veritas gratis

Anyone with the link can now access dolphin ascendant, our ramshackle online library.  If you would like to contribute, let us know.

(click here to view previous related posts)

UAB chapter of Alabama Citizens for Consitutional Reform upcoming meeting

The newly formed UAB chapter of ACCR is holding its second meeting this week.  The ACCR is a group of citizens united in advocacy for a reformed state constitution.  Our allegedly "sweet" home's constitution is thick and sticky with racist, outdated laws, including the foundations of a tax system that regressively and negatively impacts the poor and a stipulation that mandates that statewide votes be counted in order to change legislation.  The student film "It's a Thick Book" demonstrates both the structural violence carried out against already marginalized populations because of our constitution and also the irrelevance of our constitution to the reality of our biologically and culturally diverse state. Watch the film for free here, or here with a free teaching guide.  Details about the UAB ACCR meeting are below:

Hello everyone!

I hope you are all having a great Spring semester and enjoying this gracious weather.  As you will read on the attached flier, we are having our first ACCR event of the semester this Thursday night at 7pm in HHB 106.  This meeting is not only for UAB students, but for the surrounding community as well.  We want these meetings to provide an open forum for discussion and encourage positive action within our city.  Would you mind forwarding the event flier out to friends, students, faculty, staff, and anyone that you think would be interested in actively supporting our struggle for a new state constitution?

We will be viewing a short film, Open Secret, which I had the pleasure of viewing at the American Association of University Women conference this fall.  Using the actual transcripts from the 1901 Constitutional Convention as the basis of script, the film very adequately illustrates the cultural, racial, and political biases that comprise the legislative foundation of our great state.  We will also be discussing the next step in solidifying ACCR's presence on UAB's campus.
Thank you for your support, and I hope to see you all there!  

Sagan Spamming

Letting the people know what Papa Carl has to say (via google search).

Photo credit: Skepticblog

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. 

"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." 

"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." 

"Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge." 

"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense." 

Links to free PDFs of his writings:

"The Rules of the Game" (1997)

"Does Truth Matter?..." (1996)

Contact (1985)

The Dragons of Eden (1978)

Billions and Billions (1997)

Considering Gender

Last night the UAB Gay/Straight Student Alliance hosted a showing of the Groundspark film "Straightlaced: How Gender's Got Us All Tied Up" on campus.  The film is an amalgam of Southern California high school students of diverse backgrounds, gender identities, and sexual orientations speaking to their experience with and perceptions of the concept of gender.  The students consider gender as it is expressed in the media, as society or western culture instructs us to perform gender, and their own identities as they struggle with fitting in to the categories provided to us by our culture.  The students' voices are the only bearer of information in this film - with the exception of the documentary's narrative structure derived from the editor's understanding of the interview content - and their articulate young voices are a welcome grabbag of fresh perspectives on a binary that our culture is only recently attempting to move beyond.

Until I saw the film, I was unaware of the label "genderqueer" and its definition.  According to the biological female that identified herself as genderqueer in the film, the category encompasses individuals who do not identify as either male or female but rather a kind of third gender space.  Genderqueer is not analogous to the sexual orientation of bisexual in the context of the homo-hetero spectrum of sexuality because it is not a combination of male and female gender roles; instead, genderqueer individuals consider themselves as neither male nor female, but something else entirely.  This concept is difficult to grasp in a culture whose cognitive framework is so often founded on binary oppositions and language is equally dependent on these contrasts.  Much anthropological research exists on gender as it is culturally mandated and performed in other parts of the world, and a glance at this information can sharpen our understanding of gender in our own culture.

Anthropology is useful because it is the attempted scientific study of humans.  I emphasize the word attempted because the field's founders and practitioners - though they have certainly strived to proceed ethically - have for the most part failed to be both an objective voice on the reality of human existence and also an advocate for applying that knowledge to real world social and environmental justice problems; in other words, good anthropology is done with and for the people it studies, and it is my understanding that this is a relatively new idea in the discipline.  Despite the mistakes of the past, it is because of the diligent research of all previous anthropologists that we have so much data on the diversity of the human experience.

Most anthropologists recognize that gender is a performance because culturally proscribed gender roles are not dependent on biology.  In other words,  the behavior and mental categories associated with gender roles are arbitrarily determined by culture, not governed by material differences in men and women.  The fact that certain gender roles just happen to pertain to biological females and others to biological males is completely socially determined.  For example, in traditional Fiji, the female gender role is associated with inshore marine fishing while all gardening activities are associated with men.  This division of activities has nothing to do with the physical inability of Fijian women and men to carry out the gendered behavior of the opposite sex, but rather stems from 3,000 year old traditional cultural values.  It is important to note that even though gender is considered a performance of cultural standards of behavior and categories of thought that govern that behavior, gender roles are often strident in a way that the term "performance" does not convey.  Individuals who express gender in unique ways can be socially punished and in some cases are even considered "deviant" for violating their culture's gender rules.

Margaret Mead and her Samoan collaborators, dressed in traditional barkcloth skirts.

Early work done by Margaret Mead is considered to be the first research in Anthropology to challenge the idea that gender roles are biologically based.  In her book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, Mead compares gender roles among “the gentle mountain-dwelling Arapesh, the fierce cannibalistic Mundugumor, and the graceful head-hunters of Tchambuli,” and finds that each society expresses female and male gender roles in a different way (1935).  Most importantly, the genders and gendered behavior recognized by the societies she studied were different from - and in one case, quite the opposite of - genders and gender roles as they are expressed in American culture.  Though this book has since received criticism because of Mead's tendency to generalize data to fit her theory and her sometimes romantic prose, it was nonetheless groundbreaking in its assertion that gender is not innate.


A slightly more recent work by Serena Nanda discusses the third gender class of the Hijras in India.  In Neither Man nor Woman, Nanda explores the lives of Hijras, religious groups of men that dress and behave as women, but neither identify nor are identified as women or men (1999).  Hijras perform a specific religious role in certain ceremonies in India (mostly weddings and births), and because of their status as individuals of a third gender, are believed to have the power to bless or curse ceremony attendants.  However, also because of their status as individuals of a third gender, many Hijras must beg to survive.

18 year old Sonia in Armritsar, India
Photo Credit: Antonio Di Vico, Nazca Pictures

Photo Credit:  ASC Queer Theory Blog

Another frequently cited work by Nanda on the anthropology of gender explores the lives and cultural roles of third genders in indigenous America.  Titled "Multiple Genders among North American Indians," the essay discusses how early historical accounts of Native American gender variants referred to them as the Berdache, but that this term stems from the bias of historians because it is derived from the Arabic translation of the phrase "male prostitute."  Early misunderstandings of third genders by white anthropologists who could not see beyond their own culture's values have tainted what little evidence we have on the origins and past expressions of these third genders, but studying with existing North American Indians that identify as these genders has improved this.  Nanda notes that across American Indian societies, gender variants had these features in common:  "transvestism, cross-gender occupation, same sex (but different gender) sexuality, some culturally normative and acknowledged process for recruitment to the role, special language and ritual roles, and associations with spiritual power" (2000:14).  More information on Native American gender variants are available here.  [shameful plug: Nanda's essay appears in this introduction to cultural anthropology reader].

"Two-Spirit" people of the Crow Indians.
Photo credit: AllyAction

While these are just a few examples of gender roles as they occur cross-culturally, they illustrate that just like sexuality, religion, and table manners, gender is not limited to just our culture's categories of expression, but is more like a spectrum of human diversity and possibility.  

Graphic Credit: I'm in Flux

I recently read the fantastic book Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman's 2010 update to their 1993 book about members of our culture who bend America's gender rules into something new.  Both volumes are composed of original contributions from untraditionally gendered individuals and provide insight to the struggles and triumphs faced by those that choose to create their own gender reality.  Like the film "Straightlaced," these books - along with the emergence of Queer Theory as a social science and the increasing portrayal of untraditional genders in the media - demonstrate that the movement to go beyond a dual-gendered cultural system is well underway in America.  I think an anthropological perspective remains as salient to our culture's understanding of gender today as it has been in the past and can only lend more context to this movement; I hope to use the perspective provided by the cross-cultural lens to ignite social change through my own activism, teaching, and research.

The glitter rainbow - an appropriate symbol for the gender spectrum?

   

"Dolphin Ascendant" launch announcement

Exciting news on the freedom of information front:  we have launched a website where all of our digital copies of educational materials will be accessible.  Everything from encyclopedias to documentaries to copies of lesson plans and class notes will be available on "dolphin ascendant."  It will take a few months to get the hyperlinks working properly and a few more to increase our online storage capacity, but we do have a few things up already.  Because of fair use laws, access to the site is limited to people who ask us for permission via email.  I personally invision a future where access to information is not limited to those who have the money to afford internet access and educational materials.  Unfortunately, this utopic notion is not reality, but perhaps "dolphin ascendant" can play a small part in getting us there.  Just zoom an email to mydoglikeschz@gmail.com if you are interested in access.

Historical Ecology Wikiproject - seeking editors

Below is a copy of the email we sent regarding our new encyclopedic endeavor.


Greetings!

We are undergraduate anthropology students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.  This past semester we took a course in Historical Ecology in which we were challenged to develop a project that enhanced education in the subject.  We chose to create a historical ecology wikiproject to unite diverse researchers interested in improving the quality and quantity of wikipedia articles relevant to the topic of historical ecology, and we invite you to join our efforts. 

Specifically, we hope to encourage fellow project editors to join us in researching and composing sections of articles on the historical ecology of their own regions - we have already begun work on a new historical ecology section for the Jefferson County, Alabama wikipedia article.  We are seeking anyone interested in investing time and effort into developing similar sections for their own location's wiki article page.

If we gather enough support and our proposal becomes an actual project, we hope over time the wikiproject will both foster a greater public understanding of human/environment interactions and also encourage dialogue between theoretically diverse researchers from many different bioregions.  If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us - our information is below.    

Here is the link to our wikiproject proposal page:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals/Historical_Ecology
For more information on wikiprojects, please visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiProject

Thank you for your time, and we look forward to collaborating with you.

With all our regards and respect,

Anna McCown
admccown@uab.edu

Lindsay Whiteaker
lins090@uab.edu

Jake Delisle
jdelisle@uab.edu

Changing Education Paradigms