On being made of Velveeta cheese

The "self" that we think of in Western culture, or at least that I, as an American, think of, could be entirely different from the self that other cultures think of. I do not tend to think of myself in terms of my ancestry or the land that I live on, or even in terms of the friends and community that I have. I think of myself as my individual traits and accomplishments. Here is one example of a different way to think about it. Jeanette Armstrong, a First Nations Okanagan woman, tries to explain the Okanagan notion of self:
"The first difference I want to explore has to do with the idea of what we are as an individual life force within our skins, and how we might think that in relation to the unseen terrain we traverse as we walk the land. I speak of how we perceive that, and in consequence how we perceive the effect on the world around us. … Each person is born into a family and a community. No person is born isolated from those two things…. You are that which is family and community; within that you cannot be separate. … Without [the capacity to bond] the person is said to be 'crippled/incapacitated' and 'lifeless.' To not have community or family is to be scattered or falling apart. … [Okanagans] refer to the land and our bodies with the same root syllable. This means that the flesh which is our body is pieces of the land come to us through the things which the land is. The soil, the water, the air, and all other life-forms contributed parts to be our flesh. We are our land/place. Not to know and to celebrate this … is to be dis-placed."*

So who am I, on this view of self? It will take a lot longer to tell in this way of thinking of self. Thinking of the parts of the earth that make up my self, when I was a child, I was made up of wheat and chemicals (white bread), more chemicals (Velveeta cheese), peanuts and sugarcane (peanut butter), grapes, apples and more sugarcane (grape jelly from the store and apple jelly that my father's mother made), pecans from my father's parents' farm, pears, apples, cows (loved hamburgers, and would never eat anything else when we went to a restaurant), cow's milk, and more wheat and sugarcane (sugary breakfast cereals). With the exception of the apples that went into my grandmother's jelly and the pecans my grandfather picked, I do not know which soil or which land produced any of this food. Now I am living in Australia, the first person anywhere in my ancestry to do so. My body is made up of kangaroo meat, shot somewhere in the Australian bush as wild game, lambs from some sheep station somewhere in Australia, almonds grown in South Australia, apples grown in Tasmania, whiting and barramundi caught in the rivers and ocean just off the coast of Brisbane, ginger beer from ginger and sugarcane grown in north Queensland, vegetables grown mostly within a day's drive of Brisbane, bought at the local farmer's market, and Dagoba chocolate made from cocoa grown on a fair trade, sustainable plantation in the Dominican Republic. (This really is pretty much my diet -- I know it sounds politically correct and joyless.) I breathe in oxygen breathed out by the eucalyptus, fig and mangrove trees growing in my neighborhood. (And I think the other plants I breathe in are grown somewhere in northern NSW.) Still, I don't know that I feel that I belong to the land here yet.

I was born into a family in the United States of America, born to a white mother and father who had been and would continue to be active on behalf of equal rights for African-Americans. I have a brother who is three years older then me, and he has a son and another child on the way. My mother was an only child, and my father had an older brother and sister. I have many cousins, who I do not speak to often, but who I love and care about. In recent years, we cousins usually see each other only at weddings and funerals. My grandparents are all dead now. My father's parents, in South Carolina, had also each worked on behalf of African-Americans (though they thought of them as 'coloured'), with my grandfather treating them as equals in his work on the railroad, and my grandmother volunteering to teach local black children to read when she found out that they could not. They did not think of this in terms of civil rights, merely in terms of being "good Christians." Their ancestors came to North America from Scotland in the early 1800s.

My mother's father was born to Finnish parents in Montana, on a ranch that they had been given as homesteading land. My great-grandfather fled Finland so that he would not be drafted into the Russian Czar's army, and as far as he and his new bride knew, their homestead was unoccupied land available for settling. It actually belonged to the Crow Indians, and was made "available" to whites when the US government revoked several Indian treaties in the late 1800s. My mother's mother was from Arkansas, an orphan from age 8, but we have family records for her side that go back many generations. Her ancestors were among the first white settlers to come to North America in the 1600s, and they settled in what is now Massachusetts.

So, one branch of my family has been in North America for only 3 generations, another branch for about 17 generations. I do feel that I belong to that land. It could be because I grew up there; it could be because my ancestors have been there for so long. But whatever the reason is, I feel a sacred connection, not to the U.S., but to North America.

* Jeanette Armstrong, "Keepers of the Earth," in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, T. Roszak, M. Gomes & A. Kanner (Eds.), San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995, pp. 316-324.

Talking talking inside the head

"As a child of ten, I once sat on a hillside on the reservation with my father and his mother as they looked down into the town in the valley floor. ... My grandmother said (translated from Okanagan), 'The people down there are dangerous, they are all insane.' My father agreed, commenting, 'It's because they are wild and scatter anywhere.' I remember looking down into the town and being afraid. ... The words my grandmother and my father used to describe the newcomers in the valley offer a way into the perspective I wish to share with you. ...
If I were to interpret/transliterate the Okanagan meaning of my grandmother's words, it might be this: 'The ones below who are not of us [as place], may be a chaotic threat in action; they are all self-absorbed [arguing] inside each of their heads.' My father's words might be something like this: 'Their actions have a source, they have displacement panic, they have been pulled apart from themselves as family [generational sense] and place [as land/us/survival].'*


* Jeanette Armstrong, "Keepers of the Earth," in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, T. Roszak, M. Gomes & A. Kanner (Eds.), San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995, pp. 316-324.

Client-centered flexible delivery learning, & other wanks from the world of higher education

As we all know, a university education is a “product” that we “deliver” to our “clients” (the students). It is vitally important that we “allow students to realize their learning objectives.” Wankety-wank-wank.

When asked to provide a revised course profile (syllabus) about a course in ethical philosophy, one that matched the university's new mission statement, a philosopher at a prestigious and reputable Australian university wrote the following on page one: “Students will engage in a lexically-based interaction with the works of ethnic minority scholar David Hume.” On page two, he said, “Page one was for university administrators. This page is for students. You will be reading works by David Hume.”

The Department chair at another prestigious and reputable Australian university was asked to fill out a form by the university administration. A member of the faculty had stopped by his office to get him for lunch, and he said, “Oh, wait just a minute while I finish this form.” The faculty member waited while the chair studied each item on the form, brow furrowed as he thought about it for a few moments, and then wrote something down. He did this on each item, and then signed and dated the form. “OK, I’m ready, let’s go.” As he got up to get his coat on, the faculty member thought to himself, I wonder what that form was, and took a peek. The form and the answers went like this:

In what ways has your department changed its curriculum to help students attain the graduate attributes the University has agreed upon?
Scribbled in the chair’s handwriting, “Get fucked”

What changes has your department made to align with the University’s mission statement and vision for the next 5 years?
Scribbled in the chair’s handwriting, “Get fucked”

And so it went for the rest of the form. Now that’s what tenure is for!

But seriously, all this administrative hoo-ha really takes time away from working on how to develop a course that really gives students a chance to learn. I want time to give some real thought to the courses I learned the most in when I was in school, and to think about how to make that happen. Something tells me that's not what the bureaucrats have in mind though... To do that, the students would have to put some effort in and read a lot, and that just isn't the model for today's university.










p.s. Small business coaching

Speaking well of indigenous cultures is romanticizing them? I don't think so.

Hugh Brody has this to say:
"Fatalism and impatience are recurring attitudes when intellectuals, politicians, and journalists speak about the destiny of hunter-gatherers or, indeed, of any other indigenous societies. These people are bound to change, … sure to disappear [say the would-be realists]. … Instead of attempting to hold back the inevitable, [the fatalists continue] those who care … should advocate the full participation of indigenous peoples in the modernization process. This bundle of arguments is endorsed as the 'realistic' position; the rival view is to be stigmatized as romanticism.

…the underlying story is clear enough. One kind of economy and culture overwhelms another. …To report this, and to work with or for those in despair, is not to be romantic so much as to be in touch with the real. Men and women in most hunter-gatherer communities relate histories, often within their own lifetimes, of extreme loss…. Personal experience on frontiers and the findings of many scholars endorse the voices of the elders. … Where, then, is romanticism? In pretending that a particular kind of history has not taken place? Or in giving voice to those whose heritage and experience are part of this history?
…
[The 'realist'] line of reasoning draws on faith in progress and posits more or less a priori that human history is composed of changes that are improvements. Yet to suggest that all change is for the better is to pretend that frontiers do not exist, and that they proceed in some benign and innocent way. This is a belief, not a discovery made by social science. To insist that all changes are some form of 'development' does not oppose romance with realism. Faith in progress is itself a kind of religion.

…anthropologists who have worked in hunter-gatherer societies repeatedly celebrate the humor, gentleness, and everyday equality they find there. To celebrate the qualities of the system, and to identify the many ways in which that system secures a successful relationship between people and their lands, as well as among the people themselves – this is to identify the real, not perpetuate the romantic. Nor is it romanticism to express concern about a system's decline, to convey people's dismay about being dispossessed, to affirm their rights to keep their lands, languages, and customs.
…Egalitarianism, respect for the elderly, loving regard for children, diligent respect for the land, plants, and animals on which people depend – these are the 'virtues,' too often missing in the 'developed' world, that cause visitors to hunter-gatherer societies to experience deep admiration. To describe these things, and seek to understand them, is not romanticism but the most relevant kind of realism."

pp. 136-141, Hugh Brody, 2000, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World, NY: North Point Press.

What is scientific knowledge?

Science is fundamentally the search for knowledge. Scientists are motivated by a tremendous curiosity about how the world works. Particularly in the biological sciences, many scientists are also motivated by awe at the mystery and complexity of nature. So how did we get this reputation of being uptight and cold-hearted, incapable of feeling wonder?

What is science, essentially? It is a set of methods, techniques for investigation. In particular, it is the process of examining alternative explanations for observable phenomena by testing them against each other. If observations fit explanation A better than explanation B, we prefer explanation A. We are always looking for possible alternative explanations for a set of observations – that’s why we run control conditions and get into heated debates with people who have different theories.

A research scientist has to be comfortable with uncertainty, with not knowing. The results of experiments are frequently surprising, and are rarely neat and tidy. So we’re constantly working in a world of nuance and uncertainty and maybe-it’s-this-way. It probably takes a certain kind of personality to be comfortable in that space. People who need definite answers could never succeed as scientists, though maybe they would do OK as engineers.

Contrary to the portrayal of science in the popular media, it is not a reified set of known facts, but a dynamic, shifting array of theories and hypotheses, constantly changing in the light of new discoveries. Yet the array has internal coherence, even as it changes. As scientific theories change, we come to new and different understandings of the world and our place in it.

The greatest book I've ever read

I think I would have to say The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World, by Hugh Brody is the one. It's lyrical, impassioned, and a profound statement about our humanity. The book is an expression of his life's work as an anthropologist and filmmaker working among the indigenous people of the Canadian and Alaskan Arctic in their struggles to have their culture and rights recognized. The book makes a strong case that when cultures are destroyed, when there are no more people living as hunters and foragers and thinking in those ways, we will have lost an important part of what it means to be human.

He tells a funny story to illustrate the difference between how Inuit hunter-gatherers think, and how people from the modern industrial world think. If you’re living as a hunter and forager, your sense of what a day is would of course depend strongly on the sun, when it rises and sets. You would choose what is an appropriate activity for a particular time based on these natural cycles. In the summer, the days that far north are of course very long, and the midday sun is bright. People prefer the slightly cooler light of midnight for a lot of their activities. So the Inuit children stay up all night to play, then go home to breakfast, and then to bed. In Pond Inlet, the Canadian government school runs during the summer months, and of course holds classes at regular school hours. It is a product of the industrialized world, where things are done at particular times on the clock, natural cycles be damned. The children are too sleepy to either go to school or to stay awake in school, having been up all night in the light. The teachers met with the parents to discuss the problem. They all agreed that it was important that the children should go to bed early, so that they could go to school. Good, the teachers said, then you’ll make the children go to bed? No, said the parents, we couldn’t do that. You have to do that, you run the school. And so they each went their ways, puzzled by the others’ unwillingness to take responsibility, and nothing was done.
Brody writes of these far northern hunter-gatherers:
“The Inuit way is without authoritarianism; parents are inclined to trust children to know what they need. Individuals have to be left to make decisions for themselves; and children are individuals just as adults are.... This belief is fundamental to the Inuit way of being in the world, to their culture, and to hunter-gatherer cultures more generally. ... The needs the school was supposed to meet might be a matter of agreement, with Inuit and teachers of one mind about the importance of southern kinds of education; but the imposition of the routines and authority of school was still alien. To suggest that parents should impose authority ... was not acceptable to the parents in Pond Inlet. If there was a clash of schedules, let the Qallunat, the southerners, in whom these clashes originated and in whose role was their orchestration, do the job. Qallunat had designed, built, and even furnished Inuit homes, so why should they not go there and organize bedtime too?...The tenacity with which Inuit held on to the core of their culture was both startling and delicious.... It showed what it means for people to insist upon that which defines them. Refusing to force bedtime on their children in an arctic June sustained a heartland of Inuit life.” p. 29.
Hugh Brody, 2000, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World, NY: North Point Press.
(A division of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux)

Grieving for ecosystems

I had a dream that there was a hillside covered with rainforest. In the dream, Americans came in and cut down the rainforest to make room for new modern apartment buildings. They did it overnight, so suddenly, and then in the morning the forest was gone. I was overwhelmed with grief that something so precious had been destroyed beyond repair, and was gone forever. It's the same way I have felt when someone close to me has died, the feeling that something irreversible has happened. In the dream, I wandered through the stumps on the hillside, and finally found a few scattered old growth trees - huge old eucalypts more than an armspan wide. This did nothing for my grief, though, because the forest, the living system they had been a part of, was still dead. If someone wonderful had died, and someone said, no, look, the rest of the body is gone, but we've still preserved some lung tissue in a Petri dish, it wouldn’t comfort me. The point was that the forest was gone, irrevocably. I woke up still feeling the grief.

An ecosystem cannot be brought back. Individual species can find new ways to survive, as peregrine falcons have done in the “canyons” of modern cities, but the complex interdependence of an ecosystem, once destroyed, cannot be put back together. What took hundreds of thousands or millions of years to develop, with its intricate web of interrelationships, cannot be put back together by human action, it can only be destroyed by it. This now seems to be our species’ role in the ecosystems of the world. But we are also a species who can grieve these losses, foresee them, and try to stop them. Where I live used to be covered with rainforest or dry eucalypt forest a century ago, and though there are many trees around, there is no more forest. My dream was a dream of this place, where I live. So what can I do now to stop this from happening in other parts of Queensland? Conservation shouldn’t be about individual species, it should be about ecosystems. Can we develop an ethos in which ecosystems have as much right to exist and live as do people?

Australian Rainforest Conservation
Australian Wildlife Conservation
Community Biodiversity Network
Rainforest Action Network

You would think it was a carnival funhouse, but it's something much darker

This dream had to be an allegory about the U.S. I found myself living in a place that seemed kind of like being at a combination boarding school/carnival fun house. There were many, many people who lived here, like a small city, and it looked a little like Disneyland. Everywhere you turned, there were all these mechanical mannequins – clowns, animals, giant lollipops, that would move around and pop up. A kid would have found this delightful. The buildings looked like fake buildings in Disneyland: façades that made them look like castles, or old Victorian houses from a Dickens set, cobblestone streets, but really, there were ordinary buildings with classrooms and dormitories behind the façades. Seems like a good metaphor for America.

We all had to report to a guy who I'll just call The Boss. He ran this place, and when he said he wanted something done, it got done. When he said he wanted to see you, you went to see him. That sort of character. No one questioned what he wanted, it just got done. I never saw him in the dream, he was just a presence. Kind of like Karl Rove – I guess he was just a symbol for totalitarian authority.

The Boss made an announcement over TV that we were being invaded. I looked out the window and saw troops of Asian men in khaki uniforms marching up the street. I was panicked and thought, “This is an emergency, we'd all better get to a safe place.” Then all the mechanical gears and tracks that operated in the funhouse city began to move, and buildings were shifting around, clowns popping up, giant teddy bears offering candy, and I couldn't see the invaders anymore. As I went around the city, I couldn't see any sign of them. I went to class, as I was supposed to on my schedule, and began talking to a guy who looked like a Goth about the invasion. We were both asking what had happened to the invasion. The teacher told us not to talk about that. We talked after class about trying to figure out what was really going on in this place, where nothing was as it seemed. He and I made plans to meet secretly later to talk about it, in his dormitory.

After class, I was walking round the city, looking for any sign of the invasion. I got to the edge of the city, where I could see tracks – like trolley tracks – on which all the buildings moved, and the back side of the buildings with all the gears and machinery that moved them. I could see the reality of the city, instead of the funhouse illusion. There was not a trace anywhere of any of the soldiers, or of any fighting or blood. I began to have the chilling feeling that the mechanisms of the city had simply crushed the invaders, destroyed the bodies, and cleaned up all the blood, hiding reality behind the façade of fun. I could imagine street-sweeping machinery washing away the blood as if no invasion had taken place. The TV had gone back to life as normal, no more news of the invasion, as if it had never happened. I don't need to explain that as a symbol, do I? Pretty obvious.

As I went back to Goth guy's dorm to meet him, a messenger came and told me that The Boss wanted to see me. When that happened, you were supposed to go right away. I didn't, because I wanted to tell my friend/ally the Goth what I suspected had happened to the invasion. As I was trying to meet him, another messenger from The Boss found me to let me know that The Boss didn't like to be kept waiting. All I managed to say to the Goth before being led off was that this place was not the carnival funhouse it seemed to be, but something much more sinister.

Need I say more to interpret this one? Isn't this an obvious dream about America?