Complete Sentence Controversy

From 60 Minutes, Andy Borowitz

Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.

Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS's 60 Minutes on Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

Continued here at the Huffington Post.

This would be funny if it weren't so true.

Ropi Survives Pálotas

For months now, Ropi, an 18 year old high school student in Budapest, has been blogging about the agony of preparing to dance the Pálotas, a traditional Hungarian dance, at a school performance. The tales of stepping on his partner's feet have been tucked in between accounts of ancient Roman history, scores on math tests, his thoughts about his somewhat cool personality and what others say about it, and what he will do when he gets out of school. It's a blog I follow regularly because it is so charmingly mixes maturity well beyond his 18 years with honest, age appropriate concerns about life, girls, parents, and the future. The look of his blog changes too, reflecting his own experimenting with who he is and could be.

So I was delighted when he posted this video of the dance. There is something very universal, in 2008, of a school dance in a decorated gymnasium, with parents taking shaky videos of their kids' performances. (Yes, there are places where kids don't even go to school, let alone have video cameras, but there are also many places where they do.) Ropi is the tallest kid in his class and he's wearing blue. I think he's right there in the beginning with his back to us.

Fluorescent Bulbs - Dimmers and Mercury

Back in April 2007 I did a brief post on moving to fluorescent light bulbs. We've been changing to the fluorescent bulbs as the old ones burn out. But the one over our kitchen table burned out pretty fast. I thought they were supposed to last longer. Well, I put in a new new. Several days later as I was sitting at the table, there was a poof sound and the light went out.



I mentioned this to someone who does maintenance stuff and it came out that most fluorescent light bulbs DO NOT work with dimmer switches. So I started looking for fluorescents that are ok for dimmer switches. Costco didn't have them. Fred Meyer didn't have them. I called Lowe's. They had them. But I couldn't find them. A very nice sales woman was sure she had seen them, but she didn't seem to have any more knowledge about where they were than I did. She asked another salesperson who said they were "right here" but a women had bought them all and was headed to Wasilla to buy all the ones they had.

I thought that a bit weird, but who was I to question him. The nice saleswoman took me to the info counter where the lady shrugged her shoulders. "I'll look it up in the computer for you if you have a few minutes" the nice salesperson said. I wandered to
the garden shop and when I came back with some cyclamen (pink) and kalenchoe (yellow,) she was waiting for me just around the corner from where we were looking. The whole end of the shelf was dimmable fluorescents.

But there was one more issue. These things have mercury and you aren't supposed to just throw them out. So what do you do? As I was researching this, I also was reminded that batteries have mercury too. From a Lawrence, Kansas recycling site:

Developing awareness of household batteries and their current use is essential to understanding the importance of this collection program. The following list provides facts about battery use and its impact on our solid waste stream:

• 2.5 billion dry cell batteries are sold in the US each year
• An estimated 530,000 pounds of batteries require disposal daily
• Americans own over 900 million battery operated devices
• The average household batteries accounted for 89% of the mercury in the municipal solid waste stream
• Alkaline and carbon-zinc batteries are the most common types of batteries consumed, comprising 90-93% of all batteries in the residential waste stream
• In a recent EPA study, nickel-cadmium (Ni-Cd) rechargeable batteries were found to contribute over 50% of the cadmium in the waste stream

An Anchorage Daily News online post - is this on the recycling and renewables blog? can't tell for sure - from March 2008 written by Kevin Harun says:

Improper disposal of fluorescent lamps includes discarding them in the trash and intentional crushing. Improper disposal of fluorescent lights may eventually make its way into soils and water bodies. When the lamp is crushed, the mercury expels into the air and may contaminate the surrounding area.

If a lamp is crushed, intentionally or unintentionally, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) strongly recommends that people present leave the area for at least 15 minutes.

Proper disposal of fluorescent lamps is as follows: Once the lamp is removed, place the lamp in original packaging or a long cardboard box. Do no tape the lamps together. Store them in a dry place.

Once you are ready to dispose of them, bring them to Total Reclaim, Inc in the Huffman Business Park. Total Reclaim, Inc. will charge 18 cents per linear foot for them to be properly disposed of. Total Reclaim may be reached by calling 561-0544.
Types of lamps to look out for:
• Fluorescent – Straight, circular, or U-tubes
• High Intensity Discharge (HID) lamps
• “Green Tip” or “low mercury” lamps
• Neon lamps, and
• Any other lamps that may contain mercury, lead, and high pressure sodium.

What's wrong with this solution? It gives people these personal costs:
a. storing their used bulbs
b. taking them to the Huffman Business Park
c. paying someone to take your bulbs
for basically communal gain
a. reducing mercury (and other) contamination

The Municipality is relying on people's concern for the public good to do the right thing. Certainly, there are people who will do this. But all the costs are personal and the rewards are communal- keeping mercury out of the landfill. OK, I guess knowing you did something good for the community for some people is a personal reward.

But it's so much easier to just dump the bulb into your garbage bag and have Solid Waste people pick it up.

This is a case of the bulb companies being inefficient - using economic terms - because their product has externalities (polluting the environment) that we have to pay for which they don't have to consider in their costs. (An externality is a cost that is passed on to the community and does not show up in the cost or price of the item, so the manufacturer makes a profit by having everyone else subsidize the costs of cleaning-up his garbage. This is one of the problems with the market that even classical economists identify.)

So ideally, the manufacturers find a way to make an efficient light bulb without using mercury or other toxic materials. But until that day, they should be charged a recycling fee high enough to recover the mercury in the bulbs. It could be used by the Municipality to pay people to bring in their old light bulbs and perhaps a little bonus to make it worth their while to drive to the recycle place. In communities with poor folk, the collection of such recyclables with return deposits (like aluminum cans) is often done by the poor who can raise money this way and clean the environment.

So, I now have a dimmable fluorescent light bulb ($11 - yikes!) and when I'm done with it, I get to pay someone to take it off my hands.

Claude Lévi-Strauss One Hundredth Birthday - Post 3: What Others are Saying

Today I'm going to give you glimpses of what others - people who know this topic much better than I - are saying about Claude Lévi Strauss' 100th birthday. [All the Lévi-Strauss Birthday posts are here.] In each case you are only getting a small portion of what they have written. You can read the rest by following the links. These are in the order that I found them.

From Robert K. Blechman at Blogcritics - Sci/Tech

Beyond his well-known scholarly accomplishments, I think I can say without fear of contradiction that Professor Lévi-Strauss' personal longevity is a testament to the positive benefits of the pursuit of structural anthropology on long life and good health. Just carrying around his four-volume, 2200 page oeuvre, "Mythologiques" will improve your muscle tone and cardiovascular capacity...

Some critics get hung up on discrepancies within the structural methodology which Lévi-Strauss used to explain mythology, totemic systems and kinship systems. Other criticism focuses on how a particular interpretation doesn't fit the recorded ethnography for a culture. While the methodology itself, or its particular application may be subject to review and revision, what is important is that Lévi-Strauss demonstrated that there is a universality to the human mind, and given sufficient symbolic material, all peoples -- whether within an oral culture, a literate culture or our post-literate culture — still retain a commonality which can be explored through our symbol systems and perhaps understood in terms of the underlying structures transmitted via the stories told.

Our own "modern" culture also has a mythic "score," but being part of it, it is difficult for us to see. The distinctions between "raw" vs. "cooked," "nature" vs. "culture" and "modern" vs. "primitive" that Lévi-Strauss finds in his studies of North and South America native populations drive the narratives, beliefs and social customs of 21st century populations as well. [continue here.]

From Patrick Wilcken at the Times [London] Literary Supplement: [Note - this looks like the really authoritative piece to read]

The century of Claude Lévi-Strauss: How the great anthropologist, now approaching his 100th birthday, has earned a place in the prestigious Pléiade library

Patrick Wilcken

In 1938, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss drove a mule train up a derelict telegraph line, which wound its way across the scrublands of Mato Grosso state in Brazil. He headed an ethnographic team conducting fieldwork among the semi-nomadic Nambikwara who roamed the plains through the dry season. Photographs from the journey look dated even for their era. Men in pith helmets mingling with virtually naked tribesmen, mules heaving crates of equipment through the wilderness, laden-down canoes and jungle campsites – it all has the feel of some grand nineteenth-century scientific expedition. Yet, after the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss would add a modern twist to anthropology with the development of a completely new way of thinking about ethnographic data...

As he approaches his 100th birthday on November 28, Lévi-Strauss has become one of the few living authors to find a place in Gallimard’s Pléiade library. From the almost weightless Bible paper and soft leather cover to the pale pink flyleaves and the gold-embossed “Claude Lévi-Strauss Oeuvres” on the spine, Gallimard has retained the library’s old-world gravitas. In a testament to just how differently the publishing industry works across the Channel, this 2,000-page, seventy-euro edition sold 13,000 copies in its first three months...

The first thing one notices about this book is a huge absence. Organized chronologically, the collection skips from 1962, when Lévi-Strauss had only recently entered the Collège de France, to the mid-1970s, after his retirement; from the birth of structuralism in the popular imagination to the beginning of its decline. The core of Lévi-Strauss’s career when he was professor at the Collège, a media celebrity and one of the most influential theorists of his age, has been excised. Lévi-Strauss has opted for what he described as his “petites mythologiques” over the centrepiece of his career, the monolithic Mythologiques quartet. A further absence is his PhD thesis, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949), the reinterpretation of the field of kinship studies which established him as a leading thinker in post-war France. As Lévi-Strauss himself made the selection, it seems a timid assessment of his own output. [continue here]

Here are some 1988 (so he's 79 or 80) video interviews in French with several anthropologists (Lévi-Strauss is the first). These aren't related to his birthday, but they give us a chance to see and hear the man. Even for those of us who don't understand French - you surely can pick out some words, including the French pronunciation of his name - they are worth watching.

Entretiens avec Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS, Jean-Pierre VERNANT, Jacques Le GOFF, Pierre BOURDIEU, Andre, COMTE-SPONVILLE, Michel TOURNIER et Luc de HEUSCH. 1988

(part 2 is here)



And one in English, no, it turns out to be in French too. This is 1972 I believe, so he would be 63 here (his birthday is the end of November).


This link at YouTube will give you more videos from these two sets of interviews.



For a detailed discussion of Lévi-Strauss' political development, we have
An essay to mark the 100th birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss: Anti-Historicism and the Algerian War

Andy Blunden. May 2008

Introduction

The publication of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “The Savage Mind” in early 1962, as France stood on the precipice of civil war, launched a trend of “anti-historicism” in social philosophy. This “anti-historicism” had its roots in Durkheim’s sociology and structural linguistics, and while remaining a positive contribution to scientific technique, the ethical and political implications of this turn were far reaching and mixed. The point of this article is to show how social movements impact on the development of science. In spite of Lévi-Strauss’s adoption of the cloak of scientific objectivity, his “anti-historicism” was a direct response to the Algerian struggle for independence and presaged the decentred post-colonial world then emerging from such struggles across the world. The impact of this “anti-historicism” on science and politics shifted over the following decades but such transformations were also responses to social movements, whether or not they were valid scientific paradigms shifts. I will explain what I mean by “anti-historicism” later, once some of the nuances of Lévi-Strauss’s position and its relation to the Algerian independence war have been explored.

Lévi-Strauss’s Intellectual Development up to 1962

At school in the 1920s, Lévi-Strauss was involved in moderate socialist politics and at university was general secretary of the Federation of Socialist Students for a time, but his experience of the Second World War and in Brazil led him to a political position of refusing to accept the superiority of his own Western European culture, inclusive of both the dominant capitalist culture and the socialist alternative. He did not ‘drop out’ though, but adopted as his central value Western society’s key achievement, science, and worked assiduously to secure a place in that society as an esteemed scientist. His greatest fear was the prospect of the world being subsumed by a monoculture, and above all he valued cultural diversity, which, somewhat ironically, he credited as both the content and the source of progress.

His commitment to cultural diversity and admiration for ‘primitive’ (Lévi-Strauss’s word) cultures pre-existed all of his scientific discoveries as an anthropologist, and indeed motivated his interest in anthropology. But he almost never lent his name and prestige to a cause or spoke out publicly against the destruction of the ‘primitive’ cultures he so admired, almost never. Lévi-Strauss consistently adopted the cloak of scientific objectivity and rightly judged that his political aims could best be furthered by distancing himself behind the mask of science. Lévi-Strauss’s trope of discovering his political beliefs to be scientifically proven facts is really a very dogmatic mode of political argument.

By his own account, in his youth Lévi-Strauss had three ‘intellectual mistresses’: geology, Freud and Marx. But he was never a Marxist in any recognizable sense; Marx for him was an icon of ethical skepticism and scientific critique, but he never accepted Marx’s commitment to socialism, class struggle nor his historical method. Likewise, geology and psychoanalysis stood for the need to probe below surface impressions to the underlying structures. His public admiration for Marx and Freud did however serve to give him a probably undeserved reputation for being on the Left. [continue here]

And excerpts from the Jewish Daily Newspaper The Forward's article in honor of Lévi-Strauss' 100th birthday:

Claude of the Jungle
The other Lévi-Strauss turns 100

By Benjamin Ivry
Thu. Nov 06, 2008

On November 28, the centenary of the legendary French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss will be fêted in Paris. As a centenary celebration of a legend, however, it is rather unusual, as the birthday boy is very much alive and well.

Born in 1908 to a French-Jewish family — his grandfather served as a rabbi in Versailles — Lévi-Strauss made his name with such key texts as “Tristes Tropiques” (“A World on the Wane”) in 1955 and “La Pensée sauvage” (“The Savage Mind”) in 1962. . .
[The photo came with The Forward article and is a Getty Image.]

His sheer mastery of a vast number of subjects — a friend, writer Claudine Hermann, once said that Lévi-Strauss “gave me the impression of universal knowledge” — has left some readers with the image of a remote, aloof observer. Yet over the years, the supposedly cool and reticent Lévi-Strauss has granted increasingly telling glimpses into his personality and motivations.

Among these, unquestionably, are his Jewish roots, as he recently explained to the newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur. “In grade school, I was called ‘dirty Jew,’” he said. He went on to recall fistfights provoked by antisemitic school bullies: “Suddenly finding oneself contested by a community to which one believed oneself to belong entirely may lead a young mind to take some distance in terms of social reality, insofar as he is forced to look at it simultaneously from within, where he believes himself to be, and from without, where he is placed.” This sense of dislocation as a French Jew, he implies, was a natural mindset for studying other cultures, and especially for reserving judgment on their qualities and right to exist. He survived World War II in exile, and part of that time was spent in New York, teaching at The New School. Faculty members there advised him to call himself “Claude L. Strauss,” lest Yankee students laugh too much at the coincidence between his name and that of the Bavarian-Jewish immigrant tailor who introduced denim blue jeans.

In 1952, a scant few years after he learned the full tragedy of the Nazi occupation of his homeland, Lévi-Strauss wrote a text that continues to resonate, “Race and History.” [A small part of which I excerpted in the first post of this series.] Sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the book made the case that fighting the notion that some races are inferior to others also means combating the concept that some societies are culturally superior to others. Its adamant originality may have been influenced by a close wartime friendship with surrealist poet André Breton, whose “imaginative vivacity” he lauded in a moving tribute to another writer, Georges Dumézil, at the French Academy.

The rest of the Forward piece is here.

I feel a little embarrassed because there are so many people so much more knowledgeable than I on this topic. So I have a responsibility to point out some of them and what they are saying about Claude Lévi Strauss. More tomorrow. And, oh yes, even before reading this last piece above, it became very clear that most people looking up Levi-Strauss are looking up the jeans. Is there some distant relationship between the two? Maybe that will come up as I continue this.

Anchorage International Film Festival Selections - Documentaries

Here's the list of the Documentary Features and Shorts for the AIFF. The Festival site doesn't have links up yet, so I've done what I could to fill in a bit of information on the films.

The program guide is available in PDF form. The website also says the program guide will be in the Press on November 26.

It would be nice if they had information on getting tickets on their site and prices. There are ads in the Press and ADN that say tickets are available at Bear Tooth, but that's what the website is for. If the info is there, I can't find it.

There are three focusing on Alaska - one on moving the village of Shishmareff, one on Pebble Mine, and one on a junk trip from Washington to Valdez. Another fish movie is about an Oregon tribe's battle to remove dams and bring back the salmon.

DOCUMENTARY FEATURES

A Nashville State of Mind • John-Martin Vogel • 88 min. USA
The alternative music scene in Nashville.


A Powerful Noise • Tom Cappello & Scott • 91 min. USA
"A documentary film about women changing the world. "

Ballou • Michael Patrei • 83 min. USA This film is about a marching band.

Crawford • David Modigliani • 74 min. USA



Junk Dreams • By Skye Borgman • 73 min. USA


Rachel: A Perfect Life • Fiona Cochrane • 91 hr/min Australia This is one where the topic might cause some people to pass (single mother, brain surgery, epilepsy) but one reviewer (?) writes:

"This film's appeal lies in the personality of its subject, Rachel Ouchirenko, and her truly brave and forthright approach to solving her biggest problem."

Secrets to Love • Tracie Donahue • 63 min. USA

"Director Tracie Donahue searches for the answers to finding (and maintaining) a healthy, happy love, by asking real couples and relationship experts the most important questions."

The Last Days of Shishmaref • Jan Louter • 88 min. Netherlands
This is a Dutch film about an Alaskan village. It looks like an important movie for urban Alaskans to see


The Wrecking Crew • Denny Tedesco • 98 min. USA
About a group of studio musicians in the late 60's who backed up the hottest groups of the late 60s in LA. The music will be good at least, based on the songlist.

Upstream Battle • Ben Kempas • 97 min. Germany

Native Americans on the Klamath River fight for their fish – against an energy corporation. Their struggle may trigger the largest dam removal project in history.

DOCUMENTARY SHORTS

Leave Her to Die • Antonia Thomson • 49 min. Canada

"A 2 year old baby girl lay alone on a bamboo mat in a government orphanage in Northern Thailand"

Red Gold • Travis Rummel • 54 min. USA

Produced by Felt Soul Media and Trout Unlimited Alaska, Red Gold is a one-hour documentary film on the proposed Pebble Mine told through the voices of commercial, subsistence and sport fishermen of Bristol Bay, Alaska.

Reefer Madness • Steve Hanson • 23 min. Canada
Can't find much on this one - Canadian freight train graffiti artist Fatso's trip across Canada.

Splitting Hairs • F Stone Roberts • 28 min. USA
The synopsis begins:

Facial hair championships began 30 years ago in the Black Forest of Germany. “Beard Clubs” organized social gatherings that gradually became competitive. Over time, the championships drew competitors from across Europe, but it was not until the early 1990’s that American pioneers Bruce Roe and Phil Olsen discovered the event.

OK World - Do we get a little slack now? We did NOT reelect Ted Stevens

Today's numbers give Mark Begich enough votes to win the Alaska Senate seat. We do some things right.

From the Anchorage Daily News:

MICHAEL R. BLOOD 11/18/08 9:22 PM EST AP
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest serving Republican in Senate history, narrowly lost his re-election bid Tuesday, marking the downfall of a Washington political power and Alaska icon who couldn't survive a conviction on federal corruption charges. His defeat to Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich moves Senate Democrats closer to a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority.
Stevens' ouster on his 85th birthday marks an abrupt realignment in Alaska politics and will alter the power structure in the Senate, where he has served since the days of the Johnson administration while holding seats on some of the most influential committees in Congress.
The crotchety octogenarian built like a birch sapling likes to encourage comparisons with the Incredible Hulk, but he occupies an outsized place in Alaska history. His involvement in politics dates to the days before Alaska statehood, and he is esteemed for his ability to secure billions of dollars in federal aid for transportation and military projects. The Anchorage airport bears his name; in Alaska, it's simply "Uncle Ted."

Tuesday's tally of just over 24,000 absentee and other ballots gave Begich 146,286, or 47.56 percent, to 143,912, or 46.76 percent, for Stevens.




[Later Update: Here's the New York Times report on the Alaska election results and the impacts on the US Senate.]

Claude Lévi-Strauss One Hundredth Birthday - Post 2

[All the Lévi-Strauss Birthday posts are here.]


I'm going to continue offering work by or about Lévi-Strauss for the next week in the hopes that I'll learn something useful and in that some of you will have the patience to read something a little heavier than normal blog fare if it's in short doses. And some people have complained that reading blogs prevents them from reading books, so we come full circle.
[Photo credit below*]

I'm drawn in this section, to the point, mentioned yesterday too, that Lévi-Strauss believed that the mind of 'primitive' peoples was no different from the mind of 'civilized' peoples. My experiences overseas certainly confirm this. There are bright inquisitive minds in every culture just as there are dull ones. Although I live in a 'civilized' community, neither I nor most of my fellow citizens have done much to create the world in which we live. We are dependent on technology most of us cannot even fix let alone create. And few of us can even make 'simple' things like baskets or weave fibers into cloth. In Alaska this is particularly of interest, since many of the rural inhabitants, who are looked down on by the many urban inhabitants, can probably do a lot more to create and repair the environments in which they live.

In any case, here is an excerpt from one scholar's (Hans H Penner) introduction to Lévi-Strauss. He's very sparing of the commas, so if you get confused, try reading it out loud until you figure out where he meant to pause. At one point I stuck in [,]s because I really needed them.

The list of scholars who have changed the course of an academic discipline in their own lifetime is very short. Einstein and Chomsky are clearly on the list and so is Claude Lévi-Strauss, who made the words "structuralism" and "structural analysis" common terms in most newspapers and weekly magazines around the world. The terms were certainly used before Lévi-Strauss made them so popular. No one would deny that the term "structure' was used in physics, logic, and anthropology long before Lévi-Strauss began to lecture on "structural anthropology." This being so it is often claimed that there is really nothing new in what Lévi-Strauss has to say, his popularity was nothing more than one of the many vogues that arise and pass away in Paris. If this is true then it is hard to explain the explosive controversy that took place after Lévi-Strauss began to publish essays on something called "structural analysis." Structuralism simply cannot be separated from the thought of Lévi-Strauss. After Lévi-Strauss the study of kinship, totemism, myth and ritual would never be the same again. As one disgruntled scholar put it, "Yet it has been said that when one turns from Lévi-Strauss to any other attempt to analyze these myths, the results look old-fashioned and unconvincing; and I too find this to be so." I agree.

The Fundamental theme running through all of his writings is that it is a serious error to follow the thought of Lévy-Bruhl (as many do) and think that there is a fundamental difference between so-called "primitive" and "modern" societies. That "primitive mentality" is like the mentality of our children, or, that they are "mystical" and we are "logical" in our way of thinking, that there are two modes of thinking that are different in kind. The basic binary opposition, nature/culture (raw/cooked) can be found in all of his publications. It would be an error to think of this basic opposition as a dualism or as containing ontological significance. Nevertheless, the opposition nature/culture clearly marks what Lévi-Strauss thinks human nature is all about. We are rational creatures who [,] says Lévi-Strauss [,] must first of all know the world before it becomes useful to us. Lévi-Strauss is not a pragmatist. What fascinates Lévi-Strauss are such questions as, "since it is clearly not necessary for our existence, why do human beings cook food?" Why are there prohibitions on eating certain kinds of food? Perhaps the most significant question Lévi-Strauss asks is, "what is the significance of 'the other'?" "We/they?" Throughout all of the diverse material he studies Lévi-Strauss finds a logic, a structure. And for Lévi-Strauss where there is a logical structure there is also rationality.

From:

Plenner, Hans H (ed)(1998) Teaching Lévi-Strauss, Atlanta: Scholars Press, pp. 1-2

*The photo of Claude Levi-Strauss is from culturamauff.blogspot.com but I suspect is not original to that blog.

Monday Odds and Ends (posted Tuesday)

After a couple of long posts, I get to do a short one. Just a few shots from yesterday. After class, I stopped at the UAA library to get the Levi-Strauss books and ran into this old friend. I got to see this Steven Gordon painting everyday when my office was in the library building in with ISER. That was before the library was expanded. It was nice to see it again - still in the library building. Gordon manages to capture the look and feel of the trees here. I mean, it's just a bunch of trees, right? No, it's much, much more than that. (I thought about cropping the chair out of the picture. It really messes up the balance badly. But, it's part of the environment of the picture now. And this is supposed to be a fast post.)

Then back home with my treasures. It was gratifying to see that I'm not the only one still using my bike. While I'm not riding with the frequency of the summer, at least to the University and back isn't too far and the paths are well maintained. I was also glad to see in the ADN yesterday that the city has put up new bike racks. I'm curious to see what they got. Not all bike racks are equal. Some are almost impossible to use, but the ones here are good. It says $17,000 for 13 bike racks, which sounds steep. But each rack should accommodate 5-10 bikes which would come to $130-$260 per bike space. It also included two bike boxes - I saw some of those in Portland - which I'm sure are much more expensive. But, compared to car parking spaces, it's a great deal. And if bikers had better spaces to ride (the trails are nice, but only if they go where you are going, and the ones along the streets can be pretty bumpy) and safely lock their bikes, more people would bike, even in winter.

Then we needed a Thai fix, and ran into our mayor, whose suspense over the election might end today. He was picking up take out with his son at the Thai Kitchen. Of course, he can't do this without talking to everyone. I wonder how long it will take, if all goes well, for everyone in DC to know who he is too. A little more time than it took Sarah I'm sure.

Claude Lévi-Strauss One Hundredth Birthday - Post 1

[All the Lévi-Strauss Birthday posts are here.]

I first read a book by Levi-Strauss as a doctoral student. It wasn't something assigned; I'm not sure how or why I picked it up. It was about going to Brazil. I was enchanted. I haven't gotten around to reading more about him, but he's always had a favored spot in my mind. So I was more than a little excited when I did the Famous People Born in 1908 post last January discovered that he was still alive. I wanted to do some posts in honor of his birthday - which will be a week from Friday on November 28. But I don't know all that much. So, finally, today, I stopped at the library and checked out seven books on or by Levi-Strauss. I'm hoping to do some cramming in the next ten days and to share some quotes here each day. Note, since I'm working from books and not the web, I'll put in citations for people who want to find the original. (I'll try to see if I can also find some of this online.)

What I'm discovering though, is that Levi-Strauss does not do sound-bites. What he's writing about is very complex, and he doesn't simplify it. So I felt a little better when I read, from Edmund Leach

The outstanding characteristic of his writing, whether in French or in English, is that it is difficult to understand; his sociological theories combine baffling complexity with overwhelming erudition. (Leach, 1977, p. 3)

Actually, I think that exaggerates it somewhat, but I try to put up quotes here that are reasonably easy to understand. Levi-Strauss, it seems to me, is complex, and has lots of caveats, simply because it is extremely easy to take things he says out of context. So he's constantly making sure that the reader isn't doing that. For example:

The way of thinking among people we call, usually and wrongly, 'primitive' - let's describe them rather as 'without writing,' because I think this is really the discriminatory factor between them and us - has been interpreted in two different fashions, both of which in my opinion were equally wrong. (Levi-Strauss, 1979, p. 15)

I have to admit to being guilty to doing much the same thing in this blog - lots of asides to expalin how what I'm writing might be taken wrong and how I really intend it. And also lots of qualifications, such as 'in my opinion'. Some would say, 'well of course it is just your opinion,' but if I don't write it, others will jump to conclusions that I'm stating a 'truth.' So, I take comfort in Levi-Strauss' writing.

So for the next week I'll try to write a little bit about what I'm discovering in the books. Today I really want to start with Levi-Strauss' own words. One book, Myth and Meaning, is from a series of radio talks Levi-Strauss gave in December 1977 on CBS. (As I'm writing this I'm going to Google this and see if the audio is available. Answer: Not found easily.) The table of contents is a series of questions that are addressed in each chapter. From Chapter 2:

There are those who say that the thinking of so-called primitive people is inferior to scientific thinking. They say that it is inferior, not because of a matter of style, but because, scientifically speaking, it is wrong. How would you compare 'primitive' thought with 'scientific' thought?

Claude Levi-Strauss responds (somewhat abridged):

He starts this section with the quote immediately above. He then goes on to describe the two fashions. Malinowski felt that:

The thought of all the populations without writing which are the subject matter of anthropology was entirely, or is, determined by the basic needs of life. If you know that a people, whoever they are, is determined by the bare necessities of living - finding subsistence, satisfying the sexual drives, and so on - then you can explain their social institutions, their beliefs, their mythology, and the like. This very widespread conception in anthropology generally goes under the name of functionalism.

The other fashion is not so much that theirs is an inferior kind of thought, but a fundamentally different kind of thought. This approach is exemplified by the work of Lévy-Bruhl, who considered that the basic difference between 'primitive' thought - I always put the word 'primitive' within quotes - and modern thought is that the first is entirely determined by emotion and mystic representations. Whereas Malinowski's is a utilitarian conception, the other is an emotional or affective concpetion; and what I have tried to emphasize is that actually the thought of people without writing, is or can be in many instances, on the one hand, disinterested - and this is a difference in relation to Malinowski - and, on the other hand, intellectual - a difference in relation to Lévy-Bruhl.

He's going to explain what he means by disinterested and intellectual soon.

What I tried to show in Totemism and in The Savage Mind, for instance, is that these people whom we usually consider as completely subservient to the need of not starving, of continuing able just to subsist in very harsh material conditions, are perfectly capable of disinterested thinking; that is, they are moved by a need or a desire to understand the world around them, its nature and their society. On the other hand, to achieve that end, they proceed by intellectual means, exactly as a philosopher, or even to some extent a scientist, can and would do.

Hey, I found this online - I don't have to keep typing this. SMILING.

This is my basic hypothesis. I would like to dispel a misunderstanding right away. To say that a way of thinking is disinterested and that it is an intellectual way of thinking does not mean at all that it is equal to scientific thinking. Of course, it remains different in one a way, and inferior in another way. It remains different because its aim is to reach by the shortest possible means a general understanding of the universe —and not only a general but a total understanding. That is, it is a way of thinking which must imply that if you don’t understand everything, you don’t explain anything. This is entirely in contradiction to what scientific thinking does, which is to proceed step by step, trying to give explanations for very limited phenomena, and then going on to other kinds of phenomena, and so on. As Descartes had already said, scientific thinking aimed to divide the difficulty into as many parts as were necessary in order to solve it So this totalitarian [I think holistic would be a better word since totalitarian has another connotation] ambition of the savage mind is quite different from the procedures of scientific thinking. Of course, the great difference is that this ambition does not succeed. We are able, through scientific thinking, to achieve mastery over nature—I don’t need to elaborate that point, it is obvious enough—while, of course, myth is unsuccessful in giving man more material power over the environment. However, it gives man, very importantly, the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand the universe. It is, of course, only an illusion.

So, what I understand this to mean is that people without writing think the same way as people with writing. But rather than attempting to understanding the world by breaking it up into smaller and smaller parts which they can study, the people without writing develop holistic myths that explain and help them understand the universe. It's the same type of thinking, but focused on a macro explanation rather than micro explanations. I'm not sure I buy this completely that it is the same type of thinking, but I agree that it is certainly as sophisticated.

He goes on to talk about using different parts of the brain. This is easier to understand.

We should note, however, that as scientific thinkers we use a very limited amount of our mental power. We use what is needed by our profession, our trade, or the particular situation in which we are involved at the moment...

Today we use less and we use more of our mental capacity than we did in the past; And it is not exactly the same kind of mental capacity as it was either. For example, we use considerablyless of our sensory perceptions. It seems that there was a particular tribe which was able to see the planet Venus in full daylight, something which to me would be utterly impossible and incredible. I put the question to professional astronomers; they told me, of course, that we don't but, nevertheless, when we know the amount of light emitted by the planet Venus in full daylight, it was not absolutely inconceivable that some people could. Later on I looked into old treatises on navigation belonging to our own civilization and it seems that sailors of old were perfectly able to see the planet in full daylight. Probably we could still do so if we had a trained eye.

It is exactly the same with our knowledge about plants or animals. People who are without writing have a fantastically precise knoweldge of their environment and all their resources. All these things we have lost, but we did not lose them for nothing; we are now able to drive an automobile without being crushed at each moment, for example, or in the evening to turn our our television or radio. This implies a training of mental capacities which 'primitive' peoples don't have because they don't need them. I feel that, with the potential they have, they could have changed the quality of their mind, but it would not be needed for the kind of life and relationship to nature that they have. You cannot develop all the mental capacities belonging to mankind all at once. You can only use a small sector, and this sector is not the same according to the culture. That is all.

Actually, he keeps going. You can read more at this link to Myth and Meaning.

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1979) Myth and Meaning, New York: Schocken Books (also the link above)
Leach, Edmund (1970) Claude Levi-Strauss, New York: The Viking Press

Intimate Partner Violence at the Opera

We went to Carmen this afternoon. The Discovery Theater at the Performing Arts Center is a wonderful space. Acoustics are good and no one is too far from the action.

But I have to say, that since being on a steering committee for the prevention of intimate partner violence I see things I probably would have glossed over in the past. Here's an opera about a woman who makes sport out of seducing men. Except Don Jose becomes infatuated and when Carmen is over him, he becomes obsessed.

Certainly others must have made the connection between Carmen and Domestic Violence. Or so you'd think. But Google doesn't reveal many who have done much about it. The first ten pages of Google hits for Carmen+Domestic Violence show us a lot of women named Carmen who were the victims of domestic violence, with a few more who work in that field. There was only one hit (on page 2) related to the opera. The Syracuse opera had a discussion with one of their performances of Carmen:

If you think you’ve seen Carmen in all her blazing persona, wait until you experience this more intimate version of Bizet’s famous opera by Peter Brook, the provocative English theatre and film director. Designed to intensify the psychological state of Carmen, Brook’s adaptation (with Marius Constant and Jean-Claude Carrière) focuses solely on the three main characters: Carmen, Don Jose, Micaela. The New York Times called Brook’s innovative version of Carmen “a raw, brutal tale of mutual self destruction that’s fueled by both lust and existential bloodlust – and is as deadly for others as it is for themselves.”

Syracuse Opera's LIVING OPERA series in collaboration with VERA HOUSE and the Redhouse Arts Center present:

RED FLAGS

A FREE insider's look into La Tragédie de Carmen and its parallels to modern day domestic violence issues

•Spot the 'red flags' of potential domestic violence issues in relationships•
•Explore the 'good girl vs. bad girl' stereotype and its effect on violence towards women•

Join us as we discuss the contemporary issues being brought to light by this raw, brutal electrifying opera.

Panel Speakers include: Stage director Jeffrey Tangeman, Syracuse Opera's Director of Music Douglas Kinney Frost, and Radio Host and Vera House [A Domestic Violence intervention and prevention organization] Advocate Elisa Morales.

Adding 'opera' to the search terms narrows things down a lot. We get a booklist from the Boston Public Library to prepare for the Boston Lyric Opera's performance of Carment that includes:

Sex! Violence! Bullfights! Smoking! Great music!
Georges Bizet's Carmen is one of the world's best-loved operas. It tells the story of the Spanish gypsy girl, Carmen who took love all too lightly. From the opening of the opera in front of a cigarette factory to the dramatic conclusion of the story in front of the bullring, very little of human emotion remains unsung. This booklist is designed for the opera-lover and the opera-neophyte in celebration of Boston Lyric Opera's "Carmen on the Common" and its preview performances at the Boston Public Library.

Defending Our Lives: Getting Away from Domestic Violence & Staying Safe by Susan Murphy-Milano
A resource which offers step-by-step plans for leaving abusive relationships

In How to Stop Elder Abuse Anne Hart writes:





I don't really know if the Discovery Theater has a cloak room, but from this jumble of coats during intermission, it would appear other people don't know about it if there is one. I'd pay a dollar not to have to sit on my coat.

Anyway, after about 30 minutes of Googling, I've really only found the one opera company - in Syracuse - that seems to have done anything about using Carmen as a way to educate opera goers about intimate partner and domestic violence.

I think that every domestic violence intervention and prevention agency in communities that have opera should get in touch with their opera companies and begin working now to collaborate with them on any production of Carmen. I'm embarrassed I didn't think about it here in Anchroage. There can be a page or two in the program. There can be before or after performance discussions. I can't imagine an opera company that could, politically, turn down such a request. Syracuse seems to have a model that can be used as a starting point.

There's no reason to stop performing Carmen, but it is important to use such performances to raise people's consciousness of domestic and intimate partner violence and how to work to prevent it.