The gender of revolution

February 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Despite women’s widespread participation in the “Arab Spring”, perhaps most notably in Egypt, many activists point out that women have been sidelined by the new political systems. The new governments created after the fall of regimes rarely feature prominent women and their agendas almost never champion women’s concerns. Women have been left out of the political dialogue since Mubarak was ousted and the committee to redraft the constitution excluded women, even female legal experts. Many Arab feminists express concern over the situation of women in Iraq, where after the overthrow of a secular tyrant four-fifths of all female pupils and students have discontinued their education.

The exclusion of women in the post-revolution state-building efforts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya is partly a result of political and social factors and the speed at which these transitions are happening, which tends to favor groups that are already organized and seasoned in politics—mostly men. Traditional social and cultural norms have relegated Middle Eastern women,” said Mahnaz Afkhami, the founder and president of the Women’s Learning Partnership, an international NGO working on women’s leadership and empowerment issues across much of the Muslim world. “They often lack the social, economic, and political power they need to overcome antagonistic groups and aggressive policy.”
Human Rights Watch researcher Nadya Khalife argues that the political culture in many regions across the Middle East had yet to prioritize women’s rights, or take women’s voices seriously.

But it would be a mistake to put too much weight on the difficulties that Arab women face on their cultural background. It seems that all revolutions leave women behind. The peaceful transitions in Eastern Europe in the 1990ties hardly created more egalitarian societies. In fact, arguably, the generous provisions of the paternalistic state, such as free child care facilities, long and paid maternity leaves, free health care, have all been replaced with the market driven, capitalist policies. Even more dramatically, the right to abortion have been replaced by much stricter regulations and in some countries, like Poland, it was outlawed. The new leaders like Walesa or Havel certainly did not fight to implement gender equality provisions in the newly democratizing states. Notably, Walesa openly called for the return of traditional roles for women.

http://wolnemedia.net/wierzenia/matka-boska-nie-ubiera-sie-u-prady/

Preferred model of femininity...

The impact of Catholicism on the new society was overwhelming in Poland, where the old dogmas were replaced by growing power of religious fundamentalism. The public space in these new democracies excluded many groups, namely women and sexual minorities. Finally, the public/private divisions continue to endure and the roles of women continue to be prescribed according to old, gendered scenarios.

The cultural wars in Poland intensified with the prospects of EU accession, perceived by some as a threat to existing social relations. But for a long time before the 2004 accession, one of the main characteristics of polarized Polish politics, particularly after 1989’s political opening, was the clash between conservatives promoting family values and defending tradition on one side, and emerging new social movements claiming citizenship rights and legal protection on the other. Gender roles played a special part in these conflicts, because they were perceived as constitutive to the character of the Polish nation. The earlier socialist state’s insistence on freeing women from home confinement and domesticity (albeit limited in scope, and often in name only) is now contrasted with a Catholic ideology that emphasizes women’s roles as mothers and caretakers. Religion took on a political role and dictates acceptable social norms, and has a big impact not just on public sphere but is reflected in legislation. Hitchens was definitely not a feminist but his assertions about the harmful effects of religious dogma played out in rather tragic ways for Polish women.

The accession to the EU in 2004 of a number of post-Soviet states, was a double edged sword for women’s rights advocated in countries like Poland. The EU economic policies in many cases forced the government to yield significant social policies to the EU demands, while forcing the respective governments to start taking seriously the EU’s demands for gender mainstreaming, and various equality measures already present in other member states.

The news from the EU has been gloomy lately, filled with reports of the euro crisis, debt burden, undisciplined spending. Many predict that to solve the growing financial crisis, the countries need to make drastic cuts in spending, curb social services, limit generous pensions and public employees’ entitlements. While the economic model of the EU is being questioned, the liberal democratic model that governs it seems safely entrenched, and the inequalities of the political system persist. The political identity of the EU is closely tied with the economic system. Some of the feminist critics if the EU have long warned that the punitive austerity measures will not affect male and female citizens of the in EU in the same way. For women, who lost much ground since 1989, further cuts in domestic spending and the dismantling of the welfare state, will have disastrous effects.

And so revolutions everywhere have a way to bypass women, and until we insist that women’s rights are a priority in every context and in every culture, it will continue to be so.

 

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Gender, Interpersonal Communication, Politics, Uncategorized

Research Ethics in Impossibly Unethical Situations

December 21, 2011 By 5 Comments

The very existence of my research site is unethical.  It is a place of poverty and death—a mountaintop tuberculosis sanatorium in Romania where many patients are incurable. They know their situation is hopeless. Dozens of patients I have personally known died during the course of my research. Some have told me that because they are dying, they want to tell me their stories and to help those who still might live.  I enter into every interview knowing that I may not have the opportunity for follow-up questions.  My months living there were filled with ethically tricky situations, from patients (and nurses) asking for my medical opinions to being propositioned sexually by patients. The worst was when Florin a chubby-faced 20 year old patient committed suicide the same day I interviewed him. His doctor gave him the bad news that he had the same highly resistant strain of TB as his father and he would have to stay at the sanatorium much longer. He was so scared, that evening he left and hung himself. I didn’t find out until months later when I asked his father, now also dead of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) how his son was. I didn’t know what despair looked like until I saw that man, cheeks sunken in, wearing his dead son’s brightly colored hooded sweatshirt. When he finally died, I was disgusted with myself for thinking it was merciful–that maybe death was better than constantly being tortured for infecting his son with a deadly disease.   My university Institutional Review Board (IRB) did not prepare me for any of this—in fact nothing did. Here I was worrying about protecting my participants from my research, but who was protecting them from their own lives?

© Jonathan Stillo This couch, where crying relatives sit waiting for the patient to be admitted is the saddest place in the sanatorium. Sometimes, the goodbyes said here are final ones.

The most important “ethics review” I ever received did not come my university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), or the Romanian medical ethics board which both approved my anthropological research on tuberculosis in Romania. Rather, it came from Mr. Gheorghe, a fifty year- old Roma man dying of MDR-TB,   when he stepped out on the sanatorium balcony and told anyone within earshot something close to the following: “Jonathan is a good person. He wants to know about your lives and your families. You should talk to him.” I could feel myself blushing as he said this. His opinion mattered to the other patients, especially because he was the one selling them cigarettes out of his nightstand. Suddenly, other patients seemed eager to speak with me when they had been aloof and skeptical only days before.  Gheorghe didn’t live long enough for me to thank him, he died of a “massive hemoptysis” a technical way of saying he coughed up a massive amount of blood. This is how TB patients often die and it is terrifying.

©Jonathan Stillo Hemoptysis- As patients grow sicker, they cough up blood, sometimes pints at a time.

It took years for me to obtain the official permissions required to live at a Romanian TB sanatorium. I even had to sign a waiver for the U.S. National Science Foundation that they were not liable if I caught the disease. But just having the permission of my university and the Romanian government were not enough. I had to actually ask patients for their permission to ask them about sensitive issues, sometimes asking dying patients about their regrets and about how their families will survive without them.  Part of my initial problem was I didn’t know how to ask the patients to let me interview and survey them. Following my IRB protocol, I showed them my stamped informed consent, a full page of Romanian legalese with talk of risks and benefits. I would read sections out loud and the more “informed” the patients became the more uncomfortable they became. This level of formality does not exist in most aspects of their lives. They could not understand that if I only wanted to talk with them, why I needed such involved paperwork with multiple signatures, dates and stamps.  In fact, when I submitted my original protocol to the Romanian medical ethics board, I was laughed at and told that this research did not need approval because it was not “clinical”.

What did patients care about? That I would protect their identities and that the process was voluntary. Everything else, including talk of risks and benefits, names and numbers of people to contact, made them uncomfortable.  They just wanted my assurance that I would maintain their confidentiality by not publishing their names.  Many patients did not even have an expectation of privacy and did not feel qualified to make the decision as to whether or not they should participate in my research. They did not want to hear about protocols. Rather, they wanted someone that they trusted to tell them it was ok and that they could trust me. A document from my IRB could not accomplish this, only someone else vouching for me could.

I gained the endorsement of Mr. Gheorghe by accident.  There was no plan, he just seemed willing to talk so I sat on his bed with him and asked about photographs on his wall, one of a handsome young man in a military uniform (him during socialism), another of a strikingly beautiful woman on a motorcycle (his 18 year old daughter) and my favorite, him and his wife proudly standing with their eight children in front of their rural home. He told me that doctors never sit on patient’s beds and they never ask about things like this. Visiting doctors and researchers only care about numbers and information on the patient charts. They are not interested in patient’s lives, only their disease.

In my last post, The Trobriand Islanders Never Friended Malinowski on Facebook,  I suggested that the reason for the existence of IRBs is not primarily the protection of research participants. Rather, it is to provide legal protection to institutions such as hospitals and universities which despite their non-profit status, operate more like businesses every day. Every researcher connected with the CUNY system must undergo an online ethics training course where they are without fail, asked questions about the Tuskegee syphilis study and the importance of informed consent. The problem is that researchers in any time are operating under the ethical norms of their particular time and place. Withholding antibiotics from those men long after their syphilis could have been cured is ethically unconscionable now, but then, it was not, at least to enough of the people involved. Today, it is still the medical industry (specifically pharmaceutical companies) that is pushing (and in my opinion far exceeding ethical boundaries, in spite of the presence of IRBs in virtually every medical and educational institution.

US CDC Venereal Disease Branch (1970-73) Tuskegee syphilis study doctor injects subject with placebo

In Romania, people generally don’t sue each other, especially the impoverished patients I work with. They live on a mountain “beyond the sight of God” as one patient put it. They don’t have access to lawyers and cannot even call or email the contact info on my informed consent because they lack internet access and money for international calls. When these patients give me their informed consent, it is informed by the personal relationship I have with them and those they know. They do so with the knowledge that they would have little recourse if I did behave unethically. It makes their consent all the more meaningful. Ultimately consent, at least in my research site, has little to do with my protocols and institutional approvals. For the patients informed consent is not something I read out loud to them, it is earned over the course of months through drinking coffee, staring off the balcony and exchanging stories of our families. It is something I take seriously not because of the IRB, but because I know that the people sharing their lives with me trust me on a personal level. I owe it to them to behave in a way that is ethically appropriate and respects their humanity and dignity. I think at this point we have a system of ethics approval which is designed by clinicians and enforced by lawyers for the protection of hospital and university endowments in a litigious society. It is the worst of possible worlds and despite best intentions 20 years from now, future researchers will read of all of the unethical research that took place even in this age of IRBs.

I think part of the issue is that ethical research means different things to different people and institutions. In the technical, clinical and legal language of U.S. IRBs, it means limiting “risk” to the study participants. This definition of ethics was inadequate for one of my Romanian transcribers who did not want to work on my project unless there was an actual benefit to Romanian TB patients—that I am not simply studying their “biosociality” or some other nebulous academic nonsense, but rather trying to use my research to improve people’s lives. I told her that is the only reason why I research. This is the same concern that many patients had. However, it never comes up in my U.S. ethics reviews.  I wish it did.

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, CUNY, To Ponder

The National Conversation

December 19, 2011 By 4 Comments

One of the points frequently made about Occupy Wall Street is that it has shifted the national conversation by putting income inequality and financial deregulation back on the table. At the same time, one of the most inspiring things about the actual site of Zuccotti Park, and the other Occupy encampments, has been their creation of a forum for open conversation about issues of local and national policy.

But what is the national conversation? Where does it take place? Whose voices are involved? Today I want to ask: Could expanding the national conversation become a focal point for political mobilization? Could activists mobilize around a clear articulation of the need for a more open, engaged, diverse national conversation? Could this be a way to bridge constituencies that currently have a hard time talking to one another?

Image Credit: Ubiquitous Clip Art

As a rhetorical strategy, the idea of expanding the national conversation is double-edged. It encourages us to pull back from direct, explicitly partisan mobilization, and to look instead for more “neutral” (read: widely acceptable) ways of framing the issues. At the same time, it also takes for granted the idea that “more” conversation on such issues will ultimately mean “better” conversation.

(When OWS puts income inequality on the table, we assume that this is a push in the direction of less inequality, since current norms don’t allow an explicit argument for greater inequality. Those who want to bolster inequality have to reframe the issue, for example by shifting to a conversation about “job creation” — also something that can’t be explicitly rejected in the current political climate.)

Image Credit: HappyPlace.com

Yet I think there is a lot to be said for this kind of strategy, especially in this moment, when the national conversation in the U.S. is operating on a very shallow level, with little substantive debate and much divisive sound-biting. Is this the best we can do?

It bothers me, for example, when my political comrades describe our country as if it consisted of three constituencies: left-wing voters, left-wing leaders, and right-wing leaders. It’s as if they forget all about the right-wing voters, the people who actually vote for and support Romney and Perry and Gingrich. Then they turn around and say: The politicians are ignoring the will of the people! I don’t hear enough activists on my side of the spectrum talking about what motivates Republican voters.

2008 Electoral Map

Of course, gerry-mandering and voter suppression are real. There are all kinds of problems built into the system. To some extent, the politicians are ignoring the will of the people. But we do still hold elections, and plenty of people participate in them — and, of those people, plenty are voting for right-wing candidates. The Republican party has a strong electoral basis in social conservatism and religious fundamentalism. I don’t see how we can hope to change or understand the current situation nationally without taking that into account. And that means framing the national debate to include the issues that mobilize those communities alongside our own.

So: How do we open up the conversation?

Image Credit: Scoop NZ

Sometimes it seems as if presidential debates are just about the only time when a national conversation actually takes place. There, campaign finance reform is a central issue, and already a main focus of political activism. But I usually hear this issue framed in terms of who gets elected, as if the only purpose of presidential elections were to find out which of two parties will hold power for the next four years. Shouldn’t presidential debates be the highest level of national conversation? Shouldn’t they be supported by a layered, systemic national conversation that continues throughout all phases of the election cycle? Isn’t campaign finance reform really about trying to make the presidential contest less of what Brian Lehrer calls a “horse race” and more of a substantive conversation on national issues?

In short, I don’t think it’s enough right now to mobilize on specific issues. The bill that just passed in the Senate is a good example: It’s terrifying. But even more terrifying is the fact that we have arrived at a moment where such a bill can pass without significant national debate. There are only so many petitions that one can sign against specific bills that most people in the country have never even heard of. I am yearning for a longer-term view of politics, for a vision of the future that goes beyond slowing or preventing the slide toward authoritarianism.

Photo Credit: Cover Lay Down

And so I wonder:

  • What if expanding the national conversation became the explicit platform of a social movement or political party? What kinds of implications (for campaign finance reform, for education, for civil rights, for financial regulation) could be woven into an argument for more open and thorough debate?
  • What kind of articulate challenges could be put forth in terms of how actually to accomplish this expansion? What type of debates, conversations, forums, round tables, symposia, performances, and educational programs would support such an expansion? What kinds of institutions and media are best situated to accomplish this? What kinds of pressure could cause them to do so?
  • And finally: Is there a special role here for education and academia? (Here’s a challenge for intellectuals to support OWS. And here’s a proposal to shed light on how politicians interact with experts in relevant fields.) How can we counter the spinning of higher education as an elitist club? What are the real systems that can raise the level of public debate and get people interested in the national conversation?

Filed Under: Audience, Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Debating, Education, Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Media, New York, Politics, Punctuation, Scholarship, Social Media, What if . . .

Pop Cultural Pop

December 1, 2011 By 2 Comments

Doing pop culture analysis is like trying to carve a tunnel through a mountainside with a spoon. But as a daily rider of public transportation, I can’t help but notice the images that barrage us as we travel from one point to another. It amazes me that we have sold this space to advertisers rather than using it for art, news, or public dialogue.

Here’s one that I noticed recently:

Advertisement for "The Big Bang Theory"

What strikes me about this ad is that it seems to un-self-consciously demonstrate mainstream America’s imaginary world of neatly defined identity categories and their associated hierarchies of power and influence.

I have never watched “The Big Bang Theory,” so I don’t know anything about these characters beyond what’s shown here. But when I look at the poster, what I basically see is a central white man surrounded by four other, less central people. The central guy is taller than the others and, in the poster I see most often, he is the only one looking directly out at the viewer.

Then there are the “others.” From left to right: the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s effeminate and/or retro and/or gay (as indicated by tight purple pants); the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s not white; the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s nerdy and/or intellectual and/or Jewish (as indicated by glasses); and the woman. Whether or not these descriptions are true of the characters in the show, they are clearly marked this way in the poster.

If you think I’m being reductive, note that these ads for “The Big Bang Theory” (produced by CBS) are in every case — as far as I’ve seen, on the subway — bundled with ads for “30 Rock” (produced by NBC). I’m not sure if I would have thought to read these ads as such an obvious statement of mainstream television’s understanding of identity politics if the two ads weren’t so bizarrely, strikingly similar to each other.

Advertisement for "30 Rock"

I have actually seen “30 Rock,” so I do know something about the characters. All the same, the line-up in the poster is identical to the one I’ve described above, with a single, possible significant difference: the nerdy / intellectual / Jewish role (the one marked with glasses) is now being played by a woman.

So we have again, from left to right and top to bottom: the guy marked as effeminate, emotional, possibly gay; the racial other; the silly, blond woman; the intellectual (now female); and finally, of course, the white guy. No markings on him!

There’s nothing new about this analysis. We all know that white men and women dominate mainstream television, and that identity politics gets absorbed into pop culture — for better and for worse — through the addition of secondary characters, more or less stereotypical, marked as different kinds of “other” in relation to the central white male.

Even given all that, I am struck by the juxtaposition of these two ads — plastered side by side all over New York City’s public transportation system — and by the fact that whoever put them together either did not notice their eerily parallel composition, or else accepted it as a statement about what counts as “prime time” in today’s world.

 

Filed Under: Art, Audience, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Marketing, Media, New York, Politics, Style

Supertitles

November 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This past week, David Henry Hwang’s new comedy Chinglish opened on Broadway. The play, as all of the advertising for the production will tell you, is “the hilarious story” of cross-cultural communication and misunderstandings. (Whether it is in fact hilarious or not, I will leave to critics and audiences to decide). The title takes its name from the derogatory term for mistranslations that occur when going from Mandarin to English. Hwang attempts to expand and possibly redeem the term from its implied pejorative Sinophobic bias by including the mistranslations of English into Mandarin under the umbrella of “Chinglish.” Particularly skewered in this play are the random Chinese characters that US teenagers get tattooed on their backs without knowing how to read the words, a prostitution advertisement taken for “Classical Chinese poetry” on the cover of an academic journal, and the American businessman who thinks he can order in a restaurant—or really do anything in China—without speaking the language.

 

Example of a “Chinglish” sign

Example of a “Chinglish” sign

Creative Commons License photo credit: Jonas in China

When purchasing tickets, would-be audience members are warned that this production is in “English and Mandarin (with English surtitles),” in much the same way they would be warned of profanity, violent content, or seizure-inducing strobe lights. My first thought was, “Why do we need a warning? Is bilingualism dangerous?” But my second less flippant thought was, “Why no Mandarin surtitles?” If this is supposed to be about the American misunderstanding of Chinese culture, just as much as the other way around, then why do we only read the English words, while hearing both English and Mandarin? Is this exemplifying the exact linguistic bias that Hwang is attempting to undermine in the play?

The purpose of supertitles (or as they are called in the warning listed above, “surtitles,” a term which I just discovered is a Canadian trademark) is ostensibly comprehension. Unlike on the dramatic stages of Broadway, supertitles are common in opera companies. New York City’s own Metropolitan Opera developed seat-back versions (the also-trademarked “Met Titles”) that resemble multi-lingual pager displays, sending lyrics to audience members in calming amber LEDs. The aria may be sung in a language that the audience member does not understand or using diction that is unintelligible to the listener. The words projected above the stage (or on the tiny screen mounted on the seat in front of the audience member) are supposed to make it easier to understand what is happening during the opera.

 

Supertitles before an opera

 Creative Commons License photo credit: testastretta-999

I would be lying if I didn’t say that I use this technology when I attend operas. I tried turning it off once during a performance of Nixon in China (an opera sung in English), but there was the constant gnawing that I was missing something if I didn’t have the glowing amber lights translating the words that I supposedly understood. Does this technology in fact detract from the experience of the performance? I am watching and listening to the performance, but when my eyes flicker to the screen, I am no longer relying on the performer’s interpretation. I merely listen, while reading the text. The physical body of the actor is no longer important to me, and I just listen to the singer’s voice. Does this make me a lazy audience member? Or merely someone who privileges reading a translated meaning over the actor’s interpretation?

 

David Henry Hwang's Chinglish on Broadway

David Henry Hwang's Chinglish on Broadway

 Creative Commons License photo credit: Mark Runyon

Back to Broadway and Hwang’s Chinglish. In this case, we are talking about a non-musical—something very different from the world of opera up at Lincoln Center—and, therefore, the use of supertitles differs from the operatic trope. Rather than projecting every word, only Mandarin words translated into English are supertitled. When an actor speaks in Mandarin, my eyes immediately go to the words which are projected onto the walls of the set. I am not reading the actor’s body language, only the meaning of the words. However, when actors speaks in English, no translation is provided and my focus remained on the actors—fully taking in their posture, gestures, eye-contact, and facial expressions.

This feeling of always being behind the action is described by an occurrence late in the second act. Next to me in the balcony, was a group of spectators who spoke fluent Chinese. At one point, Jennifer Lim (playing the role of Deputy Minister Xi Yan) was delivering a monologue. Before the words could be translated into English, a single guffaw of recognition came from a woman in the group. This single laugh seemed to encompass the production’s feeling of cross-cultural disconnect more than anything Hwang could have scripted. I knew that something humorous had occurred, and I was about to find out what. But perhaps it would not be laugh-out-loud funny to me in translation. When the English words were finally revealed a second later and I caught up with the meaning of what had been said, the actor had already moved on to the more poignant part of the speech. At this point a more demure English chuckle was all that could be elicited from the non-Chinese speakers in the audience, who were left wondering how the line must have been heard in its original language. That single laugh is something that could not be translated into a supertitle.

Filed Under: Audience, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Language, New York, Non-verbal Communication, Oral Communication

The Politics of Specialized Knowledge

October 17, 2011 By 1 Comment

What are the possible relations between knowledge and power?

On the one hand, it is obvious how specialized knowledges frequently become intertwined with social hierarchies and used to prop up unjust divisions of class, race, and gender, among others. On the other hand, as someone dedicated to the preservation and development of certain fields of knowledge both academic and artistic, I cannot accept any simple equation between power and knowledge.

The idea that power and knowledge are two sides of the same coin has been powerfully articulated by Michel Foucault. Another way to say this, using the language of Pierre Bourdieu, would be that specialized knowledge is a kind of cultural capital, a form of power distinct from but analogous to money. Many of the contributors of Hacking the Academy seem to subscribe to this idea: Understand the political uses of knowledge, and you’ve understood knowledge itself.

Cartoon by Mark Stivers

I don’t agree with this.

Knowledge is political, but it is more than an incarnation of politics. This goes not only for dominant fields of knowledge but also for subjugated knowledge of every kind: neither can be reduced to the power relations that surround them. What then is knowledge, besides power? What is the internal structure of subjugated knowledge? Can such knowledge also be highly specialized and refined? And, on the other hand, can institutionally supported knowledges be extricated from the power that supports them?

In this post, I want to ask about the relationship between areas of knowledge and categories of political identity. In other words, I want to bring together some thoughts on democracy and social justice with some thoughts on epistemology. In doing so, it seems to me that there is an immediate problem: The structure inherently leads to specialization. This is a fundamental characteristic of knowledge and one that works against any easy integration between the impulse to research and the impulse to democratize.

What I mean by specialization is that knowledge is differentially accessible. Knowledge is structured in branching pathways because it is a confrontation with a reality that is not purely invented. Whether this reality is the abstract patterning of mathematics, the detailed records of historical archives, or the physiology of human anatomy, knowledge is exploration and discovery as well as creativity and invention. If you go down one path, you cannot go as far down another.

Drawing by Laura Lee

This means that fields of knowledge have depth. In order to understand advanced algebra, one should know how to count from zero to ten. In order to grasp advanced theoretical arguments, one must learn the vocabulary used in that field. Knowledge makes possible further, more specific, more specialized knowledge. While all knowledge is potentially available, it is not all equally accessible. Knowledge is not like a menu from which you can order any item. It is rather like a territory in which some places are easier to get to than others, given any particular starting point.

If this is true, then we cannot hope to make knowledge democratic in the same way that a society can be democratic. Even as we fight to make education available to everyone, the structure of education entails some degree of specialization. A society can argue in the public sphere over which areas of knowledge should constitute its basic curriculum. But in doing so, it presupposes a “public” built on certain knowledges rather than others. There will always remain areas of specialized knowledge that are not common. Some will be aligned with the powerful and others with the powerless. So the relationship between power and knowledge will always be complex.

At a time when social protest and democracy are receiving new energy and attention through the chain of events that now extends from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, I want to ask about the intersection of political categories and specialized knowledges. A lot of excellent work has been done on intersectionality in politics, for example at the difficult but crucial intersection of feminist and anti-racist mobilization. It seems to me that specialized knowledge is another important piece of this puzzle.

Marya Wethers at Movement Research (photo: Ian Douglas)

This issue came up for me recently when Iele Paloumpis wrote about an evening of Movement Research at Judson Church. Paloumpis writes of being moved by Marya Wethers piece then goes on to criticize the rest of the evening (and the organization in general) for its apparent whiteness. I was reminded of this again when I sat at a meeting of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communications Institute and found myself internally critiquing its whiteness along the same vein. Yet I also found that could not put the Schwartz Institute and Movement Research into quite the same category when it came to this politicized critique.

Failure to diversify is a serious charge that can be applied to countless institutions ranging from Hollywood to the United States Senate. My goal here is not to interrogate either the Schwartz Institute or Movement Research on their particular successes, failures, or histories, but to draw attention to the politics of knowledge as it plays out in certain contexts of which these are two examples close to me personally. To begin with, I want to acknowledge that every successful contemporary institution has its own unique history necessarily tied to institutional power and that none can escape being more or less imbricated in the racist history of the United States.

What interests me here is that these two institutions are explicitly defined by their support of a particular field of knowledge: “movement” in one case and “communications” in the other. The Schwartz Institute draws its fellows from the CUNY doctoral pool, which means it reflects the demographics of doctoral students rather than undergraduates. And Movement Research, with its unique and in many ways politically radical history linked to avant-garde dance, likewise represents a specific community. Both communities tend strongly towards leftist politics while also depending on a significant degree of economic privilege to sustain themselves.

Ben Spatz at Movement Research (photo by Ian Douglas)

I am part of both communities and both organizations. I was one of the artists included in what Paloumpis called the “list of white choreographers” that made up the rest of that evening of Movement Research. And while I don’t mind being pointed to as an example of racial privilege, what was missing for me in Paloumpis’s analysis was the mission of Movement Research and what exactly it successfully represents. This is what brings me to the question of specialized knowledge.

At this point I can only offer a series of questions:

  • How should we think about the intersectionality between what are commonly called “identity” categories (race, gender, class — but also size, age, religion…) and what are more often thought of as fields of knowledge or craft (dance, movement, writing, communications — but also math, science, literature…)?
  • Is it possible to bring something to the ongoing and always controversial discussion of curriculum and pedagogy by approaching areas of knowledge as political (or politicizable) communities that intersect with those of “identity”?
  • For example, could the conversation about English literature — how to define the field coherently while working against the legacies of imperialism — benefit from some of the critical tools put forth by the analysis of political intersectionality?

I do not mean to suggest that we should simply equate having specialized knowledge with being part of an identity group or social class. That would be as wrong-headed as trying to develop equivalencies between different axes of oppression. The value of intersectionality is that it views such axes as a distinct dimension, each adding an irreducible layer of complexity to any given issue. It is difficult enough to analyze any given event (or book, or advertisement) in terms of its intersecting politics of gender, race, and class. What happens if we add the question of specialized knowledges to this analysis?

Map of intersecting identities from CALCASA

If I feel that Movement Research deserves less censure than the Schwartz Institute for its visible whiteness, this is because I believe the field of dance/movement (and especially experimental dance/movement) is far more marginal and endangered in our society than that of communications, especially when the latter is tied to business education. In fact, there is some common ground between them, as both focus on embodiment as a medium of communication. But there is also a difference between the two fields: one that has much to do with power but which is not simply reducible to any other political category. In this case, the axis of power I am talking about is not one of gender, race, class, or any conventional category of politicized identity. It is about different kinds of knowledge and which knowledges are considered important or unimportant in a given society.

Again, this is not to deny the importance of bringing to bear on such organizations a critique that examines injustice across the categories of political identity. Obviously, the question of which fields of knowledge are subsidized is profoundly linked to the question of which communities hold power. But the two questions are not identical.

It is difficult to speak about knowledge and politics in the same breath. From the perspective of politics, specialized knowledge can look like an elitist ruse; while from the perspective of research, politics can look like a distraction. This is the case not only for established academic disciplines of specialized knowledges, like particle physics or medieval history, but also for marginalized knowledges of all kinds. Even if one has no institutional support to pursue one’s research, by framing it as research one already takes a step away from a purely political mobilization that would demand more resources for reasons of social justice. Indeed, this may be one way to complicate the dilemma faced by political movements in defining their constituencies without relying on an essentialism that is ultimately counter-productive.

Boondocks cartoon by Aaron McGruder

To conclude: Although institutions that support fields of knowledge should be called out on their social politics, it seems to me that such critiques might also benefit from a more complex politics of knowledge, one that understands knowledge and power as interwoven but distinct. After all, even an utterly tyrannical power structure can harbor valuable knowledge, including some that may one day prove essential precisely to those people who are mobilized against the tyrannical or unjust institutions that helped to develop it. An obvious example is the use of social media and cellphones to organize democratic protests — but can’t the same thing be said about knowledge in other areas, including movement and communication?

If nothing else, I hope that I have shown here that knowledge is not equivalent to power, even if the question of which knowledges receive institutional support is always a political one. It seems to me that working on this paradox is a crucial and defining task for many institutions both within and beyond academia.

Filed Under: Art, BLSCI, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, CUNY, Education, edupunk, Gender, Higher Education, New York, Non-verbal Communication, Pedagogy, Politics, Social Media, To Ponder

Occupying the Brooklyn Bridge

October 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Normally, after I teach a four-hour class on Staten Island, which takes me two hours to get to and two hours to get back from, I go straight home and take a nap. But there’s no denying that something special is in the air these days, and since the Express Bus passes by Wall Street in any case, I thought I would go and have a look at the most exciting potential social movement since the 2003 anti-war protests.

The iconic image of Seattle '99. All other photos (below) were taken today with my little phone camera.

I had only been living in New York City for a couple of years when the Bush government began a palpable build-up towards the war in Iraq. The 2003 protests were much larger, perhaps because there was a single clear and urgent demand uniting us and bringing us into the streets: Do not invade Iraq. But the urgency and poignancy of this demand was matched by a sense of inevitability as it became apparent that our country could and would start a war in Iraq despite our attempts to stop it.

Protesters and cops on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Despite the fact that I believe profoundly in a politics of social protest and radical democracy, I’ve always found it hard to participate on more than an occasional basis. On a personal level, I’ve often found the act of protest unsatisfying. It’s not precise, well-crafted, or efficient. I believe in it, but I’ve always want to be part of something more clearly defined, something within which I could have a clear role and a clear set of responsibilities. As a result I have pursued an artistic practice and eventually academic studies: areas where I could set long-term goals for myself and feel I had some chance of achieving them.

But I think I may have been wrong. Maybe social movements are, in their own way, precise and well-crafted and efficient. Maybe it is possible to find or make a clear role for oneself in a social movement. Maybe it is possible to set long-term goals. Maybe the problem for me in 2003 wasn’t that protest didn’t make sense to me but that it couldn’t provide me with a living. Now that I have a more stable income, at least for the time being, and now that my artistic practice is also more secure, I wonder again how my life and my work could be made to serve more directly political ends.

The police begin a long process of peaceful arrests.

I had barely arrived in Zuccotti Park when the 3:00pm march began. The crowd flowed uptown as a line of police kept our chanting and placards confined to the sidewalk. “ALL DAY! ALL WEEK! OCCUPY WALL STREET!” Not one but several double decker tour buses passed alongside the protesters. We cheered at them and sometimes they cheered back. The mood was festive. “BANKS GOT BAILED OUT! WE GOT SOLD OUT!” A woman with a tape recorder briefly interviewed me: “Do you feel proud of these people?” Yes.

We filled up the entire sidewalk, making it difficult for non-protesters to get through. There were cameras everywhere. One man spoke into his own tape recorder, calling the crowd “inspired and eclectic.” He was right. Although there was a substantial portion of visibly punk-influenced protesters, they were not the majority. There were plenty of older folk and a range of dress styles including a few people in suits. “TELL ME WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE! THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!” From where I stood the group seemed predominantly white, but by no means entirely.

Protesters stopped traffic on the bridge.

I was surprised when I saw in front of me that the protest was headed up onto the Brooklyn Bridge. I had thought we would circle back to the park or perhaps head up towards Union Square as I knew happened recently. What was the plan here? Were we going to walk to Brooklyn? What would we do once we got there? But it didn’t really matter. A point was being made. We were walking. We were appearing. I wanted to be part of this appearance. As I told the woman with the tape recorder, I don’t have any expectations, but I do have a hope. I hope this is the beginning of a new social movement.

I followed the line of protesters onto the pedestrian walkway and we began to cross over the bridge. Then, slowly, I began to realize that there was another group of protesters below us on the other level. They were down there with the cars. And the cars were stopping. At first traffic was reduced to two lanes, then one. Finally it came to a halt. “WE ARE THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT! YOU ARE THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT!” At least two hundred protesters jammed the bridge, making it impassable. It was an electric moment, one that seemed not to have been anticipated either by the protesters or by police.

Detained protesters are lined up on the side of the bridge, separated from the rest.

We were taking over the bridge.

From the pedestrian walkway, I watched the other group below. Those of us above were protesters, but we were not breaking the law. They were. It was our job to witness whatever happened to them.

Police vehicles line up on the bridge for mass arrests.

After several minutes the police began to arrive from both sides on the lower level. No one was in any hurry. I heard someone ask: “How do you de-escalate a situation like this?” The answer: You don’t. The protesters wanted to walk to Brooklyn. They were not going to turn back. And at a certain point the police would no longer let them. “WHOSE BRIDGE? OUR BRIDGE!” Soon the police had set up barriers around the protesting group. Cops and protesters faced off. From above, we watched.

The police began to arrest the protesters on the lower level of the bridge. It was unceremonious and simple. They didn’t need any cause beyond the fact that the protesters were blocking traffic. Yet how could this end? Surely they were not going to arrest hundreds of people? Then I began to understand that this is exactly what they were going to do.

“THIS IS A PEACEFUL MARCH! THIS IS A PEACEFUL MARCH!”

Traffic was completely blocked on the outbound side of the bridge.

Or perhaps they would not be officially arrested, but merely detained. Separated. Hands bound behind their backs with white plastic zip-ties. Lined up sitting against the side of the bridge. Trucks and buses called in to bring them away. The bridge cleared for business as usual.

It was obvious that this was going to take hours. Hours in which outgoing traffic would be halted, causing jams throughout lower Manhattan as everyone leaving the city had to take an alternate route.

From above, we watched.

Police escort protesters off the pedestrian walkway.

Some protesters were very angry at the cops for doing this. Some of them were yelling that it was our right to be on the bridge because the bridge is a public space. A few were screaming at the cops and calling them Nazis.

I didn’t feel any anger at the cops. I don’t consider the police force to be entirely aligned with the interests of the rich. We do not live in a police state. From what I saw today, the cops behaved respectfully, even if their attitudes were verbally and physically aggressive.

I understand why there is a law that says you can’t block traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s not a bad law, as laws go. The point isn’t that protesters should be allowed to do whatever they want with impunity. The point is that protesters can choose to break the law peacefully but firmly in order to draw attention to their cause.

But what is the cause?

Organizer hands an activist newspaper to the driver of an inbound car.

No single demand is being made by the protest movement that has become known as Occupy Wall Street. I think that’s a good thing. The demands of this seedling movement are too broad and fundamental to be captured in a single demand or even a list of demands, at least so far. The Tea Party did not begin with a single demand. It’s a party, a group, a community. It has pulled the Republican party to the right. Can this new movement pull the Democratic party to the left?

It would not be hard to describe the basic politics of the people gathered at Wall Street. They are against corporate globalization and the ever-increasing, unjustifiable gap between rich and poor. Surely most of those gathered there also support environmental sustainability, green technologies, feminism and anti-racist politics. But there’s plenty of room for disagreement as well. And when it comes to putting these values into practice through specific social policies — that’s a whole different question.

I wonder if an action that clearly breaks the law, such as stopping traffic on a Brooklyn Bridge, does imply the need for a clearer demand. To peacefully occupy Wall Street is one thing. Such an occupation could go on indefinitely. It could last for days, months, even years. It could become the epicenter of a new social movement in the United States, something that hasn’t been seen for decades. A city within a city. A beating heart for a new body politic.

AWAKEN! Protesters coming off the bridge.

Blocking traffic is something else. We are the people. Ultimately, when united, we hold all the power because we are everyone. We can shut down the city. We can redistribute the wealth. We can create a federal works program. We can rebuild infrastructure. We can regulate the banks. We can pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We can release nonviolent offenders. We can forgive student debt. Because if “we” is everyone, there’s no one else to stop us. But “we” do not agree on all these things. We have different perspectives, different values, different ideas.

Who occupied the bridge? I’m not asking for the names of individuals who were there. I’m asking who these individuals represent. The idea that a small group can represent a larger one is tricky, dicey, delicate, but absolutely essential. We will not have pure consensus among three hundred thousand people, let alone seven billion. Some form of representation is essential.

So who was it that occupied Brooklyn Bridge today? Was it a bunch of left-wing New Yorkers? Was it the NYC branch of a global anti-tyranny movement that started Tahrir Square? Was it the face of democracy? Was it the people of the United States of America? Was it you?

Eventually the police came and cleared us off the pedestrian walkway as well. By the time I left perhaps a quarter of those on the lower level had been arrested. I wonder if they are still there now, as I write this, in the process of being arrested. More importantly, I wonder how many people will be back tomorrow and the next day. Increasing numbers, I hope. More every day. Until we find out what this moment really means for this city, this country, this world.

(More details and photos here.)

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, edupunk, New York, Politics, Process, Social Media, Social Networking, To Ponder, Uncategorized, What if . . .

At Home in the City

September 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Finding a place to live is a complicated, essential, bittersweet, sometimes unexpectedly profound part of living in a big city. Having spent the past two weeks touring Brooklyn in an apartment search, I feel newly connected and newly aware of the patchwork fabric of diversity and interconnectedness that is our shared urban world.

apartment (noun): a suite of rooms forming one residence; a flat. ORIGIN: from Fr. appartement, from Ital. appartamento, from appartare ‘to separate’.

To separate. Our shared need for distance allows us to remain together. In cities we pack closely together, our buildings made of boxes inside boxes. Apartments inside buildings, rooms inside apartments. This one is mine, that one is yours. This is the bedroom, that is the kitchen. So we keep things organized. I’ve also lived in more communal spaces, in squats and lofts and cabins. But it’s true, what they say: The older I get, the more glad I am to have my personal life boxed and protected in the confines of an apart-ment. This isn’t because I want to isolate myself from the world. On the contrary, it’s because I want my engagements in the world to extend beyond the level of neighbor and neighborhood. As a teacher, artist, and academic, I spend most of my time and energy cultivating a public existence through those larger institutional channels. At the same time, I also need a private life, an intimate life, the kind of life that can unfold within an apartment. This leaves precious little time or energy for neighbors and the neighborhood.

I’ve always romanticized cities, even though I’ve almost always lived in one. My childhood dreams and fantasies were brimming with golden and silver cityscapes inspired by films and books like The Fifth Element and Imajica. As I grew up I became more interested in actual cities, which are sometimes golden and sometimes silver but always also real and mundane and frustrating and specific and impossible to capture or describe or comprehend. During this apartment search I don’t think about the cities of my childhood imagination. I’m fixated on the realities of rent stabilization, demographics, transportation, and square footage. But afterwards, looking back, it’s clear that I have been walking through one of those cities about which I used to dream. The force of New York City no longer hits me with a single impact like the fantastic cities of literature and film. I’ve never been up into a helicopter to see it from that distance as a single glimmering artifact. But this city has something else going for it that my dream-cities never had: It’s real.

Next to the east side of Prospect Park my partner and I visit a large, high-ceilinged apartment in a vast old mansion of a building. Apparently this building is the best if you have dogs. Everyone there has dogs, and there is the botanical garden across the street where you can walk your dogs. But we don’t have a dog, and the apartment feels cold to me. It makes me think of a nineteenth century novel full of strange illnesses and ongoing, unspoken suffering in the drawing room. Even the neighborhood feels cold to me: no shops, no cafes, no restaurants. Each person alone in their apartment with their dogs. But it’s also raining that day, which makes a difference.

Close to the heart of downtown Brooklyn we discover a gem of an apartment with a small stained-glass window and old, decorative, perfectly maintained wooden doorframes. Someone has put a lot of love into this apartment and it shows. It’s priced below market rate because the bedroom is in between the living room and the kitchen and bathroom. This means that if one person is up and about, the other can have no guarantee of peace or privacy. Even so, we can’t afford it. The market has changed since we looked two years ago, and not in our favor. Now, if we want to have cafes and fresh produce nearby, we’ll have to find them the edge of the gentrification wave.

In Crown Heights, we find ourselves walking along that thin edge. In a way it seems inevitable that we will end up living along a border area like this, where class, race, and cultural history collide before our eyes. Here we can have our cafes and groceries, if we don’t mind living on a somewhat desolate street where half the block is taken up by an enormous parking garage. The apartment itself is beautiful, but is it worth pushing our budget when the subways nearby are not quite the ones that we want? As New Yorkers we are reconciled to the fact that we will spend a good portion of every day on the subway, in those moving boxes that bring us all together and carry us on our separate ways. Transportation by subway is another complex calculus to be applied to the apartment hunt: Which subways exactly, and just how far away?

We even look at one of those ridiculous new luxury buildings that claim to offer “a high-quality living experience” with gym, lounge, and optional valet parking. The cheapest studio, its price brought down to within our range by the economic travails of the past few years, is luxurious but tiny. Far worse is the feeling that living here would be equivalent to selling one’s soul, aligning oneself with all that is wrong in the world. Culturally we are as out of place here as we are in the housing projects that are hidden in plain sight, two blocks away, next to the highway. There we feel like invaders, threatening and threatened, simultaneously guilty of privilege and anxious to protect it. Here we feel something different but equally painful: This is not what buildings and apartments should look like. This is not what we — I mean all of us — should be doing with our money. This is not what we should be doing with New York City.

Differences in culture and differences in privilege map onto each other in complex and not always obvious ways. In south Williamsburg we find ourselves in a Latino neighborhood where music and advertising and signage in Spanish mark a distinct community. Two years ago we looked at an apartment in the Hasidic neighborhood next door. In both places we still feel out of place. Differences in language, clothing, and food are both personal and political. For us as a couple they are simply preferences that have emerged organically from our lives and backgrounds and interests. But we cannot pretend that in living here we would not also be part of a much larger wave of change in this area. And if it’s really a question of (white) “hipsters” vs. Latinos then we are inescapably in the category of the former. That’s how privilege works: You have to own it even if you don’t identify with it. White, male, “hipster” — I am none of these and yet I am all of them. It depends what each term means. It depends who you ask. It depends if we are talking about privilege or identification.

A few blocks away, but across the highway and a few blocks closer to Bedford Ave — the fount of this gentrification wave — we find the first apartment on which we are moved to put down a deposit. It’s smaller than the other but we have our cafes and our restaurants and our groceries. Once again we have landed right on the edge on this wave, this pattern that is beyond our control. One block away is a coffee shop dominated by famously entrepreneurial laptops. Half a block in the opposite direction, kids play basketball in the street under a string of Puerto Rican flags. So the city puts us in our place. This is the kind of neighborhood we want. And we can afford to live here, as long as we don’t mind that the kitchen floor is peeling up and there is no sink in the bathroom. From this apartment we can stage our own projects and journeys and battles with and through the city. Perhaps this is why it already feels like our home, and why my sweetheart starts kissing me when the realty agent isn’t looking. This hasn’t happened in any other apartment so far: The kissing test.

I am glad to be a new Writing Fellow at Baruch College, itself a towering vision of the contemporary city, hundreds more boxes within boxes organized to bring us together and keep us part according to the organizational system we call higher education. The architecture of the vertical campus reminds me of the towering luxury condominium in Fort Greene, but the student body is the most ethnically diverse in the nation. My first impression of the Bernard Schwartz Communication Institute is that it is much less diverse than the rest of Baruch, a subject I hope to explore in a future blog post. Nor do I feel at home in a world focused on “business” as distinct from culture, ecology, and social justice. But I do see the potential here for a new generation of thinking about communication, education, and how we choose to build our collective future. I see that this school, and CUNY in general, is the future of this city, dirty and golden and real.

IMAGE CREDITS: City from The Fifth Element (see also City and The City). “Gentrification… Just say NO” from southside rants. Gentrification diagram from Geosimulation. Avalon Fort Greene from Rent.com (see also “Suddenly, a Brooklyn Skyline”, New York Times). Cafe photograph from Atlas Cafe. “Puerto Rican flags strung across a street in South Williamsburg” from City Limits. Baruch College Vertical Campus from Architectural Record.

Filed Under: Art, Audience, BLSCI, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, CUNY, Media, New York, Politics

Capitalism, critique and catastrophe

May 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Shoting star and other dollar origami by Corey Comenitz http://www.corigami.com/Gallery_3.html

I’m following John and David’s posts, both of which I think responded insightfully and eloquently to aspects of Grant McCraken’s presentation that I was too flustered by to take on myself. My immediate thought, following McCraken’s argument that anthropology should be a tool for companies, analyzing culture in order to help companies capture potential consumers, was that the motives of academics and business people are different. The task of academics is to question social structures—like the relationship between culture and the marketplace—in terms of how they affect human flourishing. And, the task of business people is to grow business. Either their job is not to care how their business affects human flourishing (writ large, not just the shareholders and consumers), or to assume that the growth of business is an inherent and general good.

But, is this a fair assumption or a prejudice? As soon as I had articulated this thought to myself, as a possible response to McCraken, I realized it sounded like a prejudice. This led me to think about the tropes that commonly circulate among academics, and to think of the generalizations made on both sides of the business/academic divide.

RSA videos have been circulating recently among my friends (and fellow academics). The first one that circulated among my (academic) friends was Slavoj Zizek’s “First tragedy, then farce.” The next was the David Harvey’s “Crises of Capitalism,” also posted on cac.ophony. One thing that struck me about them both is the catastrophic view of capitalism. Harvey ends his argument by saying that capitalism will only continue to become more extreme, that it is a phenomenon that far exceeds the range of our current political discourse, even our current political framework. Zizek suggests (with tiny caveats, it’s just a suggestion!) that charity merely mitigates the “zero point” of the increase in human suffering inherent to capitalism.

This is an old idea, made glamorous by a celebrity and by technology. Yet Zizek acts, though he cites Oscar Wilde, as if this were an original insight. I do think Marx’s ideas are still very relevant and useful today, but I’m frustrated that Marx still seems like a daring and challenging reference, and an endpoint. When his ideas are re-voiced outside of academic context, they seem to me to be more invoked and applied than built upon.

What I’d like to see turned into an RSA is perhaps Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, in which he studies the oppressions of several different political and economic forms, in different historical periods, and measures them against revolutions and the forms of governance and economics that replaced the old. No clear winners. I’d like to see some of George Yúdice’s ideas in an RSA. For example, he argues in The Expediency of Culture, that capitalism in its current phase is capturing more of human life, turning more and more of culture into a commodity. At the same time, he says, commodification has been cultured. The marketplace is more and more in the hands of more and more people. This takes us to last year’s keynote speaker, Clay Shirkey, who described Amazon as a kind of partial democratization of the marketplace. Or is it the commodification of democracy? Yúdice sees the capacity for the distribution of political agency, for more inclusive and effective solidarities, in this phase of the relationship between capital and culture.

In order to actually be able to turn speeches like McCraken’s into opportunities for mutually constructive criticism and dialogue, I think we might need to agree that we come to the table with a different set of prejudices about terms like the marketplace, capitalism, business, and academia. And would it be possible to have a conversation about who and how business and academia see themselves as serving to advance human flourishing?

Filed Under: BLSCI, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Liberal Arts, Politics, Symposium

Russian Aboriginal Ice Dance: “Cultural Theft”?

February 25, 2010 By 6 Comments

Playing with the ongoing theme of dance in recent postings, here is one controversial piece of dance. The 2010 Olympics ice dancing competition just ended, and the aboriginal folk dance put together by the Russian team brought a lot of controversies in and out of the ice rink. Voila! (The video clip shows the original version performed in the past month before it had to be “toned down” at the Olympics.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_uoToFGK6E[/youtube]

It has been reported that especially some indigenous Australians expressed their anger and frustration calling it as “appalling,” “a rip-off” and “exploitation.” Bev Manton, chairwoman of the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council, wrote last month in The Sydney Morning Herald that “the faux tribal designs on the costumes and the skaters’ faces ‘are no more authentic or Aboriginal than the shiploads of cheap Aboriginal tourist trinkets that pour into our country from overseas.’”

Now, compare this to the U.S. team’s “Bollywood” impression, which has become a YouTube sensation and instant favorite amongst Indian communities.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1zTUcOmtg4[/youtube]

Apart from the quality of each performance itself, there are a series of questions that come to my mind. Why do some people consider the Russian pair’s dance offensive or feel uncomfortable while the majority enjoy the U.S. pair’s? (To my mind, it is not just a simple matter of the skating costumes, although one of the NBC commentators mentioned that the Russian team’s faux leaves hanging from their tribal costumes were “gimmicks” whereas the U.S. team’s Indian clothes were “authentic.”) If dancing is a means of cultural expression and human communication, what are the limits of cultural appropriation in dancing in which indigenous culture can be shared, celebrated, and replicated by nonnative members? When does cultural tribute stop being appropriation and become theft? Where is the line between them? How far is too far? While costume controversy seems to be a perennial source of woe and entertainment in figure skating, it is amusing to find these questions to be still valid, perhaps more than ever, in the so-called age of globalization.

Filed Under: Art, Cross-Cultural Communication, Fun
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