Summer's almost gone...

Not officially, of course.  But tomorrow morning I meet with the chair of our department (Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work) to strategize our upcoming departmental "retreat," which takes place a week from today.  I have to meet since I'm the "coordinator" (they don't give it the respect of "director") of our anthropology program, which includes a BA in Anthropology as well as a Minor in Anthropology.

So, how did I spend my summer?  Not writing blog posts, obviously.  This summer was a staycation for me, with twice-weekly visits to physical therapy to help with my aging back and legs (I turned 71 on July 8).  I tried to get out, on the days I didn't have PT, to walk at least a mile or so, but it was hard because July was a very hot, dry month, with temps in the high 90s almost every day and "feel-like" temps over 100º.  My longest walk was about 4 miles, shortest was usually a 0.7 mile loop in a nearby park.

About that 0.7 mile loop.  I've decided that when I talk about it, instead of saying I walked "a bit less than a mile" I'm going to start saying "I walked a bit more than a kilometer."  Sounds better, right?  A kilometer is about 0.62 miles.  I know this from being a runner and converting the 5K and 10K runs into miles and vice versa.

Fathers Day!

In honor of Fathers Day, here's a photo of my Dad in 1945.  He's standing on a hill in Auxier, Kentucky.  Note the coal-company style houses down the hill behind him.

This was around the time I was born, July 1945.  In later years, but while I was still pretty young, Auxier was kind of a magical place for me.  Almost a Tom Sawyer kind of place.  When we were there in the summers I spent the entire time barefoot, and at the end of a day my friends and I would be pretty well powdered over with coal dust.  When I was big enough, my chore would be to tote a bucket down to the nearby well and pump water to carry back to the house (not too far).  I'm pretty sure that was the best water I've ever had.  We used the water for drinking, cooking, and bathing, because there was no piped water into the house.  We also had no indoor toilet, so the restroom was a short hike back past the cornfield.  Good times!

November 22, 1963

Today is the day in 1963 that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

I was in my first year at St. Johns College, Annapolis, Maryland.  I was about to go for a run before my Dad picked me up to drive home for Thanksgiving.  As I was leaving the dorm someone yelled out that the President had been shot, and we spent some time listening to a radio.  The run was scuttled.

On the drive home Dad and I listened to the radio in the car.  As I recall (it's been a while) he didn't say anything.  He had always been a Republican, and later became a fan of Rush Limbaugh etc.  I am not sure how he felt about what happened to Kennedy.

It's already 2014, and what've I done lately?

On December 31, 2013, I made a resolution to try to write a blog post every day in 2014.  So far, I've written one. Oh well.

A story that appeared this morning via the Zinn Education Project prompted me to reflect a little. The story is about how, 45 years ago today, President LBJ had a luncheon for women who at the time were viewed as being active in various ways.  Among the guests was Eartha Kitt, famous for the song "Santa Baby" and also for being, for a time, Catwoman.  When she was invited to say something, she stood up and, in LBJ's face, criticized the Vietnam War.  For some time after that, she found it hard to get work. It was like that back then.

I had not heard about this, and that revelation got me wishing that I had become more politically aware earlier on.  People say that you're liberal when you're young, and then conservative as you get older.  I am the reversal of that process.  In January 1968 I was a senior at William & Mary, just waking up, partly because I had extra energy available from having to stop the competitive running that got me into William & Mary in the first place.  I was taking Russian, not for blatantly political reasons so much as to be able to read the fascinating writing I had seen on signs and banners in the film Doctor Zhivago.  I read the Communist Manifesto, not as a required thing, but to see what the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) members who kept coming around trying to get me to join were so jacked up about; and surprise, some of it made sense.

I was already a little bit preset towards cynicism with regards to the official US line on the Soviet Union, "communism," and such.  Of course, in public school in the 1950s I had practiced diving under my school desk at the sound of the air raid sirens. The desks were wooden...  At least we could say that we were close enough to strategic targets like Washington, Camp David, and Fort Ritchie that we might be, marginally, on somebody's radar.  At the same time, though, as a high school distance runner my coach had lent out books on the great distance runners of that time, many of whom were from Eastern Bloc countries.  Reading about them, they seemed like pretty normal, even admirable, people.

After graduation, in the summer of 1968, a friend and I wandered around behind the "Iron Curtain" for a few weeks looking for the Red Menace, but all we found were open, generous people and a horrible knockoff of Coca Cola (the People's Cola, we called it). In Prague we spent a little time with one of those athletes I had read about, Emil Zátopek, and found him and others not only normal and admirable, but distinctly proud of the direction socialism was taking in what was then Czechoslovakia.

Also in Prague, we visited the North Vietnam Information Agency, and got a glimpse of their side of the story: photos of bombings, people and buildings blown apart. We were doing to them what we said they were doing to us, except that it was all taking place in their country, and we were the invaders. This was sobering.

There's more, but I'll save it for another post.

"The Sound of Music"

On a lighter note, sort of. Willy and I are watching "Sound of Music," the remake, on NBC.  My memory of this story cannot be separated from how I first saw it.

It was summer 1968, and my friend George and I had just hitch-hiked from Italy into what was then Yugoslavia.  We stopped in a little town in Slovenia, right on the coast, checked into a campground, and then wandered thru town.  I actually managed to get my hair cut, using my feeble Russian to communicate with the barber.  We noticed a poster for "The Sound of Music" and managed to decode that it was being shown that night.  So we went.

The film was projected onto the wall of what I recall was the town hall.  Many of the chairs arranged in front of the wall were occupied by little old ladies in black peasant garb.  As we watched, they cheered every time the nazis got their comeuppance, and especially when Liesl rejected Rolfe. Surreal, but that's how I prefer to remember it.

November 22

November 22, 1963. I was in my first semester at St. Johns College, in Annapolis. I was heading out for a run when someone told us. No run. My father picked me up a little later and we made the drive to Hagerstown for Thanksgiving break. I don't remember him saying much, but then he was a pretty rabid republican. Anyway, what JFK means to me, more than anything else, is that he gave us the Peace Corps, which led me to Willy and our family. Peace Corps also, incidentally, led me to my career in creole language studies and my passion for the issues involved in nonstandard languages and education. Thanks, JFK...

Thirty years ago today...

Today, November 1, was a Tuesday 30 years ago. I was in Carriacou, Grenada, working on my doctoral research. For the past week, the US military had been invading / intervening in Grenada following the coup against Maurice Bishop and his government. It was early this Tuesday morning that the US finally got around to establishing a presence on Carriacou in the form of US Marines, who landed using these amphibious troop carriers, which caused quite a stir. They seemed lost at first, but eventually found Hillsborough and parked along the main street. Except for wanting to know where the "battalion of North Korean soldiers" was hiding, the Marines seemed very calm and professional, very concerned with maintaining a positive image of themselves; a stark contrast with the Army folk who came in the next day.

That Tuesday night I found myself in the Brunswick cemetery with my old friend, Peter Benjamin and many others, the night to hang out with departed relatives and friends. Mr. Benjamin's wife had passed away, so we sat on her stone, lighting candles and having a rum or two. We hear the Marines walking along the road below the cemetery and talking, apparently wondering what all these people among the graves were doing...

Robert Lawless: mentor and friend

(The following obituary for my old friend and professor, Robert Lawless, was written by his wife Anita Raghavan.)

Family, friends, colleagues, and students celebrate the life of Robert Lawless

Robert Lawless, Professor of Anthropology, Wichita State University, passed away peacefully on February 2, 2012 of heart failure at HCA Wesley Medical Center, Wichita, Kansas.   Family and friends were by his side at the time of his passing.  He did not suffer.   He was taken to the hospital by ambulance at about 4 am and had passed away by 9:26 am.   He had gone to work the day before and was in good spirits.   He complained of chest pain at about 4 am on the day of his death.   He had been battling heart disease for roughly seven years.

Robert was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and grew up in Sand Springs.  Oklahoma.   His father taught instrumental music in the public schools of Sand Springs and Tulsa, Oklahoma.   As a youngster Robert played the trombone in his father’s band and was a drum major.   Music and music appreciation was an integral part of his life till the very end.

After graduating from Sand Springs High School, (he frequently and without much prompting regaled friends with his high school cheer song) he left Oklahoma for a Journalism degree at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.   He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1959.    He was a journalist in San Francisco and left to join military service.   He volunteered for the National Security Agency and went to the Army Language School in Monterey, California where he studied Russian.    He was stationed on the border of the former USSR and Germany.   There he learned German.   He helped to gather information for the USA about the maneuverings of the Soviet army.   He was honorably discharged and chose to teach English Literature at Brent School - Baguio, Philippines.    Interest in studying further led him to a Master’s degree program in Asian Studies from the University of the Philippines, Manila.   He learned several Philippine dialects and languages.   He married Aida Arribas and they had a son, Andrew and a daughter, Ilona.   At two years old Andrew was diagnosed with autism.   Robert’s ongoing advocacy for people with special needs grew with this personal milestone in his life.   He was a social justice activist for positive change in several local and international areas of the world.

Interest in pursuing a PhD led him back to the USA where he worked as an editor for two publishing companies, John Wiley and Sons and Prentice Hall, and to the Anthropology Department at the New School for Social Research, New York.   He engaged in anthropological field work among the Kalingas of the North Luzon highlands in the Philippines.   He graduated in 1975.   He did international rice research and helped gather information for the UN.   He did field work in Haiti while in Florida.   He learned Haitian Creole.   His research focused on a comparative holistic and evolutionary examination of foraging, agricultural, and industrial peoples.  He spent 7 years doing research among urban scavengers in Manila, investigated peasants in the Central Plains of Luzon, studied neo-colonial warfare on the island of Timor and lived with headhunters in the North Luzon Highlands.  For several years he investigated the social organization of hospitals in Manhattan and the survival values of street people on its Lower East Side.   He attempted to teach himself Spanish.

In 1978 he joined the Anthropology faculty and the African Studies faculty at the University of Florida and served there as an Associate Professor for 14 years.  Since 1982, he concentrated on work in Haiti, investigated its tourism, sociopolitical structures, coffee production, and religion.   Much of his work used an integrative approach to the study of the cognitive and ecological aspects of people’s beliefs and behaviors.   He married Anita Raghavan in 1988.  In 1992 they moved to Kansas where he joined the Anthropology Department as a socio-cultural anthropologist and as an undergraduate advisor at Wichita State University.  He served as the department chair from 1996-1999.   He had three children with Anita, a daughter Sharmini and twin sons, Kylen and Tavrick.  Tavrick was diagnosed at birth with Down syndrome.  This intensified his interest in a comprehensive and fulfilling life for people with special needs.

Robert amassed a record of scholarship, including several recognized books, especially one on Haiti, and many articles in international journals.  He was a prolific writer using a style that was succinct and powerful.  He served as a journal and book review editor and he reviewed numerous manuscripts and grant proposals submitted for research funding.  His field research during a 10-12 year long stay in the Philippines included work among urban residents and more isolated tribal groups such as the Kalinga.  He also did field work among immigrant ethnic groups in New York and among communities in Haiti.  He served in various roles in professional organizations including the association of Philippine Anthropologists and The Association of Third World Studies.  He was directly involved in the drafting of position papers for the Aristide Government in preparation for the restoration of representative government in Haiti.

Robert enjoyed teaching and saw teaching as a primary medium for dispensing his knowledge and experience to an audience of students.  Throughout his career, he touched thousands of students who enjoyed his academic energy, his knowledge, and his wit.  He served on many Masters and PhD dissertation committees, thus influencing generations of new students in the field.  He cared immensely about his students and took great pride in their many accomplishments. 

Robert loved his family both biological and “adopted.”  He was a foreign exchange “dad” to many, “adopted” several children and young adults, and was a local guardian to international students.  He enjoyed keeping up with their achievements, their joys and tribulations.

He is survived by his wife Anita Raghavan, daughters Ilona and Sharmini, sons Andrew, Kylen and Tavrick, granddaughters Mackenzie and Kerrigan, and his brothers Jerrold and Lyndon.

He also leaves behind a number of professional colleagues and friends who treasured their friendship with him, a large number of students who loved him as a teacher and a mentor, and a community of friends and acquaintances both locally and beyond.   A private service was held at 2:00 pm on February 7, 2012 at All Faith Affinity Mortuary and Funeral Home in Wichita, KS.   A Robert Lawless Memorial Fund has been established and can be reached C/o Rev. C. Pace-Adair, PO Box 48045 Wichita, KS 67201-8045.   The memorial fund will support the diverse academic and social issues that Robert cared about.   

Still waiting...

So, here we are well into March of 2012.  I'm still waiting for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Pearle, Wolfowitz, et al to be arrested and sent to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Robert Lawless

One of my favorite anthropology professors and friends, Robert Lawless, passed away yesterday.    I first encountered Robert when he was at the University of Florida.  In the fall of 1980 I was his teaching assistant for Anthropology and Modern Life (ANT 2410 as I recall).  As an assistant in that course, I learned most of what I needed to know to pass the masters-level comprehensive exams.  I also learned two really important concepts for the study of culture that I have continued to use and teach for over 30 years now: the distinction between folk and analytic models, and the concept of cynical knowledge.  More about these in a later post.  Right now, a story Robert posted on the Anthro-L listserve from field-notes of his research among the Kalinga, former headhunters of Luzon, The Philippines.

Usually a group of young men would decide that they needed a late afternoon or early evening snack. They would then surreptitiously grab a dog (black preferred) and sneak it out of the village into some wooded area, kill it, roast it, and eat it along with some alcoholic beverage (made from rice or sugarcane).  This event was usually done with a strong sense of camaraderie.  After several months in a Middle Pasil, I had the honor of being invited to one of these events.  Of course, between bites of dog meat and sweetbreads I asked them what they called this event.  They replied (much to my anthropological satisfaction) that it had no name.  Then they asked me (much to my disconcertedness) what it was called in my culture when a group of guys grabbed a dog and went off to roast and eat it.  Trying to think fast, since I knew that I already had a growing reputation for being stupid about things in my culture [you are all invited to read an article on this issue by me published in Anthropology Vol. 10, No. 1 (May 1986), pp. 55-74, and titled "Ethnoethnographers and the Anthropologist"], I replied that we called it "picnic" (using the English word). 
A few months later I was in another village quite a distance from the aforementioned one when after several weeks a group of young guys that I had been establishing rapport with came to me and whispered in my ear (in Kalinga), "Would you like to come with us on a piknik," using a word that clearly sounded like the English work picnic.  I responded (in Kalinga), "Sure, but what's a piknik?"  They said, "You know, that's where we grab a dog, take it out in the woods, roast it, and eat it." "Where did you get the word 'piknik'?" "Oh, that an old Kalinga word for this event." "But have you always used that word." "I guess so." "Did you know that word last season?" "Oh, no, just a few weeks ago, some guy from the village over the mountain came here, we took him out for a dog feast, and he told us that 'piknik' was the ancient Kalinga word for what we were doing."
RIP, Robert. You will be missed by many.

I didn't write anything for 9/11

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.

The day after the 4th of July

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.

The view from my office window

Arrrgh!

The Peace Corps and me

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

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.

Word meanings and other relations

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.

I have the ears of a teenager!

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...

Another change!

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...

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.

The AAAs

I had originally intended to blog from the American Anthropological Association meetings in Philadelphia, but that didn’t happen for various reasons. Herewith a few preliminary reflections:

• Minor annoyance: Willy accompanied me to the meetings, and attended my and other sessions with no problem. However, when she tried to enter the publishers’ area she was stopped at the door because she didn’t have an ID badge. When I tried to take her in with me, they still wouldn’t let her enter. WTF? She might have bought a book from somebody, for Jebus’s sake.
  
  
• Slightly less minor annoyance: We had to pay extra for internet service, and it wasn’t very reliable at that. But it seems to me that AAA ought to either hold its meetings in a place that provides internet at no extra charge, or include internet access in the registration fee. I mean, come on, it’s 2009, virtually everybody at the meetings had a computer and had reason to use it, as I did in keeping in touch with my university email, students’ activities on Blackboard, and so on.
  
  
• Major annoyance: Only two sessions out of I don't know how many hundreds had “Caribbean” listed in the program topic index.
  
  
• Another major annoyance: Not finding much of anything with a Caribbean theme, I searched the program for interesting sessions to attend and found.... almost nothing! And I’m a pretty eclectic dude. To be fair, I only had Friday afternoon, Saturday, and part of Sunday to work with, and there were a couple of sessions I would have gone to earlier in the week, but again, c’mon. I did attend an interesting session on Darwin and anthropology, which included Nina Jablonski doing her very smooth rap on the evolution of skin color. And I went to the memorial gathering for Dell Hymes; a moving experience, with a number of his former students and colleagues, as well as his wife Virginia, sharing memories and stories. Of course, maybe it’s just me, but so many session titles seem to be written in some kind of Doublespeak that’s, to me, impenetrable and off-putting.
  
  
• I definitely prefer the meetings I usually go to, like the Society for Caribbean Linguistics and the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. Smaller, more focused, more opportunities for interaction and feedback. I wonder whether smaller section meetings (Society for Linguistic Anthropology, etc.) wouldn’t be more rewarding. Problem is, I like the opportunity to range outside my normal comfort zone from time to time.
  

Willy and I both did enjoy a couple of days in the Big City, and we practically lived on Philly cheese-steaks from the Reading Terminal Market, right next door to the hotel.