tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91615183863368768612024-03-04T20:02:23.712-08:00An Anthropology of the FamiliarStacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-24365749136216038482015-09-18T09:31:00.003-07:002015-09-18T09:32:28.358-07:00The Double Standards of Taking Risks<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Yesterday morning, I opened my social media to the below video plastered across friends' timelines. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Back in 2012, icy calm free soloist, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/the-ascent-of-alex-honnold-2/" target="_blank">Alex Honnold, was featured on 60 Minutes</a> for his ropeless ascents of daunting climbs throughout the world. Despite the mellow and seemingly-sensible climber's repeated descriptions of his solos as high consequence, not high risk, he's been embraced largely for his steely nerves in the face of daring. And the general assumption for most of us, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">despite Honnold's claims otherwise,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> is that it's ultimately about adrenaline. Either way, he's lauded as though he's conquering fears for all of us. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">In May, world renowned risk-taker, Dean Potter, made national headlines when his final wing suit flight went wrong. He and fellow flyer, Graham Hunt, crashed into Yosemite's towering stone walls and two lives ceased. Potter was long respected in the climbing and extreme sports communities for his high-risk antics and rule-breaking lifestyle. Though both men inspired many (and doubtless troubled many others), it's Potter's deep and open conversations about death that we tend to remember. </span><a href="http://www.elephantjournal.com/2015/05/i-dont-want-to-die-but-im-okay-putting-it-all-out-there-for-the-most-beautiful-expression-of-my-life-rip-dean-potter/" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;" target="_blank">"I don't want to die, but I'm ok with putting it all out there, for the most beautiful expression of my life,"</a> <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">he's once said. I guess that's one way to practice mindfulness. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Clearly, extreme risk sports are capturing the imaginations of an increasingly mainstream audience. And this, by itself, seems fine. Culturally, I could expound on the varied reasons sociologists think people engage in adrenaline-inducing activities. It's called edgework and the theories are based in ideas of a sort of psychological disenfranchisement that results from the capitalist economic and work systems. So m</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">aybe we need this extreme inspiration. Maybe we're stirred by the perceived bravery or a need, like Potter's, to find that edge that makes life sparkle.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> I love asking these questions--after all, while I'd never solo, I'm a scared-of-heights climber who keeps trudging back to the cliffs.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">But that's not what interests me right now. It's the parallels I keep seeing between participating in high-risk sport and drug use, and the contradictions in how these practices are treated by our laws and our society.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">In June, three BASE jumpers were convicted of <b><i>misdemeanor</i></b> reckless endangerment for <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/nyregion/3-men-convicted-of-misdemeanors-in-2013-skydive-from-1-world-trade-center.html?_r=0" target="_blank">for leaping off the World Trade Center in 2013</a>. The charges could have meant up to a year in jail, but the jumpers were ultimately sentenced to community service. I don't have a problem so much with the charges or sentences doled out to these men. Perhaps, I would even agree with critics that they're harsh, given the fact that they were skilled and worked actively to minimize risks to themselves and others. But as</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> a former drug researcher and social justice advocate, I question why these BASE jumpers received less punishment for their act than they would have for injecting themselves with heroin. And there's no telling what the retribution would have been had they done so exuberantly, had they threatened to inject others, at the base of the WTC.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> Would drug users have been convicted of the top charge of burglary (dismissed in the BASE jumping case) if they had simply entered the building to use in private? I'm concerned by the double standard that this particular brand of risk-taking highlights. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">So, to start, how are extreme sports and drug use similar?</span><br />
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<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Physical risk to self. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">That physical risk, however, is variable. It depends on specifics, on each individuals' efforts to recognize and minimize it. There are worthwhile distinctions between drug use and abuse and addiction, between injecting and snorting, between using one's own clean syringe and works each time and sharing with others. Sometimes these choices are true choices, other times shaped by social circumstances. Most often, though, the relative risks are acknowledged by the users. Similarly, extreme sports enthusiasts distinguish between free-climbing (using a rope) and soloing, or free-soloing (no rope), trail riding and jockeying racehorses. Some of these things, though related, just aren't so dangerous. Other are. There are degrees. </span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Potential to harm others, especially emotionally.</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">While motivations for both drug use and extreme sports participation vary a great deal, pleasure-seeking and adrenaline-seeking apply to many in both groups. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Potter's view, mentioned above, offers</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> an inspiring way to view the world indeed. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">And that's the thing with the folks sociologists refer to as edgeworkers: The ways they play with risk, taunt death, inspires a lot of us. Their risk-taking tends to be laced with a desire to be as close to life in the present moment as possible. It's almost mindful. Whether or not similar motivations drive drug users is debatable, but after years of studying meth use and spending time around both recreational users and addicts throughout my life, I'd say yea, for many this is absolutely what's going on.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The laws that make both illegal cause more harm than the practices themselves. This is well-documented when it comes to </span><a href="https://www.aclu.org/against-drug-prohibition" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;" target="_blank">drug use</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">, but was recently, and solidly, </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/may/22/did-rules-not-risk-cause-dean-potters-base-jumping-death" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;" target="_blank">put forth regarding high-risk sports</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">.</span></li>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">But the next piece of this puzzle is recognizing how the two are different, especially socially...</span></div>
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<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The WTC jumpers were convicted of misdemeanor reckless endangerment. Under NY law, self-injection of a narcotic is a <b><a href="http://ypdcrime.com/penal.law/article220.htm#p220.46" target="_blank">felony</a>. </b>Felonies, even the smaller ones, have a way of ruining lives that misdemeanors just don't.</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Extreme sports participants tend, disproportionately, to be white men. Actually, so do illegal drug users, but those who face the legal repercussions of their use tend not to be. In particular, in the US, it's far and away <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/criminal-justice/locked-up-in-america/michelle-alexander-a-system-of-racial-and-social-control/" target="_blank">black men who are punished for using drugs</a>.</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The knee-jerk responses differ considerably. The overdose is always, always deemed tragic, emphasis is on the family, the loss. The edgework death, however, is permitted more complexity. Potter's death saddened many and was scoffed at by some. But time and again, folks brushed the sadness, the accountability to loved ones, aside, to celebrate a man who lived his life "well," doing what he loved. Individuals who die because of drugs aren't afforded that degree of humanity. Their lives are viewed as tragic, their deaths as well. Regardless of how they would have interpreted it.</span></li>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">There's no clean way to wrap this up at this point. It's a thought, a process, with many limbs. But how, I wonder, could recognizing these similarities and disparities move us toward a more human, more humane, way of interacting with one another? </span></div>
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Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-32835240053380273092014-10-22T06:33:00.001-07:002014-10-24T21:26:32.601-07:00Subjectivity of suffering?I have nearly finished<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"> week four of my five-week yoga teacher training course in Rishikesh, India...on an ashram. I mention the ashram bit not so much because of my religion-related struggles but because it's highly relevant to the way I'm learning yoga, and consequently, to the way I'm learning philosophy, which is offered up in a very unfamiliar context, in unfamiliar ways. Rather than the structured philosophical debates that may run a tangent or two but circle around a concept with which all are familiar (ie, we all read the assigned book), philosophy classes here consist of a quiet yet captivating monk talking about concepts from the Bhagavad Gita, often in nonlinear, even circular ways. A western trained academic, I've been struggling with this way of learning, finding the concepts we've covered rather obvious and at times basic. </span><br><div><br></div><div>But the other day, as I was grappling with my frustrations, with my desire to get "more" out if the class, a classmate shared something really important. "You come from a very academic background. You - we, as westerners - are accustomed to learning with the head. But here, this, they teach you so you must learn it with your heart. You learn it here," and she placed her hand at her heart chakra. It helped. And here's the thing: intellectually, the concepts that guide yogic philosophy as we're learning it aren't difficult. But emotionally, experientially, they can feel damn near impossible to reconcile with the way the world works. </div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><br></span></div><div>I<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"> don't think I'm especially talented at this heart-based learning, and I'm sure there are some folks out there who would say I'm a downright failure at heart-based living, but I'm open to giving it a try now that I have some clue as to what's going on. So this post is sort of my clumsy attempt at sharing my journey of trying to apply what we've discussed in philosophy, using my heart, to some everyday challenges. </span></div><div><br></div><div>We'll start with the basic idea presented in class - "suffering" is subjective and situated not in a vaccuum of the moment but a context of lifetimes and lives. In essence, the lesson was that while it is fine, good even, to act to help others in need, one must accept the suffering without judgment, one must be open to the idea that, suffering in this present may fit into a larger context that changes the meaning of the conditions we deemed suffering. </div><div><br></div><div>Intellectually, this concept fits neatly with my anthropological background and ongoing research on drug use and homelessness. Human suffering is something I've always been able to step back from, to view through a lens of cultural and individual relativism. Even though at my core I would guess there are some universal conditions out there that all would deem suffering, I also recognize that people's experiences of these conditions are relative. If you add the other layers of belief that shape these philosophies, they may not be more palatable to you on a gut level, but they should make sense. </div><div><br></div><div>For example, here in India, the levels of poverty suggest, to my western brain, suffering. Yet to a yogi, and likely to many if not all Indians, my separation from the spiritual or from my family are significant forms of suffering. In my own work as a researcher I defended the relativity of suffering regularly as I sought to highlight the multidimensionality of drug users' experiences. Thus, intellectually, I had little trouble accepting when Mataji told us that we must try not to judge the conditions of others, or ourselves, as suffering. And, to some extent, though I would argue that as a society we have more responsibility to one another than to just leave it all without critical questions, I get where it's going and agree that, on a personal level, this can be a helpful view of the world. </div><div><br></div><div>It's when I try to apply this concept with my heart that I struggle. And, for me, it's the animals that make it tough. See, while my human research participants can share their emotions and we can, together, consider their experiences in lifetimes of context, with non-human animals, suffering becomes much more poignant and, as such, much more black and white. </div><div><br></div><div>The other day, our yoga hall/ashram mascot dog turned up at my room with a nasty laceration that was on its way to being infected. Earlier, noisier-than-usual monkey scuffles outside our asana class had sounded like a dog was involved and I had wondered if that dog was Ajna/Kevin. I'm still not certain his gash is from monkeys but it seems likely. We tried to find a vet in town but the only hope was closed for the week's holiday. We tried to engage the help of medical students and a doctor to clean out the wound or give an antibiotic, but had no luck. Eventually, we were told where to get some antiseptic ointment and given some gauze to try and clean the wound ourselves. It was less than successful though not a total failure - in line with other philosophical lessons, I'm trying to be ok with the fact that my actions didn't bring about what I hoped would be the most ideal result of getting the dog to a vet, where he could maybe get a rabies shot - as we got some of the nasty gunk out of the wound and some of the good gunk in and should be able to have a vet out after Diwali to give him his shot. </div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_x2LwRLf3PsqdA2bgDIppyhTZQ1To0EEr04uDG3uyhKbF5I5NC3Gbxx8XPA4_YMWCu1-_XPLOpAKprvrnEhWciGsb2-8FOW0aEE2WwSVC5ksNf8nM32vmHYnYQIBcN1mdVzhplnSTLF7X/s640/blogger-image-492536318.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_x2LwRLf3PsqdA2bgDIppyhTZQ1To0EEr04uDG3uyhKbF5I5NC3Gbxx8XPA4_YMWCu1-_XPLOpAKprvrnEhWciGsb2-8FOW0aEE2WwSVC5ksNf8nM32vmHYnYQIBcN1mdVzhplnSTLF7X/s640/blogger-image-492536318.jpg"></a></div><br></div><div>But here's this thing; it's india. There are countless homeless, starving, injured, mistreated dogs here and very few resources to do anything about it. And it breaks my heart endlessly. And all I can feel is that they are suffering and I want to fix it even though I know that the<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"> "one at a time" won't even make a dent in anything. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">And this is where it gets really tough for me to engage emotionally with the concept of suffering in the way I'm "supposed" to. If I follow Mataji's philosophy on the relativity of suffering then these dogs are not necessarily suffering and their lives may, as my classmate pointed out the first week, actually be a preferable alternative to the western notion that if it can't live well it shouldn't have to live at all. Subjectivity. Relativity. All terms I throw around with ease in an academic setting. And while I get it intellectually, I can't quite bring myself to accept it emotionally. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><br></span></div><div><font face="Helvetica Neue Light, HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif">Meanwhile, the struggle continues to find Ajna/Kevin some treatment and I don't know when I'm supposed to let go. Apparently, living this concept is much harder than thinking about it. </font></div><div><font face="Helvetica Neue Light, HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="Helvetica Neue Light, HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif">Tonight, we meditated on our female energy. And when we got back, there was Ajna/Kevin, sleeping on my doorstep. As I stroked his head, my brain wandered through possible outcomes for him and the tears started to flow as I imagined what I saw as the worst. My emotions were certainly flowing and i tried, for once, to be ok with whatever comes his way. I tried to accept that maybe, just maybe, he isn't suffering. </font></div><div><font face="Helvetica Neue Light, HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="Helvetica Neue Light, HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif">At the end of the day, I'm (obviously) still grappling with this learning with the heart thing as it's way more exhausting than using my head, but I think I've got one lesson down: I can only control my actions, never the outcomes, so I'll do my best to keep doing what I can, just for the sake of doing it, because taking care of this wise old street dog just feels like the right thing to do. </font></div>Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-61508245085819161662014-09-27T22:22:00.001-07:002014-09-27T22:23:08.716-07:00My evolution of home<div>Anthropology has a long history of studying the cultural traits of people who have forged their way in a particular setting. Especially in the older texts, it's not uncommon to find work on "hill tribes" or "desert nomads," groups - and perhaps people - who are largely defined, to scholars anyway, by the landscapes they inhabit. These things shape the ways people eat, dress, build, etc. </div><br><div>I like to say I grew up in a barn. After all, the smells of horses and hay and leather and oil, rather than a particular place, have always been my comfort. Some might argue this is because they were my main constants as a child. <div> </div><div>Fairly mobile during my youth, even when we stayed in the same region, my family switched neighborhoods, houses, and cities often enough that I changed school districts and friend groups and rarely if ever grew attached to a house. After my parents' divorce and my mom's remarriage, we moved out of state and eventually across the country so that I shuffled between households based on the school schedule. My childhood, in this way at least, was a far cry from my husband's - his parents still live in the house in which he grew up. And as such, I've always had a slightly different concept of "home," one that's left me full of wanderlust as an adult. The two sides to this are of course a restless independence and an unsettled searching. </div><div><br></div><div>As I've grown older, settled down in love and life and place a bit, I've come to appreciate the topography of a home in a way I never did before. The deserts of the American West have long held a special place in my heart: I adore the open spaces and the sparse, delicate, often thorny, vegetation. <span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">But only recently have I found something that softens me as only home can: the mountains. I'm not really a mountain girl in general. I will ski but I don't crave it, I can't stand winter and don't especially like snow, I prefer flat hikes through wide open valleys over hilly ones aimed at a vista. But being in the midst of mountains, in their proximity, in their foothills, does the trick, letting me exhale that noisy breath of true relief. Much like my friends who feel restless, even anxious, away from the ocean, I've come to feel this way when away from mountains. </span></div><div><br></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJAnQKFemc7GxWXqfAJsobQ8PJinhEY-cq9_Yb4ul3y97mpun92jg-8Lhst3_Q4aDhWmPqafQ08riXMjuB8mRqXFOZk78VHyf0h470QxjouDfTV361DvwhWz-Si_qlSQxhinWAgC5TQjN3/s640/blogger-image-728057029.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJAnQKFemc7GxWXqfAJsobQ8PJinhEY-cq9_Yb4ul3y97mpun92jg-8Lhst3_Q4aDhWmPqafQ08riXMjuB8mRqXFOZk78VHyf0h470QxjouDfTV361DvwhWz-Si_qlSQxhinWAgC5TQjN3/s640/blogger-image-728057029.jpg"></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br></div></div></div><div>I began to appreciate this connection just months ago, after leaving my heart in the hills around Chiang Mai, Thailand for the more famous climbing in the beautiful beaches of the Andaman coast. And again, just days ago, as my plane left the bustle of Delhi and grazed the Himalayan foothills before touching down in Northern India's Dehradun, and along the winding roads that led deeper into the foothills, to Rishikesh. There is still chaos, though on a much smaller scale, but it's the air that is different here, and it goes beyond pollution. </div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA4ZZg5lPpnD6EOFRNnnv4g06NqBmVIsPjSj4ttq_bhDewnxT9eGW3fh2SUBbX2dx80n-FXZPtOZlfzKdOhYy1BCnB1wb01Nq46_tf1BF6MHKuwZcznc4fNlILjNTJqAKTYPohzEM7PPdA/s640/blogger-image-302235825.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA4ZZg5lPpnD6EOFRNnnv4g06NqBmVIsPjSj4ttq_bhDewnxT9eGW3fh2SUBbX2dx80n-FXZPtOZlfzKdOhYy1BCnB1wb01Nq46_tf1BF6MHKuwZcznc4fNlILjNTJqAKTYPohzEM7PPdA/s640/blogger-image-302235825.jpg"></a></div></div><br></div><div>What I find is that I am different amidst it all, tucked into the hills. <span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">And while my home will always, first and foremost, be with my little family, wherever we are, it seems that now that may need to stick to the mountains. </span></div></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">If I turn myself back into an anthropologist, I can't help but wonder: if a topography can shape an entire culture, what must it be able to do to a little person? What, I wonder, has Colorado, and all those high desert valleys and cliff bands, and its wide open skies and expressive clouds, done to me? </span></div><br><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf6TGVONxUdRNCjNeIqj3mq8qvzQupWhwoZVdW2-L85H0Xg_hGm05B0nDVY2jZq1NVerg9GVCd-5_veEnpf03D_haRkXYRPZwx0NhvuWFgo0jLDqLhQq0bE2zU9Jsn2CT76IWGumeEheuS/s640/blogger-image--625329774.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf6TGVONxUdRNCjNeIqj3mq8qvzQupWhwoZVdW2-L85H0Xg_hGm05B0nDVY2jZq1NVerg9GVCd-5_veEnpf03D_haRkXYRPZwx0NhvuWFgo0jLDqLhQq0bE2zU9Jsn2CT76IWGumeEheuS/s640/blogger-image--625329774.jpg"></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNpXLtAo_M91QgwKt0Tgn1Uob8JaGDQGxkMe1y-0chRoWjvx-2DGJcdsUtHwJLp59J9We0Rf1zqnVfnZh1rieMqn1lL-4L3oL4IOj4i1gsYcCUVXahM-CW8i3yG9PJ1QMpKlyf_t38nYWa/s640/blogger-image-1612807517.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNpXLtAo_M91QgwKt0Tgn1Uob8JaGDQGxkMe1y-0chRoWjvx-2DGJcdsUtHwJLp59J9We0Rf1zqnVfnZh1rieMqn1lL-4L3oL4IOj4i1gsYcCUVXahM-CW8i3yG9PJ1QMpKlyf_t38nYWa/s640/blogger-image-1612807517.jpg"></a></div><br></div>Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-29317682537218775332014-08-13T21:46:00.004-07:002014-08-13T21:47:29.442-07:00tracing hairs, muscles, veins: sitting still during visiting hours<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpwP8A8801y8BICg6mNeWkejuK5aAg6UqewtKZTVkzF0mVPjbopjJOiXhLBwks8tvm8O9ZKMLoUnVvu_xYDBqiHyJclR8Fq_HplEQBldfhqtLrlJaKzmxxQYiLFRRQaPWPhr9ojfxZw2ZA/s1600/photo+2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpwP8A8801y8BICg6mNeWkejuK5aAg6UqewtKZTVkzF0mVPjbopjJOiXhLBwks8tvm8O9ZKMLoUnVvu_xYDBqiHyJclR8Fq_HplEQBldfhqtLrlJaKzmxxQYiLFRRQaPWPhr9ojfxZw2ZA/s1600/photo+2.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a>Late June, my horse was injured pretty badly. Well, it wasn't supposed to be a big deal, but infection set in and the damaged tendon started to adhere, and long story short, he's been in and out of the equine hospital for the past 6 weeks or so and tolerating pretty aggressive treatments when he's been lucky enough to be home. It's been rough, and I haven't been able to enjoy what for me is the most effective stress reliever out there - riding my horse - while going through this relatively stressful time. But I got something else out of it, something I really appreciated the other day while I was visiting him at the hospital, sitting in silence in his stall, watching his lips as he sifted through straw for his endless supply of fragrant green hay, admiring the sheen of his coat and the delicate, ever present veins beneath his thin thoroughbred skin: my mind was quiet, in tune, present.<br />
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In this sometimes overwhelming American culture in which I live, busyness is something that is expected, lauded, admired. "I've been busy" has become a standard response to "How have you been?" It's something I find myself saying, even if I'm not all that busy, because to be anything else could be mistaken for being [insert undesirable characteristic here].<br />
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As I've been setting out on this new path of mine over the past several months - stepping away from research and academia, trying my hand at freelance writing, preparing to head to India for Yoga Teacher Training - I've found that a routine, almost daily yoga practice helps me retain the focus to work without any hard deadlines and to manage the stress associated with personal issues, such as my horse's injury. But I've also begun to seek out the quiet this practice offers. It's so un-American, so unfamiliar and unnerving, and it's definitely not easy. During a meditation the other morning, the instructor challenged us to observe how long it took us before we lost focus on the breath moving in and out of our nostrils, to consider the implications of the fact that, for most of us, attention didn't stay fixed but wandered instead to the day's tasks, to yesterday's stresses, to life's goals. And this particular yoga instructor likes to refer to this relentless tendency to drift away from right now as an addiction to the busyness of our minds, of our lives. And while as a drug researcher I have all kinds of issues with the concept of addiction, in this particular brain-limited, metaphorical sense, I think it rings quite true. I like that busyness. There is comfort in it. Plus, it's a habit so ingrained, I almost don't know what to do in its absence.<br />
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So, I've been trying, throughout my days, off my mat, to consciously observe moments, to be present. And the other day, in Reed's stall, I did just that. Not perfectly, but glowingly. And I carried the joy of fully being there, in shared silence with an animal for whom the present <i>is </i>the primary place to be, for the rest of the day. So that when I left his side and returned home, I smelled the nutty smell that is the top of my dog's head, I listened to the slight burning in my eyes from too many hours spent reading and writing electronically, I savored the bright fruits that made up so many of that day's meals. I attempted to just <i>be</i>.<br />
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Then, last night, I was reading this tongue-in-cheek <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/travel/12-things-foreigners-hate-about-the-us-94461481107.html" target="_blank">article</a> about the many things foreigners find frustrating (and endearing?) about Americans, and of course one stood out to me: "You live to work. Too bad your life sucks." This certainly doesn't apply to all of us, and the author doesn't claim that it does, but it's become enough of a cultural norm that many of us risk missing our lives in their entireties as we chase something of much more arbitrary value.<br />
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I'm aware that my observations and thoughts on this matter are by no means novel and I have certainly not abandoned my compulsion toward busyness, toward work with "value", toward being defined by my career (or lack of it). What I did do that I hope pushes me toward a bit more balance was stop, sit still, and carefully, lovingly, trace exactly what was in front of me.<br />
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<br />Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-39411831731645838852014-07-02T21:53:00.003-07:002014-07-03T06:45:05.063-07:00Big Love and banning veils: On the (unintended?) consequences of
criminalizing "(im)morality"I recently decided to try Amazon Prime's instant video service and got into watching the HBO show, Big Love, a drama (at times a soap opera) featuring a polygamist Mormon family struggling to make their way in Utah's more mainstream, non-fundamentalist Mormon community. The show itself is interesting, and it has been both widely lauded and widely criticized. As one who is fairly uneducated in the specifics of Mormonism but who doesn't prescribe at all to any particular religious system, I found the portrayals of the religion itself to be fairly neutral. They did not come across to the uninitiated as any stranger or more extreme than any other religious believes, nor did their portrayal seem attributable to any deeper agenda. I was also able to think critically about the underlying or exacerbating contexts that shape the stereotypes as well as the experiences of the shows highly stigmatized focal group, members of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saimts (FLDS).<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span><div><font color="#252525" face="Times, Times New Roman, serif"><span style="line-height: 22px;"><br></span></font>
What I found especially interesting were the social implications not of polygamy/plural marriage itself, not of the Mormon exclusion of the group that has re-defined itself as FLDS, but of the ways that the criminalization of polygamy may contribute to and perpetuate the very demonized aspects of these groups that were so prevalent in the show - incest, child sexual abuse, and a mafia-like mentality of control and dominance - and may in turn foster further criminality and place at increased risk those who are most vulnerable to begin with.<br>
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As a drugs researcher, I constantly think about the social impact of the criminalization of drugs in particular and morality in general. The perpetuation of stigma, the fear of arrest and incarceration, these things contribute to drug users' isolation from full participation in mainstream society (unless, of course, they are able to pass to a certain extent, which is another issue). In essence, criminalization pushes people into survival strategies that rely heavily upon insular communities in which social norms are not to be questioned and that foster the engagement of these communities and community members in illegal, often violent, activities. Furthermore, this isolation and involvement in an array of criminal activity positions communities and their members in close proximity to established criminal networks.<br>
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Fortunately, when it comes to drug use, there seems to be a growing conversation about the consequences of criminalization and the possibilities of legalization (though this latter part is largely limited to marijuana and perhaps my impression of a "movement" may simply be the result of a biased twitter feed). But I wonder if some of the lessons learned from the drug war vs. drug legalization debate may in fact be applied toward other legal prescriptions of individual morality.<br>
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*****<br>
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Anthropologists have long studied marriage and kinship patterns across cultures. In fact, these findings - that marriage norms (including who may be married to whom and how many people may enter into a marriage) differ considerably the world over and throughout history - have been at the core of <a href="http://www.aaanet.org/issues/policy-advocacy/Statement-on-Marriage-and-the-family.cfm" target="_blank">anthropological challenges</a> to the conservative claim that marriage is "between one man and one woman." And on this, the anthropologists are absolutely right. It is simply absurd to reify such a moral standard in ways that refuse to acknowledge the realities of the world in which we live - a world in which there is no single set standard for the ways (or reasons) that people commit to one another.<br>
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So what I have long thought about, not having a personal moral issue with polygamy itself, and what the show Big Love has really highlighted for me, is whether when we criminalize one behavior socially deemed "immoral" (typically victimless) are we actually putting people at increased risk and in fact cultivating an entire community of individuals whose daily lives are in turn based on and accepting of other, more dangerous or harmful behaviors (such as violence, rape, and child sexual abuse) in large part because of their isolation from (and consequent mistrust of) the mainstream society from which the very core of their lives - their primary relationships - must be kept secret.<br>
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For example, with several examples and multiple characters, Big Love highlights the many challenges faced by a career person torn between living openly in his/her marriages and maintaining not only respect of potential clients but also potential investors, employers, and even banking resources. To admit to living in a plural marriage was to limit one's opportunities in the mainstream business world; as such, engagement with other socially and economically marginalized groups (Native American tribes) or in fringe (certainly by mainstream Mormon standards) economies (gambling) was portrayed as one of few viable alternatives. These struggles were positioned beside the lives of those on the compound, where all were "out" but considerable violence and corruption were rampant and embeddedness in criminal networks was the norm. The show doesn't come out and argue that criminalization of polygamy may actually underlie many of the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10904019/The-evil-preacher-who-runs-his-cult-from-prison.html" target="_blank">problem</a>(s) we have seen over the years on these compounds, but it certainly sets the attentive audience up to ask the questions.<br>
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In essence, the cases of illegal drugs and of plural marriage/polygamy/the FLDS in the United States suggest that when we decide, as a society, to use the legal system to restrict behaviors deemed immoral - not just behaviors that cause harm to others - we may create a system that a) isolates those who engage in these practices (many of whom may be vulnerable on multiple levels) from mainstream society and resources, placing them in increased danger and b) perpetuates underground and illegal economies that facilitate crimes against others, crimes of violence. In addition to drug use, similar <a href="http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/ten-reasons-decriminalize-sex-work" target="_blank">arguments</a> have been made with regard to the consequences of criminalizing sex work.<br>
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But the other day another policy was upheld, one that is perhaps about a different kind of morality but one that has the potential, it seems, to place those it ostensibly (and perhaps a bit condescendingly) claims to protect (through the preservation of France's moral values and cultural norms) at greater risk. In 2010, France banned the wearing of face-covering Muslim veils, such as the niqab or the burka, in public. French authorities have claimed the ban was put in place in large part to preserve French culture, which seems to be quite concerned with the notion that Muslim men are forcing their wives to wear such veils. Another concern relates more to issues of security and identifiability, though this is less discussed. The <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2014/07/european-court-upholds-france-face-veil-ban-201471125415290937.html" target="_blank">ban was recently upheld by a European court</a>, which defended France's right to prioritize its own cultural values over "freedom of religion." (As an anthropologist living in the US during a time when <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/supreme-court-scotus-hobby-lobby-all-forms-contraception" target="_blank">corporations have been given religious imperative over the rights and health of women</a>, I find all of this especially interesting, but that's all beyond the scope of the current post!)<br>
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Here's the thing...to some extent, I can actually understand both sides of the argument - the French have decided to prioritize an aspect of their culture that authorities and decision-makers and many citizens believe fosters gender equality in the face of a religion that many believe squelches it. Muslim women who believe wearing such veils are part of their religious expression, their relationship to God, and who are neither pressured nor coerced into wearing it, find such a ban to be a huge infringement upon their rights. It is an emotionally and politically loaded debate and one that is perhaps endlessly fascinating and lacking a straightforward, all-pleasing solution.<br>
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But ultimately, I must admit that this isn't my primary concern. My concern is for the few women who <i>are </i>coerced or manipulated or downright forced to wear a full veil, something that would suggest a relationship power differential that places them at increased risk for abuse among other things. Banning the veil places these women, who were likely isolated living in France anyway, at even greater risk than they would have been at previously. They will be further isolated if leaving their home is conditional upon wearing an article of clothing that is banned, leaving them three choices: a) go out in the banned garment and hazard getting caught, b) face the consequences of going out <i>without</i> the banned garment, against their husband's wishes, or c) don't go out. This may not only further limit their opportunities to establish their own relationships with women who have different experiences and perspectives, but perhaps more realistically and problematically could hinder their abilities to fulfill their roles in the family. Will these women's movements, as well as their networks, be further restricted? My concern is that the French have said, in essence: <i>We believe that the niqab and the burka are signs of gender inequality and domestic violence (or risk for it). Therefore, we will pass a policy that will perpetuate the isolation of the women who wear it, whether or not they choose to do so. </i><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><br></span></div><div>While I certainly argue that these examples point to a need to continually and critically evaluate the potential consequences of new and existing policies, this is by no means an attempt to turn a blind eye to the actual issues associated with many of these examples or to filter everything through rose colored lenses. Rather, is is a contemplation of the complexity of our actions, and of the need to consider how what we do as a society, how we build a legal system, what it looks like, what we choose to put in it and where, all of these things in turn impact not only the real yet often intangible or unimaginable social structure but also the <font face="Helvetica Neue Light, HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif">daily experiences of real live human beings...often in ways we didn't anticipate and certainly don't desire. </font></div></div>Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-38757047402043028712014-05-25T11:21:00.002-07:002014-05-27T20:54:52.565-07:00Fostering an ethos of self-care amidst a culture of egoAs those of you who know me in person or regularly follow this blog are aware, my relatively recent return to a consistent yoga practice has brought up a number of challenges - physical, emotional, and psychological. First among these has been the notion of self-care that is such an important tenet of yoga practice. If you have ever been in a yoga class, or followed one online, or read a yoga book, or even used one of those asana apps on your phone, you know it: the instructor repeatedly reminds you to "listen to your body," "don't jam yourself," "take rests if you need to," "find your edge, but don't force yourself past it."<br />
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I grew up with a competitive American spirit. As a child, I competed in two sports at the state and national levels and I have always been exceptionally hard on myself, not necessarily expecting to win or even outperform others, but always expecting to improve and perform my "best," whatever that is. And that's just the thing; my concept of my personal best was based on a rather linear imagined trajectory, not on the very non-linear reality of my life and the multitude of factors that shape our performance in anything. Along with this ego of performance expectation came a drive to "train" at a certain level as well. Though I no longer ride horses competitively, I find it difficult to ride "for fun" outside of a training program, and expect myself to commit six days a week to it. Though I climb recreationally, I find it frustrating that, unless I devote at least 4 days per week to it, I just don't have the naturally powerful physique to make progress or even avoid regression. This struggle to let go of my own ego in sports has actually kept me from enjoying them to the max in the busy and complicated context that is my everyday adult life.<br />
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And, perhaps not surprisingly, when I began practicing yoga on a regular basis, I found myself beginning to fall into this same trap. If I missed a day, I felt guilty. I wanted to be a "good yogi" and this meant practicing ___________ . . . it started with <u>every other day</u> and morphed into <u>daily</u>. When I missed a day because I was tired, or because I climbed, or because I just felt like writing all day instead, I was consumed by guilt. Although I was learning the ethic of self-care on the mat (I try to choose my practices according to my needs on a given day, I have learned to laugh when I fall out of a pose rather than becoming frustrated), I was blatantly ignoring it in my daily decisions around <i>whether or not </i>to practice.<br />
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Yesterday, while I was playing around on twitter after a long day of teaching a psychological anthropology unit, I came across <a href="https://twitter.com/kstonetraining/status/410984949924102144/photo/1" target="_blank">this</a> fun, tongue-in-cheek article. Not surprisingly, the thing we need to stop saying about yoga that resonated with me the most is "I'm so mad I missed yoga yesterday. I wanted to go every day this week." Kate Stone, the article's author - a yoga instructor and personal trainer - insightfully wondered why we say these things, asking, <i>Why? Did your body want to move that much?</i><br />
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The article, and specifically the author's challenge to the externally and systematically imposed expectations made me think about the lesson I had taught earlier in the day. In particular, anthropologist <a href="http://www.case.edu/artsci/anth/EileenAnderson-Fye.html" target="_blank">Eileen Anderson-Fye</a>'s exploration of body image among adolescent girls in Belize. The notion of self-care was something that Anderson-Fye argues is a possible protective factor against disordered body image and eating behavior in a country where beauty is highly valued and Western media is visible. Other researchers have posited that Americans' sense of the self as being changeable, something always "in progress," contributes to our relative risk for eating disorders.<br />
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But maybe it's also this relative absence of an ethic of self care - despite living in a highly individualistic society - that places us at risk for all kinds of things. That makes it so hard to listen to our bodies, even in a yoga class, because we are more concerned with meeting expectations, with meeting an externally mediated and measured notion of "success" or "progress." I see it all over the place: in my plethora of friends who brag about not taking vacation time; in those I know who pride themselves on working through their off days or wake in the middle of the night and rather than reading themselves to sleep, choose to get up and work; in the bristling judgment I've faced when I explain that time spent with my husband, my horse, and my dog is more important to me to me than following a particular career path. In essence, to some degree, one could argue that our culture of ego has created a culture of braggart martyrs, of people who sacrifice themselves for others (or for work), but rather than doing so in quiet acceptance or even enjoyment, do so for the status associated with the embodiment of a particular notion of the ideal self.<br />
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However, the importance of self-care is something that is receiving increased <a href="http://notesfromadogwalker.com/2013/09/07/self-care-is-not-optional-how-burnout-ended-my-career-at-the-shelter/" target="_blank">attention</a>, especially for those who work in the caring professions. In essence, people are starting to recognize that to avoid burnout and actually increase efficacy in helping others, we must honor and nurture ourselves and our own needs and even wants. And this growing appreciation is something that I've elected to prioritize for myself. I guess the trick at this point will be keeping the ego out of self-care itself...hard as it may be, when I decide to listen to my body and skip that yoga class, to take off work when I'm sick, to spend time with family instead of working overtime, I also need to avoid judging others who don't follow the same path. Because, at the end of the day, maybe self-care looks a little different for all of us.<br />
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<br />Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-34126360358848307332014-04-30T13:32:00.000-07:002014-05-27T20:44:37.368-07:00How 'bout that weather?When I first moved to a farm just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia in 2002, I was immediately struck by several things. Coming directly from a year in New York City and four in Los Angeles, I was blown away that the farm's main "hand," a lifelong Virginian who must have been in his 70s, said hello with a nod and a hand wave <i>every single time we passed</i> in a day; the local grocer/sandwich shop took checks; and, the weather was a valid and frequent topic of conversation.<br />
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After nearly a decade of living in places where snow didn't really happen and one rarely needed to check the weather to decide what to wear (I lived in the Phoenix area for 4 years prior to moving to Los Angeles for university), weather just wasn't something I thought of as an actual conversation piece. And in New York, the weather just never really seemed relevant - maybe because so much of life centers around the built environment rather than the natural one? - maybe because it just wasn't "cool" to make this sort of small talk? I don't really know either way, but I was utterly startled by the degree to which, in Virginia, I talked about the weather.<br />
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And now, living in Colorado, a place where the weather is rarely predictable - I mean, we can get 70 degrees and sunny skies in February and a snowstorm in June - I find that, once again, I talk about the weather all the time.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">January 2013</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRr5FrSwwqj74h4aICH7-werX-nUhFwuibGG0kZP4qwTECCPeVLMiO-5SLSxTzda3NJag_cKkJvNmfBcYFNmbwcjuohVZ-hShxM0NwvRPeMYd5_Ewi0tK9lPqDxTn8DIjrONoYBgq4dXsu/s1600/may+2013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRr5FrSwwqj74h4aICH7-werX-nUhFwuibGG0kZP4qwTECCPeVLMiO-5SLSxTzda3NJag_cKkJvNmfBcYFNmbwcjuohVZ-hShxM0NwvRPeMYd5_Ewi0tK9lPqDxTn8DIjrONoYBgq4dXsu/s1600/may+2013.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">May 2013</td></tr>
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We have had relentless wind for about a week now, and I noticed that in the last few days especially, the weather - specifically, the wind - has been central to most of my casual interactions with people. I ran into a neighbor while walking the dog this morning and after a quick exchange about his upcoming yard sale, we parted ways, ending our conversation with, "I'm about ready for this wind to quit." "No kidding! I've had about enough." I had a similar conversation with my yoga instructor yesterday and more in depth versions with several friends. The wind is making us all feel a little nuts, so perhaps it's especially relevant. But I think it's fair to say, the weather in Colorado always seems important.<br />
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And that's where I've begun to ask myself some questions. Why is that in some parts of the world, in some parts of the country, weather is such an acceptable - and genuine feeling - topic of conversation, while in others it's simply not? In essence, my experiences and observations of others' tell me there are a couple of overlapping factors that may make weather an appropriate conversation topic: first, the actual weather in the place (i.e., is it quickly changing, does it come with extra challenges such as snow, etc.); second, the degree to which people's day-to-day activities involve being outside in the weather.<br />
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So, a few examples:<br />
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CONSISTENTLY GOOD, BUT UNEVENTFUL, WEATHER + OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES = DON'T TALK ABOUT THE WEATHER<br />
In places like Los Angeles, at least when I lived there, weather is pretty much always nice. It's almost like living in climate control. That the weather will be good is virtually a given, so even if you engage in a lot of outdoor activities, you just don't think about the weather. Arizona was much like this when I lived there, as well. I know people bitch about the heat, but in my experience, that's mostly people who <i>don't </i>live there. We rode horses year round in an uncovered outdoor arena. In the summer we rode early in the morning. When it rained maybe we didn't ride for a couple of days. But when it came to day to day living, the weather just wasn't ever worth talking about.<br />
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4-SEASONS, PLENTY OF BAD WEATHER + SUPER URBAN = DON'T TALK ABOUT THE WEATHER<br />
My dear friend, M, simply despises all talk about the weather, and I've always associated this with the fact that talking about the weather is decidedly uncouth while M is pretty much one of the "cool" folks. Cool people, urban people, just don't talk about the weather. It's a form of small talk left to those of us considered "bumpkins" (I am totally included in this categorization, by the way!). But in the last several years, I've noticed M starting to talk about the weather, and not in a mocking or ironic way. Rather, he genuinely gives a shit about it. He's also been engaging in a lot more outdoor activities - he has a dog now and hikes more than he ever did in the past - and has been moving regularly between the urban center of NYC (where we moved together over a decade ago), upstate New York, the pacific northwest, and southern California. Perhaps what I once attributed to cultural valuing actually has more to do with lifestyle; perhaps weather doesn't seem important when most of our time is spent indoors, when we can move about through subway tunnels, in and out of air-conditioned cabs and restaurants and workplaces, when we're moving about a city with a complete immersion in its built spaces.<br />
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SEASONS, PLENTY OF GOOD & BAD WEATHER + OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES = LOTS OF TALK ABOUT WEATHER<br />
As I alluded to above, I found myself really starting to talk and think an awful lot about weather in smaller communities that experience regular and irregular changes in weather (Charlottesville, VA; Streitdorf, Austria; Fort Collins, CO). It just so happens that in these places my life has also heavily centered around the outdoors. In Virginia and Austria I worked on horse farms. In Colorado...well, in Colorado I think all of our lives center around the outdoors to some extent. I ride horses and rock climb and walk my dog. Many of the people I know think nothing of riding their bikes year round, commuting anywhere from 5-15 each way in well-below-freezing temperatures, high winds, and blizzards. Life for these folks is perhaps not disrupted by the weather, but it's sure affected by it. For me, a very vocal hater of winter, life is seriously unsettled. While, in the summer my daily activities get me outside for 6 hours a day or more, in the winter I must transition some of these activities into indoor activities (e.g., I climb at a gym or ride in an indoor arena), usually bitterly. Not a cold weather person, I find winter incredibly disruptive. Just as a heat-hating climber/hiker/mountain biker may find Arizona's summers disruptive as they move them indoors or force them to readjust their ideal schedule. But that's the thing with Colorado; it seems like everybody is outside all the time if they can be, so weather is of considerable importance and relevance to our lives.<br />
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So maybe, at the end of the day, these tendencies to talk about the weather or not, the definition of such talk as unintellectual or irrelevant small talk, have less to do with some abstracted notion of a "cultural norm" and more to do with the realities of each of our day-to-day realities.Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-36333444055521228792014-04-24T11:33:00.001-07:002014-05-27T20:45:25.453-07:00Food as culture: The devaluing of convenienceFood is a funny thing. The ways we eat and the foods we eat tell us a lot about cultures. Not only do these things differ between cultures, but they also give us insights into who belongs to various groups within a given culture. Units on food and nutrition are <i>always</i> popular among my undergraduate classes, and there are certainly times I've wondered why I didn't pursue a career path that had more to do with food. After all, I have always been fascinated by what is considered food, rules about eating, etc. I've written a bit on the question of what constitutes foods in different cultures <a href="http://anthropologyofthefamiliar.blogspot.com/2013/02/culture-food-and-edible-animal.html" target="_blank">previously</a>; but what I'm really interested in right now has to do with what we can learn about a culture by thinking about how foods are made and how food, as a priority, fits in with broader cultural systems of meaning. And how shifts in eating may be reflections of or responses to larger cultural shifts.<br />
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My summer of 2013 was pretty exquisite. In addition to my standard summers' fare of road trips to stunning canyons and cliff faces, 2013 was sprinkled with an abundance of work-related and for-pleasure travel in the US and Europe, something I was quite exuberant about...except for one thing - my panic about the potential challenge of finding gluten free foods while on many of these trips. I've never been the bravest eater when it comes to meats, but other than that, I've always been willing and able to try just about any food at least once. Since I quit eating gluten due to a sensitivity (I've never been diagnosed with anything but was sick for years until I gave it up), though, I've had to become a much more tentative eater. Unfortunately, this has made one of my other favorite pastimes (besides eating), travel, far more stressful.<br />
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Last summer, it was a several day stop-off in Paris to visit with my father that worried me the most. Every time I've visited France in the past decade, I've felt awful the entire time, and in recent years it had been getting progressively worse. I had initially assumed that this had much to do with the abundance of butter and heavy creams present in French cuisine. Thus, since eating loads of French food in Paris has both considerable cultural and personal (my father LOVES French food!) significance and happens constantly, I had for years dreaded these visits. This trip, my first (to France) since figuring out my gluten sensitivity, promised to be no different, and I started stressing about it as soon as I bought my ticket.<br />
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See, the thing is, while when I travel with my husband or on my own, I know that I can easily seek out restaurants that will either have "natural" gluten free options (e.g., Thai food is super easy for me to eat) or that are readily accommodating (e.g., have labeled menus), these things are just not options when dining with my dad. He opts for heavy European (especially French) food whenever eating out and, when in France, especially enjoys his traditional meals in brasseries and higher end, but older school restaurants. And, of course, his breakfasts come from the bakery on his block. From pretty much all perspectives, I really admire this about my dad. I love that he is so excited about French food and about food in general...but with my (non-voluntary) diet restrictions I was worried.<br />
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But something totally unexpected happened on this trip. The first night that we went out to eat, we simply explained my limitations to the server and asked if the particular sauce that came on the fish I'd ordered would be safe. He looked at us almost in confusion..."I don't know why this sauce would have flour in it, but I'll ask the chef." (In my head, I thought, <i>flour is hidden in <b>everything</b>!</i>) This happened numerous times and each time I was safe - no hidden flour, no hidden gluten, and when galettes were made from buckwheat, they were made from just that, with no wheat flour added. As it turned out, eating gluten free in Paris was easy so long as I skipped the obvious - no baguette, no croissant, no pastry, so the only tragic thing about being gluten free in Paris was not having the time to check out any of the city's gluten free patisseries or restaurants (<a href="http://www.helmutnewcake.com/" target="_blank">this is the one I really wanted to visit!</a>).<br />
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As my dad and I reflected on the ease with which I was able to avoid gluten, he recalled a related experience he'd had with his wife. A pescetarian, S is careful to avoid soups in many restaurants because of the likelihood that they use chicken or beef stock. In the US, she always asks and about 50% of the time veggie soup is made with veggie stock but the rest of the time it's got some sort of animal base to that broth (maybe this is worse because of their Texas residence?). Anyway, apparently whenever she asks this same question in Paris - "Excuse me, but is this veggie soup made with chicken/beef stock?" - she gets a similar response to the one I received when asking about flour/gluten, only perhaps even more startled..."Of course not! Why on earth would we make vegetable soup with meat stock? That would make it a different soup!"<br />
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Hmm...they are, of course, correct. It would change the character and the flavor and the texture of the food, things that, in French cuisine, are of the utmost import. French cuisine remains, for the most part, embedded in an ethic of slow, from scratch, and deliberate. That is, unless the flour is adding something beyond thickness (i.e., a roux), it doesn't go in.<br />
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All of this really got me thinking about the American diet and eating gluten free and how this journey in eating has made me more aware of some peculiarities of food in this country and how they've been shifting in recent years. When I cook at home, it's remarkably easy to cook gluten free. I have loads of options - some leaving out grain altogether, some choosing to eat gluten free grains, some choosing gluten free versions of traditionally wheat-based products - when I cook for myself, and find that, most often, I prefer to leave the grain out or eat something like rice or quinoa. When I make soups and sauces, I have no need for flour and on the very rare occasion that I need to thicken something, I use cornstarch. I admittedly do tend to avoid cooking the types of foods that require a roux or similar, but I never cooked that way anyway so I haven't noticed the difference.<br />
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It's going out (especially outside of the bubble that Fort Collins can be) or trying to eat processed foods (not something I do very often, fortunately) that can be tricky. Because the hard thing about avoiding gluten in the American diet isn't in avoiding pasta or bread, it's that gluten has a tendency to make its way into everything. It's a short-cut, both for time and money it seems. Apparently, some folks even bind hamburgers with flour. Sometimes, in American versions of Indian or Thai restaurants, curries are thickened with it (not something I found in Thailand or Malaysia, where curries tended to be thin or thickened with rice flour). It just shows up in everything. And this seems to be a trend in American eating that I find remarkably telling.<br />
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Like much of life in the US, in recent decades, it seems that our food is often based on convenience and cost rather than flavor or authenticity or quality or freshness of ingredients. Through an anthropological lens, the value placed upon convenience in our society is of considerable importance. The need for convenient food is something that is an indicator of the so-called Protestant work ethic. As in, "I work 80 hours a week, so I need food that is easy." The emphasis on cheap production is a reflection of a society that places great value on profit motive, but also one that sees considerable wealth disparities. Whereas, in France, it is perfectly acceptable to take hours mid-day to eat a meal, in the US, we too often eat lunch at our desks and pride ourselves on it. In a country that has a history of placing much greater value on consumption of goods rather than experiences, the art of dining and the value of food are of little relevance (to many).<br />
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Part of why this stands out so clearly to me right now is that, lately, it seems like things may be shifting. Yes, we Americans still seem to be especially prone to fad diets with little sense of cultural food identity (at least compared to many other places), and yes, we still often choose convenience over quality; but, the multitude of varying philosophies about food and lifestyle that abound these days are rooted in ethics of going back to whole foods, cooking from scratch, and connecting to the source(s) of one's food. It seems that, increasingly, regardless of the particular diet fad one has directed his/her attention toward - that is, whether one eats vegan and only buys from the farmer's market or is paleo and only gets foods direct from farmers and ranchers - there is an increasingly mainstream movement toward knowing what that food is, knowing not only how to prepare it, but maybe even how to raise it.<br />
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And, of course, this all makes me wonder whether perhaps there are changes afoot. Are people trading hours at a desk for hours in a garden, tracking elk, or behind a stove, shifting the relative cultural value of work and that of food? I hope so. As, if given the choice, it seems to me that convenience is overrated.Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-41832366273445263042014-04-16T18:23:00.001-07:002014-05-27T20:55:49.973-07:00Life reboot, yoga teacher training in India<div>
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Again and again, I have turned to yoga in times of struggle and times of loss.<a href="http://anthropologyofthefamiliar.blogspot.com/2014/03/oh-lessons-ive-learned-yoga-as-vessel.html" style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Yoga has taught me</a> many things over the years, but most of all, to appreciate the moment and to accept myself and others without judgment. Currently in the midst of an exciting and frightening career change, I once again look to yoga to offer tools for and acceptance of personal transformation. However, this time, I want to take it one step further. In addition to deepening my own practice, I want to train to teach yoga here in Colorado. So, I'm asking for your help to accomplish these goals of sharing and teaching the many lessons yoga has to offer while re-energizing my life along the way. <br style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><br style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Always an anthropologist and a wanderer at heart, I want to do my teacher training in India, the birthplace of yoga. I plan to attend a 5 week teacher training at an <a href="http://www.parmarth.com/index.php" style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">ashram in Rishikesh, India</a>. This course will not only be personally transformative, but will cover yoga philosophy, anatomy, asanas (poses), chants and prayers, and cultural aspects of Indian festivals. In other words, it will also prepare me to teach yoga, write about yoga, and guide people in living by the principles of yoga.</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" />If interested, this is also a chance to follow someone through the teacher training process and experience of ashram living as I will (if permitted) blog throughout the journey or keep a journal to share upon my return. You can follow me now and later at<a href="http://anthropologyofthefamiliar.blogspot.com/" style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">anthropologyofthefamiliar.blogspot.com</a>.<br style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><br style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" />I am asking for your help to cover the following anticipated expenses. Any amount helps and all donations are appreciated!<br style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><br style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Course/living expenses paid to the ashram - $1,000<br style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Airfare - $1,500<br style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Vaccinations - $1,000<br style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><br style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" />TOTAL - $3,500<br style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><br style="margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" />Thank you so much for your support! Even if you can't make a donation, please consider sharing.</span></div>
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http://www.gofundme.com/8abltgStacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-27461497324114873282014-03-31T11:42:00.001-07:002014-05-27T20:55:06.534-07:00Oh the lessons I've learned . . . Yoga as a Vessel for Personal GrowthIn true American fashion, I have spent most of the nearly 3.5 decades of my life thus far in a hurry. Even as a kid going to horse shows, it’s all “hurry up and wait.” As a student, I rushed between school and work and activities and my social life. As an adult, I find myself rushing to meet deadlines, sometimes staring at a computer screen for so many hours for so many consecutive days that I awake with eye strain. American culture is all about linear trajectories to “success,” it’s all about overachieving and multitasking and, ultimately, it’s all about ego. And despite my background in anthropology (Read: Shouldn’t I be able to identify these characteristics as cultural? I trained for this!), I am no less prone to the influence of my birth culture than anybody else. I have been lucky, however, as yoga has taught me about presence, about the moment, and about sitting still and quiet and without judgment for long enough that I am finally, at 34, beginning to accept and enjoy myself.<br />
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<span class="s2">Yoga has come in and out of my life since I first stepped onto a mat at 18. I was drawn to it for the physical challenge but soon discovered that, as wonderful as backbends and hip openers and inversions may feel physically, it was what they’ve brought to the heart and mind of my life that are the most valuable to me.</span></div>
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<span class="s2">While I have been practicing yoga with varying consistency for 16 years, there are three distinct periods in my life when I sought the practice out, and each of these times has taught me a distinct (though connected) lesson about the benefits of being still yet present, about being in the moment: to sit with emotion/pain; to quiet the mind; and, most recently, to accept myself, without ego and without judgment. </span></div>
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<span class="s2"><b><i>Sitting with emotion/pain</i></b></span></div>
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<span class="s2">When I was 15 years old, my first horse, Clancy, broke his leg and we had to “put him down.” Clancy had been my best friend for the past four years, since coming to me skinny and frightened, and we had grown up together. But there was nothing I could do when he broke his leg. I wasn’t even there when it happened. </span></div>
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<span class="s2">I responded to Clancy’s death in a quintessentially American way. I evaded the many emotions - sadness, grief, guilt - that accompanied my loss and threw myself into horses, competitions, and teenage experimentation. Between my overachiever personality and my inability (or unwillingness) to feel the pain that accompanied this loss, I was quickly drawn to methamphetamine. In addition to increasing my confidence, meth allowed me to bury my pain while continuing to present an illusion of success. During the subsequent years, I slept little and hid well, disguising almost daily drug use with all kinds of traditional achievements - I maintained good grades, competed at nationals in my equestrian division, worked part-time, got into college. Outside of those first days after Clancy’s untimely death - when the pain was still overwhelming, gut-wrenching - I managed to avoid feeling the loss.</span></div>
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<span class="s2">That is, until my very first yoga class. I was 18 years old and living away from home for the first time, attending the University of California Los Angeles. I had traded methamphetamine for more readily available coping mechanisms and had begun to truly loathe myself. Yoga was offered as an elective two nights each week for the duration of the ten week quarter, so I signed up, expecting to gain flexibility and possibly some “cool” points. What I found was much more. Yoga helped me revisit a pain that I had been avoiding for 3 years. What’s more, yoga taught me to acknowledge it, to feel it, and to let it go. For me, this did not mean letting go of Clancy, or forgetting our time together, or minimizing the loss, but it did mean leaving the destructive baggage behind so I could begin to ease my way into the present. To this day, I don’t completely understand the mechanisms of this lesson, but I think it was the relative quiet of the class, the remarkable stillness of Savasana. </span></div>
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<span class="s2">The class was held on a raised deck, open to the air, and, being Los Angeles, the evenings were warm. That first night changed my life. I was surprised at the physical challenge of the practice itself. But I was stirred by what happened at the end. As the instructor guided us into Savasana, I first discovered the challenge of true relaxation. In fact, I came nowhere near it. Instead, my body weary, my heart strained, I fell into a lucid dreamlike state during which I finally said goodbye and mourned in truth for the first time over the horse that I had lost, the one that had been my best friend, the one that I had saved, and the one that I had somehow totally let down. With no images, no words, no music to distract my mind from the guilt and sadness that I had carried with me for three years, I was forced to sit with it, and the grief shook my slack body. That night, I learned my first lesson from yoga - I learned that it is ok to feel, and that until we truly acknowledge our emotion and let it move through our bodies, it will be impossible to forgive or to grow.</span></div>
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<span class="s2"><b><i>Quieting the mind</i></b></span></div>
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<span class="s2">In the years immediately following that first encounter, I practiced yoga sporadically, but struggled to find another transformative moment. In fact, caught up in the rush of life and the exhilaration of becoming an adult, when I did attend class, I would catch myself clenching my jaw and grinding my teeth throughout the practice. Racing through postures in flow and power classes, I simply could not quiet my mind enough to experience yoga as anything other than a workout. And I didn’t just practice yoga this way; I was living this way, moving from job to job, from town town, from person to person.</span></div>
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<span class="s2">That is, until I discovered the joy of a different kind of practice in a distinctly different place. At 23 years old, I was preparing to embark on an adventure of a lifetime. For others, I framed it as an academic excursion, a very pragmatic pre-grad-school-application test of my mettle. I was going to go to Morocco to study Arabic and to explore the possibilities of conducting graduate research there. After the fast-paced atmospheres of Los Angeles and New York City, after the bitter cold of manual labor in central Virginia’s harshest winter in a decade, the desert heat and open space were wildly appealing. I left for Morocco armed with a set of yoga asana cards and a mat and for three months I learned Arabic, spoke French, ate with my hands, and came to appreciate the value of a common Moroccan saying, “Un homme </span><span class="s3">pressé est déjà mort”</span><span class="s2">/“A man in a hurry is already dead.” During my time in Morocco, I practiced yoga nearly every day and rather than rushing through poses or working toward a sweat, I discovered a practice that was about what felt good each day, that was about being on rooftops overlooking strange cities, that was about opening up my heart to a world that I was learning to truly experience and be present in. </span></div>
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<span class="s2">When I returned to the US, yoga remained a regular part of my life and it was during this time that I first began to quiet my mind. Under the tutelage of Anusara-trained Jordan Kirk, my practice began to deepen. Through holding poses and finding the details of mental as well as physical alignment, I began to learn to quiet my mind for long enough each day to make room for the type of joy that radiates from within. While flow classes had enabled me to anticipate what would come next, feeding into my overanxious brain, Anusara taught me not only to wait, but to delve into the present with the same enthusiasm I usually brought to “what next?” I think the first time I felt this type of “present” was in Camatkarasana (wild thing), a truly invigorating and freeing pose that always encourages me to surrender to the moment. </span></div>
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<span class="s2">I still struggle with this lesson of quieting the mind, and often find myself looking to my husband and our dog as a reminder of its benefits. Both seem impossibly comfortable with “just being” in a way that I work for every day. But once I felt it for that first time, I now find this type of presence comes quickly during any yoga practice and every now and again, I catch glimpses of it in my daily life. After all, every day is practice. And while learning to slow down, quiet my mind, and appreciate the moment has not changed my craving for movement, it has changed the way I experience the journey.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEuNm1UaMM8e1CTeXZW-FF61xxpT95wBOC7qNtUtJbv_i04ZfmYELGL3zzFecu3KJfH3P0T0oh46anCRi6DyxPKTXR8nkeEWGXp0FyJAIfMUOA2Pg2M8ZQPouRDHvfzdJIxZDjB4DPNw2l/s1600/2609_60124908436_6399942_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEuNm1UaMM8e1CTeXZW-FF61xxpT95wBOC7qNtUtJbv_i04ZfmYELGL3zzFecu3KJfH3P0T0oh46anCRi6DyxPKTXR8nkeEWGXp0FyJAIfMUOA2Pg2M8ZQPouRDHvfzdJIxZDjB4DPNw2l/s1600/2609_60124908436_6399942_n.jpg" height="320" width="208" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The author reveling in history and adventure,<br />
Egypt, circa 2005</td></tr>
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<span class="s2"><b><i>Accepting myself</i></b></span></div>
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<span class="s2"><b><i></i></b></span><br /></div>
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<span class="s2">The importance of accepting myself, without ego and without judgment, is the most recent lesson that yoga has brought to my life. After an eight-year hiatus from routine practice, I recently returned to the mat, and my body and spirit have been grateful. This latest lesson is an important one, and in a highly competitive world, one that was sorely needed. Ego and self-judgment have become considerable barriers in recent years, blocking my ability to experience true joy, even in the best of times, even in activities that are supposed to be fun. </span></div>
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<span class="s2">When I went to that first yoga class 16 years ago, I had no ego, no expectations, about my own abilities. But a month ago, when I laid my mat on the hardwood floor of a yoga studio for the first time in years, I felt my stomach flip. Nerves. Would I be able to live up to my past performance capacity? It had been so long since I last engaged in a routine yoga practice, and my hamstrings had become so tight, my back tender from injury, my mind filled with the stresses of a competitive and demanding career and, at 34 years old - despite a valiant effort to remain active through horse-back riding and rock climbing - my body had already begun to reflect, and to manifest, these stresses.</span></div>
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<span class="s2">Self-conscious and worried that I would both let myself down and look a fool attempting the very asanas that had once been so familiar and freeing, I beelined for a relatively isolated corner of the studio. As I took a seat beside the mirror, the self-judgement began immediately. I critiqued my reflection for its hunched shoulders and struggled to sit up straight. I ground my teeth in frustration with my own weaknesses and with the nascent fear that yoga, a practice that had helped me through hard times in the past, was now daunting, even more so than the first time I ever attempted it. </span></div>
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<span class="s2">Serendipitously, the instructor’s lesson that day, what she wanted each of us to take away, was about judgment. “Do not judge yourself, do not compare yourself to others - in your practice or in your life. Let go of society’s expectations about what is the ‘good’ or ‘right’ or ‘successful’ path for you. Let it go, and accept yourself in your heart.” They were the perfect words at the perfect time. The reminded me of the Sufi proverb, “No fear, no expectations,” that I had always found inspiring. My ego had grown too powerful, and I was becoming paralyzed with fear.</span></div>
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<div class="p3">
<span class="s2">In the midst of a major life change, I had thought that returning to a regular yoga practice would help me make an important decision. Suddenly, however, I realized that yoga was not here to help me work through the decision, as I had expected, but to teach me to come to terms with my choice, whatever it would be. Whether I elected to stay on the same path or take that frightening leap into the unknown, I would need to overcome expectations - my own as well as those of others. And to do this, I realized, I would first have to learn to sit with myself, my true self, without judgment. And when the teacher began to speak and I took that first focused breath toward an awesome new intention, a tear rolled down my cheek. </span></div>
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<div class="p3">
<span class="s2">As I have renewed my practice, and come to re-learn my body and its changes without judgment, without expectation, I have found greater joy in every activity. I can appreciate that I am stronger than I used to be, but that I am also tighter, and I am ok with this, because there is no greater value in one or the other. These physical qualities are simply the result of life - the result of rock climbing regularly, the result of hours sitting at a desk - and they will benefit from being balanced but they neither increase nor decrease the value of me.</span></div>
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<div class="p3">
<span class="s2">Throughout my life, like many smart, motivated women, I have tied my self-worth up in what I can do, bound my identity to a career or an accomplishment. Once again, yoga has jolted me, offering perspective and a powerful reminder that self-judgment, ego, is not a motivator but a barrier to growth. Ego is what would keep me from embracing the joy of Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (bridge pose) simply because Urdhva Dhanurasana (wheel), once so accessible, is once again a challenge. Ego is what would prevent me from attempting standing splits class after class even though my lines may never be as stunning as those of the former dancers. Ego would not allow me to submit this essay or share these experiences for fear that they are not profound enough to be worthwhile.</span></div>
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<span class="s2">*****</span></div>
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<span class="s2">As an American, I have often been witness to, and sometimes experienced, that desire for a fast-paced, fitness-oriented yoga practice. Vinyasa flow and power yoga classes interspersed with asana-inspired crunches and held to thumping beats are no longer difficult to find. In fact, they tend to be far more common and crowded than the quieter, stiller (though no less challenging) Inyegar, Anusara, and Kripalu inspired classes that have taught me so much. And I by no means want to downplay the physiological benefits of yoga. Routine practice relieves years of spinal compression that comes from hunching over a computer and reminds me to stay in tune with, and listen to, my body. Yoga keeps me strong in the depths of my muscles and complements other sports I enjoy. The physical benefits of yoga practice are not and should not be ignored. </span></div>
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<span class="s2">But, for me, the physical benefits are simply a welcome bonus. Over the years, yoga has come into my life at opportune times and I have sought it out during times of mental and emotional turmoil. Again and again, I have found that, through the physical practice of asanas, I have explored lessons that went well beyond the physical, that taught me to integrate the physical with the mental. For me the concept of stillness, has been the most significant overarching lesson. Achieved through both the movement through poses and the deep holding of them, this learning to be present has translated into an ability to sit with my emotion, with my mind, and, eventually, I hope, with myself. As with my ability to focus in order to hold an arm balance or suspend my fear to permit inversion, as I become better at remaining present without judgment on the mat, the next challenge will be translating these lessons into my everyday living.</span></div>
Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-68889753382686398202014-03-26T09:37:00.000-07:002014-05-27T20:46:54.708-07:00Gender & power, or why I sometimes wish I were a 200+ lb manThe other night, after watching my remarkably powerful partner repeatedly launch his bowling ball through the air so it landed with a concentration shattering thud a third of the way down the lane (he was not messing around; this is just how he bowls), I turned ruefully to my friend, "Sometimes, I just wish I could spend a day in his body. I want to know what it feels like to have the kind of brute strength to break things by accident."<br />
<br />
I am a reasonably strong woman. I grew up riding horses, which is code for mucking stalls, carrying water buckets, and throwing bales of hay. I practice yoga and I rock climb. Since I started climbing, I don't regularly lift weights, but I'm no stranger to them. I am reasonably strong. But when I want to move something that weighs, say, as much as I do, I have to work pretty damn hard at it. I cannot always open my own jars. I have <i>never</i> thought I was pulling on something with a normal force only to have it fall apart in my hand. I am reasonably strong, but I am not especially powerful, not physically anyway.<br />
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I think this sense of natural power is something many men (and <a href="http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-13018/5-things-i-miss-about-weighing-more-than-300-pounds.html" target="_blank">some women</a>) come to take for granted, this trust in one's own physical prowess, not in a pound for pound kind of way, but in an absolute kind of way. I'm pretty sure that if he needed to, my husband could just pick up a car. He's pulled me, two other women, and several men, all linked together in boats and inner tubes, through what seemed like miles of river too shallow to raft, too cold for most of us to walk through. He is, by my definition, powerful. And this degree of power seems to be accompanied by certainty, by trust in one's own ability to act.<br />
<br />
I covet this type of power on a regular basis. I just want to know what it feels like. But today I wanted it with a different type of desperation, the kind that stems from fear and insecurity and vulnerability. I wanted to feel that kind of power from the inside, with all the certainty and self-confidence that come with it. I wanted this from the kind of desperate and terrified positionality that I wonder if big powerful (men) can ever completely understand.<br />
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My friend J and I were walking the dogs this afternoon when, seemingly out of nowhere, a little spaniel charged us. Having encountered this trouble-maker dog previously when it broke away from its owner and charged my dog, snarling and clawing at her face, I braced myself and positioned my body between my neurotic and unforgetting border collie mix and the charging spaniel. The dog was surprisingly polite to our little group and all seemed fine as we turned to try and return it to its owners just a house away.<br />
<br />
But Bagel (my dog) seemed to know something wasn't right (or she was still traumatized by the spaniel) because she pulled her epic slip-the-collar-and-roll-over-in-the-middle-of-the-street-tail-wagging-and-all routine. By the time I processed her fear, I turned to see a huge bloodhound type dog heading straight for us. He went directly for J's dog, the smallest and most submissive of the three, and seemed to be trying to bite her over and over again around her face and her throat. I don't know if he is usually an aggressive dog or if he mistook Lola and her screams for prey, or if he thought he needed to protect the little spaniel, and I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but at the time he was a monster and we didn't know what to do about it.<br />
<br />
He broke Lola's skin, ripping her ear open, before J managed to wedge herself between them, draping her own body over her little terrier's in an absolute display of reactive altruism. We shouted at the dog to stop. We tried to create barriers and move it away with our own bodies. I wanted to do what I had read is a safe-ish way to break up a dog fight and <a href="http://www.aspca.org/pet-care/virtual-pet-behaviorist/dog-behavior/breaking-dogfight" target="_blank">lift the dog's hind end like a wheelbarrow</a>, but feared he would turn on me or on one of the two dogs in my charge. I wanted to kick the dog, to hurt him just enough to scare him off, but my empathy coupled with my fear paralyzed me and I stuck to more passive measures. My size and pound for pound a hell of a lot fiercer, this was a dog neither J nor I could fathom managing if he turned his aggression on us.<br />
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The hound's owner, a large man in his early 30s, showed up just as J got Lola out of harm's way and the big dog turned his attention to the wily former reservation mutt I was dog-sitting. She seemed unfazed, but I was relieved when the owner removed his dog from the situation and it became clear that my gumption wouldn't be tested.<br />
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Walking away, I don't know if I have ever felt so helpless. J and I talked about it, both wishing we had been more aggressive, more pro-active in actually forcing the dog to retreat. I don't know what I would have done had the dog attacked Bagel instead of little Lola. I imagine I would have done just as I have done every other time I've worried my dog was threatened; I would have done as J did and used my body as a shield. I am confident I would be able to protect my dog, even if it meant risking myself, but I would probably not have had the power (physical or emotional or psychological) to remove the threat from the situation.<br />
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What bothers me about this is that my response would never be as certain as my husband's when I told him about it. His is a certainty that comes with having a degree of physical power that renders one, not invincible, but certainly less vulnerable. This certainty is something that cannot be learned late in life. It is something that comes with always having strength beyond what you "should," beyond what is "normal," and the weight to throw behind it. But, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it is more than that. I wonder if perhaps it isn't just about having profound physical power, but also about living in a world that focuses on and reinforces and perpetuates your power on multiple levels. That is, I think maybe it's also about gender.<br />
<br />
While I cannot speak for all women, it's fair to argue that part of why the particular type of vulnerability J and I experienced during that dog encounter is especially frightening for and disproportionately experienced by, women, is because we are constantly reminded of our own vulnerability. It is coupled with and exacerbated by structural vulnerability relating not only to gendered disparities in size and strength but to disparate distributions of material and social power over time such that it is imprinted. It is reinforced every time I read an article about women being attacked by men, every time I hear an argument for or against women's rights to healthcare, to child care, to maternity leave, to dress a certain way, etc. It is highlighted when I seek to be empathic and understand the suffering of my fellow women, fellow humans, fellow creatures. In fact, psychologists and sociologists have begun to show that part of women's distinct ways of constructing "risk" - across all kinds of domains (from sports to finances) - compared to men may be attributable not only to gendered differences in upbringing around communication and values and life role expectations, but because of our disproportionate likelihood of becoming a victim of sexual assault, an act that culturally and psychologically compounds multiple forms of vulnerability (see, for example,<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9972583" target="_blank"> Gustafson 1998</a>).<br />
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So, as much as I still admit to envying the type of physical power that would have allowed me to intervene and protect myself, J, and our group of dogs in a more proactive way, even if I could physically have moved that hound dog, I have learned, I have been taught all of my life, to be aware always of my own vulnerability. And something tells me brute strength wouldn't be enough to overcome that type of uncertainty.Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-29561575510971373502014-01-20T08:22:00.000-08:002014-05-27T20:55:23.874-07:00When life is edgework...maybe too many edges?Lately, in the hopes of expanding my research identity beyond "the girl who studies meth use," I've been learning a lot about edgework theory and constructions of risk, especially in sport, and I can't help but think about how it applies to my own life. A very simplistic explanation of edgework theory is that it situates voluntary risk taking within the structures of the capitalist economy, conceptualizing it as embodiment of, escape from, or resistance to one's position in it. Lyng's edgework, at its core, is about the skillful navigation of the wiggly and fuzzy boundary that ostensibly separates chaos from control. According to Lyng and other edgework theorists, this navigation of risk (physical, emotional, and psychological) arises as a means of achieving fulfillment. In this sense, many behaviors can be conceptualized as edgework, from so-called lifestyle or extreme sports (skydiving, mountaineering, and rock climbing for example) to high stakes careers, from the pro-ana subculture to participation in S&M. The argument goes that people seek out voluntary risk taking to find the fulfillment that is otherwise lacking in our current political-economic structure. In some forms of edgework, they resist this structure; in others (most of those that have been the center of researchers' attention) they embody it.<br />
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While I've never thought of myself as a risk taker or an edgeworker, if I use the above definition, I really always have been. I've spent the vast majority of my life riding horses, an activity that is often treated as a non-sport and low-risk although its risk and injury profile closely resembles motorcycle riding - when we do get hurt, it's often bad, and statistics put it up there as one of the more "dangerous" sports there is. Even as a kid, I rarely rode the quiet horses; most of my mounts were young with little training and/or came off the racetrack at some point. I jumped big jumps and competed in high-pressure situations, and for the most part, I loved it. I thrived on the thrill and, more importantly, on the challenge of walking that edge, of having to control my own nerves, of pushing myself to perform even when frightened or overwhelmed.<br />
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As an adult, I continued riding, though mostly this meant catching whatever free rides I could find - read: rescues, horses straight off the auction block, horses about whom little was known. I also spent much of my young adult life looking for something fulfilling and relished in the insecurity of traveling often and moving perhaps more often. In my 20s I met my now-husband who happens to be a rock climber and, despite my fear of heights, I learned to climb. In 2012, I completed a PhD and embarked upon what I hoped would be a fulfilling and exciting "soft money" career. At the time, I had a tough and athletic mare straight off the track. She was challenging emotionally and physically and, for someone like me (not the most assertive out there), she was borderline dangerous. But throughout the final years of my PhD, when I was adjuncting at least 2 classes a semester, commuting many hours each week, and writing writing writing, she filled a void and challenged me in important ways. I even thanked her in my dissertation. During this same time, I really started to push myself at lead climbing, and finally began learning to effectively manage my fear of heights and of falling. I was truly navigating multiple edges, and I was <b>loving it!</b> <br />
<br />
Then something happened. I got scared. Really scared. I was scared of my tough horse and now, sometimes, I'm still scared of my much kinder horse. For a while I've been blaming my age, blaming an injury, blaming my schedule. But I can't quite buy it. I fluctuate too much. My confidence returns only to be shot down instantly. And I noticed the other day that when things look good at work, fear wanes in other areas.<br />
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That said...edgework theory has given me a new lens that I think is worth exploring. I graduated. I started working on a small NIH grant. My research was still exciting and comfortable, but about a year in, I began to feel the insecurity of soft money. My grant was going to run out and I hadn't yet found more funding. Suddenly, the edges that had been fulfilling were nothing but stressful. Suddenly, it was as though work had become edgework, too, as I sought to strategize ways to secure funding, as I sought to learn as many new subfields and bodies of literature as possible to cast a wide net of proposals, and as I struggled with the fear and insecurity that accompanies the constant threat of losing not only one's income, but one's identity. As the rejections continued, and the (unpaid) work hours lengthened, my job began to feel like the "high stakes" careers edgework researchers always talk about. I am constantly on multiple deadlines, deadlines that if I miss cost me a potential salary. And it's all wrapped up in my identity, or my identity is wrapped up in it. After all, I don't just <b>do</b> social science or anthropological research. I <b>am</b> an anthropologist. What happens if my funding just ends, what happens if I'm not anymore?<br />
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As the nature of my work shifted, so did my relationship to my favorite athletic endeavors. Suddenly, the horse's every threat became the potential for death and I couldn't manage my own fear any longer. Suddenly, I lost the progress I'd made lead climbing, and the prospect of even a tiny fall at the gym also became unmanageable. In recreation, I no longer see a boundary between chaos and control, or a way to manage fear. And this has a snowball effect. The more confidence I lose, the more challenging it is, and the less rewarding, to grapple with edges. In the past year, I've come to really want my recreation to feel safe...could it be because, right now, my job doesn't?<br />
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So, armed with this theory of edgework, I've begun to ask myself: is it possible to have "too many edges"? I'm so curious to know whether people's relation to edgework activities shifts such that they can only handle a few at a time, or if it only works if it feels truly voluntary, or if we all need varying amounts of it. Is voluntary risk-taking more appealing when most aspects of life are safe and secure?Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-610578218830600832013-11-24T20:20:00.005-08:002014-05-27T20:48:31.256-07:00Why we need to quit gendering "success"Yesterday afternoon, I went to the climbing gym for a quick session. I was working my way up a route near the max of my ability, and exhausted about 3/4 of the way up, half falling, half simply sitting in my harness. Fortunately, I was on top-rope so fell only so far as the rope stretched, as when I looked down in the direction of my belayer, I saw another climber not 10 feet below me, lead climbing on a different route that overlapped with mine and ended on the same anchors. This behavior is a major violation of climbing etiquette - it is dangerous and it is obtrusive - and for a rather nervous climber like myself, it has the especially anxiety-inducing consequence of making me feel that I need to rush through a "project," perhaps forgoing additional attempts at moves I find challenging. I jumped back on the route, climbed until I fell again one move from the top, and when I saw that the man was still climbing just behind me, I asked to be lowered. My partner and I exchanged exasperated looks with neighboring climbers, but didn't say anything to the offending pair. We waited for them to apologize. They never did, and in fact they engaged in a number of other rude violations of climbing etiquette while there, including leaving a lead rope unattended on a route after they finished climbing it. This occupied the route so that, although they were no longer climbing it, others could not.<br />
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Perhaps because I had just returned from the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting where I elected to prioritize feminist panels over those that were drug related, I was <i>really</i> angered by this encounter. Contrary to popular advice or wisdom or whatever, however, I was <i>not</i> angered at my own silence. Rather, I was bothered by the two men's oblivion, by their unwillingness to just look about and consider how their actions were affecting the people around them.<br />
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The thing is, there have been countless lists floating around the internet lately that highlight the traits of "successful" people and telling women how they need to change in order to be more "successful" themselves. [I've put the term successful in quotes here as it is a problematic concept in and of itself and these articles consistently refer to very cultured and arguably gendered notions of success - financial, material, work-related, etc.] There is even a recent <a href="http://theprofessorisin.com/2013/11/10/the-top-5-mistakes-women-make-in-academic-settings/" target="_blank">blog</a> post I came across that urges women in academia to practice engaging in assertive or confident, rather than submissive, body language and to learn to take up (demand) more space for themselves.<br />
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In many societies, including the US, dominance is associated with masculinity while the act of submission and traits/behaviors associated with submissiveness are viewed as feminine. This gendering of (preferred vs. undesirable) behaviors manifests at multiple levels of society and reifies the relative status of men and women. It shapes gender, contributing to a strictly binary vision of the construct. Thus, how men and women are taught to act and interact from a young age and specific character traits in turn correspond with the hierarchical categorization of gender across society.<br />
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Now, as a relatively submissive person (by nature and probably also via my upbringing and culture), I am certainly grateful for the lessons that have taught me to be more assertive, to be more straightforward and open about my needs and desires. My concern with all this discourse encouraging women to adopt traits associated with normative masculinity and abandon those associated with normative femininity comes when I envision a world in which everybody is demanding that the soft-spoke person across the table speak louder. What I don't understand is why the conversation seems to exclude a request that the soft-spoken person's table-mate listen harder. Why don't we, as a society, ask the person who is taking up more than his/her "share" of space to look around and consider whether and how this is affecting others? Why does it seem that the pressure to change is primarily placed upon those who strive to be <i>less </i>demanding to become more so? Why can't thinking of how one's actions affect others be seen as confident and competent? (Arguably, this is where the reification of the gender/submission association has its greatest impact.)<br />
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It makes me think of <a href="http://www.cpr.org/news/story/man-who-quit-money" target="_blank">this interview</a> I heard last summer with Daniel Suelo, who has spent the last nearly 15 years living "without money." While he does depend upon generosity and publicly funded resources for many things, he has managed to survive and thrive for all these years without himself directly engaging the cash economy. And he has apparently been largely criticized for it, with a major and common critique being that what he's doing isn't sustainable for the whole society. In the interview, he noted that odds are, in a society as large as our current one, this is true. His way of life is largely dependent upon those who <i>do</i> participate in the cash economy. But he turns this question back on his critics and wonders why these same people fail to recognize that, at the end of the day, the excessive consumerism valorized in American culture is far less sustainable on a global scale.<br />
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Ultimately, we need to consider what type of society we want to live in. Is it one in which every person fights for the limited space on the couch or is it one in which every person makes him or herself so small as to take up less than a cushion? It's probably neither. We need people who are acting in the best interest of themselves and in the best interest of others. We need people capable of balancing being relational with assertive about their own ideas. I'm not proposing an end to the call for submissive women (and men) to step up and make their voices heard, to take up their share of space, or to confidently share their ideas. Rather, I'm arguing that we need an equal call for those who are more dominant in nature to look around before taking up so much space, to try listening harder before asking a companion to speak up, and to consider the good of the group in addition to any benefit to themselves. To truly (re)value these various traits in a more equitable manner we will have to de-gender the traits themselves or acknowledge and rectify persistent gender inequalities. Looks like it's back to feminism 101.Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-81097014138442572792013-04-15T19:45:00.000-07:002014-05-27T20:49:29.248-07:00My heart will go out . . . When public tragedy strikes, it understandably sets people on edge, highlighting the vulnerability of safe places and insulated populations. Events like the Newtown massacre and today's bombings at the Boston marathon set my Facebook page twittering with heartfelt outreach, with the sending of thoughts and prayers, and with people fearfully finding themselves able to relate to the circumstances and the victims. I hate to admit it, but since the Aurora shooting, I am frightened of going into movie theaters, especially for popular, high-profile films. And I feel for those who were affected and continue to be. We have seen too many sad events both in the US and abroad in recent years. <br />
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But, each time I am faced with people's anger and philosophical questions that stem from these incidents, I find myself reflecting upon why we, as a society, are not infuriated and heartbroken every single day. Because, the fact of the matter is, we live in a world where the the tragedies are rampant and the inequities are astronomical. As Americans, we live in a country where the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjVko-DMeF4" target="_blank">wealth gaps</a> are among some of the largest in the world; where we have accepted the fact that some <a href="http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_22118586/death-toll-homeless-found-denver-streets-nears-700" target="_blank">people will die because they cannot find, or afford, safe, appropriate shelter</a>; where some of our cities have some of the highest gun murder rates in the world (<a href="http://www.policymic.com/articles/22686/america-s-10-deadliest-cities-2012" target="_blank">America's 10 Deadliest Cities</a>; <a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/01/gun-violence-us-cities-compared-deadliest-nations-world/4412/" target="_blank">Gun Violence in US Cities</a>). In Baltimore, in the past 30 days, 22 people were <a href="http://data.baltimoresun.com/homicides/" target="_blank">murdered</a>; all of these people were Black; all but three were men. My guess is that most were poor. In <a href="http://www.detroitfirefilm.org/" target="_blank">Detroit</a>, a city that gets roughly 3,000 fires annually, firefighters seem to disproportionately (compared to other cities) risk their lives entering dilapidated and ostensibly vacant structures in an effort to save the have-nots who have too likely taken refuge within. Yet we do not seem to regard these systemic, structurally-rooted, forms of violence as violence, we do not view them as a call to reproach the system or challenge the culture.<br />
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I certainly grieve for the many victims of these highly-publicized incidents; I am sad for those who lost their lives, for those who lost their loved ones, for those who lost their sense of security; but my outrage runs much deeper, and finds its roots at the many daily tragedies we just accept. I am baffled, not by the occasional "crazy" or the periodic sociopath (or group of sociopaths), but by a country that so systematically oppresses entire groups of people, that abandons them and blames them and deems them "undeserving", not only of our tax dollars, but of our tears. I am angry because at <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">the end of the day, it feels like nobody cares enough about those people to question society. We, as a culture, have expanded this "deserving vs undeserving poor" mentality to "deserving vs undeserving" period . . . "innocents" are deserving of our grief, they're the reason for reflection. The poor, the oppressed, we can sweep them under the rug again and again and again. I'd like to think we're just so numb to it now, that it's been too painful, so we can't react to (structural as well as physical) violence on such a scale, with such regularity. But I don't think that's it. I think, at the end of the day, we just don't care as much about those folks.</span><br />
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Many people will make the argument that an awful lot of these people were not "innocent", that they were embedded in systems that create and perpetuate violence. Others may cite moral transgressions or "weaknesses" as justification. But we cannot fool ourselves or construct ourselves as innocent by denying our own complicity in such systems. With very few exceptions, we - even the most oppressed, even the well-meaning, among us - are part of the problem, if for no other reason than we all work harder to get by (to succeed even) within the structure when perhaps we should be dismantling it (thank you to Paulo Freire for this image of the oppressive oppressed).<br />
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And this is, of course, where I get bogged down. As an anthropologist, I seek to understand: I ask myself, <i>has my home culture has always been this way, so callously favoring the wealthy?</i> I seek to understand the larger structural systems that have set us all up in opposition to one another, that seem to require some to suffer so others can succeed. I ask whether xenophobia is a cultural or a human phenomenon. But when I try to think just as me, just as a person, not as an academic, I don't know if I care <i>why</i>. I want to know what we are going to do about it. Then, feeling too vulnerable and ineffective, I bring my inner-academic back out and wonder, is it possible to effect meaningful (and desirable) change without answering these other questions? And that I don't know. For now, I know only this, and I will choose to reflect upon it every day, not just when the media decides something awful has happened: <b>My heart will go out to the poor, to the suffering, to the daily murdered or beaten or frightened, to those who find themselves oppressed, exploited and excluded.</b> I will think of them every single day. And maybe one day I will have an answer.Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-82755508674158399692013-02-22T22:37:00.001-08:002014-05-27T20:49:49.199-07:00Culture, food, and the edible animalAnthropologists spend a lot of time and energy thinking about the foods and food-related rituals and meanings of cultures the world over. In Mary Douglas' influential "Abominations of Leviticus", she explored the religion-based categorization of foods as edible and inedible. Marvin Harris' "<a href="http://greenconsensus.com/education/food/materials/02_due_september19/Harris_Sacred_Cow_Riddle.pdf" target="_blank">The Riddle of the Sacred Cow</a>" examines the Hindu prohibition against eating cows from a materialist perspective, arguing the myriad ways cows are more valuable to the society alive than as food. These canonic anthropological texts are decades old, but what has recently emerged as "<a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/02/130222-horse-meat-beef-scandal-food-france-england-europe-science-romania-nestle-horsemeat/" target="_blank">Europe's Horse Meat Scandal</a>" has once again highlighted the role of culture in defining what constitutes an edible animal, not just among anthropologists, but in popular media. And, of course, as an anthropologist and a horse girl, I just had to write about it.<br />
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I grew up riding horses. I love them. <b style="font-style: italic;">Love </b>them. I have devoted years of my life to riding and caring for these magical creatures, working with them, and trying to rehab/rehome/and otherwise save them. I do not eat them though I try very hard to understand, and be ok with the fact, that others do.<br />
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So, several years ago, shortly after visiting some family friends in Switzerland, my father had the irrepressible need to share what he found to be a very funny experience. At dinner one evening, he asked the family's 9 year old daughter, "Do you like horses?"to which she responded, "Mmm, yum" while rubbing her belly. As my father tells it, he about fell out of his chair laughing as he pictured my response had I been there.<br />
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My father has spent a decent portion of his young adult and adult life living in France and has himself eaten horse so he did not find this statement or the behavior shocking, though given the context of his personal life (me!), he was certainly surprised in a "young girls like to <i>ride </i>horses not <i>eat </i>them!" kind of way. As much as I prefer to be culturally respectful when I travel, I cannot see myself voluntarily eating a horse (though there is some speculation that I have unknowingly done so at some point...) and when I've lived in places where horse meat was common, I've always found it moderately upsetting.<br />
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But here's the thing. I'm an anthropologist. It's my job to think about how culture has shaped the way we (people, so this includes me!) think about and define <i>everything, </i>including what we eat. So, intellectually, I get it. I understand why other cultures eat horse meat and I find it rather surprising when the Huffington Post tags articles on the topic with comments like "Gross!". I'm not a vegan - or even a vegetarian these days - but I do believe the critique that once we have made the decision to kill a living creature for our own sustenance, does it really matter which animal we kill? is worth while. Because this is where culture comes in. It is culture that defines which animals are edible and which ones are not. For example, this is why Americans are notoriously squeamish about foods that may be perfectly ordinary in other places - think escargot (snails) or crustaceans with their heads on and eyes intact. Whether based on religion, material/economic importance, or historical sentiment, culture guides the foods we should and should not consume.<br />
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Yet here's the thing that gets me every time. I know all of this and it still doesn't matter. I won't eat horse any more readily than I would eat dog, and while I know there is some personal sentiment involved, I don't think it's just about my personal attachment to these animals. After all, I can't imagine myself eating cat either, although I don't much care for cats in general and have never had a close relationship with one. In parts of South America, people eat guinea pigs. I have never had a guinea pig as a pet, but to me they simply don't constitute food. I don't find the prospect of eating bugs emotionally upsetting but I do find it stomach turning.<br />
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Part of what is so interesting about the European "horse meat scandal" is the fact that horse's role in Europe and Canada is quite similar to its role in the US. In all these places horses are used in work, and primarily for recreational purposes - whether as pets or sport horses. However, perhaps - and I'm no expert on this so I'm certainly open to alternative suggestions - the <i>meaning</i> of the horse still differs slightly in these varied contexts. The horse, in American culture, holds a special, almost mythical place that I'm not sure it holds in European or even Canadian societies. In the US, the horse dominates our lore about the Native American (becoming an integral part of both "noble savage" and "dominating white man" discourses). The horse is a vehicle for hero stories on race tracks and in movies about race tracks (the fact that these animals' realities rarely reach mythic standards is a totally separate issue). The horse represents the American West. Our relationship with horses comes to represent our relationship with nature and as such, the relationship between nature and culture (see Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rodeo-Anthropologist-Looks-Wild-Tame/dp/0226469557" target="_blank">Rodeo: An Anthropologist Looks at the Wild and the Tame</a></i>). Thus, in addition to my personal relationship with the animal, all of these cultural factors shape a broader, shared cultural meaning of the horse that I draw upon when deciding how I feel about its consumption. As an anthropologist, I can intellectualize my culture all I want, but I cannot completely remove myself from it.Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-53303434598211810032013-01-13T09:31:00.001-08:002014-05-27T20:56:25.916-07:00That girl vs. this girl . . . from HillaryInspired by my friend and colleague's <a href="http://midwesternberliners.blogspot.com/2013/01/that-girl-vs-this-girl.html" target="_blank">recent blog post</a> and a visit from a long-time friend, I want to revisit the concept of the changing or evolving "self"both personally and, of course, anthropologically. First, let's take a quick glance at the personal, using the same template Hillary used - "That girl vs. this girl" a ten-item comparison of myself ten years ago to myself today.<br />
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<b>That girl . . . </b><br />
1) Lived and worked on a horse farm in beautiful rural central Virginia.<br />
2) Was undeniably restless and set to embark on 6+ more years of vagabondish wandering adventures, both stateside and abroad. She didn't ever want to live anywhere for more than a year.<br />
3) Rolled her own cigarettes, wore Carhartt insulated overalls daily, and didn't bat an eye at spending a week's salary on a pair of shoes.<br />
4) Had a BA in Anthropology but wasn't sure what kind of career path she wanted to follow.<br />
5) Wrote poetry while walking, mucking out stalls, or riding through pastures; then performed the poems at open mic nights.<br />
6) Hated the holidays and always asked to work during them so she wouldn't have to deal; she was often called a "grinch" for this.<br />
7) Had no interest in children but buckets of affection and maternal instinct toward dogs, horses, snakes and other non-human creatures.<br />
8) Got tattoos to mark changes in life and self.<br />
9) Still thought she could save the world, or at least other people.<br />
10) Surrounded herself with brilliant, creative, thoughtful people who challenged her to grow and experience new things.<br />
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<b>This girl</b> . . .<br />
1) Has been living in the same town for almost 6 years (the longest she's lived anywhere since she was 9 years old!) and just bought a house with her husband.<br />
2) Hasn't smoked a cigarette in at least 4 years and doesn't miss it at all.<br />
3) Gets tattoos because they are beautiful.<br />
4) Is happily directing that maternal instinct toward the funniest, sweetest dog ever.<br />
5) Dropped out of nursing school and abandoned a funded PhD in medical anthropology, but wound up with a master's, a PhD, and career that she loves.<br />
6) Still has a ton to learn about everything, and is grateful to be surrounded by people and critters who are wonderful teachers.<br />
7) Is generally not all that restless. But when she gets "itchy feet" she annoys her partner by endlessly shopping for airline tickets and reading about possible adventure destinations.<br />
8) Climbs rocks (this could <i>never </i>have been predicted), rides her badass horse, and knits in her spare time or to relieve stress.<br />
9) Is still not really a big fan of holidays...or her birthday...except Tour de Fat. <a href="http://www.newbelgium.com/events/tour-de-fat.aspx" target="_blank">Tour de Fat</a> is the greatest!<br />
10) Has lived in 9 states and 3 non-US countries, and has finally figured out that, for her, home isn't a place, it's a person.<br />
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<u>An anthropology of change</u></div>
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This little blog was a fun enough exercise in personal reflection, which seems appropriate this time of year and given some major milestones I've experienced in the last year. But it also makes me think about the concept of change in American culture, a concept that I vividly remember writing about on my MA exam back in 2007 (I think it was 2007 anyway). </div>
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In American culture, we are certainly fixated on the individual. We are obsessed with individual rights (both in good and bad ways), we have great admiration for individual creativity and can appreciate out of the box thinking, and we view the self as something that changes over time, that we can expand and grow and improve. Reflections such as "that girl vs this girl" are fun, for sure, but they are also culturally meaningful. This isn't a reflection on experiences, but an examination of who I "was" versus who I "am". And, as an American, I embrace this fully. I think it's good to think about the ways I have changed - both for the better and, although maybe less fun to think about, for the worse. People always say we become more rigid, less willing to change as we get older. I think this exercise in reflection may be a great way to check in ten years down the road. But I wonder, what, really is "self"?<br />
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There are some scholars out there who have talked extensively about the concept of "self" and how this self may or may not be seen as maleable in different cultures. The concept of a maleable or changeable self has actually been suggested to put a person at risk for eating disorders or make plastic surgery more culturally acceptable. On the other side of this, cultures that see the self as core, unchanging, a given, may actually be protective against some of these things. What part of the "self" must be malleable to make a particular individual (and all those who share a culture with her) vulnerable to an eating disorder? Some have talked about a linking of the socioeconomic self (one's status) to the physical self. Some have talked about cultural ideas about normal or abnormal behaviors and how, once new norms are internalized, one's sense of self has changed. But I have rarely seen an anthropologist explicitly define this word that we throw around so often.<br />
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And when I turn the lens upon my own above reflection, and examine my own changing "self", I am forced to ask, who am I really? For example, as a young person, I had ideas about myself and engaged in certain behaviors that felt core, central to who I "truly" was. Wanderlust was an enormous part of this self. I moved often, I adored the excitement of learning a new neighborhood, culture, language, and making new friends who were perhaps nothing like and possibly wouldn't even like my friends from past lives/adventures. But, as my little reflection shows, wandering is no longer a part of my life. The desire to wander still comes in waves, but it is controllable, "wanderlust" is not necessarily inherently linked to "wandering". So is my true "self" the desire? Or is it behavior? In my research, active methamphetamine users are constantly fighting to avoid the many labels ascribed to them: tweaker, addict, meth head, etc. They may say, "I'm addicted" but most don't view their drug use as a core part of their selves. 12-step programs sort of do though. They view "addict" as an unchangeable part of the self and "drug use" as the changeable part. So again, it seems that in any consideration of the concept of self, or of behavior, or of change, it is worthwhile to explore what we mean by self, and which parts are malleable or not. </div>
Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-3846552983923030002012-12-03T19:25:00.002-08:002014-05-27T20:50:16.299-07:00Is there a culture of negotiation?The first time I went to Morocco, I was 22 years old. It was spring, I had been living in New York for about six months, and I was itching for some sun and the promise of a new life (i.e., one that didn't involve an hour-long commute to three part time jobs just to scrape by while living in a condemned building). Morocco had been suggested to me as a possible graduate research destination so I decided to check it out. That first trip to Morocco lasted only a week but changed my life forever and set me on an entirely new path that meandered but ultimately led to my current circumstances.<br />
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One of element of Moroccan culture that dominates daily life - whether one is a tourist, a foreign/exchange student, or a Moroccan - is the art of negotiation, or bargaining. The extent and meaning of this process clearly differs according to one's position in the culture, but is one that all must navigate at some point.<br />
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My most memorable experience of bargaining (until recently days) came on that first visit to Morocco. I really wanted to buy a carpet but I had no guide book and <i>no clue </i>what one was worth. Furthermore, I didn't know how to judge quality. So, after a day of wandering the Medina in Marrakech, I wandered into one of the many shops determined to bargain and find myself a good deal on a reasonable carpet.<br />
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In my experience, bargaining over tourist goods in Morocco typically takes place over lovely tea (aka <a href="http://taginecooking.blogspot.com/2009/04/moroccan-tea-lovingly-refered-to-as.html" target="_blank">Moroccan Whiskey</a> - this China green tea, mint and sugar keeps one hydrated and happy and is one of my favorite smells ever!). Buyer and seller chat, smoke cigarettes, and to a certain extent, size one another up. The bargaining is sometimes entirely verbal, other times written (I've heard this referred to as the "Berber way") and there is a general expectation from the perspective of each party that an item will in fact be purchased. I learned this the hard way that first time I tried to buy a run in Morocco. My ignorance put me in the position of offering such a low price that I offended my (seedy) carpet salesman, yet he had nothing available within my meagre budget. In fact, this expectation that a transaction would take place led the salesman, presumably prompted by my solo status and lack of a wedding ring, to (think it was appropriate to) suggest I provide sexual favors in exchange for the carpet I liked. So, I did the unthinkable - I left the store without buying a thing.<br />
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During this particular transaction (odd and anticlimactic as it was) and many more successful ones over the years, I developed my own bargaining style. It's no-frills and seems well-suited in less touristy parts of Morocco than those places where the actual process of bargaining is as important as the ultimate purchase. I won't bargain excessively and I don't try to rip people off. I identify what I think is a fair price (range?) and work within this.<br />
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Living in a country where bargaining is simply not part of my normal day-to-day existence, I have been a bit taken aback by the expectation, bordering on mandate, that one will bargain over a house. It seems to me it is potentially to the detriment of the entire transaction. Just the other day, my partner and I made an offer on our first home purchase. This process has involved extensive searching - of neighborhoods and of our own souls and priorities. While we wanted to make just one offer on our prospective home, because that offer was below the asking price, we were advised to go a bit lower, making room for the bargaining process. So, we offered less than we are willing to spend simply for the purpose of giving the sellers a chance to counter, and hoping that the counter will fall within our pre-determined limits. We will have to be willing to walk away if it doesn't, like I did that first time I bargained in Morocco, or the many times since.<br />
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All of this has me thinking about the process of bargaining and its cultural meaning in context. I'm not certain if there is an inherent significance of bargaining in Morocco outside of the strange tourist economy where it dominates. But I do find it very culturally interesting in the context of the process of purchasing a home in the US.<br />
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Buying a home, as I have learned in recent weeks, is an extremely emotional and taxing process, certainly for the buyer and I can only imagine for the seller. Bargaining only adds to this. Buyers must commit emotionally to calling a place home just to make the offer, yet their offer must be one that is acceptable to the seller. If it's not, they will have to find another place to call home. Sellers, in turn, may take offer amounts personally, becoming genuinely offended if buyers point out needed or desired changes to the home as purchase conditions or simply offer less than what the sellers believe the home is worth. It is this emotion that makes bargaining about home prices possible (after all, why not just average three appraisals and make that the set, fixed price?). Perhaps this emotion and the subsequent bargaining even allow home prices to keep increasing.<br />
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Interestingly, while bargaining emphasizes the emotionality and subjectivity of the home buying process, efforts are made to minimize direct emotional connection (or any contact at all) between the buyers and sellers. Although I think the transaction would go much faster were my partner and I able to sit down with our prospective sellers, we will likely never meet, never even speak to, the couple who currently own the home we are hoping to purchase. Rather, we deal with an army of realtors, brokers, and other professionals who stand between us, ensuring that this separation is maintained.<br />
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I'd love to hear from folks who have purchased homes in the US or other countries - What do you think of the process? Is bargaining/negotiation part of the process in other places? Are buyer and seller separated? Is all of this hoopla just about creating and supporting an industry (as I'm beginning to suspect)?Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-18454106166707916122012-11-07T20:35:00.003-08:002014-05-27T20:50:39.767-07:00Putting a roof over one's headI have finally reached the point in my life when I have surrendered to the idea of home ownership. The purchase hasn't happened yet, but the process and the search have begun. In America in particular, there is a very powerful significance to purchasing a home. It symbolizes adulthood, domestication, and success. The idea that one has not truly done well in life unless one owns a home is by no means unique to the US, but it is certainly very deep-seated here. In much of <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/property/house-and-home/why-the-germans-and-french-prefer-to-rent-2291077.html" target="_blank">continental Europe</a>, for example, one can be considered a respectable, successful adult and still rent the roof over her head. In the US, renting has often been left to the young, the transient, the very urban, and the poor or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Homeownership_by_race_2009.jpg" target="_blank">otherwise socially marginalized</a>. Some have gone as far as to say that the attempt to extend the "American Dream" of homeownership to folks of limited economic means contributed to the housing crisis we saw several years ago. (More likely, it's to do with lending to people based on their <i>projected </i>rather than <i>actual </i>incomes, but that's another discussion altogether!). What we do know is that, in the US, it is the cultural norm for an "adult", especially one living outside of the major cities, to aspire to homeownership.<br />
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As I go through this rite of passage myself, my research actively reminds me of the fact that, in the US, despite our cultural preference for homeownership, this is simply not a reality for many. Most of the participants in my current research rent their homes, <i>if </i>they have one. Many, at some point during the study, have become (or been to start with) homeless. For most, this means they couchsurf, staying for several weeks or nights with friends who do, for now, have a roof. Several, however, are on the streets, which means that most nights they must fend for themselves to find a place to sleep. This may be in a tent along the river or in a hidden field, on an acquaintance's front porch, or in a shelter. On really cold nights, it often just means walking walking walking.<br />
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A couple of weeks ago, a friend and research participant died. She died in a park, maybe because of the cold, maybe because of a medical condition, but she went that night because for some reason, she didn't have a place to stay. It broke my heart, and continues to do so every time I think of her or the very many and very sad friends she left behind. I know for many of the homeless (I'm talking about those who are homeless involuntarily, not the Travelers who pass through town every summer) in my community, especially if they have lost cars or friends with homes, one of the top goals of a day's hustle is often to scrounge up enough for a hotel room for the night. This is especially true when shelters don't have enough beds, winters are cold, and local authorities have been giving out lots of tickets for camping.<br />
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Much of the social science literature on homelessness in the US looks at major urban environments, where people rely on (semi)permanent camps. Whether people's roofs are campers or cars or tents or boxes or just the underpass, these camps provide a sense of stability that is blatantly absent from so many other areas of their lives. These settings provide the backdrop to well established systems of reciprocity, mutual assistance to facilitate daily survival, safety in numbers, familiarity and social support. I can't help but wonder how the lack of permanent camp in my town undermines these social needs. The world is home to many many nomadic people, to people who wander by choice, out of need, and because it is simply what they do. But, most of these cultural groups move together - home moves with them. In my little community, many of the folks who don't have their own homes come together during the day but they must scatter at night. Sometimes, I hear about couples who camp together - for the safety and companionship - but rarely any other groups or pairings. "Home" for these folks changes nightly and is for a single occupant.<br />
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I can't help but wonder, if people hadn't had to go their separate ways that night, whether our friend might have lived. Maybe someone - other than her loyal and now heartbroken dog - would have been looking out for her. I can't help but wonder what we are saying, as a culture and a society, when we ticket a person for not having a home.<br />
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Last spring, I had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with <a href="http://ksuweb.kennesaw.edu/~mboeri/boeriteam.html" target="_blank">Dr. Miriam Boeri </a>at a conference. Another drug researcher, we had great talks about controlled use, addiction, and options for treatment. Dr. Boeri talked extensively and enthusiastically about the potential benefits of a <a href="http://www.pathwaystohousing.org/content/our_model" target="_blank">Housing First</a> model in reducing the consequences of addiction (and often in reducing addiction itself). In this country, we so often think of homelessness as the consequence of something - addiction, criminality - that we forget that it is often the cause of something - addiction (one friend told me she never drank until she became homeless, but she needs something to kill the time; another told me that as long as she uses drugs she'll always have a place to crash off the streets), criminality (after all, it's a crime to be homeless in many communities!). According to most of the local models for ending homelessness that I've seen, we work backwards, trying to make people "worthy" of having a home - we clean them up or find them jobs and encourage them to pull themselves up, save money, and move into a place with a permanent roof. This model certainly works for some, but many are left out in the cold so to speak. The Housing First model suggests that if we offer housing first, other things are more likely to fall into place - for example, substance use treatment is more effective.<br />
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And this is when the anthropologist in me kicks in again, wondering whether having housing is simply a structural benefit. Does a roof of one's own simply make a person less dependent on systems of reciprocity that keep them embedded in what epidemiologists would call "risk" networks? I think there is something to this, but it is incomplet. Many of the folks I know who have housing use it to <i>give back </i>to individuals within those very "risk" networks who have helped them out in the past. So, while I think there is a pragmatic structural benefit to providing housing first, I think there may be more to it than that. I wonder if it isn't also about subjectivity. Perhaps the very demoralization - both imposed and internalized stigma - associated with being homeless in the US has such a profound impact as to undermine agency to make changes in other aspects of life. Perhaps the home has become so central to our own sense of self-worth that, regardless of one's other attributes, to be homeless is the most severe cultural abomination.Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-57062081355652456212012-10-23T21:36:00.003-07:002014-05-27T20:56:38.921-07:00The anthropologist who didn't want to changeWhen I act as an anthropologist, that is, when I do my job, I go into the field as a child. Even though my research participants are mostly American-born and living in America, I must be willing to ask what may feel like stupid questions to clarify things I don't understand. This means I spend a lot of time watching so I can learn the rules before interacting. It means I may make lots of mistakes and it means I am seeking to experience and understand a different<i> </i>way of living, a different way of experiencing the ever-elusive "normal".<br />
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Interestingly, in research, this outsider status (however precarious as a researcher in my own "back yard") gives me the latitude to make mistakes without offending and to ask questions without ego. This leniency toward the ignorant outsider has been confirmed for me in casual travels abroad, where if I made a mistake, it was often chalked up as harmless and the rule I had violated was clearly explained. In our work, anthropologists are excellent at being quiet observers and inquisitive children. We are by necessity chameleons and must be willing to operate frequently outside our comfort zones. This perspective of being an outsider trying to experience the world as an insider is what gives our research its richness. But I wonder if am I the only one who struggles with this in real life.<br />
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In recent years, I have dealt very very personally with walking this line. I have sought to maintain my own personal space and identity and to live according to the cultural rules that have defined much of my life. However, when I (ad)ventured into a situation in which personal cultures clashed, cultural relativism was suddenly worthless. It didn't matter that, after a while, I could map the differences between respective backgrounds (and subsequent expectations) or that I had been able to turn a reflexive eye upon my own culture, had come to think critically about my own rules. I found myself not wanting to change; at times, in fact, I was aggressively resistant to it.<br />
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I hesitate (perhaps because of ego?) to say this was quite ethnocentric. I didn't, and still don't, think my way is <i>better, </i>but it became a symbol of me, a scrap that I felt I could hold on to in the face of a life that was swirling around me, often feeling out of my own control. Ironically, central to this very identity - that of an anthropologist - is a view of myself as adaptable and open minded. <br />
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All of this has made me wonder: Is this a struggle faced by all anthropologists? As anthropologists, is it fair to expect ourselves to be as accepting and as flexible in reality as we are in work? In fact, do we spend so much time changing, adapting, accepting, in our professional lives that change becomes overwhelming in our personal ones? Do we spend so much time distancing ourselves from judging the differences between cultures that we fail to truly empathize with, or even understand, people's personal connections to their cultural "truths"?Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-51043886923026349612012-09-11T21:03:00.000-07:002014-05-27T20:51:42.681-07:00Constructions of Family BondsLast fall I taught Introduction to Cultural Anthropology for the first time and it was enlightening. Granted, I'm quite glad to be done with teaching, at least for the time being, but this return to basics was both academically and personally cathartic, transforming, inspiring.<br />
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One of the most profound lessons we learn in early courses in cultural anthropology derives from the analysis of family structure across cultures around the world. On a personal level this is an element of cultural difference that I have always struggled with, although I <i>adore</i><i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i>the diversity academically. I bet most of us are good at seeing the "faults" in our own family, but may be better at pointing them out in others. For example, cultures have varied ways of defining who can and cannot marry (and I'm not talking about just gender variations or status categories, I'm talking about who is defined as what type of family <i>before </i>a wedding). Patrilineal versus matrilineal societies trace inheritance as well as authority according to different family lines (though almost exclusively, the power still tends to reside with males). In some societies, an individual's ties to his or her blood relatives are viewed as the most important; in others, ties to one's significant other and subsequent nuclear family are expected to take priority. When there is a clash in cultural ideologies around these fundamental expectations and cultural norms, as I imagine is rather common in countries with great cultural diversity, there is plenty of space and plenty of fuel for conflict and heartache.<br />
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This <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/31/mother-saves-pieces-of-sons-childhood-gives-it-to-him-at-his-wedding_n_1726043.html" target="_blank">Huffington Post story</a> tells of a mother's wedding gift for her son. She essentially collected trinkets from his childhood, put them into the giftable form of a lamp base, and gave him the lamp at his rehearsal dinner. I first read this story on facebook and my personal response was something along the lines of "ICK! What must the poor wife think? Where are the boundaries in this family? How inappropriate for a wedding!" I then of course read the comments (because usually that's the most entertaining, though sometimes frustrating, part of having most of my non-radio news sources posting on my facebook page) and found that there were very few neutral or, "I can see how it would be a great gift, but it's not for me", comments. Nope, people either <b>loved </b>it or <b>hated</b> it. And this, of course, speaks on some level to our expectations not just about weddings, but more importantly, about what they represent.<br />
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If we borrow from Victor Turner and others and view the wedding as a rite of passage in which the individual moves through a series of social statuses - separating from the role as single person/son/daughter, standing in a liminal space of almost married, reintegrating with society as a married person - it is clear that one's social status changes. We don't really need this model for this to make sense as there are all kinds of rituals that remind us to varying degrees every time we attend a wedding. I would say most people recognize this in similar ways, but the ways that one's status changes and what it means for other family relationships is going to vary from one culture (and, arguably, one family) to another.<br />
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This gift thus represented (perhaps unintentionally) a particular interaction with these cultural expectations, and of course the meaning of this is as subject to interpretation as the rest of it. I'm going to venture a guess that, to the mother giving the gift and perhaps to her son, this gift was meant to celebrate his childhood, a phase of life which marriage officially ends. Perhaps she also saw it as a way of sharing that childhood with his new wife, though obviously I can't be sure. But here is what my response told me about my own worldview and view of weddings and families. I see a wedding as a time to celebrate the <i>new </i>social role and the embarkment on a new life. I see the focus of a wedding as the bond between the individuals getting married, <i>not </i>the bonds with other family members. This does not mean I think family and friends aren't part of that, but that I view the bond between the couple as the primary bond and all the others as secondary. Therefore, I found the mother's gift unnerving, and if I had been the bride, I probably would have found it offensive. It highlighted the bond between mother and son rather than the bond between husband and wife. As such, while it may have been a thoughtful graduation gift or appropriate for some other milestone, it seemed highly inappropriate as a wed<br />
ding gift.<br />
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Now keep in mind, this is not a judgment of the gift or the family structure itself, but a reflection on what my own response to that family structure teaches me about myself. My own family history as well as my cultural background, as a white, middle-class American, emphasizes the significant-other bond. This doesn't mean it neglects the parent-child bond, but that it expects it to change when the child reaches adulthood - what's that term, cut the apron strings?<br />
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The funny thing is, we all, to some extent or another, expect each other to follow similar rules about these relationships but because culture is something we often don't explicitly recognize as such (that's kind of the point, after all!), they may lead to awkward situations, hurt feelings, and even conflict. I was recently at a wedding where the couple was staying with the bride's family before and after the wedding. They had traveled far, were on a budget, and enjoyed the family time that was often limited to other times of the year. But a friend was appalled that their wedding night would be spent with parents/in-laws so got them a room at a hotel in town. The gesture was based in love, but also in culture.<br />
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I've found all these events a great reminder that when I feel baffled, offended, put off, or overwhelmed by someone else's actions and decisions (including but obviously not limited to those that are family-based), it is a good opportunity to reflect on my own culture, both personal and societal, and how it has influenced my response. I hope that by doing this, by trying to write it down and share my anthropology of the familiar with others, I will grow as an anthropologist and, perhaps more importantly, as a person.Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-47125481040162104312012-08-18T08:47:00.000-07:002014-05-27T20:52:13.131-07:00Ritual, Anonymity, and Coping with LossOne of the few cultural practices that is likely to be a human universal is the ritual coping with death. When I was an undergraduate in Anthropology at UCLA, I was struck by Renato Rosaldo's description of grief and ritual headhunting among the Ilongot, a tribe in the Philippines. Headhunting offered a ritualized and, up until the 1970s, socially permissible means of coping with grief over the death of a loved one. Rosaldo spoke at length in his writings of his struggles to get a truly "<a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emic" target="_blank">emic</a>"perspective on headhunting and the particular emotion that the ritual was intended to cope with. He noted that it was not until his wife, Michelle, died in the field that he truly understood, experienced, this emotion. Other anthropologists write of rituals and emotional norms relating to death, from rites that celebrate the life to those that help the lost person carry on in the bodies and spirits of those who survive, to cultural rules for mourning. While there is vast diversity in the ways humans employ culture to cope with death, we all seem to turn to ritual.<br />
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Yesterday was one of the saddest days I have faced in a very long time. It was the first time that, as an adult, I said a permanent goodbye to someone I knew and it was the first time in my life I said this permanent goodbye to someone young, healthy, and happy. Paul was probably one of the kindest people I've ever met. I didn't know him well, but his energy was contagious. The first time I met him, at my partner's first station out of the fire academy, I remember him talking about his wife. And when he talked about his wife, he lit up the room, even though it was something simple, something probably even mundane. He was just one of those people who inspired the people around him to make the most of life and to appreciate every moment. Because that is how he lived his life. Thus, even though I didn't know him well, I find myself more affected by his death than I have been by the loss of any person in my past. This is the first time I was able to experience my own culture's death rites - the funeral, the burial - from a truly emic perspective, and I must admit that I was grateful for the rhythms and structure of ritual.<br />
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Although I'm an anthropologist and I love thinking about and analyzing ritual, I often whine about it when I encounter it in my own life. I don't usually like the relative anonymity of it, the fact that ritual often depersonalizes an entire experience. This is probably why the weddings I find the most moving are those in which people add pieces of themselves. But, in this case, the personal quickly became too much. The hymns, the incense, the readings, those were the things that helped me cope while still providing a way to say goodbye. Yes, these things depersonalized much of the ceremony, but they also made it possible to get through. They allowed us to catch our breath, to mourn together, and to acknowledge the permanence of this passing without collapsing into the grief of the individual and the family he left behind. The eulogies were beautiful, each of them from the heart, each of them honoring the wonderful man while expressing their sadness. But the eulogies were also exhausting, emotional enough that had they been the bulk of the ceremony, it would have overwhelmed.<br />
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I have never appreciated ritual quite like I did yesterday. I have always turned to my intellectualization of it, picked it apart, fussed over the idea that we so often participate in it without knowing or caring why, letting it take away that cherished notion of the individual that my American heart holds in such high regard. But it is perhaps the very anonymity of ritual allows us to cope with loss in a shared way, as a community. Mind you, it doesn't take the place of private, emotion-filled mourning and it doesn't completely remove the heartache from the ceremony. Rather, it helps keep things manageable while people come together to say goodbye. I can only hope it made room for us to move forward, taking inspiration from his life, standing by his family, celebrating who he was, without getting entirely lost in the void he left behind.<br />
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RIP Paul, you will be missed and you will always be loved.Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-83055367731334444992012-08-07T11:36:00.000-07:002014-05-27T20:52:47.252-07:00You are what you eat: Food & IdentityIf you grew up in the US, the expression "you are what you eat" probably has specific connotations for you, most of which relate to the physical and health related "consequences" or "benefits" of following a certain diet. Namely, if you eat cupcakes and french fries, you are likely pudgy if not downright obese; if you eat salads and grilled (insert lean protein here), you are svelte and (thus) "desirable". I am certain I heard the expression as well as other wonders like "a moment at the lips, a lifetime on the hips" from my grandmother or my father when I made the grievous error of becoming chubby in my pre-pre-teens. But as I grow older I am learning that my home country and I have a much more complex relationship with food than this basic interpretation of the common phrase "you are what you eat" would suggest.<br />
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The idea that food (and consumption more generally) is closely linked to cultural and psychological constructs such as identity is nothing new or novel on my part (in fact, an entire chapter of my dissertation centers around the idea that being a user of a particular type of drug is an identity option). However, the extent to which Americans seem to seek out a unique identity through consumption, including food choices and diet, has become especially interesting to me lately. It all started a couple of years ago when, on my very American 70 mile commute to class I was listening to Michael Pollan's <i>Omnivore's Dilemma</i>. Early in the book, Pollan introduces what he sees as a phenomenon unique to the US - an obsession, not with a national cuisine, but with diets, with ways of eating, many (but not all) of which are passing fads. He goes on to argue that diets would not be so successful in countries with a stronger national food identity - in France, for example, the Atkins diet would never take root because what type of French person would give up croissants or a proper baguette? But, he argues, in the US, because of the fact that we lack a food identity, such diets thrive (perhaps one could test this by looking at their prevalence in regions of the country with strong regional food identities, though it seems difficult to separate other regional differences from cuisine...).<br />
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For example, though I'm not a "dieter" per se, throughout my life, I have moved through various dietary categories, spending significant time as a vegan (a little over a year), vegetarian (many years on and off, beginning in my early teens), pescetarian (the past six years until recently), and struggling-to-be-responsible/conscientious-omnivore (the latest). A number of things happened in the past six months or so that drove me to this latest, which means I have begun to eat certain (i.e., 100% grass fed/pasture raised, local-when-possible) non-fish meats for the first time in almost a decade. And funny enough, although my body has dealt wonderfully with the transition, my mind and my heart have found it to be a bumpier road.<br />
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First, much of my identity over the past many years has related to my status as a vege- or pesce-tarian. Many (and for a while the majority) of my friends had similar eating habits. It often made travel (especially if I wanted to be a "good anthropologist" and experience local foods) difficult, and actually, this was what originally brought me back to fish after years without any meat. But it was a part of who I was, and although I didn't think of myself as an animal rights vegetarian (I do after all wear leather), since starting to eat poultry and grazing animals again I have begun to feel a certain type of guilt.<br />
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I have though long and hard (perhaps excessively) about this decision and it was ultimately my desire (stated so eloquently by Ted Kerasote in his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bloodties-Nature-Culture-Ted-Kerasote/dp/1568360274" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Blood Ties</a>) to do as little harm as possible with my diet that actually led me back to meat. I began to rethink what I meant by harm (which I had once only conceptualized in terms of the specific animals I would or would not eat) and, living in the wide open spaces (grazing lands) of the American West, consuming ethically and humanely raised local animal products began to seem more responsible than stuffing my body with processed soy, which had become one of my only major protein sources.<br />
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So, intellectually, I feel ok about my newfound consumption patterns. But emotionally, I'm not quite there yet. I don't know if I am truly mourning the creatures I am about to eat when I tearfully thank them during preparation (this really does keep happening, especially with whole poultry), or if I am mourning the person I was for so many years. I don't know if I am feeling guilty and full of self-loathing or if I am truly appreciating the fact that I am taking a life to feed myself. And why is that life less valuable than my own or my dog's? In my brain, I know it's culture that has taught me what animals are acceptable to eat or not (after all, in some countries, my dog could<i> </i>be the meal), but that doesn't mean I haven't internalized it.<br />
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I'm still grappling with this and quite possibly will be for some time, as it seems harder and harder to feel truly good about anything I eat. Perhaps this is in itself a reflection of the state of a culture, of the idea that American society has come to a point where we have so little core cultural identity, we are so divided, that all of our choices, especially those relative to consumption patterns, become markers of various subgroups.Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-55849351438799197782012-07-12T08:44:00.000-07:002014-05-27T20:53:11.889-07:00Curaçao 2: Stop f-ing staring at me! Traveling (and living) under the male gazeThe island of <span style="line-height: 19px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Curaçao is really rather fascinating and, of course, full of contradictions. It is one of the three islands of the Dutch Caribbean so in many ways the Dutch-influenced foods don't make much sense in the steady 80 degree+ weather. But due to rocky soil and low rainfall, the local cuisine is lacking in the standard tropical fruits one often thinks of when imaging island dining. The little country has its own economic base, sort of, in the Venezuelan oil refineries, making tourism a secondary economy. This means that, while there is certainly a strong tourist infrastructure in the form of beachside bars/restaurants, dive schools & resorts and lovely hotels set in renovated colonial buildings, it is easy to walk the streets - even the markets - in peace. Even the process of buying fruit and veggies at the floating market was straightforward. As a woman traveling alone, I always appreciate a place where I can walk without being hollered at or followed (as much as I love Morocco, this was something that was endlessly annoying, even after months and especially in towns with more tourists). I've always envied the ease with which my male travel friends can move about a new place, never feeling dissected or undressed just for existing in their own bodies. Unfortunately, despite initial appearances, </span></span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">Curaçao proved no better (or worse, I suppose) for the self-conscious female traveler than any other destination.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">I honed my international travel wardrobe sensibilities in Morocco in my early twenties, trying on <i>cultural relativism</i> as a way of life and appreciating the skin-covering, flowing clothes for their considerable comfort combined with sun-protection. So, when I travel outside of the United States now (outside of winter, of course!), I typically pack the following - jeans or pants; t-shirts; knee-length or longer skirts or dresses; light-weight long-sleeved shoulder coverings - and mix and match as needed. There persists an element of the issue of</span><span style="line-height: 19px;"> <i>cultural relativism</i>, of respecting local dress codes and culture, including more recently, beliefs about tattoos (which I often try to cover when outside of the US or Europe). In parts of western Europe - I'm mostly thinking of a particular summer in Paris - I find that the increased coverage is helpful, but not foolproof, in preventing obnoxious men from yelling from their vehicles. This has served me well in multiple countries and is </span><span style="line-height: 19px;">not too far off from how I normally dress anyway so it's generally easy. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And at first, </span></span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">Curaçao seemed like it would be an easy place to wear tank tops and t-shirts <i>without</i> the shoulder coverings. After all, local women were dressed in tighter clothing than I and the other tourists (mostly Dutch) I encountered were often sunburned in their post-beach minidresses or swimsuit coverups. So, my first evening on the island, I headed from my hotel across the bridge to wander around one of the historic parts of <a href="http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/819/" target="_blank">Willemstad</a> and find a waterfront spot to grab some food and a cocktail. I still don't know who the stares came from - whether they were other tourists or locals - or what motivated them - was it my half-sleeve of vegetables or the fact that I was maybe the only tourist in long pants or was it my being female? I will never know, but the stares were predatory and unapologetic and they were many. The thing is, I hate being stared at regardless of the motivation and it makes me slouch, cover up, and avoid eye contact (all highly effective in every country I've been in). So, I found myself for the duration of my short trip, especially in certain parts of town (none of this was an issue near the beaches and, while uncomfortable, I should make it clear that I never felt unsafe) reverting to this way of walking around. I carried my little linen long-sleeved shirt to throw on while walking around and only wore my shorts when on a tour. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">This experience, while relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things that could harm a person, is one that I can never quite reconcile with the type of woman, the type of feminist, and the type of anthropologist I'd like to be. I want to visit other places and respect other people and what they consider normal. When I lived in Austria, I remember being repeatedly taken aback by the fact people would stare unashamedly at you, especially on the U-bahn, but there was never anything behind it but perhaps curiosity and sometimes an assessment of the coolness (or lack thereof) of my footwear. But, after talking to a couple of Austrians and long-term expats, I quickly learned not to be self-conscious, that this was normal behavior and I wasn't being singled out. I imagine that when I find myself stared at in many of the ways that make me uncomfortable, it is similarly innocuous, and I am reacting from my American sensibility of "It's rude to stare", "Don't stare at people, that's rude". </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">But there is something about a predatory male gaze - one that no woman alive can say she's never felt - that I find completely unnerving, completely terrifying. It's why, despite the relative safety of my quaint little town, I detest walking by groups of men. It is not flattering (though I am aware some women would say it is), it feels degrading and while my ability to cope with it varies from place to place, its occurrence seems to be pretty darn consistent, especially in the West (I don't recall ever feeling this way in Japan or Cambodia) and it is something that undermines my ability to fully enjoy my travels, especially in places where the "cultural norm" is to be scantily clad. That's part of what I find so interesting; in Morocco, I found that if I dressed appropriately, while I may get called after or stared at for being an obvious foreigner, there was no predation in it when I was dressed appropriately (had I not been, it may have been a different matter, but I can't speak to this). When I was in Paris a few summers later, however, I felt the need to cover myself nose to toes to feel comfortable.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">I remember, shortly after that summer, I moved to Montreal. One evening I was walking with my new roommate and I was explaining how I'd come to almost always dress as I would have in Morocco, finding that, while I didn't always want to be so modest, it made me feel less of a target for the type of male attention that makes my skin crawl. We were talking about the idea that in so many cultures, including in the US and Canada, it is the responsibility of women to be covered if they don't want to be degraded by the male gaze, a fact that persists and still nags me as highly problematic. I can cope on some level with applying the type of cultural relativism that allows me to cover up in another country, but in my own country I feel entitled to challenge the norms. I should be able to walk around naked if I want to and not be the subject of sexualizing, predatory stares, but I'm not. </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">In fact, we live in a world where women are taught that it is their responsibility to avoid rape (</span><a href="http://jezebel.com/5875912/university-institutes-dress-code-to-keep-students-from-getting-raped" style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;" target="_blank">it's evident in policies designed to "protect" women</a> as well as<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;"> </span><a href="http://observers.france24.com/content/20110510-sluts-world-unite-against-sexual-violence-slutwalks-toronto-boston" style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;" target="_blank">when women are repeatedly blamed for their own victimization</a><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">). I live in a country where my research participants (active drug users) have often done more time for possession than their rapists and abusers for their crimes. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">M</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">ind you, the fact that this same stare coming from someone who identifies as female has never bothered me serves as a reminder that the discomfort that accompanies the male gaze goes well beyond the experience of being sexualized - it's about power and it's about the violence against women (physical, structural, emotional) that is embedded in our everyday lives. Perhaps if we could eliminate the power gap this gaze would take on new meaning and cease to be another tool of violence. Plenty of others have engaged this conversation and have done so more</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;"> </span><a href="http://phoenixandolivebranch.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/modesty-body-policing-and-rape-culture/" style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;" target="_blank">eloquently</a>,<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;"> more <a href="http://www.slutwalktoronto.com/" target="_blank">forcefully</a>, and with more <a href="http://womanofsteele.tumblr.com/post/3811556833/if-robbery-victims-were-treated-like-rape-victims-the" target="_blank">biting humor</a> than I, yet we seem incapable of actually changing the culture in any tangible or sustainable way. Perhaps if we continue the conversation insistently, pushing back whenever these dress code policies arise, encouraging young women to view themselves not as asexual but as more than sexual, encouraging young men to do the same. Meanwhile, I'll keep traveling and when I do so, will abide by local dress codes and do my best to be respectful of cultural norms. But maybe when I'm home <i>I'll </i>be the unapologetic one, I won't look down or slouch or cover up because I'm passing a group of boys or men. Maybe that's one step I can take?</span>Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-15880823566801200982012-06-27T06:42:00.001-07:002014-05-27T20:56:06.061-07:00Curaçao 1: Growing Into My Grown-Up Travel ShoesMy recent, very very short trip to a little island in the southern Caribbean (<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Cura<span style="line-height: 16px;">ç</span>ao</span>), inspired a number of personal and anthropological thoughts that I will try to cover over my next few blog posts. First, and the one that hit me hardest toward the end of my 5-day (2 of which were spent travelling) excursion, is the idea of growing into a new identity as an "adult" traveler and thinking about what this means for travel and cultural experience in general.<br />
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When I was a kid, I had the fortune of riding my parents' coattails when it came to travel. I took my first steps on a boat off the island of Capri, was kicked unceremoniously out of London's pubs while still in a stroller, and lived in Strasbourg, France for a year as a toddler. In the years that followed, thanks to my father's francophilia and my mother's love for movement, I travelled repeatedly to Europe as well as travelling and eventually living all over the United States. When I hit my early twenties, I began to cultivate my own preferred style of travel. It involved working, sort of saving money, quitting my job and impulsively "moving" somewhere (to another state, another country, whatever made most sense at the time) for anywhere from 3-15 months but never more. In this vein, between the ages of 21 and 27 years (when I moved to Colorado), I lived in six states within the US, three countries outside it, and on three continents in total:<br />
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* New York City<br />
* Charlottesville, VA<br />
* Fes & Essaouira, Morocco<br />
* Tempe, AZ<br />
* Streitdorf, Austria<br />
* Montreal, QC, Canada<br />
* Rawlins, WY<br />
* Cleveland, OH<br />
* and finally, Fort Collins, CO.<br />
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While this movement was eventually exhausting, it was also exciting and enabled me to really get to know places and their people. It was my recreational release for my inner-anthropologist. I used travel as an occasion to get to know a culture on some level.<br />
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Since coming to Colorado, I have lived in one city. I have now been here for longer than I remember living anywhere in my entire life, and for personal reasons, I suspect I will live here for at least the next twenty or thirty years. But my feet still get itchy, as in, I still get intense urges to "get out of here". Which is where this trip to <span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Cura</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 16px;">ç</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">ao came in - I needed to celebrate my successful dissertation defense and I needed to do it <i>away</i>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Unfortunately, in the past five years of rootedness, I've learned that I don't particularly enjoy this type of travel that many of us participate in for vacation and relaxation. After three days on this beautiful little island, I felt like I was just starting to hit my stride and get a sense of the island's own personality and pace. I felt that I knew more about what the tourist agencies <i>wanted </i>me to know and nearly nothing about what real life looked like. A couple of years ago, I visited Costa Rica with a good friend and had a similar experience. It was a great trip and the scenery was mindblowingly beautiful, but it was impossible to get into the rhythm of the country - which is the main reason I love public transit! - and still see what we wanted to see. We just didn't have enough time for both, a problem that was in part due to the fact that we only visited for a week but that was exacerbated by the fact that I am a poor planner and a horrible rusher. Apparently, I prefer to just move somewhere, hang out for three months, and call that my vacation. But as an adult, in my current life, that kind of travel doesn't seem realistic. So, I am searching the landscape of less lengthy travel patterns to find something I like, that perhaps I can learn from if not emulate. But I'm struggling as most of what I've seen simply does not fit with what I want to get out of a "vacation".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I remember being shocked while visiting a dear friend in Egypt. When we went to one of many of the amazing historical/tourist sites, a bus full of Italian tourists had stopped as well. Many of the women wore only short-shorts, flip flops and bikini/bra tops. None of this was culturally appropriate, but more importantly, it was explicitly disrespectful. There is certainly room for critiquing cultural relativism when over-simplified and over-applied, but it seems to me that if you have the </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">choice </i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">to visit a country on vacation, you should select a country whose culture you are capable of respecting, at least outwardly. After all, you are funneling your money into their economy so it may as well be something you support on some level or at a minimum can live with. </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Many people I know travel exclusively for the very reason I went to </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Curaçao - relaxation & escape - and so they plant themselves at (all-inclusive) resorts or get with a professional tour company that arranges everything and whisks them from site to site providing carefully selected historical and cultural "context" (I'll talk more about this in a later blog). And, while it's not particularly my preferred way to travel and I am sure there are myriad culture and economic issues associated with traveling this way, it may not be all bad either. At least the people on tours are attempting to learn about their context even if it's typically done in a highly sanitized, voyeuristic way. And those who are going to all-inclusive resorts or refusing to leave the tourist zone are being honest with themselves and what their travel intentions are and may have set themselves in an environment where they won't offend local sensibilities. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But the lurking question persists: Are we doing ourselves, our home cultures, and those we visit a diservice when we insist on traveling at the constant rushed pace of an American or with the cultural ideals regarding modesty of a "Westerner" (whatever that means)? </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I know that what I love about travel is slowly learning the rhythms of a new place, whether it's in the US or further afield. I find that it fosters the kind of experience that is life-changing even if it's not always as photogenic or as impressive on facebook. Unfortunately, my current life doesn't facilitate this kind of travel. In order to sit peacefully in one place for the next thirty years of my life, I had to settle down. I have a partner, a dog, a horse, all of whom make it difficult (emotionally, as in I would miss them all terribly, more than logistically) to just pick up and leave for months on end. I have a job that is flexible, but, at least at this point, perhaps not <i>that </i>flexible. So I resign myself to movement-packed travel that often feels like it is more about the principle than about the experience, and I have not yet figured out how to mix my need for cultural immersion with my reality. What I fear is that this new way of travel is simply my new normal, and that a tender part of my soul will just have to wait until I'm retired.</span>Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9161518386336876861.post-55616530018677923902012-06-09T21:59:00.003-07:002014-05-27T20:53:49.131-07:00Drugs in the Media - What's up with the romance of heroin?Last night, Mike and I went to see my awesome friend Chelsea in a production of <i>Rent</i>. This was great for a number of reasons, some of which hadn't occurred to me until I read the director's note in the program. First, it was great because I adore supporting friends' engagement in this kind of stuff - how can you <b>not </b>want to watch a friend thrive in a context totally separate from the one you typically see them in?! And this one was a special treat because Chelsea is talented. A friend from the barn, we usually see one another in a context of hay, sweat, slobber and dirt; but last night she danced in heels and revealed an enviable singing voice as well as a gift for performance overall. <b>SOOOO </b>much fun to watch! Ok, so in addition to that, this production of <i>Rent</i> was great because it was really well done, and because I will just always love the play, and I will always go home humming "There's only us, there's only this, . . .", and I will always cry because I am enough of a romantic that I will always root for the characters even when I know their fates. I want to mention one last (and unanticipated) awesomeness of this production, and that is the one pointed out by the director: the importance of showing this play in a community theater in Loveland, CO. Yes, it's great that <i>Rent </i>has been adopted by other countries and that it has shown on probably every major stage in the US, but that it can reach (even though it's almost 20 years after it first opened) these smaller sub-rural (is that even a term?) communities is just as important.<br />
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But all of this is beside the point because, as much as I love <i>Rent</i>, I apparently cannot quite remove my "I research drug use & addiction and<i> </i>its portrayal in the media" hat even for an evening. So, of course, I came home wondering, would the play's many current and former injection drug users be sympathetic, likable, even relatable if they were meth users?<br />
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This question came to me in part because, two summers ago, I spent the majority of my time watching, reading and analyzing popular entertainment media that featured methamphetamine and off-hand, I can't think of a single example of a meth user who was portrayed sympathetically, let alone romantically. Yet, back during my undergrad years in the late 1990s/early 2000s, I went through a phase of watching heroin movies. While heroin is not necessarily glamorized in popular entertainment media (think <i>Requiem for a Dream</i>), my not at all systematic observation suggests that addiction to this drug is often portrayed as something that a general audience can sympathize with if not relate to . . . think about the tragic romanticism of movies like <i>High Art</i> and <i>Gia</i>, for example. Even <i>Basketball Diaries </i>and <i>Permanent Midnight </i>(both of which are based on true-life stories) have characters you root for. Most meth users in popular media are horrible people, far too "folk-devilish" to drive a film in such a way. Rather, the meth users in these media tend to drive stories entirely through their scandalous antics with very little humanity (though there is a scene toward the end of <i>Spun </i>when Brittany Murphy and Jason Schwartzman share a spun out bonding session).<br />
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Now, I'm not saying that the romanticized portrayals of heroin addiction in the media are preferable<i> </i>to the portrayal of the scandalous meth addict. Rather, I'm curious what it is about the respective substances and their histories and patterns of use that makes them take on their respective roles in entertainment. Any suggestions? I'd love to hear them!<br />
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Part of me wonders - thanks in part to questions asked by many a research participant over the past couple of years - whether it could have something to do with the lack of visible dopesickness experienced by meth, cocaine, crack and other non-opiate drug users. Does the fact that heroin makes people go through well-known physical withdrawals make addiction to it something worthy of sympathy rather than scorn? The women I've interviewed in my own research are predominately meth users and several have told me that they feel judged even by other drug users. While popular entertainment media certainly does portray the heroin addicted person as scandalous at times, they also portray her as struggling with something that would clearly be difficult for anybody.<br />
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But romantic? What on earth is romantic about dopesickness? Or the drastic loss of libido experienced by so many long-term drug (especially heroin) addicts? I still just can't quite figure out what it is that makes heroin take this role but it certainly does in <i>Rent</i>. Of the characters we learn anything about, most have HIV and for some of them (Roger and Mimi in particular), it's strongly suggested that they got their disease from injecting heroin. But they are wonderfully drawn characters (especially for a musical) whose addictions (present and past) and daily struggles are still made relatable. And their tragic love story is only strengthened by Roger's barbs about Mimi's continued heroin use.<br />
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I think this is an issue I may need to explore academically at some point, systematically. I wonder if my impressions are simply the result of having spent so much time turning a critical lens on meth but not on heroin...all the same, a lay impression is important when thinking about the role of these types of media in constructing the meaning of drugs in our society, leading me to ask for future literature reviews if not studies, how do the meanings of meth and heroin diverge from one another and where do they overlap? And, of course, what do these meanings in context tell us about our society & culture?Stacey McKennahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12423240974360887141noreply@blogger.com4