Author Topic: Gender & Identity in Online Culture  (Read 69528 times)

Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #125 on: March 07, 2007, 05:30:32 PM
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And this is where you lose me.  I get that you are using Men as the group name and not men as in me -and but this sounds like "You're bigger and stronger than me, so if I hit you in the knees with a baseball bat it won't hurt as much, so it's ok to hit you with the bat."


The point is, it's not a bat, it's a nerf ball.



Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #126 on: March 07, 2007, 05:35:38 PM
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I see personal interactions as a microcosmic version of the group's general views and attitudes at large. If stereotypes fail us (and they do on so many levels) then we are FORCED to take into account the actions of individual. If individuals do not represent, at least on some level, the actions and attitudes of the group as a whole, then I firmly believe our assessment of the group must be flawed.

There really are other levles of analysis. The flock acts in certain ways which are not consistent or describable by watching individual birds.

Stereotype is A) not justified by social science, and B) teh application of group observations to indviduals.

Social science is the study of the way that the flock moves, and how it does so.

I don't really care if you reject social science, as I'm suspecting from your post that you do, but when you do that, I'm going to react the same as if you said you disbelieved physics. It's not my job to prove my discipline exists any more than it's the job of evolutionists to prove to people who've been fed propaganda that their discipline exists.



Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #127 on: March 07, 2007, 05:36:41 PM
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Let me also go back to Palimpsest's story of how she discovered some of her own unintentional racist attitudes.  I think we have to come to terms with and accept that it is a tendency of all people, no matter our culture or gender, to abuse power.  Depending on how narrowly you define things, there are not many, if any, peoples of the world who have not been oppressors at one point in history.  Neither being a man nor being white gives us a monopoly on oppression, especially when you view things historically.  It's something we're all capable of.  Accept that, and move on to the next step.

What is important, then, is taking responsibility for one's own behavior.  Try to become more self-aware of how you are using and abusing power and learn how to relate to others more fairly. Learn how you can be an instrument of change and promote social equality.  Learn how to better appreciate diversity and where others are coming from.  Learn how to connect with people on a more personal level and overcome the differences between us, hopefully, even to better appreciate those differences.  Responsibility is the key word for me.  I try to let go of the blame and guilt and concern myself instead with how I can act in the present and move forward positively.

Ditto. And ditto your feeling of positive-ness.



Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #128 on: March 07, 2007, 05:44:20 PM
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It is possible to be sexist against men. I know this shocks people, but it's also possible to be racist against white people. Just because a minority is in the position of victim doesn't mean they are incapable of also victimizing the majority. Sexism is bad - or is it only bad when it actively harms a member of a particular gender? So men can tell sexist jokes at work if their boss is a woman - since she's in the position of power? Or I can say the 'n' word if my supervisor is black? It's okay for a black guy to call a white woman a "cracker b*tch" (I'm not especially offended by racial slurs against white people) because he's the minority and she isn't? Just because someone has (possibly justifiable) anger about their position in society does not make a certain behavior acceptable - it just makes it understandable. If a child has a terrible home life and becomes a hoodlum, it's not okay for him to vandalize houses and steal cars just because he was dealt a bad hand. We're still responsible for our actions.

No, it's not possible to be sexist against men or racist against white people.

Systemically, these just arent' possibilities.

You can harbor anti-male or anti-white attitudes, but racism as it is used in terms of social science and as it is meaningful in the world, is a systemic problem that continually puts barriers in front of an oppressed class.

Me saying "YOU SUCK!" doesn't correlate to you being unable to get equal pay, or have your word counted as valid in a court of law, or determine your own bodily rights. Therefore, me saying "YOU SUCK!" sucks, but only on a personal level.

Racism is a systemic thing.

Whites and oppressor classes are stuck in this model of racism as a personal feeling of badness, which is why whites are often flummoxed when black people say things like, "That is racist."

"I didn't mean it to be racist," replies white person X, "I had good intentions."

"Who the fuck cares about yoru intentions?" asks black person Y. "You just contributed to teh atmopshere that makes it possible for people to burn crosses on my lawn in 200-and-bloody-7!"

"But I didn't mean it!"

"White people are clueless."

"See! That's racism!"

"?"

*

You're creating a false equivalence between two unequivolent things.

Here's an illustration that illustrates the fallacy of reverse racism -- http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2005/12/02/a-concise-history-of-black-white-relations-in-the-usa/

Here's a link less fliply describing the varieties of modern racism, and their systemic effects -- http://www.rachelstavern.com/?p=395




Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #129 on: March 07, 2007, 05:47:25 PM
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Believing everything you hear in jokes is dangerous -- but so is never laughing at anything.  Especially oneself.

The question isn't never laughing at anything. The stereotype of the humorless feminist (voila) is based on teh fact that we object to jokes that have a role in oppressing women.

Take that ignorant t-shirt that came out lately:

NO
MEANS
NO

(and then around the NO was written "have another drink")

This is specifically not funny.

"The Sad Tale of the Tearless Onion" is a joke that is funny.

"Just Do It?" Funny.

99% of the entries posted on that scary, scary feminist blog Pandagon? Hysterical.



Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #130 on: March 07, 2007, 05:48:02 PM
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What I'm arguing against is the idea that it would be okay for one group to make these sorts of jokes while condemning the other for it.


And what you're continuing to fail to understand is power differentials.



Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #131 on: March 07, 2007, 05:48:52 PM
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Whether a joke supports or does not support oppression does not directly correlate to how much it hurts the individual who is the subject (or the perceived subject) of the joke.  It may be that jokes that are biased against men hurt slic's feelings WAY more than jokes that are biased against women hurt palimpsest's feelings.  She's not talking about her personal pain, and she's also not talking about slic's personal pain.  She's not denying anyone's right to anger or upset or whatever when they personally encounter an offensive stereotype.  She's not minimizing that. 

If you'll note from hautdesert's very fine example, the joke she deconstructs is not aimed at a specific woman.  It's on public media, it's aimed at all women.  That commercial, and other media offerings and locker room jokes and plenty of other examples that have come up in this thread already, feed into a system that denigrates women, that assigns them as a class lesser status than that given to men.  Men can't be victimized this particular way, because there is no such corresponding system at work against them. 

It's not dismissive of us to say, "Oh but you aren't being oppressed", because as a class, you're not, regardless of how you feel individually.  The same way I am not oppressed because of my race, no matter how many dumb cracker jokes a person of color makes.  Even if they direct those jokes at me, to my face, I'm still not oppressed.  I may be angry, I may be hurt, but I'm not being oppressed.  The person of color can make jokes until the cows come home, I (and people of my race) are still going to (likely) be wealthier, have greater opportunities and enjoy better health.  Thus, I am not oppressed, no matter how annoyed I am.  I'm not saying the person of color has the right to make those jokes, or that it would be humane of them to do so, or that I deserve to have to listen to those jokes, or anything like that.  Still, the person of color's jokes aimed at me don't fall under the rubric of oppression, though it can fall under plenty of other headings, including headings that deplore such actions as mean-spirited.

Cut. Print.



Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #132 on: March 07, 2007, 05:50:37 PM
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I think the sci-fi music idea is great, but you reaaly should move it to a different thread.  It is distracing from the point of this one.

Yeah, I somehow suspect that was the fond hope. Sorry to ruin everyone's work to move the subject.

I'm nearly done with what I have to say anyway, since it seems to me most of the remaining objections are based in a rejection or misunderstanding of social science, which limits the efficacy of argument.



Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #133 on: March 07, 2007, 06:08:43 PM
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One problem of Anthropology is it's paradigm of cultural relativism.  This is essentially the viewpoint that you cannot judge actions using rules external to the actor's culture.   This was played up a lot in Star Trek in their Prime Directive (which was repeatedly shown to be defectiveness).  We have feminist anthropologists to thank (sincerely) for criticizing the failings cultural relativism with respect to human rights abuses- abuses which are more far more often carried out against women than men (although not exclusively).

That's interesting. May I ask when you got your degree?

The fact that i don't consider this problem very modern may also correlate to where I got mine. UC Santa Cruz has an activist faculty. My understanding though is that most anthropologists no longer look at cultural relativism as an absolute, esp. when it comes to human rights abuses, but rather use it as a way of trying to recenter without as many eurocentric knee jerks.

International activism has to be culturally sensitive.

Take female circumcision (please -- take it and throw it away). You get a lot of history of people going into Africa and going "Yo! Stop that shit right now!"

And then you have these lovely, lovely reactions of the problem getting much worse.

Colonialists make FGS (female genital surgeries)* illegal; local people divorce FGS from their ritualistic context and perform them on younger and younger children (which, from Carolyn Martin Shaw's research, is damaging for several reasons, including the fact that the rite loses what positive social connections it has, and also because it's more likely to be more severely physically damaging to young girls.)

Colonialists forbid FGS in hospitals; they reinforce unhygeinic conditions that kill women.

Colonialists take a strong stance that FGS is evil; cultures that never, ever practiced it go, "We'll prove we're not white, and that we're on teh side of Africans. We'll start practicing FGS!"

These things just don't work.

What has been making progress is culturally sensitive activism. Emphasis on educating women reduces FGS. Creating economic opportunities for women so that they are not as exclusively reliant on marriage, reduces FGS. Talking about hte health problems of FGS including the fact that it can be inhibitive for reproduction, because that's what the women involved seem to care about -- this reduces FGS. Placing tools for activism in the hands of women who are part of the culture and want to stop FGS, rather than forcing all the activism from outside, reduces FGS. So can talking to communities as a whole, or finding other kinds of rituals that can substitute for FGS.

So, I don't think the ideas of cultural relativism and activism are irreconcilable, but it's necessary to move away from the Mead mode of "If an indigenous person got a snake bite, and I had a snake bite kit, I wouldn't help them" which was generally so stupid that as far as I know not even she practiced it.

--

*FGS -- I'm not satisfied with any of the ways of referring to female circumcision. Female Genital Mutilation is useful in some conversations, but it's very alienating. And female circumcision is a misnomer which has led to some more of that lovely false equivalency. So, FGS, imperfect, is my compromise.



SFEley

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Reply #134 on: March 07, 2007, 06:16:02 PM
No, it's not possible to be sexist against men or racist against white people.

Systemically, these just arent' possibilities.

You're probably going to think this is nit-picking at best, or an attempt to distract from your point at worst, but it really isn't.  When we're being absolute, can we please change "men" and "white people" to something like "the dominant class" or, even better, your terminology of "the default?"

I ask not because I'm disagreeing with you fundamentally (I'm not sure yet whether I completely agree, but I want to think about it some more before I open my mouth) but because I have an overprecise mind, one that recoils at broad strokes, and at no point in this discussion was it limited to American middle-class culture.  

There certainly are places in the world where white people are the minority and can be oppressed.  Saying it's not possible to be racist against white people in Japan, for instance, is wrong on the face of it.  There are also microcultures in the United States in which the local power structure and economy is entirely non-white.  You could say that's a reaction to the larger system, but still, within those areas white people are the exception.  Saying that whites cannot be systemically oppressed when your immediate area is not a white-dominated world sounds contrary to stuff I've actually seen.

I'm not sure whether there are any significant cultures in the world (micro- or otherwise) where men aren't dominant.  That one may be justifiable in the real world, though I still have that itch to try to think of an exception.

Am I wrong about this?  Can white people not be oppressed even in local contexts when they're the minority and have no power?

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Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #135 on: March 07, 2007, 06:16:56 PM
Sure. It is not possible to practice systemic discrimination against the dominant class.



fiveyearwinter

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Reply #136 on: March 07, 2007, 06:18:34 PM
When you said that it's impossible to be sexist against men, it meant the end of this conversation for me. I read everything else you had to say, but most of it was the same to me (as it should have been since you were still arguing from your perspective).

We're arguing from points of view that are simply irreconcilable. There's not even any common ground to discuss this upon. Needless to say, I do not consider the functional definition of racism as equated with "oppression" to be correct, nor do I believe that equating my disagreement with you equivalent to disbelief in the laws of physics. You do, that's fine. I've nothing more to say that you haven't already heard.

EDIT: I suppose the qualifier of "systemic discrimination" makes things better on the surface, but I guess I am still too focused on the fact that it can happen in individual instances. Regardless, I find this debate to be more or less fruitless at this point. Thanks, everybody! I'm sure I'll keep reading. :)
« Last Edit: March 07, 2007, 06:50:08 PM by fiveyearwinter »



Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #137 on: March 07, 2007, 06:22:02 PM
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Am I wrong about this?  Can white people not be oppressed even in local contexts when they're the minority and have no power?

They can.

We always have to be aware of the effects of a post-colonial world, but systems get more complicated outside the United States. Seizing land from Guyanan farmers is racist against whites, and at the same time, complex, because of that country's history of race relations, and current positioning in the global context visa vis majority white countries.

Whiteness, of course, is a constructed category. I'm white until I meet a Nazi, at which point I'm a dirty Jew. Irish people are white now, but weren't a while ago, and etc. "White" isn't an absolute category, so you can get white people oppressed by other white people, stuff like Romani being oppressed in Eastern Europe, even though Romani are white-ish. And it's sort of open -- are Armenians white? Are tehy white when you don't know they're Armenian? Are they still white when we're talking about the Armenian genocide?

Whiteness is a problematic, but still sociologically significant, category in the United States, which matches, as I understand, fuzzily but pretty well with the categorizations in western Europe. I was definitely using it in that sense.



Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #138 on: March 07, 2007, 06:24:36 PM
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Needless to say, I do not consider the functional definition of racism as equated with "oppression" to be correct, nor do I believe that equating my disagreement with you equivalent to disbelief in the laws of physics.

To be specific, I equated a lack of belief in social science with a lack of belief in physics.



fiveyearwinter

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Reply #139 on: March 07, 2007, 06:29:12 PM
Corrected. My point remains.



SFEley

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Reply #140 on: March 07, 2007, 06:37:15 PM
I'm nearly done with what I have to say anyway, since it seems to me most of the remaining objections are based in a rejection or misunderstanding of social science, which limits the efficacy of argument.

It's a shame that you'll be "done" at that point.  The sense I get from both you and Anarkey is that, having nearly pushed past that 'interruption' stage and gotten most of us men to listen, the women are getting too burned out to say anything more.  Everyone's saying the same thing: "I'll keep reading, but I'm not gonna feed this crocodile."

It's too bad.  My questions were sincere ones, they weren't just to keep the ball rolling for its own sake.  It looks I asked them too late.  But I can't blame you -- this thread has been something of a gauntlet.  

Thanks for putting up with it this far.  And that goes to everyone.

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Birnam Wood

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Reply #141 on: March 07, 2007, 10:16:45 PM
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I see personal interactions as a microcosmic version of the group's general views and attitudes at large. If stereotypes fail us (and they do on so many levels) then we are FORCED to take into account the actions of individual. If individuals do not represent, at least on some level, the actions and attitudes of the group as a whole, then I firmly believe our assessment of the group must be flawed.
Good points by Palimpsest.  I'll add that if there were no emergent properties when moving from the micro to the macro, you would have no fields of Sociology or Anthropology.  Psychology would be able to cover it all.  Psychology is important and related to both fields- as there is a relationship between the macro and the micro.

To take another look at humor and gender politics, think about humor that involves a woman dressing up as a man vs. a man dressing up as a woman.  A man dressing up as a woman usually serves to make fun of women, or women with certain characteristics (e.g., Rasputia from Norbit).  If a man is passing as a woman and fools others, discovery of the deception usually leads to humiliation and embarrassment for the man that lowers his status.  However, when a woman masquerades as a man, the result is to raise her social status, and when her true identity is discovered the response is anger and feelings of betrayal (e.g., Victor Victoria).  There's at least one good academic example from ethnography that I can easily site as well. 

In fact, this observation can perhaps be extended to the case of Palimpsest being mistaken for a man in the Forums, or at least to the theoretical discussion.  In essence, "if you're a woman, you should advertise it so we men are not tricked into thinking you're a man."  I am not accusing men on the forum of consciously thinking this.  But, I think that we men need to reflect a little on that and see if there is some of that in our response. 

Again, this is an expectation of behavior that stems from the norms of our culture.  I'm not saying this to beat up on anyone.  However, the only way for the culture to change is for individuals to change.  If you think a behavior is wrong, you as an individual must take responsibility for contributing to the change.  You contribute by changing yourself, by learning to recognize these harmful patterns, patterns that we tend to accept because we are brought up into them.  You contribute to change by your actions and by talking to others about their actions.

In beginning Anthropology we talk about real norms versus ideal norms.  Ideal norms are believed by the culture to be true.  For example, we are society based on social equality and believe it is wrong to discriminate.  However, we are often blind to our own discriminatory behavior unless it is extremely blatant, and even then we may rationalize it and fail to recognize it for what it is.  The real norm is that discrimination persists.

Also, when you think of yourself as a good person it is hard to imagine that you could do something that your are philosophically opposed to, even unknowingly.  It is painful to realize that you're being hypocritical.

Add to this the tendency of people to push back when you push against them.  I see this as one side of the fight or flight response.  Some folks have probably flown from this post in fear of facing something painful or being criticized.  Some people have stood up to fight.  I would also like to add that these are not the only possible responses, just our instinctual responses.  There have also been others who have risen above these animal impulses and stayed to discuss the topic further and seek their own self-actualization.  This is what I try to do, and I applaud all the other forum members who are doing the same.

It looks to me like Palimpsest is having to repeat herself (although I think her arguments have been clear), and she's already contributed hugely to the discussion.  If she's ready to move on, I don't blame her.  It wouldn't be fair to continue discussing her posts without her rebutting, but if there are questions that members still feel are outstanding, perhaps they can be re-framed and the discussion can continue with those who remain.  I think there are others whom we could hear from, too.

To fiveyearwinter- If you disagree with how Palimpsest defines racism (as being intrinsically tied to oppression), I simply you suggest you fill in "racist oppression" whenever you see the term, and fill in "sexist oppression" when you see sexism.  You don't have to get hung up on the terms.  We can pull out a dictionary or search definitions on the web to resolve that if need be.  I think the words you're using are secondary to the points that each of you is trying to make about the damage that gender-based jokes can have on both men and women.

I think you're saying it's a double standard for someone to say that jokes against women to not be ok while jokes against men are ok.  I don't disagree with that claim about it being a double-standard.  However, I'm not convinced that it serves to remove the social power that still rests with men.  I'm not sure if you believe that to be the case either.  Even if it did, well, there's still plenty of power left to share.  If the power differential between women as a class became switched with that of men as a class, I might be worried because it is unequal.  So, jokes against men are not as harmful on the group scale as they are on the individual scale.

I do see negative repercussions of jokes against men on the macro scale, however.  I don't think the jokes can makes men an oppressed group, but they can increase tension between men and women and impede communication.  Derogatory jokes tend to reinforce our perceptions of differentness and make it more difficult for us to understand and relate to each other effectively and functionally. Extending that back down to the individual level, it gives individuals a convenient excuse for not communicating effectively.  Men might say (and women might use analogous statements)
  • "No wonder she can't understand where I'm coming from." 
  • "What else would I expect of a woman."
  • "I don't understand women, they're like a different species."

It's important to aknowledge differences, hopefully to understand and appreciate them.  However, it is essential to also recognize our similarities and the common ground we share in order to have healthy and productive relationships. 

I can understand Palimpsest pulling out since she's contributed so much and obviously has some other obligations to attend to.  Maybe that's part of your reason too.  I believe you were posting to this thread before I got here.  I don't want to make assumptions about your motivation, and I'll give you a benefit of the doubt.  I don't even know your gender, but I don't think that precludes this same type of thinking between two women who see themselves as belonging to different groups.  I just hope hope this kind of "we're incapable of understanding each other" attitude is not a motivation for you to leave the discussion. Anyway, your reasons are your business, and I respect that.

With all that said, I have to admit that I sometimes find myself laughing at a gender based joke that I disagree with philosophically.  When that happens I have to think about the joke a bit, and about the source of the joke.  Times like that help bring things to a conscious level.  But sometimes I decide that I don't have to take the joke too seriously.  In general, I don't care for gender or race based jokes, and usually do find them offensive, though.

One time a woman who works in another office in my organization sent an e-mail chain letter of anti-man jokes to a few of her friends, all women.  One of those women has a nickname that is the same as my first name, and the sender ended up directing the e-mail to me instead.  I laughed about that and was not offended.  A couple of the jokes I thought were pretty clever.  I didn't think she was trying to be mean-spirited, and I just didn't take it too seriously.  I knew that the sender found it embarrassing, anyway, so I tried to just make light of the situation.  I certainly didn't find them very harmful to me.
« Last Edit: March 08, 2007, 03:33:08 AM by Birnam Wood »



slic

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Reply #142 on: March 08, 2007, 03:01:25 AM
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And this is where you lose me.  I get that you are using Men as the group name and not men as in me -and but this sounds like "You're bigger and stronger than me, so if I hit you in the knees with a baseball bat it won't hurt as much, so it's ok to hit you with the bat."


The point is, it's not a bat, it's a nerf ball.
Not sure if I'm in a semantics arguement and don't know it, or we are miscommunicating on scale.
The point of my comments along this line were to point out the flammability of the tone (if you can use that term online) of some of the comments.
One more analogical try and I'll stop:
It's like someone living in a Canada, and they've just lost their job in an economically depressed region, and the response is "Well ,you live in Canda, and it has a great standard of living, their national GDP is up 6% and out west the economy is booming - so you're not victimized/oppressed because whole lot of people in your country are doing just fine."



Birnam Wood

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Reply #143 on: March 08, 2007, 07:20:41 AM
Palimpsest,

Sorry, I'm getting lost in the thread and missed this post at first!  I was also looking back even further in the thread and saw your comment on page 2 that you were trained as a Social Anthropologist.  Before now I'd only caught your later post about your Anthropology Prof & racism.  Sorry it took me so long to catch on that your background in Anthro was more extensive.  Now I'm revising this post a little, too.

Quote
One problem of Anthropology is it's paradigm of cultural relativism.  This is essentially the viewpoint that you cannot judge actions using rules external to the actor's culture.   This was played up a lot in Star Trek in their Prime Directive (which was repeatedly shown to be defectiveness).  We have feminist anthropologists to thank (sincerely) for criticizing the failings cultural relativism with respect to human rights abuses- abuses which are more far more often carried out against women than men (although not exclusively).

That's interesting. May I ask when you got your degree?

BA in Social Anthro with a minor in Spanish Language from UC Riverside, 1997. 

The fact that i don't consider this problem very modern may also correlate to where I got mine. UC Santa Cruz has an activist faculty. My understanding though is that most anthropologists no longer look at cultural relativism as an absolute, esp. when it comes to human rights abuses, but rather use it as a way of trying to recenter without as many eurocentric knee jerks.

True, it's not a very modern issue in the field.  I thought it might be new to a lot of folks in the discussion, though.  Having not read the prior two pages more thoroughly when I first posted, I didn't realize your familiarity with the issue, either.  Also, I don't think anyone's come up with a concisely stated paradigm that people can agree on.  I've been out of the loop for a while.  However, I joined AAA over a year ago, and I've been reading their publications.  That doesn't mean I'm in the loop, but I have not gotten a sense from what I've read that the issue has been adequately resolved for the field as a whole.  I'm not really sure what the consensus is, if there is one.

I keep hearing about growing schisms in the field.  I was always attracted to the holistic approach that distinguished Anthropology.  However, many departments are splitting, separating Biological from Social & Cultural Anthro.  I've been trying to get a sense where the field is going. 

A month ago when I was flying out of state I ran into one of my faculty advisers.  Totally by chance he got in line behind me to board the plane.  We ended up sitting together the whole flight and talking about the field, about the department at UCR, etc.  What I learned about the field from him was not particularly encouraging. 

Until a year ago I was really set on returning to school for a PhD in Anthro once my kids get a little older.  Instead, I have focused lately on my long-time love of writing. 

International activism has to be culturally sensitive.

Take female circumcision (please -- take it and throw it away). You get a lot of history of people going into Africa and going "Yo! Stop that shit right now!"

And then you have these lovely, lovely reactions of the problem getting much worse.

Colonialists make FGS (female genital surgeries)* illegal; local people divorce FGS from their ritualistic context and perform them on younger and younger children (which, from Carolyn Martin Shaw's research, is damaging for several reasons, including the fact that the rite loses what positive social connections it has, and also because it's more likely to be more severely physically damaging to young girls.)

Colonialists forbid FGS in hospitals; they reinforce unhygeinic conditions that kill women.

Colonialists take a strong stance that FGS is evil; cultures that never, ever practiced it go, "We'll prove we're not white, and that we're on the side of Africans. We'll start practicing FGS!"

These things just don't work.

Yes, one natural response when you push people is for them to push back.  Anyway, it's a colonial response, "Let us teach you primitive, backwards people how to be civilized."  Very condescending.


What has been making progress is culturally sensitive activism. Emphasis on educating women reduces FGS. Creating economic opportunities for women so that they are not as exclusively reliant on marriage, reduces FGS. Talking about hte health problems of FGS including the fact that it can be inhibitive for reproduction, because that's what the women involved seem to care about -- this reduces FGS. Placing tools for activism in the hands of women who are part of the culture and want to stop FGS, rather than forcing all the activism from outside, reduces FGS. So can talking to communities as a whole, or finding other kinds of rituals that can substitute for FGS.

So, I don't think the ideas of cultural relativism and activism are irreconcilable, but it's necessary to move away from the Mead mode of "If an indigenous person got a snake bite, and I had a snake bite kit, I wouldn't help them" which was generally so stupid that as far as I know not even she practiced it.

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*FGS -- I'm not satisfied with any of the ways of referring to female circumcision. Female Genital Mutilation is useful in some conversations, but it's very alienating. And female circumcision is a misnomer which has led to some more of that lovely false equivalence. So, FGS, imperfect, is my compromise.

I originally had put more of my ideas about how to approach these issues in a balanced way, balancing the relativistic rights of the group to practice its culture vs. the rights of the individual.  But I thought it was getting convoluted.  Your examples are far better than what I was cobbling together. 

Cultural relativism certainly cannot be abandoned entirely.  It just seems to me that it's based on the assumption that all cultures are equally good.  I prefer to think that all cultures are to varying degrees dysfunctional.  They survive if they are functional enough to survive, otherwise they perish. 

This mirrors my understanding of evolution.  Darwinian theory assumes that evolution is fitness maximizing.  However, as some of my professors pointed out, it's really fitness satisficing.  An organism has to have just enough fitness to survive, and not much more.  So, it's not really maximizing it's fitness. 

So, there's a lot of dysfunctional traits that both organisms and cultures can have if they are just functional enough to survive.  This also means there may be plenty of room to change a culture to make it more prosperous and more functional. In fact, I think it is the function of culture (especially technology as physical culture) to make the organism more fit.  In this way, culture helps human organisms survive when their biological fitness alone would cause them to perish.  In this way, greater genetic diversity is achieved in the species than would be possible without culture.

Culturally sensitive activism is obviously a great approach, an application that tries to find a balance between these issues.  I'm glad to hear about the success that is coming from it.  I'm sure that as people continue to find and develop models that work with different issues and with different cultures this will have significant impact on the field of Anthropology. 

I have to admit that this discussion has really reminded me about why I love Anthropology!  My focus was really on Cognitive & Linguistic Anthro (backed up by the Spanish Linguistics) and Latin American Studies.  But these themes of sexism, racism, and ethnocentrism run throughout the discipline.  To be honest, my interest in racism and ethnocentrism are what got me into Anthro in the first place. Sexism was not originally part of my primary focus, but as I learned more about human rights abuses that continued against women it became a more central interest.
« Last Edit: March 08, 2007, 08:57:50 AM by Birnam Wood »



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Reply #144 on: March 16, 2007, 06:23:02 AM

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