Postmodern Glacier professor defends his dreadful study as “misunderstood”. It wasn’t.

March 13, 2016 • 11:00 am

Along with three co-authors, Mark Carey, a dean and professor of history at Robert D. Clark Honors college at the University of Oregon, recently published a dreadful postmodernist paper in Progress in Human Geography, “Glaciers, gender and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.” (reference and link below). I wrote about it on this site last week, and have since read the whole thing twice. I still haven’t recovered.

At first I thought, with others, that the paper might be a hoax, but it wasn’t—it’s a real paper, just as opaque and crazy as Alan Sokal’s paper that caused such a furor when published in Social Text in 1996. But Sokal’s paper was an out-and-out hoax, designed to show just how insane the whole postmodern enterprise really was. And it did its job—mostly. But it didn’t eliminate this kind of nonsense in the humanities, because papers like that of Carey et al. are still being written, still being reviewed favorably and published, and still getting funding from the American taxpayers. Carey’s work, including this paper, was funded by a National Science Foundation grant to the tune of nearly $413,000 (see below).

The Carey et al. paper was written to try to to infuse the study of glaciers with a feminist perspective. But it suffers from a number of problems:

It’s horribly written, in the kind of obscurantist, ideology-packed prose that we’re used to from postmodernism. And it says the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. These people need to learn how to write.

While the paper does call attention to the underrepresentation of women in the earth sciences, and mentions one program designed to give young women experience in glaciology and polar ecology (admirable aims), that’s not its main point. Its main point is to show how a “feminist perspective” in glaciology will advance the field. It does not make this case (see below).

It’s actually anti-science, for it repeatedly points out the problems with so-called objective Western science, namely its refusal to incorporate the voices of marginalized people, but, more important, to accept “other ways of knowing” about glaciers. It turns out that these “other ways of knowing” are simply subjective and emotional views incorporated in human narratives, art, and literature. These are not “ways of knowing” that will advance the field. Science is repeatedly denigrated, and, in fact, I’m surprised that this stuff was funded by the National Science Foundation. Has it become the National Science and Other Ways of Knowing Foundation?

The paper is an exercise in confirmation bias, picking and choosing bits of the literature that confirm the authors’ preconceived views that science is a male-dominated, Western hegemony that tramples all over women and minorities. Reading the paper, you see that it’s a series of cherry-picked anecdotes that support this view. While it’s certainly true that minorities and women have been discriminated against in science, that is well known, and remedies are already being formulated. The paper itself adds nothing to that discourse but to apply it to glaciology, and in an anecdotal rather than systematic or statistical way. One could write exactly this kind of postmodern paper about any discipline in which women and minorities are underrepresented. But, as I said, the point of Carey et al. is not to re-plow this well-trodden ground, but to claim that the field of glaciology, and how we use our knowledge to effect change, will be drastically transformed using a feminist (and minority) perspective.

In the end, the paper, infused with anecdotes, confirmation bias, and calls for “other ways of knowing,” reminds me a lot of theology. It’s a maddening and useless piece of work, and it angers me that the money we taxpayers spent on it wasn’t diverted to something that actually adds to our knowledge. Here are a few highlights (?) of the paper and my take on them—quotes from the paper are indented:

The rationale:

The feminist lens is crucial given the historical marginalization of women, the importance of gender in glacier-related knowledges, and the ways in which systems of colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchy co-constituted gendered science. Additionally, the feminist perspective seeks to uncover and embrace marginalized knowledges and alternative narratives, which are increasingly needed for effective global environmental change research, including glaciology (Castree et al., 2014; Hulme, 2011).

. . . The tendency to exclude women and emphasize masculinity thus has far-reaching effects on science and knowledge, including glaciology and glacier-related knowledges.

We’ll see what the “other ways of knowing” add to glaciology in a minute.

The good stuff:

Carey et al. mention one program, “Girls on Ice,” that gives training about glaciers in Alaska and Washington State to help facilitate women’s entry into science and give them “life training.” That sounds useful, but the authors can’t resist this postmodern snipe:

While the program may perpetuate a male-female binary that feminist studies and queer theory have long sought to dismantle, Girls on Ice plays a key role in glaciology to provide female role models. . .

But what’s the alternative to “perpetuating that binary,” which, after all, is really a pronounced bimodality with a low-frequency continuum between the male and female peaks? Should the program be “Girls, Transgender Women, and Genderfluid (But Mostly Female) People on Ice?” But I digress. . .

The dissing and deposing of science. Here are a few quotes:

Much geographical fieldwork involves this masculinist reflexivity generating supposed objectivity through distance from and disinterest in the subject (Coddington, 2015; Sundberg, 2003). These conclusions transcend gendered dimensions of knowledge by acknowledging broader trends in Western sciences that have sought to place science at a god-like vantage from nowhere, ignoring both situated knowledges and the geography of science (Haraway, 1988; Shapin, 1998; Livingstone, 2003).

. . . Castree et al. (2014: 765), for example, contend that other forms of knowledge, discourse and understanding [beyond natural sciences] must be properly acknowledged, precisely because they both affect, and are affected by, science and technology. These forms range beyond the cognitive to encompass the moral, spiritual, aesthetic and affective.

These calls align with those of feminist political ecology and feminist postcolonial science studies that seek to unsettle dominant Western assumptions, narratives, and representations which tend to privilege the natural sciences and often emerge through the co-constituted processes of colonialism, patriarchy, and unequal power relations (Harding, 2009).

Yes, that’s the postmodern Sandra Harding, whose writing, along with that of Judith Butler, is just as bad as that in this paper. Note how poorly written that last sentence is. It reeks of obscurantism. But wait—there’s more (my emphasis)!:

These alternative representations from the visual and literary arts do more than simply offer cross-disciplinary perspectives on the cryosphere. Instead, they reveal entirely different approaches, interactions, relationships, perceptions, values, emotions, knowledges, and ways of knowing and interacting with dynamic environments. They decenter the natural sciences, disrupt masculinity, deconstruct embedded power structures, depart from homogenous and masculinist narratives about glaciers, and empower and incorporate different ways of seeing, interacting, and representing glaciers – all key goals of feminist glaciology.

and

But the natural sciences are not equipped to understand the complexities and potentialities of human societies, or to recognize the ways in which science and knowledge have historically been linked to imperial and hegemonic capitalist agendas. Feminist glaciology participates in this broader movement by suggesting richer conceptions of human-environment relations, and highlighting the disempowering and forestalling qualities of an unexamined and totalizing science.

In other words, “Hey, science, look over here—don’t forget us in the humanities!”

Granted, if you want to incorporate scientific findings into social policy, you need to know something about society. But the examples in this paper don’t tell us anything useful about that. What are those examples? Read on.

The “other ways of knowing.”

It turns out, after all the bloviating of Carey et al. about the need for marginalized perspectives in glaciology, that the “other ways of knowing” are completely lame. They involve art and literature, and don’t seem to advance glaciology— either technically or in its interactions with society. The authors give four examples of these “other ways of knowing”; get a load of them:

For instance, Scottish visual artist Katie Paterson’s 2007 work, Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull, depicts the impermanence of glaciers while broadening the notion of glaciers as repositories for climatic records and diverting what it means to ‘record’ and be a ‘record’ (Paterson, 2007). Paterson chronicled the ordinary sounds of the Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, and Solheimajökull glaciers in Iceland, and then transferred the audio tracks to LP micro-groove vinyl ‘ice’ records – records created by casting and freezing the glaciers’ own meltwater. She then played the frozen records simultaneously on three turntables as they melted. The audio recordings (available [here]) fuse glacier sounds with the high whine of the ice record itself. After ten minutes, the actual ice LP record deteriorates and the sound melts away. Climatic data from ice core records are often imported into climate models, while rates of glacier retreat chronicling meters melted per year are usually taken directly at face value, with policy implications. Both the ice cores and ice loss measurements feed homogenizing global narratives of glaciers with somewhat restricted views of the cryosphere, lacking emotional and sensory interactions with the ice that occurs in Paterson’s artworks. Paterson and other artists thus intervene in such ‘truths’ by presenting purposefully imprecise social and scientific methodologies and works.

Well, that’s useful, isn’t it? Art it may be, but not glaciology.

Here’s another example.

In addition to glacier artwork, there is also a growing body of literature that expands understandings of the cryosphere and grapples with core issues in feminist geography.Uzma Aslam Khan’s (2010) short story ‘Ice, Mating’, for example, explores religious, nationalistic, and colonial themes in Pakistan, while also featuring intense sexual symbolism of glaciers acting upon a landscape. Khan writes: ‘It was Farhana who told me that Pakistan has more glaciers than anywhere outside the poles. And I’ve seen them! I’ve even seen them fuck!’ (Khan, 2010: 102, emphasis in original). This fictional story draws from local understandings of Karakoram geomorphology, their cultures of glaciers and mountains, the gendered nature of landscape perceptions, and the legacies of colonialism. In Khan’s story, glacier knowledge, while highly sexualized, is acquired through locals’ interactions with the surrounding glaciers rather than through classic Western channels of knowledge dissemination through reports and academic articles. Khan subverts traditional roles of who acts upon whom, complicating patriarchal assumptions that, as with society, nature must have rulers and the ruled (Keller, 1983).

Pay attention to the notion above that glaciers “fuck”; for, as we’ll see, the sexual metaphor is not nearly so wonderful when applied to men.

Here’s another:

The American science fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. LeGuin has also explored ice and glaciers in several works. Her novel The Left Hand of Darkness (LeGuin, 1969) upends notions of gender while re-imagining masculine polar exploration. The novel sends two fugitives on an 81-day journey across the Gobrin Glacier on the fictional planet of Winter. In a frozen world without warfare, LeGuin imagines a place without men and women, where there are no fixed or different sexes. In her 1982 short story Sur, LeGuin portrays a group of South American women who reach the South Pole two years before the all-male Amundsen and Scott parties. But these women leave no record of their activities in Antarctica, and upon their return tell nobody of their feat. Such a radical, postcolonial, feminist narrative about polar exploration serves to underscore the history still perpetuated today, a history imbued with masculinity and heroic men (Bloom, 2008).

Note that last sentence, which shows that the authors will glean anything to buttress their confirmation bias. This is like theology!

Below is my favorite example of how the authors claim that “folk knowledge” can advance glaciology (my emphasis):

. . . whereas glaciologists may try to measure glaciers and understand ice physics by studying the glacial ice itself, indigenous accounts do not portray the ice as passive, to be measured and mastered in a stereotypically masculinist sense. ‘The glaciers these women speak of’, explains Cruikshank (2005: 51–3), ‘engage all the senses. [The glaciers] are willful, capricious, easily excited by human intemperance, but equally placated by quick-witted human responses. Proper behavior is deferential. I was warned, for instance, about firm taboos against “cooking with grease” near glaciers that are offended by such smells.…Cooked food, especially fat, might grow into a glacier overnight if improperly handled.’ The narratives Cruikshank collected show how humans and nature are intimately linked, and subsequently demonstrate the capacity of folk glaciologies to diversify the field of glaciology and subvert the hegemony of natural sciences.

And here is how the authors denigrate those skeptics who dismiss the effect of cooking grease on glacial advance:

Such knowledge diversification, however, can meet resistance, as folk glaciologies challenge existing power dynamics and cultures of control within glaciology. For instance, in response to Cruikshank’s detailed and highly acclaimed research, geographer Cole Harris suggested instead that Cruikshank attributed too much weight to ‘Native’ stories and non-scientific understandings of glaciers. He questioned the relevance of indigenous narratives about sentient glaciers in today’s modern world by explaining how he consulted a colleague, ‘an expert on snow’, about why glaciers advanced rapidly (surged). The expert ‘spoke of ground water, friction, and the laws of physics. Is it possible, I [Harris] asked, that they surge because they don’t like the smell of grease? He looked at me blankly, slowly shook his head, and retreated into his office’ (Harris, 2005: 105).

And that’s pretty much it: the “other ways of knowing” whereby “marginalized voices” can advance glaciology. Read the paper for yourself if you don’t believe me.

One more point. It’s apparently okay to sexualize glaciers when women do it. But Ceiling Cat forbid when men stick their coring apparatuses (i.e., surrogate penises) into glaciers to acquire their supposedly objective knowledge:

Structures of power and domination also stimulated the first large-scale ice core drilling projects – these archetypal masculinist projects to literally penetrate glaciers and extract for measurement and exploitation the ice in Greenland and Antarctica.

Oh dear–those men with their Big Drills, penetrating the glaciers, are horrible! I’m sure, though, that Carey et al. also mean “figuratively penetrate”. And then the cores (metaphorical semen?), which have yielded immensely valuable scientific data, are devalued as tools of Western and postcolonial hegemony:

These ice cores were born in the contest for scientific authority and geostrategic control of the polar regions, manifesting the centrality of power, conquest, and national security in the history of glaciological knowledge.

. . . Both the ice cores and ice loss measurements feed homogenizing global narratives of glaciers with somewhat restricted views of the cryosphere, lacking emotional and sensory interactions with the ice that occurs in Paterson’s artworks. . . These interactions and acquaintances with the ice diverge from the more masculinist domination of the glaciers in polar colonial science, ice core extraction, and quantification.

I could go on and on, but I have neither the time nor the will to continue “unpacking” this dreadful paper. If you think I’m exaggerating, read it for yourself—it’s free. And it’s even worse than I have shown above. For example, read the stuff on Arctic exploration, like this:

The scientific leaders of the Canadian Polar Continental Shelf Project (1958–70), for example, attempted to frame the Arctic as an ‘experimental space’ rather than an ‘expeditionary space’, as the basis of the credibility of both their scientific work and Canada’s territorial aspirations. Yet, their deployment of ‘a precarious authority of experiment’ fared poorly in the course of difficult Arctic field work; they could not escape the ‘Boy Scout attitude to Arctic fieldwork’ and the ‘epistemic baggage of the exploratory tradition and adventurous observation’. Though these attempted reframings of Arctic work did not preclude latent masculinities, they did suggest tensions with more explicit masculinities (Powell, 2007).

Carey and his co-authors were rightly slammed for publishing this paper, and in an interview by Carolyn Gramling, a staff writer for Science, Carey has just tried to justify his work. Read the interview: “Q&A: Author of ‘feminist glaciology’ study reflects on sudden appearance in culture wars” (free access). Not only does it make clear that the paper was dead serious, but Carey says all the kerfuffle about and criticism of the paper came from people misunderstanding it. Gramling throws softball questions at Carey—it’s a lame interview in which she doesn’t challenge the paper at all:

Q [Gramling]: Were you aware about the brouhaha over your paper? How do you feel about it?

A [Carey]: Professional research is published in journals for specialists in a given field. When removed from that context and described to nonspecialists, the research can be misunderstood and potentially misrepresented. What is surprising about the brouhaha is the high level of misinterpretations, mischaracterization, and misinformation that circulate about research and researchers—though this has, unfortunately, been happening to scientists for centuries, especially climate researchers in recent decades.

The good news is that people are talking about glaciers! But there’s much more to the story than just the glaciers. People and societies impose their values on glaciers when they discuss, debate, and study them—which is what we mean when we say that ice is not just ice. Glaciers become the platform to express people’s own views about politics, economics, cultural values, and social relations (such as gender relations). The attention during the last week proves our point clearly: that glaciers are, in fact, highly politicized sites of contestation. Glaciers don’t have a gender. But the rhetoric about ice tells us a great deal about what people think of science and gender.

That’s just like theology: Carey argues that the pushback against this paper simply confirms its thesis. It’s clear that he will brook no dissent, for that simply arises from misunderstanding. And that’s like theology, too—Sophisticated Theology™.

I’d love to see Alan Sokal write a mock “defense” of his famous Social Text paper along the lines of Carey’s exculpatory interview. You can pretty much defend any piece of postmodernist tripe by saying that it was “misunderstood;” and in fact I think Sokal has raised exactly this point somewhere in his writing.

In the meantime, all ye scientists who have trouble getting funding, read and weep about Carey’s NSF award:

_________

Carey, M., M. Jackson, A. Antonello, and J. Rushing. 2016. Glaciers, gender and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research. Progress in Human Geography, Published online before print January 10, 2016, doi:10.1177/0309132515623368

A real paper or a Sokal-esque hoax? You be the judge

March 6, 2016 • 11:00 am

Certain forms of postmodern discourse are so outré that you can’t tell whether they’re serious or jokes. (Indeed, some postmodernists claim that their serious pieces can be construed as jocular!) The most famous example of this conflation between the scholarly and the absurd is, of course, Alan Sokal’s hoax article on physics and postmodernism for the journal Social Text, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity“. (I’m proud to say that the first letter in the New York Times about that piece was my own praise for Sokal. I was then roundly attacked on the phone by an old friend who had, without my knowledge, gone over to the Dark Side and become a postmodernist.)

So here’s an article that just appeared in the journal Progress in Human Geography (pdf here, h/t to reader David). Click on the screenshot to go to the whole thing. The journal is real, and the authors seem real too. In fact, first author Mark Carey is a Professor of History and Associate Dean at Clark Honors college of the University of Oregon. He’s published lots of stuff on glaciers. Here is his latest paper with three coauthors. Your job is to at least skim it and judge whether it’s a genuine scholarly paper or a Sokalian hoax. I’m betting on the former.

Here are two excerpts from the abysmally written paper:

A critical but overlooked aspect of the human dimensions of glaciers and global change research is the relationship between gender and glaciers. While there has been relatively little research on gender and global environmental change in general (Moosa and Tuana, 2014; Arora-Jonsson, 2011), there is even less from a feminist perspective that focuses on gender (understood here not as a male/female binary, but as a range of personal and social possibilities) and also on power, justice, inequality, and knowledge production in the context of ice, glacier change, and glaciology (exceptions are Bloom et al., 2008; Williams and Golovnev, 2015; Hevly, 1996; Hulbe et al., 2010; Cruikshank, 2005). Feminist theories and critical epistemologies – especially feminist political ecology and feminist postcolonial science studies – open up new perspectives and analyses of the history of glaciological knowledge. Researchers in feminist political ecology and feminist geography (e.g. Sultana, 2014; Mollett and Faria, 2013; Elmhirst, 2011; Coddington, 2015) have also called for studies to move ‘beyond gender’, to include analyses of power, justice, and knowledge production as well as ‘to unsettle and challenge dominant assumptions’ that are often embedded in Eurocentric knowledges (Harris, 2015: xx). Given the prominent place of glaciers both within the social imaginary of climate change and in global environmental change research, a feminist approach has important present-day relevance for understanding the dynamic relationship between people and ice – what Nüsser and Baghel (2015) refer to as the cryoscape.

Through a review and synthesis of a multi-disciplinary and wide-ranging literature on human-ice relations, this paper proposes a feminist glaciology framework to analyze human-glacier dynamics, glacier narratives and discourse, and claims to credibility and authority of glaciological knowledge through the lens of feminist studies.

How many buzzwords can you find in the above? Doesn’t it make you want to bang your skull against the desk? I won’t torture you much longer, but here’s one more bit:

II. Why feminist glaciology?

Feminist glaciology asks how knowledge related to glaciers is produced, circulated, and gains credibility and authority across time and space. It simultaneously brings to the forefront glacier knowledge that has been marginalized or deemed ‘outside’ of traditional glaciology. It asks how glaciers came to be meaningful and significant (through what ontological and epistemological process), as well as trying to destabilize underlying assumptions about ice and environment through the dismantling of a host of boundaries and binaries. The feminist lens is crucial given the historical marginalization of women, the importance of gender in glacier-related knowledges, and the ways in which systems of colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchy co-constituted gendered science. Additionally, the feminist perspective seeks to uncover and embrace marginalized knowledges and alternative narratives, which are increasingly needed for effective global environmental change research, including glaciology (Castree et al., 2014; Hulme, 2011). A combination of feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology provide the intellectual foundation for feminist glaciology.

Oh, and I couldn’t resist this, near the end:

Second, we reiterate the need not only to appreciate the differential impacts of environmental change on different groups of people – men and women, rich and poor, North and South – but to understand how the science that guides attempted solutions may in fact perpetuate differences because they are, essentially, built on and draw their epistemic power from differentiation and marginalization. Struggles over authority and legitimacy play out in many obvious ways in climate change negotiations. Struggles also happen in less obvious ways, such as in the environmental change research underpinning climate politics. Analysts and practitioners must recognize the ways in which more-than-scientific, non-Western, non-masculinist modes of knowledge, thinking, and action are marginalized. The response to simplistic ‘ice is just ice’ discourse is not merely to foreground or single out women and their experiences – that would simply perpetuate binaries and boundaries and ignore deeper foundations.

Okay, weigh in below: real or hoax?

By the way, this was funded in part by the U.S. taxpayers:

How much did the first author get from the NSF? A reader found the official grant award notice, and the amount is $ 412,930. It was an NSF CAREER award approved by the Division of Social and Economic Sciences, and the title was “Glaciers and Glaciology: How Nature, Field Research, and Societal Forces Shape the Earth Sciences.”

Where is William Proxmire when we need him?

2015: “Kimono Wednesdays” cancelled at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts on grounds of cultural appropriation

February 24, 2016 • 10:00 am

Here’s one of the more ludicrous recent protests against “cultural appropriation”, one that actually succeeded in cowing a famous museum last year: the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was a harbinger of the “cultural appropriation wars” that are now raging on college campuses, in which, for example, improperly prepared General Tso’s chicken is deemed a cultural offense by Asian students (the dish is actually Asian-American, unknown in China).

The BMFA had scheduled what they call “Kimono Wednesdays,” in which visitors would be able to try on a kimono in front of Monet’s picture “La Japonaise,” a portrait of his wife Camille dressed in a kimono. The painting:

As the BBC and Boston Globe reported in July of last year, as part of a celebration for the departing director of the Museum, visitors were encouraged to pose in front of the painting wearing a replica of the kimono worn by Camille Monet, to wit:

There was also a Museum lecture, originally called “Claude Monet: Flirting With the Exotic.” (I do think that title is patronizing!) But this ignited protests that the kimono-wearing and touting of the “exotic” constituted “cultural appropriation and racist ‘exotification’ of Asian culture”. The title of the talk was changed to “Claude Monet: ‘La Japonaise,”, and they stopped letting visitors wear the kimono, though it remained on display. But the protests continued.

The BBC:

Some [protestors] stood with signs next to visitors who tried on the kimono.

“It’s not racist if you looks cute & exotic in it besides the MFA supports this!” one sign read.

Amnes Siyuan, one of the protest’s organisers, said: “A bunch of people tried to prove that they were not racist. That was not the point. We wanted to talk about why this event is cultural appropriation.”

Christiana Wang, another protester, said Asian Americans tend to be underrepresented and are forced into certain categories, such as the geisha or the quiet student.

Wang’s notion is one I don’t understand: are Asian-American women really forced into the category of “geisha”? If so, how? As for “quiet student”, if Asian-Americans retain a cultural tradition of not being loud or brash, surely that doesn’t force them to behave that way, and plenty of them don’t.

The protests:

As the Boston Globe reported on July 19:

The furor reached new heights on Wednesday as about two dozen protesters and half as many counterprotesters filled the MFA’s Impressionist gallery.

On one side, a group of mostly young Asian-American and white women gathered to protest “Kimono Wednesdays,” demanding additional context for the event and questioning views of Asians as “the other” in American culture.

They held signs with messages like “Not your Asian fetish” and “I have been assaulted, raped, harassed + stalked, denied my humanity repeatedly & you don’t want to think about me because I am just another Japanese woman.”

. . . Displaying a sign reading “Decolonize our museums,” a woman who gave her name only as Pampi, 36, spoke about the need to trace artworks to their first acquisitions, which she said were often violent, and charged the MFA with shirking its responsibility to curate the event for a diverse American audience.

I seriously doubt that the Monet was acquired or borrowed “violently”!

But, as the Globe reported, there were Japanese who supported the exhibit as well:

Stepping into the dispute this week were several counterprotesters wearing kimonos, including some older Japanese women, who advocated for the museum to return to its initial “Kimono Wednesdays” programming. One held a sign saying “I am not offended by people wearing kimono in front of French paintings.” Another sign read, in part, “I welcome museum exhibits that share Japanese culture with the community.”

Etsuko Yashiro, 53, of Concord, who helps organize Boston’s Japan Festival, said she was there to share the beauty of kimonos with an American audience. Ikuko Burns, 79, who was born in Tokyo and has lived in Boston for 53 years, explained how she used to bring kimonos to local schools as a consultant for the Children’s Museum to teach introductory lessons on Japan.

“I’m a little bit disappointed by the other side,” she said, questioning what the protest had to do with Monet’s painting and chalking it up to the participants’ youth.

Here are some women, two in kimonos, confronting the protestors:

kimonowednesday_02 — Matsuko Levin (center), Danyeun Kim, and Etsuko Yashiro were at odds with a group of younger women protesting at the MFA.. Photo by Kayana Szymczak for the Boston Globe

And another defender:

Even the Japanese consul in Boston was puzzled:

“We actually do not quite understand what their point of protest is,” said Jiro Usui, the Deputy Consul General of Japan in Boston. “We tried to listen to those people who are protesting, but we think together with the MFA we should encourage that Japanese culture be appreciated in a positive way.”

But, as AsAm News reports, the Museum caved under the protest:

“We heard concerns from some members of our community, and as a result we’ve decided to change our programming,” a museum statement read. “The kimonos will now be on display in the Impressionist gallery every Wednesday evening in July for visitors to touch and engage with, but not to try on. This allows the MFA to continue to achieve the program’s goal of offering an interactive experience with the kimonos—understanding their weight and size, and appreciating the embroidery, material, and narrative composition.”

And, as a further concession to the protests, the Museum held a two-hour discussion about whether the exhibit constituted cultural appropriation. Listen to the discussion below if you must; I’ve heard only snippets. (The discussion includes both supporters and objectors to the exhibit.) Some of the participants get quite exercised.

My own opinion? This was neither racist nor cultural “appropriation” (except in the sense that non-Japanese wore a kimono), but a celebration of a beautiful garment. Now if the subjects had made their eyes slanted as a way to mock the Japanese, that would have been rank bigotry. That aside (it didn’t happen), how often does anyone get to wear a kimono?I can imagine why some women would like to try (I would were I a woman!)

I can see the point of protesting the title of the original talk, “Flirting with the exotic,” for kimonos, at least in the past, were not “exotic” in Japan. But the protests went way beyond that. It became unacceptable for Westerners to simply don a kimono. And if that’s the case, then it’s surely cultural appropriation for Japanese to wear Levis, as many do. As we know, Western dress has become the norm in Japan.

This reminds me of the protests against Halloween costumes on the same grounds. But there’s a difference between wearing costumes to mock a culture, to celebrate a culture, or simply to dress up as a character for Halloween. The BMFA display seems to me to fall on the “celebration” side, while the protestors largely fall into the class of Special Snowflakes looking for any excuse to be offended.

Certainly the U.S. has treated Asians poorly in the past: think of the Japanese first- and second-generation immigrants who, despite having become American citizens, were still put in camps in the Western U.S. during World War II under the suspicion that they might be spies. That was insupportable, for at that very same time soldiers of Japanese descent were fighting for the U.S. against Germany. But this exhibit doesn’t come close to that form of discrimination.

It’s curious that at 6 minutes into the discussion, an organizer invites the audience to a reception with “tea and other refreshments”. Isn’t tea a cultural appropriation from the Japanese (and Indians)?

I try to be sensible of real discrimination against groups of people (of course I don’t always succeed), but after long cogitation I can’t see anything in these protests beyond a desire of some young people to be offended by anything. If wearing a kimono is racist, then am I racist when I wear my Indian kurta and dhoti when I visit India? Or even in the U.S.? Is a woman who wears a sari to an Indian music concert engaging in unacceptable cultural appropriation, or even racism?

I don’t think so, nor do I think we must always cave in to those who demand that we not adopt parts of their culture that we like. Surely we can hear them out, but their demands needn’t always be met.

I can dimly discern a bit of a rationale for the protests in the title of the original lecture: Japanese-Americans are not “exotic,” but just another ethnic group that has joined and contributed to the melting pot. But people need to learn that there’s a difference between celebrating a culture and denigrating it. I really do fear what this country will look like in 50 years if the trend of decrying “cultural appropriation” continues.

George Will lauds the hard-headedness of scientists over the mushiness of humanities scholars

December 19, 2015 • 9:45 am

Even a conservative can be right sometimes, including George Will. Although I long thought of him as a Catholic, he’s now declared himself a “low-voltage atheist”, which of course shows that he has some discriminatory power. In a piece at the Washington Post called “American higher education is a house divided,” he lauds the University of Chicago’s free-speech standards (I am SO proud of these), standards that have now been copied by six other schools, including Purdue.

Will also maintains, and I’d like to think he’s right, that scientists on academic faculties are less likely to buy into reflexive internet accusations, and more likely to promote free speech, than are their colleagues in the humanities. Admittedly, the data he gives are anecdotal, but I think that scientists’ instilled habits of doubt and questioning do put them on a straighter path than those who think that all viewpoints are equally “privileged”:

Scientists and engineers live lives governed by the reality principle: Get the variables wrong, the experiment will fail, even if this seems insensitive; do the math wrong, the equation will tell you, even if that hurts your feelings. Reality does not similarly regulate the production of Marxist interpretations of “Middlemarch” or turgid monographs on the false consciousness of Parisian street sweepers in 1714. Literature professors “deconstructing” Herman Melville cause nothing worse than excruciating boredom in their students. If engineers ignore reality, reality deconstructs their bridges.

. . . In their scalding 2007 book “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case,” Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson plausibly argue that Duke’s disgrace — a fictional rape; hysterical academics trashing due process — was driven by the faculty Group of 88. Signatories of its manifesto included “only two professors in math, just one in the hard sciences, and zero in law. . . . More than 84 percent described their research interests as related to race, class or gender (or all three). The Group of 88 was disproportionately concentrated in the humanities and some social science departments. Fully 80 percent of the African-American studies faculty members signed the statement, followed by women’s studies (72.2 percent) and cultural anthropology (60 percent).”

Higher education is increasingly a house divided. In the sciences and even the humanities, actual scholars maintain the high standards of their noble calling. But in the humanities, especially, and elsewhere, faux scholars representing specious disciplines exploit academia as a jobs program for otherwise unemployable propagandists hostile to freedom of expression.

Them’s fighting words, and humanities scholars will object, but there’s food for thought there. And no, not all humanities scholars oppose freedom of expression; that’s a bit of an exaggeration!

I love the humanities—or at least the objects they study—but the way I was taught literature and art was to try to understand it as an aesthetic object rather than to deconstruct it in a postmodern way, relating it to various ideological viewpoints or social movements. One of my friends, in fact, resigned as head of an English department in a major university because the faculty, rather than teaching literature in a way that would get students to both enjoy it and develop the habit of reading it, regarded it as a corpse to be dissected with Marxist tools, postmodern tools, Darwinian tools, and so on. Give me the New Criticism any day!

h/t: Diane G.

Tanya Luhrmann and the decline of the New York Times

October 31, 2014 • 7:06 am

As newspapers throughout the U.S. go belly up, there are only a few—actually one—that still represent high-quality journalism. And that one is The New York Times. Yes, it is still the go-to paper if you want substance and intellectual viands, but it seems to me to be on the decline as well. The science pages are slowly going downhill, dominated by superannuated writers (with notable exceptions like Carl Zimmer and Natalie Angier), and are increasingly heavy on “health and medicine” rather than pure science. Its opinion columns, too, seem lamer than they used to be.

Perhaps this is a “get off my lawn” moment, but having people like Ross Douthat as the best of conservative opinion speaks poorly for either conservatism or the paper itself.

But what cannot be excused is the Times’s signing of anthropologist Tanya Lurhmann from Stanford as a regular op-ed columnist. I had thought that her lucubrations appeared only online, but I read a paper copy of the Times yesterday and, to my shock, saw a completely lame column by Luhrmann called “Ghosts are back!”

Apparently this is supposed to be some Halloween-themed piece that yields some serious conclusions, but it seems totally muddled to me. Read it: it’s very short. Maybe my faculties are dulled by a miserable cold, but I can’t make heads or tails of what she says.

Here are her points:

1. Before the 19th century, ghosts were perceived as solid spirits.

2. After that, ghosts were transformed, as in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” into translucent spirits. This change apparently has great sociological import for Luhrmann.

3. This change in the solidity of ghosts, says Luhrmann, may reflect the decline in belief of the supernatural, so that ghosts became less tangible. She has another theory that is hers, too: the fake “spirit photography” of the era needed a way to distinguish ghosts from real people, so they were made transparent.

4. Changing gears, Luhrmann notes that modern culture is saturated with supernaturalism in the form of ghosts, sci-fi stuff, and the paranormal. One explanation (mine) is that the Internet has disseminated this stuff, as it has cat pictures and atheism. But Luhrmann has another theory:

Scholars sometimes talk about this supernaturalization as a kind of “re-enchantment” of the world — as a growing awareness that the modern world is not stripped of the magical, as the German sociologist Max Weber and so many others once thought, but is in some ways more fascinated than ever with the idea that there is more than material reality around us. In part, I think, this is because skepticism has made the supernatural safe, even fun. It turns out that while many Americans may think that there are ghosts, they often don’t believe that ghosts can harm them.

Well, first of all I’m not sure that the modern world really does entertain more belief in the supernatural component than, say, it did 50 years ago. Seances and Ouija Boards are out of fashion, and past-life regression seems to be disappearing. Where’s her proof that “supernaturalization” is increasing? And what is this about making the supernatural “safe and fun”? This seems to be an idea pulled out of one’s nether parts. Really, we believe more in ghosts (an unevidenced assertion) because we now think that they can’t hurt us?

This is apparently what passes for Deep Thought in the New York Times’s op-ed columns. Remember, Luhrmann gets paid actual money to write stuff like this. Can the Times find no writers that can actually have meaningful things to say?

But the worst part of Lurhmann’s column is its ending

There is, however, a deeper reason. Just as spiritualism became a means to hold on to the supernatural claims of religion in the face of science in the 19th century, the supernaturalism of our own time may enable something similar. The God that has emerged in the post-1960s “renewalist” Christianity practiced by nearly a quarter of all Americans is vividly supernatural — a Jesus who walks by your side just as Jesus walked with his disciples. This assertion that the supernatural is natural helps to make the case for God in a secular age, because it promises people that they will know by experience that God is real.

Perhaps technology plays a role as well. Our world is animated in ways that can seem almost uncanny — lights that snap on as you approach, cars that fire into life without keys, websites that know what you like to read and suggest more books like those. The Internet is not material in the ordinary way. It feels somehow different. Maybe this, too, stokes our imagination.

This suggests there may be even more supernaturalism in years to come.

Happy Halloween.

What? We have a revival of supernaturalism (which, by the way, is in her characterization nonreligious) because there is a new brand of Christianity that makes Jesus your personal friend? What the hell is that about? The recognition that people accept the supernatural (the religious brand) because they have a personal, transformative experience was the thesis of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book published in 1902. It is nothing new to claim that Jesus walks by your side, for that concept of a personal God has been going on for decades. And it’s not a claim that “the supernatural is natural,” either, regardless of what Luhrmann says. It’s a claim that “the supernatural is right here with you.”

As for the paragraph about automatic light switches and websites, that’s just padding. Really, does the existence of the Internet and advertiser-tracking really promote a belief in the supernatural? “Wow, Amazon suggested that I buy a book by Christopher Hitchens. That’s supernatural, dude!”

One gets the feeling here that Luhrmann is either casting about for things to fill a column on deadline, or that she’s trying to apply her studies on one Christian sect to other areas where they don’t belong. Either way, she’s filling up newspaper space with tedious and unsupported speculations. There is nothing here to stimulate one’s thinking.

I’ve written a fair bit about Luhrmann (see here, for instance), not because I dislike her—though I don’t sense a particularly deep thinker—but because I think she instantiates a new phenomenon: a secular analysis of religion conducted in a way that allows religious people to remain comfortable with their beliefs. Although Luhrmann’s stance is one of an objective anthropologist who just gives us the facts, in reality she is more like Elaine Ecklund, someone whose research implicitly buttresses the importance of religion. Both Ecklund and Luhrmann, I think, know exactly what they’re doing, and what they know is that espousing “belief in belief” will bring them renown, like getting columns in the New York Times. You won’t see someone like Sam Harris writing regularly in the NYT op-ed section, for his thoughts aren’t soothing enough for Times readers.

“Happy Halloween,” indeed!

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