I'll never forget when my dream of Israel died. I grew up in a family in which we were proud of Israel. We watched "Exodus" with joy. I could not understand Vanessa Redgrave claiming that Zionism was racism. And then came the Israeli massacres of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila. I understood.
How did the dream of a homeland, a place free from discrimination and oppression, become oppression incarnate?
It's evidence, to me, why revolutions don't work. In a Derrida-esque way, the margin becomes the center and carries out marginalization of The Other, in this case Palestinians. Israel as a state, I am sorry to say, learned the wrong lessons from millennia of oppression of Jews - the state learned how to violently control the imagined enemy. That's not to say that some Palestinian groups are NOT the enemy. Clearly they are. But this is to a great extent a created enemy; the state moved from battle with local Palestinian farmers trying to keep their land and life, to the classification of an entire social group as terrorists.
The American valorization of Israel, especially in the 1950s, poses an interesting comparison to the recent U.S. election of Barack Obama. From student papers and overall analysis of media discourse, it's clear to me that even conservatives and others opposed to Obama on the basis of his goals and policies, his vision of civil society, were pleased that he won the election. They were celebratory because it proved that America is "no longer" racist. American support of Israel, I think, arose out of similar social processes. America was anti-Semitic (note our government's refusal to allow Jewish refugees from Europe into the U.S. until after WWII and 'discovery' of the concentration camps). American support of the dream of a Jewish homeland became, similarly, proof that we weren't anti-Semitic.
Does that make it true? Semitism, like racism, runs deeper than politics. Politics express the will of society - but, in a complex state society, only imperfectly because politics is also about power and strategy and compromise in the name of the art of getting things done. How basic cultural ideas are expressed in the political domain do not completely and accurately reflect those cultural ideas work. A conservative can support the idea of a Black president and still be racist in his or her everyday dealings with African-Americans. Similarly, anti-Semitism lies deep in American society. Here, we can use the concept of hegemony. The Christmas holidays permeate American life. Christmas is fundamental to our social and economic relationships - note how essential buying and selling at Christmas is to the American economy. It's the taken-for-granted, so that anyone who chooses not to participate in Christmas is labeled 'wrong' in some way. People who object to Christian nativity scenes are labeled as demanding special rights. The response of people of different subcultures in the U.S. has been to elevate whatever religious ritual they have around northern winter time to a celebration along the lines of Christmas. Hanukkah is a good example of this. Assimilation here means maintain a surface difference that marks membership in a group, but in its key points accedes to and incorporates the larger national ritual (the frenzy of consumerism). Fear of "The Other" (Arabs, Jews, African-Americans) continues, alleviated somewhat by evidence that "they're just like us" if they participate in the national rituals.
And the violence in Israel/Palestine continues. Palestinian children are bombed in their schools; pregnant women can not go to the hospital to give birth; Palestinians are daily harassed and humiliated at checkpoints; a wall is built to enclose "The Other."
So many Israelis support peace and justice. When will this become the dominant mode of interaction? The U.S. is complicit in the violence of the Israeli government. I am ashamed.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Do Lefties Blame Soldiers?
I started to respond to today's post on DeathPower, but it was too long to post on someone else's blog.
DeathPower presents the heartrending statistics on the rates of suicide among Iraqi war vets. Great points and an important issue, but I took issue with his statement that "those on the left without such acquaintances often make the horrible mistake of blaming soldiers for the wars they are sent to fight."
It just ain't so.
It hit a sore point with me because of the kinds of urban legends that go around about the treatment of Vietnam War Vets by civilians and anti-war activists. These are used by the right to demonize the left. In fact, stories of returning soldiers being spit on by hippies are apocryphal (“it happened to the cousin of a friend of mine”). I know quite a few Viet Vets (from both sides!) from my work in SE Asia, and their anger is reserved for government policy (and the VFW in the case of Americans, which wouldn't let Viet Vets join because they weren't vets of a formally-designated foreign war!). The cutbacks on services to returning military began then and continue today.
Anti-Iraq war activists, in fact, have made a significant point of making their opposition about policy and the government and not about those who join and carry out the military mission. Sometimes they're a little elitist in their analysis of why people join, but analysis often sounds elitist because it's about looking at the system as a whole. Anti-war activists today are, I think, riffing off of John Kerry's "Winter Soldier" testimony: "We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out." He said the war had made him and his fellow vets into criminals at the behest of the government.
In fact, a bigger issue for the left is the way that the government has left vets hanging – cutbacks in GI Bill benefits, lack of access to medical care, and particularly lack of access to quality and consistent mental health care. PTSD shows up among many people who have experienced violent, traumatic events. Psychotherapy can make a huge difference in their lives. Why isn't money put into that?
We can disagree as to whether people should judge a particular government's actions as immoral, but that's not the same as being anti-soldier. We can probably all agree that, regardless of our politics, veterans are mistreated by the government. That was true of Vietnam War Vets and it's true if Middle East War Vets today.
DeathPower presents the heartrending statistics on the rates of suicide among Iraqi war vets. Great points and an important issue, but I took issue with his statement that "those on the left without such acquaintances often make the horrible mistake of blaming soldiers for the wars they are sent to fight."
It just ain't so.
It hit a sore point with me because of the kinds of urban legends that go around about the treatment of Vietnam War Vets by civilians and anti-war activists. These are used by the right to demonize the left. In fact, stories of returning soldiers being spit on by hippies are apocryphal (“it happened to the cousin of a friend of mine”). I know quite a few Viet Vets (from both sides!) from my work in SE Asia, and their anger is reserved for government policy (and the VFW in the case of Americans, which wouldn't let Viet Vets join because they weren't vets of a formally-designated foreign war!). The cutbacks on services to returning military began then and continue today.
Anti-Iraq war activists, in fact, have made a significant point of making their opposition about policy and the government and not about those who join and carry out the military mission. Sometimes they're a little elitist in their analysis of why people join, but analysis often sounds elitist because it's about looking at the system as a whole. Anti-war activists today are, I think, riffing off of John Kerry's "Winter Soldier" testimony: "We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out." He said the war had made him and his fellow vets into criminals at the behest of the government.
In fact, a bigger issue for the left is the way that the government has left vets hanging – cutbacks in GI Bill benefits, lack of access to medical care, and particularly lack of access to quality and consistent mental health care. PTSD shows up among many people who have experienced violent, traumatic events. Psychotherapy can make a huge difference in their lives. Why isn't money put into that?
We can disagree as to whether people should judge a particular government's actions as immoral, but that's not the same as being anti-soldier. We can probably all agree that, regardless of our politics, veterans are mistreated by the government. That was true of Vietnam War Vets and it's true if Middle East War Vets today.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
The Nietsche Family Circus
A randomly generated pairing of a Family Circus cartoon and a quote from Neitsche. Strangely and absurdly amusing, especially if you grew up wondering why this inane cartoon has such a long run!
Friday, July 4, 2008
A wordle based on my dissertation abstract
Creating clouds on wordle is a hoot. I did a couple on a recent paper I wrote on opium control and participatory development (think of the oxymoron!), but can't find them. C'est la vie.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Discussion of AAVE "Savage Minds"
On May 20th, 2008, Kerim wrote about AAVE on the anthro group blog "Savage Minds."
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is something I teach frequently in anthropology classes, both Intro to Cultural Anthro and Anthropology of Communication. It’s a useful ethnographic example as I’ve been teaching in urban colleges and universities, particularly in an arts and media school and a predominantly Black university. Looking at the history and the sociolinguistics of AAVE is a great way to talk about issues of the broader system in which agency takes place.
An initial post-er disputed the idea that “because AAVE exists, it means that there are people who don’t want to [conform] to white culture.” In fact, my observations are that in fact there are people who don’t want to conform to White culture and their use of AAVE can be a very conscious statement of that. That’s not a rejection of economic advancement, it’s a rejection of the terms of economic advancement, which have historically been closed to much of this population. What we, as anthropologists, can do is look at what AAVE does in a range of social relationships.
One point of debate was whether people can choose their dialects. I hold that most cannot. They learn their natal dialect; that is the process of language socialization, and this becomes a child’s first language. For many (by no means all!) urban, working-class African-American children, AAVE is their natal language. They choose this as much as any person chooses their culture. However, people might choose to code switch when that’s socially possible. We need to look at who code switches or not, why, when (in what setting, with whom).
For instance, many of my Black students and friends are very emphatically opposed to AAVE, which they term Ebonics or, more often, ‘slang.’ And yet in their most vigorous defenses of Standard English, you can hear them segue into the phonetics of AAVE, for instance, /aks/ for /ask/. They don’t intend to do this, they don’t want to do this. Upwardly-mobile people might hyper-correct (over-pronounce the /sk/, for instance).
To understand this, I think we need to look at the separate parts of language, some of which are very conscious and some of which are so deeply embedded into our cognition and language that it’s nearly unconscious. Phonetics tends to be deeply embedded; studies of language socialization show that infants can recognize the sounds of their parents’ native language (the one spoken to the infant) within a days of their birth. The human mouth is capable of making 100s of sounds, but most languages use only a small number of those possible sounds (see, for instance, the chapter on language in Nanda & Warms, Cultural Anthropology).
Grammar is also deeply embedded in our cognition, part of the taken-for-granted. An example I give for this is Pijin languages. In the Solomon Islands, I learned Kwaio (an Austronesian language) by first learning Pijin and then gradually slotting in Kwaio words in my Pijin talk (until I morphed into speaking Kwaio exclusively). Pijin was a trade language. The vocabulary was at least nominally English (specifically, British English of the early 20th century), but pronunciation (phonetics) and grammar (syntax) more closely followed the rules of the Austronesian languages spoken in the Solomon Islands, particularly on the island of Malaita. They fit the new vocabulary into their existing language structures, and I made use of that syntactical structure of Pijin to learn Kwaio (a reverse engineering, I suppose).
Vocabulary is much more transient. We all pick up new words all the time, when there is occasion for it (for instance, in a 101 class in university, a big part of what students are doing is learning new vocabulary). Yet, for some reason, both African –Americans and ethnically White people associate AAVE with ‘slang,’ or vocabulary.
These are some of the ‘laws of language’ that create and maintain AAVE.
The political issue is why Black folks still speak AAVE. AAVE is also maintained by the existence of ethnic enclaves. Clearly this is due in large part to historical and present-day segregation. On the level of interpersonal relations, there are social costs to a Black person who chooses to speak Standard English. They are labeled “mama’s girl” or “acting White” and seen as rejecting their social peers. A great example of this can be seen in the film “American Tongues” (produced and directed by Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker, 1988). This is sociolinguistics. Speaking AAVE conveys information about social relationships among people, it makes someone a member of a group. When you know that you are in a world that rejects you, the security of being an accepted member of your group is significant.
Of course “we don’t make choices outside of history and outside of ideology,” as one post-er put it, but we are active agents within our own system. African-Americans who speak AAVE are no more automatons in the face of structure and system than we are on this list and there is evidence of their intentions. I have attended Trinity Universal Church of Christ; many of my students are members of the congregation and employees of Trinity; and I have in-laws who are African Nationalists. They absolutely reject the hegemony of White culture. That does not mean that they reject economic advancement. They seek, rather, to build the economic base of their own community. I think this is inherently impossible as the economic wealth of their community must ultimately be built on inflows from the mainstream culture, but that is their ideology. And there are unintended consequences to these choices due to institutionalized racism in American culture, for instance, the assumption that someone speaking AAVE is uneducated, lazy, unemployed, working class, criminal, dangerous, “not one of us.”
There is evidence of people choosing to speak Standard English as a political (or class) stance; note the forceful acceptance of the correctness of Standard English by the upper classes of African-Americans (the “talented tenth,” W.E.B. DuBois). Reject of AAVE is a class strategy for upward-mobility.
When I teach, I also place this discussion in the context of the English Only movement in the United States, and here we return to Kerim’s initial post. Think of the huge outcry against “Ebonics” in the 1980s. Why did people care so much and why is it still talked about today? The Ebonics Resolution arose out of work linguists had done on how the teach the reading and writing of Standard English to students who had grown up using AAVE almost exclusively. It was called the Bridge Program and it was very successful. The goal was to educate teachers on the specific phonetic and syntactical features of AAVE so that (1) they would recognize these as linguistic differences and not as evidence of learning disabilities; and (2) to give teachers specific exercises and tools to clearly explicate the differences between AAVE and SE that children needed to learn so as to read and write Standard English. As John Rickford, a linguist specializing in dialects, pointed out, we’ve been using ‘immersion’ for years and it is not working. Huge numbers of young African-American, predominantly male students (young, urban, African-American males are the predominant speakers of ‘pure’ AAVE) are failing. Immersion isn’t working, so why not try something else? This program was also supported by William Labov (a linguist specializing in American dialects). We need to understand this controversy in terms of the ways in which speaking SE is a marker of membership of the community of American citizens, so that speaking a different dialect of English is seen as a rejection of the rights of citizenship.
Most discussion of “Black English” is in the negative – let’s explain how they’re different. But a good anthropologist needs to understand the context of positive cultural values of AAVE. Aside from expressing affection and belonging in social relationships, it is a language that gives free form to certain kinds of metaphor and story-telling. In teaching, I use studies of “The Signifying Monkey” and “Shine on the Titanic” to illustrate traditions of story-telling that extended up through Dolomite (a comedian who is sometimes referred to as “the godfather of rap”) and on to hip-hop. I usually also discuss “signifying” or “playing the dozens,” linguistic forms of competitive insult that are highly positively marked in segments of the African-American community (particularly men, particularly working class men, but by no means confined to this segment).
BTW, Labov and Rickford argue that in fact there’s a national AAVE that show remarkable coherence over time and region; and that the numbers of AAVE speakers have increased with the end of segregation as more urban poor are left behind in the cities.
I’ve lots of references, but here’s a few:
Rickford and Rickford, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, 2000
Labov, William, “Can Reading Failure be Reversed: A Linguistic Approach to the Question,” in Literacy Among African-American Youth, 1995
See also William Labov’s 1997 Testimony to Congress on Ebonics and the Bridge Program
One of the points brought up by a European post-er was this assumption that my statement of diversity and difference was an inherent statement of hierarchy. He didn’t say it in so many words, but that’s what he kept on assuming. Why?
I know that American have a hard time with difference. We say everyone has a right to be different and my students most emphatically believe that they are each unique. In fact, it’s important to reinforce, repeatedly, that recognizing real cultural patterns of difference is not the same as stereotyping. (Why it’s not is a different blog.)
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is something I teach frequently in anthropology classes, both Intro to Cultural Anthro and Anthropology of Communication. It’s a useful ethnographic example as I’ve been teaching in urban colleges and universities, particularly in an arts and media school and a predominantly Black university. Looking at the history and the sociolinguistics of AAVE is a great way to talk about issues of the broader system in which agency takes place.
An initial post-er disputed the idea that “because AAVE exists, it means that there are people who don’t want to [conform] to white culture.” In fact, my observations are that in fact there are people who don’t want to conform to White culture and their use of AAVE can be a very conscious statement of that. That’s not a rejection of economic advancement, it’s a rejection of the terms of economic advancement, which have historically been closed to much of this population. What we, as anthropologists, can do is look at what AAVE does in a range of social relationships.
One point of debate was whether people can choose their dialects. I hold that most cannot. They learn their natal dialect; that is the process of language socialization, and this becomes a child’s first language. For many (by no means all!) urban, working-class African-American children, AAVE is their natal language. They choose this as much as any person chooses their culture. However, people might choose to code switch when that’s socially possible. We need to look at who code switches or not, why, when (in what setting, with whom).
For instance, many of my Black students and friends are very emphatically opposed to AAVE, which they term Ebonics or, more often, ‘slang.’ And yet in their most vigorous defenses of Standard English, you can hear them segue into the phonetics of AAVE, for instance, /aks/ for /ask/. They don’t intend to do this, they don’t want to do this. Upwardly-mobile people might hyper-correct (over-pronounce the /sk/, for instance).
To understand this, I think we need to look at the separate parts of language, some of which are very conscious and some of which are so deeply embedded into our cognition and language that it’s nearly unconscious. Phonetics tends to be deeply embedded; studies of language socialization show that infants can recognize the sounds of their parents’ native language (the one spoken to the infant) within a days of their birth. The human mouth is capable of making 100s of sounds, but most languages use only a small number of those possible sounds (see, for instance, the chapter on language in Nanda & Warms, Cultural Anthropology).
Grammar is also deeply embedded in our cognition, part of the taken-for-granted. An example I give for this is Pijin languages. In the Solomon Islands, I learned Kwaio (an Austronesian language) by first learning Pijin and then gradually slotting in Kwaio words in my Pijin talk (until I morphed into speaking Kwaio exclusively). Pijin was a trade language. The vocabulary was at least nominally English (specifically, British English of the early 20th century), but pronunciation (phonetics) and grammar (syntax) more closely followed the rules of the Austronesian languages spoken in the Solomon Islands, particularly on the island of Malaita. They fit the new vocabulary into their existing language structures, and I made use of that syntactical structure of Pijin to learn Kwaio (a reverse engineering, I suppose).
Vocabulary is much more transient. We all pick up new words all the time, when there is occasion for it (for instance, in a 101 class in university, a big part of what students are doing is learning new vocabulary). Yet, for some reason, both African –Americans and ethnically White people associate AAVE with ‘slang,’ or vocabulary.
These are some of the ‘laws of language’ that create and maintain AAVE.
The political issue is why Black folks still speak AAVE. AAVE is also maintained by the existence of ethnic enclaves. Clearly this is due in large part to historical and present-day segregation. On the level of interpersonal relations, there are social costs to a Black person who chooses to speak Standard English. They are labeled “mama’s girl” or “acting White” and seen as rejecting their social peers. A great example of this can be seen in the film “American Tongues” (produced and directed by Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker, 1988). This is sociolinguistics. Speaking AAVE conveys information about social relationships among people, it makes someone a member of a group. When you know that you are in a world that rejects you, the security of being an accepted member of your group is significant.
Of course “we don’t make choices outside of history and outside of ideology,” as one post-er put it, but we are active agents within our own system. African-Americans who speak AAVE are no more automatons in the face of structure and system than we are on this list and there is evidence of their intentions. I have attended Trinity Universal Church of Christ; many of my students are members of the congregation and employees of Trinity; and I have in-laws who are African Nationalists. They absolutely reject the hegemony of White culture. That does not mean that they reject economic advancement. They seek, rather, to build the economic base of their own community. I think this is inherently impossible as the economic wealth of their community must ultimately be built on inflows from the mainstream culture, but that is their ideology. And there are unintended consequences to these choices due to institutionalized racism in American culture, for instance, the assumption that someone speaking AAVE is uneducated, lazy, unemployed, working class, criminal, dangerous, “not one of us.”
There is evidence of people choosing to speak Standard English as a political (or class) stance; note the forceful acceptance of the correctness of Standard English by the upper classes of African-Americans (the “talented tenth,” W.E.B. DuBois). Reject of AAVE is a class strategy for upward-mobility.
When I teach, I also place this discussion in the context of the English Only movement in the United States, and here we return to Kerim’s initial post. Think of the huge outcry against “Ebonics” in the 1980s. Why did people care so much and why is it still talked about today? The Ebonics Resolution arose out of work linguists had done on how the teach the reading and writing of Standard English to students who had grown up using AAVE almost exclusively. It was called the Bridge Program and it was very successful. The goal was to educate teachers on the specific phonetic and syntactical features of AAVE so that (1) they would recognize these as linguistic differences and not as evidence of learning disabilities; and (2) to give teachers specific exercises and tools to clearly explicate the differences between AAVE and SE that children needed to learn so as to read and write Standard English. As John Rickford, a linguist specializing in dialects, pointed out, we’ve been using ‘immersion’ for years and it is not working. Huge numbers of young African-American, predominantly male students (young, urban, African-American males are the predominant speakers of ‘pure’ AAVE) are failing. Immersion isn’t working, so why not try something else? This program was also supported by William Labov (a linguist specializing in American dialects). We need to understand this controversy in terms of the ways in which speaking SE is a marker of membership of the community of American citizens, so that speaking a different dialect of English is seen as a rejection of the rights of citizenship.
Most discussion of “Black English” is in the negative – let’s explain how they’re different. But a good anthropologist needs to understand the context of positive cultural values of AAVE. Aside from expressing affection and belonging in social relationships, it is a language that gives free form to certain kinds of metaphor and story-telling. In teaching, I use studies of “The Signifying Monkey” and “Shine on the Titanic” to illustrate traditions of story-telling that extended up through Dolomite (a comedian who is sometimes referred to as “the godfather of rap”) and on to hip-hop. I usually also discuss “signifying” or “playing the dozens,” linguistic forms of competitive insult that are highly positively marked in segments of the African-American community (particularly men, particularly working class men, but by no means confined to this segment).
BTW, Labov and Rickford argue that in fact there’s a national AAVE that show remarkable coherence over time and region; and that the numbers of AAVE speakers have increased with the end of segregation as more urban poor are left behind in the cities.
I’ve lots of references, but here’s a few:
Rickford and Rickford, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, 2000
Labov, William, “Can Reading Failure be Reversed: A Linguistic Approach to the Question,” in Literacy Among African-American Youth, 1995
See also William Labov’s 1997 Testimony to Congress on Ebonics and the Bridge Program
One of the points brought up by a European post-er was this assumption that my statement of diversity and difference was an inherent statement of hierarchy. He didn’t say it in so many words, but that’s what he kept on assuming. Why?
I know that American have a hard time with difference. We say everyone has a right to be different and my students most emphatically believe that they are each unique. In fact, it’s important to reinforce, repeatedly, that recognizing real cultural patterns of difference is not the same as stereotyping. (Why it’s not is a different blog.)
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