On American Pets

Posted on 3 September 2011 by Carol

I am pretty old and I’ve lived for many years overseas, where animals may be petted and fed, but that’s about it.  With this information as backdrop, I have to admit I’m pretty shocked by current American attitudes toward and treatment of pets (including my own!).  I have been confronted, sharply, with this issue in the last few days, having selected a cat (Gwendolyn) from the pound and brought her home.  The result is that I’m struggling with serious pet-related moral dilemmas.  Gwendolyn herself cost $20, plus $5 for the cardboard carrying case.  These minor expenses were, however, just the beginning.   

We first went to Petsmart to buy a litter box.  Knowing we would be travelling from time to time, we reasoned that we should have one of those self-cleaning kinds—the $100 price tag was our first surprise.  We also realized we’d need some more cat food ($20).  We forgot to buy the kitty litter, and had to make an extra trip to the grocery store for that ($6+ gas)—total expenditure for the day:  >$165. 

By the second day, we’d realized that Gwendolyn liked scratching up the door frames, so we returned to Petsmart to buy a scratching post ($20)—not, incidentally, one she’s so far deigned to use.  While there, we realized that we might do better with some self-feeding dishes (another $20 for the two, for water, food).  The SPCA had also offered us a month’s free insurance.  When I called to activate the insurance, I was persuaded (remembering the horror tales of my friends and students about the cost of medical care for pets) to buy a year’s insurance (~$100).  Total expenditure for the day:  $144.

On the third day (today), I took Gwendolyn to the vet.  The SPCA had offered, and indeed required, an immediate visit to the vet, which was advertised as ‘free’.  At my ‘free’ visit, I was advised to 1) get (and pay for) a booster shot for feline AIDS , 2) begin a two-shot process to immunize against feline leukemia, 3) screen the cat for intestinal parasites, and 4) have a pedicure (all totaling $74)—none of which seems to be covered by the insurance.  As I was leaving, I inquired about a flea collar and was advised to buy an ointment, which turned out to cost $90 for a year’s supply! Total expenditure by 11 AM:   $160.

Now let me back up a bit and explain that Gwendolyn is a delightful little creature.  She weighs a mere 8 pounds, is ‘dilute calico’ in color, and has no tail.  Apparently in line with her Manx breed, she follows us around like a puppy dog (not, however, getting underfoot), she sleeps peacefully outside our bedroom door at night, she often sits quietly by me when I’m in repose, and delights us with various vigorous antics as she occasionally tears around the house.  She purrs loudly, cries softly, and her fur is about the softest I’ve ever felt.  We love her.

My dilemma has to do with my intellectual realization/awareness that if I were asked to assess, beforehand, the advisability or even morality of spending roughly $500 in three days on a perfectly healthy, happy cat (especially knowing that such costs will recur), I would have said ‘you’re crazy.’  Yet I just did that.  I believe there are far more worthy causes on which I would choose to spend this money (despite my utter enjoyment of this cat), were I being rational.

I tried to analyze what prompted me (us) to do this—we did, after all, have some idea that there would be costs associated with pet ownership.  But the scale of expense has still been a surprise. [I am reminded of the shock I saw on the face of Totok, an Indonesian driver at my husband’s office, when he learned that we were prepared to contribute Rp. 200,000 (about $20, but also perhaps half of his monthly salary) to the local version of the SPCA, when they accepted four stray cats that had been dumped in our Jakarta front yard —he was ready to ‘get rid of them for us’ at no charge.]

I know that in the US context, I have responded to social pressure (some quite subtle)—from kind-hearted SPCA personnel, the vet, and the social and financial world in which I live (near Ithaca, NY, full of pet-loving folks whom my husband describes as ‘hyper-liberals’).  I share many of their values—I too love animals.  But another part of those values, one far more fundamental in my mind, is a concern about people in other parts of the world (or even in our own country) for whom I’d consider a contribution of $500 more sensible.  I would think carefully, normally, before making such a contribution even for human beings!

I suspect I’ll continue to provide this care for Gwendolyn; she is an adorable creature and I already love her.  But I remain uncomfortable with my behaviour, sitting firmly, awkwardly, on the horns of this difficult dilemma.  Why do we spend such vast sums on animals when there are so many human beings in such dire need?  Is not a starving child [and there are many in the world] more sensible to save than taking preventative actions for a recently stray cat!?  My value system comes down squarely on the starving child, while my behaviour has opted for the cat….

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Belated Delight in Gardening

Posted on 23 August 2011 by Carol

Never did I imagine that I would enjoy gardening.  But for the past two years, I have found a new pleasure in life.

In October 2009, I moved into my own home (only the second home I’ve ever owned, having lived most of my life in rented houses overseas).  In the backyard, there was a small, square patch of weeds, surrounded by an overgrown path, with a cute archway entrance.  At that time, I saw only a field of goldenrod—one of the few temperate zone plants I recognized.  Our neighbour, the son of the previous owners, told me that it had been a nice, if somewhat chaotic flower garden when his mother had cared for it, but that it had been neglected for four years.  I resisted his suggestion that we simply dig it all up and start over again.

I wandered around the mass of vegetation, wondering what was hidden within, not expecting much.  Still, something moved me in the spring of 2010 to begin pulling up the goldenrod—I got my husband to remind me of which plants were in fact goldenrod, since at that time the tell-tale yellow flowers were of course no longer in evidence.  He also introduced me to another plant with distinctive fuzzy leaves (elephant ears maybe?), which he also suggested I might remove.  I began, in a very lackadaisical way, to occasionally spend some time out there, pulling up these two kinds of weeds (the only ones I recognized besides dandelions).  I found, to my surprise, that I rather liked sitting in the dirt, messing about with these two invaders. 

Gradually, as I reduced the number of weeds, I began to uncover stepping stones, scattered throughout the small space.  I was enchanted with their discovery, and began pulling up the weeds more freely around those stepping stones, reasoning that no one would plant anything desirable under or directly adjacent to stepping stones.  A small goal emerged:  to uncover all the stones—I was sufficiently ignorant of plants to have no idea what lay before me of a botanical nature.  Meanwhile, in the springtime, I found that our yard, including the garden, was ringed with daffodils, my absolute favorite flower!  There were also violets and crocuses, a few tulips, and more—flowers from my childhood that I had rarely seen as an adult, living as I had, for decades in the tropics.

In May 2010, I left home to spend a month in Portland, Oregon with my mother, my two ‘natural’ children and my grandchildren.  While I was gone, my husband sent me pictures of the brilliant and abundant red poppies that emerged in that field of goldenrod.  There were also pink and white peonies, harmed by a late frost, but still producing some flowers.  Meanwhile, my mother, son and I happened to go to an open house at an iris plantation south of Portland (Schreiner’s Gardens)—I’d never seen so many beautiful flowers.  My mother told me of her own and her mother’s particular love for irises. I wondered if I might be able to grow some in that goldenrod field, to carry on what could become a family mini-tradition.

Back home, as the summer drew to a close, the tithonia my husband had planted in the flower garden began to bloom with wild abandon.  I’d never heard of them, but they were tall and of a lovely, vibrant orange color.  At the Farmer’s Market, we found, and then planted, narcissus and black eyed susans.  Meanwhile, my husband found in his mother’s house a beautiful silver bowl, with two layers of a patterned insert, designed to hold cut flowers—his mother happily parted with it, and I began routinely cutting flowers from our garden to fill it.  I had always bought flowers in Bogor, Indonesia, from a flower man who came every Saturday to our house (beginning in 1996 (!), continuing until we left in 2009).  Now I had my own source, and I made regular use of the flowers.  Our dining table began to overflow with flowers—-in the summer and fall of 2010, they were mainly tithonia and black eyed susans.

Having planted some flowers, and having them actually produce—even in this weedy chaos—stimulated me to continue my weeding efforts.  I also wrote to the owner of the iris plantation (my son’s friend), and ordered some irises that he considered suitable for Etna’s harsh climate.   In the fall, I planted the 12 irises he sent, as directed, some near the dead leaves of the original irises in the garden (which must have bloomed sometime while I was away).  More stepping stones emerged among the weeds.  My husband encouraged me, readily answering my questions (and planting flowers for me from time to time), with his far greater knowledge of plants.

This past spring, as the snows gradually gave way, I watched with curiosity to see what would emerge.  I hoped my weeding efforts would have made the garden a more hospitable environment for the flowers I loved so much.  I wanted to see the poppies and the peonies; and I wondered what else might be visible with so many fewer weeds.  However, as the spring progressed, the daffodils again arrived, and fewer goldenrod or fuzzy leaved invaders emerged.  I found instead a new pest:  hogwort weed.  It has lovely leaves, but takes over everything; and I found an amazing array of underground roots in part of the garden.  This year, my spare time has been spent pulling out hogwort weed and removing unwanted roots. 

Still, my weed patch has begun to look like a garden.  The lovely purple and white climatis climbing up both sides of the archway thrived (though not entirely evenly).  The new irises bloomed, one after another, in a great variety of colors (yellow, blue, purple, pink, orange), each utterly lovely, emerging near the  original arc of what turned out to be uniformly light pink ones.  We planted cone flowers and cosmos (both bore abundantly in pink and white), yellow and maroon dahlias, pink zinnias.  Multicolored portulaca make a bright ground cover; and yellow and orange marigolds peek out from their abundant foliage. The black eyed susans and tithonia produced flowers this year, though they were unhappy with the rainy June and nearly totally dry July.  The dahlias and zinnias provided a welcome supplement for my bouquets.  The two rose bushes we found in the garden gave us a few small, but pretty pinkish red roses (not quite up to what a Portlander expects—-‘the city of roses’).  Now we’ve found pink and purple gladiolas that we also didn’t plant.

I continue to go out every day or so for a short while to pull up hogwort weed; and I look with anticipation every morning to see what new blossoms the garden is offering.  All an unexpected delight!

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The Dangers of ‘Poverty’ as a Topic

Posted on 22 August 2011 by Carol

Studying ‘poverty’ has become a popular activity within the field of international development.  There are poverty specialists, pro-poor programs (which always make me wonder if the programs are designed to encourage poverty rather than overcome it), and more.  CIFOR (the Center for International Forestry Research) has for a number of years run a “Poverty and Environment Network”, with field studies and comparative analyses that span the globe.   I myself am now involved in one of Cornell’s IGERTs (Integrative Graduate Education, Research and Training programs) focused on “Food Systems and Poverty Reduction.”

But I have found myself uneasy with the use of the term, poverty, and its role as a ‘frame’ within which research should be undertaken.  My dis-ease began when, sometime in the mid-2000s, I read Arturo Escobar’s Encountering Development:  The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.  Although his writing is more radical, more anti-establishment, than my own thinking, I came away from reading that book with an altered outlook, particularly on poverty.  Indeed, I have avoided talking about poverty, and have encouraged others to similarly refrain from doing so, ever since I read that book.

Here I emphasize my own conclusions, sparked by his analysis.  The crux of the problem is that an emphasis on poverty is an emphasis on a lack, a shortcoming; it defines the people whose conditions are addressed in negative terms; it reinforces unwarranted feelings of superiority among those whose financial situations are good and, conversely, it encourages feelings of inferiority among those defined by their lack of cash.  It also defines the world, and what is important in it, in purely economic terms, a problem I see as more general. 

In the early 2000s, when I was reading Escobar’s book, CIFOR began a process of defining what it meant by poverty.  I argued—if we had to have an emphasis on poverty—for using the ideas propounded by Amartya Sen.  Sen identified three kinds of deprivation, which he saw as together resulting in ‘poverty’:

  • Social capability deprivation: shortages of information, knowledge, skills, participation in organizations, and sources of finance;
  • Political capability deprivation: lack of access to political decisionmaking, inability to voice aspirations or take collective action (not only the capability to vote);
  • Psychological capability deprivation: inadequacy of people’s sense of their own potential, rendering critical thought difficult; lack of self-confidence.

Those developing CIFOR’s definition of poverty were not impressed, choosing instead the more conventional, financial definition as the only feasible one. I have also seen cases where Sen’s broader definition (or a similarly broad one) was accepted as the ideal by a project; but when ‘push came to shove’, decisions were made to address only the financial issue.  The argument: ‘measurable’ indicators were needed—by a government, a donor, or narrow, disciplinary conventions relating to evidence and validity. [Incidentally, if you’ve ever tried to document the incomes of rural people in developing countries, you’ll know just how reliable such ‘measurable indicators’ really are—-not very.]

I do not argue that ‘poor’ people are uniformly involved in well-functioning social systems, that they all possess useful and insightful indigenous knowledge, that they all equitably distribute the goods they produce, or that they all provide well for the old and the infirm.  But I do know that many cultural systems provide their adherents, their members with non-monetary benefits of great value.  The Kenyah Dayaks with whom I’ve interacted for over three decades, for instance, tend to more openly recognize and value the differing strengths of individuals than do Americans, leading to a sense of security and self-confidence worthy of envy.  Their norms of sharing make Americans appear utterly niggardly.  Gender equity is higher among them than among any other group I have encountered.  In comparison with life on Java, they pride themselves on the fact that ‘no Kenyah has to sleep under a bridge’—they take care of their own. 

Differing strengths appear among different cultural groups, but the importance, even the utility for humanity, of locally valued traits disappears completely with the emphasis on poverty, on the people’s simple lack of money.  Better we should build on people’s strengths and the opportunities these provide; we might consider, for instance, ‘food systems and empowerment’ or ‘food systems and local knowledge’—such foci recognize the potential and capabilities of local people and provide conceptual frames that implicitly recognize the creativity, energy, knowledge, and potential for improvement that exist among all human beings.

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Reveling in my Access to Books

Posted on 21 August 2011 by Carol

I lived for many years in places where books were not readily available—in Turkey as a child, for decades during my adult years in Indonesia, in the Sultanate of Oman for four mid-life years.  Now (in my dotage), I live in Etna, NY, a place where access to books is unparalleled.  Cornell University has 13 or 14 libraries; it includes what is widely considered the best Indonesia collection in the entire world.  I have access to all of that, plus the books in something called ‘Libraries Worldwide’.   I can order a book, and even if it’s not at Cornell, it normally comes in a few days!  Cornell even has a system that will deliver the book I want from the Cornell library in which it resides to the one nearest my office!

During the past decade and a half, in Indonesia, I worked at CIFOR (Center for International Forestry Research), which had a small, if nice collection of books related to forestry; but the bias in that institution was toward the biophysical on the one hand, and toward journals and journal articles, on the other.  These latter were considered more ‘impactful’ and ‘prestigious’ than books, by my colleagues.  In my own field, books are perhaps more important, since we anthropologists write in prose, with far fewer figures, tables and graphs.  We need the verbal fullness [some would say, verbosity] offered by books, to understand the complexity of systems, in detail; the word limits for articles are just too confining for many of our studies.

I am now working on a paper on swidden fallows.  Swiddens are the fields that form part of the kinds of systems also called ‘shifting cultivation’ or, more pejoratively, ‘slash-and-burn agriculture’.  I think I want to make a point about a possible difference in official and academic attitudes toward swiddens that relates to the respective colonial experiences of different countries and regions—but I’m still not sure if this is correct.  In the pursuit of information on this issue, I have recently read two books that I enjoyed so much I wanted to share their delights.

The first was by Michael Dove, whose writings I always enjoy.  This brand new book (2011) is called The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo.  Since so much of my own academic work has focused on Borneo, I was particularly anxious to read this book; and it did not disappoint.  One focus of the book was on the two commodities, pepper and rubber, which Dove addressed both historically and currently.  He also managed to locate these commodities in the human systems with which they interacted.  Without ignoring the histories of the crops themselves, he explained how these related to the social and political systems of their time (from past to present).  He complemented these historical and broad-sweep analyses with the specifics of cases.  He analyzed, for instance a historical document from the Bornean (Banjar) courts of the 17th century, pulling out the pertinent bits relating to pepper, the unusual view, for instance, that planting pepper would create political chaos.  He used his own doctoral field experience among the Kantu’ dayaks of West Kalimantan to illustrate social and political features of rubber cultivation there. 

The Kenyah dayaks I’d worked with in East Kalimantan had experimented with a variety of crops, including pepper and rubber, though certainly not on the scale of the Kantu’.  Still, Dove’s discussions of local people’s creativity and experimentalism, their constraints to and opportunities for production, the historical search for balance between cash crops and the main subsistence  crop, rice, all rang true.  What a pleasure to have easy access to this book!

Then…again in search of information on swiddens, fallows and colonialism, I turned to a 2009 book by Peter Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging:  Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe.  Peter Geschiere’s name was long familiar to me, as I’d supervised research for a decade or more in Cameroon (though never done long term research there).  Yet, I’d felt some personal embarrassment not to have read any of his works. I looked forward with interest and curiosity to reading this book, which, like Dove’s, dealt with both the present and the past.  Although my search for information on swiddens was not fulfilled, the book filled in many gaps in my knowledge of Central and West Africa.  Geschiere wrote of political and human conditions in Cote d’Ivoire—the first country I ever visited in Africa.  [I remember my incredible excitement in 1995, on my first visit to ‘the dark continent’.  This was also the country where I sought with some difficulty to resuscitate the French I’d learned and loved in college, four decades earlier.  And indeed, this was the country where I was introduced to the concept of autochthony, as immigrants streamed in from the North, the East and the West, some fleeing war, others fleeing ecological disaster, in search of a livelihood, but creating both benefits and difficulties for their local patrons, the autochthones.]  Geschiere also provided details of Cameroon’s history, dates about colonial and recent history that I imagined needing for future writings, statements about colonial attitudes toward locals vis-à-vis immigrants, changing definitions of what it meant to be an in-migrant (an allochthone) and the political ramifications thereof, age-related differences I knew to be important in much of Africa.  Like Dove, he used detailed cases from his indepth doctoral research in eastern Cameroon to provide a fuller understanding of what the historical and political realities meant to individual human beings and to the functioning of local systems.

I have ordered and received a 1980 book by Joel Kahn (Minangkabau Social Formations: Indonesian Peasants and the World-Economy) and a 1957 book by Furnivall (Colonial Policy and Practice: a Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India), both of which I’ve read before—long ago.  In these, I seek this same concatenation of local, global and historical material, hoping again for insights on swidden fallows and related colonial policies/attitudes.  I seek broader scale information on areas I also know well [I lived for three years (1983-86) among the Minangkabau in West Sumatra; and several decades in “Netherlands India” (Indonesia)]—that I might better assess the accuracy of the information.

The luxury of having an endless supply of books continues to delight.  Whither next?

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Advertising my fun book about Borneo

Posted on 16 August 2011 by Carol

A few years ago, my husband and I wanted to try out one of the ‘print on demand’ publishing arrangements, so, with a little help from the Center for International Forestry Research, we tried out lulu.com, and published a book I’d written purely for fun.  It tells a story, in short vignettes, about our year living with our 11 year old son on a local boat in a swamp in Borneo (in 1992 and 1993).  Check it out.  You might like it too.  Any proceeds go to a local non-governmental conservation organization called Riak Bumi, in Borneo.

Support independent publishing: Buy this book on Lulu.

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Politics again

Posted on 14 August 2011 by Carol

A couple of nights ago, my husband and I watched the Republican debates on the Fox TV channel.  It was a depressing evening….as we listened to the alien world view, the assumptions about life and politics that we did not share.  Even the questions failed to raise what we considered to be key issues (though admittedly we gave up after an hour and half, missing the final half hour).  Perhaps they came up then.

The most depressing was the quality of the candidates:  The interchanges between Bachmann and Pawlenty, in which one of them was clearly lying thru his/her teeth (we suspected ‘her’ teeth—just a few moments ago, I see that Pawlenty has withdrawn from the race); the uniform faith in the market as an equalizer and an engine for growth (do we need growth, or, more likely, redistribution); the assumption that we’re all trying to make more money (when we’re already one of, if not the, richest nation on earth); the absolute and historically unfounded belief in the link between jobs and low taxes for corporations and the rich; the unwillingness to consider raising taxes when so much is at stake; zero attention to the vast and growing discrepancies in wealth in the country; and no attention at all to the rest of the world (though perhaps it came up in the last half hour…).

Romney, who at one point long ago, seemed like a fairly reasonable man, has moved further and further to the right—I suppose in response to the right-ward shift of the populace.  He stressed his and Herman Cain’s special competence in running a business, which he clearly considered prime qualifications for running a government.  Ron Paul, though a bit of a nut-case, at least seems to be sincere, more honest than the rest—but what would he do to the country if he were in charge?  The fact that Newt Gingerich sounded comparatively sane and rational, among this lot, is a telling and worrying observation!  Although the Texan, Perry, never appeared on the debate stage, his routine linking of religion and politics is another frightening spectre. And then there’s Sarah Palin, who seems to appear at any political get-together….

In the face of such options, what does one wish?  Does one hope that the worst of the lot will win the Republican nomination so that Obama will have a less credible opponent?  But then, what if this less credible opponent actually manages to win the race!?  The right has been incredibly successful at blaming Obama for problems that clearly had their roots in the long Republican Presidential years.  Bush’s behaviour and policies created problems far too deep to overcome in the short amount of time Obama has been in office—even if he’d made no mistakes.

I wrote of my fears about Bush before his first non-election, and even more fundamentally after he’d been in office for several years:

 http://earth01.net/CJPColfer/ccwritings/CColferWritings.html

Although the global situation has changed—fortunately, Obama has rendered the US less of a pariah among nations than it was during the Bush era—many of my fears about Bush are replicated with this new batch of Republicans and Tea-Party proponents.  Where do we go from here?  The answer to that questions has profound implications for the future of the Earth and humanity.

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Formal religion–some thoughts

Posted on 14 August 2011 by Carol

I have never been enthralled with formal religion, and my husband’s utterly rabid atheism ensures its absence from our home.  But my own beliefs include a sense of the wonder of the universe and I have some sort of vague but valued spirituality, which includes an also vague but loved and kindly god, perhaps looking down on us with gentle fondness.  On Sunday last, my 87 year old mother dragged me to her church, the First Congregational Church of Portland—she preferred not to drive and there was a party for her significant other’s 90th birthday party immediately after the service.  I go with her perhaps once a year, when she urges, begs, occasionally demands that I do so.

I am always intrigued with my own reaction to these services (which I try so hard to avoid).  I usually find the sermons of interest, urging human behaviours of which I approve, containing little or nothing that I find genuinely objectionable.  The church itself is a thing of beauty.  In front, behind the alter and the organ, there are two or three beautiful wooden spires towering about the congregation.  Attached to these are lovely swirling, three-lobed carvings, presumably representing the trinity.  To the sides are dramatic stained glass windows, with biblical scenes to one side and nature’s beauty to the other.  The congregation is arranged in a semi-circle, seated in conventional wooden pews, with little slots for hymnals and for the tiny cups handed out at communion.  There is a balcony available as well.  The preacher is dressed in flowing black robes, with a colorful satin cloth draped around his neck and down the front.

This church, whose members tend to be upper middle class, considers itself ‘open and affirming’, which means that they invite people in off the street and they welcome the gay and lesbian community proactively.  They do good works, they invite artists to display their art in excellent monthly exhibits.  There are many reasons I should approve of this church, despite the difference in our world views.  God’s place in the world view displayed at the church is far more central than in my own—which focuses more on people and their/our actions.

Anyway, the personal reaction that confuses me is the degree to which I am touched by what happens in church.  We say The Lord’s Prayer (which my mother paid me in my childhood to learn by heart—and I still remember), we sing Doxology (a song I also know by heart and that reminds me of my grandfather, who was a preacher in a Congregational Church).  This Sunday, near the 4th of July, we sang America the Beautiful (a song I learned as a child, and which I sang when I was homesick, living in Turkey, far from home).  The church is also renowned for its excellent music.  This Sunday the choir sang some lovely songs, and there was a nice solo; other Sundays they’ve had a fantastic group that plays bells and chimes.  There are also readings to which the congregation responds, also reading.  Some of these I also find touching.  Both in songs and in readings, I find myself unable to continue singing or speaking, because the tears are in my eyes and my throat closes.

In East Kalimantan, when doing ethnographic research among Uma’ Jalan Kenyah Dayaks in 1979 and ’80, I attended the local church services occasionally.  Their church was a very different one, in a rude building (though better than people’s homes), with crude benches for the congregation, an ordinary table for the altar, simple beams for the cross.  A version of Christianity had been pressed upon them by fundamentalist American Christian missionaries (reinforced by a government that had insisted at gunpoint in the 1960s that they choose Christianity or Islam over their recent animist beliefs).  Their Christian religion was called KINGMI.  The people were genuine in their then-current commitment to Christianity, nonetheless.  One sermon I remember had me chuckling a bit, because they used the term, daging, to translate ‘flesh’.  Daging is the term used in daily life for ‘meat’—which struck me as funny, if technically correct.  The preacher, trained by the missionaries, also called for a division of labour within the household that replicated the American sex roles of the 1950s:  Dayak women were encouraged to bring their husbands some tea or coffee when the husbands returned home from the fields.  I found this both amusing and irritating, since these people were far more equitable in terms of sex roles than most groups, and in fact the women were more consistently involved in hard agricultural labour than the men. 

But the point of this diversion is that despite these ways in which I disagreed with what was being said, I remember vividly the feeling of community oneness that came over me in one of these Kenyah services.  The congregation was singing together—it could have been during a rendition of one of those songs I knew so well, sung in Indonesian.  I don’t remember, but what I do remember is that I suddenly understood something new about religion that I had never fully experienced myself.  This community (or at least this congregation—there was another, Catholic group that worshipped separately) was acting and feeling as one in a way that was touching and meaningful to me. 

I ask myself why, when I am actually rather agnostic, I am so touched by these church services. Is it their links to my distant childhood, my family connections?   I am also intrigued that although they are meaningful at some level, I do not seek them out, nor even find them pleasurable.  They touch something in me, related to my values; they are deep and somehow painful—perhaps it is in my realization of my own impotence in bringing about the desirable conditions and good actions that so many of us, human beings, want.

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Literature’s power

Posted on 23 June 2011 by Carol

Thinking about my own youth, and having just attended a huge, beautiful and extravagant Jewish wedding, I was reminded of a book that had a profound, if temporary, effect on my young life.  I was 13 or 14 when I read the book, Marjorie Morningstar, in which a young Jewish woman struggles with society’s injunctions, taking a lover, and eventually returning to her roots to marry a socially acceptable, even desirable, Jewish man.  My memories of the story focus on the conclusion, which seriously affected my own youthful sexuality.  At the end of the story, right before her wedding, Marjorie decides she must tell her fiancé ‘the truth’, that she is no longer a virgin.  Although the young man accepts her and marries her anyway, the result is an eternal loss for him, ‘his eyes never regain their brightness’ (or something to that effect).  To my young and impressionable mind,  this was a genuine morality tale, and one that inspired me to stop short of sexual intercourse for four or five years to come.  I could not bear the thought of potentially causing such everlasting pain to the man I would come to love—a testament to the interactions among human beings’ symbolic and cultural systems on the one hand, and the pragmatic dangers recounted in my last blog, on the other.

I looked up Marjorie Morningstar on the internet today, unsure if that was even the name of this book that had ruled an important part of my life for so long.  Written by Herman Wouk, it was published in 1955 (at the height of ‘the feminine mystique’).  I found a 2005 review by Alana Newhouse, subtitled ‘the conservative novel that liberal feminists love’.  Newhouse notes that the book has 556 pages of Marjorie’s life before her marriage as she acts out and struggles with her youthful rebellion; the once-so-powerful conclusion occupies only nine pages.  I am intrigued with the power of those final pages; and also with the fact that my adult life probably more closely fit with the spirit of the bulk of the book.  Certainly the message contained in the conclusion no longer attracts me.

A few weeks ago, I went to a play in Ithaca, NY, called ‘S/He’.  Before going to the play, I imagined a perhaps-futuristic story about transgender.  Instead, the play was a melding of youthful sexuality as played out conventionally in America and in Turkey (two countries with which I have long-standing links).  The most shocking aspect to me was the timelessness of the stories within each cultural context. 

  • In the American case, a young woman is attracted to a boy, who impregnates her in a combination of seduction and eventual rape.  She fears to tell her parents she is pregnant, but eventually does; she talks with her girlfriend and eventually explains that she was raped; she is advised by an unconventional older man (oddly, a tattoo artist).  In the end, in typical American fashion, she overcomes her misery and goes forth into the world with hope and positive expectations for her future.
  • In the Turkish case, surely unfamiliar to most viewers, the young people are in love.  The woman is advised repeatedly by her female friend not to make love with her beloved, as this will inevitably prevent him from marrying her—as she will no longer be a virgin.  We are shown the young man’s close relationship with his mother.  The young woman eventually does make love with him, is caught in flagrante by the mother who comes home unexpectedly, and this seals her fate.  In good Turkish tradition, true love always ends in disaster.  In the final scene, the two lovers are separated and ill, surely (from a Turkish perspective) dying.

Either of these stories could nearly as easily have been written, produced, observed in the 1950s, without much change, and still have had the same cultural punch as they had in 2011.  ‘It’s a strange strange world we live in, Master Jack.’

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Youth, Reproductive Rights, and Crazy Politicians

Posted on 23 June 2011 by Carol

The Republicans (in the US) have been trying to fiddle around again with women’s reproductive rights.  It makes my blood boil.

When I was in my teens (early 1960s), considering my own sexuality, being tempted by my own body and that of my boyfriend, there was no reliable birth control.  My parents, who were very gentle and kind, reminded me occasionally of the dangers of unplanned pregnancy.  These included the physical dangers of early childbearing, the strong emotions engendered by sex.  But I found the other implications they mentioned more frightening.  For some reason I was particularly put off by the idea of being forced into marriage.  I feared that forced marriage would mean a big, lifelong question mark for me:  Did the father truly love me or did he simply marry me out of duty.    And of course—if the father should refuse to marry me—single motherhood, without job skills, was another unappealing possibility.  I was also reminded that early childbearing would mean the loss of many of my dreams for the future (an education, travel, interesting work).  Abortion, never desirable, was illegal and dangerous.  All these factors contributed to my maintaining my chastity for several years longer than I would have under current conditions.

Only a few years later, with the advent of effective birth control, there was a serious discontinuity, a shift in the ‘geography’ of women’s lives.  Suddenly, sexuality was possible without several of these once-realistic fears.  One immediate and obvious change was a shift in attitude about unmarried people living together.  I remember the suddenness of the change in my own social network.  In 1964, I illicitly (though with some considerable enthusiasm), obtained birth control so that I could engage in unmarried sex (I had to lie to the doctor, pretending I was about to marry).  But a year later, I still rejected outright, and with some outrage, my lover’s suggestion that we simply live together; another woman in my social circle was shunned by some (though not by me) because she lived with a man.  By 1966, my own parents suggested I first live unmarried with the man I actually did marry.  And my friends were suddenly moving in together right and left.  A huge cultural shift had occurred, and very quickly.

I recognize and retain some uncertainty about the appropriate age at which to begin engaging in sex; and I’m uncertain how parents should deal with the issue.  How does one know when one’s children are ‘ready’ for meaningful sex?  How does one protect those who are not yet ‘old enough’ somehow?  And HIV/AIDS has added a dimension that complicates all sexuality. Ultimately, in my own children’s case, I concluded that I simply had to rely on their own good sense—but questions do remain in my mind.    Still, overall, my own take on this historical reality is a decidedly positive one.

Despite these uncertainties—there are so many uncertainties about parenting—I wholeheartedly approve of the increase in women’s reproductive freedom that has occurred over the course of my own life.  I am grateful that my daughter and (eventually) I were free to explore our sexuality before marrying, without the serious adverse social and health repercussions that had existed previously.  I feel that it allowed us to consider other important issues, beyond simple sexual curiosity and desire, more fully than would have been possible previously, in selecting our marriage partners.  The pleasures and knowledge gained from sexual experimentation, which had been available to men all along, became a possibility for women, expanding gender equality, making life fuller for both sexes.

So…to return to the Republicans…I deplore their attempts to regulate women’s sexuality with all my heart.  The most damning element, in my mind, is one that doesn’t even affect those in my ‘socio-economic class’.  I and my offspring could afford an abortion, even an illegal one, if we had so desired.  In my youth, we all knew about women who’d died in alleyways from illegal abortions performed with coat hangers, by unlicensed abortionists.  Roe vs. Wade changed that; it, along with the availability of the various preferred and reliable methods of birth control, truly liberated women, as few things had done before.  George W. Bush’s policies that took away whatever access many poor women had to birth control brought tears to my eyes; and I shudder to think that current politics in the US may take these rights away from the women of this nation as well. 

Going back to back alley abortions and old style, rigid sex roles is a bad idea.  So is forcing women to bear children they do not want.  No one wins under such circumstances.

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On Adjusting to Aging in America

Posted on 11 June 2011 by Carol

In 2006, at the age of 62, I made an arrangement with my full time employer (in Indonesia) to go onto a 3/4 time arrangement.  My thinking was that this would help allow me to adjust to eventual retirement more gracefully.   It certainly let me spend more time in the US, where I could begin to understand our mothers’ situations, and help solve their increasing number of logistical problems (related primarily to their growing vulnerability and weakness).  It also meant I could see my children and grandchildren more regularly.  All in all, it was probably a good idea.

In 2009, at the conclusion of the third year of 3/4 time work, I decided to take another step toward retirement.  I did not (and do not) want to completely retire—that would truly drive me mad—-but I did want a) to be more accessible to my family (all three other generations), and b) reduce the quantity and urgency of my work somewhat.  This decision meant moving back to the US at the conclusion of my contract in July 2009.  During that spring, I realized that these major life changes were likely to involve some considerable stress; and that I should be prepared for a difficult time.  I imagined that I would suffer from the loss of the personal meaning that I attach to my work; and that I would experience a degree of culture shock, moving back to the US—as I had read about and heard from others.

I decided that keeping a more regular, daily journal would be a good idea; and that in the journal I should record my feelings.  I reasoned that this would help me to remain ‘in touch’ with those feelings, and that this might prevent them from getting out of hand.  I also wanted to record the things I cherished about my life in Bogor, where I had lived for about 15 years (longer than any other place on earth).  Although I have always kept a journal, I have not generally been as faithful about keeping it as I was during the period of transition, from Bogor to Etna, NY.   I also recorded more emotionally positive memories and observations than I usually do.   A journal can serve the function of a psychotherapist, as mine often does.  During this time, although I did include sadness and irritations, I included much more in a nostalgic vein.

Another oddity was that, during that first year of transition, in Bogor and back in the US, I used third person.  I wrote of myself as ‘the old crone’.  I kept in mind the feminist writings about the wisdom of old women, and their contributions to the lives of the ensuing generations.  This may have helped me to retain an element of detachment from whatever proved difficult.

I think that keeping such a journal helped significantly in making the transition much less painful than I anticipated or than what has been recorded and reported by others.  I also believe that these recordings will be a real pleasure for me to read at some point in the future.

Of course, it’s also true that I didn’t really stop working.  I wound up, during that first year, having what felt like full time employment (finishing an edited book, writing several articles and chapters for other people’s works; team teaching a course).  The editing work allowed me to stay in email contact with many of my colleagues, reducing my potential loneliness; and the teaching allowed me to meet new friends and become immersed to some degree in a new work context.  I actually enjoyed my own marginality in both places.  It allowed me the flexibility to disappear, when I headed West several times a year for my mother’s care and to see my children and grandchildren.

I found that readjusting to life in the US (after so many years abroad) was actually a pleasure.  I loved having my own car and no driver; the good roads delighted me.  I reveled in the changing seasons, after so many years in the tropics.  The availability of any book I could imagine from Cornell or its partner libraries was an amazing luxury, as were the routine appearance of interesting speakers and more events than one could possibly attend.  Shopping and cooking, though sometimes mildly tedious, were easy, quick; and my husband and I could choose what we felt like eating—this was another surprising delight, after years of eating what someone else decided to cook.

The ease with which my adjustment has occurred is partly dependent, of course, on the simple facts of comparatively good health and a financially adequate retirement arrangement.  But I think the journal writing smoothed the process significantly too.

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