Seeing things differently: Kate Spade Saturday

Window shopping! Literally. Kate Spade Saturday is (or was - I just read it was scheduled to be open for a month only, until July 7) a pop-up storefront on Gansevoort Street, with three locations in NYC. 

When you swipe the large touchscreen, the lights around the shop window flash like you hit the jackpot. 

Then you are instructed on what to do:

I like that you are promised one hour delivery. Could they bring dinner with that purse?

Is it retail, is it advertisement, is it installation, is it performance, is it a self- reflective engagement of all of the above.

Seeing Things Differently: George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal

Living at home while I interned, then worked a bona fide job in NYC, I became a Jersey commuter, moving through the 42nd Street Port Authority Bus Terminal briskly and avoiding contact of any kind with other persons and with other things that might bear traces of contact with other persons, unfortunately including urine. On occasion, I had the even worse misfortune (I thought then) of having to pass through the grim and grimy GWB Bus Terminal. Today, however, I realized what a masterpiece in fact this place is. Here are a few images from my iPhone, taken early this afternoon on platform 22, waiting for bus 186:

Overhead, in the seated waiting area

Overhead

The trash can!

View of the GWB from the end of platform 22

View from the other end of the platform

Another trash can!

Wishing I had the architectural vocabulary to compare this with the bridge span

Concrete, steel, glass, and light

When I arrived at my parents', I immediately googled GWB Bus Station. Those who know more about architecture or NYC history will know already that the designer is Pier Luigi Nervi, who also designed the 1960 Rome Olympic stadium, with which the bus station clearly shares a strong family resemblance: https://www.google.com/search?q=nervi+rome+stadium&client=safari&hl=en&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=J13XUaKzGuvD4AOJj4GQBQ&ved=0CDQQsAQ&biw=768&bih=900

A little more background on the building is here: http://www.panynj.gov/bus-terminals/gwbbs-history.html

There are plans to undertake a multimillion dollar renovation of the station, which I imagine will mean developing the neighborhood into another income bracket.

Children versus childhood

Just woke (alone in a quiet cool NYC apartment. Not a Cheerio on the floor!) and decided to post a few thoughts after reading late last night:

Thinking about children, childhood, parents (mothers, fathers, other care givers) in terms of material culture and in particular in museum collections. What can we find?

Visiting the Yale University Furniture Study the other day, our workshop leader noted that the painting on early 19th century fancy chairs not uncommonly involved the work of women and children. (In the case of a particular chair manufacturer, it also involved the work of convicts. Rather enterprising, I thought.)

So, the painting on chairs, which might be displayed as an example of decorative arts, domestic interiors, New England history, or early American industry, is an artifact also of children's lives. Sharon Brookshaw, in her 2009 article, "The Material Culture of Children and Childhood," notes that the UK's National Trust Museum of Childhood had displayed work implements and products from industries like lace-making in which children significantly participated.

Contemporary expectations about children and childhood can prevent us from seeing their material traces, especially from the past.

Historian Philippe Aries famously asserted in Centuries of Childhood (1962) that although children existed, childhood had not in the Middle Ages. Following Aries, scholars now distinguish between "children" and "childhood," but both terms are understood to refer to individuals / groups (children) and experiences (childhood) that are largely cultural and social. The idea that children are (physically and / or psychologically) immature is itself culturally and socially defined. Brookshaw (2009) notes that the word infant derives from the Latin in-fans or "not speaking."

"Children" and "childhood" become used to reference different sets of perspectives - one centered on those defined as children, and the other on adults who importantly and meaningfully interact with children and impose on them ideas and practices about what children are and ought to be.

"Children represent an interesting case in terms of material culture as, although much of the material world they interact with is made deliberately, purposefully and is reflective of the culture from which it originates, the objects we most commonly associate with this group were not made or controlled directly by its members, but rather are imposed on it by another group: adults" (Brookshaw 2009: 367)

One example: Toys (and Brookshaw discusses the problems with their collection in museums).

Another example (which especially interests me): "the material culture of parenthood: items that parents feel obliged to buy for their children that the child may not necessarily want or even need" (Brookshaw 2009: 368).

A collection of rattles at the New-York Historical Society. Artifacts of children, childhood, or parenthood?

The material culture of parenting

The parenthropologist is kicking off her sabbatical with a 4-week seminar on 19th century American material culture sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and held at Bard Graduate Center. 

Being accustomed to working with people, I feel a bit adrift working with objects. Frustratingly, they cannot talk to me.

The question that I bring to the seminar is this:

Parenting in twenty-first century America is understood to be an enterprise that requires the acquisition of new clothes, accessories, furnishings, gadgets, devices, and all manner of stuff and gear for parents and children alike. How have we come to accumulate so much for the purpose of childrearing? What things did the raising of children require in the past? 

View of billboard visible from NYC's High Line

Yes, fat talk is a problem... and no, this is not the solution

This morning, I stumbled across this extremely unhelpful headline on a Web site called Medical Daily:

"Girl, Shut It!" Study Finds People Don't Like Women Who 'Fat Talk'

 

The piece itself describes the same study detailed here in the NYT, which examined how undergraduate college students perceived speakers of fat talk, and specifically the speaker's body shape / size might affect their perception. Here is how the NYT described it:

As an online experiment, Dr. Corning showed 139 undergraduates photos of two thin and two overweight women, each making either a positive or negative remark about her body.

Because of the stigma against heavier people, Dr. Corning expected that the most popular option would be a thin woman who made positive comments about her body. But she found that wasn’t the case.

The most likable woman chosen by the students was overweight and quoted as saying: “I know I’m not perfect, but I love the way I look. I know how to work with what I’ve got, and that’s all that matters.”

 
Here is how Medical Daily described it:

Over 100 female undergrads were shown a series of photos of thin or overweight women participating in fat talk. The women in the photos who engaged in fat talk were rated as significantly less likeable, regardless of whether or not they were overweight.

"The take-home message is that if women engage in fat talk in the hope of enhancing their social bonds, their attempts may have the effect of backfiring," said Corning.

The NYT unpacks how and why fat talk can be such a problem among girls and women:

But putting a stop to fat talk is difficult. Dr. Corning said, in part because it feels airless and scripted and seems to offer the responder no avenue to change the dynamic without threatening the relationship. She gave an example:

First friend: “I can’t believe I ate that brownie. I am so fat!”

Second friend: “You must be joking — you are so not fat. Just look at my thighs.”

The second friend’s reply, an “empathetic” self-deprecating retort to maintain the friendship on equal standing, includes reflexive praise of the first friend’s body, supposedly feeding the first friend’s hungry cry for affirmation, Dr. Corning said. But to do so, the second friend has eviscerated herself, a toxic tear-down by comparison.

Medical Daily treats fat talk as a problem of likeability: "A new study from Notre Dame suggests that "fat talk," or those everyday statements that voice dissatisfaction about bodily appearance, eating, and exercise, is very unpopular among college-aged women."

As a parent and a former journalist, I think it is interesting to read the two pieces and important to think about the different messages that they send, not only about the study itself, but also how to read and interpret research. There is a lot reported these days that is relevant to practice and policy concerning the health and well being of girls and women. We need to understand what it means.

Putting the anthropology into parenting: Milk

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This image appeared at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/08/05/seven-up-in-milk-mmmmmm-wholesome/

As a second generation Korean-American, I have had a hate-love relationship with milk. My own parents, especially my pediatrician mother, prescribed it to the three of us kids so that we would have strong bones and, in particular, be tall like other American kids. However, my parents could not stomach it particularly well, not to mention that they did not especially care for its taste. The same on both counts for me, too. I regularly balked at having to take my dose unless it was laced liberally with sugar or Quik. Yet, none of us ever questioned the importance and necessity of drinking milk for our health and growth. Now, as a parent, I sometimes catch myself repeating the same mantras to my own kids, for whom we regularly pour a glass of milk to have at breakfast and / or dinner.

So, when a friend shared this link on Facebook, it caught my eye. It reports on a movement to block FDA approval to allow milk producers to use “anysafe and suitable sweetener as an optional ingredient” in (cow’s) milk and other dairy products.

The idea apparently is to add sweeteners like aspartame to milk – on the one hand, to encourage its consumption in U.S. schools, where children are opting for juice or water over milk, and on the other hand, to use sweeteners that will add no or low calories, which is a concern when Americans are only too aware of the problem of obesity.

This has placed nutritionists in the interesting position of defending the sugar in chocolate and strawberry milk, which they say not only does not contribute to obesity, but seems to encourage more consumption of milk.

The NPR notes that a group opposing the milk producers calls them out on "turn[ing] the wholesome drink (milk) into another artificial flavor-laden sweet snack."

All of which got this parent thinking like an anthropologist.

Milk is as much a product of culture as of nature, and the conditions in which it is consumed (as well as the effects and consequences for human biology) might best be understood in biocultural perspective, as medical anthropologist Andrea S. Wiley has demonstrated. Wiley has conducted studies on cow’s milk consumption, documenting how it might be linked with differences in height and BMI and age at menarche.

In her 2007 article, “Transforming Milk in a Global Economy,” Wiley asks the question that I think we might be asking ourselves now: “[H]ow has milk, often viewed as the most ‘natural’ of foods, been technologically transformed to take on new roles, reflecting other social, cultural, and economic trends” (666-667).

Leaving aside the questions one might have about the safety of the sweeteners, why the milk producers have sparked ire and outrage seems to be rooted in our perception that they are committing adulteration on at least two fronts. First, the addition of artificial substances to natural substances, especially milk, with its association as pure nourishment, looks to us like pollution. (Note that one of the consistent refrains about aspartame is that it is a natural sweetener.)

Second, the transformation of milk into a sweet snack contaminates what has been understood popularly to be a wholesome drink with the taste of the market. In fact, milk long has been a commodity and its production an industry that has been not only regulated by government, but also promoted, supported, and subsidized by it. In recent years, milk consumption in the U.S. has been in decline, so there is no doubt that milk producers would be interested in remaking milk to compete with other beverages in the market.

Six days until six years!

"Now We Are Six"

When I was one,
I had just begun.
When I was two,
I was nearly new.
When I was three,
I was hardly me.
When I was four,
I was not much more.
When I was five,
I was just alive.
But now I am six,
I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six
now and forever. 

A.A. Milne