I am taking part in a symposium at the Society for American Archaeology meeting in Memphis, Tennessee this month. The symposium's theme is "Single Sites From Which Much has Been Learned," and most of the talks will focus on individual sites that have contributed a good deal of data relevant to our understanding of particular regions and periods of time. I have chosen to discuss a Chumash cemetery in Los Angeles County that was occupied between AD 1500 and AD 1785. The reason why I chose to discuss this site is that it is one of the relatively few inland sites discussed in the academic (as opposed to Cultural Resources Management) literature, and as such has had a huge influence on how researchers view the inland areas.
The problem is that there are many other inland sites that have been excavated, but which are rarely discussed in the academic literature*. The result is that one site, which is unique in many ways, has often been taken as representative of not only a region (the inland Los Angeles County portion of the Chumash culture area), but of multiple regions (the inland of the Chumash culture area in general, inclusive of multiple types of ecological areas spread over four counties).
So, I'm going to talk both about why the site is important and the documents written by Linda King that describe the site are valuable, and why we shouldn't be relying on it. I have no idea how well it will go over.
However, while I was in the middle of writing this paper, I heard this on the radio. The long and the short of it is that the first archaeologists are returning to Iraq. However, rather than excavating at the huge city sites, which had long been the main focus of research, they are visiting a smaller site and finding that it is rather different, in terms of both artifacts and features, from what had been expected.
Which is surprising at first - discovering that the models of a society built up over decades of archaeological research are either wrong or, at the very least, strangely incomplete - but it really shouldn't be. Archaeology is always having to reconstruct the past based on what amounts to a set of intellectual puzzle pieces, knowing all the while that many pieces are missing. Archaeologist, of course, are human, and as such we have a tendency to fixate on the pattern that we think is emerging, sometimes to the detriment to the pattern actually emerging. This tends to correct itself over time - those who remember that certain types of sites have not been investigated, or certain regions outright ignored, will focus their attentions there (my graduate adviser, himself one of the big names in Californian archaeology, has both published on the generally ignored inland regions, and has encouraged his graduate students, myself included, to follow suit; meanwhile, my friend Professor David Robinson of the University of Central Lancashire, has focused his research on even less acknowledge interior sites), and over time these individuals accumulate enough weight that they can force the more entrenched individuals into the margins. However, in the meantime, there is a tendency towards regional complacency amongst many researchers - in the Santa Barbara Channel, people have generally remained fixated to the point of myopia on the coast and Channel Islands; in Iraq, they focus on Ur to the exclusion of the equally important (if less spectacular) smaller sites. And, as a result, we have a less-than-complete understanding of a region taken as great wisdom.
Still, it is nice to hear that it is changing in Iraq, and to know that I have played a role in changing this in my own neck of the woods.
*There are several reasons for this. One is that these sites are in areas that most of the big theorists workin in California are not particularly interested in for various non-archaeology-related reasons (though odd excuses regarding the state of preservation or the relative importance of sites never looked at are often made). Another is that the work done on these sites has largely been done by archaeologists working in environmental consulting and preservation, such as myself, and there is something of a weird bias against our work on the part of many, though thankfully not all, academic archaeologists (and, it should be noted, that this bias has been steadily, if slowly, eroding for decades now). A third reason is that the results of our work are usually buried in what is called the "grey literature" - documents that are written for legal compliance reasons and then deposited in information centers that are difficult to search as compared to a well-indexed university library, resulting in many academic researchers not wanting to spend their (admittedly limited) time going through these reports.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Monday, April 2, 2012
The Friend Zone...Like the Twighlight Zone, but Less Real
I loathe the term "the Friend Zone." It is one of those terms that seems to get thrown around without much thought, generally by men as an excuse for why they have had little success with dating and/or sex. My dislike for this term comes from my often-stated dislike for sloppy thinking and irrational claims, and as such I am not going to get into a discussion of whether or not the idea of the Friend Zone is born out of issues pertaining to privilege or misogyny (besides, more articulate individuals than myself have already done so). Instead I will explain that my dislike for the term and concept comes from the sheer idiocy of it.
First, a bit of background. I used to believe in the Friend zone. More, I thought that I was one of it's sad inhabitants. Throughout my teens and much of my 20s, I made very little progress on the relationship front, often feeling bewildered by the social situations in which I found myself, finding that anytime a woman was interested in me as anything more than a friend, she lost interest relatively quickly, and I usually ended up feeling hurt. Like many young men, I found myself looking at the poor treatment being dished out by some of the other young men, and figured that women were attracted to assholes. Unlike some other young men, though, I at least was reflective enough to see that my own behaviors likely had something to do with me being alone. Still, nonetheless, I believed that there was a "friend zone" from which one could not return once banished, and that it was populated with nice young men like myself.
What began to turn my view around was a conversation with a friend in which she ranted at great length about how "all men are promiscuous, and don't care who they hurt!" Being a man who has never been promiscuous, this assertion annoyed me, and when called on the basic sexism of her statement, my friend decided to back it up by pointing out the number of men who both she and her female friends had encountered who either cheated, or else were willing to manipulate women for sex, and then vanish.
At the time, I had a housemate who, perhaps a couple of times a month, would go to the local bars and clubs looking for a one-night stand. He was willing to say any line, make any empty promise, and play any game to get laid. Needless to say, it was a rare night when he went out trolling for sex that he didn't bring someone home or end up at someone else's home. Assuming that he managed to do this twice a month, which is a fair estimate based on what I saw, that means that 24 different women got to some degree involved with him per year. By contrast, our other housemate was single part of the year, but tended to be more reserved, and not given to manipulation or lies, and while not necessarily averse to one-night-stands, was always honest about this and tended to pursue relationships. As a result, he tended to end up in bed with fewer women over the course of the year, probably 2-3, and (based on conversations I had with a couple of them after they were no longer in contact with him) he never left them feeling confused, used, or manipulated. As yet another contrast, due to my own general shyness and social incompetence, I spent that year celibate.
So, running the numbers, one man could easily convince 24 women that he's a cad, another man could convince another two or three that he's a decent guy, and one would simply be inoffensive. Even though the men who were not assholes outnumbered the cad 2-to-1 (and probably by a much larger margin in the general population outside of my post-college apartment), the one who was willing to behave poorly impacted the views of a larger number of women, thus making his type seem far more common than he really is.
What does this have to do with the "friend zone"? Simple - most of the concept of the "friend zone" revolves around the notion that "women only date assholes" and/or "I'm a nice guy, and that's why women don't go for me". So, I realized after I crunched the numbers, 24 women would "date an asshole" (more like have sex with one, but the terminology never seems to change), but, contrary to most of the rhetoric surrounding the "friend zone" they would not know that he was an asshole until after the fact because he was good at manipulating them. What's more, though, most women didn't fall for the manipulative jerk, but he would keep trying until someone did, which allowed specific cases to be cherry-picked by those who wished to find examples of "women always going for assholes", allowing them to convince themselves of the truth of this position while never engaging in the essential dishonesty of how they were building their case. In other words, the women didn't go after an asshole so much as someone who was an asshole didn't have any problem engaging in manipulative and deceptive behavior (because he's an asshole) and messed with a particular sub-set of women. So, in the process of calling out my friend's sexism, I ended up confronting the more complicated reality of the so-called asshole. In doing this, I was forced to confront the fact that most women were not going after assholes, and that the problem really wasn't with women, it was with the deceptive behaviors of a small but active number of men.
The other, related, part of the "friend zone" concept is that women don't go for nice guys. Yet, in looking at this, I had to realize that this was manifestly untrue. Again, most women didn't fall for the lines, lies, and manipulations. So, most women showed discretion most of the time. Also, the other housemate was certainly not lacking for feminine company, and he treated everyone in his life, women and men alike, quite well, showing that women were perfectly willing to choose the company and companionship of someone who was decent. I was alone in being alone, but just as the caddish housemate's active sex life was due to his poor behavior, my lack of one was also due to my behavior.
Now, a quick digression. If you look up anything written by anyone who is critical of the "friend zone" concept, there is a tendency to insist that the "nice guys" who complain of being "banished to the friend zone" are really just misogynistic bastards who view women as sex objects and nothing more, and who think that they are owed something by the women in their lives, and who only associate with women in the hopes of getting their romantic or sexual attentions. This is an over-simplification and over-generalization par excellence. There are a number of them who are like this, to be certain - I have met many a self-proclaimed "nice guy" whose nice behaviors are simply them attempting to build up some sort of account that they hope or expect to someday be paid out in affection or sex, who are emotionally handicapped to the point that they are incapable of having genuine friendships with women. However, this is not, in any way, a universal description of the men who believe themselves to be stranded in the "friend zone."
For myself, I did do many things to help others, including women to whom I was attracted. I would rescue people stranded by malfunctioning cars, be a shoulder to cry on when something had gone awry, and perform various friendly tasks for others. I did not, however, do these things expecting to be paid back in some way, nor did I do them in the hopes of attracting a particular type of attention. I never expected that either would be the case. I did them because I genuinely wanted to help or please the people for whom I was doing them - that's it, no expectation of anything else. And I didn't just do them for women to whom I was attracted, I did them for most of the people in my life. Even today, when I am in a stable long-term relationship, I still do these things when time and resources allow, because I like doing them for people.
Likewise, I didn't engage in friendships with women simply out of the hopes that someday they would notice what a helluva' guy I was and decide to fall for me. I did so because I liked them as people, and it is worth noting that I maintained these friendships for years after any attraction I felt had faded.
So, I wasn't just a self-proclaimed "nice guy" who does nice things in the hopes of some sort of payout, I was someone who genuinely liked being helpful and being friends without thought of some sort of future payout. I think that, arguably, I really was a nice guy, as opposed to a "nice guy."
Okay, so back to the topic - in dispelling the notion that all, or even most, men are pigs, I had to confront the notion that a small sub-set of piggish men could cause a disproportionate amount of damage to the feelings and lives of others, thus making their sort look more common than they really are, and giving embittered individual a false feeling of certainty when they declared that "women only date assholes" despite the fact that this is manifestly untrue. This, in turn, caused me to look at why I fared so poorly on the romance and sex front. I was quickly forced to deal with a fact that I had long known, but chosen to ignore: nobody had banished me to the "friend zone" - my own shyness and lack of knowledge and skill at communicating my feelings and interests had made it impossible for any of the women I met to know if I was interested in something more than friendship, and so they assumed that I was not. Nobody had banished me, I had unknowingly banished everyone else.
And this is, by and large, the truth of it. I have yet to meet a man who claims to be stuck "in the friend zone" who has not their own behavior to blame. The simple fact of the matter is that not every woman is interested in any given man, and there are those to whom you will never be anything but a friend. This can be a nice position, most of my closest and most valued friends have been women, and I feel much the richer for having them in my life. But if every woman you meet views you as "a good friend" as opposed to "a potential romantic partner", there is a near 100% chance that it is you, and not them, that is doing something wrong. Perhaps, like me, you are shy and uncomfortable with social situations...that's still you're problem and not theirs, just as it was my problem and not anyone else's. Perhaps you are the opposite, too forward and not able to behave appropriately under the right circumstances - again, you're problem, not someone else's. The point is this - if you believe that you have been "banished", then it is not them, but you, who needs to look at your behavior and see what's going on.
either I nor anyone else is, or ever has been, owed relationships, sex, affection, etc. And not everyone to whom you are attracted will return the interest, deal with it. But if nobody ever does, then it's probably a mistake that you are making, not anyone else's failure to recognize what a catch you are. This "friend zone" nonsense is the product of placing one's own shortcomings onto another. It's a bad hypotheses based on sloppy thinking and a heaping dollop of confirmation bias, and as such, I rather loathe it.
First, a bit of background. I used to believe in the Friend zone. More, I thought that I was one of it's sad inhabitants. Throughout my teens and much of my 20s, I made very little progress on the relationship front, often feeling bewildered by the social situations in which I found myself, finding that anytime a woman was interested in me as anything more than a friend, she lost interest relatively quickly, and I usually ended up feeling hurt. Like many young men, I found myself looking at the poor treatment being dished out by some of the other young men, and figured that women were attracted to assholes. Unlike some other young men, though, I at least was reflective enough to see that my own behaviors likely had something to do with me being alone. Still, nonetheless, I believed that there was a "friend zone" from which one could not return once banished, and that it was populated with nice young men like myself.
What began to turn my view around was a conversation with a friend in which she ranted at great length about how "all men are promiscuous, and don't care who they hurt!" Being a man who has never been promiscuous, this assertion annoyed me, and when called on the basic sexism of her statement, my friend decided to back it up by pointing out the number of men who both she and her female friends had encountered who either cheated, or else were willing to manipulate women for sex, and then vanish.
At the time, I had a housemate who, perhaps a couple of times a month, would go to the local bars and clubs looking for a one-night stand. He was willing to say any line, make any empty promise, and play any game to get laid. Needless to say, it was a rare night when he went out trolling for sex that he didn't bring someone home or end up at someone else's home. Assuming that he managed to do this twice a month, which is a fair estimate based on what I saw, that means that 24 different women got to some degree involved with him per year. By contrast, our other housemate was single part of the year, but tended to be more reserved, and not given to manipulation or lies, and while not necessarily averse to one-night-stands, was always honest about this and tended to pursue relationships. As a result, he tended to end up in bed with fewer women over the course of the year, probably 2-3, and (based on conversations I had with a couple of them after they were no longer in contact with him) he never left them feeling confused, used, or manipulated. As yet another contrast, due to my own general shyness and social incompetence, I spent that year celibate.
So, running the numbers, one man could easily convince 24 women that he's a cad, another man could convince another two or three that he's a decent guy, and one would simply be inoffensive. Even though the men who were not assholes outnumbered the cad 2-to-1 (and probably by a much larger margin in the general population outside of my post-college apartment), the one who was willing to behave poorly impacted the views of a larger number of women, thus making his type seem far more common than he really is.
What does this have to do with the "friend zone"? Simple - most of the concept of the "friend zone" revolves around the notion that "women only date assholes" and/or "I'm a nice guy, and that's why women don't go for me". So, I realized after I crunched the numbers, 24 women would "date an asshole" (more like have sex with one, but the terminology never seems to change), but, contrary to most of the rhetoric surrounding the "friend zone" they would not know that he was an asshole until after the fact because he was good at manipulating them. What's more, though, most women didn't fall for the manipulative jerk, but he would keep trying until someone did, which allowed specific cases to be cherry-picked by those who wished to find examples of "women always going for assholes", allowing them to convince themselves of the truth of this position while never engaging in the essential dishonesty of how they were building their case. In other words, the women didn't go after an asshole so much as someone who was an asshole didn't have any problem engaging in manipulative and deceptive behavior (because he's an asshole) and messed with a particular sub-set of women. So, in the process of calling out my friend's sexism, I ended up confronting the more complicated reality of the so-called asshole. In doing this, I was forced to confront the fact that most women were not going after assholes, and that the problem really wasn't with women, it was with the deceptive behaviors of a small but active number of men.
The other, related, part of the "friend zone" concept is that women don't go for nice guys. Yet, in looking at this, I had to realize that this was manifestly untrue. Again, most women didn't fall for the lines, lies, and manipulations. So, most women showed discretion most of the time. Also, the other housemate was certainly not lacking for feminine company, and he treated everyone in his life, women and men alike, quite well, showing that women were perfectly willing to choose the company and companionship of someone who was decent. I was alone in being alone, but just as the caddish housemate's active sex life was due to his poor behavior, my lack of one was also due to my behavior.
Now, a quick digression. If you look up anything written by anyone who is critical of the "friend zone" concept, there is a tendency to insist that the "nice guys" who complain of being "banished to the friend zone" are really just misogynistic bastards who view women as sex objects and nothing more, and who think that they are owed something by the women in their lives, and who only associate with women in the hopes of getting their romantic or sexual attentions. This is an over-simplification and over-generalization par excellence. There are a number of them who are like this, to be certain - I have met many a self-proclaimed "nice guy" whose nice behaviors are simply them attempting to build up some sort of account that they hope or expect to someday be paid out in affection or sex, who are emotionally handicapped to the point that they are incapable of having genuine friendships with women. However, this is not, in any way, a universal description of the men who believe themselves to be stranded in the "friend zone."
For myself, I did do many things to help others, including women to whom I was attracted. I would rescue people stranded by malfunctioning cars, be a shoulder to cry on when something had gone awry, and perform various friendly tasks for others. I did not, however, do these things expecting to be paid back in some way, nor did I do them in the hopes of attracting a particular type of attention. I never expected that either would be the case. I did them because I genuinely wanted to help or please the people for whom I was doing them - that's it, no expectation of anything else. And I didn't just do them for women to whom I was attracted, I did them for most of the people in my life. Even today, when I am in a stable long-term relationship, I still do these things when time and resources allow, because I like doing them for people.
Likewise, I didn't engage in friendships with women simply out of the hopes that someday they would notice what a helluva' guy I was and decide to fall for me. I did so because I liked them as people, and it is worth noting that I maintained these friendships for years after any attraction I felt had faded.
So, I wasn't just a self-proclaimed "nice guy" who does nice things in the hopes of some sort of payout, I was someone who genuinely liked being helpful and being friends without thought of some sort of future payout. I think that, arguably, I really was a nice guy, as opposed to a "nice guy."
Okay, so back to the topic - in dispelling the notion that all, or even most, men are pigs, I had to confront the notion that a small sub-set of piggish men could cause a disproportionate amount of damage to the feelings and lives of others, thus making their sort look more common than they really are, and giving embittered individual a false feeling of certainty when they declared that "women only date assholes" despite the fact that this is manifestly untrue. This, in turn, caused me to look at why I fared so poorly on the romance and sex front. I was quickly forced to deal with a fact that I had long known, but chosen to ignore: nobody had banished me to the "friend zone" - my own shyness and lack of knowledge and skill at communicating my feelings and interests had made it impossible for any of the women I met to know if I was interested in something more than friendship, and so they assumed that I was not. Nobody had banished me, I had unknowingly banished everyone else.
And this is, by and large, the truth of it. I have yet to meet a man who claims to be stuck "in the friend zone" who has not their own behavior to blame. The simple fact of the matter is that not every woman is interested in any given man, and there are those to whom you will never be anything but a friend. This can be a nice position, most of my closest and most valued friends have been women, and I feel much the richer for having them in my life. But if every woman you meet views you as "a good friend" as opposed to "a potential romantic partner", there is a near 100% chance that it is you, and not them, that is doing something wrong. Perhaps, like me, you are shy and uncomfortable with social situations...that's still you're problem and not theirs, just as it was my problem and not anyone else's. Perhaps you are the opposite, too forward and not able to behave appropriately under the right circumstances - again, you're problem, not someone else's. The point is this - if you believe that you have been "banished", then it is not them, but you, who needs to look at your behavior and see what's going on.
either I nor anyone else is, or ever has been, owed relationships, sex, affection, etc. And not everyone to whom you are attracted will return the interest, deal with it. But if nobody ever does, then it's probably a mistake that you are making, not anyone else's failure to recognize what a catch you are. This "friend zone" nonsense is the product of placing one's own shortcomings onto another. It's a bad hypotheses based on sloppy thinking and a heaping dollop of confirmation bias, and as such, I rather loathe it.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
GMO Musings
I am absolutely indifferent towards the labeling of genetically modified plants sold as food or as an ingredient in food. I have done a whole butt-load of reading, and I have come away with the conclusion that the claims that consuming these foods that is going to endanger my health are generally baseless, and that most of the worrisome health claims are no less biased or misleading than the worst of Monsanto's paid advertising. And while I don't necessarily care for the business practices of the companies that produce these foods, neither do I particularly care for the business practices of the companies that produce "organic" foods, or non-genetically modified standard crops. So, if these were labelled as genetically modified, it would do very little to my own buying habits.
And yet, despite my indifference to the concept, I get annoyed whenever I hear people shout about their desire to have these things labelled. Why?
Well, as little as I care about whether or not these products are labelled, I loathe sloppy thinking and sloganeering, and the anti-GMO movement is rife with, in fact arguably based on, sloppy thinking and sloganeering.
Some of the claims made by GMO opponents, specifically those questioning the potential for unforeseen legal complications arising from the ability to patent a self-replicating organism, may have a good deal of merit. Even here, many of the horror stories have been exaggerated, but there are nonetheless very real concerns regarding the ownership of genetic stock and the application of patent laws to organisms that could, conceivably, get free of their approved fields.
Parallel to the legal issues, there are ethical concerns over the ability of a company to patent genetic material. While I don't necessarily find many of the objections convincing myself, they are nonetheless present and are worthy of consideration.
And, of course, there are more mundane but nonetheless real market concerns regarding the production and ownership of seeds from GMO crops - does the presence of GMO crops that have particularly desirable traits have the potential to warp markets in such a way that more affordable (and likely necessary to avoid a monoculture) seeds will eventually become difficult to obtain, especially for farmers in marginal environments? There are economists who will argue either way, but we won't really know until the market becomes saturated with these products, which is rapidly occuring.
But rather than focus on these types of issues, most of the active anti-GMO demonstrators go for shock value, exploiting the "ick factor", getting people to shout slogans and stop thinking, and appealing to emotions. On Facebook recently, I saw two overblown emotional appeals regarding GMOs. One was a link to a petition to call for the labeling of GMOs - again, a cause to which I am entirely indifferent and to which I really have no objection even if I have no particular desire for it either - where the link bore the photograph of a little girl holding a cardboard sign with the words "I am not a science experiment" emblazoned upon it.
No, kid, you are not a science experiment, and your parents should have been ashamed for making you hold that sign. What you are is a human, and humans have to eat, and we have a wide variety of foods available to us. That your parents want to feed you foods that have not been altered using recently developed technology (even if they demonstrate through their protest that the do not actually understand the technology in question) is their own business, and not a big deal as far as I am concerned. That they decided to use their child as a billboard for a misleading statement regarding their misconceptions about the way that this technology is used in order to short-cut past peoples critical faculties is disgusting.
In the other case, someone I know stated that they would not buy from a particular store because that distributor carried some food and other products in which one of the ingredients was derived from crops that had been created by Monsanto, and they did not want to "give money to a company that is trying to poison us!" I, of course, responded, pointing out that while there are legitimate issues regarding the development of any new technology, including genetic engineering, the fact of the matter is that there is no reason to assume that Monsanto is poisoning anybody, and that, again, this sort of argument is an appeal to emotion, engineered to get us to repeat it without thinking about it.
Likewise, much of the anti-GMO rhetoric exploits the "ick factor" - the desire to get people to not like something based not on it's actual traits, but based instead on deep-seated prejudices that all of us harbor. The labeling of genetically-modified plants as "frankenfoods" and the focus on dubious claims regarding the placement of animal (and, I have even heard it claimed, human) genetic material in plants are both examples of this - the reason why the use of such genetic material (assuming the case that someone tells you of is even happening - most of the popular examples you are likely to hear turn out to be false if you do a little research) is bad is never really articulated, it's just icky...much like the comparison to a 19th century gothic horror novel makes little sense but pushes a lot of culturally-rooted buttons. The appeal to the "ick factor" exploits the same traits that inform both legitimate avoidance of disease, but also inter-personal prejudices and bigotry, and is one that really never results in good when we use it in place of critical thinking.
Then there's the tendency for people to be far more critical of genetic engineering than of technologies that they favor. For example, in the Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan (a man for whom I have less and less use every passing day) discusses potatoes as a crop. He spends a good deal of time examining the claims made by Monsanto for one of their particular potato crops - and it should be said that his criticisms and questions are both reasonable and well-explained. However, he then looks to one "organic" potato farmer and accepts every damn thing that this potato farmer says, what is quite literally the farmer's sales pitch, at face value without any meaningful critical examination, and when discussing crop yields he even "fails" (I suspect intentionally, based on the rest of the book) to ask such basic questions as whether or not the yields the farmer describes are seasonal or yearly yields - this point is, in fact, left very vague in the text. So, while he is rightfully critical of one technology, he is fawningly obseqious to the user of another, even though there are many legitimate technical and ethical concerns with organic farming methods. He concludes the chapter by describing how he planted some Monsanto potatoes, and then threw them away without eating them...but he never actually provides a coherent, well-articulated reason for not eating them, he just sort of implies that they are somehow evil and dangerous without explicitly saying so or providing any justification.
And, so, I find myself woefully unimpressed by the majority of anti-GMO claims. There are legitimate issues with any technology, genetic engineering included, and these issue need to be discussed. However, making false, misleading statements and relying on emotional appeal does nothing but muddy the waters and distract from real concerns. If people stated that they wanted the labeling done because they are concerned about the potential legal issue, or ethical concerns, or even because they just don't like big corporations (in which case, why are they buying food from a place large enough to support labeling to begin with?), then I might actually support it rather than being indifferent to it. But given that it is part of an on-going tendency towards sloppy thinking, frequent conspiracy-mongering, and constant dishonesty, I find that I can't support it - not because I find the notion of labeling unreasonable, but because I distrust the motivation behind it.
P.S. I was at a party some years back, when a fairly typical 30-something white affluent urbanite from San Francisco (where the party was held) asked me if I had heard about Michael Pollan. I explained that I had, and that when I actually went and researched many of the claims ubiquitous in his writing, I routinely found him to be misleading and dishonest, more a propagandist than an educator. She then went on about how, while he might make mistakes (umm, lady, when it's consistent even after he has been corrected by legitimate authorities, it ain't mistakes, it's intentional lies and distortion), he was a net good. She then went about trying to explain crop rotation to me - and given as how I am A) educated, B) know a fair bit about how humans dealt with sustenance in the past, and B) grew up and spent my formative years in an agricultural community and not (like her) San Francisco, I found myself having to routinely correct her. While she accepted the corrections, she nonetheless condescendingly kept going on about how she understood so much more about agriculture than I did while simultaneously proving that she knew next to nothing about the subject. I had to resist the urge to clobber her with the loaf of tofu that, no joke, was sitting on the counter next to my elbow.
And yet, despite my indifference to the concept, I get annoyed whenever I hear people shout about their desire to have these things labelled. Why?
Well, as little as I care about whether or not these products are labelled, I loathe sloppy thinking and sloganeering, and the anti-GMO movement is rife with, in fact arguably based on, sloppy thinking and sloganeering.
Some of the claims made by GMO opponents, specifically those questioning the potential for unforeseen legal complications arising from the ability to patent a self-replicating organism, may have a good deal of merit. Even here, many of the horror stories have been exaggerated, but there are nonetheless very real concerns regarding the ownership of genetic stock and the application of patent laws to organisms that could, conceivably, get free of their approved fields.
Parallel to the legal issues, there are ethical concerns over the ability of a company to patent genetic material. While I don't necessarily find many of the objections convincing myself, they are nonetheless present and are worthy of consideration.
And, of course, there are more mundane but nonetheless real market concerns regarding the production and ownership of seeds from GMO crops - does the presence of GMO crops that have particularly desirable traits have the potential to warp markets in such a way that more affordable (and likely necessary to avoid a monoculture) seeds will eventually become difficult to obtain, especially for farmers in marginal environments? There are economists who will argue either way, but we won't really know until the market becomes saturated with these products, which is rapidly occuring.
But rather than focus on these types of issues, most of the active anti-GMO demonstrators go for shock value, exploiting the "ick factor", getting people to shout slogans and stop thinking, and appealing to emotions. On Facebook recently, I saw two overblown emotional appeals regarding GMOs. One was a link to a petition to call for the labeling of GMOs - again, a cause to which I am entirely indifferent and to which I really have no objection even if I have no particular desire for it either - where the link bore the photograph of a little girl holding a cardboard sign with the words "I am not a science experiment" emblazoned upon it.
No, kid, you are not a science experiment, and your parents should have been ashamed for making you hold that sign. What you are is a human, and humans have to eat, and we have a wide variety of foods available to us. That your parents want to feed you foods that have not been altered using recently developed technology (even if they demonstrate through their protest that the do not actually understand the technology in question) is their own business, and not a big deal as far as I am concerned. That they decided to use their child as a billboard for a misleading statement regarding their misconceptions about the way that this technology is used in order to short-cut past peoples critical faculties is disgusting.
In the other case, someone I know stated that they would not buy from a particular store because that distributor carried some food and other products in which one of the ingredients was derived from crops that had been created by Monsanto, and they did not want to "give money to a company that is trying to poison us!" I, of course, responded, pointing out that while there are legitimate issues regarding the development of any new technology, including genetic engineering, the fact of the matter is that there is no reason to assume that Monsanto is poisoning anybody, and that, again, this sort of argument is an appeal to emotion, engineered to get us to repeat it without thinking about it.
Likewise, much of the anti-GMO rhetoric exploits the "ick factor" - the desire to get people to not like something based not on it's actual traits, but based instead on deep-seated prejudices that all of us harbor. The labeling of genetically-modified plants as "frankenfoods" and the focus on dubious claims regarding the placement of animal (and, I have even heard it claimed, human) genetic material in plants are both examples of this - the reason why the use of such genetic material (assuming the case that someone tells you of is even happening - most of the popular examples you are likely to hear turn out to be false if you do a little research) is bad is never really articulated, it's just icky...much like the comparison to a 19th century gothic horror novel makes little sense but pushes a lot of culturally-rooted buttons. The appeal to the "ick factor" exploits the same traits that inform both legitimate avoidance of disease, but also inter-personal prejudices and bigotry, and is one that really never results in good when we use it in place of critical thinking.
Then there's the tendency for people to be far more critical of genetic engineering than of technologies that they favor. For example, in the Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan (a man for whom I have less and less use every passing day) discusses potatoes as a crop. He spends a good deal of time examining the claims made by Monsanto for one of their particular potato crops - and it should be said that his criticisms and questions are both reasonable and well-explained. However, he then looks to one "organic" potato farmer and accepts every damn thing that this potato farmer says, what is quite literally the farmer's sales pitch, at face value without any meaningful critical examination, and when discussing crop yields he even "fails" (I suspect intentionally, based on the rest of the book) to ask such basic questions as whether or not the yields the farmer describes are seasonal or yearly yields - this point is, in fact, left very vague in the text. So, while he is rightfully critical of one technology, he is fawningly obseqious to the user of another, even though there are many legitimate technical and ethical concerns with organic farming methods. He concludes the chapter by describing how he planted some Monsanto potatoes, and then threw them away without eating them...but he never actually provides a coherent, well-articulated reason for not eating them, he just sort of implies that they are somehow evil and dangerous without explicitly saying so or providing any justification.
And, so, I find myself woefully unimpressed by the majority of anti-GMO claims. There are legitimate issues with any technology, genetic engineering included, and these issue need to be discussed. However, making false, misleading statements and relying on emotional appeal does nothing but muddy the waters and distract from real concerns. If people stated that they wanted the labeling done because they are concerned about the potential legal issue, or ethical concerns, or even because they just don't like big corporations (in which case, why are they buying food from a place large enough to support labeling to begin with?), then I might actually support it rather than being indifferent to it. But given that it is part of an on-going tendency towards sloppy thinking, frequent conspiracy-mongering, and constant dishonesty, I find that I can't support it - not because I find the notion of labeling unreasonable, but because I distrust the motivation behind it.
P.S. I was at a party some years back, when a fairly typical 30-something white affluent urbanite from San Francisco (where the party was held) asked me if I had heard about Michael Pollan. I explained that I had, and that when I actually went and researched many of the claims ubiquitous in his writing, I routinely found him to be misleading and dishonest, more a propagandist than an educator. She then went on about how, while he might make mistakes (umm, lady, when it's consistent even after he has been corrected by legitimate authorities, it ain't mistakes, it's intentional lies and distortion), he was a net good. She then went about trying to explain crop rotation to me - and given as how I am A) educated, B) know a fair bit about how humans dealt with sustenance in the past, and B) grew up and spent my formative years in an agricultural community and not (like her) San Francisco, I found myself having to routinely correct her. While she accepted the corrections, she nonetheless condescendingly kept going on about how she understood so much more about agriculture than I did while simultaneously proving that she knew next to nothing about the subject. I had to resist the urge to clobber her with the loaf of tofu that, no joke, was sitting on the counter next to my elbow.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Ancient Aliens - the Test!
The History Channel needs its ass kicked
So, you may have heard of the show Ancient Aliens. It is on the History Channel and is basically the latest iteration of the old bullshit that alleges that the various ancient achievements of humanity couldn't have possibly been accomplished by, well, humans, and therefore it must have been aliens!
You can probably guess my reaction to this proposition.
However, like so much of the rot that's on allegedly educational television, I just sort of ignored it.
Until about a year ago.
I don't know what the hell happened, but around December 2010/January 2011, a frighteningly large number of the people that I know and encounter began to watch this damn show. Not just watch it, but began to take it at least slightly seriously, as evidenced by the fact that I now have to routinely explain to people why producer/on-screen personality Giorgio Tsoukalos is, perhaps, not the best source for information regarding Earth's past.
On a fairly regular basis, both family members and friends contact me, by phone, or email, or just walk up and start talking to me, wanting to know about the claim that the ancient King Hamburgular of southern Podunkistan was actually a reptoid alien based on the artistic representations of him as a snake found on friezes in his palace. I then have to explain that the friezes in question actually show King Hamburgalar's zoo, and the reason why the images look like snakes is because they are, rather clearly, images of snakes. If the person is at my home or visiting my office, I then pull out a book on southern Podunkistan archaeology in order to prove my point. The person with whom I am speaking will then assert that they never really believed it, but thought it was a fun idea, and wanted to ask. But, of course, they began the conversation insinuating that they find the claim plausible, even if they didn't completely buy it.
A week later, someone, often the same person (there's a rotating cast of around seven of them) will come to me with the latest lame-brained claim from Giorgio Tsoukalos and the Ancient Aliens swarm. And the process repeats.
Giorgio Tsoukalos. Gaze into the hair of madness!
I can not, for the life of me, figure out why otherwise intelligent people think that this guy has any credibility. Leaving aside the fact that he has a surname that sounds like a Yiddish slang word for one's posterior, and that he looks like he failed to learn Don King's hair gel secrets, there's the fact that Mr. Tsoukalos never met a specious claim or false "fact" that he didn't like. This guy has been a fixture on pseudo-science and pseudo-history shows on Discovery and the History Channel for years, and he's never made a damn lick of sense. He always goes for whatever outrageous claim is made, no matter how clearly stupid it is, and will insist that "anyone who is open-minded" has to accept his claims, while managing to show himself to be so closed-minded that he is ready to ignore the mountains of evidence showing himself to be full of bovine feces. On my list of trustworthy people, Tsoukalis ranks just above Biblical creationists and just below used car salesmen in plaid jackets.
Nonetheless, I have enough interactions with people who don't know how to identify someone who's pre-frontal cortex is clearly being devoured by his own hair that I have developed something of a formula for talking to people about this show. In fact, I think that I can convert that formula into a simple questionnaire, available for anyone to use:
1. Is the culture depicted as influenced by aliens non-European?*
2. At what point in the episode did someone insist that "establishment" archaeologists are "hiding the truth" or "too cowardly to face the evidence?" How many times was this assertion repeated after the initial statement?
3. Did the person making the statement also make statements indicating their ignorance of the fact that an "establishment" archaeologist can get more grant money and positive attention actually for proving a radical theory than by trying to crush it?
3. Are the aliens said to be humanoid or reptilian? Are they extremely tall, or quite squat?
4. What best describes the shape of the alien spaceship: A) Dinner Plate; B) Cigar; C) Arrowhead; D) Hamburger?
5. How often did the presenter or "experts" on the show make unverifiable claims? A) Once per ten minutes; B) Two-to-four times per ten minutes; C) Five or more times per ten minutes; D) No actually verifiable claim was made during the episode - or, all claims made were unverifiable.
6. Please circle each of the following items that it is claimed in this episode was part of the ancient knowledge that is being covered up by archaeologists:
Super Technology
Not-so-super technology that nonetheless was too advanced
for these primitive savages to have had without alien
intervention
Magic
The Existence of the Soul
The "True extraterrestrial" origins of humanity
Astronomical knowledge only recently re-learned by NASA
Astronomical knowledge still unknown to NASA
Why people ever thought that Jim Carrey was funny
Super healing (which nonetheless somehow did not raise the average life expectancy
above the age of 35)
7a. How many times during the course of the episode did the "experts" compare themselves to (or compare their claims to the theories of) either Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, or Galileo?
7b. If they compared themselves to Isaac Newton, did they also compare themselves to Isaac Hayes? If not, why not?
8a. How many times per episode did somebody state that they would easily give up their "ancient alien" claim if only there were another explanation available?
8b. How much video was then given over to that individual going to a library, or even doing a Wikipedia search, to look up other possible, non-alien, explanations?
9. Did anyone in the episode insist that "establishment" archaeologists refuse to take their claims seriously, and then appear later in the episode stating that they were unwilling to look at the work of the "establishment" archaeologists?**
10. Was quantum physics at any point mentioned as an explanation for anything in the episode?
Now, fill out this questionairre for each episode watched. Keep the questionairres, and once you have seen ten episodes, begin looking for patterns. If that doesn't convince you of the level of bullshit that the Ancient Aliens crew likes to produce, you may want to consider upping your medication dosages.
*This is important, as it is typically not white people who are accused of being incapable of developing civilization/technology/non-stick pan coating. If the alien-influenced culture is European, the claim is still delusional, but at least it's not racist.
**Just pointing this out - if you insist that everyone else look at your work and take it seriously, but you refuse to look at the work of the professional and trained people who have dedicated their lives to this, then you are a tool and a hypotcrite.
So, you may have heard of the show Ancient Aliens. It is on the History Channel and is basically the latest iteration of the old bullshit that alleges that the various ancient achievements of humanity couldn't have possibly been accomplished by, well, humans, and therefore it must have been aliens!
You can probably guess my reaction to this proposition.
However, like so much of the rot that's on allegedly educational television, I just sort of ignored it.
Until about a year ago.
I don't know what the hell happened, but around December 2010/January 2011, a frighteningly large number of the people that I know and encounter began to watch this damn show. Not just watch it, but began to take it at least slightly seriously, as evidenced by the fact that I now have to routinely explain to people why producer/on-screen personality Giorgio Tsoukalos is, perhaps, not the best source for information regarding Earth's past.
On a fairly regular basis, both family members and friends contact me, by phone, or email, or just walk up and start talking to me, wanting to know about the claim that the ancient King Hamburgular of southern Podunkistan was actually a reptoid alien based on the artistic representations of him as a snake found on friezes in his palace. I then have to explain that the friezes in question actually show King Hamburgalar's zoo, and the reason why the images look like snakes is because they are, rather clearly, images of snakes. If the person is at my home or visiting my office, I then pull out a book on southern Podunkistan archaeology in order to prove my point. The person with whom I am speaking will then assert that they never really believed it, but thought it was a fun idea, and wanted to ask. But, of course, they began the conversation insinuating that they find the claim plausible, even if they didn't completely buy it.
A week later, someone, often the same person (there's a rotating cast of around seven of them) will come to me with the latest lame-brained claim from Giorgio Tsoukalos and the Ancient Aliens swarm. And the process repeats.
Giorgio Tsoukalos. Gaze into the hair of madness!
I can not, for the life of me, figure out why otherwise intelligent people think that this guy has any credibility. Leaving aside the fact that he has a surname that sounds like a Yiddish slang word for one's posterior, and that he looks like he failed to learn Don King's hair gel secrets, there's the fact that Mr. Tsoukalos never met a specious claim or false "fact" that he didn't like. This guy has been a fixture on pseudo-science and pseudo-history shows on Discovery and the History Channel for years, and he's never made a damn lick of sense. He always goes for whatever outrageous claim is made, no matter how clearly stupid it is, and will insist that "anyone who is open-minded" has to accept his claims, while managing to show himself to be so closed-minded that he is ready to ignore the mountains of evidence showing himself to be full of bovine feces. On my list of trustworthy people, Tsoukalis ranks just above Biblical creationists and just below used car salesmen in plaid jackets.
Nonetheless, I have enough interactions with people who don't know how to identify someone who's pre-frontal cortex is clearly being devoured by his own hair that I have developed something of a formula for talking to people about this show. In fact, I think that I can convert that formula into a simple questionnaire, available for anyone to use:
1. Is the culture depicted as influenced by aliens non-European?*
2. At what point in the episode did someone insist that "establishment" archaeologists are "hiding the truth" or "too cowardly to face the evidence?" How many times was this assertion repeated after the initial statement?
3. Did the person making the statement also make statements indicating their ignorance of the fact that an "establishment" archaeologist can get more grant money and positive attention actually for proving a radical theory than by trying to crush it?
3. Are the aliens said to be humanoid or reptilian? Are they extremely tall, or quite squat?
4. What best describes the shape of the alien spaceship: A) Dinner Plate; B) Cigar; C) Arrowhead; D) Hamburger?
5. How often did the presenter or "experts" on the show make unverifiable claims? A) Once per ten minutes; B) Two-to-four times per ten minutes; C) Five or more times per ten minutes; D) No actually verifiable claim was made during the episode - or, all claims made were unverifiable.
6. Please circle each of the following items that it is claimed in this episode was part of the ancient knowledge that is being covered up by archaeologists:
Super Technology
Not-so-super technology that nonetheless was too advanced
for these primitive savages to have had without alien
intervention
Magic
The Existence of the Soul
The "True extraterrestrial" origins of humanity
Astronomical knowledge only recently re-learned by NASA
Astronomical knowledge still unknown to NASA
Why people ever thought that Jim Carrey was funny
Super healing (which nonetheless somehow did not raise the average life expectancy
above the age of 35)
7a. How many times during the course of the episode did the "experts" compare themselves to (or compare their claims to the theories of) either Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, or Galileo?
7b. If they compared themselves to Isaac Newton, did they also compare themselves to Isaac Hayes? If not, why not?
8a. How many times per episode did somebody state that they would easily give up their "ancient alien" claim if only there were another explanation available?
8b. How much video was then given over to that individual going to a library, or even doing a Wikipedia search, to look up other possible, non-alien, explanations?
9. Did anyone in the episode insist that "establishment" archaeologists refuse to take their claims seriously, and then appear later in the episode stating that they were unwilling to look at the work of the "establishment" archaeologists?**
10. Was quantum physics at any point mentioned as an explanation for anything in the episode?
Now, fill out this questionairre for each episode watched. Keep the questionairres, and once you have seen ten episodes, begin looking for patterns. If that doesn't convince you of the level of bullshit that the Ancient Aliens crew likes to produce, you may want to consider upping your medication dosages.
*This is important, as it is typically not white people who are accused of being incapable of developing civilization/technology/non-stick pan coating. If the alien-influenced culture is European, the claim is still delusional, but at least it's not racist.
**Just pointing this out - if you insist that everyone else look at your work and take it seriously, but you refuse to look at the work of the professional and trained people who have dedicated their lives to this, then you are a tool and a hypotcrite.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Meanwhile, in an Indiana Jones Movie...
A few minutes ago, I was called over to the office of one of the other archaeologists who works for my company. A woman was sitting in his extra chair while he stood over his desk staring down at three items spread out on it: a large ovoid chunk of sandstone with a crude face carved into it and a groove carved along the backside (as if it were intended to be bound by rope with the face hidden from view), a pestle carved from an unknown stone* with a strange ridge pattern on the handle, and a soapstone carving of a crouching man with his hands clenched at his chest. My boss took photos (which I don't currently have access to, but I will try to get them), and we both asked her questions. We couldn't say much about the artifacts, but they did appear to be consistent in design and materials with Aztec sculpture.
Seems that the objects were given to her by an elderly Mexican woman who had once lived on a large estate in Mexico. However, our visitor's grasp of Spanish coupled with the donor's grasp of English were insufficient to allow a more detailed description of the item's provenance to be gained.
So, we have sent the photos on to a few people we know who are experts in Aztec and Meso-American archaeology, and we will see what comes of this.
Still, this seems like the sort of thing that belongs in an adventure movie. A woman (who, naturally, was a redhead dressed all in black) comes by our office asking out opinion about three mysterious artifacts that came to her by way of a convoluted route, and she can't find information on what they are or what, if anything, they mean. I spend alot of time trying to disabuse people of the notion that my job in any way resembles and Indiana Jones story...and then this happens.
Now we're just waiting for some guy in a trench coat who speaks with a vaguely European accent to come by the office, threateningly asking if we know the whereabouts of these artifacts.
And, of course it has been pointed out to me that this occurred in 2012, no doubt meaning that these items are in some way connected to the impending Mayan apocalypse, despite the fact that they are more likely Aztec.
*As archaeologists are not geologists, this is, it must be said, not an unusual description. So, when you hear someone talk about a "mysterious artifact of unknown material", remember that the "unknown material" part is usually an admission of the archaeologist's ignorance, and not a convincing statement about the allegedly mysterious nature of the item.
Seems that the objects were given to her by an elderly Mexican woman who had once lived on a large estate in Mexico. However, our visitor's grasp of Spanish coupled with the donor's grasp of English were insufficient to allow a more detailed description of the item's provenance to be gained.
So, we have sent the photos on to a few people we know who are experts in Aztec and Meso-American archaeology, and we will see what comes of this.
Still, this seems like the sort of thing that belongs in an adventure movie. A woman (who, naturally, was a redhead dressed all in black) comes by our office asking out opinion about three mysterious artifacts that came to her by way of a convoluted route, and she can't find information on what they are or what, if anything, they mean. I spend alot of time trying to disabuse people of the notion that my job in any way resembles and Indiana Jones story...and then this happens.
Now we're just waiting for some guy in a trench coat who speaks with a vaguely European accent to come by the office, threateningly asking if we know the whereabouts of these artifacts.
And, of course it has been pointed out to me that this occurred in 2012, no doubt meaning that these items are in some way connected to the impending Mayan apocalypse, despite the fact that they are more likely Aztec.
*As archaeologists are not geologists, this is, it must be said, not an unusual description. So, when you hear someone talk about a "mysterious artifact of unknown material", remember that the "unknown material" part is usually an admission of the archaeologist's ignorance, and not a convincing statement about the allegedly mysterious nature of the item.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Computers, Encyclopedias, and Status
As a graduate student, I read an article about a small, isolated fishing village in southeast Asia, where changes to the world's economy brought a relative increase in local wealth. What did many of the fishermen in this village do with their new-found money? they bought televisions. This seems straightforward enough to most of us - the village was isolated, and the purchase of a television would allow the villagers to hear about life in the outside world, to become more connected to events outside of their small town.
Unfortunately, there was no electricity to power the televisions. Now, the reaction to most people who hear of this is something along the lines of "wow, those foolish third-world fishermen! Buying televisions that they can't use! What rubes!" In fact, I had a similar reaction when I had read that part of the article. The reason for this reaction, though, is that those of us who live in a wired world where television, radio, and the internet are ubiqituos fail to grasp and aspect of life in this village that I suspect many of our grandparents and great-grandparents might have been in a better position to understand. That the television wouldn't work without electricity was beside the point. The televisions were status objects - ownership of them signaled to other villagers that the person with the television had both sufficient funds to purchase a television and that they were, in this way, more like the higher-status people in the more affluent parts of the world. The purchase of the television wasn't about being able to watch it, it was about being perceived as the sort of person who owns such a thing. The point wasn't to watch television programs, but rather to gain the status inherent in the ownership of the television.
Viewed in this way, the behavior of the villagers ceases to be a story of naive hicks who don't know nuthin' 'bout this here 'lectricity, and becomes the more accurate story of people living in a community where social status is vitally important and maintained in part through the ownership of goods that signal status.
And lest you think that this is a tendency relegated to villages in southeast Asia, consider the mania that we as a culture have over useless crap and sub-optimal materials that have a particular designer label, political affiliation or meaning, or are associated with a high-status individual or lifestyle (status here not necessarily meaning wealth or socio-economic standing, but rather a lifestyle to which members of a group or sub-culture aspire). We may not buy televisions for places that are off-the-grid, but we engage in the same sorts of materials. Even groups that pride themselves on throwing off the shackles of consumer culture engage in it. Labels such as "organic", "free range", "natural", "spiritual", and "holistic" have often dubious meanings, but are applied to products and services in order to appeal to the desire for in-group status of people of a progressive political bent just as brand names such as "BMW" and "Versace" appeal to the more traditionally status conscious. At times it's not even a label, as such, but rather an association: hemp as opposed to cotton because of the political associations of a hemp purchase, for example*. And of course the Right-wing crowd, traditionally religious people, the Skeptic movement, etc. all have their own version. The motivation to purchase many items or services is motivated less than a need for that item or service or even the perceived good of doing so (in many cases, the purchase may even be counter-productive if actually analyzed) than we are by the desire to be seen by others (and even see ourselves) as the "type of person who buys/uses/likes" the thing in question. As such, we are not so different from the villagers purchasing unusable televisions.
I thought about this today as I read this article on the demise of Encyclopedia Britannica's print edition. While many people are either praising or demonizing this as a triumph of Wikipedia's "open source" model vs. Britannica's so-called "closed source" approach, the article makes a pretty compelling case that this has far more to do with the use of material goods to build and maintain status (my words, not the authors) than it does with any sort of technical or social aspect of Wikipedia.
When I was a kid, by which I mean from the time I was born until I graduated from high school, computers were not ubiquitous. Most people that I knew did not own a computer, as they were seen as being of little practical use for most people up until I was a teenager, and even then the internet didn't become a tool of widespread common use until I was in my twenties. Thinking back, when I was in high school, those of us with computers in our home were small in number, and our parents usually viewed the computer as an educational investment - though they were often unclear as to how exactly it was supposed to aid in our educations. However, they wished to be seen as the sorts of people who would invest in their children's education, and as such would buy the trappings of such a thing even if they didn't understand precisely how it was supposed to help us. By contrast, the encyclopedia had long been seen as an investment in education (though there is research from the publishers themselves that indicates that the books were rarely opened and my own experience is that many people weren't quite clear how, precisely, to use them as reference tools) and as such were common in households without computers, and even most of those with them, provided that the adults of the household wanted to see themselves and be seen by others as the sort of people who invested in the children's education..
In the time since then, computers have become more widespread, and better understood. Nowadays, it's a rare parent who doesn't have some understanding of how a computer can contribute to their child's education, making the purchase of a computer a widely agreed upon educational investment, meaning that someone wanting to be seen as the sort of person who makes such an investment can buy the tools that actually and clearly achieve this end.
In the end, the computer may have won because it conveys the status that a set of encyclopedias once did, but simultaneously also is an tool that people know how to use and, importantly, want to use in a way that perhaps they did not want to use an encyclopedia..
*Yes, I know, there are applications for which hemp is ideally suited. However, it is abundantly clear that many, perhaps the majority of, hemp purchasers buy the products because they are "making a statement", and gaining status within their peer group, rather than for practical reasons.
Unfortunately, there was no electricity to power the televisions. Now, the reaction to most people who hear of this is something along the lines of "wow, those foolish third-world fishermen! Buying televisions that they can't use! What rubes!" In fact, I had a similar reaction when I had read that part of the article. The reason for this reaction, though, is that those of us who live in a wired world where television, radio, and the internet are ubiqituos fail to grasp and aspect of life in this village that I suspect many of our grandparents and great-grandparents might have been in a better position to understand. That the television wouldn't work without electricity was beside the point. The televisions were status objects - ownership of them signaled to other villagers that the person with the television had both sufficient funds to purchase a television and that they were, in this way, more like the higher-status people in the more affluent parts of the world. The purchase of the television wasn't about being able to watch it, it was about being perceived as the sort of person who owns such a thing. The point wasn't to watch television programs, but rather to gain the status inherent in the ownership of the television.
Viewed in this way, the behavior of the villagers ceases to be a story of naive hicks who don't know nuthin' 'bout this here 'lectricity, and becomes the more accurate story of people living in a community where social status is vitally important and maintained in part through the ownership of goods that signal status.
And lest you think that this is a tendency relegated to villages in southeast Asia, consider the mania that we as a culture have over useless crap and sub-optimal materials that have a particular designer label, political affiliation or meaning, or are associated with a high-status individual or lifestyle (status here not necessarily meaning wealth or socio-economic standing, but rather a lifestyle to which members of a group or sub-culture aspire). We may not buy televisions for places that are off-the-grid, but we engage in the same sorts of materials. Even groups that pride themselves on throwing off the shackles of consumer culture engage in it. Labels such as "organic", "free range", "natural", "spiritual", and "holistic" have often dubious meanings, but are applied to products and services in order to appeal to the desire for in-group status of people of a progressive political bent just as brand names such as "BMW" and "Versace" appeal to the more traditionally status conscious. At times it's not even a label, as such, but rather an association: hemp as opposed to cotton because of the political associations of a hemp purchase, for example*. And of course the Right-wing crowd, traditionally religious people, the Skeptic movement, etc. all have their own version. The motivation to purchase many items or services is motivated less than a need for that item or service or even the perceived good of doing so (in many cases, the purchase may even be counter-productive if actually analyzed) than we are by the desire to be seen by others (and even see ourselves) as the "type of person who buys/uses/likes" the thing in question. As such, we are not so different from the villagers purchasing unusable televisions.
I thought about this today as I read this article on the demise of Encyclopedia Britannica's print edition. While many people are either praising or demonizing this as a triumph of Wikipedia's "open source" model vs. Britannica's so-called "closed source" approach, the article makes a pretty compelling case that this has far more to do with the use of material goods to build and maintain status (my words, not the authors) than it does with any sort of technical or social aspect of Wikipedia.
When I was a kid, by which I mean from the time I was born until I graduated from high school, computers were not ubiquitous. Most people that I knew did not own a computer, as they were seen as being of little practical use for most people up until I was a teenager, and even then the internet didn't become a tool of widespread common use until I was in my twenties. Thinking back, when I was in high school, those of us with computers in our home were small in number, and our parents usually viewed the computer as an educational investment - though they were often unclear as to how exactly it was supposed to aid in our educations. However, they wished to be seen as the sorts of people who would invest in their children's education, and as such would buy the trappings of such a thing even if they didn't understand precisely how it was supposed to help us. By contrast, the encyclopedia had long been seen as an investment in education (though there is research from the publishers themselves that indicates that the books were rarely opened and my own experience is that many people weren't quite clear how, precisely, to use them as reference tools) and as such were common in households without computers, and even most of those with them, provided that the adults of the household wanted to see themselves and be seen by others as the sort of people who invested in the children's education..
In the time since then, computers have become more widespread, and better understood. Nowadays, it's a rare parent who doesn't have some understanding of how a computer can contribute to their child's education, making the purchase of a computer a widely agreed upon educational investment, meaning that someone wanting to be seen as the sort of person who makes such an investment can buy the tools that actually and clearly achieve this end.
In the end, the computer may have won because it conveys the status that a set of encyclopedias once did, but simultaneously also is an tool that people know how to use and, importantly, want to use in a way that perhaps they did not want to use an encyclopedia..
*Yes, I know, there are applications for which hemp is ideally suited. However, it is abundantly clear that many, perhaps the majority of, hemp purchasers buy the products because they are "making a statement", and gaining status within their peer group, rather than for practical reasons.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Ignorant Savage Miners!
Some years back, I witnessed a discussion that contained a rather bizarre form of racism, and it's the sort of thing that I have not really been able to get out of my head since.
I was working on a project in the Sierra Nevadas, near the heart of the Gold Rush territory, and amongst the historic features that we were having to evaluate were a set of mining ditches. Mining ditches, for those unaware, are, just as the name implies, ditches dug into the ground (often on the slopes of hills and mountains) to transport water for the purposes of running sluices and later for using gravity to pressurize water used in hydrologic strip mining. In the Sierra Nevada, the mountainous terrain meant that many systems contained both ditches that run downhill and along the slopes and flumes that crossed drainages, gaps, and often were affixed to the sides of particularly steep mountains.
For this project, we held regular meetings with representatives from the Native American organizations that hisotrically lived in the area. For the most part these meetings were interesting and yielded good results. But sometimes very odd things came of them.
In on particular meeting, talk turned to the Gold Rush-era sites. The Native American representatives had typically shown little interest in these sites, but on this day they wanted to discuss them in-depth. When we got to a discussion of the mining ditches, one of the representatives stated "well, these ditches all follow ones used by the Indians" When asked why she had made this claim, her response was "well, they have to have. I mean, those miners didn't have engineers to build the ditches, so they had to follow the routes put there by the Indians!" She was then asked if she knew of any such ditches being made by the native peoples of the area, and what the ditches were used for, and she responded that she didn't know of anything of the sort, but reiterated that they must have existed because otherwise these miners wouldn't have had anything to follow and they wouldn't have been able to make their ditches.
Historically, the true accomplishments of Native Americans have often been denied by citing the alleged engineering knowledge necessary to build the earthworks of the midwest and southeast, or the pyramids and cities in Central America and South America, or the amazing cliff dwellings of the southwest...and then denying that the Native Americans had any such knowledge. Then, naturally, claims about various people from all over the world who "clearly colonized the Americas" were floated, each one pointing out that "a savage couldn't have constructed these amazing structures!" Of course, the native peoples did build these things, and were able to develop the technical know-how necessary to do so. It was nothing but racism that led people to assume otherwise.
And here I was, with a Native American representative telling me that a group of 19th century miners must have copied ditches from the Native Americans because they lacked the technical knowledge necessary to build them. This buried the needle on my irony meter, and when I returned home I had to find a repair shop to recalibrate it.
Some of the mining ditches are spectacular feats of engineering, to be certain. And most of these truly spectacular ones were, in fact, designed by engineers who were hired by the firms that owned the giant mining companies that characterize later gold mining in the Sierra Nevadas. Many of the ditches, though, were very simple hand-dug channels that flowed downhill - I could build one, and I am no engineer. The in-between ones, the ones that were impressive but didn't scale cliffs or require miles and miles of complex scaffolding to keep them aloft? Well, those ones would require a certain amount of know-how, and yes, a native person could gain that known-how through trial-and-error and through keen observation. A farmer from, say, the east coast of the United States who has had to deal with moving water for irrigation would come with that know-how based on past experience.
It is entirely possible that the native peoples of the area did construct some ditches for their own purposes prior to the Gold Rush. I can think of a few potential uses for such constructs, and they certainly had the degree of technical sophistication necessary to do so. But the idea that the miners had to occupy native ditches because they were too stupid or ignorant to create their own? That's just weird.
I was working on a project in the Sierra Nevadas, near the heart of the Gold Rush territory, and amongst the historic features that we were having to evaluate were a set of mining ditches. Mining ditches, for those unaware, are, just as the name implies, ditches dug into the ground (often on the slopes of hills and mountains) to transport water for the purposes of running sluices and later for using gravity to pressurize water used in hydrologic strip mining. In the Sierra Nevada, the mountainous terrain meant that many systems contained both ditches that run downhill and along the slopes and flumes that crossed drainages, gaps, and often were affixed to the sides of particularly steep mountains.
For this project, we held regular meetings with representatives from the Native American organizations that hisotrically lived in the area. For the most part these meetings were interesting and yielded good results. But sometimes very odd things came of them.
In on particular meeting, talk turned to the Gold Rush-era sites. The Native American representatives had typically shown little interest in these sites, but on this day they wanted to discuss them in-depth. When we got to a discussion of the mining ditches, one of the representatives stated "well, these ditches all follow ones used by the Indians" When asked why she had made this claim, her response was "well, they have to have. I mean, those miners didn't have engineers to build the ditches, so they had to follow the routes put there by the Indians!" She was then asked if she knew of any such ditches being made by the native peoples of the area, and what the ditches were used for, and she responded that she didn't know of anything of the sort, but reiterated that they must have existed because otherwise these miners wouldn't have had anything to follow and they wouldn't have been able to make their ditches.
Historically, the true accomplishments of Native Americans have often been denied by citing the alleged engineering knowledge necessary to build the earthworks of the midwest and southeast, or the pyramids and cities in Central America and South America, or the amazing cliff dwellings of the southwest...and then denying that the Native Americans had any such knowledge. Then, naturally, claims about various people from all over the world who "clearly colonized the Americas" were floated, each one pointing out that "a savage couldn't have constructed these amazing structures!" Of course, the native peoples did build these things, and were able to develop the technical know-how necessary to do so. It was nothing but racism that led people to assume otherwise.
And here I was, with a Native American representative telling me that a group of 19th century miners must have copied ditches from the Native Americans because they lacked the technical knowledge necessary to build them. This buried the needle on my irony meter, and when I returned home I had to find a repair shop to recalibrate it.
Some of the mining ditches are spectacular feats of engineering, to be certain. And most of these truly spectacular ones were, in fact, designed by engineers who were hired by the firms that owned the giant mining companies that characterize later gold mining in the Sierra Nevadas. Many of the ditches, though, were very simple hand-dug channels that flowed downhill - I could build one, and I am no engineer. The in-between ones, the ones that were impressive but didn't scale cliffs or require miles and miles of complex scaffolding to keep them aloft? Well, those ones would require a certain amount of know-how, and yes, a native person could gain that known-how through trial-and-error and through keen observation. A farmer from, say, the east coast of the United States who has had to deal with moving water for irrigation would come with that know-how based on past experience.
It is entirely possible that the native peoples of the area did construct some ditches for their own purposes prior to the Gold Rush. I can think of a few potential uses for such constructs, and they certainly had the degree of technical sophistication necessary to do so. But the idea that the miners had to occupy native ditches because they were too stupid or ignorant to create their own? That's just weird.
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