history: November 2006 Archives

While most Americans will engage in some form of gluttony today, it is an Unhappy day for American Indians. Jesus Evil Kachina distributed this article, which refers to the National Day of Mourning. Here is a history of the so-called first thanksgiving, summarizing competing claims: those of the "victors" and those of the "vanquished." As with many internet sources (noted as a caution to students), the statement is not properly supported with references (I believe they do exist; ideally they would be included for verification and crossreferencing).

One of the most stupid, insensitive, and embarrasing things I've ever done was give Jesus Evil Kachina a thanksgiving card (nearly 20 years ago) which said something to the effect of white people giving thanks for one reason and "indians giving thanks that europeans didn't come with tactical nuclear weapons." The sentiment tickled my dark sense of humor, but how painful must it have been to an Apache?

Meanwhile, for the past several years, I have been attending university in the town of Amherst, MA, which is named after "Lord Jeff, who was an early pioneer in biological warfare.

I don't advocate that non-Indian Americans feel guilty for the privileges we have (guilt is a selfish emotion), rather that we recognize the price paid for what has become our inheritance. The town of Plymouth has erected a small monument as part of their efforts at redress. The 37th annual Day of Mourning begins at noon, again calling for the release of political prisoner, Leonard Peltier.

“How do you foresee the transition?”

A U.S. military commander asked this question after watching Keanu Sai’s presentation on the occupation of Hawai’i: “American Occupation of the Hawaiian State: A Century Unchecked.” I was moved to laughter throughout these three presentations today and the talk and video last night.

The evidence is irrefutable and the argument elegant. The process, however, is going to take some time, as Hawaiian Nationals negotiate “the paradox of being tied to [their] own identity.” Kalawai’a Moore (“The Discursive Struggle over Hawaiian Identity and Subjectivity “) detailed the discursive collision of subjectivities shaped under terms of “colonization” with the emerging knowledge that colonization was a deception to cover up illegal occupation. Kalawai’a revels in the postmodern irony of using state theory and the status of Hawaiian Nationals to break out of an Oppressive-Resistance relationship. :-) He invoked Lyotard’s concept of the differend as “a case of conflict between at least two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments" (Lyotard, 1988:xi).” In the Hawaiian case the referents have been broken: “the referent evoked is now the system by which states measure their own legitimate existence and validate personality under International Law.”

While Kuhio Vogeler compared the prolonged occupation of Hawai’i with that of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (“Prolonged Occupations: Hawai’i and the Baltic States”), I was reminded of Farida Vis’ presentation yesterday (“Resisting Occupation: The Palestinian Suicide Bomber and the Western Print Media”). Kuhio was speaking of path dependency (the tendency for initial policy choices to persist: policy/practices can change with much political pressure), and Farida emphasized how the Israeli media machine is always first out with stories concerning events in the Middle East, necessarily framing any response that comes next as a reaction “to” or “against” the version already disseminated. Kuhio’s discussion of path dependency and critical junctures (after the fact, one can argue there must have been sufficient force to produce movement away from equilibrium/inertia because a change did occur) also had me thinking about this conference as a discourse event. I’ve been doing that already – although somehow I do find myself realizing these things after the trajectory is set in motion.

I told Tove at the start of today’s lunchbreak that I’m a troublemaker, she assured me that meant she would like me. :-) But, I qualified, “I make trouble in all directions.” Tove’s urgency to make change effective now is vitalizing: I am inspired by her clarity of vision. Children and their parents should be informed about the long-term effects of mother tongue medium instruction, which is more effective at ensuring fluent acquisition of English than early educational exposure to English. This is a slightly different issue than Rakesh Bhatt’s insistence that learning English early will not have an adverse effect on mother tongue fluency and linguistic persistence (“Colonial Dis-course, Alter-native Ideologies, and the Politics of Linguistic Nostalgia”). I was pained, listening to Tove and Rakesh’s debate, because I sensed more areas of agreement than disagreement. It seemed to me that Rakesh “heard” Tove saying Kashmiri children should be denied English, which is far from her point. She and Robert were both arguing for the best possible conditions for teaching English to them (and anyone).

Socioeconomic class definitely is at play within the (microsocial) debate and the (macrosocial) realities. Those without material and tangible resources want and need hope and skills now: a little is immeasurably better than nothing. Rakesh wants to respond to that need now, and – really! – so do Tove and Robert. There is a definite difference between the careful construction of language policy and local solutions to immediate needs. Perhaps, however, the two approaches do not need to be mutually exclusive?

My new pal Stephen worked on Kimcoco Iamoto's election to the Oahu Board of Education.

Post election radio and text interview (added 14 November 2006).

I watched with dismay as the “peaceniks” broke off into a huddle after Fred Odisho’s presentation on “Discourse During Insurgency/Counterinsurgency: The Importance of Achieving Communication Superiority in Gaining the Support of the People.” In the front of the room was another huddle – all men, most of them big – talking with this Iraqi military officer. I joined the huddle up front. “You’ve got guts,” I said to Fred, “an army man coming to talk in a nest of peaceniks.” He gave me a wink, “Someone’s got to do it,” he said, “otherwise people only get what CNN gives them.”

I’m not convinced that the academics gathered here only get their news from CNN, but it was obvious to me that here was a split in the conference body. Ruth opened the questioning of Fred, his father Edward (“The Iraqi War: A Typical Example of Cultural and Linguistic Dis-course”), and Russell Zanca (audio report May 17) (“Losing Hearts and Minds in Iraq? Cultural Competence and War”) wondering how it is that people who are otherwise so smart could have made the mistakes detailed in this panel. Tove continued: ” are we as researchers, in some way supporting the occupiers to become “nice occupiers” through training in intercultural communication?”

I took her question seriously. I share her frustration. Every time I hear someone mention Iraqis killed because they didn’t understand English and thus couldn’t follow directions, I am reminded of similar tragic incidents with police and people who are deaf. One can’t “stop” or “raise your hands slowly” if you don’t hear the words. Tove invited me to join the gang for lunch...I hesitated over whom to join because I had already been engaged in banter with the Hawaiians. These were the guys I’d observed in “hypermasculine homoeroticism” with the Iraqis. NO! Not really, but it is a good line, isn’t it? :-) (Not my line, alas, hence the quotation marks.) I told Ruth I was going "to infiltrate the enemy."

The blatant gender division (five-on-five) was disrupted only by (husband) Robert in the peacenik huddle and the comment by a woman in the audience who had noted that the military might explicitly want not to promote intercultural understanding because such capability humanizes the enemy, making them harder to kill. In this regard, she suggested that intercultural training conducted by/for the military is actually quite subversive. Is this as simple as men vs women? I don’t think so, but gender is difficult to dismiss completely. Tove’s morning keynote addressed “Kurds in Turkey and in (Iraqi) Kurdistan – Comparison of Educational Linguistic Human Rights in Two Situations of Occupation.”

Perhaps it is not surprising that a champion of the Kurds might be drawn into conflict with champions of the Iraqis? The Hawai’ians, meanwhile, made identifications with the Iraqis on terms of literal occupation while recognizing the “legal brief” being constructed by Tove to present a case for the violation of Kurdish linguistic human rights. These political scientists, Kuhio, Keanu, Kalawai’a, and Stephen (I think he’s honorary, and an actual lawyer, of some kind, not above bribery), kept my pen flying as they discussed international law’s definitions of insurgency, occupation, sovereignty, genocide, and human rights.

I recently remembered working as a ballot-counter in Indianapolis, IN over a decade ago. It was a great experience in accountable democracy. There were a dozen of us, most experienced, a few - like me and my partner - verifying the vote for the first time. There was comfort and camraderie not only among the respective Republicans and Democrats, but also between us. The shared citizenship mattered even as anxieties rose and fell with the ongoing tallies and palpable disappointment/thrill of losing/winning the precinct.

Oh how times change, especially with communication technology. Hacking Democracy details concerns with electronic voting. Mark Crispin Miller spoke about election fraud last spring at a conference hosted by the Communication Department at UMass Amherst, Communication in Crisis. Miller was in town for an updated presentation last week. I bumped into him and Viveca at The Black Sheep; he was predicting we will be 'fooled again' today. I hope he is wrong, but no one has done more than him in documenting the evidence.

I posted some resources from Tom Atlee regarding the potential for problems with electronic voting machines back in July 2003.

I wouldn't go so far as to say what happens this election proves or disproves any claims. I do think we need to be watching carefully and bracing ourselves to recognize, admit, and challenge the integrity of our voting system. What's wrong with having proof? Of course there are critiques of the cases made in the materials I've linked - fine and dandy. Let's debate! Still - what's wrong with having proof?

Proposal:

Utilizing critical discourse analysis, this paper examines the discourse of transaction in headline stories in four different languages – Finnish, Swedish, Persian (Iran) and US English – regarding the 2005 Israeli pullout from Neve Dekalim in which Jewish settlers resisted relocation. A textual analysis yields themes (indexes and icons) that are intertextual.

Intertextuality, as conceptualized by Fairclough and Foucault, refers to the way that statements always reactualize other statements. Each newspaper account generates its centering effect (Threadgold) in both horizontal and vertical ways (Bahktin) along the dimensions of time, space, place, and motion. For instance, aggression is attributed to different actors and along opposing trajectories in the Persian text than among the three western versions – which also have some significant distinctions from each other. The stories reported in these four online newspapers thus work interdiscursively to replicate and perpetuate a global, monocentric discourse of perpetual conflict. According to Irvine, interdiscursivity is “a specific semiotic effect [that] must be created in practice” (2005, p. 72). Most interesting, the examination of these media accounts reproduced similar interlinguistic dynamics among the four researchers, whose national identities align with the languages and newspapers chosen.

Such social metonymy highlights the challenge of decentering dominant discourses: the same referents can be treated differently in various national and/or media discourses yet still work to generate an overarching monocentric discourse. We argue that simultaneous attention to the workings of ideology at all levels - including our microsocial interactions with each other - enables the recognition of polycentricity and the interruption of interdiscursively monocentric repetitions. Such analyses and the linguistic options they support can contribute to the decentering of present discursive hegemonies of conflict and occupation.

I'll (attempt ! to) present on behalf of Ehya, Jussi, and Karin, of Dexus Nexus 3.0 (August 2005), on Wednesday Nov 8 at 3 pm in the "transaction" thread of Dialogue Under Occupation: The Discourse of Enactment, Transaction, Reaction, and Resolution, hosted by Northeastern Illinois University.

[excerpts from Obituary, Institute for Advanced Study]

Geertz acknowledged and explored the innate desire of humanity to "make sense out of experience, to give it form and order." In Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988), Geertz stated, "The next necessary thing...is neither the construction of a universal Esperanto-like culture...nor the invention of some vast technology of human management. It is to enlarge the possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another in interest, outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world where tumbled as they are into endless connection, it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other's way."

Geertz recounted that he was exposed to a form of anthropology "then called, rather awkwardly, 'pattern theory' or configurationalism.' In this dispensation, stemming from work before and during the war by the comparative linguist Edward Sapir at Yale and the cultural holist Ruth Benedict at Columbia, it was the interrelation of elements, the gestalt they formed, not their particular atomistic character that was taken to be the heart of the matter."

Back in the day when I attended several Tavistock conferences (note new book) I met folks who were into Gestalt Theory, which - I wonder? - may trace some of its roots back to Geertz. Still tempts me as something to look into someday. The analogy of a soap bubble used at the site linked is akin to the imagery I've had concerning gravity...