Tenure, she wrote

I've been following Tenure, she wrote, a lovely blog written by a fellow female academic about her own struggles with the current system's dead-ends and downfalls. This is the type of reading many people from my circle seem to be into lately and I guess it is a bit questionable how much of this reading is actually good for us and how much of it is just another type of self-poisoning, like listening to emotionally masochistic songs about break-up when the person you were stalking got away. Our plight seems to be a bit more sophisticated than that, but it's not, really: the academic dream was the stalked and we were the delusion-ed stalkers hoping it will still come out alright in spite of contrary evidence, it seems.
Of course, certain nuances need to be added, still: that unlike real stalking cases, the object of our desire actually did use and encourage us in the delusion (I know, this is probably what most stalkers would say), and the fact that not all of us were left on the outside. Some of us, after quite a lot of struggle, did make it into some kind of tenured position, though it's still pretty much a lottery.

Returning to what I wanted to share about Tenure, she wrote, I was particularly touched by this post of hers, in which she talks about a problem so common for some of us within academia, but so gender-specific that most academia-criticizing lit doesn't cover it. I've been in similar situations more times than I can keep count of, and I'm not the only one. The line between open aggression and hints to your gut is more blurred, finer and softer than it is in the streets, let's say, but this doesn't make the environment (much) safer, it just makes the harassers more shrouded and shroud-able in the cloak of "you got it all wrong".

On the ineluctable inner reverence

"At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis we still have not cut off the head of the king." (Jean L. Cohen, 1994)

Perhaps this observation, which I tend to agree with, has less to do with monarchy than it has to do with humanity's inner tendency towards hierarchical structures. That would actually be a no-brainer for anyone that knows the least bit of political theory; but the story goes, I think, deeper than this. Monarchy and hierarchy are not solely about power, as the quote above seems to suggest, but they're about a sense of the sacred as well. If you regard sacredness as yet another dimension of power which people needed to invent in order to justify and legitimize that power's existence in the first place, then this observation doesn't add much to the initial point made by Cohen, but if you tend to see the sacred more as something parallel, implied by power but also different from it - as I do - then the point changes. 
The fact that, as the author put it, the representation of power has still remained under the spell of the monarchy means not only that we tend to see power as centralized and hegemonic, but also that we tend to ascribe a certain ineluctable aura to it. The spell of the monarchy is a charming choice of words here, for pinpointing at the enchantment associated usually with magic (and the aura of the sacred I was referring to).
We don't just need to refer to a (political) power above us, we also want to idealize it. We don't just want to be part of a hierarchical structure, we want to have some trace of reverence for it. Monarchy may be well dead in many parts of the old and new world, but humanity still crowns its kings and queens in nearly all aspects of collective life.

A bit of professional pride

“We [anthropologists] have been the first to insist on a number of things: that the world does not divide into the pious and the superstitious; that there are sculptures in jungles and paintings in deserts; that political order is possible without centralized power and principled justice without codified rules; that the norms of reason were not fixed in Greece, the evolution of morality not consummated in England. Most important, we were the first to insist that we see the lives of others through lenses of our own grinding and that they look back on ours through ones of their own.” (Clifford Geertz)

I would only add one thing to that: I dislike it when cultural relativism (initiated by anthropology) is pushed into moral relativism. I will not argue for the "dangers" or poor content of this "postmodern chaos" or anything like that, I will merely say that I, as an almost conservative-oriented anthropologist, simply dislike it.

When being able to read and write was uncool

“The Greek aristocracy at first disdained the technology of alphabetic writing and remained devoted instead to the recitative tradition through which it acquired oral fluency with Homer and the few other “inspired” poets whom it sprinkled into daily conversation. Writing and reading may have been regarded as distasteful for any variety of reasons: because they were tasks and skills antithetical to the askêsis of military life that the typical aristocrat knew; because, in the face of a dramaturgical intensity of an established pedagogy that intimately linked theater, communality and religious devotion, the mechanics of writing and reading could only seem pale and impoverished; because the alphabet may have had its initial Greek invention among Greek merchants or the inscribers of pottery, whom the aristocrat could only disdain. The Greeks themselves – at least in the surviving archive – have remarkably little to say on the subject. Whatever the case may be, literacy in ancient Greece came to be the competency of precisely that stratum which had initially resisted it together with those who came to be their rivals in wealth. It never approached universality, even among the free-born male population.” (James D. Faubion, An anthropology of ethics, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p 63)

And here we ("we" as in contemporary Westerners) are trying to push literacy down the world's throat as the miracle cure for social unrest, poverty, violence and so on, and, even more interestingly, as the miracle push towards "development" and "progress". At least in the humanities, it would have been reasonable to expect a certain atheism by now in relation to the oh-so-worshiped  notion of progress. It's so nineteenth century... 

Of course, it is true that in the world of today, meaning in the social context that we create and maintain, not being equipped with literacy skills is a major drawback; the point was not to deny that. But we shouldn't forget that the context we choose to maintain at a certain point is highly volatile and the truths and "facts" we take for granted (like the intricate link between literacy and development in society or mental capability in the individual) can so easily change.

***

But apart from this theoretical point I wanted to make, I can totally imagine myself back then, with the confident and somewhat distinguished attitude that a classy female smoker can arbor today in the grand hollywoodian setting, rolling my eyes at a certain someone who can read and write and looking condescendingly to him for being so vulgar... "No, you can't buy me a Ouzo [actually they didn't have that back then, so replace "Ouzo" with whatever else they drank in those days]... Girls like me don't even talk to boys like you...". Funny thought. Especially considering the contemporary Western (if not already globalized) sapiosexuality.

Geopolitics (new collaboration)

From now on, besides the book reviews for constiinte.ro, you can also find some other writings of mine on this portal, in the format of one-two page news and reviews of geopolitics (as well in Romanian, so I wouldn't recommend it for my non-Romanian friends).

That's it for now.

Always the other and otherness

I (we) tend to talk a lot about "the other" and "otherness" and tend to use this theme as a go-to when explaining anthropological matters. I've wondered a couple of times whether the same things on which a study or another focuses could be perfectly explained (and emphasizing the same causal explanation) not using the whole other narrative. But then the thought just passed slipped my mind, as the reading or writing I was engaged into was most probably required for an objective very "in the now".

Reading Marc Augé - who is a brilliant theoretician of postmodernity and redefined spatiality, by the way, so if you like works like Bauman and post-structuralists like Foucault you should really see some of his writings as well - I came across this interesting passage:

"Snow" and on how we read

Going through my lecture notes on Orhan Pamuk's "Snow", I feel the urge to remark upon two things.

1. My notes (the quotations) tend to target things that "judge" the Islamic culture overwhelmingly, or that at least emphasize the difference. I really think that Islam and the Arab world, generally speaking, are the world's ultimate alterity in the present time. I made few notes on things that struck me as "poetic" and many notes on things that struck me as "unfair" and the whole phenomenology associated with it.
And of course, my question is, first and foremost, this: How much would my lecture notes differ from what they are now if I was from another culture, or differently educated etc? How much does my tendency to be biased by feminist themes and a certain eurocentrism impact what I chose to retain from this book, in terms of "quotable" bits? Is this bias only slight or stronger than I like to think? And finally, did this bias "ruin" this book for me? (I must note that the reading was quite enjoyable in spite of what one could understand from this post and these inquires).

2. I tend to think, not only because of this book but the thing is more visible using this one, that literature cannot be as apolitical as it partially succeeded to be before. Because, in a complete contradiction with the diminished political involvement of present times (political skepticism and the large number of people not showing up to vote, a general cynicism regarding the whole political class etc) the world is more politicized than ever. Maybe it's because of the overrated term of globalization, maybe not. What I'm pretty certain about is the fact that the two go together and are faces of the same coin: the more political the whole society gets (and politics pervade literature and all domains of the thought actually), the more disgusted people become with concrete politics, not being able to ignore their failure any more. So the world is becoming more and less political at the same time.
And incidents like being quick to label things as "discriminative" etc (aka to politicize them), things that before would have been anywhere between common and outrageous, but not necessary political, is just another tendency to confirm that. A heightened awareness is everywhere. And we're a bit injected with hysteria (see the violent political debates from recently) because of it. Nothing is apolitical anymore. And in some regards, this flux of enriched awareness is welcome. But I can't help wondering if it isn't also: first of all, an obstacle to "true"-er feeling and abandoning yourself to it; and second of all dangerous in terms of society itself becoming ultimately unable to settle anything about how things should be run.