Yale Daily News column, 12/6/2007: death, social class and metamorphosis.
(Helpful background: unsafe practices regarding pieces of scenery cause School of Drama student to get killed during load-in; the story generates 41 eulogies in the comments section; meanwhile, most of campus is talking about op-ed piece written by Eton alum decrying classism in pricing at the library cafe.)
I wish I were kidding about that last one, but I'm not. I find it unfortunate that only a few online commenters had the courage to ask whether the author actually knew anyone for whom this was an issue, or if he were sympathizing with the plight of purely speculative individuals.
***
Sorry that posting has been infrequent at best; most of my energy is going into term papers. If I'm lucky, they'll yield passages worth posting. Otherwise, I'll see you in a week or so.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Sunday, November 25, 2007
I'm still waiting for the nationwide Cigarette Aesthetics Blog, though.
Helen, as usual, has the right idea.
Not with the smoking per se, of course--though I'm becoming increasingly convinced that there's a wide spectrum of cigarette activity between abstinence and addiction that we ignore the more we automatically label smoking "a disgusting habit," and to our aesthetic peril.
But with the discipline of the conceit: limiting the scope of each post to that which can be encompassed by the smoke from a single cigarette.
Without such discipline, of course, blogging is every bit as debilitating an addiction as smoking. Believe me--I grew up in a generation (and social circle) where most of my friends had LiveJournals, and when we were ushered into a room around a microphone and asked to spill our guts about them for the newspaper the only thing that seemed odd to me was that there were other people around. I'm not saying the Internet made me confessional. But the medium of the blog normalizes a confessional behavior that is both infinitely performative (anyone could stumble upon the URL!) and solitary (there's no one to look in the eyes). And everything, everything, everything becomes potential post fodder.
Because on the Internet, every thought must be inscribed to be transmitted. Permanence is a byproduct of the medium. And when there's very little distinction between the action required to type out an IM and the action required to type out a blog post, publication becomes the obvious answer.
So it's not just that my generation is going to have problems with this "face-to-face-communication" you speak of. It's that we don't have an internal mechanism to distinguish between "thought worth sharing" and "thought not worth sharing." We assume that the virtual marketplace of ideas is robust enough that the cream will rise to the top of the Google search page, and beyond that we let our fingers do all the thinking.
Not with the smoking per se, of course--though I'm becoming increasingly convinced that there's a wide spectrum of cigarette activity between abstinence and addiction that we ignore the more we automatically label smoking "a disgusting habit," and to our aesthetic peril.
But with the discipline of the conceit: limiting the scope of each post to that which can be encompassed by the smoke from a single cigarette.
Without such discipline, of course, blogging is every bit as debilitating an addiction as smoking. Believe me--I grew up in a generation (and social circle) where most of my friends had LiveJournals, and when we were ushered into a room around a microphone and asked to spill our guts about them for the newspaper the only thing that seemed odd to me was that there were other people around. I'm not saying the Internet made me confessional. But the medium of the blog normalizes a confessional behavior that is both infinitely performative (anyone could stumble upon the URL!) and solitary (there's no one to look in the eyes). And everything, everything, everything becomes potential post fodder.
Because on the Internet, every thought must be inscribed to be transmitted. Permanence is a byproduct of the medium. And when there's very little distinction between the action required to type out an IM and the action required to type out a blog post, publication becomes the obvious answer.
So it's not just that my generation is going to have problems with this "face-to-face-communication" you speak of. It's that we don't have an internal mechanism to distinguish between "thought worth sharing" and "thought not worth sharing." We assume that the virtual marketplace of ideas is robust enough that the cream will rise to the top of the Google search page, and beyond that we let our fingers do all the thinking.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
I wanna bite the hand that feeds me...
Yale Daily News column, 11/15/2007: My "Radio Radio" moment, or at least Sister Souljah.
(Helpful background: a couple of idiots chalk up some racist and homophobic graffiti; campus groups decide that this is just another example of how unbelievably intolerant Yale is, and hold rally and vigil; the Yale Daily News jumps on its white horse and declares that it will protect free speech by increasing op-ed content by 20%.)
So goes my attempt to surf the wave of controversy; the YDN opened up a whole new avenue of attack when it published an editorial yesterday saying that maybe, just maybe, a University-sponsored vigil of the kind that was held for the Virginia Tech massacre last spring or for 9/11 wasn't the appropriate response to a few incidents of "hate speech." When I went in last night to edit my column the editor-in-chief told me he'd received 30 letters calling him and his institution racist.
I missed yesterday's events, but I heard that Cross Campus was festooned with signs reproducing student quotes about racism and intolerance at Yale, including "the best thing about Yale is that I get to graduate." A freshman friend of mine says that he's heard people say "If I knew things like this would happen, I wouldn't have come here."
For pete's sake, people. There is legitimate injustice in this world. Get over yourselves.
(Helpful background: a couple of idiots chalk up some racist and homophobic graffiti; campus groups decide that this is just another example of how unbelievably intolerant Yale is, and hold rally and vigil; the Yale Daily News jumps on its white horse and declares that it will protect free speech by increasing op-ed content by 20%.)
So goes my attempt to surf the wave of controversy; the YDN opened up a whole new avenue of attack when it published an editorial yesterday saying that maybe, just maybe, a University-sponsored vigil of the kind that was held for the Virginia Tech massacre last spring or for 9/11 wasn't the appropriate response to a few incidents of "hate speech." When I went in last night to edit my column the editor-in-chief told me he'd received 30 letters calling him and his institution racist.
I missed yesterday's events, but I heard that Cross Campus was festooned with signs reproducing student quotes about racism and intolerance at Yale, including "the best thing about Yale is that I get to graduate." A freshman friend of mine says that he's heard people say "If I knew things like this would happen, I wouldn't have come here."
For pete's sake, people. There is legitimate injustice in this world. Get over yourselves.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Yale Daily News column, 11/6/07: V for Vendetta; recognition; "can I see some ID?"
Helpful background: the Elm City Resident Card; emails from this summer's Immigration and Customs enforcement raids.
Helpful background: the Elm City Resident Card; emails from this summer's Immigration and Customs enforcement raids.
Friday, November 2, 2007
"And the Middle Ages really weren't that bad..."
Tonight I saw a production of Henry IV--both parts--that was pure theatre magic. But even pure theatre magic isn't always enough to keep me entranced, especially while watching a Shakespeare history, and often I find myself thinking about the politics of the play. Not of writing it, per se--I'm not a scholar of the Elizabethan Age, nor do I claim to be (I just have a semi-ridiculous level of familiarity with the canon)--but of the era it evokes.
In Henry IV, for example, there's much discussion among the nobles (both rebel and loyal) of someone's "powers," by which they mean the number of soldiers at his command. If you think about it, this is almost absurdly republican; you can't win a battle unless you can inspire men to lay their lives on the line for you. That means you either have to "run on the issues" (i.e. convince the prospective soldiers that their lives will be significantly better if the revolt succeeds, or, if you're a loyalist, significantly worse) or provide saludary benefits compelling enough that it's worth the risk of death to obtain them, meaning you're improving quality of life among the commoners.
Monarchy is often thought of as a system of government so static as to be stifling, but that's probably more a flaw of the absolutist monarchy of the 18th century from which so many of our arguments for republicanism were spawned. Medieval monarchy, with all its fiefdoms and instabilities, did give power to the people in this way. Sure, they weren't involved in the day-to-day governance of the polis, but that's just a slightly more conservative form of republicanism than the one we have today; no one who values popular sovereignty or democratic participation does so because they want to decide when the garbage gets picked up each week.
And I won't address the line-of-succession thing vis-a-vis the Hillary candidacy except to say this: we do expect our leaders, then as now, to be moral examples for the country as a whole, and it's reasonable to assume that the most direct beneficiary of the moral teachings of a strong king will be his son. (This is why Hal's delinquency is so important to the instability of the realm under his father, of course, and why Henry IV has no ability to muster his strength against his failing health for the sake of the throne; at the end of the day, it's his own reign that has failed, not the prospect of his son's.) It's like an endorsement, but without the calculus of expediency; a man with whom the man I trust spends his time is a man to whom my trust extends.
***
By the way, last week's YDN column will actually run next Tuesday. Expect fantastic policy extrapolations.
In Henry IV, for example, there's much discussion among the nobles (both rebel and loyal) of someone's "powers," by which they mean the number of soldiers at his command. If you think about it, this is almost absurdly republican; you can't win a battle unless you can inspire men to lay their lives on the line for you. That means you either have to "run on the issues" (i.e. convince the prospective soldiers that their lives will be significantly better if the revolt succeeds, or, if you're a loyalist, significantly worse) or provide saludary benefits compelling enough that it's worth the risk of death to obtain them, meaning you're improving quality of life among the commoners.
Monarchy is often thought of as a system of government so static as to be stifling, but that's probably more a flaw of the absolutist monarchy of the 18th century from which so many of our arguments for republicanism were spawned. Medieval monarchy, with all its fiefdoms and instabilities, did give power to the people in this way. Sure, they weren't involved in the day-to-day governance of the polis, but that's just a slightly more conservative form of republicanism than the one we have today; no one who values popular sovereignty or democratic participation does so because they want to decide when the garbage gets picked up each week.
And I won't address the line-of-succession thing vis-a-vis the Hillary candidacy except to say this: we do expect our leaders, then as now, to be moral examples for the country as a whole, and it's reasonable to assume that the most direct beneficiary of the moral teachings of a strong king will be his son. (This is why Hal's delinquency is so important to the instability of the realm under his father, of course, and why Henry IV has no ability to muster his strength against his failing health for the sake of the throne; at the end of the day, it's his own reign that has failed, not the prospect of his son's.) It's like an endorsement, but without the calculus of expediency; a man with whom the man I trust spends his time is a man to whom my trust extends.
***
By the way, last week's YDN column will actually run next Tuesday. Expect fantastic policy extrapolations.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Your Army Boots
I got this NYTimes article sent to me about 2 or 3 times when it first came out, because I'm the only anthropologist most of my friends know. I've already gotten the response piece that came out today forwarded once.
I have to say, I keep trying to find some revulsion toward the program in myself, and I can't. Yes, I'm fully aware of the tangled history of anthropology with policy goals--the eugenics stuff, of course, but also the legacy of colonial ethnography: we'll send you to the island to study the natives so you can tell us how best to control them. And I don't know if my attitude toward the image of anthropologists in army boots is one of fatalistic reconciliation, insofar as if they're going to have a war they might as well have us around to make it less awful in the execution, or one of genuine endorsement. Many of my foreign-policy arguments boil down to the sentiment that there ought to be more anthropologists in the State Department, but actually I don't think that an Undersecretary of Cultural Understanding would turn me into a neocon.
It's not that I'm still a cultural relativist. I think my stronger reservations have to do with the practice of anthropology--not concerns about its "integrity," just its efficacy. I don't think goal-based ethnography is likely to be that helpful, because what makes ethnography most useful is its ability to observe everything (or as much as possible) and only then determine what is important and causative. That does require a certain degree of open-mindedness philosophically, but a much larger one intellectually. The history of early modern ethnography (I'm thinking specifically of Laura Bohannan here) is littered with anecdotes wherein the anthropologist goes in looking for something, constructs an entire theory to explain the culture she's studying, then finally, suddenly learns the real answer was in front of her nose all the time. That's probably liable to happen with any ethnography, but if you think you know what you're looking for it's bound to be much more difficult.
Besides, isn't it likely that if we weren't sending anthropologists into Kabul and Basra to figure out the problem of short-term security and peaceability, but rather to give us a better long-term understanding of those regions, no strings attached, that we'd have much better information available to us for future strategy? Are we serious about the question of whether democracy is a universal good, or aren't we? Because again, I'm no neocon, but I think it's worth looking into--at very least measuring the diameter of the throat before we shove the gun barrel down.
P.S. To the woman who wrote today's Op-Ed: "Emily Post" work is degrading, sure, maybe. But it would be much more so if the anthropologists didn't seem to be the only ones who knew how to do it. It's silly that people don't think about these things, but if they really need a cultural babysitter, so be it.
I have to say, I keep trying to find some revulsion toward the program in myself, and I can't. Yes, I'm fully aware of the tangled history of anthropology with policy goals--the eugenics stuff, of course, but also the legacy of colonial ethnography: we'll send you to the island to study the natives so you can tell us how best to control them. And I don't know if my attitude toward the image of anthropologists in army boots is one of fatalistic reconciliation, insofar as if they're going to have a war they might as well have us around to make it less awful in the execution, or one of genuine endorsement. Many of my foreign-policy arguments boil down to the sentiment that there ought to be more anthropologists in the State Department, but actually I don't think that an Undersecretary of Cultural Understanding would turn me into a neocon.
It's not that I'm still a cultural relativist. I think my stronger reservations have to do with the practice of anthropology--not concerns about its "integrity," just its efficacy. I don't think goal-based ethnography is likely to be that helpful, because what makes ethnography most useful is its ability to observe everything (or as much as possible) and only then determine what is important and causative. That does require a certain degree of open-mindedness philosophically, but a much larger one intellectually. The history of early modern ethnography (I'm thinking specifically of Laura Bohannan here) is littered with anecdotes wherein the anthropologist goes in looking for something, constructs an entire theory to explain the culture she's studying, then finally, suddenly learns the real answer was in front of her nose all the time. That's probably liable to happen with any ethnography, but if you think you know what you're looking for it's bound to be much more difficult.
Besides, isn't it likely that if we weren't sending anthropologists into Kabul and Basra to figure out the problem of short-term security and peaceability, but rather to give us a better long-term understanding of those regions, no strings attached, that we'd have much better information available to us for future strategy? Are we serious about the question of whether democracy is a universal good, or aren't we? Because again, I'm no neocon, but I think it's worth looking into--at very least measuring the diameter of the throat before we shove the gun barrel down.
P.S. To the woman who wrote today's Op-Ed: "Emily Post" work is degrading, sure, maybe. But it would be much more so if the anthropologists didn't seem to be the only ones who knew how to do it. It's silly that people don't think about these things, but if they really need a cultural babysitter, so be it.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Yale Daily News column, 10/18/07: awkwardness, ritual and traditionalism.
Don't freak out: the headline they stuck on it was even more trad than the piece itself. Besides, is it really traditionalist to admit that political correctness would be okay if it were just carried to a slightly reconceived (and more-or-less depoliticized) conclusion?
(Helpful background: Tory Marshman on ANTM; YDN scene fails to have anything interesting to say about ritual.)
ETA: Okay, so I found the YDN scene pieces to be completely devoid of information, but apparently the one on a cappella was still too dangerous and got removed from the website. Yikes.
Don't freak out: the headline they stuck on it was even more trad than the piece itself. Besides, is it really traditionalist to admit that political correctness would be okay if it were just carried to a slightly reconceived (and more-or-less depoliticized) conclusion?
(Helpful background: Tory Marshman on ANTM; YDN scene fails to have anything interesting to say about ritual.)
ETA: Okay, so I found the YDN scene pieces to be completely devoid of information, but apparently the one on a cappella was still too dangerous and got removed from the website. Yikes.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Yale Daily News column, 10/4/07: Crime reporting, off-campus bias and structural v. deontological views of criminality.
Not that I have an axe to grind about being off-campus, or anything.
At least I wasn't one of the people who got beaten with milk crates. (Other helpful background; freshman death threats; rape notification.)
Not that I have an axe to grind about being off-campus, or anything.
At least I wasn't one of the people who got beaten with milk crates. (Other helpful background; freshman death threats; rape notification.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)