(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

it's too cold to climb out on the fire escape so i am smoking in my bed, listening to "the royal tenenbaums" soundtrack which is the music i will forever assiciate with this winter that just passed. with christmas lights at polish bars and various ways of feeling colder and colder and listening to it when it was beginning to get light out. i think i have a different brand of insomnia in the winter.
much as i am excited about my grants and the way my project seems to have fallen together, at least in theory (i will know more next week after i talk to this one bio anthro professor), but i do regret that i won't be able to spend the whole summer in new york again. i love summers in new york with the rooftop parties and wine in sidewalk cafes and wandering through the east village at three in the morning when the ground is still warm. and i won't get to have my birthday with friends again...i have not celebrated my birthday with friends since i was 18...and even then, that was with charlie and my ex-boyfriend, and we had to go to court, for fuck's sake, so that birthday could have been better.
i slept a full night's sleep for the first time in about two weeks, as a result i am feeling belligerently lazy today. i woke up, got some sushi delivered, watched "curse of the jade scorpion" which was really funny, and did not even climb out of bed until 5. claire is in town because she is reading a paper at some conference at columbia entitled "murderous whores in the night of the world" (the paper, not the conference) so i am waiting for her to get done with that so we can go out. yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn. must. wake. up. maybe it's that i did not have coffee today.

Comments

[vaguerant.livejournal.com]

Pardon my asking, sir. What's your upcoming research? And why can't you stay in NY for the majority of the summer?

Re:

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

ahhh, did i not tell you? i got my grant money...i am going to the jungle...so i will be gone most of june and till the end of july....the research, provided that it all works out, will be working with this indigenous group in the amazonian basin who got missionized relatively recently so just looking at cosmology changers, esp. w/r/t concepts of guilt and shame and marriage/sexual practices as a result of missionization...
of course, the specifics remain to be seen...the imporant thing is that i might have found a group i can work with...they are in easternmost ecuador, the Auco...there is a bio anthro NYU person who has a biostation down there because he works on spider monkeys and he has contacts with the local population and he's been saying for years someone should do cultural work with them...so i am going to talk to him about visiting this summer and assessing the situation...i will have to be there learning quechua anyway...this all sounds very confusing, i'll tell you more on the phone...
*smooches*
nica

rere

[remsaverem.livejournal.com]

well, i was going to post, but then i got too tired and distracted so i didn't.
but since you responded to me anyways i thought i'd say hello ;)

when do you head down there anyways?
i still have that extra plane ticket to new york that must be used by... december i think it is.
not much has been going on around here, massive influx of family this weekend, which was all in all pretty cool. some are still here. i have horrid cramps and about 2 weeks of homework to make up, so i'm going to go immerse myself in the world of circuitry, trigonometry, and vector math. please shoot me.

and oh, hey... have you ever seen a show on tv called 'the other half'?
i came home from work today early since i am in so much pain and was laying on the couch flipping through the channels. its this show for women (?) hosted by men (?) and its really, really weird. not quite judith butlery but definitely social contract issues. the hosts of the show are actually dick clark, this kid from saved by the bell (slater i think), and some other guy who is good friends with a man who runs the national inquirer (what a combination eh?). todays guests were a bunch of polygamist women, and there was a whole section on fasion faux pas'. i'm still trying to understand what i just watched. and one other question... what did angel do to drive druisilla insane (i still don't know that full backstory).

okay, i'm off to misery for a bit.
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmwa.

Re: rere

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

no, i have never seen that show but now i am confused and intrigued from your description...i am not sure i understand the format...hm.
um, let's see, if everything goes as planned i will head out june 7th or 8th and be back at the end of july. this is the program i am going to do with FLAS money
http://www.asu.edu/clas/latin/ecuador/
the first half sounds kind of cheesy, the second one pretty cool, but i have to do both in order to get the grant, which is fine because it will give me more time to do language stuff. i will have a 5-day break between the two parts which will fall on my birthday so i want to do something fun for that...maybe meet up with people...you're going to be in cuba then, right? that will be awesome, so interesting. the rest of the time when i am not doing that program i will have to go check out a possible field site that is near the bio anthro guy's biostation. i have to get more shots, ouch.
you can come visit any time before or after that...wanna come in august? that way you will see new york in the summer, which is just amazing, and you can stay at my new apartment which is not ridiculously far away (or, as we say in russia, on devil's horns) and i won't have school and you won't have school...right? or if you want to you, and you can work-wise, come in may, before you take off to do your summer thing... :)
angel tortured and killed drusilla's entire family before her eyes, she fled to the convent, all messed up already, and on the day she took her vows, he turned her into a vampire. and then much later she turned spike into a vampire. mmmmm, spike....

whoops--this should be the response to VAGUERANT

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

haha, my browser was not opening picture icons for some reason so in a temporary bout of dyslexia i mistakenly thought that your reply was from my friend andi...hence my response above was addressed to her...
so, answering your post properly and coherently this time:
my project is working with a small-scale preferably isolated group of Indians in the amazonian basin who have been the subject of missionanization in the last 20 or so years. i am interested in seeing how cosmology and cultural construction of self and personhood gets affected when a radical cosmological influence from the outside becomes a factor. my specific interest is sexuality because a) missionaries focus on practices more so than beliefs, and sexual practices are a biggie and b) that's the area in which alterity and different behavior is particularly corporeal and tangible. i am interested in what happens in terms of cultural constructions of causality and associations when linguistic and psychological concepts like guilt and shame get importend. mostly i like the ethnopsychological approach, but also foucault is really useful in terms of the changes in space and practices of living that take place...like restructuring of the household, changing of architecture of the living spaces and planning of the communities and stuff like that...i got a FLAS grant (it's from the US gov't for study of foreign languages) to do a program in Quechua in Ecuador and another grant thanks to which i will be able to go check out a possible field site. So i'll be there for a couple of months. hence no summer in new york, at least not till the end of july. um, and why am i sir all of a sudden? last i checked i was still of the female persuasion...of course, gender is all construction and performitivity and all that judith butler stuff, but still...

moo

[vaguerant.livejournal.com]

In what way is Foucault useful in that sense? You mentioned reading Discipline and Punish a month ago. Something like his habit of analyzing structures and spaces to describe the investments of panopticism? Or some sort of reorganization of hierarchies where the indigenous people's bodies and their behaviour become objects of knowledge?
Not sure how Foucault's typically historical approach would fit in with something as tangential as a missionary-culture, since missionaries don't tap into the same resources as far as control goes.

It does sound like useful subject matter. Besides being a kind of exciting and uncertain. Why the interest in that specific region?
I'd imagine it'd be difficult getting specific psychological information (guilt, sexuality) from the natives if you're also a tangential part of their culture, who's just learning the language.
I admire you for doing something so original and creative. :) Very cool.

Re: moo

[(Anonymous)]

ok, fuck-o, as my friend refers to him, is useful more for idea generation and a kind of assessment analysis than for any sort of comprehensive methodology. partially he is useful for understanding the history of colonization and missionization in Latin America--one of the first things the Spaniards did in order to comban native resistance and syncretic religions that were arising was to literally relocate the indians from pueblos to citys, consolidating as many as 20 pueblos at a time into a very different sort of physical, urban, public space that was organized in a panopticum kind of way--so, the main plaza where religious and cultural expression took place was surrounded by institutional, monitoring structures like the church and the jail. in terms of what is going on today, the missionaries will come in and restructure the houses so that the sleeping arrangements are different. thus their idea of sin, and the indiginous idea of sin (or lack thereof) will be contested and played out in a domestic space that will literally be restructured by the missionaries and the bodies will be located and organized in a different way, relfecting a different sort of ideology and practice. again, it's interesting to look at it in such a way, but my main interest is ethnopsychology, not Foucauldian historicizing. the concepts that are really useful to me are categories like Robert Levy's hypercognized versus hypocognized language, and looking for the possibility of descreptancy between the transmission and reception of ideological information (so, i am interested in situations that are quite common where missionaries thought they were really succesful because indigenous people accepted jesus, except it turned out they just integrated him into their preexisting polytheistic canon of gods). The difficulty in getting specific psychological information depends and varies form place to place.

metamoocil

[vaguerant.livejournal.com]

This might be redundant for you to go back to an old entry, and I'm sorry for my long periodic absences. I disappear regularly, which is annoying to everyone I know.

I see what you mean now, as far as idea generation goes. I never knew that aspect of Latin American colonialization, but that certainly explains the architecture of and organization of certain cities that come to mind. Using fuck-o in that way makes a lot sense to me now. But again, I assume the recent missionaries that head over to developing countries these days do not have such strict methodology or freedom to redesign living spaces. They're not exactly branches of larger colonial nations (but their own individual churches), which previously used religion as an investment of power; and the countries they're trying to invade have often developed in reaction to European colonialism, and have a certain sense of self-determination. I don't really know, though, what these missionaries do when they flock to other countries, since I've only met a few young ones. Usually Mormons.
I've never read Robert Levy before, but that aspect you speak of sounds like an interesting focal point. I imagine the language these missionaries think and speak in is so saturated with cultural context that there definitely would be some problems in meshing two incommensurable viewpoints through a translator. Concepts like the polarity of original sin and divine righteousness that comes from a single God, etc. could be recuperated in unusual ways. I'm curious to see how your research pans out -- in a way it seems as if it's starting from hypotheses based on theories which have their roots in other contexts, rather than a hypothesis developed from direct observation. It might change a lot once you get there.

Anyway, yeah. I think what you're doing is quite cool. My own experiences after college haven't coalesced so well into single goals and paradigms, and I envy people who know what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how they're gonna get there.

Re: metamoocil

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

don't worry about not replying for periods of time; i am impressed you keep up with your lj as much as you do with all your voyages.
you are definitely right about hypothesis being based in theory, but for the most part that's the catch-22 of all graduate research (unless you are one of those rare social science students who follow the science student model and conduct their research under the umbrella of the previous academic research and data of their advisor). so after i do some preliminary/pilot fieldwork, i will be able to have a better mid-range theory, i.e. my orginal hypothesis mediated by data and observations.
at the moment i don't know exactly what the protocol of missionaries is in entirety--that's what i am trying to research right now. historically, catholic missionaries had very specific "checklists" of practices (a lot of them sexual) they used as guidelines to take confessions of the indigenous people. mormons are just odd...i had a fleeting idea of trying to see what happens when mormon missionaries end up in cultures with institutionalized polygamy, but they are not good for study because usually they are young neophytes on one-year "missions" and they don't establish that much relationship with the communities.
as per the whole discourse and impact of missionaries being different today, well, yes, on one hand it is, because today's missionization takes place in countries that like you say developed reactions to European colonialism. however, the groups i want to concentrate on are very isolated and very devoted to their traditional ways; some of them (at least in Ecuador) have become politically active in recent decates, opposing oil companies and land devastation, but many move further away into forest reserves and are not citizens of the coutnry in the same way that urban dwellers are. Plus, these comminities are fairly small (150 people to 300-400 people), sometimes with rather ephemeral or seasonal dwellings like tree houses, basically what i am trying to say that on such a small, isolated scale it's not that hard for missionaries to engage in old-school one-on-one colonial prosyletizing, since the infrastructure has not been developed as engaged resistance, but rather as isolationist avoidance.
levy is a really fucking interesting fellow; he is one of the classical psychological anthropologists, a lot of whom were also cross-trained as clinical psychologists, linguists, etc. (actually the pioneer of the whole school, gregory bateson was all of the above, plus one of the first theoriests in cybernetics and communication theory). i find him very useful b/c i do have some universalist ideas as far as anthropology goes, and i am interested in any intelligent meta-frame for conducting cross-cultural research. if you ever have a free minute (or a couple of months), his "tahitians" is utterly brilliant.
in either case, i will keep you posted.

Re: moo part 2

[(Anonymous)]

There are many amazonian groups where sexuality is a very open discourse, and much of the daily conversation, gossip and jokes pivots around it. As for me being a tangential part of the culture, well, that's why the requirement for fieldwork for an anthropology PhD is at least an uninterrupted year preceded by a couple of pilot studies. It definitely takes time to establish contacts and trust and to learn the language, and I am just at stage one of the process.
The location appeals to me because a) I have already invested several years in learning Spanish, b) I wanted to concentrate on a small-scale group with noticeable alterity and the best places for that are the Pacific, i.e. new guinea, melanesia, etc., or Amazonian basin, and c) I really like warm weather. The cultural situation seems to lend itself to my interests, so we'll see...
and i don't know how original or creative it is... i mean, it is compared to 99% of career paths, but many other anthropology students in my program are doing really interesting shit. my friend ilka is going to do resistance via media and internet in Tibet, another girl wants to do televangelism in east africa, my friend from my old program is doing stuff with theory of mind and cultural norms of punishment among small-scale agricultural groups, my old advisor does stuff on biological/evolutionary causes behind food taboos for women, etc.
but still, it's a nice compliment from someone who is off teaching in China. :)

meta-moo

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

oh, well, the journal did not log me in, but obviously the above two responses are from me.
i seem to have been hit with the stupid stick lately as far as LJ formatting goes.