My gut reacts pleasantly to the elections

So, after an excruciatingly long campaign, America has elected its first African-American president. We've heard all the adjectives by now: "historic", "seminal", "inspirational", "thrilling" etc. But I did not anticipate feeling the way I did the day after the elections. I woke up on the 5th of November feeling inexplicably good about being in America. And the first thing I thought to myself was, "I don't think I'd mind being an American citizen now."
For many years now I've been decidedly unenthusiastic about applying for citizenship here. The idea of putting my hand to my heart and pledging allegiance to the United States made me very uncomfortable. Sure, I love my American friends, I love the academic institutions I've been affiliated with, I love my Midwestern cat, I love my home, my garden with its view of pine trees and maples, now turning vermilion and gold. But feeling a sense of belonging to a place, a land, a people is vastly different from feeling any affinity for everything a nation stands for...and for the past eight years, this nation has seemed to stand for all the wrong things.
But on November 5th, it seemed like America came closer to its ideal than it had ever before. Sure there are still inequities here, there is still corruption of the highest order, and domestic and foreign policies that sicken the soul; but there is also that sense within me that here, now, we have a chance for redemption. I think to myself, "If this country can elect a person called Barack Hussein Obama to the nation's highest office, if the majority of its people are capable of growing past the basest of xenophobic reactions, then this is a country I would like to be a part of."
If someone had asked me a few days ago if an Obama presidency would make me reconsider my stance on citizenship, I would have shrugged and said 'no'. But, unexpectedly, his victory has given me a sense of optimism not only about America, but about the nature of humanity and its capacity to see difference, accept it and think beyond it.

Musings of a bored grad student

I sit writing in my lovely little office on the third floor of Alumni. It's a glorious autumn day and through my window I see giant oaks, their leaves still green as the summer. But here and there a little golden leaf drifts down, the sun catching its final dance. But reminding me that there is beauty beyond the realms of nature is the Corinthian pillar that stands so close to my window. Its curlicue tops almost within reach--the only thing that redeems this otherwise unremarkable building of grayish yellow. All of this seems like an indulgence amid my prosaic pursuits of the day: more drafts of pithy abstracts and proposals that attempt to play mind-games with over-worked reviewers. The pointlessness of this exercise is not lost on me. How bizarrely conceited I feel...pimping my research, worrying about my Dickensian writing, dotted as it is with passive -voice and an over abundance of clauses.
I crave moss-covered silences. I crave a place where my deadlines and my rejected proposals do not chase after me; where the stillness of a moment is not interrupted by the guilt of unaccomplished goals, the pestering of tasks left undone. I am no longer the Ulysses who craved the roiling waves of an open ocean; I want to linger with the Lotus Eaters, content in the languid warmth of each day.

Spore sets our view of humanity back 150 years.

The new video game ‘Spore’ is the talk of the town in gaming circles these days. At the heart of this game (created by Maxis of SIMs fame) are evolutionary processes. The game starts with a strange planet where a little microorganism has just landed piggy-backing on a meteoroid. The fate of this little critter rests in the hands of the player who has to choose various mutations, deciding which direction this organism takes in its evolutionary path. The game has been commended by biologists for introducing the concepts of contingency and randomness as important factors shaping the evolution of any particular species.

The problem is that the game doesn’t stop at biological evolution. Tied into this game is a fundamental presumption that societies also follow these progressive evolutionary patterns. Once the organisms in this game have reached a level of sentient intelligence, the players have the option of moving them on a path of supposedly increasing cultural sophistication from “simpler” tribal societies of hunter-gatherers to space-travelling species.

This view of societal “progress” and “evolution” sets our view of humanity back a hundred and fifty years to the time of early anthropologists who presumed that non-European, non-urban cultures were naturally more primitive and less-evolved. These early thinkers placed tribal populations the world over, who were contemporaneous to urban Europe, at an inferior intellectual strata, marking them with labels of “savage”, “barbaric” and “backward”. It was a teleological view of the human species with more "primitive" peoples climbing a ladder of progress towards technologically sophisticated civilizations.

Spore gets things wrong at two fundamental levels. One, its very premise—of placing cultural and technological difference as a difference in rank as opposed to a variation in type—is faulty. Anthropologists in the 20^th century have worked over-time to correct these presumptions of their predecessors only to be confronted by techno-geeks in the 21^st century falling back on the same fallacy. The second way in which Spore messes things up is by presenting (biological) evolutionary time as being of the same scale as cultural and technological change. Evolutionary time spans millennia; any given mutation requiring unimaginable quantities of time to transform into visible special differences. Technological changes within human communities, on the other hand, are incredibly fast and short-lived in comparison to evolutionary time. For the creators of Spore to speak of technological change in the same breath as evolution gives players a distorted sense of time, with eons of evolution occupying the same scale as decades of technological change.

As a gamer, Spore is incredibly exciting to me. As an anthropologist, it makes me shudder.

Priding and Parading in New Delhi

Never in my life had I even imagined that I would participate in a Queer Pride parade in India. But it's happened. On June 29, 2008 New Delhi (along with Bangalore and Calcutta) witnessed a spectacular show of pride on the part of the Queer community and their supporters. There were Gays and Lesbians, Bis and a good number of Transgendred and Transsexual folks. And many, many straight people who'd "come out" in support of the Queer community.

The organizers initially had hoped for a turnout of around a hundred people. Amazingly, though, the group that marched from Janpath to Jantarmantar numbered a little more than a thousand! Provision had been made for those who wished to remain anonymous: Rainbow striped masks were available for anyone who wanted it. I showed up at Janpath with a friend expecting to see a small sombre group of masked individuals. Instead, we found ourselves in a festive sea of smiling faces, chanting and hooting, waving rainbow flags and carrying banners up high. I expected police aggression and some right-wing Hindu groups to show up and set things on fire...but all I saw was immense enthusiasm. The cops looked amused and happy, the spectators looked genuinely interested, the press was respectful and we encountered no hostility as we made our noisy way down one of Delhi's busiest streets.
My friend and I walked with a banner that read "Delhi be Proud", and chanted "Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isaai, Hetero, Homo Bhai-Bhai" (Hindus, Muslinms, Sikhs, Christians, Heteros, Homos: We're all brothers!), a take on India's favourite national diversity slogan, and sang "Hum honge kameyaab", the Hindi version of "We shall overcome". We also called for the legalization of Queer behaviour (the offending Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code being the object of our collective ire).

Finally, we stopped near Jantarmantar, paid our respects to those whose circumstances would not permit them to participate in the parade and lit candles in a silent vigil. When everyone began to disperse and we walked back down for some coffee, we saw the street strewn with rainbow flags, we passed outrageously made-up hijras twittering and laughing about the few incredible hours we had all just spent, and all seemed right in the world.

What's morality got to do with art anway?

A month or so ago, after the Grammies, I heard a lot of talk about how giving Amy Winehouse an award only legitimized her drug use. Really? I wonder how true that is, and more importantly, if it is true, does it matter? Does our appreciation of a work of art have to be contingent on the moral rectitude of the creator? I say no. And not because artists are some how exempt from a culture's moral code, and neither because it is an impossibly high standard to keep up for too long. I do think that the aesthetic value or the deep meanings inherent to art constitute an entirely different cultural entity from the artist who has created the work. I am not asking that the artist not be judged for his or her moral and ethical failings; what I am saying is that the work of art itself ought not to be indicted for the sole reason of its creator's flaws.
Take the infamous Wagner, for instance. A member of the Nazi party, a man committed to the Aryan cause and the the genocide that it entailed, Wagner is perhaps the poster-child of this debate. But how much ever I abhor the man, his actions, and what he stood for, I cannot and will not say that his music does not move me. I will admit that not having personally experienced the holocaust and never having known anyone who has, my reaction to Wagner, while very strong, is not visceral. His music does not immediately bring to mind concentration camps; it brings to mind Valkyries and Saxons! But having said that, I do not feel that knowing his past, I must be compelled to condemn his music along with him.
When we create works of art, we bring into the world what is in some measure, the best in us...what is most human in us. And having created art, it is no longer merely of us but of the world. When we create a work of immense beauty, or something that speaks to a certain truth that dwells within humanity, we unwittingly create a being that reflects what we perhaps could have been. Surely, art is bigger than we are, more sublime, and more human than we are? Should it not be judged as such?

Brown peoples in boxes

We were in New York in December and while there, we visited the American Museum of Natural History. I love natural history museums...those huge bone-sets of dinosaurs and mammoths, whales precariously hanging from ceilings, elk and egrets staring at you with glassy eyes that betray no hint of resentment. Takes me back to my days as a little kid, wandering the halls of Bombay's natural history museum, spotting Great Indian Bustards and White Rhinos. Imagine my utter dismay, then, as I saunter through the Museum in New York, walk past the gallery with the orangutans and the lemurs, and find myself confronted by a semi-naked brown man blowing darts at an unseen victim. I had never before seen a fellow brown man in a glass box, and needless to say, though he was made of wax, the effect was jarring. It did not stop with the semi-naked man blowing darts. The Museum is apparently full of glass boxes with brown peoples of all shades in them--South American, Polynesians, East Asians, South Asians, Africans, Arabs, Plains Indians, Coastal Indians. Where, I wondered, have all the white folks gone?! There is something profoundly disturbing about seeing a flock of curious ruddy-cheeked, blue-eyed kids gather around a glass box with a brown person in it. Some colonized, brown core of me balks, my inner knee buckles. Surely, if peoples of other lands and cultures were interesting enough to put in a Natural History museum, then why not throw in some Bohemians, some Teutons, some Gauls. I'd have loved to see a diorama of a smoky Parisian cafe (with a label about how with the recent smoking ban, this little scene would soon be extinct)? Or a snapshot of the running of the Bulls in Pampalona? A scene from Oktoberfest? A few Vikings thrown in for good measure? Nope...none of that. Only brown folks. I could have accepted prehistoric brown peoples, but there were exhibits from the not very distant past and the 20th century-- a diorama of Samakhand complete with Persian carpets and hookahs, or the box with the Mongolian yurt, for instance. What we're seeing here is the classic association of the non-"Western" with nature and with the past. The brown person, placed in a glass box flanked by Mammoths and Orangutans.