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Monthly Archives: April 2013

Irritation Meditation # 5: Persecution Ain’t a Fricking Contest!

29 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Irritation Meditation, Religion

≈ 33 Comments

Tags

atheism, discrimination, First World Problems, Logos, Persecution, religion, Repression, T-Shirts

FXdukveAs far as irritation goes, this one comes close to being a mere amusement. I am talking about a challenge issued by The Atheist Advocate, the terms of which are fairly well explained by the illustration here, and I have to admit it’s tempting to just get behind this one. Seriously, I can almost go along with it.

…almost.

If only I had a nickel for all the times I have seen Christians complain about petty grievances or pass along outright falsehoods about this or that attack on their faith, well I could certainly afford another nice meal on that change. Hell, the non-existent war on Christmas alone ought to earn some believers a permanent subscription to “Cry Wolf Daily” (which actually wouldn’t be a bad blog project, come to think of it). Anyway, the point is that it gets damned tiresome to hear a dominant religious majority whine about how religious minorities are oppressing them.

But of course it isn’t really a dominant majority that spreads these cries of repression. Rather it is a small and highly vocal group of political Christians who would like very much to define repression of their beliefs so broadly as to include the failure to bow to their every Goddamned whim.

Taken at face value, I can’t help thinking this little gambit doesn’t quite rise above the difficulties it seeks to address. This whole thing really strikes me as something of a contest over First World Problems. One would hate to run into the occasional lunatic that might make either of these T-Shirts cause for real violence. …or the occasional workplace bigot that might actually use less violent means of putting someone from the wrong camp in their place. In any event, I expect most folks here in America would probably face little other than an uncomfortable conversation or three over wearing either of these shirts. There are some definite regional exceptions to be sure (cough! …deep South! …midwest!), but for the most part I think we are talking about a war of words.

Yes, I do figure those wearing an ‘atheist’ T-Shirt will have quite a few more of those unpleasant conversations than those wearing a ‘Christian’ T-Shirt, but I am open to the possibility that I am wrong about that, and I certainly wouldn’t estimate the flack for wearing the Christian shirt to be zero. Oddly enough, I expect some of the grief given to both Christians and atheists over this sort of thing could come from the same sources. An awful lot of people seem to want to have their sin and get to heaven too, so to speak, and they can be equally testy with religious fundamentalists and non-believers alike. This ‘moderate’ bunch can be especially testy if they believe someone else has brought the issue to the table and tried to force the question, …say by advertizing their (non-)beliefs in public.

That said, yes, I do think Christians are more likely to get a free pass on public expressions of their views f for no other reasn than that they have had their foot in that door for longer than those of us in the just-say-no camp. What strikes me as far more important is the fact that the list of people who have found out what ‘persecution really is’ would be unlikely to include anyone whose main worry of the day is what people will say about an ugly T-Shirt. There are people out there who face real consequences because of their belief-stances, and both atheists and theists are among them. That list also includes plenty of people who face real suffering as a result of things over which they have absolutely no control whatsoever. So, I think people should count themselves blessed if they live somewhere that you could actually play this game and expect life to continue in the wake of it.

As a general rule, I think anyone who wants others to appreciate the struggles they face could do better than to start by trivializing those of others people. I also think we would all be better served if folks spent less time claiming the title of most-repressed and more time thinking about what constitutes reasonable treatment of those with whom we disagree.

Oddly enough I’m not really opposed to the challenge, per se, just a certain over-billing of its significance. Still, if this leads a few of the more self-important Christians to rethink their narratives of martyrdom, then perhaps it’s a good thing. If it leads some people of either camp (or any other) to think carefully about their own bully-triggers and what we can do to help those under the gun for such things, so much the better.

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Thoughts on the Cherokee Blood-Feud, or Anthropology is Only Fun Till Someone Puts an Eye Out!

26 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Anthropology, Education, History, Native American Themes

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Blood Feud, Cherokee, Collectivism, Conflict Resolution, Ethnography, History, Justice, Navajo, War

Three Cherokee

Three Cherokee

…and of course that is when it gets really interesting.

By poking an eye out, I am of course talking about a special sort of moment one gets from time to time in the study of anthropology, at least I do. It’s the sort of moment when some cultural practice causes the hair on the back of your neck stand up and your stomach tries to dig its way to China (or Antarctica, as would be the case here in Barrow). I’m talking about that kind of moment when you encounter something in an ethnography that just seems like too much. So, you sit there and ask yourself, “How in the Hell could that be anything but wrong?” And for a little while anyway, your mind just doesn’t want to travel down that road, the one that leads to understanding the practice in its own context. You’d rather just say ‘no’. Hell, you’d rather shout it at them across the waters, over the mountains, and even if need be through the ages, cause someone needs to say it somehow, “This is just wrong!”

For the students in one of my classes this semester that moment came courtesy of the Cherokee blood feud, and the sticking point was very clearly collective responsibility for murder. Simply put, the feud enabled the clan of a murdered individual to claim revenge against any member of the clan to which the offending party belonged. More than that, the terms of this blood feud obligate people to do so.

But I said ‘murdered’ didn’t I?

Sequoyah

Sequoyah

That’s not quite right. In the old way, any individual responsible for killing another Cherokee could initiate the obligation to exact revenge, even if the killing was an accident. As our reading described it, a horse borrowed for the day could start trouble by bucking its rider off, thus triggering a feud between the clan of its owner and that of the deceased rider. So pretending for this paragraph anyway that I am Cherokee – I’m not, …not even the ubiquitous Cherokee grandmother every other white guy seems to have been blessed with – but let’s just pretend for a moment. If my brother’s horse spooks and kills a rider, I could be killed in revenge for this event. They do not need to take the offending party (if there even is such a person in this example); they might prefer to kill a different member of my brother’s clan (someone like ME, perhaps). So, I could die because of something my brother did, …even if that was an accident. The article we read even contained an instance in which a killer talked the avenging parties into killing someone else from his own clan.

And yes, this bothered my students. I can’t really blame them, because I can remember my own feelings years ago as I came to grips with this kind of dispute-system. It violates my sense of justice too, or at least the master metaphors through which I and my students typically process this kind of information.

But it’s worse than that!

You see, the point here isn’t merely that people do this, but that this system is actually normative. In a certain time and place, according to a certain cultural order, this is what was SUPPOSED to happen. This is what’s right, at least as the Cherokee once defined it, and that proved more than a little disturbing to my students this semester.

Proper verdicts thunder!

Proper verdicts thunder!

I’m inclined to think the sticking point is an intuitive sense that guilt is an individual responsibility, at least for myself and the students in my classroom last week. Guilt is the medium through which we seem to want to look at deviant behavior, and that concept does not seem to want to travel in large groups; it resides in the soul of a single individual.

Heh, …I said soul, didn’t I?

It is perhaps part of the legacy of historical Christianity under which all moral failings could at one time be construed as defiance of the Lord. Whether one had committed murder, taken to drink, or charged interest on a loan, all of these crimes and others were testimony to personal defiance of the Lord. And of course, much like Santa Clause, He would know!

I’m inclined to think the projection of an omniscient judge and jury played an important role in shaping the concepts of guilt so familiar to people today. One can even see a trace of this mythic imaginary in secularized notions such as crimes against the state (or against society as a whole). Guilt is personal, it is absolute, and it obtains even when the social facts proceed on without taking notice of it. Even the medicalized notions of deviance stemming from the mid to late twentieth-century seem to be largely focused on the individual. The insanity defense is about the capacity of an individual to grasp right or wrong, and it is one individual after another whose failures in life can be described as due to this or that syndrome. When we withhold the pronouncement of guilt on an individual, it is rather often to pronounce sickness upon him instead. Either way, we do not typically assign counseling as a condition of probation for all the members of his extended family.

In short, we care who dunnit. We really care!

Adam and Eve Hide from God

Adam and Eve Hide from God

That of course has less to do with anything inherently wrong with clan-based blood-feuds than it does the cultural logic of western traditions. What pokes my students and I in the eye as we study this custom has less to do with has less to do with Cherokee society than our moral sensibilities. We just can’t fit their approach into our own world, not without feeling a little violated when doing it.

I’ve learned to regard that feeling as evidence that I have just found something worth studying. For some of my students, the problem was collective responsibility, but the real irony here is that we are not really strangers to collective responsibility. Not by a long shot.

It probably won’t help matters much to mention gangs in this regard, though the logic of a gang hit is certainly comparable in some respects (one needn’t get the original culprit, just one of his home-boys). But of course gang members are hardly the only people in modern America to engage in disputation at the level of collective responsibility. We may have fought a war against Saddam Hussein, but in real-world terms that meant killing a lot of Iraqis. The same can be said of the Taliban whose principal cause of war appears to have been sheltering Bin Laden. The story will not change much for any given war; war is by definition a conflict between collective entities. Either way someone is dying because of what some other bastard did, and folks may be sad about it, we might even make a regretful movie or sing a sad song about it, but such is war.

kcarson2In some cases the absurdity of this collective logic creeps through the practice of war more than others. When I used to teach Navajo history, I used to despair that the first of my two textbooks spent far too much time detailing a pattern of raid and retribution between Navajos and the Spanish. Time and again, the book would describe a raid conducted by Navajos followed by a punitive expedition carried out by the Spanish. It’s a pattern that continued clear up through the Mexican period in the Southwest, and further still into the early years of American occupation. And in all these punitive actions, no-one seems to have bothered to ask if the Navajo communities bearing the brunt of the attack had much to do with those who had been doing the raiding. Collective responsibility was simply assumed.

It should be added that Navajos seem to have taken the brunt of the blame for a pattern of raiding that was fairly ubiquitous in the Southwest. They were certainly not the only group conducting such raids, but that is a gripe for another day.

imagesFor their own part Navajos developed an oral tradition describing a very different allocation of responsibility to the specific raiding parties, viewed as irresponsible young men bringing trouble to their own people. This point becomes that much more clear in the wake of the Long Walk and internment at Fort Sumner. This event marks the nadir of most stories about Navajo history, it is story in which Kit Carson ’rounded up’ the vast majority of the Navajo people and took them to a small reservation in Southeastern New Mexico. The next four years (1864-68) were difficult to say the least for Navajos and damned expensive for the U.S. government. In the end they were allowed to return home.

ManuelitoSome have defended Carson’s actions on the grounds that it had at least ended the raiding patterns of the past centuries. What these historians consistently missed was that the raiding patterns continued in the years after fort Sumner. After Fort Sumner, a raid brought Federal troops who went straight to the Navajo police under the leadership of Ganado Mucho or Manuelito. The Navajo police then brought back whatever livestock had been stolen. Before Fort Sumner a Navajo raid was an act of war with collective responsibility applying to the Navajo people as a whole; after Fort Sumner it was a criminal act, the responsibility for which fell on individual shoulders. The difference that makes this distinction had less to do with actions than understandings.

…and in this case that was all the difference in the world.

Perhaps the logic of warfare is too remote for the majority of us in modern America, but there is one respect in which the notion of collective responsibility is absolutely a part of our every day lives, the business of corporations. As some would describe it, the very point of forming a corporation is to re-allocate responsibility for the actions associated with a business concern. Once a source of great controversy, the existence of these collective entities in American business (and that of the world at large) is easily accepted as an accomplished fact.

It is just the way the world works, so common wisdom would have it. We accept that we will not get to talk to the bastard (or bastards) at Bank of America, Wells Fargo, or any other major bank who decided they could reorder your checks from the biggest to the smallest in the event of an overdraft and charge extra fees in the process. We accept that the poor agent who answers our call will be the one to hear whatever we have to say about such an outrage. We accept that CEOs in charge of failing corporations may travel freely on to the next chapter in their bright shining futures, leaving countless lives ruined in their wake. And we accept that (with rare exceptions) lives lost or immiserated by corporations will never result in punishment of those specifically responsible for polluting this river or putting that firebomb of a vehicle on the market.

"I warn you, Sir! The discourtesy of this bank is beyond all limits. One word more and I — I withdraw my overdraft!"

“I warn you, Sir! The discourtesy of this bank is beyond all limits. One word more and I — I withdraw my overdraft!”

Of course, there are circumstances in which charges of criminal fraud or negligence may occur, but this would seem to be the rare exception (except perhaps in Island where they actually have the balls to hold white collar criminals accountable for wrecking a national economy) Under normal circumstances, these giant entities screw customers and maim communities with impunity, and there is little one can do about it. The most one might hope to see in the way of justice from such practices will take the form of financial compensation from a corporate entity, the loss shared out through its stock-holders. Those directly responsible for terrible decisions will in most cases never see any significant retribution for the harm they cause to others.

…and the more I think about it, the more this one starts to feel like another poke in the eye.

If collective responsibility is the sticking point in accepting the justice of a clan-based feud system, it is not because collective responsibility escapes us, or perhaps it is because it escapes us when we actually use such an approach in our own lives. The real question is just why do we allow for collective responsibility in warfare and corporate business activities while insisting on individual responsibility for ‘crimes’? I and my students didn’t follow this question, because of course that wasn’t the task at hand, but it’s the sort of thing I hope will hang in their minds long after they have hit send on their final papers. If it’s done right, a good anthropology course should leave students with more than a collection of facts about other people in other times and places, it should also leave them with a new sense of the communities in which they themselves live.

The cognitive poke in the eye is on the house.

***

Three Cherokee are from here. The image of Sequoyah is from the Smithsonian Institution. The image of Kit Carson is from the Kit Carson Museum. Ganado Mucho comes from Navajo People.org. Adam and Eve hiding from God comes from an old engraving by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. I got it from istockphoto. Manuelito comes from a class at ASU. The gavel is from Sara Marberry’s Blog. The Bank Cartoon comes origonally from an entry of Punch Magazine published in 1917, but I got it from Wikipedia.

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Piuraagiaqta!

22 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Alaska

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Alaska, Barrow, Contests, Games, Photos, Piuraagiaqta, Spring, Whaling

A Sledding We Will Go! (Pic taken with my phone.)

A Sledding We Will Go! (Pic taken with my phone.)

So, we recently celebrated Piuraagiaqta here in Barrow. That’s our Spring festival for those of you whose tongues aren’t feeling adventurous. I was pretty busy during this several-day event, but I snuck outside on a few occasions to catch the outdoor games held on one of our lagoons.

Simon Says “Click to embiggen!”

yes, this is what a parade looks like at the top of the world.
Gotta Have Emergency Vehicles
Balloons and moar!

“ASRC” stands for “Arctic Slope Regional Corporation”
an I get a little Elevation?)
This one makes me feel warm, …almost!

Truck!
Yes, they throw candy (everyone throws candy)
College float. Hey why aren’t you in class!?!

Games on the Middle Lagoon
Moar Games
The Harpoon toss turned out to be a 2×4 aimed at a painted picture of a whale. …mind you, some guys were pretty good.

Did I mention this whole thing is held on a lagoon?
Coming Around the turn!
Sculptures, and the whaling theme is on everyone’s mind. It’s about that time, if the ice will just cooperate!

Sculpture In-Progress
Youngsters racing snow machines
A Sledding We Will Go! (Pic taken with my phone.)

Moar Sculptures (And golfers in the background) (pic by phone)

Harpoon Toss!

A view of the games from above.

The Final Race. It was held at 4:00pm Barrow time, which turned out to be about 5:00pm. For the longest time it looked like they were going to have 3 racers, but a fourth showed. (and my battery died just before the second place guy crashed.  I think he was okay, but maybe his machine wasn’t)

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I’ll take Cold Tropes and War Analogies for $50, Alex!

19 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Education, History

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

Analogies, Cold War, Communism, Education, History, Metaphors, Pokemon, teaching, Trops

coldwar_nike1It’s getting harder to explain the history of the cold war, at least insofar as students are less and less likely to relate to the era in any personal way. Gone are the days when the subject could elicit a visceral reaction from the under-thirty age-set. I distinctly recall that fear of the world ending with the push of a single button played a big role in my own teen angst, and I doubt I am special in that regard. Hell, I sorta figured it was actually going to happen at some point, all of us were going to die in one big final feud, but then again I’m fun like that. The point is that the subject hung like a cloud over the heads of some of us back in the day.

I suspect a lot of my students have trouble wrapping their minds around the whole thing. So, when you come to something like the Cuban Missile Crisis, it takes a little prep work to get across what would have seemed obvious to my own generation, that this little event, a paragraph or two in the average textbook, actually threatened all of life as we know it. Today, I usually just tell my students that none of us would have been born had things gone differently in that particular sequence of events.

I think they get it.

…sort of.

It’s not just the subject matter that is slipping away, so to speak; it’s also the imagery. This isn’t just true of the cold war. Many of my favorite pop-references are becoming less and less relevant to younger students as my youth passes further and further from the realm of things about which the kids at the cool table could be asked to give a damn.

cokeOne of my favorite teaching-gambits for the cold war has slowly faded into the realm of useless. For years I used to ask my students who lost the cola wars. This always got some funny looks, followed by suggestions of ‘Coke’ then ‘Pepsi’ both of which I would shoot down without the slightest hint of an explanation, …leaving them to give me more funny looks.

How could it be neither?

Sooner or later someone would suggest Shasta, Nehi, RC-Cola, or some other obscure brand of soda most likely consumed by cave men in the sad old days before Paula Abdul and Michael Jackson. This suggestion would then become a jumping off point for discussing the impact of the cold war on various third world nations forced to articulate their own interests in terms framed by the U.S. and Soviet Union.

imagesToday my students still give me blank stares, but they are not the blank stares of students struggling with a conundrum; they are the blank stares of students listening to someone try and explain a complicated issue by means of a metaphor that is no more accessible to them than the full story in itself. Sadly, it is time for me to move this metaphor to the back shelf and put some other theme in the specials section of my intellectual supermarket.

(See what I did there?)

Missionary colonial periodI once TAed for an instructor that used to compare the Cold War to the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the colonial era, each bringing a vision of absolute truth to Native Americans, promising that truth was the key to liberation, demanding their loyalty, and taking everything they had in the process. (How’s that for a run-on sentence!) So, that professor seemed to be suggesting there was nothing new under the sun, just two new world powers playing the same old shell games with the rest of humanity. I like this analogy too, but it’s not so much a quick entry into the topic as a food-for-thought and what-does-it-all-mean kinda notion.

Today I was trying to explain the dynamics of proxy wars to a student when I could see the light go off over her head. A moment later she exclaimed that it was just like Pokémon. The other students quickly nodded, and after a brief moment in which I sort of wanted to cry, I thought actually that isn’t too bad.

PiakchuSo, here I sit, watching the next batch of students suffer their way through an exam and wondering if this is the wave of my pedagogical future? Will I soon find myself saying things like; “And then Nikita Kruschev said, ‘Fidel Castro, I choose you!'” Can I wrap my mind around the concept of West Germany as Picachu? Can I use this narrative without promoting anyone to the heroic status of Ash? Or should I just let John Wayne have that role? Can y’all imagine the Duke in his Green Beret uniform whipping out a pocket monster and saying; “have at ’em liddle pardner!” The imagery almost seems promising, but I just don’t know if I am up to the task. This isn’t my era, and I don’t know the game.

The whole project does have a certain amount of promise. I wonder if I can get faculty development funds for this? I wonder if the Dean of Instruction will give me money to go to the gym and develop my Pokédex?

Cause I really don’t think I can teach this subject without a fancy new gym badge!

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Bonus Super-Villain: This Girl is Nasty in Real Life and on Screen!

10 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in History, Movie Villainy, Movies

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

Anna Rosmus, Deviance, Germany, History, Holocaust, Memory, Nazis, Villainy, World War II

1990-the-nasty-girl-poster1What makes Sonia Rosenberger so nasty? It isn’t what you would think, or even what the cover of The Nasty Girl would seem to suggest. Precocious though she may be, Sonia’s crimes are those of an historian. She earned the title in her hometown by asking the wrong questions about its history.

I love her.

Sonia’s journey into super-villainy began with an essay contest. As a young student at a Catholic school in Germany, Sonia decided to enter into a national writing contest. She had two topics to choose from; “The concept of Europe” and “My Hometown During the Third Reich.” Sonia’s teacher sensibly encouraged her to go with the first topic, but Sonia had been brought up to believe that the good people of her home town had resisted the Nazis. How could she pass up the opportunity to reveal the heroics of her friends and neighbors?

Please don’t fault Sonia for the innocence of her original intentions! Even the dark flowers of villainy take some time to bloom.

You see it wasn’t long before it became clear to Sonia that something was amiss. Everyone in town seemed to agree that the only true Nazi had been the mayor, but she could not quite seem to get her hands on his files at the local library. What little information she could find on Professor Juckenack, the great hero of the resistance, turned out to be an essay in support of Nazi racial politics. And no-one could seem to remember the concentration camp in town, at least not without a little needling on the subject, in which case they were quick to point out that it was far better than all the others. …the camp that didn’t exist, that is.

Something was amiss!

So, you might wonder what would a good girl wold do upon finding such a mystery? What should a good girl do upon discovering that the people she most looked up to seemed to be damned uncomfortable whenever she tried to talk to them about her personal project? Well, I personally have no idea what a good girl would do about such a quandary, but I can tell you what this bad Betty did.

She dug deeper!

Despite hints, pleas, and even threats, Sonia just kept pressing on in pursuit of the unwelcome truth. Hell, she even kept at it after someone chucked a brick through her car window. Trust me, that was just the beginning. Sonia ignored the advice of neighbors, parents, and even her husband in her pursuit of the truth, sacrificing health and safety in an effort to learn just what had really happened in her hometown during the Nazi years.

I ask you, would a good girl do that? Not a chance!

Left with no other options, Sonia sued the town to gain access to the mayor’s old documents, and when the town changed its laws to prevent her from getting access yet again, …she just sued the town again. She acted as her own lawyer in both ventures, by the way. (Yeah, she’s just that bad-ass.) And do I need to say that she won the second case too? That’s right; good guys don’t always win. Sometimes they get their butts kicked by villainous nasty girls.

Twice!

I’m not even going to tell you what Sonia did when the town library pretended to lose the mayor’s files in yet another effort to hide the truth from her villainous campaign. Suffice to say this juggernaut of naughtiness would not be dissuaded! You know what else I’m not going to tell you? What Sonia found out about Professor Juckenack and his activities under the Third Reich. Nor will I tell you what happened when he sued her for writing about it in her book on the subject. I’m not going to tell you, because I’m feeling a little bad myself today. (Sonia has inspired me to evil.) And if you want to know the answers to these questions, well then you are just going to have to come over to the dark side and dig a little yourself.

Ha!

RosmusPassau300pxwBut you know what the best part of this story is? It is actually based on the life of a real person. her name is Anna Rosmus of Passau, Germany, and she is every bit as wicked as the celluloid creation she inspired. Anna didn’t stop with one book about her hometown, she turned her tireless pursuit of unwelcome truths into a career in scholarship, much of it dedicated to ensuring that the memorials to this painful chapter in German history would not be forgotten, neglected, concealed from the public, or outright defaced. Time and again, Dr. Rosmus has called attention to realities good decent folk would just as soon forget.

Who would do such a thing?

Only a nasty girl.

A very nasty girl indeed!

***

(The image of Anna Rosmus is from http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/133c/133cPrevYears/133c04/133c04l17-NaziPast70s80s.htm)

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