This is not really better. The reason it's not better is that it makes objectivity an individual trait, rather than a feature of the collective attempt to understand the world. Now, they do discuss this distinction between the individual researcher and the research community in their text (pp. 25-26), and it's not a bad treatment of the problem. But why, then, do they keep the wrong (i.e. non-scientific) definition of objectivity in their glossary, which presumably some students might consult as an aid to understanding?

To the extent that they do this, Lavenda and Schultz contribute to the problem of the public perception of science in general, and social science in particular.

No rest for the cranky!

2011-12-28T09:41:00.000-05:00

This morning, via campus email, we received a message from our university president. Here's the first paragraph (my emphasis added):

Last week, representatives from CNN visited our campus to determine if we had the capacity to hold a Republican presidential debate. The representatives from CNN were impressed with our campus and would like to hold the internationally-broadcast event in the Lazzara Performance Hall of the Fine Arts Center the evening of Thursday, Jan. 26. More than four million people are expected to watch this debate in the United States alone. In addition, it will air on CNN International, CNN Radio and Armed Forces Radio, giving UNF the domestic and global exposure we simply cannot buy. Student groups are particularly excited about the event and have asked UNF to work with CNN. I have agreed, as I would for any other major event that brings this type of prestige and publicity.

Publicity, maybe, but prestige? Really? We want our university to share in the prestige emanating from this gang of serial hypocrites and abusers?

We're all doomed.

Christmas in Florida!

2011-12-18T17:48:00.000-05:00

New blog: "Evolution/Revolution"

2011-12-03T16:17:00.000-05:00

Some of my colleagues in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of North Florida have started a new blog called Evolution/Revolution. We expect that this will be a place for us to post some of our research notes, as well as social science-informed commentary on happenings in the world around us. Come on over and have a look!

Shouldn't get no respect

2011-11-27T09:20:00.001-05:00

Just now (Sunday morning, ca. 9:00 am on the East Coast), on CNN, the editorial editor for the NH Union Leader explained his endorsement of Gingrich over Romney: Romney "wants to be liked," but Gingrich "wants to be respected." Whatever happened to "deserves to be respected," which applies to none of the Rethuglicans?

And his second choice is Perry! He sounded like someone who should never be allowed to operate a keyboard connected to an editorial page.

Mrs. Cain: Herman "totally respects women"

2011-11-14T09:17:00.001-05:00

In an interview on NBC's Today show this morning, GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain's wife Gloria told the interviewer that he "totally respects women."

Uh huh. I guess that explains his calling former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "Princess Nancy" in the GOP presidential debate over the weekend.

Random thoughts about US individualism

2011-11-01T09:38:00.000-04:00

I have mentioned before that we can explain much of US culture in terms of the distinction between two modes of enculturation: independence training (IT) and dependence training (DT). These concepts were used by Chinese-American anthropologist Francis L K Hsu to help understand differences between his native Chinese culture and US culture. Briefly, Chinese enculturation fostered a willingness to value ties among people among people that included reciprocal rights and obligations, while in the US enculturation tends to stress the autonomy of individuals and their rights at the expense of the obligations. The result, in the US, is a relative lack of a value of social responsibility, at least beyond the nuclear family. It's hard, though, to pin down exactly why the US is like this, instead of like something else. And as in most areas of the human enterprise, there probably isn't one simple answer. So, some semi-random thoughts pulled from an email I wrote the other day in which I tried to get at the issue from several perspectives:

One reason the US has such strong IT compared to other cultures may be that we are still in our adolescent phase of becoming a society, we haven't figured out how to be mature in the world. We are, to paraphrase (I believe) Shakespeare, wanton children swatting at flies. Self-centered, complacent, even arrogant, in our willful ignorance. And fully, religiously, certain that our lack of social responsibility toward our fellow humans is natural, the way things should be. If this sounds a bit like the old national character studies of Benedict and others, ok, as long as we don't take it too far.

A little story, which I think I got from Pete Seeger (who in turn I believe got it from Woody Gurthrie): Way out in the lonely west somewhere, a farmer rests on his porch after a hard day's work. A lone rider approaches, and says "Is this your farm?" The farmer replies "Yes." Stranger: "Where'd you get it from?" Farmer: "From my father." Stranger: "Where'd he get it from?" Farmer: "He took it from some Indians." Stranger: "Well, I'm taking it from you."

We can trace some of this back to when the Europeans encountered "America" and began their ethnocentrism-driven regime of raping and pillaging. Often, in those earliest days, it literally was one person, or a tiny group, with little or no support, who wandered off into the wilderness. Other culture heroes: Andrew Jackson, killer and abuser of Native Americans; Teddy Roosevelt, advocate for clearing the land of indigenous peoples to make room for the "Germanic-speaking" bearers of civilization (Hitler approved of course). How much have we outgrown this middle-school playground mentality, really?

The rise of capitalism of course also feeds into our original Individualistic Narrative: the "self-made man," the wealthy person who cobbles together a fortune somehow without any help whatsoever from anyone on the planet. Capitalism has encouraged isolation, fragmentation, of workers and their families, and at the same time discouraged, often with violence, attempts by workers to reconstitute a social fabric. This is an important part of our national mythology. Think of one of our culture heroes, Ayn Rand, a vicious psychopath masquerading as a "philosopher" who happens to be the darling of the Tea Party movement.

And of course, over-population and crowding stress just further exacerbate the problem. A lethal concoction: IT and crowding stress, with few if any cultural mechanisms in place to lower the resulting pressure.

Something about IT that's important to remember is that it doesn't just apply to individual persons/organisms. It applies at whatever level is appropriate. It gives us corporations as "individual persons." It sets the US, as a corporate entity, against the UN, the World Court, the Geneva Conventions, etc. Because we are, still it seems, the adolescent bullies on the playground.

Irritable vowel syndrome

2011-10-21T13:56:00.000-04:00

This is the sort of thing that makes my head hurt.

This morning while looking through some old files I came across a "language arts" exam given to middle school students in Carriacou (Grenada) in 1983. The very first question:

Put a ring around the word that has two vowels
(a) man (b) pet (c) gram (d) boat

Okay, now, we all know what the expected "right" answer was, don't we? Of course. It was (d) boat. Because the word boat has two vowels. Except that it doesn't, really. The word boat, pronounced in Grenada as [bot], has one vowel (some speakers produce something like [bʷot] with a very brief labiovelar glide- still not two vowels, though). The oa spelling of this vowel is an artifact of the convoluted history of the English writing system, not an accurate reflection of the present underlying phonology of English.

Of course, what's going on here is the perpetuation of the ancient language = writing meme, by which any question about language is assumed to refer to the writing system, not the actual spoken language. Indeed, here in the US of A young people spend their K–college years attending "language arts" and "composition" classes that almost universally focus on writing (spelling, punctuation, etc.), not language.

Anyway, that was 1983. My head is hurting now because yesterday, in a guest lecture on language, I asked the 100+ students in the lecture hall how many vowels are there in English? And after all these roughly 25 years of teaching about language, the question still works: they still fall into the language = writing trap. Their universal answer: five, maybe 6 (a, e, i, o, u, sometimes y). I then astounded them by pulling out my twelve vowel sounds, as in the following words:

beat         loot
bit    bird        look
bait                     coat
bet       bud         caught
bat                      cot

A part of me enjoys tricking students in this way, semester after semester. And it's so predictable. But another part of me bemoans the fact that I can still do it so easily. Students in the English-speaking world simply do not, apparently, receive substantive instruction on the nature of language, or the nature of English.

Will they ever?

Florida Governor Scott says we don't need anthropologists

2011-10-18T15:01:00.000-04:00

Florida Governor Rick ~~Voldemort~~ Scott wants universities to turn their backs on the liberal arts and sciences and focus on useful things like, you know, engineering and computer science. Op-ed cartoonist Jeff Parker at Florida Today captures the governor's worldview very nicely:

In addition, Jeff writes:

Instead of a well-rounded, competitive, educated populace, Scott seemingly prefers to develop "foot soldiers for capitalism" as Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce puts it. The Governor appears satisfied with the idea of turning our universities into VoTech centers.
Plus, all that critical thinking and problem solving, nurtured by a liberal arts education, just gets in the way of ideological agendas like Scott's.

Nicely put. I'll save my own rant for later.

It's cults all the way down (and back up!)

2011-10-09T12:29:00.001-04:00

Anthropologically speaking, the recent brouhaha over whether Mormonism is a "cult" is amusing, and it offers one of those teachable moments we all live for. Robert Jeffress, a pastor at the Dallas, Texas, First Baptist Church, referred to Mormonism as a "theological cult" in an interview with reporters at the Values Voter Summit on Friday, October 7. You can watch him defend his remark on Fox News here.

The whole thing is amusing because, in the US Folk Model, the word cult is to religion roughly what dialect is to language. A variety of religion (or language) is tagged as non-standard, perhaps a bit weird or undesirable, the property of some minority or other that isn't quite inside the pale.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary has these as the first three definitions of cult (my emphasis added):

1: formal religious veneration: worship
2: a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also: its body of adherents
3: a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also: its body of adherents

Note that the third definition, the one Pastor Jeffress presumably had in mind, is the negative one. The first two reflect the history of the term, which has the same root as culture (Latin cultus) and referred to the set of beliefs and behaviors associated with the worship or veneration of a god, saint, etc. These definitions are not what most people have in mind when they use the term cult, and I would argue that to reflect actual usage in US society Merriam-Webster have these in the wrong order.

At least some anthropologists, following Anthony F. C. Wallace, continue to use cult in this broader, neutral sense to refer to any system of beliefs and behaviors involving the supernatural in some way. Wallace identified four basic types of cults: individualistic; shamanistic; communal; ecclesiastical. Individualistic and shamanistic cults are most characteristic of small-scale societies whose subsistence is based on foraging or horticulture. In these cults there are no full-time religious practitioners and most of what needs to be known to manipulate the supernatural is available to all, though especially talented individuals (shamans) may be consulted. Ecclesiastical cults, typical of large-scale, stratified, state societies, have full-time practitioners who control access to the knowledge and also the performance of rituals. Historically, the bureaucracy associated with these cults was frequently intertwined with or even equivalent to the state bureaucracy. Communal cults appear as a bridge, but are most obvious in some pastoral societies such as the Maasai, where for example all males in an age-set undergo the ritual that transforms them from warriors to elders.

Religious cults conceived in this way form an implicational scale, so that for example people whose lives are centered on an ecclesiastical cult nevertheless also have beliefs and behaviors that reflect communal, shamanistic, and individualistic levels of organization.

So, anthropologists might use the word cult to describe Christianity as a whole, or at any level; the same with Islam, Judaism, or any other set of beliefs and behaviors. Haitian Vodoun is a cult, and so is Jeffress's Southern Baptist Convention. Everything is a cult, or nothing is a cult.

We can play the same game with the term dialect. Appalachian English is a dialect of American English, which is a dialect of English, which is a dialect of West Germanic, which is a dialect of Germanic, which is a dialect Indo-European, which is a dialect of Human Language.

It's dialects, and cults, all the way up and down.

Essay on Ebonics

2011-09-23T12:33:00.000-04:00

Anyone interested in the current status of African American English, or "Ebonics," might enjoy checking out my essay just posted on the American Anthropological Association's online Anthropology News web site.

State-sponsored murder

2011-09-20T12:11:00.000-04:00

According to Amnesty International, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles has refused to intervene in tomorrow's scheduled execution of Troy Davis, despite the overwhelming evidence that there is more than "reasonable doubt" that he committed the crime he was convicted of.

It's dismaying, but not that surprising. As a core part of the Old Confederacy, Georgia is (at least) a crypto-fascist state. State-sponsored murder, otherwise known as "execution," is a way for such states to demonstrate their absolute power over their citizens, including the power to decide whether they live or die.

I didn't write anything for 9/11

2011-09-11T18:25:00.000-04:00

Well, I didn't. I did spend both yesterday and today actively avoiding mention of 9/11 on the TV, so as to be reminded as little as possible of the Tuesday ten years ago when our Marine son, Tommy, stationed at The Pentagon, was out of our reach for nearly the whole day. I watched Ivan Reitmann's silly science-fiction comedy Evolution (David Duchovny, Julianne Moore, etc.), and I watched the first two parts of Lord of the Rings (the extended version!). I also managed some of Avatar. I played banjo. I walked with Tinker the Terrier. Whatever, anything to avoid what I was sure would be the grotesque "commemoration" of an obscene event (I'm pretty sure I was right).

But inevitably, in checking my usual news and information sources on the web, I did come across several essays that come as close as I could, without doing it myself (which I didn't feel like doing), to expressing the swamp of ideas and feelings I have about 9/11 and its aftermath. And not just the aftermath, but also the run-up.

The first is an essay by Tom Engelhardt titled Let's Cancel 9/11: Bury the War State's Blank Check at Sea. One of the salient paragraphs from this essay is this one:

Ask yourself this: ten years into the post-9/11 era, haven't we had enough of ourselves? If we have any respect for history or humanity or decency left, isn’t it time to rip the Band-Aid off the wound, to remove 9/11 from our collective consciousness? No more invocations of those attacks to explain otherwise inexplicable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our oh-so-global war on terror. No more invocations of 9/11 to keep the Pentagon and the national security state flooded with money. No more invocations of 9/11 to justify every encroachment on liberty, every new step in the surveillance of Americans, every advance in pat-downs and wand-downs and strip downs that keeps fear high and the homeland security state afloat.

A second essay titled Generation 9/11: History will be embarrassed by us, is by fellow anthropologist Greg Laden, and appeared on his blog The X Blog. Greg's essay contains this, which spoke nicely to my own thoughts:

And now might be a good point to ask the question, “What has risen from the ashes of the 9/11 attacks?” There was much talk at the time, and since then, and again today, about how great America is, how great Americans are, and how we will move forward and become better and stronger and so on and so forth. But it is just talk. What has happened instead is something entirely different.

And what happened has been a social and political disaster, as Greg points out:

The Tea Party and things like the Tea Party. Strongly held anti-social illogical destructive beliefs with no hope of critical self evaluation, in a large and organized part of the population. It is obvious why this happened in the Republican Party and not the Democratic Party, but people on both sides of the political aisle have contributed. Literalist, libertarian, paranoid, self-centered, easily frightened, reactionary, sub-average in intelligence, deluded in self worth and unmovable in conviction and belief despite all evidence to the contrary.

Moving on. The last is from one of my favorite online essayists, William Rivers Pitt, who posts at Truthout.org. His essay, called The Children of Aftermath, focuses on the fact that there are children in the 5th grade now who have known no other country, no other world, than the one 9/11 gave us:

All across America, there are classrooms filled with fifth graders who only know the World Trade Center from pictures. They have achieved the final perfection of George Orwell's vision - we have always been at war with Eurasia - because they have never known a world where their country has not been at war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I hope you will read these essays. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for 9/12/2011.

Guest blog: People of Wisconsin: Rethink recall. Rethink. Recall

2011-08-15T11:28:00.001-04:00

Now that we are past the Wisconsin state senate recall elections, we need to take a cold, hard look at what needs to be done in 2012. The people of Wisconsin are “energized,” as the pundits say, but we need to be realistic about where we focus our energy and how we allocate limited time and financial resources.

Quite apart from any possible recall elections, here is what we have to look forward to in Wisconsin in 2012 (not in chronological order, but in my rough order of importance):

Presidential election
Municipal and school board elections
Election of a new US Senator
Elections for all eight Wis. congressional districts
Election of half the members of the state senate
Elections for all members of the state assembly
Probable Republican and Democratic primaries for US Senate
Republican presidential primary
Other possible primaries

Keep in mind that for these elections the district lines have been redrawn, and new voter ID requirements will be implemented, so there will be plenty of room for confusion. We are a 50-50 state when it comes to statewide races. But the new Republican-drawn districts mean that there will be fewer 50-50 districts. With close races likely we need to pick our battles carefully. Voter turnout will be crucial.

So even though I have a “Recall Walker” sticker on my bumper, I am reluctantly advocating that we put aside that goal in favor of the following:

1) Educate people about the new voter ID requirements and new district lines, and get out the vote.

2) Give Scott Walker a Democratic legislature to work with.

3) Focus on electing a worthy successor to Herb Kohl.

4) Elect more progressive Representatives to Congress.

So I am rethinking my bumper sticker. I will leave it on the car, but now it does not mean recall as ”remove,” but rather as “remember.” In every one of those four goals, people need to “recall” Walker. Recall the damage done to middle-class, working class, and struggling citizens. Recall the damage being done to public schools and the environment. Recall the voter suppression policies put into effect.

And recall what Wisconsin was like before the Walker era. Recall worker rights and responsibilities. Recall treating people with respect. Recall cooperation. Recall consultation with those affected by legislation.

That is my rethinking of the recall of the Governor. Recall Walker without recalling Walker. We have a lot of work to do. We need to use him and recall his record to rally and motivate voters. 2014 will be here soon enough.

-------------------------

Jim Oakley lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Jim is a fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteer who served with me in the Eastern Caribbean in the early 1970s. Since then Jim has been teaching Spanish in the Wisconsin public school system. Jim is, naturally, heavily invested in what's been going on in Wisconsin, and he writes about it.

Another August 6th

2011-08-06T08:09:00.001-04:00

Once again, the anniversary that affects me more than almost any other has rolled around. On August 6th, 1945, just shy of a month after I was born, the US dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. This was, at the time, the most deadly use of a weapon of mass destruction ever inflicted by humans on other humans. A few days later, on August 9, we repeated the experiment with a newer and "improved" bomb dropped on Nagasaki. At least 150,000 and more likely over 200,000 people were either killed immediately or died from injuries caused by the explosions. In later years, many people suffered from the aftereffects of radiation exposure; this includes birth defects.

Apologists for the bombings claim that they were needed to bring Japan to an earlier surrender than might have happened otherwise. Such an action taken today would without doubt be considered collective punishment under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and thus a war crime.

To be reminded of the effects of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have a look at these photos at Life.com. Some are disturbing enough to be accompanied by a warning, but anyone who thinks that the bombings were justified should have a look, and ponder.

"Isn't US foreign policy typically and historically made up of about the worst possible crap anyone could imagine?"

2011-08-05T16:34:00.001-04:00

The title of this brief post comes from a friend and anthropology colleague, and the answer to his question is "Yes."

The latest evidence of this comes from a Wikileaks release of documents related to the US's dealings with Haiti in general and, more specifically, former Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide. As reported in The Nation:

The secret cables, made available to the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté by WikiLeaks, show how the political defeat of Aristide and his Lavalas movement has been the central pillar of US policy toward the Caribbean nation over the last two US administrations, even though—or perhaps because—US officials understood that he was the most popular political figure in Haiti.

The friend and colleague, by the way, is someone who has researched and written about Haiti from an anthropological perspective for many years. He adds that "US foreign policy is eventually deleterious both to US foreign relations and US domestic tranquility. In other words, it is completely stupid and self-defeating."

I miss Pogo...

2011-07-21T12:49:00.000-04:00

Belief in evolution: the US is way out of line, literally

2011-07-18T07:45:00.000-04:00

Objectivity

2011-07-12T17:08:00.000-04:00

A colleague recently sent out a link to the Postmodernism Dictionary, which has an entry for the term Objective:

Being objective means to have no bias or distortions; to see things [as] they actually are. It assumes the individual is able to bracket their subjective perspective, biases, and prejudices. Postmodernism, in general, questions the degree to which we can obtain objectivity.

This is not a good scientific definition of objective; it is, rather, a straw argument, set up as a convenient wall against which to play intellectual ping pong. Lest I be accused of setting up my own straw postmodernism, let me call your attention to Schultz and Lavenda's textbook, Cultural Anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition (Oxford 2012). This book is written largely from the perspective of non-scientific, postmodern, and interpretivist anthropology. On page 44, they define objective knowledge as:

Knowledge about reality that is absolute and true.

This is no better. It reduces the notion of objectivity to a cartoon of itself. But before I offer something more, er, realistic, let me explain why I am so incensed by these kinds of definitions.

I take anthropology to be a social science. This is relatively uncontroversial; here at UNF, we're even located in the Social Sciences building (but then, so is the Dean's office!). It is true that we often say that anthropology as a discipline overlaps with the "sciences" and the "humanities" (history, philosophy, world languages, literature, etc.), as if these were normally non-overlapping magisteria, to borrow from Stephen Jay Gould. Scientific method applies here, but not over there. (I disagree with this divide, I think it's an artifact of a particular cultural history, but that might be another post.)
In any case, the business of the sciences is to develop what I am going to call, after Lett, objective synthetic propositional knowledge. A synthetic proposition is one that's not simply an identity. For example, the proposition "bachelors are unmarried men" is not synthetic, it's analytic, because it's simply a definition. On the other hand, the proposition "all bachelors are unhappy" is synthetic, it's not a definition but rather a proposition that can be tested and shown to true or false. I don't want to go any further with these terms; the object of this post is to talk about the notion of objective.
Now, organisms need to be able to acquire knowledge of the world around them to survive, multiply, and prosper. The knowledge of the world that any organism can acquire and make use of is contingent upon the sort of organism that it is. The contingency is defined by the complexity of the organism's nervous system, and also by the needs of the organism- what it has to "know" to make it through its world. No organism takes in, processes, and acts on raw data; all organisms "filter" incoming data through their senses, which have been shaped by natural selection. Frogs, for example, have a visual system that is tuned, by evolution, to make them aware of those things around them that they need to "know" about in order to prosper. Specifically, frogs' visual system consists of the following sorts of "detectors" (Lieberman 1984: 54-55):

Edge detectors identify boundaries of objects.
Bug detectors identify small convex moving objects.
Event detectors identify sudden movements.
Dimming detectors identify falling light intensity.
Blue detectors identify bodies of water.

Having knowledge about these aspects of the world allows frogs to eat, sit by the waterside, and leap into the water when a potential danger appears. Frogs need to "know" these things (and some others) about the world if they're going to live long enough to reproduce. This is as true for humans as it is for frogs, although humans, via culture, can manipulate to some degree the contingencies that apply to them. So, although we have evolved to be able to perceive and respond to narrow (compared to what the Universe makes available) ranges of light and sound, we can create technology that allows us to see and hear beyond the limits of our native visual and auditory systems. We can do a lot "better" than frogs, in the sense that our visual system allows us to develop more fine-grained visual knowledge of the world around us. But we, and frogs, are both constrained by our natures; neither of us can develop knowledge about the world that is "absolute and true."
So, back to objectivity. A scientific definition of objectivity as it relates to the construction of propositional knowledge might go something like this (Lett 1997: 46):

[A proposition] is objective in the scientific sense of the term if it is both publicly verifiable and testable.

Example: I tell students that the Aymara word for 'your house' is utama. This bit of knowledge is objective not because it's "absolute and true," but because my students can go to Bolivia or Perú, or nowadays even email an Aymara speaker, and ask them how to say 'your house', and the answer should come back utama. It's publicly verifiable and testable.
Subjective knowledge is about me: The Aymara language sounds beautiful. Not publicly verifiable, not testable. Objective knowledge is about us, working together, to develop an understanding of the world: The Aymara language is Head-final (heads of phrases follow their complements). That proposition can be publicly verified and tested. And that's what science is about.

References
Lett, J. 1997. Science, Reason, and Anthropology: The Principles of Rational Inquiry. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Lieberman, P. 1984. The Biology and Evolution of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schultz, E. and R. Lavenda. 2012. Cultural Anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition. Oxford University Press.

Stop the stoning!

2011-07-11T13:03:00.001-04:00

Today is the International Day Against Stoning; it may sound like a Monty Python sketch, but it's deadly serious. The International Committee Against Stoning has a petition, and it needs as many signatures as it can get. As they write:

As you know Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani is still languishing in prison. The authorities recently mentioned her case saying that no final decision had yet been reached on her stoning sentence and that Sakineh must remain in prison. Falsely accused of murdering her husband, her only crime is that she is a woman in Iran. Her lawyer, Sajjad Houtan Kian, also remains in prison for having had the courage to defend her and other women with stoning sentences in Tabriz prison; he has been sentenced to four years imprisonment, been put under a lot of pressure and lost 20 kilos (44 pounds) as a result.

The campaign to Save Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani has been an important one. It has spoken out in defence of humanity, and against the barbaric punishment of stoning everywhere. It has mobilised immense pressure against and condemnation of the Islamic regime of Iran from millions across the globe. These are accomplishments we must all be proud of.

On 11 July 2011, the International Day against Stoning, let’s once again step up the pressure to demand Sakineh’s immediate release and an end to stoning. Join us by either standing in a city square with a photo or poster of Sakineh, tweeting, or by organising an act of solidarity or a flash mob to raise awareness and attention. On 11 July, in 100 cities worldwide, let us once again raise the banner of humanity against one of the barbarisms of our time.

Here's a direct link to the petition.

It's only "fraud" if you are poor?

2011-07-08T11:06:00.001-04:00

In response to an online petition I signed yesterday, I just received an email from Florida Senator Bill Nelson. The petition asked senators not to "balance the budget" on the backs of seniors and the poor. The email included this [my emphasis]:

While I support reasonable cuts to discretionary spending, it is clear that we cannot balance our budget through discretionary spending cuts alone. That’s why I am pressing my colleagues to support a comprehensive approach to deficit reduction that not only eliminates duplicative programs, but also reduces extraneous procurements and phases-out unnecessary and outdated tax breaks that only benefit a few large corporations. Furthermore, we must continue efforts to curb the fraud that plagues programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which costs taxpayers billions.

So, wait. The term "fraud" is applied to the elderly and the poor, who are the major recipients of Medicare (I am among them) and Medicaid. Meanwhile, "large corporations" are only guilty of taking advantage of "tax breaks," which are presumably at least legal?

This is why I am not a registered Demoncrat. Very few of them are significantly more moral than the Rethuglicans.

Sometimes, students get it!

2011-07-07T09:32:00.000-04:00

So, I taught a section of our Peoples and Cultures of the World (a junior-level course for non-majors) in the Summer A term; we met twice a week for six weeks, three and a half hours per session, and there were 45 students in the class. I treat this course as an introduction to cultural anthropology, with a rich variety of "peoples" and "cultures" to illustrate the concepts. The peoples we met included the Aymara (Central Andes), Yanomama (Orinoco Basin), Baka (Cameroun), Maya (Yucatan, Mexico), Maasai (East Africa), and of course Carriacou, where I've done fieldwork.

The final topic of the course, as I teach it, deals with globalization and the culture of capitalism. For this subject matter I like to bring the students back to themselves, by including "us" as one of the "peoples and cultures of the world." One way that I sometimes do this is by showing them the first 30 minutes or so of the John Sayles film Matewan. This true story of the May 1920 Matewan Massacre deals with the culture of capitalism by showing how West Virginia coal miners in the early 20th century had to deal with exploitative coal operators, dangerous working conditions, and the threat of violence on the part of "agents" hired by the coal companies to prevent the miners from organizing themselves into unions. It also touches on globalization, by showing coal company owners attempting to replace striking miners with African Americans and immigrants from Italy.

This time, I got an unexpected reaction to this bit of film. A student, in her final reflexive essay, wrote this:

Also, I wanted to thank you for showing the video about the West Virginia coal miners. I am from West Virginia and came from a family of coal miners. I don’t think people in the United States understand how dangerous coal mining still is today. My Uncle was a survivor of the Sago Mine explosion that happened about 4 years ago and it hit my family with the realization that something can happen at any second. Even though devastating disasters like this still exist today, the mines do not take all the safety precautions to prevent explosions from happening in the future. I hope that this video has opened the eyes of some of the people in class to realize that the coal used to heat their homes, is mined in dangerous working conditions.

Unfortunately, I didn't read the essays until the course was over, and thus I could not go back into class and try to generate some extra discussion. But at least there is satisfaction in knowing that something in the course was deeply relevant for at least one student, and that's a good feeling.

Tonight's evening sky

2011-07-05T21:58:00.000-04:00

I just watched the International Space Station go overhead. It came out of the northwest at 9:16 pm and headed toward the southeast, a very bright point of light with a slight orange color due to the recently-set Sun. It was visible for about four minutes. Balanced against it nearby was the bright crescent Moon.

Pretty cool... If only we could do more of this kind of thing, instead of waging wars.

The day after the 4th of July

2011-07-05T20:18:00.000-04:00

Ok, so I didn't write anything on the 4th; I was busy starting the job of cleaning out our horribly overcrowded garage, which I did after walking 4 miles with Tinker the Terrier. I worked on the garage until it got too hot, and then got busy with some other things. So, I didn't get around to writing a 4th of July post.

And anyway, last year's post is still valid. We still labor under the same misconceptions about what our country is really about, the same disconnect between what we say we are and what the evidence suggests that we actually are. No need to rebelabor the points.

I will say that it continues to frustrate and disappoint me that our President, the one we elected under a banner of "hope and change," continues to behave pretty much as a Bush Lite on two major points:

Our ongoing and never-ending wars. Not only do continue massive troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now we've added Libya and Somalia to the list of countries we are either occupying or terrorizing from the air. I wrote about our national war-addiction back in May, so I won't repeat it here.
The continuing absence of punishment for war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by former "president" Bush and his administration. President Obama and his DOJ continue to acquiesce to claims of immunity on the part of members of the Bush administration who suggested, allowed, ordered, justified, and otherwise participated in Bush's Torture Regime. People who should be in jail by now are walking the streets, enjoying their retirement from what can only be called the most immoral administration in the history of the United States.

One thing I am pretty sure of is that things are not going to change much between now and July 4, 2012.

To laugh or to cry?

2011-06-15T14:08:00.002-04:00

I had a student this morning who came to class with no paper or writing implement. He wrote his answer to our in-class activity on his cell phone, then sent it to me as an email.

Che's birthday

2011-06-14T16:06:00.000-04:00

Today, June 14, is the birthday of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, a complicated historical figure if ever there was one. Back in 2009 I wrote a brief note about the irony that emerged from his execution in Bolivia. Follow this link to a longer essay on Che in historical perspective: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The author, David Glenn Cox, is not an apologist for Che's revolutionary violence, but he does show that although Che, as a revolutionary, was violent at times, his violence was more than matched by the violence committed by George Washington, our own revolutionary exemplar. And by the bankers who have treated us so savagely in more recent times:

You see, I am not trying to justify Che’s violence as much as to explain it and to understand it. Ten million homes foreclosed equal more than forty million men, women and children ejected from their homes. They live their lives under threats and under pressure, searching for a decent job when there are none. This is no accident, this is violence done in the name of profit. This is revolution by the pen and the freedom to be manipulated and ordered out for the benefit of others. Forty million people is the largest peace time human disenfranchisement in human history. The bankers who profited from this crime have not been punished but have been rewarded and are receiving their annual bonuses again.

Blog: Carriacou 1968

2011-06-02T14:04:00.000-04:00

Bill Cameron was a VSO (British version of Peace Corps) teacher on Carriacou just before I arrived. He was there for the 1967-68 school year. He has a blog with some of his very nice photos from then, as well as commentary, all worth checking out if you have an interest in that part of the West Indies.

More thoughts on Memorial Day

2011-05-30T12:10:00.000-04:00

The parades, concerts, and other activities associated with Memorial Day in the United States can be loosely grouped under what some anthropologists refer to as rites of intensification. A typical definition of these rites is that they are "rituals intended either to bolster a natural process necessary to survival or to reaffirm the society's commitment to a particular set of values and beliefs" [my emphasis].

What are the "values and beliefs" that we reaffirm on Memorial Day? To answer this question, we have to make a distinction between folk (or, roughly, emic) and analytic (roughly, etic) ideas. The folk model answer must include values such as patriotism, freedom, democracy, glorification of military service, the extension of that service to all parts of the world, and, especially, the honoring of those who have lost their lives in that service. The omnipresent symbol that represents all this is the national flag, visible through the window as I write this, flying in a warm breeze in front of both our neighbor's houses.

But there is a dark side to all this, and the dark side is our national war addiction. We are so addicted to the warm, fuzzy feelings invoked by the parades, the hot dogs and hamburgers and apple pie, the returning military people surprising their families with an unexpected homecoming, the Skype calls between wives and husbands, and so on, that we are compelled to sacrifice our people and wealth to satisfy this addiction by the almost uninterrupted perpetration of violence in far-off places. We are not a happy people unless we are at war.

What, you say? How can this be? Have a look at Wikipedia's listing of US military operations from 1775 to the present. Or, if you don't trust Wikipedia, check out this chronicle of military interventions since 1890.

One important thing to notice on both of these listings (there are many others, just Google "us military interventions" is that it really is hard to find a stretch of time lasting more than a year or so when the US has not been engaged militarily, either domestically or internationally. If we focus on just the period between the end of WWI and the start of WWII, we find these :

1919   Honduras
1919   Yugoslavia
1920   Guatemala
1920-21 West Virginia
1922   Turkey
1922-34 China
1924-25   Honduras
1925   Panama
1932   El Salvador
1932   Washington, DC

Several of these, in particular in Guatemala, West Virginia, Honduras, and Panama, involved the use of troops against unionized workers or workers attempting to unionize. Others involved the suppression of popular revolts against autocratic leaders.

How weak are the folk values of "freedom" and "democracy" in which we are supposedly enculturated.

Another song for Memorial Day

2011-05-30T08:03:00.000-04:00

For Memorial Day last year, I posted Pete Seeger's "Bring them Home." This year, I give you his "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," which he sang on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on February 25, 1968 (he had sung it on an earlier show, but CBS censors cut it). It was aimed at the Vietnam War then, but it's still plenty relevant.

Blog: Anthropologists for Justice and Peace

2011-05-23T18:29:00.000-04:00

There is (or will be shortly) a link on the left to a relatively new blog, Anthropologists for Justice and Peace. Here's how they describe themselves:

AJP joins the academy to building non-state and non-market solutions to social injustice.

We're still here!

2011-05-22T08:52:00.001-04:00

Looks like the Rapture didn't happen yesterday after all. Either that, or only the heathens are left behind; come to think of it, the neighborhood was pretty quiet this morning when I took our dog for a walk.

Incidentally, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, which seems pretty reliable, the word heathen, is from Anglo-Saxon hǣðen, meaning "not Christian or Jew." The word may have originally referred to people who lived on the heath, i.e. non-farmers, wild people (the word pagan has a similar historical origin). Old English hǣðen underwent the usual vowel changes, which is why we now pronounce it [hiːðən].

The whole "rapture" thing reminds me of a story about the late Sir Eric Gairy, former Grenadian political leader and a sort of mini-Papa Doc. During one of his campaigns in the 50s or maybe 60s, he told people that he would prove his power by walking on the water of St. George's harbor, which is actually the partly submerged rim of an extinct (?) volcano. On the appointed night he was rowed out to the middle of the harbor. He stood up in the boat and started to step out onto the water, and then dramatically stopped and looked up, cupping his ear with his hand as if listening to something. He sat back down in the boat and they rowed him to shore. There he told the onlookers that just as he was about to walk on the water, he received a message from God who told him it wasn't the right time.

And here's the sad part: a lot of those people on shore believed him.

New link: Linguistics in the Classroom

2011-05-15T14:55:00.000-04:00

I have added a link to a blog titled "Linguistics in the Classroom," written by Ann Evans at Montclair State University. Ann's description of the site follows:

This blog is meant to help teachers show their students how language is constructed, how meaning is made, and what the role of language is in our lives. It contains information and exercises to illustrate linguistic ideas and principles at the word, sentence, and paragraph level, and within language communities. Each point and exercise is introduced simply, with examples, and is usually meant to take ten minutes or less.

This blog is the continuation of an article published in the Spring 2011 issue of the Duke University journal Pedagogy.
Ann Evans is an Adjunct Professor of Writing at Montclair State University. She has an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from Montclair State, and an M.A. in English from New York University. Besides English, she speaks French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Greek.

If you are looking for exercises and linguistics-oriented explanations to share, especially with writing-troubled students, check it out.

Sherwood, Tennessee

2011-04-21T16:37:00.000-04:00

My old friend John Lynch has produced (and narrates) a short film on the history of his hometown, Sherwood, Tennessee.

He asked me to record some banjo music for the sound track, which I did. And we can all thank him for the tasteful way in which he put it well into the background.

Time is relative

2011-04-20T11:06:00.000-04:00

Louisiana Governor ~~Booby~~ Bobby Jindal, interviewed on NBC's Today show this morning, told Matt Lauer that President Obama is "our most liberal president in modern times."

Really? So for Jindal, presumably, "modern times" includes only this millennium? We have to write off Bill Clinton, who was far more liberal than Obama? What about Jimmy Carter? What about Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson? Hell, on some if not most measures, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was more liberal than Obama. All these presidents except FDR served after the end of World War II.

I was born during World War II. Does this mean that I was born in pre-modern times, but I now live in modern times?

Jindal really is spectacularly stupid.

I eat, I digest, I poop; therefore I am a gastroenterologist

2011-04-11T15:10:00.000-04:00

The Jamaica Gleaner has an online article today with the headline A Waste of Time to Teach Patois- Seaga. In the article, former Prime Minister Edward Seaga tells the Gleaner that:

...it would be a waste of the country's educational resources to teach Patois in schools.

"There is no standard way of spelling a particular word in Patois," Seaga said. "If you want people to be able to talk to one another in Jamaica and outside of Jamaica, it does not make any sense."

Also in the article, the current Prime Minister, Bruce Golding, chimes in:

According to Golding, teaching Patois would be akin to saying, "We have failed to impart our accepted language of English, so we are giving up. This one can't work, so let us find another one that can work."

Here is what bothers me about this: neither of these people is a linguist. What they know about language as an object of study they picked up in their years in language arts and English literature and composition classes. But despite this, they are perfectly willing to challenge real linguist Hubert Devonish, a professor of linguistics at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, and others, who are in favor of bringing Jamaican Creole (Patois) into the schools as an enhancement to early education and especially early literacy. Just back in January many people concerned about this issue met in Jamaica to convene a Caribbean Language Policy Conference that addressed these and other issue pertaining to the ecology of "standard," creole, and other languages in schools, government, the work place, etc.

But because they can talk, Seaga and Golding get to disagree authoritatively with linguists. It's as if because I eat, digest, and poop, I am qualified to lecture on gastroenterology.

When do we get to charge these people with practicing linguistics without a license?

The view from Wisconsin (2)

2011-04-01T18:42:00.001-04:00

Here is the rest of my friend Jim Oakley's writing (to date!) on the assault on teachers and other working people taking place in Wisconsin and around the country.

Greetings, all --

I have waited a while before compiling this follow-up to my commentary, "Which Side Are You On?" Now it's time. I have gotten lots of feedback --almost all complimentary-- by word-of-mouth, phone, email, etc. I appreciate all of it. Some people sent articles or referred me to links, some of which I will share now.

One article expressed a contrasting viewpoint, titled "A Union Education". It comes from the Wall Street corporate perspective, echoing the effort to divide public and private workers, misreading the Wisconsin situation, and blaming public workers for increased state and local spending. Someone like Robert Reich or Paul Krugman could probably take it apart point by point. It gives you an idea what we are up against. As the friend who sent it to me said, it is "food for thought for ALL of us." Here's the link:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704615504576172701898769040.html

Another friend sent a link for an article about a teacher in Maine that is really great. Here it is:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/09-6

My commentary was published in the Ashland Daily Press (http://ashlandwi.com/articles/2011/03/26/opinions/doc4d8a0c4f43211120603518.txt) There have been no on-line or in-print comments there as yet.

But there were several comments when it appeared in the Ashland Current (http://ashlandcurrent.com/opinion/11/03/19/which-side-are-you), including a correction. Apparently the Lincoln Day dinner only cost $25. I wish I had verified the cost. (Good thing I am not a journalist.) But one of the comments read: "The cost of the meal isn't really that important." Or as one of our slogans goes, "It's not about the money."

Another link that was sent to me gives a pretty good summary of our Wisconsin situation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k7F8O_5yaE&feature=player_embedded, by someone called TheBadgerMom.

One more link that I will share is a New York Times column by a UW-Madison prof, Bill Cronon, who is now being harassed by some Republican state legislators:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/opinion/22cronon.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Also from James Fallows, on the harassment of Cronon:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/03/have-you-no-sense-of-decency-the-wm-cronon-story/73010/

Now, just a few additional comments of my own:

1) Some folks seem to think that unions have outlived their usefulness, and now we can have all the good stuff without collective bargaining. This seems naive at best.

2) I continue to notice a certain disdain for educators, for other public employees, and for education in general. Compared to other societies, we do not value education. Our culture values sports, but not physical education. It values entertainment and competition more than cooperation and science.

3) Some of what comes from the Tea Party types sounds almost socialist. Apparently if one earns a living as a public employee, that money is not his/her own. It's communal taxpayer money. Sure, the governmental entity collects taxes and uses some of those taxes to pay for services which the employees provide, but they earn that money.

4) We have a growing disparity between the very, very rich and the rest of us. Call it class war, if you must, but the inequities are growing, and the attacks on unions and on medicaid recipients are scapegoating, not budget balancing.

5) The governor and his allies are changing the rules in the middle of the game --without consulting the other players. Public workers and local governments, school boards and teacher unions, are made of people who have learned to work together, respecting each other's roles in the system --a system that was not broken. Everyone realizes that economic times are rough. But where is the shared sacrifice? Are the corporate bigwigs doing their part or just getting theirs?

6) Finally, we need to step back and look at this in perspective. We are not Japan or Libya or Haiti. And in many ways we have been forced into a distraction that diverts us from issues that ought to have more of our concern: the environment and climate change, global economic concerns, health care, real improvements in our education system, war and peace.

Please vote on April 5.

--Jim

The view from Wisconsin (1)

2011-04-01T18:38:00.000-04:00

Jim Oakley is a fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteer who served with me in the Eastern Caribbean in the early 1970s. Jim and I got to know each other in 1971 while rooming with a wonderful Barbadian family during our training before we were sent off to teach Spanish in different parts of Grenada. Since then Jim has been teaching Spanish in the Wisconsin public school system. Jim is, naturally, heavily invested in what's been going on in Wisconsin, and he has written about it. Below is part 1 of his thoughts and observations; Part 2 will follow shortly.

Which Side Are You On?

By Jim Oakley

I was proud to be part of two big demonstrations of democracy recently, one
in Madison and one in Washburn (aka "Madison North").

On Saturday, February 26, in Madison, we marched for workers' rights and
for other changes in the "budget repair bill." It showed Wisconsin at its
best. As one of the chants went, "This is what democracy looks like!" I
had never before been part of such a large group of people. It was
peaceful, organized, civil, and positive. And unlike the view of State
Senator Glenn Grothman (whom I know well, having previously lived in his
district), not a single "slob," union boss," or "thug" in sight.

Crowd estimates varied from 70,000 to 100,000. I do not know how one
estimates crowd numbers, especially in this case since people were moving
around all the streets and sidewalks adjacent to the capitol, plus they
were inside the building and on some of the nearby streets. And some folks
were leaving the area as others were arriving. I heard there was a Tea
Party counter-demonstration in the area. I did not see them, but I hear
they also were peaceful and civil.

I am dismayed at the intransigence of our governor. If he has his way
Wisconsin is in a race to the bottom --in education, health, environment,
and human rights. As one of the signs said, "If you think education is
expensive, watch what stupid will cost!" I cannot imagine any previous
governor --including Republicans Dreyfus, Thompson, and Knowles-- acting in
such a dictatorial manner as Mr. Walker. The politics of division and "us
versus them" are not worthy of Wisconsin.

The 2,000-plus people gathered in Washburn on March 12 displayed a similar
sense of community, determination and respect. They greeted Governor
Walker and others attending the Republican dinner at the Steak Pit
restaurant with a strong message of people power. There was not a single
untoward incident, for which we can be grateful to the local and guest
police, the organizers of the rally, and everyone who volunteered and
pitched in to do what needed to be done.

I have been trying to reconcile two apparently contradictory notions in my
mind. One is the concept of compromise, including the common good and the
politics of inclusion. The other is expressed in the old union song "Which
side are you on?" which was sung both in Madison and Washburn.

Our society values both concepts, but in our political system, the latter
is currently dominant, and the politics of division is rampant. Our
governor and his enablers seem bent on destroying the Wisconsin we know and
love. I wish I could say --as I have in the past over other contentious
issues-- "Oh, I'm sure they mean well." Nope. They seem to see value in
dividing different groups of public workers against each other, and trying
to pit public employees against private workers. I don't think it's working.

Basically he has declared war on public unions --and thus on the middle
class. It is clearly a "war of choice". As a teacher, I feel personally
attacked every time a union is attacked. My grandmother worked in rural
Iowa almost a hundred years ago. She was dismissed from her teaching job
as soon as she married. Years later when she was in her 90s it rankled her
still. In the 1960s and 70s my mother served on the school board in Beaver
Dam, Wisconsin. When she began, women teachers were paid less than men,
single men were paid less than married men, and no teacher had collective
bargaining. By the time she left the school board they did.

No institution is perfect -- no union, no political party, no church, no
family-- but they all have valid roles to play in civil society, and I
believe that in the marketplace of ideas the common good should rise to the
top, no matter who has more money.

There are many types of rights, and of course the Bill of Rights of our
Constitution is where the most essential ones are enshrined. There are also
basic rights promoted by the United Nations --including the right to form
unions. But of course, governments can grant and take away rights. That
any rights exist is because at some point people banded together and fought
for them; it never has been automatic. But the general trend in most
societies has been toward greater rights, not fewer, and toward respectful
inclusion and cooperation.

The price of rights is eternal vigilance. That is why the latest
initiatives of our current governor have struck a nerve. Wisconsin has
enjoyed fifty years of labor peace. The collective bargaining process has
been a major factor in the quality of life we enjoy in Wisconsin. Our
education system continually ranks in the top ten states. I do not believe
in worshiping test scores, and we are not perfect, but we regularly
outperform the so-called "right-to-work" states.

People deserve more rights, not fewer. If public employees enjoy benefits
gained through collective bargaining, so also should all other workers.
Public workers deserve strong unions. So do workers in Mexican sweatshops
and Chinese Wallmart suppliers.

I consider myself a person of faith. And people of faith often agree to
disagree respectfully. As I was watching the people on the streets of
Washburn and the cars arriving for the dinner at the Steak Pit, I asked
myself a few WWJD questions, which now I will ask you:

Would Jesus have marched in support of teachers and other public workers?
Or would He caucus with the Tea Party folks?

Would He pay $200 for a Lincoln Day dinner with the Pharisees? Or would He
help cook for the volunteers who kept the rally safe for everyone?

For that matter, what would Lincoln do? Of course he was not perfect. Even
FDR has been quoted as not favoring collective bargaining for public
employees. But given a choice between oligarchs and their minions on one
side and public servants on the other, where would Lincoln or Roosevelt
(Teddy or Franklin) come down?

Which brings me back to that old union song, "Which side are you on?" While
there is still room for compromise and still hope for the common good, the
governor has forced us to choose. When we have our regular elections, and
possible recall elections, you decide: Which side are you on?

By the way, "Which Side Are You On?" is a union song written by Florence Reece. You can hear her sing it here, probably recorded in the 1940s.

Florida "lawmakers" seek to end tenure in the state colleges

2011-04-01T13:44:00.000-04:00

This is a comment I just posted on Valencia Community College Computer Science professor Lisa Macon's blog devoted to discussing the attempt by the Florida legislature to end the tenure system in the state colleges:

... I don't think that the central concern of these folks is either cost-cutting or "bad teachers." I think the heart of the matter is that they hate education at all levels, but especially higher ed. This is where students are supposed to learn to observe the world around them and make critical, rational analyses of that world on the basis of evidence. The right-wing goons know that they were elected precisely because we have not done this as well as we should have, and they also know that if we ever do teach people to think critically they will never be elected to anything again. So, they want to destroy this aspect of higher higher education and turn everything into training colleges turning out good, compliant carbon-units for predatory capitalism. If they are successful with the state colleges, they will come for us in the universities next (they've already begun, actually).

The view from my office window

2011-04-01T12:11:00.002-04:00

Arrrgh!

Measures of US inequality

2011-03-23T15:41:00.000-04:00

Mother Jones has a nice set of easy-to-read graphics that highlight economic inequality in the US. Here are two of the more interesting; the rest can be found here.

The first graph contrasts the average income of the bottom 90% of US families with the average income of the top 0.01% of US families. The top families (in yellow) average over 27 million dollars, while the bottom families, in blue, average just over 31 thousand. The balloons on the right (representing income) contrast with the square on the left, which represents numbers of families. Note that while blue nearly fills all but one row of the square, the blue balloon is tiny compared to the yellow and orange balloons, which together represent the income of the top one-tenth of one percent of families.

The second set of graphs shows average household income and change in average income over time, 1979-2007. Things to take away: (1) The average income of the top 1% of families has soared from around half a million to nearly 2 million dollars; (2) the top 20% made a very modest gain; but the lower 60% of families have not changed at all; (3) the lowest 80% of families has actually suffered a decrease in their share of national income, while only the top 20% has seen an increase. The biggest increase in share of national income has been enjoyed by families in the top 1% income bracket.

If you happen to be among the top 1%, this must all look pretty good. Otherwise, you should be pissed off, especially when any politician suggests that anyone other than those in the top 1% should be asked to "sacrifice" for the sake of the economy.

US teacher pay in international context

2011-03-14T09:25:00.001-04:00

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has put out a table comparing teacher pay to GDP in a number of countries. Imperfect as it might be, I think it says something about the priority that teacher pay receives in these countries. In any case, the US does not show up well, which is not surprising since "education" is not highly valued here, despite the lip service it receives.

Notice that Finland, cited as a "top performing nation," is not far above the US. Still, Finnish teachers probably receive far more benefits (health care, education, retirement, etc.) than US teachers do.

[Thanks to PZ Myers at Pharyngula for linking to this table, which is posted here.

Linguistics at the center of Everything

2011-03-10T06:38:00.000-05:00

Actually, so is anthropology, but this makes the point nicely that linguistics is not a marginal subject area.

"Incomprehensible shouting" is US official language

2011-03-04T18:31:00.002-05:00

Incomprehensible Shouting Named Official U.S. Language

Distinction without a difference: “Foreign Culture” and Cultural Diversity”

2011-02-04T14:07:00.001-05:00

Currently at the University of North Florida, we have courses that students can take to fulfill “cultural diversity” (CD) and “foreign culture” (FC) requirements. The CD requirement applies across the university to students in their first two years, while the FC requirement applies to students in the College of Arts and Sciences and is satisfied by a number of junior and senior level courses. Neither of these categories is tied to a specific department: CD and FC courses are located across a wide range of academic fields.

The rationale for these requirements is that students need to be taken out of the cultural context they are familiar with and exposed to “others.” I agree with this, and as an anthropologist, I might go so far as to say that the students need to be taken out of their comfort zones and then brought home again, hopefully to understand in a new way their own cultures. But I have a problem with the distinction, as it is now drawn, between CD and FC. CD courses are about “cultural diversity” as it exists within the US. FC courses are limited to “cultures” outside the US, hence the term “foreign culture.”

This distinction ignores the fact that there are “cultures” within the US that are just as “foreign” to most of our students as many of the cultures they might encounter outside the US. Consider: Cherokee, Hopi, Navaho, Inuit, Lakota, Mikasuki, Cree, Omaha, and many other Native American cultures. Or African American cultures, such as Gullah/Geechee and Afro-Seminole. Or the Amish and Mennonites. Or isolated Appalachian communities. What about the Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Asian communities within the US?

And what about native Hawaiians? Hawai’i is in the US, technically, but…. And where does Puerto Rico fall in this scheme? The people are US citizens by birth, but their first language is mostly Spanish, so do they represent “cultural diversity” or “foreign culture?” What do we do with the Cuban and Haitian communities in South Florida? Or American Samoa? And to turn the question around, what might be wrong with considering the cultural diversity of a “foreign” place like China or India? Does only the US exhibit “cultural diversity?”

Why does any of this matter? It matters because CD and FC courses nearly always fully enroll, because they meet requirements that students have to fulfill. Departments that are able to offer these courses can generate nice pots of tuition money for the university. And for faculty who teach them, especially in anthropology but likely some others as well, they represent the one chance we have to offer a course on our geographical foci (the Caribbean, West Africa, Mexico, etc.) without worrying that the course won’t attract enough students.

The problem is that the strict delineation between US-based CD and “foreign” FC means that any anthropologist who specializes within the US may have a tough time getting to teach their specialty. The Foreign Culture Committee, which bestows the label “foreign culture,” recently denied FC designation for an anthropology course on peoples and cultures of the Southwest on the grounds that “the southwest” is part of the US. Such a course, as taught by our resident expert in this area, would give students beyond anthropology an entry to some pretty exotic cultures, including for example the Hopi, Apache, and Navaho, among others. At the same time, the designation would ensure that the course is available for anthropology students.

My interim solution would be to keep CD courses as a designation for lower level (frosh and sophomore) courses that teach about “cultural diversity” within the United States, and then to expand FC to include upper level courses that examine the cultures of coherent communities within the United States that differ significantly from the mainstream, European-based, unmarked one that most of our students come from.

Any quest for change will face the inertia of a somewhat powerful College committee; but this is a fight worth having, I think.

Twenty excellent TED talks for anthropologists

2011-02-02T11:10:00.000-05:00

Follow this link to MastersDegree.net's listing of 20 TED talks of special interest to anthropologists.

The Peace Corps and me

2011-01-20T16:25:00.001-05:00

This posting was triggered by the recent passing of Sargent Shriver, the first Director of the Peace Corps, and attempts to show in a little more detail the effect being a Peace Corps Volunteer had on me.

Carriacou is a part of the West Indian state of Grenada, Carriacou, and Petite Martinique, located in the southeastern Caribbean just north of Trinidad and Tobago. I first saw this little (12 square mile) island in July of 1971 as a Peace Corps Volunteer in training. Of course, I had never heard of Carriacou before the Peace Corps folks told me that's where I would be going when we linked up in Philadelphia a few weeks earlier. There followed teacher training and orientation at Lincoln University, outside Philly, and then our trip to the Caribbean for further training and visits to our field sites.

My first impression of Carriacou was that it looked like a desert; it was incredibly brown and dry, the result of an extended drought. Water was scarce, and on top of that many people were mourning the loss of relatives and friends in the recent sinking of the schooner City of St. George on a trip between Grenada and Carriacou. But folks were friendly and welcoming, and I thought I could handle it.

(The photo at right shows me sitting on a colonial-era cannon at the Hospital, 2003.)

Six weeks later, I began teaching Spanish in the newly-opened Junior Secondary School. The school was intended specifically for those children who reached the age of 12 years and were unable to attend high school, for either academic or financial reasons. Previously, these children had to remain in their primary schools, often sitting in classes with much younger children. The hope, at the time, was that they would be better served in a separate junior secondary with less emphasis on academics and more "practical" work, such as cooking, woodworking, and the like.

Although children at the Junior Secondary were considered for the most part less scholastically capable than those who entered secondary school, I was soon very impressed with their quickness in learning Spanish. I had taught for a year at a prestigious private boys' school in the States, where the students were highly selected for and expected to be college material. I saw no difference between their capacity to learn and that of my new charges. Of course, there were big differences in the materials at our disposal. In Carriacou there was no language lab, and there were no textbooks; everything had to be improvised. I eventually produced little text booklets for the children on the school's mimeograph machine. Despite these shortcomings, the children were enthusiastic about Spanish and over the years several became Spanish teachers themselves.

During time spent in the teachers' lounge, I was at first puzzled by the complaints of teachers in other subjects who talked of the children's "backwardness" in such things as history, language arts, mathematics, and science. In some cases, the very same children who were doing fine in Spanish were failing these other subjects. Perhaps because I was a language teacher, I soon began to feel the glimmerings of a possible solution to this paradox. Although Peace Corps had offered no serious insight into the language(s) of Carriacou, I began to realize that the language the children and others in Carriacou spoke was very different from the English I had grown up with. I began to see patterns in both phonology and grammar, and although I did not realize it at the time I began unconsciously internalizing a good deal of Carriacou Creole English.

At the same time, I was aware that my method of teaching Spanish, the "direct" method, made as little use as possible of any language other than the target. Objects, drawings on the chalkboard, and in-class situations served to get the meaning across rather than lengthy explanations in English. Of course, in the children's other classes, this was not the case: there English was the medium through which the children were expected to learn. I began to feel that this was one of the major stumbling blocks to the children's in-school learning, although at the time I did not have the knowledge of linguistics and anthropology to understand the situation fully.

I stayed in Carriacou, teaching Spanish to children and adults, until December 1974. My wife and I had gotten married in August, but Peace Corps was not providing any extra living allowance so Willy and I decided to come to the states, where I worked for several years as a social services coordinator for the public housing agency in my home town of Hagerstown, Maryland. But I began to feel the call of graduate school.

I applied to programs in Latin American Studies at Miami University of Ohio and the University of Florida. Florida was the first to respond; the then director of the Center for Latin American Studies, Terry McCoy, called me up and said I could have a Title VI fellowship if I agreed to study either Portuguese or Aymara. I asked, what's Aymara, and he explained that it's a Native American language spoken in the central Andes. Being already pretty fluent in Spanish, and never one to take the easy way out, I chose Aymara. This would end up being one of the handful of best choices I've ever made, because the director of the Aymara Language Program at Florida was M.J. Hardman, a linguistic anthropologist. I immediately began taking, besides Aymara, other courses in linguistics and anthropology, but it was Professor Hardman's courses in particular that gave me the information I needed to explain that paradox I first encountered in the junior secondary school: Why did Carriacou children learn Spanish just fine, but have so much trouble in their other subjects? I like to say that a light bulb flashed on in my head during nearly every class...

During a course on peasant societies and cultures, the professor loaned me a copy of Don Hill's ethnography of Carriacou, which I read almost in one sitting. This planted the seed of an idea: could I do research on Carriacou? Then during a linguistics course, while looking for a book to review, I discovered in the library Bernadette Farquhar's grammar of Antiguan Creole. Reading this, I recognized some patterns as similar to those I remembered for Carriacou Speech, while others seemed very different. I thought, I should do this on Carriacou! I received a grant from the Inter-American Foundation to return to Carriacou in the summer of 1979 to carry out linguistic fieldwork, mostly in the same school I had taught in a few years earlier. I took our son, then four years old, along with me so that Willy could begin her own studies. The result was my 1980 MA thesis in Latin American Studies, which consisted of a first (and in hindsight highly flawed) description of Carriacou English Creole.

In the course of this work, I found that the differences between Carriacou Creole and English were even greater than I had originally thought. I developed an applied research plan to test my original notion that the differences between these languages placed a barrier between many Carriacou children and their acquisition of fluent literacy. A second grant from the Inter-American Foundation allowed us, as a family, to spend 1982-83 on Carriacou testing this idea, once again in the very school where I had taught as a PCV. While I carried out my research Willy taught Spanish for a while at the high school, and our son went through second grade.

The basic idea was to give a group of Carriacou children access to literacy through their native language, using an orthography developed as part of my grammar. At the same time, the children were periodically tested in English to test the hypothesis that learning to read their own speech would help them in their reading of English.

This research, first reported in my dissertation (1985) and later in a book (2000), as well as in numerous conference presentations and several published articles (see here), was a direct outgrowth of my experience in the Peace Corps. So also is my ongoing research documenting French Creole as spoken by some elderly folks on Carriacou. I can say the same for my career as a professor at the University of North Florida.

And, of course, Peace Corps made it possible for me to meet my wife Willy. We had our 36th anniversary back in August 2010, and we have two marvelous children and one stupendous grandson.

So once again, thanks to Sargent Shriver and Peace Corps, for being such an enormous part of my life.

Sargent Shriver, 1915-2011

2011-01-18T21:21:00.000-05:00

Sargent Shriver passed away today after a long bout with Alzheimers. He was the first Director of the Peace Corps and as such, I never had the opportunity to tell him how much he meant to me:

In 1971, unable to find a job with a BA in Spanish, the Peace Corps took me in and sent me to Carriacou, Grenada, West Indies.
I liked teaching Spanish on Carriacou so much that I "re-upped" after my two-year term.
While there, I met Willy, and married her in 1974.
Soon after, we returned to the US, where we had two children.
In graduate school in 1978, I met the person who would be my main mentor in anthropology and linguistics, and I started thinking that I could do linguistic research on Carriacou. I went back in 1979, then again in 1982-1984, 1999, 2003, and 2006. I published on my research, including a modest book describing the English Creole spoken there.
Meanwhile, Willy and I had two children and (so far) one grandchild.
I am now in in the midst of my 22nd year as an associate professor of anthropology and linguistics.

And none of this would likely have happened, if not for the Peace Corps. So thank you, Sargent Shriver.

William Rivers Pitt: "The Wrath of Fools"

2011-01-11T12:04:00.001-05:00

Will Pitt is one of my favorite essayists; his writing appears on Truthout.org and his essays are often re-posted elsewhere. His essay for Jan 10, 2011, titled The Wrath of Fools: An Open Letter to the Far Right, is particularly satisfying to me, as a linguist. Pitt insists that we avoid the temptation to attribute the hideous shootings at the Safeway in Tucson on Friday to a lone, deranged person operating in a vacuum:

"Mainstream" news personalities like David Gergen and John King bent over backwards warning people not to blame Sarah Palin and her ilk for this calamity. It was a sick man who did this, they said. Bollocks to that. I hate to break this to the "mainstream" media know-betters, but words matter. When people like Palin spray the airwaves with calls to violence and incantations of imminent doom, people like Loughner are listening, and prepared to act. The "mainstream" media lets it fly without any questions or rebuttal, because it's good for ratings, and here we are. Words matter. Play Russian Roulette long enough, and someone inevitably winds up dead.

And let's be clear: there is no moral equivalency between "right" and "left" here. There are no "liberals" calling for "Second Amendment remedies"; there are no "liberals" putting up maps with rifle cross-hairs marking key conservatives for elimination. This is a Right Thing. It's also a Race Thing, as Pitt points out:

I'm talking to you, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly, and Michael Savage, and Ann Coulter, and Laura Ingraham, and to every other right-wing tripe-spewing blowhard blogger and Fox News broadcaster. I hope you are proud of yourselves, because this is the day you get to reap what you have been relentlessly sowing since you were forced to encompass the unmitigated outrage of a Black man winning the office of President of the United States.

That's right, I said it. Anyone who thinks good old-fashioned American bigotry and racism are not the core motivation for a vast majority of these so-called "revolutionaries" should get their heads examined. You've heard of the "elephant in the middle of the room?" Well, this is the burning cross in the middle of the room, and no amount of spin will douse those flames.

The idea that this crime, and others like it, are the products of lone, deranged individuals, with little or no influence from the social and cultural context that they live in, is promoted by our culture's values of independence training and individualism. Everything is done by, and to, individuals; society does not exist. Remember the derision that followed Hillary Clinton's book It Takes a Village to Raise a Child?

We are doomed, unless we can change our culture. If we can't change it, our culture will destroy us.

Amendment: Perhaps I should end with "we are doomed, unless we can find our village."

My favorite recent photo

2011-01-10T15:56:00.000-05:00

Young fruit bats in Australia, orphaned by the recent flooding, at a bat clinic:

Bill O'Reilly thinks the tides can't be explained

2011-01-07T13:51:00.000-05:00

Stephen Colbert and Neil DeGrasse Tyson help him out:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Bill O'Reilly Proves God's Existence - Neil deGrasse Tyson

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

March to Keep Fear Alive

Ring in the new!

2011-01-01T12:54:00.000-05:00

This just in: A very baby Garter Snake (genus Thamnophis) cornered by our fierce terrier, Tinker Belle, this morning in the backyard. After the photo, it was relocated to a dog-free part of the yard.

Garter snakes are born live, so this little one probably has some siblings (and maybe even a mom) hanging around.

Garters are also mildly venomous, but they don't have fangs so they like to keep chewing when they bite something. People's response to the venom varies, in my experience, from a mild itch (me) to something resembling an allergic reaction (our daughter).

Ring out the old...

2010-12-31T19:15:00.001-05:00

It's New Year's Eve. Here in northern Florida, we finally had a northern Florida type day, sunny with temps at or near 70. This provided the excuse for a five-mile walk through the Julington-Durbin Preserve with our little terrier, Tinker Belle. The only hitch was that about ten minutes into the walk, I started having those nagging doubts about whether I locked the car up or not, so we walked to where I could check with the remote. It was reassuring to hear the beep of the alarm.

Even on the last day of 2010, some Fall colors linger here, and the subdued reds and browns of the deciduous trees make a nice contrast with the always-green evergreens, as you can see in these photos. The trails itself mostly winds over and around a prehistoric sand dune, at times skirting cypress swamp. There are relatively open areas, and there is also pretty thick forest.

We see, from time to time, deer, raccoons, possums, armadillos, squirrels of course, and various birds including hawks, crows, pileated woodpeckers, wild turkeys, and smaller modern dinosaurs that I can't identify. Reptiles are my strength, and we've seen, in warmer weather, gopher tortoises, terrapins, box turtles, yellow and red rat snakes, black racers, and even a water moccassin down in the swamp. The ranger says there are lots of pygmy rattlers, but in all my miles of walking this place I have yet to see one. I haven't seen the family of bobcats that are said to reside here, either.

There's one place in the woods where people have left a couple of strange items. One is what looks like an old trap, large enough for a bear but with the trap door rusted open.

Another is what appears to be a bath tub, accumulating leaves and whatnot which has gradually provided sufficient organic material so that now a small tree is growing in it.

Anyways, this walk was a nice way to end the year. It also provided me with time to think about how the year went, the good, the bad, and the ugly. First, the Good:

We had several opportunities (including now at the end of the year) to visit with our son and his new family, which includes our grandson Gabriel, who turned two yesterday. Sometimes, he's a Terrible Two, but mostly he's a Terrific Two.
Our daughter, the offspring that inherited my passion for critters, successfully completed her first semester of veterinary school, and she too is home for the holidays. She's studying in the Caribbean, and her semester began with a hurricane, but things went ok after that.
In August Willy and I got to revisit the place where we were married, Barbados, 36 and counting years ago. We had an excellent time, enhanced by our attendance at the conference of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics, a group that includes so many positively marvelous people who are both fun and intellectually stimulating to interact with.

The Bad?

By returning control of the House to Rethuglicans and reducing the Democrats' majority in the Senate, Americans once again proved to the world that they are the stupidest, most gullible, most easily manipulated voters on the Planet, perhaps in the Galaxy, if not the Universe.
Our President, questing ever for "bipartisanship" and "consensus," did not win for us national health care, a living minimum wage, or free education through university. Instead, he allowed viciously mean-spirited Republicans to dictate the terms of engagement at every turn, and in the end what we got was an ever-widening gap between the wealthiest 1 or 2 percent of the country and all the rest. I'm not saying he didn't get us anything at all, but it has been disappointing to say the least.
Our President upped the ante on the GW Bush administration by expanding a hopeless and idiotic "war on terror" in Afghanistan, so that now Afghanistan is really Obama's War. And it's stupid. And every US military person who is injured or dies in this Kafkaesque nightmare is a sacrificial lamb on the altar of our addiction to "war."
The increasing stranglehold of the corporatist/capitalist "business" model on higher education is most upsetting. Professors at universities are treated, now, like stock persons at Barnes & Noble, or Books-a-Million. We are "evaluated" by our students, who are notoriously unqualified for this task. And the students themselves have devolved. I started out teaching high school and middle school in 1969. When I came to UNF in 1989, the students were mature, eager to learn, happy to be in a classroom. Now, 22 years later, I feel like I'm back in middle school. It may take an entire semester to convince some of them that yes, the notes they take in class are important, and no, I am not going to provide them with a "study guide" for the test. [Disclaimer: Not all our students are like this, obviously; we have many great students, especially in our Anthropology Program. But the general feeling, that the quality of intellectual life is going down, remains. Added 1/1/11 at 6:15 pm.]

The Ugly?

The following people, listed in no particular order, are walking around, free to go pretty much where they want, with little likelihood that they will ever pay for the crimes they have committed on ourselves and many, many others who share the world with us: Henry Kissinger; George W. Bush; Dick Cheney; Richard Pearle; William Kristol; Donald Rumsfeld; Condoleeza Rice; Karl Rove; The Koch Brothers; John McCain; Etc.
The following people are dead, but they should be exhumed, placed on trial, and postemptively hanged at The Hague for what they did to us and others in the world: Richard Nixon; Ronald Reagan; Augusto Pinochet; Etc.

So, I have mixed feelings about 2010. Most of the non-good feelings go away when I'm with my grandson, though.

Why anthropologists are special

2010-12-23T10:21:00.002-05:00

Yeah, I know, I've posted a lot of cartoons and such lately but hey... And by the way, it's called participant observation.

Science is good

2010-12-20T10:28:00.000-05:00

From XKCD.com, one of the weirdest cartoon sites ever, but still...

Science is not that hard

2010-12-11T16:49:00.003-05:00

There's a lot of discussion, some reasonable, other not so much, about the AAA Executive Board's decision to drop "science" from its mission statement. There's a lot of history behind, especially the conflict between the (sometimes legitimate) postmodernist critique of science. But that's not what this post is about. This is about the nature of science.

Science reflects, I think, an attitude, a skeptical attitude, toward the world. The goal of science, as expressed by Jim Lett* and with which I wholeheartedly agree is that:

Science is an objective, logical, and systematic technique for acquiring synthetic propositional knowledge.

The best way to illustrate this is probably with an example. Every semester in linguistics I start out by presenting students with a little piece of data from Aymara:

[utama] 'your house'

I then ask them what they can tell me about Aymara from this data. They try heroically, but in the end we have to agree that it's not much. I ask them what do we need, and they say "more data." So I give them:

[yapusa] 'our field'

Does this help? No. Why not? Because while it is more data, but it's not evidence; there's no contrast, and therefore no information. We need evidence that produces a contrast. Eventually someone gets the idea to ask how Aymara says 'our house':

[utasa] 'our house'

Now we have contrast, because while both items contain 'house', one has 'your' and the other has 'our'. We're on our way. We can create some hypotheses:

[uta]     'house'
[yapu'   'field'
[-ma]    'your'
[-sa]     'our]

As we collect more data/evidence, they discover that [utaxa] can also mean 'our house'. We revise our hypotheses to show that [-sa] is first person plural inclusive (yours and mine) while [-xa] is exclusive (mine or ours, but not yours). At some point, they usually ask for 'his house':

[utapa] 'his house'

And we then have the hypothesis that [-pa] means 'his'. This is quickly demolished, however, as they continue to discover that [utapa] also may mean 'her house' or 'their house'. So, we have to revise our hypothesis about [-pa], which turns out to be 'her/his/their', i.e. 'third person', with no number or sex-based gender specified (Human gender is, however).

Eventually, we can take these hypotheses and construct a theory (grammar) of Aymara possession, which could look something like this:

Aymara personal possession can be explained using the categories + Human, + First Person, +Second Person:

[-xa]     +Human, +First Person, -Second Person 'my or our, not your'
[-ma]    +Human, -First Person, +Second Person 'your, not my'
[-sa]     +Human, +First Person, +Second Person 'your and my'
[-pa]    +Human, -First Person, -Second Person 'not your or my (her/his their)'

This set of interconnected hypotheses constitutes what scientists would call a theory (linguists would call it a grammar) of Aymara personal possession, which can be united with a slightly larger theory (grammar) of Aymara personal reference. This is what "science" does.

I suspect that for some people this doesn't look much like science, because we didn't need a lab, white coats, Bunsen burners and flasks, or intricate technology of any kind other than ourselves, and we didn't apply any quantitative measures. But it is science, because it proceeds from empirical data through evidence and hypotheses to theory. And it's objective (I didn't just dream it up, someone else can collect the same data) as well as self-correcting. There's even room for experimentation (can I say [yapuma], and if so what does it mean?).

In other words, science is more of attitude toward the world than anything else. And it's not that mysterious or difficult, anyone can "do science."

Reference
Lett, James. Science, Reason, and Anthropology: A Guide to Critical Thinking. Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.

Word meanings and other relations

2010-12-08T19:29:00.003-05:00

Most people who survive the US educational system know a little bit about what linguists call nyms. Nyms are sets of meaning relations that words have with each other.

For example, everybody's heard of synonyms and antonyms (we'll come back to antonyms a bit later). Synonyms are words that supposedly have the same meaning, like couch and sofa, or big and large. I say supposedly, though, because true synonyms are pretty rare. I suppose couch and sofa work ok, but check out these phrases:

my big brother
my large brother

Still think big and large are synonyms? Try the same experiment with little and small.

There are some nyms, though, that most people haven't heard about, for example:

Hyponyms. These are kinds of something, as in terrier, chihuahua, and German shepherd, which are kinds of dogs, which makes terrier, chihuahua, and German shepherd hyponyms of dog.

And:

Metonyms. We use these when we refer to a whole something by naming one of its parts. My favorite is suits, as in look like you're busy, the suits are coming. Here suits is a metonym for the people who wear business suits and are in charge, the bosses.

And again:

Partonyms (aka meronyms). These are parts of something: head, ear, leg, and tail are parts of a dog, so they are partonyms.

And one more:

Retronyms. These show up when we have to specify something's older form because the newer one has become the default. Acoustic guitar is a retronym; before there were electric guitars, all guitars were acoustic and if you spelled it out you were being redundant. Straight razor is probably another.

Before we get to antonyms, I might mention two other relations between words, one of which most people know, and the other maybe a bit less known:

Homophones. These are words that sound the same but have different meanings: led and lead; sweet and suite; feet and feat.

Homographs. These are words that are spelled the same, but pronounced differently and with different meanings. For example, dove (the bird) and dove (past tense of dive).

And now, at last, antonyms. Antonyms are supposed to be opposites, but it turns out it's a little more complicated than that; there are several flavors of antonyms:

Gradable antonyms. These are opposites that have intermediate forms or grades in between. For example, something doesn't have to be either hot or cold, it can be warm, lukewarm, tepid, cool, chilly, etc.

Nongradable (or complementary) antonyms. Unlike gradable antonyms, these have to be one or the other: single or married; dead or alive. There's nothing in between.

Converse antonyms. These antonyms entail each other; you can't be a member of the pair unless the other member also exists: wife and husband; parent and child; teacher and student. Can't have one without the other.

It's this last set of antonyms that's illustrated in the photo. Grampa Ron and Grandson Gabriel: converse antonyms.

Some fun with derivational morphology

2010-12-04T17:19:00.000-05:00

From today's Dilbert:

Hurricane Anti-Science hits New Orleans

2010-12-01T10:26:00.003-05:00

The American Anthropological Association, to which I belong, held its annual convention last week in New Orleans. I was unable to attend, and I may just not bother any more, if what was proposed at those meetings comes to pass.

Anthropologist Peter Wood, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, reports that the AAA Executive Board is proposing a new mission statement that deletes the term "science" and replaces it with "public understanding," as in this marked up paragraph:

Section 1. The purposes of the Association shall be to advance anthropology as the science that studies public understanding of humankind in all its aspects. through This includes, but is not limited to, archeological, biological, ethnological, social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, visual, and linguistic anthropological research; The Association also commits itself and to further the professional interests of American anthropologists, including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge, expertise, and interpretation. and its use to solve human problems.

Note that they have also deleted the term "ethnological," which has always referred to the comparative study of human cultures with the goal of developing broad general theories about Human Culture.

This is a disturbing development for a discipline that has, since the days of Franz Boas, the founder of American academic anthropology, seen itself as linking the sciences and humanities to gain the broadest and deepest knowledge of what humans are, where they came from, and so on. But it's not entirely unexpected, as for the last several decades people who call themselves "postmodernists" and "interpretivists" have gradually taken over the field, bringing with them a rejection of the empirically based, objective, systematic, logical, and rational methodologies developed by Boas and those who followed him.

One of the most dangerously bogus claims that these folks have made is that science cannot help sort out immoral from moral aspects of cultures. This is wrong, because we need good, empirically based, objective knowledge if we want to make valid assertions about who is doing what to whom, to what ends, and at what cost. Fuzzy-minded "interpretations" of, say, female genital mutilation may be useful and even necessary, but if all knowledge is contingent then any claims we make about the harm this does can always be contested and anthropologists become, essentially, over-educated journalists.

I have a feeling I may be writing more about this...

The Simpsons meet Avatar

2010-11-27T11:28:00.002-05:00

Why I like Alan Grayson!

2010-11-19T10:49:00.000-05:00

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette is at it again!

2010-11-11T21:17:00.002-05:00

On November 4, 2010, the faculty and staff at UL/Lafayette received an email that included this (my emphasis in bold):

Program Review and Budget Reduction Planning
Drs. Steve Landry and Carolyn Bruder are currently holding a second round of meetings with the academic deans to provide additional feedback regarding the deans’ original budget reduction plans and to elicit their responses to program review data. Following these meetings, the President will receive from Academic Affairs the initial recommendations for budget reductions and program elimination, prioritization, and reorganization. Should the President determine that some program closures must be initiated in response to the mid-year state budget reductions, campus leaders will meet with academic administrators, faculty, and students in the affected programs to explain the criteria that were considered in formulating a program elimination recommendation and to discuss the proposal with program constituents. Mid-year budget reductions from the state should be announced before the semester break that begins in December.

Really? You're going to tell people that they will no longer have a job in January just before Christmas break?

And the most important reason that they may get away with it: faculty at ULL, and indeed throughout the Louisiana system, have no faculty union. Here in Florida, when Florida State University fired some 21 faculty, including well-known anthropologist Dean Falk, the union, United Faculty of Florida, was able to force them to hire all these faculty back. The reason: FSU administrators did not follow the procedures for termination specified in the collective bargaining agreement, which is the contract between faculty and the school's managerial elite.

Not only do ULL faculty not have a collective bargaining agreement; they also, as of today, continue to work the fall semester without having signed any contract at all! [Added Nov 13: One has to wonder whether being late with contracts is a deliberate strategy; that would be even more evil than I expected.]

Here's a suggestion for any ULL administrators that might read this: If you want to cut your budget, end the football program. You've already canned Philosophy; "football" is not spelled with "ph." Wait, wait: maybe you should consider closing the school of Business Administration; after all, it's graduates from those schools who have put us in this mess we're in now.

(For my thoughts on other mischief perpetrated by ULL, go here and here.)

Some surprising word origins

2010-11-08T09:37:00.000-05:00

Best Colleges Online has a post on the sometimes surprising origins of 20 frequently used words. Interesting. Check it out.

Taking the "broken" out of "broken English," part 3

2010-10-28T13:27:00.005-04:00

So, what does a language need to have in order to count as a human language, and do those varieties of English sometimes regarded as "broken," "ungrammatical," or even just "slang" have what it takes?

There are several directions one might take in answering this question. The answers will not differ, but different audiences will require somewhat different approaches or different mixtures of the approaches.

The "Universal Grammar" approach. This assumes that the audience knows enough about linguistics to handle concepts such Principles and Parameters, Merge, Move, Projection, and so on.
The "Design Features" approach. This approach will work for both folks who have had linguistics and the unwashed, as the relevant design features (Hockett 1960) are relatively non-technical.
The "Language Arts" approach. This approach should work for almost anyone who has at least weathered the twelve years or so of "language arts" and related material usually offered in the public schools.

For this post, I will take maybe two examples from each of these approaches, in reverse order (i.e. from least to most technical).

Language Arts
(1) All (spoken) human languages have consonants and vowels. Vowels are sounds made by allowing air to pass freely through the vocal tract, with no obstruction. The classic Spanish vowels [a e i o u] are good examples, but of course English has a few more than that. My own (Appalachian) variety has about twelve; consider the middle sounds in the following: beat, bit, bait, bet, bat, cot, caught, coat, full, fool, but, bird. Consonants, on the other hand, are the sounds we make when we obstruct the air flow in some way by bringing different parts of the vocal apparatus together. Consider the first sounds in the words tip, chip, sip, nip, lip, rip, whip.

So, does English Creole have vowels and consonants? Of course, just consider the following words, spelled using a system I developed for reading materials; I have included a rendering using the International Phonetic Alphabet for those interested, as well as a gloss:

maniku   [maniku]   'opposum'
rachet   [ratʃɛt]   'prickly-pear cactus'
tong    [tɔŋ]   'town' (in Carriacou, refers to Hillsborough)

(2) All human languages have personal reference. Personal reference is the slightly fancy expression for personal pronouns and associated forms. All languages have at least first person (I, we) and second person (you). Many languages have third person (she, he, they) as well, but some don't (Latin didn't). Does English Creole have such things? You bet. Here are the forms usually used for subjects of sentences:

First Person:    a, mi (sing)       wi (plural)
Second Person:      yu (sing)              alyu (plural)
Third Person:         i, shi (sing)          dē (plural)

Design Features
Charles Hockett proposed a set of "design features" intended to shed light on the evolution of human language from other animal communication systems. By "design" he did not mean the "intelligent design" pushed by present-day creationists; he meant that these features were shaped by natural selection. Some features are shared by other animals, and some appear to be unique to human language (for a full listing, go here). Here I will focus on two or three design features that are necessary for human language, and show that English Creole has them.

(1) Displacement. All human languages allow their speakers to communicate about things that are not present in space and/or time. I can write about bonobos, even though there are none within sight. Or, I can mention Charles Hockett, even though he died in 2000. I can also talk about what I plan to teach in Monday's classes, which have not happened yet. In adition to talking about the present, English Creole speakers on Carriacou, especially the older ones, talk readily about Hurricane Janet, which devastated the island and nearby Grenada in 1955. They also make plans for the upcoming planting season, approaching holidays, and so on. They have displacement.

(2) Productivity/creativity. Humans can use language to speak and write things that have never been spoken or written before. Most of the sentences in this post are newly minted examples of English. English Creole speakers are highly creative, and in fact there is a musical genre, soca/calypso, that especially capitalizes on this feature as singers compete in creating and performing new, never before heard material. In 1979, folks on Carriacou speculated on the impending return to Earth of Skylab.

(3) Duality of patterning. This may be the most difficult design feature to explain easily, but it will be worth the effort. Languages are composed first of all of a finite number of perceptually discrete vowels and consonants; how many depends on the language. These are called phonemes. Phonemes do not carry meaning themselves, but instead combine and recombine to form meaningful units (words, prefixes, suffixes, etc.). In English, the consonant phonemes /p t k/ can combine with the vowel phoneme /æ/ (the vowel in US English cat) to form at least the following words: /æt/ 'at'; /kæt/ 'cat'; /tæk/ 'tack'; /ækt/ 'act'; /pækt/ 'pact'; /tækt/ 'tact'; and so on. English Creole speakers do not normally have the /æ/ vowel, but they do have /a/, the vowel in US English cot. With this vowel and the same three consonants, some of the words they can form are: /ka/ 'car'; /at/ 'at'; /tak/ 'talk'; /papa/ 'dad'; /tap/ 'top'; /pat/ 'part'; and so on. So English Creole does have duality of patterning.

And by the way, the duality of patterning feature is what makes phonologically-based ("alphabetic") writing systems the easiest to learn: they map onto our naturally evolved mental organization of language.

Universal Grammar
Universal Grammar is "the system of categories, operations, and principles shared by all human languages and considered to be innate" (O'Grady et al 2005: 657). Two operations that are considered to be universal are Merge and Move.

(1) Merge. The Merge operation allows for elements of language to be combined at various levels: sounds are combined into words, words into phrases, and phrases into sentences. For sounds into words, see the description of the Duality of Patterning feature above. For the rest, note:

Words into phrases: [a], [the], [cat], [mouse] → [the cat], [a mouse]
Phrases into a bigger phrase: [a mouse], [ate] → [ate a mouse]
Phrases into sentence: [the cat ate a mouse]

Does Creole have Merge? Here is the above English example, repeated word-for-word:

Words into phrases: [a], [di], [kyat], [mows] → [di kyat], [a mows]
Phrases into a bigger phrase: [a mows], [it] → [it a mows]
Phrases into sentence: [di kyat it a mows]

(2) Move. The Move operation allows for constituents (words, phrases) to be moved out of their usual position and into another position. For example, in English yes-no type questions can be formed by moving the Auxiliary Verb to the front (the underlined space represents the original position of the Auxiliary):

The cat is in the kitchen.   →   Is the cat __ in the kitchen?

In so-called Wh- questions, which are marked by Interrogative Pronouns, English moves both the Auxiliary and the Interrogative to the front:

The cat is in the kitchen.   →   Where is the cat __ __?

Creole also has the Move operation. The difference, however, is that Creole does not have a Move Auxiliary rule; it does have the Move Interrogative rule. So the yes-no question in Creole is marked by intonation Again, word-for-word:

Di kyat dē in di kichin.   →   Di kyat dē in di kichin?↑

But not (the asterisk means the sentence is ungrammatical): *Dē di kyat __ in di kichin?

For Wh- questions, Creole moves the Interrogative, like English, but not the Auxiliary:

Di kyat dē in di kichin.   → We di kyat dē __?

Wrapping up, then: Whichever approach you take, Creole (and other "broken" Englishes) can be shown to have what any language needs to be considered a human language. A Martian linguist would not see Creole as standing apart from the other dialects of the Human Language.

Stay tuned for the next installment, in which we consider things present in "broken" English that might be missing from the standard language...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hockett, Charles. 1960. "The Origin of Speech". in Scientific American, 203, pp. 89–97.
O'Grady, William, et al. 2005. Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.

This just about sums it all up...

2010-10-15T08:10:00.002-04:00

...but you'll have to go below the fold to see it. Caution: not for pets or small children.

Chimp vs. human vocal tracts

2010-10-05T10:44:00.002-04:00

I may write more about this later, but for now just examine the differences.

Later... (added on Oct 9, 2010):

Essentially, in apes the larynx is higher and the epiglottis can lock with the velum; in humans the larynx is too low for this to happen. Also, ape tongue movement is mostly in-out, while humans can move the muscle up and down as well as in-out. Furthermore, the tube through which air passes from the glottis out to the lips is gently curved in apes, but in humans it forms a right angle. Anyone who plays any kind of wind instrument knows that different shapes produce different sounds.

What all this means is that apes (and human newborns, who are similar) cannot produce sounds with the acoustic properties of adult human speech. And it's why it was such a stroke of genius to try out manually-produced sign languages on them.

Taking the "broken" out of "broken English," part 2

2010-09-28T15:18:00.001-04:00

Before I move on to what a language needs in order to be a human language, let me take care of one other thing that people sometimes see as "missing" from African American English, the English-lexicon creoles, etc. I am speaking of the copula.

The copula is a "linking verb" (Crystal 1991: 84). The most frequently used one in English is probably be and its conjugated forms: am, is, are; was, were; being; been. The function of the copula is to link phrasal constituents of sentences, especially a subject and its predicate. Predicates in English that can be linked to a subject by the copula include:

(1) Noun Phrase:   This is a book.
      Prepositional Phrase:   They are at school.
      Verb Phrase:   I am walking home.
      Adjective Phrase:   She is tall.

In the English Creole that I am using for this exercise, only the first two would have a copula, and only one of those uses something that sounds like English is- but more about that in a later installment. The other two would look like this:

(2) Verb Phrase: A wakin hom.
       Adjective phrase: Shi tal.

In some varieties of African-American, the first two would also usually not have a linking verb. Note the following from AAVE:

(3) Noun Phrase:     This a book.
       Prepositional Phrase:     They at school.

At some times and places in the past (and sometimes even now) children, especially African American children, who produced sentences like those in (2) and (3) were labeled as cognitively deficient or language-impaired, because the sentences don't contain an identifiable "verb," a thing we deem necessary for complete sentences in English, as in (1) above. Such children have even been placed in Special Education classes, and in fact the Head Start Program was in its earliest years designed to get African American children out of their supposedly language-deficient homes.

But there's a problem, and it's not a minor one. The languages of the world are not all in agreement about what needs or doesn't need to appear in the predicate of a sentence. All languages have predicates, but they can be interestingly and even surprisingly different in terms of what they demand. To give an extreme example, Aymara, a language found mainly in the Andes in the region where Perú, Bolivia, and Chile intersect, demands an accounting of the source of the information presented in the predicate. The source might be personal knowledge (I was a witness), knowledge through language (a witness told me), evidence of some kind that I or someone else saw, a legend or myth about which nobody alive has personal knowledge, or even an admission that no source is forthcoming (I'm just talking for the sake of talking). In English we can say, with impunity, she ate the cheese, without any source of evidence or validity whatsoever. Aymara requires more:

(4) Jupax kis manq'iwa (she ate the cheese, and I saw her do it).
       Jupax kis manq'iwa siwa (someone who saw her says that she ate the cheese).
       Jupax kis manq'pachawa (I saw evidence-maybe cheese crumbs- that she ate the cheese).
       Jupax kis manq'itayna   (the old stories say she ate the cheese).
       Jupax kis manq'chïxa   (maybe she ate the cheese, maybe she didn't, whatever...)

The point is that you have to do something, otherwise the sentence is not grammatical, but this is not required for English except in very special contexts (scientific papers, for example, but certainly not in political discourse!). The further point is that there are plenty of languages around that don't require "verbs" in places where Accepted English requires them. Take the Russian translations of the sentences in (2) and (3):

(5) Eto knyiga   (this ~~is a~~ book).
       Oni v shkole (they ~~are~~ at school).
       Ona vysokaya (she is tall).

There are other, unrelated languages I could ppoint to. For example, here are a couple in Malay-Indonesian:

(6) Ini kuda   (this ~~is a~~ horse).
       Kuda ini bagus   (this horse is good).

And so on. The point, which I may or may not have taken too long to make, is that languages, including African American ones, differ in what they demand of the predicates of their sentences, and yet they all work as human languages.

No child is "cognitively deficient" just because they might say something like she my teacher. To insist otherwise is simply to be racist.

May Day in September

2010-09-06T11:07:00.001-04:00

Today is "Labor Day" in the United States, a day that is supposed to commemorate the Workers of our fair land. Most countries do this on May 1. The May 1 holiday was declared in 1891 by international labor organizations in remembrance, ironically, of the Chicago Haymarket Riots of 1886, in which workers demonstrated for among other things the eight-hour day. President Cleveland thought that having Labor Day on that day might promote further worker unrest, so he set it for the first Monday in September.

Anyway, history aside, it is deeply ironic that we even have a "Labor Day," since we are, arguably, the country of the world that least values or respects labor. A couple of points that should make you cranky:

In the US, the average CEO of a major corporation "earns" in one day what the average worker earns in a year.
Last year, the CEO of my health insurance ~~klepto~~- corporation "earned" my annual salary every hour.
Exact figures vary, but it's safe to say that roughly 10% of the US population controls at least 80% of the nation's wealth, while the other 90% of the population shares about 20% of the total wealth.
Many workers who have a full-time (40 hours a week) job, and many who work at more than one job, are still around or below the poverty line and cannot afford to live in a house or apartment.
Increasingly, even workers who have a full-time job do not have health care and cannot afford to help their children attend colleges and universities.
Workers who attempt to unionize in the US are frequently prevented from doing so, a violation of Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Until we have at least a federally mandated living minimum wage and unhindered access to unions, I do not think that we can say that we "value" or "respect" labor.

Walter Goldschmidt (1913-2010)

2010-09-03T06:42:00.000-04:00

We have lost a remarkable anthropologist who, among many other things, was president of the American Anthropological Association in 1976. His way of looking at humanity comes up every time I discuss ethnocentrism and cultural relativism. I don't have a link to an official obituary yet, but when one appears I'll post it here. Meanwhile, explore his blog and be impressed by his command of the anthropological enterprise.

I have the ears of a teenager!

2010-09-01T19:35:00.000-04:00

This afternoon on NPR's Talk of the Nation, host Neil Conan interviewed Howard Stapleton, the inventor of a thing called the Mosquito:

The device emits a high-pitched sound that drives teens crazy but can't be heard by most adults over 25. Inventor Howard Stapleton explains how it works.

The idea is that those pesky teenagers, who are usually up to no good anyway, are mentally jangled by the high buzzing sound and move on. But here's the thing: when they played the sound on the radio, I heard it perfectly, but Neal said he couldn't hear it at all!

And I'm 65! But I feel 19...

My Ebonics interview

2010-08-26T13:47:00.002-04:00

On Tuesday morning I was interviewed by News 4 Jacksonville (WJXT), our local television station. The interview, which you can see here, was prompted by a recent call from the Drug Enforcement Agency for "linguists" who could assists their agents in understanding the language on surreptitiously recorded telephone calls between drug dealers and customers.

In the interview, I pointed out that Ebonics (African American Vernacular English) is a valid form of human language, with all the linguistic properties of French, Spanish, or any other language. I suggested that a combination of phonological, grammatical, and lexical features of AAVE could easily combine to render it not understandable to people unfamiliar with this language variety, and I gave a couple of examples (not included in the video):

She be working at Publix.
It's a book on the floor.*

I also offered the opinion that there might be ethical issues involved when professional linguists take on the task of helping the DEA carry out its policies, and I drew the analogy with the American Anthropological Association's resolution condemning the use of anthropologists by the military in the "Human Terrains System" in Iraq and elsewhere. This sort of made it into the video, though they didn't show me saying it.

However, what's really interesting are the comments posted by people who saw the report. Here's a sample:

Some people are so lazy they can't even muster enough energy to talk right. Pathetic.

Ebonics is now a dialect because white people are scared to tell them they are stupid, let's just call the elephant in the room out, the 60's are over, it's time for blacks to come on over and sit at the American table, obviously having a culture within a culture isn't working for them.

How the he!! is Ebonics considered a dialect? It sounds like your talking with a mouth full of sh!t

And here's my favorite:

I get the need for the "translators" but for some academic walking brain to classify ebonics as a dialect is further proof of just how far society will go to coddle those too lazy to speak properly!

There was at least one relatively positive comment:

Back in the late 80's while in college, I took a linguistics class. The teacher was black, of an island nation not Africa (This is relevant due to the topic). I don't recall the details, but he did make a convincing stand regarding Ebonics as a dialect. I know Ebonics just sounds like a bunch of uneducated talk, but before you jump educate yourself a bit.

It's interesting. As of this writing, there are about 150 comments posted, nearly all deriding, in one way or another, the idea that Ebonics could be a language. This suggests a catastrophic failure of the public school "language arts" curriculum. If the topic were physics, most people would defer to the physicists; if the topic were digestion, even though most people can digest food, they would still defer to the gastroenterologists. But if the topic is language, everyone thinks they're a linguist.

-----------------------
*She works at Publix (it's her job, she may not be there right now).
There is a book on the floor.

Taking the "broken" out of "broken English"

2010-08-16T15:43:00.002-04:00

My presentation at the meetings of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics last week centered on sharing a teaching strategy for reducing the prejudice I encounter, in my classes and elsewhere, toward "non-standard" varieties of language. These include African American Vernacular English (AAVE), any of a number of creole languages (Jamaican, Haitian, etc.), and even my own Upper South variety of Appalachian English.

This is clearly a problem that isn't going to go away soon. Every semester for the last 20+ years I have faced a new group of students in my introductions to linguistics, and every semester these students bring with them the very same nonsense about the nature of language, and the nature of English. Some of that nonsense: English has five vowels (because there are five or six, depending on how you count, vowel letters); the articles (the, a/an) are adjectives that modify their nouns; sentences containing "double negatives" actually are affirmative; dialects that deviate from "standard English" are inferior, stupid, illogical, etc.; and so on, and on.

Because I work on "non-standard" languages, I may have heard all this more than most. In 1979, while gathering data for a description of the English Creole spoken in Carriacou, Grenada, I had one person, a visitor from Canada, tell me that Carriacou people had no right to their own words for things (mug for pitcher, for example), and that their children should be taken away and placed in standard-speaking homes because if they spoke Creole all their lives, their brain cells would deteriorate. During the same fieldwork, a Grenadian physician told me that if I were successful in showing that Creole speakers followed grammar rules, that would show that they were human beings worthy of better treatment than that usually dealt out to them. And that same year, in the National Geographic Magazine, Ethel Starbird wrote that people of St. Vincent, Grenada, and the Grenadines speak English "with a certain free-form style."

So, over the years I have developed a way of approaching the problem. It involves some linguistic sophistication, so I usually do it toward the end of an introductory linguistics course. Now and then, though, I do it as a Lone Ranger exercise (ride in, fire a few silver bullets, ride out). This might be, for example, a literature course in which students are reading a lot of AAVE. The target language is most often AAVE or Appalachian, but sometimes I'm asked to do the exercise for Gullah in a course on the peoples and cultures of the Sea Island, and every couple of years I do it for Caribbean Creole in my own course on the West Indies. The language can change, but the method and many of the details remain much the same. For this iteration, I am using the English Creole spoken in Carriacou.

The strategy is to begin with examples of things people notice that make Creole seem unlike English. Usually, this involves features that are "missing," features that may be attributed to a lack of education although in fact they are simply features of the language in question. Here are a couple of things that might be perceived as "missing" in Creole:

The plural suffix (-s)
The possessive suffix (-'s)
Dental fricatives (the "th" sounds)

The trick is to show that these features are not necessary for something to be a human language. For example, many languages do not overtly mark number on nouns. Two that come quickly to mind are Bambara, a West African language, and.... wait for it..... French! Here's how this looks (note that in Bambara, the number follows the noun):

English:     one cow...    three cows
Creole:       wan kow...     tri kow
Bambara:   mishi kele...   mishi saba
French:       une vache...   trois vaches

Okay, I know what you're thinking: the French plural vaches has an -s on the end, so it's not an example. But here's the thing: both vache and vaches are pronounced [vaʃ], roughly the first syllable in the name "Vashti."

Let's take the possessive suffix. Note the following.

English: Anansi's shoulder
Creole: Anansi shōlda

It's pretty easy to find languages that do not require marking on nouns for possessive.

Bhasa Indonesian: kuda Ali (Ali's horse)
Urhobo Isoko: emete ose (daughter [of] father; father's daughter)

So, neither a plural affix nor a possessive is required for something to be a human language. But what about those dental fricatives?

English: thin, then
Creole: tin, den

It turns out that the sounds [θ], as in thin, and [ð] as in then, are quite rare among the world's languages. And furthermore, we can say that Creole speakers use [t] and [d] as substitutes for them, much as English speakers substitute an aspirated alveolar [tʰ] for unaspirated dental [t̪] in Spanish words like taco. This process of sound substitution happens whenever languages collide, so it's ton be expected in creole languages.

So, something doesn't need possessive or plural affixes, or "th" sounds, to be considered an example of human language. But what does it need? We'll tackle that issue in the next installment.

Starbird, E. 1979. Taking it as it comes: St. Vincent, the Grenadines, and Grenada. National Geographic 156 (September 1979), pages 399-425.

Conference blogging 3

2010-08-16T14:57:00.000-04:00

We're back home now, but I have to share this. In one of the panels I met a Cuban musicologist who had been part of a team recording folk music on Carriacou back in the 1980s, just before the Grenada Revolution imploded and the US did their "intervasion," as some Grenadians called it.

So, here Rolando Pérez Fernández presents me with a copy of the record he produced from that fieldwork. I promised to reciprocate by transcribing what I could of the French and English Creole that might be heard on the record. But first, I have to find someone to convert the analog LP to digital. Wow!

Conference blogging 2

2010-08-11T12:16:00.000-04:00

Well, it's surprisingly hard to keep up with blogging when you're at a conference of linguists and what you mostly want to do is talk. This is probably more true of me than most, since I'm the only linguist at my university. It's rare that I'm surrounded by people who totally understand concepts like allophone and absence of copula. Too much fun.

Also, it's hard to be cranky when the view from your hotel balcony is of the Caribbean Sea. The waves are rolling gently over a line of reefs a few yards off the beach, and a humongous hummingbird flits around in the tree just outside. I am playing hooky from a session going on now to write a bit here before we meet downstairs for lunch.

Today is the third day of the conference, and my two duties are scheduled for tomorrow. I chair a session on varieties of French Creole in the morning, then in the afternoon I do a presentation on a tentative method I've worked out for reducing linguistic prejudice among my students against African-American and other "non-standard" forms of English.

One of the really cool and satisfying things about these conferences is that I get to meet and interact with people whose names were in my dissertation bibliography these many years ago: in particular this time folks like Mervyn Alleyne, John Rickford, and Bernadette Farquhar. It was Farquhar's 1974 dissertation on Antiguan Creole, discovered by me at the University of Florida Library's Latin American Collection in 1978, that as I told her yesterday "ruined my life, but in a good way." Her description of Antiguan Creole led me to conceive of doing similar work in Carriacou, where I had been a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1971-74.

The conference, incidentally, is celebrating the late Richard Allsopp, a scholar of Caribbean languages who has very unfortunately passed away but who I had met some years back. His magnum opus I suppose is the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, published by Oxford in 1996, with a 2003 paperback edition from the University of the West Indies Press. However, it was earlier article* on Africanisms in Caribbean creoles that contributed most to my own research by documenting how idioms in African languages had been carried to the New World by slaves and relexified to produce expressions such as "cut-eye" and "hard-ears."

More later...

*Allsopp, R. 1977. Africanisms in the Idiom of Caribbean English. In Language and Linguistic Problems in Africa, ed by P. Kotey and H. Der-Houssikian. Columbia SC: Hornbeam Press. Pages 429-41.

Interesting...

2010-08-09T10:55:00.001-04:00

From a friend:

Did you know that the words "race car" spelled backwards still spells
"race car"?

That "eat" is the only word that, if you take the 1st letter and move
it to the last, spells its past tense, "ate"?

And if you rearrange the letters in "so-called tea party Republicans,"
and add just a few more letters, it spells: "Shut the hell up you
free-loading, progress-blocking, benefit-grabbing, resource-sucking,
violent, hypocritical assholes, and face the fact that you nearly
wrecked the country under Bush."

Conference blogging

2010-08-09T10:51:00.000-04:00

This week we're at the meetings of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics, in Barbados. Life is pretty good! We arrived yesterday late afternoon, after being delayed for two hours in Miami. The two hours were spent sitting on the plane, first waiting for the arrival of a replacement copilot, and then waiting for a pretty vigorous thunderstorm to calm down.

Amazingly, although we're deep in the Tropics, it's cooler and more comfortable here than Jacksonville has been this summer. We've been consistently in the high 90s or at 100, with heat indexes in 105-110 range. Here, today, it's in the mid-80s and there's a wonderful breeze coming in off the water, which is maybe at most 100 yards from our hotel room.

While waiting to board in Miami several conference attendees joined us, including the Society President John Rickford and his wife Angela, who have researched extensively on African-American English and its uses. More attendees appeared at breakfast this morning. It's always fun to meet someone you've known, and who has known you, from publications, but whom you've never encountered in person until a conference.

It should be a good time...

The most destructive use ever of weapons of mass destruction

2010-08-06T15:14:00.000-04:00

This is the 65th anniversary of the US's bombing of Hiroshima, followed shortly after by a repeat on Nagasaki. As I wrote last year:

I was just under a month old on August 6, 1945. On that day, a US bomber dropped the bizarrely named nuclear bomb "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, Japan, killing up to 140,000 people, 80,000 of them instantly. Three days later, US forces dropped a second bomb, "Fat Man," on Nagasaki, killing another 80,000. Besides those who died, many survivors lived with terrible injuries, and for many years babies were born deformed by the lingering effects of the radiation.

So, in less than a week 64 [now 65] years ago, the United States of America committed the two most destructive uses of weapons of mass destruction in the history of humankind. The usual defense is that it was necessary to end the war, but this is subject to debate. There is also evidence that the real purpose was to show the Soviet Union that we had the Bomb and we were crazy enough to use it, needed or not. I don't know which is true, perhaps both are. What I do know is that possession of nuclear weapons by the US makes me just as nervous as their possession by any other nation. And why shouldn't it, given that we are the only ones who, so far, who have actually used them?

This year, Life.com has posted a gallery of unpublished images.

New Blog Link

2010-08-05T21:29:00.000-04:00

There's a new link over on the left to the blog Anthro Jack, written by a friend from the Anthro-L list. Anthro Jack is now participating and observing in the predominantly Cree speaking community of Chisasibi, a town near the eastern shore of James Bay in northern Québec. AJ is investigating the role of alcohol in the culture and society of Chisasibi. Fascinating stuff, check it out!

For me, one interesting thing going on in Chisasibi is that they use the Cree syllabary to write the language. The word Chisasibi looks like this:

ᒋᓴᓱᐱ

Too cool!

The Primate Diaries is now in exile

2010-08-02T09:03:00.000-04:00

Eric Michael Johnson has taken his excellent blog, The Primate Diaries, off of Scienceblogs, but he's still writing. He calls his new blog The Primate Diaries in Exile. Check it out.

Marvin Harris on holistic anthropology

2010-07-26T16:02:00.000-04:00

From Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times, page 139 (Altamira Press 1999):

Anthropologists who are committed to holism must come to terms with the risks of making mistakes. In this connection, warning students that the findings of science are provisional and subject to various distortions and biases may help to relieve some of the angst associated with holistic perspectives. Another point to be kept in mind is that the misinformation transmitted through a holistic text or introductory class is not likely to be as remote from current expert opinion as the usual non-academic sources of knowledge about biocultural evolution, such as creationism and New Age necromancy. Bear in mind that only a very small percentage of students take introductory courses in anthropology in order to prepare for graduate school; the great majority are only passing through, and one anthropology course is all they will ever take. Indeed, that one anthropology course may be the only course in the social sciences they will ever take. Given the facts that anthropology has so much to say, that its knowledge is vital for our ability to live as informed and responsible citizens of the world, and that there is so little time and space in which to say it, our students deserve to have us try to give them the most holistic view possible.

Amen.

"Culture" comes to the Naval Academy

2010-07-22T13:14:00.000-04:00

From an article in today's Washington Post:

Last month, the Naval Academy department then known as Department of Language Studies quietly changed its name to Department of Language and Cultures.

It hardly registers as big news. But to Clementine Fujimura, the lone anthropology professor at the Annapolis campus, the change is "huge."

Why? "Because it's acknowledging that the Navy is accepting that we need to be teaching about culture," she said.

Yeah, well, I'm not so sure that this is the "huge news" Dr. Fujimura thinks it is. But first, I have a question:

The Naval Academy only has one anthropologist on faculty??? WTF?!?

Moving on. Here's why I think that this may not be something to celebrate. When academic departments outside of anthropology teach "culture," they generally have in mind a sort of dumbed-down, laundry-list approach to culture: Look at the exotic foods these folks eat, or their clothing, or the gestures they use for "come here" and "good-bye." They rarely, if ever, apply the insights that anthropology has developed into the nature and structure of culture as a human adaptation.

Perhaps Dr. Fujimura is happy with this, but she shouldn't be, unless she happens to count herself among the "postmodern" "interpretivist" cultural types who have participated in the trivialization of the culture concept over the last couple of decades.

Here at UNF, our World Languages department (a fine name, I think) has proposed a name change to the "Department of Language, Literature, and Culture." As a group, we in the anthropology program saw this as outlandishly over-reaching (wouldn't the English Department have to be absorbed?), as well as a usurpation of what is, traditionally, the academic domain of anthropology. Since we are now in the middle of summer, we don't know whether World Languages' quest for this name change will be picked up in the fall or not, but there will certainly be some opposition.
And by the way, toward the end of the full WaPo article there is this:

...anthropologists have ever been wary of the use to which their profession might be put by the military, whose purpose, of course, goes far beyond the passive study of other cultures.

Excuse me. Anthropologist have never really been "passive" in their study of cultures. The central research method of cultural anthropology is not called participant observation for nothing. And E. B. Tylor (1832-1917) referred to anthropology as "essentially a reformer's science... active at once in aiding progress and in removing hindrance" (quoted in Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (p. 62), Altamira Press 1999).

Are jobs more important than health?

2010-07-17T22:05:00.000-04:00

Louisiana governor ~~Booby~~ Bobby Jindal published an op-ed piece in The Washington Post today. Commenting on President Obama's moratorium on deep-water offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, he wrote:

This ill-advised and ill-considered moratorium, which a federal judge called "arbitrary" and "capricious," creates a second disaster for our economy, throwing thousands of hardworking folks out of their jobs and causing real damage to many families.

Uh, yeah: "arbitrary." A decision to do something relatively timid, compared to what really ought to be done, to help ensure that the environmental and social disaster that just actually happened in the Gulf doesn't repeat itself is "arbitrary."

What Jindal's complaint reminds me of is the argument about tobacco and jobs. We know tobacco products kill people, and not just those who actually use them, by the way. But, we can't just stop growing them, because all those tobacco farmers would lose their "traditional way of making a living." Well, you know what: If your "traditional way of making a living" is bad for people and the planet, you should be told to find another way to make a living.

That applies to tobacco farmers, whose "traditional way of making a living" feeds an addiction that makes people sick and dead, and it also applies to people who "make a living" by drilling into deep water to extract oil to feed our other major addiction.

Of course, I'm not saying that either tobacco farmers or oil workers should simply be thrown on the landfill of history. Surely we, the richest country in the world, could simply pay all these folks to not grow tobacco or drill for oil.

A short dose of irony

2010-07-14T21:39:00.000-04:00

This post will be vague, as I don't want to bother looking up the details and I'm relying on an increasingly faulty memory. Anyways, a couple of says ago I listened to some Republicanoid apologist argue that we should amend the Constitution to make our conditions for citizenship more stringent, like in some European countries. In some of those countries, a child born in the country is not automatically a citizen unless at least one of the parents can establish that they are in the country legally. In the US, a child born in the country is a citizen, regardless of the status of the parents.

So, European policy is good, US policy is bad. And therein lies the irony. It wasn't long ago that these same people were screaming that government involvement in health care, like, you know, they have in Europe, would be evil. The US system, in which capitalist kleptocrats control our access to health care, about as un-European as you can get, was just great.

So, is Europe good or bad? Obviously, Republicans can't make up their minds.

Fifty years at Gombe

2010-07-14T18:25:00.001-04:00

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the research, begun by Jane Goodall, on the chimpanzees that inhabit the Gombe Stream area on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. This groundbreaking, dare I say it, ethnographic study of this community of chimps has contributed enormously to our knowledge about these cousins of ours.

One of the stars of the research was Flo (ca. 1929–1972), the matriarch of the "F Family," pictured here. She is the only chimpanzee to have an obituary published in the Times of London. She's shown here fishing for termites, one of the cultural activities possessed by this community that anthropologists were not aware of prior to this research.

As reported on the Smithsonian Magazine web site, the Gombe chimps have taught us lots of interesting things about chimps, including the following (the bolded lead is from the web site; the comments that follow are mine):

Chimpanzees eat meat. Not all chimp communities do this, but at Gombe and in other places both males and females hunt monkeys, small antelopes, and other game, and then share the meat afterwards.
Chimpanzees use tools. These include chewed up leaves for sponges, plant stems for termite fishing, and even stones for breaking open certain hard-shelled fruits. Again, the exact repertoire varies from group to group and reflects social learning passed on mostly from mothers to their offspring.
Chimpanzees engage in warfare. I'm not sure I'd call it warfare, but yes, the group at Gombe sends out its males from time to patrol the borders of their territory, and they have been known to systematically attack and kill members of neighboring communities.
Chimpanzees can be cannibals. As can humans. This is apparently extremely rare, though, and involved a mother and daughter stealing infants and killing and eating them.
Chimpanzees have complex social relationships. Chimps live in ranked societies. There is a hierarchy for females as well as males, and the highest ranking males are usually the sons of high-ranking females. The core of the group is a mother and her children. Chimps are promiscuous, and while chimps normally know very well who their mothers are, they do not know their fathers. They also know their siblings, and sex between siblings, as well as between mothers and sons, is very rare. Females frequently seek a male from a neighboring group to mate with.

All in all, the Gombe chimps have shown us that these fellow primates have individual personalities, socially transmitted culture*, and complex lives. Let's hope we don't send them into oblivion with our homocentric arrogance and short-sightedness.

*Really, proto-culture, that is, culture without language.

The bureaukleptocrats are still at it!

2010-07-09T18:04:00.000-04:00

Imagine a university where the following things happen:

A "short" summer course is offered, to be taught in July, and students begin registering and paying for it.
By early June, only eight students have registered, so some ~~klepto~~ administrator decides to cancel the class. The instructor slated to the teach the class is notified, not in writing, but verbally.
The day before the class is scheduled to begin, the class is still listed on the university's web site, and nobody, other than the instructor, has been told that it was canceled.
On the first day of class, the course is still online and the eight students are still registered. The instructor goes to the classroom at the appropriate time. Seven students are present. None have been told that the class was canceled. Some are upset to learn this, since the course is required for their major. When asked whether they had paid for the class, most students answer affirmatively.
Finally, the day after the first class, the course is removed from the web site.
At least one student was able to get a Late Schedule Adjustment in order to register for a different class.
As of this writing, the instructor still has not received official, written word that the course was canceled.

If there seems to be no clear, established routine for canceling classes and informing those affected in a timely manner, this is because the ~~klepto~~ administrators of this university prefer to keep it that way. As one of them was reported to have stated in a faculty senate meeting, they prefer to keep things vague, so that they can be "flexible." One wonders what this means. We have already learned that one thing it means is that they can decide, after the fact, whether and what to pay a faculty member for teaching a course. Perhaps it also means that they can keep the money students have paid for registration as long as they want to, all the while pocketing the interest.

Apparently, also, this ~~klepto~~ administration prefers to offer students fewer choices in courses, and herd everyone into one large class. In the case described above, they "saved" $1200 (the medieval salary this instructor would have received) by canceling a class that would have brought in at least $3840 in tuition and fees. Based on this evidence, they aren't really very smart.

The 4th of July

2010-07-04T21:50:00.003-04:00

Today is our "Independence Day." It seems as though this might be a day to pause and reflect on what we are, and what we could be. If we actually did this on any other day, I would be willing to cut us some slack on this day, but we don't. We seem to be in a perpetual state of self-delusion.

One of our major delusions is that what we experienced in the aftermath of our declaration on July 4, 1776, was a revolution. But was it, really? In the end the people who were in control on the ground were still in control. The slaves were still slaves, the poor were still poor. Native Americans were on the verge of experiencing, if they had not already experienced it, one of the more egregious cases of genocide and ethnocide* in world history.

The Jamaican historian of the Caribbean Franklin Knight points out, in his The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, that the Haitian revolution, which culminated in 1804, was the first successful revolution in the Americas. In the end, the former slaves were on top, and the former landowners had been killed or fled to places like Louisiana. At the end of the American "revolution," the former elites were still the elites.

Some other delusions we have about ourselves are listed and explained on this web site. Among them:

When politicians and regular folk talk about “Protecting our American Way of Life” ™ they are referring to our “freedoms,” our ability to worship the way that we wish to do so, dress the way we wish to do so, and so on.
The USA is the best, most desirable place in the world, and everyone in the world, if they had a choice, would want to live here.
America and Americans are the most giving people in the world – we help out other countries more so than any other country does.
America has the best health care system in the world. Anyone who needs care can go and get it at an emergency room, whether they have money or not.
“The Government” (and/or Government employees/employment, and/or “bigger government”) is bad/useless, and private sector employees are always more useful/valuable/productive.
The American people have the most civil (and other) rights, freedom and privacy on the planet.
Liberals/Progressives and their leaders just want the government to take care of all of their needs, from the “cradle to the grave,” they don’t believe in personal responsibility, they expect the government to somehow magically make everything fair, and they want the population to be controlled by the government. That’s how it is in Europe, and that’s what the Liberals want here too.

Think about it.

*Ethnocide is the anthropological term for destruction of a culture that leaves the people in place. This was the official US policy toward Native Americans, especially late in the 19th century.

Manatee interlude

2010-06-22T22:18:00.000-04:00

This morning, I took our dog for a walk out on a pier that juts into the St. Johns River near our home. There is a little docking platform about halfway out, and when we got there we discovered a pod of half a dozen or more manatees (Trichechus manatus) churning up the water around the dock, nibbling algae off the pilings and otherwise feeding on the underwater plant life. Luckily, I had walked with my camera, and the critters practically dared me to take their pictures.

In these photos, you can see one of the things that make me want to opt out of being "American": the wounds on the manatees' backs caused by their being run over by morons in speedboats. People here like to put large boats with huge, overpowered engines in the rivers and creeks, and then blast through the water, caring nothing for what might be in the way. Manatees are especially vulnerable because they have to come to the surface for air now and again, and so, if they're lucky, they collect these scars; if not, they die.

Anthropology can explain this by evoking the American mode of enculturation called Independence Training (IT). IT begins at birth and produces a tendency for Americans, or at least "good" Americans, to see themselves as the center of the Universe, rejecting ties of reciprocal interdependence, decrying the value of social responsibility. How else to explain our lack of national health care, the difficulty we have with trade unions, our preference as a nation to "go it alone" (Iraq, Afghanistan, Grenada, Vietnam...), our fear of the very word "socialism," even our antipathy toward the United Nations and our refusal to obey the World Court.

But back to the manatees. I think that the reason their plight bothers me so much is that, as a Peace Corps Volunteer and later as an anthropologist in training, I lived in a small fishing and farming community in the Caribbean. There, people went to sea, you know, like the actual ocean, in tiny boats with lawn-mower size engines, to, like, fish. They did it to survive.

People here run around here in their megaboats for nothing, because they're assholes.

Languages is my strength, too...

2010-06-13T12:51:00.002-04:00

Online anthropology lectures

2010-06-04T10:42:00.001-04:00

I have just been made aware of a site that boasts links to "100 incredible anthropology lectures online."

Looking it over quickly, I found some useful and interesting things, with talks by scholars ranging from Robert Sapolsky (primatology) to Derek Bickerton (creole languages). Some are audio, some video, and many link to either TED or iTunes U. The links are arranged by topic (cultural, linguistics, general, archeology, etc.). All in all, this appears to be a nice resource.

Debating strategy

2010-06-01T07:19:00.001-04:00

Here's what to expect when debating anyone living outside evidence-based reality (e.g. creationists, post-modernists...):

A song for Memorial Day

2010-05-31T16:43:00.000-04:00

Francisco Ayala: Evolution is "not just a theory"

2010-05-30T11:01:00.000-04:00

Francisco Ayala, biologist at the University of California at Irvine, recipient of the National Medal of Science, and recent winner of the Templeton Prize, has an article in Standpoint Magazine in which he confuses the relationship between science and religion (not too surprising, since the Templeton Priz e is awarded for "Outstanding contributions in affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works"). PZ Myers at Pharyngula has done a nice job of dealing with this aspect of the article: I want to focus on something else for a moment. In the article, Ayala writes:

That evolution has occurred is, in ordinary language, a fact, not just a theory.

He's right about the fact part, of course; evolution is a fact in the same sense that the Earth revolves around the Sun is a fact. But it's sad to see him contrast fact with theory, as is regularly done in popular usage where theory means an idea for which there is no good evidence, an unsupported guess. As I wrote on this blog some time back:

For scientists, a theory is a set of interconnected hypotheses that describe and/or explain some aspect of the world. The hypotheses must be logical, falsifiable, and above all constructed from the analysis of data collected by way of systematic, objective investigation of the empirical world

It does the scientific literacy of the public no good to place theory and fact in opposition to one another in this way, and it's especially disappointing to see this done by someone with Ayala's prestige. People are confused enough as it is.

Another change!

2010-05-29T12:09:00.001-04:00

OK, I think I like this template better. It's the same as the last one, except that the sidebar is on the left side of the page, and posts are on the right. The template is called "Minima Lefty Stretch"; I wonder why I like it... As before I may play with the fonts and colors.

Changes...

2010-05-27T21:22:00.000-04:00

So, I have changed the blog template. I like this one because it stretches out, letting you see embedded videos that were partly hidden in the old template. I might still fiddle a bit with the fonts and colors, but basically I think I like it. Let me know what you think.

Catching up...

2010-05-22T19:14:00.000-04:00

So many weird things have been happening lately, it's hard to keep up and sometimes the AAADD (Age Affected Attention Deficit Disorder) just halts you in your tracks. But here's an attempt:

Last Tuesday, Kentucky voters, a perpetually clueless lot apparently, chose eye surgeon Randal "Rand" Paul, son of Ron Paul, as the Republican candidate for the US Senatorial elections to be held later this year. The next day, in a painfully witless performance on The Rachel Maddow Show, Rand stuck to his position that owners of private businesses, like, say, restaurants, should be able to refuse service to African Americans or anyone else, all the while insisting that he, himself, would not frequent such establishments and that the "free market" would take care of them. I wonder... He also suggested that the Americans with Disabilities Act should be repealed. And, just to put the ass in dumbass, he claimed that President Obama is being too harsh in blaming British Petroleum for the Gulf of Mexico clustershag that, as I write, is destroying the wetlands around the Mississippi River delta and moving east toward Florida. After all, he said, accidents do happen. As someone else (I've lost track) responded, that's just what you want to hear from the person who's performing surgery on your eyes.

And for good measure, John Stossel, one-time champion for consumers' rights but now a pathetic media whore for FAUX News, backed up Paul, saying that he thought that part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act should be repealed.

The Paul's, and Stossel, claim to be "libertarians," but they're the wrong kind of libertarian. They belong to the selfish, hyper-individualistic, anti-social Ayn Rand-inspired right-libertarians. There are other libertarians, the left-libertarians or libertarian socialists, who combine a desire for reasonable individual freedom with the realization that humans are social animals and that there are many social functions and problems that can only be handled at the scale of government.

Moving on... Also this week, the Texas State School Board voted to doom Texas schoolchildren to a right-wing revisionist fantasy view of history that, among other things, ignores Thomas Jefferson while making a hero of Joe McCarthy, claims that the Founders intended the US to be a christian nation, and suggests that the United Nations challenges US sovereignty. They also tried to replace "Atlantic Slave Trade" with "Atlantic Triangular Trade," I suppose because that sounds so much more, you know, bloodless, but that, at least, failed to make it into the new history standards.

I wonder what'll happen next week...

Does Palin know what she's talking about? You betcha... Not!

2010-05-11T14:59:00.000-04:00

Here is Alaska half-governor Sarah Palin in a recent interview with Bill O'~~Really~~ O'Reilly of FAUX News:

I have said all along that America is based on Judeo-Christian beliefs and, you know, nobody has to believe me though. You can just go to our Founding Fathers' early documents and see how they crafted a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution that allows that Judeo-Christian belief to be the foundation of our lives. And our Constitution, of course, essentially acknowledging that our unalienable rights don't come from man; they come from God. So this document is set up to protect us from a government that would ever infringe upon our rights to have freedom of religion and to be able to express our faith freely.

And she is clearly and indisputably wrong. Here is the Preamble to the US Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And if you keep reading, there is no mention, not one word, of God or religion. The only place religion is mentioned is in Amendment I of the Bill of Rights, to wit:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

And, for good measure, here is a portion of the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by President John Adams in 1797:

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

But, to give her credit, maybe Palin's just reading the wrong documents. Here is the Preamble to the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, March, 1861 (my emphasis):

We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America.

Could it be that she and the other Teabaggers who insist that the US is a "Christian nation" are reading the wrong documents? It seems implausible. More likely, they just make up whatever fits their agenda, and happily proclaim it to be The Truth.

Amen.

Dawkins: "If science worked like religion"

2010-05-10T11:54:00.000-04:00

End of semester blues

2010-05-05T13:51:00.001-04:00

In the semester just ended, I taught a section of Linguistic Anthropology. An ever-present theme in this course is the concept of linguist relativism: the idea that all human languages are equally good at being human languages, even those we often devalue or disparage, like African American Vernacular English (AAVE, or Ebonics). Complementing this is the idea that languages may have quite different ways of expressing some concept, but that this says nothing about the cognitive capacity of speakers.

So, when I put the following question on the last test, I fully expected it to be a throwaway, a sure couple of percentage points for everyone:

TRUE or FALSE: When Ebonics (AAVE) speakers say Mary pen for Standard English Mary's pen, they are demonstrating their lack of the concept of possession.

Imagine my surprise when I found that only 67% of the students answered (correctly) "false," while 33% answered (incorrectly) "true."

This is after spending 15 weeks with a professor whose entire research life has been spent investigating, analyzing, writing about, and teaching about "non-standard" languages. A professor whose interest in these languages was jump-started back in the late 1970s by Bill Labov's classic article "The Logic of Non-Standard English," which should have killed these ideas, but obviously didn't.

Another question, this one also a presumed freebie:

According to your professor, the decision to call vernacular forms of language, such as Ebonics or creoles, a "language" or a "dialect" is based primarily on: (a) science (b) linguistics (c) logic (d) politics.

The correct answer is (d). In this same class, only 39% answered correctly; 61% were incorrect. All those who answered incorrectly chose (b). Again, this after repeated iterations of Max Weinreich's classic aphorism: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy." Plus a discussion of the brouhaha surrounding the Oakland (California) School Board's attempt to designate Ebonics a "language" for educational purposes (the African American community of Oakland does not have its own army and navy).

This same question, with slightly different answer choices, was on the final test in my other class, an introduction to linguistics for English and English Education majors. In this class, 83% gave the correct answer (politics); only 17% were incorrect.

What does all this mean? Are English majors "smarter" than Anthropology majors (and by "smarter" I mean only better at living up to the expectations of professors, nothing more)? I don't think so, generally, but the performance of the Anthropology majors in my class this semester, with a few exceptions, was certainly disappointing. For example, despite my constant needling, threats at testing (some carried out), talking about their importance, etc., they refused to commit to memory the required symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Of course, this was true of some in the English linguistics class as well.

Overall, it was a somewhat frustrating semester.
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Labov, W. 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pages 201-240.