White people! White people have all kinds of ridiculous gadgets and toys in their kitchen. They’ve got 16 different knives, an eggbeater, a slicer, a dicer, a cheese grater, and all kinds of other wacky shit. My dad has one (1) big fuckoff cleaver, and chopsticks.

What can white people make in their kitchens that my dad can’t? Grits?

I found this both incredibly humorous—particularly because it was in my apartment a few weeks ago that he pointed to the Ikea knives in the Ikea knife holder on the Ikea butcher’s block and said, essentially, that he wasn’t in Kansas anymore—and quite accurate.

In Taiwan, every form of food I ingested was cooked with nothing more than:

1. A bowl
2. A wooden stick
3. A metal cutter

How is this possible? Obviously the paradox of choice and maximization of individual freedom so intrinsic to American consumer culture play a big role in this, but maybe also it’s that Chinese culinary accoutrements have merely been refined over millennia. There’s an efficiency implicit in the—excuse the misnomer—Spartan, function-over-form aesthetic of the Chinese kitchen.

Clearly, then, while both Chinese and Americans might be said to place great weight in the skill of a chef, the former would almost certainly define “skill” as a learned ability, whereas the latter might pay more attention to the pomp and circumstance around the person.

Perhaps I’m making drastic leaps of logic, but stay with me. Entertain the possibility that the above is correct, if only because it’s so contradictory to certain research that claims Chinese pay more attention to context than Americans.

When you look at the picture on the computer screen at right, where do your eyes linger longest? Surprisingly, the answer to that question might differ depending upon where you were raised. Americans stare more fixedly at the train in the center, while Chinese let their eyes roam more around the entire picture, according to research by psychologist Richard Nisbett, PhD.

Interesting, no?

In the excerpt below, the character Shevek talks with his hosts on the planet Urras. The twin planets Urras and Anarres have had no communication with each other for more than a century, since the Urrasti insurrectionists were exiled to Anarres. Shevek is the first visitor from Anarres since the exile.

Shevek felt extremely uncomfortable. He got up and went over to the windows. “Your world is very beautiful,” he said. “I wish I could see more. While I must stay inside, will you give me books?”

“Of course, sir! What sort?”

“History, pictures, stories, anything. Maybe they should be books for children. You see, I know very little. We learn about Urras, but mostly about Odo’s times. Before that was eight and one half thousand years! And then since the Settlement of Anarres is a century and a half; since the last ship brought the last settlers—ignorance. We ignore you; you ignore us. You are our history. We are perhaps your future. I want to learn, not to ignore. It is the reason I came. We must know each other. We are not primitive men. Our morality is no longer tribal, it cannot be. Such ignorance is a wrong, from which wrong will arise. So I come to learn.”

That says rather succinctly what I was trying to convey about feeling culturally challenged.

Somehow, I have nothing more to say on the matter right now.

Recalling times when I have been culturally challenged in Taiwan, there is a single very vivid memory which stands out among all the rest. I was hanging out with a friend late at night, just the two of us, and in the midst of our deep ruminations on life and personality and our respective futures, some oblique statement tipped me off to a potential religiosity in my friend. So I asked, “Do you believe in God?” I thought it a reasonable question, one which did not overstep any boundaries in terms of what I may or may not ask.

She suddenly looked very confused, and asked, “Well, which god?” Fortunately I was not so oblivious to her mindset that I thought she was referring to differing conceptions of the Judeo-Christian God. I realized—although I had already known this on some intellectual level, of course—that her religious heritage was such that there are a myriad of gods, and myriad expectations are attached to them. A person might believe in any number of gods, and eschew belief in others, thereby delineating a very individual, albeit substantially contextualized, set of rules for what constitutes acceptable behavior.

How insensitive it was of me to ask! Fortunately she was not at all offended. She reacted similarly yet oppositely to what I might expect from a peer in the U.S. An American college student in the Northeast, when met with a positive answer from “the God question,” might respond with polite disdain, with patronization, like an evolutionist discovering a Creationist. Standard “my god is bigger than your god” fare. I think the motivation for such a reaction, while utterly indefensible, is that the disdaining individual feels more educated. It is difficult to believe that one can subscribe to beliefs of Creationism, when evolutionism and its daughter theories have populated the academic world so completely. In a sense, this person is saying: “Oh, that. You still believe that?”

My friend’s reaction was not too distant from this. She smiled and laughed a bit when she realized where I was coming from with my question. She began to explain, humiliatingly for me, that the Chinese tradition holds many gods, unlike my Western tradition, which has been predominantly monotheistic for a good two millennia now. The disdain, the patting on the head, came from a vector I still believe I perceived in how she presented this knowledge to me: I am a Westerner, come to Taiwan to study—and I still believe in that monotheism stuff?

This incident, so planted in my mind for all my days, took root and spread outwards to touch memories of similar happenings. I was outside, talking to a friend, discussing the learning of languages and how much that brings, how much understanding of humans, both others and the self, it affords one. My memory of the conversation is hazy now, but I believe we were talking in English. My friend asked me whether I knew any websites where he could find free books in English to read. Of course I did! I would link him to Gutenberg.org, so named because of Gutenberg, the German, the man who invented—he built—“he, hundreds of years ago, in the past, he makes a big machine to make—produce—many books.” No, the machine did not write them. Oh, yes, OK, it did write them, but it did not author them. Nevermind. (I would make the same mistakes! But would he?)

I warned my friend that while the works on this website would indeed be free, and in English, they would be quite old. “Why?” Well, because—how on Earth to explain, using rudimentary vocabulary, copyright law and the golem that is the culture of ownership grasping its leash? I knew this was a test I had to pass if I ever wanted to be a teacher, so I tried my best. “And so, most books there, only before 1920 or so.” My friend was still very confused. “Tell me about the old books.” Egg on my face. English was never painted on cloth and hauled across deserts to foreign kingdoms. Its writers were never compelled, at behest of the emperor and under penalty of death, to write, just write, lest the world never know their perfect philosophies.

I know nothing of age nor progress. I am an American, a puling infant amid cultures and worlds thoroughly adolescent. What can I do for you, that you haven’t already tried? What can I say to you, that you haven’t already heard?

I want to rediscover each and every one of you and tell you why you are still great. Long ago, just this morning, America tried to become the archive, the library of Alexandria, for all cultures willing to come. Tell us. We are listening. We may be rapt within our own ignorance, but we are blessed with youth and vigor, too. All our hands are stained with blood; I was just trying to be like you. So invite me to the table tell me a tale. Let’s forget our differences, which never really existed anyway, and have a meal.

So I decided to find out.

On Wednesday evening, shortly before 8pm, there was a meeting scheduled to discuss William Q. Judge’s The Ocean of Theosophy. Naturally I knew nothing of this work and intended to do no research beforehand, so as not to ruin whatever surprise awaited me. Surprised I was, and surprisingly frustrated that I hadn’t taken the time to find the book and read it before attending the meeting.

Here’s an excerpt from the portion of the text under discussion at the meeting I attended.

This is the state of Devachan, a Sanskrit word meaning literally “the place of the gods,” where the soul enjoys felicity; but as the gods have no such bodies as ours, the Self in devachan is devoid of a mortal body. In the ancient books it is said that this state lasts “for years of infinite number,” or “for a period proportionate to the merit of the being”; and when the mental forces peculiar to the state are exhausted, “the being is drawn down again to be reborn in the world of mortals.” Devachan is therefore an interlude between births in the world.

So that’s the kind of stuff we’re dealing with here.

My initial take on the philosophical outlook expounded by the text—and consequently, by theosophy in general—was that it was a snobbish mishmash of cultures foreign to the white man, ostentatiously veiled in the raiment of calculated sophistication. One of those books that seeks to make the reader feel utterly gauche. Almost as unbearable as the Generation Xers pruning their bonsai trees.

But this soon changed. Those in attendance were oftentimes quite critical of the material, and asked questions whose profundity made the excerpt above look like Simple English Wikipedia. There was a wonderful unspoken linguistic practice of forbidding the word “I”; attendees and chairperson alike would always use the first person plural, e.g. “Actually, the question we asked was…” or “As we understand it, it seems that….”

The meeting was such an intense rush of intellectual nourishment that I didn’t say a word the whole way through. I was at times struggling to follow the discussion of the room, so lost was I in weird cerebral meanderings certain comments had led me to.

I was recently asked about my personal religious beliefs, about my spirituality, if any. I said that I’ve taken to explaining the matter so: “I believe equally in the truth of all religions, up to and including the point at which each might exclude others.” To some people, it’s a cop-out answer. To others, it’s honest and maybe even deep.

The declaration of the United Lodge of Theosophists closes with a similar sentiment, known as the Eclectic Maxim of H. P. Blavatsky:

The true Theosophist belongs to no cult or sect, yet belongs to each and all.

Now that’s something I can believe in.

Last night, while training home with some friends after watching an incredible performance of classical guitar at a coffee shop in a suburb, it was somehow decided that it would be interesting to hang out with friends while not using verbal communication. I believe this was inspired by Jordan’s comment, “Man, I wish you guys didn’t speak English.” He seemed to feel that our not speaking the same language would help him achieve insanity, which is definitely one of his most solid goals in life.

We discussed the terms of the experiment while walking to get something to eat. We pledged that once we’d procured 40s and ‘za, the experiment would commence. (While we naturally wanted to start it as early as possible, we thought it’d be inexcusably rude to try to order food without using words.) It was decided that sounds were legal, but referencing any phonemes already existing in any established language (of which any of us had knowledge) was not.

There was much debate surrounding the use of gesticulations. Ultimately it was agreed that while nearly every physical gesture is culturally constructed and therefore constitutive of language, a high degree of abstraction of which would imply associations with verbal communication, certain gesticulates should be made legal, as we did not trust ourselves to avoid them: squinting to convey lack of comprehension; a widening of the eyes to mean surprise; and of course nodding of the head to mean “yes” and shaking to mean “no.”

What surprised me about the experiment is how fluidly we four were able to communicate with each other. I made a your-mom joke, and everyone got it—and we were all stunned at how that was possible. A few hours into the evening, I expressed to one friend that our rapidly codifying system of grunts and gestures was for all intents and purposes identical to our regular spoken language. In other words, it didn’t end up feeling much like an experiment at all, once we got into it. We realized that the next step was to attempt to hang out with no verbal communication, and no nonverbal communication.

Naturally that’s a concept we can approach only asymptotically at best, but I’m intrigued at the chance to try. Somehow I’d expected that the language experiment we ran last night would test my motives to hang out with my friends; for example, if we can’t talk to each other, what else is there? What do we do? But talk we could, because, as it turns out, most of the meaning we have of each other is assumed and might reside within ourselves.

We even renamed each other.

So, I feel I’ve learned a lot about how languages evolve. It was like a crash course in memetics. I highly recommend the experiment to anyone at all curious about communication theory, or merely who’s introspective. Maybe someday I can impose it on a class during a 3-hour session. That would be fun.

The list of candidates ran as follows. Already I have a pretty good idea who will be appointed.

The Culture and Communication Department will be bringing in three candidates for the faculty position of Assistant Professor of Anthropology.

Please join us for their research presentations.

Friday, January 30, 2009

Brent Luvaas will be on campus on January 30, 2009

His research presentation will be from 3:00-4:00 in Room 114. The title of his presentation is “Globalization Goes DIY: The Politics of Place in Indonesian Indie Music”

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Janet Alexanian will be on campus on February 5, 2009.

Her research seminar will be from 3:00-4:00 in Room 114. The title of her presentation is “Contested Visions: Cultural Politics and Anxiety in Post-Revolutionary Iran”

Monday, February 16, 2009

Stephanie Sadre-Orafai will be on campus on February 16, 2009.

Her research seminar will be from 2:30-3:30 in Room 114. The title of her presentation is “Casting as Practice, Casting as Metaphor: Rethinking Media and Multiculturalism in the New York Fashion Industry”

Unfortunately, I’ve already decided I won’t be attending any of these sessions, as a professor (of sociology–damn!) who’s rather dear to me teaches a class at all the prescribed times.

Naturally, I’d love to meet these people and feel them out for teaching talent, but I think that this Dr. Luvaas has the position in the bag. Applying for a position at a university with an already booming Music Industry major and a rapidly expanding Media Studies division in Communication and giving a presentation on globalization, politics, social space, and indie music, and located in a classically hip anthropological place, is smart.

And before you say that it might just be mere coincidence that his topic so uniquely suits our university’s tastes, I submit to you that the chap has a rather broad swath of ethnomusicality credit to his name. Also, it appears that his dissertation was chaired by Sherry Ortner, which would definitely spruce up the pedigree around here. (Ortner, though quite a figure herself, studied with Geertz at the U of C.)

The department here already has a solid assortment of females as assistant professors (they outnumber males, actually), so I can’t even see a female hire out of motivation for political correctness or diversity mandates keeping him away.

Sorry I won’t be around to take classes with the guy.

Since there weren’t any orders coming in, no one in the whole place had anything to do. The boss had just left, and so things got crazy. Long story short, one of the cooks, who’s skinnier than I am, perched up on the metal counter, hands curled underneath his armpits, and squawked as loudly as he could. One of the drivers then picked him up and attempted to place him in a trash can.

But I am telling this story because the subject of “the American” came up, and the guys started grilling me about all the things they didn’t know. No one had ever asked me what I studied.

I said,

“Well, in America, mostly anthropology. Here in Germany, it’s pretty much just been computer science.”

That’s the standard answer for when I’m asked, which is rather often. What I received in return, however, was an absolutely epic answer.

“Anthropology… you mean, like, Stargate?”

I was floored. Yes. Yes, anthropology is exactly freaking like that. Well, I wish it were, anyway. But, I mean, he got the idea right!

I will never forget this conversation, and I hope you don’t, either.

Although that gets me thinking: how freaking hard would it be to scare a hunter-gatherer? I mean on one hand, maybe you could just brandish an iPhone, and the villagers would either worship you or kill you for channeling demons. But that would happen in any Soviet Bloc country, too, and probably more likely there than in Papua New Guinea.

If you spend your entire life trying to kill shit without a gun, and you live in the jungle and get chased by tigers and maybe the occasional dragon, you’re probably going to be tough as hell. I mean, I’m a pale computer geek and even I was never impressed by John Wayne. You know?

So anyway, in the spirit of the Savage Minds post, I’d offer these tentative rules for an anthropologist’s code:

1. Lie
2. Publish
3. Repeat

At least, that’s how I understand the field thus far.