I'm writing a paper that's due tomorrow at 2pm. It's 10pm now, and I am just really starting. Here's what I've got:

The rhetoric of teen pregnancy is a crucial site to examine race. It carries enormous emotional weight for almost all participants in debate on the topic and sex education (one of the major goals of which is to avoid teen pregnancy) is “deeply grounding when it comes to morality” (Luker 185). Teens are between childhood and adulthood, and are moving from being “at risk” to “potentially dangerous,” and the act of becoming pregnant is often seen as forcing that social transition. Thus, descriptions of pregnant teens are descriptions as passive as “children having children” and morally aggressive as “welfare queens.” Both of these descriptions are loaded with racial meaning, but it is a meaning that relies on a degree of flexibility that seems absent from biological conceptions of race. Instead, Stoler’s emphasis on the folk theory of cultural contagions (151) coupled with the idea that such contamination is never entirely erasable (Dawdy 150) provide a useful starting place. What they discuss indirectly, I hope to reframe here in an exploration of the role of aging in racialization.

Normally, this would all be erased by the time the paper got handed in, replaced by something that hung together a little better. But I just haven't had the time, so it may just make it all the way.

Wish me luck!

I feel like I have learned an enormous amount from the RaceFail posts. I have not engaged, except to occasionally thank people, because as I have watched other people make mistakes I would have made and be quite rightly corrected, I was able to understand the importance of just sitting back and listening, Of learning without burdening others with my slow steps.

But I face a dilemma. I am an academic, a grad student anthropologist, and I am writing papers and presenting at conferences. I have a responsibility to incorporate racism. I simply cannot sit back and listen, my career depends on me speaking up. And the big reason that this IS my career is because I WANT to speak up and make change.

That means that I'm going to try to make my slow steps public. It means that I'm going to try to benefit, professionally, from attempting to be anti-racist. And even though I am certainly not a white person whose social network is made up exclusively (or even predominantly) of white people, and even though there are WoC who write and work on issues related to racism who are helping me check my work, I am still painfully aware of how much of a novice I am in recognizing my privilege.

My problem is by no means a new one. Even though I'm not trying to speak for others so much as for myself and the world I want to live in, my failure, because of my privilege, will hurt others more than me. I am going to f* up, and I am going to hurt people in the process. And it is a fact of my privilege that I will be able to do this and it probably won't hurt my career. But the alternative, making my career about something else, is much worse. I feel called to educate. I feel called to make change for social justice. And I believe that it is my moral obligation (as a human being, as a Christian, as a future-mother of future-children of color, as well as my personal calling that I am morally obliged to follow) to make my life about this.

So, I am uncomfortable. As I should be. Discomfort is not fun.

--

P.S. Feel free to pat me on the back, this is MY lj, after all. However, if you're going to suggest that it's not a big deal that I'm going to hurt people, or that I shouldn't worry so much about my privilege, please refrain and read some of the amazing stuff by brilliant people on why that is not the case.

ETA: also feel free to disagree with me. Duh.

1) The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is an amazing thing and will hopefully help me make my ethnographic discourse analysis paper on livejournal worth reading.

2) There's no way in hell this paper will be done by Wednesday.

Okay, so there's like a million awesome school things to talk about today. So awesome, in fact, that I have to list them. (A great opportunity for a pretentious list, too! Can this day get any radder?)

(adviser) I met with SS today. She is a total beast. I've been wanting her on my committee but she's been in the field all year and wants to KNOW ME before she jumps on board. So, I'm taking her class on Women in U.S. Health next semester.
I want her because these are the research interests she lists: Identity, ethnicity and community in health care; United States; HIV/AIDS; governmentality; access to health care; social movements; gender and sexuality. Did I really not immediately identify her as THE NUMBER ONE PERSON I TOTALLY HAVE TO WORK WITH?
And I read one of her articles on the "Politics of Recognition" and she talks about getting away from bounded notions of identity and "cultural competence" in health care and towards a participatory model based on reciprocity and getting target communities involved in their health care instead of some hierarchical, "here's what your people need" approach. And, can we just review? Her work is totally theoretically grounded AND applicable in meaningful (politically engaged) ways! *dorky cry of glee*
And when I met with her? I was totally cogent talking about my research! 

(bootstrap bullshit) After that I went to a talk about welfare queens. That is, the scholar - a prof who opened by telling about her teenage pregnancy, domestic violence, and use of welfare - debunked a lot of the ideas held about what mothers on welfare look like. She presented all of these amazing women - most women of color - who fate had shit on, standing up and getting degrees and pulling themselves out of poverty. She challenged the problematic scapegoating of teen moms, and the awful oxymoron of saying teen moms are too immature to be welfare recipients (cuz they'll just spend it on fake nails) - it was all very relevant to the lit review I did last semester. The PROBLEMS were that she really didn't ultimately combat the problematic bootstrap myth, the neoliberal discourse of choice, that underlies all of this demonization of poor women. And she reinforced a couple of things about Latinas (specifically that Mexican American families don't want their daughters to be educated). But, she said some really important things about higher education as, economically speaking, the best route for gov't intervention for poor people.

(committee) THEN I met with SL, my prof in the History of Anthro Theory and told him about my secret intellectual idea about writing an article type of thing defending tenure. I have this whole thing in my head. With a little more cross-cultural research, I think it could be really good. And it would be very differet from my main research, which could be good for showing my depth down the line.

(dissertation) And then there was ANOTHER talk, this one about undocumented students, and making schools safer places. They basically compared the problem with "color-blindness" (that is, teachers pretending that their students "don't have a race" and thereby erasing their identities and their real lives) to the Don't Ask, Don't Tell approach to legal status. On the one hand, I'm with it. On the other hand, however, I think that community work has to happen alongside this, because getting kids talking about legal status with OTHER kids who might tell their Border Patrol mommies and daddies is not cool. Also, I have my doubts about school as a safe space for immigrant kids of color, regardless of this silencing of legal status. I mean, as long as gang involvement is linked to immigrant status and ethnicity, and as long as suspected gang members are being targeted for policing (e.g., "go home and change that shirt, there's too much blue on it!"), I doubt that creating spaces for students to talk freely about a (stigmatized) legal status is very helpful. HOWEVER, the idea that there should be an oath for teachers protecting them from having to share information about students that might incriminate them seems like a pretty good one to me, as long as it puts no other student in danger.

(ethnography) And so I've been thinking about my research again, and I'm pretty excited about it, but that will have to wait for another entry since this one's already too long!

1) As the Red Queen said, "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" When I got to sit in on a group of high school seniors in Rincon H.S. talking about body image, I was in total awe. They were talking about Bourdieu, habitus, and decolonizing language and body. They were doing surveys, taking field notes, and becoming involved in school policy-making. It was awesome. And there wasn't a blonde head in the room.

2) I'm getting really excited about Bakhtin. Especially the ideas that Kit Woolard develops about moving bilingualism to the center rather than relegating it to the margins. When I think about my own research, and why I want to be working with immigrant Latinas, this is a big part of why (metaphorically, since I'm interested more in expectations and norms and embodiment than language, and what I'm interested in re: language has more to do with stance than codeswitching).

3) I love this. I definitely want to be an anthropologist. I just wish that I could take the pace down a notch.

4) We may be buying a house much sooner than I expected.

5) Brain, Child is an awesome magazine, and makes me remember why - even with all it's massive problems - 2nd Wave feminism still has some good things to offer. (Which is not to say I identify as 2nd Wave, cuz there's just too much wrong there, but there's some lessons I think get lost in later iterations. I'm especially fond of the importance of over-representing in your personal life - and your teaching of children - what is under-represented outside.) I was especially a fan of the article on cursing like a sailor.

6) Ack! I have class in an hour and SO MUCH LEFT TO READ! LJ, you time-succubus.

The articles I am reading for medical anthropology this week talk about phenomenology of the body and they challenge the old mind/body dichotomy. They also make the very important point that this (Western) dichotomy may make it hard to write an experience-based ethnography of the body because we aren't so much used to thinking about, say, a bodyful mind.

One example was when the author (Thomas Ots) and his Chinese buddy (in China) ate a bunch of crappy food on the train. Author started to feel nauseous. At this moment, his buddy announced that he was feeling vertigo (or something close enough to that I'm not going to bother explaining), which makes more cultural sense (he explains in the article, but I'm not going to bother here). Author stops, and tries to feel vertigo and sure enough, he realizes that, along with the nausea, his head feels a bit muzzy. Eureka! They go through "identical" experiences, and emphasize different locations for the yucky.

The problem for me is that, when I woke up, I felt a little sick to my stomach (after reading articles like this until I fell asleep last night). Then, I felt hungry. Then I felt hungry and nauseous. Then I felt hungry, nauseous, muzzy headed and headache-y, and my chest feels full of energy. None of this is actually very bad, it's all low-level annoying and could very easily be what the author talks about re: psychosomatization of emotion (ie, I'm pissed that I'm back to 7 days a week of work, there's nothing I can do about it, I swallow my bitterness, I feel like crap). But you know, it could also very easily be that because I'm reading about this stuff, I'm feeling it. I do that a lot. It's part of why I like books. My mommy says I'm sensitive. ;-)

My prof keeps asking us: why the HELL do healers want to be healers? Being around sick people sucks. They're sick! And needy!

More and more I've been thinking about this and about the fact that I really am not so much interested in making my life about sick people. And part of the reason that I like doing stuff with sexuality is that - even though there is DEFINITELY some big bad stuff out there - sexuality is a great thing.

Anyway,  I continue to think medanth is SO KEWL and I want to keep doing it. Even if it does make me feel like crap from time to time.



*Ots, Thomas. (1991) Phenomenology of the Body: The Subject-Object Problem in Psychosomatic Medicine and the Role of Traditional Medical Systems Herein. Curare: Anthropologies of Medicine, special issue 7(91): 43-58.

Ots, Thomas. (1990) The Angry Liver, the Anxious Heart and the Melancholy Spleen: The Phenomenology of Perceptions in Chinese Culture. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14: 21-58.

Despite the fact that the class I am TAing for, called Many Ways of Being Human, is an intro to anthropology and not intended to be about racism, I cannot envision doing anything without talking about racism. Given the history of anthropology, given where I am working, given who my students are, I simply cannot imagine it.

When I worked with Identity, Inc and the Spanish-speaking immigrant youth who participated in that program and talking about (surprise!) identity, racism came up. It came up because people experienced racism and because they had racist things to say. Usually they experienced racism from White people and Black people, and those who had had racist things to say said them about Black people (and occasionally Asian people). It was not my job to teach them how not to be racist, it was my job to support them in resisting the racism they faced.

Now, here, I have a very different job description. I don't know how many kids in my section identify as PoC. It could be as many as half the 3/4 of the class, it could be as little as 1/7. When I brought white privilege into a conversation (I tried to ease us in by talking about classed space), at least half the class was extremely resistant to the idea.

Last week, I spoke at length (outside of class) with a White female student who, in addition to living in Africa for a while, has a number of (adopted) sibilings of color, and went to high school where she was "one of three white students in her class of 120." Her response to this has been to decide (as I suspect her mother taught her) that the world should be colorblind, and that in fact, she IS colorblind.

We had a nice long conversation about it. I broke down for her a couple of the ways that being "colorblind" is so totally not anti-racist and challenged her both on the quotidian and ideal applications of her desire for a world that ignores the differences wrapped up in that symbolic word/concept "color."

I'm pretty sure she didn't get it. When she left, my parting words were, "don't get to comfortable with your resistance," but I don't think she's ready to be uncomfortable. It took me a while, too, so I still hope, for her sake, that even after she forgets this conversation entirely, some of the ideas nudge her in new directions.

But, after the conversation, I had to sit and think about my own advice. It's gotten pretty comfortable, sitting in front of a group of relatively uninformed students and challenging them to both stop exoticizing and reducing to white-for-all-intents-and-purposes. It's gotten pretty easy to forget that, informed or not, my words in the classroom and out of it (my words in my research in particular), however much they may INTEND to be anti-racist (as my student intended to be), may silence rather than support. In her good intentions, I saw my own, and it was an uncomfortable reminder. But if there's anything that reassures me, it is the fact that I am uncomfortable.

Now, back to work! 

I am, I must admit, a bit uncomfortable these days. I was accepted to grad school at least partly because I had a clear idea of what I would be doing with myself. I knew what I wanted to do my research on, the timeline for school, and the career trajectory. What I didn't have was the theoretical base.

After a semester and a half here, I am beginning to get a taste of what I don't know, which has had the effect of throwing my research questions into doubt. Then, on top of that, I've been going around and collecting advice from more senior students and professors. Here is a collection of some of the advice I've received:

• don't worry about your timeline, you don't know anything yet
• you need to have a clear timeline or you will never graduate but will spend the rest of your life in grad school
• you really can't move forward with your research until you have a theoretical base
• you really can't move forward with your research until you have IRB approval
• you really can't come up with any important questions until you've really been IN the field for a while, so you should do that ASAP
• you should stop having such a narrow topic and such specific questions
• you should know exactly who and what you want to study, and it should be something with lots of research already so that you can look at it with a new theoretical base
• you need to get IRB approval ASAP and you should really be publishing and presenting at conferences: publish or die!
• you shouldn't bother with the IRB for your Master's Thesis
• you will never get IRB approval for your topic
• it shouldn't be too hard to get IRB approval for your topic, even though you're dealing with kids and sexuality
• no one will ever do an Independent Study with you during the summer
• you should do an Independent Study with me over the summer!

In short, I am living in a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

Beyond the advice of others, I am doing my best to be comfortable with my own feelings of uncertainty, to believe wholeheartedly that the discomfort I'm feeling is healthy and indicative of learning. I am trying to let go of my need to have a plan and to accept the lack of control.
I have made some mistakes, which helps me feel a little less anxious about making more. I've made some friends and found colleagues I deeply respect that are also trustworthy. In the end, those have been the only real lessons I can imagine being universal.

And now: I have a meeting with a grad adviser to try to put together an AnthGradAZ Wiki over the summer.

I never thought I'd go giggly for a structuralist, but it just goes to show that my brain is being blown open and my prejudices are beginning to spill out.

Marshall Sahlins' lecture "Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of 'The World System'" is (at least at this point - I'm only 1/8 of the way through) about the roles of "so-called peripheral peoples" in shaping the "modern global order" (5). I'm not going to talk about the paper, but I did want to reproduce his seventh footnote, found on page 6, here in full.

"The 'mystique of Western domination' encompasses a whole series of related propositions, ranging in value from absurd o false, and including: (1) that before the expansion of the West other peoples had lived and developed 'in isolation' - which just means that we weren't there; (2) that the historic adaptations they were compelled to make to one another do not count as such, for everything then was 'pristine' and 'indigenous'; (3) that their interaction with the West however has been a qualitatively different process since (4) European power uniquely destroys the ancient harmonies and coherence of these exotic cultures; and (5) in the process of their 'acculturation' or assimilation to the West their own cultural distinctiveness is irreversibly extinguished."

Agree or disagree, I am friggin' thrilled that statements like this are coming up in my reading.

I'm reading an article for my Ethnographic Discourse Analysis class called "Language ideology and racial inequality: Competing functions of Spanish in an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant" by Rusty Barrett and it is bringing back all KINDS of uncomfortable memories.

I was 18 when I first worked at La Madeleine, a faux-French restaurant in chic Bethesda. When I started, I was the only U.S. born person and the only White person working there, including the managers, and the non-managers were split evenly between immigrant Africans (Cameroon, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, etc.) and immigrant Latinos (from El Salvador and Mexico). Because the Africans were more bilingual (French and English), and because my French was better than my Spanish, I began as friends with them, particularly a man named Omar from Cameroon who continues to be one of the most genuinely good and kind people I've ever met in my life. Although I'd taken two years of Spanish in high school, I was completely unable to communicate with most of the Latinos whose English was far better than my Spanish but still not enough to have real conversations.

I'm not sure why I was inspired to really get to know my Spanish-speaking colleagues, when (from Barrett's article), it is obvious that many white people would simply prefer to keep to the communities they already understood. Barrett mentions how other white people would come and ask him how to say, "Fuck off" and other words that they could use to "put Hispanics in their place" if they felt they were being insulted (179), and I have to say I fully understand the impulse. I was constantly the butt of some of my coworkers jokes (particularly two middle aged Salvadoran women who constantly brought me up in sexual contexts, even bringing a little wind up penis to work and asking me over and over if I liked it - I brought a great deal of this on myself* by shocking them with the information that I was attracted to women as well as men), and as in order to learn Spanish (getting people to teach me vocabularly constantly and children's songs and desperately trying to have conversations despite the language barrier) I was forced to play the clown, a foolish, sluttish outsider. I'd say that I took the whole thing good naturedly, I recognized how much I had to learn, and being the ONLY White United Statesian, as well as the youngest, newest employee surely shifted my expectations for power and authority. I recognized that I had more upward mobility than anyone else working there, but I was also very very young, emotionally and socially if not physically.

By the second summer, the restaurant was changing; there were more Latinos and fewer Africans and the new managers were all U.S. born and the GM was white. She was pretty awful and her treatment of the Spanish-speaking employees was shameful. I had grown close to some of my coworkers, had written letters to them in broken Spanish during the school year, and once I returned home, spent almost every afternoon hanging out, driving them on errands, and helping out where English was necessary. But I was still the butt of jokes, still the foolish outside, and I was not yet terribly competent at understanding the social expectations of such an environment. I drew constantly during the extended down times and teased back and forth with people, including the Latino bilingual manager. I recall with real deep shame when I drew a picture of a woman with big ears, a flat head, and droopy breasts, labeled it "Your Mom" and gave it to said manager WHILE HE WAS AT A TABLE WITH CUSTOMERS. It would have been over the line in any case - although I didn't fully understand that in part because of the way I was teased by some of my Spanish-speaking coworkers - but it was totally unacceptable the way I did it. His reaction was profound and utter disbelief and a clear reprimand. I was very confused and apologetic, but I really didn't get it.

Of course, none of this is really about restaurant Spanish language ideologies, except perhaps some of mine. But even though my restaurant experiences were quite different from Barrett's in Chalupatown, there is enough in common that I question some of his conclusions about the use of Spanish and Mock Spanish. Much of it rings true - Mock Spanish was certainly used both to feel good about one's "accomodation" of the inferior/ignorant Spanish-speaker while simultaneously signalling a non-Latino identity. I can't say a White identity, as Barrett does, because my experience of it came from Africans and Black United Statesians. But there were times that it wasn't used that way, that instead what is undeniably Mock Spanish was used as something different. That is, Spanish-speakers AND English-speakers would use some of these words, like "finito" (which referred explicitly to the end of one's shift: "finito?" is your shift done? "finito!" my shift is done). When I tried - over a couple of weeks - to get someone to teach me the RIGHT way of asking this, something like terminado? or te vas?, I was consistently rebuffed and retaught "finito" by my multiple teachers. Although I had initially identified "finito" as something like Mock Spanish, by the end I thought it might actually be a Salvadoran innovation. Perhaps I was being intentionally excluded from proper Spanish (that is, a fluid conversation between two Spanish speakers), but my sense was that there were a number of words and phrases that became a sort of pidgin and were used as powerfully by Spanish-speakers as by English-speakers. I do not suggest that there was not racial tension - there certainly was, though (at least my first summer) in different ways from Barrett's experience - but when communication broke down, there was obvious frustration and disapproval on both sides. It is no surprise that the English speakers had more power in those relationships, but I believe it is a mischaracterization to suggest that the use of these Mock Spanish words were simply indicative of a "can't-be-bothered" attitude on the part of English-speakers that served as an excuse to escape blame for communication breakdowns. Not being in a position to use such commands very frequently myself (as the youngest and newest I took orders, I didn't give any), this observation came from watching such interactions take place every day (and break down every day).

Of course, I was no anthropologist carefully versed in what to be watching, and I obviously missed a great deal (which I intended to illustrate clearly in mentioning my embarrassing well-intentioned racist drawing), but I don't think that necessarily makes what I did get completely useless. Beyond the simple difference of experience, I think it is important to actually bring up the possibility of a restaurant pidgin that worked in conjunction with Mock Spanish, rather than a simple instance of well-intentioned racism. I do not intend to contest the idea that racism was at play and at work in the language use there, but I do contest the idea that Latinos were only resistant in their use of Spanish to exclude English-speakers. Instead, I suggest that the use of Mock Spanish by Spanish-speakers became an act of resistance in itself, and was wielded against incompetent managers and coworkers.




* After a convo with my bud tatterpunk I feel like I should add here that I do not think sharing my sexual identity should have necessarily opened me to such sexual teasing, only that sometimes it does. And the experience helped me to learn what sort of places I need to be more wary. Again, not that queer people should have to be wary, but that sadly we don't live in that world most of the time. Also, this is nothing compared to the badness that could have come, and I am glad I learned the lesson in such a relatively harmless way.
----

I have decided to leave this a public entry for now. I'm a little nervous, as my presentation of myself feels risky, but if I took the risky parts out, you wouldn't be able to fully appreciate the context of these observations and ideas. I have often spoken up in favor of such risky anthropology, and even though this isn't anthropology I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is. That said, if I get too flamed, I'm exercising my privilege and friend-locking this puppy.

I have to write a response to this book. I read it in two days and spent five hours talking about it with a friend so that I could write about it. And yet, the thing that most closely relates is the following comic I found, thanks to fallingfae .





Do you think I could just hand in the comic?

Y'all probably heard about the 7 young men who went "beaner-jumping" and killed Ecuadorian immigrant Marcello Lucero. You are, undoubtedly, horrified that such racial hate crimes are still happening. Talking about it with a friend, I learned about race-costume parties such as in Santa Clara University and Delaware, where students came dressed up as janitors, cholas, landscapers and pregnant teens. Of course it's problematic, but what it says about gender is really interesting, too. The options available to men were either really low-status low-pay jobs or gangbangers, for women, the options were a deprecated form of motherhood or gangbangers.

Of course, people were outraged and hurt. But what really interests me is that pregnant Latinas got recognized as representative. See, I've been essentially making the argument that it is something that we white United Statesians have been panicking about for quite a while now. We first saw it in the early immigration policies that restricted Mexican female immigration based on fears of hyper-fertility. But what's a little surprising is that Latinas don't get pregnant more often than, say, African Americans ages 15-19, but they sure as heck have more live births. Also, Latinas are by far the most likely of the three groups (Latinas, Blacks, and Whites) to be married as well as a teen parent.

So, bizarrely, Latinas are really doing a great job of successfully following the government funded abstinence only until marriage curricula that emphasize that the BEST sex (their capitals not mine) happens in marriage. They don't advocate waiting until you're a certain age to get married, but they do emphasize the misery of single teen mothers (and a number of other horrible things about appropriate gender norms that I won't get into here).

What's crazy is that the outrage is over a party that acknowledges stereotypes. Is the problem that it isn't merely acknowledgement but mockery? That in and of itself, such an event perpetuates the categories it shows? Because, of course there are plenty of Latinos who DON'T fit those stereotypes, but we who fight for equality fight because there are many who do. We recognize exactly what those partygoers recognized, that being a pregnant or parenting teen is stigmatized for women of color and thus limits your opportunities for economic success, that Latino men - especially immigrant Latinos - are stuck in the dirtiest manual labor. Does silencing the topic prevent it from occurring? (Michelle Fine, at least, would say no.) Does laughing at the problem, and mocking it under a strobe light, make it more prevalent? Or is it a way of accepting the status quo?

As much as I recognize the problems of this, and as much as I know that the intent was not to raise awareness of the political problems of these stereotypes, I cannot help but feel that this play did more to challenge these realities than it did to accept them. The violence done to Latinos was not the naming of the stigma, but the system that keeps people in the stigmatized roles, and, perhaps the stigmatization in the first place. And while I DO agree that the party reinforced the stigmas of teen pregnancy and landscaping, who among those calling foul would hope for those roles for their own children?

Discussion welcome.

So I'm relying pretty heavily on Dilemmas of Desire for my final paper in Sociolinguistics because it is only of only three academic sources that include the narratives of Latina teens talking about their own sexuality. Anyway, in one section a Latina teen who "vigilantly controls her sexual feelings" tells about how she stays away from dancing reggae with guys because it makes guys hard and girls horny and the something snaps in them and they say, "oh let's go to the bedroom." 

At first, I had to giggle a little, because, while I don't go around perreando these days, there was a time in my life I did and the idea of me moving from the dance floor to a bedroom because of that is pretty far off. (I know I'm not everybody.) Even after I grew up a little and started working at Identity, I wholly supported dancing - even close body-to-body dancing - as a way kids could enjoy each other without danger. But then I remembered.

The last retreat that I attended with Identity, we ended up allowing the kids to have a "party" in one of the houses. Obviously, my co-facilitator and I were there. And at first I had no issue with the closeness, but at some point I blinked and saw two or three girls touching the ground with their hands while the guys behind them held their hips close and I just started blushing like crazy. Feeling like a bizarre 1950's chaperone, I ran around the room straightening girls up and making space between partners. Now my JOB was to chaperone, so this isn't totally unreasonable, but where IS the line? And who determines it? What makes one kind of closeness acceptable and another dangerous?

I still smile and shake my head thinking of that trip. Soon after, I kicked all the guys out to their own house and a bunch of the kids threw a fit. I wasn't having it. Until that point I had been afraid that if made to choose between what I thought was correct and what would make me popular I might cave, but I had absolutely no sympathy for their fury and even smiled to myself when I heard some girls bitching about me amongst themselves in their room. I went in and explained myself anyway, and soon after I had a line of girls (and even a boy or two avoiding going to sleep) knocking on my door and apologizing.

Here, doing research quite literally on my couch instead of "in the field," I am enjoying myself and learning a lot. Part of me really misses the joy of the drama, the intensity, of adolescent lives (seeing and supporting them, not living it), but I realize now that, although I can certainly do it, I have no interest in being a chaperone again. When I enter the field from here, my role will be different from what it was at Identity, and that is nothing but good.

In trying to write my National Science Foundation grant proposal, I am struggling to formulate my goals in the form of hypotheses that can be disproved. Obviously, this is important to some science-y people. But Geertz is a social scientist obsessed with interpreting meaning, and he really shaped my approach to anthropology. Interpretation, it turns out, is pretty friggin' difficult to disprove. But it is, unfortunately, what I want to do. Ethnography, as Wikipedia so helpfully asserts, "links what people say to what they actually do."

It boggles my mind why anyone would think this is less important than creating/assigning generalizing structures that ALSO can't predict the future.

Can I just take a moment to say, I love Geertz. I LOVE Geertz. Love love love.

Why do I love Geertz?

Because he is what I believe an anthropologist should be. He is not generally polemical, but has few qualms at scorning perspectives and people he finds ridiculous (and includes himself in that category often enough). He is utterly academic without ever taking his feet off the ground. And best of all, he is completely serious while his tongue in lodged firmly in his cheek.

I don't expect to do much theorizing, though who knows what the future holds, but if I ever did I would try to do it like him.

(eugenics*) So life kicked into high gear last week. I lost my laptop (but recovered it) and realized that just because I'm keeping up with class readings does not mean I'm actually keeping up. Hello research projects! I struggled madly to figure out what I wanted to do (why must theses be clear and concise? why not vague and wide-ranging?) and more once I realized what doing it would entail.

(filibusters*) I realized that meditating can no longer be an "optional" part of my daily routine. I've been more consistent on meditation here (about 5 days a week) than I ever was back in D.C., but it just isn't enough. Those days when I lost things? (You remember: my debit card, school ID, driver's license, and laptop.) All occurred on days or the morning after days in which I failed to find time to meditate. Beyond that, and its obvious effect on my insomnia, it also simply makes me FEEL better. I can read more and longer. I understand things more deeply. I am more likely to do my pathetic little exercise routine (pushups, crunches and leg lifts on the floor of my office in between readings). And my shoulders feel less tense.

(growers*) I'm enjoying my Mexican Immigration class a lot, except I feel like a lot of the students are re-hashing stuff everybody should already know by now. Hello! We're in grad school! Can't we just take for granted that Manifest Destiny was a crucial part of U.S. history? I want to go deeper than blaming the media - it's too easy to say and too impossible to correct. And I'm annoyed that we keep trying to have a conversation about "why immigration policy is bad" instead of talking about the root causes (in my opinion, the "Zero Sum Game"/Culture War perspective that hypes xenophobic warnings of "racial swamping" and the basic question - not detailed laws - of how we define citizenship) and trying to come up with solutions. I realize this is only the third week, but the semester is short, people! (As I covered in point 1.)

(hyperfertility*) I am preparing to get started on research. At this point my research ideas involve interviewing (and/or surveying) high school nurses and/or teachers before, during, and after they teach sex ed. I'll be trying to elicit information about cultural values around sex and comparing them with what is already known about strategies in Latino families around pregnancy-prevention (the focus of my MA thesis and NSF grant proposal), differences in language choice between "sex talk" and other talk (the sociolinguistics project), and perspectives and opinions about the effects of immigrant status on academic success and sexual risk (for the Mexican Immigration class). As you can see, I'm trying to minimize the number of research sites I will have to develop. All this is dependant, however, on IRB (Institutional Review Board/Human Subjects) approval. I've passed the Human Subjects training, now I just have to get my proposal in.

(immigration*) This weeks list is all about immigration. Allow me to explain "One cannot divorce the Border Patrol's founding in 1924 from an era when eugenics was the rage." (Dying to Live, 111) Filibusters were the name given to expansionist raids from California and Texas into Mexico after the Civil War. U.S. growers had a major impact on immigration trends when it became their policy (supported by the Border Patrol) to recruit undocumented labor and bring them across the Border in huge numbers, growers are still a huge lobby impacting bad labor conditions (human rights concerns), unrealistic Border policies, and continued cycles of migration. And, as you may have heard, Mexican women have been a particular demographic threat because of their supposed hyperfertility.

Okay, greenity I didn't ignore your comment, I just wasn't ready to answer it yet.

My information about them is so profoundly limited that I have trouble imagining how my observations would be of much interest. So if, for example, I seem to condone what appears to be heinous, take it to mean that I simply do not want to condemn what I know nothing about and vice versa.

The experience in Colorado City (back from that trip to Northern Arizona last month) consisted of the following:
1) about 15 minutes of background info from a professor who has worked in the area for years (with the Kaibab Paiute, not FLDS)
2) going and buying snacks at a grocery store manned (actually womanned) by FLDS women with long hair french braided in the back and poofed up in the front and wearing long simple dresses. Just like the women whose kids got taken, if you want a popular image.
3) eating lunch at a little dive that sold FLDS tracts next to the register, one of which I picked up and read
4) more conversation afterward in the car with 7 other anthro people.

The time in the store was the most interesting to me. I immediately walked away from my companions and looked through the aisles alone. It was obvious that we were part of the same group, because of our clothes and hair and manners we stuck out like sore thumbs. Apart from the women at the registers, there were a number of women with small children doing their shopping. Despite sticking out, I was not apparently the object of their or their children's attention. But whereas my companions, who walked around speaking loudly (I thought), appeared to be pretty much ignored, when I smiled at someone or greeted them, they smiled back and talked to me as well.

The girl who rang me up struck me at the time as pretty young, but on reflection she was no younger than girls who ring me up at the Safeway in back home. What was different was my interpretation of her working and her youth. I saw her as "of a marriageable age" and working to support her family in a system that seems utterly foreign to me, as opposed to the youth I'm used to who are NOT of a marriageable age, although they are certainly old enough to have children of their own and are part of a system that I'm far more comfortable with.

In the restaurant, a young mother with two children allowed her little daughter - 2 years old? - to run to the front counter. The little girl slipped right in front of me and nailed her face in the counter. She ran back to her mother and who comforted her. What really surprised me though was that she barely made any sound as she sobbed. I glanced to my professor who tacitly confirmed my question about whether the relative silence of the girl was cultural. I can't IMAGINE a 2-year-old in my culture having that occur in that particular way and staying so quiet. It disturbed me more than anything else I saw. Certainly more than the huge vans for families with many mothers and tons of kids or than the half-built houses everywhere designed to evade taxes. I would like to think that the little girl was "naturally" like that, but her excitement, her energy in her run, suggest to me that was not the case.

Finally, the tract. It was, undoubtedly, screwed up. It begins with an explanation of the sexual evils of woman and appears to be aimed at men avoiding them, then the main part begins. The story is of a woman, dying of a disease in the most abject poverty possible with babies all around (also, apparently, starving and dying) who explains that all this has happened because she cheated on her husband (she was a second wife) with a bad (young) man.  Yes indeed. It's almost comic. My only question is whether, by refusing to accompany the FLDS preacher back to civilization to avoid people's attention (scorn? pity?) she is considered to be atoning (even though it will mean the eventual death of her children by starvation when she dies) or she is considered to be beyond help. At any rate the preacher leaves her and the thing ends with another exhortation to women to stop being such big sluts. It is beyond doubt that this is related to community conceoptions of marriage, gender, and theology, but if my experience reading ancient Greek myths has taught me ANYTHING its that what the men write ain't necessarily what the women think or live. Another example is of the FLDS women going with their children to some of the reservation casinos in the area.

So, what do I think? It sure as hell isn't a life I'd want, and I strongly doubt that the situation allows for polygamy in a happy healthy way for anybody concerned. Furthermore, I am quite concerned by the idea that people need help from the FBI agents constantly stationed there to be able to escape. I sympathize with them because they are certainly persecuted, but living outside the law means that there is no protection for those powerless INSIDE the society, and that gives me the heebee-geebies.

Now I am very curious, greenity , why you asked.

I'm taking a break from reading philosophy to write this post. Apparently, for this class, I've got 1500+ pages of reading for this week. Now, that's not so bad, because we only have to choose one reading to really focus on and be prepared to analyze for class, but I really AM interested in Kant, and I wish that there weren't 900+ pages of him to read. I'm all about original sources, but this is a little more than I can handle.

On the other hand, all the reading for other classes seems totally manageable.

This should not be taken as a rant. I don't have enough information to rant. This should be taken as a question looking for an answer.

The golden age of celebrity ethnographers like Margaret Mead who presented their work directly to the world (or at least publicly accessible media) rather than to the academy appears to have dwindled somewhat, to say the least.

I hope that all the anthropology blogs (like Savage Minds and Culture Matters and This Blog Sits, to name a few) that are popping up signal a change in that area, but as of yet, the blogging community - especially the SPECIALTY blogs blogging communities - is (are) still pretty limited in their audience. The information may be becoming more free, more available, but you've still got to dig (or at the very least know where to look) to find it.

WHAT anthropologists are studying and what they are learning has an enormous potential to change the world in small and large ways. There are anthropologists who study (as I hope to) subcultures and communities in the U.S., for example. But what they do, what they learn, seems to be known only to their contemporaries and sometimes not even then. (Except in cases like the Minerva Project, where anthropologists work for the Dept. of Defense.) 

Why? Are people actually actively trying to get the word out to local media? Are they contacting local news media? Beyond the applied anthropologists - another kettle of fish altogether, since they are actively working with communities to make change instead of being primarily in the academy - what are anthropologists doing to make sure that their hard work actually makes a difference?

Do I regret not reading this woman before applying to grad schools? Oh hell yes.

Which is not to say that I would have applied to Columbia to work with her instead, her area is very different from mine, but she is also a genius. Amazing. I'm in love.

The quotation from Writing Women's Worlds that made me happiest today:

"Telling stories, it has seemed to me, could be a powerful tool for unsettling the culture concept and subverting the process of "othering" it entails."