Gerda Wever-Rabehl's Blog
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Earlier, Suite 101's Anthropology site featured a few articles on Hindu caste system, it's victims and our universal need to belong.
This week's article revisits that discussion, at least in part. Since those previous articles were published here, I have receive numerous emails in response. Since it appears that this is a popular topic, and I revisiting it seems worthwhile.
In revisiting then, I first focused on the question asked by Emile Durkheim toward the end of the nineteenth century: What hold societies together, or what is the nature of solidarity? In many cases, the social glue that keeps societies together is kinship. Many small and simple societies rely on kinship as the basis for the way they function. Shared blood is the glue that keeps these societies together. A good example of this ideology of kinship is the Hindu caste system. This system presents a fixed social order, in which kinship is determined by the link between marriage and social group. This is further linked with livelihood and the division of labour in the community and society at large, as well as with spiritual purity, which determines ones place in the social pecking order. Each person is born into a certain group and he or she marries within this group- not outside of it. He or she has a set way of making a living, also determined by the social group in which he or she is born. Ones place in the group is reinforced on a daily basis by all sorts of behaviors and restrictions thereof and further supported through an elaborate system of belief and ritual.
But what about our contemporary and complex modern societies- what is the social glue that keeps us together? Read this week's article to find out.
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Given that it's Halloween soon, I got to thinking about witches. That whole witch-hunt, what was that really about? Somehow, I've got a hunch that it had a lot to do with sex.
Just think about those poor Church fathers. Frisky as hell, but no way to do anything about it. Some of 'm got so frisky that they were just about obsessed with women. They started to think up all these stories about witches having sex with Satan. The strangest stories started popping up, about witches having sex with satanic creatures with horns, big red tails and insatiable sexual appetites. Or stories of women who put long sticks between their legs, rub on a magic unguent and fly off to have sex with some evil spirited male goat.
Nobody at the time thought of these stories as evidencing a serious mental illness. Instead, millions of pious Christians bought it.
But you see what I think is that those frisky Chucrh fathers needed an outlet. These erotic stories about witches, Satan and sex did the job. The stories they came up with made erotic art and literature an OK thing in the eyes of the Church. It was, you could say, pornography produced, sanctified and glorified by the good old Church fathers themselves. But I don't think that's the whole story.
Fascinating? Click here to read more!
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Contemporary witch hunts are, as I've argued in the articles on witches I've done so far, closely related to superstitions, poverty and natural disasters. Once you combine a steady faith in the supernatural with hunger, poverty, and unemployment, you'll undoubtedly get people to blame their unfavorable event on black magic. We just are fond of believing in the invisible, or, some might say, the irrational and in this week's article , I argue that we've believed in witches, ghosts, the devil, angels, and other invisible entities for so long and in so many different places that it has become part and parcel of the human psyche.
Sometimes this predisposition to believe in a mysterious and invisible reality has disturbingly consequences. Besides the fact that thousands of people continue to be killed because they are believed to have evil powers, in some regions, people associate AIDS and HIV with evil spirits. Rune Blix Hagen (2004) suggests for example, that at times, women are accused of being behind the AIDS epidemic. They are seen as dangerous witches who must be rendered harmless. Certain AIDS-infected men believe that evil spirits can be forced out by dipping their penises in the vaginal fluids of virgins. These ideas about witchcraft can result, says Rune Blix Hagen (2004), in the raping of young girls and the killing of older women. This phenomenon, part of larger incidents of witch-related violence, is a growing problem in some countries .
Rune Blix Hagen (2004) points out that the authorities of various African countries are trying to focus attention on peoples' tendency to relate AIDS with witchcraft. In a Malawi information campaign, for example, large road signs and posters have been erected with the message "AIDS is real... it is not witchcraft. Always use a condom and live" (Rune Blix Hagen (2004).
References
Rune Blix Hagen (2004). The Witch-hunts on African Sorcerers?by Rune Blix Hagen, Subject Librarian, University of Tromsø. Available online at http://www.ub.uit.no/fag/historie/africanwitches.htm
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Last week, we had the bull balls, and this week, we have penis snatchers. What do they have in common? Nothing, nada, zip. The bull ball story meant to illustrate the connections between food and culture or, in other words, the connections between what we have learnt to see as edible and what not. This learning is, of course culturally constructed, and I tried to show this by telling the story of being served "swinging beef" in Southwestern Alberta, Canada. The penis snatchers have nothing whatsoever to do with this. October is witches month in the history department of Suite 101 (at least it was last time I heard) and in my first article on "witches", I explore contemporary witch-hunt. Yep, you read it correctly. Witch-hunts are not a thing of the past. In fact, some people suggest that thousands of people die each year as the result of violence related to witch-hunting in countries such as Cameroon, Kenya, Congo, Sierra Leone and South Africa. Now what do penis snatchers have to do with this? Well, while you might have thought that witch-hunting would be an activity exclusively aimed at women, this is not necessarily so. Supposedly, eight men in Accra, Ghana, were accused of using witchcraft to snatch penises. They allegedly planned to return them in return for cash." Turns out this was a bad move. The penis snatchers were attacked by mobs. Two snatchers died and six were seriously injured. The penises of all victims turned out to be just fine, but the victims had firmly believed that the sorcerers had the power to make their genitals shrink or disappear completely. So, there you have it. Two entirely different subjects connected by male genitalia. To read them both, click here , and then here.
See also this great article on penis snatching!
Do you have a funny story that illustrates one of the infinite weird and wonderful ways in which human beings express themselves? Pass 'm on! or post in our discussion forum.
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
In this week's article, I explore the connection between food and culture, or to be more precise, the connection between what we have learnt to see as edible and what not. This learning is, of course, culturally coloured.
To illustrate this point, I told the story of my recent road trip through parts of Western Canada Once I got to the prairies (Fort MacLeod in South-Western Alberta, Canada, to be precise), I was introduced to a local delicacy, "Prairie Oysters." Prairie Oysters are also known under a variety of other names (among my favorite names are cowboy caviar and even better, swinging beef). But however referred to, swinging beef, Rocky Mountains oysters, Montana tender-groins, cowboy caviar, swinging beef or calf fires, they are what they are: Bulls' Balls.
These are removed when the bull is still young with the idea to make the bull more obedient and easier to handle. Once cut off, they're given a rinse and peeled as if they were apples, then they are rolled around in flour and pepper, and off they go in the frying pan to be fried, deep-fried whole, cut into broad or thin slices, or marinated. Then: Bon appetite! Given that I myself have been a vegetarian my whole life, I declined the delicacy.
This story illustrates French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's point: "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are". And indeed, what and how we eat is an expression of how we see the world.
The story illustrates the intricate relation between the universal and the cultural. The people at the table there in Fort Macleod were devouring the "swinging beef." My reaction was something akin to disgust. Both the delight and disgust are feelings that have been shaped by the ways in which we come to understand food. The foods we react to with delight or disgust are certainly different. Yet both - disgust and delight - are universal reactions to food, shared by us all.
Do you have a disgusting or funny food story? Pass 'm on! or post in our discussion forum.
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
The official end of summer has induced in me a post-partum depression of some sort. I am just not ready to part with what has been a long, hot and marvelous summer. And so, rather than accepting the inevitable, I turn to denial and fantasize about vacations in hot and tropical destinations. Even though the whole idea of vacationing is in some way a little curious to me.
Yet in the country of my youth, The Netherlands, vacationing is a must. Everyone vacations. The Dutch tend to explain their fondness for vacations, for being away "from it all," as essential for their mental health. Yet it seems to me that the drive to vacation might rather be rooted in symbol of social status. And the further the better. Nowadays, a few days at the beach just don't cut it. No, one really makes a statement when reporting on past or upcoming trips to far and exotic destinations, like Kenya, Thailand, Australia, China or India.
The Dutch also feel very sorry for those unfortunate and deprived souls who do not vacation and often, the only explanation available to them is that "they must not be able to afford it."
As a result of this real or perceived mental or social need, the Dutch travel obsessively. De Telegraaf, a Dutch newspaper, reports that in the year 2000, 70 per cent of the Dutch vacation, a stunning amount of 12 million people, vacationed. In 2004, this amount had risen to over 80 per cent. In that year, 16,2 million Dutch people traveled internationally.
Compare these numbers with 3.5 million Canadian travelers in 2000 (amounting to 11,5 per cent), and a little fewer than five million Canadian overseas travelers in 2005 (15 per cent). Europe is still the favorite overseas destination for Canadians who are traveling just for fun. These European trips account for 43 per cent of all overseas pleasure visits in 2005. But visits to the Caribbean and Mexico are a close second favorite fun destination, accounting for 39 per cent of overseas pleasure visits.
So, in light of these musings on tropical vacationing, I decided to indulge a little longer in my tropical travel daydreams and write a little on Mexico. To read the article, you know what to do. Yep, click here
References
Kerncijfers. Toerisme & Recreatie Editie (2005). Retrieved September 26, 2006 from: http://www.holland.com/files/corporate/kerncijfers/Kerncijfers%20A4%202005%20def.pdf#search=%22statistiek%20nederlanders%20reizen%20intercontinentaal%202005%22
Laszlo Buasz (2005). Vacations Sour. Print Edition 09/08/06 Page R8 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060809.HEADS09/TPStory/?query=Europe+as+top+pleasure+destination+
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
In one of my previous articles, I talked about belonging. In this week's article , I am touching on one of the ways in which we express that belonging: Fashion. Style and fashion go hand in hand with social identification. Being a member of a social group, we learn what acceptable styles are. In other words, we learn to adapt the way we dress and adorn ourselves to our social environment. This does not mean we end up all looking the same, but it means that we learn to abide by some basic guidelines as to what styles and fashions are permissible to the people we associate with. Within these guidelines, there's some space to create our own unique style. Yet in war situations, this might change. During a war, the "basic stylistic guidelines" might be tightened to heighten nationalistic feelings.
Claus Jahnke, a dear friend of mine and member of a society who collects historic German and Austrian clothing, gives an example. He says that in the 1930s, the German fashion industry was entirely "Aryanized." The Nazi's introduced, for example, a special label to indicate that "Aryan hands only" had manufactured that particular garment.
Jahnke's collection includes pieces from leading Jewish-owned couture houses in Berlin and Vienna. The Nazi's closed these fashion houses during the Second World War, and much of their garments were destroyed. Jahnke's motivation to collect these pieces is a deep-felt desire to not only teach the public about the history of fashion and textiles, but to use fashion as a means to talk about conflict resolution and peace.
Based on one of Jahnke's exhibits at The Vancouver Holocaust Centre, a new book will appear in the fall of this year. The book will have the same title as Jahnke's exhibit: Broken Threads
The book is entirely in line with Jahnke's life work. It chronicles pre-WWII Jewish fashion design and its destruction. It is a little-known but fascinating part of the historty of fashion and of WWII history at the same time.
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Even though I just moved on after doing a series of articles on landscapes during the month of August, I just could not resist writing one more little piece on it after reading an article in yesterday's Globe and Mail.
Grant Linney, the author, starts off by saying that the Canadian wilderness has for long been part of our mental and cultural landscape. Until quite recently, Linney states, outdoor play was an ordinary part of growing up. As a result, these kids were, says Linney, "much more aware of our intimate connections to the outdoors and its natural systems." Linney laments that this is no longer so, and that kids today are increasingly spending leisure time indoors.
In his view, the growing trend towards indoor play is the result of our growing fear of the outdoors. If we are not intimidated by regulations, procedures and liability waivers before embarking on an outdoors adventure, then we might imagine West Nile viruses or pedophiles lurking in the bushes. Or perhaps we might imagine running into an outdoor terrorist training camp, such as the ones in the Toronto area.
The result of this fear and increasing unwillingness to expose our children to the outdoors, says Linney, quoting Louv from Last Child in the Woods, is "nature deficit disorder."
Besides being skeptical of our ongoing need to pathologize anything unpleasant, from feelings of sadness to playing indoors, I am also skeptical of the point Linney is making.
Lack of outdoors experiences might very well contribute to our overall sense of alienation and isolation from our landscape. But it seems to me that Linney only partly solves the problem.
Linney suggests that kids will develop "ecological literacy" and become "the ecologically literate citizens that our planet so desperately needs" if they engage in a healthy dose of safe and educational experiences in the outdoors. Yet the current dismal state of our natural environment hardly proves Linney's statement that those kids of former generations really were so "much more aware of [their] intimate connections to the outdoors and its natural systems." Perhaps outdoor experiences are a beginning toward ecological literacy, but it's not the whole answer. Not even close.
To read the full text of Linney's piece, check The Globe and Mail, Tuesday September 5, 2006, page A13.
References
Grant Linney. Reclaiming the Outdoors for Our Children. In: The Globe and Mail, Tuesday September 5, 2006, page A13.
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
This week's article, the last in the series on landscape, explores the question as to how the exile of people with connections to the land and its markers, impacts the landscape of that region.
I have been interested for quite some time in the question of the suffering of ethnic German immediately following Work-War II, and so, choosing that context to explore the aforementioned question came naturally.
Several hundred thousands ethnic Germans were, immediately following World-War II, driven across the borders of Germany and Austria. Less fortunate others ended up in concentration or labor camps. During this deportation, an estimated thirty thousand Germans died in the camps, in massacres and in forced marches.
I started musing the question as to what, if any, the impact of this exile is on that suddenly abandoned landscape? How does mass deportation of people with connections to the land and its markers, impact that landscape, I wondered.
In exploring these questions, I turned to one of the many women I have spoken with over the past years. Of German descent, she was one of the many who were expelled from their homes. Her home was in an area that was placed under Polish administration during the Yalta and Potsdam Conference. She had spent most of her childhood in that area and told me the story of her return there many years later. In it, she offers an explanation as to why the landscape of her childhood - at the time so tenderly cared for and looked after-- dilapidated so much after the mass deportations.
To read the article, click here
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Well, we've been talking about landscape now for a while. But many of us live in cities or suburbs. Do we refer to that also as landscape? If so, what does it contain? How estranged are we who live in the suburbs really from nature and landscape?
Unlike in years past, modern urban areas, especially those in North America, are no longer clearly distinct from rural areas. Much of the rural areas surrounding the city have been swallowed up by the rapid and relentless growth of urban areas. New housing complexes, industrial terrains, and of course, malls have gobbled up the countryside areas as well as the functional and esthetic boundaries between rural and urban areas. The landscape has become fragmented. Many of the new complexes, houses and parks are built with convenience and cost efficiency in mind. As a result, they are often isolated, surrounded by huge parking lots and accessible only by a no-man's land of highways. No place for pedestrians and street life in these fragmented and disconnected suburbs.
Another fragmenting aspect of the landscape of modern urban life is the homogeneity that appears to be the norm in landscape planning. In my own suburban Canadian neighborhood, there are few indigenous plants and shrubs in the nicely landscaped areas around the townhouse complexes. Instead, best-selling, exotic horticulture, alien to this environment. It makes the landscape around here look like a mass-produced product that has no longer any connections with the traditional cultural and ecological realities of the place.
How does this fragmentation of our landscape affect our lives? Well, activities belonging to home, shopping and recreation have also become fragmented and isolated, connected no longer by pedestrian connections and street life, but by a web of highways and parking lots.
Having said all of that, our need for connections is powerful, even, perhaps especially, in the tangled and secluded webs of highways, parking lots and suburbs. In some places, local malls take the place of the market place and the street. Take the mall in my own community. Small literary and community-based events are organized by a local community organization (http://www.nebca.org/), and promoted by and held at the mall. Call me naive, but I just don't buy the idea that the mall's involvement is exclusively motivated by public relations and commercial interests (pun not intended). It might just be that our need to connect and belong to a community sometimes surpasses our greed...
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
In this week's article, I explored the question as to how people perceive the land around them, and how that perception changes over time. I highlighted that with time, the space we inhabit becomes permeated with cultural and historical meaning. In other words, the space we inhabit starts symbolizing the very way in which we do this. This symbolic meaning, the land being charged with the cultural and historical meaning given to it by its inhabitants, makes space become landscape.
So indeed, the ways in which we look at the landscape changes with time. As time goes by, we entrench cultural meanings in our living spaces, which, as a consequence, become symbolic for the ways in which we live.
These cultural representations help us define and control our sense of who we are. Andrew Strathern and Pamela Steward (2003) point out in their Epilogue (pp. 229-236) that missionaries and other colonizers leave a notable mark on the environment. In their effort to control the new space, they often invade the landscape with large settlements and roads. Yet over time, we might turn these very representations of oppression into proud artifacts of our own heritage.
The landscape of my youth is a good example of this process. The city of Nijmegen was founded by the Romans. A little over 2000 years ago, Emperor Trajan built a settlement here as a camp to protect the border of the Roman Empire. The name of the settlement was "Novio Magus," meaning "new market". To this day, remnants of the Roman colonization of Nijmegen can be found, and are carefully preserved at the Nijmegen Museum. The very fact that the marks of the colonizer are carefully preserved illustrates that aforementioned process- over time, artifacts of an oppressive past become deposits of a personal and collective history.
Indeed, landscape is more than a visual representation on a piece of canvas. In the words of Jim Hodges, "Landscape is a piece that is emotional and psychological."
References
Pamela J. Steward and Andrew Strathern (2003). Landscape, Memory and History. Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
I emphasized landscape as a dimension of our personal and collective history. To illustrate that point, I wrote a little about the landscapes that shaped my own existence: the landscapes and horizons of the area around the more than 2,000 year-old city of Nijmegen, the oldest city in the Netherlands.
Interestingly, the term landscape itself is rooted in a Dutch term that originally referred to the painting of natural scenery (Steven C. Bourassa, 1991). This term, landschap, was first used in English - landskip - in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, Milton referred to landtskip as a view of the scenery itself rather than the painting of it (Bourassa, 1991).
Even though the way we commonly use the concept 'landscape' is clearly influenced by Milton's use of the term, landscape is an ambiguous and difficult concept, which involves nature as well as art and objects. Our common use of the term landscape presupposes that we withdraw from the practical use of or day-to-day immersion in this mix of nature, art and objects to look at it as if from a distance. In other words, the way we use the term 'landscape' presumes a detached viewer. But experiencing landscape involves more than seeing- it is an experience, which involves all of the senses. The way we tend to speak of landscape fails to deal with this all-encompassing sensuous experiential aspect of landscape.
So landscape involves not merely aesthetics but practical and sensuous engagement as well. As Bourassa argues, landscape requires an aesthetics of engagement rather than an aesthetic of detachment (Bourassa, 1991, p. 21). In the next few weeks, this is how I will employ the term landscape- as a practical, lived and aesthetic dimension of the ways in which we live our personal and collective history.
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Landscape is a dimension of our personal and collective history. Landscapes accompany our individual, national and collective lives. In this companionship, both partners are impacted. Landscape impacts our becoming, while we in turn impact the landscape with our actions.
Certainly for me, landscapes have been formative- my existence is intimately connected with the landscapes and horizons of the area around the city of Nijmegen. Over 2,000 years old, it is the oldest city in the Netherlands. Nijmegen is situated on the banks of the river Waal, and is surrounded by hills, woods and polders. I love this diversity of the landscape of my youth and think that I will always return to it.
But it is not just the natural landscape that has an impact on our identity. The artifacts of collective life and memory- buildings and monuments- also leave their marks. Standing on the other side of the river Waal, the silhouette of the city centre in the background is a magnificent mix of historic and modern buildings and monuments. This diversity was born, at least in part, in conflict. Much of the inner city of Nijmegen was destroyed in the accidental bombardment of 1944.
The particulars of those formative landscapes become the particulars of ones self, of ones memory and identity. This is what landscape is- a deposit of our personal and collective history.
In the next few weeks, I will explore aspects of landscape and self. What are our connections with nature and landscape? How do we shape the sensuous ties with the earth? Is, as some suggest, our connection with nature and landscape in crisis? Is this crisis a reflection of the crisis of modern man?
In the first article in this series, I will explore running as a mode of interacting with the environment. How do runners, especially long-distance runners, perceive the landscape in which they move? How does it differ from other modes of being and what can we learn from it?
To read the article, click here
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
This is the last week of "Outcast Month". Over the past month, we have looked at various aspects of social exclusion. Here, we will take a moment to look back and consider the few aspects we were able to explore over the past four weeks.
We started off by looking at our need to belong from an evolutionary standpoint. For our ancestors, membership to small groups protected them against all sorts of things. Belonging to a group was crucial for survival. And while we don't need groups to protect us from wildlife or weather, we are deeply social creatures and social banishment is very threatening to our wellbeing. In this first article , we concluded that our desire to belong to a group, to know and to be known is universal and the fear of rejection and the pain of social rejection too, is shared by us all.
In the second article in this series on outcasts we explored the social and personal factors that contribute to people becoming outcasts. One of the insights that emerged from the research on these contributing factors is that social rejection has a lot to do with the degree of similarity or "fit" between the person and the group. If a person "fits in" well, there is no problem but when a person does not "fit in", when there is little similarity between an individual and the members of the group, then he or she is at risk of becoming an outcast. And once a person has become a social outcast, he or she is caught in a vicious cycle of loneliness that is very hard to break.
After these theoretical explorations, we looked at a specific example of social isolation- India's Untouchables. In this article we looked at the Hindu caste system. Discrimination based on caste membership is, since India's independency in 1947, illegal, yet it is alive and well, especially in rural areas. Going back 2,000 years and perhaps the oldest system of social hierarchy, India's caste system renders one in six Indians "impure". They are the Untouchables.
This ancient system of social stratification rests on the basic premise that, based on karma and purity of one's livelihood, a person is born into one of four castes. Those born as Brahmans are priests and teachers; Kshatriyas are rulers; Vaisyas are merchants and traders and Sudras are laborers. Untouchables are a fifth group considered so unworthy that it is placed outside of the caste system. They are, in quite a literal sense, out-castes, better known as Dalits.
Millions of Dalits are trapped in an inexorable cycle of extreme poverty, illiteracy, and oppression. And on top of that, there is violence. In the last article in this series, we considered the plight of Dalit women, which is especially depressing. They suffer double discrimination, one based on caste, the other on gender. Many young Dalit girls for example, end up as prostitutes under the guise of the religious practice devadasis, meaning "female servant of god", sexually serving upper-caste members. Many of them are eventually sold to an urban brothel.
Dalit women are frequently raped, gang-raped, beaten, tortured or forced to walk through the streets naked as punishment for something she or her family has done (Amnesty International 2005).
This brings us full circle to our first article . Evolution has instilled us with a powerful need to belong. Throughout human history social exile has been tantamount to the death sentence. Rejection is pretty much universally experienced as negative and painful, and this experience affects the whole of us: behavior, emotion, perception and cognition. The reason for it, the desire to belong, is equally universal, although the way it is enacted depends differs depending on culture.
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
I spent a fair amount of time in India; especially in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, one of the states in which caste based discrimination is on the rise. With caste-based discrimination, I mean discrimination and oppression directed at India's nearly two million Untouchables. Rendered "impure" by sacred Indian texts that go back 2,000 years, they are seen as subhuman and are relentlessly exploited. National Geographic's Tom O'Neil joined some of them during their dismal days and reported on their stories in the June 2003 issue of the National Geographic. One of the stories Tom O'Neil tells in his article titled "Untouchable" is the story of Amrutbhai Sarasiya. Amrutbhai is a Bangi, which means that he belongs to the scavenger caste, the very lowest caste, at rock bottom of the hundreds of Untouchable caste categories. Depending on the state, members of this lowest caste are named Bhangis, Pakhis or Sikkaliars. Many of them earn a living by manually unclogging and cleaning sewers, latrines and gutters, and by removing dead animals from the street. Tom O'Neill describes how Amrutbhai jumps, after a moment hesitation, into a cockroach filled sewer to lift bucket after bucket of excrement over his head, onto the street. Without protective gear, many get sick or even die from the carbon dioxin gasses in the sewers, they develop lung infections or stomach problems. Many of these workers are women, who manually empty the banned but still commonly used non-flush latrines for less than a dollar a day.
There are all sorts of rules and regulations to discourage caste based discrimination, which has been illegal since 1947. But these laws are for the most part theoretical constructs, and seem only to prevent the most blatant forms of discrimination. The reality for people like Amrutbhai and the millions of Untouchables like him is that they continue to be trapped on the very bottom of a system that functions by virtue of their shameless and relentless exploitation.
Click here to read India's Outcasts. The Struggle of Untouchables.
References
Tom O'Neil (2003). Untouchable. In: National Geographic, June 2003.
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Last week, we noted that social exclusion, or the threat of it, is a complex and mysterious phenomenon that permeates all of our relationships and almost all aspects of our lives. Exclusion is, and always has been, very bad news. For our ancestors, it meant death. For our contemporary selves, it kind of means the same. But this week's question is, who is this outcast? We all experience rejection and exclusion at some point or other, but few of us have to deal with lasting exclusion or bullying. Do those few have shared features or dispositions that make them more vulnerable to become a social outcast? And are there social circumstances that make certain people more vulnerable to bullying? In exploring these questions, I will borrow from the insightful and contemporary work of Roelof Hortulanus, Anja Machielse and Ludwien Meeuwesen. (2006), Anja Machielse (2006) and that of Jaana Juvonen and Elisheva F. Gross. As always, there are no easy answers. Social and personal factors that cause people to become outcasts interact in complex and convoluted ways, ways that are not easily unraveled. Yet one of the insights that emerge from their research is that social rejection has a lot to do with the degree of similarity or "fit" between the person and the group. There is no problem if a person "fits in" but when there is little similarity or "fit", he or she is at risk of becoming an outcast. Another insight that emerges is that once this person has become a social outcast, he or she is caught in a vicious cycle of loneliness that is very hard to break.
To read the whole article, click here. Questions or comments? Email me!
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Social exclusion, or the threat of it, is a complex and mysterious phenomenon that permeates all of our relationships and almost all aspects of our lives. Indeed, we are deeply social creatures. Since the beginning of our collective history, we lived, loved, mourned and worked with others. We knew these others and they knew us. We flourish when we belong. Not belonging and being a social outcast is very bad news for human beings. For our ancestral brothers and sisters, it meant death. For us, it kind of means the same. Sure enough, the world has changed. Our social ties to others have become much less personal and much more complex, yet for many of us, social isolation is a scary prospect that should really be avoided, whatever it takes. If our fear for social banishment materializes, we will surely feel (it's empirical), bad. Studies show that social outcasts are anxious and depressed, they think about and do destructive things and die sooner than people who are socially well connected. This strong reaction to the new status of outcast can be blamed on, at least in large part, our primordial drive to survive, which, for our ancestors entailed group membership. After all, without the benefits of the group, our ancestral sisters and brothers would have had no protection from the weather and or predators and isolation from the group would have been a death sentence. These evolutionary roots might be one good reason why even in our more technical and less personal world, the desire for social connection and the fear of losing it is pretty well universal. True, there are cultural differences in the ways in which way this desire is enacted differs but the desire to belong, the fear of rejection and the pain of social isolation are, or so it seems, shared by us all.
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Earlier, I asked the question whether the secret love between Radha and Krishna was like a Pinot Noir, sex in a glass, or whether it was more like a storm in a teacup, a thunderstorm in the making, about to break two lovers. Depending on your point of view, it could be either one or perhaps a little bit of both. Whatever your point of view is, I do think that Kinsey might find a different crowd if he were to repeat his study today. After all, modern technology and urban living conditions have minimized the risks, costs and consequences of the casual affair while maximizing the ease with which one can start one.
Despite the archaic attraction, and despite the fact that our ancestry is filled with casual sex (despite even the evolutionary significance of casual sex), much of the research of sexuality is focused on marriage. This is in part because extramarital sex is brief and fleeting, which makes it hard to study. The secrecy in which it is cloaked makes it even harder. In the famous Kinsey study on sexuality for example, the sheer fact that there were questions about extramarital sex caused many people to refuse to participate in the study. Many of those who did agree to participate and talk to Kinsey about sex, refused to answer the questions related to extramarital sex. After all, casual affairs can have hefty risks, costs and or consequences and Kinsey's participants were keenly aware of this.
For four weeks, we have explored various aspects of desire. We have looked at desire from a mythical standpoint, and last week, we looked at the evolutionary roots of casual sex. I think it's fair to say that causal sex is, and always has been, enormously, ceaselessly and primordially attractive, an attraction evidenced by countless plays, films, novels, biographies, autobiographies and life itself. Zsa Zsa Gabor aptly expresses what might, at least to some degree, lie at the root of the desire for casual sex: that pesky sense that passionate sexual desire can only be found in the transcendence of the mundane routines of domestic life: "I know nothing about sex, because I was always married." What does contemporary research on desire have to say about all of this? How does research on desire compare to research on other aspects of sexuality?
Read the last article in this series for a look at theories of desire.
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
This week's article on sexuality and desire looks at the evolutionary roots of desire, especially when it comes to the illicit affair. Yes, our forefathers and mothers did it too. Our ancestral brothers would most likely have been more motivated to do it with more than one partner than our ancestral sisters- the primordial urge to survive has implanted a forceful desire in men to be with a variety of women. And while women are traditionally much less interested in being with a variety of partners, there must have been at least a few ancestral sisters to oblige, perhaps in return for some extra food or shelter.
Studies show that modern men and women are much like their ancestral brothers and sisters. If women are considering a potential lover, the one quality they look for is generosity. Studies also show that men's desire to be with more than one partner is alive and well. Billy Crystal said it well: "Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place."
In the article , this difference between men and women is referred to as the Coolidge Effect. The story goes that President Calvin Coolidge and his wife were given separate tours of new government farms. When Mrs. Coolidge passed the chicken coups, she noticed a rooster robustly copulating with a hen. She asked the guide how often the rooster did this. The guide answered: "Dozens of times a day". "Make sure you mention this to the President", replied Mrs. Coolidge. When the President passed by the coops and was informed about the rooster's performance, he asked the guide: "Always with the same hen?" "Oh, no", the guide replied. "Always a different hen". "Make sure you mention that to Mrs. Coolidge" said the President!
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Was the secret love between Radha and Krishna like a Pinot Noir, sex in a glass, or was it a storm in a teacup, a calm version of a thunderstorm about to break two lovers in its rage?
A wine lover and maker, I am currently making a pinot noir. My wine making friend looked up the description of Pinot Noir on Wikipedia, where Joel Fleischman of Vanity Fair is quoted to describe pinot noir as "the most romantic of wines, with so voluptuous a perfume, so sweet an edge, and so powerful a punch that, like falling in love, they make the blood run hot and the soul wax embarrassingly poetic." Wikipedia also quotes Master Sommelier Madeline Triffon as calling pinot "sex in a glass" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinot_Noir)
From the endless stream of steamy confessions of illicit love affairs, from memoirists such as Anais Nin to discussions on illicit love and dating in women's magazines, you might think the illicit affair is like that: Sex in a glass. Ample classic and modern plays, movies, poetry classic evidence the appeal of secrecy as thrilling and romantic. Yet the harsh personal, communal, ethical and legal disapproval and condemnation evidence the dark and stormy side of the illicit. While this tension between allure and denunciation exist in the East as well as in the West, the lines between the conjugal and the adulterous are drawn particularly sharp in the East where the gods who look after marriage and fertility are neatly separated from those who look after erotic love.
I am exploring this twofold feature of secrecy in a second article of a four-part series. Once again, the Gitagovinda serves as point of departure. I will explore the way in which the poet, Jayadeva, imparted the adulterous aspects of the love affair between Radha and Krishna.
For more about sexuality in a historical context, read Kerry Kublius'
Gerda Wever-Rabehl
The Write Room
www.thewriteroom.net
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Sex is in the air. Saturday's Globe and Mail reports for example, that Jerry Hall has embraced the flaccid penis. As the new ambassador of limp and unwilling manliness, she is working to stiffen the already towering profits of an erectile dysfunction drug. The sexuality of mature women is also receiving ample attention- just a couple weeks ago, the Globe and Mail featured a section on the sexuality of "mature women" and just as recently, the book "Sex and the Seasoned Woman: Pursuing the Passionate Life" by Gail Sheehy came out (published by Random House). In between the lifeless penises and older women, there's plenty attention for other aspects of sex and desire. The CBC for example, featured sexuality and seduction in one of the documentaries in a series called War of the Sexes. And just last night, CBC's Passionate Eye featured Middlesex, a documentary about the wide diversity in the expression of gender and sexuality.
I have been following this plethora of research on and interest in desire and sexuality rather closely. After all, anthropologists have some sort of reputation for being fearless inspectors of sexual practices around the world. And who am I to spoil that (probably false and rather self-proclaimed) reputation? So, given the fact that sex appears to be in the air, together with the fact that I really should keep the aforementioned reputation erect, I decided to do a four-part series on sexuality and desire.
In the first two articles in this series, we will look at conceptions of desire and sexuality as they emerge from Indian mythology. We will do so by focusing on the Gitagovinda, a poem about the passionate love affair between Radha and Krishna. It is the truly magnificent tale of desire, sexuality and the joys and pains of a passionate but secret and adulterous love affair. In the first article, we will look at the way in which their passion is portrayed as natural, carnal and spiritual all at the same time. In the second article, we will explore more closely the extramarital, secret and adulterous aspects of desire as they emerge from the love between Radha and Krishna.
For more about sexuality in a historical context, read Kerry Kublius'
Gerda Wever-Rabehl, The Write Room
www.thewriteroom.net
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Last week, I shared one of the countless stories of women who endured unspeakable hardship during or immediately after WW II. Many of the women I spoke with over the past years were expelled, violated and humiliated in indescribable ways, yet few of them had an opportunity to speak of it. Having been part of the aggressor, their stories and their suffering has not counted in the eyes of the world.
This week, I would like to share one more story, worth being told and worth being heard. It is the story of a young Canadian girl who, in a cruel twist of fate, ended up with relatives in Germany during WWII.
We had been sent to my grandparents in the hope that it would be a safer place for us to be, but we found ourselves in the heat of the last battles before Berlin. I remember the bombings. Alarms would go off and we'd find refuge in the cellar. And instead of doing homework, we searched after school for the potato beetles, which had been dropped from the planes into our potato fields. Or else, we searched for the silver-strips- also dropped from planes onto our pastures and fields. These strips, if eaten by the animals, would kill 'm. The village was surrounded and my sister, my aunt and myself scrambled like everybody else to get out of the village into the nearby forest. My grandmother stayed with my gradfather. He refused to leave what he had worked for so hard. Besides, he had been in the First World War and the soldiers of the Russian Army had been very good to him then. He had shared his food and drinks with them, and he did not worry about a thing. But when the German militaries found them there, with the heat of battle narrowing in on them, they told him in no uncertain terms to get the hell out of there. But by then it was already too late. When my grandparents reached the outskirts of the village in their horse-pulled wagon, they met soldiers from the Red Army there and were robbed of the few things they had brought with them. And as rape became a weapon to humiliate and degrade, they threw my grandmother in the muddy clay and raped her with my grandfather looking on, stupefied. When they were done with her, they dragged my grandfather away with them and put him to work as servant. My grandmother got up from the ground and walked away. She walked and kept on going until she reached Konigstein an den Elbe where she found shelter with a few old friends. My grandfather later managed to escape from the Red Army. Frenzied and raging, he started looking for her....
Gerda Wever-Rabehl, The Write Room
www.thewriteroom.net
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
Rather than just talking about the stories of German women in the abstract, I would like to share a short excerpt from one of those stories. It is one of the countless stories of women who endured unspeakable hardship during or immediately after WW II. Many of them were expelled, violated and humiliated in indescribable ways, yet many have had few, if any, opportunity to speak of it. Their stories, their suffering has not counted in the eyes of the world.
This is how one of the women describes her experiences:
I was eight years old when we got back to the village early that evening. The earth shook as it endured bomb after bomb, the darkening sky was thick with smoke. The orange brilliance of distant fires was the only color among the greys of dust and smoke. All that was left of our village was rubble. Burnt out tanks littered the road. Inside our home, we found only vile waste, decay, disease and pollution. In the basement lay the decaying body of Sam, our dog. The filth and destruction, the embodiment of defeat and subsequent devaluation, immediately etched itself into my mind. The exile and the hiding in the forest had been frightening, but for me, it was also a bit exciting, it had given me a sense of adventure. But the direct exposure to death and destruction provoked terror. We stayed that night in the one small house that still stood and had not been vandalized. While the world was raging against us with merciless forces of destruction, we anxiously lay beside dirty and wounded German soldiers, many of who were moaning and crying. As soon as the new day dawned, we became a few in the mass of refugees we were trying to escape the fighting.
Stripped of our dignity and selfhood, defeated, inferior and powerless, we were now faceless women, easy prey for the angry and resentful soldiers of the Polish and Red Army. Defeated already, women were randomly taken from the slow moving rows of refugees to be sexually used, raped and exploited. A mother here, an aunt there, a sister there. Once part of the occupiers, the women became the occupied, the sexually invaded. Mass and random rape degraded, humiliated and destroyed the women so effectively that after a while, they became numb to it. In many towns and villages we crossed, every woman between ten and eighty had been raped, mostly by soldiers of the Red Army, but sometimes by French, American and British militaries as well. One day, my aunt became one of the millions of women who were raped during the last months of World War II. Four soldiers grabbed her satchel, tossed it in the gutter and raped my aunt right beside the road, in the cold wet earth of the ditch. My sister and myself, terrified by her screams and paralyzed with fear for the soldiers, just kept on walking. Weeping soundless cries, we walked and walked and just kept on moving along with the throngs of lost people until my aunt caught up to us during a standstill.
Gerda Wever-Rabehl, The Write Room
www.thewriteroom.net
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
For some time now, I have been collecting war-stories of women, particularly the stories of women whose lives have been discolored by displacement, war and imprisonment. I have been particularly interested in the stories of women who endured unspeakable hardship, but whose suffering has not 'counted' in the eyes of others, for example, the stories of German women who were displaced, raped in front of their husbands, fathers and children or sent to Russian prison camps immediately after WWII. Their stories are threads in a complicated and intractable fabric that consists of the historical events and traumatic experiences they lived through, their memories of it and the emotions evoked by the telling.
The telling of as well as the listening to these narratives is tough. For one, the memories have been redirected by time and by the absence of an audience for their stories. And after the long silence, many fragments of these memories are concealed and buried in the faraway and distant corners of their psyche, beyond reach. But the emotions have not always been packed away as neatly as some of the details of the events themselves. I have spoken to women who are consumed by anger, resentment and bitterness. Their tales of experiences of war and displacement were silenced for a long time, and the memories of it might have become patchy, but not their anger at the humiliation and violence they endured. The fury and rage continue to demand acknowledgement.
The suffering that ensues from grand-scale displacement and persecution is enormous. When there is no collective or public recognition of this pain, or worse, when the forced expulsion and the pain that accompanies it is denied, new hatred can be the response. Some of the women I have spoken to over the past few years, responded to the absence of a collective recognition with so much hatred and indeed, racisms, that reconciliation only seems a remote possibility.
And so, social injustice might find a future.... The suffering of German women, children and elderly civilians, is a sensitive, emotionally laden and political topic, and complete resolve will never be achieved. What we might hope for is that we can create a space in which pain and trauma can be heard and acknowledged without giving new opportunities for alienation, threat or victimization.
Gerda Wever-Rabehl, The Write Room
www.thewriteroom.net
Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl
While the percentage of women has risen in many of the formerly male dominated professions, the opposite is happening in information technology. The number of women being trained in information technology related fields are dropping. This is worrisome, especially considering that for better jobs, advanced technological know-how will increasingly be a requirement.
Yet when computer-programming jobs were still low-priority and lousy paying, women did them. All six programmers of the world's first electronic tube computer (1945), for example, were women. And some of them went on to bigger and better things afterwards (see also Drew Robb at http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/career/article.php/1564501). This situation has changed. Programming and design jobs have become high-status and high-salary positions. And men now hold the vast majority of these positions.
Why worry about the predominance of men in design and programming you ask? Well, the thing is, a program or tool is designed by someone for someone, to be used for a certain purpose. The design we come up with will undoubtedly embody all sorts of beliefs about the world and our relations in it. It would simply be naive to think that the product of our design is value free.
Take computer games for example. They are, on the whole, designed by, for and marketed to males. The games my nine-year old son plays, are by and large solitary. They are based on strict and rigid rules, either/or scenarios and result in winning or losing- all features that appeal to boys. The main characters in the majority of his computer games are more often than not aggressive, sometimes sexist and for the most part male. The female game characters are generally top-heavy and grotesque looking bystanders instead of positive and active participants. Somehow, I don't think that these features, while appealing to boys, attract girls in the same way and it wouldn't surprise me if they contributed to girls spending a lot less time playing computer games and them starting computer courses with less computer experience and confidence than boys do.
Women once dominated computer-programming domains. Bringing them back there is important, I think. But it seems to me that this return will have to start in technology education. Technology education can motivate girls by connecting technology with their preference to use technology to connect, communicate, and collaborate. Once that connection is made, who knows, women might once again be inventors, makers and repairers of technology.
Gerda Wever-Rabehl, The Write Room
www.thewriteroom.net