After a year: genocide by any other name

And the name, I learned this week, is: The Dahiya Doctrine.  Mehdi Hassan explains here. 

Here we go again...

One of my favorite UF professors, Robert Lawless, passed away in 2012. He had written a book titled Haiti's Bad Press, which covered many of the ways the US has mistreated Haiti since the people there won their independence in 1804. So many ways. And now, a new one. US right-wing racist dipshits have spread a "rumor" that Haitian "illegal" immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are seizing pet cats and dogs and eating them.

First, these immigrants are not "illegal." Second, I know a little about Haiti, much of it from Prof Lawless, and I've never heard of any tradition of people there eating cats or dogs.* This is just another wave of bad press, much of which originated in the wave of sensationalist and inaccurate horror films featuring "voodoo" and "witchcraft" starting in the early 20th century.

The real problem and danger is that Trump and his allies like Vance and Loomer keep doubling down on the story and are setting up a scenario where people are going to get hurt. Like Jan 6. Already schools have had to close and Haitians are being threatened by Trump's witless followers.

It makes me sick.

(*Dr. Lawless did tell us about his being invited to a dog cookout in the forest by men of a tribe of former headhunters in the Philippines, but that was not this.  Link to Picnic)

Still the word of the day

 Eight months or so on, and it still looks like genocide to me.

Word of the day

I know I'll get pummeled for this, but: I keep seeing children in Gaza being pulled, some dead, some alive, out of rubble created by bombing and shelling. The ones lucky enough to be alive will likely go to a hospital with no water, no fuel and thus no electricity, so that they'll only remain lucky if all they need is a band-aid. The word that keeps coming to mind is:

Genocide.

Invasive species...

 I never caught the story, but last week on the CNN news crawl the theme of the global cost of "invasive species" showed up a number of times.

No mention that I saw included Humans, and yet Homo sapiens is invasive everywhere outside of Africa.

Ad don't even think about the cost to the world of that species' invasions...

A couple of thoughts...

Tommy 🥔ville wants the military to bend to his personal fantasies about the world. But in the past, the military has sometimes led the way in establishing rights that "society" has tried to withhold. Access to health care is a human right, not subject to whatever he thinks his imaginary friends want.

-----

Asa Hutchinson says that women's reproductive health access should be up to each state. I call Bullshit. This is a human rights issue, and not up to the whims of Alabama or Mississippi. Or Iowa.

Neandertals, again...

OK, so it has been a while.  I'm trying to gear up for more writing here.  Meanwhile I posted this on Facebook this morning, edited a bit:

Yesterday after the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll trial was announced, tRump's lawyer Joe Tacopina came out and took a few questions. A heckler in the back kept yelling at him "Fucking Neanderthal! You're a fucking Neanderthal! ..."

So this is when I would have liked to be there to lecture the crowd on the humanity of the Neandertals, and the extremely unlikely chance that any male N would have behaved in his band like the former president has behaved all his life. Such a male Neandertal would have long since been cast out of the group or killed, maybe by the women.

"Neandertal" republicans

 Last night (May10) on The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, law professor Lawrence Tribe described republican efforts to drag women back to pre-Roe days as "Neandertal." I just want to go on record as saying that the Neandertals were very likely nowhere near as misogynistic as these thugs.

Artist: Tom Bjöklund

Guest blog: On Whoopi Goldberg and the "race" thing

My Anthropology colleague Daniel Cring posted this on Facebook a couple days ago and I thought it best go up here as well. 

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

Whoopi Goldberg:

“Let’s be truthful, the Holocaust isn’t about race, it’s not. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about. These are two groups of white people.”

She continued: “You’re missing the point … let’s talk about it for what it really is. It’s about how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, Jews … everybody eats each other.”

As an anthropologist who created and taught a college course on “race and racism”, I believe that Whoopi has a point that people are missing here.

Johann Blumenbach (1752 -1840) was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and “anthropologist”, who pretty much created the concept of “race” as a way to classify human biological diversity. Today we know that this is a taxonomically invalid taxon. Human biological diversity is continuous and not discrete. The concept of “race” has no scientific validity but yet people continue to use it to discriminate because of population pressures.

And now the term “ethnicity”, not biological diversity but rather cultural diversity including religious diversity. Because of exogamy, “race” and ethnicity are not coterminous even though people use these two terms interchangeably.

Eugenics and racism were increasingly more prevalent in the 20th century because of population pressures cause by colonialism and imperialism. And most certainly Nazi Germany believed that they were the Master “Race”- the Aryan Race. But they also believe in eugenics, so that many other people died in the death camps- Poles, Russians, homosexuals, Roma People, handicapped, and apparently even some Soviet prisoners of war. I remember seeing the mortal remains of the victims of Auschwitz in the British contemporary documentary “Memory of the Camps” and one victim wore a Christian crucifix that they took to their grave when they were buried in a mass grave with all the other victims of the Nazi atrocities- Jews, Poles, Roma, homosexuals, mental and physically unfit Germans, and Soviet POWs.

I once sat in a sociology class “Minority Groups” here at UL and I saw how students started to argue which minority group had been persecuted the most throughout history, and I remembered the sacrifice by three young men in Mississippi- one “black”, and two Jewish men in June 1964 during the Civil Rights Movement- “The victims were James Chaney from Meridian, Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City. All three were associated with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO)” (Wikipedia).

What the hell are we humans doing to ourselves? We have conquered nature, but not ourselves.

Some things that are pissing me off

"America."  The people who have these red MAGA hats and other paraphernalia have no idea that "America" refers to not just the United States, but to the whole hemisphere.  And for the most part they don't care.  What they want to "make great again" is just the little part of America that's in the US. 

And actually, they can't even do that, because the US has never been "great," and therefore cannot be made "great" again.  The US has, for its entire existence, been a nation built on exploitation, oppression, genocide, and internal colonialism; a nation built on two kinds of slavery: chattel slavery (people owning people), and wage slavery (people owning other people's labor).

Republicans.  The people who yell "Make America Great Again" the loudest have no intention of actually doing so.  They continue to block: efforts to raise the minimum wage, and thus make wage slavery a little less onerous; efforts to put in place a truly sane national health care system by eliminating the "health insurance" industry; attempts to reform laws regarding the possession of firearms;  elimination of student debt and extension of free public education to college/university; elimination of medieval restrictions on women's reproductive health care (and why are males even a part of this conversation?); etc.

Critics of Critical Race Theory.  As far as I can tell, these critics don't understand the terms "critical," or "race," or "theory."

China.  Yeah, China, for its obviously genocidal treatment of the Uyghurs, but also for its stupidity in mistaking communism for fascism.

Владимир Путин.  He's on my list for wanting to reconstitute the old CCCP by armed force instead of making Russia a place these other countries, like Ukraine, want to hang with.  

The Vaccine Refuseniks.  These people who equate remaining unvaccinated with "freedom" and "liberty" are killing us.  And they're pissing me off.  If nearly all of them had gotten vaccinated when the rest of us did, we'd probably be pretty much over this thing. You know, like how we're over smallpox, and polio, and etc.

Educational administrators at every level.  Mark Twain wrote:  "In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."  See the recent spate of Boards removing books like Maus (about the Holocaust) from their curricula, or banning use of the word "gay" in classes.  People on these boards seem to work under the illusion that children are snowflakes.  Well, they aren't.  They're tough.  They can take it, often better than their parents.

This is only a partial list; I'll be back.

Opening for Linguistic Anthropologist at University of North Florida

 The Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at the University of North Florida invites applications for a full-time, nine-month, tenure-track faculty member in linguistic anthropology at the level of Assistant Professor to begin in August 2022.

Candidates should have expertise in linguistic anthropology grounded in contemporary cultural anthropological theories and qualitative ethnographic research. Their study of language should intersect with two or more of the following areas of investigation: gender and sexuality, race and racism, migration, new media, and politics. Geographic focus of research is open. Requirements for this position also include: a PhD in Anthropology by August 1st, 2022, some prior scholarly publications in the field of linguistic anthropology, knowledge of at least one foreign language, and some relevant teaching experience.

The position requires that candidates demonstrate an ability to teach face-to-face and online classes in linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and in their geographic area of expertise. Previous experience or a commitment to developing study abroad programs and/or field schools is preferred.

UNF faculty are expected to maintain the highest standards of academic excellence in all phases of instruction, research/scholarship/creative activity, and service. The successful candidate will be expected to excel in teaching, maintain an active research agenda including publication in peer-reviewed outlets, secure external research funding, and make meaningful service contributions to the department, the university, and the discipline.

UNF is a Carnegie Community Engaged institution. This designation celebrates the University’s collaboration with community partners from the local to the global level. It reflects UNF’s mission to contribute to the public good and prepare educated, engaged citizens. We are especially interested in candidates who can contribute to the diversity and excellence of the academic community through their research, teaching and service and are committed to increasing the participation of the members of underrepresented groups.

To apply, please complete an online application for Position #338820 at https://www.unfjobs.org/. Applicants must complete the online application and electronically upload: 1) a cover letter that addresses their research, teaching profile, and professional plan for the next 5 years; 2) a curriculum vitae; 3) a statement of their teaching experience and philosophy; 4) copies of relevant syllabi; 5) 1-2 sample publications in linguistic anthropology; and 6) unofficial transcripts. A minimum of three (3) references with contact information must be listed in the application. Candidates who are invited for campus interviews will be asked to have original, signed reference letters mailed or submitted electronically. Incomplete applications will not be considered. Initial review of applications will begin on November 15, 2021 and will continue until the position is filled. For more information contact Dr. Rosa de Jorio, Search Committee Chair, at (904) 620-1642 or rdejorio@unf.edu.

UNF is an Equal Opportunity/Equal Access/Affirmative Action Institution.

Cultural survival...

Over on Facebook someone wrote about the people who were brought from Africa to the New World as slaves:

• [They] ...survived being chained to other human bodies for several months in the bottom of a disease-infested ship during the Middle Passage, lost their language, customs and traditions, picked up the English language as best they could while working free of charge from sun up to sun down...

I might call this the Blank Slate Hypothesis of African-American language and culture. Anyway, I responded:

I'm sorry, but this is very misleading. The slaves off the boats still knew their languages and where they were from (although the countries they were did not exist in their present form). They passed this knowledge down as best they could. The descendants of slaves that I worked with in the Caribbean use words from African languages in their daily speech, as do many African Americans*. Where I worked, many people had a tradition of knowing what African ethnic group their ancestors came from (Kongo, Igbo, Mandingo, Yoruba, etc.). The Gullah people near where I am now (Northeast Florida) have hundreds of African words in their everyday speech. The idea that all this rich culture and language was erased by slavery is a convenient myth promulgated by whites; and it's been totally disproven by anthropologists (I am one) and others. 

I''ll give you just one example: the word 'juke' as in 'juke box'. This word was brought to the Americas by speakers of Fula, a West African language. In Fula it means to pierce, jab, penetrate, including sexually. The Juke Joint became the place you went to hook up; the Juke Box played the music. To this day, people where I worked use 'juke' as a word for getting pricked by, say, a cactus spine. There's a lot more to this (I wrote my dissertation on an Afro-Creole English from Grenada) but I think (hope) I've made my point.

There was pushback:

• [They] ... were taken to central slave-exporting ports, from where they were forced aboard TransAtlantic transport ships under brutally inhumane conditions. The "passengers" typically were a mixture of tribes and languages. Of course they lost their language, customs, and traditions.

And again, I responded:

And I am telling you that you are wrong. Sorry, but here's no polite way to say it. The idea that Black people "lost their language, customs, and traditions" was made up by White people to make Blacks seem subhuman. Many language features that they brought from Africa and incorporated into their speech over here were said to show mental deficiency, because, you know, they couldn't possibly be legitimate carryovers from somewhere else. You may not like it, but it's a fact. If you don't want to believe me, look for Lorenzo Dow Turner and Melville Herskovits, two of many scholars who have demonstrated the continuities between West Africa and African American languages and cultures.

• You are purporting that the enslavement of Africans did not deprive them of their language, culture or traditions because they have managed to retain a small remnant of each. That's preposterous.

I am arguing against the original proposition, which was that Africans lost ALL their culture and language in the slave experience. They did not. They carried with them more than a "small remnant." They mingled that with the languages and cultures they were embedded in in the New World: English, French, Spanish, etc. In each they created new languages out of English (etc.) and the "remnants" they brought. In some cases they continued speaking their home languages right into the present (Cuba, for example). Retention and creativity; I have spent my academic career studying this, and I know what the fuck I'm talking about.

Do you eat okra? The plant and the name for it come from West Africa (Igbo language). Have you ever called peanuts goobers? The plant is American, of course, but its African name (nguba) comes from Kikongo. Watch the Living Dead?  Zombie is from Kikongo zumbi or nzambi. And on and on....

The more interesting (to me) influences of West African are in the grammars developed by the slaves and their descendants.  That would be a whole 'nother thread I think, but one example: The West African languages I've studied don't have the English th sounds. So in the encounter, English words get reworked and th sounds become t or d: the > de; this > dis; and so on. Exactly this sort of thing was used by the racists to label Blacks "lazy"- because they didn't always pronounce our th's.  Some said they couldn't make these sounds because they had "lazy tongues" or "thick lips."  Of course, they can learn to make them because they are Homo sapiens. But it was (and sometimes still is) grist for the racist mill.

The Blank Slate Hypothesis of African American language and culture attributes any deviation from "standard" language and culture to cognitive deficiency, the inability to learn the presumedly more "advanced" language of whichever Europeans the slaves ended up among.  I wish I could write "attributed" in that last sentence, but it seems to be alive and well, and still a part of the folk model for some, at least.

*I use the term "African American" to refer to the descendants of slaves brought from Africa to the New World, all of which is really "America."

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

Herskovits, Melville.  1966.  The New World Negro: Selected Papers in Afroamerican Studies.  Minerva Press.

Turner, Lorenzo D. 2002 [1949].  Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect.  University of South Carolina Press.

Retirement!

 So the SASW Department gave me a retirement send off yesterday. Very relaxed and informal, and with kind words. They know I like primates, so they gave me what appears to be a Spider Monkey and donated a brick in my name to the Jax Zoo. Little do they know I’ll be around a lot, cleaning 32 years of experience out of my office. Thanks, Everybody!

Grades are in!

Grades are in. I had 19 students for my last (?) Introduction to Anthropology class. The course was presented over Zoom for six weeks from mid-June to last July 30. We met on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:00am to 12:30pm. I typically gave us a 15-20 minute break at around 10:30.

I tried to cover a couple of topics each meeting, although that didn't always work out. I used the first three weeks to cover biological anthropology, and saved culture and language for the last three. Throughout, I used videos from the old Faces of Culture series as well as a film on documenting endangered languages and a segment from David Mayberry-Lewis's Millennium series.

Lectures were supplemented with Powerpoint slides. Generally I use the slides as bullet points; only if there's an especially worthwhile quote do I include it on the slide, for example this from Teddy Roosevelt:

In lecture, students were exposed to all the things wrong with TR's worldview.

The class average was in the B range and lowest grade was a C. I would have preferred face-to-face, obviously, but still they were a pretty good group.

Needed: "cynical knowledge"

What people call "Critical Race Theory" should, in my view, be a component of a larger program of what Chomsky calls "intellectual self-defense." Or, if you prefer, what a professor of mine (r.i.p. Robert Lawless) called "cynical knowledge." This is a realization, developed through scientific observation and analysis of the facts of US history, that the pablum we are fed from almost all sides of our culture about how gloriously wonderful and beneficent the US has always been is no more than the "propaganda" and "mind control" that we deride when we see it in other nations.

We only have to look at the people jumping on Rep. Ilhan Omar for suggesting that the US has done bad things to realize that we desperately need this kind of knowledge. Otherwise, we just keep doing bad things, like ripping little kids away from their parents at the border, surely a Crime Against Humanity.

"Tribal" again, encore

Still thinking about the popular use of "tribal" in referring to political or actual conflict.

Journalists and others call it "tribal" I think because they've learned somewhere that the societies we anthropologists think of as tribal (mostly small-scale horticulturalists and pastoralists) are always warring against each other, which of course they rarely do except in very special circumstances. Steven Pinker has exacerbated the problem by bleating about how much more peaceful we are now that we have large nation-states to keep our demons under control.

For me, "tribal" yields an admittedly somewhat fuzzy set of social and cultural features which set these sociocultural "systems" apart from larger-scale systems of the sort that Friedman was referencing. Maybe one of the most important is the distinction between small-scale shamanistic/communalistic religious cults and the larger-scale ecclesiastical cults at the center of mideastern conflict. Social fusion/fission plays a part in these conflicts. This is suggested by violence between Christian cults (Northern Ireland), islamic cults (Middle East etc.), and so on all over the place. They had fusion forced on them by external colonial powers, now they're striving for fission to preserve what they see as their identity.

So maybe the Social Imperative is at the heart of it all. SI promotes fusion, but too much fusion provokes crowding stress, and SI responds with fission?

Incidentally, I feel the same way about the gross misuse of "theory." This past year I actually heard Ira Flatow on NPR's Science Friday ask a physicist "when does a theory become a fact?" I meant to email him but never did....

"Tribal" again

 Tom Friedman was just on CNN pushing the “tribal politics” meme to describe our problems. Where is the Anthropolgy Word Police Squad?

"Neanderthal Thinking"

Holy coprolites, the work of anthropologists is never done!

We are being told that President Biden has charged the governors of Texas and Mississippi with "Neandertal thinking" (don't get me started on the spelling!) for their decisions to drop Covid-related restrictions.

How do we get through to him that any random Neandertal (early European Homo sapiens) almost certainly had more empathy, more concern for the members of their community, than these two troglodytic governors combined? Why? Because without doubt as children they were dependence-trained and thus sensitive not just to what their society owed them, but what they owed to their society reciprocally. Not independence-trained like these selfish, socially irresponsible "modern" USAniacs.

Restarting

I've been off the blog, really pretty much just off, for most of the last presidential term.  Every time I thought of writing about something, before I could get my thoughts collected something else happened that knocked the first thoughts off the road.  Now that we have a new, slightly more boring (i.e. "normal") president, maybe there will be time to think and write a little between events.

News: I have now received my two doses of the Pfizer vaccine.  My age (75 and counting) qualified me for an early vaccination.  Tomorrow (Feb 25) will mark two weeks since my second dose, so I should be able to go out the house without being terrified.

So, my thought for this first post of 2021:

Now over half-a-million dead from the virus! I still want to see the former president and his enablers indicted, possibly for negligent homicide although that almost seems too lenient. It could be genocide, since they seemed to lose interest when they learned that Black and Brown populations were the most susceptible to the worst effects of the virus.

Another August 6th

Today is the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, followed shortly thereafter by the bombing of Nagasaki. So far, watching the News (CNN, MSNBC) I haven't caught any mention of it.

I'll let my past posts speak for themselves:

2009: An almost unmentioned anniversary

2010: The most destructive use ever of weapons of mass destruction

2011: Another August 6th

2012: Yet another August 6th

2013: August 6, 1945

2014: It's August 6th, again

2015: August 6, 2015

2016: August 6, again