ENG 549 Everyday Blog

Introduction

2009-12-26T06:35:00.000-08:00

Course Description:

Modernity erupted into the social as a disruption of custom/tradition/ habit. In its place, it suggested new habits (more rationally conceived, more efficient), new attitudes towards what life is TRULY about, new modes of “finding one’s way in the world.” The activities comprised by this “finding” presume a new kind of subject: for starters, someone who can distinguish between work and pleasure, thought and emotion, private and public, and so forth until we realize that these categorical distinctions mask other, more perverse and complex binaries ---the line that separates nature from culture, for example; or the distance and tension between social order and social change. All these negotiations (between boredom and excitement, compulsion and innovation, etc.) play out in the terrain of something intellectual from the 19th c. through the early 21st c. call “everyday life.”

But in calling out this object of study, intellectual traditions have evoked a lot more than simply a description of repeated or recurrent activities (brushing your teeth, taking the bus, listening to your iPod, sitting at a desk in a uniquely decorated office cubicle, eating a Lean Cuisine micro waved lasagna for lunch, texting your girlfriend, etc.).

According to Ben Highmore, author of The Everyday Reader (Routledge 2002), everyday life can be mapped (as an object of study) according to a certain number of polarities / dualities, tendencies or orientations.

One possible sketch of these tendencies might look something like this:

Particular / General
Agency / Structure
Experience / Institutions
Feelings / Protocols
Resistance / Power
Micro / Macro

Implied in the study of everyday life is also the study of “everydayness” –what it illuminates, or obscures, how it can be a “good” thing, or a drag, how it is a refuge from stuff that really hurts or irritates, or it is the thing itself that provokes that irritation.

On the other side of the fence….always, seductively rearing its head, the possibility of “something” that crashes the ordinary and sends us to the extra-ordinary (like the Aretha Franklin song, something or someone, that just “sends me’).

In this seminar we will tackle:

1) the raw material of everyday life itself (as stuff, plot, and trope: i.e. the ontology of the thing itself)
2) the intellectual traditions that have claimed “the study” of this object (i.e. the epistemologies)
3) the mechanics of “striking a pose” as students/readers of 1 and 2 above (i.e. the metacommentary generated by exercises of reflexivity; a philosophical bracket to grant ourselves permission to play with the dialectics of being, and so forth........)

Inda and the Classroom

2009-05-04T10:49:00.000-07:00

Reading Inda's article, "The Value of Immigrant Life," has provided me with a new perspective on the place in which I encounter this issue the most: the classroom. Illegal immigration is an issue that most of my students either live with on a daily basis or which doesn't affect their everyday life at all. There is an obvious racial and class divide when it comes to this issue, and most of my students whose lives do not feature concerns about illegal immigration have a very different outlook than whose who do. This conflict between (mostly white) students who have been indoctrinated into the U.S.'s repudiation of immigrants as a threat, and students (mostly minority) who have life experiences that contradict the other point of view, makes for an interesting classroom environment.

It is often difficult to get the majority of students to appreciate that their opinions have (in some cases falsely) been influenced by a system of politics and government that has co-opted the bodies language, and terrain of an entire people (immigrants), and turned it into a threat. The effect that this co-opting has on real people -- my students for example -- is that they unknowingly begin to think about immigrants in terms of apathy or fear, instead of human compassion. It's a jarring wake-up call when students are forced to confront, and possibly dismiss, these ingrained ideas, one that they either embrace or reject passionately.

Last semester I assigned my students to read Jimmy Santiago Baca's (pictured left) "Coming into Language," a standard essay that is featured in the course's book, Writing as Revision. I assigned this reading with the goal of showing the students that even in the most extreme of cases, a person is capable of deriving enjoyment, solace, and identity from writing and language. What I didn't anticipate was that my students would take our discussion and turn it into a dicussion about race, rights, and illegal immigration. Many of the students were reluctant to even trust Baca -- a Mexican criminal, who writes this from his experiences in prison -- as a source. They felt he was blaming his situation on the system and refusing to take responsibility for his actions. Some students, of course, were persuaded by his story and had a kind of revelation. They were touched by the humanity that Baca brought to minorities and to prisoners. Others had a stronger reaction.

The class discussion was a heated one. Students on both sides were trying to convince students on the other side. Students who sympathized with Baca attempted to argue that Baca was in many ways a victim of the system. He hadn't learned to read or write at a young age because of his race and his social background, and that when given the opportunity and education, he made a name for himself. The other students were unable to see past their own (in my opinion, limited) view of the world. It was very difficult for them to understand such a foreign point of view. They received a good education, they had privilege, and they were taught from a young age that if you just tried hard enough, you would succeed. These ideologies just did not gel with the story that Baca had to tell them, and most refused to step outside the box of pre-conceived notions.

Overall, it was a good learning experience for me as a teacher, and the next time I teach that text I will be more prepared to handle this issue. The vehemence on both sides seemed to come out of nowhere for me. All I could do at the end of that class period was hope that some of the students who were so passionate on both sides had listened to the other side and absorbed some of it, and while Inda's text was a helpful lens for me to read, I'm not sure it would be helpful to my students. I find it hard to believe that freshmen would sit back and accept Inda's argument that their thoughts and ideas about illegal immigration have in large part been shaped by an impersonal system.

-Ashley

Shah

2009-05-04T09:37:00.001-07:00

This article revealing the legitimacy and illegitimacy of marriage, fitting within a Christian norm, reminded me of a conversation I recently had with a friend of mine, as well as previous conversations with my parents. It was a larger discussion about the definition and privileges of marriage. My friend and I were discussing rape within marriage--when it was so hard to define, before the laws changed, when women could not technically sue their own husbands for raping them because they were, in fact, married. How does one separate sex from rape (that's right--when a person says no, but apparently deciding this wasn't so easy) within a "legalized" situation?

I haven't given a lot of thought to bigamy or polygamy besides when I first learned those terms, but reading over this article gave me some intuition about how I truly felt about the matter, why it is outlawed, and why people and cultures are fighting against those laws. Though I do see the merit in a mostly streamlined system, it gave me thought about what laws are slowly destroying cultures that have settled within America. Or does America need to make these laws to create a culture of its own? We are the cultureless country--or are we the opposite? We have an abundance of culture. Only, we are all so different, we cannot make a whole. Regional differences, religious differences, tribal and cultural and linguistic differences. All here. Our history is mainly Christian, in that, our Constitution and our "country" was fought for and "settled" (I use this term loosely) by Christian men. But. Did that mean the lasting ideas, our lasting laws, our lasting ideals, were necessarily that? I would like to think there would be more flexibility, something more grounding than that, and perhaps more open. I'm not sure if I have said this all like I would like to, so I'm looking forward to discussing it in class.

JZ

Immigration Long Ago

2009-05-04T08:51:00.001-07:00

Jay Caldwell, M.D., M.P.H.
4 May 2009

[Although this may seem a stretch, I’m going to link this week’s subject, immigration, with something that goes on in my daily life. It is a stretch, but give me a moment.]

Back on November 21st, Marcia Marma, the English Department’s “Program Assistant” for the Graduate Literature Program, emailed out a notice from one of my classmates who was having to give up her job as Research Assistant to Professor Annette Kolodny, because she had accepted a position in Louisiana at The Southern Review. The notice read:

Hi everyone,

Attached is a posting for a research assistant position with Professor Annette Kolodny. I encourage you all to apply. Annette is great to work with, the work is interesting, and you'll learn a lot about research and publishing. Annette is looking for someone with an interest in American literature who can start in early December and who can commit for at least a year. You'd be working with her on a book project.

I'm leaving the position because I've just accepted a job at The Southern Review in Baton Rouge, and I'm moving December 15th. Please feel free to call or email me with any questions.

Thanks!
Cara Adams

The official job description read:

Professor Emerita Annette Kolodny is seeking a part-time research assistant beginning December 1, 2008 and continuing through—and likely beyond—December 1, 2009. The position offers an invaluable opportunity to learn professional research skills, the skills required for publishable writing, and how to prepare a book for publication by working with Professor Kolodny to complete her current book project In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and American Popular Culture, under contract to Duke University Press. The ideal candidate would be a graduate student with interests in American literature and particularly Native American literature and popular culture. The student must have excellent English language skills, excellent research skills (both in the library and online), and some experience in preparing manuscripts for publication. The student will need a laptop and an automobile and must be willing to meet with Professor Kolodny at her home (about a fifteen-twenty minute drive from campus). Professor Kolodny will employ this graduate student privately (not through University funding but through her own personal funding), so the position will represent extra employment above and beyond the student’s employment with the University of Arizona.

I answered, blowing my own horn of course, suggesting to Dr. Kolodny that I would be one primo RA. I figured the $12 hourly would be pizza money. I downplayed the fact that I was probably only five years younger than she. I did check her out, of course. She’s a heavy hitter. An important late-twentieth century feminist critic. She’s got her own Wikipedia entry (it turns out that I have a Wikipedia entry too, but on more careful review it is actually for L. Jay Caldwell, the Colgate football coach from 1893-1895). One facet of Dr. Kolodny's expertise and fame has to do with the land and its literary feminization. Her entry in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism fills 23 pages, the personal headnote alone being 3 pages long (2143-2165). She is a heavy hitter.

So, I show up. I soon learn that Dr. Kololdny, to many, is a kind, compassionate, caring, faithful, and devoted friend and colleague. I also discover that she can be annoying, infuriating, conceited, filled with hubris, devoid of patience, tactless, irascible, and mean-spirited. To me she is direct, precise, careful, and doesn't tolerate much b.s., but is willing to listen to my editorial suggestions, even accepting an occasional one. Over the last several months I have actually refined my writing style, starting sentences with conjunctions, eschewing some commas, and incorporating more readable quotations. I have also learned to follow instructions exactly, not striking out too far on my own.

Her husband, Daniel Peters, is a novelist, apparently of Middle American historical romances, at least judging by the titles: The Luck of Huemac (1981, 422 pp), Tikal (1983, 657 pp), and The Incas (1995, 1057 pp). These are all available through amazon.com. He seems to be working on his fourth, which Dr. Kolodny alludes to occasionally. He's also a big sports fan, whereas his wife has zilch interest. He's also got a hair and scalp situation going that he could pass for Bozo the Clown. Nice guy, though, really nice guy, and fully devoted to her care, well-being, and happiness.

Dr. Kolodny has had rheumatoid arthritis since she was a teenager, and is now so crippled and deformed, that she can barely walk, her arms have about one-half the range-of-motion of John McCain’s, and her fingers and hands have assumed a permanent and disabling ulnar drift. She undergoes aggressive and regular treatment for this, but is a poster girl for courage and grit. That’s where I (and Cara and several others before me) come in.

It’s actually great work. I function as an amanuensis. I take dictation directly from her into my computer, I write emails and letters for her, I do bibliographic and biographical research, I edit, I check out books and track down articles, I print, I deliver. I think I even may have provided some outside insight and feedback to her project. The hardest part of this gig is the time frame. Temporally, I am a lark. I usually get out of bed between 4 and 5 am, though I shoot for 3:30 in the summer. I’m in bed by 8 or 9. Because of her illness and her therapy sessions she says she rarely awakens before noon and often works through the night until near daylight. That would be 12 hours off from my clock. So once a week I work for her between 7:30 and 10 or 11 or 12 . That would be p.m. I’m pretty groggy by the time I go home.

This book she is now writing connects directly to this week's subject: immigration. In a nutshell, Dr. Kolodny is showing how Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas subverted the American national narrative the leaders of our country were attempting to write in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Founding Fathers, and other heavy hitters over the next century, very much wanted the United States to have a white foundational myth-story. Columbus, a swarthy Italian in the hire of the Spanish, was not the ideal candidate for our national hero. What was needed was a blond, blue-eyed Nordic type. Think Leif Erickson. Furthermore, it was important to show that the “Indians” whom the “northmen” found here were not aboriginal to the region. To some degree, they succeeded and Dr. Kolodny is now carefully and deliberately deconstructing this myth. Her book is being written for both the lay public as well as professionals.

This past week we have been working on William Gilmore Simms. He was a South Carolinian who besides being a prolific author of historical romances, published a popular, history textbook, The History of South Carolina from its First European Discovery to its Erection into a Republic (1844) that remained in use for almost a half-century. In it, for example, and in articles published in Magnolia; or Southern Monthly, he argued fervently for the idea that the burial mounds and tumuli found throughout the south were not the remains of extinct Indian tribes, but rather were the remains of white cultures that had been destroyed by living savages (today we know this to be wrong: they are very, very old remains of very, very ancient aboriginal cultures). Dr. Kolodny quotes extensively from Simms, e.g. “suddenly, the fierce red men of the south-west came down upon them in howling thousands, captured their women, slaughtered their men, and drove them to their fortresses:—how they fought to the last, and perished to a man! And, in this history, you have the history of the Tumuli, the works of defence and worship—the thousand proofs with which our land is covered, of a genius and an industry immeasurably superior to any thing that the Indian inhabitants of this country ever attempted.”

So the connection here is immigration, but in this case who immigrated where and when. I have read extensive portions of her book, but it keeps growing like Topsy. Suffice that she is showing carefully and definitively that those folks who insist that “northmen” first came to this continent in the tenth or eleventh or twelfth centuries and established permanent colonies (Vinland), and who are thus ancestral to the white races of America are, to put it coarsely, full of shit.

Immigration seems forever to be a cauldron of narrativity. Even today, the ethnohistory of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, is struggling with the issue of who has primacy, and so who has legitimacy in the region. Such a task of partitioning and compartmentalizing within nations is, in the end, counterproductive. I shall be interested in how Dr. Kolodny's book addresses this.

Legitimation of the Everyday

2009-05-04T07:41:00.000-07:00

This week's readings (and the blog entries of my classmates, in particular) focused my attention to one aspect of the everyday--legitimation. The U.S. is rather intensely committed to any number of processes of legitimation (or criminalization) of human activity, as can be seen in the Inda and Shah pieces. We are a nation of exclusions and inclusions, a binary of us/them. This can be seen in our school playgrounds, our airport waiting areas (ever notice how "like" people tend to cluster together in those places?), in music videos, in our responses to issues of gay marriage, etc. into infinity.

I had a form of this concept in mind over the past few weeks due to some of my students who have been penning responses to selected writings of Teddy Roosevelt. In some of these pieces Roosevelt asserts that people who want to be called Americans have an obligation to "be American," in the sense that they should lay aside prior cultural/national allegiances in order to become "Americanized." My students have been voicing amazement that immigrant rhetoric can be traced as far back in American history as Roosevelt's time.

What I have come to realize throughout this semester is that the everyday is unfailingly tied to processes of legitimation. As a minority, I have come to expect certain processes that demand I legitimize Connie's Everyday to other people. As a woman, I expect to have to legitimize my stance on child-rearing, marriage, interactions with other women, etc. As a college student, I expect to have to legitimate my positions on topics about which I knew little before my years of higher education. As a doctoral student, I expect to have to justify my areas of professional focus to colleagues, mentors, and even my family.

Heck, I even find myself legitimating the weeks I've spent away from my Weimaraners back home in North Carolina--TO those two dogs, mind you. As I prepared to walk into the airport yesterday to board a plane back to the desert, I found myself explaining to those two unhappy faces WHY I had to leave and exactly when I would be back home. Now, I'm the first to admit that I tend to treat my dogs as if they are people, but I would argue that this isn't the real reason I took time to legitimate my activities to a couple of dogs. Rather, there is an ineffable human need to locate, identify, quantify, and legitimate our ordinary existences. We seem to feel a need to create a position for ourselves that is justified and appropriately contrasted to some level of the non-legitimate. WHY we feel this way I cannot begin to conjecture. But what I do know is this: Human beings are not alone in positioning the everyday in relation to others. We can trace similar processes in the activities of animals and their relationships to other beings and the landscapes which they inhabit. Perhaps then there is an everyday that transcends species--the writings of Donna Haraway would seem to offer ample evidence of this position. Haraway suggests that the everyday of humans and dogs frequently intersect in ways that argue against strict lines of them/us experience, as the contact zones where species meet are themselves argument against hard and fast rules of human and animal engagement. Yet she also argues against simply "celebrat[ing] complexity," asserting that we should instead "become worldly and [ . . . ] respond" (When Species Meet, 41).

This, then, is my final thought on the current semester of learning: Although Haraway's discussion relates very specifically to dog/human interactions, I think there is much insight in her comment above. In a practical sense, this thing we term the "everyday" is itself less a celebration of complexity as it is a system of actively encountering the world and responding to those encounters. This process of response is what creates our everyday--both those parts of our everyday that we control ourselves and those parts that represent the responses of those around us. We cannot, in any real sense, "make" an everyday as individuals, except in isolation from others (and I'm certainly not advocating the hermit route); rather, we make the everyday collectively and collaboratively--humans, companion species, other species, all of those living forms that impact, support, complicate, and enrich our everyday experiences.

It's been a pleasure exploring ideas with all of you this semester. Best wishes to each of you in your future work and beyond.

Connie

P.S. I am thoroughly jet-lagged as I write this, so please excuse any rough wording!

How can they see with sequins in their eyes?

2009-05-04T01:39:00.000-07:00

When reading Shah's "Adjusting Intimacies", I was surprised by the lack of full attention to the gender issues at work in both cases. It could be because we only just finished Berlant's feminist reading, but they stood out starkly.

Shah did address the portrait of Don Sing's pitiable wife who marshaled sympathy by playing the role of the "worthy and helpless dependent woman" (128). The role of power in this instance is debatable. One one hand, it was clearly a show of submission and sympathy, extorting gender stereotypes that both cultures involved could connect to. On the other, by playing into these stereotypes, Don Sing was released while the two men arrested with him were not. The goal of the sympathy letter was fulfilled which, arguably, is a sort of power.

What Shah did not address adequately, however was how the case of Soledad Garcia Jubala was also a case of a weak woman appealing to a gendered stereotype to gain pity. Her attorneys appealed on behalf of the "Dona Ana county widow" (133) and her poor fatherless children. Again, the woman in the situation used a traditional stereotype in order to get her way and win the case. Nami Singh did not use this defense to legitimize her own marriage but attempted to use only primary proof that a divorce had not taken place. It is a sad but apparent truth that proof is trumped by an emotional appeal. This essay was a sad confirmation, to me, that the judicial system is a stage show. Whoever can cry the biggest tears, play the stereotype the most sympathetically, wins the case. Razzle dazzle 'em.

-Caitlin

Legal Matters

2009-05-03T23:03:00.000-07:00

I sometimes think that I live in a bubble, a rather privileged bubble at that, so it is hard to understand the struggles that so many people go through to try and make better lives for themselves, yet I was reminded of my upper-middle class fog when reading about how immigrant women, in the logic of biopolitics, should be denied prenatal care to discourage them from coming into this country. It appears to be commonplace in right wing thinking to be rigid about laws set up to keep people out, to keep people down, and to keep people in their “place,” using statistics and scare tactics implying that immigrants are the source of our crime, deteriorating schools, deficiencies of social services, etc. (p. 134). But those laws are set up by those who are the dominant culture and they want to keep it that way.

Of the three essays examining immigration and the law, Inda’s was the most compelling because it exposed the ugly nature of exclusionary tactics and the technology of power that Foucault terms “biopower.” The concept of presenting Third World immigrants as a threat to the cultural unity of the nation and likening it to Nazi policies seemed at first a bit extreme to me, but the more I thought about it and read the valid points made by the author, I see how easily the rhetoric of hate and mistrust can bolster a cause of exclusion that is inhuman and can lead to the elimination of a perceived threat--even here in America. As Ina explains, “Biopower thus implies nothing specific about what is to be done with those bodies construed as dangerous. One possibility, of course, is extermination. However, more typical of modern states is the practice of multiplying for some the risk of death or of subjecting dangerous bodies to marginalization, expulsion, and rejection.”(p. 139)

So often the statistics we are presented only show the crimes committed, the garbage left on the immigrant trails, the drug traffickers who are paired with a common laborer, and the drain on our local and state economies, but rarely do we hear of the statistics that show how immigrants contribute to society, whether they came here under legally sanctioned means or not. As a nation of immigrants, we all have family stories of such triumphs over adversity, including many of us going to school and getting our degrees when those in our families before us could or did not. What would it have been like if our own families were denied access to the opportunities we have been afforded? Inda’s article made me more cognizant of an agenda that is far more organized and directed as an agenda of fear and hate than I realized.

Most of us are all products one way or another of some kind of immigration or outside/inside status, and each and every one of us has heart-felt stories of our families and the struggles they underwent to get to this country and to make something of their lives. Why is it that we choose to ignore those statistics and focus on the elements of fear? Inda presents a very clear case of how such points of the argument have steered our legislation. It is not just economics that drives the immigrant flow these days—it is as much a product of generations of families that live on both sides of the border and shared memories and activities of those people who feel a connection to both countries. But economics would be enough to compel people to come here, and that’s the point being made—if a population feels their economic superiority is threatened, they will go to any measure to ensure their hegemony, but they will use every means at their disposal to discredit and reduce the immigrant to nothing more than an invader. Recently, the news reported about how bad the economy was in Europe and that many immigrants were returning to their home country because there were no economic advantages to stay in their adopted country. As the Mexican economy grows and with it more opportunities for its citizens, will be potentially see an exodus out of our country? And what would that do to our economy and our flow of labor? We are at once accepting of a cheap labor source and outraged by the presence of “outsiders” wanting the same services we enjoy. We seem to have a very short cultural memory.
-Julie Sasse

2009-05-03T18:34:00.000-07:00

Part of our class inquiry this semester has been to develop a line of thought that notes the difference between everyday life and the theories we establish about it, between the thing itself and our means of understanding it. The way I have tried to incorporate this into the larger scope of my work has been to examine cross-epistemological or cultural encounters as a point where the constructedness and necessity of theories or narratives can be simultaneously recognized. In the last 48 hours I’ve been forced to recognize the theoretically detached nature of even this endeavor of positive recognition because of an occurrence or moment in life. Over the past three years or so my grandmother’s mental and then physical health has waned, on Friday evening she passed away. Luckily, because I grew up in Tucson and most of my father’s family lives here, I was able to be there even though I’m in graduate school – something I think that might be different for many people who face similar events. I was not prepared to be as affected as I’ve found myself to be (my hands are twitching involuntarily as a type this, for instance), but I think this points out an important difference between theorizing or abstracting an encounter with the fragile constructedness of human truths and lives, and the experience of living through and witnessing that realization. I’m going to copy a portion of something I wrote Saturday morning because I couldn’t sleep that coincidentally (or perhaps ironically) calls upon some similar ideas to those used by Jonathan Xavier Inda in his article on the biopolitics of immigration policy (at the time that I originally wrote the paragraphs below I hadn’t read his essay), afterwards I’ll try to reflect on its meaning in the context of our course. I should point out here that my grandmother, whose nickname was Mimi, was unconscious when my wife and I arrived, and had been for several hours.

5/2/2009, 5:30 a.m.

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when I walked into Mimi’s room last night. Having not been in Tucson or St. Louis when my other grandparents passed away, I had not before seen someone so close to death. The first thing that entered my mind when I sat down next to her to say goodbye was that this was bare life. (It seems weird that I would think of an academic concept in a moment like that, but the impulse is hard to turn off.) Bare life is an idea discussed by an Italian philosopher and legal theorist named Giorgio Agamben who I’ve been reading and using in my work for about three years. It refers to the state of human existence when all the social, cultural, and political markers that create our identity have been stripped away. It is when there is nothing left but the sheer fact of physical existence – a breathing organism, which may or may not be human. Entering Mimi’s room, I did not want to recognize the person in the bed as my grandmother, and so I think I tried to find a way of conceptualizing what was going on that would allow me to maintain that distance. This narrative distanced and protected me from what was going on in a sense: at first I couldn’t touch her. After sitting for about thirty seconds and telling her I loved her I got up and went to the other side of the room. I think there is another way of looking at her passing though, one that showed itself to me as the evening went on. Her existence was not stripped bare because she was surrounded by the people to whom she gave life, and who love her. At the actual moment that she died, her three remaining children were sitting close to her, and her grandchildren and their families were surrounding her. This moment was her physical existence in a sense, but it was not, and is not, stripped bare. Her family is the material continuation of the life that she lived – we literally proceed from her body. For Agamben, bare life is a negative thing in the contemporary world, the left-over portion of existence after everything else has been atomized in its subjection to an unwieldy and often monstrous social organization. For my grandmother, what was left over after her physical existence ended is everything that made her life what it was.

I think that the difference between the narrative that I’m constructing here, the similar ones that I’m sure my father and his siblings are writing for themselves, and the narrative(s) of biopolitical exclusion that Inda discusses in his essay is not simply one of scope. It has something to do with the two meanings of passing: one having to do with a performative identity and the other with a traditional euphemism for death. The logic may be similar – the family is finding a way to deal with my grandmother’s death by narrating the difference between her conscious life and the physical life that expired, and the nation narrates a difference between its legal or cultural existence and the lives that are treated as excess and deported; my grandmother’s life is dissolving into our memories of her, but in a way already has passed materially into the lives of those who are her genetic descendants, and the person of the sovereign (the king) dissolves in a biopolitical nation-state into the sovereign existence of a people, which is then protected in the same way that his body once was. However, in some ways I think (or want to say) that the purposes of the parallel narratives are different. They’re both a preservation of self, but one is cognizant of the material history to which it relates, and the other is not. My attempt to begin working through the experience of watching my grandmother die is conscious of my material relation to her, whereas the narratives of American national identity that criminalize migration are not conscious of the historical causes of the particular patterns of that migration (to use the terminology emphasized by De Genova in his article on deportation). We might say that the current form of the United States and its concurrent narrative of self were birthed by the process and effects of westward expansion and colonization that we read about in Philip Deloria’s book, as well as by the forceful transfer of what is now the southwestern portion of the United States from the hands of the Mexican state (also constructed through a process of colonization, though different in important ways) into those of the U.S. government and its sovereign population. The fear that the narratives of “illegal immigration” depend upon are a fear of passing away. Instead of a physical expiration though, this passing would be a passing into a different identity – which, if we were to work through the logic, would point out that the national identity (or individual identities that make it up) are performed, though passed off as essential. The liminal lives of migrant workers are not valued, while the liminal life of my grandmother was valued, even as she passed away and was unconscious of what was going on around her, her family was intent upon narrating the experience in a positive way that included her as a meaningful participant in the event. Thus my father and his siblings engaged in a narrative not of biopolitical exclusion (as sovereign decision makers withdrawing support and allowing death), but of understanding and release. In contrast, the biopolitical decision of the sovereign as described by Inda is one in which passivity and aggression become indistinguishable as the nation state actively ignores its own historical constructedness and fragile legitimacy: It enacts deportation but does not give witness to the effects. On the other hand, the moment that I witnessed and participated in (and still am, in a way) was one in which I’ve been forced to confront and work through the fragile construction of “me” through identification (material and otherwise) with my grandmother. This recognizance pushed me through what I think was initially an impulse for purity through disavowal when I first arrived, and I was eventually able to briefly embrace her and then say goodbye. This type of recognition of ultimate sameness and the contact that it allows between two apparently different forms of the same life (human) is what is missing in the immigration policies and politics of the United States in the attempt to manage and support only one.

-- Andy DuMont

Border Crossings and Death

2009-05-03T17:08:00.000-07:00

Out of this week's readings there is no doubt for me that Inda's piece on biopower was the most interesting for me. I had never really thought about the control of the border as a place of eugenics, but it makes sense when Inda contextualizes it. I was particularly interested in the way that Governor Wilson tried to deny prenatal care to pregnant women because they were "illegal." I think that's an example of disallowing "life to the point of death" (139).

I found myself thinking a lot about my family history while reading this piece. My brother has recently started researching our ancestors and has found the logs from Ellis island where my great great great grandfather and grandmother came to the country. At that point, I'm not sure the designation of "legal" or "illegal" even had any weight. I try to imagine what it would have been like for them and totally fail. What I do know is that they left the East Coast to escape a very nasty anti-Irish sentiment. They had the sparsely populated mid-West to escape too. Modern immigrants don't have that luxury.

I often do find myself uncomfortable with the lack of distinction between "legal" and "illegal" immigrants in pieces such as this though. Mostly because I think it's important to note the different ways those labels have been constructed and the differences and similarities that members of those two groups might have. I think that a more focused dialogue about who tends to be a "legal" immigrant and who tends to be an "illegal" immigrant (at a national level) is necessary to reform immigration law into something actually useful. The current approach obviously isn't working.
- Josh Zimmerman

Law as Performance

2009-05-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

Julie's post about U.S. immigration policy as a performance of control is interesting, and I think relevant to Nayan Shah's discussion of legal interpretations of Hindu marriage in "Adjudicating Intimacies on U.S. Frontiers." Rather than upholding static definitions and taxonomies, Shah sees adjudications of intimacy as "a process that simultaneously shored up the norm as it scrutinized deviancy" (118).

For example, in the Las Cruces case, the category of "Hindu marriage" became synonymous with deviance (infant marriages, polygamy, illegitimacy, etc.); in fact, a judge found that the "sanctioning of 'Hindu' marriages disputed the 'standards of morals in every Christian nation'" (124). But in the Gate, WA, case the same category of Hindu marriage was used as a substitute for--as a category nearly synonymous with--white, heterosexual marriage. The defendant's status as a civic-minded married man was used to generate sympathy for him and his wife. Hindu marriage was invoked as an assurance of morality, not as a mark of deviance, as had happened in New Mexico.

I'm engaged to be married this summer, and so the intersection between legal and intimate definitions of love and commitment is definitely on my mind. Shah suggests that this intersection is a kind of triangle between one's innermost nature, one's sexual relations and one's relationship to property and the material world. The frustrating and confusing thing is that in exercising our choice and agency concerning intimacy, we do not get to control the social meaning ascribed to our choices. In choosing to be in a monogamous, heterosexual marriage, I am inadvertently part of the performance of legitimacy and de-legitimacy that privileges one kind of relationship. My frustration is similar to that provoked by the first Berlant article we read early in the semester. She used Foucault's capillary model of power to show that power is embedded in ideology through the procedures and mechanisms of State and everyday living. I think Shah would agree with this description of power--that law, in adjudicating intimacy, is less about proclaiming edicts and more about a process of ascribing meaning to behavior and relationships. So the question remains: how do we exercise agency and enjoy intimacy within a web of power and spectrum of taxonomies? How do we perform change? Shah shows that "Hindu marriage" was not a static category in the U.S. during the 1930s, so what can we do to open up and destabilize rigid, unjust and heterosexist definitions of marriage in our current age?

- Esme

Twisted Love Affair

2009-05-01T20:01:00.000-07:00

To begin, I find it helpful to refer to Berlant's third chapter in The Anatomy of National Fantasy. In this chapter, Berlant sets up the psychopathology of Puritan life as found in The Scarlet Letter and states that love is "a technical term designating a form of social control" (97). Just below, she goes on, and I think this description is valid in trying to come to terms with some of Genova's dealings and definitions of the migrant's plight in his article "'Illegality' and Deportability in Everyday Life."

"Juridical spectacle works to install a New Law by harnessing two different temporalities: first, that of New Testament eschatology, which places the Puritan colony within the time frame of God's providential 'calendar,' and second, that of the duration of the legal spectacle itself, which places the citizen in a present tense defined by the parameters of the legal 'event'" (79-8).

I couldn't help but see this concept/theory applied to recent border policy and attitudes towards the immigrant; the border spectacle provides this same "juridical spectacle" that Berlant talks about in her book; in a sense, the border provides a twisted, backwards expression of love, in that it, according to Genova, "has been rendered synonymous with the U.S. nation-state's purported 'loss of control' of its borders and has supplied the pretext for what has in fact been a continuous intensification of militarized control on the U.S.-Mexico border" (436). A loss of control might appear obvious to the casual onlooker, but Genova goes on to say that the spectacle--the root from which causes this twisted form of love to grow--is grounded in the fact that border agents have created a "revolving door" policy--most of the immigrants picked up along the border are given the choice to "waive their rights to a deportation hearing," return to Mexico and then attempt to enter the country again until they succeed on crossing. The law, therefore, sets up a false pretense of control, but it is enough to satiate the minds of U.S. citizens that the country is being protected; meanwhile, the spectacle provided at the border between immigrants and patrol agents, seems to be working to form a tacit understanding, dare I say love: it almost seems to me like a I'll-scratch-your-back-if-you-scratch-mine gesture. Somewhere along the way, Genova states, our U.S. policy traded in the immigrant for a dollar sign: we began to see him as currency in jobs or positions other citizens were unwilling to take. When this happened, the spectacle began, and has continued.

--Julie Luaterbach-Colby

Casualties of the Building of the National Symbolic

2009-04-27T10:28:00.001-07:00

In her section “America, Post-Utopia,” Lauren Berlant quotes Eric Hosbawn, who said “Americans had to be made….The immigrants were encouraged to accept rituals commemorating the history of the nation—the Revolution and its founding fathers (the 4th of July) and the Protestant Anglo-Saxon tradition (Thanksgiving Day)—as indeed they did, since these now became holidays and occasions for public and private festivity.” She uses the quote to further her exploration of the building of the “National Symbolic,” as citizens celebrated their “national culture” at different moments.

As she states earlier, the idea of “nation” is essentially a mental construct rather than a definition of borders or physical landscape. She writes, “Modern citizens are born in nations and are taught to perceive the nation as an intimate quality of identity, as intimate and inevitable as biologically-rooted affiliations through gender or the family.”

But since this idea of “National Symbolic” depends on the citizens’ participation in the building of meaning and the making of myth, the government institutes plans, events, and laws that reinforce the importance of nation above all else. This comes into play in particular in the lives of immigrants, past and present. Berlant writes, “This is the American utopian promise: by disrupting the subject’s local affiliations and self-centeredness, national identity confers on the collective subject an indivisible and immortal body, and vice versa.” But as she examines in Hawthorne’s critique, this utopian promise is ultimately a fallacy. The nationhood they are given is no more immortal or indivisible than their own cultural, personal, and familial bonds, which in most cases are more crucial in shaping and honoring their individual identity.

This examination reminded me of an aspect of my manuscript, where I explore the effects of assimilation in Cajun culture. The following excerpt ruminates on this idea:

My mom gave up trying to teach me her first language when I was still an infant. It was just too hard, she said. My dad didn’t understand the language, and she was living a long drive away from the rest of her family. I think that it was more than that though. I think that deep down, there was a voice inside her that said it was not okay for her to speak it.

My mom’s first language was French. It wasn’t the flowery, sweet French spoken in movies with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron pirouetting across the screen or by black clad bohemian writers smoking in Parisian underground cafes. Hers had the guts of the swamp and the balm of the bayou behind it. My mom is Cajun and her French was too. It was a language soft and wispy enough to lullaby babies asleep in too hot, mosquito-filled Louisiana summers. But it was loud enough to make yourself heard over the accordion-playin’, fiddle-twangin’, guitar-pickin’ loudness of the band at the local fais do do. It was sultry and sweet, brash and bold, and it was theirs...and hers... for a time. But it was never mine.

My mom’s first day of school, she told me, the words all stopped. It was just after the last putters of FDR’s long drive of a presidency, but his words still carried the sound of his fully fueled Plymouth. “There is room for but one language in this country,” he had said on the radio across miles of American terrain, “and that is the English language.”

Many diverse ethnic communities throughout the United States were asked to give up their rich heritage in return for promises of liberty and freedom, in return for being an American. Here, we’ll take your French, your Gumbo, your Crawfish Etouffée, and we’ll give you English, rifles for war, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
The repercussions of assimilation resounded in the classroom where my mom sat for the very first time. She and a roomful of five-year-olds were told, in a language they had never heard at home and barely heard at all, that they were not to speak French anymore. English, the moving lips said, was the only language they were to communicate in from now on. From that first day, children, dressed in clothes sewn from red-gingham and blue-flowered cotton feed sacks, sat listless in class, unable to understand either their lessons or what the teachers were asking them to do. Some teachers were compassionate, whispering translations in little ears. Others were not. Little boys and girls were shamed, trickles of urine running down their desks because they did not know how to ask permission to use the bathroom in English and were not listened to when they asked in French. This was despite the fact that most of the teachers were locals who spoke the language themselves.

Speaking French was forbidden anywhere on the school ground. If some little girl was overheard outside during playtime disobeying the rule, the afternoon would find her writing “I will not speak French at school” hundreds of times on the chalkboard or kneeling on dry corn kernels in the back corner of the room.

In those classrooms in small town Southwest Louisiana, it was instilled in students that speaking English was equal to being well-educated, to being smart. And in swift chalk lines on the blackboard and the hand-waving dismissal of their words by teachers, these young minds were forced not only to abandon their way of communicating but to deal with the effects of knowing that they were now smarter than the rest of their families- their tanties, their parans, their mommies and daddies.

It was in those small flip-top desks that my mother lost a piece of who she was. She lost a piece of where she came from, and it’s a piece I’m still trying to discover.

--Lisa

one nation, undivided by history

2009-04-27T10:28:00.000-07:00

Let me begin with this:

"This is the American utopian promise: by disrupting the subject's local affiliations and self-centeredness, national identity confers on the collective subject and indivisible and immortal body, and vice versa."(Berlant 49)

Alexander noted in his post that he believed himself to be the only student who had to prepare for reading Berlant's The Anatomy of National Fantasy by first reading Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, but he was wrong. I, too, had never read the novel. Somehow in my otherwise very thorough high school and collegiate education, I managed to avoid it. I thought this a blessing; I'd heard terrible things. Much to my surprise I found I enjoyed it very much, and that even better, I connected to it in a way that I hadn't for most of the readings in this class. So while Berlant's writing seemed obtuse and frustrating to no end, my strong connection enabled me to power through, and for once, gain understanding with a piece of theoretical writing.

While reading the novel (rather hurriedly), I had a sense of something under the surface, that Hawthorne was trying to tell us something about ourselves. I think that Berlant hits it on the head when talks about the American amnesia that afflicts most of us who are under the thrall of the National Symbolic, as she calls it. Like many of the previous posts, I too thought that the Statue of Liberty was the perfect symbol for which Berlant to rest her argument. In the novel, Hawthorne presents us with protagonists whose enemy seems to be their own villainy and sense of guilt, but by the end, you realize that Hawthorne is saying something much different. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale toil under the oppression of their sins for seven years, but the novel ends with their freedom. Their Puritan community had used Hester for all this time as a symbol of what not to be, or as Berlant notes, "the penal machine is a sign of social positivity as collective identity is generated by the scaffold's operation" (59). The whole novel is built around a community who gains its sense of the National Symbolic in a series of negations: don't do this, don't be that, or else. On a more simple level, Hester acts as a deterrent, and as a reminder of their own positive identity as a community of saints (of which Dimmesdale represents their hypocrisy in thinking themselves so above Hester). Adultery is bad, we are not adulterers, thus, we are good.

The ending of the novel aims to historically reconfigure, almost to reclaim, a sense of national identity, one that is not built upon blind nationalism and persecution of the dissending (like Hester and her symbolic spawn), but is instead built upon a critical consciousness. Hester, Pearl, and Arthur find absolution in freedom from the system that takes their sin and defines their whole lives by it, while the rest of the sinning population (who have the good fortune not to get caught) gets away with it. Berlant writes:

"But because this formal transfiguration of citizens into the juridico-utopian public sphere slights the scene of everyday life relations and consciousness, that scene ultimately provides the material for a counter-memory among 'the people' which is individual, familial, collective, and historical: the libidinous ground on which Hawthorne's critical nationalism is founded." (98)

The revelation of Arthur Dimmesdale's private shame, both within the novel's story and the framework of the novel in relation to its readers, the American public, provides an instance of clarity and contradiction within an otherwise unified and "perfect" system of obeisance. Berlant argues that without this sort of story in our national consciousness, we become a nation of blind nationalists, seeking solace in the "immortal body" of our fantasy and never questioning both its foundations and its secrets, which our lost to our amnesiac minds. I think this is why stories are so important to all cultures, so that they can wake us up and reclaim individual stories and differences outside of the "appropriate" symbolic consciousness.

While reading her section on the Statue of Liberty, I also couldn't help recalling the end scene of the 1986 animated film An American Tail. The film features Fievel the Jewish Russian mouse whose family has immigrated to the United States for a land of freedom, hope, and no cats. Of course, they learn by the end that no place is that perfect and that utopia they were dreaming of is literally a "no-place." The mouse family sought to escape the harshness of their everyday life in Russia, only to find that nothing much is different in America. The final scene of the film features Fievel reuniting with his family, having vanquished the enemy, and the brand new Statue of Liberty has just been constructed. If that isn't a perfect representation of that immortal body she represents, then I'm reading it wrong. Just watch it for yourself, you'll see what I mean:

-Ashley

Oh No.

2009-04-27T10:08:00.000-07:00

When I first read the introduction to this book, my heart crashed into my stomach a little, especially at this line: "In humorous and in deeply serious moments, then, Hawthorne depicts national fantasy as fundamental to the political and everyday life of Americans, whose "Americanness" is as central to their sense of entitlement and desire as any family name and tradition and sensation itself might be" (4). It reminded me of the surge of nationalism post-9/11 caused throughout America, which, at first, was expected and wanted. America, on the whole, was more forgiving of itself and we were, more or less, for a time, "united". However, our nationalism grew into something ugly, in my mind. I'll hedge away from any political debate or opinion here, but the last administration's efforts to raise awareness of "Americanness" had me disgusted and confused about the ever-evolving picture of what it means to be American, and what the government tried to shape us in, and what shape we were left in.

"United We Stand" was America's slogan for emerging from a disaster, yet the media around that slogan twisted it to be the slogan for being American. Suddenly, the very idea of Americanness changed, like it has before and will do so again. When this country began, to be American meant different things, like it does today. But those were centered around the true idea of freedom, that is, not being ruled by a monarch or another country an ocean away. People fled here to escape persecution, social and religious. Our Americanness was written down on paper, in the Constitution.

Nowadays, I feel like though our country has aged, has settled, has been made up by cultures around the world, the government and media still has the sway to create the picture of a true American. How may we come up with our own ideas and own solutions to why we are American when people try to hand us plates and try to force feed their own ideas?

I believe that this may be straying from Berlant's path here, but in my everyday, I do not always think about my nation. I know I am lucky to live here as compared to other places, but I do not think that it is essential to my everyday to think about what I can do to be a better American. It seems one can shortcut that problem by substituting "person" for "American". Perhaps that will fix our identity crisis.

Jennie Z

Dispatch from the 2009 Arizona History Convention in Prescott: A Study in Stereotypes and National Identity

2009-04-27T07:58:00.000-07:00

Jay Caldwell
26 April 2009

The Trip, Outbound

[Thursday, 23 April: I drove, my wife Diana rode shotgun, and in the backseat were my 86-year-old mother and her 88-year-old friend Lillian, a former-judge. Just for fun, I chose the long way, via Ajo, Gila Bend, Buckeye, and Aguila. 7½ hours.]

On the first leg, the Border Patrol was out in impressive numbers. Half-way to Ajo we saw a lanky guy with dusky skin and a bandana around his head run across the road from south to north. Obviously, an illegal I commented. As we approached, he signaled to someone on the other side of the highway, arm extended, wrist extended 90º, palm facing away. The other illegals, I said. Maybe an Indian someone else said. This is a bad stretch of road, she added. I looked to my left as we sped by. There was a pick-up in the scrub pulling a trailer full of horses with a half-dozen other guys all in cowboy hats standing around. There goes the stereotype for you. Just a bunch of hard-working cowboys.

A dozen or so miles later two Border Patrol wagons were parked on the south side of the road. Four officers were herding a bunch of lanky guys with dusky skin into their vans. Just after we passed by a third Border agent pulled up behind the others. Stereotypes confirmed. Illegals.

Fifteen minutes later a we passed a Border Patrol truck pulling onto the highway from a dirt track to the right. It followed us several hundred yards back and I wondered if those guys could give speeding tickets. Just as we approached Why a lanky man with dusky skin but no bandana around his head ran across the road from the left. Another cowboy? I asked. To be honest he looked pretty Indian and spaced out and after all, there was a casino just a couple of hundred yards up the road. In the rearview mirror I saw the Border Patrol pass the spot, slow, then turn around and stop on the other side of the road. Stereotypes in action again.

After a not real good lunch in Ajo we headed north. Before long we came to a string of speed limit signs, slowing us from 65 to 55 to 45 to 35 to 25 to 15, then a bunch of cones, a rank of stop signs, and a raggedy trailer off to the right. A red-headed kid in a green uniform came out and walked across the road and put out his hand, arm supinated, palm toward me. I came to a stop so that he was lined up not with my window, but the back of the trunk. I was feeling cute. I thought he had blond hair, my mother thought it was red. No one else could remember.

Where did you come from? . . . Tucson

Where are you going? . . . Prescott

Taken aback momentarily, why did you come this way? . . . because I wanted to.

He looked nonplussed. All of you American citizens? . . . uh huh

Earlier, for about 45’, my mother had seemed to be asleep. She had on sunglasses so that when I looked at her in the mirror she was just sitting there, upright and still. Later, as Diana and I were trying to get to sleep in our hotel room in the Hassayampa Inn, I asked her if my mother’d been asleep. She admitted that for a moment there she’d wondered if maybe she had just simply died, sitting there in the backseat. Morbid, yeah, but then we started wondering what would have happened if she had been dead and if the Border Patrol guy had asked each of us to show him some ID or, worse, to get out of the car? What would we do? Or, even if that hadn’t happened, what do you do if you suddenly realize you have a corpse in the backseat? We drifted off to sleep, uneasily.

The Conference

This is one of these events where quality of the presenters can be pretty iffy. They usually fall into one of several categories:

a) The Hobbyist: a former school teacher from Back East, now retired to Arizona and doing a little parlor sleuthing on local history (lots of train robberies, outlaw stories, and Indian raids)
b) The Relative: a longtime resident doing a little library work on family genealogy or local history: the ______ Ranch; my great aunt, _______, a pioneer seamstress; or, railroadin’ on the Tucson, Cornelia & Gila Bend. Hard to fault these sweethearts.
c) Doing what comes natural: a retired lawyer doing some fact history on a peripherally notorious legal case: the notorious Whiskey Row showdown, the Sycamore Canyon Indian ambush, etc. This can be any ex-professional: cop, teacher, doctor, architect, you name it.
d) The student: a budding young academic historian doing a class project and encouraged by his/her teacher just to submit a paper and see what happens.
e) The character: a guy dressed up in a huge cowboy hat, concho belt with massive turquoise buckle, and boots to the mid-calf talking about outlaws and sheriffs as if he might be the latter, but really wants to be the former.
f) The super-specialized expert: Sewing needles used by late 19th century Mormon settlers in northeastern Arizona. Inevitably these talks end up being catalogues of minutiae.
g) The professional: the rarest breed of all, a real historian who can actually use and analyze specific event to illustrate some broad(er) theme.

Examples of this last category were two Friday morning papers read in a double session titled The New Deal/Depression in Arizona: “The New Deal Impact on Native American Art” and “Boys and Men of the CCC: Gender Constructions and the Great Depression.” I mention these two because I sat in on them. Each seemed to touch on matters of everyday life and stereotype. The first lady handed out a flier for her soon to be published book (by the U of A Press) A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933-1943, that contained lots of words like romanticism, indigenous, Other, commodification, colonization, transcultural. The second lady, just completing some sort of a degree in history from NAU actually spoke out-loud words like hegemonic, patriarchy, masculinity, feminization, self-hood, interiority, role stratification, and of course gender construction. When you read or hear this kind of jargon you know you are in the presence of someone serious.

The point of the former paper was that as U.S. Indian policy changed during the twentieth century from conquest to sequestration to assimilation, so too did attitudes about Indian art. In general, the emphases of Roosevelt’s Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes, and Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier, were to promote the dignity of Indian-ness but they chose to foreground the fantasy ideal of the pre-contact Indian, rather than the Indian-of-the-present. I’ve got to get her book. $48 after the conference discount. The second talk described how the ideals of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century masculinity were impacted by the realities of the Depression (e.g., men no longer had the role of primary bread-winner). The Civilian Conservation Corps was established to rebuild American infrastructure, but had the serendipitous (maybe, or maybe just the side-) effect of restoring the ideals of American masculinity as well.

I sat through far too many of the A-F category talks for the rare G presenter. Judge Lillian footed dinner Friday night. I had Cornish game hen. Others had scallops or prime rib or ravioli. This was at the Sheraton/Yavapai Indian Casino (now there’s a whole other set of stereotypes).

Breakfast

The alluring raven-tressed waitress at a nearby eatery (Sweettart Café) had noli me tangere and a deer tattooed on the volar surface of her left forearm. She wore all black with a simple, knotted black cord necklace and bracelet and black eyeliner. Asking people about their tattoos is almost always a great ice breaker. I learned this by talking to heroin addicts at the methadone clinic where I work. She said it came from her favorite poem, one by Thomas Wyatt. So I looked it up back in the room, on the free WiFi. Wyatt (1503-1542), it turns out, was one of Anne Boleyn’s many suitors (and maybe lover), at least until Henry VIII moved in on him. So, he wrote this for/about her:
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more;
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about,
“Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.”
When I asked her about it two days later, she blushed and said that she thought of herself as her own Caesar. She lives by herself, up a nearby canyon, in a derelict cabin she’s fixing up, owned by her folks. Her father’s a golf pro. She doesn’t play golf. Never did.

The Trip, Return

We took the Interstate home. At the rest stop just north of Casa Grande four sets of Indians had spread blankets out under the veranda and trees, with rows and rows of reasonably priced and attractive trinkets for sale. One guy was offering “white turquoise.” I had never seen this before but according to the December, 2000, Rockhound Gazette it was discovered in a turquoise mine on the Shoshone Indian Reservation near Battle Mountain, Nevada in 1993. An assay proved it to be true turquoise. To quote the Gazette, “It was not until 1996, however, that it was finally made into jewelry. The Shoshone Indians are not known for jewelry work and, as a consequence, the Shoshone sell or trade the white turquoise to the Navaho in Arizona who work it into jewelry. Because white turquoise is as rare as the white buffalo, the Indians call it “White buffalo” turquoise. Turquoise gets its color from the heavy metals in the ground where it forms. Blue turquoise forms where there is copper present (most Arizona turquoise). Green turquoise forms where iron is present (most Nevada turquoise). White turquoise, where there are no heavy metals present, turns out to be rare. To date no other vein of white turquoise has been discovered anywhere else. When this current vein runs out that will be the last of it.” That got me to thinking about a great idea for a paper: “The Economics of Native American Roadside Jewelry Merchandising.”

The trip took only 3½ hours, including that stop. Everyone got back alive. Without added jewelry.

National Identity and Symbolism

2009-04-27T07:03:00.000-07:00

The Scarlet Letter is a novel that is rich in characters and symbolism, having never read this classic, I found myself wishing for more time to read it a second time, especially after reading Lauren Berlant’s critique of it, The Anatomy of National Fantasy, I was not quite sure if I understood all of her points. After reading this, I thought about the many symbols we connect with in our everyday lives that relate to our identity on many levels—national, state, city, school, etc. Berlant discusses the National Symbolic, “[It] thus seeks to produce a fantasy of national integration, although the content of this fantasy is a matter of cultural debate and historical transformation” (22). She gives the Statue of Liberty as an example of a symbol that represents the people. She says, “Articulating the national symbol as an expression by “the people” and of “the people,” the world’s popular capitalization of the statue provided an opportunity for the self-styled “masses” to take ownership of the symbolic material of national fantasy—a populism of the symbol long reinforced by the statue's crucial placement in the American experience of immigrants who saw it as the national boundary” (22). Monuments such as this, natural wonders, or manmade creations all can serve to represent the American public; however, not everyone will interpret them in the same way and therefore this reduces the collective identity. Many years ago, when the colonists were becoming established, they did not refer to themselves as Americans but as Virginians or whatever their state/city was at the time; this was important to maintain sovereignty. Today, the national identity of America may continue to be a mystery and one that we will continue to solve individually.
One other point that was interesting in my reading is an essay referring to Hawthorne, a notebook entry written by him states, “Is truth a fantasy which we are able to pursue forever and never grasp?” This search for truth is found throughout The Scarlett Letter, but particularly involves Pearl and the identity of her father. The townspeople and Chillingworth desire to discover the answer, but it remains a mystery. Hester Prynne bears the burden of this secret and is measured and hurt by this judgmental society. There is a connection between this idea of pursuing the truth and society’s desire to pursue happiness. Berlant makes references to the idea of happiness several times throughout her critique in regards to the political, collective life. She writes, “Happiness, which Americans are fundamentally defined as in righteous pursuit of, is the result of being able to separate everyday from national life” (199). She continues on to say that Americans have to forget their personal memory in order to preserve the national identity. On the one hand, Hester participates in this by teaching Pearl indirectly about the political arena they live in and what the expectations are in this society, and on the other hand, she finds her own type of happiness in her everyday tasks and life. Perhaps the pursuit of truth and national identity occur in a more sporadic timeframe and in various arenas, but the pursuit of happiness occurs every day in the rituals of daily life. Kristin

The Romance of National Fantasy

2009-04-26T21:40:00.000-07:00

I want to start with a portion of an essay I wrote last semester in a class on the American novel in which we read The Scarlett Letter and then compare that reading to some of the concerns that come up in Berlant’s book on national fantasy, and our course’s project of examining everyday life:

Filled with apparently lost souls and misguided intentions, Hawthorne’s Scarlett Letter seems to be interested in the play between surface appearance and interior composition. Consider the following passage from the chapter “The Interior of a Heart,” in which the narrator describes Reverend Dimmesdale’s reflections on the visions that appear before him in his fanciful misery:

None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment, by an effort of his will, he could discern substances through their misty lack of substance, and convince himself that they were not solid in their nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or that big, square, leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity. But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the truest and most substantial things which the poor minister now dealt with. It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit's joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false--it is impalpable--it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. (97)

We know that Dimmesdale’s suffering comes from his knowledge that his exterior life does not match the interior knowledge of his past actions. Thus, we might say that the visions that appear to him are a manifestation of his desire to be free from the torment laid upon him by his own duplicity. Yet, he sees through the unsubstantial visions to the actual objects that make up his world, which are ‘solid in nature.’ The book and table are solid, by nature of being physical objects. However, we might also read the phrase to indicate that they are solid objects in the natural world, meaning that the translucent visions might have a real existence in the supernatural world. Not only does this play on the solidity of nature open up something beyond the material world, it fixes that something in the objects placed before the Reverend in his study.

The more significant of these objects, in the light of this interweaving of nature and the supernatural, is “the brazen-clasped volume of divinity.” The OED gives a figurative definition of brazen as “hardened in effrontery; shameless,” which by the example from 1853 that follows , seems to have a particular relevance to religious or social matters. The clasp, also according to the OED, can connote the “act of surrounding or comprehending and holding.” Therefore, the bronze clasping upon the physical book not only indicates the reverend’s brazen attempts to maintain a grasp upon his professional life as his private sins betray it, but also the presumptuous attempt by a book to comprehensively contain knowledge of the divine. As a symbol of Dimmesdale’s professional and spiritual life the book takes on a symbolic meaning that stretches it between the material and the immaterial world of his visions. Thus, when the narrator moves on in the next sentence to remark that these visions were “the truest and most substantial things the poor minster now dealt with,” he does so ironically, since the book and its writing are equally ethereal. In other words, focusing on the psychological reading of Dimmesdale’s torment allows us to understand only one aspect of his character. Caught between his public and private lives, he begins not only to doubt the truth of his sanctioned beliefs, but also to create an alternative reality out of the abscesses in his mind.

I then go on to argue that the tortured reverend functions as a kind of romantic hero in the novel. This use of the concept of romance is fairly specific; it comes from reading the form of the novel as a tension between realism and romance, defined not as romantic love necessarily, but as an innocent means of reading the world. The classic example that we started this other class with was Don Quixote in Cervantes’s novel of the same name. The night’s madness in that work places him outside the normal realm of logical understanding of the world, but by doing so Cervantes demonstrates (among other things) that all other forms of structuring the human world are equally delirious – they just happen to be more widely accepted. Thus, the innocence of the romantic hero conceals and simultaneously reveals an insight into a different form of truth. By arguing that Dimmesdale can be read as a part of this tradition, I’m attempting to identify something similar to what I think Berlant is noting when she discusses the tension between utopia and the law.

She locates this tension in the problem of creating national unity that subsumes or assimilates local differences or idiosyncrasies. These fragmentary locations, or even individuals gain wholeness through participation (or, we could say, interpellation) in “an ‘Imaginary’ realm of ideality and wholeness, where the subject becomes whole by being reconstituted as a collective subject, or citizen” (24). This collectivity relates to “a larger simulacrum of wholeness” that she sees in the Statue of Liberty. The statue, she argues, functions as a “national dialectical image,” that “works in a utopian way to create multiple spaces that coexist in time despite contradiction, without threat of annihilation” (25). These contradictions occur in a similar space to the one that identify in the passage from my earlier essay: Dimmesdale’s awareness of his own indiscretions with Hester creates the space in his mind that allows him to begin questioning not only his spiritual beliefs, but the solidity of the objective world in which he lives. The permeability of the two worlds with respect to each other implies a kind of dialectical relationship, not unlike the way in which the law and utopian vision of America relate to each other. Berlant notices two possible readings of utopia: one that the nation is formed already as “utopia incarnate, the already realized fulfillment of the assurance of universal sovereignty postulated by Enlightenment political thought” or the other in which “an imperfect formation constituted by a promise for future fulfillment [is] imminently in the state of perfection but to be achieved within history” (32). The coexistence of these two possibilities seems to be where her use of the word fantasy is important, since it refers to the functioning of a system of thought that calls itself into being by making it seem as if it always existed; America was virgin land, but the natural promise of that virgin land was that its future form was always already contained within its natural form. The historical latency of this preformed identity is created after the fact of its own realization. In other words, cause and effect are inverted: the effect in the present day creates the space to read its own cause in the past. This movement effectively erases prior versions of remembering the past, clearing the space for this new narrative to supplant them. Like the readings we did at the beginning of the semester that discussed the nostalgic remembrance of something that did not carry meaning in its enactment but in its remembrance, this formation of Americanness identifies the promise of its present existence in the past, thereby securing the continuity of its future. The problem with the law in its relationship to this dual meaning is that it attempts to solidify the utopia of American – encode it legally. This role assumes a temporal freeze in which the unity of utopia exists in one form past and present. However, as she notes elsewhere, the power of national fantasy lies prominently in its ability to subsume difference. This assimilative function depends on adaptability to some degree, and the permanent encoding of national identity in law potentially stops this process. On the other hand, it is precisely this desire for stability and an encoded, mutually intelligible national identity that drives the assimilative process of change in the first place. What this tension means, I think, in the everyday lives of American citizens is something that shows up in Dimmesdale’s tortured attempt to find peace in his own liminal existence.

In the chapter on madness (3), Berlant describes a countercultural effect of the law (the letter of the law, as she puts it, playing on the meaning of Hester’s A). “For Prynne, Dimmesdale, and Chillingsworth,” she writes, “magical thinking takes on new forms of unreason: the state of law is a state of madness, in which juridical transfigurations of the body and the mind induce species of insanity” (100). This unreason emerges in Dimmesdale’s questioning the solidity of the objects surrounding him, but it also occupies the juridical space in which the solidity of the social order is constructed. Even though “the spaces beyond reason” are “images of how the law itself works to establish a certain reign of reason that locates reason’s antipode,” “they are also forms of counter-memory” (100). Therefore, while these moments of madness or insanity seem as though they point out a problem with the individual’s conception of time and space, they actually exist as fissures in the totalizing narrative of national fantasy. The tendency of the law is to assimilate them, making them become the images of the law that Berlant refers to in the quote above. However, they also have the potential to indicate that this kind of indirect challenge is not only possible, but, it seems, inevitable. Referring specifically to the way in which the national symbolic order is constructed around the image of the female body, she puts it rather succinctly at the end of the first chapter:
If one direction of Hawthorne’s refusal of the sunny Symbolic order is to construct an ever shifting set of terms within the context of the promised symbolic resolution that characterizes utopian thought, the other is that new models of political and everyday life are always being produced, even within the utopia of textuality. And so the still-colonized viewer of American history must do the same, seeing out of the corner of the hymen, like an asterisk, pointing her in another direction. (55, 56).

Even though Hawthorne’s writing works within the symbolic structures that it attempts to question, thereby feeding their subsumption of difference (locality or individuality), the exposure of different possibilities can also be valuable in itself. Like the protagonists of Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places, the citizen of Berlant’s America can find herself subjected to and also a subject of this utopic fantasy, but still discover meanings that evade the sanctioned version of reality. Therefore, Dimmesdale’s untruth that dissolves the reality of the universe is not necessarily reserved for a few, since the nature of national identity creates a space in which our lives are led, but does not determine the way in which we interpret them.

[Passages from The Scarlett Letter quoted from the Norton Critical Edition, ed. Leland S. Person, 2005].

-- Andy DuMont

National Fantasy and the Landscape

2009-04-26T20:55:00.000-07:00

The constructs that have helped to shape national identity and the collective national fantasy have been a topic that I have been studying this semester in my class on the landscape, so it was interesting to see parallels in The Anatomy of National Fantasy. It reminds me that no creative product is created in a vacuum (not just pretty pictures/not just an interesting story—there are underlying structures and messages inherent in the work) and that they are products of a society with many veils of meaning, much of which is tied in some way to the concept of desire. Just as “Alice Doane’s Appeal” and The Scarlet Letter can be deconstructed to reveal Hawthorne’s notion of personal/national representation, so too did landscape painters create their seemingly benign pictures to construct an America “as a domestic, and yet a strange and foreign place” much like Hawthorne uses his writing to underpin a greater discourse on society, politics, and ethics. Of course, it is an appropriate corollary—Hawthorne was born in 1804 and died in 1864 and lived for a time in the Berkshires. In the mid-nineteenth century Thomas Cole and other Hudson River School artists were making overtly symbolic paintings about the nation and its transformation from sinful and primitive to civilized and enlightened, often focusing on the very territory that Hawthorne lived.

Lauren Berlant explains that “America” is an assumed relation and an explication of collective practices within the political space of the nation (including a “tangled cluster” of juridical, territorial, genetic, linguistic, and experiential) that bind us together in the space of the “National Symbolic.” Berlant explains that “national fantasy” is the term to describe how national culture becomes local—through images, narratives, monuments, and sites that circulate through personal/collective consciousness. Stated and unstated literal and metaphorical meanings shape national form, and the landscape paintings of the nineteenth century (and subsequent mass-produced images of the land) were loaded with literal references to beauty, bounty, wilderness, the sublime, and progress as much as the metaphoric connotations that encouraged Manifest Destiny, decimation of native populations, and rampant development. By personifying the nation as a woman further reinforced the notion of desire and of possession.

The chapter, “America, Post-Utopia: Body, Landscape, and National Fantasy in Hawthorne’s Native Land,” most resonates in its parallels to how the landscape in the visual arts was used metaphorically for the construction of National Fantasy. As the author explains, early American utopian nationalism developed a fundamental antagonism between the National Symbolic, which emphasized the dream of collectivity and unity, and pragmatic political discourse. (p. 33) Prior to the mid 1800s, landscapes followed Jeffersonian ideals of the nation as a peaceful, agrarian utopia, with a similar dream of collectivity and unity. Pastoral and woodland scenes dominated the time as if to reinforce the collective will of a people and the leaders of the day. Yet, as the political and capitalist aims shifted to a more aggressive push for dominance in the world market and political realm, artistic intentions also shifted.

The new landscape paintings depicted the Native Americans as helpless primitives instead of the noble savage, and the landscape itself was imbued with new metaphoric associations with power, technological advancement, and the total settlement of the wilderness areas of the country. The land was something to conquer and exploit—to ravage as if it were a gendered, receptive, and fertile ground. Berlant explains that one of the three elements in Hawthorne’s creation of the National Symbolic through the articulation of subjectivity and landscape is the construction of the narrative linkages between landscape, historical time, and sexuality.(p. 35) But while Hawthorne represents the image of woman as the caretaker of national history through “images of grotesque, ancient women,” most symbolic figures in the visual arts saw the image of national identity as either a woman of the earth, dressed in Greek toga or as a dignified Native American woman, and later as a cultivated, finely dressed lady. She explains that the image of the decrepit woman is an unacceptable and improper source of national culture, but the only available source of what is valuable about “our” collective past—intentional devices to reveal the anxiety about the discrepancy between the value of “private” historical knowledge and its grotesque origins.(p. 36)

Historical landscapes are invested spaces, a locus of memory intended to recall or reinforce the intersection between the everyday and the momentous, all wrapped up in a package that serves to codify our national fantasy. The Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and many other natural wonders in America are gendered symbols of American greatness presented as spectacle. Historic sites, marked by the recollection of what happened on a particular spot rather than a physical/visual wonder, are also spectacle constructs meant to reinforce a collective identity and establish a shared history. As Berlant remarks, “This is the American utopian promise: by disrupting the subject’s local affiliations and self-centeredness, national identity confers on the collective subject an indivisible and immortal body, and vice versa.” (p. 49) Thus, the landscape becomes a politicized symbol of nation hood and a vehicle to make history vital by shaping it into something that transcends its subjectivity and temporality. Hawthorne critiques the production of American “national” identity, but for the visual arts, such deconstruction does not appear until modernism replaces representation and its symbolic content with the anarchy of abstraction.
-Julie Sasse

2009-04-26T18:05:00.000-07:00

Because a lot of Berlant's language in her analysis of Hawthorne baffled and irritated me, I chose to focus in on her discussion of the Statue of Liberty. Her quote early on that "the statue's stability as a point of national identity depends on her body being indivisible, like America," (23) immediately made me think of the ending scene from the original Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston realizes only after seeing the half-submerged decaying body of the Lady that he was on Earth the entire time. For his character Taylor, an American astronaut, there couldn't be a more appropriate symbol for both decaying national identity and his feeling of decaying humanity after being treated as a lesser creature throughout the film. As I thought about it, I can't really come up with a symbol that could have been used in the Statue's place as effectively.

The statue's body has been brought to its literal knees and past them, lowered from its impressive height and broken out of immortality by a steady decay. While I don't entirely buy the extent to which Berlant draws out the statue's sexual availability from her national availability, I think her point about the immobility connected to her immortality can also be connected to the iconic last scene. Unable to protect herself, she fell along with the human race, a symbol of their inability to win the war and the end to the utopian dream she represented.

One of the primary themes in Planet of the Apes was meant to be the social critique of humanity and how inhumane it appears when applied back to us. This ending scene with the destroyed image of national pride automatically then points to the American quest for dominance and the civilizations that have been and are demolished along the way. For a passive symbol, the Statue of Lady Liberty represents a legacy of violence. The demolished frame, then, could represent not an end to utopia but an end to violence. Maybe some element of that sentiment was there in Zaius' last line: that Taylor was off to find his "destiny".

-Caitlin

State or Community?

2009-04-26T15:49:00.000-07:00

I must admit Berlant left me a little confused. Not only her writing style, but her understanding of Hawthorne's work seemed to me a little stretched. That being said, I found her approach to The Scarlet Letter fascinating, in many ways, and her close reading of the novel - reflected in the numerous page references, was impressive. I was probably one of the only students in class who had to prepare for Berlant by reading Hawthorne? and, unfortunately, I didn't find the time to delve sufficiently into the work to challenge Berlant properly. Despite this limitation, there is, in particular, one aspect of her reading that I thought was a little too ambitious on her part.

She intended to give a gendered and post-nationalist (or whatever we should call it) reading of the Scarlet Letter and in this I think she succeeded. The Law (capital 'L') as a masculine domain, and the feminine counter-memory... all that was convincing. In particular I thought her understanding of little Pearl as the Anima of the protagonist was interesting. I, for one, was quite surprised that Hawthorne chose to give his herione a daughter rather than a son - think of the uncountable instances in stories, myth, and fiction, where the zyzygies father/daughter and mother/son appear! I too thought that Hawthorne probably attempted to forge a closer unity between the parent and the child by his choice of gender than what is common in narratives with mythic potention, such as The Scarlet Letter. Berlant seems to agree.

Berlant quite early posits her agenda: she wishes to give an account of a national fanstasy, meaning, the process by which "national culture become local" (p. 5). To me this sounded identical to the sociological project of the now-not-so-famous French marxist thinker Louis Althusser. In one of his most discussed concepts of 'interpellation', Althusser seeks to establish the process that makes subjects out of individuals, such as when a police officer shouts out "hey, you!" This is an ideological marker in that a political system is embodied in the very act of calling out to a specific subject. There is, in Althusser's mind, no ideology without subject, and no subjectivity without ideology. Isn't this something of the same Berlant seeks to achieve in her reading of Hawthorne??

If it is, I can only say that this was not exactly what I got away from reading The Scarlet Letter. My impression was how an early puritan community in the New World was fumbling a little bit in the dark in trying to forge out a political system out of what was hitherto exclusively religious practice and belief. Of course, with catastrophic consequences for Hester Prynne, but still not exactly a well-ordered and carefully crafted legal expression. Dimmesdale, and the other characters, I felt, were insecure, doubtful, and so forth - not exactly suitable candidates for ideologicla interpellation.

Berlant, on the other hand, seemed to draw a close association between the State (capital 'S') and the letter 'A' emboridered on Hester Prynne's bosom. Numerous places she equates the punishment inflicted on Hester with the "State" (for instance, p. 32; 69; 94; 97, to mention but some very few). Again, I didn't feel the presence of a unitary and coherent state system, or a utopian vision of nationality when reading Hawthorne as Berlant suggests. Do Americans read Hawthorne differently than me, perhaps??

-- Alexander

National Fantasy Drives Me Actually Crazy

2009-04-26T15:21:00.001-07:00

I will admit this first and foremost: As a student, this is exactly the type of book I struggle with the most. I often find myself lost in the author's words, constantly thinking to myself "That phrase doesn't actually mean anything recognizable." It might just be my own inability to process the language effectively, but I'd imagine I'm not the only one who finds this sort of reading challenging.

On to the text itself. I couldn't help but read this book through the lens of Sarah Vowell's recent (and excellent) "The Wordy Shipmates." Both books are concerned with the ways in which national identity is constructed through the creation of mythic figures, inter and intra community conflicts and the emotions and predilictions of a lucky few authors and leaders.

I was particularly taken with Berlant's description of the response of Puritan women to Hester's punishment when she says, "Not only do women not display a proper attitude toward the law, their very presence in the public sphere violates the narrator's sense of propriety" (107). This idea of "attitude" toward the law is actually a key part of Vowell's work, in particular her retelling of the life of Anne Hutchinson. Besides the possible delusions of grandeur she suffered from, Hutchinson's real sin in the eyes of the magistrates of the colony seems to have been her belief that the law applied equally to both men and women and that the law must be clearly explicated to be effective. Her sham trial before the magistrates highlighted that the culture envisioned by the men of the colony did not have the ideological space for a woman shrewd enough to speak back against the law itself, to challenge whether her "crimes" were crimes at all.

It is this expansion of women into the "public" sphere that seems to tie in most tightly to our exploration of the everyday. What is fascinating to me, however, is that Berlant's observation is both about women's presence in a public sphere and their attitude towards artifacts within that sphere. Yes, men were uncomfortable with the presence of women in matters of the law. More importantly (for me at least), men were uncomfortable not only with the expansion of women's bodies into the public sphere, but with the expansion of their minds into a public sphere. The very fact of their opinions on the law creates a disruption in the fabric of the Puritan everyday.
And there was nothing the Puritans feared more (Winthrop in particular) than disruption.

-Josh Zimmerman

Just Be Yourself

2009-04-26T11:11:00.000-07:00

As a former high school English teacher who taught The Scarlet Letter numerous times (I was skeptical the first time I brought the novel into the classroom, but kept using the text because students had such engaged responses), I am most interested in Berlant's reading of the end of the novel. She posits:

"The moral [Hawthorne] puts forth, that to be 'true' is to '[s]how freely to the world ... some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!' exhorts the citizen/reader to donate her/his body to public intelligibility. From the point of view of this maxim, the narrative aims to install a memory of the consequences that persons, citizens, and states suffer when the subject insists on her/his physical and psychic opacity or autonomy from the community" (157).

My former students were drawn to the same passages regarding truth, freedom and expression of self, but their reading was very different from Berlant's. (Are we surprised?! Not once did a high school student refer to Hester Prynne as a "prosthetic phallus" ...) For my students, "the office of the scarlet letter" was to remind us to be ourselves, who we really are, flaws and all. The end of the novel was for them an invitation to let their hair out of its bonnet to glisten in the sun, and to unpin from their chests the repressive labels placed on them by their parents or teachers or peers. They read Dimmesdale's death as a reminder of the consequences of waiting too long to be honest about one's true self, and the ambiguous community responses to his confession and death as proof that his fears about speaking his truth were unwarranted. For my students, the counter-memory of personal truth prevailed in the novel, as further confirmed by the altered meaning of the A--the repressive label was transfigured through honesty and good works.

But Berlant shows that while Hester's responsibility toward the end of the novel is "to reempower the minister, to return to him control over language, the law, and his own body, so ruthlessly taken away from him by their engagement in a 'link of mutual crime' and negative law"--a goal which privileges the self over the community symbolic--the narrator has a different objective (134). According to Berlant, "the narrator's mission, following Dimmesdale's self-exposure, is to rescue the law from its humiliation, to eradicate the amnesiac technology of the state, and to make Puritan culture 'safe' for the future identity of the postrevolutionary nation" (134). In other words, we are invited to make counter-memory the material of the state, in exchange for "a fantasy of boundless identity" (216).

Berlant suggests that we engage with the paradoxes, not the dichotomies, of self/nation and personal/political. Ben Highmore, in one of our early readings, proposed that we engage in the everyday as "an architectural practice" whereby we uncover "a house of material memory opposed to the constructed memory of nation" ("Dwelling on the Daily" 43). If I'm reading Berlant correctly, she seems to suggest that without the construction of nation we might not find a comfortable place to dwell at all.

Changing music to fit European models

2009-04-20T12:07:00.000-07:00

While reading the selections from Jon Cruz’s book, I was reminded of my experiences in choir. Cruz quotes Thomas Fenner “Our desire is, not to obtain any song in a more or less changed or mangled conditions, as you surely do when you take it out of its foreordained and appropriate setting in some part of the complicated negro religious ritual, and adapt it to be sung as a regular four-part song by a choir or congregation, either white or black” (170). I have been in different choirs from junior high to university, and we sang some of these four-part black spirituals. It was unsettling to me when we would sing them because I thought we looked and sounded ridiculous. Our voices didn’t possess the depth of sorrow that was needed at least from my limited knowledge. I thought about the chapter in Deloria’s book on music and how the people transcribing the Indian music couldn’t get the rhythms or sounds right. I find it interesting that these same ideas existed in transcribing black spirituals, this idea of pressing the music into a European model of music, time signatures, notes and accents.

A few years ago I watched a movie called “Songcatcher” about a woman who goes into the Appalachian Mountains to document some of the music of the people living there. I don’t remember everything about the movie, but what stayed with me was how difficult it was to capture the music and put it on paper, transcribing a sorrowful piece of music like “Pretty Saro” on to paper with lines and black dots for notes and set rhythm. It just doesn’t portray the song’s sadness, timbre or accents. It’s difficult to represent a song perfectly. I know it’s important for folklorists to find a way to document music from different cultures and that really the only way to do it is within the paradigms of our own knowledge, but I wonder if there is a different way because things are lost by forcing the music into European models.

-Colleen Murphy

Inda's Values

2009-04-20T11:38:00.000-07:00

While reading Inda's Value of Immigrant Life I was struck very early on by an argument made on the first page, about the struggle of government against illegal immigrants--police on the border and denying prenatal care in California. Inda argued that because of this, it meant that the government meant that immigrant life is less of value than that of regular citizens. I did not initially buy that argument. It was not in Inda's idea, but rather the presentation of it. Believe me, when I read that prenatal care was being denied to illegal immigrants I was shocked. The care is not denied to the immigrants, but the the children themselves. On that issue, I do buy the argument that the value of life for these children is decreasing in the government's eyes. Humanitarian aid should not be given out as a reward. It should be standard. Being such a controversial subject, I would had hoped that Inda would have expressed that one point with more power than it holds.

It's always interesting to read articles and listen to opinions about immigration reform/problems/arguments/life. I believe the best way to tackle it is to read everything I get my hands on. Being from the East Coast the immigration I knew was the German and Irish immigrations from the 1800's and that history. The hatred, the eventual assimilation, and now the "melting pot" that is the US, that is the East Coast. I knew that story. I did not know the borderland story. The most recent immigration wave to my coast was the Cuban and Puetro Rican immigration influence, but at best I grew up with 1st and 2nd generation Puerto Rican-Americans. So it is interesting to read the different points and counterpoints of the issue of illegal immigration. However, I did remember this dispute: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2057207&page=1, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,198757,00.html about Geno's Steaks (the most famous cheesesteak place, besides Pat's, in all of Philly, owned by the descendant of Italian immigrants). The owner had a personal history of his grandparents being immigrants from Italy and "struggling to learn English," which he used as a point that if his family had to do it, wanted to do it, and struggled to do it, to become "American" (I remember that part from an onair interview) so should other people seeking ways into America. Nowadays, I feel like that one view is becoming a regular point in conservative/anti-illegal immigration talk. I found this to be a very interesting dynamic--how two waves of immigration were similar and yet so different. This was the first real insight into this particular issue (from my end) that was looming across the nation. I would actually like to do more reading into why this immigration wave is different to the nation, when other waves in the past have been struggled against, this one, the issue of the border, is being tackled by gates, guns, and discriminatory aid--and the lack thereof.
Jennie Ziegler

sets and stages, slaves and prostitutes

2009-04-20T10:58:00.000-07:00

Let me start off by quoting from Jay Roach's article on slave spectacles:

"The apparent callousness of such accounts may be in part explained (though not in any way excused), by the very normality of the slave trade in the performance of daily life in New Orleans. The restored behavior of the marketplace created by its synergy a behavioral vortex in which

human relationships could be drained of sympathetic imagination and shaped to the purposes of consumption and exchange. Under such conditions, the most intolerable of injustices may be made to seem natural and commonplace, and the most demented of spectacles 'normal.'" Pg. 53

Roach is talking about the stage upon which slaves were sold and the performance of human indignity enacted, but the whole time I was reading his article, I kept flashing on the new TV show, Dollhouse. For those of you who aren't familiar with it -- which you should be, it's fantastic -- Dollhouse is about an underground

organization that traffics in a human slavery via technology. A "Doll" or "Active" is conscripted for a term of five years, most under duress, during which they are taken out of the Dollhouse, programmed to be anything their buyer chooses, and then put back in the Dollhouse when they're done being "played with." It's a show that plays with the themes of consent, control and freedom, and the spaces in which these acts are performed are eerily like what Roach was describing in his article.

Roach goes on to describe in detail the place of performance for the slave auctions, the pleasant aura of which made it possible to pretend that the slaves were anything but human beings. The Dollhouse, like the institution of slavery, takes human bodies, and going even further, human minds, and turns them into goods for consumption and profit. There are many layers of performance in the show. Obviously, there are the Dolls themselves, who are programmed with new identities at alarming rates. Then, there are those who run the Dollhouse, who tell themselves that what they are doing is normal and, in a way, philanthropic. The space they have constructed for themselves reinforces this notion.

The Dollhouse itself is a place of peace and zen, in which Actives when not on duty go to relax, get a massage, paint some art, or partake in banana pancakes. It is an elaborately constructed ruse, both to fool the Dolls into complacency, and on a less conscious level, to fool themselves into believing, to quote Roach, what they do is "natural and commonplace." Roach's fixation on the space of performance is a really interesting one to me. When he switches to the sexualization of slave bodies, saying, "I believe that slavery was explicitly and officially sexualized -- and thereby at least symbolically recuperated -- in the development of legally sanctioned prostitution during the post Reconstruction 1880s," my thoughts still stuck on Dollhouse. The show itself is like a slave spectacle. Each week viewers watch as the helpless dolls are programmed for deeds good and bad, and we as free beings are lead along for the ride, complicit in the crimes being committed against these fictional characters, and those real people that they represent.

--Ashley

All About Context: Artifacts Are Not Produced in a Vacuum

2009-04-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

“All music is ‘folk music.’ I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.”
--Louis Armstrong
(this quote is not directly related to the thoughts I explore here, but I like it and wanted to include it)

I am not at all a science person, but when I was reading Jon Cruz’s exploration of the black spiritual, I could not help but think in scientific terms. I thought of the right conditions, variables, hypotheses. What I liked most about his work was the way it challenged the notion that either artifacts or testimonies are sufficient in exploring the history of a cultural experience. They are important to study, but so too is the historical context that surrounds them. I think we often look at artifacts out of context without realizing 1) that our perceptions of the products are totally defined by our own knowledge and experience (for example: the way we perceive slave spirituals is influenced by the country and region we grew up in, what textbooks we have studied and what they say about the history of slavery, whether our family was involved in the slave trade—on either side, what our conceptions are about the lives, emotions, thoughts of slaves, what our conceptions are about the morality of slaveowners, etc. etc. etc.) and 2) that there is a complicated historical situation that these artifacts emerged from before they were “preserved” (for example—as Cruz explores—the slaves being unaccepted by white culture and thus needed to retain their cultural identity as West Africans, slaves being taught Christian tenants and hymns and the evolution in white owners as thinking of slaves as having “souls” which allowed them to do so, songs as anthems adopted for abolition, songs as ways to maintain confidence in the self despite being constantly put down).

Cruz discusses how looking at artifacts themselves led people to disregard the people who made them, projecting their own ideology of what those people thought or felt onto them through the reader’s interpretation of the song. He says, “one would never really need to know much about historical subjects who were displaced and rendered invisible by the triumph of their artifacts.”

Cruz aims to “move toward understanding the spiritual as a culminating point upon a sociohistorical map.” He “treat[s] black song making as a cultural site, an intersection, where we see social interests and social struggles coincide and entwine as we go through the process of discovery and mapping black culture.” I thought this was really interesting to look at the production of the songs as a place on a timeline, where slaves producing the song were reflecting what they had experienced, where they were at the moment in light of their context, and in some ways, alluding to what was to come. I thought it was fascinating the way he looked at the black university choirs’ performance of the spirituals and the excitement national and international audiences as fueling the research, transcription, preservation and performance of these songs.

I began to think about this too in relationship to music in my homestate of Louisiana. There has been a recent rise, over the past five years or so, in young Louisiana musicians creating Cajun or Zydecho bands—and oftentimes a mix of the two. They record, they play in Louisiana, they tour. The bands, like the Pine Leaf Boys, often cite their desire to play this music because they learned this style of music growing up and want to continue in the tradition of their parents and older Cajun musicians. They often put their own style and twist on traditional tunes, and add their own songs, written in traditional styles, to the mix. But the other fact is that more and more cities and communities throughout the United States have begun to host “folk music festivals,” “Cajun music festivals,” “bluegrass festivals” over the past decade or so. With the growth of these festivals—oftentimes free or with a low ticket price—event organizers have created a demand for these bands. Before, there were a few festivals throughout the country, mostly in large urban areas. But now smaller cities like Tucson and even small towns in states like California are joining in. With the interest in the community, these events are popular, and with this popularity comes a desire to bring in diverse acts from all over. We have an old-style country band, a old-timey band, a couple of blues musicians, now we need…. A Cajun Band.

A similar thing has happened with brass bands in New Orleans. Brass bands evolved out of the Mardi Gras tradition in New Orleans. Bands, most often from mostly African American schools, would march in the parades, and the most talented musicians, upon graduation, repurposed their skills into large brass ensembles. One such musician was Kermit Ruffins, who graduated from St. Augustine High School to form Rebirth Brass Band. Since Ruffins formed Rebirth over twenty years ago, the band has gone through many formations, with members cycling in and out. And over time, brass bands became another signifier for New Orleans—with bands playing gigs on MTV and touring the country. As brass bands became a signifier of New Orleans, traveling brass bands gave people from other places a taste of New Orleans without having to actually get on a plane. Now there are dozens of brass bands in the city—Hot 8 Brass Band, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Soul Rebels Brass Band, Treme Brass Band, New Orleans Brass Band. A further increase of popularity and notoriety of these bands came after Hurricane Katrina, when many bands were displaced and toured the country playing shows more out of necessity than desire. Their home was a wreck. Bands that typically were home for most of the year were on tour more, exposing more people throughout the U.S. to their music and to the “culture” of New Orleans.

In all these cases, studying the context for music making does not make the artifacts themselves less significant. In fact, quite the opposite. By taking the time to examine the artifacts in the historical location where they were constructed, we can see them in a richer, more fleshed-out light. For it is not just about the making of the product, but how that making was influenced by and in turn influenced the culture around it.

~ Lisa

Images:

Pine Leaf Boys-- from Pine Leaf Boys website, publicity shot
Rebirth Brass Band- By PABLEAUX JOHNSON for New York Times
Published: November 26, 2006

Looking at Performance and Collaboration

2009-04-20T08:42:00.000-07:00

I have never had the opportunity to read or learn about this time in history, so I found all the readings quite compelling. Having a background in theatre, I thought that Roach’s definition and application of the term “performance” to be an interesting one. In regards to the marketplace, Roach says, “I would interpret the performative space of the exchange as a behavioral vortex of consumption and expenditure, material and symbolic” (54). It seems that the marketplace was like a theatre where people came dressed in their finest to see and be seen and to be entertained, and that the purchasing of goods was a secondary concern. Because the people at this time were accustomed to the daily performance aspects of the slave auctions, such as their dancing and being on display naked, they were not focused on the negative connotations that such acts implied. As Roach points out, “The apparent callousness of such accounts may be in part explained (though not in any way excuse to) by the very normality of the slave trade in the performance of daily life in New Orleans” (53). Perhaps these “normal” yet terrible spectacles could be seen as similar to public executions in Renaissance England or to other forms of public humiliation where human beings were on display. Levine goes on to analyze actual plays that contain similar themes to what is occurring daily. He writes, “By this I do not mean simply the depiction of a general historical and cultural “background” but rather the discovery of intersecting networks of practices, attitudes, actions, and meanings, those that reside in specific cultural conditions and those that become visible by means of performance” (58). As in earlier times, playwrights get many of their ideas for plays from actual events in everyday life. When playgoers see a play, they identify with, disagree with, or are informed about the subject matter. Obviously these performances of everyday life can have an impact on one’s views or interpretations of a cultural practice.
In addition to Roach’s topic of performance, I was intrigued by Levine’s chapter on slave songs. He writes, “Slaves often take over entire white hymns and folksongs, as White and Jackson maintained, but altered those significantly in terms of words, musical structure, and especially performance before making them their own. The result was a hybrid with a strong African base” (39). I thought about how most everything is a hybrid of some sort and that everyone builds off of others’ ideas. Even in today’s music world rappers and hip-hop artists borrow from each other and incorporate others’ work as a sign of respect and appreciation. However, a significant difference between re-creating song lyrics, either by the slaves or today’s musicians, and one’s written work based off of another’s thoughts is possession. I find this interesting that writers are so concerned with plagiarism and citing another’s work, but in certain types of music this practice does not seem to be as common. Levine points out, “Slave songs, then, were never static; at no time did Negroes create a “final” version of any spiritual. Always the community felt free to alter and re-create them” (43). Perhaps it is this sense of community that is more important than a sense of ownership. Because the songs were mainly recorded in an oral tradition and there was not a written record, this may account for the lack of concern of ownership, but more than that is this was a way that the slaves could bond together and maintain their sense of identity under horrible circumstances, which is what Levine argues when he states: “Here again slave music confronts us with evidence which indicates that however seriously the slave system may have diminished the strong sense of community that had bound Africans together, it never totally destroyed it were left to the individual atomized and emotionally and psychically defenseless before his white masters” (44). Unlike the whites, who focused on spiritual songs in a specific setting, like church, the slaves’ songs were created as their everyday lives unfolded, during good and bad times, and this was one of the ways they maintained a part of their culture. Kristin

2009-04-19T20:23:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed Della Pollock's "Exceptional Spaces: Essay in Performance and History" on several levels. First, I think the essay modus operandi--its establishment and setting of performance in light of slave auctions--was fascinating. The definition for performance that Pollack borrows from Richard Schechner was particularly interesting to me: "restored behavior" or "twice-behaved behavior." This sense of "re-doing" what has already been done was so brilliantly (albeit sickeningly) tied to Pollack's comparison of slave auctions to brothels and whorehouses which later took over New Orleans. I was most interested in Pollack's description of the triangular enterprise: money, flesh and property, with flesh dominantly displayed in the center. As Pollack says, "the centrality of naked flesh signifies the abundant availability of all commodities: everything can be put up for sale, and everything can be examined and handled even by those who are 'just looking'" (57). A bit later in the essay, Pollack takes this notion of transfer a bit further. Not only could anything by resold and transferred, but in that transfer, anything could be transformed: the protagonist Zoe is resurrected as a white woman, fully transformed and transfigured in her environment. Like a piece of scrap metal put under the flame, the body too can be reshaped and reformed in this spectacle of resale and rebirth.

This objectification of the body--especially female--can be quite clearly linked to the intentions of the brothels and whorehouses; this re-representation of behavior manifested in different environment made me curious regarding the recycling of slavery notions in our present day.

Simultaneously with this essay I was reading David Foster Wallace's "Big Red Sun" in which he explores the inside world of the 1998 Adult Video News Awards (AVNAs), the equivalent of the Oscars in Adult Porn. To rehash the entire essay would just cause me to become emotional and rant: suffice to say that Wallace, if he were in conversation with Pollack, would probably see some parallelisms--especially in light of this triangular exchange--between the slave auctions and later the brothels of New Orleans and the AVNAs in Las Vegas (yes, that's right; the show is hosted every year in Vegas--go figure).

--Julie Lauterbach-Colby

Performance

2009-04-19T19:56:00.000-07:00

I thought Roach's take on a performance based view of slave auctions was extremely interesting and well-written. The more in-depth the analysis became, the more questions I had about the intricacies of this view. The one that made me the most curious was the possible connection to the theory of dramaturgy and the designation of backstage spaces. Would it be possible to identify a “backstage” in his view?

If the auction stage became a nexus of commerce and performance where the culture of flesh becoming object was played out, the backstage area would have to be a location where some kind of facade or mask was dropped. I originally believed that space historically would be emancipation. Both performance and commerce functioned as attempts to distract from the humanity of the people being auctioned. In performance, a player consciously makes him or herself an object of scrutiny. This allows the audience to view a slave as both consciously choosing their actions and willingly becoming objects at the same time. The connection between commerce and dehumanization should be obvious. The moment when those masks or costumes were dropped would be the moment that humanity was restored to slaves and emancipation from the stage was achieved.

However, I think now that “backstage” was any moment that those people were free from the scrutiny of their oppressors. Any moment where they felt they were asserting their humanity, whether through song or action. Emancipation would be the moment where backstage became the only stage.
-Caitlin

Eroticizing Slavery

2009-04-19T19:34:00.000-07:00

Like most of the essays and articles for this class, this week’s selection about slavery was new information to me, but nonetheless interesting and providing new insights. In particular, it shed light on how much we take for granted in terms of what information is used to frame our culture and what is omitted from history. The sense of bias and subjectivity of the people engagaged in the slave trade or witnessing it as spectacle is hard to fathom--far too often we accept what is told to us, written down, or depicted in photography and painting without contextualizing the information or peeling away the layers of specificities, agendas, and motivations that allow such information to become irrefutable fact in our minds.

In particular, I was intrigued by the article by Joseph R. Roach, “Slave Spectacles and Tragic Octoroons.” First, I had not thought about the myriad actions that we call everyday life as performative, but indeed they are—we perform at the workplace, at our gyms and on our days off; for our friends, our colleagues and co-workers, and in a self-reflexive way, for ourselves. In short, everything that implies action of some sort is performative and furthermore, as Roach suggests, “The performative. . . is a cultural act, a critical perspective, a political intervention.” (p. 49)

With that framework in mind, it was interesting to see how the author addressed the performative traditions of the trafficking in human flesh in antebellum America to link it to present-day practices of eroticized spectacle. Of course, one of the most obvious of the “collective representations” to which the author refers is art. The many paintings, sculptures, and films, etc. that I have seen which address the theme of slavery now come back to me to be considered in a new light. That those during the antebellum period rationalized their practice of “exhibiting” slaves to be sold because they found precedents in ancient Greek and Roman times seems incredible. Given that we have long held up those cultures as paradigms of civility and order, the delusion that slavery was acceptable behavior has to link to something perceived to be rational in order to be desensitized enough to take part in it.

More appalling, however, is the circus-like atmosphere that was created. It was one thing to insist that for the progress of America we must stoop to unprecedented lows to find the workforce needed to keep up the demand of product, but to be entertained by the spectacle complete with musical accompaniment and costumes reveals just how little the people of the time were normalized into thinking this was acceptable behavior. Of course, as the author explains, while such behavior appears beyond callous, “The restored behavior of the marketplace created by its synergy a behavioral vortex in which human relationships could be drained of sympathetic imagination and shaped to the purposes of consumption and exchange.”(p 53)

Furthermore, the elegant, theater-like rotunda connected to the St. Louis Hotel further legitimized the practice, for if an opulent building is erected for such purposes, does it not reinforce the notion that such an enterprise is an extension of sophisticated society? It is no wonder that a leap can be made from the slaves who were stripped down for the examination of their bodies to the display of prostitutes in the brothels—so often we are expected to believe that sex workers prefer their profession over other types of employment, just as we are led to believe that slaves accepted their plight. And while it might be a plausible notion, as the author suggests, that the practice of forcing slaves to dance in semi-nudity for prospective buyers anticipated the development of American musical comedy, it only reinforces the notion that it was spawned by callous indifference to what was really taking place, especially since the minstrels were performed by whites in blackface.

Of course, the idea that paintings were sold in one part of the rotunda, slaves in the middle, and land in another, while beyond despicable, clearly illustrates the institutionalizing of desire and possession. Of the many paintings and etchings that were mentioned in the essay, I wonder how many of the artists were complacent in their selection of subject matter or if they stepped outside of their exotic reverie to realize what stereotypes they were establishing and myths they were promulgating, all for money. In many ways, such artists, while lacking the cultural hindsight to access the practice in more humanistic terms, are much like prostitutes—they play on the prospective buyers need to possess and to fetishize everything, giving them what they want all in the name of formal artistic concerns and exoticism. To call the slave spectacle as American as baseball, however, seems to me to be a big stretch by the author. While the average man might have been allowed to “inspect the merchandise,” it implies that large audiences chose to partake in witnessing the slave auction over other forms of entertainment. I surely hope this is not true, but while I thought at first the analogy to the New Orleans Superdome to the slave market rotunda a bit far fetched, on second thought, it is not without merit that we are engaging in a similar practice of spectacle, albeit with the players in command of their present and future, agreeing to the fetishization of their bodies to the highest bidder. Giving people what they desire through surrogate performative practices and representations therefore places athletes and artists in the same category perhaps. They are each performing for an elite consumer which then trickles down to the middleclass citizen who, in parody of what they think is the embodiment of desire, takes the game, or the reproduction of the painting in the case of the artist, as an acceptable surrogate to the real thing. Not to diminish the deplorable practice of slavery where there is no choice in the matter of the servitude or the spectacle of the auction, however, it is interesting to note the strategic dance between desire, possession, and need that still plays out in contemporary society.

-Julie Sasse

Artifacts vs. Testimonies

2009-04-19T17:14:00.000-07:00

In Jon Cruz's book I was most startled and struck by the section titled "Triumph of the Taxonomic." In this section Cruz quotes a song that includes the lines, "Fall out here and shuck dis corn / Oh. ...oh, ho / Bigges pil ever see sence I was born / Oh. ...oh, ho" (182). The rest of the song is a commentary not just on the physical labor demanded of the speaker, but a kind of lament and description of a world out of joint. For example, the line "What in the worl' is de marter here" is repeated at the beginning of the song, and the later verses narrate the social dynamics of slavery: subjugation, ownership, class divides and resentments, etc. The surprising thing is that the song was classified as a "corn song," corn songs being a sub-category of "work songs" in the new taxonomy. As Cruz writes, "What underwrites this historically embedded text's social reference--the social relations of slavery--is eclipsed by a budding ethnomusicology. In the new scientistic view, the song took on significance through ... the framework of the taxonomy that gave it a new place within folklore" (182). In other words, the same impulse that sought to make an artifact (as opposed to testimony) of a lived expression and a lived art--hence lodging the song as an object within the past--also divorced the song from the very past it was taxonomized within. "Technical neutrality" obscures the social reality--both the social reality of slavery, and the social reality of folkloric preservation and classification that alters and reinscribes and resignifies expressions as merely forms (183).

Of course, Deloria's chapter on music comes to mind, especially the section on musicologists' efforts to understand Omaha harmony. John Comfort Fillmore found that in the Omaha music he studied, "the melodies did imply harmony--indeed, a universally shared harmony--and could, therefore, be understood through standard music systematics" (Deloria 201). But in classifying Omaha music, Fillmore furthered developmentalist ways of understanding the world: Fillmore found in the music a "latent harmonic sense" (Deloria 201). In other words, Fillmore and others were able to simultaneously say that Indian music was just like European music, and less developed than European music. So, it was safe to appropriate Indian melodies as nationalist music because doing so furthered the desire to both highlight what was authentically American AND confirm the progress of European colonization.

In discussing folkloric approaches to understanding and documenting music from marginalized social and racial groups, Cruz and Deloria remind us of the dangers and responsibilities inherent when, in wanting to document or understand something, we deliberately or inadvertently objectify lived expressions of social experience. Reading Cruz and Deloria's critiques/warnings makes me appreciate Kathleen Stewart's approach even more. She said there's no perfect text for the social, but didn't abandon the effort of letting the surfeit of the social speak through her text. What other models do we have in this social moment?

- Esme

Conscious Blurring of the Sacred and Mundane

2009-04-19T16:24:00.000-07:00

I’d like to offer some fragmentary comments on Lawrence Levine’s reading of slave songs and the potential to read misrecognition or misunderstanding as a practical break or fissure in totalizing power relationships, particularly in relationship to the totalizing narrative of oppositional subjectivity/identity established in Hegel’s model of the master-slave dialectic.

Levine quotes Clifton Furness writing about a prayer meeting, in a way that appears at first to reify slave consciousness as ripe for subordination: “I was gripped with the feeling of a mass-intelligence,” Furness writes, “a self-conscious entity, gradually informing the crowd and taking possession of every mind there, including my own” (42). He (Levine) interprets this passage and others as

mak[ing] it clear that the spirituals both during and after slavery were the product of an improvisational communal consciousness. They were not, as some observers thought, totally new creations, but were forged out of many preexisting bits of old songs mixed together with snatches of new tunes and lyrics and fit into a fairly traditional but never wholly static metrical pattern. The were, to answer Higginson’s question, simultaneously the result of individual and mass creativity. (42).

The interpretation is needed, I think, to dispel another potential reading of Furness’s description. Before getting to the passage above that comes from Levine’s pen, I took Furness’s reading of the songs as an implication of a divide between the mass-intelligence and the individuals who formed that mass. It was as if they were caught up in it, but not really responsible for the creative act; as though they were a vehicle for some larger consciousness, but not conscious themselves. We could see this in the “self-conscious entity” that “informs” the crowd, meaning that the crowd becomes a formless void, waiting to be imbued with meaning by some transcendent power or idea(l). The difference for my initial reading of Furness and Levine’s, comes from an expectation on my part (to go back to Deloria) that the researcher will see the slaves as less intelligent or self-conscious when reading through a modernizing European model.

This expectation surfaced earlier in my reading as well, when Levine describes the, “spontaneity, this sense of almost instantaneous community which so impressed Higginson, [that] constitutes a central element in every account of slave singing” (40). Initially, I had been wondering why he decided to look at slave songs coming from only the religious or spiritual setting. In other words, if the spiritual setting established a kind of communal consciousness/entity, and Levine interpreted this as a synecdoche for slave life, I wanted to know if it was a sampling error, if the spontaneous communal creativity seen in the churches, was something mirrored by all instances of singing, or if his reading was hiding an ability for individual composition and creation. However, Levine goes onto address this question, which rests upon an assumed distinction between everyday life and heightened circumstances, such as church (or art, or, or, or). Levine seems to want us to see the songs arising from everyday life (of which spirituality is an integral part), instead of as an unconscious expression of lived reality (and therefore, if we follow the typical construction of slave insight as unconscious: less intelligent, less articulate, (almost) accidental). Levine sees the lines between the everyday and the transcendent as consciously blurred, or blurred in (slave) consciousness. This blurring highlights the important difference between slave and master social or cultural practices and understandings, in which the slaveholder relies upon a separation of the transcendent from the everyday in order to justify his or her terrorizing of others while still maintaining a sense of spiritual purity.

Levine spots this difference in the opposing conceptions of what it means to be a chosen people. Noting that it might be surprising to see slaves conceiving of themselves as a chosen people in their songs (which we do), he writes that

White Americans could be expected to sing of triumph and salvation, given their long-standing heritage of the idea of a chosen people which was reinforced in this era by the belief in inevitable progress and manifest destiny, the spread-eagle oratory, the bombastic folklore, and paradoxically, the deep insecurities concomitant with the tasks of taming a continent and developing an identity. (45)

The heightened sense of what it meant to be chosen enabled slaveholders (or the majority of white Americans, even in the North) to imaginatively transcend the mundane everyday through the imagined ideal of exceptionalism or ordained destiny. The slaves, on the other hand, lived through their everyday. The way we read the relationships between the words in the second part of this statement seems important. If the slave lives through, slogs through, only survives his or her everyday, it becomes a mundane terror, something from which to escape. However if we see the slave living through or within that mundane and terrifying reality as it was perceived by others (the slaveholders), then the relationship between the secular and sacred, the mundane and the transcendent becomes more complex. To go back to the problem of when the songs were sung, Levine affirms that “they were not sung solely or even primarily in churches or praise houses, but were used as rowing songs, field songs, work songs, and social songs” (48). “For the slaves, then,” he writes, “songs of God and the mythic heroes of their religion were not confined to any specific time or place, but were appropriate to almost every situation” (48). Therefore, the sacred intertwines with the profane, or everyday, and becomes a way of reading it. While for the slaveholders it was an escape from mundaneness, sacredness for the slaves was a means of finding meaning in the moments and meanings that slipped through, or perhaps more accurately, that coexisted with the awfulness of their bondage.

This treatment of the everyday life of the slave is not an attempt to romanticize his or her spirituality, which becomes again a dangerous way of primitivizing difference. Rather, it de-trivializes slave songs. The temptation to read the songs as primarily something performed in the church, and therefore separated from everyday life not only establishes a foundation to see slave songs as derivatives of European-based hymns (which Levine argues against early in the essay), but also pushes their message of salvation into an otherwordly realm of sacred belief and hope. As Levine puts it, understanding this blurring of the sacred and everyday means that we see “the manner in which the sacred world of the slaves was able to fuse the precedents of the past, the conditions of the present, and the promise of the future into one connected reality” (54). This connection of past, present and future into one concurrent reality seems an important idea, one that gains currency if we consider Levine’s suggestive title. “Slave Songs and Slave Consciousness” calls to mind not just the communal entity forged through the songs that the article analyzes, but also the Hegelian model of subjectivity (if I understand it properly) in which there is a master consciousness, recognized in the dominance of the slave by the master. Slave consciousness then becomes consciousness of the master, or rather, consciousness of the presence of the master, and the experience of terror in that presence. Levine characterizes the typical reading of slave songs as derivative as something that follows this logic. However, the “vitally creative elements of slave culture” remained, meaning that the system to enslaved the slave did not “so totally [penetrate] his personality structure as to infantilize him and reduce him to a kind of tabula rasa upon which the white man could write what he chose” (57). This vision of the slave as a blank slate means that his consciousness of self has either been erased, or, as in Hegel’s model, exists only as a derivative of the master’s consciousness. Hegel tells us that the slave gains self-consciousness through the realization that his work (as material manifestations of his presence in the world) is appropriated by the master. In other words, he gains self-recognition only through consciousness of alienation from himself. Levine’s reading of the slave songs challenges this concept, because in order for it to function properly, the slave must have no remaining vestiges of his originating culture or tradition through assimilation. Thus, the narrative that slave songs derived from Christian hymns, but not the other way around. Levine writes in opposition to this model that the slave could either be seen as “divested of old cultural patterns but not allowed to adopt those of their new homeland,” or “cling[ing] to as many as possible of the old ways of thinking and acting” (57). He argues that the slave songs represent the second of these options, which is positive in a sense, but I think we might see in his argument another. Early on, as alluded to above, he writes that the musical influence that created the slave narratives ran across the cultural divide in both directions, making it less a division than a point of mutual re-creation (37). While the songs did not change the political situation of the slaves, they did challenge the oppressive reality in other ways (58). I think we might see this challenge in the different model of slave consciousness that the songs represent, one that, like DeCerteu’s idea of la perruque, enables on a means of reading one’s surroundings differently from the structures or strategies that shape that reality. The songs as tactical interventions in the everyday life of slaves means, as Levine argues, that they open another field of communal meaning and relationship that the slaveholders either assumed was confined to Sundays or that they misrecognized entirely.

-- Andy DuMont

Dislodged Songs

2009-04-19T15:52:00.000-07:00

The reading that really struck me this week was Jon Cruz's "Culture on the Margins." It was a quote pulled from Thomas P Fenner that I found the most thought provoking. Cruz notes Fenner's argument that songs should be viewed as "activities and practices" and that, "Dislodging songs from their context and transporting them through musical transcription invariably resulted in the loss of meaning (169).

We've talked a lot in the class about the way that the everyday is constructed by our culture and I find myself often thinking about the way that the very act of analyzing and recording an event or artifact can change it (very quantum). But I have never thought about it in the way that Cruz describes it. The song is not just studied, it is "dislodged." The word implies two things for me. One, the act of study implies a kind of violence across the object. Force is applied to seperate the artifact from it's context. The work not only can damage the object, but what of the context to which it belonged? Do we leave a sort of theoretical hole or scar on that context? The image that comes to my mind is my father working at pulling up a tree stump from our backyard. The stump was eventually pulled, but in the process the earth around it had be churned up and a whole mass of tiny roots had been riped off and left in the group.

Two, too believe we can dislodge an artifact from its context seems to imply that we can examine it in some sort of cultural vacuum. I think most in the class would agree that this is not true. But it does point to the reason that we strive to "dislodge" the artifact in the first place. It seems that this sort of study is employing methods more suited to the physical sciences than the social sciences. When we dislodge an artifact, we are trying to be objective and to limit variables, to control our experiment. There are any number of historical, political, and social reasons we would do that (some of which we've already talked about). But in the end, I think the most important thing to realize is that, in the social sciences, dislodgement often means that the artifact we are studying is very often not the same as the artifact before our attempts to pry it free.

- Josh Zimmerman

Torture as Performance

2009-04-19T10:51:00.001-07:00

Jay E. Caldwell
19 April 2009 (Sunday)

Joseph Roach's remarkable essay, "Slave Spectacles and Tragic Octoroons," got me thinking about other sorts of "performances" and spectacles not necessarily designed to be that, and certainly more private. Mark Danner's recent piece in the New York Review of Books (LVI.6 [9 April 2009]: 69-77): "U.S. Torture: Voices from the Black Sites" is a sort of theater review. It is actually an enhanced review of the ICRC [Red Cross] Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody, released in February, 2009. Danner, Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley, is an expert in this rather murky and unpleasant subject. In 2004 he authored Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. Much of the ICRC material on which Danner bases his essay comes from a single suspected al-Qaeda chief (or at least warrior), Abu Zubaydah, who had been wounded, then captured, in a firefight in Pakistan, then nursed back to health in U.S. military hospitals before he was transferred to Guantanamo.

The Guantanamo sessions were a remarkable series of linked performances that led to other performances elsewhere. Zubaydah and his thirteen fellow "comrades" were expected to perform for a changing variety of U.S. officials: to talk, to reveal, to confess, to name names, to rat-out, to squeal. As payment for these performances they would no longer be subjected to whatever methods the U.S. military, FBI, and CIA interrogators came up with to elicit these testimonies. But the irony in all this was that the interrogators were as much performers as were the "high value detainees." Each day they'd have to come up with a new act to perform in order to tighten the screws on the prisoners, for after a while their audience would adapt and would no longer respond with the kind of applause being sought. What the prisoners probably didn't know was that their interrogators had to audition all new acts with higher-ups, maybe even as high up as Washington, D.C., before they could be included in the show's repertoire. Now the irony of all this was that while the prison guards were feigning intending to kill the prisoners, the prisoners were feigning providing valid information rather than just the shit they'd say because they figured that's what the guards wanted to hear. This must have been quite a circus with a non-stop merry-go-round of dramatic performances and an ever-changing cast. You can catch a re-enactment (by Amnesty International) of one of the scenes at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/apr/22/advertising.humanrights.

And then the Red Cross arrived. Now the prisoners had a new audience. They were also treated to a whole new show themselves. Presumably the ICRC actors, caring, humane, and officially neutral, didn't care what the detainees knew. Their agenda was to care about how the prior (and ongoing) show was carried out. The agenda of the prisoners changed, too. After all, if self-interest lies at the heart of each man's soul, then his role might change as the scenery and costumes changed. The detainees must have soon learned that the Red Cross people were going to demonstrate no malicious behavior, but whether that would translate into honesty on the part of the detainees wasn't clear. Their agenda of feigning truth out of self-preservation might continue. Danner weighs in on this by noting that what Zabaydah and his compatriots claimed to have experienced at Guantanamo was quite similar to what others in their same metaphorical boat experienced elsewhere at the hands of their U.S. captors.

And about this time a new show opened in Washington, D.C., with an all new cast, but based on the same script. The headliner of the cast was our President, George W. Bush. His agenda was to reassure his audience (us), that all was right and decent in his administration and that anything you'd heard to the contrary just wasn't true. At the White House premier in September, 2006, he admitted that while some suspected terrorists had to be secluded in "an environment where they can be held secretly [and] questioned by experts, he insisted that "The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values. I have not authorized it--and I will not authorize it." He added that occasionally, but in some extreme and special cases "an alternative set of procedures" had to be employed, but "These procedures were designed to be safe, and to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations." Not realizing that the Red Cross would soon blow his cover he assured us that "I cannot describe the specific methods used--I think you understand why" (all 70).

And now we come to the last (or at least the most recent) series of performances. Someone leaked the Red Cross report (a brief 43-page pamphlet). You can read it at http://www.nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf. Danner wrote his damning review (not of the ICRC but of the CIA). Unimpeachable sources were coming forward (Mr. Bush was never included in this elite group). The result was that an ACLU lawsuit that had been simmering off-Broadway for several years finally got prime-time exposure. As a response the Obama administration released 120-140 pages of minimally redacted (black felt-tip marker edits) CIA documents; these,too, can be read at aclu.org. So now the show is no longer a secret, by-invitation-only affair. The audience is now all of us and the response, after a national outbreak of hand-wringing, has been an appropriate blend of outrage, embarrassment, and anger. The result is that the long-running Guantanamo play has closed and perhaps the theater may soon be razed.

So many performances, so many actors, so many agendae, an ever-changing script. And we are all now a part of that drama.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
(As You Like It, II.7.139-143)

Naked Money

2009-04-14T16:23:00.000-07:00

In his rarely-read-but-frequently-cited work, The Philosophy of Money, the early German sociologist Georg Simmel makes some interesting remarks on economic transactions. Ideal-typically, he claims, the symbolic power in any market exchange lies with the person who puts down the money, the buyer, at the expense of the one who picks it up, the seller. Economic value is really the creation of the transaction itself, but, ultimately, Simmel claims that the one who leaves with the goods and not the sum paid is the one who has asserted him or herself through the trade (of course, in real life, countless exceptions present themselves, such as a transaction of overpriced goods; purchases made in material desperation; or simply charitable purchases – though the latter can easily be translated into a defense for Simmel's point). Simmel's point is not to contrast the use of money to expressions of altruism, but to barter: the prototypical form of material circulation.

The power ubiquitous relationship of economic transactions is, according to Simmel, most clearly witnessed in the purchase of sexual favors. By performing a sexual favor, the prostitute, as it were, submits herself entirely. The john, on the other hand, exploits the freedom and power of his money and sets the terms for the exchange. Simmel hints at the following twist of social relations: if sexual favors are acquired through some form of barter, the provider sets the terms, and the recipient is the one to appear desperate; in monetary prostitution, on the other hand, it is the provider of the services who seem desperate for the money of the buyer.

I think there is a fundamental similarity between Simmels Philosophy of Money and Joseph A. Roach's Slave Spectacles and Tragic Octoroons. Roach, too, regards the introduction of money to social exchange as a way to undress the social relationships of their secrecy, of their public guard. It easily turns naked, at least for some of those involved. Roach's depiction of the antebellum Louisiana slave market as a theatrical spectacle gets at yet another point: markets will often be sexualized. Black slaves were often displayed (partially or fully) undressed and mounted on auctioneers' tables where they would be requested to move, dance, and so forth. This was true of both male and female slaves. In contrast to the fully dressed purchasers, the naked skin of the people for sale created an erotic or even homosocial atmosphere, according to Roach.

To me, the ingenious part of Roach's account is the fact that he refuses to view the trade in slaves in isolation, but rather considers it as a constitutive part of the entire economy of the Louisiana antebellum market. On one table in the Rotunda, pictures would be sold, at another, real estate, and on a third, black slaves. The three tables complete the economic circuit: "money transforms flesh into property, property transforms flesh into money, flesh transforms money into property" (p. 59). Hence, the selling of naked bodies epitomizes the freedom ant totality of the market through a spectacle which signals that 'everything is for sale'.

Roach, a theater historian, convincingly shows how the spectacle of slavery and nudity was also created in plastic, visual, and stage art on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 19th century. The point, I take it, is twofold. Firstly, markets in contentious commodities can be sexualized in order to continue to circulate. Spectacles which entice purchasing fervor and excitement are able to maintain market order through the appeal the entitlements of purchasers, 'everything is for sale!'. Secondly, although plantation slavery is over, Roach gives us hints of its vestiges through his hints at modern commercialism and the entertainment industry of contemporary popular culture. Our current age too is imbued with sexualized bodies and the fusion of sexualized spectacles with completely unrelated objects. Money is easily sexualized (Simmel), and markets will often be theatrical (Roach). Although markets today are diffused in space and no longer dependent on locational proximity, on could ask if not the advertisement industry assures the continued existence of the sexualized spectacle that makes things run.

-- Alexander

Liminals

2009-04-13T11:19:00.000-07:00

“Indians in Unexpected Places” first chapter had me thinking about liminal spaces and people. Native Americans have become a liminal in American society. Their representation and stereotyping, perpetuated by rumors and fear of the misunderstood, of the unknown, only worsened their situation. Deloria explores this stereotype and violence within the Wild West of the 1800’s through battles and the society of the west, including interplay between white society and Indian reservations. Indians became liminals because of whites trying to control and stabilize a mobile culture. Indians were distrusted on a reservation and off it. They became liminals because white society did not allow them to belong to their own land.

The issue of “outbreak” also became important. Rumors and stories of sudden attacks from Indians grew fear deeper into west. Sudden breakouts in fire or sickness were attributed to Indians. “As a white fear and expectation, the, outbreak offered a new understanding of violence, one poised to replace the surround and the last stand” (27). The “surround” and “last stand” were two fears about Indian culture and the stereotype of violence that was placed on them. It is interesting to note that the stereotype placed on the Indians of violence was created by the white society that wished to control the Indians, fearing violence as a repercussion of their own actions. Groupthink certainly would be an interesting study. Indian names were translated, or just fabricated, into English, perpetuating the “liminal” cycle. The Native Americans were loosing their culture to a synthetic new one of English names and violent acts, something that was not the natural case.

Indians were given the unwanted land for the unwanted people. They were gated and fenced and told to stay, then mistrusted and forced to assimilate. The fear born out of whites’ own actions forced an entire culture to be unsure of its space among their own land, their own culture and their interaction with others. This movement, though not an unheard of story, is surprising and worrying as we look to it today. When did this not become a major issue? When will it be revisited? Will Native Americans cease to become liminal, if not to themselves, then to the American society?

Jennie Z

Reminders

2009-04-13T10:30:00.000-07:00

Here in the United States we are in a unique position. Like most people, we have homes and family and places which we call our own. We feel a sense of propriety over that cactus in our backyard, or the view from the window of the house in which we grew up. You know, the one that overlooks the bay. But, the fact is that North America is a continent largely built upon stolen land.

Native American literature and studies emphasize the marginalization and mistreatment of Indians, the senseless acts of violence, and the basic murder of entire cultures. Philip J. Deloria's book, Indians in Unexpected Places, does an excellent job of contextualizing the plight of the modern (and historical) Indian. While I was reading, the whole time I was reminded of how wholly unaffected my life has been by the cultures that first inhabited this land.

What I mean is that it's not something I, or most people, think about on a daily basis (although it should be). We, as white people (and if you're not white, then I apologize for including you), don't want to think about the fact that the place we call home is not supposed to be ours. Our national psyche is built on the notion of manifest destiny, and we as Americans have taken this land to be ours in every way that it is possible to do so. I think that many of the struggles that Deloria talks about in his book stem from this conflict. Non-native peoples have taken control of a land with a history that we just don't want to be reminded of. We don't want to be reminded that we are thieves. We don't want to be reminded of bloodshed and hardship. We don't want to be reminded that we aren't the center of the universe.

So, the way I see it is that Native people aren't suffering because of malicious intent (for the most part). Native people are suffering because the majority of people who live in this country just don't want that guilt resting on their shoulders in their everyday lives. They don't want to think about it, and every time an Indian shows up in an "unexpected place," they are a reminder of the sins of our ancestors, and a time that most people would like to pretend never even happened.

-Ashley

Expectations

2009-04-13T10:09:00.000-07:00

As I read Philip Deloria’s account of representation and expectation I found myself thinking back on the novels that we have read and how my own expectations create a lens for my interpretations of the readings and other’s cultures. Deloria points out in his introduction that we are told constantly in our lives what our expectations should be due to our “global mass-mediated culture” (6). I had not thought of the term “expectations” in quite the way that Deloria hopes that we will interpret it in relation to power and domination, but it made a lot of sense to me. When I was reading Kathleen Stewart’s book, my expectations about the people from the Appalachian area differed from the ones I had about Native Americans; perhaps because I am completely unfamiliar with the Appalachian region, I have allowed stories and films to dictate my knowledge of this area and create stereotypes. Growing up in the Southwest, I have had more exposure and opportunity to gain knowledge about Native Americans and this culture does not seem as foreign to me. It is interesting to note which stories, symbols, and truths become dominate and which fade into the background, depending on one’s own exposure and lens; today much of this can be attributed to technology, especially computers and films.
Deloria points out regarding live performances versus films “It's technologies of mass production reaching audiences differently and engaging them for a different set of expectations. They were key to the shifting of Indian violence from 19th-century possibility to 20th-century titillation and metaphor” (55). Recently, I researched and wrote a paper on Shakespeare's Henry V and the differences between an original practices production in a theater and to different film versions. The two films vary greatly in their depiction of war due to the historical context that they were filmed in. Laurence Olivier's film from 1944 was a wartime propaganda film which highlighted England's shining and convincing victory over the French; this was important because at this time the English people desired/expected victory in their own lives over the Germans. In Branagh’s 1989 version, he depicts war as horrific, dark, and agonizing for everyone; the battle scene is full of special effects, which filmgoers have come to expect. In regards to the expectations about Native Americans, Deloria states: “The relatively sympathetic films of the early decades gave way to genre-defining representations of war-whooping Indian savagery that lasted for most of the rest of the century” (105). Because films reached such large audiences and because they can readily create realistic scenarios, they are used to help create people's expectations. People who have not had any exposure or historical context to Native Americans, except in films which portray them as violent, believe that this is truly how these people are and to see them through any other lens is not only unbelievable but humorous. As we become farther removed from this period in history, it is easy to forget or consider the authenticity behind what we expect to be representative of another’s culture. Regarding the various fragments of culture which become a part of people's everyday lives Deloria confirms, “It is far from harmless. It sets and reinforces expectations. Those expectations occur in little fragments and in sweeping narratives throughout American and, indeed, global culture” (225). It is increasingly difficult to work through all of the media-generated depictions of which symbols are authentic and represent a culture in a truthful manner. Deloria reminds us to think of the history behind how a group, place or culture came to be and the importance of learning about that historical context before making assumptions or having expectations. As time moves forward and our histories become longer, we have to question if it will become easier or more difficult for future generations to record and to remember cultures within their historical frameworks. For example, in education today, in many courses, a professor chooses what time frame to cover in a particular class; however, while one may find that it is necessary to teach what has happened previously, one may gloss over much of the historical accuracies in order to focus on current literature, events, etc. Due to the capabilities of technology, we may assume that it will be easier to document and maintain historical accuracy, but we have to acknowledge that the authenticity especially of marginalized groups may become lost in the gaps of globalization. Kristin

Identity, Authenticity, Ideology in INDIANS in unexpected places

2009-04-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

I found this book very compelling, so much so that I had a difficult time figuring out what to write about. One of the most interesting pieces to me was the section on representation. I was particularly interested in the idea that Indians were made to be “authentic” Indians, ignoring the passing of time and changes to their culture with modernity, so as to fulfill white citizens expectations of what Indians are.

Throughout the discussion of Indians in film, I kept thinking of the Sherman Alexie film “I Hated Tonto (Still Do)” that I have taught in my composition courses. In the essay, Alexie explores, in relation to his own exposure to Indians and film and his upbringing as a Spokane Indian, the “handsome, blue-eyed warrior” in film. He discusses white actors playing Indian roles and says of Tonto: “I was just one little Indian boy who hated Tonto because Tonto was the only cinematic Indian who looked like me.”

We don’t get that bit until the end though, and I was amazed that some of my students did not pick up on the irony in this piece. They said Alexie was being racist or that he didn’t want to be Tonto “just because.” In fact, Alexie offers in his personal reflection a similar argument to that presented in Deloria’s book. The representations are inadequate, inaccurate, and shallow. Films misrepresent, misinterpret and misunderstand Indian culture. And yet, he came to identify with the representation of an “authentic” Indian, embodied by a white actor, in such a way that he was ashamed by his own “inauthenticity.” Alexie writes:

“I watched the movies and saw the kind of Indian I was supposed to be.
A cinematic Indian is supposed to climb mountains.
I am afraid of heights.
A cinematic Indian is supposed to wade into streams and sing songs.
I don’t know how to swim.
A cinematic Indian is supposed to be a warrior.
I haven’t been in a fistfight since the sixth grade and she beat the crap out of me.
I mean, I knew I could never be as brave, as strong, as wise, as visionary, as white as the Indians in the movies.”

One of the most interesting discussions of representation that Deloria offers was the Columbian Exposition and the Cody shows that took place there. The shows and their success relied on the “authenticity” of the Indians and really, the authenticity of the Indians reenacting what their ancestors experienced. Still, it was presented not as an act but as truth. By having the Indians stay in tent communities that were open to spectators all day, they were a living exhibit. He writes, “in the smothering omnipresence of a white racial gaze, show Indians were, in fact, always performing Indianness, whether they wanted to or not, twenty-four hours a day.” However, they were performing Indianness as expected by white spectators even when their Indianness was changing.

I liked the account when an English soldier addressed an Indian in what he thought would be his language: “How! Heavy wet.” Rocky Bear responded in a British accent saying “Yes, it’s rather nawsty, me boy.” In doing so, Rocky Bear thwarted expectations that Indians were suspended in the past. He had spent eighteen months in Europe and had been exposed to experiences in different culture communities. Even if people wanted to treat Indians as if they were anachronistic beings, representations of static figures from the past, that was not the reality of the situation. Even as they “performed” Indian, they were participating in the changes and technological advancements of the national and global community.

I think the most valuable commentary of the book is that history informs stereotypes and stereotypes inform the way history plays out. I also think he shows how ideologies affect the way we perceive truth. He writes, “Ideologies offer both truthful pictures of the world as it exists and falsely prescriptive understandings of the world as it might (or should) be….Ideologies, in other words, are not, in fact, true, but, as things that structure real belief and action in the world, they might as well be. Ideology is not simply an idea reproduced by individuals in and through systems of representation. Rather, it is lived experience, something we see and perform on a daily basis.” In living our ideologies, how much are we willing to shape what we witness to fit into our own perceptions of who people are and how they live? In the case of representation of Indians in films and exhibitions, it seems the effort was made to make that shaping as easy as possible. Viewers did not even have to think about their perceptions but only watch them be confirmed.

~Lisa

p.s.
I also thought about these issues when attending a Yacqui “Gloria” ceremony this past Saturday. How much did the ceremony, the dress, the ritual go along with my conceptions of who Native Americans are and what their rituals are like? I’m still trying to digest this experience, but I thought it was interesting that I had brought this book along to get reading done in the meantime.

Everyday receipts

2009-04-13T08:43:00.000-07:00

I grew up in western Colorado. In school, I learned about the indigenous tribes that resided in the area. We went on field trips to the Ute Indian Museum and Mesa Verde. I heard their language in the names of lakes and rivers without knowing it. To me, Indians lived in the past. I knew that Indians lived on reservations around the U.S., but I had never seen them in everyday places. When I moved to Arizona, I went to Eastern Arizona College which is about 45 minutes from Bylas on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. Safford was the closest town for shopping, and I saw Apaches at Walmart and Thriftee and Dairy Queen. Once I noticed on the bottom of a receipt from Thriftee the phrases “Thank you. Gracias. Ah Iyi Ee.” I asked a friend what “Ah Iyi Ee” meant, Thank you in Apache. I should have known. Deloria is right when he says that we only imagine Indians in the locations Hollywood or the media place them. The media doesn’t put them in everyday places like getting ice cream with their kids or in a grocery store shopping.
-Colleen Murphy

Listening to what you can't see.

2009-04-12T21:58:00.000-07:00

Andy DuMont
4.13.09

I wrote this post in two segments. One, as I was reading the introduction on Saturday morning, the second as I finish the book Sunday night – I’ve labeled the two different entries.

Saturday Morning.

Two weeks ago in Professor Gallego’s class on Western theories of subjectivity we were discussing Luce Irigaray’s book That Sex Which is Not One. During the course of the conversation, we came to the question of what she was attempting to accomplish by writing the book. As a feminist scholar, her work deconstructs or points out the constructed nature of linguistic and cultural systems as patriarchal. Several people offered ideas about her aim, most centering around the idea of deconstructing this patriarchal linguistic system in order to then re-create the symbolic order in a way that was not patriarchal. However, this reading of the book, we discovered, missed much of her point – this being that such a recreation would result in the same structural problems, but with only the possibility of a different ordering content (instead of men as patriarchs, we could have matriarchal systems, but they replicate the same problem with different tools). As these non-solutions were being offered, Professor Gallego interjected and told us that we were still “thinking like men” (the class being comprised of about 90% men). The impossible key, he implied (I think), was to think like women. Impossible not because we were men and therefore couldn’t think like women, but because we can’t not think in terms of symbolic structures, which are by necessity already patriarchal (or whatever structural analog comes to do the same task of creating order). The point I want to take away that might be useful for our class, is that it is possible for a person to think in a way that is not totally defined by their identity (recognizing that this is a kind of deconstructive non-thought), “like men” in our case in that conversation, or in expected ways, to follow Deloria’s metaphor about Indian identity in the U.S. He writes in the introduction to his book that his aim of pointing out the relationship between expectation and difference or stereotype is

not to argue the familiar cliché about the winners writing the history. Rather, it is to ask us to consider the kinds of frames that have been placed around a shared past. It is not simply to assert that ideology and domination have made certain histories unable to be spoken. Instead, it is to ask how we came to certain kinds of tellings and not others. (7)

This assertion is not asking us to make space for othered people and groups to speak, but instead to listen, as they are likely already saying something we cannot (or choose not to) hear. (The “we” here is the dominant center, necessarily undefined in itself, but defining for that which exists around it; we can fill it with who or whatever does not think about their/its own identity because it appears transparent). In other words, he’s asking us not to think in expecting ways, but to listen to the tellings that are usually, systematically, ignored. I haven’t read the rest of the book yet, but I’m willing to bet (expect, perhaps) that this aim will not reconstruct another system of expectation, but rather, will describe or ask for a critical practice of not coming to rest in expectations or systematic understandings. To go back to my story about Irigaray, this conception would parallel that aim of not inscribing another symbolic order, since it will operate by ordering logic, even if women are in power. (Women in power are not really women, she argues, but are symbolically men). The problem, as I indicated before, is that this goal is impossible. This, I think, is the same thing that Deloria suggests in this introduction – it is impossible to exist and think without expectations, but we can continually question those expectations as a means of lessening their impact on our shared existence, or everyday life. If we take this as a means of confronting, or living through the everyday, I think it offers a useful or interesting perspective. The everyday as an object (the “thing itself” to use Kantian terminology), is impossible to perceive or understand. This does not mean it is not real, but simply that its totality is beyond our comprehension. Our systems of knowledge, our symbolic networks capture a part of it, but cannot encompass it. Geertz told us a few weeks ago that we can tell someone something about something (to paraphrase badly). It seems like we have a similar conclusion here (though, as I tell my students constantly, not a tidy resolution); that we can know something about the everyday, but we cannot know all of it because our expectations, while necessary for symbolic order, limit our knowledge. Deloria’s aim seems to be to expand this limit, or challenge us to realize its constructed nature.

Sunday Night:

After reading the rest of the book, Deloria appears to work in a way that supports my reading of the introduction. The chapter on representation, for example, gets at some interesting ways of thinking about this problem of expectation. Describing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, for instance, tells us that the Indian’s camp, ostensibly backstage, was incorporated into the show through timely curtain raises and its use as an entry portal for audience members to the arena. A few pages later he writes that this and other techniques meant that “in the smothering omnipresence of a white racial gaze, show Indians were, in fact, always performing Indianness, whether they wanted to or not, twenty-four hours a day” (67). This forced performance might seem to only be exploitive use of Indians to fulfill audience expectations for Indian Identity. However, as Deloria shows in other parts of the chapter, the show, and later film industry, were also spaces that performers were able cultivate other forms of representation as well as their own relationships with modernity. This participation was not only a challenge or resistance to the space of white modernity then; it was also an appropriation of the expectations of white Americans to meet other ends.
Yet, Deloria notes in the conclusion that “many of these pioneering efforts in cultural politics failed, even on their own terms,” which might lead us to think that the (mis)use of representational space was an empty gesture. However, he goes on to say that these failures “were not simply the product of Indian failure. That is, they cannot be seen simply in the economic terms of competition—as an inability to offer Indian selves and products capable of succeeding in a marketplace of culture and consumption” (233). He argues that they were also products of the transition from one cultural economy to another in the dominant society. I would add that it also indicates a failure on the part of white, or European-Americans to listen or see the alternative representations that were presented to them by these producers of culture. This willful inability to recognize another form of representation might be inescapable; as I noted before, symbolic systems always have limitations but are (apparently) necessary, and we can only interpret what we see or hear through symbols. In other words, we accidentally miss something of what life presents to us, and do it on purpose. Returning to the woman who sat in the salon chair in the introduction, Deloria tells us that

we will probably never know, of course, what Red Cloud Woman thought she was up to—her personal history of modernity will remain a secret history. But we owe her the courtesy of taking her seriously as a shaper of images, a member of a cohort, a participant in a politics of race and gender representation, an Indian person acting with intent and intelligence in one of many unexpected places. (240)

Thus, we have a double removal from the representational act: Red Cloud Woman thinks she’s up to something, but may not know its final effect, and we can’t know what her intent is in the first place. The point, to be repetitive, seems to be that we should recognize this limitation and then listen as carefully as possible to what is said, but also to how we’re responding, and what this tells us.

A Piece of the Indian Pie

2009-04-12T21:23:00.000-07:00

"A Piece of the Indian Pie"
Reflections on Indians in Unexpected Places

Philip J. Deloria’s book was enlightening, informative, a pleasure to read, and filled with new insights and perspectives about athenticity and self-determination. I don’t recall reading a more thorough assessment of how Native Americans have contributed to the fabric of their culture and worked resiliently to function within the constraints imposed on them by white culture and expectations. I am particularly interested in the topic of Native American identity, authenticity, and cultural appropriation since I wrote my thesis on Native American art and the authenticity controversy as it relates to fine art and the Indian Arts and Crafts Act. I had many first-hand accounts of white artists “pretending” to be Indian out of a romanticized longing for cultural meaning and out of pure greed to get on the multi-cultural bandwagon that was a lucrative obsession for many in the arts during the 1970s. What I discovered is that for the most part, Native American artists who were within the museum circuit tolerated what they called “wannabes,” with expectations that “karma” would get them in the end for fear that more regulations would only further hinder their artistic goals, while the Native American craftsperson trying to eek out a living at the various Indian markets could only grumble about the unfairness of it all, unable to do anything about it.

It took a few brave, fed up artists to try to get the government to do something about it—to force them to use the very law that was originally enacted to protect the white consumer (from getting Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican-made items passed off as Indian-made which affected the value and authenticity of their collections) to protect the Indian artist from unscrupulous white artists who invented a family history or hid behind stories that they couldn’t prove their Indianness because their familys refused to submit to the census takers who tried to force a number on them. It’s one thing to have the Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican artists pretend to be Indian to make money off their artistic heritage, but it’s quite another to have white people in their own back yard pretend to be Indian—taking yet another “piece of the Indian pie,” to quote David Bradley, an Ojibwe artist who was responsible for pressuring the government to act.

It’s quite a controversial topic, and I see the racism inherent in census numbers and blood percentages, etc., but I also see the struggle that Native Americans endure to keep their art, their religion, and their culture alive without becoming a source of entertainment or spiritual/cultural tourism. As multi-culturalism slowly became replaced by globalism in the visual arts (and the art market), many of those “pseudo Indians” disappeared from the scene (and stopped selling themselves as Indians), but maybe the threat of that law also had something to do with it. Deloria mentions Jimmie Durham as a “Native” artist who “aligns himself with Indian drivers, seeing a social and political engagement beneath the white expectations of Indian backwardness,” but from my research, he is one of the artists who has no proof that he is indeed an Indian, yet has become internationally famous for his dialectic art that critiques white-imposed stereotypes, so I guess Durham’s adversarial role against white culture and their tendency to stereotype and assertions of Indianness suffices for authenticity for many.

On another note, I for one don’t feel comfortable going to an Indian dance at the pueblos any more, not because I don’t find them beautiful and fascinating, but because I’m ashamed at how many of the tourists/white audiences behave—trying to climb into the kivas when warned they are off limits and taking pictures when they have been told it is forbidden. They act like these dances are staged events for their edification, not guests who should be respectful and thankful to be allowed to witness such private events (of course how many times have any of us as travelers also witnessed Americans and Europeans alike being disrespectful of their own cultures by snapping away pictures inside a historic church or cathedral during a service as if it is a stop at Disneyland, oblivious to the worshippers who use the church for real religious practice?). Would we really tolerate it if large groups of people in shorts and t-shirts came into our churches, talked loudly and snapped pictures of us singing and worshipping? We still seem to think that everything Indian is here for our entertainment when in actuality it is them thriving in the everyday of their lives in spite of our voyeurism.

That said, I found it truly enlightening when Deloria revealed how many Native Americans went along with the Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West shows in order to get something out of it for themselves—whether it was seeing the world or receiving an education or the pay it provided for their families. How they had to play the role of savage to assuage a paying audience hungry to reinforce the stereotypes they had been fed through pulp fiction and their own ignorance. It baffles me that Americans perpetuate the idea of the Indian as spectacle even today, but it doesn’t help when films are still struggling with how to present their histories, tourist shops still sell rubber tomahawks, and galleries and museums prefer to exhibit Native American art that replicates old traditions instead of championing the new artistic strides being made by Native American artists. In the 1980s I saw how the artists who dressed up as Indians seemed to get more attention (and sales) for being Indian artists. I can see how easy it was for so many non-Indians to get away with their charades—they gave the collector (audience) what they expected—a beaded, contemplative, nostalgic image of a Hollywood Indian. We (impressionable young gallery workers and wealthy white collectors alike) ate it up when artist Fritz Scholder (who, by the way, just had a large retrospective at the Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian) came to Marshall Way in Scottsdale in his gleaming Rolls Royce in the 1980s; and I recall with particular infatuation when Charles Loloma (noted Hopi jeweler) offered me a ride in his Rolls Royce in the late 1970s—part of a long line of Indians in unexpected places—their cars reinforced the exotic personas they constructed to build the myth that was expected of them, but by playing the role, they got what they wanted from their audiences. They didn’t need to dress up as stereotypical Indians, but they did use props nevertheless to capture the attention of those needing a good story to back up their purchases (or maybe they both just loved Rolls Royce's and they had the money to buy them?).

Just last month I juried the painting and photography division of the Heard Museum’s Indian Market. While I know there to be many wonderful examples of contemporary painting and photography by Native American artists throughout the US and Canada, they were certainly not present in this selection—instead it was weak reinforcements of traditional art forms, many of which were instilled in Indian artists by white teachers from decades ago and perpetuated by white jurors who don’t seem to want Indian artists to develop artistically. To them, authentic Indian art is conceptually created in a vacuum, and preferably on the reservation so the romantic notion of the Indian can continue. Interestingly, the other white juror only wanted to select the works that most reinforced the stereotypes of Indian culture, while the Native American juror, who was also part of the process, found the more abstract works of more interest. Together we were able to out-vote the juror who was intent upon keeping the art “status quo.” The problem lies in that Native American artists for the most part are now being taught in universities and art schools like everyone else, except for the rare few who are taught by their extended artisan families. If after all their mainstream training, their art cannot be considered authentic unless it “looks Indian” simply reinforces the same stereotypes that Deloria mentions in regards to sports and music. Indian artists have the right to simply put their work out there as individuals and not have it overtly tied to their culture, spirituality, or heritage unless they want it to be. However, in art history and the art market, the artist’s biography is integral to the whole package—the artist as celebrity, Indian or not. I suppose that the best correlation to the dilemma of “authentic” Indian art in the Deloria book is the chapter on music and the musicologists and musicians who struggled to find common ground between authentic Indian music and Western ideals of meter, rhythm, and melody. It’s a difficult line to walk—when does Indian innovation get perceived as assimilation and how pure does something have to be in order to be acceptable to every audience? The main thing is honesty and transparency about the roots of the creative product and not to sell something as pure when it is a hybrid of influences and sources. Indian art has been subject to hybridity and influence for centuries as various tribes borrowed stylistically from one another. It seems to me that Indian artists have every bit as much right to borrow and become influenced by everything around them without fear of being labeled as "inauthentic."

In today’s New York Times there is an article “Seeing History through Indian’s Eyes” in which filmmaker Ric Burns is teaming up with Chris Eyre, an American Indian director who directed “Smoke Signals,” adaptations of Tony Hillerman’s “Skinwalkers” and other film projects, to direct “Tecumseh’s Vision” for PBS history series “We Shall Remain.” Eyre was initially reluctant to work on the project because the feature film scripts he receives are generally “guilt ridden, and at the end the Indians lose.” One of the biggest problems the two directors face is the idea of the re-enactments and re-creations, something we read about in Deloria’s accounts of Indians traveling in the U. S. and abroad re-enacting battles in which they ultimately lost. Trying to find a sense of authenticity, honesty, and integrity for both parties is the ultimate challenge. That is one film I plan to see, because I think as a team they can achieve it as best as anyone can, given that the past is long over and everyone’s interpretations are subject to variations of the truth.
-Julie Sasse

The Problematic of Alice Fletcher's "patriotism" and Fillmore's "universal harmonic commensurability"

2009-04-12T21:09:00.000-07:00

In the chapter from Deloria's book titled "The Hills are Alive . . . With the Sound of Indian" appears the following notation about Alice Fletcher:

Alice Fletcher clearly had aims beyond the ethnographic salvage of Indian music. As a young woman, she had expressed an early desire for the creation of a particularly American form of music. Taken with the decidedly avian sounds of nature produced by the flutist Sidney Lanier, she wrote in 1873: "Your flute gave me that for which I had ceased to hope, true American music, and awakened in my heart a feeling of patriotism that I never knew before" (195).

This passage nudged at my consciousness when I first read it, and I found myself returning to it multiple times, mulling over possible reasons for its impact on me. I believe the reason for its insistent tug on my thoughts has to do with a notion that actually appears shortly after this passage above, when Deloria explores the ideas of John Comfort Fillmore and his assertion that there is a universal natural harmony. In her declaration of patriotism relative to identifying "true American music," Fletcher seems to be invoking a sense of universalism herself, one that argues for a musical harmony that is discrete--"American"--yet is functionally representative of "all" America, all Americans, America itself. That this is a bit of an idealized stretch goes without saying, and it perhaps isn't particularly productive to nit-pick Fletcher's moment of patriotic epiphany.

However, this accretion of a universalized Americanness becomes more problematic when seen through the lens of the Fillmore material. Deloria notes that Fillmore invokes a sense of "universal harmonic commensurability"(203), although there is no indication in the essay whether Fillmore literally invokes the term "commensurability" or if the word instead is a reflection of Deloria's sense of Fillmore's concepts. Either way, it's a powerful word when applied to any diasporic or displaced population. In the contemporary era, the terms “paradigm” and “incommensurability” most often refer to the theories put forth by Thomas Kuhn in 1962. Although Kuhn went on to postulate a number of other theories (primarily within the fields of philosophy of science and history of science), the original theories set forth in his landmark publication, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, are most relevant to Deloria’s chapter. In the essay, Kuhn theorizes that normal science is “dependent upon some set of received beliefs, a paradigm, which marks out what the acceptable research problems are and what acceptable solutions to these problem (sic) must look like” (Andersen 20). Kuhn adds to this the idea that “some of the scientific problems defined by a paradigm may turn out to be unsolvable within the framework of the paradigm, that is, turn into anomalies” (Andersen 20). When anomalies are separated from the “normal” within a paradigm, this creates a crisis that only a revolution in accepted paradigm can fully resolve. Kuhn referred to this point of conflict between competing belief systems or sets as “incommensurability.” According to Kuhn, the problem with incommensurate paradigms is that they are not so much incomparable as they are incompatible (Hung 63). To put this into context for our discussion, consider this: A belief that the earth is round is completely different from a belief in a flat world. The two beliefs are comparable, in that they both address the essential questions of “What is the Earth? What is its shape?” However, there are no reasonable points of compatibility between the two viewpoints, as each must disprove and obliterate the other in order to be accepted as the norm, or the “correct” viewpoint—that is, the current paradigm (Hung 63). (On a side note, my paper for this semester will explore anomalies in the sense of incommensurability and paradigm structures of culture--stay tuned!)

Using these concepts of competing paradigms and the problems raised by incompatible, opposing norms, it is possible to understand why Fillmore and Fletcher ultimately encountered many unresolveable problems in defining (and thereby limiting, particularly in a Western-centric sense) Indian musical forms. Fillmore’s position rests on the assumption that there are identifiable points of commensurability—that is, universalities. If this position were provable, then his points would perhaps stand on firmer ground. However, in the process of asserting universality, Fillmore fails to account for points of error or contention; or, to put it into Kuhnian terms, he fails to recognize that such “universal” paradigms are not “natural”; rather, they are constructs that depend upon the agreement of all interested parties in their continuance. The moment that a point of contention develops, there arises the very real potential for incommensurability, in the short term, and outright paradigm shift, in the long term. For these reasons, I find Fillmore’s work interesting and thought-provoking, but also inherently flawed.

Which brings me back to Fletcher’s notions of “patriotism” and “true American music.” As with Fillmore, I find her position to be interesting and not unlikeable (after all, I can very much appreciate the power of the flute to change the world around us, as happens every time I listen to James Galway’s The Enchanted Forest). However, as with Fillmore, Fletcher does not seem aware that her position, at least as she framed it in that moment in time, rests on the assumption that there is “a” true American music that one can clearly identify, and that there is “an” America that provokes patriotism. The problem with each of these things is similar to the problems laid out in the paragraph above—commensurability implies universal acceptance, a thing which all human cultures (and all human beings, I would argue) seem to dispute on a regular basis. As for me, I’m a paradigm shift kinda girl. My sort of universal is that which is universally changeable and transformative—viva la universal difference!

Connie

2009-04-12T21:06:00.000-07:00

While relating topics in our weekly readings to my own experiences is something I try to do somewhat sparingly, I was drawn to Deloria's chapter on "Technology" that focused on the history of Native Americans and the automobile. Deloria connects cars to "a driver's sense of self and of the nature of his or her power" (138). While the freedom of moving from place to place without relying on other people could definitely be connected to power, this immediately reminded me of our class discussion about real estate and a sense of identity as an individual with status in America. Deloria does an excellent job of connecting this "symbolic system" to that of the Native American culture that is his topic, and I admire his style of writing a lot. However, I did feel that some of the symbols he invoked could be examined more in terms of current events.

While I agree that automobiles have in the past been The Symbol of progress for the American family, Deloria published in 2004 and the crisis for fuel was well under way. Automobiles also became symbols of excessive consumption, making them a problematic issue for citizens everywhere. Transportation in general is a hot topic, and while I have been questioned extensively about my choice to own a bicycle rather than a car, I feel that I have been complimented more frequently in recent years than looked down on as a lesser citizen. In connecting to the progress of automobile technology, Native American culture has also connected to that subtle shifting of values that has taken place recently. I would be interested to hear reactions to that shift.
-Caitlin

Representation as Intercession

2009-04-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

On Thursday I heard Dr. Vivyan Adair give a talk called "The Missing Story of Ourselves: Women, Poverty and the Politics of Feminist Representation." Dr. Adair opened her presentation by sharing a piece of her own story: waking up in a shelter still wearing blood-stained clothing from her husband's most recent assault and being addressed with "disdain" and "uneasy pity" as she visited the Welfare office with her eight-month-old daughter. Several of her teeth had been knocked out in the assault and she was told that replacing them was not "medically necessary for someone feeding at the public trough." Adair discussed the ways in which poor, single mothers' bodies and actions are read according to already existing tropes, stereotypes and ideologies. Her project, as she explained it, is to "intercede at the level of representation" by telling unexpected stories about women who are, or have been, living with Welfare assistance. In a photo-narrative exhibit on display this month at the downtown branch of the public library, Adair has gathered the stories of Welfare moms who defy the expectations of poor, single mothers so commonly portrayed in our national discourse and culture.

Deloria's project also centers around the inseparability of the representational and political. He asks us to "consider the kinds of frames that have been placed around a shared past" (6). I found the chapter on musical representation especially interesting. First of all, the very notion of "salvage ethnology" binds indigenous music within a strict fence of anachronism. As we saw in earlier readings, many early 20th century folkloric impulses were framed and executed within narratives of progress and nostalgia--to embrace, understand and believe our modernity we had to get in touch with where we come from. But viewing Native American music in particular as a dying art in need of salvage retold the story of vanishing and disappearance already so entrenched in white national narratives, and tied up with assumptions of pacification. Even efforts to understand and communicate Omaha songs and scales, for example, were thwarted by the paradoxes of representation: Indianizing vs. authenticity, universalism vs. (hierarchical) difference and developmentalism, "truly American" vs. exotic, and the reinforcement vs. questioning of racist stereotypes.

I'm intrigued by Deloria's attention to a specific and provocative window of time, and appreciate how he continually reminds us of the temporal relationships between, for example, the performance of the opera Shanewis and Plenty Horses arriving at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In fact, because the Columbian Exposition is such a touchstone moment in Deloria's book, it made me wonder about contemporary examples of collective, national representation. What stories are we telling about ourselves as a nation right now, and what is the forum for the transmission of those stories? Do we have a forum like an expo that is self-consciously representational (as opposed to political)--a national forum where we gather to show who we are? I remember Expo 88 from my childhood (I didn't go, but I remember hearing about it), but that was in Australia. Has the postmodern sense that there's no way to tell the real story--that in fact everything is created and fractured--rendered World's Fair type expositions obsolete? Just curious ...

- Esme

Cars and Driving Backwards (Cultural Notes)

2009-04-12T16:33:00.000-07:00

In my 101 class last year, I showed the movie "Smoke Signals" based off of Sherman Alexie's novel, Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fist Fight in Heaven. Alexie wrote the screenplay for the movie and helped with some directorial decisions. I had always wondered about that car. Cars, actually, play quite a key role in the film: Deloria mentions the reservation car driving backwards, but perhaps a more significant vehicle is that of the Victor's father. I thought it interesting, then, that Deloria makes reference to this idea of progress and pacification in terms of technology (albeit, Deloria goes on to point out the two different rhetorical narratives given to explain the juxtaposition between Indians and cars). Victor's father's truck serves as a type of metaphorical progress, seen darkly through the Victor's childhood eyes: it is progress (the truck) that takes his father away from him; progress that makes possible the divorce between his father and mother; progress that, arguably, was rooted in his father's feelings of shame and alcohol abuse. Conversations between Victor and his father take place within that vehicle--conversations about becoming a man, growing into a forgotten culture and learning to never trust the white man. These conversations, call them rites of passage or individual progression, ring distantly similar to those coming of age stories touched upon earlier in Deloria's historical narrative: the sons of Two Sticks entering the house and, leaving with four men dead. Some sides arguably make the point that such an act could be considered the young men's rite of passage, in a similar sense as was Plenty Horses' killing of Casey. However, one thing I continued to come back to while reading these chapters was Deloria's exploration of the actions taking place within a contained area. That is, one of the most important visuals I had while reading was this idea of the fence, the border and the surrounded territory--a notion with which, before these historical events, Indians were unfamiliar.

I remember after showing the Alexie film in my class one of my students, from a South Dakota tribe, speaking up and saying in response to the scene of driving backward, "It's because the carburetor's dead. You see that all the time on the reservation." I think that remark was burned into my mind along with that image of the fence--my own juxtaposition of Indian expectation. The expectation that progress is a busted carburetor. A backwards glance. A story told to "barter" for a ride to the border of the reservation--a self-contained space that did not exist before the times of self-proclaimed "white progress."

The implications of this book are haunting. I'm so glad we read this following Stewart the week before. I feel that my response to Stewart's work in Appalachia was greatly influenced by what my perceived expectations of that culture were. Deloria gave me some framework in which I was able to look back, humbled by my own uninformed sense of ideology and discourse, and read that text with new eyes.

--Julie Lauterbach-Colby

Haoles, Gussiks, and Gringos

2009-04-11T13:48:00.001-07:00

Jay Caldwell

10 April 2009

[Kudos for Indians in Unexpected Places. I love the subject. I am envious of Deloria’s writing style—a kind of combination of reporting, research, memoir, and analysis. I am fully on board with his thesis that in order to understand the genesis and impact of stereotypes you have to understand the history/genesis of those representations and the agenda of those presenting them. ]

During this past week one of my favorite academic journals arrived in my post box: The Journal of Sport History and serendipitously this Summer, 2008, issue (yes, that is the most current and our library carries it: GV561.J6 @3C) is a themed forum on “Indigenous Sport.” Great stuff, and it dovetails perfectly with Deloria’s chapter, “Athletics.” One selection in this JSH, by Courtney W. Mason, titled “The Construction of Banff as a ‘Natural’ Environment: Sporting Festivals, Tourism, and Representations of Aboriginal Peoples,” is also relevant to Deloria’s chapter “Representation.” In this paper Mason details how the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Canadian government, and several local entrepreneurs envisioned, then developed the eastern slope of the Rockies as a tourist Mecca, originally for the elite European and eastern U.S. traveler, then, once a “carriage road” was blazed in 1914, for the middle class. Banff’s most promising selling point was its “naturalness,” a term which connoted not just untrammeled pristine beauty (meaning the absence of visible evidence of “productive sites of labor and subsistence land use practices” [223]: no mining, timbering, or farming), but also the presence of (pacified) Indians, or Aboriginal peoples, as the Canadians say. But not just any Indians would do, they would have to exhibit “pre-colonial” Indian-ness. This paper describes, in detail, exactly how this all came to pass.

From here Mason undertakes to demonstrate the “problematics” of this tourist-“nature”-Indian interface. She offers several insightful observations about the forces in play:

· “cultural festivals organized by dominant agents or institutions that control some aspects of cultural representations may share a performance discourse that often stands in contrast or opposition to the ways communities may stage themselves” (after Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 230-1).

· “…when tourist productions are consumed almost entirely by one dominant cultural group and that same group also controls some of the means of production, representations of Indigenous peoples can often reinforce racist stereotypes as they are in some ways designed to simulate consumers’ expectations of Indigenous groups and meet market demands to satisfy the tourism industry” (after Edward Bruner, 231)

· “access to space and the spaces themselves are the most powerful aspects of controlling representation of any tourism production” (after Edward Bruner, 231)

· “Homogenous labels support offensive and even racist stereotypes regarding Aboriginal peoples by glossing over the diversity of North American Indigenous languages and cultural groups.” (after Beatrice Medicine, 231)

These texts got me thinking about a variety of “tourist” experiences I have had and how the institutionally-imposed and -reinforced representations have long seemed to me hollow, but hollow based on some insider knowledge to which I was privy.

Consider the Hawaiian “spirit of aloha.” There is no need for me to delve too deeply into the picture we have of smiling, brown-skinned, maidens hula dancing and of airport leis and kisses on the cheek by these same smiling, brown-skinned, maidens. The problem I have with this is that my wife and I lived on Oahu for a year (1970-1971) while I did a pediatric internship at Kauikeolani Children’s Hospital and she taught in high school. I got to see these same once-smiling, brown-skinned, maidens at 2:00 am in the hospital emergency room where under the pressures of fatigue, darkness, perhaps some alcohol and/or weed, poverty, and fear there was no longer even a semblance of “aloha spirit” in evidence. There was anger, spite, humorlessness, shabbiness, disorderliness, and even physical rebellion directed at the hospital staff and/or at an amorphous “them,” which I took to refer to the haoles (Caucasians). Although the term “Hawaiian” is officially reserved for locals who can trace their ancestry back to people who were resident (indigenous) when the missionaries arrived in 1820, outsiders call everyone in Hawaii who seems to have some sort of Polynesian appearance (i.e. smiling, brown-skinned maidens) a Hawaiian. There is, today, a fairly vigorous pro-“Hawaiian” movement that has resulted in widespread advancement of indigenous rights, especially the rights of land use and ownership. Even Hawaii now is officially Hawai’i. Despite all this, the tourism industry still has its agenda and foremost is that it is a paradise for outsiders to visit. The unstated message is: we’ll fulfill pretty much any fantasy you desire (golf, “nature,” culture, beaches, weather), but you have to agree to three things: stay in assigned areas and don’t go wandering off, spend your money freely, then leave.

After our year in Lanikai we moved to Kotzebue, Alaska, deep in the heart of Eskimoland, or so we envisioned, where I was to be a doctor and my wife a school teacher (how about that for stereotypical white liberal paternalism). Every summer we noticed standard schoolbuses full of tourists being driven up and down our only street, barely a mile long , dropped off at the museum near the airport, then whisked away on the daily Wein jet (that had brought them in, several hours earlier[1]). I noticed that the drivers were usually young, college-aged, gussiks (Caucasians), so one day during the last of our thirty-months in Kotzebue we booked a tour. The driver didn’t know us and we didn’t know her. My God, what she told people: historical misstatements, cultural faux pas, some general outright silliness, and jokes that were not funny, and subtly cruel. We were finally dumped off at the museum, which had grown and modernized in our time there, to watch a troupe of Eskimo entertainers (carefully constructed of at least one very old, but spry elder, an old nana or two, several adorable children aging all the way down to pre-schoolers, a precocious young adolescent or two, several virile and athletic young men, and, of course several knockdown gorgeous smiling brown-skinned maidens) dance, joke, clown, and demonstrate some aspects of their heritage that would seem most pleasing to the mostly white audience, making sure—through costumery and chatter—that “Eskimoness” was kept at the forefront: for instance, the dance. All so phony, yet all so real, and all so very lucrative for these really impoverished people. Kotzebue was a kind of low-budget, off-Broadway Banff.

I suspect that much has already been written about the problematics of the Santa Fe Railway’s development of Indian entertainment along its route west: the “Indian Detours” promotion, the annual Indian Market in Santa Fe itself, and the arts & crafts industry at/in the Albuquerque train station, but Mason’s points certainly apply to these. But this brings me, finally, to the question of mariachi bands.

I was born and raised and now again live in Tucson where mariachis have always seemed part of the entertainment complex. While Indian dances and “ceremonies” rarely work their way into the fabric of the Tucson cultural scene (as they do in Hawaii and Kotzebue)—you have to go out to the rez to experience them—the Mexican(-American/Hispanic) tradition of mariachi music seems to be omnipresent. Not being an expert on the lore of the mariachi, I only assume it is some kind of “authentic” representation of Mexican musical heritage. That may not be true. Its authenticity be a shibboleth. It may bear only a faint resemblance to its origins and meaning. In fact, it may have been so co-opted by Anglos that it has become a joke. There are, I have learned, international mariachi festivals in which bands win prizes for being the best in one or another sub-category of the mariachi genre (all girl, all kids, and I suspect even all Irish, all left-handed, and so on).

Recently we attended a company Christmas dinner for a business created by my late stepfather: Concrete Designs. I even worked there for a couple of college summers. My stepfather sold Concrete Designs to Oldcastle, an Irish firm, when he retired and Oldcastle had just brought in some new, youthful, management types. Either because it was a good idea (about 75% of the employees of CD are Hispanic) or because it seemed to be a good idea (after all, Oldcastle may have theorized, this was Tucson in the holiday season), a very loud mariachi troupe was hired. Through the evening they circulated throughout the banquet room at the local Indian casino, essentially squelching all conversation.

In March my wife and I went to a dinner sponsored by the Tucson Presidio Trust (tucsonpresdiotrust.org), a non-profit group whose mission it is to “guide and aid in the interpretation of the history of the Old Pueblo at the Tucson Origins Heritage Park
with special emphasis on the Spanish Colonial period” and to restore the “original” 1776 Tucson presidio, by which is really meant the original colonial habitation of Tucson. In any case, the food was themed Mexican, even to the “Mexican hot chocolate” that was served as a dessert beverage over at the Presidio San Agustín del Tucson Garrison itself where people walked around in 18^th century military uniforms (http://tucsonpresidiotrust.org/soldados.htm and http://tucsonpresidiotrust.org/costume.htm) and occasionally shot off muskets. After dinner, inexplicably, a group of Mayan dancers performed with their incense and drums, then followed, a youthful mariachi band, just recently named the outstanding youth band (or something along those lines). That essentially squelched all further conversation.

I would like to believe that mariachi music is as an integral a part of “Mexican” culture as is, well, as is, ah . . . baseball integral in “American” culture. I am being purposefully ironic here. Baseball is not quintessentially American. Ham and eggs are not quintessentially American. There is nothing we could call essentially and necessarily American because “America” simply does not exist as a unity. Likewise, “Mexican” as a totalizing term is meaningless. “Mexican” and “American” are as much homogenizing labels as is “Indian,” and are therefore, in some sense, racist. So what about mariachis? I have a sense that mariachi, as a concept and as a performance, has been so anglicized that it has become the borderzone equivalent of the Hawaiian hula dance.

Aloha, piuraa, and adios.

[1] Later, when tourism really began to blossom, Wein would put on two jets a day in the summer, offering the intrepid tourist time enough to drive out of town or get in a motorboat and zoom around Kotzebue Sound for a few minutes.

Dvorak and Natives

2009-04-09T16:13:00.000-07:00

Don't we have a musicologist in class? I vaguely remember that someone introduced himself as a student of oriental music of some sort... If that is so, I suspect that this person enjoyed Deloria's chapter on native american music. Being from a through-and-through musical family, and myself a pastime piano player, I found the discussion on the native american harmony, rhythm, and beat immensely interesting.

Deloria's description of composers' attempt to amass native tunes and to transcribe these in accordance with western notation seems to suggest that these attempts were, at least, partial failures; indian music defy the logic of sheet music. I knew Dvorak tried to assemble his impressions of the American continent in his 9th symphony, but not that native american music was supposed to be part of the piece. Maybe Deloria's point is well attested in Dvorak's attempt? Although I love the work, it does not really sound much like the little I have heard of indian music, and the scores Deloria provided in his book. As an aside: the majestic and arousing theme from the fourth movement, was quoted to the tone during the battle scenes of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Ring – not exactly a moment intended to evoke imageries of native people...

(If you haven't heard the symphony, it is worth checking out: it is, after all, something like a tonal version of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, an excited European's attempt to make sense of, and pay homage to, the New World)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmZ25MDvzNU

Deloria's intimations of feeling offended by use native american music and imagery in the final chapter seemed tenderly honest and made it easier for me to situate his book in a larger historical and political context. And I think I understand where he is coming from. Native Americans have been masters of being unexpected: "thoroughly creative in crafting an Indian life in the twentieth-century United States. And that is something that should not be expected at all" (p. 135). Whites tended to assign natives to two positions in cultural depictions: noble savages or simply savages. Their own adaption was not expected. I understand him to mean that Natives' use of Cars, their careers as actors in Wester movies, musicians, and sports signals an oppressed people's acts of resistance. Adaptation is a form of defying power, at least when the oppressed are expected to continue the life they lived before the arrival of the alien rulers. So, when rap artists and football supporters chant taken-out-of-context native songs, Deloria gets his migraine back: "a five-hundred-year-old headache, and it's called disrespect, injustice, and oppression" (p. 224).

I have made a personal experience that proves Deloria’s point. I thought I had done my homework well when I spoke with an Apache at a bar here in Tucson once. I told him that I had seen and enjoyed the 1993 film Geronimo: An American Legend. To my surprise – an astonishment that possible mirrors that Deloria attributes to Whites witnessing natives' adaptation strategies – the person told me that neither him nor others of the Indian community valued this portrayal of the Apache chief much. As we discussed it, it gradually became apparent that, yes, besides the title, the movie really was a portrayal of white generals, bounty-hunters, and scouts. The true heroes were not the Apaches, but the whites who respected Indians – in this particular film, in the cast of Jason Patrick and Gene Hackman. Besides the valuable historical details Deloria provides, his book is a great reminder that cultural chauvinism might be exercised unwillingly and unintentionally.

-- Alexander

Circling on the Side of the Road

2009-04-06T10:37:00.001-07:00

Kathleen Stewart’s book was thought-provoking and engaging to me, but when I actually sat down to consider what to write about, I found myself challenged. Maybe this is because while I enjoyed reading this book, I thought I was going to get more out of it. I thought I was going to get more of the people. What I got were segments of their stories punctuating what felt like a long meditation on the nature of creating meaning, of narrative for taking fact and producing meaning, on the process of re-membering and unforgetting.

I have read bits of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which Stewart references in the first chapter. She says she could “describe the rooms and rafters, the cracks in the walls, the damp underneath of the houses where dogs and fleas and other creatures lie, the furniture…” (p. 21) and to be honest, I wish she did. I understand what she was doing in the constant cycle of her discussing the people of the community and her own role there in deciphering their stories and imitating them. At the same time, I am less interested in her role as folklorist as I am in the stories of the people there. For me, it would be sufficient for her to set up the dynamics, her own recognition of the limitation of narrative and to move forward. When she brought up narrative and narrativity, I assumed we were going to get more of that. I wanted more. I loved the sections where we got the “side of the road” stories told by community members in their own language.

At the same time, I also feel like the way Stewart chose to write this book was in tribute to the way in which the people of the West Virginia coal towns she came to know made sense of life. Their way was not to offer a simple explanation but to offer different accounts. The truth was not derived from the literal. Rather, it was derived from the feeling they got, the relation of a singular event to their belief systems and values. Their stories take place on the “side of the road,” and where an event actually took place is of less concern than the placement of the event in the community collective conscious, in the relationship to other events that each community member has their own story about. Stewart says, “Imagine the kind of place where, when something happens, people make sense of it not by constructing an explanation of what happened, but by offering accounts of its impacts, traces, and signs” (p. 57). I believe that this is what she is attempting to do with much of her book—offer glimpses, through her own limited perspective and account, of the people she met, the stories they told, the cultural events she witnessed. I wonder if she felt, after getting to know the community well, that this was the only way to tell their story.

****

This is sort of an aside, but in the interest of differing accounts and the way our brains make connections, reading this book also called to mind the song “Side of the Road” by Lucinda Williams, one of my favorite songwriters. In the song, she and her lover sit on the side of the road, and in this space of non-being, she can contemplate what her life would be without that person. The non-space of the side of the road allows for the sort of quiet space where nothing actually changes, but the mind is free to wander and contemplate.

The Side of the Road- Lucinda Williams

“You wait in the car on the side of the road
Lemme go and stand awhile, I wanna know you're there but I wanna be alone
If only for a minute or two
I wanna see what it feels like to be without you
I wanna know the touch of my own skin
Against the sun, against the wind

I walked out in a field, the grass was high, it brushed against my legs
I just stood and looked out at the open space and a farmhouse out a ways
And I wondered about the people who lived in it
And I wondered if they were happy and content
Were there children and a man and a wife?
Did she love him and take her hair down at night?

If I stray away too far from you, don't go and try to find me
It doesn't mean I don't love you, it doesn't mean I won't come back and
stay beside you
It only means I need a little time
To follow that unbroken line
To a place where the wild things grow
To a place where I used to always go
La la la, la la la, la la la, la la la
La la la la, la la la, la la la, la la la

If only for a minute or two
I wanna see what it feels like to be without you
I wanna know the touch of my own skin
Against the sun, against the wind”

~Lisa

Where the Dust Settles, Culture Springs Up

2009-04-06T10:15:00.001-07:00

Kathleen's Stewart's A Space on the Side of the Road brought up an interesting point in her section "'Subjects' and 'Objects' in the Space of an Immanent Critique". She writes of James Agee and his insistence on describing every detail of objects in a space. She does not think this is necessary but when reflecting into my own encounter with "Other" culture, I can't help but disagree with Stewart in thinking that actually, objects hold a lot of weight.

As a writer, when I describe culture, I do it sometimes through region, through environment, food, place, and setting. I think about the "Other" culture of my mom's family who live out in rural Ohio. Entering their town I remember certain shapes of houses, the feel of driving up a dirt road, passing fields, streams, cattails and wheat. Within my family's various houses I think of the objects collected there--from one set of aunt and uncle with their "newer" modeled house, and cultureless Pottery Barn-feel to our relatives' houses who are the quintessential holders of that town's culture. Their houses are worn, lived-in with large yards and community-made products, mostly wooden furniture and baskets made by the local Amish. The Mennonites and Amish hold much sway over the little town and it is evident within the objects found in people's houses, or what is traded on a daily basis, like those woven, handmade, sturdy and beautiful baskets that the Amish sell every Saturday on the front lawn of local business and hotel chains. This is where I find the culture of this town. Not only in the way of life that seeps into every crack of that place, but also in the things that hold court there--what the community provides for itself and prides itself for. I wonder, within Arizona's culture of today, not of yesteryear, even as students of the UA--what kind of culture we hold jointly together and what objects we would say are unique to this community and to each other.

Jennie Z

The Lingo of Tiny Places

2009-04-06T10:02:00.000-07:00

My father grew up in a very small town in Texas called Cleburne. It's about twenty-five minutes outside Dallas, and it is absolutely the most miserable place I have ever visited in my life. I used to dread taking family trips to visit my grandmother, aunts, and uncles (of whom I have fourteen on my father's side) because entering Cleburne was like entering a foreign country. The rules as I knew them just didn't apply.

My father was born in 1941, three months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He was raised in Cleburne, current population 29,050, with his six brothers and sisters in a two bedroom house right next to the train tracks. His mother, my grandmother, is currently 98 years old and living alone in the same house she's lived in since she married my grandfather at 17 years of age. She has never been on an airplane and never traveled further than 50 miles from the place of her birth. All seven of her children live within 200 miles of her. Most of my paternal family lives in Texas because if they were to move anywhere else, the culture shock would probably kill them instantly.

I have never been to Appalachia, but the entire time I was reading Kathleen Stewart's A Space on the Side of the Road, I kept picturing Cleburne, Texas. My experiences in small-town Cleburne, although no where near as dramatic as Stewart's in Appalachia, are overwhelmingly similar to the cultural atmosphere that Stewart found "by the side of the road." Cleburners have their own manner of speaking that is almost unintelligible to outsiders, inflecting their words with meaning and sound that was foreign to me as a child. I was always incredibly confused by the meaning of the word "drawers" whenever I visited my grandmother. A drawer to me was a place to store clothes or toys. A Cleburner firmly believes that "drawers" are the same as "underpants."

But despite such petty examples, overall the feeling that I got from reading Stewart's book was the same feeling I used to get while visiting Podunk, USA. Stewart writes:

"Imagine, in short, how culture in an occupied, betrayed, fragmented, and finally deserted place might become not a corpus of abstract ideas or grounded traditions, but a shifting and nervous space of desire immanent in lost and re-membered and imagined things. Picture the effort to track a cultural "system" that is "located," if anywhere, in the nervous, shifting, hard-to-follow trajectories of desire and in-filled with all of the confusion and aggravation of desire itself. Imagine a world that dwells in the space of the gap, in a logic of negation, surprise, contingency, roadblock, and perpetual incompletion."

This is Cleburne. A remnant of an old America that no longer exists. The town is poor and small. It used to depend on oil and farming, two sources of income that are dwindling now in the area. Beautiful farmland has been superseded by commercial structures, fading and becoming dingy with neglect. It is a place that still harbors the old seeds of racism and conflict. A place where people are aware that they should be tolerant, but just can't bring themselves to comply. A place the young are constantly trying to escape from (my father married at 18 just to leave his mother's house -- the marriage failed, not surprisingly), and the old can't bring themselves to leave. The gaps that Stewart talks about so often in her book are everywhere in my memories of Cleburne, a place stuck in a memory and tradition that the rest of the country has left far behind.

-Ashley

A Space on the Side of the Road: The Importance of Language and Listening

2009-04-06T08:58:00.000-07:00

Kathleen Stewart’s book A Space on the Side of the Road was filled with so many rich observations that I had difficulty selecting one or two aspects that I wanted to focus on. I enjoyed making connections to the other readings such as, the importance of language and stories and the definition of place and neighborliness, which made me think of Glassie’s experience with his observations of these topics in Ballymenone.
When Stewart first arrives and is listening to stories and “scanning for signs” of culture, she discusses the difficulty in listening and understanding the local language: "Missing pieces and unknown meanings taught me to listen not just more intently, but differently—a listening in order to retell" (8). This experience is a reminder that not only does every country have its own language but so does every community or group, and in order to belong and understand, one must learn the terminology of that particular community. Stewart’s description of listening “more intently and differently” is of importance due to the fact that it seems many people in today’s societies are not accustomed to listening, either due to a lack of time, a lack of interest or an emphasis on visual stimulus. Stewart goes on to say, "And of course over time it became necessary to tell stories in the local way with words so that people would still visit me and stopped to talk" (8). She, of course, has the motivation for carefully listening because she wants to become a part of this community; she does not want to have to “look over the shoulders” of the people she is observing. I found it interesting that once she is accepted into this community, she is confronted with the same issue as every person who is a part of any group—taking a side. She writes, "Things happened and were retold in ways that drew people together or push them apart. There were people and places I knew to avoid from the stories some told about them. Talking to some neighbors, I found myself prohibited from talking to others" (9). This idea of being asked to take a side or not being permitted to speak with others because one risks being alienated from their established group is a culturally accepted practice in many societies and reinforces the “us” and “them.” This prevention of Stewart from speaking with others is some indication of her belonging and acceptance, which on one hand is something she desires for her research but on the other hand is limiting.
Stewart recognizes that culture is not easy to represent, so she uses many “tricks” in order to have her readers fully grasp the sense of language and culture; she even implements “direct appeals such as, ‘picture’ this and ‘imagine’ that” to guide the reader through the cultural language and create a true depiction of this space. This guidance may be necessary to remind those from a western culture to listen and use our imaginations.
As a society, we have lost some of our ability to listen intently for any length of time, and consequently, we have lost some of our imaginative capabilities. Children and adults alike are bombarded with visual stimulation every day—from television to iPhones, to computers—where nothing is left to the imagination. Unlike cultures where story-telling still takes place and is a dominant way of communication, many societies are not trained to listen carefully—their imaginations have become stilted—instead, they require some type of visual representation. With the technological advances in film, television, computers, etc., we will continue not to have to listen as closely because the visual aspects will become even more dominant and sweeping as time moves forward. Kristin

Thank you for being a friend

2009-04-06T08:46:00.000-07:00

Let's start with a side note. Kathleen Stewart's tendency to start sentences with "Imagine..." or "Picture..." made me read this whole book with the voice of Estelle Getty in my head.

I actually think that worked to the advantage of the book. Estelle Getty's character Sophia lived in just the sort of community being described here. Insular, both tight knit and "gossipy", economically challenged. If nothing else, hearing Sopia read in my head made the book a lot of fun.

I was mostly struck by how much I felt like I understood the lives of the people being written about. I grew up in a larger community than the one being described, but it was also the only population area in a fairly large valley in Western Nebraska. I had many elderly neighbors growing up who had never left the valley in their entire lives. And as far as most of the rest of the state was concerned, our little corner didn't even exist. I'm not sure if we would have needed to create a "space on the side of the road" because I'm not convinced that even that space would have made others realize we were there.

The idea of space is one I'm currently obsessed with. Mostly, what type of space is being discussed. There are spaces for living, spaces for performing, spaces for dialogue (which can be performing), spaces for solitary creativity, etc. I think looking carefully at what sort of space is needed vs what sort of space can be made available is an important step in discussing the lives and tribulations of any population. I think Kathleen Stewart generally does a good job of that. I actually felt like she was the first ethnographer I've read (in this class or my other class this semester) who really managed to situate herself in way that felt satisfying to me. She not only seemed aware of the challenges and triumphs of the community she was studying, but she also seemed very aware of her own positionality as a researcher.

-Josh Zimmerman

Honest Ridge

2009-04-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

Almost ten years ago, I went to Texas, the place my dad was born, to do genealogical research and to meet some of my cousins and other family members. My dad’s half sister – a woman I accidentally found on the internet and had just met – graciously took me around the old haunts. We drove out to Honest Ridge, the small community a few miles outside of Mexia where the family lived and worked as sharecroppers. My aunt showed me the house where my great-grandparents lived. The building was barely standing and the wood weathered, and my aunt warned me not to get too close. It was shadowed under some large trees with some rusted buckets and cans littering the overgrown yard. The windows were broken out and the door was lopsided. I could see my great-grandfather leaning against the door frame smoking a cigarette in his dirty overalls from working all day on the land that wasn’t his. I could see my great-grandmother boiling laundry in a pot on the fire then later walking out to the bright meadow to hang the clothes on a line. I had heard about these people and how they lived from my grandma during her short stay in Texas. She grew up in Honolulu and couldn’t handle the country life. The graveyard was about a half mile down the road, where family members could visit often. About a mile away from the dilapidated structure was the meadow where my grandparents lived and where my father was born. It was just a meadow now, the structure probably taken apart for wood after my grandparents moved to California. Kathleen Stewart writes, “The trash that collects around people’s places, like the ruins that collect in the hills, is imprinted with a life history (and death) and embodies a continuous process of composition and decomposition. They become compelling signs of a past, like the present, where things fall apart and where everything, including power itself is constructed and transient” (96). No one lives there anymore. This community was abandoned when people moved to Mexia or Ft. Worth to find work, leaving nothing but the old building and a cemetery.
-Colleen Murphy

Doubly Occupied Space

2009-04-05T23:19:00.000-07:00

Image above: Finger's Cafe in my birth town of Maiden, NC. This eventually became Campbell's Drug Store, with the soda counter left intact all the way up to the 1970's. I heard many a local yokel conversation in this place when I was very young, and had many a soda-fountain vanilla Coke and box of rock candy at the counter!

Kathleen Stewart's book has many interesting points of entry--this makes it difficult to select just one point to pursue in this week's blog entry. I decided to take as my focus the concept that dominates the opening pages of the second chapter in the book; that is, the idea of a "doubly occupied space."

In the chapter in which this idea is thoughtfully laid out, Stewart ruminates on, among other things, the way in which location can both explain and complicate how we perceive individuals and the lives that they live in those spaces. What is ironic in this section is that the chapter itself (and, it could be said, the entire book as well) invokes a sort of doubled space for our particular class, in that we can see the connections to familiar theoretical writers covered this semester, such as the references to de Certeau on page 42. This follows on the heels of similar familiar critical references in the first chapter, such as Babcock, Rosaldo, Benjamin and Bourdieu. I find it interesting how the connection of the personal space of our current course here at UofA creates its own sort of doubling when complicated by a text that invokes many of the voices that have brought us to this point in the semester. I don't know that any of these observations adds anything of particular substance to our discussion--but it's a point of conflation that I personally find compelling and that appeals greatly to the sociologist in me, and is therefore worth noting.

The second "doubled space" that caught my attention this week is much more personal--the way in which Stewart's book so poignantly captures the lingo of generations that may soon be gone forever. In particular, the conversations transcribed in Chapter 5 were a lovely trip down memory lane. In my grandparents' generation in Southern/near-Southern states such as the Carolinas, the Virginias, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, particular generations have recognizable dialects, colloquialisms, and other unique aspects of verbal communication. It's a way of speaking that is fast disappearing in the populous, less remote areas of these states, as the minimally educated generations of the past give way to successive generations composed of increasingly better educated, more cosmopolitan residents. One can still hear expressions such as "called me back up again" and "he took off," but more and more this happens in fairly self-contained settings, such as when seeing family or old friends, or when speaking to elderly generations or people who live in economically deprived areas, and people often use a more formal register of language when speaking in business, work, or school settings. I find these changes to be bittersweet. On the one hand, they demonstrate that Southerners are experiencing great gains in education, opportunities, and the like. Yet, they also mean that some of the characteristics that so define this region of the country are fast fading away, taking with them some of those elements of Southern culture that make this region uniquely "home" to those of us who grew up there.

A third thing came to mind as I was reading Chapter 5. Stewart turns a considerable amount of focus onto an interesting analysis of the manner in which the body is "embed[ded] [ . . . ] in a poetics of daily pains, eccentric markings, and momumental peculiarities that open onto the space of a social imaginary" (132). She goes on to state that, "They describe the body as an "other" that can be seen, felt, and encountered. The body, like the hills, becomes a collection of places that [ . . . ] take on a life of their own" (132). I find this a particularly insightful observation on Stewart's part. All this weekend, I've been noticing how this plays out in conversations that took place on Facebook between me and a particular friend from back home on the east coast, and I realized how accurate Stewart's observation is and how applicable this is, not just to the coal country of West Virginia, but also to more urbanized Southeastern locations such as the Carolinas, Tennessee and Georgia. I began charting some of these "bodyisms" in my Facebook encounters this weekend. Some of the terms that cropped up (many of which appear in some form or other in Stewart's chapter)included:

"cancer couldn't (which sounds like 'puddin' if this person says it aloud) get ahold of her"

"tried to grab me a nap, but that same old cough was workin' on me"

"workin' on a headache"

"I laid there after that coughing fit and like to never get back up"

This last one was so close to the one in the book that it made me laugh out loud. You'll notice the form of several of the key words are different than the sample in the book, such as "like" instead of "liked," and the present/future tense "get" back up, as opposed to "got back up." These little differences are common as you move from location to location, with particular broad geographical areas developing slightly different wording for roughly the same phrases and ideas. I'm sure linguists could make much of this, but for my own purposes it simply serves to locate self and others; local, "just down the road," and locations "at a right piece" (a.k.a., relatively distant).

All of this reminds me intensely of Francois Lyotard's concepts of paralogic discourse (or, to use a postmodern Gerald Vizenor term, those things that deny metanarrative). In this sense, there is and cannot be any one definable "communication" or system of meaning. Instead, there are multiple discourses, multiple meanings, and those things which make for effective communication are best found in the willingness of communicants to accept differences in communication and meaning, to embrace "paralogical discourse." This is a space in which meanings are doubled, tripled, redoubled, and sometimes abandoned altogether, yet a space in which communication can and does always take place on some level.

Connie

Dis-re-membering master narratives and the imagination of space

2009-04-05T22:03:00.000-07:00

The fourth chapter of Stewart’s book, “Chronotopes” caught my attention as a place where her overarching argument is made in a particularly interesting way. The relationship between progress or History and individual places becomes purposefully muddled in her explanation of the everyday life of the people she’s living with. On page 97 she writes that “master narratives speak of a war of positions. In this case, in this doubly occupied place, there is first the perspective of industry and the status quo that would write the history of this place as an inevitable progress of events. In response, a critical voice claims events as evidence of the forceful exploitation of a people and the tragic death and destruction of a culture.” Her critique of master narratives that follows draws upon DeCerteu, among others, to argue that both models of History, “would close the very gap that gives rise to local chronotopes of haunting places and the need to constantly re-member things” (97). This gap that she identifies, the space on the side of the road of her title, is what is left out as master narratives of progress or exploitation cut through places like interstates and locate them only in terms of temporal relationships, rather than seeing the local cultural geography that arises from a network of signs and interpersonal relationships. This is why, as she argues elsewhere, the camps and hollers can be simultaneously characterized as a place of “both authenticity and a degraded state of nature. ‘American’ encounters with ‘Appalachia,’ then, come always already encased in a totalizing transcendant order that scans the surface of things for its own ‘highs’ and ‘lows” (119). As I attempted to argue in my presentation on Ray Young Bear’s poetry a week ago, often times, our interpretations of other cultures and places will tell us more about our own desires and anxieties than about the truths of people’s lives that are (supposedly) the object of study or reflection.
The experience of reading the chapter on chronotopes confirms this need or desire for an ordered, even teleological progression to follow. The first section was somewhat difficult on a first read through, but as soon as she shifts and begins giving what appeared to be her versions of the master narratives, the fog lifted. I could follow an already established narrative structure (either progress or exploitation) rather than having to piece (re-member) it on my own. Interestingly, Stewart highlights this shift by distancing herself from the narrative that she’s giving by inserting the line “I could tell you” into the beginning of several paragraphs. The effect is to make the reader sit up and realize that though they’re more comfortable, perhaps, with this version of things (or thangs), that she’s going to complicate it some a ways down the road. As she writes near the end of the chapter, “the shock of history, then, is not the end of the story, but its ground and motivation. Things do not simply fall into ruin or dissipate in the winds of progress but fashion themselves into powerful effects that remember things in such a way that ‘history’ digs itself into the present and people cain’t help but recall it” (111). Stewart’s narrative and the local stories that make it up refuse to look past the material space of the present, and the fact that it’s made up of the effects of the past, but it is not a mere giving over of the self or culture to the master narrative.
The story that she tells of Hollie and the job counselor in Chapter 5 seems a particularly good instance of this kind of refusal. As the counselor tries to “help Hollie in his Real Circumstances,” his “direct, instrumental questions” miss the significance or truth of experience that Hollie is attempting to communicate, and vice versa. Rather than accept the offers of help (residential programs), and the accompanying expectations for living situation, that the counselor offers, Hollie finally responds “well, maybe someday I might get to come back and see if you have anything for me” (137, font formatting original). Stewart’s understanding of the encounter is that the two men find themselves baffled by “two interpretive spaces” that do not intersect, leaving each to retreat into his initial understanding of the other, Hollie becomes backward “white trash” and the counselor becomes “instrumentalized” and “removed from the logic of the encounter itself” (137). If anything, this characterization of the counselor is one potential weakness of Stewart’s account, as she is unable to enter into a similar sympathetic interpretation of the counselor’s motivations and expectations as Hollie’s (or chooses not to). However, this is a minor point, and the book seems to attempt a mimetic re-presentation of the events and people that she encountered during her work, something that comes through more clearly in the story that she tells here. Her emphasis upon the space-time relationship draws attention to that which is usually missed, particularly in her frequent exhortations for the reader to “picture” or “imagine” a scene, conversation, or other space that she then goes on to describe. The somewhat destabilizing style that I noted above slows us down, I think, so that we can co-create the imaginative work of the remembering that she undertakes throughout the book.

- Andy DuMont

The Line of Storytelling

2009-04-05T19:14:00.000-07:00

I've been fascinated by storytelling for awhile now--all my life, actually--and I always seem to come back to a key frustrated of mine through the re-telling of stories: how to render each person's voice so that it accurately fits the truest possible depiction of the person, and how am I able to re-tell the story in a way that honors others' voices and not just my own interpretation of the narrative?

Lately I've read Joan Didion's collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion, at least in the creative nonfiction world, seemed to reinvent new journalism. She speaks with a reserved and subtle passion for her subjects; for the most part, the "I" that is so prevalent to the traditional story (the "I" needing to be present in order for the readers/listeners to feel connected, feel as if they are being led through the experience) almost altogether disappears. What is left, however, is a beautifully rich scene of detail and voice. While others embrace the personal, interior journey of the mind, Didion allows her subjects to speak for themselves; she allows the surrounding environment to bear witness, as she provides detail after detail. It is, for the most part, a journey into the everyday. What is gained by such a project, however, is a deep sense on the reader's part that what Didion is in fact doing is using these outside subjects as vehicles, or a way to get inside an idea--what she wants to really say about such a scene. In this sense, we as readers do not feel cheated or deceived; we feel, strangely, as though we know more about Didion from these outside sources and the everyday notation than if she were to come out and say so directly herself, "This is who I am."

I felt the same way with Stewart, and although I respect the comments made by others and some slight frustrations with her style choices, I think I'm beginning to understand these choices. By grounding her readers in the characters, by asking them to "imagine" and "picture" certain details of the scene, we in fact learn much more about our narrator than we might have anticipated. Story allows us a lens, and we see that lens through a certain perspective. I think Stewart's aim--or lens--was to try to accurately paint scene and allow us as readers to perhaps fill in those gaps. Where Glassie plugs up those holes with minute procedures and measurements, Stewart lends a bit more freedom. It is as if by just reading, the space on the side of the road is left wide enough to allow for us to enter and commune for a time--we have room to ask questions (where Glassie just provides the answer).

I also must say, on a side note, that I appreciated the readings and authors leading up to this book. Stewart does name and refer to quite a variety of thinkers in her field, and it was refreshing for me to be able to see those names and connect what I had read of their work to how Stewart referenced them in her work. I felt like I was being rewarded.

--Julie Lauterbach-Colby

"What's happened to the American dream?"

2009-04-05T18:06:00.000-07:00

I apologize for the Watchmen quote, but I thought of that scene repeatedly when reading Kathleen Stewart's A Space on the Side of the Road. The response to the posed question is, "It came true. You're lookin' at it," and in the prologue to Stewart's study of West Virginia, she stated that the narrative space under scrutiny "stands as a kind of back talk to 'America's' mythic claims to realism, progress, and order" (3). These places are where the American dream has slowly decayed into fragments and then these fragments have been stitched together again backward and sideways from the original order. I can see immediately where that level of decay causes discomfort for many people, because seeing the nostalgic rural ideal of power and progress (red barn, white fence, fat cows, apple pie) which is still commonly seen as the quintessential American dream fall so far short of pristine calls into question many core values. There are still recognizable traces from the original "ideals of kinship, neighborliness, and Christianity" (46) but they're altered by the very real evidence in a small town that these values are not universal and timeless. Nothing is set into stone.

"Men are not naturally good husbands or providers but 'by nature' given to drinking and fighting and running the roads. They get turned around in middle age in sudden Christian conversion... and their testimony dwells on their wild days, performing a poetics in which, they say, people have to 'get all the way down' before they can 'see'" (186).

This is where faith has to turn to when the original ideals, the American Dream, did not run the course expected. If it brought them to a place so "got down", then the belief is that there must be hardship before there can be a reward.

One of my independent projects during my undergraduate years was a collection of both images and prose with the subject of rural decay. I spent every summer in Vermont when I was young and I went to college in Ohio, so the sight of cars or tractors or barns or houses that just seemed to have been left to rot when they stopped functioning like they were supposed to. When I was little, I thought the rotten barn across from my great-grandmother's house was magical. I had nightmares about the roof caving in and killing me but I couldn't stop running across the street to explore inside despite my fear.

My project explored the definition of function in object, if a house could stop being a house when one wall fell down, two walls, cracks appeared in the ceiling, the chimney fell off. Did people give things function through use or was the seemingly bombed out husk with one window still a house? Thus, I empathize greatly with Stewart's reference to "dread and desire" (118) and connect it directly to the aesthetic of decay present in the place she has chosen and the places I witness. We don't like to think of where our Dream will end up, of our favorite things or people rotting, even if it's inevitable.

-Caitlin

Narrative and the "New Ethnography"

2009-04-05T14:45:00.000-07:00

Although I agree with what other students have said in critique of Kathleen Stewart's prose, I must also say that I really enjoyed her book.

First, I admire her project, which she positions within ethnographic history and methodology as a possible form with which to enact or perform a "new ethnography" (26). She wants to avoid searching for and presenting a perfect textual solution to cultural representation. Instead, she strives "to displace not just the signs or products of essentialism (generalizations, reifications) but the very desires that motivate academic essentialism itself--the desire for decontaminated 'meaning,' the need to require that visual and verbal constructs yield meaning down to their last detail, the effort to get the gist, to gather objects of analysis into an order of things" (26). Stewart's invocation of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men helped me understand her discussion of anthropology as cultural critique and her desire to flood us with details and stories and lyric images as a way of making the space at the side of the road real, without telling us what it means. (Just as William Roseberry asks us to examine Geertz in light of his own ambitions, it would be interesting to investigate Stewart's text through the lens of her own desires for it. Maybe this is something we can address in discussion.)

The next element that drew me into Stewart's project was her discussion of narrative, which made a bridge for me from Turner to this text, and helped deepen my sense of the interrelatedness of story and culture, and the power of story in general. Stewart writes that "narrative is first and foremost a meditating form through which 'meaning' must pass. Stories, in other words, are productive" and that "rather than complete or 'exemplify' a thought, narratives produce a further searching" (29, 32). I think this is true, certainly of the stories I love to read. Although tales and fables are kinds of narratives that are created to explain the world or prescribe behavior, I think that most stories give image and space to the gap between reality and meaning, not to the linear and hierarchical effort of assigning meaning to reality. When I listen to or read or tell or write a story, I am interested in dwelling in the "as if" and indeterminacy that Turner discusses--not in sealing up the certain, the walled, the named. I think the way that Stewart forms her own text--with the "imagine"s and the "picture"s and the slipping in and out of different kinds of speech and her reticence to classify or interpret her subjects' stories (though maybe she does this more than she thinks she does; and maybe she needs to, to reach us)--is to keep us within the gap, within the productive act of story and the searching that narrative ignites.

Later in the book Stewart writes, "In the inescapably mediated space of a narrated world it is as if the tension between talk and idea calls attention to itself, and the gap between word and world becomes an object of fascination, signaling mysterious effects and unforeseen possibilities ... 'Things that happen' are imbued both with the expectation of anomaly or chance occurrence and with the quality of revealed distinctions, overarching laws, and moral-mythic orders" (181). This got my attention because it sounds a lot like the "do"s in a fiction class: the ending must be surprising, and also inevitable. Moreover, Stewart addresses my gripe with meta-fiction and postmodern lit: though I can be charmed and seduced by the antics of calling attention to the textiness--to the createdness--of text, ultimately I'm satisfied by possibility, not disintegration. But I fear that this is a digression!

In the end, what strikes me most about the book are the lyric images still in my mind: Eva Mae walking the roads with a knife; the boy hanging from the wire with the flesh of his heel blown out; coffee and cigarettes on a table; the man who put his arm in a sling so as to create an explanation for signing an x instead of his name; Waylon Jennings in a truck; ghostly visitations; the woman who said no one, not even the preacher, could tell her not to wear pants. Am I romanticizing the hard times and poverty and violence of West Virginia through the musicality of the voices and images still in my head? I hope not. I do know I'm listening.

- Esme

A Space on the Side of the Road

2009-04-05T13:08:00.000-07:00

Once I got past my frustration with Kathleen Stewart’s writing style (“imagine” this and “picture” that and the interwoven use of “re-membered” versus “remembered” repeated over and over again), I realize that she is simply trying to place the reader in the world in which she immersed herself. Perhaps this kind of writing is simply new to me coming from an art history background, but I did find Henry Glassie’s Passing the Time in Ballymenone easier to follow and easier to embrace the basic humanity and dignity of the subjects of his study based on how he presented the material.

Furthermore, Stewart’s tendency to string theoretical perspectives in one long sentence without seeming conclusion (as if she needed to prove she knew the canons of discourse) left me drifting from her point. However, once she started to relate the stories and offer her observations of their cultural meaning, I warmed up to her perspective. I suppose the main point I came to grips with is to suspend judgment about a people and their condition and instead focus on the patterns of narrative and how it relates to meaning—how these people structure their lives in order to cope with their distressed, oppressed, apparently futile condition. As Stewart suggests, “Imagine yourself caught in the space of story that opens when plans are interrupted by the accidental and the progress of time gives way to a graphic rumination through spaces of danger and desire, trial and transformation, self-extension and return.” (p.28) The people of this part of West Virginia have been stripped of their dignity in many ways, but their humanity is still there, as evidenced in their stories of lamentation over lost lives, lost opportunities, and lost health.

By Chapter 5 of Stewart’s book, I began to understand where my frustration with her topic is rooted. I am hopelessly middle class. I find her examination of the “Other America,” of the people of western Appalachia, uncomfortable because I have bought into the myth of “realism, progress, and order.” The narrative “space on the side of the road” that she describes is indeed one that is “against” what I strive for. As Stewart explains, “In the United States, ‘Appalachia’ became one of these ‘Other’ places and filled the bourgeois imaginary with both dread and desire.”(p. 118) I don’t feel the desire she mentions (although the desire she speaks of must be of a rural existence free from the concerns of urbanity?), but I do feel dread. Dread of the lives they represent—one failure piled on top of another failure and the ignorance and zealous religiosity that pervades their culture—keeps me from feeling the same kind of empathy, sympathy, and keen interest in understanding.

Stewart has come to understand this culture of poverty and she has suspended judgment of their lack to examine the narrative structures that hold their lives together. When she says, “Picture how in the camps the order of things is not a civilizing presence captured in well-tended lawns and balanced checkbooks, disciplined bodies, educated reason, and routinized careers but a conspiratorial threat,”(p. 123) I begin to understand my own biases and how my life embodies much of what those people must fear and disdain. Stewart’s examination bridges a gap of misunderstanding for me and looks beyond the surface of stereotypes to find meaning in what happens on “a space on the side of the road.”
-Julie Sasse

What is Culture?

2009-04-03T17:46:00.000-07:00

There is so much to delve into in Kathleen Stewart’s A Place on the Side of the Road that I choose to only focus on one small point here; one I am more familiar with from before as a student of sociology for many years. The question of what Culture really is. The academic history within my field is long, and involves most of the important contributors. From Marx’s false consciousness, to Weber’s values, to Durkheim’s collective sentiments; later, Parsons’s normative systems, and Ann Swidler’s a tool-kit for signification.

Unsurprisingly, the latter, Ann Swidler, comes closest to the understanding of culture espoused by Kathleen Stewart. Swidler does not think there is a unitary and overarching system of meaning in any society or any group, but rather a symbolic arsenal it is possible for members to draw from when justifying opinions, or explaining/justifying actions. Hence, a tool-kit.

Stewart’s prose is dense (rich at best, confusing at worst), and makes claims to lineage from several famous literary critics, such as Kristeva and Bakhtin. The closest I could come to a definition of culture in A Space, was on page 210: something that cannot be read, but only recounted, through “multilayered narratives of the poetic in the everyday of things”.

In other words, sort of a combination of Geertz’s textual approach and the praxis view of his critics, as we discussed last week’s readings? Through her abundance of material, I think Stewart makes a strong case for her reading of local culture. I just wonder if she doesn’t stretch her conclusions a bit far when she implies that the derelict mining towns are essential to modern capitalism. This argument is not new: Marx himself talked about the need of capital to have a certain proportion of the population excluded from active participation in the production process. If this is the point Stewart is trying to make, it is probably fine, and interesting in view of the topic and location she chooses to investigate the matter. I would still like to stress that there is a difference between cause and effect, and I am not so sure we can say that deserted mining towns are causal to Capitalism; maybe they just express the effects of the system.

Also, is it really possible to couch sweeping (systemic) claims with the multilayered and narrative view of culture endorsed by the author?

- Alexander

Pele’s Space

2009-04-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

Jay E. Caldwell
3 April 2009

I am fascinated by the title of Kathleen Stewart’s ethnography of “the hard-core Appalachian coal-mining region of southwestern West Virginia.” In a discussion relevant to the subject of the everyday, the idea of a space on the side of the road offers several possibilities for meaning. First, the “road” is the everyday and what is on the side of that road is “accidental,” to use her own term. It is not mainstream, and its relevance comes simply from that very antimony. We can better envision, better understand the run-of-the-mill, by seeing it in the context of what it isn’t. Stewart writes that this space “draws attention to differences and borders and to moments of boundary/passage between inside/outside, wildness/civilization, animal/human, life/death, revival/decay” (205).

On the other hand, the space on the side of the road is a diverticulum and within it may be what matters most. It is as if one can climb down a rabbit hole into an alternative existence. For Lewis Carroll and Alice, that detour was into nonsense. But for Stewart, it is only in that space that truly meaningful relationships develop and it is only those affairs that have meaning. She writes,

[Picture h]ow the space of the story situates meaning and event in a dense discursive landscape of encounter as the narrator encounters the accidental event and finds herself roaming in a graphic scene in which objects speak to her and meaning, memory, and motive seem to adhere to storied things to become a force encountered. (32)

Last week I turned off into a space on the side of my own road when Pele came to visit Alaska and closed off most access to and from the state for several days, four in my own case. This caesura, this apostrophe in my life brought with it not just an interruption of my anticipated routine, my everyday life, but inserted an entirely new “dense discursive landscape of encounter” as I came to grips with this new everyday life. For four days I dropped into a holding pattern of new associations: people, food, place, weather, activity soon became as mundane as my former world. Antimonies formed: strangers/friends, restaurant/kitchen, hotel/home, cold/warm, cloister/freedom, dependant/active. And yet, quite soon that space became as meaningful to me as my other world. It evolved its own pleasures; I suspect I experienced a form of the Patty Hearst Syndrome. My behavior became as goal-directed as it usually is. I struggled to maintain control of my own course. I traded in interpersonal relationships for hedonism. I could go where I pleased, when I pleased, and do what I would without asking permission or having to invite or encourage sociality. There were new people with whom to speak, new foods to sample, new places to go, and yet the structure of my day soon took form, different, of course, from the other/former world, but no less mundane: scraping ice from the windshield of my rental car; pulling on heavy coat, muffler, and hat while still inside; searching out food; checking the internet for updates from the Alaska Volcano Observatory [http://www.avo.alaska.edu/activity/Redoubt.php] and the (Ted Stevens International) airport [http://aia-mufids.dot.state.ak.us/]; calling Alaska Airlines regularly to check on flight and seat availability; and following the weekend of college basketball on my hotel television.
Almost every conversation was bound to validate that “meaning, memory, and motive seem to adhere to storied things to become a force encountered” because in Alaska such caesuras are not the accidental, but the usual. Alaskans, with a certain aplomb, have learned to cope with natural events that interrupt their lives. All this supports Stewart’s thesis that the space of culture blooms beside the road, and that ethnography “grows unrelentingly discursive in the effort to lead with the ‘Other’s’ stories, to clear a space in which they might have not the last word but an Other word pointing to an Other world” (39).

And upon my return to the “Real” World, I was greeted with a kind of bemused acceptance and compassion. My people, too, had come to evolve a slightly altered everyday life that no longer included or needed me. In a way I found that I was interrupting them when I assumed that the old ways would simply resume, as if the apostrophe could be removed, expunged. But just as “can’t” subtly alters a sentence that once had in its place “cannot,” so too a return from a space on the side of the road alters the texture of that ongoing road.

Becoming an Insider

2009-03-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I wanted to take this class, aside from my interest in folklore, was the chance to explore a little bit of anthropology, something I didn't have time to do as an undergrad. I've written before in these blog entries about my fascination with The Tourist, but I think that fascination stems from something else, something that our readings this week were all indirectly concerned with: insiders and outsiders.

Geertz deals with this phenomena in the context of anthropological research and the need for an anthropologist's subjects to open up and let the anthropologist into their inner circles. He talks about the difficulties he and his wife experienced in Bali for the first week of their stay, how the villagers would pretend that they didn't exist, but somehow knew almost everything about them. Geertz includes the anecdote of his acceptance among the Balinese villagers in the essay because it is directly related to the subject of his essay: cockfights. It was only after Geertz and his wife act as the villagers do in a police raid that the villagers accept them. Naturally, this process is more problematic than both he and I make it sound. I don't think that an outsider can ever truly become an insider in a context such as this. For the most part, I think one has to be born into a culture in order to experience it in the fullest sense.

Which leads me to Rosaldo. Over and over again, he states that he was unable to truly comprehend the motives of the headhunters. He states that he kept on trying to categorize the grief of the Ilongots in ways that did not apply, and finally concludes that this "bookish dogma" is useless (4). What he needs is empathy, and a good healthy dose of imagination. It isn't until the accidental death of his wife that Rosaldo is able to understand the behavior of his subjects. Until this happened, he was unable to suspend his own cultural assumptions so that he might truly comprehend their motives. In a way, he became a sort of insider.

I think Rosaldo's story highlights one of the main problems inherent in studying other cultures. It took the death of his wife for him to be able to empathize with the raging bereavement of the Ilongots. He does acknowledge that his rage was very different from that of the Ilongots, having from a different cultural basis, and it did produce effective results in the end. However, it seems to me, had the tragic death of his wife not occurred, his field work would not have passed muster because he would have most likely not been able to overcome his outsider status.

-Ashley

Mourning and the everyday

2009-03-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

My grandmother passed away over the weekend. She had been suffering from Alzheimers for fifteen years, and we have been anticipating her death. But it’s still a shock. My aunt who is my grandma’s only living child decided to have a memorial service in the summer. This works out great for everyone with jobs, school or kids in school, but it leaves us all empty for that ceremony of the funeral service to complete the ritualistic part of the mourning period. I have been grieving the loss of my grandmother for years. The grandma I remember was always independent, passionate and full of life, not the woman I saw at the nursing home. But I am used to completing the funeral ritual then having to deal with the everyday part of mourning. Rosaldo states, “Most anthropological studies of death eliminate emotions by assuming the position of the most detached observer. Such studies usually conflate the ritual process with the process of mourning, equate ritual with the obligatory, and ignore the relation between ritual and everyday life” (7). The funeral or memorial service doesn’t embody the grief that people feel after they lose someone. It’s the outward ritual of mourning, only a part of the process. No one sees the rituals of weeping in homes or family members comforting each other in private. Those actions are the everyday.
-Colleen Murphy

An Ethnographer’s Experience in Interpreting Death

2009-03-30T08:48:00.000-07:00

After reading the articles/chapters for this week, I was happy and relieved to find that ethnographers’ work is not easy to carry out and that there are many different ways of studying and writing about another’s culture. I obviously had been mis-informed or just confused when I first heard about ethnographic studies because the people discussing them talked about doing these types of studies, as if they were not difficult. I felt unsure and questioned how one could study another culture and feel knowledgeable and confident enough to write about it without essentializing that culture. When I read Clifford Geertz’s chapter on the Balinese cockfights and how he discusses that an ethnographer only has his/her own interpretation, I thought this sounded like a plausible explanation. In discussing the methods an ethnographer employs, Geertz asserts: “but whatever the level at which one operates, and however intricately, the guiding principle is the same: societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One has only to learn how to gain access to them” (453). Not only does the ethnographer only have interpretation, but every person living in a society has his/her own interpretation of what one’s culture represents.
Although I enjoyed reading and learning about Geertz’s ethnographic methods, threading that I most identified with was Renato Rosaldo’s chapter “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage.” First, he is of the same mind as Geertz when he says, “All interpretations are provisional; they are made by positioned subjects who are prepared to know certain things and not others. Even when knowledgeable, sensitive, fluent in the language, and able to move easily in an alien cultural world, good ethnographers still have their limits, and their analyses always are incomplete” (8). I believe that it is not possible for one to ever truly know another’s culture simply because of the fact that even within a culture every individual’s experience will be different. After Rosaldo begins his discussion of death and the Ilongot’s response to it and his inability to understand, he acknowledges that because ethnographers are outside observers, “such studies usually conflate the ritual process with the process of mourning, equate ritual with the obligatory, and ignore the relation between ritual and everyday life” (15). Death is confronted differently in every culture, and even though an ethnographer can observe the public rituals, there are many other private and personal aspects, such as emotions and everyday routines/rituals that are not able to be observed; the private ones hold as much, if not more, importance in understanding how a culture faces a loved one’s death. I am reminded of the chapter in de Certeau’s book “The Unnamable” and when he writes about the difficulties in speaking of death: “When it is repressed, death returns in an exotic language (that of a past, of ancient religions or distant traditions); it has to be invoked in foreign dialects; it is as difficult to speak about in one's own language as it is for someone to die ‘at home’” (de Certeau 192). Rosaldo also comments on North Americans’ reactions to death: “Yet most North Americans, especially those without personal experience of loss, find death subject best avoided. In trying to shield themselves from their own mortality, North Americans often claim that the bereaved don't want to speak about their losses” (56). When my grandmother passed away, I did find it strange the casual things we said to each other, the reactions of others, and the expectations I felt not to express my grief outwardly. When Rosaldo experiences the death of his wife, he realizes that now he can identify with the Ilongots’ grief and reactions in a more comprehensible way due to his own range of emotions. He writes, “The notion of position also refers to how life experiences both enable and inhibit particular kinds of insight” (19). It is important that Rosaldo acknowledges this but also realizes that even though he is closer in his understanding, he can still only have his interpretation. In an insightful observation, Rosaldo reminds us that: “The majority of intensive ethnographic studies have been conducted by relatively young people who have no personal experience of devastating personal losses. Furthermore, such researchers usually come from upper-middle-class Anglo-American professional backgrounds, where people often shield themselves by not talking about death and other people's bereavement” (55). It is the experience of events and the emotions that they produce that do allow us, while not fully, to relate more closely to others’ emotions. If one has not had similar experiences and emotions, one’s interpretation will be even more from the outside, looking in. Kristin

Headhunting Thoughts

2009-03-30T08:05:00.000-07:00

I found Rosaldo's article on headhunting an interesting one. The "cultural force of emotion" explored within the Ilongot community focused on rage through grief. At first, Rosaldo thought that Ilongots practiced headhunting due to "exchange theory"--canceling of rage through taking another's life. Rosaldo thought that when someone lost someone, their instinct is to set out and claim another life, a balance. However, this was not the case. The headhunting did not extinguish the grief and rage. Grief and rage were not emotions up for exchange. Instead, Rosaldo had to dig deeper into this ritual, and perhaps ask different questions, to find what he was looking for. He found that it was a way to cope with the emotions they felt, as individuals, then as a greater community after a tragedy occurred. When the practice was blocked from the community, the Ilongots were anxious and saddened, almost restless because of the loss of that cornerstone of their culture. They could not bear to listen to the headhunting song for it would call to their souls, their past grief, urging them to headhunt again.

I thought about the different ways different cultures let out their grief and any emotion that accompanies it. Though this was one of the more interesting ways of dealing with grief that I have found, I wonder at our Western practices--sometimes turning to religion with great zeal, our funerals and wakes and receptions, or even small rebellions against their current way of life. Our society does not condone violence but it makes excuses for it, especially with loss and rage.

Jennie Ziegler

Anthropology and cultural conflict

2009-03-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

Notes on a Balinese cockfight raised an issue for me that I often wonder about. How does a researcher deal with documenting activities that they might find unethical? For myself, I found the details of the cockfights stomach churning. I would have been hard pressed to watch the events described with anything resembling objectivity.

While i could understand that some might argue that the anthropologist has no right and/or obligation to interfere with cultural practices, I wonder where the line is? Let's consider the Rosaldo headhunter piece. Rosaldo writes powerfully about the phenomenon. But what happens if the headhunters decide to go after a kill? Assuming the tribe would allow it, does Rosaldo go along to document this rare event? I think that the easy answer to this question is "Of course not!" But I'm not convinced the easy answer is the answer all researchers would come up with.

I don't think this is an issue restricted to anthropology though. I often feel the same way about nature documentaries. While some might draw a sharp distinction between the ethics of how we treat animals vs people, I generally don't. If the endangered white rhino in your documentary is dying of thirst, I always wonder why the documentarians don't give it water. Yes it interferes. But sometimes, isn't it worth it?

- Josh Zimmerman

A Place for Grief and Rage

2009-03-29T21:39:00.000-07:00

As I read Rosaldo's essays, I kept thinking about my own concept and understanding of anger. I think, in many cases, I was raised in a home that expressed itself through silent rage--things fester and are mulled over by the individual, but the situation which caused the rage was rarely brought out in the open. When this did happen--most dramatically during my parents' fights, I automatically thought the worst: that this would be the end of the marriage, another divorce, etc etc.
I now realize that there was and should be an appropriate place for rage and anger to unfold in our lives. It's healthy and meaningful.
Some already know this, but I help with an organization based in Guatemala City that runs domestic violence advocacy programs for women and girls all over Central America. As one of the group's interpreters, what I've found is that most--if not all--of these women have been living under a shadow of silence and unspoken rage for the last thirty years (since the civil wars began). It was interesting to note Rosaldo's own placement of Christianity within the context of re-framing the Ilongot's anger. I think, in a similar way, the religious influence has served to pacify many aspects and expressions of the Central American woman's own anger. I know religion played a big role in my own nervousness and apprehension about facing my own griefs and passionate fits of rage.
I believe one of the key aspects of Rosaldo's essays that I take away is the assertion that ethnographic studies of a culture must be rooted and commented upon through personal experience. Yes, like the other essays infer, especially Geertz, we do look over the shoulders and thereby comment, but as Rosaldo points out, there are certain cultural aspects that cannot be fathomed by an outsider--they must be experienced before the observer even begins to comment. Anything less would perform a disservice to the culture being observed.

--Julie Lauterbach-Colby

Biography as Ethnography

2009-03-29T20:12:00.000-07:00

Jay Caldwell

27, 29 March 2009

[Written in a hotel room in Anchorage, Alaska, awaiting the clearing of the ash plume from this morning’s most recent eruption of Mount Redoubt, an active volcano a little over a hundred miles to the southeast, so that I can fly back to Tucson for class.]

[Posted from this same hotel room several days later…with some hope now that the ashfall has been cleared from the airport. No eruption now for 23 hours, 50 minutes.]

At some point during this week’s anthropology readings I came to the conclusion that I no longer knew what exactly ethnography is. Or isn’t. The OED states unambiguously that it is “the scientific description of nations or races of men, with their customs, habits, and points of difference,” and further that ethnology constitutes “the science which treats of races and peoples, and of their relations to one another, their distinctive physical and other characteristics, etc.” These formulations speak of a sort of detachment, or at least the appending of “science/scientific” hints at this. And yet, that detachment is exactly what Renato Rosaldo decries in his chapter in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis titled “After Objectivism.” He writes, “What if the detached observer’s authoritative objectivity resides more in a manner of speaking than in apt characterizations of other forms of life?” (52). He insists that what makes an analysis/observation more relevant, more meaningful, is an insight informed by an awareness of, an empathy for, the emotional state of a person or group whose behavior/ritual is being studied. His example of a mock ethnography of his future in-laws’ breakfast ritual is a case in point; he argues that “personal narratives offer an alternative mode of representing other forms of life” (60), while at the same time, “[n]ormalizing descriptions can reveal and conceal aspects of social reality” (61), and thus should not be discarded. That said, my problem is that I am unclear about what constitutes a description of “races and peoples, and of their relations to one another.”

Clearly, mere observation cannot constitute the whole of an ethnography. Informants must be queried, questioned, culled, and their reliability and representativeness ascertained. Is not the study of an informant a biography (“A written record of the life of an individual”)? Is not a biography nothing more than one thread of the many from which an ethnography is/can be woven? Henry Glassie pointed out, in Passing Time in Ballymenone, the relevance of history to ethnography. Would not biography then be an important part of an ethnography. Must ethnography be limited to the “present”? Must biography be relegated only to the past? From a well-researched biography of Abraham Lincoln or Ulysses S. Grant or Jefferson Davis would we not glean some information about “races and peoples [of mid-19^th century America], and of their relations to one another”? If the past tense negates a biography’s ethnographic significance, then would not a biography of T. Boone Pickens, Steve Jobbs, or Bruce Springsteen constitute a legitimate source of information about current American culture, just as Rosaldo’s “biography” of Insan reveals (or we stipulate that it reveals) much about Ilongot culture of northern Luzon, Philippines.

I am sure that Biography, as a literary (or scientific) genre, freights as much theory as does anthropology, ethnography, and Everyday Life. But at the heart of biography there lurks the biographer. And a biographer is surely as susceptible to bias, agenda, agency, and colonialism as is an ethnographer. In fact, we hope that a biographer does not see his/her role as the formulator of a mere hagiography, celeb bio. That is where agenda comes in and how, in some fashion, a scientist, an anthropologist, an ethnographer is acknowledged a mantle of dispassion and honesty, whereas a biographer seems to allowed a point-of-view, if not even a pulpit. One might argue that a biographer has at his/her disposal not just the subject him/herself, but a variety of texts relevant to that person, thus creating a kind of pedestal onto which the subject is placed (or from which he is knocked off) and so differentiating a biography from an ethnography. But Clifford Geertz, in his seminal “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” makes the point that “cultural forms can be treated as texts, as imaginative works built out of social materials” (449) and from an analysis of these “assemblage[s] of texts” sociological principles can be formulated (448). Likewise, Victor Turner, in his piece, “Social Dramas and Stories About Them,” argues that within a social drama there are principal actors “for whom the group which constitutes the field of dramatic action has a high value priority” and conversely there exists what he calls a “star group . . . with which a person identifies most deeply and in which he finds fulfillment of his major social and personal strivings and desires” (69). In my mind it is hard to distinguish these formulations from biography.

From all this I would conclude that the “science” of biography must be (should be) closely aligned with the science of ethnography. I have no idea if what I am saying is so elementary (puerile) as to be meaningless, or whether it may be insightful. Each enterprise would surely benefit, from both its theoretical foundation and its practical undertaking, by studying the world of the other, and both should benefit from Rosaldo’s insistence that distance and neutrality do not necessarily make the product better, since in both projects we are dealing with other human beings, that is to say with others fairly like ourselves.

Performance and Performers

2009-03-29T19:30:00.000-07:00

It takes a Cliffort Geertz to introduce the topic of a Balinese cockfight by first inviting the reader to run along with him and his wife, in "The Raid", to the fight arena, before stating that two birds "hacking each other to pieces" serves a similar function to the community as has a production of Macbeth in the Anglo-American society. Although Geertz approach has been subject to criticism - some of which was included in this week's readings - anthropologists seem to agree that rituals, from theatre to cockfights, as social enactments of the sentiments of members of a community; whether viewed as an "ensemble of texts" (Geertz), the practiced unity of material conditions and ideology (Rosberry), a "busy intersection" of several social processes (Rosaldo), or as a "social drama" (Turner).

Here, I would like to discuss the views espoused by Turner. His notion is, fundamentally speaking, that "a social drama first manifests itself as a breach of a norm, the infraction of a rule of morality, law, custom or etiquette in some public arena (...) Once visible, it can hardly be revoked" (pp. 69-70). Although Turner offers several examples, it is easy to evoke other instances where the public display of norms and morals have been germane to a public occurrence: think of the Eichmann trials, or - to give some recognition to Geertz's textual approach - the erection of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, or the Vietnam War memorial in Washington D.C.

An important point for Turner is to distinguish between social dramas and theatre. Or, rather, he seeks to compare and contrast the two, accepting that they share fundamental characteristics, though differ in important ways. A staged drama is organized, planned, and clearly separates between the performers and the onlookers. A "social drama", on the other hand, according to Turner, is impossible to plan and coordinate, and one cannot plan the duration of the spectacle. As he states, a social drama "represents a perpetual challenge to all aspirations to perfection in social and political organization" (p. 70). Also, the termination of one drama often heralds the beginning of another. No director, no playbill, and no fixed list of characters.

With such substantial differences, what is there really left that is similar? Turner resorts to Aristotle's general classification of Drama, or rather, tragedy, which is a display of an action structure that is complete, whole, and of a certain magnitude, having a beginning, middle and an end (with the tragic loss of Aristotle's work on comedy, the few notes on the comic form scattered in the "Poetics" does not violate this particularly abstract description of drama). Aristotle, of course, added several other qualifications to Tragedy, but - probably because they are more specific - Turner does not draw upon those. We are therefore left with the following unity between social and staged dramas: they are coherent action structures that serve as some form of normative meta-analysis of the society from which it springs, and for which the spectacle is intended.

Personally, there is one theorist I miss in Turner's account: M. M. Bakhtin. In his great work, "Rebelais and His World", the latter explicitly engages with the Aristotelian characterization of Drama, and problematizes the theatrical orthodoxy that audience and thespians execute different roles in the performance. As according to Bakhtin, official culture involves hierarchies, and specialized roles. For instance, the religious spectacle of Christian mass has a particular organization, so that priests exclusively deliver messages according to established belief, whereas the congregation only incidentally take direct part in the ceremony in the form of song and prayer. In other words, there is performance, and there is role division in terms of performance and attendance.

It all sounds similar to Turners "social dramas". However, Bakhtin tries to show that official culture has always been challenged from below, as it were, by popular culture. Since Bakhtin focuses on the Middle Ages, pop culture is not so much a system of mass produced symbolic merchandise, but festivals, carnivals, and other expressions of communal emotional effort. Still sounds like Turners "social dramas"? Well, Bakhtin goes on to describe the carnivalesque as a public spectacle characterized by the rejection of formalized organization, specialized roles, and - most importantly - the inseparable nature of performers and audience. In the carnival, the the audience is the one to perform. Incidentally, this ritual form is inherently comic, according to Bakhtin

I think an important nuance between different segments of rituals by neglecting this difference. To be sure, popular culture, as described by Bakhtin, is fundamentally emotional, and unpredictable. If Turner wants to bring attention to the unity between different forms of public performances and social events of political and ideological nature, why not start from popular culture instead of the carefully orchestrated events we find in the theatrical cannon?

-- Alexander

Storytelling

2009-03-29T18:21:00.001-07:00

The significance of narrative to anthropology and ethnography expressed in various ways by all of this week's authors put me in mind of an interview Bill Moyers conducted last month with Parker Palmer, a long-time educator, founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal, and senior associate of the American Association of Higher Education. Palmer discussed the importance of the telling of stories--perhaps similar to Geertz's notion of metacommentaries--to Obama's successful campaign:

"Camp Obama, starting two and a half, three years before the election, when the Obama candidacy was a real long shot, happened around the country. Circles of people gathered together for two or three days and invited to tell three stories [sic].

"And I want to call attention to this because I think movements always begin in this very interior place in the human heart where people are asked to look at and share something of their own lives, their own experience.

"And so at Camp Obama, in small groups and over a period of a couple of days, people were invited, first of all, to tell the story of self. What are the hurts and hopes that bring you to this occasion, to the possibility that this long-shot candidate might represent your interests and might actually get elected? The story of self.

"The second story, very important, the story of us. How do you see your own story relating to the stories of other people you know and to the larger American story that's going on right now? [...] The 'Who am I?' question is important. But the 'Whose am I?' question is equally important.

"... And then finally they were asked to tell the story of now from their point of view. What do you see going on in this moment that makes you think we have a chance to heal some of the hurts and pursue some of the hopes that you've named in those earlier stories?" (www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02202009/transcript2.html)

According to Turner, a story is "a spontaneous unit of social process and a fact of everyone's experience in every human society" (68). Turner adds that while stories tell us about our relationships and stresses and societal tensions, they also "feed back into the social process, providing it with a rhetoric, a mode of employment, and a meaning" (72). In other words, stories don't just display or represent our lives--they give us tools for interpreting and transforming and reassembling them.

A lawyer friend of mine explained that stories are the reason she chose her profession. She told me that the law is all about storytelling, and not in the Judge Wapner sense of drama in the courtroom, but because legal recourse is all about the performance of facts and experience as narrative. She said that in her experience, the best story--the most satisfying, meaningful, truthful story--always wins in court. Her comments seem in keeping with Turner's remarks about reflective ("showing ourselves to ourselves") and reflexive ("arousing consciousness of ourselves as we see ourselves") dramas.

Turner's observations about breach, conflict and redress, and pre-liminal, liminal and post-liminal time, are also fascinating to me, because I write fiction. My current workshop professor often says that all stories begin with disequilibrium. The "why now?" of the story is initiated by a dismembering catalyst--something is thrown into turmoil, and then resolved either through "reintegration," as Turner names it, or "recognition of schism" (69).

In fiction workshops we also talk about the truth and the actual, and that they are rarely the same, and the truest thing is not necessarily the actual thing. This reminds me of Turner when he says that the subjunctive, ritual mood narrates the "'if it were so,' not 'it is so'" (83).

I do sometimes have angst about writing fiction. Am I hiding behind the invented because I am afraid of the real? Is it self-indulgent to make things up instead of document actual lives and experiences? This week's readings have assuaged some of that concern by showing me that narrative itself is deeply human, and that ethnography and fiction-writing are more related than I would have hoped to think.

- Esme

Observation, Interpretation and Theory

2009-03-29T11:22:00.000-07:00

As a novice to the study of everyday life/folklore and its theories, I am still intrigued by the interpretive model and find the focused examination of a particular aspect of a culture fascinating. While a greater understanding of the economics and politics of a culture certainly has a bearing on cultural practices, first looking and recording must be an integral element to the study of a people and their way of life (case in point being Glassie’s study of Ballymenone—if one has no knowledge of the complex politics of Ireland, one is already behind in understanding much of the content of the stories told). Everything we study is in essence interpretive, because we take the information we gather from myriad sources and try to make sense of it—as Professor Alvarez mentioned in our last class—cultural theory is not science; it is not law; it is interpretive (although I believe some of the most radical advances in science and law has also come about from free thinking and interpretive methods). The same holds true for art history—each art historian can only look and respond to formulate their own interpretations of what they see. The main point with any study is to accept or reject a scholar’s observations recalling that there is never any one way to explain a culture’s actions. What we learn from one scholar’s study is looking through a single lens.

But while I began this writing with the intention of focusing on Geertz, I returned to Turner’s piece only to find upon the second reading that it made more sense. He too learned the structuralist-functionalist style of anthropology in which laws of structure and process are revealed, but he sees this approach as limiting. What is key here is his comment that “the general theory you take into the field leads you to select certain data for attention, but blinds you to others perhaps more important for the understanding of the people studied.” (63) The concept of “structures of experience” as fundamental units in the study of human action, seems to take a more distanced approach than Geertz’s, yet it keeps from overly romanticizing particular practices, such as reducing the cock fight to an extension of the male penis.

When Turner lays out the threefold nature of these structures of experience as cognative, conative, and affective, he explains that what has lacked in the study of culture is the psychology of individuals who greatly contribute to the actions of a community. “We never cease to learn our own culture,” Turner explains, “let alone other cultures, and our own culture is always changing.”(64) How true—a study of a certain group of people in America in the 1960s would be vastly different from a study of the same community in the 2000s—technology, age of the community, world economics, and countless other changes in the world at large affect the actions of a group, not to mention the psychological makeup of the people as individuals. To solve this problem, Turner’s approach (and those of Hayden White and others) is to pick out the “threads” that link the event to be explained to different areas of the context. These threads describe the nature of connections between and “element” or “event” and its significant environing socioculture field views. Turner calls these events “social dramas” which are a type of narrative that can be examined in two ways (taken from Kenneth Pike): from “emic” and “etic” perspectives. Emic perspectives involve descriptions provide an internal view, while etic perspectives come from criteria external to the system. This inside/outside view allows the researcher to see the focus of their study objectively. It seems reasonable to assume that in order to know a culture and its practices that one must look deeply into the minutia that is their lives as much as to step back to see patterns and structures that emerge and link them to a bigger picture.

Turner's description of the division between “chronicle” and “story” brings to mind Glassie’s distinctions between the ceilis, histories, songs, and chat of the people of Ballymenone. The connection can be seen in how autobiography, personal account, factual record, and other information can turn chronicle into a story and vice versa. In many ways it also recalls how memory works in regards to photographs in modern society—we create a memory when seeing a photograph of our past rather than simply conjuring up the memory on our own. Many times a recollection of our past comes not from our own memories, but from the stories told to us by others (in effect, their version of the past, not necessarily our own) augmented by photographs, also filtered by the individual who took the photograph and the conditions of the moment based on technology, lighting, etc.

So, there is no real truth, but versions of it based on random information and images that are loosely organized by the people themselves or those who study them. I recall a recent phone call from my sister asking me my recollection of an event in my family’s history (my older sister locking in me in the garage in the 1960s to keep me from going to a rock concert and getting into trouble) and how we had three different versions of the story, (some including more than one of us locking each other in the garage at various times!) By now the real truth is impossible—no one wrote the event(s) in their diaries and there are no photographic documents. Yet the story persists in the family. While perhaps a trivial event, it does however, speak much about the dynamics of a family in the 1960s struggling with a changing middleclass culture that was threatened by drugs, free love, and resistance to war. The small, emic perspectives inform the etic perspective, but in actuality, they are all loose compilations of facts, conjecture, and interpretations that are subjective from both the observer and the observed.
-Julie Sasse

"Academic-ese"

2009-03-27T19:35:00.001-07:00

I very much enjoyed Rosaldo's "After Objectivism" and knew that I would from the moment I started chuckling at his family breakfast ethnography. I've wanted to do this before, particularly for a classroom setting: use the language of the discipline to describe its inner workings. I find it exhausting, trying to keep up with a vocabulary of terms that no one has ever explicitly given me and every reading for class involves a heavy amount of back and forth between the text and a dictionary, despite the absence of many of these terms in that dictionary. I dream of an easily laid-out vocabulary list like those handed out in foreign language classes; because that's what the language of academia is, really. A foreign language that every student is trying to play catch-up with, learning as they go and inevitably using words along the way that they haven't the faintest idea how to define. Everyone is guilty of it, whether the field is sociology, anthropology, literature, folklore, creative writing, painting, physics, etc. We want to be welcomed as part of the greater university culture so we manage a "fluency" (to borrow a term from an earlier reading) in the university's language so we are accepted and able to move within it.

I don't intend to suggest that broadening our vocabulary and gaining knowledge within the disciplines that are formed by that vocabulary is a "bad thing" entirely. Many of the terms I looked up became very helpful in articulating something I wanted to say that previously would have taken too long and still been unclear. But there comes a point where we're recycling language, only coming up with more complicated ways of saying what we want to say. Language is a tool of communication, that is its primary function, and if language obstructs communication then its purpose isn't really being fulfilled.

When Rosaldo says, "Clearly there is a gap between the technical idiom of ethnography and the language of everyday life" (51), I think his point that the language of a community should reflect that community could be easily expanded to other fields and to the institution
as a whole. When there is a problem identified, the next course is usually to try to fix it. Rosaldo suggests several things to keep in mind when writing an ethnography, including "Who is speaking to whom, about what, for what purposes, and under what circumstances?" (54) If, as a proposed possibility, new students who are trying to play catch-up to join an ongoing conversation become the professors who are perpetuating that conversation... why are we continuing the muddled nature of our communication?

-Caitlin

Traditions passed on? Evolved? Changed? Lost?

2009-03-23T10:56:00.000-07:00

“Folklorists who come from societies in which creativity and wisdom are suspect—societies in which artists are dismissed as isolated cranks and old people are pitied as diseased young people—regularly display misunderstanding of the social organization of communities like Ballymenone in unsuccessful predictions of the deaths of arts known only to a few aged people. Generation after generation contains the last basket weaver and the last ballad singer. When they were young, Hugh Nolan and Michael Boyle were not noted storytellers. They would not have performed for a visiting folklorist. Their elders, George Armstrong and Hugh McGiveney, would have told the tales, while the folklorist foretold the demise of the art and young Hugh and Mick cut turf and hay. But now they are the tellers….” (63).

I really enjoyed reading Glassie’s research and exploration of the Irish community Ballymenone. I liked what he said early in the book about not wanting to pay too much attention to the everyday or to the event but “to see people as they are: free and stuck in the world” (15). I think there is a tendency to lose this perspective when we come to cultures that are not our own with preconceived notions about who the people are and what’s important to them. Then, as explored in the essay we read on Smithsonian festivals, people “are” an isolated cultural dance or artwork taken out of context or they “are” the contents of their kitchen and want they make every Sunday for dinner. I think in my own work exploring Cajun culture, I sometimes have the temptation to make exotic the everyday because I feel the rituals, especially the routine of women in the culture, are fascinating. Glassie’s work and the way he handled the stories of his subjects with integrity and, whenever possible, allowing their own words to be present on the page avoids reductive thinking about these individuals or the community they are a part of.

I included the epitaph above because I also think this connects to preconceived notions limiting the understanding of another culture. What he says in this quote makes sense to me, but I have felt myself thinking that way at times. I do think this issue can be complicated when you think about extending the crafts that are handed down to rituals, language or traditions in the community. For example, in the Cajun community in Louisiana, very few people of my generation speak Cajun French. The language is spoken by the older generation, and because it is not a written language, it is likely to die out. Here there is not the cycle Glassie speaks of. There are also values that are attributed to people of communities that due to changing time and different historical context may not be maintained. For example, Cajun people have historically always been thrifty, able to make do with what they had and to be grateful for that despite hardships. But now as Cajuns begin to identify more with “American” identity than their Cajun one, they are becoming more consumerist. This is combined with the fact that many Cajun men now work for lucrative offshore drilling companies. They don’t have to scrimp and save anymore. And yet, something is lost that was intrinsic to the values of the Cajun people.

*********

“Ceilis happen at home, in the kitchen by the hearth.” (72)

“Ceilis are not planned. They happen. At night you sit to rest and perhaps a neighbor or two will lift the latch and join you at the hearth.” (71)

When I traveled throughout Eastern Canada last summer doing research, I visited Prince Edward Island. The land the fictional Anne of Green Gables called home is home to many citizens who originally came from Ireland. While there, I attended a “ceili.” Even though I am part Irish, I had never heard of the term before. There was traditional Irish music and singing. Men and women played fiddles and mandolin and guitar. I don’t remember any storytelling.

The thing that struck me about this experience in relationship to what I discussed above, is that all of the performers were relatively young, in their twenties and thirties. And most of the attendees were upwards of 50 or 60, as evidenced by silver hair. The announcer spoke of being encouraged by the youth’s interest in the ceilis. I thought it was great that youth were performing. At the same time, I found it a little disheartening that so few young people were present and other ones like me that were there were tourists. Perhaps this is reductive thinking as well and youth participate in their own cultural traditions in places outside this Knights of Columbus hall, but it got me thinking. - Lisa