Okay, the next post will be my first attempt at bringing you into my nerdy, nerdy world. I went back to make a little change to my recent post on foreign languages in academic texts and ended up largely re-writing it. Thanks to JKB for pointing out that there really is a connotational difference between guest worker and Gastarbeiter. Just goes to show, sometimes you can make a difference when someone is wrong on the Internet.
(And yes, the title of this post is German and I didn't explain what it means. I'm being ironic.)
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Pontifications on the senmin: A new series from the American Umlaut
I've just returned from a party thrown by my professor, where I had the remarkable experience of eating lasagna containing fruit. It was surprisingly good, but I don't know if I could ever get used to the experience of finding slices of banana in my pasta.
A couple of hours before the party ended, I was visited by my muse and a theory of domestic-policy logic for issuing the 1871 Emancipation Edict (which legally made the senmin (literally "despised ones" - members of the various Japanese outcaste groups) burst fully formed into my brain. I rapidly negotiated permission from my new friend Yuri to convert his paper plane into scrap paper and scribble my thoughts on it before I forgot them. I got the paper, he got to sit in my lap and rub my whiskers while I wrote - I should mention that Yuri is four, and beards and blonds both being relative rarities in Japan he found me really fascinating.
My scrap of paper reads as follows:
I set out to write up a post explaining the ideas crammed into these two paragraphs, and ended up with three only very slightly less unreadable pages. I'm not a particularly gifted writer, but if I can't explain my ideas well enough that you can understand them without being a japanologist, then I have two problems: I'm really not accomplishing much with the non-autobiographical half of this blog, and I probably don't understand my own theory well enough.
So instead of drowning my poor audience in a single hopelessly tangled mess that most of you would skip over anyhow, I'm going to take my time and write a series of posts that explain what I'm thinking and what others have written that makes me think that way. I don't know if I'm up to the task, but I'm going to do my best to emulate my favorite authors and make a dry, academic subject live and breathe for you - to open a window into a world you might not otherwise visit and share with you the passion that I feel for it.
And hopefully, by the time I'm done explaining my theory to you, I will finally understand just what it is I'm talking about.
A couple of hours before the party ended, I was visited by my muse and a theory of domestic-policy logic for issuing the 1871 Emancipation Edict (which legally made the senmin (literally "despised ones" - members of the various Japanese outcaste groups) burst fully formed into my brain. I rapidly negotiated permission from my new friend Yuri to convert his paper plane into scrap paper and scribble my thoughts on it before I forgot them. I got the paper, he got to sit in my lap and rub my whiskers while I wrote - I should mention that Yuri is four, and beards and blonds both being relative rarities in Japan he found me really fascinating.
My scrap of paper reads as follows:
A nation state requires recognition from within and without - from within to establish the imagined community that lends the legitimacy that is the true source of institutional power in any nation and from without to guarantee at least a certain level of legitimacy for its geographical/physical boundaries - there can be no "nation state" if there is no general agreement as to its geographic definition.
The ostensible reason for the Kaihou-rei [the senmin emancipation edict] was the latter, but the former was no less important. It may seem silly to say that consistency was important in an authoritarian country, but the "plausibel und anschließbar" [plausible and applicable/attachable - this is a quote from Alois Hahn that I'll explain in a later post] criterium surely applies to the labels defining Us as well as those defining the Other.
I set out to write up a post explaining the ideas crammed into these two paragraphs, and ended up with three only very slightly less unreadable pages. I'm not a particularly gifted writer, but if I can't explain my ideas well enough that you can understand them without being a japanologist, then I have two problems: I'm really not accomplishing much with the non-autobiographical half of this blog, and I probably don't understand my own theory well enough.
So instead of drowning my poor audience in a single hopelessly tangled mess that most of you would skip over anyhow, I'm going to take my time and write a series of posts that explain what I'm thinking and what others have written that makes me think that way. I don't know if I'm up to the task, but I'm going to do my best to emulate my favorite authors and make a dry, academic subject live and breathe for you - to open a window into a world you might not otherwise visit and share with you the passion that I feel for it.
And hopefully, by the time I'm done explaining my theory to you, I will finally understand just what it is I'm talking about.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
A brief note to the academics of the world
I think I can say I've had a pretty decent education. Twelve years of American public school, and I've been attending university continuously since the year 2000. I have a high school diploma, a BA, a BS, and most of an MA. And in the last two years I've taken graduate level courses on the concept of the "nation state", sociology and linguistics.
I say all of this not to boast (though it's great to indulge my inner snoot*), but to make clear why I expect, when I open Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, a book concerned with the history of the nation state with a focus on sociology and linguistics, I expect to be able to read and understand the contents.
Instead it turns out that Anderson expects me to be a polyglot and interested in what he has to say. There are terms and phrases in Latin, French and German left untranslated and unexplained throughout the book, a depressingly common phenomenon in academic texts. Instead of referring to foreign workers as "guest workers", he chooses to enlist the subtle nuance of the German Gastarbeiter. Which literally means "guest workers," but (as noted by JKB in comments) carries a negative connotation not present in the English word. If Anderson had simply added a footnote explaining that the first time he used the term, I would be perfectly okay with his choice, but what of the half-page quotation in French that forms the basis of half a chapter's discussion? Does the whole quotation have such a subtle nuance that it wasn't possible to even attempt a translation for we poor few who don't read French?
I don't mind an author writing a book that is difficult to read because the concepts it contains are complex or because it assumes prior knowledge relating to the subject matter. And I don't mind an author using foreign vocabulary (my thesis and my blog both use lots of Japanese) as long as it is explained - in fact it can enrich a text by adding subtle textures not otherwise possible. But an author who cannot write an English-language book comprehensible to a monoglot English audience familiar with the subject matter is simply a bad writer. I'm much more impressed by the intellect of an author who can explain a complicated idea clearly than one who can throw around lots of words I don't understand and cannot look up in a dictionary.
* derived from "snooty", obviously
I say all of this not to boast (though it's great to indulge my inner snoot*), but to make clear why I expect, when I open Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, a book concerned with the history of the nation state with a focus on sociology and linguistics, I expect to be able to read and understand the contents.
Instead it turns out that Anderson expects me to be a polyglot and interested in what he has to say. There are terms and phrases in Latin, French and German left untranslated and unexplained throughout the book, a depressingly common phenomenon in academic texts. Instead of referring to foreign workers as "guest workers", he chooses to enlist the subtle nuance of the German Gastarbeiter. Which literally means "guest workers," but (as noted by JKB in comments) carries a negative connotation not present in the English word. If Anderson had simply added a footnote explaining that the first time he used the term, I would be perfectly okay with his choice, but what of the half-page quotation in French that forms the basis of half a chapter's discussion? Does the whole quotation have such a subtle nuance that it wasn't possible to even attempt a translation for we poor few who don't read French?
I don't mind an author writing a book that is difficult to read because the concepts it contains are complex or because it assumes prior knowledge relating to the subject matter. And I don't mind an author using foreign vocabulary (my thesis and my blog both use lots of Japanese) as long as it is explained - in fact it can enrich a text by adding subtle textures not otherwise possible. But an author who cannot write an English-language book comprehensible to a monoglot English audience familiar with the subject matter is simply a bad writer. I'm much more impressed by the intellect of an author who can explain a complicated idea clearly than one who can throw around lots of words I don't understand and cannot look up in a dictionary.
* derived from "snooty", obviously
Friday, November 28, 2008
Quote of the day
"Reading a newspaper is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot." - Benedict Anderson
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!
I am really sad to be in Japan and without a real kitchen today. Last Thanksgiving Rose and I prepared a truly awesome feast with home-made delicacies of every sort. This year I ate ramen. Which is also good, but significantly less traditional.
It's my family's tradition to force everyone to say what they are thankful for in the previous year before anyone is allowed to eat. As a child, of course, I found this mildly embarrassing and figured it was just another expression of grown-ups' need to inflict emotional harm on their children by forcing them to wait for things (as with being forced to wait until after breakfast to open Christmas presents, another time-honored Johnson family torture technique). As I've gotten older, though, I've come to appreciate the exercise of taking a moment to reflect on all that for which we are grateful.
I am thankful this year, as in every year, that I have found the world this year as well to be full of beautiful people with big hearts in which they have made space for me. I give the greatest thanks, though, for the beautiful woman waiting for me to return to Düsseldorf. We've been together five years, and she knows me as well as it is possible for one person to know another, and she married me anyway.
Enjoy your turkey, everybody.
I am really sad to be in Japan and without a real kitchen today. Last Thanksgiving Rose and I prepared a truly awesome feast with home-made delicacies of every sort. This year I ate ramen. Which is also good, but significantly less traditional.
It's my family's tradition to force everyone to say what they are thankful for in the previous year before anyone is allowed to eat. As a child, of course, I found this mildly embarrassing and figured it was just another expression of grown-ups' need to inflict emotional harm on their children by forcing them to wait for things (as with being forced to wait until after breakfast to open Christmas presents, another time-honored Johnson family torture technique). As I've gotten older, though, I've come to appreciate the exercise of taking a moment to reflect on all that for which we are grateful.
I am thankful this year, as in every year, that I have found the world this year as well to be full of beautiful people with big hearts in which they have made space for me. I give the greatest thanks, though, for the beautiful woman waiting for me to return to Düsseldorf. We've been together five years, and she knows me as well as it is possible for one person to know another, and she married me anyway.
Enjoy your turkey, everybody.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Word of the day
食わず嫌い - kuwazugirai
Na-nominal, literally means "something one dislikes without having eaten it" but is also used in the more expansive sense of having an unfounded negative prejudice.
I learned this in a way that completely cracked me up. I met a professor for lunch earlier today with a friend of mine who, it must be remarked for this story to make sense, is a lesbian. They were discussing the relationship between discrimination based on sexuality and discrimination based on caste - which is my friend's research topic - when the conversation wended its way into the topic of the nature of sexuality itself. Is it more strongly naturally or culturally influenced?
Of course, that's a debate that has no easy answer. But I was very amused when my friend posited the possibility to the professor that his heterosexuality was simply kuwazugirai.
Na-nominal, literally means "something one dislikes without having eaten it" but is also used in the more expansive sense of having an unfounded negative prejudice.
I learned this in a way that completely cracked me up. I met a professor for lunch earlier today with a friend of mine who, it must be remarked for this story to make sense, is a lesbian. They were discussing the relationship between discrimination based on sexuality and discrimination based on caste - which is my friend's research topic - when the conversation wended its way into the topic of the nature of sexuality itself. Is it more strongly naturally or culturally influenced?
Of course, that's a debate that has no easy answer. But I was very amused when my friend posited the possibility to the professor that his heterosexuality was simply kuwazugirai.
A word on Japanese grammar - the na-nominal
I like the idea of putting a "word of the day" in here whenever I learn something that I find particularly interesting. Today's is going to be a special kind of word called a na-nominal, and I thought an explanation of what that means might be interesting for the half of my audience or so who isn't familiar with Japanese and informative for anyone who is interested in Japanese but hasn't learned much grammar.
One of the real mind-blowing things that really got me hooked on Japanese in the beginning is the fact that Japanese words simply can't be divided into the categories we know from English grammar. For example, every school child learns that a noun is a word representing a "person, place or thing." But Japanese nouns aren't that picky. An awful lot of them can be convinced to represent an action if you tack the auxiliary verb suru onto them. And there is an entire family of the bloody things that refuse to represent objects, and are instead used exclusively as adjectives or adverbs. These rebellious souls of the Japanese linguistic universe are called keiyoudoushi in Japanese. I learned to call them na-nominals as an undergrad, but I've discovered that there are so many nomenclatures used to describe Japanese grammar in English that in conversation I find it's easier just to learn and use the Japanese terms. I'm trying to avoid using too much Japanese vocabulary here, though, so I'll stick with na-nominal.
So how do these dastardly little rebels work? As you'd think, they mostly work like nouns - if you say "that woman is pretty", you put it together exactly as though kirei (pretty) were a noun. (Ano onna wa kirei desu.) The only time na-nominals don't look exactly like nouns is when they are used to directly modify a noun or a verb - if they're modifying a noun, you stick a na suffix onto them, and if they're modifying a verb they pick up a ni. So the "the pretty woman" is kirei na onna, and "to smile prettily" is kirei ni warau.
The reason for this historically is really interesting - the na is a shortened form of the classical Japanese copula nari. Nari following a noun means "it is [the noun]", but the copula can also go between two nouns to give you a construct meaning "the [noun A] that is [noun B]". There were evidently plenty of nouns that were only used in such a construct, which is essentially adjectival, and then the copula was shortened to the particle na.
If you've made it this far, congratulations. I promise not to post anything nearly this geeky again for at least a week.
One of the real mind-blowing things that really got me hooked on Japanese in the beginning is the fact that Japanese words simply can't be divided into the categories we know from English grammar. For example, every school child learns that a noun is a word representing a "person, place or thing." But Japanese nouns aren't that picky. An awful lot of them can be convinced to represent an action if you tack the auxiliary verb suru onto them. And there is an entire family of the bloody things that refuse to represent objects, and are instead used exclusively as adjectives or adverbs. These rebellious souls of the Japanese linguistic universe are called keiyoudoushi in Japanese. I learned to call them na-nominals as an undergrad, but I've discovered that there are so many nomenclatures used to describe Japanese grammar in English that in conversation I find it's easier just to learn and use the Japanese terms. I'm trying to avoid using too much Japanese vocabulary here, though, so I'll stick with na-nominal.
So how do these dastardly little rebels work? As you'd think, they mostly work like nouns - if you say "that woman is pretty", you put it together exactly as though kirei (pretty) were a noun. (Ano onna wa kirei desu.) The only time na-nominals don't look exactly like nouns is when they are used to directly modify a noun or a verb - if they're modifying a noun, you stick a na suffix onto them, and if they're modifying a verb they pick up a ni. So the "the pretty woman" is kirei na onna, and "to smile prettily" is kirei ni warau.
The reason for this historically is really interesting - the na is a shortened form of the classical Japanese copula nari. Nari following a noun means "it is [the noun]", but the copula can also go between two nouns to give you a construct meaning "the [noun A] that is [noun B]". There were evidently plenty of nouns that were only used in such a construct, which is essentially adjectival, and then the copula was shortened to the particle na.
If you've made it this far, congratulations. I promise not to post anything nearly this geeky again for at least a week.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Word of the day
良妻賢母 - ryousaikenbo
Eng: A good wife and a wise mother
This word is the term for the Japanese ideal of a woman's place in society; supporting her husband in every possible way and devoted to the upbringing of her children.
Of course, America's view of a woman's place was generally quite similar just a few generations ago. I was really surprised today to learn, though, that a fellow student of mine in her early thirties went to a high-school that had an etiquette class for its female students that was intended to inculcate the proper habits of a ryousaikenbo in the next generation of mothers.
Edit:
I just have to add this. I adhere pretty strongly to the cultural relativist school of thought. It would be ridiculous for me to judge a culture for its values - we tend to forget that the things we excoriate other cultures for, we were doing ourselves just a generation or two ago. But I'm surrounded here by brilliant fellow students who are conducting fascinating research and arriving at startlingly insightful conclusions. Most of them are women: what a waste it is even on purely objective terms to tell them all that is their job to stay home, raise babies and cook.
Eng: A good wife and a wise mother
This word is the term for the Japanese ideal of a woman's place in society; supporting her husband in every possible way and devoted to the upbringing of her children.
Of course, America's view of a woman's place was generally quite similar just a few generations ago. I was really surprised today to learn, though, that a fellow student of mine in her early thirties went to a high-school that had an etiquette class for its female students that was intended to inculcate the proper habits of a ryousaikenbo in the next generation of mothers.
Edit:
I just have to add this. I adhere pretty strongly to the cultural relativist school of thought. It would be ridiculous for me to judge a culture for its values - we tend to forget that the things we excoriate other cultures for, we were doing ourselves just a generation or two ago. But I'm surrounded here by brilliant fellow students who are conducting fascinating research and arriving at startlingly insightful conclusions. Most of them are women: what a waste it is even on purely objective terms to tell them all that is their job to stay home, raise babies and cook.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Friday, November 7, 2008
Word of the day
Sometimes a word fits just perfectly with what it means:
食言する - shokugen suru
Literally, "eating one's words", this verb means "to go back on one's promise".
For students of Japanese out there, a disclaimer - this word is awesome but evidently isn't very commonly used.
食言する - shokugen suru
Literally, "eating one's words", this verb means "to go back on one's promise".
For students of Japanese out there, a disclaimer - this word is awesome but evidently isn't very commonly used.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Exaptation
I learned about the concept of exaptation in a linguistics class I took for fun last semester. Originally, exaptation was a term from biology. It describes a process that happens a lot in evolution, in which a feature that was originally evolved to do one job starts being used to do something completely different. Birds are my favorite example - feathers were originally scales (birds' ancestors were reptiles) that were exapted to become a temperature control system - if you get cold, fluff your feathers up, and if you get hot, move the feathers around to generate a breeze. Being able to keep cool on a hot day is a pretty nifty trick, and so natural selection put pressure on feathered animals to evolve to be able to move air more efficiently. The result is that these animals' front limbs, which were originally used for transportation, were exapted to function as fans. Eventually these fans were so efficient that they could actually be used to glide for a few seconds at a time, making it easier for good fliers to escape predators and pass their genes on to the next generation. And voila, in a few hundred million years you've exapted armor to be used as temperature control, then exapted the temperature control system to be used as a flight system.
In linguistics, exaptation describes a similar process - linguistic evolution turns out to have remarkable parallels to biological evolution. When a new concept comes into existence, it needs a name, and it is quite common to exapt an older word instead of making up a new one. "Science", for example, entered the English language in the 14th century meaning "knowledge", then gradually came to have the nuance of referring to conceptual knowledge rather than practical knowledge - a practical distinction to be able to make, which is probably why the word stuck around. It wasn't until the 19th century that "science" came to refer to the practice of determining truth by means of experiment.
I had the epiphany last night at around two o'clock that the phenomenon of the Burakumin could be described using parallels to biological evolution. If we think of Japanese society as an organism, we can see the various outcaste groups as attributes evolved by that society to perform specific functions - butcher animals, work leather, clean temples, etc. As society's needs changed (as, for example, basket-weaving came to be seen as degrading work), rather than create new groups, the outcaste groups went through a process of exaptation. And in 1871, when the outcaste groups were officially dissolved, Japan ended up with something like an appendix - an attribute that used to serve a now non-existent need, but that was also not detrimental enough to the organism as a whole to disappear quickly.
Unfortunately, this insight makes it pretty much impossible to use the theoretical model of outsiders that I wanted to use. Now I need to find a good article or two on exaptation and as big a pile of information as I can get my hands on on theories of outsider status. I'm definitely going to have to synthesize a theoretical framework for my thesis's analysis from what other people have done; nothing I've seen so far does a good job of explaining all of the attributes of the Burakumin over their thousand years of history.
In linguistics, exaptation describes a similar process - linguistic evolution turns out to have remarkable parallels to biological evolution. When a new concept comes into existence, it needs a name, and it is quite common to exapt an older word instead of making up a new one. "Science", for example, entered the English language in the 14th century meaning "knowledge", then gradually came to have the nuance of referring to conceptual knowledge rather than practical knowledge - a practical distinction to be able to make, which is probably why the word stuck around. It wasn't until the 19th century that "science" came to refer to the practice of determining truth by means of experiment.
I had the epiphany last night at around two o'clock that the phenomenon of the Burakumin could be described using parallels to biological evolution. If we think of Japanese society as an organism, we can see the various outcaste groups as attributes evolved by that society to perform specific functions - butcher animals, work leather, clean temples, etc. As society's needs changed (as, for example, basket-weaving came to be seen as degrading work), rather than create new groups, the outcaste groups went through a process of exaptation. And in 1871, when the outcaste groups were officially dissolved, Japan ended up with something like an appendix - an attribute that used to serve a now non-existent need, but that was also not detrimental enough to the organism as a whole to disappear quickly.
Unfortunately, this insight makes it pretty much impossible to use the theoretical model of outsiders that I wanted to use. Now I need to find a good article or two on exaptation and as big a pile of information as I can get my hands on on theories of outsider status. I'm definitely going to have to synthesize a theoretical framework for my thesis's analysis from what other people have done; nothing I've seen so far does a good job of explaining all of the attributes of the Burakumin over their thousand years of history.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Yes we can!
I can stop pretending to be Canadian now! Yessss!
Seriously, you have no idea what it's been like living as an American expat the last five years, as America has launched an unnecessary war, kidnapped and imprisoned innocent people without trial, tortured its prisoners... These things should be shameful to every American, but when you're a foreigner, that shame is magnified by the tendency of others to associate you with the actions of your homeland.
I am so proud of us. We've elected a black man named Barack Hussein Obama to be our president, sending a clear message to the pundits and commentators who have spent the last twenty months telling us that we were too racist and xenophobic to ever do such a thing: We are better, more thoughtful, more mature than that. We've elected a government with a mandate for the creation of universal health care, which will finally remedy the ludicrous situation that links Americans' access to affordable, quality health care to our employment. We've repudiated the trickle-down pseudoscience that has informed our recent economic policy. And most importantly to me, we've put a thoughtful, intelligent, curious human being in the White House.
I know the next four years won't be as good as Obama and his supporters hope. But I think we've just elected a president that will make me proud to tell people where I'm from. I know I'm proud tonight. Go us.
Seriously, you have no idea what it's been like living as an American expat the last five years, as America has launched an unnecessary war, kidnapped and imprisoned innocent people without trial, tortured its prisoners... These things should be shameful to every American, but when you're a foreigner, that shame is magnified by the tendency of others to associate you with the actions of your homeland.
I am so proud of us. We've elected a black man named Barack Hussein Obama to be our president, sending a clear message to the pundits and commentators who have spent the last twenty months telling us that we were too racist and xenophobic to ever do such a thing: We are better, more thoughtful, more mature than that. We've elected a government with a mandate for the creation of universal health care, which will finally remedy the ludicrous situation that links Americans' access to affordable, quality health care to our employment. We've repudiated the trickle-down pseudoscience that has informed our recent economic policy. And most importantly to me, we've put a thoughtful, intelligent, curious human being in the White House.
I know the next four years won't be as good as Obama and his supporters hope. But I think we've just elected a president that will make me proud to tell people where I'm from. I know I'm proud tonight. Go us.
The waiting is killing me...
Okay, guys, hurry it up already.
Starting next year, I say we just all meet in Kansas ('cause it's in the middle) and just raise our hands when our candidate's name is called. That would be so much faster...
Starting next year, I say we just all meet in Kansas ('cause it's in the middle) and just raise our hands when our candidate's name is called. That would be so much faster...
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Excersize your rights!
The following is a public service announcement sponsored by The American Umlaut.
It's Tuesday, November 4th. Election Day. It's actually been Election Day for twenty two hours here in Japan already, but it's just beginning at home and the polls won't close on the west coast until tomorrow afternoon for me. Which is torture - I've been following this campaign seriously for about two years, so this is like pushing Christmas back a day.
Please go vote. I don't care who for. Vote Republican, vote Democratic, vote Libertarian, vote Communist. Voting is how you make your voice heard - a vote for a third party candidate won't put that candidate in power, but it sends a message to the major parties that you are prepared to vote for someone who's willing represent your views. You can't expect a political party to adopt policies that appeal to people who can't be arsed to get down to a polling booth.
And remember that your ballot contains a lot more than just a list of presidential candidates - on this single day, Washingtonians will decide whether to invest their tax dollars in a highway expansion project, Californians will decide whether to amend their constitution to discriminate against homosexuals, Michigan will decide whether to allow state funding for stem cell research. And across the country, thousands of the public servants that make up the government, our government, will be hired and fired by the American people.
Our democracy can only work if the people make their voices heard. So please take the time today to get to a polling place and tell the government what you'd like it to do. The lines are going to be long all over the place; bring a book, bring your DS, bring a lawn chair, bring a friend.
I'm excited to wake up tomorrow and find out what we decided. Have a wonderful Election Day.
It's Tuesday, November 4th. Election Day. It's actually been Election Day for twenty two hours here in Japan already, but it's just beginning at home and the polls won't close on the west coast until tomorrow afternoon for me. Which is torture - I've been following this campaign seriously for about two years, so this is like pushing Christmas back a day.
Please go vote. I don't care who for. Vote Republican, vote Democratic, vote Libertarian, vote Communist. Voting is how you make your voice heard - a vote for a third party candidate won't put that candidate in power, but it sends a message to the major parties that you are prepared to vote for someone who's willing represent your views. You can't expect a political party to adopt policies that appeal to people who can't be arsed to get down to a polling booth.
And remember that your ballot contains a lot more than just a list of presidential candidates - on this single day, Washingtonians will decide whether to invest their tax dollars in a highway expansion project, Californians will decide whether to amend their constitution to discriminate against homosexuals, Michigan will decide whether to allow state funding for stem cell research. And across the country, thousands of the public servants that make up the government, our government, will be hired and fired by the American people.
Our democracy can only work if the people make their voices heard. So please take the time today to get to a polling place and tell the government what you'd like it to do. The lines are going to be long all over the place; bring a book, bring your DS, bring a lawn chair, bring a friend.
I'm excited to wake up tomorrow and find out what we decided. Have a wonderful Election Day.
Plausibel und anschließbar
Studying, for me, is like riding a cheap Splash Mountain ripoff: a long, tortuously uneventful slog punctuated occasionally by rushes of excitement. In the two years I took classes in Düsseldorf, my greatest moment of excitement was the discovery of an essay called Die soziale Konstrukt des Fremden (The Social Construct of the Other), by Alois Hahn. In it, he systematically breaks down the characteristics of the phenomenon of "otherness" in society. It is a short, dense text that has the unmistakable mark of genius - it's filled with ideas I'd never had before that, upon reading, were so self evident as to be obvious to any fool.
I've intended to use Hahn's text as the theoretical basis for my master's thesis ever since I read it last year. Now that I've dug a bit deeper into the question of Buraku history, I'm finding that Hahn alone isn't going to be able to pull off the trick of explaining the curious combination of phenomena that make up the particular flavor of "otherness" enjoyed by the Burakumin and, historically, by the dozens of groups that eventually came under that label. I'm going to have to find other approaches to the question of otherness, stretch them out a bit, sew them together, patch in a few of my own ideas, and try to make a reasonable theoretical basis for the analysis I'm trying to pull off.
This is a much more difficult nut to crack than I thought it would be. At the heart of it, my question is really quite simple; how were the Burakumin seen before 1871? How were they seen after 1871? How much of the change can be attributed to their change in legal status due to the 1871 Buraku Emancipation Edict?
The more I learn, the more questions I end up with. There is, first, the huge problem that "Burakumin" as a unitary, nation-wide status never really existed until it was legally abolished - right up until the Buraku Emancipation Edict there were local rules on who was a member of an outcaste group, and what, exactly, that membership meant. That makes it very difficult to describe views of the outcastes prior to 1871 without overgeneralizing. Another problem is that, although the Burakumin were a subject of a great deal of public debate in the 1870's (precisely because of their emancipation), there wasn't a great deal written about them in the years immediately before that.
This is like walking through an infinite maze. The more you explore, the more you know, but the more you know, the more unexplored places you become aware of. It's hard to know when to stop trying to go down every path and start sketching out a map.
I've intended to use Hahn's text as the theoretical basis for my master's thesis ever since I read it last year. Now that I've dug a bit deeper into the question of Buraku history, I'm finding that Hahn alone isn't going to be able to pull off the trick of explaining the curious combination of phenomena that make up the particular flavor of "otherness" enjoyed by the Burakumin and, historically, by the dozens of groups that eventually came under that label. I'm going to have to find other approaches to the question of otherness, stretch them out a bit, sew them together, patch in a few of my own ideas, and try to make a reasonable theoretical basis for the analysis I'm trying to pull off.
This is a much more difficult nut to crack than I thought it would be. At the heart of it, my question is really quite simple; how were the Burakumin seen before 1871? How were they seen after 1871? How much of the change can be attributed to their change in legal status due to the 1871 Buraku Emancipation Edict?
The more I learn, the more questions I end up with. There is, first, the huge problem that "Burakumin" as a unitary, nation-wide status never really existed until it was legally abolished - right up until the Buraku Emancipation Edict there were local rules on who was a member of an outcaste group, and what, exactly, that membership meant. That makes it very difficult to describe views of the outcastes prior to 1871 without overgeneralizing. Another problem is that, although the Burakumin were a subject of a great deal of public debate in the 1870's (precisely because of their emancipation), there wasn't a great deal written about them in the years immediately before that.
This is like walking through an infinite maze. The more you explore, the more you know, but the more you know, the more unexplored places you become aware of. It's hard to know when to stop trying to go down every path and start sketching out a map.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Und, daß so was von so was kommt
Karaoke is one of those fantastic little words that are largely responsible for my love of learning languages. It is a portmanteau of the Japanese word kara, meaning "empty," and the English word "orchestra." The history of karaoke is a remarkable game of intercultural ping-pong, with the concept originating in America, made successful in Japan, patented by a Filipino and re-imported into America under its Japanese name.
This Tuesday I got together with my fellow graduate students for an evening of karaoke, and I was reminded again of just how different and fantastic the experience is in Japan. My experience of American style karaoke has mostly not been so great. People singing karaoke (myself very much included) aren't generally the best singers, and if you don't know the person singing there's no real emotional basis for enjoying the performance. Japanese style karaoke eliminates this, though, by putting the whole thing in a little room, where only people you know are singing. Add a few extra microphones for group sing-alongs, a couple of tambourines for the rhythmically inclined, and a non-stop supply of beer, and you've got a recipe for a marvelous social experience.
There were a lot of great moments that night, but the best was singing Bon Jovi's "It's My Life" as the final song before we left. As I sung, everyone else jumped up and began dancing around the room, up on the table, screaming along with the chorus. When the finale came they swarmed me, and we ended the night with a high-energy group hug.
Some things are just better over here.
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