Anthro-apologist
Nov. 12th, 2004 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI used to think I was a cultural relativist, but now I'm not so sure. I think I might be more 'anthro-apologist' than anthropologist.
What is cultural relativism? 'To be a scientific concept,' writes Mark Glazer, 'culture has to be studied as an object without evaluative consideration. When we are not able to do that we no longer have a science of culture. Some anthropologists associated with this point of view are Franz Boas and his students Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Melville Herskovits, Ruth Benedict, Paul Radin, Margaret Mead, Ruth Bunzel and many others. Franz Boas is the key theoretician in this group. Boas published his views on the comparative method in 1896. In his "Eighteen Professions" (1915), which is a credo, Alfred Kroeber, a follower of Boas, affirms some of the basic tenets of cultural relativism:
(1) all men are completely civilized, and
(2) there are no higher and lower cultures. Much later in his career, Kroeber makes three additional points on cultural relativism,
(3) that science should begin with questions and not with answers,
(4) that science is a "dispassionate" endeavor which should not accept any ideology, and
(5) that sweeping generalizations are not compatible with science.
Cultural Relativism, Mark Glazer
Well, so far I'm a cultural relativist, because I accept at least four of those five points (I have some problems with 4, as we'll see later). I also like the work of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and am rather annoyed when I hear that they're both often referred to now as having been 'discredited' since the mid-twentieth century. I was discussing Benedict's distinction between Shame and Guilt cultures this week on Click Opera, and Margaret Mead's name came up on my favourite Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed this week. The brilliant Laurie Taylor turned his attention to the prickly question of childhood sexuality. The BBC's blurb runs:
'In the light of the recent Pitcairn case where disclosures of widespread child abuse were pitted against a defence of traditional cultural practices, Laurie Taylor asks is there such thing as a universal sexual morality particularly concerning children. Laurie discusses the construction of childhood and children's sexuality with Dr Heather Montgomery, Lecturer in Childhood Studies at the Open University and Jenny Kitzinger, Professor of Media and Communication at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University and author of Framing Abuse - Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence Against Children.'
Until next Tuesday you can hear the discussion here. Scroll forward to 14.46. Taylor talks about Margaret Mead's 'Children and Sexuality in Samoa', and plays a clip of Mead talking about how the Samoan adolescents she observed showed less anxiety about sex than American or European adolescents because 'they'd looked through the blinds of houses and seen lovers, and seen death too. Adolescence is not necessarily the kind of time that we've made of it in Europe and America'.
'Margaret Mead had an explicit agenda,' says Heather Montgomery. 'She went there wanting to find, almost, the Noble Savage. She found what she wanted to find.'
Margaret Mead is, perhaps, an 'anthro-apologist'. She casts aside the scientific neutrality required of cultural relativism and makes positive claims for the cultures she studies being in some way superior to our own, just as I do about Japan.
Heather puts the case for cultural relativism in Thinking Allowed. In different societies, she says, sex is thought of in different ways. Sex in the west is no longer about reproduction but about pleasure and identity. We've been influenced by Freud and Foucault.
Jenny Kitzinger puts an alternative viewpoint, one you might describe as 'universalist liberalism'. She describes how the rapists in the Pitcairn case used cultural relativism as a defense for their forcible rape of young girls, invoking the local age of consent (12 years) and local traditions to justify their actions. This, says Kitzinger is a 'red herring'. The raped women themselves do not give this account of things.
Heather responds with a description of the Crockers' research in the 1970s on Amerindian tribes, where girls as young as seven indulge in sex and are seen as 'stingy' if they don't. We can't talk about 'universal ideas about the body,' she says, and we can't say that this Amerindian tribe was 'abusing' its children, who were well adapted to their own society by these practices and showed no trauma. Jenny questions whether the girls' consent could meaningfully have been given, and questions whether mere adjustment to society is a defense of social practices. Finally, Heather says that it's hard to impose western ideas of childhood innocence on children from other cultures, and the debate ends.
I take Heather's position, but it's important to note that both women are cultural relativists. It's just that one -- Jenny -- distinguishes cultural relativism from ethical relativism and imposes universalist judgements (in fact the judgements of western liberalism) on the cultures she's studying.
In July of this year Terry Eagleton wrote an interesting essay for the New Statesman, 'Rediscover a common cause or die'. It's an essay about both cultural relativism and identity politics.
'Culture has descended from the macro to the micro,' writes Eagleton, 'from whole societies to a range of interest groups within them. It is more about Hell's Angels than Hellenic Greece. This naturally raises the question of how micro you can get. Do the two teachers in the village school constitute a culture? What about Posh and Becks?
'Neither a work of art nor a way of life can be said to be "right" or "wrong", as one might say of a political strategy or a code of ethics. It would be like saying that the Romanian language was a mistake... Culture tends to appeal to custom, not reason, which is to say that it has a habit of drawing its justification from itself. An appeal to cultural tradition simply means that doing something for a very long time is the next best thing to being right. The reason why you go in for honour killings or racial lynchings is because this is the kind of thing you go in for. The word "culture", like the words "taste" or "evil", means among other things: don't argue. What we do is what we do. We cannot justify it rationally, but neither can you justify your objections to it.
'So we might as well declare a truce. As long as you let us get on with female infanticide, which is completely unremarkable in our society, we shall let you get on with the domestic violence that figures so richly in your own cultural tradition. Cultural relativism of this sort is highly convenient for the ruling powers. If it means that they cannot criticise other cultures, it also means that as a culture they are immune from criticism themselves.'
Eagleton, a Marxist, subscribes to a universalist view of justice, and doesn't see this fragmentation of cultural identities, and the irrationality of their self-justifications, as a positive development. But if Margaret Mead is disparaged for having 'had an agenda', doesn't Marxism also have an agenda? And what about science itself? The ethical outlooks of Marxism and science are western in their origins, so to the extent that we propose them as 'objective' we are being ethnocentric. But it's fine to be evangelical on their behalf and proclaim them as 'a better world system'. Just so long as you realise you're in the ring with a lot of competing agendas and ideologies about what's universally desireable.
Recently I've been debating with Marxy on his blog about Japan, and whether it should open up its markets and become more like the west. I made fun of Marxy when he declared himself an Absolutist rather than a cultural relativist, telling him that Absolutism is the belief in things like the Divine Right of Kings and Natural Law, but in fact there is a position called Parochial Absolutism which opposes cultural relativism. It's just a rather stupid position. Here's a Parochial Absolutist called Richard Kulisz:
'I'm an extreme Absolutist, I just have no illusion that the culture around me (which is not "my" culture even though it's the culture I grew up with) is ideal. So I can condemn the barbarism of middle-east pederasty and the authoritarianism of modern education in the same breath. Actually, my revulsion of barbaric societies (eg, any society that has remained in the Stone Age in this era) leads me to positions like "either brainwash them or nuke them all"; I don't care how it's done, those cultures should be wiped off the face of the planet.'
Now this is an extreme version of what Marxy seems to be saying about Japan. But it's also a negative version of what I say about Japan. Because I'm actually a Japan evangelist. I think Japan is better than other cultures, and I want to see the whole planet Japanized. So perhaps I'm more of an Absolutist than I thought. But I prefer the term 'enlightened anthro-apology'.
What is cultural relativism? 'To be a scientific concept,' writes Mark Glazer, 'culture has to be studied as an object without evaluative consideration. When we are not able to do that we no longer have a science of culture. Some anthropologists associated with this point of view are Franz Boas and his students Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Melville Herskovits, Ruth Benedict, Paul Radin, Margaret Mead, Ruth Bunzel and many others. Franz Boas is the key theoretician in this group. Boas published his views on the comparative method in 1896. In his "Eighteen Professions" (1915), which is a credo, Alfred Kroeber, a follower of Boas, affirms some of the basic tenets of cultural relativism:
(1) all men are completely civilized, and
(2) there are no higher and lower cultures. Much later in his career, Kroeber makes three additional points on cultural relativism,
(3) that science should begin with questions and not with answers,
(4) that science is a "dispassionate" endeavor which should not accept any ideology, and
(5) that sweeping generalizations are not compatible with science.
Cultural Relativism, Mark Glazer
Well, so far I'm a cultural relativist, because I accept at least four of those five points (I have some problems with 4, as we'll see later). I also like the work of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and am rather annoyed when I hear that they're both often referred to now as having been 'discredited' since the mid-twentieth century. I was discussing Benedict's distinction between Shame and Guilt cultures this week on Click Opera, and Margaret Mead's name came up on my favourite Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed this week. The brilliant Laurie Taylor turned his attention to the prickly question of childhood sexuality. The BBC's blurb runs:
'In the light of the recent Pitcairn case where disclosures of widespread child abuse were pitted against a defence of traditional cultural practices, Laurie Taylor asks is there such thing as a universal sexual morality particularly concerning children. Laurie discusses the construction of childhood and children's sexuality with Dr Heather Montgomery, Lecturer in Childhood Studies at the Open University and Jenny Kitzinger, Professor of Media and Communication at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University and author of Framing Abuse - Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence Against Children.'
Until next Tuesday you can hear the discussion here. Scroll forward to 14.46. Taylor talks about Margaret Mead's 'Children and Sexuality in Samoa', and plays a clip of Mead talking about how the Samoan adolescents she observed showed less anxiety about sex than American or European adolescents because 'they'd looked through the blinds of houses and seen lovers, and seen death too. Adolescence is not necessarily the kind of time that we've made of it in Europe and America'.
'Margaret Mead had an explicit agenda,' says Heather Montgomery. 'She went there wanting to find, almost, the Noble Savage. She found what she wanted to find.'
Margaret Mead is, perhaps, an 'anthro-apologist'. She casts aside the scientific neutrality required of cultural relativism and makes positive claims for the cultures she studies being in some way superior to our own, just as I do about Japan.
Heather puts the case for cultural relativism in Thinking Allowed. In different societies, she says, sex is thought of in different ways. Sex in the west is no longer about reproduction but about pleasure and identity. We've been influenced by Freud and Foucault.
Jenny Kitzinger puts an alternative viewpoint, one you might describe as 'universalist liberalism'. She describes how the rapists in the Pitcairn case used cultural relativism as a defense for their forcible rape of young girls, invoking the local age of consent (12 years) and local traditions to justify their actions. This, says Kitzinger is a 'red herring'. The raped women themselves do not give this account of things.
Heather responds with a description of the Crockers' research in the 1970s on Amerindian tribes, where girls as young as seven indulge in sex and are seen as 'stingy' if they don't. We can't talk about 'universal ideas about the body,' she says, and we can't say that this Amerindian tribe was 'abusing' its children, who were well adapted to their own society by these practices and showed no trauma. Jenny questions whether the girls' consent could meaningfully have been given, and questions whether mere adjustment to society is a defense of social practices. Finally, Heather says that it's hard to impose western ideas of childhood innocence on children from other cultures, and the debate ends.
I take Heather's position, but it's important to note that both women are cultural relativists. It's just that one -- Jenny -- distinguishes cultural relativism from ethical relativism and imposes universalist judgements (in fact the judgements of western liberalism) on the cultures she's studying.
In July of this year Terry Eagleton wrote an interesting essay for the New Statesman, 'Rediscover a common cause or die'. It's an essay about both cultural relativism and identity politics.
'Culture has descended from the macro to the micro,' writes Eagleton, 'from whole societies to a range of interest groups within them. It is more about Hell's Angels than Hellenic Greece. This naturally raises the question of how micro you can get. Do the two teachers in the village school constitute a culture? What about Posh and Becks?
'Neither a work of art nor a way of life can be said to be "right" or "wrong", as one might say of a political strategy or a code of ethics. It would be like saying that the Romanian language was a mistake... Culture tends to appeal to custom, not reason, which is to say that it has a habit of drawing its justification from itself. An appeal to cultural tradition simply means that doing something for a very long time is the next best thing to being right. The reason why you go in for honour killings or racial lynchings is because this is the kind of thing you go in for. The word "culture", like the words "taste" or "evil", means among other things: don't argue. What we do is what we do. We cannot justify it rationally, but neither can you justify your objections to it.
'So we might as well declare a truce. As long as you let us get on with female infanticide, which is completely unremarkable in our society, we shall let you get on with the domestic violence that figures so richly in your own cultural tradition. Cultural relativism of this sort is highly convenient for the ruling powers. If it means that they cannot criticise other cultures, it also means that as a culture they are immune from criticism themselves.'
Eagleton, a Marxist, subscribes to a universalist view of justice, and doesn't see this fragmentation of cultural identities, and the irrationality of their self-justifications, as a positive development. But if Margaret Mead is disparaged for having 'had an agenda', doesn't Marxism also have an agenda? And what about science itself? The ethical outlooks of Marxism and science are western in their origins, so to the extent that we propose them as 'objective' we are being ethnocentric. But it's fine to be evangelical on their behalf and proclaim them as 'a better world system'. Just so long as you realise you're in the ring with a lot of competing agendas and ideologies about what's universally desireable.
Recently I've been debating with Marxy on his blog about Japan, and whether it should open up its markets and become more like the west. I made fun of Marxy when he declared himself an Absolutist rather than a cultural relativist, telling him that Absolutism is the belief in things like the Divine Right of Kings and Natural Law, but in fact there is a position called Parochial Absolutism which opposes cultural relativism. It's just a rather stupid position. Here's a Parochial Absolutist called Richard Kulisz:
'I'm an extreme Absolutist, I just have no illusion that the culture around me (which is not "my" culture even though it's the culture I grew up with) is ideal. So I can condemn the barbarism of middle-east pederasty and the authoritarianism of modern education in the same breath. Actually, my revulsion of barbaric societies (eg, any society that has remained in the Stone Age in this era) leads me to positions like "either brainwash them or nuke them all"; I don't care how it's done, those cultures should be wiped off the face of the planet.'
Now this is an extreme version of what Marxy seems to be saying about Japan. But it's also a negative version of what I say about Japan. Because I'm actually a Japan evangelist. I think Japan is better than other cultures, and I want to see the whole planet Japanized. So perhaps I'm more of an Absolutist than I thought. But I prefer the term 'enlightened anthro-apology'.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-12 10:32 am (UTC)http://www.zumcomics.info/j/japanize.html
her (her?) work reminds me of a lo-fi Julie Doucet (http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/artStudio.php?artist=a3dff7dd52e65a).
The image is a little... wobbly because it's the cover of of an A7 zine.
divine wind
Date: 2004-11-12 10:33 am (UTC)There is, of course, a negative side to such isolationism. That is why I think Japan is a good place to look at if you want to weigh the pros and cons of globalisation. That is to say, Japan's lack of interference in the affairs of other countries, also comes at the cost of not letting other countries 'interfere' with them. Just as Shinto is a blood religion, the religion of being Japanese and related by blood to the divine emperor, so it is impossible for a foreigner to 'become' Japanese. Is this good, because it protects Japanese culture? Or is it bad because it reflects a kind of cultural and ethnic incest? Is globalisation good because it increases cosmopolitanism around the world? Or is it bad because it destroys the individuality of the cultures it touches?
For me, living in Japan really highlighted these questions. I still don't really have an answer. In a sense, I found the questions themselves a bit depressing. There didn't seem to be any 'good' thing to do.
Anyway, I just thought that the idea of Japanizing the world, as you mentioned, is a bit of a contradiction in terms, because of the reasons above.
Japan's Economy and Media
Date: 2004-11-12 11:08 am (UTC)As for the media, while the big newspapers have probably the largest subscription base in the world, I haven't seen much about the quality of the journalism. Pretty much any official organisation has a 'Press Club (http://www.japanmediareview.com/japan/media/1062799785.php)', which contains journalists from select news organisations (generally the major ones), who are spoon fed 'news', with the end result being a fair degree of conformity. Any true investigative journalism tends to be done by the tabloids, which are of lower journalistic integrity. The upside I see is the success of Channel 2 (www.2ch.net), which allows for anonymous posts from anyone, and provides a chance for anyone to speak out.
That's my 2￥ worth of exploding myths for the day.
In terms of something a little bit more relevant, when I see university students doing hip hop dances I've found myself wondering whether they understand what they're trying to emulate. It looks strange to me, but they obviously aren't worried at all. I guess it doesn't really matter anyway.
Re: divine wind
Date: 2004-11-12 11:45 am (UTC)Here is her article (http://basic1.easily.co.uk/04F022/036051/Japanization.html) about Japanisation...
A prediction made by the French Hegelian philosopher, Alexander Kojève in 1959, that "the interraction of the West and Japan will result not in a vulgarisation of Japan but rather in a Japanization of the West," is being born out.
Howard
I think I'm turning Japanese
Date: 2004-11-12 12:42 pm (UTC)I suppose what I was trying to say was not that it is impossible for Japan to influence the world, but that to try and influence it in a dynamic, pro-active, if you like 'evangelical' sense seems to contradict something in the very nature of Japanese-ness. But these are all monolithic abstracts, anyway, and I don't have much faith in them.
Re: I think I'm turning Japanese
Date: 2004-11-12 12:58 pm (UTC)Secondly, there is talk in this article and elsewhere of the failure or decline of individualism in the West. I'd just like to say that if I believe passionately in anything, then it is individualism. But I have never equated my own individualism with what the media seems to mean by the term. It seems to me that part of individualism must be a respect for the individualism of others. It's not a "fuck you" attitude. Or not for me. In fact, at the moment it seems to me that only indiviidualism can provide any kind of solution for racism and so on, because when you insist on defining people in terms of groups, clashes in value are inevitable and negotiations are unweidly and basically racism of one form or another never disappears.
Apology
Date: 2004-11-12 01:24 pm (UTC)(1) all men are completely civilized, and
(2) there are no higher and lower cultures. Much later in his career, Kroeber makes three additional points on cultural relativism,
(3) that science should begin with questions and not with answers,
(4) that science is a "dispassionate" endeavor which should not accept any ideology, and
(5) that sweeping generalizations are not compatible with science.
1. If all men are civilized. Who isn’t? What is to be civilized? Is it positive? Do we have to asume it as something positive or negative?
If there is no possibility of its negation the concept doesn’t mean anything.
2. What's the point of speaking of higher and lower cultures? You have seem to point out some interesting issues where the japans are better for you. It's it necessary for all us to agree?
3. Begin with questions? how about just question, or better, just end with questions. And one important point is that one always begins with some answers. One has a point of view. And there are some brave ones that end changing their minds. But they are the fewer ones.
4. no comments.
5. ¿What does this mean?
And some comment about science. Do you want to be "scientifical"? what does that mean? is it positive? I surelly love the way you do anthro-apology. Even if it is of the littlest community, like the last post on Bowie. ¿Do you think someone that doesn't love Bowie could have written something like that?
Japan and Thailand
Date: 2004-11-12 02:24 pm (UTC)I plan on moving to Japan or Thailand before I'm 30.
Thailand is much cheaper than Japan by all standards, however one must basically already have money as the the Bhut you would make as a commoner is worthless.
As an american you can enjoy a fully furnished skyrise apartment with a plasma TV, maid service and view of the river for about $1000.
The same price most people pay to live in a 100 yeear old broke down closet in Manhattan.
Don't get me wrong, I love New York, but you don't get your money's worth. ever.
The downside to thailand is the government still insists all property and business is 50 percent thai owned....something the united states should have considered long ago.
The culture is more laid back than Tokyo...it's basically Los Angeles Vs New York in comparision to people, climate and work ethic.
But thailand has just raised itself out of 3rd world status...thanks to american companies who left americans jobless of course.
But thailand is the most economically viable option in asia currently with the exchange rate....just don't go there broke, you won't make anything.
Japan is more viable if you are already working and can work there. Working class Japanese will face longer hours than americans, even expats.
Unless one has an unbelieveable way of turning out income in Japan, IT will most likely be very expensive and somewhat stressful.
The apts in Tokyo are about 5 times the price of apts in Manhattan, and you pay your "key money" or broker fee to the landlord...so there is no avoiding it, and it can be as much as they wish 1-3 months aside from the rent and security.
Japan is also very strict about behaviour and community.
It is unnacceptable to not recycle, however one would find it such as they provide you with everything neccessary to live there even if you don't speak japanese.
I think I have an expat welcome video for the Shinjuku ward of tokyo...
yes..
http://www.city.shinjuku.tokyo.jp/koho/video/No51/51_Modem_mov.html
It's kinda stale, but it's informative for anyone who is actually thinking of moving to Japan. IT tells you about national health insurance, ward registration, earthquake drills etc.
Health Insurance is MANDATORY in Japan.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-12 02:46 pm (UTC)Most of the energy we spend everyday here is directed to decoding things. We try to learn the rules, the language, and what is expected of us. Outside of the social group, certain rules do not apply to us aliens, but said rules are necessary for us to know in order to satisfy our curiosity about the behavior of the in-group. Because of strong in-group/out-group divisions in Japanese socialization, I wonder sometimes if we tend to confuse phenomenally indistinct language barriers and social barriers. The more language we learn, the more obvious social exclusion appears to us, and once the language is learned, finding yourself still trapped in the role of The Other after so much work can be frustrating. Of the Japan reactions, I suspect the majority of the negative reactions are a result of that very frustration. There is an irrational root to a lot of Japan punditry. The feeling of being excluded, restricted, exiled, or rejected makes people more hostile.
It’s a bit like going on a guided tour of a syrup factory and being more enthusiastic than anyone else there. You ask pointed questions, make notes, stand entranced and wax poetic about the scent of molasses wafting from the hot swirling tubs. The tour guides are excited by your bright eyed love of their world. The employees want to give you the best free samples, and maybe even some of the unfree samples for free. You learn all the syrup jargon and lingo, freeing the tour guides from the constraits of everyday speech and allowing them to say what they really want about first molasses and second molasses, blackstrap, and the unsung controversies at the heart of the business. You are the customer which the product dreams of at night, the fantasized consumer. Nearing the end of the tour, you put your first foot forward and ask to live in the factory. You want to be a tour guide. You want to be a part of it too. Yet, you get turned down. You are a customer is what you are. That you were outside looking in, satisfied, overwhelmed – this is why everyone was happy with you. You verified the syrup. You legitimized the syrup. Once you get turned down for the job and can’t be part of the factory, your attitude changes. Suddenly, syrup becomes something that causes people to slip and crack their heads on the sidewalk. You put it in the same category as water so that you can denigrate it. You speak at length about the company’s unjust policies and make references to historical evils (”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Molasses_Disaster”).
This is why I think negative images of Japan crop up among foreigners who are close to Japan – because they are not allowed to turn in their Otherness. From frustration comes pessimistic theory. Since they have been working very hard to get close to Japan, they feel entitled to speak as experts. But expert or not, everyone says bad things about a party they are not invited to.
...more
Date: 2004-11-12 02:46 pm (UTC)But since foreigners hunger for content, and since we believe that content must necessarily belong only to the household, the tradition, and the citizen; we feel excluded when we can’t babysit the neighbors kids, when we aren’t asked for our opinions at a company meeting, or when we can’t vote.
Yet, those roles are already filled! And they wouldn’t be that interesting to most foreigners anyway. It’s the exclusion that makes us batty.
Interestingly, as foreigners, we generally have more control over how the Japanese perceive Japan than the Japanese do. We are outsiders, so people come to us in order make guesses about what the Japanese macrocosm must be like. Japan imagines itself through other eyes. The non-japanese spectator has an important role in the phenomenon of Japan. I find it ironic that Westerners, who actually have a great deal of control over the concept of ‘Japan’, become reactionary when they can’t inhabit that concept themselves.
But I don’t know. I only mean this in a general amateur sense. I love Japan and the Japanese and feel slight pangs of both guilt and shame when I type things like “The Japanese are…”.
A last note:
Momus, you’re optimism for Japan is important to me. I have decided to devote myself to this country as much as my own. I am not a Japan-pessimist, but I agree with a lot of the criticisms. Within Japan, anti-japanese sentiments among foreigners are at an all time high. I can’t go to a party without hearing complaints.
Which is why reading your journal is so refreshing.
I honestly do worry, thinking “What if Momus changes his mind? What if after he learns Japanese and has been in enough diverse unspectacular situations here, he becomes a pessimist?”. I’m hoping you never do. I work in a school, go to meetings, deal with powerful ojiisans in local government and bitter foreigners in local circles. After a long day of miscommunication fumbles, rote work, and bad impressions, I can read your journal, say “YES!”, and be reminded of why I’m here.
Yeah, reading what you have to say legitimizes many of my hopes for Japan.
From Absolutism to Structuralist Criticism
Date: 2004-11-12 02:55 pm (UTC)I did some soul-searching on my own site and realized that what underpins my use of the word Absolutism was a belief that culture is a completely artificial liquid given shape by its supporting structures. The direct decisions of government shape the institutions which form the basis for standard behavior, and I find it absurd to let any nation get away with hiding behind "traditions" made up mostly of modern conceits. And if culture represents only the current shape of institutional structures, problems in the culture itself can be certainly criticized as evidence of structural flaws without taking a form of ethnic debasing.
Japan is not a primitive country - the ruling elite know what they are doing. The system they created worked fantastically from 1955 to 1991, and now we are in a period of hedonic lag - comfort and love of a structural whole that no longer serves the purpose for which it was created. Tradition is the enormous wall behind which the elite hides itself from reality.
This position seems to be different from that of the Parochial Absolutists, so don't lump me in with them.
Although I never hear you say it directly, Momus, are you not an Orientalist and Exoticist? Do you love Japan because Japan loves you? Do you love Japan because it's different? I have many a male friend who loves that Japanese girls are socially bound to stay silent in times of domestic dispute. Japan is comfortable for the swaggering Westerner, but I'd rather Japan be comfortable for the Japanese.
Marxy
children
Date: 2004-11-12 03:19 pm (UTC)The trauma seems to be located less in the act itself than in the culture of acquiescence that ignores the public abuse of a small child--all of those girls speak of asking for help from the people around them while a forty year old businessman was fondling them and jerking off on them, and having the other passengers simply look away in embarrassment. The point, I think, is power. Childhood is an incredibly sexual time, but that doesn't make circumstantially nonconsensual sexual abuse any easier to deal with. It's like saying that, because women are sexual, rape is somehow justified. It's ridiculous to say that the pitcairn girls didn't give an account of the pitcairn men's behaviour as abuse, because the charges were brought by one or several of the victims--victims, I think, who had moved to the mainland and gotten out of the male-dominant microculture. The women on Pitcairn can accept or even encourage the men's behavior, but Muslim women can also accept and encourage the honor killings of daughters who have been raped because their culture is so thoroughly bounded on all sides by masculine control. I guess my point is that force is force no matter what. I guess for me, outside all discussions of cultural relativism, it can be boiled down to a notion of fair play--pick on (or jerk off on) someone your own size.
-B
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-12 03:25 pm (UTC)Except people who only want to join a club which won't have them as a member!
Think of Kafka's parable 'Before The Law', the centrepiece of 'The Trial'. The man waits all his life before the law, never getting past the gatekeeper. The door is for him alone, but finally the gatekeeper closes it. Does he slander the law? No. Is he miserable? Perhaps... bu not necessarily. Elsewhere Kafka says 'Happiness is to have an ideal, and not to advance towards it'. Paul Bowles said 'To remain foreign is a great luxury'. And Rilke envied the great unrequited lovers, whose love outstripped the beloved.
Re: children
Date: 2004-11-12 03:44 pm (UTC)That's a wonderfully good formula.
However, the Japanese do not accept sexual abuse on trains or anywhere else. They may be more ambivalent about reports of it and they don't do as much pulpit dancing about it, but you cannot jerk off on a child on a train without being stopped. Other passengers will not simply 'look away in embarrasment' That's ridiculous. Sure, there may be exceptions, but for the most part it is mythology. There is not nearly as much sexual abuse in Japan as the West make-believes there is.
If anything, there is just more sex in Japan and fewer taboos. But that's not a reason to imagine a greater number of abuses.
Re: children
Date: 2004-11-12 04:01 pm (UTC)You misunderstood if you think that view was being presented by Jenny Kitzinger. Her view is very close to yours; I think where you both differ from me is that you think there is a neutral social space. I don't. For instance, you say 'I think that this attitude [Japanese girls deciding they'd been abused by chikkans] is less a result of being brainwashed by Western sexual mores than it is having a cultural distance which makes it possible to talk about the experience and judge it.' Now, sure you can step away from one culture, but not into a vacuum. You always step into another. Thought is not even possible without language and its codification of social meanings, which are culturally relative. Likewise, you say 'victims, I think, who had moved to the mainland and gotten out of the male-dominant microculture.' That may be true, but you don't describe the other half -- these women had gotten out of something, but into something else.
Margaret Mead described her Samoan girls as having the choice of whether to indulge in childhood sex or to take refuge in the missionary's house. But she didn't try to portray the missionary's house as having a 'missing ethics' -- as being, in other words, a completely neutral space. The price you paid for sheltering there was indoctrination with Christianity, and the whole package of metaphysical and moral ideas about the body contained in it.
I think the title of Jenny Kitzinger's book is interesting, because it pre-judges the question:
'Framing Abuse - Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence Against Children'
The epistemological model of that title is odd. First of all, 'abuse' and 'violence' are not morally neutral terms. She is already 'framing' social relations in a particular way by using those words, already declaring her situatedness. But the book also wants to be a deconstruction of western 'framing' (by the public and media) of non-western practices. In other words, it deconstructs western terms but not its own, and it tolerates everything except what it finds intolerable. It also uses the language of cultural relativism while endorsing the idea that there are some things -- rights -- which are exempt from it. Does Jenny believe she's standing on neutral ground, whereas everyone else is implicated in culture?
Re: children
Date: 2004-11-12 04:54 pm (UTC)I accept that there is no such thing as neutral cultural ground, but what then do you see as acceptable reasons for cultural intervention? I assume, for example, that you don't think female circumcision is a good idea, no matter how acceptable it might be to the majority of Malians or Somalians, perhaps even to the women themselves. Do you think 'we' (the West) should use our considerable economic and diplomatic muscle to get those governments to ban the practice? Or do you think that it's their affair to sort out within their own society?
R.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-12 04:55 pm (UTC)To remain foriegn is a fantastic luxury. It is only a relationship to a catagory, it cannot forbid me from the knowledge of people I know.
Have you read any Donald Richie? I've only read a very short book called 'tokyo' (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1861890346/qid=1100276471/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/002-3718882-9199254?v=glance&s=books) last week. Everything else I know about him comes from a conversation I had last month. He both recognizes that which prompts crictism (which other writers, like Kerr, claim to discover), and yet loves Japan for some of the same reasons. He is also one of the writers who is at ease with being an outsider. Which I think means he is in love with it.
p.s.: I put a link to the amazon reviews of the book 'Tokyo'. I read the book and the reviews, and I don't believe the reviews.
Also, I'm not sure I understand the signifigance of 'Before the Law'. I wanted to know what the man said after the gatekeeper told him that the door was there for him alone. The story itself left me wondering, and so does your referance to it. I don't understand how you relate it to the situation in Japan. Bowles and Rilke's statements are easy, but I'm in the dark as far as 'before the law'. I'm missing something.
Re: children
Date: 2004-11-12 06:06 pm (UTC)As to Klitzinger's book, I agree that it's a dicey project. But academia is full of that kind of supercharged deconstruction-cum-political tract. By the way, what kind of 'choice' is it to give a child the opportunity to flee her family, friends, everything that's familiar to her, and join some creepy whiteface missionaries? That does not count as 'choice', not for a child at least. I have read a little Mead (though admittedly not much), and I agree with Heather--she always seemed to have something invested in keeping her savages savage and noble. Anyway, the last word in any anthropological debate like this is, for me, the "Gentle Tasayday" hoax--just a delicious example of the Western wet dream of the other.
B
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-12 06:31 pm (UTC)Re: children
Date: 2004-11-12 06:32 pm (UTC)http://www.plexus.org/lacink/lacink11/zizek.html
B
Re: children
Date: 2004-11-12 07:08 pm (UTC)It must be the way Freud tells them, but that's a very funny joke.
Re: children
Date: 2004-11-12 07:27 pm (UTC)One thing I do know is that I reject and abhor the attitude outlined by the Absolutist who talked about 'barbaric societies (eg, any society that has remained in the Stone Age in this era)' and said they should be nuked or brainwashed. It's just a historical nonsense to say that some societies existing now are 'in the Stone Age'. All societies now existing are postmodern societies, including those like the Taliban, or those that practise clitorectomy. We've all by now met each other, or at least are aware of each other's presence. This 'meeting' has relativised all our mores and made them as dependent on 'the way others do things' as 'the way we've always done things'. So I think that clitorectomy now might look the same as clitorectomy then, but that it's very different. If it does indeed persist, it's 'postmodern clitorectomy'. It may well, like postmodern Islam, have got stricter and more 'fundamentalist' because of its contact with the West.
I'm always a bit suspicious of the way the West intervenes in other cultures using women as its point of entry. It's as if the West says 'You guys can cut off each other's heads, eat dogs, and all the rest of it. That's up to you. That's culture. But we don't like the way you're treating your women'. Now, that may actually be a modern form of 'rape and pillage'. We come and sack your material resources and take your women. We believe that the women are the weak point in your tribal system because it is our habit to think that women are 'a weak point'. We believe that your women will betray you, and we reward them for betraying you. We talk to your women in such a way that they see the error of their former ways. We talk to your women in such a way that they realise that to be a woman is a terribly low thing. Except in our culture, where it's almost as good as being a man.
So no, I don't support clitorectomy, but neither do I support going in to your culture to talk, particularly, to your women. And especially not when my culture has a recent history of going into your culture to grab your natural resources or trade in your people as slaves. The solution is to find a way to relate to your whole culture in a way that is respectful, and not isolate elements of it.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-12 08:11 pm (UTC)Basically, there's nothing "wrong" with making judgments, but all judgments, ultimately, are universally baseless.
I think that's pretty apt. It skirts the issue of universalism yet realizes that we will continue to argue that our values are the True and Universal values.
Example: I will fight against all forms of child maiming as long as I can. That includes binding feet, clitorectomies and cutting the foreskin. I argue that's it deformation performed on someone who can agree or disagree to have it done. And since I believe in individual choice and responsibility vs. tribalism, I argue against it.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-12 08:21 pm (UTC)But do you choose individual choice and responsibility, or do they choose you? In other words, the individualism of your choice may be as determined by a society with a very particular ideology of individualism and choice (the idea of the protestant personal god lying behind individualism and the idea of free capitalist markets lying behind choice) as the adoption of tribalism may be for someone born into a tribal culture. All you're saying in the end is that you're fighting non-western ways of life because you're western.
Mead Festival
Date: 2004-11-12 08:37 pm (UTC)"The 28th annual Mead Festival offers the best in international
documentary films, conversations, and roundtables. Themes this season include native media from the Northwest Coast and the Southwest and a tribute to the creator of cinema verite, Jean Rouch.
Six days of 40 plus films from around the globe. Full schedule on Festival website: http://www.amnh.org/mead (http://www.amnh.org/mead)."
Some intriguing films, including one about Russian men who love canaries (Meistersinger - The Sound of Russia).
Tim