Thinking about difference

Lately I have been thinking a lot about how human beings perceive difference. This, of course, is an occupational hazard. Much theoretical ink has been spilled on how human societies and individuals deal with difference – psychologically, culturally, historically, linguistically: “I and thou,” “Self and Other,” “sign, signifier, and signified,” the evocative and provocative “free floating signifier.” As scholars, how do we/can we/should we represent people unlike ourselves? What are we to make of physical difference, the most dramatic example being male/female, and the gender constructions based upon those anatomical distinctions? Racial difference which is less physically marked but no less socially important? The less immediately visible categories of religion, ethnicity and class conveyed through verbal and non-verbal forms of communication: dress, gestures, ritual, conversation? Finally, as privileged intellectuals, can we represent those differences without being dismissive, condescending, patronizing, presumptuous, or just plain wrong?

I believe that we can and should speak of difference, if for no other reason than, as an historian, I am required to translate the thoughts and actions of people from the past in ways that make sense to my own time and place. If this can’t be done, I’m out of a job. So I try. Students sometimes challenge my attempts – rarely on epistemological grounds, more frequently on identity-based claims. Every time I teach the history of slavery and race relations, for example, I know that at least one student will wonder what an uppity white girl from NJ could possibly tell them about the history of their own people. On a few occasions, students have said as much to my face. This doesn’t really offend me. I advise them to stick around for a few weeks and if they don’t like what they see, drop the course. No big deal.

Race also comes up because of what I don’t teach. I once had a colleague who told her students that I was a racist due to my failure to include material on Native American history in my undergraduate historiography class. This did offend me – until my sense of humor kicked in. True, Native American history wasn’t in a syllabus that covers the history of history from Herodotus to the present in 16 weeks. It does include material about identity-based history (working class/women/African-American). I cover indigenous history in my Latin American history classes and I also do research on Brazilian Indians, but as she barely knew me, she wouldn’t have known that. Had she, I suspect her ire would have only increased. Not only do I assign books on Native American history written by non-Native Americans, but I am attempting to write Native American history myself. Given my identity, could I hope to do so properly?

Moving beyond academic pettiness, the perception of difference, of course, has huge consequences in everyday life. It typically justifies wars, massacres, genocides, and all sorts of socioeconomic and political discrimination. It should go without saying, however, that although human beings may have an innate propensity to create oppositional categories to make sense of their world, difference need not be the basis of inequality or exclusion. Why can’t difference simply be … different?

When thinking about such heady ideas, I have found it useful to take a step back and observe how children deal with living in the world. This leads me to what got me thinking about all of this in the first place. A few months ago, my kids started taking African dance classes. My eldest daughter was exposed to African drumming and dancing two years ago at a summer camp and has been begging for lessons every since. I finally located a class for children sponsored by the African American Performing Arts Center, a lovely facility that promotes a variety of cultural activities. My youngest daughter tried a few classes and quickly dropped out. Why? She felt self-conscious. Why? Because she was different. “Mommy,” (delivered in an overly loud stage whisper) “I’m the only one that’s white.” Interestingly, despite the fact that her kindergarten class is almost evenly divided among Hispanic, black, Native American, and white kids, and this never seems to have been an issue, being the only one that was different mattered. No problem; she plays with other siblings who are stuck there during dance class.

My older daughter, however, has been all but color blind since she was very small. If anybody thinks it’s strange that this fair blond kid likes African dance, they haven’t said so. The dance community consists of African American kids and their families, some biracial couples and their kids, and some white parents who have adopted African kids. There’s a few African and Haitian families as well. Nice folks.

While going through the whirlwind of rehearsals leading up to the first performance of the “African American Performing Arts Youth Ensemble,” however, one could not escape constructions of difference. I overheard one adult volunteer attempting to herd a bunch of kids running amok into some kind of order, trying to sort out names. She asked Renee, “are you Ruth?” “No, she answered, “Ruth’s the white girl.”

The white girl. Of course, she is. As her mother, this revelation should not have come as a surprise. But in a certain sense, it did. This is probably the first time she’s been identified with reference to her race. Since “white” is the dominant racial signifier in US society, there is rarely cause to specify. Towards the end of the dress rehearsal, the dancers formed a “solo circle” which allowed any child who felt so moved to go into the center and dance while the remainder of the group clapped. The Brazilianist in me instantly recognized this as a “roda” a circle or “wheel” that one sees in Brazilian samba. Sometimes the kids went out alone, sometimes in twos or threes. Ruth went out with two girls but as they hadn’t coordinated what they were going to do, it didn’t work very well. Later she said, “mom, I felt weird being out there with Diandra and Isis.” “Why?” I asked. Whiteness, it turned out, had nothing to do with it. “Because they’re so tall,” she said. “I felt really short.”

The performance, by the way, was great. It had absolutely nothing to do with elitist, intellectual qualms about white people appropriating the cultural forms of the “other.” The drums were loud, the dancing was great, the applause genuine, the occasion heartfelt. My kid was out there having the time of her life, dancing with verve and a huge, radiant smile. She took my breath away.

A final post script: at the dinner following the performance, one of the drummers asked me if I was the parent of the “tall, blond girl.”

I had to laugh.

Writing History

I have been thinking about writing a lot lately.  This derives, in part, from teaching a graduate seminar on historical theory this semester.  The reading list is not for the faint-hearted: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Foucault, Derrida, Spivak, to name a few.  The texts are dense at best, obscurantist at worst.  I am confronted weekly with the implicit, and sometimes explicit, questions: “Why are we reading this?”  “How can this help me to be a better historian?”

I am still working out these questions for myself.  Theory has enriched the ways in which I think about the extent to which human beings exercise free will or are bounded by the cultural norms and institutional constraints of their societies.  It forces me to be honest about what information I can or cannot derive from a documentary source.  It causes me to question how narratives are constructed, for what purposes, and by whom.  And it makes me confront the reality that there are no hard and fast lines that distinguish fact from fiction.  That said, most theoretical works would be all but impenetrable to the average reader.  They are tough going even for specialists who have been trained how to read them.  The conundrum remains, how do I convey these theoretical insights without restricting my readership to a narrow audience of other intellectuals with advanced degrees like myself?

One option is that I need not concern myself with a wider reading public.  Academic acclaim is not based on the number of copies one sells or the length of time that elapses before one’s work goes out of print.  Academics generally derive a fairly trivial amount of their income from book sales.  As an aside, I should add that a colleague of mine who wrote a guide entitled, ironically enough, Writing History, earns enough in royalties on that title to pay for his five kids’ summer programs every year.

However, I am also reminded of a recent comment by a student who argued that we need not feel apologetic or defensive for having come up with a specialized, professional language with which we can communicate specific, nuanced ideas to colleagues.  Certainly, researchers in the hard sciences feel no such compunction.  However, I find myself caught between the desire to produce a well crafted, evocative story and to probe its theoretical intricacies in a sophisticated way.  Can one do both?

This dilemma came to a head recently in another class.  I had assigned a recently published book that was well reviewed but that I had not read before ordering it.  Oops!  Upon reading it, I found it simply dreadful, but it was too late.   Every theoretical buzzword and concept was prominently displayed, overblown claims were made on the basis of inadequate or inconclusive data, in short, content-free jargon.  I felt that I had been bludgeoned by the equivalent of badly designed, dysfunctional kitchen sink.  A rather large one.  Even worse, I found myself having to justify to my students, why I made them waste their valuable time and money reading this thing.  I opted for contrition and some reflections on how and why the peer-review process can go badly wrong.  I was genuinely disillusioned that the editorial process, such that it was, had served this scholar so poorly.

Around the same time, a guest speaker came to speak at a workshop in our department.  This was Camilla Townsend, an historian of the Americas writ large, and coincidentally, a long term friend of mine.  Cami and I met as girls at a convention sponsored by the Wizard of Oz Club.  We were both fans of L. Frank Baum and even as a 12 year old, her gifts as a writer were already apparent.  We lost touch and found each other about ten years ago at a history conference, discovering that we had both become historians of Latin America and the Atlantic World.

Cami is a beautiful prose writer.  She examines figures that have been written about so much that you’d think there would be nothing left to say.  Pocahantas.  Frederick Douglass.  Malitzin, also known as La Malinche, an indigenous woman captive who served as Hernán Cortés’s translator during the conquest of Mexico.  But through a careful and imaginative reading of the limited documentation about these individuals, she causes us to rethink what we think we know.

After her visit, I read her Pocahantas and the Powhatan Dilemna which had been sitting on my shelf unread for some years.  Quite simply, it was lovely.  It was the first history book that I have read purely for pleasure in probably ten years or more.  She was quite clear about what she thought could be verified and where she was on shakier ground.  Her voice and methodological interventions, however, remained unobtrusive and did not distract from the compelling story she told.  I was reminded of advice once given by the writer we mutually admire. L. Frank Baum.  In a 1902 editorial entitled “What Children Want,” Baum wrote: “the language employed should be simple and unadorned.  As for a moral, children are quick to discover and absorb one, provided it is not tacked up like a warning on a signpost.”  Substitute “theoretical framework” for “moral,” and these might serve as guidelines for the historian as well.

During Cami’s talk, a colleague commented on the quality of her writing and asked if it “every got her into trouble.”  A strange question at first glance.  The implication was that writing too well could be bad.  Cami responded that, “yes,” if one writes too accessibly, one runs the risk of not being taken seriously.  The analysis and hard work that goes into one’s interpretation can be overlooked if one doesn’t hit the  reader over the head with it.  One can also write for one’s colleagues in the manner respected by the profession in other contexts.  It is a matter of pairing style with venue and intended audience.

I am left with the thought that for the historian, a theoretical foundation might best be utilized as if one were a ballet dancer.  The best dancers wear their training lightly.  They distill years of specialized training and bloody hard work into gestures of astonishing lightness and beauty.  The effort is concealed; in fact it is necessary to do so in order for it to appear effortless.  Perhaps I can aspire to that in my writing.  If I use  theory to inform my conclusions and qualify my claims, that may suffice.  I would like to write something that is beautiful, yet substantial, definitive not because it includes every empirical factoid but because the prose lingers in the mind.

Maybe I also should rethink how I use footnotes.

Out of the mouths of babes

I have been writing a book for what seems like forever, to the point of embarrassment.  I’ve been working on it so long, half the time I don’t remember why I’m writing it or what I’m trying to say.  Like a graduate student that hopes to avoid queries about the progress of one’s dissertation, I dread the well meaning questions: “so how’s the book coming along?” “Are you getting any writing done?”  “So what is your book about anyway?”  I expect this from family, from friends, from colleagues.  Sometimes it comes out of the blue.  At my grandmother’s 100th birthday party in 2007, a friend of her named Connie, a spry, talkative, and mildly irritating 90-something, pounced on me and asked “so when is your next book coming out?”  Huh?  It turned out that she had read the copy of my first book that I had given to my grandmother.  Go figure.  Moreover, she came up with a very precise summary of the book’s main arguments that was surprising in a non-academic.

I began thinking about this book in 1997 and researching it in earnest in 2000.  A few extenuating circumstances – children born in 1998 and 2002, several years of related sleep deprivation, a five year stint as associate chair of my department – have legitimately slowed my progress.  But now it’s time to get the damn thing done.  A sabbatical last semester provided a much-needed jump start and I have two substantial (read overly long) chapters completed.  Since then, I try to write a little bit every day; often I get up early to make this happen.

The book, by the way, is about attempts to settle an indigenous frontier in Brazil from the years 1760-1910. It examines the extent to which Indians were able to dictate outcomes in a context of limited effective state presence.  It deals with how disparate cultures interact with one another.  There’s violence and slavery and disease and exploitation, illicit sex, lascivious dances, entrepreneurship, religious and cultural intolerance, environmental degradation, and a fairly predictable unhappy ending.  In the most abstract sense, it deals with how human beings deal with difference and create boundaries to make sense of their world.

So this morning, I was completing  a section about an Indian soldier named Inocencio who served as an interpreter and mediator for a Portuguese man named Bento Lourenço who was a prospector, explorer and road builder.  Inocencio traveled to Rio de Janeiro and requested and sought audiences with the Brazilian emperor, not once, but at least three times during the 1820s.  This involved walking several hundred miles in each direction.  The local authorities didn’t approve of this fellow wandering off to Rio without formal papers, often attracting native followers to join him in Pied Piper fashion.  They issued arrest warrants.  The Emperor, however, was impressed, and gave the shrewd Inocencio a title as Captain of the Indians, special privileges, freedom of movement and lots of presents, some useful, others symbolic.  My favorite was the portrait of the emperor in a gilded frame – which Inocencio valued enough to lug along a few hundred miles before he was arrested.  Within the space of a year, he went to Rio, illegally sold booty gained from the Emperor, was arrested, reassigned to a new frontier post, escaped, went back to Rio, was arrested again, and sent back to his new post.

As I was finishing, my husband wandered out and asked me what I was doing.  I proceeded to summarize this tale, in a shamelessly long-winded and circuitous fashion, replete with excessive detail.  While holding forth, my 6 year old daughter emerged from her room and sat in my lap and listened.  She then spontaneously made up the following dialogue which summed up the main points quite nicely:

“Oh no, I’m in jail again!  Poopy!”

“Hurrah!  I’m out of jail!  Let’s go to Rio!” (upon repetition, she added “with our Indian friends!”)

“Let’s sell stuff!”

I think she should write the damn book.

“Me as Historian”

Me as Historian

I am told that my late colleague, Tim Moy, often began responses to student questions with the phrase, “We as historians…”  I like this, both as strategy and rhetorical device.  Strategically, it makes students feel as they are participants in the historical endeavor and not just passive recipients.  Rhetorically, it evokes the democratic potential of history.  With a few bucks and a website, anybody can be an historian.

Yet on the rare occasions when I interject “we as historians” during a class, it feels a bit presumptuous.  Tim, of course, was anything but.  But for myself, I have some trouble speaking for all historians when we are such a diverse lot.  “Me as historian,”  while a grammatically questionable construction, is a bit more manageable.  And given that I tend towards the small scale in my historical work, at a minimum it’s internally consistent.

This somewhat rambling preamble is an entry into the question, “What kind of historian am I?”  This evening I will lead the first session of a graduate seminar in Advanced Historiography and I am requiring each student to write a short essay responding to this question.  I ask my undergraduates to do a similar exercise with the question “What is History?”   In order for this not to devolve into intellectual voyeurism and perhaps even to approximate some sort of debate, I figured it was only fair to devote some thought to the question myself.  So here goes.

My undergraduate degree was in Anthropology and my approach to history reflects that.  I strive to be an ethnographer of the past.  I had too many moral qualms about poking into the lives of the living to be a successful anthropologist, unless I wanted to use fieldwork as the basis for an extended meditation on myself.  I did not.  An added plus: accountability towards the dead, while still a real concern, is rather more attenuated than responsibility towards the living.

I am probably not much of a credit to my Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins.   Hopkins was the first doctoral program in History in the United States – it embraced German models of empiricism and pedagogy.   One of my advisers really did claim in Rankean fashion that the “facts spoke for themselves.”  Hence there was no need for formal training in the philosophy or theory of history.  All that was required was a comprehensive gathering of data, artfully arranged into a coherent narrative.  I may have found that enough at one time; I no longer do.

I exaggerate a bit.  There were theorists at Hopkins, proponents of the linguistic turn and subaltern studies.  Gayatri Spivak came to give a talk; Hayden White taught there.  Gabriel Spiegel, a path-breaking theorist in the historical field, now teaches at JHU and just assumed the presidency of the American Historical Association.  But in the late 80s-early 90s, theorists were much embattled and (this may be urban legend) reputedly some literally came to blows with the empiricists in faculty meetings.

Since leaving graduate school, I have become more theoretically inclined.  My work has been enriched and informed by theory.  However, I can’t really claim to be a theorist either, at least, not a very good one.  Some scholars have a natural aptitude for theory; others dismiss it out of hand.  Some approach it because they think they should or because they are required to teach it or learn it.  Of those, I suspect the majority work their butts off and get maybe half of it.  That’s pretty much where I stand.

So much for what I am not.  The historical approach that best fits what I do is micro-history.  I enjoy studying the small to illuminate the large.  In particular with respect to how the state interacts with society, how the actions of individuals, particularly those situated at the far extremities of power, are able to mediate ideas, policies, disparate cultural understandings.  They are also sometimes able to subvert or transform larger political agendas, often because at the local level the state often doesn’t pay a whole lot of attention.  Looking at the local often provides ample evidence that what the state discursively asserts as reality is just a load of bull.  I like these contradictions.  They amuse and often fascinate me … as historian.

Why graduate school?

This posting was inspired by a recent entry in the blog entitled “stuff white people like.” This blogster pokes fun at a variety of elite white pretensions: Priuses, vegetarianism, organic food, bottled water, gifted children, gourmet sandwiches, bilingualism, and so on. There is enough truth in the stereotypes to make some of them quite funny; after all that is how and why stereotypes work. And I freely admit that many of them apply to me: I recycle, bike to work, and would drive a Prius if I could afford one. I have “gifted” children who are learning second languages. I have studied and lived abroad, in locations where I have been the only white North American around. I like coffee, overly elaborate sandwiches, sushi, dark chocolate, wine, and tend towards a vegetarian diet. I have, not one, but two “useless” degrees, in Anthropology and History respectively, am happily ensconced in my own Ivory Trailer, and can discuss arcane theorists and philosophers. I also do most of my shopping at Walmart (we all have our contradictions); except for produce of course, that comes from the locally owned and operated community farm.

So that’s all very nice. A full disclosure in the confessional mode. How very Foucauldian. Not to mention ironic. Now what about graduate school?

The entry, which can be found at: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/81-graduate-school/ argues the following:

Whites are congenitally addicted to intellectual one-up-manship. An impractical undergraduate degree is insufficient to succeed in this game. So further higher education is needed with preference for “ the true ivory tower of academia …. as it imparts true, useless knowledge. The best subjects are English, History, Art History, Film, Gender Studies, <insert nation> Studies, Classics, Philosophy, Political Science, <insert European nation> Literature, and the ultimate: Comp Lit.”

Pursuit of a graduate degree also allegedly enables one to live a life of sloth while obtaining it and then provides an inexhaustible fund of erudition that can be strategically deployed at cocktail parties.

Lest I be dismissed unfairly as a humorless white girl, let me say that I did find the satire funny, because, after all, some of it is true. My mother, who had a B.S. in chemical engineering, used to say that B.S. stood for bullshit, M.S. stood for more shit, and Ph.D. meant piled higher and deeper (that would refer to my dad who had a Ph.D. in chemical engineering). Of their progeny, one kid got a Ph.D., one got a Master’s and one dropped out of college after about a year (that would be NS or “No shit!”) Incidentally, No Shit!, when in the workforce, made considerably more money than Piled Higher and Deeper.

We have all run across irritating pretentious intellectual poseurs in social settings. And hey, not all of them are white. Irrespective of color though, it is easy to write them off as useless, self-indulgent dilettantes whose educational forays are bankrolled by secret trust funds or mom and dad. However, I suspect they are in the minority. Many graduate students dig themselves deep into student loan debt, and, if they obtain the coveted Ph.D., face uncertain employment prospects and modest salaries. If this is the case, and if one privileges economic self- interest over other goals, it begs the obvious question, “are you friggin’ stupid or what? If you’re that smart, why not become a lawyer instead?”

Our blogster would seem to agree, stating “It is important to understand that a graduate degree does not make someone smart, so do not feel intimidated. They may have read more, but in no way does that make them smarter, more competent, or more likable [sic] than you.” Picking pretense over profit, in fact, would make one dumber, less competent and less likeable (or perhaps merely “likeable enough”).

True, a diploma does not confer brains, despite what the Wizard of Oz may have claimed to the Scarecrow in the MGM movie. Or, to quote another line of the Scarecrow’s from that film, “some people without brains do awful lot of talking.” Plenty of advanced degree holders are, in my opinion, complete idiots. And I also count among my friends a number of very smart, resourceful people who never completed college, or even high school. But to dismiss the acquisition of a specialized, graduate degree as merely frivolous and self-indulgent is to miss the point. Most people that follow that path are people of good will, motivated by idealism, a sense of vocation, and a desire to create and disseminate knowledge. They often give up years of potential income and career advancement and require a great deal of tolerance from friends, spouses, and children along the way. Given the degree of sacrifice required, if this path were pursued solely out of a desire to feel intellectually smug, well, these folks indeed would deserve our mockery and contempt.

However, I’d like to believe that the average academically-minded person, white or otherwise, is not that pathetic, shortsighted, or shallow. Given that I am a professional academic, you might dismiss this belief as shamelessly self-serving. But let’s think a minute about what purpose the supposedly “useless” disciplines of literature, history, philosophy, or political science serve. The successful pursuit of a liberal arts degree, from the B.A. to the Ph.D., requires the development of a certain skill set. You must learn how to read, write and think critically about material that is often difficult to understand upon first reading. Ideally, you then pass on those skills to others as a teacher or in some other professional setting. A foundation in critical thinking might then be translated into real life situations like being able to pick apart the logic or evidentiary grounds of arguments for or against global warming. Or to be able to see through cheap political tricks during election season.

One of the privileges enjoyed by complex societies is the economic wherewithal to support an intellectual class. That class, while it may provide its fair share of obfuscating, impenetrable prose, also produces art, literature, and investigations about how individuals and societies have behaved, thought, and acted, in the past and the present. In fact, the blog “stuff white people like” is a perfect example of this kind of intellectual production. Its author is providing an ethnography, of sorts, of the values held by a certain class of the mainstream white population in the early twenty-first century U.S. But undergirding this site is the belief that affluent white people behave the way that they do, not out of genuine conviction or conscience, but simply because they want to feel superior to the rest of humanity. Yes, I get that it’s satire. But if it happens to be true, it’s not very funny.

Engels and patriarchy

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the man who described monogamous marriage at its best as “a wedded life of leaden boredom which is described as domestic bliss” might inspire some additional commentary. (He never formally married by the way). His cynicism about middle class marriage aside, is Engels’s broader argument about the material bases of gender inequality convincing? Or as David commented, only partly tongue in cheek, are men inherently jerks who subordinate women simply because they can? Rebecca has asked me to post the following in hopes of continuing yesterday’s conversation.

Right before the break, we discussed the impact of marriage on modern times and the role of women in past and contemporary marriage pairs. This made me think of an article I read in Ms. magazine awhile back. It discusses the role of the housewife in relation to the phenomenon of Desperate Housewives. I personally have never seen the show, but the large following ensures that I know a little about the plot. Basically, how does popular culture affect our understanding of what is acceptable in terms of marriage? A couple years ago, it was Sex and the City (another show I’ve never seen), which portrayed the ability of single women to live their own, independent lives. I know at the end, however, they all had their fairy tale ending, complete with true love and a man in the picture. Going from that supposedly independent lifestyle to Desperate Housewives seems a little backward to me. This may not seem directly related to Engels but am a fan of relating theory to present day life and how various things affect culture. Below is the link for the article in Ms.

http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2005/housewifewars.asp

Also, below here is Heidi Hartman’s article in Signs.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0097-9740%28198121%296%3A3%3C366%3ATFATLO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q

About the issue of work…Engels demonstrates the division of labor as detrimental to women for several reasons. First, once men’s “work” starts being monetarily rewarded, they are given dominion over women’s “work” that is usually unpaid. Second, when men start working outside of the home, there is a clear demarcation of where supposedly valued work should be performed. Thus women get marginalized and their activities are deemed inferior. Jeanne Boydston’s Home and Work discusses this idea and analyzes the historic transformation of women’s value in the capitalistic society. I am just wondering how given this information and the ever present notion that housework is not actually “work”, how do we as supposedly enlightened people overcome this dichotomy? It’s rather depressing because still women do the majority of housework despite their increased participation in the “workforce” (which is a problematic term, but I’ll let it go for now).

Comments?

Got a question? General advice column for students

Here is a place to post general questions about course content, about research, and about academic life in general. For topics that might be of general interest, I will start a new thread. My office is always open but if you get struck by a random thought and want a quick answer, or if you want advice about a general issue but prefer to remain anonymous, here’s your opportunity.