Author Archive for Dara Lind

Thursday Post-Capital-ist Cookie Blogging

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 10, 2008
in Extemporanea
. 4 Comments

My apologies for having been absent from posting the last couple of days. I was in DC, renewing my Left-cred at some Campus Progress events, catching up with some fellow Mafiosi and influential patrons, and meeting people more interesting, intelligent, and generally awesome than I am. My most profound thanks to everyone with whom I got to hang out during my visit.

I’d bake cookies as a gesture of thanks, but I suspect it will be a few weeks before I produce my next successful batch of cookies. See, I’m totally enthralled by this NYT piece on technical secrets of the chocolate chip cookie, but it recommends letting the dough sit for 36 hours for ideal results. What this advice neglects to take into account is that the only state in which the substance known as Chocolate Chip Cookie is more delicious than just-out-of-the-oven is when it is still cookie dough. And asking a would-be baker to let it sit unconsumed for 36 hours seems absurd, especially for those of us bakers who are more known for our generosity than our patience and impulse control. So this baking advice will likely have the effect of provoking me to seek out innovations in the direct distribution of unbaked dough, which is good news for the college-kid “valets” at my apartment building but unhelpful for anyone outside the MSP metro.

Yeah, yeah, health risks, I know. But I’ve always had a bit of a subversive streak as a baker: my first batch of public cookies were deployed to diffuse standardized-test-ambition tension among a few of my friends in high school, and a former professor of mine has informed me of his willingness to set up a “shell account” so that he can receive tokens of my appreciation without technically accepting compensation from me. Compared to cookie-laundering, handing out raw dough sounds positively tame.

Also, no, I didn’t get to hang out with Ted Leo. But I did shake his hand and stammer at him for a bit. I’m perfectly satisfied with that.

In which the U.S. Conference of Mayors agrees with me.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 7, 2008
in Immigration, Media and Politics
. 0 Comments

Insofar as Noah’s response to my post of yesterday can be summarized as “The most pragmatically viable response is to blame employers because it’s better than blaming immigrants,” I agree completely. Insofar as it can be summarized as “We shouldn’t be talking about changing our own perception in ways that can’t make for more viable public narratives” I disagree vehemently.

The initial reason that I wrote the post was actually that I’m frustrated generally with a refusal to expect business owners to see their workers as human beings rather than warm bodies and this is a very good example of that. But Noah’s attribution of it to my radical localism on immigration is also valid. I suspect that a paradigm shift will be a more durable solution to the issue than even the most liberal legislation will, and the xenophobes are more likely to change their minds when they get to know actual immigrants — or at least have to confront them at marches and town-hall meetings — than through narratives delivered on the national stage.

The short-term effects will be pretty bad in places like Hazleton or Prince George’s County, but the short-term effects will be pretty bad there anyway, and what ICE is doing — in those cities as well as more immigrant-friendly places like New Haven and LA — is worse by orders of magnitude. And if the news out of the Conference of Mayors is any indication, local governments are largely at least somewhat pro-immigrant in their outlook. So pragmatically we’re in decent shape.

I get the importance of narratives. But I suspect it’s the smaller, private changes in attitude that will end up driving immigration reform on a human scale.

A clinic for the cure of bleeding hearts.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 7, 2008
in Immigration and Politics
. 2 Comments

Another day, another story about immigration-law processes in the MSM. This one is the Washington Post with an article about the increasing popularity of immigration clinics at law schools, which ought to be reassuring but instead is just hugely depressing.

Apparently, despite sources at a number of schools, the Post couldn’t find anyone who had actually gone into practice advocating for immigrants after participating in one of these clinics as a law student. The best they could do was a current student who “definitely plans to” do so, and an alumna who’s now a lawyer for the government because she wants to “push for the middle.” (Because if we’ve learned anything from Guantanamo, it’s that moderate-minded lawyers have high efficacy and job satisfaction.)

Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate that the clinic system allows immigrants — not to mention disadvantaged clients of other clinics — access to talented legal minds. But it seems to me that rather than giving students a taste of a field that leads them to develop a career interest, clinics actually have the effect of allowing students to quiet their consciences when they take the (lucrative) beaten path after graduation: “Hey, I did the do-gooder thing back in law school, I’ve done my part.” Part of this might be that the culture of law schools does a lot to encourage defeatist attitudes toward social-justice-y but unglamorous areas of legal practice.

The perspective this enables is one I’ve run into most frequently in high-school theatre. Sure, students appreciate the opportunity to get out and do what they love, not to mention the recognition: from what I know of pre-law undergrads, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the prestige of “hot” immigration clinics drew ambitious students who didn’t much care about immigration. But regardless of how fulfilling they find it now, they shrug it off with “but of course I’m not crazy enough to do it for a living.”

What we seem to be left with is a system where the ranks of immigration lawyers are populated by clinic students on one side, and clinic alumni on the other. That bodes poorly for the students — not to mention those they represent.

The table next to me at the Cosi where I’m blogging is occupied by two young lawyers, one of whom just said to the other: “But I’m just out of law school, I couldn’t just go work for the Obama campaign.” Case in point?

Layover NYT blogging

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 6, 2008
in Immigration, Media and Politics
. 0 Comments

The more I learn about immigration policy, the more frustrated I get with the (mostly) uncritical consensus that employers who hire undocumented immigrants deserve to be prosecuted. Today’s NYT lead story reads to me like a step and a half in the right direction.

First of all, since employers are lobbying for more liberal immigration policy at the grassroots and state as well as federal levels, they’re more likely to have an impact where the legislative action is as well as changing citizens’ opinions. (Public opinion, incidentally, is offered by Secretary Chertoff at the end of the article as the reason immigration policy can’t be liberalized — which would be a satisfactory explanation if his department’s own ICE, wholly unaccountable to public opinion, weren’t pursuing more aggressive anti-undocumented-immigrant practices in the absence of any change in law.)

Second of all, this is being covered without recourse to the phantom the pro-immigrant Left usually raises over this issue: “employers who hire undocumented immigrants engage in abusive and inhumane practices!” It’s true that noncitizens don’t have the leverage to protect their rights that would make abuse impossible, but from what I’ve heard in the field the phenomenon is greatly exaggerated.

In fact, the relationship between employer and employee is often more humane than it’s usually given credit for being, and I’m disappointed that the Times didn’t touch on this as well (hence the half-step). Most employers the NYT quotes are driven by their need to “fill” positions, i.e. with warm bodies — providing at least some credibility to the claim of inhumane treatment. One employer goes further in recognizing her employees as human beings, arguing that their skill and knowledge make them “irreplaceable.”

But no one the Times quotes finds himself (or is willing to admit he finds himself) in the position that I hear is most common: having been presented with documentation that appeared to be legitimate at the time of hiring, employers don’t want to confront their workers about it now because they feel a personal connection to them and don’t want to leave them out in the cold. Perhaps this is mostly true of small business owners, who are less likely to be on the radar of a Times reporter; but it seems to me that much of the reason no one says these things in the press is that no one expects them to do so.

Both Left and Right expect employers to treat their employees according to a purely transactional logic rather than a corporate one — some call it exploitation, some entrepreneurialism. And they’re expected to lobby as business owners protecting their interests, not people engaged in relationships with others. But the ability of various dynamics to play into a single relationship — economic and personal, for example — is one of the strongest arguments for integrating immigrants into their communities completely rather than allowing them to remain in the shadows. Failing to recognize the humanity of business relationships makes it impossible to talk about this, and impugns the transactional logic by which we’re expected to talk about business in general.

Isaac Chotiner: Right on the issues, wrong on Casablanca.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 4, 2008
in Extemporanea
. 0 Comments

Isaac Chotiner at The Plank:

After reading over the coverage of Jesse Helms’ passing on a prominent conservative blog, it seems apt to quote Sean Connery in Goldfinger, and say that it is “shocking, positively shocking” that the conservative movement has trouble winning over black voters.

Unless Chotiner electrocuted Kathryn Jean Lopez in a bathtub shortly before writing this post, he had no business using that Bond quote. What’s worse, I’m assuming he was instead trying to make a reference to the phenomenon that spurred the local colloquialism “Claude Rains Shock” — one of the most quoted film scenes in current circulation.

I’m entirely on board with the content of the post, but I worry about a world where bloggers feel no obligation to fact-check their pop-culture quotes.

American Birthday Defamiliarization Blogging

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 4, 2008
in Arts, Media and Social Theory
. 2 Comments

Savage Minds seems fairly willing to follow the Los Angeles Times in anointing Christian Lander, of Stuff White People Like, a “satirical ethnographer.” (The Times also calls him a “grassroots anthropologist” — would someone please tell them that’s more or less the only kind there is?) I appreciate the willingness to connect anthropology to cultural criticism, of course, but if it were actually anthropology it’d be funnier.

The key to this particular style of observational humor is the defamiliarization it accomplishes, which dovetails, SM notes, with “the idea that anthropologists cleverly reveal the deep structure of the seemingly close at home or obvious.” But the reason that Lander’s site is neither anthropological nor really that funny is that defamiliarization is stylistically tougher than it looks. It’s not just a matter of zooming out and noticing that all of these self-styled individualists that populate the hipster class (a class which Lander admits includes himself) are just the same, but pointing out that their everyday preferences and practices are completely ridiculous. The former gives you one joke, perhaps two; the possibilities of the latter are as limitless as the conventions and neuroses of the culture itself. But in order to properly achieve this kind of critical distance, the way in which the humorist leads his audience toward the subject — themselves — has to jar them out of their own skin: defamiliarization. (The best example I can come up with of humor that embodies this without being at all anthropological is Breakfast of Champions-era Vonnegut.)

The problem that I have with Lander isn’t that he’s unwilling to look beyond his own social circle for content (not even “lifting a Google,” to borrow a cringeworthy phrase from the Times piece). The subculture he’s describing is small and uniform enough that it works. My problem is that, at the end of the day, he doesn’t bother to disguise the fact that he knows he’s writing for them, too — or at least for people familiar with them — so he needs to do no more than point out an item on a list for his readers to start with the ironic smiles and knowing nods.

When he does continue to the “anthropological” analysis in the second part of the post, he continues to rely on the shared point of reference. Tying a phenomenon that the audience understands completely into an unfamiliar framework is about as jarring as tying an ornament to a Christmas tree. It’s not defamiliarization if they get it from the beginning. This is especially true on a blog, where any paragraph over two sentences has a drastically lower chance of actually getting read — especially if it’s not the first or last. (Lander’s less unfunny when he breaks with form, such as the post on scarves which opened with the assertion that “White People’s body temperatures do not operate on logical or consistent levels…”)

The result is that Lander doesn’t write about white people anthropologically — he’s not actually writing about them at all. He sticks quite faithfully to the name of the blog, less an ethnographer than a curator.

If you want to read a more effective (if dated) defamiliarization of the American bourgeois, check out another of my guilty-pleasure favorites of classic anthropology: Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” In fact, I’d strongly recommend it. Holiday weekends are as much for reflection as for anything else, after all, and the Fourth — despite our continued narcissism over our origin myth — isn’t just about a moment but about the people, or peoples, to whom it gave a name.

Incidentally, when we read the Nacirema piece in my twelfth-grade English class, I was the last person to get the joke. Then I went off and became an anthro major. Funny, that.

Meme adoption, behind the Times.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on June 29, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Media and Technology
. 2 Comments

Before this morning, I had only one Facebook friend who had adopted the middle name “Hussein” — an acquaintance I acted with back in Ohio. After today’s NYT trend piece, I now have six.

I can’t help but feel that adopting a meme after you’ve read about it in the New York Times isn’t just a cardinal violation of the Hipster Code of Conduct, but a total misuse of social media. As laid out in the article, the point of the meme isn’t just to declare support for Senator Obama — heaven knows, there are dozens of other ways to do that on Facebook alone — but to force a reconsideration in one’s own friends of the supposedly “dangerous,” “un-American” nature of the man’s middle name. It’s a brilliant idea, using the individual connections of social networking to influence individual political attitudes.

But if you don’t interact online with people who would judge someone negatively based on the associations “Hussein” presents, it’s a useless gesture, and I doubt many Yalies do have Facebook friends who fit that description. Furthermore, while a few friends spontaneously adopting the name Hussein might be recognized as a political statement, and therefore merit some consideration by those who would otherwise draw bigoted conclusions, dozens of friends doing so can’t be seen as anything other than “the next Facebook trend,” and therefore doesn’t provoke much further thought at all — sabotaging its purpose.

The rapidity with which memes can become mass phenomena on the Internet is astounding, but that doesn’t mean everything has to be a mass phenomenon. When we turn every gesture into a Gesture (a wave into The Wave), we blunt the edge of the original action. Maybe once we start treating everything on the Internet as a new toy, we’ll be able to develop notions of scale and proportion; more likely, though, the capitalist confidence that spontaneous, unchecked growth will allow everything to find its proper place will defeat inclinations toward more cautious planning. The Internet never found a good idea it couldn’t broadcast, but this may be far too much of a good thing,

Aren’t you a little too old for “Coming of Age in Samoa”?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on June 28, 2008
in General Scholarship and Social Theory
. 0 Comments

Confessions of an Anthro major: the concerted efforts my more established co-scholars are currently making to re-establish public anthropolology (book awards for which I am sadly ineligible, etc.) are probably more closely tied than they admit to the wish, expressed by many of the anthropologists I know, that the public would just get the heck over Margaret Mead already. (In certain cases, the wish that the public would just get the heck over Jared Diamond already is also a motivating factor.)

I’ve mentioned before that it’s bad for public image of the discipline that “the Anthropologist You Are Most Likely To Be Asked About By The Person Sitting Next To You On The Plane” (as Rex of Savage Minds puts it) comes from an era in anthropological history that most in the discipline today are uncomfortable with at best. But unfortunately, ignoring Margaret won’t get her to go away, and I’m increasingly convinced that allowing her reputation to stand prevents new public anthropologists from breaking in on their own terms, because in the public eye they can only lay claim to an identity as anthropologists insofar as they’re doing the “Margaret Mead thing” (comprehensive fieldwork in Melanesian societies that deliberately tries to ignore the effects of modernity, etc.)

Obviously, this wouldn’t be as frustrating if Mead had done her fieldwork properly; but really, she didn’t. So I’m thrilled to do my part to dismantle her legacy by urging you to read this article that examines how Mead’s preconceptions and approach shaped her eventual conclusions (again, h/t Savage Minds); to quote authors Ira Bashkow and Lise Dobrin, ” in many ways the situations that anthropologists experience in the field are ones that they themselves have played a role in shaping.” If methodological criticism isn’t what turns you on (even clear, concise, enlightening methodological criticism), read it because it uses a love triangle as an explanatory factor and comes very close to saying “Fieldwork: ur doin it wrong.”

Yes, the concept of “wrong” does exist in anthropology, though it loses much of its resonance and respectability when applied to contemporary work as opposed to that of the Benighted Past; we too are suckers for our own progressive narrative. But the continual eye-rolling and hand-wringing over Mead indicates that in the absence of being able to judge our subjects with impunity, anthropologists tie the reputation of the discipline to holding our methods to very high standards; some would say this is in the name of science, but I (loath to lean on the term “science” for credibility) think it’s really just necessary to good scholarship. And I hold out a little bit of idealistic hope that if the avatar for the anthropological profession weren’t a woman whose methods were so loosey-goosey and unrigorous, pundits et al wouldn’t be so quick to affix the word “anthropological” to any cock-eyed analysis that happened to mention the word “taboo.”

After all, real anthropologists need those jobs. We have precious few enough as it is.

When I talk about “standards,” I don’t mean a political-sciencey Scrupulous Standardization of the Gathering of Facts. That’s impossible to do in anthropology, and even if it weren’t it would certainly lead to the impossibility of any pop anthro — up to and including most of my contributions to print media thus far, and arguably some of my contributions to this blog as well. I mean a constant interrogation of the role one’s own outlook plays in filtering information, and a refusal to present one’s conclusions as uncolored by those filters.

Friday Border Skirmish Blogging

Published
by
Dara Lind
on June 27, 2008
in Arts, Links and Media
. 0 Comments

Because if Helen gets to link to anthropology blogs, I get to link to movie reviews.

I’m sure I’ve gotten more of a kick reading merciless reviews of The Happening than I possibly could have by watching the movie itself, and Chris Orr’s non-review review obviously takes the cake. But Anthony Lane, taking advantage of the mini-time-warps of print media (the review is published weeks after the movie comes out? Bizarre!), engages in a meta-review of both movie and reception, and in the process manages to turn M. Night Shyamalan into something like an Old Testament prophet:

he is trying to reinsert the fear of death into a moviegoing culture that would prefer to think of it as laughable, dismissible, or gross. People around me in the cinema were cackling…the same audiences who go tense and quiet on the rare occasions when, as Shyamalan did in “The Sixth Sense,” he makes sombre and controlled use of the same anxieties.

It’s an interesting read on his career: a cautionary tale against trying to be Buckley’s “man who stands athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” by means of shock therapy. Because shock is just another peculiarly modern thrill.

Meanwhile, Sudes’ review of Wanted (which is thoroughly great) wins for the image of the week:

my dog-eared copy of Summer Action Movies: Theory and Practice (eds. Joel Silver & Jerry Bruckheimer).

Not least because the second edition of said book would totally include my as-yet-unwritten essay on why Iron Man is the first truly postmodern action movie.

He Forgot It in People

Published
by
Dara Lind
on June 27, 2008
in Media and Politics
. 2 Comments

I haven’t even ordered a copy of Grand New Party to read yet. (I know, I know, shame on me. It’s fourth in my mental queue of books to read on Minneapolis buses. The Bible is third, though, and if I bump it back any further it’ll break the hearts of those nice ladies who proselytized me in Brooklyn Center the other day.) So I’m assuming that the reason the second half of today’s David Brooks column hasn’t received the attention the first half has is that Brooks is just recapping Ross and Reihan’s points.

But Brooks can still turn a phrase inimitably, so I’d be surprised if this line weren’t entirely his own invention:

Self-conscious maternalists like Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins ensured that New Deal programs were biased in favor of traditional two-parent families.

I’m tickled pink by “self-conscious maternalists,” and not just because it’s an adorable phrase (which may or may not have been appropriated for the “Political Views” box in my Facebook profile). The point about being a “self-conscious” maternalist, rather than a “deliberate” maternalist, is that it distinguishes between advocating for the maintenance of convention and being conventional oneself. Eleanor Roosevelt herself was hardly a role model for the sort of “traditional” family she espoused — “well-behaved women rarely make history,” and all that. But she understood that she didn’t need to become what she sought to protect: tradition for her was policy, not performance. Certainly Eleanor wouldn’t have been able to make any respected claim to caring about families today, when the accumulation of “everyday person” (read: good old boy) cred is tracked as scrupulously as that of donor dollars, when candidates establish traditionalism by becoming avatars of it rather than imagining policies to protect it.

It’s not just the ideas of the young conservatives that are heterodox, but their personalities. The blogger vanguard isn’t afraid to be, well, vanguardy. (Caveat: my perception of Brooks’ Crew of Babycon Worthies may well be skewed by the charismatic pull of Reihan’s music videos and James’ sideburns.) If much of what the conservative movement inculcated in its acolytes was the ambivalence surrounding a “Beltway conservatism” that valorized local wisdoms, one of the best side effects of the new breed’s heterodox trajectories is that it’s allowed them to realize that the idea-pushers don’t have to be everything they propose. (If I weren’t a postmodernist, I’d be using the phrase “be themselves” right about now, but from where I stand it’s much more a question of which self they’re being: not a solely public one.)

This isn’t to say that I hope Grand New Party drums the performativity out of politics: that’s technocratic, heartless and insane. But the wonderful thing about performative politics is that it enables the politician to adopt different roles depending on the situation, while the obsession with performing traditional values led to immobility and finally caricature. A man who performs his own platform isn’t necessarily authentic or consistent so much as he is a slave to identity politics.