anthropology

I just wanted to pass on a few good reads about the Haiti situation -- not so much the news, but some commentary on how elites, such as the media and organizational leadership (the UN), model institutional racism and classism.

First, Campus Progress published an interesting interview with Dr. Kathleen Tierney, professor of sociology and behavioral science and director of the Natural Hazard Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Tierney had some interesting things to say about the behavior of media outlets when reporting on large scale disasters.

And what did the early research discover?

If you go back to the 1950s and you look at some of those writings, a lot of it’s about disaster myths—what people say happens in disasters versus what really happens. What these researchers discovered was that the media—even way back in the 1950s and 1960s—approached huge disasters with certain frames. When the media reports on disasters, they’re inevitably going to focus on the dramatic and antisocial, even if it’s one percent of the population committing these acts. And even back then, the looting myth always came to the fore of media reports.

As it has in Haiti.

Yes. For example, the day after this earthquake in Haiti, it was reported that a prison had collapsed and prisoners had gotten away—the presumption being that they had escaped to go and loot. The prisoners didn’t go to check on their mothers or their sisters, they went to loot. And we presumably know this, because they’re bad people, they’re criminals. The bad people frame reached its nadir with Katrina.

It's really rare to gain exposure to a media outlet not run by a multimillion dollar corporation. Consequently, it's even more challenging these days to trust a media outlet's reporting on these larger events. With powerful corporations running these outlets, it's not hard to see how ratings and advertising drive sensationalism in our media. If the story's made more juicy, the idea is that more people tune in. But "juicy" apparently doesn't mean accurate. Tierney explains the looting fallacy the media reported in its coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

Do you think that because the victims of both Haiti and Katrina were poor and black, the media approached the stories with a certain perspective?

Definitely. There is an institutionalized racism in the way these poor black disaster victims are treated. The victims of Katrina were treated with so much presumption, as if you could assume they were going to loot, because they were black. Just like we know that the people in Haiti are bad because they’re black. Black men especially are demonized. During Katrina, the media picked up on every rumor—whether it was raped four-year-olds in the Superdome or people shooting each other. Actually, for a paper me and a couple of my graduate students wrote called “Metaphors Matter,” we found some transcripts of TV programs in which members of the media expressed regret. They were saying, “We really blew it during Katrina; we acted on all of these rumors.” I myself was on Jim Lehrer’s show, where they were asking about the looting [in Katrina], and I got into it with a police officer, and he ended up agreeing with me that it was a myth. It’s not real...

This institutionalized fear is also at play in the Haiti earthquake rescue efforts, only it might be a bit less based on race than class. To CNN's credit, it does a good job of shining a light on the questionable behavior of the UN leadership. Last night, a Haitian resident assisting those critically injured in the attack told CNN's Sanjay Gupta that the UN medical personnel had fled, ordered out by UN officials because of safety concerns. A retired Army Lt. General explained what was going on:

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who led relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said the evacuation of the clinic's medical staff was unforgivable.

"We can't be leaning so much toward security that we allow people to die," he said Saturday.

"Search and rescue must trump security," Honoré said Friday night. "I've never seen anything like this before in my life. They need to man up and get back in there."

Honoré drew parallels between the tragedy in New Orleans and in Port-au-Prince. But even in the chaos of Katrina, he said, he had never seen medical staff walk away.

"I find this astonishing these doctors left," he said. "People are scared of the poor."

It's very interesting to me that there's constant talk of the world uniting together to support Haiti, yet the very people charged with the responsibility of assisting the Haitian people bail when they stereotype the poor and imagine the bad things that might happen. In fairness, the rescue teams did return to Haiti this morning as the article noted, but the time they were gone last night is telling. As Dr. Tierney points out in her interview, it invalidates the "We're all Haitians" sentiment. Even though it sounds nice, realism tells us we're not. This fear of the impoverished and subsequent withdrawal from the area by UN forces is a display of cultural ignorance. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something that should be recognized. The reality is that the wide majority of non-Haitians has no clue what it's like to be Haitian, to live in such deplorable conditions.

I'm not writing this because I'm pissed off that this is going on. I simply think it's important that as many people as possible dig deeper than the glossy, convenient stories today's newscasts offer us. There's some compelling sociology and anthropology existing underneath the reporting. Once we become aware of that, I believe we can improve our responses -- both in the rescue work and reporting work -- to similar disasters in the future.

Promoted by Sarah

I've been doing some thinking on the role of a University. Our conception of what it should be is very different from what it is in reality. Professor Michael Wesch, a Cultural Anthropologist at Kansas State University put it very nicely a while ago:

Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously – not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our “subjects,” “disciplines,” and “courses.” McLuhan’s statement about the bewildered child confronting “the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called “the real world” which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is “merely academic.”

Not surprisingly, our students struggle to find meaning and significance inside these walls. They tune out of class, and log on to Facebook.

A true University should embrace learning, not teaching. A true University should view knowledge as a journey, not a scarce parcel. A true University should build a culture of the possibly of discovery through discussion at all times of day and night.

Instead we fidget in our chairs for three hours a day, spend hours dumbly thumbing through books in the library, and spend the rest of our time in a whirlwind of activity, trying to keep up with mounting piles of work, but also plunging headfirst into the elaborate civil society we've created to bring meaning, purpose, wholesomeness to fill the emptiness in our lives that our classes carve out.

Mr. Arne Duncan, tear down this wall.

What is a University? What should it be? I'm not asking you to describe your own college or similar institutions. Instead, what are the aspirations, hopes, contradictions, negations, paradoxes, stereotypes and associations with this concept? A University is not a college, the beer-soaked playground of the idle bourgeois, one long sex romp for the future staid suits of tomorrow. (In reality, perhaps it is, but we have entered the land of myths and symbolism).

I close my eyes and let my mind wander. The word University evokes vague echoes of Plato's academy, no? A grass and marble oasis of idyll, with students, their features wavering between long-bearded be-toga'd elders and excitable, sandy-haired fast-talking youngsters. These students might be tweed-jacketed, their brows furrowed too deeply for those so young, opening tomes in a rich velvet tomb of a room. Perhaps two women are striding to some unknown destination, the Pakistani explaining her understanding of the intricacies of physics to her Kansas friend. A rich tableau of images bubble and dissolve in a warm bath of emotions in the mind. Timelessness, Pursuit of Knowledge, Camaraderie, Dedication, Wholesomeness. All these concepts rush past my mind and double back to make sure they left their mark.

And yet, something is missing, is it not? Where are the professors? Where are these Socratic guides in this journey of intellectual discovery? A holistic concept of the University is intricately tied with those modern-day sages. They could be sitting down in a circle on a lawn with their students, leading them on a nature hike, arranging tours to local institutions of interests. They could be narrating the story of how a train stays on its tracks, or the first time they took a girl to a dance, while sharing a barbecue'd kebab with their pupils.

A true University should embrace learning, not teaching. A true University should view knowledge as a journey, not a scarce parcel. A true University should build a culture of the possibly of discovery through discussion at all times of day and night.

The "modern" University observes an archaic ritual, barely changed since those times when books were scarce and princes and monks paid to have a scholar read one aloud for hours a day. Michael Wesch, cultural anthropologist, explains the classroom:

I arrived early, finding 493 empty numbered chairs sitting mindlessly fixated on the front of the room. A 600 square foot screen stared back at them. Hundreds of students would soon fill the chairs, but the carefully designed sound-absorbing walls and ceiling, along with state of the art embedded speakers, ensured that there would only be one person in this room to be heard. That person would be me, pacing around somewhere near stage-left, ducking intermittently behind a small podium housing a computer with a wireless gyromouse that will grant me control of some 786,432 points of light on that massive screen.

The room is nothing less than a state of the art information dump, a physical manifestation of the all too pervasive yet narrow and naïve assumption that to learn is simply to acquire information, built for teachers to effectively carry out the relatively simple task of conveying information. Its sheer size, layout, and technology are testaments to the efficiency and expediency with which we can now provide students with their required credit hours.

Professor Wesch had his students produce a video on their experiences in the classroom:

It is strange, it is not? This take on a University is very different than the collective assumptions, stereotypes, and aspirations we have for what it could be. Perhaps this dream of what a University could be, should be, is a lie. Perhaps we are nostalgically clinging to a past that never was. Perhaps. However, the present is untenable. A generation of students and a generation of teachers are bound by a love of learning, but everyone can sense that the current model of schooling deadens the spirit and slows the mind of teacher and student alike.

Crossposted (with edits) to InnermostParts.org