Anthropology Times

Letters to My Tutor…
Reading: America Day by Day

My dearest Simone,

You write of Harlem as if it’s the same America as the rest of New York City. I wonder whether people at the time were upset about that. Even in my lifetime there was still this heavy sense that black America was America with an asterisk. It’s not so much less true nowadays as it is that many right-thinking people, as you say, have declared that being a different skin color isn’t a problem anymore as long as you’re just like white America in every other way. A lot of lip service is given to multiculturalism, but I find that most (particularly middle-class white Americans) are not comfortable with that concept in practice beyond a colorful holiday or the like; in social situations and everyday encounters, (middle-class) white people expect non-whites to act white or at the very least to acknowledge that the white way is the right way (gender roles, household makeup, family structures, rules of politeness…) In some ways the “racist” South is more geared toward accepting cultural difference than the rest of America. Among people who believe that a god made the “races” separately, there is a deeper acceptance of the idea that you have to learn to live with difference somehow; they do not as readily accept or apply the concept that homogeneity is the solution to inequality due to racism. I often heard growing up that in the North a white person can have a black person over for dinner, but they can’t be friends, while in the South, a white person can’t have a black person over for dinner, but they can be friends. After living out West for a while, I find it easy to imagine the genesis of that statement.

I appreciate the bits of history that you include. I was not familiar with the “Father of Harlem” Philip A. Payton, the black man who spearheaded the idea to rent spaces in difficult-to-fill apartment buildings to blacks. I was familiar with the “white flight” that you described, that as blacks moved into more of the apartment buildings in Harlem, whites left the area en masse. A recent article in the Washington Post makes note of a trend toward more segregated neighborhoods in Prince George’s County resulting from affluent blacks wanting to live in neighborhoods with other affluent blacks. Some of the comments may speak to the fact that despite the promises of post-racial rhetoric, it may not be so simple for blacks, even educated, affluent ones, to pass for white once skin color is discounted and further they don’t want to. I’m interested in whether the trend in Prince George’s County is present elsewhere.

I will write more on February next time.

With all my heart’s sweetness,
S.

Letters to My Tutor…
Reading: America Day by Day

My dearest Simone,

When I first started writing here I considered keeping a running illness narrative documenting my return from medicated mind fog.  For the most part I did not do this, but since it’s been a year it seems like a good time to add to the notes I did make here and there.

Reading of your arrival in New York, I see the perfect description of my return from the land of fog.  I recognize my mind again.  I recognize my thinking, but still it doesn’t feel completely real.  When you write, “All the world is in limbo. I say, ‘This is New York.’ But I don’t completely believe it,” it’s as if you have known my mind’s journey.  The mechanics, the structures, the pathways are all familiar to me again, but the flesh, the skin is missing.  It’s all a matter of exercising my faculties and rebuilding a certain level of confidence.  “Will I be able to reincarnate myself?” you ask, and this is my worry.

I admire your warm appreciation of the lies we tell in the convenience of everyday speech and their underlying truths.  You write that you are just a name bandied about among mutual friends when recounting a phone call with otherwise strangers:  “I say again, ‘I’d very much like to see you,’ It’s not even true, and they know it; it isn’t them I want to see because I don’t know them,  But the voices are almost friendly, natural.  This naturalness already comforts me, as a kind of friendship.”  As children we all struggle with this discordance as we learn language and culture.  Does anyone ever really settle into a place of prattling off these repeated and rehearsed lines without a steady dialogue that reads much like what you wrote?  Some people appear to carry out days and weeks and months and lifetimes of these exchanges without much underlying thought, notice, or discomfort.  As my mind becomes more energetic, I feel I must work harder to find the comfort in these exchanges.

Your talk of impoverished artists in America echo some of my current considerations.  “But in Europe there was nothing dishonorable about poverty: a poor artist experienced the favors and friendships of bohemian life.  By lending him money, people provided one of those services that is natural between friends.  Here, says C., no one would let you die of hunger, perhaps, but offers of dinner or a loan are alms granted grudgingly, making friendship impossible.”  I’ve been thinking that friendships with a wide range of people would be more comfortable if I made a bit more money.  I believe it true that if people here feel that your situation begs for assistance even if you do not, they feel less comfortable around you.  The services of which you speak are not natural between friends in America particularly when these friends could be said to be in different economic brackets.  At any rate, I am taking special pains to be more productive at my paid work with this very consideration in mind.

Many times I’ve heard that we are spoiled for choice in America.  A friend once marveled at the length and breath of the cereal aisle.  You write, “A thousand choices, but all equivalent,” and how this abundance of choice might create a false sense of freedom.  I’ve long believed that a false sense of choice has become a cornerstone of American democracy.  In what some have labeled a post-racial era currently, some political candidates take careful recognition of how American have grown comfortable with this false choice.  It seems several “ethnic” candidates have gone with the message that the fact that I look different is a sign a progress and increased choice and opportunity, while communicating strongly that in they ways that matter I’m the same type of candidate you’re used to.  You write, “There are a thousand possibilities, but they’re all the same.  A thousand choices but all equivalent.  In this way, the American citizen can squander his obligatory domestic freedom, without perceiving that this life itself is not free.”

And the clock ticks and tocks.  I should post before midnight.

Until next time,
S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I plan to read more articles, but in the coming weeks I will write about reading America: Day by Day.  I had planned to do this when I originally mentioned reading the book, but never worked it into my update schedule.  I will likely revisit a few things from the past year before moving on.  Here’s a brief update on my state of mourning for my friend:

I do not feel as much that there is a hole in the world. I think I may have moved on to a more restorative phase of mourning. I can smile and laugh more genuinely when reminiscing as well as when suddenly reminded of him. In recent months, I’ve seen several people in passing who look a lot like my friend. I believe most of the times there has been a similarity with the nose and the shape of the face, but I suspect that if I were to stop the person the overall similarity would be less than the impression created in a fleeting glance. In addition to similarities in physical appearance, I’ve noticed people with similar mannerisms and/or speech.  Several morning ago there was something in the way a stranger greeted me in passing that gave me goosebumps. I don’t immediately recall specific stories of people talking this way during my childhood, but the stories exists and they were generally communicated in a positive fashion. I’m sure I could find several people from Mississippi who would say that these recent experiences were evidence of my friend trying to communicate with me from the beyond, and my most immediate and guttural response is in line with this thinking.  I try to take joy in the feeling rather than be dismissive of it. My friend very much believed in spirits and ghosts and having this feeling reminds me of him. The one other time I remember having this experience also involved someone who died suddenly, and it involved noticing people with similar voice and manner of speaking.  I wasn’t close friends with this person, but we had significant shared experiences and we shared close friends.  That time the experience occurred much closer to the death.

I will mix in some more updates on things from the past year over the next few posts.

Yours always,
S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I’ve completed a year of self-study in anthropology.  I will likely continue with more of the same for a while.  I will have more to say about that later.  Over the past week, I came across something that I wrote in high school.  I was struck with the sense that it sounded like an angle an anthropologist might have used.  I wrote this during a timed test for which we had the option to free-style an essay in lieu of writing about whatever literature we were reading at the time.  It was popular with the natives back then and it was printed in the school paper unedited.  The quoted material is from the student handbook.  Some of what I wrote then seems useful to me now.

Much love,

S.

Budding Anthropologist?

The Demise of Antiquity: Europe and the Mediterranean in the First Millennium AD
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 18: 227-244 (Volume publication date October 1989)
Klavs Randsborg
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

This is another article that leaves me wondering what the editing process may have been like.  For instance the final section is labeled “Conclusions,” but it introduces a complex subject, symbolic representations, that hadn’t been covered earlier in the article and didn’t seem to sum up or touch on the overall themes of the article in a conclusory way.

Of more note, is the lack of clarity as to which parts of the author’s discussion were based on archaeological evidence.  In the introduction Radsborg writes that “new archaeological data … is drastically changing our picture of the period and of the world …”  I didn’t come away with any clear ideas of how this was so from the body of the review.  For example, Radsborg notes that archaeology has greatly increased the understanding of rural settlements during the first millennium, but the discussion that follows doesn’t clearly delineate which bits of information, such as the fact that the farms were quite large and as many as 20 of them could make up a single settlement, came specifically from archaeological data, were bolstered by archaeological data, or came mostly from historical sources.  A previous article I read on Norse archaeology that covered some of the same time period, made mention of specific dig sites in the body of the review.  It was nice to be able to google the names of these sites for further information on what was found there and how it added to or challenged the existing history.  Names of dig sites would have been helpful for this review.  I imagine that looking at the references would answer my questions, but it’s nice to have a bit firmer toe-holds in the body of the review.  The author does such a great job of providing toe-holds for exploring the causes of the fall of the Roman empire and factors that were important in the rise of modern Europe that I wondered whether useful toe-holds were removed during editing.

The review on Norse archaeology and this current review both emphasized the value of the knowledge gained from medieval archaeology. The Norse review noted that medieval archaeology was often thought of “as an expensive way to find out what we already know.”  Reading both reviews, I was generally left with a positive view of the types of people who do medieval archeology in that they seem to be the sorts who question whether we really know what we think we know or  whether we are missing important bits of information that we hadn’t even considered that we were missing; they also seemed to heavily promote interdisciplinary efforts that highlight differing angles. Radsborg writes that he enjoys discussions of the fall of Rome that include both internal and external causes for the fall.  He says it doesn’t matter so much whether the theories are right or wrong seeing that the discussion that comes from including multiple angles is so much richer.

It’s possible what I saw as a lack of toe-holds in parts of the review was a strategy seeing that Radsborg has written a book covering the same material … show ‘em that you got skills, but leave them wanting more …  The First Millennium AD in Europe and the Mediterranean: An Archaeological Essay.

Ever yours,
S.