Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight
Clifford Geertz

As longtime Goffmania readers know, Clifford Geertz is my hero. His essay, "Common Sense as a Cultural System" is one of the touchstones of my education. Of all the social thinkers I had ever read, he was the one that showed me the value of humanistic inquiry. The greatest puzzles are not scientific; instead, the most challenging unravelings are those directed toward questions of meaning. I switched rather abruptly from one of CP Snow's two cultures to the other. After Geertz, science smacked of nothing so much as the application of brutish force, and a new value, perceptiveness, came to replace rigor in my hierarchy of goals. I don't think I could have ever enjoyed art until I read Geertz. After reading Geertz, artworks shifted from the periphery to the center, and I even started looking at trees in new ways.

Well, I've reached the limit of my capacity for gushing. Here's a passage from Geertz's Notes on a Balinese Cockfight:

Now, a few special occasions aside, cockfights are illegal in Bali under the Republic (as, for not altogether unrelated reasons, they were under the Dutch), largely as a result of the pretensions to puritanism radical nationalism tends to bring with it. The elite, which is not itself so very puritan, worries about the poor, ignorant peasant gambling all his money away, about what foreigners will think, about the waste of time better devoted to building up the country. It sees cockfighting as "primitive," "backward," "unprogressive," and generally unbecoming an ambitious nation. And, as with those other embarrassments -opium smoking, begging, or uncovered breasts-it seeks, rather unsystematically, to put a stop to it.

As a result, the fights are usually held in a secluded corner of a village in semisecrecy, a fact which tends to slow the action a little-not very much, but the Balinese do not care to have it slowed at all. In this case, however, perhaps because they were raising money for a school that the government was unable to give them, perhaps because raids had been few recently, perhaps, as I gathered from subsequent discussion, there was a notion that the necessary bribes had been paid, they thought they could take a chance on the central square and draw a larger and more enthusiastic crowd without attracting the attention of the law.

They were wrong. In the midst of the third match, with hundreds of people, including, still transparent, myself and my wife, fused into a single body around the ring, a superorganism in the literal sense, a truck full of policemen armed with machine guns roared up. Amid great screeching cries of "pulisi! pulisi!" from the crowd, the policemen jumped out, and, springing into the center of the ring, began to swing their guns around like gangsters in a motion picture, though not going so far as actually to fire them. The superorganism came instantly apart as its components scattered in all directions. People raced down the road, disappeared head first over walls, scrambled under platforms, folded themselves behind wicker screens, scuttled up coconut trees. Cocks armed with steel spurs sharp enough to cut off a finger or run a hole through a foot were running wildly around. Everything was dust and panic.

On the established anthropological principle, When in Rome, my wife and I decided, only slightly less instantaneously than everyone else, that the thing to do was run too. We ran down the main village street, northward, away from where we were living, for we were on that side of the ring. About half-way down another fugitive ducked suddenly into a compound-his own, it turned out-and we, seeing nothing ahead of us but rice fields, open country, and a very high volcano, followed him. As the three of us came tumbling into the courtyard, his wife, who had apparently been through this sort of thing before, whipped out a table, a tablecloth, three chairs, and three cups of tea, and we all, without any explicit communication whatsoever, sat down, commenced to sip tea, and sought to compose ourselves.

A final thought about Geertz: he had me convinced for a while that I wanted to become an anthropologist. This was perhaps his only bad effect. Nowadays, I know I don't want to be an anthropologist, preferring to Geertz's the approach of Vonnegut, who said in a speech: "George did point out correctly that I have a Masters degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago, but that was a terrible mistake. I can’t stand primitive people. They are so stupid."
posted by neel master at 2:26 AM

The Prison-Industrial Complex

Hipster fave Eric Schlosser writes about the shady connection between prisons and revenue:

Today the United States has approximately 1.8 million people behind bars: about 100,000 in federal custody, 1.1 million in state custody, and 600,000 in local jails. Prisons hold inmates convicted of federal or state crimes; jails hold people awaiting trial or serving short sentences. The United States now imprisons more people than any other country in the world -- perhaps half a million more than Communist China. The American inmate population has grown so large that it is difficult to comprehend: imagine the combined populations of Atlanta, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Des Moines, and Miami behind bars. "We have embarked on a great social experiment," says Marc Mauer, the author of the upcoming book The Race to Incarcerate. "No other society in human history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for the purpose of crime control." The prison boom in the United States is a recent phenomenon. Throughout the first three quarters of this century the nation's incarceration rate remained relatively stable, at about 110 prison inmates for every 100,000 people. In the mid-1970s the rate began to climb, doubling in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s. The rate is now 445 per 100,000; among adult men it is about 1,100 per 100,000. During the past two decades roughly a thousand new prisons and jails have been built in the United States. Nevertheless, America's prisons are more overcrowded now than when the building spree began, and the inmate population continues to increase by 50,000 to 80,000 people a year.

The economist and legal scholar Michael K. Block, who believes that American sentencing policies are still not harsh enough, offers a straightforward explanation for why the United States has lately incarcerated so many people: "There are too many prisoners because there are too many criminals committing too many crimes." Indeed, the nation's prisons now hold about 150,000 armed robbers, 125,000 murderers, and 100,000 sex offenders -- enough violent criminals to populate a medium-sized city such as Cincinnati. Few would dispute the need to remove these people from society. The level of violent crime in the United States, despite recent declines, still dwarfs that in Western Europe. But the proportion of offenders being sent to prison each year for violent crimes has actually fallen during the prison boom. In 1980 about half the people entering state prison were violent offenders; in 1995 less than a third had been convicted of a violent crime. The enormous increase in America's inmate population can be explained in large part by the sentences given to people who have committed nonviolent offenses. Crimes that in other countries would usually lead to community service, fines, or drug treatment -- or would not be considered crimes at all -- in the United States now lead to a prison term, by far the most expensive form of punishment. "No matter what the question has been in American criminal justice over the last generation," says Franklin E. Zimring, the director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute, "prison has been the answer."

No Cruising For You: African American Youth and Police in Oakland
J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

It's not the job of police to solve social problems. Give them such a task, and more often than not they'll either muddle around and make the situation worse, or push it out into somebody else's jurisdiction, making it somebody else's problem. And why should we expect otherwise? Solving social problems is not part of police training. It's not in their mentality. It's not in their job descriptions. Asking them to take on such tasks is just asking for trouble.

So why is the City of Oakland asking its police department to solve the problem of the Sideshows?

Sideshows are the gatherings of mostly African American young folk, who congregate in parking lots and along certain city streets to play music and show off their cars. Although these gatherings have a particular Oakland, African American, hip-hop, turn-of-the-millennium beat to them, they are not much different than what American kids have been doing on American streets since cars were invented. It's a lot like the 1960's-era, Central Valley white kids in American Graffiti. But instead of going out to the edge of town for drag races, these Oakland kids are turning donuts in the middle of intersections. Yeah, it's sometimes dangerous, and it's almost always annoying to older folk (like myself) who have to put up with the noise and the inconveniences.

But the Sideshows are not a gang, or a crowd of people setting out to cause trouble. It's mostly kids with a lot of exuberance and youthful enthusiasm, with a lot of time on their hands, and not a lot of things to do in a city that does not especially value black teenagers and young adults. Sure, there are a few troublemakers and knuckleheads in the crowd, but they are in the distinct minority.

posted by neel master at 2:11 AM

Socialism: An Obituary
Roger Kimball

Roger Kimball has published some or the other version of this rant in every issue of the New Criterion since I started reading it. I've never encountered anyone so thoroughly obsessed with discrediting something. It's worrisome, though, because he forces me to wonder why he would he be so vigilant? What if he's right? He never convinced me, but there's a passage in Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind that always gives me trouble. Bloom is mocking Rawl's A Theory of Justice. I always took Rawls to be this sober, reasonable guy; I mean, maybe you wouldn't want Foucault over to your parents' house for dinner, but Rawls seemed like the friend you show your parents to prove that liberals can be normal. But there's Bloom, ripping Rawls a new one; he calls the minimax theory a 'parody' of a widespread tendency to dismiss human excellence as some sort of bourgeois artifice. Bloom can barely restrain himself from making an all-out assault on all-encompassing notions of equality.

Luckily, Roger Kimball has never managed to seem quite so convincing.

What is socialism? In part, it is optimism translated into a political program. Until he took up gardening, Candide was a sort of proto-socialist; his mentor Pangloss could have been one of socialism’s founding philosophers. Socialism is also unselfishness embraced as an axiom: the gratifying emotion of unselfishness, experienced alternately as resentment against others and titillating satisfaction with oneself. The philosophy of Rousseau, which elevated what he called the “indescribably sweet” feeling of virtue into a political imperative, is socialism in ovo. “Man is born free,” Rousseau famously exclaimed, “but is everywhere in chains.” That heart-stopping conundrum—too thrilling to be corrected by mere experience—is the fundamental motor of socialism. It is a motor fueled by this corollary: that the multitude unaccountably colludes in perpetuating its own bondage and must therefore be, in Rousseau’s ominous phrase, “forced to be free.”

posted by neel master at 2:08 AM

If you ever needed something to worry about, there's always prisons. Jesus, there are so many prisons and so many prisoners. This is a problem for all sorts of people, from namby-pamby sociologists all the way over to reactionary sherrifs and whatnot. Let's survey the field.

Profit and Stealth in the Prison-Industrial Complex
Alexander Pitofsky
Postmodern Culture

In this cogent, wide-ranging study, Joseph Hallinan examines the ways in which the American penal system has been transformed during the last twenty years. Working-class Americans who used to protest when state officials announced plans to build prisons in their communities now compete to attract new penitentiaries and the jobs they create. The incarceration of convicts--once perceived as a grim governmental responsibility--has become a thriving, recession-proof industry. Prison officials have shifted their priorities from inmate rehabilitation programs to budgetary concerns; instead of focusing on the prevention of recidivism, they focus on the reduction of "average daily inmate costs." Perhaps the most startling feature of these institutional changes, Hallinan observes, is the fact that they have been implemented without substantive public debate. Although incarceration rates have reached levels that would have seemed inconceivable as recently as the early 1980s, the public seems virtually unaware of the ways in which the aims and methodologies of the nation's penal system have been revised. Going Up the River will disappoint readers in search of a polemic against what Hallinan calls "the prison-industrial complex," but it provides an ideal starting place for readers who want to understand how the confluence of economics and punishment has reshaped the prison culture of the United States.

posted by neel master at 1:53 AM

"[My task is to] offer an alternative vision of living systems, a vision which recognizes the power and role of genes without subscribing to genetic determinism, and which recaptures an understanding of living organisms and their trajectories through time and space as lying at the centre of biology. It is these trajectories that I call lifelines. Far from being determined, or needing to invoke some non-material concept of free will to help us escape the determinist trap, it is in the nature of living systems to be radically indeterminate, to continually construct their-our-own futures, albeit in circumstances not of our own choosing."

— Steven Rose, neurobiologist

posted by neel master at 1:46 AM

The Testimony of Peter Breggin, M.D.

Peter Breggin is an outspoken present-day antipsychiatrist. He seems extreme, but who knows what extreme is in this topsy-turvy world? Apparently, he's not so extreme, since he testified in front of a House committee, where he said things like this:

It is important for the Education Committee to understand that the ADD/ADHD diagnosis was developed specifically for the purpose of justifying the use of drugs to subdue the behaviors of children in the classroom. The content of the diagnosis in the 1994 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association shows that it is specifically aimed at suppressing unwanted behaviors in the classroom.

The diagnosis is divided into three types: hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention.

Under hyperactivity, the first two (and most powerful) criteria are "often fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat" and "often leaves seat in classroom or in other situations in which remaining seated is expected." Clearly, these two "symptoms" are nothing more nor less than the behaviors most likely to cause disruptions in a large, structured classroom.

Under impulsivity, the first criteria is "often blurts out answers before questions have been completed" and under inattention, the first criteria is "often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, work, or other activities." Once again, the diagnosis itself, formulated over several decades, leaves no question concerning its purpose: to redefine disruptive classroom behavior into a disease. The ultimate aim is to justify the use of medication to suppress or control the behaviors.

posted by neel master at 1:41 AM

Jeff Koons: Getting It

Douglas Coupland asseses wacky artist Jeff Koons:

I once had a discussion with a friend: we were trying to figure out what it would be like to go through life without a sense of humor. By this, we meant going through life being incapable - in a medical and biological sense - of understanding funniness, in much the same way that the colorblind can never understand the concept of 'green'. Imagine: you'd be standing amid all sorts of everyday situations - around water coolers, in shop queues and the like - and for no apparent reason, people around you would suddenly erupt into bizarre brays and coughs and parps of air. You'd ask them what made them emit such noises, and they'd tell you something called 'a joke', and you'd stare back at them and say, 'So? What's the big deal?'
I think this idea is germane when approaching the work of Jeff Koons, the quintessential 80s artist. His body of work has survived for going on two decades now, its financial value ever escalating and its art historical value remaining high (in many ways escalating right along with its investment status).
So why should such an established artist inspire fantasies about lacking a sense of humor? Well, in the most respectful way, Koons can seem like a joke - one either gets Koons or one doesn't. If you do, you do, and if you don't, you don't. And it seems that half the artworld does (and loves his work), and half the artworld doesn't (and stares uncomprehendingly at vacuum cleaners in plexiglass cases, balloon bunnies and porcelain puppies), and the twain will never meet.

posted by neel master at 1:33 AM