Many thanks again to Lorenz Khazaleh atantropologi.infofor bringing my attention to this fascinating interview with Maurice Bloch, where views are expressed that sit perfectly well with the thrust of the Open Anthropology Project. This also ties in with my response to the comment that I am “ambivalent” about my own work that one can findhere.
Interviewed by Maarja Kaaristo inEurozinein February of this year, Maurice Block makes several statements that I found to be critically relevant.
First, on anthropological knowledge:
Anthropologists don’t usually talk about the basis of their knowledge because they take it for granted. What they do talk about, and what they tend to use in their representation of the knowledge of the people they study, is a kind of second level that assumes an earlier level….More and more, I began to stress that the basis of our knowledge, the knowledge that we use to making inferences, is based much less on culture than anthropology tends to believe. So many anthropologists began to think of me as an anti-anthropologist.
Second, concerning applied anthropology, the discussion seems a bit muddled, perhaps as a result of the interviewer conflating “development experts” with “applied anthropologists”, with Bloch’s response largely focusing on critiques of the former, and the problems posed for the work of the latter who do not necessarily fall in line with the goals and practices of development agencies that hire them as consultants. Let’s move on before someone asks me why people are not wearing enough hats.
Third, on the two senses of the term “anthropology” and the disappearance of institutional anthropology:
(a) I would like to distinguish between two senses of the word “anthropology”. It can refer to institutions inside universities, which are called “anthropology departments”. Anthropology departments teach and are coherent insofar as they have a tradition. That’s one sense of anthropology - as institution. It’s very possible that anthropology departments will disappear, there’s no reason why they should continue existing. They only exist insofar as they’re useful in terms of teaching and developing a tradition. It may well be that they just disappear; it wouldn’t bother me very much. That’s why I’m not very interested in the crisis of representation, because I’m not that interested in anthropology as an institutional system.
(b) On the other hand [there are] the general questions of anthropology, which exist irrespective of anthropology departments. In fact, I would consider that all human beings are anthropologists: all are concerned with the general theoretical questions about the nature of human beings, about explanations of diversity and similarity. Of course I’m not worried about the continuation of this form of anthropology, it seems to me impossible that it could ever disappear.
Fourth, on letting anthropology departments die, and what the loss would be:
One could say, all right, let anthropology departments die, let them spend their time considering themselves to be the most fascinating phenomenon in the universe, and let them get on with fewer and fewer students. Then we could just forget about anthropology and start again. Yet if we did that it would just be repeating the mistakes of the past. To lose the knowledge, both theoretical and empirical, which has been accumulated - and I fear that is what’s happening - because anthropologists have not been addressing those questions that are burning questions for human beings. Other people have done it and have not made use of what anthropologists have learned.
Fifth, on anthropology in public debates:
Having said this, there’s another thing that has to be said, and that is that when professional anthropologists join the anthropological debate, which they rarely do, it may well be that their role is one of caution. Because we have learned that easy answers don’t work. So we anthropologists will always have a negative role and I think that’s right. But I think we should engage with the general questions that people are ask, rather than spending our time navel gazing.
I rarely agree 100% with anything anyone says, but I am close to doing so in the case of Bloch’s comments above, and in that interview as a whole. There are questions that remain however:
(1) How do we ascertain what is “navel gazing”–is it the abstract discussion of how the human soul is formed, or is it the seemingly pointless question of “why aren’t people wearing enough hats”? I hope people will see why that vignette fromMonty Pythonremains so brilliantly germane to the work we do.
(2) Not letting anthropological knowledge accumulated over past generations simply vanish, is one thing. To locate that knowledge, and to identify it with the continued existence of anthropology departments, is another. I do not believe that the death of departments means the death of knowledges that were generated in such departments, or that suddenly they become more closed off to a wider public.
(Thanks again to Lorenz Khazaleh andhis blogfor notification of the release of the current issue of Anthropology News.)
In a short commentary titled, “Practical Challenges of Multi-Sited Ethnography“, written by Ulla Berg in Anthropology News (May, 2008), there is one basic limitation that I want to highlight, and some of my commentary might remind readers ofGeorge Marcus’ “no new ideas”argument (parts of which I agree with, and parts of which apply to his own argument).
Ulla Berg is not mistaken in observing that, “a real challenge with multi-sited fieldwork is that the researcher has less time at each individual site and with each localized population, thus having fewer opportunities to ‘get to know’ people and their social worlds, and to establish more profound social relationships in ways that allow us access to more existential fields of experience”. The problem comes with conflating physical spaces with the meaning of experience–the former is fixed, and the latter is communicable. Interestingly, Berg states that her research interests focus on communicative practices, and this is where the familiar blind spot presents itself, as I argued in “Another Revolution Missed” (also from Anthropology News).
Anthropologists are not well suited to studying new transformations if they are not willing to consider new ways of doing so. The multi-sited Malinowski who follows a positivist notion of “sites” definitely hamstrings any attempt on our part to break out of the little boxes we have inherited.
The challenge to studying transnationalism and globalization is, first, a conceptual one, and only second, and as a result of the first, a methodological one. While calling for new analytical categories and research strategies, Berg never raises the possibility of following “informants” online as they communicate across places. Her article is very well intentioned and constructive, and I only raise the question as to why, if one is interested in communication and transnationalism, working with people who span communities in the U.S. and Peru, there would be no mention of cyberspace…especially when dealing with U.S. based informants. Facebook “Español”, as one example, exists I imagine to serve an audience that does not consist of Spain alone.
A very interesting conversational interview between Tiziana Terranova and Marc Bousquet is available on theHow the University Workswebsite. I only wish to reproduce some notes and memorable quotes from this discussion, since they cover a great deal of important ground on the concept of the university as an “ivory tower”, a term that I have reproduced on this blog, and in fact appears in one of the category headings.
Let me preface their discussion by noting that the “ivory tower” term–often used in accusing sentences that depict universities as elitist–is not one that is owned by any one political ideology. One can find individuals who fit some definition of political radicalism who make this charge, as well as more conservative types. It is convenient to use the “ivory tower” label in any argument in which the university figures. Marc Bousquet also notes this in his comments on the label as it “signifies all the way around the political clock”, a “classic ideologeme – practically un-dislodgeable from any point of view”.
In the introduction to their exchange, originally published inMute, the “ivory tower” concept is immediately targeted as somewhat of an outdated caricature that is not in line with current political economic realities:
Far removed from the clichéd image of the ‘ivory tower’, today’s universities have been opened to the harsh realities of neoliberal economics: huge volumes of students, extreme levels of performance-geared management, casualisation of employment, and the conversion of students into ‘consumers’. In the name of democratisation and equality, the university has become a cross between a supermarket and a factory whose consumers are also its hyper-exploited labour force.
In line with this thinking, Terranova characterizes the contemporary university as an “open system” that opens out onto the field of casualised labour and “underpaid socialised labour power”. (As someone working in a department where almost half the courses, and perhaps most of the students, are taught by colleagues who also suffered their way to a PhD, only to be rewarded with temporary positions and very meager salaries, I am no stranger to this process–indeed, their union is currently on strike after several years without a contract, in a long-standing conflict with a university run like a private corporation, but almost entirely on public funds.) “Networked intelligence” and “mass intellectuality” is how Terranova also envisions the current situation of knowledge production in which universities find themselves.
Marc Bousquet agrees that the university has never been sheltered from commerce or politics, and thus never really was an “ivory tower”. He notes that in the U.S. at least 60% of high school graduates have some experience with higher education, and thus one might conclude it has increasingly become a mass product, a commodity with which most are familiar consumers.
The question emerges of how the university can be transformed and directed in a process of engaged social transformation, and whose interests are served in a site where production, reproduction, and consumption converge. If tenured faculty might be classically seen as those possessing the privileges associated with the idea of the “ivory tower”, Bousquet observes that their position is somewhat more schizophrenic:
Tenured faculty schizophrenically experience themselves as both labour and management, a contradictory position reflected in US labour law. They also have another schizophrenia of seeking to produce or direct a cultural-material transformation while simultaneously serving capital (as reproductive labour) through the socialisation of a disciplined professional-managerial class.
This observation is not offered as if to somehow whitewash the political role of the tenured, for as Bousquet adds later, speaking of the high rate of unionization among the tenured in the U.S. in terms of “an old-style craft unionism, a labour aristocracy that preserves workplace hierarchy, and has been very much complicit in the perma-temping of the university workforce, preserving their own jobs while selling out the future”.
Both Terranova and Bousquet agree–and here this really resonates once again with the situation I see in my home university–increasing numbers of students are themselves temporary workers, who engage in higher education (which some conservative stalwarts characterize as a “leisure” activity) in the hopes of securing better paying jobs. Even in Quebec, with very low tuition fees compared to the Canadian average, the fact remains there is a cost of living that students have to shoulder, since most are independent and self-sustaining. Given the limited job market, or inadequate qualifications, or poor wages, it’s not surprising to discover that more and more of our students are seeking work in Montreal’s thriving pornographic industry. At this pace, it should not be surprising if students begin to sell their organs to fund their studies. Most end up saddled with debt, a situation with which I am still personally familiar, and credit card companies mount stalls everywhere on campus to seek out students who are desperate from some extra, short term cash. The tuition may be “low”, but we have an “emergency food fund” for students. Matters are quite grim now, and there is no promise that the situation will improve. That so many of these students, most I would say, maintain such a positive spirit, remain energetic and committed to their studies, produce so much high quality work and maintain such an active interest is not just a tribute to them, it defeats another set of myths: that of the “dumbing down” of students who are in university so we can “baby sit” them.
While Terranova and Bousquet both seem to agree, and repeat, that there is opportunity for transformation of the university system as a result of these changes, that massification will help to positively transform the social role of the university and open up new sites of resistance, I remain very skeptical about that. Indeed, some of the reasons for my own reticence here stem from some of the features that Terranova herself notes, especially the applicability of
Louis Althusser’s notion of education as ‘Institutional State Apparatus’….And there is no doubt, as Foucault once put it, that the university still partially ‘stands for the institutional apparatus through which society ensures its uneventful reproduction at the least cost to itself’. Sadie Plant used this quote to contest what she thinks is the ‘Platonic’ bias of many pedagogical approaches to higher education which contribute to making the university what Foucault said it was: the idea that knowledge is something that is ‘recalled’ ready made from an original source and then simply transmitted from mind to mind. This is really the uneventful reproduction of readymade knowledges for the purposes of social reproduction.
I may be mistaken, but I believe there is a theme that runs through their discussion that assumes that temporary teachers, i.e., part-time faculty, the “flex workforce” and “temps” they refer to, will be the source of the transformation of the university. As Bousquet puts it:
A big part of the academic ‘labour of reproduction’ is the production, legitimation, and policing of inequality. I think academic labour, including organised academic labour, needs to submit itself to the tutelage of more radical forms of labour self-organisation. More radical than the trade union movement, as you say. Mass intellectuality implies a revolutionary transformation in the academic consciousness, faculty especially.
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Let me close with little side note that may be of interest to independent scholars, it is interesting to see how the Transformative Studies Institute (home of the journal Theory in Action–see the call for papers below), offers alternative arrangements to facilitate research in a system that caters for those with university affiliations:
If you wish to pursue grants without institutional restraints and politics, you can do so as a TSI research Fellow or Associate. We recognize that the traditional hierarchical and elitist journals, colleges, and foundations often do not take adjuncts, non-tenure track professors, independent scholars, and those employed in the less prestigious academy or other organizations too seriously. TSI however believes that there is a significant contribution to be made by all scholars regardless of one’s employment situation or affiliations. This is why we offer legitimate scholars an opportunity to affiliate themselves with TSI as research Fellows and Associates. Upon acceptance, you will be able to use your affiliation with us as your home institution. We will provide you with support, institutional email, letterhead, and other materials. Furthermore, since we do not require exclusive rights to your intellectual work, you are free to disseminate your research through any outlet.Should you wish to have your work published by the TSI we will do so. The TSI will require the customary 10% of the grant funds (commonly referred to as ‘indirect costs’) for the operation of the institute. However, you retain full autonomy with TSI support.
Exec #1: Item six on the agenda: “The Meaning of Life” Now uh, Harry, you’ve had some thoughts on this.
Exec #2: Yeah, I’ve had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we’ve come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: People aren’t wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person’s soul. However, this “soul” does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.
Exec #3: What was that about hats again?
Exec #2: Oh, Uh… people aren’t wearing enough.
Exec #1: Is this true?
Exec #4: Certainly. Hat sales have increased but not pari passu, as our research…
Exec #3: [Interrupting] “Not wearing enough”? enough for what purpose?
Exec #5: Can I just ask, with reference to your second point, when you say souls don’t develop because people become distracted…
[looking out window]
Exec #5: Has anyone noticed that building there before?
This is a call for papers for the peer-reviewed journal Theory in Action, a forum for ideas and discussion of research that connects theory and action:
Do elections matter? Do they express the voices of citizens or do they simply legitimize corporate interests? What does the U.S. election mean for workers, the middle class, and for other nations? What differences exist between the Republican and Democratic candidates? Are the U.S. or the E.U. proper democratic models for poor nations? Is proportional representation a more democratic model than U.S. style winner-take-all elections? What is the current purpose of the Electoral College? What would be better participatory models for the 22nd century? What about the China question?
PreviouslyI outlined briefly the meaning of “new world knowledge” and its Caribbean roots in the New World Movement. Since the late 1960s, a number of new schools of theory, research, and anaylsis have developed and taken root, in a ways that furthered, added to, or otherwise amended the research and activist orientations of the New World Movement. Among these we can include world-systems analysis, practice theory, Third World feminism, some form or variant of what some call post-modernism, post-colonialism, and critiques of Orientalism and Eurocentrism.
Perhaps it is due to the plethora of voices, of shades and inflections of tendencies, of overlaps and sometimes very abstract dividing lines, of a massive literature, endless conferences, and so forth, that I personally have lost a sense of the ‘crispness’, the sharp orientations that produced statements in bold relief that for me characterized so much of what was produced by the New World Movement, where “nuance” would have sounded like compromise, where compromise sounded like a call to more of the same old collaboration. Even in my relatively short life experience, nuance and negotiation, as academic buzz words are still relatively new, definitely post-1980s in my case.
More importantly, I have lost sense of locally rooted scholarship with clearly defined political orientations. I wonder if there are scholars “out there”, especially those with some connection to the Caribbean, who have had the same dream of “reviving” the New World Movement, with the aim of reexamining and building upon some of its central tenets:
bringing the promises of independence and decolonization to life;
achieving the development of local economic self-sufficiency;
popular democracy;
cultural autochthony; and,
social transformation
With the exception of perhaps a few holdouts, such as Latin American Perspectives and The Monthly Review, I can’t think of when the last time was that I reencountered such goals being openly espoused in scholarly writing, despite the mass-mediated notions that universities are bastions of some kind of socialist radicalism.
Principles, such as those listed above in rather un-nuanced form, in my mind become pertinent and valuable once again, if one sees the world as not having outlived and overcome colonial legacies; a renewal of imperialist projects (i.e., the “Project for a New American Century”); the revitalization of old discourses of civilization vs. savagery; the undermining of national independence; the hegemonic grasp of a capitalist world market that can be seen at its worst in bleeding nations that became dependent on imported foods rather than putting their faith in unfashionable ideas (for free marketeers and technocrats) of food sovereignty; the spread of a Western consumer culture and the expanded projection of Western tastes and values, with consequences for the environment, political independence, and sustainable lifeways.
The Caribbean, for those who live there, were raised there, or have developed personal connections to the region, stands out as one of the regions on earth that is most vulnerable to all of these changes. It would be fitting if a new, New World Movement were to emerge for what is, arguably, a region of world historic importance. This idea was well expressed most recently by Junot Diaz, the Dominican winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, in an interview with Newsweek:
The Caribbean generally and the island of Hispaniola specifically is the linchpin, the pivot point where the old world swung into the new world. If you want the transformation point, if you want the ground zero where the Old World died and the New World began, it’s there. I mean, nothing is more quintessentially American-in the entire span of that description-than the Caribbean and more specifically the Dominican Republic. If you want to be incredibly grandiose, the entire world, we’re all the children of what happened in the Caribbean, whether we know it or not. I mean, the extermination of indigenous people, the conquest of the New World, slavery and in some ways the rise of this form of capitalism that we all live under. I mean really the modern world was given rise by what began in the Caribbean.
If anyone “out there” is also dreaming of a New World Movement², let’s collaborate.
I am happy to announce the launch of the new OPEN ANTHROPOLOGYwebsite which, as it is developed, will more closely complement this blog. For now I have featured courses, blogs, and websites that form part of my work.
In “Making Wikis Work for Scholars,” an article by Andy Guess in the 28 April, 2008, issue of Inside Higher Ed, one begins to see more positive assessments by some scholars of the value of Wikipedia for teaching, with some limitations (some making use of the limitations themselves), some doubts about credibility, and some new attempts by scholars to produce wikis that surmount credibility issues. All are in agreement with open source and open access work being used for both research and teaching.
Using Wikipedia in the University Classroom
One of the article commentators explains that s/he uses Wikipedia for course assignments, where students work on entries of relevance to the subject matter of the course, with the aim of finding inaccuracies and making corrections. As that teacher states, “They learn 4 things 1) that Wikipedia can be useful but has its limits 2) how to assess knowledge 3) how to research a topic 4) how to actively put their knowledge to work as Wikipedia guerrillas. My aim is for the students to see themselves as active producers of knowledge and as contributors to scholarly debates”.
Jbmurray, an academic and Wikipedia contributor, who would nonetheless advise students against using Wikipedia as a research source, produced a very interestingpage on Wikipedia itself, explaining the advantages, and pitfalls, of using Wikipedia for assignments.
One of the critically important things that students learn by contributing to Wikipedia articles, or creating new ones as part of coursework, is the value of revision. In addition, the projects helped to teach collaboration, and open up peer review beyond the judgment of a single professor. Jbmurray calls this “collective, public, peer review”: collaborating with Wikpedia editors, feedback from other Wikipedia contributors, and members of the public. Professors, on the other hand, can track the inputs and changes made by students, a system that allows for a greater degree of transparency, Jbmurray argues.
While Jbmurray worries that argumentation is not a skill that is developed in such assignments, that the development of a cogent thesis is not the core of the activity, students learn to think critically of information. In addition, they learn skills that will be of value in work settings outside of academia: “information gathering, presentation, meticulousness, teamwork, and the ability to negotiate with the public sphere”.
If you are a professor or teacher at a school or university or college, we encourage you to use Wikipedia in your class to demonstrate how an open content website works (or doesn’t). You are not the first person to do so, and many of these projects have resulted in both advancing the student’s knowledge and useful content being added to Wikipedia. An advantage of this over regular homework is that the student is dealing with a real world situation, which is not only more educational but also makes it more interesting (”the world gets to see my work”), probably resulting in increased dedication. Besides, it will give the students a chance to collaborate on course notes and papers, and their effort might remain online for reference, instead of being discarded and forgotten as is usual with paper coursework, or classroom systems which are routinely reinitialized.
Continued Worries
As Andy Guess’ sources notes, there are continued worries around quality and the peer review process revolving around Wikipedia: “the very structure of Wikipedia encourages editors (who can be anyone) to disregard expertise and undermine the basic mechanics of peer review and academic credibility”. Wikipedia is rife with conflict and anonymity, many have noted, which can lead to the erosion of the accuracy of an article and even acts of repeated vandalism, as outlined in a memorable, ethnographically sensitive, piece on Wikipedia by Nicholson Baker in the 20 March, 2008, issue of The New York Review of Books (”The Charms of Wikipedia“). As Andy Guess puts it: “the site’s openness — the ability of everyone to participate, without having to identify themselves by name — leads to an erosion of accountability and, often, an increasingly shrill cacophony”.
Academic, Peer Reviewed, Open Source Encyclopedias
Not having to conform to the constraints and vagaries of Wikipedia, as if it were “the only show in town”, some academics have opted to create wikis that are more in line with professional standards of accountability, peer review, and credible research. It is still open access, but not quite as open at the source of knowledge production.
Guess provides a very good outline of these various initiatives, some of which, likeCitizendium, still try to build linkages with coursework. This is spelled out ina press releaseon the site, dated 24 January, 2008, part of which follows here:
In a striking departure from traditional methods of teaching, a new way for students to gain course credits is emerging. As with so much else this decade, it is all down to the Internet.
Traditional teaching saw students laboring to produce essays that to them felt onerous and oftentimes pointless. Once read by the lecturer their writing was generally consigned to the dustbin.
For some students, that situation is now radically changing.
In a never-before-seen new initiative, the online reference encyclopedia project Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org), in collaboration with expert teachers and lecturers, has launched Eduzendium. The Eduzendium project allows students to write their assignments online on the Citizendium on a given topic allocated by their teacher.
Students can take responsibility for their work for course credits, and teachers grade the finished work based on the quality of the final article produced from each student’s input.
But students not only get to earn grade credits, they add to the global store of knowledge as they earn their written course assignment credits. By collaborating with the rapidly growing Citizendium (CZ) community of expert and non-expert authors, they can have their essays become a lasting article in the Citizendium.
Perhaps best of all, students actually get to learn in a highly collaborative real-time way, enjoying direct online access to highly competent help with their work, in the form of the Citizendium authors and expert editors. The community is small, but growing and quite lively. It is also polite, in no small part because real names are required. For these reasons, the Eduzendium program differs crucially from using Wikipedia in a similar way.
And many basic topics are still wide open.
One of the thrusts of these scholarly efforts is to create resources that will attract scholarly input, especially if contributors become “curators” of their pieces online, and are able to show that they received peer review by other scholars in an often cited resource. This is one of the principles that we find driving the site, Scholarpedia. The primary emphasis of Scholarpedia, howevers, seems to be the natural sciences and computation sciences.
Google is also currently developing a resource,knol, which so far has contributors working by invitation only. Knol describes its mission, in preliminary terms:
Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing….The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors
What About Anthropology?
Citizendium currently has, among other such groups, anAnthropology Workgroup.It currently has a small group of identifiable editors, and a few dozen contributors, to most fields in anthropology aside from cultural anthropology which is still very limited on that site. The group is clearly working slowly and carefully, with articles at different stages of completion, review, and approval, and only about a dozen actually approved at the moment.
A recent commentator on this blog noted an absence of open source/open access course textbooks in anthropology. Apparently anthropology is “distinguishing” itself as one of the few fields not to have these freely available, freely amendable, open source course texts.
This is indeed surprising, given the number of Internet-literate anthropologists, given the growing number of anthropology blogs, and anthropologists interested in open source and open access issues, and given some of the freely available resources that would permit networking and content management needed for collaborating on building these course texts.
If anyone is interested in pursuing this course, please count me in.
Of course this issue cannot be laid to rest until it gets wider, more meaningful recognition, not to mention some profuse apologizing from Hillary Clinton and the white troops in her white-oriented campaign, as well as the mainstream media with its racialized double-standards. If one wants to have a discussion about race and gender, then one way not to preclude the need for any such discussion is to do as Clinton: proving that being black in America still carries greater stigma than being a woman, and bears a greater load of disadvantage, mistrust, and hostility. This post was motivated by three items; let’s go through each of these in turn.
In the aftermath of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary - a race in which Senator Hillary Clinton had a 20-point lead only a few months ago - the racism and hypocrisy of the Clinton campaign was laid bare for all a nation to scorn.
Desperate and willing to do anything to win, the Clintons resorted to a naked form of racism aimed directly at white working-class voters in the rural portions of the state. Their message: Barack Obama cannot win because he’s black.
In the early stages of the campaign, it was Clinton’s cadre who kept playing the race card. In New Hampshire, Clinton’s co-chair, Billy Shaheen, accused Obama of being a drug dealer; then there was the photograph of Sen. Barack Obama in Somalian garb leaked to the press by Clinton’s staff.
In the aftermath of the South Carolina primary, former President Bill Clinton compared Obama’s victory to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. His message was clear: Obama was a marginal, black candidate.
Then came the disgraceful remarks of Geraldine Ferraro, who could not, and would not, shut her mouth. “If Obama was a white man,” she charged, “he would not be in this position.”And she was adamant and unapologetic amid the resulting outcry. “Every time that campaign is upset about something, they call it racist,” she proclaimed. “I will not be discriminated against because I’m white.” [MF: Note that neither Ferraro nor Clinton make any apology for this apparent confession of what they see as their own party's tokenism--Obama got as far as he did in their party after all.]
Say what?
The Clintons refused to publicly call for Ferraro’s resignation. Ferraro remained unrepentant when she finally did resign. “The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you,” she bitterly wrote Hillary. And she never apologized for her remarks.
(Update: Hillary Clinton appears to have reaffirmed her role as the leader of “the white vote”–see The New York Times, “Clinton Touts White Support,” and USA Today, “Clinton makes case for wide appeal.” As her campaign begins to fade, Clinton is taking a desperate, damaging turn: “Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said. There is indeed a pattern, and The Angry Black Woman has a very incisive post on this with some lively commentary from readers.)
The second item comes from Orlando Patterson, in an Op-Ed in The New York Times for 11 March, 2008, titled: “The Red Phone in Black and White“. It concerns the Clinton campaign’s airing of the “phone call at 3:00am” ad that I show on my previous post mentioned above. Patterson argued the following, very perceptively in my view:
I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.
The ad could easily have removed its racist sub-message by including images of a black child, mother or father — or by stating that the danger was external terrorism. Instead, the child on whom the camera first focuses is blond. Two other sleeping children, presumably in another bed, are not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them ambiguous. Still it is obvious that they are not black — both, in fact, seem vaguely Latino.
Finally, Hillary Clinton appears, wearing a business suit at 3 a.m., answering the phone. The message: our loved ones are in grave danger and only Mrs. Clinton can save them. An Obama presidency would be dangerous — and not just because of his lack of experience. In my reading, the ad, in the insidious language of symbolism, says that Mr. Obama is himself the danger, the outsider within.
The third item concerns Clinton’s hypocrisy. Having taken the opportunity to lambaste Obama’s association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, it turns out that she and her husband invited him to the White House for a prayer breakfast of salvation and forgiveness following her husband’s “indiscretion” (Trinidadians: read “she get horn” here, as you already know well). Hillary Clinton pompously declared recently:
“Given all that we have heard and seen, he would not have been my pastor. While we don’t have a choice when it comes to our relatives, we do have a choice when it comes to our pastors or our church.”
Black Star News finds this hypocrisy staggering. Not so much, perhaps, in the context of U.S. “democracy”. As Malcolm X, simply and cuttingly, explained: “American democracy is hypocrisy“. It is such a voice that is badly needed today, and has been sorely lacking for decades now, Malcolm X having been–I will argue–the most monumental and significant public intellectual and political leader that the U.S. produced in the twentieth century. Let’s hear and see Malcolm X in the YouTube video below:
The additional hypocrisy comes from this mass-mediated outrage–more like white hysteria–over the comments by Rev. Wright, which have been construed as “anti-American” and as justification for the attacks of 9-11-2001. This manufactured outrage and fear has been perpetuated for several weeks already. (The fact that the lexicon of McCarthyism has been revived and reinforced seems to attract the critical attention of too few.)
But when a famous, right wing, Republican-friendly, white religious leader like Reverend Jerry Falwell asserted, with Pat Robertson’s consent (the man who called for the assassination of a foreign head of state who was popularly elected: Hugo Chavez), that 9-11 was God’s curse on America for having tolerated gays, pagans, and the American Civil Liberties Union, among others…how long did that furor last? How many political campaigns were derailed from being associated with Christian Conservatives? See and hear for yourself Falwell making these comments:
If a white pastor justifies the attacks, well, OK, the white mass and its media note it, make some comments, and largely let it die. When a black pastor makes much more reasonable, historically grounded, arguments: OUTRAGE, FEAR, LOATHING, CONTEMPT.
(Update 1:Six days after this post was originally published, E.J. Dionne produced an opinion piece in The Washington Post titled, “Fair Play for False Prophets“, featuring a discussion of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. At least some still remember, and can compare similar situations. Dionne leads his article by asking: “Do white right-wing preachers have it easier than black left-wing preachers? Is there a double standard?” His first answer is yes, and the second one should also be yes. He qualifies that since left wing black preachers attack the fundamentals of American social structures, they draw more heat than those on the right who focus on morality. This would seem to miss the point of what Falwell was doing in the video shown above.)
(Update 2: Eight days after this post was originally published, Frank Rich wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times titled, “The All-White Elephant in the Room.” Rich speaks at length of the white, right wing preachers that have endorsed Republican candidates, and received these candidates’ warm regards in return, including John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani. Rich notes the racial double-standards at work in spotlighting Rev. Wright, while moving his white counterparts into the shadows:
Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.
Perhaps that’s why virtually no one has rebroadcast the highly relevant prototype for Mr. Wright’s fiery claim that 9/11 was America’s chickens “coming home to roost.” That would be the Sept. 13, 2001, televised exchange between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who blamed the attacks on America’s abortionists, feminists, gays and A.C.L.U. lawyers. [Mr. Wright blamed the attacks on America's foreign policy.]
….it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates - and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them - we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.
It is encouraging that at least a couple of voices in the mass media are finally, and only too late, coming to these realizations and drawing these conclusions. Let’s see if this line of media self-questioning develops any further.)
Finally, let’s note one consistent pattern in this electoral campaign. It seems like a campaign of two against one: the two white candidates who are strong on security, versus the dangerous black kid. Hillary Clinton almost always has something personally positive to say about Republican candidate John McCain–how much she likes him, respects him, how well she has worked with him in the Senate, how she honours his great service to the nation (a common preface to all her comments on McCain, a favour Republicans never paid to John Kerry in 2004), what a war hero McCain is, and so forth. Clinton seems to be signaling to voters that McCain would be preferable to Obama. She has raised “experience” (being encrusted in the Washington establishment for long enough) as being the measure of a candidate–effectively passing her baton to McCain who has far more “experience” than she does. HillaryClinton also was in fundamental agreement with McCain, after their return from a trip together to Iraq in 2005, that the insurgency was failing, and that it would be a mistake to withdraw U.S. forces.
The last time Clinton had anything positive to say about Obama, it was to better set up the sucker punch that she delivered the next morning–standing as the violated victim, shrieking about dishonest Obama, the little black boy she was oh so kind to. The idea here is that the man to vote for, in her eyes, is the fellow white insider, John McCain, and to damage Obama as much as possible in the meantime. Bill Clinton has also stated very directly that Hillary Clinton and John McCain are very close:
“She and John McCain are very close….They always laugh that if they wound up being the nominees of their party, it would be the most civilized election in American history, and they’re afraid they’d put the voters to sleep because they like and respect each other.”
Let’s then sum up the critical cues that have been transmitted to a fearful, conservative, and white dominated American public, cues which can be listed under the heading of, “Obama the savage“:
Black, can’t win
Black, got ahead because of our favours to him
Black, above his station, hence “elitist” (Clinton, with a $109 million income, is “more in tune with the white working class”…read white, and drop working class)
Black, can’t be trusted
Black, dangerous
Black, in Somalia, looks local there, looks foreign to us
Black, and his black pastor is un-American
Black, and one of his friends is a “terrorist”
Black, he is Christian, “as far as I know” (as Clinton said, suggesting there may be some room for knowing something else to be true)
Black, an outsider, we need experience
Black, so the other white person, McCain, is more trustworthy, better for “our” safety
Black, he is just words, another big black talker, a flim flam man, a cool show, but deep down you don’t know what you’re getting
Of course racism is alive and well in America, and there is no greater racism than making subtle diabolical uses of that racism while avoiding the issue of race altogether.
This item was provoked by a student essay in Cyberspace Ethnography, and is meant as an invitation for readers to post their ideas rather than serving as some sort of definitive statement on the issue.
Speaking of how the self is presented on Facebook, one informant told the researcher in the course:
“The person I am, this changes too. I seek out new experiences with new people. What this means is I come into new ‘truths’. So am I always the same? I don’t think so. I’m changing into a new person. I also like to think I’m finding and making myself in this way.”
Tying in with previous posts on “impermanence” (first, second), I thanked the researcher for provoking the following speculative question:
“I wonder about the extent to which this act of seeing ourselves as caterpillars-becoming-butterflies, the constant metamorphosis we claim to undergo, is more a statement of desire, and one motivated out of fear of death and hope that we will live on in some form or fashion. My very tentative impression is that in societies where persons lack a pronounced fear of death, there is a greater sense of a fixed self in social life, not stasis, not an absence of beliefs in a spirit world or an afterlife, but a sense that the ‘leopard cannot easily change its spots’.”
(Aside from this: I loved the quote of an informant who says of self-presentation on Facebook–”it’s what you like, not what you are like that matters”.)
Feel free to post your thoughts on this topic, especially whether there is any ethnographic substance to support the speculation above.
On the subject of death and blogging, and related to previous posts about Roi Kwabena, see the post on “blogging the dead” at Guanaguanare.
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A project designed to liberate anthropology from the confines of discipline, profession, and institution, as a new form of knowledge acquisition and production, in a changing world, and in the struggle to create a new world.
