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!

Learn me this!

I love it when science and intuition agree, as with recent research on how kids learn:

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. It's this kind of learning, in fact, that allows kids to learn from teachers in the first place.

The quote above comes from Alison Gopnik's description of two recently published studies on preschool. I wonder whether or not we are seeing the effects in higher education?

A feminist teaching moment

Yesterday, as faculty advisor to the undergraduate Anthropology Club, I showed the film, "The Business of Being Born," and facilitated a discussion afterward. About 50 students attended. Not bad for Friday at 4pm. (Then again, at least one other colleague and I offered extra credit...)

I could go on and on more about the surprise and shock and earnest questioning that they expressed, including the guys: One approached me afterward and admitted that childbirth had not been a topic he had thought was all that important to him, but now he was not so sure.

Also, I thought I might share part of an e-mail that a student wrote to me after viewing the film:

I don't even know how to describe how I feel after watching it! WOW. First of all, I cannot believe how they used to strap women down to tables like they did in the 1920s like they were test subjects!! I am shocked about the statistics concerning Cesarean Sections- I don't know WHY anybody would choose a surgery over what your body was created to handle itself! I am just mortified over any type of surgery but specifically this one in general. I am also shocked at the connection they mentioned between the rise of unnecessary medical intervention during child birth and the increase in developmental problems in children. It seems so obvious now. And the overall medicalization of child birth- how it is treated like an illness to be "cured". Is child birth really needing a "cure?" Is the cure not being pregnant? Is the "treatment" of pregnancy as an illness seriously necessary? How and why is it looked upon as a "problem to be addressed" is just absolutely fascinating. Child birth is truly a business in modern America- another opportunity to capitalize, which totally takes away from something that is an inherent natural right as a woman. I just loved the film and I needed to email you to share it!

These are exactly the moments when I realize what is so important and meaningful about teaching: It is producing a moment for us to think beyond what we accept as reality, making possible a different reality.

Anthropology without Culture

StraightMan and I have become a dual-academic career, dual-blog couple.

His post from today - "Doubling Down on Culture" - is especially worth reading for those of us who teach anthropology to undergraduates.

I could not agree more with StraightMan about his point that the challenge of teaching cultural anthropology is not that students have no knowledge about "culture," but that they already have a lot of it, not all of it actually in agreement (or frankly, relevant to) what I see as the aims of ANTH 100.

This is the point at which I think teaching anthropology ought to start.

In fact, a particular problem that I encounter is that too many students seem to regard my course as confirming what they think they already know.

This, despite explicitly telling students at the start of the semester that the point of the course will be to unlearn what they have been taught already, assigning them articles and books and ethnographic films that can go a bit overboard in contradicting conventionally held ideas (like the happy portrayal of polygyny in the classic film, "Masai Women"...), and continually harping on the point in discussions and lectures.

Is it possible to write a textbook called "Culture Is Overrated"? Just asking.

Keeping up with The Times

Exams and papers have been graded, and the fall semester has a great big fork stuck in it. Then along comes this article, "Mental Health Needs Seen Growing at Colleges," which I think is worth a gander for anyone teaching undergraduate students:

A recent survey by the American College Counseling Association found that a majority of students seek help for normal post-adolescent trouble like romantic heartbreak and identity crises. But 44 percent in counseling have severe psychological disorders, up from 16 percent in 2000, and 24 percent are on psychiatric medication, up from 17 percent a decade ago.

The most common disorders today: depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, alcohol abuse, attention disorders, self-injury and eating disorders.

Every semester, it seems, I have at least one or two students who come to talk to me about their concerns about their performance in my courses - in connection with the side effects of the medications that they take for depression and / or anxiety and / or attention disorders.

What got to me especially was the effects that students' problems have on the people who work with them: "The need to help this troubled population has forced campus mental health centers — whose staffs, on average, have not grown in proportion to student enrollment in 15 years — to take extraordinary measures to make do."

This is not to mention the professors, like me, who frankly are unequipped to do much more than make referrals to the counseling center. However, each referral results from my taking the time and care to sit and listen - and absorb - the worries of a student who approaches me as his or her teacher.

“By this point in the semester to not lose hope or get jaded about the work, it can be a challenge,” Dr. Hwang [a clinical psychology at SUNY Stony Brook] said. “By the end of the day, I go home so adrenalized that even though I’m exhausted it will take me hours to fall asleep.”

For relief, she plays with her 2-year-old daughter, and she has taken up the guitar again.

Hmm. I need a hobby.

The mean reds

Remember in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," when Holly says to Paul:

"You know those days when you get the mean reds?"

"The mean reds, you mean like the blues?"

"No. The blues are because you're getting fat and maybe it's been raining too long, you're just sad, that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?"

Kind of. I mean, it is not exactly fear that I am feeling right now, but more like diffuse anxiety, which I suppose is a kind of fear that I will forget something or someone... The diffuseness of my anxiety could be mistaken for not knowing what it is that itches and nag.

In other words: It is the end of the semester.

What triggers the mean reds for me is not necessarily having to write exams (or even to grade them within 24 hours of their completion). It is:

* Having to hear yet another student's confession about the problems he or she has been having from the start of the semester that affected the quality of the student's performance in my class, which he or she in fact found quite interesting, also that the student is a lot more intelligent and hard-working than he or she might have given the impression of being. None of which I dispute. However, I cannot grade the goodness of intention or the greatness of potential.

* Having to say no to students asking for or requesting a range of exceptions, from submitting work from the first month of class now during finals week to whether or not they can devise an additional assignment for extra credit to rescheduling the date and time of their final exams b/c they have back-to-back exams.

***

Look. I know it is "right" to say no. Also, that as the professor, I have the right to say no.

The fact is that I do say no.

However. I hate being put in the position of having to say yes or no. At all.

Perhaps it is that I am uncomfortable with the "power" of being the professor who assigns the grades. (I suppose it is an occupation hazard of being a cultural anthropologist, but sometimes I cannot help but feel that this power is being exercised rather arbitrarily - I mean, we all hear the stories from students about the insane professor in another department...)

Or am I showing my gender: I like to be nice, and I have a problem with not being nice?

Or perhaps it is that I feel the efforts I already make for students seem to go unrecognized - for example, for students in ANTH 100, I post events like lectures and films that they can attend and write about for extra credit on the Web-based course calendar.

Not to mention what I had been doing up there in the front of the lecture hall during the entire rest of the semester. Which might or might not have made a difference. Blurgh.

***

So, I have the mean reds right now:

Well, when I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there. If I could find a real-life place that'd make me feel like Tiffany's, then - then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name!

Sign of the times

Huh. Not sure what to make of this photograph taken at the Jon Stewart / Stephen Colbert rally and posted on Inside Higher Ed. Am I supposed to laugh because I also am supposed agree - or because (to be honest) I find it rather ludicrous?

I think there is a lot more to say about "evidence-based" discourse. Certainly there ought to be more careful and considered study of, say, teaching and prenatal care, to mention two arenas where a need for more "evidence-based" practice is being claimed. However, "evidence-based" discourse seems to be grounded in narrow functionalism, with little interest in, say, ritual.

Yet, rituals accomplish important, meaningful, and necessary work for us as members of communities. I mean, we all engage in any number of apparently unimportant, meaningless, and unnecessary - and unevidenced - practices whose effects might be missed when they become eliminated.

There is a lot more to say. Alas, I am not the parenthropologist to do it at this moment.

Talking and Listening to Kids about Difference (3)

Last Friday, I had the privilege of giving a keynote lecture at the city school district’s teachers conference on diversity. This week, I am posting excerpts from my talk, “Talking and Listening to Kids about Difference: Perspectives from Parenthropology.” Here is part 3:

As a parenthropologist, I have come to think that the difficulty of talking and listening to kids about difference comes in part from our own discomfort with talking and listening about difference among ourselves, as parents and teachers. We need to create “the talk” about race along the lines of “the talk” about reproduction. In fact, there are now resources offering thoughtful advice to parents and teachers on talking and listening to kids about difference. Parents magazine, on their Web site, has an article on “Raising a Child Who Respects Difference” that suggest to parents: “First, Forget ‘Color Blindness’” and “Don’t Wait for Them to Bring It Up.” The Southern Poverty Law Center develops and distributes free materials for K-12 teachers through its Teaching Tolerance Web site. There is now even an iPhone app for this: The Race Awareness Project has developed two “games,” one called “Guess My Race” and another called “Who Am I,” which were designed to help (and guide) parents through conversations about race with their pre-school and elementary school-aged kids.

I suggest also that in order to create “the talk,” we as parents and teachers need to be clear about the words that we use. So, in the hopes that we can find the words for us to use, here is what anthropologists have to say about two ways of talking about difference that are especially salient in the United States today – race and culture.

I noted earlier that as an anthropologist, I am trained in a discipline that is concerned with both universality and diversity. What makes us the same? What makes us different? Anthropology also is distinctive in its holistic approach, in which we consider any given dimension of human experience as interconnected with still others. For example, is food a matter of physiological need, economic activity, religious law, local custom, climate change – or all of the above? The holism of anthropology is reflected in the fact that the discipline is comprised of sub-disciplines: The four fields of archaeology, biological or physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. Four-fields anthropology became organized in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, building upon earlier traditions in the study of human “civilization,” which reflected then current concerns with differences among people – in their physical appearance, in their behaviors and beliefs, in the environments and conditions in which they lived – which were being encountered in travel and exploration and trade globally.

Following upon a much older philosophical tradition that so-called inner qualities, such as intelligence, were manifested in outer qualities, in particular appearance, it was thought that traits such as skin color could be interpreted as markers or even expressions of emotional, intellectual, and other “essential” characteristics. In fact, early and mid-19th century anatomists and physiologists – the fore-bearers of biological or physical anthropology – were involved in efforts to locate the sources of difference in the human body itself, taking measurements and creating scales that defined the “races” of humankind. In addition, it was claimed that the “races” themselves had developed separately, with each race representing “sub-species” of humanity, and “steps” in human evolution. Race became an explanation, or rather an excuse, for political, economic, and social policies that segregated and subjugated peoples.

This 19th century concept of biological “race” has been discredited in the work of 20th century scientists, including anthropologists, who emphasize the lack of concordance in so-called racial traits: Not only does difference in physical appearance not correspond with difference in emotional or intellectual characteristics, but even racialized traits associated with physical appearance (such as skin color, eye color, hair texture, eye and nose shape, and so on) do not correspond with each other. Nor is race coded in our DNA. Even to the trained eyes of geneticists, human DNA looks remarkably the same: There is more genetic variation in penguins and in fruit flies than there is in humans. In fact, geneticists tell us that two individuals who would be classified, according to physical appearance, as members of the same race, are likely to have as many or even more differences in their mitochondrial DNA as two individuals classified as members of two different races. Our genes provide evidence of the shared origins of modern humans in Africa. We are, indeed, a single race.

So, then how do we make sense of difference in physical appearance, which in the United States today, we continue to describe as “race”? Clearly, human biological variation exists, but what it tells us is a story about the migration of modern humans, out of Africa, to the far reaches of the globe, which is itself a remarkable tale with the power to excite the imagination. Human biological variation tells us a story about certain sets of genes arriving at the right time and place to be favored, or at least not disadvantaged, for survival – like darker skin closer to the equator and lighter skin in regions further flung. In other words, the difference in physical appearance that Americans call race could be described as a side effect of ancestry.

The discrediting of the 19th century concept of biological race and the 20th century recognition of human biological variation are developments connected also with a completely different way of thinking about differences – that is, the concept of culture. Defining and refining the concept of culture has consumed anthropologists for the last century, but at heart, culture is a way of talking about difference as behaviors and beliefs that are shared in groups through learning and teaching. The concept of culture is, in part, a reaction to the concept of race: It asserts that customs and habits are invented and become acquired. They are not innate to bodies and inherited through blood and genes. Culture also suggests that the most important and meaningful differences between people are the ones that they have learned since childhood then continue to teach to their own children. An example of the power of culture is, unfortunately, the persistence of the idea that “race” describes and explains differences between people.

As a parenthropologist, I suggest that it is critical that we, as teachers and parents, recognize the significance of what we do in our work with children – and the difference it can make. A few weeks ago, my daughter came home from school, bursting with a story that she told us at dinner. She had read a book called Amazing Grace, about a girl who wanted to be Peter Pan in her class play, despite discouragement from other children that Peter Pan was not a girl and Peter Pan was not black like Grace. My daughter told us in no uncertain terms that these were not good reasons and that she herself could be Peter Pan, just like Barack Obama could be president. Not only can we, as teachers and parents, make and re-make the meaning of difference by talking and listening to kids, but I think it also might be the only real hope that we have.

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...

Teaching Nacirema

You might have read Horace Miner's "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" in an introductory class in anthropology. If not, here is a clue about its significance: What does Nacirema spell backwards?

Here is a Wiki on Nacirema.

When I teach "Nacirema" in ANTH 100, we typically engage in a discussion about the bizarre and strange habits of a society that we assume is exotic and primitive. When it is revealed, either by a student or by myself, that "they" are "us," the discussion turns to concepts like ethnocentrism and cultural relativism. Also, that ethnography also is a form of writing, so that we ourselves participate in the making of the exotic, even in word choices ("medicine men" versus "doctors"). I also like to suggest that a reason why students today might fail to recognize the Nacirema is that Miner's account, originally published in 1956, describes a society that has changed since then.

In previous semesters, the discussion has become animated, with a handful of students in the know "sitting out" while the rest work through the article.

This time, however, about a third of the students in one section of ANTH 100 had read "Nacirema" in high school. In both sections, students caught on quickly.

So, I still had almost 20 minutes to kill. (Not to worry. I always have more material that I want to cover...)

It makes me wonder whether or not it might be time for mothballs. For the article, I mean.

Eggsactly!

Followed this link from martinimade to an eggsperiment to determine whether or not pastured eggs really taste better.

As a college professor, I feel like this account actually might be useful for teaching basic concepts in research methods - like how and why science is based on comparison, what is a variable, the challenges of controlling for x, y, or z, and that engaging in research really ought to be recognized as itself a creative endeavor.

As an anthropologist, I appreciated the recognition that eating is shaped by its context. It really means something to me that I eat eggs from "happy" chickens.

The political economy of craft

Not sure where I will go with these thoughts, but then again, the whole point of this blog (for me) is just to think. At all.

Reading Adrienne Martini's Sweater Quest has had me contemplating what all the fuss about craft is all about. (Sweater Quest is itself a fine rumination on the fuss as well. Here, I am responding less to what Adrienne writes and more to a contemporary American discourse on craft. Like, the fact that apparently it is the thing to do.) I get all the analysis about frugality and practicality and authenticity and so on, which you can see in articles in The New York Times Magazine on backyard chickens and female organic farmers and so on.

As a cultural anthropologist, however, I immediately feel hesitation about "authenticity" as an explanation. (Then again, even terms like frugality and practicality also ought not to be taken for granted. However, "authenticity" seems to be something about which cultural anthropologists are understood to have something to say.) Authenticity is a claim that one makes, not a fact or a reason in itself. So, authenticity seems to me a place to start an examination of craft, not end it. What does it mean now? What has it meant in the past? Who is making the claims about authenticity? Who is validating or invalidating them? What is at stake? How and why do people think about their lives as having or not having authenticity with and without craft?

As an aside, interesting to note the favoring of "craft" over "crafts." Not unlike "culture" versus "cultures." Craft sounds more grown-up, more significant, and like culture, more universal. It is the quality that gives things importance and meaning (and value) and not the things themselves. "Crafts" sounds trivial. Also, craft is dear - that is, expensive. Crafts are cheap: They are commodities. (They are not authentic?)

There is a discourse on "craft" in the social sciences that seems to me born out of claims being made for work and masculinity - I am imagining Richard Sennett's recent work, The Craftsman - but of course so much of the current attention to craft that is evident to me is on crafts associated with women. I think it is not surprising to observe that women now claim what they do as "craft" and not "crafts."

(Of course, this begs the question of which women? How does what looks to me like an educated middle-class woman's movement in parts of Europe and North America connect with other ideas and practices of crafting in other societies? Or is it only crafting under particular kinds of conditions? Do collectives of women sewing embroidered shirts, being paid by the bale, with the shirts being sold at a market, "count" as craft? Why or why not? Ultimately, does not the existence of industrial goods define craft, too?)

So, I will admit this: Part of me is just waiting for the backlash against craft. Because I see a risk of it becoming One More Thing that is being prescribed as Something I Ought to Do.

I am fairly certain that the thought never has crossed StraightMan's mind to learn how to whittle or tinsmith or cobble or scrimshaw.

Like StraightMan, I already am engaged in work from which I derive the satisfactions of continual process and practice and society and even observed results and effects. As much as we kvetch and kvell over the injustices and indignities of working in Higher Ed - in particular, being much underpaid not to mention misunderstood (sniff, sniff) - I think we both still feel the thrill for and from the the craft involved in being a teacher and a scholar. I think we might be in one of the few "good" jobs left in the world in the sense that, at least in the classroom, we enjoy a good deal of autonomy.

So, hear out my Barbara Ehrenreich moment: I think what has helped inspire the current turn to craft is the deterioration in the conditions of work that American men and women have experienced in recent decades.

Or as sociologist Arlie Hochschild suggested: In the late 1980's and early 1990's, when American men and women were spending long hours away from home, it was that work could feel like an "escape" from the pressures of home, where individuals might not feel rewarded or acknowledged as they might at work. When work, however, is not satisfying socially, emotionally, or financially, then home becomes a haven in a heartless world, as the historian Christopher Lasch called the family.

Yet, there are problems, too, with finding reward and acknowledgement in family, esp. in this era of expert-advised and resource-intensive parenting. Children might be part of the motivation to become involved in craft. Directing one's efforts at craft - like decorating a dozen bear-face cupcakes - can contribute to one's parenting. However, I wonder also whether or not craft offers another form of effort that frankly feels more "satisfying"? Unlike children, your craft is under your control. (This is where the issue of autonomy matters.)

So, it seems to me, the current discourse on craft seems worth examining both in terms of its gendered dimensions and especially its political economy. What are the larger conditions that effect this moment of craft? What does it mean for European and North American men to claim "craftsmanship" at a time when it is becoming clear that those "good" manufacturing jobs will not return to where they are - and for women to pursue craft / crafts at a time when females now comprise half the paid workforce?

Here comes my second Barbara Ehrenreich moment: Leaving aside the want and need for some kind of reward and acknowledgement that we expect in domains such as work and family - and now craft - can craft itself do it for everyone? Why do so many of us just expect work to suck so that we see our real, true lives and selves - the authentic - doing something else? Is it not worth trying to change?

The end is near

This old jalopy called my semester comes shuddering to a stop. I am fumbling my way out of it. Today, I have two exams to write. Tomorrow, I have final poster presentations in medical anthropology. Friday, I give the exam in linguistic anthropology.

This is all set against the possibility of furloughs starting next week. What does a furlough mean for an academic? I think it just means a pay reduction - for work already completed, I might add.

So, I feel a mite like a cranky anthropologist. Which brings me to my recent discovery of a blog called The Cranky Linguist, which is written by an anthropology professor.

I especially appreciated his musings on students missing the point you were making all semester.

StraightMan and I remind each other constantly that we should stop being so surprised. On occasion, I have offered in-class reviews ahead of exams, posting PowerPoint slides of questions (and answers), with the exact wording that later appears on the exam - and students still answered incorrectly.

I cannot speak for professors in other disciplines, but I think unfortunately, in anthropology, students take our classes expecting to have confirmed what they think they already know - for example, about human evolution and Neanderthals and race and culture and so-called Ebonics. It might be that students assume that they do not know much about chemistry or biology, but even the ones who come to my classes simply because they are fulfilling a General Education requirement figure that they know about culture and that they can be different and that it is important to respect them even so. Duh.

Which is ironic because in all of my classes, I feel like I take as much trouble to demonstrate what culture cannot explain. In other words, when you come to my class, you should expect me to try to contradict everything you think know, not confirm it. The default mode in my classes might be that whatever the common-sense line is, say something else.

To be continued.

Keeping up with The Times

While it is true that they occasionally say things that seem to make sense to us, as far as StraightMan and I are concerned, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, John Tierney, and Nicholas Wade are the Gray Lady's own Evil League of Evil.

As anthropologists, we reserve our particular ire for Wade.

Recently, Wade discovered culture, which he describes as an "evolutionary force" that has been in effect for the last 20,000 years or so.

Today, Wade reported on a study of the possible consequences of cousin marriage in the Darwin family.

The topic of cousin marriage is one that I happen to teach in ANTH 100. For example, I screen the ethnographic film "Masai Women" (a "classic" documentary that helps students connect the practice of polygyny with ideas and practices about women and property) and also assign chestnuts like Melvyn Goldstein's "When Brothers Share a Wife" (an article about fraternal polyandry in Tibet that appears in a number of textbooks).

This is all done in the service of impressing upon students the idea that there is no universal definition of marriage. It can involve more than two individuals who need not be different sexes / genders and it is not assumed that first comes love.

I also like to talk about marriage in ANTH 100 to illustrate the point that it can be difficult to cultivate a stance of cultural relativism about activities, behaviors, and attitudes that "we" consider fundamental experiences of everyday life.

Given that cousin marriages, cross-culturally and historically in American and European societies, have been preferred, I make rather a strong case for how and why such marriages ought not be seen as "unnatural." I always anticipate that at least one student will ask the inbreeding question. So, I plan to read the study that Wade cites more carefully. It sounds like an interesting approach, but I feel a bit doubtful about whether or not this particular analysis is all that robust.

Anti-anti-gay talk?

There have been classes that I loved teaching despite the students in them. I have clung desperately to my own interest in the material to carry me to the calm and gentle waters of the semester’s end – or at least dumped me on its sands. In such situations, StraightMan and I have come home and told each other: “If only the students would get out of the way of my teaching…”

Sometimes, however, the stars and the planets align: This semester, I am teaching a class on linguistic anthropology. This is the class that I spend all of my time obsessively preparing because I’m lovin’ it.

The students in linguistic anthropology seem to like to talk about talk. They also have a lot to say. I think this is in no small part due to the fact that they want, even need, meaningful opportunities to reflect on the importance of ordinary behaviors – which is part of “popularizing” anthropology.

Last Friday, we talked about the use of the phrase: “No homo.”

Students in my class explained that “no homo” becomes attached to guys’ comments, like compliments, to each other. As in: “Nice shirt.” A pause. Then: “No homo.”

The Wiki on “no homo” traces the origins of this phrase to hip hop music, in which “it parenthetically asserts that the (male) speaker is not a man who has sex with men, whether identified as gay or otherwise, after an utterance that might give that impression.”

Wikipedia also notes: “A parallel term is ‘pause’, which has the same meaning and is often used by Jay-Z, among others.”

Is this just a joke, as some students in my class claimed? Or is it an example either of undisguised gay bashing or of homophobia veiled as humor, as other students suggested?

Both the phrase itself and the extent to which it apparently is used were news to me. I still recoil when I hear students say "that's so gay," which I recall from my own high school days. So, as a college professor today, I have been surprised to hear "that's so gay" used so blithely and so often. (For the sake of being able to situate me, you could call me a Gen Xer.) I remember, in college, having a gay friend call to my attention how thoughtless and careless it was for me to use "that's so gay" as a way to say "that's so stupid."

A generous reading of the use of phrases like “no homo” and “that’s so gay” among college students today is that it is “ironic” – that is, it can be just a joke or it can be an intentional and in-your-face playing on expectations and pushing of boundaries. In this reading, “no homo” is not quite the same as gays and lesbians reclaiming “queer” for themselves, but it shares a certain sensibility, especially when we take seriously the language ideology of hip hop, from which “no homo” has been adopted, as a form of “speaking truth to power.” If opinion polls can be trusted to tell us something about what people think and believe, and if support for gay marriage can be read as some kind of marker of at least recognizing the rights and humanity of gays and lesbians, then my students belong to the generation of Americans who could make a claim for being “post-hate.” I can see the possibility, then, that my students could argue that “no homo” is anti-anti-gay.

However.

During the discussion, I suggested comparisons between the use of “no homo” and Mock Spanish, which I discussed in an earlier post. If “no homo” is intended to be just a joke, then like Mock Spanish, “getting it” depends on what linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill called “instant, unreflecting access to a cultural model” that carries a “negative residue of meaning.” In this case, getting the joke means accessing a cultural model of gay men - and accessing a cultural model of gay men also means accessing cultural models about gender, sex, and sexuality more generally.

This discussion of “no homo” emerged from consideration of Deborah Cameron’s “Performing Gender Identity: Young Men’s Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity” (1997), which describes Cameron’s re-reading of a male college student’s paper about “men’s talk.” My students agreed with Cameron that “gay” talk (like “no homo” or “that’s so gay”) is not uncommon in conversations among male college students.

The talk is not so much about “actual” gays or gayness, but guys (i.e., other male college students) “being gay” – or in Cameron’s words, “failing to measure up to the group’s standards of masculinity or femininity.” For example, she considers why a group of male college students described another individual as “being gay” based on their observation of his continual “hitting on” a particular woman – whom they also evaluated in extremely uncomplimentary terms. “I think this is because the deviance indicated for this group by the term ‘ gay’ is not so much sexual deviance,” Cameron writes, “as gender deviance.”

So, another reading of “no homo” is this: When male college students remark on a nice shirt or a new haircut or so on, their own understanding of why they then might add, “No homo,” is not necessarily that they are disavowing their comments as “hitting on” other guys – that is, they do not fear being misrecognized as “actually” gay. Instead, they are calling attention to the fact that they know, as guys, that they are not supposed to care or notice, let alone comment upon, shirts and haircuts. In general, caring, noticing, and commenting are not masculine behaviors.

In addition, I think it is telling that the examples that my students used were compliments about shirts and haircuts, which are seen as particularly “gay” concerns.

"Gay" talk, then, is not only about gay men in "actuality," but about sex and sexuality more generally. That is, the use of "no homo" seems to be about talk that might be charged with the possibility of sexual meaning. It is not just that men today are not supposed to care or notice physical appearance or attractiveness in other men, but that they also are not supposed to comment on women's shirts, haircuts, and so on - lest they themselves become labeled as lecherous and / or their compliments become construed as harassment.

Of course, uttering "no homo" also allows "actual" lechery and harassment to continue, but masquerading as sarcasm, even wit - and the joke is on the person who apparently does not have enough of a sense of humor to laugh at it.

Wisdom sits in places

Like the words of Tim Ingold, in his 2007 Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology. Titled "Anthropology Is Not Ethnography," it was published in the Proceedings of the British Academy 2008:

"As educators based in university departments, most anthropologists devote much of their lives to working with students. They probably spend considerably more time in the classroom than anywhere they might call the field. Some enjoy this more than others, but they do not, by and large, regard time in the classroom as an integral part of their anthropological practice. Students are told that anthropology is what we do with our colleagues, and with other people in other places, but not with them. Locked out of the power-house of anthropological knowledge construction, all they can do is peer through the windows that our texts and teachings offer them. It took the best part of a century, of course, for the people once known as 'natives', and latterly as 'informants', to be admitted to the big anthropology house as master-collaborators, that is as people we work with. It is now usual for their contributions to any anthropological study to be fulsomely acknowledged. Yet students remain excluded, and the inspiration and ideas that flow from our dialogue with them unrecognized. I believe this is a scandal, one of the malign consequences of the institutionalized division between research and teaching that has so blighted the practice of scholarship. For indeed, the epistemology that constructs the student as the mere recipient of anthropological knowledge produced elsewhere - rather than as a participant in its ongoing creative crafting - is the very same as that which constructs the native as an informant. And it is no more defensible."

2 jobs + 2 kids = 2 much

My husband and I are in what I grant is an enviable situation for two PhD's who are married to each other. For starters, we have each other and two children who delight (and torment) us as no other beings can. We also have two full-time jobs. In the same discipline. At two neighboring institutions. In the same town. He has tenure, I do not (yet). We appear to have the two-body problem solved.

EXCEPT that we do not. A two-body problem solved means only that there will be other issues to resolve. This is the equation of 2 jobs + 2 kids = 2 much.

Last spring, in fact exactly one year ago, I started the following journal. This is the only entry. Read further, and you can see why:

Wednesday
12:50pm Arrive in lecture room for two sections of ANTH 100 that I teach back-to-back. This morning, I arrived on campus around 9:20 after dropping off my daughter, Beanie, at preschool. My husband, whom I shall dub StraightMan for the purposes of blogging about, had dropped off our son, Bubbie, at day care. I spent about 45 minutes reading over the chapter of my book manuscript that I currently am reworking from my dissertation. I have some ideas. Then I turned my attention to preparing for my ANTH 100 and ANTH 105 lectures, printing hardcopies of the slides, then handwriting notes about points to emphasize or additional examples that might be relevant. I responded to e-mail, then ate lunch while I browsed for references on rapid ethnographic assessment and other research methods for a potential project that I have been approached about joining.

2:55pm I am supposed to meet a colleague who is borrowing my copy of “Ongka’s Big Moka” for his 5pm class. While waiting, chat with students in his class. I answer a question about a class that I will teach in the fall. Which reminds me that I want to revise the syllabus.

3:05pm Arrive back for office hours. Realize that I left the DVD of “Nanook of the North” at home because I was watching it, taking notes, and preparing my lecture for ANTH 105 (between 8:30 and 10:30pm) the previous day. Each lecture involves a mini-research project b/c anthropologist though I am, I actually do not have a thorough knowledge of the culture, history, and contemporary dilemmas of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Canela of Brazil, the !Kung San / Bushmen, and the Eskimos. I had some of my best teaching evaluation numbers the last time I taught this, but highly critical, relentless self-exploiter that I am, I decided to change the reading assignments, the films, and the general approach to the course to make it, to my mind, more engaging. What is the sound of my own hand clapping? Hint: It sounds like self-flagellation.

So, I walk up the hill to my car. In the parking lot, I chat with another self-flagellating colleague. Even the 10 minutes spent in casual conversation feel like a luxury. It is this Comrade who inspires me to log my time, as he does. By logging his time, he has come to realize that his goal of spending 15 hours a week on his research is not close to being met. It is the second full week of March, and he tells me that since the semester started, he has logged 15 hours total on his research. I express similar frustration about writing – or more like not writing – my book manuscript. Gentle reader, have I mentioned that I have a contract? With a publisher? That I have a reduction from four courses to three courses totaling more than 125 students? So, the reduction is not a reduction at all, but a reorganization. Hence, the manuscript looks like a series of files, started, but not finished, on the desktop of my Mac, and a few yellow sticky notes reminding me what I was thinking, in the event I ever should have an opportunity to reopen one of said files. It looks like this because that is all I have.

I go home, get the film and a bar of chocolate to fortify myself for my ANTH 105 class at 5pm. Note to self: Eat better, and exercise. I return to my office, realize that I need to make copies of today’s handout. I make the copies, then come back to the office (I am holding office hours) and start writing this for yuks, I suppose. I recall that Comrade and I chatted about how we feel like we spend most of our time just keeping up or just covering what we must – namely, caring for young children at home and teaching. I begin to realize that “teaching” is a gloss for all kinds of activities including, but not limited to reading and taking notes on the articles that I have assigned to the students, composing notes and/or PowerPoint slides for lectures, performing the lectures themselves, listening thoughtfully to students during their presentations and discussions, offering feedback on their comments (including constructively correcting their mis-readings of the material so as not to discourage the students), mediating disagreements that arise between particular students during discussion, attempting to draw into the discussion other students who do not participate, talking to students before and after classes about their various concerns (especially absences past and anticipated, the reasons for them, and how they might “make up” missed work or receive extra credit), answering e-mails and phone calls from students, talking with students during office hours about their grades or their plans for next semester or for graduation, designing assignments that are at once meaningful and doable and gradable, skimming the anthropology journals to which I subscribe (American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Medical Anthropology Quarterly) to present fresh not canned knowledge, browsing other electronic journals for the same, checking book reviews to see what fits the criteria of (a) what I want to read that (b) I can assign in a class that I am planning for (i) next semester and (ii) the semester after that and (iii) sometime in the future. There is still more to teaching than this, but that is all I have time for because now it is…

4:50pm Time to make the donuts. That is, go back to the lecture room where I previously taught back-to-back sections of ANTH 100, and knock them dead in ANTH 105. The topic this week: The Western fascination with Eskimos, and the film “Nanook of the North.” I produced a PowerPoint presentation of 30 slides, then cut then back to 17 because although the class is 2 ½ hours, I still need to review for the upcoming exam, screen about 45 minutes of the film itself, and leave open time for discussion.

Thursday
9:35am Arrive on campus, start my computer while I hang up my coat, and deliberately do not log on to my e-mail. New strategy: Check e-mail around 10pm at night, answer student questions immediately, answer other e-mail requiring quick response immediately (like the ones I am exchanging with a colleague whom I will call Tick – short for Tenure Clock – about a workshop that we are organizing for a fall conference – the deadline for the proposal is April), answer one or two more from the day or two before that did not require immediate response. Then do not log onto e-mail until I have put in 45 minutes of work on my book manuscript the next day. I steal time from myself.

Last night I got home around 7:45pm – my class ended shortly before 7:30pm, then I got straight into the car and drove home to be there for bedtime with the kids. StraightMan is there, as he always is. Thankfully. I saw Bubbie for a total of like15 minutes yesterday – I resent that about Wednesday. Beanie jumped up and down to see me – I snuggled with her and we read part of a story before we turned off the light. Downstairs, StraightMan puts my supper, which he cooked, in the microwave before he leaves – as faculty adviser for a student group, he attends their meetings diligently, if sometimes wishing he did not have to do it. We are a two-body problem apparently solved – two tenure-track jobs (in the same discipline) at two institutions in the same place. Lucky, but frankly, not always feeling so. It is early March, however, and we both still feel snowed under, at least metaphorically. There just never seems to be an end to the to-do list. StraightMan and I occasionally debate whether or not such items as “article” or “research” should appear on that list because they always get pushed to the bottom, like stones or cement blocks weighting down a body in the water that somebody does not want found. We always conclude, however, that we must keep such items on our lists because not to have them appear will be even worse. I eat dinner alone, absorbing the stillness of the house. The computer in our kitchen is on, I look at newspaper headlines as a way to disengage from the rest of my day. I read an unbelievably sad and unbelievably stunning piece in The Washington Post Sunday Magazine that a friend had mentioned – about parents whose children die after they have been forgotten in a car seat. The point of the piece is that this is not really a crime, but a terrible, most egregious error that reveals the shortcomings we all share as modern humans. The fault lies in our brains and in our five-point-harness carseats and in our need for said carseats and the driving around that we all do.

That parent could be me. I once arrived at home thinking that Bubbie had been there all day – I forgot to pick him up from day care. I speeded all the way up Maple Street because it was 20 minutes past the time I should have been there. It was terrible – I felt this terrible love and this terrible fear as I scooped up Bubbie and promised that I would never, ever forget to get him. He just wiggled out of my arms and picked up his stuffed cat and waited, I suppose, for me to compose myself. I hate that I did not forget the classes that I needed to prep for the next day or the assignments that required grading or the committee meeting that it was my responsibility to attend that afternoon.