Out here on my own

A blog that I "follow" (i.e., glimpse its content, then occasionally read) is savage minds, a group blog of anthropologists (primarily cultural, I think) that reads like a kind of online graduate seminar. So, sometimes I find it fun (and sometimes I find it tedious), but I find it reliably interesting.

The current post, called "Owning and caring," caught my eye. In it, the blogger considers what it means that when you own, you "care" more, which in housing translates into homes that are maintained and so on. What about public housing? What happens when the state - a focus of concern in cultural anthropology - no longer owns? Does it no longer care? The blogger uses the example of the UK:

As unusual as it is to see governments trying to rid themselves of power, there are questions to be asked about the consequences of governments also ridding themselves of ownership. Does it make the state appear heartless, literally with the heart removed, or metaphorically as lacking in feeling? In practice, in the housing estates, as elsewhere, there was a strong feeling that the state failed to care for residents. A failure to care led to the relinquishing of ownership, but they went hand in hand. You don’t bother to hold on to things you don’t care about. Perhaps owning did, indeed, give the state personhood. So where will it find its personhood without ownership?

Ownership means more than calculated "investment," which is a familiar formulation of owning and caring in the Us today. In anthropology, however, "ownership" entails entire systems of obligation between persons. So, it seems to me that owning / not owning and caring / not caring are at least part of what is being decried in the US also. For example, Americans perceive that big business does not care and that big government has failed to care. Or depending on where along the political spectrum your thoughts lead you, that it always will fail to care and / or should not be relied upon to care.

The punditry on No-Drama-Obama and Clinton as the feeler-in-chief always bothered me - personally, I want my presidents to think, not feel - but I am reconsidering what this means. If the president embodies the state, then what "we" (which I also question who or what this "we" really is...) want is a state that cares. Or at least shows that it does. In other words, it is not about the president, it is about a whole, complex system in which persons feel disempowered, disenfranchised, undervalued, underserved, un-cared for... Which might be a symptom not only that our state, but our society no longer "owns" us in the anthropological sense: There is no obligation. I echo the Savage Minds blogger's question with another: Can we be persons without obligation?

Three Women

Taking a break here in grading hell to read about other kinds of heaven and hell: The New York Times reports on the translation to stage of a radio play that Sylvia Plath wrote shortly before her death.

Called "Three Women," it invokes the voices of three women describing a wanted baby, a miscarriage, and an unintended pregnancy. (Keep in mind that roughly half of all pregnancies in the United States today are unintended, and that about half of them were conceived on birth control...) The text of "Three Women" is available here.

This stanza from the Third Voice struck me:

I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind. They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

I think it is the line, "They hug their flatness like a kind of health" that got me.

The hit

Back in the spring, I blogged about putting "Date Night" on our Netflix queue.

StraightMan and I finally saw it last night. We decided that reviews were lukewarm b/c either the reviewers have no notion of what it means to have a date night or they know too well and the movie hit too close for yuks.

Including the part when Tina Fey tells Steve Carell that her fantasy is to be able to check into a hotel by herself and have time alone and not have how her day was depend on how it was for everyone else around her.

I am sitting here in my office, on campus, on an overcast Sunday morning, mentally preparing myself to grade 90 undergraduate "fieldwork" papers. Sigh.

StraightMan has taken Beanie and Bubbie out for a little local color - the annual PumpkinFest, which includes the weighing / judging of giant pumpkins that will be hollowed and prepared as small watercraft, then raced in a "regatta" at the lake.

To be honest, I am not sure who is taking the hit here.

The Good Enough Baby

I know that this piece in current issue of The New Yorker is intended for yuks - The Good Enough Baby - but as with so much humor, it offers a reality checklist: Is my baby clean enough? Is my baby well fed enough? Is my baby stimulated enough?

The last item, on stimulation, especially interested me as a parenthropologist:

During the past few decades, early-development “experts” have stressed the importance of so-called “enrichment activities”: reading to babies, singing to them, even talking to them. We are now finding that these activities, in addition to being excruciating for the parent, may actually be harmful to the baby...

In their 1996 book, Parents' Cultural Belief Systems: Their Origins, Expressions, and Consequences, anthropologist Sara Harkness and psychologist Charles Super noted the differences in what they called parental ethnotheories given to describe and explain an infant or young child's behavior. In particular, they found that when an infant cried, American middle-class parents interpreted the cries as expressions of "boredom," which needed to be remedied with stimulation, like a new (different) toy. In contrast, Dutch parents interpreted the cries as a barometer of too much stimulation, so that the child required quiet and calm.

When I first read Harkness and Super's work, I was pregnant with Beanie. It became a running joke between StraightMan and me, who to be perfectly frank are low-stimulation people, that we would raise her Dutch...

As a parenthropologist, I think Harkness and Super's observations that American parents place value on stimulation is important. It allows us to see "boredom" as a cultural and social construction: For example, we make boredom explicitly through use of talk like "I am so bored..." and implicitly through use of talk like "This is so exciting..." We learn to feel and to give name to feelings as boredom and excitement.

Which is not to say that I am immune to such feelings: Blah blah blah. Yawn.

(Shout out to DoulaK and SustainabilityK in Prague: What are Czech ideas about boredom?)

Feeling my ethnicity

As an anthropologist, I am all about questioning essentialisms like race and ethnicity. Yet, as a person, I also feel their significance.

For example: This evening, an invitation comes through my Inbox to come out to a Little Feat show.

I turn to StraightMan: "How do I answer this? What is Little Feat?"

I entertain the possibility that it might be my age - the Wiki on Little Feat gives me the impression that the band had its heyday during the 1970s? I mean, look at the photo above.

StraightMan, also my age, however, exhibits a brand of familiarity and ease with (and enthusiasm for) Little Feat that provokes in me an emotion that ought to have a German word giving name to it: A response that is connected with the surprise of the familiar being made suddenly strange, like looking at one's own face in the mirror and not recognizing it, like talking with one's spouse and realizing that there are depths there that I fear to plumb.

So, I have to ask him: "Is this one of those bands that white people like?"

A pause. "Maybe." Another pause. "Probably."

An Anna Wintour moment

Where I am now, the devil does not wear Prada. She wears OshKosh.

The scene: The other day, while walking Beanie and her friend, Pants, who is in the second grade, home from ballet class.

The fashion faux pas: Across the street, a young woman, possibly a college student, walking in the other direction, is wearing... well, something. Kind of a shapeless swath of fabric - a tube dress?! - that brushes against the tops of her thighs. Otherwise, her legs are bare. She is, of course, talking on her phone.

The second grader, Pants, speaking apparently at the top of her lungs: Did you see that? Is that a dress?

Me, lowering my voice to "model" what I think would be so much less embarrassing: I think it is [a dress]. It is pretty short...

The first grader, Beanie, matching her friend's pitch and volume: I would never wear anything so short. Unless it was a shirt. Then I would need to wear pants with it.

The second grader, helpfully: Or leggings.

The first grader, agreeing: Or leggings.

The second grader: Or jeans that fitted.

Me: Skinny jeans?

The first grader, firmly: Leggings would be better.

There you have it: Fash-shun tips from a first and second grader.

Girls will be boys...

So, between replying to student e-mails and prepping classes, I just read this article in the NYT, intriguingly titled, "Afghan Boys Are Prized, So Girls Live the Part."

The piece describes, in Afghanistan, a practice of families enabling or encouraging daughters to live their childhoods as sons. I started reading it b/c I thought it might be interesting to assign in ANTH 100 to discuss the construction of gender and expectations that surround women's fertility and preference for sons.

It might be just me, but I find the tone / language in this piece a little bit off: The girls are described as "masquerading" and "disguised." There are "real boys," and then there are the bacha posha, which we are told means "dressed up as a boy." Yet, the author describes how the bacha posha live as "both" boys and girls, wearing the clothes of boys and having the freedoms associated with them, but also socializing with girls. (We are told that this all changes abruptly with puberty, and the expectations of marriage that accompany it.) Not only parents, but the community at large, including school administrators, participate in allowing for bacha posha. So, I find unconvincing the characterization that this is a masquerade and a disguise.

In fact, I feel like the story is even more interesting than as told here. What I find wanting is a consideration of gender beyond the it-sucks-to-be-a-girl-especially-in-Other-Cultures perspective that is taken here.

The author quotes an historian who observes: “Segregation calls for creativity. These people have the most amazing coping ability.” Which I think expresses a stance that I hope to cultivate in ANTH 100 students: Recognize the conditions and constraints - in fact, the inequalities and injustices - surrounding gender, but also the capacity of human beings to devise solutions to the problems that they also create.