Visions of sugar plums and Marcel Mauss

How I spent the last week: Giving finals. Grading finals. Drawing long eyelashes on Beanie and her seven comrades-in-arms for five performances of "The Nutcracker."

Watching Beanie march on stage before a packed house - it was something to see. It makes me wish every child had opportunities like this. To perform and to transform and to learn - and to teach her mother what it means rise to the occasion and act with grace. I am so proud and so hopeful for her :)

***

I like to think of Christmas as the Mauss wonderful time of the year.

Yuk, yuk, yuk.

A friend posted on FB the following link to comedian Jimmy Kimmel's shtick urging parents to punk their kids with prank Christmas presents.

She posted the link, commenting that while she found it side-splitting, she also wondered whether or not it was abusive. Others then mused about the potential for children to draw lessons about gratitude from the stunt.

I hope not. As a parent, I hope that my children never learn to be grateful for a gift deliberately selected to be just plain bad.

As an anthropologist, I also hope that they learn a bit about the meanings of gifts.

Marcel Mauss observed that a reason why it might be better to give than to receive is because gifts create obligation to the giver from the recipient. Or as anthropologist Lee Cronk wrote in an article that is widely taught in introductory anthropology classes, gifts always come with strings attached.

It is at this point when I am teaching on gift economies in ANTH 100 that I need to remind students that it is not necessarily "bad" to be under obligation. When you think about it, feeling obligation, as individuals and as groups, enables us to live together. We call it a sense of responsibility and of belonging. I think when my students start to feel the weight of obligation as "bad," they are responding to their understanding that giving gifts can be assertions of status and power - and receiving gifts (or feeling obliged to receive them) can be experienced as a loss of status and power. (For more on this, see the classic ethnographic film, "Ongka's Big Moka," with the memorable line from Ongka, "In giving so much, I have knocked you down."

As much as we tend to want to forget that status and power exist between adults and children and within families, they do. This is perhaps what prompted my friend to think aloud about whether or not the prank Christmas presents were abusive.

I will open myself to accusations of being utterly humorless and say that I think punking your kids with prank Christmas presents is mean.

Of course, having no sense of humor is my specialty as a woman, in particular a feminist, and a member of an ethnic minority in the U.S. The former also makes me fiercely sarcastic.

However, I say with complete sincerity: Enjoy your winter holidays :)

Tips for battling your Inner Grouch

Disclaimer: No provocative anthropological content in this post. Go to Anthropology Report or Living Anthropologically for something intelligent. This post is for the weary, like me. A few reminders for the comadres and compadres who are giving and grading final exams this week:

1. "Put your own mask on first..."

Today I awoke and realized how ill I had been for the last two weeks or so b/c I experienced health again! I had forgotten what wellness felt like.

Last Friday, I finally took myself to urgent care, not for the hacking cough that has been lingering for about a month now, but b/c I thought my eye had gone septic: Redness, swelling, pain. Turns out it was an allergic reaction to erythromycin, which I had been using to treat the pink eye that I had caught from Beanie! A shock to me b/c my parents, both doctors, dispensed erythromycin with liberality. It is not an exaggeration to say that my mother always had a few in her purse. Just in case we had a bit of soreness in our throats that needed to be quelled.

BTW, the cough? Bronchitis. The dull ache in my ears? A touch of an infection in both ears. I was prescribed a horse pill of an antibiotic and an inhaler (which cost $40!)

StraightMan, I am sorry. I should have listened to you a full 10 days earlier.


2. I am a feminist, but I have to admit that at age 41, a little lipstick and eye liner can go a long way to brightening my own impression of myself.

Fellas, you can achieve the same effects with a trim of nose and ear hair! (Oh, come on, just admit it: At age 41, that is where it is growing now.)


3. Enjoyment needs to be practiced. Preferably among a dozen or more lovely individuals who have been gathered together to drink pomegranate punch and swap Christmas cookies! (I baked Mexican wedding cakes.)


4. Speaking of the bakerly arts and sciences, these atom cookies from the baker / blogger / biological anthropologist at Not So Humble Pie look good for the winter holidays! Cookies will not cure what ails you, but they offer little bits of comfort, which are good to take.

Back to grading :)

Keeping up with the Times

Just a quick comment on this piece on "The Dwindling Power of a College Degree," which appeared in the NYT Sunday Magazine for November 27:

Computers have hurt workers outside factories too. Picture the advertising agency in “Mad Men,” and think about the abundance of people who were hired to do jobs that are now handled electronically by small machines. Countless secretaries were replaced by word processing, voice mail, e-mail and scheduling software; accounting staff by Excel; people in the art department by desktop design programs. This is also true of trades like plumbing and carpentry, in which new technologies replaced a bunch of people who most likely stood around helping measure things and making sure everything worked correctly.

As a result, the people whose jobs remained valuable in that “Mad Men” office were then freed up to do more valuable things. A talented art director could produce more work more quickly with InDesign. A bright accountant could spend more time thinking of new ways to make and save money, rather than spending endless hours punching numbers into an adding machine. Global trade works much the same way. It’s horrible news for a textile factory worker in North Carolina, but it may be great for a fashion designer in New York.

Has it, in fact, been great for that art director and accountant and fashion designer? Or, in addition to producing more work quickly, thinking of new ways to make and save money, and so on, are these workers not also having to take on paperwork, maintain correspondences by voice and e-mail, and schedule meetings and what not via Outlook? The technologies do not do the work on their own - they still require people to run them. Except that those people are no longer dedicated staff that (in my opinion, more efficiently) manages the operations of a workplace.

In the workplace of higher ed, I recently heard from a colleague that how a few of her now-approaching-emeritus faculty member typically handled attendance (until quite recently) was that they circulated a sheet of paper asking students to sign in - then passed along the sheets to their full-time department secretary to keep track of student absences! So that the older faculty members could not understand how and why younger faculty members complained that they could not "count" attendance in their grading. Hint: Because it takes a lot of time to keep track of student attendance. Time that younger faculty members do not necessarily have b/c we have absorbed a lot of workplace operational work ourselves... (Not to mention whether or not it is even appropriate to ask department secretaries to do work like this...)

Here is what I found a bit frightening:

A general guideline these days is that people are rewarded when they can do things that take trained judgment and skill — things, in other words, that can’t be done by computers or lower-wage workers in other countries. Money now flows around the world so quickly, and technology changes so fast, that people who thought they were in high demand find themselves uprooted.

I think we tenure-track faculty members cannot take for granted that professors will always be needed. (We know that they are not always wanted...)

It is happening already, believe it or not, in K12 schooling. Read this piece, "How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools," from The Nation's November 16 issue.

The new normal sucks.

Teaching the anthropology of reproduction: Notes

T'was the Sunday night after Thanksgiving...

At least three of us in the household are sooo not looking forward to Monday. StraightMan is looking rather long faced about the pile of papers that he did not grade over his "break," which after all had been occupied with driving the four of us to my parents' home for Thanksgiving dinner, then driving us back again. While I slept both ways, still recovering from a cold and lack of rest. I feel creeping anxiety about the week ahead, but console myself that even though I still have classes to prepare for tomorrow, I washed, folded, and even put away all of the laundry this weekend! One must find solace where it can be found, like here in the kitchen near the box of wine that StraightMan has propped open. (Respect the box of wine. It is not your parents' box of wine.) Meanwhile Beanie is skulking around, peevish and bored with her dull family after spending the entire day yesterday stomping around the woods in this unseasonably mild weather with her best friend and her much more fun family, collecting acorn caps and milkweed to create "nature crafts."

Upstairs, I hear Bubbie taking his twice-weekly bath. Improvising his own lyrics to "Puff the Magic Dragon." No amount of gently suggesting to him that Puff lives in Hanalei will convince him that the dragon does not live in Hallowee (which BTW is not the same as Halloween).

Oh, to be Bubbie and four years old!

Some time this week or next, I will be required to give student evaluations in class. Which, despite the fact that I receive good numbers and even quite good written comments, I never can bring myself to read until an entire semester has passed and my memories have been dulled a bit. Kind of like actors not wanting to read the reviews for fear that they will not be able to continue acting.

In fact, I have had a fairly good time this semester teaching the Anthropology of Reproduction. This is a 200-level course that I have tried to teach once a year. It is now an elective not only for anthropology majors, but also biology majors in the human biology track at my college. (Another huzzah for the so-called teaching college! I mean, imagine undergraduate students at a research university being permitted such an opportunity to broaden their training.) The course is also cross-listed with Women's and Gender Studies.

The class typically has been overwhelmingly female, but there are at least a few more male students now than in past years (still only five out of 30), and they tell me that they are talking it about with their friends! On top of which, they and my female students alike make a point of describing reproduction as an issue for everyone to study.

As a teacher, this is just such a feel-good kind of class :)

A plea for syllabuses and suggestions on teaching the anthropology of reproduction just circulated on a listserv to which I belong (for the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction). In part b/c I am not convinced that I will get another chance to blog this week, I thought I might post my response here:

I assigned the edited volume, Reconceiving the Second Sex, this semester, and I am finding it has been terrific for provoking discussion in class:

Esp. memorable discussions so far on the chapters on sperm by Lisa Jean Moore and Helene Goldberg, which I prefaced with short "conversation starter" videos from YouTube. One is a 30-second TV commercial for a Belgian bank. (BTW, this might pair well also with Emily Martin's classic article on the romance of the egg and sperm.) The other is a 2-minute video of animation spliced together from Spike Lee's film "She Hate Me." I have not seen the film, but you get the gist from the clips, which play on the ideas that Moore discusses.

Also, an at times raucous discussion on the chapter by Laury Oaks on the male pill, esp. whether or not female students in my class trusted males to remember to take it! The readings and discussion on semen, sperm and the male pill followed readings and discussion of menstruation and the (female) pill, including menstrual suppression. So, I showed a PBS American Experience documentary on "The Pill" to preface discussion on Oaks and the male pill. It helped bring out discussion on how birth control can be experienced as a burden, a theme that other chapters in Reconceiving the Second Sex also explore.

Another terrific piece to read and discuss (not in Reconceiving the Second Sex) is Linda Layne's "The Home Pregnancy Test: A Feminist Technology?" Again, students had a lot to say, in part b/c they felt they really had not been esp. well informed. I showed two 30-second TV commercials from YouTube, one for EPT that featured a couple confessing their anxieties and hopes as reasons for wanting to know the results early (BTW, this commercial became lampooned on "Saturday Night Live") and a humorous one for a digital test ("the most sophisticated technology you will ever pee on") that we debated about who is the intended audience / market.

Hope that helps :) Curious to learn about other experiences with teaching anthropology of reproduction!

Occupations

OK, sooner or later, I will need to write that Kate Clancy a fan letter - I confess that I have not commented on her blog due to the fact that I would need to register as a user on Scientific American and it just seemed like a hassle - but I wanted to bring this to the attention of anyone who might be reading my blog and not already reading hers. Check out this post, "What Does It Mean to Do the Right Thing?"

As an aside, I want to say to Kate Clancy that I agree with her decision to continue blogging at SA (for now) and calling foul on what else might be published over there that is unscientific, sexist, racist, and just plain wrong.

I also agree with the commenter who noted that the person who should be leaving SA's blog is not her. I feel like I have seen or else have heard of this happening too many times - that is, the principled person takes a stand that in the end has no consequence for the transgressor and no impact on the institution, which continues to back the transgressor. This is not the fault of the principled person. This is the failing of the rest of us, who need to have her back!

***

I know that someone somewhere already has said something a lot smarter and more meaningful than what I will tap here about this, but is it not kind of interesting and cool the way in which the word / concept "occupy" has become re-occupied? Part of what is so brash about "Occupy Wall Street" is that it turns on head who is (supposed to be) occupying whom. That is, Wall Street is / has been the occupying power. At a PTO meeting at my daughter's elementary school a few weeks back - where we were discussing the possibility that our city's neighborhood schools might become reorganized in order to cut costs (e.g., closing a building, laying off staff) - I joked about a need for an Occupy Our Schools movement.

I was only half joking...

What counts (in tenure)?

I seem to have re-caught the cold from which I was recovering, so I walked around the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association - this last week / end in Montreal - rasping like an aging chanteuse who had loved her Gitanes a bit much.

My blog posts were put on hold for the last couple of weeks as I continued to prep classes and grade piles of papers and exams and in the wee hours after kiddos were put to bed, finished my conference paper then continued to edit it, right until the morning of my panel. Such is the academic parent's life.

Being at the meetings got me thinking again about a concern that is never far from my mind, which is what it means to be an academic parent or parenting academic, and in particular a female parenting academic.

A few weeks back, I posted a few musings inspired by biological anthropologist and blogger Kate Clancy on being a radical scholar. I stand by my musings with even stronger conviction today. At the meetings, friends were telling me about the pressure to publish or perish in their departments - and by publish, they mean specifically peer-reviewed journal articles. Not even chapters in edited books count for much. Much less contributing to a policy paper or testifying as an expert witness or blogging or organizing and presenting a paper at a well received and well attended panel at the annual meetings.

There are more than a few points to rant, like:

* It was noted at the business meeting of the Association for Feminist Anthropology that even while we all recognize changes in the structures of the academic publishing - with presses scaling back their operations - the expectations for tenure, especially at research institutions, have been slow to change. Undoubtedly, the expectations for tenure will need to change, but unfortunately, the female junior faculty whom I know fear falling into the gap. (I imagine that this is true for male junior faculty also, but for the moment, I am concerned with the challenges facing my female colleagues in particular.)

* Feminism has forced changes in institutional ideas and practices that now enable women to come into the academy, including women like myself and my female colleagues who work on issues such as reproduction - not because they are women's issues, but because they are also everyone's issues. It is clear that the institutions themselves are failing us. Note that I blame not feminism, but the institutions themselves. There continues to be both a bias against studying so-called women's issues and a misperception of issues like reproduction as not a men's issue.

* I have to ask, what is the point of peer review exactly? Ostensibly, it has something to do with validating the quality of the work that is being published, and that might be even more important in the age of "going viral." (On a related, but tangential point, here are a few considerations about the challenges that surround alternative forms of review, such as attempts at "crowd-sourcing" peer review, at the New York Times and at AAA's blog.) So, perhaps my rant is not so much about peer review - I recognize that there ought to be a process of some sort to check our claims and evidence - but about the particular kinds of venues (e.g., journals, but not edited books) and activities that count for tenure.

On a related note, I just read this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about anthropology professors who (gasp!) love to teach undergraduates. Of course, at a so-called teaching college like the one where I teach, the challenge is more to convince administrators and staff (and sometimes even other faculty) that research contributes directly to teaching.

In short, I find frustrating the reductionist thinking about what counts in a scholarly career.

Keeping up with The Times: The "app gap"

I logged on to blog and what do you know?! I never posted this little screed on the "app gap." Give a hint of what a terrific couple of weeks it has been here in the land of 2 academic careers + 2 kiddos = 2 much 2 handle.

***

At the moment, I am standing at the corner of Conference Paper Hell and Grading Nightmare, but of course, I have had my attention diverted.

StraightMan tells me last night that I ought to blog about this article in the NYT: "Screen Time Higher Than Ever For Toddlers." The article reports on a new study from the American Academy of Pediatrics:

Despite the American Academy of Pediatrics’ longstanding recommendations to the contrary, children under 8 are spending more time than ever in front of screens, according to a study scheduled for release Tuesday.

The report also documents for the first time an emerging “app gap” in which affluent children are likely to use mobile educational games while those in low-income families are the most likely to have televisions in their bedrooms.

The article then goes on to quote a survey researcher who notes that "parents increasingly are handing their iPhones to their 1 ½-year-old kid as a shut-up toy. And parents who check their e-mail three times on the way to the bus stop are constantly modeling that behavior, so it’s only natural the kids want to use mobile devices too.”

That, to me, is the problem that ought to be the concern here. Instead, the term "app gap" seems to problematize that children from lower income households have unequal (less) access to apps.

The article quotes parents who download apps for their kids, justifying the amount of screen time that they permit:

"I’ll lie to myself that these are skill builders,’” said his father, Keith Lender, who has downloaded dozens of tablet and smart phone apps for Jaden and his 1-year-old brother, Dylan. “No, I’m not lying,” he said, correcting himself. “Jaden’s really learning hand-eye coordination from the golf game, and it beats the hell out of sitting and watching television.”

I find it interesting that this parent both expresses awareness of the criticisms about whether or not screen time is building skills - then repeats the claim about hand-eye coordination that has floated in public discourse since every 6th grader I knew (except me) had an Atari game system at home. In a moment of resignation, he remarks that at least he is not letting his kids watch television. Which BTW the AAP reports is the dominant medium in lower income households.

I leave open the possibility that screen time involving apps might be qualitatively "better" than TV, but you will need to convince me. (Dadgumit, I am a scientist!)

Look, even the nation's chief technologists are not convinced, as the NYT also reported, in an article on the Silicon Valley school of choice - a Waldorf school (!):

The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

iPad as a form of class warfare? You decide.