Tonight there was a great discussion in class about Einstein, Aristotle, and a character I wrote about at Ethnography.com a couple of years ago, Mr. Life Without Parole (LWOP). Mr. LWOP was a 21 year-old inmate confined by California to one of its high security prisons, and from there sent into “solitary confinement.” It was there I met him. And it was there he pointed out to me that “Life could be worse,” since after all, he could be looking at death by lethal injection, rather than life without parole. Well, yeah….
The discussion tonight in class was in part about E. T. Hall’s anthropological book The Dance of Life, one of my favorite books about culture. In the book, Hall claims that culture is more about Einstein, who pointed out the “everything is relative,” rather than Aristotle who believed that an objective truth existed out there, if we could only figure out what it was.
So what was Mr. LWOP, Einstein or Aristotle? The answer of course is that he was an Einsteinian, pointing out from the dark depths of “the hole” that everything, even prison sentences are relative, and indeed, things could be worse.
Which of course doesn’t solve the question of what an inmate on California’s death row might have to say—but somehow the human spirit is indeed more Einsteinian then Aristotleian, and always searching for a glimmer of hope relative to something, anything that might be worse.
Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996. In 2016 though he suddenly found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. He has also been a guest professor in Germany, and Tanzania. In the past, his main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Crime and Immigrant Youth (1999), Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), and Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012). His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies. Tony is a prolific academic, you can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.