Saturday, December 3, 2011
New blog: "Evolution/Revolution"
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!
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Shouldn't get no respect
And his second choice is Perry! He sounded like someone who should never be allowed to operate a keyboard connected to an editorial page.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Mrs. Cain: Herman "totally respects women"
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.
Uh huh. I guess that explains his calling former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "Princess Nancy" in the GOP presidential debate over the weekend.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Random thoughts about US individualism
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.
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.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Irritable vowel syndrome
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:
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:
Will they ever?
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 vowelsOkay, 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.
(a) man (b) pet (c) gram (d) boat
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 lootA 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.
bit bird look
bait coat
bet bud caught
bat cot
Will they ever?
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Florida Governor Scott says we don't need anthropologists
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:
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.Nicely put. I'll save my own rant for later.
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.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
It's cults all the way down (and back up!)
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.
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.
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