Grey, grey, unrelenting grey.
The lake appears to be frozen over completely, though it is still on the thin side in parts. The boats' cold grey metal matches the ambient air and the ice all around. Only the bits of exposed grass and wood of trees and tree stumps provides any color contrast at all.
It takes a second or third look before I even notice anything but the flat grey of the ice. But here's something interesting. . .
It appears someone has been out there . . .
Could it be that the ice fishermen are already testing the thickness in anticipation of their favorite winter pastime? And are those hockey goals? And human footprints?
Most of the evidence I see around here these days is from my other neighbors.
I tried this morning to make friends with a squirrel sitting and taking a drink by licking at the snow accumulated on the railing of my back deck. I was slow and steady in offering an outstretched hand of sunflower seeds, but the animal was not eager to trust me. Perhaps it's just as well; I have some ambivalence about humans forging paternalistic relationships with our other animal neighbors.
. . .
I woke briefly at 7:00, but returned to sleep and didn't get up again until 1:00 this afternoon! That's what Tylenol PM does for me, I guess -- a bit over nine hours of uninterrupted sleep and then a whole day of foggy semi-delirium. But better that than the tossing and turning of most nights, especially when I'm writing and navigating multiple deadlines.
Last night, after collecting a mass of article printouts, films, library books on children, parents, adoption, children and the state, children and anthropology, interdisciplinary perspectives on child abuse and neglect, etc, for the paper I'm working on for Dr. Sarri, and splurging on a manicure that helped a bit with the eczema I get on my hands in this weather, I met up with Zac, Alice, and the gang at Leopold's to celebrate Zac's birthday. Shayla stopped by to pick up my copy of
Discipline and Punish, reinforcing my latest habit of never going to a bar without an academic text in my handbag. We had a grand old time, and I had a fabulous conversation with an old college friend of Alice's, Tim, who's in the B school and the school of public health. We talked about Brazil, and Roma, and community development practices in Detroit, and so many other things I lost track. . . lovely indeed to make a new friend.
We all shuffled over to Happy's Pizza at about 1:00 or so and shared some surprisingly good pizza in the rather surreal, very un-Ann Arbor-like environment there. Of course it was about 3 by the time I got home to the cottage, and I followed what's become my standard practice of putting on my slippers, turning up the heat, and remaining in my down coat to watch an episode of something on ABC's website to distract me until the house isn't quite so frigid.
Last night it was the second half of the Grey's Anatomy cliffhanger. I enjoyed it, but . . . I don't suppose I'm the only one who's finding this season to be rather dull in comparison to previous ones? Does this have to do with the writers' strike? I wish the f-ing networks would just settle with them, already. It's time to recognize the importance of the contribution they make to good entertainment. I'm a little embarrassed by how attached I've become to silly TV programs, but they really help me relax and unclutter my mind when so much of my day requires so much of my brain capacity.
. . .
Anyway, it was because I didn't bathe and crawl into bed until almost 4 am that I slept so bloody late, and I'm actually
still finishing up my "morning coffee." It took me about an hour to get my computer to recognize my external hard drive, for some reason. Just one of those days, I guess.
It was just the right kind of day to bake, so I made a loaf of
banana bread, just the way I like it, scant on the sugar, heavy on the bananas, with loads of walnuts, and just whole wheat flour with a hint of buckwheat flour added.
While I was waiting for it to finish baking, I settled down on the couch to watch some old ethnographic films by
Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, in the
Character Formation in Different Cultures series. I didn't know anything about the films, but I found them through Mirlyn when I was doing research for this paper, and they caught my eye. I thought they might have some piece of interest in this rather amorphous paper I'm working on for Dr. Sarri. And I knew they'd also have really great ethnographic footage, because I'd expect nothing less from
Margaret Mead.
And finally, I have a lot of interest in a few related things that make me keen to give some more attention to the Boasians: (1) how anthropologists present (and have presented) their findings to the/a "public" beyond the academy, particularly through museum exhibitions and films, but also in other media (2) the use of film by ethnographers, both as a data collection tool as well as a medium of "writing up" or codifying findings into a final product, (3) how these products, in turn (from both items 1 and 2), have shaped, reinforced, transformed, or otherwise influenced discourses about culture, difference, and boundaries, that circulate in popular media, and (4) ethnography and activism.
They're odd little films, both of them, illustrative of the typical concerns of the
Culture and Personality school in American anthropology (see also
Alabama students' site) -- childrearing practices and their influence on the development of adult character and human behaviors within a given cultural context. They also demonstrate the same kinds of flaws I saw in other works from this school's work when I was reading Mead and Benedict in Traditions a couple years ago -- a nagging essentialism (a tendency to see culture as a reified and bounded set of traditions, practices and beliefs, rather than as a process and series of relationships), a tendency to exaggerate certain similarities and differences, and an apparent action agenda imbedded in the
One is called
Bathing Babies in Three Cultures and it documents the bathing practices of a handful of mothers in
New Guinea, the United States, and Bali. First, we see two Yetmo mothers going in succession to the Sepik river in New Guinea to bathe their children in the river, all "brisk and businesslike," working quickly with one child at a time, holding the child at all times, in an environment that frequently has crocodiles.
Second, we see two examples from the United States, first from the 1930s and then from the 1940s, demonstrating what Mead describes as the "careful, conscientious" approach of the American mothers, who keep their hands nearby, "ever watchful, while giving [the child] an illusion of independence". Mead notes the continuities between the '30s and '40s in American mothers' bathing practices: They both bathe the children in a porcelain tub, take time to play patty-cake and with rubber bath toys, and dry the children in large towels, and immediately diaper and dress the babies. But she also points to a departure from the 1930s concern for a regimented day according to the clock in the later bathing sequence, and the consequent increase in the mother's apparent calm. "The child is fed when he is hungry," not according to a schedule "mediated by the clock" that makes mothers anxious, she says.
Finally, we watch a couple bathing sequences in Bali. Here, the child stands in a small tub for the bath. The first mother is relaxed, and very playful. The mother splashes the child, the child splashes back. This apparently forms the basis for Mead's characterization of Balinese mothers' "playful, teething, but inattentive" manner of bathing their children, in contrast to the ways of American and New Guinean mothers. But I wonder why she makes the claim so strong when her second example, of an older mother who is bathing her youngest child, who demonstrates "not as much inclination to play" as the first mother does, and is from my observation, almost as "brisk and businesslike" as the New Guinean woman dipping her baby into the Sepik river.
The second film,
A Balinese Family, follows about a year or so in the life of one particular Balinese family, the Karmas of Bajoeng Gedé. The family is quite large, with six children, and some of the children live not in the nuclear family home of the Karma parents, but the homes of their grandmothers. Mead (writing and narration) and Bateson (photography) guide us through a series of observations of parenting practices, and interactions between parent and child, and among the children. At the risk of sounding essentializing, myself, and noting that this is one family observed at a particular point in time in the 1940s, I'm noting down some of the more salient points for my purposes right now:
- At least in this larger family, there is childrearing of older children by extended kin in separate housholds
- Balinese children are fed by giving them a coconut bowl that they can carry as they walk about, feeding themselves at their own pace.
- Rather young children are assigned the duty of being a "child nurse" to his or her younger sibling. The child-nurse learns to wrap the baby in a carrying sling to hold him or her against the child-nurse's hip.
- This child-nurse is responsible for carrying the baby around in this fashion for a whole year
- When the baby grows to be too large to be supported by the child-nurse, an older sibling takes responsibility for bathing the child
- Support for children learning to walk is provided in the form of a "walking rail," a single dowel elevated by two stakes and placed in the center of the courtyard, where very young children can use it to balance themselves for standing and walking around it, without being confined (as in an American playpen). They periodically fall on the ground and stand up again without parental intervention.
- There's are distinctive affects, according to Mead, that characterize youngest and second children, and even in this family, where there is no youngest child after Kenjeon, she begins at a point in time to demonstrate the typical "unresponsiveness of a second child in the Balinese family".
(That last point is one I'm curious about, but anyway, that's what she says.)
Hmmm. Nothing more to say about that at the moment, but it was an intriguing thing to watch while slowly making my way through my coffee and eating my first couple slices of banana bread.
Okay, well, thanks for humoring me while I think through the films a bit. I think I'm demonstrating that I'm just about ready to go back to the rhythm of seminars again, since I'm seeking the opportunity to talk about my research in the bar and in my blog. Ack.
Some stuff for further reading:Stocking, George, ed. (1986)
Malinowski,
Rivers,
Benedict and
others :
essays on culture and
personality.
Robert A LeVine (2001) Culture and Personality Studies, 1918-1960: Myth and History.
Journal of Personality 69 (6), 803–818.
Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and FilmIra Jacknis
Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 3, No. 2 (May, 1988), pp. 160-177
Husmann, Rolf (1992). A Bibliography of Ethnographic Films. Berlin
-Hamburg-Münster: LIT Verlag.
Ulewicz, Monica and Alexandra S. Beatty (2001). The Power of Video Technology in International Comparative Research in Education. National Academies Press.
Hockings, Paul (1995). Principles of Visual Anthropology. Walter de Gruyter.
Web links:
Ethnographic Film Series
University of South Carolina Educational Films DatabaseCarnegie Mellon Anthropology Video Filmography Overview of Methods in Visual Anthropology
