The cringe test

I'l admit that I'm more than a little amazed at the hullabaloo that surrounded Juan Williams' remarks about being afraid of Muslims in "Muslim garb" (whatever that is...) on planes, and his subsequent firing. Actually, what really amazed me was how little was said about his remarks before NPR decided to fire him for them. The outrage, it seems, is less about his seriously troubling remark and more about NPR's "intolerance".  Yes, the world 'intolerance' has been tossed about quite a bit these past couple of days, and most of it with reference to NPR.  Check out these headlines: "NPR's Taxpayer-Funded Intolerance" [WSJ, Oct 22]; "NPRs Intolerant Funding of Juan Williams" [The Examiner, Washington, Oct 21]; "a Brief History of NPR's Intolerance" [foxmews.com, Oct 21]. 

And of course, the whole "free-speech" argument is made.  And this is what makes it all so tricky. Should Williams have been fired for exercising his freedom of speech?  Now, there are a couple of points I want to make in this regard. One, is that while we all are awarded the freedom of speech here, I do think that as with most freedoms, this one too comes with certain responsibilities.  And if we occupy a position where our opinion is heard, considered and given more value than that of the average schmoe, it is doubly incumbent upon us to exercise this freedom with some thought and restraint.  Two, we may be free to say what we want, but we are not guaranteed freedom from every consequence of what we say.  So, really, we ought to think more before we speak. Free speech is so much more valuable when it is thought-provoking, rather than being merely provocative. In this world of tweets and sound-bites, considered speech seems to have taken a back seat to merely free speech.  And our lives are not the better for it. 

But if still in doubt, then I strongly recommend putting the rhetoric in question through the "Cringe Test".  Here's how it works:  replace the word 'Muslim' (or whatever other ethnic, religious, political category is currently under scrutiny) with the word 'Jew' or 'Black man/woman'.  If the resulting statement makes you cringe, then it's probably not as acceptable as folks would have you believe.  Try it.

On a side note, the best response I have encountered to this whole fracas has been the site, "Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things." 

Why does it matter?

I read recently that the apparel retailer 'Gap' had come out with a new logo, but then ended up reinstating the old one because of a huge outcry.  To quote from the BBC article: 


"US clothes retailer Gap has scrapped a new logo just one week after its introduction following an "outpouring of comments" online...The new logo on the website had "Gap" written in black against a light background with a small blue square behind the top of the letter "p". But critics attacked the rebranding on social networks and online forums.

More than 2,000 comments were posted on the company's Facebook page on the issue, with many demanding the return of the traditional logo." (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11520930) 

And reading this, I wondered, "Who are these people?!"  Personally, I don't think I could get myself worked up enough about the logo of a company unless they threatened to paint it on my front-door.  If the company is making the same clothes as before, their stores are not moving en-mass to the other end of town, and their stance on wages, sweatshops, out-sourcing, resourcing or what have you has not changed in any substantial way, why in the world does it matter if their logo looks different?  

Are people's lives so insipid that something as pointless as this could get them all riled up?  There are other more pressing issues that could do with some of that consumer anger and angst.  Facebook's removal of their lovely round-edged thumbnails, for instance... It makes me so angry...

Meeting the bug-eyed aliens...

I read this article the other day: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11041449.  It talked about the suggestion that folks ought to expand the search for extra-terrestrial life to include "sentient machines" and not just biological life. And this got me thinking. Who is doing the looking?  And has anyone really granted them the right to look? Let me explain. 


I'm an optimist, and I've been bred on my fair share of well-intentioned  aliens.  But  for every pointy-eared stoic Vulcan who has taught us something about being human, there is a menagerie of fanged, slavering, bug-eyed, ice-cold, robotic-limbed, cybernetically enhanced, disappearing, mind-reading, probing, spindly-fingered creatures that has given us the shivers.  And while trying to assess any possible intelligent life out there through an anthropomorphic lens of 'good' and 'evil' may be silly, it still begs one to wonder if contacting these intelligent beings may not be in our best interest.  After all, most humans don't consider themselves evil for tromping over ants in our path or eating chicken.  What if the alien beings who may be out there just consider our little planet a yummy source of food or fuel, or just another rock in the way of a Galactic Super Highway (shout-out to Douglas Adams!)?  Do we really want to be letting these critters know we're out here?


And this brings me to my main point: Considering the potential hazards of signalling our existence, has anyone asked humanity for its collective permission to seek out alien life-forms?  Generally speaking, we don't really take the folks looking for aliens too seriously. But this means that there has never been a referendum to determine if such a search is a good idea or not.  For something that could have huge implications (for better or for worse) for everyone on this planet, we have not really stopped to ask if this is ok with the rest of humanity.  There has been no vote on whether all of us, or even if most of us, want to find or contact alien intelligence.  And if/when this does happen, we may be asking ourselves one big question: who the hell signed off on this? 

When your interlocutors can google you

Over the past year in the field, I've googled myself assiduously. This I've done not out of vanity, but to make sure I knew and managed what information about me was out there.  To have control over what is to be known about me is an entirely reasonable thing to want. But out in the field, where one hopes to share confidences with one's interlocutors, the willful withholding and management of information about myself enters an ethical grey zone.  One begins to tread that fine line between being a private individual and being disingenuous.

I’m not being naive here. I really don’t believe that my interlocutors, as close as my relationship with them may have become, share every detail of their lives with me.  I am not even presuming that they always tell me “everything” that is relevant to my area of research. And that is their prerogative. 

But I approach them as an ethnographer knowing that they are part of a certain social/economic/political/religious/linguistic group. And most likely, it is their membership to any or all of these groups that has led me to them.  So while I may not claim certain knowledge of their inner motivations, I do know a great deal about who they are in these milieux, what their backgrounds are and, in many cases, what their public activities in these spheres are. They, on the other hand, cannot claim the same. Most of them only know that I am a student from a university in the United States who is doing research in India on Sufism; they know of course that I am an Indian Hindu.  Some who have heard of anthropology would know that I am one of that breed; some would know I am married, have no children, and have relatives who still live in India. They may have a faint idea about my economic and social, but would really have very little idea of my political and social views, my hobbies, my friends…unless I choose to tell them.  It is clearly an imbalanced equation. 

I am sure that they have constructed and deconstructed me. I’m sure they have imagined what my life in America must be like, and what my routines and motivations might be.  But on many accounts, their imaginings would be off the mark by miles because they only see me out of the context of my usual life.  I change my mores and lifestyles so that I may fit in better with them and learn more from them by not being a jarring presence in their midst. And it is this “modified me” that they know and construct their imaginings from.  And it is with this “modified me” that they interlocute, and in so many cases accept within their homes, their families, their sacred spaces.  And all of this makes me wonder…would they tell me the things they tell me, permit me the kind of access they do, consider me an equal in many measures, if not all, if they knew all they would if they saw me in my “natural habitat”?

I work with people who are for the most part, socially conservative.  They are wonderful people who are extremely generous and kind to me when they really have no reason to be; they get nothing much out of my research, and yet give me so much.  But these are also people who quite clearly believe that homosexuality is a sin, or that drinking alcohol, wearing clothes that don’t cover you from neck to ankle is a sign of moral lapse.  And so I again wonder: How would my interlocutors react if they saw photos of me carrying supportive banners at a Queer Pride parade, or knew that I drank and wore sun-dresses?  Would they still think me worthy of the information they give me?  And this is especially pertinent since my research is on issues of religion and spirituality—topics deeply entangled with questions of morality.

     We no longer live in an age where what biographical details we wish to disclose is entirely within our control. Doing research in urban areas among folks who have access to the Internet means that your interlocutors can google you.  And as it stands, I certainly don’t want them to have access to those photos from the Pride parade or that picture of me with the tankard of beer!

But I struggle with this.

Of trees and forests

Gaining an empathy for trees is perhaps an occupational hazzard (I use the term quite loosely) for most socio-cultural Anthropologists. I speak metaphorically, of course. We work with and within relatively small groups of people, gaining confidences, building long-lasting relationsips and bridges along the way. We get to know the people we work with not just as members of larger communities, but as complex personalities with complex desires and aspirations. Is it any wonder then, that Anthropologists make for very bad liberals, and worse liberal reformers? Revolutionary reform requires one to look at the big picture, to think of change en-mass, macroscopically. If the lived realities of a hand full of people have to be sacrificed for this "larger good", some great and much-needed reform, so be it. If one concerns oneself with the minutae of human existence and the violence inherent in sudden change, one is not meant to be a reformer or a revolutionary...in the conventional understanding of these terms. 

Think of the veil, for instance (I know, I know...cliched). But really. I'm not talking about the hijab (a scarf of some sort worn to cover just the hair and ears), which frankly is a non-issue made disproportionately political. Think of the full-body veil--the naqaab or the burqa. Bluntly put, I don't like it. I honestly feel that it robs women of their person-hood in many ways, and places the onus of moral regulation too heavily on women's shoulders. This is an old and oft-made argument. And I know enough people who think that it should be banned, or that the movement for "liberating" Muslim women should be focussed on throwing off the burqa, and that only a revolutionary act of that nature can bring any change to the warped person-hood created by the full-body veil.  But as much as I think the burqa is a form of violence against women, I cannot bring myself to join this revolutionary cry and equate unveiling to liberation. I know too many women who are able to exercise agency in some measure simply because of the burqa. They are mobile because of the burqa; they have access to education and employment because of the burqa; they are able participate in public spaces (and public spheres) thanks to the burqa. In communities where "female modesty" is taken very seriously, the burqa allows them to leave the confines of their homes and become a part of a larger world. And while I am aware of the feminist discourses on patriarchal hegemony and a need to reject them, I cannot but conclude that any law, any mass and imposed effort or discussion to do away with the burqa would be an act of immense violence against these women for whom the burqa ensures a measure of freedom. *
Even in terms of the anti-sweatshop movement in the US, I find myself often on the "wrong" side of the debate. For as much as labour reform is needed, as much as labour conditions in sweatshops are dispicable and need desparate change, boycotting certain manufacturers can mean loss of much-needed unemployment, penuary and starvation for real people in the short-term. The long-term goal of labour reform requires the sacrifice of the basic requirements of human beings somewhere in Indonesia and Vietnam right now. And my conscience cannot entirely abide by this. 
Someone once asked me, "But isn't reform good? Isn't it necessary? How can you be against reform?" I'm not sure what the solution is. How can macro-changes be effected while ensuring that individuals caught up in these revolutionary moments of "reform" are not victims of violence, that their agency is not stripped from them for the "larger good"? Maybe the solution is the lack of one--that is, not that one side is conseded to be the right one and the other, the wrong, but that the battle is ensured continuance. That for every person who wants to ban whaling (or veiling), there is someone willing to stand up for traditional whaling (or veiling) communities; for every radical revolutionary who wants to reconfigure the forest, there is a naiively empathetic tree-hugger. Both sides may be nuts, but someone's got to do it. For descending into solipsism is not a happy option, methinks. 


* I personally think it's a good move when criticism of the burqa becomes part of the religious discourse and debate among Muslims themselves.  As with this example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8290606.stm. This means that the anti-burqa discourse is framed not in third-wave feminist terms, which has so many problems of its own, but in terms of the worldview of those who veil or support veiling.