Dear Friend,Whether you're a world-renowned archaeologist, one who's hoping to be, or, like most, keen and happy to imbibe the past for its own sake, we here at world headquarters ['kay, it's just me] wish you a scintillating, surprising, satisfying new year. Unfortunately, the anthropologist in me wishes to acknowledge that the timing of such a greeting is problematic, and requires a historical perspective and the realization that one is bound up in one's own culture. Thus, my greeting must be regarded as being given in the spirit of renewal, and not necessarily anchored in some historically contingent time-keeping system. O' course, the precise moment to celebrate has been a moveable feast even the brief span of European history. Depending on when in the past couple of thousand years you lived, you might have celebrated the new year either on January 1st or at the vernal equinox, and either using the Julian or the Gregorian calendar. And, while by tradtion it's been January 1st for several centuries if you're English, when you celebrate tonight, try and remember that some people's years aren't quite finished yet, and some have already passed into the future. The now-almost universal celebration takes place in conjunction with the Gregorian calendar, and will occur at 00:00 UTC January 1, 2013. However, the Persian New Year, Nowruz [nouˈɾuːz], celebrating the solar year 1392 SH [unless you follow the Shah's calendar], will be celebrated at the upcoming vernal equinox, which takes place at 11:02 am Universal Time on March 20th, 2013. And, if your forbears used a lunar calendar, as is the case in China, you'll celebrate the advent of the year the snake on Saturday, February 9, 2013 at 16:21:00 UTC, 2013 of the Gregorian calendar [whether or not you follow a continuous numbering system based on the reign of the Yellow Emperor]. And, if you're Jewish, you've already celebrated the coming of the year 5773, at sunset on September 17, 2012 [strictly dependent on sunset in your time zone, I think]. So, Happy New Year whoever you are, and wherever you are, and whenever you are.SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.
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The Subversive Archaeologist: HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!
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The Global Sociology Blog: And While We’re On The Subject of The Power Elite…
This:
Social capital, strength of weak ties and all that stuff.
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Language Log: Misnegation mailbag
Here are some items sent in by readers over the past few weeks, to add to our list of misnegations. Larry Horn, on ADS-L:
"We'll see the fate of the coaching staff of Dallas…This cannot be understated, though, or overstated: whether it's his fault or not, Tony Romo is now 1-6 in win or go home games, either in Week 17 or the playoffs."
–ESPN SportsCenter anchor Steve Levy following another last-game elimination of the Dallas Cowboys
Maybe that should be the general strategy for all hypernegations:
"No head injury is too trivial to ignore, or to pay attention to."
"His problems can't be underestimated, or overestimated."
L.S. writes:
I came across this bewildering thicket of negations and thought you might enjoy it.
While it seems likely that multiple victimizations in a school setting would be newsworthy throughout this period, we cannot be entirely sure that the media weren’t particularly sensitized to the issue of school rampage shootings in the late 1990s, and therefore began covering these more assiduously (even when they did not involve fatalities) than had previously been true.
I think I've concluded it has the right number of negations, there are just too many of them.
CVD writes:
Before setting out to my grandmother's house for Christmas, I thought I'd pass along this sentence from the current issue of the New Yorker, which strikes me as a possible misnegation, or something close to it. It's from Bill Wyman's piece called The Pale King, which reviews a new biography of Michael Jackson by Randall Sullivan. The passage in question says, "In 1994, when the child-molestation furor was at its height, Jackson married Elvis Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie. Sullivan's book does little to challenge the general impression that this was anything other than a ploy on Jackson's part to distract the public from his P.R. implosion."
My initial reaction is that Wyman could've described the "general impression" of Jackson's marriage to Lisa Marie in a couple of ways. He could've said, "The general impression was that this was nothing but a ploy on Jackson's part . . . ." Or he could've said, "Almost no one believed that this was anything other than a ploy on Jackson's part . . . ." But to say, in effect, that "the general impression was that this was anything other than a ploy . . ." seems unidiomatic to me. And I wonder if the (at least to me) unidiomatic nature of the sentence isn't attributable to the fact that it's preceded by the phrase "does little to challenge." Thoughts? (I took me several readings to decide what, if anything, struck was odd about this passage, and it's entirely possible that it's my reaction, not the passage, that's mistaken.)
AM sends in a sentence from to this story:
"It's actually really shocking that we haven't not found more islands."
That one is perfectly correct, of course. The interesting thing about it is that in the context of the story, it's completely clear what it means, showing that merely a couple of negations and a scalar predication in a quasi-modal context are not always enough to cause a problem.
LSB writes:
After implying that Colin Powell only endorsed Barack Obama because both men are black, John Sununu issued the following statement:
“Colin Powell is a friend and I respect the endorsement decision he made and I do not doubt that it was based on anything but his support of the president’s policies. Piers Morgan’s question was whether Colin Powell should leave the party, and I don’t think he should.”
Am I alone in feeling that “do not doubt that it was based on anything but his support of the president’s policies” has gone a negation or two too far?
MD writes:
I always enjoy a good misnegation, so I thought you might like this entry I noticed a while back in the international version of the NY Times. The online version contains this line:
"The government rushed to investigate the case thoroughly, eager to dispel any notion that it took lightly the killing of one of its citizens, …"
But the international print edition (below) must have been printed before an error was noticed.
"The government rushed to investigate the case thoroughly, eager to dispel any notion that it did not take lightly the killing of one of its citizens, …"
I read it a few times after my initial interpretation seemed wrong…
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The Global Sociology Blog: Let’s Make 2013 The Year We Tell The Patriarchy To GFI
Because, seriously, last November:
“Pressure mounted Thursday for the Irish government to draft a law spelling out when life-saving abortions can be performed – a demand that came after a pregnant woman who was denied an abortion died.
Activists protested Thursday night in Belfast a day after thousands rallied in London, Dublin, Cork and Galway in memory of Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist who died a week after doctors said she was starting to miscarry her 17-week-old fetus.
Despite her rising pain, doctors refused her request for an abortion for three days because the fetus had a heartbeat. She died in the hospital from blood poisoning three days after the fetus died and was surgically removed.”
She was miscarrying. She was in horrible pain. And they let her die to make the Catholic Church happy.
And then, of course:
“Her boss found her too irresistible. He complained that if she saw his pants bulging, she was dressing inappropriately. He texted to ask how frequently she experienced orgasm. He said that, for a woman with a body like hers, not to have sex often was like having a Lamborghini in the garage and never driving it.
(…)
All of this may seem ridiculous. Indeed, it seemed sufficiently ridiculous for Nelson to take her former boss to court with the intention of suing him for sex discrimination. But the all-male panel of seven judges in the Iowa district court, which threw the case out on 21 December, saw nothing amiss. As far as Judge Mansfield was concerned, to allow a case for sex discrimination in this instance would stretch the definition of discrimination.
The judges’ rationale was that the employer was motivated by emotions, above all by his commitment to his marriage, and not by gender prejudice. “Ms Nelson was fired not because of her gender but because she was a threat to the marriage of Dr Knight,” the judgment says – thus identifying the blameless employee as the problem, rather than the wayward behaviour of Dr Knight.
The assumptions and the nature of the inferences made in the court’s judgment all reinforce patriarchy in its dominant “family values” register. It consistently identifies the victim as the problem. It alludes to allegations by Knight’s wife that Nelson flirted with her boss. Yet all the specific evidence it describes shows that Nelson put up with, rather than instigated or encouraged, flirting.
(…)
Despite acknowledging that the situation as such can occur only in a relationship between male employers and female employees, that gender does indeed occupy the key determining place, the court refused to “stretch the definition of discrimination” that far. Essentially, even if an employee is at no fault, as long as she is female this is just one of the burdens she has to bear. The responsibility is on her, not her male employer, to safeguard against eroticism – on pain of being fired.
At each step, Knight, his pastor and, to an extent, his wife – and certainly the Iowa district court – fell back on and fortified a particular knot or intersection of power (business, family and church). This knot might be called capitalist patriarchy. And its full arsenal – political, moral, legal, cultural – has just been placed behind sexist employers.”
And then this horrifying story:
Can we talk about rape culture now? Yes, we can, because it’s India. But here are the 1o factors identified as part of the rape culture there:
Few female police
Not enough police in general
Blaming provocative clothing (whatever the f!@# that means)
Acceptance of domestic violence
Lack of public safety for women
Stigmatization of the victims
Encouraging the victims to compromise (marry your rapist!)
Sluggish court system
Few convictions
Low status of women
How many of these would apply to our enlightened Western societies? After all, we do have a rape culture as well. It may take different forms but it is there all right… and forcefully denied as well. If you don’t believe it, go read this. The whole thing. And then, look at popular culture and media. It’s not hard to find.
And how can we not end 2012 with some Papal homophobia and misogyny?
“The pope is a social issues guy, more interested in themes like “traditional” family values, gay marriage and abortion than, say, helping the poor. And the Vatican is quick to slap down anyone – but especially any women, and particularly women who have the nerve to think of themselves as equal to men – who focuses on helping the most in need, instead of crusading against abortion and gay people. As far as the Church is concerned, advocating for the equal participation of women is “radical feminism” worthy of condemnation; pushing for legislation that kills gay people is worthy of a blessing.
Yes, that’s correct: just around the same time the pope was drafting his first tweet, he met with Ugandan parliamentary speaker Rebecca Kadaga, who had earlier promised to level the death penalty for gays as a “Christmas present” to the Ugandan people (minus, one assumes, the Ugandans who will be murdered because of their sexual orientation). She received a private audience with the pope, and a blessing.
(…)
As society has progressed, the Church has responded by digging its heels in to maintain outdated, misogynist social norms. And it has long used women’s bodies as a tool through which to exercise control in the face of waning influence. Now, gay people are being subjected to the same treatment. As the Church continues to recover from the international pedophilia scandal that its priests perpetrated and the entire institution covered up, and as the world’s population increasingly flees from formal religion, the pope is saying that two men or two women falling in love threatens world peace.
A Twitter feed can’t modernize an institution so out of touch with reality, with progress and with widely-accepted human rights norms.”
So, let’s make 2013 the year we tell patriarchs in all shapes and forms to GFT, shall we?
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CultureBy - Grant McCracken: When did innovation get so cool?
I live in Rowayton, Connecticut. It’s a tiny town, around 4,500 people, that sits on Long Island Sound roughly 50 miles up from New York City. Rowayton is famous for… well, it’s not famous really. It’s a sleepy little place that has managed, by applying itself as little as possible, to remain almost entirely obscure.
Under the circumstances, this took some doing. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Connecticut was a veritable Silicon Valley, filled with hard-charging inventors throwing off a profusion of new ideas and practices. Just up the coast, for instance, in a town called New Haven, Eli Whitney created the cotton gin and gun works. Connecticut inventors were learning how to make machine tools. All those things once painstakingly assembled by hand (guns, watches, bicycles, and, yes, even machines) could now be mass manufactured. The earth trembled with industrial activity.
How Rowayton managed to sleep through this fury of invention … well, we can’t be sure. Certainly, there were local sources of income. Rowayton was briefly called the oyster capital of the world. Every day, its oysters went down to New York City where they were sold to factory and office workers as the fast food of their day. The other source of income, latterly, was a fairground that featured a roller coaster, Ferris wheel, concession stands, beauty contents, and big bands. This made us vulgar and noisy, and the object of much sniffing from Darien across the way. We didn’t care. We might be vulgar, but we had oysters and, um, a roller coaster!
And then one day, something happened. The Remington Rand Corporation came to town. It installed itself in an old estate in the middle of town. Remington Rand was active in the machine tool tradition: sewing machines, firearms and typewriters. But by the middle of the 20th century, it was trying to figure out how to make something called the “business computer.” (A machine that could do for information what the machine tool did for manufacture, that was worth trying for.)
The computer work was so top-secret they put it in a building called “the barn,” a sweet little building, all stone and faux Tudor timbers (pictured). Actually, the barn looks like a preindustrial cottage, and the last place you’d expect to help produce the business computer. So much for appearances. The Barn created the Remington Rand 409. After hundreds of years of well-deserved obscurity, Rowayton had a claim to fame.
Photos from the Barn tell the story. Engineers, dressed in white shirts, wearing sensible glasses. One is wearing that early badge of geek chic, the pocket protector. And there is more than one short-sleeved shirt, that miracle of "Drip-dry" and "Wash and wear!" No one actually has tape on his glasses, but one feels that’s only a matter of time.
This is what innovation looked like after World War II, deeply practical, happily inelegant. Guys in sensible shirts. People trying stuff until they got it right. The invention process was a deeply engaging, sometimes vexing thing. The beams of the second floor proved insufficient for the weight of the new computer, so they shored them up. Vacuum tubes ran hot and had to be replaced every three hours. There were problems large and small, and the guys at Remington Rand kept at it. By mid century they were done. Lo and behold, the father of the UNIVAC line of computers and great, great, great, great grandfather of the laptop on which I write.
This is innovation as we used to do it. The recipe was simple: put inventive souls in an isolated place, give them resources, and leave them alone. We called it “R&D,” Research and Development. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t fashionable. It wasn’t sensible in certain ways. (Why was everyone white, male and middle aged?) But it was relentlessly curious. And practical. When ‘A’ didn’t work, someone said, “what about ‘B’?” And if that didn’t work, people were happy to run down the alphabet until they found something that did. “What if” was the order of the day.
There is something about this R&D tradition that feels at risk. That combination of hard thinking and brute pragmatism is now in peril. But this is just for starters. For ingenuity and reckless experiment funded a larger spirit of innovation. This was the “can do” world. A place of relentless ingenuity. And now it fails cowed, diminished, uncertain, less and less prepared to “try stuff and see what happens.” Westerners in general and Americans in particulars have retreated into pessimism. They have taken to their ideological corners. They have withdrawn from their furious engagement with the world. But of course we have grounds for discouragement. But I would have thought that the baby we do not wish to put out with the bathwater is our ability to solve problems. If we lose that once reckless, generous, exuberant spirit of invention that we truly are done for. It's time for ingenuity to stage a comeback.
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Dori's Moblog: New Year's Reconciliations
Being a super nerd, I looked up the definition for resolutions before I
thought of writing them. The definitions emphasized the notion of
"strong will and determination" (American Heritage Dictionary 2000).
That is all well and good, but I thought I would try a different take
because willfulness has never been a weakness of mine. So instead I want
to write New Year's reconciliations whereby I have to "bring myself to
accept" (American Heritage Dictionary 2000) certain situations and
contexts.
Reconciliation #1
No matter how compassionate or empowering that I try to be
towards others, my force of nature will frighten and intimidate people.
In most situations that I am in, I'm a change agent. I just can't
help it. I like to make things happen. This means that I am going to
have haters just because people fear change and if you are perceived to
be the source of that change, haters are going to hate. People hating me
just because I do what I do, or even just because I exist really
bothered me this year. The amount of attempted character assassination
that I put up with in 2012 was outrageous. So reconciliation #1 is to
accept the fact that to try an empower people who only want to take you
down is stupid. You may not need to smote their asses. You should remain
compassionate, because under all that hate is fear. But you should not
empower them.
Reconciliation #2
What is important to me is not what is important to others, even if they sometimes claim it is.
I am passionate about many things, but I prioritize quite rigorously.
Not everyone does that. People may say that your shared passion is a
priority but things change for them and for you. Do not get disappointed
by these changes in priority. In 2013, I shall accept this and devote
my energy to those who do share the same priorities. At the same time, I
will not neglect to communicate to others, in their own language, that
their priorities may also be mine.
Reconciliation #3
Everything that happens to me and through me is a gift of the universe.
The last two years have been challenging as I have sought to build
future possibilities, but every turn has been to my benefit. The
challenges of building the Indigenous Knowledge specialization allowed
me to build these amazing relationships with the local Aboriginal
community in Melbourne. The general shenanigans of the office has
tempered me yet also given me to opportunity to see how the seeds that I
have planted within my young colleagues have blossomed beautifully. I
can say that the year of 2012 was certainly blessed for me. I deepened
the relationships with people whom I love. I met new and amazing people
that I will come to love deeper. So my final reconciliation for 2013 is
to continue to live as though everything that comes to me is an
opportunity to love more, share more, and grow more.
I am looking forward to more loving, sharing, and growing in 2013.
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trinketization: Course Guide for lectures on Marx’s Capital 2013
Lecture course on Marx’s “Capital” at Goldsmiths: everybody is welcome Capitalism and Cultural Studies – Prof John Hutnyk: tuesday evenings from january 8, 2013 – 5pm-8pm Goldsmiths Room RHB 309. Free – all welcome. No fee (unless, sorry, you are doing this for award - and that, friends, is Willetts’ fault – though the Labour Party have a [...]
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The Subversive Archaeologist: Archaeology Insider Humour
Dear Reader,Feel free to jump in with any other silliness you can think of. We all need something to laugh about right now. Let's see what you've got!~ Like so many other Acheulean bifaces that don't make it as hand axes, calling them discoids or cleavers is just pointless.Libby: I've just managed to date a chunk of carbon that's 7,000 years old.Nameless archaeologist: It's about time!~ I was in a cultural depression. But I'm better now (credit: Mike Rousseau).~ If fieldwork teaches us anything, it's that abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.~ Archaeology is the still most fun you can have with your pants on (credit: Kent Flannery).SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.
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Living Anthropologically: New Guns for a New Year: American Anthropology and Gun Violence
Lynyrd Skynyrd had gun violence figured out in 1975:
Hand guns are made for killin’
Ain’t no good for nothin’ else
And if you like your whiskey
You might even shoot yourself
So why don’t we dump ‘em people
To the bottom of the sea
Before some fool come around here
Wanna shoot either you or me
–Lynyrd Skynyrd, Saturday Night Special
If they can make gun control palatable for that audience, why can’t we do it now?
As of 19 December 2012, even David Brooks and Gail Collins were in rare agreement that we were headed for some sensible gun regulations, Brooks speculating that the NRA would “get out in front of this by making some immediate concessions on gun rights, and they should promote a practical agenda on mental health and gun access” (The Newtown Aftermath). There seemed to be consensus clamor for strengthening gun laws. But as Frank Rich wisely put it, “let’s see what happens when the circus folds its tent and we are back in the bitter winds of January, redirecting our attention to the Inauguration and the Super Bowl” (America’s Other Original Sin).
We do not need to wait that long. Although many people, even Republicans, thought the NRA stance was unhelpful, disgusting, disastrous, and a thirty-round magazine of crazy, plenty of support remains for NRA-type arguments, especially in districts controlled by House Republicans. This was something I already noted before the NRA announcement, that not a single sitting House Republican had announced any change in position. The rhetoric from many places, including my own Republican representatives, had hardly budged (see Semi-Automatic Anthropology). Truthfully, for most of these representatives there is hardly any political gain from supporting even the mildest gun control regulations, and substantial backlash risk for not holding the line.
The math is simple: barring additional events, we will not be getting any national gun control legislation, of even the mildest variety. The legislation will die. As Gail Collins aptly describes, it is “hard to imagine any reform getting past the great, gaping maw that is the House of Representatives” (Wish You a Gun-Free Christmas). There will probably be some local and state-level legislative measures introduced, and there are hopeful signs of interest and participation in weapon buybacks. Of course local and state-level gun control measures are notoriously ineffective; current buyback programs are voluntary and underfunded. Still, if these local and state-level measures result in a coherent regulatory framework across a geographic region, there is some possibility that local controls could be effective.
For related reflections, see anthropologist Paul Stoller, End of Year Reflections on American Culture and Politics. Stoller invokes a classic social-cultural dichotomy made famous by Clifford Geertz in a 1957 article, Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example, which is so old that it is ungated open access. If I remember correctly, the critique of Geertz was that by only phrasing this as a difference in timing of social versus cultural change, he did not fully consider the dimensions of power and inequality at stake.
However, these legislative initiatives have already been counterbalanced by politicians attempting the NRA approach of mandating armed guards in every school. And of course, gun buybacks are miniscule in comparison to the gun buying, as people have again chosen to stock up on assault weapons and ammunition, perhaps even more dramatically than ever before. A chilling headline: Gun sales surge; 3 1/2 years of ammunition magazines sold in 72 hours. People are buying body armor and bullet-proof backpacks for schoolchildren, and demanding intensified lockdown and other security measures. The overall picture in the U.S. is of an even more militarized and insecure society. If this is the result of horrific gun violence toward first-graders, teachers, police officers during the NRA press conference, and firefighters, then the U.S. seems to be at a kind of point-of-no-return for political dysfunction. We seem more than ever unable to pass any meaningful legislation, unable to coherently discuss the issues at hand.
I wrote Semi-Automatic Anthropology as an attempt to focus on those immediate issues, the fact that for the first time in many years it appeared some gun control legislation could be accomplished. At that time, many people were falling into an “it’s all so complicated” routine, which in many cases inadvertently echoed right-wing talking points. I was not so much worried about appropriation–would that something like Daniel Lende’s No Easy Answers be more appropriated–but how our own tendency as anthropologists to emphasize holism, complexity, long-term causes was in this case contributing to the NRA narrative. At a time when even conservative columnist David Brooks said “I should say I like the idea of buying back guns and melting them down” (The Newtown Aftermath), and many people were interested in the Australian experience with a semi-automatic weapons buyback, I tried to do the math for how much it would really cost. And although I would readily concede that spending $50 billion for a semi-automatic weapons buyback is “hilariously optimistic” (a Twitter-feed accusation), the point was to try and push for the best deal possible. Fifty billion happened to be the same amount as the fiscal-stiff stimulus proposal, and considering that the NRA arm-the-schools proposal would cost at a bare minimum $4.1 billion annually, this one-time expense which would surely result in long-term savings, should hardly be considered impossible. Plus, between Newtown and the Fiscal Cliff, we needed something optimistic.
It seemed a potentially powerful political moment, a time to concentrate anthropological energies on issues that touched those classic anthropology concerns: human nature, good, evil, society, culture, history. The political math was always daunting. There may be some hope that at least for some people the framing of this issue has shifted, such that we can be hopeful for change in the medium-term, or as the Pew Research Center reports, After Newtown, Modest Change in Opinion about Gun Control. The flurry of commentary reveals other tactics available, like pushing for gun company divestment, restricting gun advertisements, requiring gun insurance, or taxing guns. But in the short term, I plan to stop commenting on FaceBook posts or other activities that seemed warranted during the brief moment when an immediate focus on gun control seemed like it might pay off.
An Unfinished Conversation on Gun Violence and Anthropology
As Gail Collins wrote in a touching editorial, Looking for America:
America needs to tackle gun violence because we need to redefine who we are. We have come to regard ourselves–and the world has come to regard us–as a country that’s so gun happy that the right to traffic freely in the most obscene quantities of weapons is regarded as far more precious than an American’s right to health care or a good education.
We have to make ourselves better.
I find myself also Looking for Anthropology. On the issue of gun violence, we have to make ourselves better. Anthropology could and should be at the leading edge of redefining who we are, the place of the U.S. in the world.
For anthropology to participate in this redefinition, we will need more pieces like Daniel Lende’s Newtown and Violence–No Easy Answers. In that sense, I completely agree with Lende’s comment, that his post is timely, jargon-free, and direct. It addresses the medium-term and long-term conditions of possibility regarding issues of violence in the U.S.
However, I should address what Lende terms our fundamental difference: “It’s about violence, not about guns, not about mental health. That’s the main message of my piece. In that sense, I don’t think it’s that complicated. We have a violence problem in the United States. That problem comes at the intersection of social, economic, and behavioral issues. Anthropologists are really good at analyzing those things. Taking away all the guns won’t change the underlying problem.”
I am not so sure. Put most baldly, the idea that taking away all the guns won’t change the problem is potentially an NRA talking point. Second, it makes it seem that we in the U.S. are fundamentally incapable of doing what other countries have done through gun control. Finally, and most importantly, I do not think it has empirical support. Lende provides a link to The Simple Truth about Gun Control by Adam Gopnik which puts all these issues together:
So don’t listen to those who, seeing twenty dead six- and seven-year-olds in ten minutes, their bodies riddled with bullets designed to rip apart bone and organ, say that this is impossibly hard, or even particularly complex, problem. It’s a very easy one. Summoning the political will to make it happen may be hard. But there’s no doubt or ambiguity about what needs to be done, nor that, if it is done, it will work. One would have to believe that Americans are somehow uniquely evil or depraved to think that the same forces that work on the rest of the planet won’t work here. It’s always hard to summon up political will for change, no matter how beneficial the change may obviously be. Summoning the political will to make automobiles safe was difficult; so was summoning the political will to limit and then effectively ban cigarettes from public places. At some point, we will become a gun-safe, and then a gun-sane, and finally a gun-free society. It’s closer than you think. . . .
On gun violence and how to end it, the facts are all in, the evidence is clear, the truth there for all who care to know it—indeed, a global consensus is in place, which, in disbelief and now in disgust, the planet waits for us to join. Those who fight against gun control, actively or passively, with a shrug of helplessness, are dooming more kids to horrible deaths and more parents to unspeakable grief just as surely as are those who fight against pediatric medicine or childhood vaccination. It’s really, and inarguably, just as simple as that.
In other words, to say that guns are not really the problem, or that gun control would not change the underlying problem, is as far as I can tell an outlier or non-consensus argument to existing empirical evidence. This is not to say, obviously, that gun control would by itself produce the panacea of a violence-free society, but it is an essential element. Until we have some form of meaningful gun control, it really is impossible to tell whether there is a violence problem in the U.S. or a gun violence problem in the U.S.
Does the U.S. have a violence problem? Or is it really a gun violence problem?
I will state upfront that I am unsure about this issue, and I do not wish to minimize it’s importance. I’ve tried reading some numbers from the Wikipedia List of countries by intentional homicide rate. I will readily admit that this is hardly an indicator of violence generally, and there are obviously flaws, but if one figure could be used to capture successful violence in a given country, this seems like a good starting place.
The U.S. obviously stands out in comparison to most Western European countries, Canada, Japan, and Australia. In comparison to this customary grouping, it does appear that the U.S. has a violence problem. However, in comparison to the Americas, including the Caribbean, the U.S. is the fourth lowest in the region, behind Canada, Chile, and Argentina. As I emphasize in my class on the Anthropology of Latin America and the Caribbean, the U.S. has been shaped by many similar processes as Latin American and the Caribbean. In this context of colonialism and slavery, the violence problem of the U.S. is not particularly different. Similarly, widening the comparison across the Eurasian countries, reveals rates that are approximately 30% higher in the U.S. A problem, yes, but perhaps not magnitudes higher than many other countries. Moreover, and this point perhaps takes us back to Lynyrd Skynyrd, there seems to be an association between homicide rates and southern states, perhaps related to historical connections of colonialism and slavery.
As David Hemenway put it (link againt h/t to Lende): “People think we have a violence problem in the United States, but we really don’t. We’re an average country in terms of all the violence measures you can think of, in terms of crime. But where we’re very different is guns. We have lots more guns than anybody else, particularly handguns” (Gun violence in America).
I agree with Lende about the need for prison reform and reform of drug laws. I would also say that three of the biggest issues that affect violence problems in the U.S. are
our healthcare system overall, which needs to encompass and treat issues like mental healthcare holistically. We need a single-payer system, Medicare for all;
our chasm of inequality, and the geographic nexus of race and class. At a minimum we need higher tax rates on top earners and accumulated wealth;
our educational inequalities. Again at a minimum we need a national funding system to make education work as opportunity, rather than exacerbating existing inequalities (a suggestion from Daniel Lende back on Anthropology, Moral Optimism, and Capitalism).
Effective gun control and these three reforms would go a long way to bringing U.S. violence closer to international norms for industrialized countries. Admittedly these measures seem currently unimaginable, “hilariously optimistic,” but in other ways, as Adam Gopnik writes, “it’s closer than you think.”
New Guns for a New Year: American Anthropology and Gun Violence
Living Anthropologically
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CONNECTED in CAIRO: Top Posts of 2012
#1 Bibliography of the Egyptian Uprisings The single most viewed post of 2012 is my bibliography of books and articles on the Egyptian uprising. I posted this when I realized that I had over 150 entries in my working bibliography. It’s been updated again and again–as of Dec. 31st, this bibliography has grown to 283, and [...]
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Erkan in the Army now...: Cengiz Aktar: Artık gündem başkanlık
Artık gündem başkanlık
“Gelinen noktada takıldıkları yer Başkanlık Sistemi… Herkes bir tez ileri sürüyor, bizim de böyle bir tezimiz var. Kabul edilir veya edilmez. Zaten bu komisyon karar mercii değil. Genel Kurul var, hatta belki referanduma gidecek. Nihai kararı millet verecek. Niye telaş ediyorsunuz. Gerekirse alternatifleri sunalım. (…) Bitti bitti, bitmediği takdirde, artık biz ne meclisin gündemini bu şekilde işgal ederiz, ne de bu komisyon sulandırılmış bir şekilde devam etmemeli (!). Biz ise bu kadar deneyimli bir ülke olmamıza rağmen bir yılı doldurduk, anayasamızı yapamıyoruz. (…) Kısa süre önce 26 maddelik anayasa paketini parlamentodan geçirdik, referanduma götürdük ve yüzde 58’le bu halkın kabulünü gördü. Daha önce anayasa çalışması yaptık. Bu anayasa çalışmasını yeniden ele alalım. (…) Bu AK Parti’nin bir anayasa teklifi olarak orada olur. (…) Anayasa olmazsa bu beni çok rahatsız etmez. Bu bizim hizmetlerimizi ciddi manada etkilemez. (…) Çünkü arzu ettiğimiz şekilde bitirilmiş olsaydı bu hizmetler çok daha seri, çabuk olabilirdi. Bazı yasal çalışmalarda engellerle karşılaşıyoruz ki, bu geliyor anayasaya takılıyor. (…) Bunlar değiştirildiği anda inanıyorum ki çok daha rahat, seri şekilde adım atma, karar alma imkânı doğacaktır.”
Söylem analizine dahi gerek yok. Başbakan’ın TRT’deki monologda serdettikleri o kadar açık ki. AK Parti, Anayasa Uzlaşma Komisyonu’ndaki dört partinin ateşle suyun birlikteliği misali pekçok hayatî maddede kat’iyen anlaşamayacağını çoğumuz gibi başından beri biliyordu. Başbakanın 22 nisan 2010’da start verdiği Asya tipi başkanlık sistemi o günden itibaren teşkilâtı ve yakın adamları tarafından usul usul gündeme sokuldu. Tepki gelince bir müddet susuldu ama Erdoğan’ın gönlünde yatan aslan hep bir kenarda tutuldu. Anayasanın akıbeti son haftalarda iyice berraklaşınca teşkilât başkanlık önerisini getiriverdi.
Artık AK Partinin başkanlık sistemli anayasa önerisi, uzatmaları oynayan anayasa yazım sürecinin önüne geçmiş durumda. Bunun vebali, aralarında anlaşamayan partiler kadar başkanlık sistemi hesabıyla anayasa çalışmasını rehin alan AK Parti’nindir. Çünkü Başbakanın iddiasının aksine bu toplum hiçbir zaman anayasasını kendisi yapmadı. Birbirini öldürmeden nasıl birlikte yaşayacağını ilk kez kendisi düşünüyor. Bu arayışa olabildiğince zaman tanınmalı, Başbakan’ın “hizmet için sınırsız yetki” dayatmasına kurban edilmemelidir.
“Artık yetki sende, ister asar, ister kesersin”
Ama anlaşılan o ki iktidar işin peşini bırakmayacak ve başkanlık meselesini gündemde tutacak. Haftasonu yine bir hizmet açılışı münasebetiyle lafı diktatörlükten açınca üstteki talihsiz nasihati hatırladım. Başkanlık arzusunu dile getirdiğinin ertesi 23 nisan 2010’da, Ankara’daki “çocuklara koltuk bırakma” müsameresi münasebetiyle yerini alan kıza deyivermişti. Lâtife deyip geçelim.
Asıp kesmeye kadar gelmeden Başbakan ve adamlarının başkanlık sisteminin parlamenter sisteme neden üstün olduğuna dair birkaç gerekçesi var. Beyanlara istinaden bunlar “istikrar gereği”, “erkler (kuvvetler) ayrılığının hizmeti engelleyici işlevi”, bu iddiayla taban tabana zıt “erkler ayrılığının en iyi işlediği sistem olması” ve “halkın seçeceği cumhurbaşkanının illâki icracı olacağı”.
Bu iddiaları hükümetin icraatı ve partinin Uzlaşma Komisyonu’na verdiği “Başkanın görev ve yetkileri” teklifi ile birlikte okuyalım.
Bir defa Asya tipi başkanlık sistemi ile istikrar arayışı demokrasiye engel. Esasen istikrar gerekçesi, “erkler ayrılığının hizmet engelleyici yapısı” gerekçesiyle örtüşüyor. Çin ve Rusya modeli itirazsız, sessiz kalkınma. Oysa siyaset sadece hizmetten ibaret değildir; erklerin ayrılığı ve nisbî güçleri ise demokrasinin selâmeti için olmazsa olmazdır. Sorun, istikrar için arzu edilen yürütmenin gücünün yetersizliğinde değil. Yürütmeyi atanmışların vesayetinden ebediyen arındıracak ve aynı zamanda onu, güçlü yasama sistemi, hukuk sistemi ve yeni kurulacak bölgelerle denetleyecek ve dengeleyecek anayasanın eksikliğinde.
AK Parti bunun çaresinin başkanlıkta olduğunu iddia ediyor. Oysa on yıldır yasama ile yargı erklerinin yürütmenin çekim alanından çıkması için ciddî bir çabası olmadı. Parlamenter sistemin temel taşları temsil adaleti ve siyasî partilerin güçlenmesi konularında adım atmadı. En adaletsiz seçim barajı hâlâ geçerli. Büyük partiyi daha büyüten küçüğe söz hakkı tanımayan tek turlu seçim sistemi de öyle. Partilerin tepesinde “kapatılma kılıcı” asılı. Parti içi demokrasi allahlık, tek adamlara biat edilen bu sistemde yasama, el kaldırıp indiren vekillerden ibaret. Şimdi böylesine özürlü bir sistemi daha anlamsızlaştıracak bir sistem sözkonusu.
Zira AK Parti’nin dayattığı şark modelinde tek erk dışında pek başka bir erk yok. “Erkler ayrılığının en etkin işlediği sistem başkanlık sistemidir” önermesi ciddî olabilir ancak Uzlaşma Komisyonuna verilen teklifte başkanın yetkileri hiçbir erk veya kurum tarafından lâyıkıyla düzenlenemiyor, denetlenemiyor, dengelenemiyor. Bazı BDP’lilerin umduğu “federal denge” AK Parti’nin aklının ucunda dahi yok. Parti uzmanlarının öngördüğü denge ve denetleme mekanizmaları, bürokratlardan oluşan teknik komiteler ve lobi şirketleri. Yani siyasetin sıfır noktası!
Doğrudan seçilmiş cumhurbaşkanının illâki icracı olacağı tezinin antitezi ise Avusturya!
2013 Başbakan’ın total iktidar yürüyüşü ve memleketle topyekûn inatlaşmasının kilit yılı olacak. Herşeye rağmen hayırlı seneler olsun diyelim…
Bu yazı ilk olarak Taraf’ta yayınlandı. Yazarın izniyle burada da yayınlanıyor.
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Erkan in the Army now...: Eurosphere roundup: Charlie Hebdo on Prophet Muhammad’s life…
French magazine illustrates the Prophet Muhammad’s life
Charlie Hebdo publishes a “halal” comic biography of the Muslim Prophet.
How the dominance of English kills the European debate
from Ideas on Europe by Ronny Patz
Spanishwalker has already argued some months ago that one of the problems of the European blogosphere is the dominance of English. He sees the problem in English being the gatekeeper language between blogging and writing in most other European languages.
“We’re standing up for Britain” or “We’re all in this together” – ways to explain the EU budget
from Jon Worth by Jon
Monti says he won’t run for Italian premier
from Hurriyet Daily News
Italy’s caretaker Premier Mario Monti said Sunday he won’t run in February elections, but if political parties..
US firms fall out of love with France, survey says
by EU-Digest
The return to power of France’s Socialist Party in the spring of 2012 after a 17-year absence has not gone down well, it seems, with American businesses with operations in the country.
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C L O S E R: Kromzwaard Trofee: Winnaars & Verliezers van 2012
Closer Blog: Wie zijn de winnaars en verliezers van 2012? Hier de uitslag van de Dr. Kromzwaard Trofee. Alle goeds voor 2013 toegewenst en bedankt voor het stemmen, de belangstelling en de kritiek.Read more: Kromzwaard Trofee: Winnaars & Verliezers van 2012
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tabsir.net: Buried Christian Empire Casts New Light on Early Islam
The “crowned man” relief found in Zafar, Yemen is seen as evidence that there was a Christian empire in the region before Islam took hold.
by Matthias Schulz, Der Spiegel, December 21, 2012
The commandment “Make yourself no graven image” has long been strictly followed in the Arab world. There are very few statues of the caliphs and ancient kings of the region. The pagan gods in the desert were usually worshipped in an “aniconic” way, that is, as beings without form.
But now a narcissistic work of human self-portrayal has turned up in Yemen. It is a figure, chiseled in stone, which apparently stems from the era of the Prophet.
Paul Yule, an archeologist from the southwestern German city of Heidelberg, has studied the relief, which is 1.70 meters (5′7″) tall, in Zafar, some 930 kilometers (581 miles) south of Mecca. It depicts a man with chains of jewelry, curls and spherical eyes. Yule dates the image to the time around 530 AD.
The German archeologist excavated sites in the rocky highlands of Yemen, an occupation that turned quite dangerous recently because of political circumstances in the country. On his last mission, Yule lost 8 kilograms (18 lbs.) and his equipment was confiscated.
Nevertheless, he is pleased, because he was able to bring notes, bits of debris and bones back to Heidelberg. Yule has concluded that Zafar was the center of an Arab tribal confederation, a realm that was two million square kilometers (about 772,000 square miles) large and exerted its influence all the way to Mecca. (more…)
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Folklore Forum: 78 Blues: Folksongs and Phonographs in the American South
John Minton, 78 Blues: Folksongs and Phonographs in the American South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. (American Made Music Series), 2008. x+288 pp. (ISBN: 9781934110195) (cloth). Yves Laberge, Ph.D. Québec John Minton is a professor of folklore at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne and his third book, “78 Blues: Folksongs and Phonographs in [...]
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The Global Sociology Blog: Let’s Make 2013 The Year We Bury The Concept of “Traditional Family”
Because it’s not a concept. It has never been a cultural and historical reality. It is an ideological construct, like any claimed “tradition”. There is no objectivity to it. Family structures are always a product of the intersection between structure, institutions and culture. Just go read Stephanie Coontz’s Family: A History. It’s all there. The boundaries of what makes a family have always been porous and who counts as kin or relative has always involved an ever-changing cast of characters. In other words, rather than corresponding to an objective reality, the invocation of “traditional family” obfuscates rather than illuminates. It is a power play, an attempt to reify and solidify a definition of a certain, limited type of family for ideological purposes. It is time to reject the phrase once and for all, along with the political content embedded in it.
After all, the first French baby of 2013 was born to two women:
Now, all it takes is for the “marriage for all” bill to pass for these women to get married. Hopefully, it won’t be long now.
Also, and I have already blogged about it, flexibility in family relations and boundaries involve older practices such as this where the intersection between economics and familial structures is clear:
“Like many men in Japan, Tsunemaru Tanaka is looking for a wife. Unlike some, he is prepared to sacrifice his name to get one. If all goes well in 2013, he’ll find a bride, her prosperous family will adopt him and he’ll take their family name. In an ideal world, he’ll run their business too. “I think I have a lot of skills to offer the right family,” he says.
Japan boasts the world’s oldest family-run businesses, the Hoshi Guest House, founded in 717. And the construction company Kongo Gumi was operated for a record-breaking 1,400 years by a succession of heirs until it was taken over in 2006. Many family firms – car-maker Suzuki, Matsui Securities, and giant brewery Suntory – break the rule of steady dynastic decline, or what is sometimes cruelly dubbed the “idiot-son syndrome”.
So how do Japanese firms do it? The answer, apparently, is adoption.Last year more than 81,000 people were adopted in Japan, one of the highest rates in the world. Remarkably, more than 90 per cent of those adopted were adults.
The practice of adopting men in their 20s and 30s is used to rescue biologically ill-fated families and ensure a business heir, says Vikas Mehrotra, of the University of Alberta, the lead author of a new paper on the Japanese phenomenon of adult adoptions. “We haven’t come across this custom in any other part of the world,” he says.
Though the phenomenon has been previously documented, its impact on economic competitiveness has not. Dr Mehrotra’s paper finds not only inherited family control still common in Japanese business, but says family firms are “puzzlingly competitive”, outperforming otherwise similar professionally managed companies. “These results are highly robust and… suggest family control ’causes’ good performance rather than the converse.”
Finding suitable heirs, however, is not as simple as it once was. Japan’s sliding birthrate has created many one-child families, and while daughters can manage the company back office, the face out front in this still chauvinistic country must be male, says Chieko Date. She is one of dozens of marriage consultants who bring together ambitious young men and the marriageable daughters of business families. Ms Date is proud of her record. “We bring happiness to both sides,” she says.
If the meetings go well, the men agree to drop their own surname and be adopted by their new bride’s family, becoming both the head of the family and its business. Ms Date’s consultancy claims to have brokered 600 of these marriages – known as “mukoyoshi” – over the past decade. “We believe that this cannot be just a business transaction,” she says. If the couples don’t like each other, the marriage and the business will fail.”
While we’re at it, we should also bury the Parsonsian “expressive/instrumental” distinction are artificial and ideologically-loaded as well as the “public/private” distinction that relegates family matters to the strictly private:
“Visit your parents. That’s an order. China’s national legislature amended its law on the elderly yesterday to require that adult children visit their aged parents “often” – or risk being sued by them.
State media said the new clause would allow elderly parents who felt neglected by their children to take them to court. The amendment does not specify how frequently such visits should occur.
A rapidly developing China is facing increasing difficulty in caring for its aging population. Three decades of market reforms have accelerated the breakup of the traditional extended family, and there are few affordable alternatives such as retirement or care homes.
State media reported this month that a grandmother in her 90s in the prosperous eastern province of Jiangsu had been forced by her son to live in a pig pen for two years.
News outlets frequently carry stories about elderly parents being abused or neglected, or of children seeking to take control of their parents’ assets without their knowledge.”
The state, in whichever shape or form it comes, has always regulated family formations, relations, and dissolutions, as it does for markets.
The family, as social institution, is structured at the intersection of a multiplicity of social forces to which it has to adapt. Conversely, it also has some impact on these forces. But this means that “family” in an of itself does not exist. In multiplicities of social contexts, one will find multiple family forms, some more patriarchal than others.
And this is really what is at stake here: the emergence and greater acceptability of non-patriarchal family forms, from single-mother-headed households to LGBT families (with or without children), to child-free singles (men and women). The invocation of “traditional family” is reflects the weaning power of a social control device. Time to finish it off.
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Language Log: Historical sociolinguistics in the movies
From reader JM:
My son Chris (age 26) e-mailed me to ask which was correct: “younger than me” or “younger than I”. He had been watching “The Patriot” (the movie with Mel Gibson), and noted the use of “younger than I.” I assume that this would have been the standard in the late 1700s. When he and I saw the movie “Lincoln” last weekend, I noted that Daniel Day Lewis pronounced what and which, etc. as [hw]. I gather (from Wikipedia, etc.) that the more common pronunciation in both the U.S. and the U.K. is now [w], but couldn’t find anything about the time course of this merger. Is it known for sure that Lincoln said [hw]? Just curious….don’t know anything about how much effort film directors put into this kind of historical accuracy.
The discussion of than in MWDEU suggests that 18th-century usage of "than I" or "than me" would have been a coin flip. As far as I know, there's been no empirical work on how that coin was biased over time (and space, and register, and social stratum) — this would be a good term project in a linguistics course, and maybe even a good thesis topic.
With respect to Lincoln's use of [hw] or [w], there's a survey of relevant evidence in Donca Minkova, "Philology, linguistics, and the history of [hw]~[w]", and Lesley Milroy, "An essay in historical sociolinguistics?: On Donka Minkova's 'Philology, linguistics, and the history of [hw]~[w]'", in Anne Curzan and Kimberly Emmons, Studies In The History Of the English Language II: Unfolding Conversations, 2004.
Minkova quotes Jespersen 1909 about British usage:
And she sketches the following trajectory for the U.S.:
Grandgent 1893 suggests that the change to [w] had by then produced only "a few scattering votes" from northern Ohio and Indiana — but on the other hand, self-reported intuitions about a stigmatized change-in-progress are likely to underestimate the spread of the incoming variant:
The later evidence is described by Labov et al. here:
In Kurath and McDavid's Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States , the distinction of /hw/ and /w/ in whale and wail, which and witch was shown to be characteristic of the North and the South, but not the Midland. In fact, the southern limit of the /hw/~/w/ distinction bundled tightly with the lexical isogloss separating the North and North Midland through Pennsylvania.
Since the LAMSAS data was gathered, the distinction has rapidly eroded. Map 8 shows only 71 of 587 speakers who maintain it. In this case, "Distinct" includes all those who were heard by the analyst as pronouncing the voiceless bilabial clearly (62 cases) or not quite clearly (9) cases. There were 3 individuals who thought that the pairs were different, but made no distinction in production; they were considered to be merged.
As Stephen Oates explains in With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (1994), Lincoln's native accent was lower-class south midland:
So the evidence, as I read it, suggests that Lincoln probably would have acquired and retained the merged pronunciation apparently characteristic of the midland region (at least in a later time period) — but [hw] in his mouth is not obviously wrong either.
Some other LL posts about the authenticity historical, regional, and ethnic variation in the entertainment industry:
"True Grit isn't true", 12/29/2010
"Acting, speech, and authenticity", 8/8/2011
"'Downton Abbey' anachronisms: beyond nitpickery", 2/13/2012
(If you're confused about what [hw] means, "Hwæt about WH?", 4/13/2011, may help.)
(And PLEASE read the link before giving us your analysis and opinions about "than I" vs. "than me"…)
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The Subversive Archaeologist: Great Laud for Rexford Winery's 2009 Pinot Noir, Santa Cruz Mountains, Regan Vineyard
Here followeth an unsolicited plug for a great winemaker and his wines.Yesterday I visited my favourite winemaker's cellar. It's the Rexford Winery, in Santa Cruz's west-side wine enclave. The vintner is the ex-Director of UC Observatories, Emeritus UC Santa Cruz Professor, and Astronomer Joe Miller. He stepped down as director about six years ago and officially retired a few years later. For about the past two years he's been transforming superb locally grown grapes into even better wines, commercially, in the same way that he did for many years out of his own home caves.The terroir in this part of the world is second to none, and Joe's wines--perennially on the Subversive Archaeologist's Wish List--are treasures the like of which I'm very privileged to have encountered. Rexford's white releases have never disappointed--especially the un-oaked chardonnay--and the reds are to be lusted after.It was a sunny but bitterly cold day for these parts, and the tasting room was open on a Monday only because it was New Year's Eve. The weather and the time of year conspired, no doubt, to ensure that we were the only two in the place for some time, and we mulled over the world's woes while Joe poured me a flight of his current offerings. He was gracious and curious about my life after being put out to pasture, and I reassured him that I would be better than fine. When it came time to leave, my host asked me which of the varietals I'd tasted was my favourite. They were all excellent: a pinot gris, a Zinfandel rosé that tasted nothing like the so-called white Zins that were so popular twenty years ago, a very complex and surprisingly big Merlot, and an '09 Pinot Noir from Corralitos, just south of Surf City. I answered that it was the pinot on the day, and that I'd been saving up my allowance to buy one of his wines for my New Year's Eve celebration. To my great delight, as he slid the bottle into a paper bag and as I was reaching for my wallet he said something like "Don't you dare try to pay for this. Have a happy retirement and a very good new year." Thank you, Joe!2009 Pinot Noir, Santa Cruz Mountains, Regan VineyardsThis was a very fine year for Pinot Noir in the Regan Vineyards. The grapes ripened slowly and steadily and achieved full maturity in excellent condition. The resulting wine is very dark for a Pinot. It has a full and and intense Pinot Noir varietal aroma with notable complexity. The taste is rich, multi-layered, and very full-bodied with a fine “silky” texture in the mouth, something that is characteristic of top French Burgundies. There is no question that this is a big wine, but it is superbly balanced. $40/bottle. Club price: $32. [Photo credit: The Subversive Archaeologist's iPhone 5, with deep gratitude to the steady-cam technology that counteracted my essential tremor.]If I were you, and I had more money than I could find good wine to drink, I'd have a good look at their Terrace Club. The benefits are top-drawer, and they'll ship anywhere it's legal to do so! Better yet, I personally guarantee that you'll never be disappointed. Please don't mention my name, lest this be seen as a quid pro quo arrangement between Joe and me, which couldn't be further from the truth.SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.
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Ethnographer | Ecographer: Sand in My Syllabus; Teaching Anthropology ‘Way Off Campus
In December 2012, I was invited to Oslo to give a presentation on pedagogy. This is what I said: I’ve taught anthropology in university classrooms; a lot. Many have been multicultural, and multigenerational. I’ve also been privileged to teach anthropology in some unusual classroom settings, for example, on cruise ships, in academic studies abroad (KulturStudier; [...]
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Language Log: "The data are": How fetishism makes us stupid
Pedantry, Dr. Johnson said in the Rambler, is the unseasonable ostentation of learning. And learning is never so unseasonable as when its display impedes the workaday business of making sense. Take the sentence from The Economist that I ran across when I was writing my word-of-the-year piece for Fresh Air on "big data":
Yet even as big data are helping banks, they are also throwing up new competitors from outside the industry.
You can see what happened here—the copy editor (it had to be a copy editor, since nobody competent to write about big data would dream of treating the phrase as anything but singular) saw data followed by a singular pronoun and a singular form of be, and corrected them to plurals. The problem is that if you construe big data as a plural then it has to denote a collection of large things, in the same way that big elephants denotes a set of elephants that are each large, not a large set of elephants of any size. In that case, I suppose big data would have to be a collection of facts like this:
π = 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751…
rather than, say
π > 3
which is a little bitty datum. If you took the sentence at face value, that is, it would be what we grammarians term “idiotic.” But I doubt whether the Economist's copy editor gave a toss, as they lot say. Sense, shmense—he or she wasn’t about to get caught out treating data as a singular noun.
The problem with such scruples is the reader is obliged to take note of them. Copy editors are meant to be gnomes working invisibly below decks to ensure that the engine of prose runs smoothly. They shouldn’t obtrude themselves conspicuously into the middle of a clause, so that the reader has to break off his attention to the writer’s argument and do a little mental stutter-step before he can remark to himself, “Oh, I see—it’s that data-must-be-plural business.” Copy-editors desirous of such notice should try another trade, one where they’re not required to hide their LittB under a bushel.
I’m not going to hash over all the arguments about the singularity of data, which has been hashed over at some length, to put it mildly. (For some generally sensible discussions of the issues, see, e.g., Motivated Grammar, Kevin Drum and the Economist’s own language critic Robert Lane Greene, writing as “Johnson,” here and here.) My own view is that there are contexts where it’s okay to treat data as a plural, but none in which you can’t treat it as a singular—and that contrary to what many “reasonable” usage writers counsel, this isn't simply a matter of “style and personal preference.” As the Economist example shows, there are times when treating data as a plural makes you sound not simply like a pedant but a fool. (There’s actually another, more substantive side to this that I want to explore, but I’ll leave that for another post.)
But it is instructive to look at the way defenders of the rule justify their position. Most simply point to the word’s etymology, but some devise synchronic explanations, comparting the word to pluralia tantum like trousers (the plural of trousum) or to British usage in sentences like “Manchester are playing Leeds” (“…and quite few of them are looking forward to it”). These arguments don’t deserve to be taken seriously, not just because they’re confused and irrelevant, but because they’re disingenuous: whatever arguments they come up with after the fact, the only reason anyone treats data as a plural nowadays is to show that they know it started its life that way.
For those purposes, it isn’t really necessary to think the rule through in all its subtlety. Usage fetishes turn copy-editing into a mechanical trade—and the machine they’re simulating doesn't need more than 64k of memory. The adherents seize on one easily identified context to demonstrate their erudition, and ignore others in which the rule would hold if it were being applied thoughtfully. In articles in The Economist, for example, data is and data are occur with roughly equal frequency, excluding cases in which data isn’t the head of the subject NP. But much (of the) data and little (of the) data occur 90 times, against 15 for few (of the) data or many (of the) data. (These figures exclude comments, explicit discussions of the plurality of the noun, and references to things like data centres, data sets and data points—the last being the way in which people nowadays most often refer to what used to be called a datum). And in these cases, too, insistence on treating data as a plural can lead to grammatical inconsistencies or semantic anomalies. My guess is that an editor’s interpolation is responsible for the number discrepancy here:
At the moment, says Anthony Tuzzolino of the University of Chicago, there is plenty of computer modelling going on of the distribution of space dust, but few data.
And in the following, the plural verb require suggests that the number-crunching applies to one datum at a time:
Repeated aerial surveys over the coming years will also give the researchers insight into how vegetation recovers from fires, how the beetles affect this process, how erosion and sedimentation affect the region’s water resources, and whether fire creates opportunities for new species to invade. So many data, of course, require a lot of number crunching.
As I said, this selective enforcement is typical of rules that have jelled into fetishes. Take the rule that unique cannot be compared, which adherents associate with modifiers like very, more, and most. People who wince at “the most unique restaurant in town” are less likely to object to a sentence like “Joyce seems to us less unique than he did to his contemporaries.” At the same time, writers overgeneralize these rules, turning them into dumb syntactic filters that block many sentences that wouldn’t have offended against the original version. That process is hard to observe directly, of course, since it manifests itself only in the absence of certain constructions. But you can draw it out in other ways, such as the responses to some items we gave to the American Heritage Usage Panel some years ago. In that survey, only 16 percent of the respondents accepted Her designs are quite unique in today's fashion scene, which is as you’d expect from a panel or writers and critics. But only 28 percent accepted The American Constitution is still nearly unique in that it allows no self-destruct mechanism. Yet even if you insist that unique is unequivocally an absolute term, there’s nothing in such sentences to object to—no more than in saying that a wound was nearly fatal. For the other 72 percent, the operating principle seems to be, "Don't modify unique with an adverb," which keeps copy editors at bay, but doesn't require any semantic insight.
I’m not troubled in the abstract by the critical attitudes that linguists condemn as prescriptivism (though I really dislike the term). But it’s a sign of what that tradition has come to that its principles so often devolve into empty gestures. The best argument against these fetishes isn’t that they’re irrational or pretentious—though there is that—but that they make us stupid.
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