Images of Japan and imagining Japanese society

Here are a few impressions:

On the way to school this morning, Beanie and I were talking about the news from Japan. I explained to her that there had been an earthquake. "Like there was in Haiti?" she asked, her eyes opening wide in horror.

Even before we reached the school, Beanie had told me: "I want to send $5 to Japan." After a pause she said: "I know it is really a little bit." For Beanie, however, it is a lot: I think she has $7 in her allowance jar now (but I am not sure whether or not that counts the $1 from the tooth fairy last night.) We will donate it to Doctors without Borders.

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We do not have cable TV at home, so Beanie has not viewed any images of the devastation there. To be honest, I find the images both arresting and horrible: It is difficult to recognize reality in the "before" and "after" satellite images or the video feed of water moving so relentlessly to carry boats, ships, cars, trucks, and entire buildings.

Is it just me, or does it seem that there are a great number of these panoramic views - not only of the disaster, but also of the lines of people (standing in queues for water, or with their bedding arranged on a gymnasium floor, with their shoes also lined neatly)? It seems to me that the orderliness and tidiness of "Japanese society" are being invoked here. The images communicate the enormity of the disaster of the earthquake and tsunami. Yet, I also receive the impression that the disorder itself (of boats occupying streets far inland and cars drifting out to sea) is being viewed as part of the disaster, not just a result of it.

I wonder also about the effects in terms of how "Japanese society" continues to be understood in the United States - in long-distance views?

This is not to mention that the news in Japan has provoked some incredibly hostile and racist reactions from Americans. I hardly even could bring myself to look at the examples reproduced in this posting on UCSC's Ethnic Studies blog, which a friend on Facebook shared. The racist Facebook posts refer to "Pearl Harbor."

In light of the references to "Pearl Harbor," I find striking that the disaster in Japan today is being described in news media as the worst "since World War 2." Indeed, the images of devastation are compared with "war scenes." However, the "war scenes" from "World War 2" that come to my mind are images of devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki - which seem esp. relevant as there is imminent risk of meltdown in the nuclear reactors.

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The unreality of the panoramic images attracts my attention to them. In contrast, I find the images of people especially difficult to view. My heart just about stopped when I saw photos on the NYT home page last night of small children being tested for radiation exposure: There was one of a little boy, wearing a winter jacket and boots, with his arms spread. It could have been Bubbie, and the girl in the background could have been Beanie.

Also difficult to view have been the images of the elderly survivors. B/c the areas hardest hit by the tsunami were the kinds of places that young people leave behind, the survivors are old people - which also makes me think that they are both the most vulnerable, but also possibly the most resilient b/c they prob'ly know a bit more about simply having to do.

Scholarly sources say...

For those of us interested in "public anthropology", yesterdays's column from the NYT's Public Editor might be worth a gander: Scholarly Work, Without All the Footnotes.

Public Editor Arthur Brisbane comments on the reactions to linguist Guy Deutscher's article, “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" which was published in the August 29th issue of the Sunday Magazine.

In fact, I had clipped the article as a possible reading to assign in Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, which I will teach again next semester, because I thought it provided a fine overview to the issues surrounding language, culture, and thought, including a discussion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis / linguistic relativity.

Brisbane notes a stream of reactions from scholars who felt that the piece exhibited "an unacceptable scale of borrowing" (i.e., plagiarism) from other linguists, including the use of specific examples.

Interestingly, Brisbane consulted with anthropologists, including Michael Silverstein, who told the NYT that “one could not avoid writing about these particular substantive phenomena and these particular lines of research, since that is what has fired folks up."

So, Brisbane concludes:

The problem here, I conclude, is not one of intellectual theft. It’s really a problem of journalism itself.

The rules of attribution and credit in the domain of scholarship are established, strict and well-understood. Journalism, by contrast, lacks a formal code for citing scholarly work. When scholarly subject matter traverses the border into popular journalism, it simply isn’t clear how much attribution is enough.

As someone who is teaching an introductory course in linguistic anthropology, I agree with Silverstein - I mean, had Guy Deutscher not used the examples that he used, he might have been criticized for showing inadequate understanding of the field itself.

As someone who previously worked in journalism and esp. enjoyed writing so-called think pieces (for which I not infrequently read scholarly works, and interviewed and quoted scholars themselves), I agree also with Brisbane, who also quotes Peter W. Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars (and an anthropologist), observing that "scholars are filling a rising appetite for science writing in the popular press and that the protocols for giving credit there remain murky."

It might be time for journalists to develop such criteria - and for those of us interested in "popularizing" scholarly work to become involved in developing them.

What you can learn from books * and * reviews

David Brooks: How I love to dislike him. He will start with an observation that makes sense to me - then blow it. Like in today's column, "The Medium Is the Medium."

Brooks begins the column by reporting on a study that found that disadvantaged kids who received books at the end of the school year - in other words, the kids typically affected by "summer slide" as measured in tests and grades - maintained higher reading scores than the kids who received no books. The results held even when they did not read the books. How and why? Here is the bit of sense:

But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

After this point is when Brooks blew it, at least for me.

I do not disagree entirely with the observations underlying a statement like this: "The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students." I teach college students, and I lament the fact every single day that too many of them are not better readers. I believe that were they better readers of books, they also might be better citizens and - gasp - better users of the Internet.

However. Brooks' exposition on the "culture" of the book versus the "culture" of the Internet makes me cranky as an anthropologist. Here again, "culture" or rather "cultures" become talked about as bounded and singular and consistent. Books and the Internet emerge from and coexist (and might or might not compete) in what we might call the one and the same "culture." In a book that I currently am perusing, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, linguist Dennis Baron reminds us:

The World Wide Web wasn't the first innovation in communication to draw some initial skepticism. Writing itself was the target of one early critic. Plato warned that writing would weaken memory, but he was more concerned that written words - mere shadows of speech - couldn't adequately represent meaning. His objections paled as more and more people began to structure their lives around handwritten documents (Baron 2009:x).

"Culture," and history, aside, Brooks' description of books as representing "a hierarchical universe" with "classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom" is exactly not the buzz that reading deserves or requires, esp. for the disadvantaged kids who likely already understand themselves as the beach reading of society.

His primary objection to the Internet is this:

Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.

I have to wonder whether or not Brooks has any self-awareness of his own position in the old media - on the "important" and "prestigious" editorial page of the Gray Lady - because this sounds like his own crankiness as a columnist in a snit about the respect that he believe he should be shown?

However. Now I have placed my own snittiness on display.

I do not think there is anything inherently anarchical about the Internet. (In its own ways, it is also hierarchical.) It is a technology, like books are a technology, and it is what we make it to be.

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While there might be nothing like reading Brooks to raise your (my) ire in the am, but I esp. learned much from reading this recent essay on "The Death and Life of the Book Review" in the June 21 issue of The Nation.

In it, John Palattella considers the past and present state of newspaper journalism and of the book review in particular:

Claims that books sections are eliminated or downsized because they can't earn their keep are bogus. It is indisputable that newspapers have been weakened by hard times and a major technological shift in the dissemination of news; it is not indisputable that newspaper books coverage has suffered for the same reasons. The book beat has been gutted primarily by cultural forces, not economic ones, and the most implacable of those forces lies within rather than outside the newsroom. It is not iPads or the Internet but the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers themselves.

.... In a news context, "anti-intellectual" does not necessarily mean an antipathy to ideas, though it can mean that too. I use the word "anti-intellectual" to describe a suspicion of ideas not gleaned from reporting and a lack of interest in ideas that are not utterly topical.

So, in Palattella's perspective, there is more at stake in book reviews than a particular book or even books and reading at large. As, dare I even suggest, Brooks also contends, it is "culture" and history.

Henrietta Lacks

This weekend, I finally finished reading science journalist Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The only reason that it took me so long to read it - over the course of two months - is that I taught three courses during the semester, have two kids (ages 3 and 6), and a spouse away at a three-week-long seminar.

It is rather serious a subject, but the narrative has such a pull, that you might need to take the book to the beach. It deservedly has received a number of excellent reviews, which can be read at Skloot's own Web site.

Henrietta Lacks is about a woman whose cancerous cells, removed from her body during a biopsy, became the basis of tissue culture research in the late 20th century. "HeLa" cells, as researchers refer to them, revolutionized medical research, contributing to scientific understanding of the basic biology of cancer and the development of chemotherapies. The story is about how and why the cells could be taken from Lacks - a poor black woman seeking care in the charity hospital at Johns Hopkins during the 1950s - and used for research with her consent or knowledge, or that of her husband or children.

Along the way, the book is also about medical research ethics and their development during the last 50 years, following the Nuremberg trials and the uncovering of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, two grim "milestones" in science. As Skloot writes in her Afterword, the issue is less about compensation - and concerns about the commercialization of tissue culture research are discussed throughout the book - and more about consent. Henrietta Lacks reads as an argument for why individuals ought to be informed at least of the possibility that their tissues might be used for research, even have a say about what kind of research. This book describes the damage that can be done when there is no information and no consent.

As important, the book is also about what happened to Henrietta's family after her death at age 31. While the cells became celebrated as a miracle of science, her children became abandoned, essentially, by their father. When they finally learn about their mother's "contribution" to science, they are ill prepared, emotionally and otherwise, to understand what this means, let alone "appreciate" the good for science and society. For example, one of Deborah's brothers refers to the "rape" of their mother's cells, which they learn - after a lifetime of their own neglect and abuse - have been exposed to nuclear radiation and fallout, HIV, scores of toxins, and other extremes in conditions to "test" their effects on humans.

Knowledge of the HeLa cells esp. devastates Deborah, the fourth of her five children and the only surviving daughter. Deborah becomes the central figure in Henrietta Lacks as she struggles to understand how her mother's cells could have done so much "good," when she herself has suffered so much from her mother's absence. Over and over again, Deborah decries the fact that no one ever bothers really to explain to her what is happening to her mother's cells. Although Skloot admits her occasional impatience with Deborah, she also never condescends to her: Is it any wonder that Deborah is under the impression that clones of her mother are walking around London, given the sensationalism of headlines in the media?

I found gripping, poignant, and difficult to read the chapters that detail the journey of discovery that Skloot and Deborah undertake. They visit a laboratory, at the invitation of the researcher, where Deborah and one of her brothers see their mother's cells under the microscopes and hear from a scientist who has dedicated his entire career to working with "HeLa" cells what they mean to him.

Then Skloot and Deborah look into whatever happened to Deborah's older sister, Elsie, who had been institutionalized as a young child, then forgotten by the family after their mother's death. I found Elsie's story even more disturbing than Lacks' own story. Deborah herself had come to be convinced that Elsie might have been deaf, as she and her brothers also had degrees of congenital deafness, which might have accounted for her apparent "slowness" (not responding to speech) that led to her being certified as an "idiot." Most of the medical records at the institution where Elsie lived and died had been destroyed, but Skloot and Deborah uncover her death certificate, with a rather gruesome photograph attached. Skloot pieces together a story in which it is likely that Elsie, who never reached her teens, had been a subject of medical experiments that might have included surgeries. The news, of course, is almost too much for Deborah to bear.

I can imagine that writing about the breakdown and the ritual of "soul cleansing" that follows were a challenge for Skloot, who rises beautifully to the occasion - I think because she so clearly feels compassion and affection for Deborah and for the other members of Henrietta's family. Indeed, as a cultural anthropologist and a former journalist, I so admired that throughout the almost 10 years that this project took to complete, Skloot respected the fact that this is not her story and that she does not control it. This is critical to how and why she, a young white journalist, gains Deborah's trust.

Initially, I had been thinking I might assign this book in Medical Anthropology or the Anthropology of the United States, but now I am thinking that it just need to be read and discussed widely. Period. It might be ideal for a "Big Read" on a college campus because it addresses important and meaningful concerns about research ethics and science as well as about race and poverty, all of which are not just coincidentally interconnected.

I want to compare this book with Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down in that it boasts careful reporting, clear and compassionate writing, and a story that catches you and knocks you down. I know any number of anthropologists who teach Fadiman's book in their classes. It also is read in book clubs, in community "Big Read" programs, and in classes on "cultural competency" in nursing and medical schools. Henrietta Lacks ought to become required reading in the life sciences.

Anthropologizing like a parent

It was from martinimade that I found my way to this blog post on how / why having babies might make you a better writer.


First off, I am so glad to see someone else reacting to The Guardian’s 10 rules for writing fiction, which it collected from the likes of Elmore Leonard and Margaret Atwood – in particular to the list from Richard Ford, which begins:

1. Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

2. Don't have children.

I am not a writer of fiction – or at least, I am not supposed to be, as an academic anthropologist (and a former newspaper reporter) – but I felt that a number of the rules for writing fiction might apply just as well to what I do.

Ford’s 1st rule might be one of the more important and meaningful suggestions that I have seen made because it acknowledges that a person does not, in fact, write or accomplish any other work in a void, but does it with the seen and unseen support of others.

Despite his misgivings, StraightMan supported my decision to leave a good job in journalism for, of all things, graduate school, so apparently he thinks my being an anthropologist is at least not a bad idea. Which it could be.

By the by, a 2008 survey by the University of Washington Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education, found that women receive 45 percent of the PhD’s in the social sciences (specifically, anthropology, communication, geography, history, political science, and sociology). We are less likely than men to be married 6 to 10 years after the PhD. When married, 34 percent of us are married to partners with PhD’s. Anecdotally, I feel like the non-PhD partners of women with PhD’s whom I know are among the most supportive, self-assured, relaxed, and confident men I ever met. Which I think speaks to Ford’s 1st rule.

As for Ford’s 2nd rule.

I admit that there are days when this makes complete sense to me. Or at least, if one has children, one ought to have a good, old-fashioned wife. I need a wife. The kind who likes to pack lunches for her Brady Bunches, to paraphrase Nelly McKay.

However. Were it not for having become a mother (not just once, but twice), what would I know? I mean specifically what would * I * know?

As an anthropologist, I find myself taking more interest in more things, not less and not fewer, as I move along. Over time, also, I am learning to be more patient with other people – possibly even with myself.

Anthropology Sidney Mintz – who happens to have been one of StraightMan’s teachers – once wrote that fieldwork requires watching people do what they do and listening to them. “Do not expect them to be consistent,” he advised.

For me, having children has made me less demanding of consistency, more accepting and even appreciative of how much contradiction we live with, big and small. I have learned to care more and to care less.

On the care-more front: I think what drew me first into journalism and then into anthropology has been the idea that everyone has their stories to tell, and they deserve to be heard. Which, by the way, I read a thoughtful reflection about “objectivity” in journalism – by Christiane Amanpour in Eric Alterman’s April 12th column in The Nation: “There are some situations one simply cannot be neutral about, because when you are neutral you are an accomplice. Objectivity doesn’t mean treating all sides equally. It means giving each side a hearing.” I think this is what anthropology does especially well.

With varying degrees of success, I try to practice while I preach to Beanie and Bubbie about manners and civility – to respond, in talk or in kind, so that people feel included and respected.

Also, I am obsessed with composting, individually and collectively, and I covet a rain barrel for our house. (See image above. Sigh.)

On the care-less front: A friend and I were chatting over breakfast the other day. This is a treat that we have ritualized, dubbing it “break fest” because we only have it during college breaks (not vacations). I will call this friend Maker because she is so accomplished as a maker of things like books and sweaters and children and home and so on. As a journalist, Maker said she thought that having children made it easier for her to ask impertinent questions. “What’s the worst you can do?” she said. “Yell at me?”