…And Remember, ‘X’ Never, Ever, Marks the Spot

While I have a moment (between several hundred pages of reading and a paper due shortly) I wanted to mention an article posted on MSNBC’s Travel News site, ‘X’ now a gender option in Australian passports. Briefly, the article summarizes the addition of an ‘X’ gender choice option on Australian passports primarily intended for individuals born of indeterminate sex. I am completely supportive of the recognition third genders and the breakdown of gender as a dualistic ‘either, or’. However, what I want to point out is that ‘X’ is not a third gender, ‘X’ means unknown.

In our quest for equality, let us also be sure to address our own underlying assumptions as well. ‘X’ is the choice because we have no other descriptor, we have no other descriptor because our culture does not recognize one. ‘X’ is a non-identity, because we haven’t seen fit to define or bestow one. We haven’t given them a gender.

Evidence for gender as a cultural construct if there ever was any.

A Rock to Remember Me By

September 11^th is coming back around. I can tell, not only by looking across the room at my calendar, but because all of my usual news and media sites are grappling with the same problem. They can’t decide what story to tell.

We all love a story with a happy ending, so much so, we habitually insert something of a perpetually uplifting disposition into almost everything lately. But we must be mindful that, in our attempts to cheer the atmosphere, we don’t reinterpret history to suit popular opinion, revise its events to suit our aims, or tweak the narrative only to spare ourselves the sometimes devastating consequences of free will.

Our past serves our present. How we use the past, in politics, in religion, and in media, says more about us presently than it ever could about the actuality of the events we describe. What I have noticed more in the past several years, particular to 9/11, is our interest in its memoirs, our focus on the individual’s subjective narrative of their own experiences. Every website, every coffee table memorial, contains a mosaic of personal tales and earnest photographs of care-worn faces looking off into the illuminated distance. We focus on the “heroes” and “where are they now” and we couch many of our current stories in the individualistic perspective of “where were you when…”. We do this, in part, because 9/11 is a hard story to tell and in part, because it is difficult to determine what our story will be when we are still in the middle of telling it.

Lawrence Langer, author of “Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory”, says “It’s essential that we strive to remember past atrocities, and not because learning about them will prevent future atrocities from happening. Instead, the acts of listening, learning, and remembering are important steps toward developing empathy for other individuals and cultures”.

He goes on to say, “The people I interview tell stories because they want the world to know what happened to them. The fact that someone knows and cares about knowing verifies their experience. It doesn’t give it meaning. But if no one cared about knowing, you’re reduced to oblivion. If we don’t pay attention to what happened on 9/11, it may as well have not happened.”

For the time being, our consumption of the “individual experience” story lets us protect ourselves from the tragedy of the event, but, I worry, does it also let us avoid the worst elements of it?

There will eventually come a time when the ‘story of 9/11’ begins to fully take shape and we will either need to address the full scope of the event or we will force a narrative that picks and chooses its perspectives. It’s hard to hear it, but 9/11 will not be about the people forever, in the same way that Pearl Harbor and the Vietnam War are also losing their personal, subjective, narratives. One day 9/11 will be a way to examine our past involvement in world affairs and our use of political power to achieve our own agendas. It will be one event along the endless march of history, a snapshot of the politics, the religion, and the culture at a particular time and a particular place. It will lose its sadness and its grief in favor of detached consideration; it will trade flowers, teddy bears, and personal photographs for steel and stone monuments and footnotes in textbooks. When that time comes, will we still listen and learn and remember in order to develop empathy, will we verify the experiences of others as they continue to recount their memories, or will we one day give it meaning outside of the stories of personal tragedy that we consume today? Or, as many fear, is 9/11 destined to be reduced to oblivion when no one cares to listen any longer?

I have no easy answers, because on Sunday, I will still remember where I was that day.

What’s Luck Got To Do With It?

School starts tomorrow. Well, officially anyway. For the past two weeks I have been busily attending orientations, gathering readings, familiarizing myself with new books, and working on papers to present at various events coming up rather quickly in the new school year. While doing so, I made a mention to several friends of mine that I was in the market for a blog topic. Having exhausted a decent amount of my creative energy already, taking requests seemed like a good avenue for a mental boost. Then, one of my friends suggested that I discuss academic bias, particularly academic bias related to gender and sexuality, and I suddenly ground to a halt. There are books upon books, articles upon articles, on just such topics, how was I going to boil it down to what amounts to a few paragraphs of disjointed musing? But then it occurred to me that, instead of focusing on academic bias within academia (it does exist, but I have discussed it before), I would address bias from outside of academia and how it affects academic women.

Over the past few years I have seen, with increasing chagrin, the conservative criticism of academia as being “too far left” garnering more and more attention. The idea that “children are being indoctrinated with a liberal agenda” is particularly offensive to me, namely because the implication of that statement is that students are empty vessels simply waiting to be filled with the desires and rhetoric of their “liberal” professors, and not cognitive, thinking, human beings capable of analysis, rational consideration, and rejection. Students do not arrive as blank slates that are then programmed with the intention to return them to society as left-wing political automatons, as some media outlets would seem to have us believe. I, in particular, encourage my colleagues and my students to disagree with me, figure out their stance on controversial issues for themselves, and engage in thoughtful discourse with those around them, as have all my professors done for me. If a student thinks a certain way, it is my goal for them to understand why they think that way, not to convert them to my way of thinking. My concern for the purposes of this post is that there is a perception of academic bias among a growing portion of the American public, which leads to the idea that colleges and universities exist as some kind of anti-religious/anti-patriotic monolith. It also has not escaped me that this perception has come from people who sometimes tout the fact that they have never been to college.

The tenets of gender bias specifically, in academia and in business and politics, are relatively well known, for instance, the idea that a man’s successes are deemed to be a result of his abilities while a woman’s successes are because she “lucked out”. Women find that they must work twice as hard to get half as far as their male colleagues, despite holding equal credentials. Women who are non-traditional teachers or who are academically aggressive are labeled “power hungry” while equally non-traditional, aggressive, men are labeled “innovative” or “confident”. A woman who takes risks and fails has a high likelihood of being seen as having character flaws; a man who takes risks and fails is often seen as the victim of circumstance. Men benefit from the assumption of competence, women typically do not.

So what does this have to do with outside academic bias and its effect on women in academia? Combine the two together and you have a recipe for trouble when a female academic interacts with the sociopolitical world at large. A highly educated woman suddenly becomes a “high and mighty” or “vicious and condescending” harridan who thinks of nothing but her own selfish wants and desires. She is a threat to notions of “the family”, she is a danger to religious principle, and she undermines all that is “right and good”. In today’s political climate, this outside message of academic bias is coming, most notably, from powerful, white, women. Women who, despite their claims, have benefited from equal opportunities in education and business, who have husbands that take on non-traditional roles, and who enjoy a high level of success working outside of their homes. They accuse other women of being abrasive, where men are praised as assertive. They accuse women of bragging, while men are rightly self-promoting. Women are admonished to be gentle and nurturing (i.e., good mothers) with the implication that they are therefore not authoritative. And yet, these same women attempt to appropriate the authority of academia with claims of academic backgrounds or degrees.

I worry where this mixed message will lead. Be educated, but not more than you should be, be strong and assertive, but only for the benefit of your husband and children, be successful, but only as much as you are permitted to. I didn’t get where I am today because of luck, and I have every intention of being successful, whether my husband says I can or not.

Pan Asian with a Side of Perspective

My apologies for the hiatus, but the past three weeks have been taken up by moving and all the irritations and frustrations that come with a five state expanse.

Needless to say, I have recently moved to Massachusetts. It’s been lovely so far, as one might imagine, but, as things do, something recently caught my eye; the local Asian restaurants. Or, to be more specific, the local pan-Asian restaurants. I say this because I have yet to see a Chinese restaurant or a Japanese one. I have, however, seen a Japanese/Thai/Korean restaurant, a Chinese/Japanese/Thai restaurant, and at least three Chinese/Thai/Korean take-out places. The culmination of my curious attention was the “all-Asian” restaurant I finally drove past this morning.

Without a doubt, food is deeply cultural. Food represents an integral part of human livelihoods, biology, identity, and culture, and Asia is a big place filled with very different cultures. Therefore, the presence of such a large number of pan-Asian restaurants makes me consider whether or not there is something going on in our culture that is expressed in the form of a taste for all-access pan-Asian food. This also strikes me as, not necessarily a uniquely American thing, but possibly a uniquely Western thing. After all, what would an “all-American” restaurant in the same vein be like? Wouldn’t we find it strange to see a menu listing a bacon cheeseburger next to the seafood jambalaya and the Boston clam chowder? Would we turn our noses at the idea of one kitchen churning out Bali Hai seared ahi, rocky mountain oysters, and chili con carne?

In the majority of cases that I know (that being my friends, family, and colleagues), I know how important it is to them that they have one place to go to that does great burgers, another that does good pasta, and another that is known for its signature burritos. They would look askance at a place that did them all, thinking that it certainly couldn’t do any of them well with so many different dishes. Yet, there seems to be nothing amiss with getting your spicy tuna rolls at the same place you get your beef bulgogi and pad thai.

Food for thought.

This Is Why I Love Anthropology…

Yesterday I visited my local discount bookstore in search of, what else, yet another anthropology book. I knew they had an anthropology section, but I couldn’t seem to find it no matter where I looked. A helpful employee finally pointed the way.

It was right between the Alcohol/Addiction and Self-Help sections, facing the ADD/ADHD/Neurological Disorders wall. Right above the Psychic/Occult and U.S. History shelves.

I always wondered what it was my professors weren’t telling me.

The Need to Believe

Considering my oft cited love of archaeological myths and hoaxes, it is likely that I will eventually propose a class that incorporates these topics, along with a general level of ethics. A colleague of mine is already developing a class that addresses the place of archaeology in the modern world. It concerns the perceptions of the discipline by non-archaeologists, the use of archaeology by individuals, nation-states, and the international community, with a partial class session likely devoted to pseudo-archaeology.

I am considering a dedicated pseudo-archaeology class. One that also delves into contentious issues within the discipline itself. Most notably, I think it is important to discuss the popularity of archaeology in the media and the need to believe. The need to believe takes shape as soon as the lines are drawn and sides are taken, as supporters and detractors battle to vindicate the conclusions of their chosen project or theory. The New York Times has a good article, A Clash of Polar Frauds and Those Who Believe (http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/belief.pdf), that uses the debate between Dr. Frederick A. Cook and Robert E. Peary, two explorers who both claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1909, as an example for how a good narrative (or in some cases, a good rivalry) can obscure the fact that the evidence is lacking for either side. Such is often the case between archaeology and pseudo-archaeology as well.

For this reason I intend to include one of my favorite hoaxes, the Beringer Hoax, whose narrative becomes even more twisted as the story ages. What began as a row between jealous colleagues eventually metamorphoses into a tale of prankster students, humiliating their professor with false fossils. The real story of the Beringer Hoax is that of two of his colleagues, J. Ignatz Roderick, professor of geography, algebra, and analysis at the university, and Georg von Eckhart, privy councillor and librarian to the bishop’s court and university, whose intent was almost certainly to plunge Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer into academic disgrace. But why? Was this simply a case of personality conflict and academic antagonism, or, like so many other archaeological hoaxes, was this predicated on a need to believe that the discoveries of archaeology (which often challenged the pervading religious beliefs of the time) were false? Are we still dealing with this today?

It ought to be a fun class.

The Collapse of Complex Contemplation

Outwardly, anthropology and archaeology are popular topics. Stories of fascinating new finds routinely make their rounds in newspapers and magazines, there are TV shows dedicated to everything from Ancient Egyptian tombs to the Spanish Inquisition, and archaeological tourism continues to grow in many countries around the world. But despite this, we have fewer anthropologists and archaeologists than we once did.

Rex (Alex Golub), on Savage Minds, (http://savageminds.org/2011/06/30/who-will-read-the-baby-boomers/) considers this subject from the perspective of anthropologists as individuals slowly being deluged with a vast body of work they can no longer reasonably work through when he says, “The result was a huge amount of baby boomer anthropologists who produced a huge amount of baby boomer anthropology. My question is: who is going to read it all?”

His question made me think of Atul Gawande’s most recent book, The Checklist Manifesto. The Checklist Manifesto primarily addresses the idea of ‘managing complexity’ in the field of medicine.  In chapter one, The Problem of Extreme Complexity, Dr. Gawande outlines the problem as such, “The ninth edition of the World Health Organization’s international classification of diseases has grown to distinguish more than thirteen thousand different diseases, syndromes, and types of injury – more than thirteen thousand different ways, in other words, that the body can fail. And, for nearly all of them, science has given us things we can do to help. If we cannot cure the disease, then we can usually reduce the harm and misery it causes. But for each condition the steps are different and they are almost never simple. Clinicians now have at their disposal some six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures, each with different requirements, risks, and considerations. It is a lot to get right.” (Gawande 2009, pg. 19)

“Here, then, is the fundamental puzzle of modern medical care: you have a desperately sick patient and in order to have a chance of saving him you have to get the knowledge right and then you have to make sure that the 178 daily tasks that follow are done correctly – despite some monitor’s alarm going off for God knows what reason, despite the patient in the next bed crashing, despite a nurse poking his head around the curtain to ask whether someone could help “get this lady’s chest open.” There is complexity upon complexity. And even specialization has begun to seem inadequate. So what do you do?” (Gawande 2009, pg. 28-29)

His solution, as the title of the book suggests, is the implementation of standardized checklists.

Could we adapt this perspective for archaeology and anthropology? We too must ‘get the knowledge right’ and make sure that the tasks are done correctly (research, publication, peer review, discussion and debate, etc.). We too must manage complexity on a level beyond the capacities of individual scientists. I doubt a checklist would necessarily do the trick given the nature of our aims, but Rex’s suggestion of a “program that promotes scholarly synthesis using new technology but with very old-fashioned goals: to start synthesizing, cataloging, and summarizing the work that has been done in the past half century” might not be such a bad idea.

The Master and Margarita Gain Their Freedom

I’ve been toying with the idea of making the Feminist Movement and, to some degree the fight for gay marriage, the focus of my thesis. Specifically, I am considering studying both of these movements in regards to their existence as social, political, and intellectual entities and trying to understand how power and identity impact the physical organization of groups and influence social and political thought.

What got me thinking along these lines is the analysis that there are many different “kinds” of feminists (differentiated by, among other things, their viewpoints on the scale of change required in society to achieve equality and the agency of the individual to enact this change). Hugo Schwyzer (http://hugoschwyzer.net), who is typically described as a liberal feminist (and in all fairness, whose blog I have been regularly following),  recently posted a series of question and answer sessions with Meghan Murphy, a fellow blogger and radical feminist, where they debated issues of pornography, prostitution, and the place of men in feminist activism.

You can check out the specific posts here:

1. http://hugoschwyzer.net/2011/06/13/feminism-porn-and-slutwalk-part-one-of-a-conversation-with-meghan-murphy/

2. http://hugoschwyzer.net/2011/06/15/male-feminists-sex-work-and-slutwalk-part-two-of-a-conversation-with-meghan-murphy/

And then a few days ago I read Laiven’s post, All Feminists are My Kind of Feminists, at Feministing.com: http://community.feministing.com/2011/06/29/all-feminists-are-my-kind-of-feminists/

It’s no surprise that disagreements in principle cause factions to form and groups to coalesce around like opinions, but I am curious to learn more about whether power, the ability to influence the actions of others, and identity, a person’s conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations, are at work within these movements more so than just disagreements over ideology.

I agree with Laiven about how the creation of “women’s spaces” have the effect of alienating men from feminist discussion in the same way that I believe that holding lesbianism as the ultimate expression of feminism alienates straight and transgender women (many of who would benefit the most from feminist ideals). What is the place of men in feminism is a good question, but how that question is addressed appears fraught with issues of identity (what does it mean to be a feminist?) and power (who gets to be a feminist? Who decides what feminism means?), as is the place of sex work in feminist thought struggling with the same (Where does the voice of the sex worker come in? Who has the authority to speak for sex workers? Who gets to decide what is the right kind and what is the wrong kind of sex work?). And perhaps most importantly, is there a privileged voice? (Does a woman’s voice ‘mean’ more than a man’s? Does a prostitute’s voice ‘mean’ more than an academic’s? Does a gay man’s voice ‘mean’ more than a straight man’s voice?) How do these movements resolve these conflicts?

If I decide to pursue this line of questioning, I can only imagine the Gordian knots I will inevitably encounter, but as they say, if you aren’t making someone mad, you aren’t doing it right.

So I leave it for now pondering this quote from Laiven (bold  mine):  “To be fair, I’m pretty well versed in terms of feminists and I don’t know any who feel 100% anti-men but I do know MANY who feel the sexes need to remain divided particularly with regard to these “women’s spaces” which allow women to “heal” from the abuses they have suffered at the hands of men. To be clear, the abuses I am discussing are of a philosophical nature. Sexual assault and/or physical abuse clearly require healing, and it is understandable why a woman/man who has suffered from this kind of abuse would want to avoid all types that represented her/his abuser. I am not talking about this. I am talking about women’s conferences and meetings and politics, which exclude men. I am talking about the complexities of oppression that come along when we truly understand how race, sex, class, religion, sexuality and other aspects of culture converge to define us in relation to an unobtainable norm – and the need to stop seeing the world as an abstract farce of oppositions.”

Quality Archaeology Since 1935 – Part Two

Happy (belated) birthday, Indiana!

I recently read Jay Fancher’s post on Anthropology.net wishing one of America’s most ubiquitous cultural icons a well-worn 30th, (http://anthropology.net/2011/06/12/happy-birthday-indy/), and this line in particular made me smile, “When people find out you’re an archaeologist, their first question is often “Is it really like Indiana Jones?”  As a result, Indy gets a lot of criticism from professionals who get tired of explaining that archaeology is rewarding, is often full of adventure and excitement, but it’s not very much like Indiana Jones.”

Since the day I declared my major, I have gotten this question, at family gatherings, at parties, and just out and about. My usual response is to use the conversation as an opportunity to really introduce archaeology as Jay suggests, though the subsequent responses I get in return are markedly less enthusiastic. While truth may be stranger than fiction, it also has a tendency to be less exciting.

Then again, I once asked a group of my archaeology professors (jokingly at the time), whether or not they would get into a fist fight with a Nazi on a tank in the name of archaeology. Needless to say, from the answers I got, it occurred to me that the problem is probably not a matter of context, but opportunity.

Fieldwork in the Blogosphere