Maps

Funny maps. An anthropological technique for eliciting informants' world view transformed into comedy. Thank goodness we can laugh about this.

"It's the culture!"

Culture is often used as an explanation for why some unusual things happen. Here is one example. When a gunman killed 8 Hong Kong tourists in Manila, the SCMP reported:

City University criminologist Dennis Wong Sing-wing said if the drama had occurred in the United States or on the mainland, the gunman would have been killed much earlier.

"It may be due to cultural differences. Filipinos are more easygoing and peace-loving so that they tend not to adopt fierce action. If the same scenario happened in the US or China, snipers would have killed the gunman a long time ago," Wong said.

"The negotiators might also have failed to assess the situation correctly, thinking it could be solved without force, as the gunman released a number of hostages."

Blaming this terrible crime and botched rescue on "culture" is ridiculous. In fact, it is no explanation at all. Many have even claimed the opposite, that there is a "culture of violence" in the Philippines (see this article in Global Nation, a Philippino online publication), and The New York Times had an article just half a year ago discussed the "culture of violence" that results from arguments over bad singing of "I did it my way" by Frank Sinatra. A better explanation was provided by a security officer in another article, also published in the SCMP:

The police assault on the bus, according to a French security expert, was “badly prepared and risky”.

The police who stormed the bus in Manila did not have specialist training and “visibly lacked adequate equipment and tactical competence”, said Frederic Gallois, who once commanded France’s elite hostage rescue unit.

After seeing live television images of the operation, the former colonel said that “one cannot understand what justified this badly prepared and risky assault.”

The police, for example, did not attempt a surprise tactic like entering the bus at several points and had also stayed too long outside the vehicle before launching their assault, he said.

Bad planning, bad government, incompetence. Common in poor countries. Simple as that. No need to resort to "culture."

Anthropologists as car park attendants

Now we know what anthropologists are good at. In an NPR ATC story about movie about a parking lot in Charlottesville, VA, the lot manager says:

"The anthropologists are always the best," Farina says, laughing. "They have a perspective that allows them to look at oddness and be interested in it and not be bored."

Money is symbolic

See this Onion article for an example of an anthropological perspective suddenly emerging in a humorous vein.

U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion

February 16, 2010 | Issue 46•07

WASHINGTON—The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.

Hong Kong at dusk

Go to this link http://61226.com/share/hk.swf and scroll your mouse over the picture without clicking it. Very cool view of sunset in Hong Kong.

Football and Gender

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113712681

Diane Robert is a Seminole fan, and she admits it contradicts her feminism, but she loves football anyway.

She begins:

I know. I know. The game reinforces the most retrograde gender roles. The men are front and center hitting each other. The women stay on the sidelines encouraging the men to hit each other.

Look at the clothes for god sake. The cheerleaders wear short skirts and eyeliner. The players wear tight britches and huge shoulder pads. The game is a feast of hyper masculinity with a side order of phallic metaphor: penetration, scoring. It's stylized warfare, fighting over 100 yards worth of symbolic turf. The object being to march deeper and deeper into enemy territory.

The very language of the game is combative: the bomb, the shotgun, the sack. The only time the game gets in touch with its feminine side is when, say, you're on your own, 25, down by six with seven seconds to go in the fourth, then you throw the Hail Mary. As usual, the men get themselves into trouble and expect a women to bail them out.

See the rest or listen to her read her essay here.

American hubris

This is one of the better articles discussing a disturbing American tendency towards bombast and boasting. Most Americans have no idea how absurd and arrogant it sounds outside the USA. It is a failure of global perspective that keeps Americans saying how the US is the best country in the world without any self-consciousness of how it sounds to outsiders, especially when, as the article only begins to note, there are plenty of areas that the US could improve upon (highest proportion of population in prison being a major one, for example). See the whole article here:

One nation, under illusion

By Neal Gabler | October 13, 2009

THE HOARIEST and most oft-repeated cliche in American politics may be that America is the greatest country in the world. Every politician, Democrat and Republican, seems duty bound to pander to this idea of American exceptionalism, and woe unto him who hints otherwise. This country is “the last, best hope of mankind,’’ or the “shining city on the hill,’’ or the “great social experiment.’’ As if this weren’t enough, Jimmy Carter upped the fawning ante 30 years ago by uttering arguably the most damning words in modern American politics. He called for a “government as good as the American people,’’ thus taking national greatness and investing it in each and every one of us.

(Rest of the article) [The article was published in the International Herald Tribune of 14 Oct. 2009, but was not put online for some reason.]