For anyone interested in social stratification and university systems, Julie Garza-Withers has written “Is the Community College Still the Best Bet for Working Class Students?” over on the “Working Class Perspectives” Blog. This blog raises similar issues to what I wrote about in my essay here “The Sociology of Status Hierarchy and Why I Think Chico State is a Better College than UC Berkeley?” Or more to the point, Garza-Withers’  blog asks why such a premium is put on where you learned something, rather than what you learned?  And more importantly, she asks why there is an inverse relationship between the quality of teaching and the status of the institution; or in other words, why are the most dedicated teachers (and smallest classes) at the Community Colleges rather than at the more high prestige places?  (The reverse question of course is why at the elite universities insist on  teaching Anthro 101 in sections with several hundred students, and an army of inexperienced teachings assistants?)

To those of us a little lower than Berkeley or Harvard in the academic pecking order, the answer is obvious: It is because in the United States there is a class system which separates us into different institutions when it comes to the allocation of status. To those at the top of the pecking order go the privileges, status, and the right to explain why the existing system is right, just, and meritocratic. And as a result, those at the top are ever-ready to uncritically assume that their advantages, and assumptions about the nature of social status are simply the natural order of things.  They do this even though this rests on an otherwise unsustatinable assumption that what you do before age 17 to get into an elite university drives what rights you have for the rest of your career.

I just read Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class by Ross Douthat (who is now a New York Times Columnist), which I highly recommend to anyone interested in how such elites view and perpetuate themselves. Douthat describes how the upper class education institutions he experienced at a private school, and then at Harvard are used by the upper class to sustain the existing social order. The strong point of the book is that Douthat is one of the few from the upper class who not only admit to the advantages, but also write about the nature of such privilege. He does this while still appreciating the advantages of Harvard’s inflated grading system, and a chance for a midnight skinny-dip with William F. Buckley, Jr. Indeed, Douthat describes the modern privileges he gained via his Harvard education in the following fashion:

“Privilege, I have termed the sum of those poses and prejudices, though I don’t mean the privilege of ole—of social registers and massive Newport cottages, or farther back of titles and family crests. No, ours [at Harvard] is the privilege that comes with belonging to an upper class grown large enough to fancy itself diverse; fluid and competitive enough to believe itself meritocratic; smart enough for intellectual snobbery but not for intellectual curiosity.” (pp. 283-284).

This of course is an important acknowledgement in a society where the wealthy and the poor alike, for different reasons, like to assume that they are all “middle class.” Or as I learned from my first sociology instructor, Tom Bruce, at the very working-class Sacramento City College in Fall, 1976: We live in a society where poverty is associated with being a slob, and wealth with being a snob. And of course none of us want to be thought of as a slob or a snob. So for this reason, Bruce went on, we all uncritically assume that we are middle class, and therefore all is o.k. with the existing order. 

As a result we are as society (except in some isolated corners populated by the Working Class Studies folk, and Ross Douthat) are reluctant to recognize the inequalities that undermine our highest ideals.  If  Tom Bruce is not an example of why community college instructors aren’t great, I don’t what is!

      I went to Linyi, China, in June because a chance to teach in Thailand suddenly evaporated due to the May crackdowns on “Red Shirts,” leaving me with under-utilized air tickets.  So I asked a colleague to arrange for an invitation to lecture at the University of Linyi, China, in her home town.  She has always apologized for her home town, which as a demographer she points out is “not that important” even in Shandong Province which has several cities more important than Linyi.  As for Linyi itself, it only has about ten million people.  Unimportant though Linyi may be, that type of population should be enough to put it in the top 20 large cities for the world, i.e. somewhere between New York City and Los Angeles! Alas, a search of Wikipedia’s list revealed that while Linyi did indeed have 10 million people, but apparently such raw numbers are insufficient for getting it on any of the top-20, or even top 100 lists.  Apparently raw numbers is not only what such biggest cities lists are about.  China is big, but why shouldn’t a city of 10 million make some kind of list?

     So what does the city of 10 million which makes none of the lists look like?  The answer is that it really looks new.  Proud citizens of Linyi drove us around at night and during the day to show off the new construction.  Remarkable was the multi-story apartment buildings of which there were scores, if not hundreds.  Indeed, there were at least 100 thirty story buildings under construction, and expansive hopes that China’s they hope rural poor will soon fill them.  Hundreds of other buildings between about eight and 30 stories were already filled.

      Equally remarkable were the many public plazas, parks, and beaches constructed during the few years.  Sand was imported to make miles of the river shoreline into public beach front.  Public art was erected in many locales, and an impressive suspension bridge, and artistic lighting added an enchantment to the bridges and t.v. tower. 

      I lectured at a sprawling university which was newer, or under construction.  Linyi University dates from 1941, but construction on the new campus I went to began in the 1990s, and students first arrived in 2002.  Today Linyi University has 30,000 students.  The ninety or so I lectured to (in English) were attentive and eager to listen to what I confess became a lot of very dry sociology.  Children of China’s rural areas, they were eager to identify how sociology could fix what they call the “economic gap” between rich and poor.  Anyway, they laughed at most of my jokes.

      Linyi of course is part of China’s policy of rural transformation which is about the government’s attempt to address that “economic gap.”   In yet another giant leap, the city planners of Linyi are hoping to revolutionize life for the rural poor of Shandong, this time pouring them into the modern new skyscrapers.  In doing this they hope to re-create some semblance of the old life by keeping village groupings together, while serving the very new needs of what is hoped will be a new industrial economy.  This is of course a high risk plan—many earlier attempts have foundered on the limits of planned central change, and the laws of unintended consequences.  Whether China’s newest attempt at rural transformation will depend on the success of places like Linyi, and their capacity to absorb the hundreds of millions still living in China’s impoverished country-side. 

     In the context of such scale, it is of course easy to forget that point my colleague first made: Linyi is not that big or unusual in the context of a larger China.  Indeed, broader questions abound.  What will a Linyi of 15 or 20 million people look like in 2025? Or more important how many Linyi-size cities will there be in China?  As this happens, not only will China change, but so will the top ten, twenty, and hundred largest cities lists on Wikpedia. 

     Or just maybe this is another case of China and the eyewitness fallacy I wrote about before?

      One of the other blogs I participate on is a local one in our local county.  There is lots of local politics on the blog, of little interest outside of our little county in California.  Except that our Congressman, Tom McClintock, is a national figure.  He is the guy who stood up in on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington to complain when President Felipe Calderon of Mexico told the US that they had a lot of really stupid immigration laws which do not do a lot to regulate immigraton one way or the other.  This was not necessarily politic of Calderon even if it was the truth, but so goes it.  McClintock replied in kind, plus some, by advising Calderon to get in line in order to get a US green card, presumably by waiting umpteen years at the US Embassy in Mexico City where such things are sometimes issued.

      I didn’t like McClintock’s speech on the House floor because it was cheap demagoguery (and yes I am one of the hundreds of thousands who watched it). Immigration reform is a major problem in the United states, in large part created by the United States fascination with cheap labor, and the inability of the United States to come up with an administratively simple guest worker visa for the last fifty years or so. Oh, and then there is lack of US American interest in deporting the people who mow our lawns, staff our restaurants and sweat shops, and re-roof my house.  For that matter many illegal immigrants make donations via fake social security numbers which they will never collect, so their money goes straight to today’s retirees.  Yeah, this is obviously a real simple problem which can be addressed by Arizona’s new anti-immigrant law gone national, as guys like my Congressman seem to believe.  But then since McClintock seems to like demagogic ranting better then the hard slog of solving real difficult problems like immigration, let me make a suggestion.

       Let’s deport Arizona.  Yep, we can cut them loose, and be done with a whole bunch of problems.  After all, Arizona wanted to go in the past—they seceded in 1861 and joined the Confederacy in order to preserve slavery, even though they didn’t have any slaves.  Then when the rest of the states finally let them in the Union in 1912, they said no thanks, because we want to wait to join on the date on which they seceded to join the Confederacy and fought to keep the slaves they never owned (this is a true story—look it up in Wikipedia).  And then what did Arizona do once they were graciously admitted to the Union, despite the bad manners?  They stole a whole bunch of Colorado River water after California appropriated it from Mexico fair and square. In the 1990s they were the last state to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday, which kind of goes with their old fascination with the Confederacy thing.   Now in 2010 they pass an immigration law which is obviously unconstitutional under the equal protection, and search and seizure provisions of the US Constitution.  What can I say?  Typical Arizona.

       That’s Arizona for you.  Is it any surprise that we continue to get really stupid legislation from them like their immigration bill, or the bill banning school teachers with accents like California’s Governor, Arnold Schwarzenneger?  I say, let’s enforce the United States’ laws, and send Arizona back to where it came from.  Which I think is Mexico, by the way.  Do you think President Calderon might take Arizona back?  Maybe he can take time out of the decades long wait at the US Embassy for his US visa to consider this proposition.  It’s a win-win.  We get rid of Arizona, and Calderon doesn’t have to wait in line any longer for a visa to visit Tucson.  

      So now Congressman McClintock and I are even.  We have both had our demagogic rant.  Are we any closer to dealing with the problem of immigration and labor in the United States?

Some years ago, I asked the question, “Who Stole Culture from Anthropology?” in a brief essay in  Anthropology News in 2006. I raised the question because many anthropologists had complained to me since about 1987, about how they had trained “too many” anthropologists with the result that they were unemployed.  The discipline seemed to be in a perpetual depression, wallowing in its own insecurities, seemingly like no other.  This bothered me though, in part I guess because I was a victim of this insecurity.  Indeed, it was in 1987 that I first applied for graduate study in Anthropology because I thought the subject of culture—which anthropology has a special claim on—was among the noblest.  My application was rejected, and I was told by some old grizzled anthropological veteran that I was lucky not to be going into the field since, after all, there were too many anthropologists, and no one really cared about culture anyway.

But when I looked around me, I  found that many many people were “doing” the core subject of anthropology, culture.  At the university, these people were found in almost any department except anthropology.  Thus there are classes on culture and marketing, multi-cultural classrooms, genetics and culture, multi-cultural social work, culture and the law, and in my own discipline of sociology classes like popular culture, and cultural contacts/conflicts.

Many of these courses are well-done, but they do not keep culture at the center of what is taught.  Nor do they keep ethnographic observation, or cultural anthropology at the center of things.  Rather, they are expressions of their own disciplines, which is perhaps as it should be.  Thus, a class on culture and marketing focuses on how to sell in modern multi-cultural societies, the multi-cultural classroom course focuses on delivering a curriculum to a diverse audience.  Social workers learn how to offer services to people who have different understandings of “the system”, and biologists speculate about how culture selects for particular genes and not others.  In sociology, where we have the closely related concept of “society” and a strong emphasis on survey research, culture is often reduced to a box checked on a survey form.  But missing are the traditions of anthropology, including emphasis on field work, ethnographic writing, four fields approach, and the rich traditions of people like Malinowski, Boas, and Durkheim.

Chico State where I teach is right now engaged in an overdue dividing up of the “general education” curriculum.  Consistent with trends in higher education, we are developing seven (or eight or ten) pathways which students can select for their general education program.  There will presumably be pathways for internationalization, sustainability, communities, technology, health, and a range of other subjects which cut across disciplines.  Culture probably will not be there, though I suppose it should be.  But I wonder, if it was there, would our student body be served any better?  The range of courses they would be required to take would come from almost anywhere except anthropology, and it is still unlikely that our undergraduates would be required to read any of the anthropological greats, or listen to someone who has experienced the loneliness and anomy of anthropological fieldwork.

Cindy van Gilder once asked on this blog when anthropology’s wayward child—that is culture—would come home.  When will anthropology’s child ever finish flirting with the Business School, Education School, Sociology Department, or Biology Department?  Or in other words, when will Cultural Anthropology be given the same weight in the curriculum of the different disciplines as Accounting in Business, Classroom Management in Education, Statistical Methods in Sociology, and Genetics in Biology.  When this happens, maybe all those under-employed Ph.D.s from Anthropology will begin to claim their discipline back.

Most of us like to rant now and then.  Usually we do this in the quiet of a bar, with the assumption that as long as we never run for political office, the rants stay in the bar.  But with the invention of the world wide web, there are new parameters to the dissemination of rants.  Witness what has happened here on www.ethnography.com during the last week where Mark Dawson shot his virtual mouth off with the rant right below this posting.  Witness too the responses over at zeroanthropology.net.  Two guys in virtual bars a continent apart rip into each other, calling each other “moron” and “bigoted” across cyber space, while the rest of us vicariously and anonymously enjoy the fireworks.  The good news for www.ethnography.com is that the two rants by Mark Dawson during the last month or so have sent the hit rate, the thing that counts in cyber-space, through the roof.  His first successful rant was an April Fool’s joke about the dissolution of the AAA, and in May there is the “butterfly” rant.  It seems that some people like rants much more than ethnographic commentary; I guess that it gives us déjà vu to when we were eight years old.  In contrast, Mark has done some enchanting writing about the ethnography of clowns, and some girl’s picture on his bedroom dresser which have attracted less than 100 hits even after 3 years.  All people seem to care about are his rants—which can go into four digits within a few days of posting.

Rants by definition are rooted in opinion and emotion.  They are not logical or analytical.  Good rants make us look at the ridiculousness of life.  As Max Forte has implicitly pointed out, Mark Twain was a great ranter.  On the other hand, bad rants make us roll our eyes and mumble “there he goes again.”  Mark did this for me last week with his first rant about Anthropologists for Justice and Peace.  The rant was emotional and made a big deal about other people who were making a big deal over not much.  In other words, there was ranting about others’ ranting.  Big deal.  This type of rant is common on talk radio.  If you want to hear more such ranting from the right, I recommend Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck.  On the left you can go to a Michael Moore movie.  Depending on your political views, you will find them funny or not (for the record I typically put on rock and roll when Hannity intrudes into my evening commute).

But to Mark Dawson’s credit, he caught himself in a boring rant, and posted a mea culpa about butterflies and the Anthropologists for Justice and Peace.  This riposte in my view was a really good rant, and had me laughing.  I laughed at the rant because the rant made more general fun of cultural anthropology’s tendency to put their own political views at the center of their discipline.  Max Forte has in turn responded with an astute and thoughtful paragraph about the contagion of laughter, and what it might (or might not) mean about the one person in the room who is not laughing.  If you want to read it, scroll down into the comments section of Forte’s blog—it is thoughtful.

Anyway, to stick to Mark’s version of ranting, I have seen the political self-absorption described in Mark’s rant in any number of disciplines in the academic world, and agree that is a great thing to make fun of.  Much such ranting is on the left, but over in the Business and Engineering schools, there are plenty of people doing it on the right.  Perhaps I like hearing cultural anthropology made fun because the condition is worse there, but I doubt that it is any worse than Physics, Business, English, Biology, Sociology, or anywhere else.  Maybe I enjoy seeing cultural anthropology made fun of is more likely for more selfish reason, i.e. because my own application for graduate study was rejected in 1987-1988.  Whatever. Like I mentioned earlier, rants are not about analysis, and certainly not about self-analysis.  But, speaking of Mark’s butterfly posting, judging from the hits we’ve taken to the site since the revised version was posted last Wednesday, lots of people are laughing with us, since they have been linking it to their Facebook accounts to share with their friends and family.  In the blogosphere this is a definition of success, so whoop-ti-do, and good for Mark.

I will admit to wishing that my more academic and boring comments on www.ethnography.com would be a bit more popular.  I would really like it if readers posted them to your Facebook account like you do the rants that Mark writes.  For that matter, Mark would appreciate it if you read his ethnography of clowns, and the girl’s picture on his bedroom dresser.  But warning:  Such posts tend to describe ethnographic techniques, research methods, cite guys like Erving Goffman, and talk about the British Library rather than ranting about morons, fascists, and bigots, words which I think should be excised from ranting vocabulary.

Bottom line: Such serious ethnographic postings get far fewer hits than rants.  All I can hope for is that Mark’s rants besides making some of us laugh, point people to the more serious and boring stuff that Mark, Cindy, Donna, Jennifer, and I have posted to www.ethnography.com over the last 5 or 6 years.  But I have little hope.  In our post-modern world rants work, and Malinowski doesn’t.  Just ask Glenn Beck over at Fox News.  He never cites Malinowski!