I Could Put Some Pink Floyd Lyrics Here, But I Won't

There was recently a brief discussion at the Open Anthropology blog concerning the commoditization of academic work, and its implications for the quality of higher education. One correlate of this restructuring of the academy, a shallowing of content in the work of both students and educators, is also implicit in this discussion at the Savage Minds blog regarding celebrity prof. Tony Blair's new course at Yale (and explicated further in the comments).

By a Nose

Well this is interesting (courtesy of the Washington Post, via the Tabsir blog). The "this" I'm referring to, in case you were unsure, is the rather exuberant advertisement in that screenshot of the Wall Street Journal's website, from the A.M. hours of September 26, proclaiming "McCain Wins Debate!" The "interesting," of course, arises from the fact that the debate didn't occur until the evening of the 26th.

(Disclaimer: I've visited the actual page for the WSJ article, and after reloading it a couple of dozen times, none of the handful of ads that appeared were the alleged McCain piece. I can only assume that the Washington Post writer that passed it along checked its veracity.)

Whether it is/was real or not, what I find interesting is the concept of an ad such as this one, and what, exactly, it's intended to do. The ad plays upon the foregone assumption in public discourse about presidential debates that one of the candidates "wins." I've always found this idea odd because, unlike in a typical competitive debate, there is no officiating party to adjudicate the merit of opposing arguments. This complicates the question of how a winner is determined - most topics conceded by the opponent? But of course no candidate ever concedes a point... What makes an argument "successful" in this context?

My point, I guess, is that, like most of the political jousting that takes place in the public eye (debates, campaign ads, monologues of talking points), the purpose here is not to facilitate the electorate's objective decision-making. Their minds have already largely been, and continue to be, unconsciously made up through processes of identification, affection, etc., and only subsequently consciously justified to themselves in rational terms of public policy. A debate, then, can only provide fodder to reinforce preexisting identifications - everyone believes "their" candidate won, and if the victory was less than resounding, it was only because the other guy behaved in a despicable, immature manner anyway, thus evoking even more sympathy for "the noble underdog" (Didn't Orwell play with something like this? Though I seem to recall more screaming...). The "winner" existed in the mind of each observer before the debate even began.

So what does an ad preemptively declaring disputational victory do to potential voters? As far as I can tell, pretty much the same thing as the debate itself.

Neil Postman is Rolling

In an unrestrained indulgence of irony, tonight's broadcast of the 60th Emmy Awards cut to a commercial break during Kirk Ellis's acceptance speech for Outstanding Writing for the HBO miniseries John Adams, in mid-sentence, in a sentence praising the coherence and depth of political dialog in Adams's era. And I quote:

...this amazing opportunity to talk about a period in our history when articulate men articulated complex thoughts in complete sentences. They used words...

and cue musical transition to commercial. Nope, we'll have no complete sentences here!

Gifts Unlooked-For

I spent today with some of my family at a northern Pennsylvania heritage festival - demonstrations of pioneer-era domestic crafts, presentations on log rafting and the underground railroad, that sort of thing. There was also a short concert by the Seneca Moon String Band, who play Appalachian and Irish folk tunes. I was initially drawn to the stage from across the festival grounds by the reedy, Jerry Garcia-esqe strains of the autoharpist's vocals, and proceeded to settle down in the shade of the ancient maple tree looming over the portable bandshell and thoroughly enjoy the remainder of the set.

One thing that I found particularly striking, however, was something independent (so far as I can perceive) of any formal characteristics of the performance itself. I refer to the lyrics of the Shaker song "Simple Gifts" (you've heard it), a rendition of which the band started into shortly after I arrived:

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,

'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,

To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.

This is by no means a rarely-performed piece in modern times; perhaps especially in secular, rather than religious, settings. But what impressed itself upon me on this occasion, for the first time in memory, was just how profoundly Buddhist is the song's sentiment. Nirvana - freedom; not least of all from shame concerning our temporal circumstances - is the place [that is no place] just right, which is attained through true simplicity in mortal existence.

I have no idea what confluence of psychic contents, social setting, and neurophysical reactions to rhythmic/melodic influences caused me to perceive this semantic echo of 5th century B.C.E. India in a composition from 19th century C.E. New England, but the all-too-infrequent sense of what I can only subjectively term "transcendence" was undeniably attached to it.

I Guess That I Could Get Crazy Now Baby, Cause We All Got In Tune

A particular area within anthropology that has long been of interest to me is the interaction of individual psychology with elements of culture and social structures. This kind of interaction can be seen in an especially striking form in experiences of spirit possession occurring across a wide variety of cultural settings.

An interview with scholar of Jewish mysticism Rachel Elior about her new book, as noted on the Paleojudaica blog today, discusses a spirit-possession legend specific to Jewish folklore, namely that of the dybbuk. The dybbuk is believed to be the spirit of a deceased man, which enters and takes control of a living person. What is interesting about Elior's analysis of this legend (from what I can gather from the interview excerpt; I have not yet read the book) is her conclusion regarding its social function:

Elior argues that for women, dybbuks could be a means to escape the demands of a confining society. Once possessed by a dybbuk (or at least claiming to be), women were no longer considered responsible for their own actions, and were exempt from arranged marriages and relieved of wifely duties. Thought to be the souls of sinners, these spirits gave a certain degree of power to the powerless, freeing them from the norms of routine life and its conventional ordering.

I find this interesting in light of parallels that can be drawn with the Hauka religious movement, originating in French-colonized Africa, practitioners of which believed themselves to invoke the spiritual identities of colonial officials. Some scholars have theorized that this activity allowed the possessed to reclaim a sense of agency within the disenfranchising context of foreign occupation (further discussion of this and other aspects of Hauka can be found in chapter 3 of Paul Stoller's Sensuous Scholarship).

The use of possession experiences as a means of reclaiming personal or group power in the face of social oppression or disorder appears to recur throughout Western history. The latest installment of the Documents blog's continuing series on possession discusses analyses of the "dancing mania" of the ~14th-18th centuries in such terms:

The dire living conditions of the late Middle Ages - natural disasters, the Black Death, famine, social unrest - made Medieval Europeans seek relief in 'the intoxication of an artificial delirium'.

And of course we have the myth of Dionysus and King Pentheus.

So, in light of this apparent tradition of social resistance through intentionally-induced states of alternate identity, how might we interpret contemporary bacchanals? The participants, as those of the aforementioned historical examples, do not seem to consciously identify as members of a coherent movement against prevailing social conditions:

What’s the point? Well, it’s just an event where a bunch of people can get together to have fun, expend pent-up energy, and meet tons of new people with similar interests.

Yet, from the hippies at Woodstock to the candy-ravers of the 1990s, those who collectively tune in, turn on, and drop out have been repeatedly vilified and condemned by guardians of the normative order. Can a trance-based movement, regardless of intent, effectively call into question an authority simply by forcing its hand, thus revealing its lack of perfect control?

And on the Fifth Day, Let Us Praise Famous Men

Well, I see that I've managed to put out a thoughtful, topical post on a daily basis since starting this blog four days ago. This is unacceptable - it sets a standard for productivity that I cannot possibly live up to.

I do have a series of posts in the offing, with my thoughts on some of the cultural and psychological dimensions of the gaming hobby, of which I am an unabashed enthusiast (to avoid any confusion for those uninitiated: by 'gaming,' I mean the broad category of imaginatively-grounded, multi-participant activities that incorporate varying degrees of competition and strategic complexity, including everything from table-top role playing, to collectible card games, to the current phenomenon that is the MMO). Stay tuned for this and more!

In the meantime, let it suffice for us to remember one of my favorite authors on the day of his birth: Ken Kesey first became conscious of our mutually-defined reality on this day in 1935, and quickly set about undermining our illusory social constructs with his insightful art and some CIA-approved consciousness-altering compounds. Thanks for all the Kool-Aid and Cukoos, Ken.

Dressed for Success

A recent discussion on the Racialicious blog concerning some ludicrous toddler footwear from Old Navy led me to think about how children's clothing has become one of the most pervasive forces for gender socialization in Western culture, and how this may have come about.

From the first day ex-utero onward, the forms and iconography of the clothes that children are dressed in differ distinctly between boys and girls. This not only plays into the process of binary gender identity development, but also the teaching of what kinds of behavior are expected of each gender role. These implied behaviors can be perceived in the very forms of articles of clothing - the types of activity facilitated (and degree of modesty demanded) by trousers, as compared to a dress, establish the boundaries for action within which children feel comfortable. More overtly, but perhaps less direct in dictating behavior, the decorative images featured on clothing definitely promote different affective attachments and role models for boys and girls (one need look no further than the aforementioned Old Navy socks to see what kind of career is being held up as the male ideal).

Lacking any real functional purpose, why should these differences exist in the first place? Until relatively recently, distinctions between the clothing of very young boys and girls was practically nonexistant. I would speculate that the differentiation came about as a result of the industrial revolution, and the commoditization of these clothes; by promoting the idea that only certain forms of clothing were appropriate for each sex, and thus not interchangeable between bro and sis, manufacturers could to sell more units to each family. Of course, this marketing tactic wasn't a completely conscious, crass invention of the capitalists - it required preexisting, at least nascent, cultural ideas about child rearing. These two forces, commerce and the common sense, could then proceed to feed off of and reinforce one another, as they plainly continue to do today.

At Least Two Wrong Answers

As an avid watcher of the anthropology blogosphere, I've been tangentially exposed to the "open access" movement in academia. Put simply, this is the ideological position that the knowledge generated through the work of professional scholars should be freely and easily accessible to everyone. I'm sympathetic to this idea, and was motivated to submit my first major scholarly work, my senior sociology thesis, to the Mana'o Project open anthropology repository. I even suggested that my classmates join me in doing so, but they all apparently chose to decline...

Although I'm pretty sure this mass failure to act was due to nothing more sinister than the apathy that seems to infect those anticipating graduation at all academic levels (the infamous "senioritis"), I was as surprised as Owen Wiltshire was to find that there appears to be a substantial countercurrent in academia that is actively opposed to open access. The sentiment expressed by this cohort seems to be that their work would be somehow "tainted" by "exposure" to the unwashed masses who did not spend enough years in early adulthood avoiding a real job. As Wiltshire notes, this flies in the face of the dominant explanation for the shortcomings of closed-access academic publication:

The point I want to make is that anthropology journals are not “failing” to get ideas out there, since many authors simply do not want to share them in such a public fashion. The “pay to access” model works very well for many academics who want to filter out members of the public, or for those who see anthropological writing as being of little interest to anyone but other anthropologists.

I have, however, also encountered academics who are of the opinion that perhaps some knowledge should not be widely available, as it may be abusable in certain hands. This is a real concern, and it calls into question the very ethicality of anthropology as an activity. Here again we may encounter a certain sense of superiority among some scholars, now expressed as an expectation of entitlement to practice their chosen profession, social consequences be damned.

As with most questions worth answering, finding a practical path to our utopian objective - making the world a better place by spreading knowledge throughout the land - is not obvious, and the inquiry is likely to produce many false-starts and failures before we arrive at a solution.

Pocket-Change Revenue and Ethical Standards, or Why I'm Wary of AdSense

During the earliest planning phases of my blogging venture, I became aware of the Google AdSense service. While the idea of making some extra money, even a few dollars, for labor I'd be expending anyway, with essentially zero investment, is undeniably a tempting proposition. Nevertheless, I've yet to install this particular widget, and I don't expect to any time soon.

My initial reason for refraining was more a matter of some imagined sense of "professionalism" or "integrity" than anything else (blogging - serious business!). But more recently, I've been reminded of another problematic aspect of forming relationships with advertisers: abandonment of ideological control.

Desperate for cash, traditional print media are not very fussy about their advertisers these days. Ann Caulkins, the publisher of the Charlotte Observer, told the paper’s religion reporter that [Obsession, a DVD currently being distributed by the Clarion Fund (http://clarionfund.org/), a nonprofit shell organization devoted to propagandizing against Islam] met the newspaper’s criteria for ads: “We’re all for freedom of expression, freedom of speech. This is in no way reflecting our opinions, but it is something we allow,” she said, adding that the newspaper would not allow material that is racist, profane, or “offers graphic images of body parts,” which at least distinguishes the paper from anything in the CSI television franchise.

Explicit standards of decency for advertisements, such as those maintained by the Charlotte Observer, the Journal of Higher Education, and presumably Google, are designed not with objectivity, but rather consumer palatability, in mind. An advertisement is deemed acceptable so long as a majority of a publication's audience will not become offended and raise an (circulation-plummeting, revenue-slashing) outcry.

The problem is that some products and services that many people find palatable or even enticing, I find myself unwilling to implicitly endorse by featuring on my website. Surely nothing so vile as Islamophobic propaganda films, certainly not from Google; but I don't want to associate myself with any of the vacuity- and vanity-perpetuating goods that are the mainstream advertising norm, either. Luckily for me, that zero investment-cost I mentioned above means my publishing overhead is significantly lower than the average newspaper or scholarly journal, and so, unlike the unfortunates at the Observer, I remain free to allow only content that does reflect my opinions. Ah, to be in the new-media vanguard...

Law and Morality in Two Domains

For this first post, I'd like to jump right into the kind of activity that I hope this blog will come to sustain - in this instance, the synthesis of two synchronistically-related (in the Jungian sense) concepts that recently thrust themselves before me.

Kenworthey Bilz and Janice Nadler's paper, "Law, Psychology & Morality", addresses, among other concerns, the consequences of a disconnect obetween legislation and the moral sense of the public. Because the laws of a society derive their power to control behavior from the fact that the public has largely internalized their validity as a source of direction, when a law is introduced that contradicts other internalized (e.g., moral) values, not only is the new law likely to be rejected and in various ways circumvented (cf. the prohibition of alcohol), but the authority of the legal system itself is called into question:

...if the law is not viewed as a legitimate
moral authority, then compliance may be lower. There is some evidence that exposure to widespread social and political corruption leads to diminished respect for law and lower levels of legal compliance.

This brings me to the latest installment of the Documents blog's discussion of the role played by trance-state and possession in the work of some pop musicians. The subject this time is Joy Division's Ian Curtis's apparent insight into the unkind vagaries of a life lived in society (here characterized as descriptive laws, not unlike those of nature), and his recognition of its incompatibility with his own precepts of moral justice (metaphysical prescriptive laws):

In Wilderness, prescriptive law plays only an indirect role, showing through in his feelings of indignation, guilt, and shame at seeing moral laws transgressed. Nevertheless, the fact that these feelings show through so strongly indicate that the relation between the two types of law is highly relevant in understanding Curtis' situation. For Curtis descriptive law (the cruel laws governing social life) and prescriptive law are fundamentally incongruous, conflicting: the laws of social life ordain that the laws of morality will always be trampled underfoot.

The failure of an arbitrary law, whether established by a legislative body or through social custom, to reflect a dominant moral sentiment is experienced as a mismatch of what is with what should be. When such a law comes by judicial fiat, it will often be a target of transgression, and possibly result in an undermining of the institutional authority by which it was imposed. But when a law is, rather, a subtle property of the social structure itself, then perhaps, as Curtis demonstrates, we only have recourse to the equally diffuse transgressions of art.