The tide is high

Enjoyed the opportunity this past weekend to celebrate my 40th birthday (!) with a whirlwind visit to the city, which I called my home in my 20s. I am happy to report that as good as my 20s were, I am glad to be where I am now, metaphorically and literally. Midlife need not be a crisis.

I figure this is not a bad start to the next half of my life :)

However - and you knew that this was coming - there are more than enough crises brewing around us. Climate change is one, with attendant other crises like the rising of sea levels.

The Museum of Modern Art currently has an exhibition called Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront that I highly recommend viewing.

Five interdisciplinary teams were assigned to design projects for five sites around New York City, including lower Manhattan. The projects addressed ecology / environment in terms of biological, social, and economic concerns - an approach that an anthropologist might call holistic. They considered humans, other animals, plants, water, and other elements. They considered history and future.

Here is a link to the Rising Currents blog.

Still recalling the fresh taste of Wellfleet in my mouth, I have to say, I found a favorite in the Zone 4 oyster-tecture project.

Here is a link to a Bloomberg new service report on oyster-tecture.

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As an aside, visiting the MOMA, along with visits this summer to the Clark Art Institute and the Corning Museum of Glass, reminded me that the role of museums is not only to preserve the past (even were that possible to do in the first place).

Museums provide us with spaces (and times) where we can imagine. That is the delight and thrill that I first experienced when my parents took me, as a grade schooler, to the American Museum of Natural History - I liked looking at the gems - and the Metropolitan Museum of Art - I liked the arms and armament, the musical instruments, and the rooms of period furniture.

Some parents instill in their kids a love of sport or craft or the great outdoors. Not being athletic or skillful myself, I suppose I might be handing along, at least, a love of museums and the recognition that they ought to be places where possibilities become re-presented to us (and not just go there to die)...

I think E.L. Konigsburg captured what is wonderful about museums so well in a book that I especially loved at that age, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which I plan to share with Beanie. When she is finished reading that classic horse tale, Misty of Chincoteague.

Queering ponies

If Beanie is horse-crazed, then I am a bit horse-crazed-crazed, as this turns out to be a fascinating topic to examine in parenthropological perspective. For example, while browsing google scholar, I found a reference to Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn (Routledge, 2002[1995]). Rooted in feminist theory (which at heart questions the “natural” order of gender and calls attention to its constructions), queer theory (which further questions sexuality), and cultural studies (which “reads” a range of cultural phenomena, including literature and film), the essays are considerations of “carnalities,” or bodies and sexualities.

As an aside: Before I was an anthropologist and before I was a journalist, I was an English major with a concentration in women’s and gender studies in the late 1980’s / early 1990’s. So, I confess to a slight weakness for overwrought readings of text(s), though I admit also to impatience with the breathlessness exhibited in the writings themselves. In any case, if an aim of scholarship is also creativity – a point on which even empiricist friends might agree – then works like this are worth entertaining.

Elspeth Probyn, in her introductory essay, titled “Queer Belongings: The Politics of Departure,” considers the phenomena of “horse-crazed” in terms of relationships between girls, and relationships between girls and horses. In so doing, she reminds us that horse-crazed is not just an idea of the mind, but also an experience of the body or bodies:

While I have always been fascinated by this connection of girls and girls and horses, body against body against body, I am far from alone in thinking that there is something wonderfully thrilling about the movement of women on women on horses. From National Velvet to My Friend Flicka, horses figure in any number of ways. And as far as I remember from the pony-club stories and experiences of my youth, it was always girls and girls and horses together, with nary a boy in sight (and if there were, they tended to be ‘sissy boys’ – but that’s another story that requires another storyteller). Within popular culture this generalized coupling of girls and horses (‘pony-mad’) then operates in opposition to that of girls and boys (‘boy-crazy’). Of course, equine associations vary – consider Jeanne Cordova’s reaction to the onset of puberty:

The day I became a girl, my life was over. ‘This is the stupidest thing I ever saw.’ I flung the bra out of the window and screamed at my mother ‘You can’t expect me to wear that. It’s meant for a horse.’ (Cordova 1992: 274)

I think Probyn reminds us here that the relationship between girls and horses undeniably carries the charge of sexuality - I mentioned in an earlier post that googling "girls and horses" is a mistake for the PG-minded - but it is not necessarily about sex (with references to Catherine the Great bracketed for the moment).

Being "horse-crazy" is different from being "boy-crazy." Probyn suggests that the relationships between girls and between girls and horses – at least as depicted in so many popular stories – are ideal and innocent, like a true sisterhood, a community between humans and animals, or culture and nature in balance with females mediating the connection. Interestingly, I find this consistent with what I have heard other thoughtful adults say about supporting girls' interests in horses - that it can be empowering for girls and that it can encourage their concern with nature and environment.

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On being "horse-crazy" versus "boy-crazy" - and providing us with another glimpse of the class dimensions of girls and horses - an observation from The Official Preppy Handbook (1980):

The Horse Phase is a standard condition of a girl-Prep's adolescence. More aesthetic than pimples, less worrisome than cars, but colossally boring while it lasts, it is the activity for girls ages ten to fourteen....

Then one day, she discovers Boys. The breeches hang in the closet, the horse-show ribbons get dusty on the wall, and the objects of her affections thereafter walk on two legs instead of four.

So, it is interesting to think about the taken-for-granted status of The Horse Phase as connected to the taken-for-granted status of girls being crazy for boys (i.e., the normativity of heterosexuality).

At least as a parenthropologist. As a parent, I still need to deal with first grade.

Twenty minutes into the future

While I am on the topic of consumption - albeit not of ponies, at least for the moment - my heart skipped a little drum machine beat when I read the news about the release of "Max Headroom: The Complete Series" on DVD.

"Blank is beautiful!"

Consuming ponies, Part 1

What is the appeal of this Pony Pals pony bike (above), which its manufacturers / marketers describe as having been invented for this reason:

What we love most of all is watching the joy children get when riding ponies. Four simple words describe it best; "saddle up and smile." But, unfortunately, not every child has the chance to experience this thrill. So that's why we created Pony Pals.

The bike pictured above is priced at $220.

What are American middle-class girls made of? Apparently, a mania for horses and ponies - which to parenthropological eyes like yours and mine does not emerge from a "natural" affinity with horses (despite what the story books tempt us into believing...), but an even more fascinating cultural and social relationship that I have been musing upon in recent posts.

If you know a little girl who is horse crazed, then you know that part of the relationship involves lots of stuff, like the bike above, or what anthropologists call "material culture" - and the production and especially consumption of said stuff is what we American middle-class parents decry as "materialism."

As an aside, I confess that I do not dislike stuff and in fact, derive enough enjoyment out of it that I sometimes get a little bit tired of everyone climbing on their high horses all the time about stuff... The problem with "consumerism" is that it deflects our attention from production and the work that we do and the conditions in which we do it (and also create). Stuff itself is not intrinsically "bad" and "evil," as I sometimes hear other parents describe it. Is it?

The pony bike probably makes more sense and has more appeal to a child than to an adult. I know, I know, I am an anthropologist and should be all about hybridity, but I find this particular hybridization a bit unsettling... The whole "Godfather" aspect with the horse's head, I think.

Keeping up with The Times

Just interrupting my stream of thought on horses to wonder whether or not Mark C Taylor is a tenured tool of corporate academia / higher ed?

Here is his August 14 op / ed piece proposing that universities and colleges ought to look at their bottom lines and act toward economic sustainability - through such measures as merging departments of philosophy at institutions like Columbia and NYU. I take it that the point here is largely rhetorical, as Taylor, a professor of religion, uses his own current affiliation (at Columbia) as an example.

In today's Room for Debate blog, Taylor, who is currently professor at Columbia and a professor emeritus at Williams College, calls for mandatory retirement of faculty.

Not that I do not see informed debate as vital - and the rethinking of academia / higher education as critical - but I do not see what Taylor says as especially imaginative. Yet because his is Mark C Taylor, his ideas find a forum in The New York Times and become part of the discourse.

Classing horses

As a parenthropologist, I am thinking about what it means for little girls today to be "horse crazy" - and of course, I am asking why American middle-class girls, like my daughter and her friends, read books that tell stories about girls and horses, play with toy horses, beg for horseback riding lessons (not to mention ponies), and so on. Here are my continuing notes on this topic.

Today, I am wondering about the classed dimensions of the horse world. Michael Korda, in his 2004 book, Horse People, notes that more than 5 million households in the United States own a horse or horses - and that the U.S. population of horses stands around 13.5 million. "That seems like a lot of horses in a country where most people had made the switch to the automobile by the end of World War I and in which horses – with a few exceptions like police horses, or carriage horses in places like New York’s Central Park, or among the Amish, are no longer working animals, strictly speaking" (1).

The number of horses suggests that the sociological reality of owning (or at least caring for) a horse involves a certain amount of diversity - but it also makes me think about horses as symbols of particular kinds of lives.

One kind of life that horses represent is an English aristocratic life, as Korda suggests:

“In England, you have to understand," Margaret says – giving me a look that means, Take this seriously! – “there’s a whole lifestyle that revolves around ponies, like the one in the Thelwell cartoons, full of cross-looking little girls in pigtails, with velvet hard hats and jodhpur boots, and tiny, fat Shetland ponies, each with a mind of its own. In the English countryside, a pony gets passed on from child to child as it gets outgrown, like clothes in a large family, so most of them don’t stay at one place all that long” (75).

From a child’s point of view, a pony in those days involved some of the same desires that center on learning to drive and owning a car today for teenage Americans – freedom to come and go as you please, responsibility (“You can have it, but you have to look after it”), a sense of power and control, on top of which, unlike a car, a pony is warm, furry, accepts – indeed expects – treats, and responds to love, affection, and attention (76).

The whole notion of a little girl and her pony is deeply entrenched in English life, and also provides an early statement about class, status, and athletic ability, very much part of the Diana the Huntress syndrome that permeates a certain stratum of English society when it comes to little girls (77).

An Anglo-American aristocratic life becomes represented in The Private Passion of Jackie Kennedy Onassis: Portrait of a Rider, by Vicky Moon (2005):

Almost every little girl dreams about owning a pony, but for Jacqueline Bouvier, it was a given…. In the privileged circle into which she was born, riding was a necessary social grace, as was playing a decent game of tennis, knowing which fork to use, and writing a proper thank-you note.

In other words, horses seem to represent the good life - and the accessibility of horses to the daughters of middle-class families (as well as aristocratic families) becomes a sign of social mobility.

Also, the riding ability of the girls themselves itself might serve social mobility: In Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1871), the poor-but-genteel March girls manage to become accomplished riders, even without their own stable of horses, and they are invited on riding parties, at which their skills are praised. Amy is mortified, however, when, on their round of calls to the wealthier families in their neighborhood, Jo reveals that they practiced on a saddle mounted on a low-lying branch of an apple tree.

In the 1940 film, "The Philadelphia Story," the aristocratic Tracy's "man of the people" fiance is shown to be lacking in class because he cannot ride a horse.

Domesticating horses

From the back flap of Kathleen Duey's Katie and the Mustang, which Beanie is reading currently:

Girls throughout history, in almost every country, have grown up trusting horses with their friendship, their secrets, and even their very lives.

I begin my parenthropological examination of this quote with questions about when, where, and why horses were domesticated - which happen to be exactly the questions that archaeologist David Anthony addresses in his 2007 book, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language.

Chapter 10 is titled "The Domestication of the Horse and the Origins of Riding: The Tale of the Teeth," which begins with a story about how finding the answers to larger questions require finding the answers to smaller questions. It goes back to the wisdom of looking at a horse's teeth. "Bit wear is important, because other kinds of evidence have proven uncertain guides to early horse domestication. Genetic evidence, which we might hope would solve the problem, does not help much" (Anthony 2007:196).

The female bloodline of modern domesticated horses show extreme diversity.... Wild mares must have been taken into domesticated horse herds in many different places at different times. Meanwhile, the male aspect of modern horse DNA, which is passed unchanged on the Y chromosome from sire to colt, shows remarkable homogeneity. It is possible that just a single wild stallion was domesticated (Anthony 2007:196).

Wild horses were likely to have lived across the Northern Hemisphere, but became extinct in North America 10 to 14,000 years ago, with climate change.

Evidence of the domestication of horses has been found in the Eurasian steppes, located north of the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea.

What was the incentive to tame wild horses if people already had cattle and sheep? Was it for transportation? Almost certainly not. Horses were large, powerful, aggressive animals, more inclined to flee or fight than to carry a human. Riding probably developed only after horses were already familiar as domesticated animals that could be controlled. The initial incentive probably was the desire for a cheap source of winter meat (Anthony 2007:200).

Surprising as it might seem - it was to me - I think this bit of information about the domestication of horses is relevant to the stories that girls like Beanie and me love(d). In books like Katie and the Mustang or the American Girl story, Meet Felicity, a wild horse, in fact a stallion, becomes tamed through the care of a young girl. This fiction seems to be an echo of a larger fiction about why horses became domesticated in the first place. Consider that, in human history, the significance of horses has changed. They have become sentimentalized and romanticized.