State of The Nation

Just catching up on issues of The Nation that went neglected at the end of the semester, and this caught my eye - from a November 21, 2011 review of Melissa Benn's School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education, which seems instructive for us on this side of the pond:

Benn quotes a commentator who observed that, for all the vehemence of disagreements on the matter, "everyone wants the same thing: a good, free, local school for all." But it may be, alas, that not everyone wants that; what many people want is for their children to have more educational advantages than others, and they are prepared to do anything legal to get that. One of the most striking features of middle-class norms of ethical propriety is that a degree of self-interest that would be condemned as unacceptably selfish if attached to one's own wants becomes irreproachably "normal," even altruistic, when attached to the education of one's children.

This leads to people reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers as a parenting manual.

Threads

No year's end reflections or new year's resolutions here. Working on my tenure file, which I will be submitting in a few weeks. 'Nuff said.

***

Being an anthropologist who has published on fetal ultrasound imaging and having just uploaded about 20 photographs from Christmas, it seems fitting to ponder this, from Jana Prikryl's review of Errol Morris' new book, Believing Is Seeing: Observations in the Mysteries of Photography, published in the December 12th issue of The Nation:

On Facebook, intimate, life-altering information is often delivered in the form of a pictogram rather than a written "status update" - the ur-example being the dim, grainy sonogram news flash, which gestate as the mother's profile picture and then bursts forth into religious iconography with the posting of the Madonna-and-child snapshot. Births, bar mitzvahs, vacations, graduations, weddings and car accidents tend to be announced by way of their visual documentation. Compared with whatever we choose to write about ourselves, these snapshots seem to offer incontrovertible proof that how we wish to be seen is, in fact, precisely how we look.

***

StraightMan posted a tribute to archaeologist Elizabeth Brumfiel, who died on New Year's Day. I wanted to make mention of this here because without her willingness to take a chance on hiring an inexperienced instructor, it is likely that StraightMan would have quit academia. So, he and I both owe her something for both being working anthropologists today.

As a parenthropologist, who I particularly appreciate is that Professor Brumfiel's research as a specialist in Aztec archaeology turned attention to women and ordinary people. When she visited StraightMan's college to give an invited lecture in 2008, I became convinced that there could be almost nothing more fascinating to study than spindle whorls! I think that this is because she was interested in gaining insight into what life and work and family must have been like.

***

In college, a friend, observing the aggressive scribbles in the margins of my books, remarked that I needed to be a more "relaxed" reader.

I do not like to relax with books. I like books to make me change my mind.

YA author Walter Dean Myers speaks against a romanticized notion of reading in favor of a radical one:

“People still try to sell books that way — as ‘books can take you to foreign lands,’ ” Myers tells The New York Times in an interview published on January 3, 2012. “We’ve given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.”

“I think that what we need to do is say reading is going to really affect your life."

Word.

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.

I've said too much / I haven't said enough

From a review of philosopher Charles Taylor's Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays, published in the August 29 / September 5 issue of The Nation:

Sometimes, Taylor is the kind of writer so fearful of simplifying a complex truth, or flattening out nuances, that he runs out of space (or courage or stamina) just when he seems about to say what he is trying to say.

Sound familiar, my fellow professors of the liberal arts?

Post-post-race

If, and I am only saying if, we ever had that much celebrated post-race moment on a certain evening in November 2008, then the evidence keeps mounting that we have been living in a post-post-race moment ever since:

Last week, readers responded swiftly to evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa's piece, "Why are black women less physically attractive than other women," which had been posted on a blog at Psychology Today - then removed amidst the (justified) outrage. The anthropology blog Savage Minds posted a response, "Why are evolutionary psychologists less intelligent than other mammals." For me, this incident serves as a reminder (again) that it is not just about speaking out against racism, but explaining exactly how racism is "at work" - in this case, it is important and necessary to discuss the particulars of the research and the assumptions embedded in it.

My other favorite columnist at The Nation (in other words, not Katha Pollitt) is Gary Younge, who in the June 6th issue penned a piece called "The Paradox of Hope," which comments on an inconvenient truth of the Obama presidency: "But for all the ways black America has felt better about itself and looked better to others, it has not actually fared better. In fact, it has been doing worse. The economic gap between black and white has grown since Obama took power." Yet, Younge notes, black Americans generally continue to support Obama. Why? #1. Look no further than the spectacle of the Birthers: "In the face of such brazenly racist attacks, defending Obama's right to the office becomes easily blurred with defending his record." #2. "Racial advancement is increasingly understood not as a process of social change but of individual promotion," Younge observes, "the elevation of black faces to high places."

This might account for how and why the recent coverage in The New York Times' "Room for Debate" blog given to a study of racism in the United States turns out to be so wrong. Living Anthropologically picks apart the problems with the study, which the authors claim as evidence of anti-white bias on the rise from the 1950s to the 2000s. Except that "they don’t have historical data–the chart is deceptive":

What they have is a survey from today, asking people “to indicate the extent to which they felt both Blacks and Whites were the target of discrimination in each decade from the 1950s to the 2000s” (Norton and Sommers 2011:216). And, of course, whites today say anti-black bias was a problem in the 1950s but drops steadily, whereas anti-white bias is steadily on the rise. Blacks today say the same thing, although not to the same extent. But that does not actually say anything about what people in each decade actually thought! All it does is support the dominant U.S. mythology: the idea that racism was a problem back in the 1950s but it’s going away or gone now.

In other words, the study might tell us something about the perceptions of white and black Americans concerning the experience of race in the United States, but it is not what the authors themselves purport their research tells us.

Finally, I just started to read Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School, an ethnography written by sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan, who had attended, then later taught at St. Paul's. I was drawn to this book for a number of reasons, including what I admit to be a personal fascination with privilege. It never has been the wealth that dazzled me, but the confidence and ease with which the elite operate in the world: They can be some of the most charming, informed, and interesting people you ever met in your life - and I know this because I attended college with them. Khan articulates perfectly the question that has nagged at me:

One of the curiosities in recent years is how our social institutions have opened to those they previously excluded, yet at the same time inequality has increased. We live in a world of democratic inequality, by which I mean that our nation embraces the democratic principle of openness and access, yet as that embrace has increased so too have our levels of inequality. We often think of openness and equality as going hand in hand. And yet if we look at our experiences over the last fifty years we can see that that is simply not the case. This is most notable in elite colleges, where student bodies are increasingly racially diverse but simultaneously richer.

The headline in The New York Times on May 24th reads: "Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite."

Our So-Called Education

Living Anthropologically posted this brief item, commenting on two articles in The New York Times:

May 14: On the one hand, "Fast Tracking to Kindergarten." Meanwhile in college it's "Your So-Called Education." As a parent of young children, and a professor, these trends seem intuitively true, and wrong. Are they also related?

I think what we are witnessing now is the further constriction of what counts as education - and parents and everyone else concerned with teaching and learning, from primary school to college and university, ought to join forces to resist it.

Or as William Deresiewicz writes in an essay reviewing a dozen recent books on the state of higher education (published in the May 23rd issue of The Nation):

There is a large, public debate right now about primary and secondary education. There is a smaller, less public debate about higher education. What I fail to understand is why they aren't the same debate.... Education, it is said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket.... Learning isn't about downloading a certain quantity of information into your brain, as the proponents of online instruction seem to think.... It is labor-intensive; it is face-to-face; it is one-at-a-time.

Deresiewicz cites Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's recently published book, Academically Adrift, which found that college students today are not in fact learning all that much in college. At institutions of higher education, the buzzword now is "assesssment," which is supposed to measure "student learning outcomes" - that is, how full are the buckets.

When students apparently fail to learn, the reflexive response of policy makers has been to blame the teachers. Witness the popularity of so-called reformers like former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, and the attacks upon public school teachers and their unions.

However, consider the conditions in which public school teachers today work. Austerity demands that they make do with less, teaching more children in their classrooms (not to mention having to manage the complexities of the lives of the children whom they teach), cutting "extras" like field trips or recess, preparing children to perform well on standardized tests that are taken as measures of the teachers themselves. How well can teachers teach - and students learn - under such conditions?

A point that Deresiewicz and Arum and Roksa (in "Your So-Called Education") all make is that there are now fewer full-time tenure-track faculty teaching at American colleges and universities: No more than 35 percent. Deresiewicz suggests:

If we're going to make college an intellectually rigorous experience of the students who already go - still more, for all the ones we want to go if we're going to reach the oft-repeated goal of universal postsecondary education, an objective that would double enrollments - we're going to need a lot more teachers: well paid, institutionally supported, socially valued.

***

Another important reason to resist the narrowing of education is that it reinforces already existing inequalities. Narrowing what counts as worth learning serves the interests of people who know what Kumon is and can afford it. The only hope for democracy is a broad education.

State of The Nation

In the May 23rd issue of The Nation, New York Times economics writer Louis Uchitelle reports on the decline in the number of dual-earner married couples between 2007 and 2010.

Uchitelle takes particular note of married couples who find themselves relying on what had been women's "second income" jobs after men lose their places as the primary bread winners:

Meanwhile, Rhonda's long working days - she leaves at around 5 am and is gone until early evening - have altered her role in the family, not to mention his. She still views him - and he views himself - as the chief provider, if not today then in the long run, when her income, they hope, will once again become secondary.

Uchitelle describes a shift in household responsibilities, but whether or not this constitutes a shift toward gender equality is another question:

When Ruth Millkman, a sociologist at the City University of New York, noticed this role reversal in data from the 1930s, she thought it was a move toward gender equality. "But because the role reversal was strongly associated with economic deprivation, it was not welcome," Milkman says. Seventy-five years later, Keith Baudendistel certainly does not welcome it. "I want to be the head of the household again," he says, "but until that can happen, we have to manage as best we can."

I have to wonder about the hope and the expectation that life can return to what it had been. Even when men like Keith find work again, they are likely to earn less (even considerably less) than what they earned before, and it is unlikely that Rhonda's income will be "secondary" again. Their home life has been and will be transformed.

I think there might have been a moment when it looked like the financial crisis might precipitate important and meaningful changes in the way things (and people) work. It seemed like crisis might precipitate a searching of our collective souls. Question the power of financial institutions. Question the work week. Question inequalities, including gender.

Did I miss the parade?

Telling us what we think we already know

That is what I think undergraduate students think I do as a professor of anthropology.

I say that b/c of course it is that time again: In-class review and then exams suggest to me that for each student who genuinely seems to have grasped the concepts as presented to them in class, then absorbed them well enough to think through the ways in which they apply in various situations (including in his or her own life), there are others who walk in and out of class apparently immune to education.

Sigh.

This is a point that columnist Katha Pollitt makes in the May 16th issue of The Nation, as she discusses the rise and fall from grace of memoirist and erstwhile do-gooder Greg Mortenson:

As a string of much-praised fake memoirs can attest - to say nothing of Bernie Madoff's meteoric career - people don't look closely at stories that tell them what they want to hear. Americans love to be inspired by heroic lone individuals who provide simple solutions to complicated problems - especially when the individuals are American and famous, the solutions are cheap and the problems are far away.

I admit that as a cultural anthropologist, I both agree with Pollitt - and feel vaguely queasy b/c I suspect that what students learn in ANTH 100 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology is the story that they want to hear. That is, the truth that they think they already know. Note that I say "what students learn." Not "what I teach." Or at least try to teach.

I think students learn that "culture" is a simple solution and a complicated problem. As in, Our culture could teach Them Over There what to do in order to fix all of Their problems, which are rooted in Their culture. They need to learn from Us.

Exhibit A: Nicholas Kristof's column on female "circumcision" this week in the New York Times. (See a response at Living Anthropologically.)

Kristof ought to read Pollitt. In fact, I ought to assign this column for ANTH 100 next fall:

We've gotten used to a certain kind of NGO fairy tale, as depicted in the children's book Beatrice's Goat, much admired by Kristof: Heifer International gives a family a farm animal, and in a dozen years, the profits send a daughter to college.... Faced with the chance to transform a life, we forget that poor people rarely need just one small thing, that they are embedded in immensely complex and oppressive social worlds.

I am grateful to Pollitt for giving a name (NGO fairy tale) to the gripe that I have had with efforts like Clean the World, "which distributes recycled soap products, along with appropriate educational materials, to impoverished countries worldwide, and to domestic homeless shelters." (Along these lines, I had heard about a group called Underwear for Africa (and in the UK, Knickers for Africa.)

It is not just that we forget, but we want (and in a way, need) to believe that poor people need Just One Small Thing b/c that seems to be all we are willing to give toward justice.

Katha Pollitt is right as usual

From the February 28th issue of The Nation:

Are you a tiger mother, a soccer mom, a helicopter parent, an attachment mom, a permissive free spirit who just wants your child to be herself? Congratulations. Your kids have a good chance of turning out reasonably well. Not because you are a parenting genius who has hit on the perfect method but because you have the time and energy and cultural capital to give your child what he needs to be successful in today's world no matter what child-raising method you choose.... Your ex may have run off with your best friend, your apartment may be too small, you may hate your job - but you are still a white collar, college-educated, middle-class person. And that makes all the difference for your children.

The biggest barrier to educational achievement today is not any of the things the media talk endlessly about: poorly prepared teachers, badly run schools, too many tests, low standards. It's child poverty - which, like poverty in general, has just dropped out of the discourse....

The parenting wars look like they are about children, but really they are only about each parent's own child. That's why they serve such a useful social function. Without them we might have to think about the frightening place America is becoming for ever more millions of kids. Who knows? We might even feel that we should do something about it.

Evolution is not something to "believe"...

... it is science that ought to be taught and learned. In case you missed this, as I did, from Patricia J. Williams' column in the February 21st issue of The Nation:

If Singapore, China and Hong Kong are producing a greater number of students with musical proficiency and excellent test scores, it's because they have made huge public investments in education. They make musical instruments available to students - as the United States once did in the first part of the twentieth century. They have teachers certified in the subjects they teach - as was the case in Russian schools during the Sputnik era. "Westerners" are not nearly as lacking in work ethic as Chua maintains; but you don't get to Yale if your elementary school has no books. You don't rank first in the world in science if, as in the United States, 60 percent of your biology teachers are reluctant to teach evolution - and 13 percent teach creationism instead.

Armchair Anthropologie

A year after his passing (shortly as his 100th birthday), there is a new biography of Claude Levi-Strauss that I am putting on my wish list to read.

Here is a link to the review in the current issue of The Nation that drew my attention to it.

I confess my ignorance of the connections between Levi-Strauss and the Surrealist artists who were his contemporaries - and their participation in "a cheerful bohemian existence in New York":

With his friends Max Ernst and Andre Breton, he sought out the most enchanting pockets of the city's flourishing cultural ecosystem, stumbling on communities that preserved traditions long ago abandoned in the old country. In his mini-memoir "New York in 1941," Levi-Strauss fondly recalled attending Chinese operas under the first arch of the Brooklyn Bridge, conducting a mock-ethnography of Fire Island and reading out translations of President Roosevelt's speeches on Free French Radio.

I think I need to find a copy of "New York in 1941." Not to mention to ethnography of Fire Island.

(Hint to undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology: The review itself could be a tidy introduction to Levi-Strauss and his "structuralism.")

Love your library

This is a shout out to the public library, which serves us all intellectually and spiritually with a wealth of books and other materials; fairly and justly by making its materials available and accessible to everyone in the community; socially by providing us with a place to be; and sustainably.

Responding to a question about e-readers, Susan Cosier writes in her Green Guru column in the January-February 2011 issue of Audubon magazine:

A book made of recycled paper requires two-thirds of a pound of minerals (primarily gravel for road construction), whereas an e-reader uses 33 pounds for its electronic components and infrastructure.

She cites a study that suggests that "e-reader owners have to read 40 to 50 e-books to break even on most of the environmental costs."

(As an aside, I read in The New Yorker a few months back that the Kindle, which uses so-called electronic-ink technology, uses less energy than the iPad. By how much, it did not say.)

So, I want to start 2011 with a reminder to myself and a call to my friends to show love to your library: Use it. Support and defend public funding of it.

For those on campus, this includes your college or university library: Make time to play in the stacks! I always walk away with a ton of titles that inspire me.

***

The "break" between semesters for me is typically slower, saner, and just as filled with work. (I know the other academics are looking at this while they are not writing that paper or revising that article they planned to - so get back to work!) Slower and saner means that I allow myself to read the piles of back issues that have accumulated in the magazine basket that I keep in the downstairs bathroom. (Which is supposed to tell you not about my toilet habits, but about the near-guilt that I feel when I do not put my month's worth of The Nation and The New Yorker out of sight. Blurgh.)

So, on a note related to my soap-box moment on the library, I want to draw attention to another public good that is much too much taken for granted: The United States Postal Service.

As John Nichols wrote in The Nation (in the April 26, 2010 issue! - I think this must have been lost behind a Title Nine catalog - because I have a weakness for outdoor performance wear and the life it might represent):

Americans do not often talk about the Postal Service as a crucial underpinning of the democratic infrastructure, but we should. At a time when 35 percent of all Americans and 50 percent of rural residents have no broadband Internet access at home, the Postal Service is universal. Its 596,000 career employees travel more than 4 million miles to deliver more than a half-billion pieces of mail each day. It goes to extraordinary ends to assure that no citizen or community is neglected; it contracts commercial planes to move parcels across the country in a matter of hours, yet it still sends bush planes into Idaho's River of No Return Wilderness Area and organizes mule trains to deliver mail, food and supplies to the Havasupai Indians on the floor of the Grand Canyon.

The Postal Service maintains a network of more than 35,000 retail outlets--the largest in the world, with more locations than McDonald's, Starbucks and Wal-Mart combined--which are visited by more than 7 million Americans each day. The postal workers they encounter in these offices and on their doorsteps are reflective of their communities, as the service has historically been and remains one of the surest sources of employment for African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, women and the poor. In short, the USPS forms a vital network of service, connection and community that provides the steadiest link between Americans and their government. As Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) chair Ruth Goldway puts it, the service is "part of the fabric of the nation."

In 2011, how about we all rethink (and rephrase in our talk) what the post office is all about? Not a business, but a public service that not only treats people with fairness - I am dumbfounded by the extraordinary reach of the post office (bush planes and mule trains?!) - it also makes fairness possible in the form of absentee ballots. The measure of its success ought not to be its profitability.

Buy some stamps today?!

The case against tenure

Over breakfast, I read Dana Goldstein's essay, "Grading 'Waiting for Superman,'" in the October 11th issue of The Nation. Goldstein, an education reporter, considers what "Waiting for Superman" - a much discussed documentary about the failures of public education - tells us and especially what it does not tell us. Her assessment is similar to Nicholas Lemann's recent comment in The New Yorker, about which I blogged recently: Both journalists note that the film celebrates charter schools as a solution, and teachers unions as the problem.

For my friends who are parents and / or who are concerned about public educations and have questions about charter schools (I confess that I probably know too little about the issue...), I think it would be smart of us to read the criticisms of "Waiting for Superman." I have not yet seen the film - not at the mall cineplex in my neck of the woods - but I certainly plan on it. My understanding is that the film, made by the director of "An Inconvenient Truth," is quite compelling. However. I know that I want to know the rest of the story, too.

What especially caught my eye is the brief comment on tenure for public school teachers, which I think gives insight to the brouhaha over tenure for faculty at colleges and universities. Goldstein quotes from an interview with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, who apparently is singled out in the film as The Enemy:

The unions are hurt by public frustration with teacher tenure, a level of job security inconceivable to most American workers, who are barely hanging on during a recession with a nearly 10 percent unemployment rate.

"Only 7 percent of American workers are in unions," Weingarten says, adding matter-of-factly, "America looks at us as islands of privilege."

That is the case against tenure?! I call this the "sucks"-is-the-new-normal effect... Never mind that the real islands of privilege might lie located elsewhere...

***

I think it ought to be noted, as Goldstein does, that unionized teachers themselves also want to see their profession do a better job at maintaining their own standards. "According to a 2003 Public Agenda poll, 47 percent of teachers believe 'the union sometimes fights to protect teachers who really should be out of the classroom," Goldstein notes.

So, why not enable, encourage, and support workers themselves to set the standards, and see that they are upheld - and to do so in a way that preserves the dignity of each individual? Which, unfortunately, "policing" too often fails to do. We might have more incentive not to bend the rules, were the rules themselves more resilient...

More buzzkill

One of my favorite feminists, Katha Pollitt, recently mused on the advantages of social democratic systems in Europe and why Americans seem to reject such nice things as paid parental leave and public child care. The column, called "It's Better Over There," tips its hat to a new book, Tom Geoghegan's Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?

As a matter of fact, I sometimes think so - and not just because, like, my parents immigrated here from South Korea.

Here is what Pollitt says:

Still, it is hard to understand why Americans fight so hard against the nanny state, which provides so many good things.... My theory is more primitive: a critical mass of white Americans would rather not have something than see black and Latino Americans get it too. No matter how often progressives point out that most welfare mothers, and most poor people, are white, Big Government means the hard-working white taxpayer heaping largesse on shiftless people of color. The Tea Party movement suggests that trope is alive and well. In the twenty-first century, the problem is—still—the color line.

It hurts because it feels true.

Art science?

I am not an art historian, nor do I play one on TV, but I have enough hubris to offer the following note about a recent visit to the MOMA to see the exhibit, "Matisse: Radical Invention."

The focus of the show is on paintings that Matisse made between 1913 and 1917 and that were received poorly at the time. The exhibition offers an argument for how and why the paintings were "radical invention" in their time, marking new direction not only in Matisse's work, but also the work of other painters.

What especially interested StraightMan and me was that this re-interpretation of the paintings is based in part on the use of imaging technologies (like X-ray) to trace - or rather, reconstruct - Matisse's process. What did he do to make these paintings, and what likely was he thinking about when he made particular choices (including repainting portions of his canvases)?

As cultural anthropologists, we are partial to "process." It is also a radical invention itself, I think, to apply imaging technologies to "art." Yet, I also wonder whether or not this might be another sign of the "scientization" or "technologization" of yet another arena of thought and experience.

I am not for mystifying art as ahistorical "genius" - I find explanations of literature and art in terms of their structures to be robust: I am not alone in thinking that Pride and Prejudice is interesting not because of the players, but because of the rules of the game itself.

Yet, I also wonder at the significance with which imaging technologies are greeted as giving us the "truth" about Matisse.

***

Pet peeve: Museum goers, put down the phones and the devices transmitting your "audio tour," and just look at what is in front of you.

Because this is what I feel that you are missing, as described by short story writer Deborah Eisenberg (whose Collected Stories is reviewed in the August 16 / 23 issue of The Nation):

Looking at a painting takes a certain composure, a certain resolve, but when you really do look at one it can be like a door swinging open, a sensation, however brief, of vaulting freedom. It's as if, for a moment, you were a different person, with different eyes and different capacities and a different history - a sensation, really, that's a lot like hope.

Language matters

StraightMan was devasted by the following post on The Chicago Manual of Style's Facebook wall:

CMOS 16 Sneak Peek: In author-date citations in reference lists, put article titles in quotation marks and use headline capitalization. With this change, the two systems of Chicago documentation (author-date and notes-bibliography) become easier to learn and use, since the stylings of elements will be the same in both systems. Only the order of the elements varies, as before.

In fact, he just had spent part of his morning "fixing" the citations in an article that he has been writing. We have a CMOS 15 on our shelf. The purchase of which we invested $55 during the writing of my dissertation. It is a little disconcerting to think that it might be obsolete: I thought good style never went out of fashion?

***

Is it just me or does there seem to be a growing interest in linguistic concerns? Arguably, language and all its uses and effects matter all the more with the use of technologies and social media, like the Internet and Facebook. The fact that the folks at CMOS are hip on Facebook seems to prove this point. Also, the point that a lot of people who engage in writing for at least some part of their day are spending too much time on Facebook - 9,508 people "like" CMOS.

In addition to the revival of the On Language column in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, a blog on language has been introduced on The Economist's Web site. It is called "Johnson," which no doubt causes much snickering in certain quarters, but which the blogger helpfully reminds us is named for dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson. Were The Economist based in the U.S., it might have been called "Webster." (See above.) I esp. like Johnson's reaction to Sarah Palin's "refudiation" of critics of her inventing the term "refudiate."

Much as I enjoy them, however, these erudite essays cannot be all there is to press coverage of language matters.

Language is the news. In the early days of the Iraq invasion, the need for Arabic specialists was much discussed - the college where I teach is in the process now of developing a minor in Arabic, which students themselves are demanding. The proposition to make English the nation's "official" language has been afoot for some time, but there seems to be renewed attention to the English-only movement, esp. with anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona.

A critical point that I tried to make in my linguistic anthropology class is that no language is inherently better or worse than any other for human communication: French is not more beautiful than German. Arabic and Chinese are not in any objective sense the hardest to learn in the world. The dominance of English results not from some kind of linguistic superiority - for example, it is argued that it is more efficient and therefore a better language for science and technology - but from processes of standardization and planning, which continue today.

It is interesting to consider how the "policing" of language works. It is for this reason that I feel as half-hearted about so much talk about Palin or George W. Bush before her: You say plain talk, I say linguistic gaffe. Is plain talk really plain? Or is it the appearance of being plain? Who among us does not commit such gaffes? Can a person's proper or improper use of language really tell us all that about him or her? What is proper and improper use of language in the first place?

More important, what are the stakes involved here? Now we have ventured into assumptions about what language is all about - and they need to be examined.

I wonder whether or not leaving language matters in the hands of the pointy heads in fact might trivialize their significance and more importantly, deflect attention from the consequences for We the People in our everyday lives.

There seems to be a need today for linguistic journalism, along the lines of science journalism, to help interpret what everyone is talking about, from so-called political correctness to Palinisms and back again.

***

On a related note, Lexington's column in the July 15th issue of The Economist offers the immodest proposal of banning the use of "great" and "exceptional" (and their variants) in political speeches in the U.S.:

Just think what a relief it will be, once Lexington’s ban comes into force, to be able to debate the role of government on its merits, without bringing providence into it.

The ban will also liberate America’s politicians to speak like normal people. At present, failing to lard their speeches with God and greatness can get them into serious trouble.

For me, another reason to like Lexington - aside from the quaint and lovely practice of having an individual assume the column's identity (versus the column assuming an individual's identity - is his? / her? assessment of David Brooks, a columnist whom I love to dislike:

In 1997 David Brooks, writing then for the Weekly Standard and now at the New York Times, wrote an essay called “A Return to National Greatness”, complaining that America had abandoned high public aspiration and become preoccupied with “the narrower concerns of private life”. It almost doesn’t matter what great task government sets for itself, Mr Brooks said, “as long as it does some tangible thing with energy and effectiveness”.

If that was ever good advice, it is rotten advice now. Americans are not unhappy because they lack an energetic government; many think Mr Obama’s administration too energetic by half. The last thing the country needs is to be distracted from its practical problems by the quest for an elusive greatness. Put such language away, says Lexington. America is indeed a great and exceptional country. But it isn’t talking about it that makes it so.

Bits of inspiration

I am writing this post on the spanking new iMac in my campus office. The screen is about as large as our TV at home! Which might say as much about the smallness of our TV as the largeness of my new iMac, but in fact, I am trying to make a point about the latter. I find myself sitting back in my desk chair b/c the sheer magnitude of the screen is causing me horizontal vertigo. See the above.

Otherwise, I am continuing work on my syllabi and on this Monday morning, not feeling esp. interesting or interested. Sigh. So, I am looking to others for bits of inspiration:

StraightMan claims that Katha Pollitt's column by itself is worth the price of our subscription to The Nation. Which is why I tell Beanie that when she grows up, she could do a lot worse than finding a partner who is a lot like her daddy - and why I want to raise Bubbie to be that kind of man. In her most recent column, Katha takes on the latent (and sometimes overt) hostility to women and girls in current media coverage on the so-called end of men.

Ooh, look! Goodies for feminist mothers or mothering feminists, whichever we choose to refer to ourselves. I kind of regard this like a box of chocolate truffles - I am thinking about each title and which one to sample...

free range kids published an interesting post on the prevalence of the sand table in pre-school America. As an anthropologist, I appreciate the material culture approach that is demonstrated here - take an object that we might take for granted in the pre school classroom, consider its history, and uncover the ideas and practices that we rarely make explicit.

Finally, here is proof again that the fake news is better at telling us what really is going on, from America's finest new source. Sitting here at my new iMac, all I can say is that I believe, I believe, I believe... Sucker.

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.

***

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.

Learn from book reviews, Part Tres

Pain in childbirth had been considered inevitable until the 19th century, when chloroform came into more common use during labor. Donald Caton, an anesthesiologist, wrote a history on the use of anesthesia and analgesia titled, What a Blessing She Had Chloroform, itself a declaration attributed to Queen Victoria.

Interestingly, the idea that childbirth need not be painful also spurred others to consider alternatives to medication, which itself presented problems, not the least of which included serious side effects and consequences for women's own experiences of childbirth. An early proponent of "natural" childbirth in the mid 20th century was Grantly Dick-Read, an obstetrician who cited examples of painless "primitive" birth from late 19th century anthropology in his book, Childbirth without Fear.

This story has been told before, but a book review in the May 31 issue of The Nation suggests another dimension that seems well worth exploring. The review, by Paula Findlen, discusses Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. As Findlen explains:

The objective developments in science of the preceding century gave way to subjective reflection about the meaning of understanding nature. Poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats marveled at the new vision of the world wrought by science. At the same time, the British astronomers, naturalists, chemists and experimenters of their generation developed a conception of the world that was, in its own way, profoundly poetic.

One of the developments of Romantic science was nitrous oxide:

In spring 1799, Humphrey Davy invited a circle of friends to experience the giddy effects of laughing gas. He was inspired enough to write a poem about it. Davy's celebrated self-experiment, in which he inhaled six quarts of N2O on May 5, 1799, led to a loss of consciousness, feeling and memory.... The psychosomatic effects (to borrow Coleridge's term) of Davy's discovery fascinated his contemporaries. He invented a new pleasure for which they had no name.

If Romanticism began as an exploration of the enhancement of the senses, at the height of its success it grappled with the novel sensation of feeling nothing at all.

It makes me wonder what we want today - to feel more or to feel less or both at the same time - and what that means.

What you can learn from book reviews

During both the six-hour flight there and back, StraightMan sat across the aisle from me, with the two kiddos and a portable DVD player. (Mind you, he owed me, after three weeks away at his NEH seminar...) This allowed me the luxury of catching up on back issues of two of my weekly reads, plus reading half of a novel on my kindle. I just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last night, and this afternoon downloaded The Girl who Played with Fire, which by all accounts is even better. Both Dragon Tattoo and Played with Fire are page-turners, with commentaries on financial journalism, Swedish society and politics, and gender, which become issued as blocks of discourse from the mouths of the characters. Rather awkward, but the commentaries themselves can be interesting. As a lapsed fictionista who has worked in journalism, I admit that I am hooked. The books are a bit of change, too, from my usual fare in non-fiction.

I admit that sometimes I never bother reading the books themselves, but I enjoy reading the reviews of them: Not just thumbs up or thumbs down, but essays that contextualize the book and its subject matter and the author's approach, or read them alongside other books. I sometimes feel that academic journals ought to look more to The New Yorker and The Nation for models on the kinds of book reviews that they themselves might publish.

In fact, The Nation published a cover story, "The Death and Life of the Book Review," in its June 21 issue (which I have not finished reading), which suggests that the state of the book review today is linked not only to the Internet and the book publishing industry, but also the future of newspaper journalism. It seems also to me that the significance of the book review today is that it is arguably one of the few remaining public outlets of ideas - not as punditry or man-on-the-street opining, but to paraphrase The Nation, with "scrutiny, the deliberate, measured analysis of literary and intellectual questions without obvious or easy answers."

Which brings me to something I learned from a book review in the May 10 issue of The Nation: A review of two books about the conservation movement, its origins and its present, one being Mark Barrow's Nature's Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology, and the other being Caroline Fraser's Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution.

I confess that I am considerably less interested in the latter than the former, being skeptical, even cynical, about naive do-goodism, of which the title smacks. Indeed, the review confirms that I am not wrong: Do-gooders especially ought not to be naive, especially about their history.

The review begins with a vignette, borrowed from Barrow, about Thomas Jefferson's scientific and philosophical interest in the woolly mammoth, which he believed had not become extinct, but survived somewhere beyond, possibly in the American West: "For Jefferson the patriot, America's natural advantages counterbalanced Europe's prodigious cultural patrimony. So in picking a fight with the Old World, he no doubt found it prudent to recruit a massive beast like the mammoth to his side." So, the reviewer, Ari Kelman, introduces us to the political history of American conservation efforts, in particular endangered species protection, which Barrow traces in his book through the 1970's. "This high-water mark lingered until the mid 1990's, when Congress, under Newt Gingrich, began rolling back environmental regulations."

Part of the history is the embrace of animals (albeit endangered) simultaneous with the rejection of other people. Kelman notes Barrow's examination of naturalists at the turn of the 20th century, a number of whom were interested in "positive eugenics" and drew parallels between the fate of animals and of people:

For many concerned onlookers, steeped in Jeffersonian and Turnerian intellectual currents, the West served as a synecdoche for the United States, and the imperiled bison served as a synecdoche for the West. If the rugged bison died out, then so too, they worried, might America, a nation they felt was being feminized by an economy that alienated workers from the land; radicalized by labor activists preaching class warfare in exploding cities; and mongrelized by ostensibly unassimilable immigrants (Catholics, Asians and Jews).

In 1886, the response, as Kelman describes, was to "embark on a scientific expedition to shoot or capture some of the remaining beasts." The bison were treated not much differently than the human population of the Great Plains - hunted first, then "saved" and collected. It is worth remembering that salvage anthropology, as well as salvage zoology, was practiced at this time in history.

Others better versed than I might be familiar already with this history. As a novice, I think as often as not, such causes as endangered species protection become presented as self-evident: Ethical and moral values that are irrefutable in any time and place. So, I think it is significant to be reminded that the sentiments now rallied around extinction and conservation themselves have histories. Knowing these histories, and making them known, will not undermine the impulse - to create the kind of nature that we think we ought to have - but hopefully lead to asking the questions that ought to be asked and producing better-informed answers.

If, indeed, the continuance of species is at stake, then it seems to me that we need to take the long view, both into the future and the past.