October 2007 Archives

Oh dear. :-/

The "ideal" acupuncture treatment is ONE needle. The idea being that a) the person being treated has clarity about what they need and b) the person providing treatment knows precisely where to tweak the need.

My average is three-four. I've one includes the treatments with a combination of brief pokes and static insertions over time, I may have reached or even (?) exceeded six of those minute stabs during one go. But I've never been privy to the grand total of SIX (!) needles: both sides of the neck, both feet, and both hands. "I decided to treat both sides today," said the Intuitive Acupuncturist, "I don't usually do that." My issue of the day was r-e-g-u-l-a-r-i-t-y. Seems this matter must be broached from many angles. Simultaneously. :-)

That, or I have no freaking idea what I "ought" to be focusing on for these treatments. Yikes! :-) The upcoming trip to Jerusalem was on my mind (along with various associated potential consequences), my dad's health (mild stroke last week), family shenanigans in general....oh yes, teaching, writing, researching, staying sane in systems that become more obviously insane the more I learn how to perceive functions, effects, consequences....

Balanced with excitement over the conference presentation, progress in the discourse/dialogue of my students (despite their disgust with the wiki), visions of how to improve both the technical and pedagogical aims of teaching through this combo of online-and-face-to-face, not to mention a possible theme for the spring's ENG112:

Peace in Our Time?
Rescuing Dialogues from Occupation.

"Erotic chaos and chaotic eroticism." The little green man embellished my summary of Open Secret, performed by the incomparable Wire Monkey.

The chaos of modern living was most marked in the second piece and in the middle of the second act: we are "bodies against steel" intoned various voices as the dancers gyrated and collided with each other, tossing about, torn from embraces, and thrown back at each other by their own as well as external forces. The sheer pleasure of being embodied was on display all evening, the joys of capability bursting against limitations imposed by - in, and through - the aftermath of mass industrialization. Emotion permeated every motion: agonies and ecstasies evoked despite the insistence that "there is no translation."

"Don't go back to sleep," we are implored - both at the beginning and the end of the show.

The party that wasn't a halloween party did (sortof) happen last night. I (as usual) weighed my options. Too tired? Such an old fart! Ok, fine, why not see how the other team really lives?

For an hour I was the only woman among a half-dozen or so apparent bachelors. According to a certain logic, I fit right in. :-) Nonetheless, when the conversation turned to talk of mothers from solicitous straight sons, I recognized some limits to mutual identification. Seeds of a horror movie were planted, until we were informed that some people had a list of other movies to make first - of an unspecified genre. Hmmm. We discussed the merits of Fear, the mtv miniseries, and the desire of such a large percentage of people to vicariously "experience" horrific events similar to those some people have actually undergone. Are these doses of self-induced, artificial, safe fear a substitute for the real fears we prefer not to confront? I am thinking of the big ones, global warming, perpetual war, unending poverty, while being aware that there are interpersonal fears as well: having a job/income, friends, a life partner... (ok, maybe this is just projection).

The trip to Israel is coming up, which elicited some questions. Do we hope for hope, or do we act as if there is hope? My somewhat circular conversation with the Cameroonian who is hoping there is hope (!) helped me clarify the core question that the conference seeks to address. Can academics really make a difference?

I have been thinking, off and on, about my upcoming presentation at Dialogue under Occupation II. I'll be talking about my observation that during the first conference, last year in Chicago, most of us as participants and workshop presenters did not engage in dialogue with each other. Actually, I can be more precise, the places where the need for dialogue was most apparent did not materialize. Instead, we privileged "discourse" in our workshop presentations, and we acted along established streams of discourse whenever areas of genuine disagreement arose. At least, this is what I witnessed. No doubt, real dialogue was occurring among at least some of the conference organizers because it is an incredible feat of courage and willpower to have arranged for this second conference to be held in East Jerusalem.

Originally slated for the West Bank, events in the region forced a move to East Jerusalem. A planned pre-conference tour to Ramallah has been cancelled. How can dialogue of any kind possibly develop in a region with such historically deep divisions? In other words, can our being there - meeting and talking from our broad intellectual knowledges and personal passions - make any kind of difference? Who knows.

At any rate, the other seed planted last night, for those attuned to the conspiracy, is for The Linus Foundation. Now, I'm not saying this idea is in competition with breaking into film production, in fact, the two possibilities are already quantumly linked. Of course, there is the matter of follow-through....

Christian posted this nine-minute video on Zeynep's Wall in Facebook. How rational are we human beings when it comes to global warming? Do we debate the "truth" of how the future "will be" (as if any of us can actually know)? Or do we invest our energy in pro-action of least risk?

"It is one thing to read in medical school that the ideal doctor-patient-interpreter 'seating configuration' is a right triangle, with the patient and interpreter forming the hypotenuse, and another to recollect the diagram in a roomful of gesticulating Hmong toward the end of a twenty-four-hour shift" (272). The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

Interpreters face similar dilemmas when they move from the training ground to the field of independent practice. :-)

When a patient refused surgery for stomach cancer, "I had expected the resident to move heaven and earth to bring in a decent interpreter. instead, I found him in the Preceptor Library, his head bowed over four articles on poorly differentiated gastric adenocarcinoma" (273).

Interesting on several levels: that there was not an interpreter to begin with and/or that the point of crisis invokes the need/desire for interpreters. Also because we see Fadiman's priority (communication with the patient) in contrast with the resident's (learn more about this medical condition).

"At Harvard, all first-year students are required to take a course called "Patient-Doctor I" (significantly, not "Doctor-Patient I") in which they learn to work with interpreters, study Kleinman's eight questions, and ponder...conundrums..." (271)

Fadiman's commentary is on the primary of the doctor's role/personhood instead of the patient's. I am, of course, curious what the students are taught about working with interpreters.

Footnote, p. 266 on "sensitive bicultural interpreting" (photocopy).

"A middle-aged man in Merced, hospitalized for an infection, was asked by an interpreter who was filling out a routine nursing admission form whether he wished, in case of death, to donate his organs. The man, believing that his doctors planned to let him die and take his heart, became highly agitated and announced that he was leaving the hospital immediately. The interpreter managed to calm him and assured him that the doctor's intentions were honorable. The man stayed until his recovery a few days later, and a sympathetic hospital administrator, anticipating similar misunderstandings with other Hmong patients, fought successfully to have the organ donor box removed from the admission form." (264)

The way this passage is framed is fascinating. Did "the interpreter" ask the question, or did the interpreter interpret a question from the form that the hospital asked? Fadiman presents this in a common sense style, but this is a quagmire for interpreters at the level of theory and practice. When & how are we actors in the situation - as in agents with responsibility and accountability for outcomes - and when are we the ("neutral" or "passive") conveyors of other's actions/intentions? How does one distinguish these levels of interaction, when, why, and on the basis of what criteria? Did the interpreter violate the standard code of ethics about not giving opinions or mediate in a culturally-appropriate way? Had the interpreter erred in the presentation/delivery and needed to correct a misunderstanding that they had caused? The problem-solving of the administrator is also remarkable; such accommodations in order to prevent that kind of institutional/cultural clash are rarely undertaken, let alone accomplished.

Fadiman generated a list of "what ifs" that she presented to one of the health care providers, who "was less interested in the Depakene than in the interpreters. However, he believed that the gulf between the Lees and their doctors was unbridgeable, and that nothing could have been done to change the outcome. 'Until I met Lia,' he said, 'I thought if you had a problem you could always settle it if you just sat and talked long enough. But we could have talked to the Lees until we were in blue in the face - we could have sent them to medical school with the world's greatest translator - and they would still think their way was right and ours was wrong'" (259).

The conflation between "interpreter" and "translator" is problematic, even though this is a common sense combination. Technically, interpreters deal with spontaneous language production and reproduction (in speech or sign language), while translators deal with written texts (with the luxury of time for research and thoughtful consideration of parts in relation to the whole). In this context, the assumption may be between "interpretation" as tending toward paraphrase and/or the metaphorical, with "translation" invoking an attitude of literality (as if direct, exact equivalents ever exist).

I will have to engage Briankle again. He was so intense about my stance in favor of "dialogue" against "dialectic" during my comps defense. At the time I had no one to back up my perception of the ways I had heard/read the term "dialectic" in use. Now I discover that none other than Raymond Williams articulates my point:

the ordinary version of ‘the dialectic’, which can so easily be abstracted as features of a theoretically isolated (determining) situation or movement…” (Marxism and Literature, p. 88).

It may well be that my learning of the concept of "dialectic" from exposure to its use in contemporary academic discourse within the discipline of communication has limited my own comprehension, with "meaning" gleaned from situations and contexts that may left gaps in any ideal or intended definition. I also may have misheard, misread, and misunderstood the nuances that gave me the overwhelming sense of cop-out: "dialectic" as a reference to things in relation always leading to a variant of the same ol' outcomes, a way to acknowledge the-impossible-way-things-are-and-we-can-do-nothing-about-it. I recognized this attitude overtly in Williams' description of "the ordinary version of 'the dialectic,'" as a "retreat to an indifferent emphasis on the complexity of cultural activity" (119), the "(resigned) recognition of the inevitable and the necessary" (118) that Williams' defines as "the true condition of hegemony...effective self-identification with the hegemonic forms" (emphasis in original, 118).

While Briankle defended the originary and ideal sense of "dialectic," I was critiquing a contemporary formation. "Formations," says Williams, "...are most recognizable as conscious movements and tendencies (literary, artistic, philosophical or scientific) which can usually be readily discerned after their formative productions" (119), and "...formations; those effective movements and tendencies, in intellectual and artistic life, which have significant and sometimes decisive influence on the active development of a culture, and which have a variable and often oblique relation to formal institutions" (117).

I assume he was aware of this distinction in our frames of reference and was pushing me to recognize and say it. Maybe he thought I was just somewhat off my rocker. It would surely not be the first time my angle was skewed!

One of Anne Fadiman's strengths as a writer is stating the culturally obvious in equal and unequivocal terms.

Of course medical practitioners in the US would not know "that when a man named Xiong or Lee or Moua walked into [their office] with a stomachache he was actually complaining that the entire universe was out of balance" (p. 61). It seems to me that one must be a believer in quantum level effects at the scale of the humanly perceptible in order to even conceive of such a possibility. Yes, there may be many linear (diagnosable, predictable and therefore curable) causes of stomachache, but who is to say definitively that those local causes and operations in the universe have absolutely, decisively, no relation to each other?

Much of what intrigues in Fadiman's story of a Hmong family's dreadful encounter with extraordinarily competent and skilled physicians are the breakdowns in understanding: the inability of worldviews to find means of expression even remotely comprehensible to each other. Some of the most poignant pathos are in those instances when mutual understanding was assumed - by one party or another, if not both.

The absence of interpreters mark the earliest and most common meetings between the Lee family and the US medical system. The complaint echos loudly, whoever has "the time and the interpreters to find out" the relevant system of beliefs of persons from another culture? (p. 61)

When no interpreter was present, the doctor and the patient stumbled around together in a dense fog of misunderstanding whose hazards only increased if the patient spoke a little English, enough to lull the doctor into mistakenly believing some useful information had been transferred. When as interpreter was present, the duration of every diagnostic interview automatically doubled. (Or tripled. Or centupled. Because most medical terms had no Hmong equivalents, laborious paraphrases were often necessary. In a recently published Hmong translation for 'parasite' is twenty-four words long; for 'hormone,' thirty-one words; and for 'X-chromosome,' forty-six words.) The prospect of those tortoise-paced interviews struck fear into the heart of every chronically harried resident. And even on the rare occasions when there was a perfect verbatim translation, there was no guarantee either side actually understood the other...'The language barrier was the most obvious problem, but not the most important...the Hmong simply didn't have the same concepts.' (p. 68-69)

This framing of different languages as "a problem" is, itself, a worse problem than the fact of language difference. Letting go the matter of duration (just for a moment!), the obviousness of language difference is merely the easiest difference to latch onto and blame for everything else that requires effort. In fact, having different concepts is "a problem" only to the extent that a desire exists to impose one concept over another, or one's version of a concept as more salient. The exigency of interpretation merely brings this natural process into unavoidable consciousness; it need not complicate the process of communication any further than is already typical (albeit conveniently unawares). I digress: clearly I value the co-creation of mutual understanding above the urgencies of haste, so-called productivity, and routinized/dehumanizing mass service.

Then there are the problems of non-assertive interpretation, such as the doctor who "would try to get an interpreter to ask a Hmong patient these questions [diagnosing pain], and the interpreter would just shrug and say, 'He just says it hurts'" (p. 69). Now, it may well be that there is no precedent for answering these kinds of questions, but this does not exonerate the interpreter from using their own bicultural experiences to creatively instigate a dialogue.

I learn from Anuj all the time.

Today, VIJAYADASHMI, a celebration of good over evil. (That's us, right?!) The Society for the Confluence of Festivals in India says,

It is a time-honored belief that if any new venture is started on this day, it is bound to be successful.

Photos from an elaborate 2005 event at the Ramlila Grounds of Kapurthala. A tourist site promotes the annual event in Kullu.

Daniel Kennedy, as the Earl of Warwick, Pistol, and Governor of Harfleur ("doing it with the lights on") in the American Shakespeare Center's traveling troupe's rendition of Henry V, inspired a fall pilgrimage across western Massachusetts.

We had a little trouble getting underway. There was a battle in the Chess War (Romania vs Bhutan, 2007) and a problem with brakefluid. (Can you really use power steering fluid in lieu of brake fluid?!) The promise of pie finally got us moving...(but was it in Box #1 or Box #2?)

After the Northampton stopover,
we got underway. The sky was as amazing as the foliage.

Eventually, we arrived and were treated to Original Staging Practices (universal lighting, eleven actors playing some forty-eight roles - if memory serves, gender obfuscation, a minimal set, actors humanized through mixing street clothes, costumes, and a "pregame" musical show - in this case, "London Calling"). Audience members were also seated on both sides of the stage: our bravest members availed themselves of the opportunity.

The show was a hit. The star regaled us groupies afterwards. We lingered at the Allium Restaurant in Great Barrington as long as we could....alas. Those Aussies are off yet again.

Fall is here, even if the temperatures tempt sunbathing. Geese mass on the Campus Pond, pausing in their journey south.

The Graduate Employee Organization steps up action to gain a fair contract. Some 150 of us gathered at various constructions entries this past Thursday morning, and many construction workers did decline to cross our picket line. A few folks I know were there:

Our spirit was stellar:

Concurrently, a protest against the war in Iraq has occupied the campus green for the past week.

Yep, these are the boots of individual, real soldiers. The one pair I walked up to for a close-up happened to belong to a young man from Vermont.

vote if you wish:

I was described as a

"piece of lint"

(as in, cannot be shaken or otherwise scraped off) but was fed a meal described as

"hot enough to challenge but not so much as to slow you down."



Whole coriander seeds in the sauce contributed to softening the taste.
Ah, come on! Invite me again! :-)

Captain Laurel (and Crew Kent) received first spray ever on the Peep Hen, approximately 09:30 in a riptide with winds at 15-17 knots. (Note: the dodger caught about half the spray.) Eventually, in the lull between upchucks, Crew Kent put in a first reefing (partial) and - some thirty minutes later - a second reefing (nearly complete). Winds from the (north?)west whipped the waves to about five or six feet at max. We spent quite a while hove to while Crew decorated the port side of the boat.

We had multiple adventures during my mere twenty-four hour stint. I realize I severely lack situation awareness, which - at this point in my sailing career (!) is hardly surprising. My focus on the current command is clear and I think I am quick (or as quick as I can be, given whatever obstacles/incompetencies present themselves). Nonetheless, I was aware, on several occasions, of operating in a vacuum: following orders with no comprehension of their relevance, sometimes without cognizance of their urgency. Things can change so fast in a small boat on the water! Sailing involves, as discussed with Megan (Shore Support/Limosine Service) on the ride back after the Crew Change, a blend of adrenalin that is felicitous and adrenalin that is decidedly not.

Defining the boundary between the happy and unhappy kinds of adrenalin is tricky, but range of awareness and degree of perception are definitely involved. For instance, our initial magnificent sail from the boat ramp took us toward a certain (closed) drawbridge. When the Captain, having turned the boat toward shore as if circling around, said, "It's time for the anchor," I knew the anchor needed to be dropped now. As I fumbled with the chain/cleat, I experienced my mind as if it was insulated, enclosed within a bubble of non-knowledge. After the anchor caught (90 feet of line!), I took stock of the speed of outgoing tide and strength of the wind and realized uh oh! how dire the situation was (had been). We were only 100 yards upriver from several stone pylons supporting a bridge that was quite low enough to snap the mast like a toothpick. We were, in fact, already safe: the adrenalin rush which then surged through me was an almost pleasant aftereffect.

Felicitous adrenalin describes (for me!) those moments when skill and teamwork is necessary but risk is not imminent. Since the potential of risk is always present (particularly while sailing), what I mean is, one has to mess up before threat is actualized. Adrenalin from peak performance and coordinated action against challenging conditions is happy. (I choose "felicitous" as an homage to J.L. Austin, whose (1962) famous work on the performative capacity of language to actually "do things" (not just describe them) includes this distinction: "Performatives cannot be true or false, only felicitous or infelicitous" (a truncated overview of speech-act theory from Dr. Andrew Cline's dissertation, chapter two).

The moments that I enjoy best, though, are not thrilling at the visceral level of survival (e.g., danger, injury) nor the emotional satisfaction of smoothly-enacted top teamwork. My favorite experiences are the calm moments after the rush, when the wind dies down, the water becomes flat, and the beauty of the landscape overwhelms the senses. There is no more alive perception than this experience of being with the universe. The Back River near the mouth of the Connecticut in the Long Island Sound is one of these gorgeous places. The stars last night, from our anchorage behind Griswold Point, were breathtaking. Sometimes such vistas impress insignificance - oh how tiny and infinitesimally unimportant this solitary lifetime; yet after adrenalin enlivens every bodily process, consciousness of timespace is more unified and expansive. Rather than one speck "in" (and therefore separated from) the universe; I am an integral component "of" its vast complexity.

U professor watched as Germany reunified

When I read her book on Kella, Germany - "Where the World Ended" - a few years ago, I was inspired by Daphne Berdahl's ethnography of borderlands. She had a tangible, physical boundary but focused on people's orientations to the border as well as their adaptations when the border changed. Her notions apply to the work I hope to do at "the border" of languages, a borderland occupied (physically,materially) by simultaneous interpretation.

I need to read the essays in this book now, Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, which she co-edited.

I'm stunned at her age - roughly mine. So much accomplished: not just the academic contributions, but goodwill in the world. A worthy life, albeit all too short.

Learned via an H-Net List for the Society for the Anthropology of Europe.

I made a faux paux the other day, responding to Martí Cabré. S/he (as I plunge headlong into another one!) copied a photo I took of an art installation in Istanbul last summer. I was curious. The photo is evocative and in fact reminded me of the struggle some of my juniors are having letting go of being told in order to risk reaching out on their own terms. When I clicked through to see Martí's post, I discovered text in a foreign language and - for some reason - assumed the language was French. I am not sure why, as I do have a passing familiarity with Spanish; had I looked I would probably have made that (just as egregious an) error. At least, my good friend the Wanokip tells me, French and Catalan are both Latin languages.

What I realized, heart-in-mouth, was that I did not "look." My eyes glanced over the unfamiliar script and bounced off, catching no friction. What would have held me was not (in this instance) any quality inherent to the language or the medium (internet computer screen). I was in a hurry. My mind was multitasking, not inattentive but distracted, cast in multiple directions.

Martí kindly provided a synopsis in English:

I was frustrated because my server could not access the blogs area. Everything was fine but the blogs. And I had things to say. I had a need.

So this made me thought about the fragility of communication (the title). We are used to communication in one way (like in TV) where the bond with the viewer is based on the constant stimuli. This is similar to some Internet contents and specifically blogs, where the voidness of the contents is concealed by the amounts of smalltalk.

I try to write things with some sense so some feedback is needed with the readers, to keep learning myself about what I write. It is too complex to be one-way. I need the other side. And if I write sporadically this bond is weak. And if my server does not allow me access to writing, a frustration arises.

This is the content of the text. And, of course, it relates as a metaphor of human communication and your image was perfect.

When I first clicked through to Martí 's site, I was guilty of my own dependence upon "communication in one way": I needed English. (Is this similar to my students expressing the need for oral - not written - instruction?) Certainly I appreciate the desire for feedback, for interaction, for engagement with the complexity of learning ourselves and learning more about subjects of interest. Just this morning, Jose and I discussed leadership as feedback that helps a person adapt...good teachers invest in giving feedback that enables students to adapt.

Martí included links to information about Catalan. Another commenter just provided some sources concerning Esperanto in response to a recent post: No Mother Tongue? Is this an example of (quantum level) relative synchronicity?!

Catalan, language: wikipedia entry
Catalan, people of: wikipedia entry
famous Catalans: wikipedia list

Esperanto, university program website: Esperanto ĉe la Universitato de Roĉestro
Estimated number of current speakers from Ethnologue (which describes Esperanto as "a language of France).
Hoss suggests: "A good scholarly starting point is "Esperanto: Language, Literature and Community" by Pierre Janton." I found a review in Esperantic Studies Number 4 Spring 1994.

Anne Fadiman's "in" to a Hmong family's view of their tragic encounter with the U.S. medical system was accomplished via two crucial individuals: an American psychologist and a Hmong-English interpreter. Dr. Sukey Walker explains why the Hmong community respects her:

"The Hmong and I have a lot in common. I have an anarchist sub-personality. I don't like coercion. I also believe that the long way around is often the shortest way from point A to point B. And I'm not very interested in what is generally called the truth. In my opinion, consensual reality is better than facts." (p. 95)

"Consensual reality is better than facts" strikes me as a way of articulating the value of intentional, conscious co-creation of meaning. Dr. Walker's crucial advice to Ms. Fadiman is to find a qualified interpreter:

"...in [Dr. Walker's] opinion," writes Fadiman, " someone who merely converted Hmong words into English, however accurately, would be of no help to me whatsoever. 'I don't call my staff interpreters,' she told me. 'I call them cultural brokers. They teach me. When I don't know what to do, I ask them. You should go find yourself a cultural broker." (p. 95)

May Ying Xiong was not trained by the interpreting profession, which might be why she was able to act more as a cultural broker than a code-of-ethics-abiding professional. ASL interpreters, for instance, are explicitly forbidden from giving advice during interpretation. The roots of this rule was the need to end paternalism between non-deaf interpreters and deaf individuals who were (and sometimes still are) stereotypically-perceived as less competent at understanding and/or negotiating their way through communication to good decisions. The rule has served to reduce paternalism, but - like many rules - prevents many of other actions too. For instance, answering such as question as "What do I do now?" would be a blatant violation of the national certifying body's Code of Professional Conduct: "Refrain from providing counsel, advice, or personal opinion" (Illustrative Behavior 2.5).

Interpreters are criticized by institutional representatives for any kind of presumed advocacy on behalf of the minority language user. This dynamic is most visible in legal situations, and adversely affects immigrants much more so than members of established minority-language communities. The travesties of miscommunication which heap more violation, degradation, and pain upon refugees and asylum-seekers leap to mind. If only more members of dominant language groups would ask how to proceed, rather than assuming that they know!

In keeping with Kenneth Burke's mission to purify war, the use of social science to shift problem-solving from violence to conversation is a welcome development.

Burke says, "language... [is] the 'critical moment' at which human motives take form" (from GM 318, in Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism by Robert Wess).

Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones, a feature story from the NYTimes, has demonstrated the "ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations," enabling soldiers "to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population."

This kind of humanitarian army is the cooperation that our world needs. We must learn to eat with our enemies. Liberal leftists (I assume?) are criticizing the experimental military program for institutionalizing yet another way to coerce local peoples to accept occupation. My initial lean, however, is that the military does not "'yet have the skill sets to implement' a coherent nonmilitary strategy," as explained by United Nations' official Tom Gregg (download a Real Audio interview by CBC radio, June 2007). One of the critics, Roberto, J. González, might characterize himself as an empowered critic of western domination. He is of course correct that the military machines have deviously misused social scientists. Are we not, collectively, less naive now than in history? Perpetuating the same old oppressive frameworks through social criticism is as devastating as popular propaganda.

"My best language is my third..."

Rhona Trauvitch complicates the usual equation that the first language learned establishes cultural ways of thought. Her spoken English rarely evinces signs indicative of a non-native user, although the trace of an accent suggests she did not learn English in the U.S. or United Kingdom.

We spoke after our professor promised to make her famous. Stephen introduced us to the thought of Matteo Bartoli, the figural teacher of Antonio Gramsci.

"Bartoli says all languages are the result of sociocultural conflict. Words are in competition with one another; words and languages are grammatical structures in competition with each other and cannot coexist: language is a battleground. There is always conflict between languages, and conflict within languages. Conflict conflict conflict, that's what language is and what language is about. Words are always vying for position in language. [Bartoli] does not mean disembodied words, but that what we are doing in language is deciding 'what will be the word for this? what will resonate?'" {From notes typed during lecture.]

Bartoli called his work neolinguistics, and then spatial linguistics. His phrase, "pattern of irradiations" caught my attention. Whatever the limitations of mathematical thinking (particularly its assumptions of permanence and predictability), physics is an amazing metaphor for human relations. Why irradiation not radiation? My own simplification: Radiation is the (natural) medium; irradiation the (man-made) use/effect. The term is applied in risk communication regarding food safety, industry (e.g., manufacture of foam, insulation, jewelry/gemstones), and medicine. Specificallly, irradiation refers to a process of ionizing radiation intended for a purpose, explicitly in contrast with the normal backdrop of daily exposure to background radiation.

In the context of this graduate seminar, Language as Action and Performance, Bartoli's combination of geography with language use is a revolutionary conception of how language makes human interrelations visible. The patterns of linguistic survival illustrate material conquest, yet - even more so - when one stops using the mother/native tongue, abandoning the cultural language in favor of the dominating language of power, then one has truly conceded to colonization. Ouch.

We spent some time discussing solutions (from Gramsci's view, linking with Bakhtin and Burke) to the dilemma of needing to learn the language(s) of power in order to work within them to preserve one's own heritage language(s) and the worldviews and wisdoms they contain. During class discussion, Gramsci's abhorrence of Esperanto was raised. His objection is rooted in the fact of Esperanto's formal rules: its refusal to accommodate innovation - the natural flexibility of languages to adapt and grow in accordance with human experiences. Rhona's moment of inspiration was describing Esperanto being "born a dead language." Her logic was comparing its rigidification to the stale preservation of languages no longer spoken - preserved only in ancient texts.

This particular session was one of the best to date. The subjectivity of my read is based largely on the subject matter: grasping ways of conceiving of languages (specifically when, how, and where they are used, by whom) as a way of mapping power relations and imagining how the continued use of diverse languages is a necessary and vital corrective to entrenched hegemony.

~~~~~

Rhona presented Flying Through Walls: Magical Realism in Literature and Advertisements this past April at Cross-Over Arts: Intermediality, a seminar in Puebla, Mexico that she attended with colleagues from the Comparative Literature Department at UMass Amherst. She placed 91st in her age/gender class in a 10km Road Race in Athens, 2005.

Professor Stephen Olbrys Gencarella is (among numerous accomplishments) a co-signer of a letter to Lingua Franca in defense of Folklore, co-author of Working with Tradition: towards a partnership model of fieldwork, and is a member of the editorial board for Liminalities: A journal of performance studies. Stephen describes his pedagogy in The Ivory Tower, Apathy, and the Art of Citizenship (available as a pdf from Best Practices).

I finally watched a movie (my only downtime this past weekend amid a grading spree!) by Wang Xiaoshuai, So Close to Paradise. The "Director's Interview" at the end of the film explains that the film had to go through three cuts before it passed government censors. Wang's career is well-established now, but in the 1990s he was as cutting-edge as they come, creating movies about life in China completely outside official channels. This film, which has been around for at least eight years, illustrates how grim life can be for many rural folk and immigrants who make their ways to large Chinese cities, seeking good jobs and better lives.

A biographical analysis of Wang describes his position within the "Sixth Generation" of Chinese filmmakers (a term I've at least heard before!) These directors are characterized by the feature of being young enough not to have had first-hand knowledge of the brutal Cultural Revolution (a label which always struck me as "sounding" like "a good thing" but was actually an intensive gutting of what we might retrospectively label as China's then-contemporary creative class). Referring again to the Director's Interview, Wang foregrounds the viewpoint of individuals instead of presenting storylines emphasizing the official doctrines of collectivity. I suppose that subjectivity is why the film's storyline did not challenge my perception as much as some foreign films. Instead, I found the poverty and exploitation familiar as another example of the depressing patterns of capitalism. Reminds me of Burke's critique of the "disorder of overproduction" in CounterStatement:

...instead of having all workers employed on half time, we have working full time and the other half idle, so that whereas overproduction could be the greatest reward of applied science, it has been, up to now, the most menacing condition our modern civilization has had to face. (p. 31)

Burke wrote in 1931. Nearly eighty years later the situation is worse.

fyi: a critique of Burke's dramatism by Frederic Jameson, linking/correcting him with Yvor Winters.

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet.

Anne Fadiman. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.
1997. (Preface, p. viii.)

The Review linked above does criticize Fadiman for overromanticizing some aspects of Hmong culture, history, and customs; what reviewer Mai Na M. Lee calls "the bigger issues." In particular, she criticizes Fadiman's conclusion that Hmong are "differently ethical." The phrasing itself is curious, requiring some serious parsing. The way I read the phrase, Fadiman is asserting that ethics are as foundational and valued among the Hmong as within any people. The use of "differently" (instead of the starker label of "different") - refers to the ethics being performed or based "in a different manner." It seems to me this opens up comparision on the basis of more, rather then less, similarity. Dr. Lee did not read the phrase this way, interpreting its meaning as more distancing (differencing?) than joining.

Dr. Lee has the benefit of context; I have not yet read that far. There is a Bakhtinian movement discernable here: the counterplay of centripetal and centrifugal forces in the utterances of Fadiman's book and Dr. Lee's review.