Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Milgram Experiment

Gramsci and Submission in a Nutshell.

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian philosopher imprisoned by the Fascists in the late 1920's believed the key to submission could be found in the "spontaneous consent" of the masses. Who are the Masses one might ask? The Intellectual- used by the dominant group as a medium to render support of the dominant class (Gramsci, 1971). For Gramsci, Hegemony was not a top-down state of power; state authorities did not barge into homes forcing individuals to submit to their power, (not in all cases). Instead by consent and coercion. Gramsci's theory of spontaneous consent raises a  puzzling question: Why do we consent, knowing the outcome offers little to no benefits to us? 

Sunday, February 21, 2010

In keeping with Nomadic vs. Sedentary lifestyles...

When thinking about this weeks critical response, two things came to mind that could not be integrated into the response, so here they are as a sort of side note I guess...
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Pastoralism in Kenya
As you may or may not know, Pastoralists live and profit off of the livestock they raise. Because of different harvest times and droughts, Pastoralists are forced to migrate. This would mean that Pastoralists lead nomadic lifestyles. One could imagine the dangers of entering a strangers territory; the Pastoralists could be interpreted as enemies attempting to attack, when they are simply looking for water and a grazing pasture. Like Malkki (1992) suggests, the state of liminality Pastoralists fall into is a consequence of their lack of "place within a space".

Also, an interesting ethnography that ties in with an idea presented in Malkki's article, where indigenous people become the land, as apposed to the land becoming people. Malkki raises the question: if an indigenous person wanted to leave their "homeland" would their identity be left behind as well?

The article is titled "The Shifting Middle Ground: Amazonian Indians and Eco-Politics", (Conklin & Graham, 1995).  

Transplantation and Uprootedness: Dangers of the Nomadic Lifestyle

          In Up in the Air (2009), George Clooney plays the character of Ryan Bingham, who spends 320 days out of the year travelling around the country for work (IMDB, 2009). Bingham is a corporate downsizer for an American company; in simple terms, he fires people. To most people, such a career would lead them to depression, but Ryan Bingham is not like most people. The “corporate downsizer” lives out of a suitcase, spends most of his time on airplanes or hotel rooms leading a nomadic lifestyle. If it weren’t for Bingham’s devilishly good looks, his character would be the antagonist. In a sense, the audience feels pity for him. However mundane Bingham’s life may seem to the audience, the character does not look for sympathy, in fact he seems to enjoy the nomadic lifestyle.

          When looking at the example of Ryan Bingham, one could ask why so many people seem to feel pity for the corporate downsizer, and not the people he is firing. In National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees (1992), Liisa Malkki notes the important link between person and place. In her article, Malkki suggests that it often isn’t until an individual is transplanted or uprooted that they discover the importance of their place within a space (Malkki, 1992). One could even go as far to say that such “places” are vital in the maintenance of the social order; in the case of the British Columbian “Safe Streets Act”, one individual accuses homeless peoples as “aggressive” beings who take part in “unlawful behaviour” (Hitchen, 2005). Similarly, refugees are viewed as “amoral, without any sense of personal or social responsibility” (Malkki, 1992). Although the homeless and the refugee have different causes for their displacement, they do possess a commonality; whether temporarily or permanent, they do not have a place within a space to call their own. As Malkki suggests, they have been “uprooted”, away from their “homeland” perhaps, or erased from their “family tree”. As one may notice above, the importance of person and place is often described by using arborescent terms, comparing an individual to a tree and his or her origins to a trees root, which is deeply rooted into the land or soil. Perhaps now we can understand the pity we feel for Bingham’s nomadic lifestyle.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Re-thinking the “Education” System

Re-thinking the “Education” System
        One of the famous thinkers of our time, Paulo Freire suggested that knowledge may only arise when questions are raised, theories are tested, and content is invented and reinvented (Freire, 2000). Rather than using the traditional “banking system”, where the teacher “deposits” knowledge into the brain of the student, Freire suggests we take on the “Problem-Solving” approach by which the student is actively engaged in the subject rather than simply memorizing. The problem with the banking system, Freire proposes, is that the student does not consciously understand the subject, but rather sees it as a separate object with no relation to other objects. Another problem with the banking system is found in its biases; the information one student receives will mirror the information given to another student. Furthermore, that information deposited into the students mind has been previously conceived as important knowledge, leaving no room for any creativity and flexibility in the curriculum. Thirdly, the banking system leads the student to believe that he or she is not capable of individual thinking, for he is a student, who passively waits to be taught by the teacher. There is a danger in this feature of the banking system; the student comes to understand knowledge as something only attainable with the help of a teacher, who ultimately filters information before depositing it into the mind of the student. By the time that student has graduated, if he or she is fit to graduate, he will have been predisposed to many of the subordinate middle class values and motivations.