Study case: corporate exec ruins charity

 

Another example how the #RuleOfExperts is, in fact, but clueless bottomline-mongering, knee-jerk streamlining and PowerPoint-assisted cheek-puffing: a former AT&T exec has ruined the American Red Cross with her senseless cuts and restructuring. #GoodForTheEconomyShitForThePeople

Gender and the City: homosociality among Bangkok's Japanese

Homosociality is so in your face in Japan that no one even notices it. A lot of time, men and women socialise separately. It's a given, no one even talks or thinks strange about it. As it is often the case in Japan, things go extreme. There are women-only train cars, lots of urbanites stop having romantic or sexual realtionships with the opposite sex, while Japanese gender-targeted marketing is perhaps the most pervasive and relentless you'll ever see. Still, homosociality is never talked about. It's so normal, like the air we breathe, that it does not even seem to register.

After 25 years of spending a lot of time with the Japanese, it really only occurred to me as a social fact last winter. For my fieldwork, I had to do sampling among Bangkok's Japanese migrants. Men wouldn't give me time of the day, so it was mostly women that I got to hang out with and ask questions. The contrast was so sharp, it came as a cognitive shock. Knowing of homosociality from research on and my travels in the Middle East and North Africa, I immediately had a light-bulb moment, 'Bang! This is it! How could I miss it all these years?'

It seems that no one has cottoned on Japanese homosociality either. There's one piece of literary research on it, but it is mostly about homoeroticism in Modern Japanese literature. Nothing in social sciences. Completamente nada. Perhaps, it's because many social scientists are not hip to the very term homosociality (I did ask around) as it comes from literary criticism. Namely, from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who, inter allia, claimed that Henry James's broken sentence structure is a sign of anal-fingering tendencies.

Cue to my Japanese migrants in Bangkok with their penchant of hanging out along gender lines. Despite my sampling difficulties, I've managed to gather enough empirical evidence from my interviews and participant observation. There are so many subtle arrangements, tacit understandings and internalised values getting the entire gender segregation machine running! Earthlings never cease to amaze me.

So that's what I just gave a talk on at the Daiwa Foundation. It is based on one of my thesis chapters, which I am also presenting at the Southeast Asia Symposium 2016 in Oxford, and also at the ASEASUK Conference 2016 at my alma mater. 

I would be very grateful for comments and suggestions, particularly re. extant research on the subject.

'Mainly' anthropologist: the journey of an interdisplinarist in a non-interdisciplinary world

When schmoozing and networking, I introduce myself as an anthropologist. That makes sense. I have attended seven courses in Anthropology, wrote my MA thesis in Anthropology, and now am writing my quite anthropological thesis based on my ethnographic fieldwork. By far, Anthropology is the language I speak and the questions that I ask about the world are very anthropological. In the course of their training, all academics get by necessity indoctrinated in the axioms and terminology of their discipline. By that token, I am at most ease talking to other anthropologists: we share the same theoretical and methodological base that enables a meaningful qualitative argument (see, anthropologists don't really use regression analysis or p-values to prove their points).

At the same time, I have done more than that. I have taken courses and research method seminars in History, Political Science, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Psychology, Psychosocial Studies, Art History, Linguistics, Studies of Religions, and even Cross-Cultural Management and Quantitative Methods. Each time I sincerely and earnestly went "local" and, by a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, assumed their epistemological claims to be true. The expected and oft achieved result was of the kind that Evans-Pritchard got after living with the Azande and studying their belief system: it all makes sense from within the system. Up to a point, however. The leap of faith, the effort to acknowledge what you see (e.g., another academic discipline) for what it is, is a conscious effort to suspend your judgement just for a while. Eventually, however, the Doubt - one of the great propelling forces of Science - creeps in. Warts, patches and chinks in the armour come to light. You still see the merits and strong points, but not with the starry-eyed naïveté of a full-on convert.

 

To illustrate the point I'm trying to drive home here, I often recur to the tale of an elephant and the six blind men of Hindustan. When they came across the animal one sunny day, they all tried to figure out what it was like by touching it. Each one assumed that it was like the part that he touched. Each one was, effectively, neither completely right, nor completely wrong: knowing well one part of the beast, but not really its ontological entirety. That is how the various branches of science operate: they know a lot about one particular part or aspect they chose to focus on, but next to none about other parts and aspects. They often do not even suspect that the elephant actually exists and is bigger than any of its constituent parts.

I feel like my blindfold has fallen a bit. I don't claim to know everything about the elephant, but at least I know that what I know is far from perfect. I also have had glimpses of the whole picture. In broader terms of the philosophy of science (shame it is not even part of most PhD courses!), this elephant metaphor is situated at a very particular place in the history of the Western scientific project.

The way I see the "academic condition" in our time is that we have moved along the (modified) Fichtean triad from the Cartesian Thesis: "what happens if we assess reality only with oursenses?", to the Modernist Analysis, where we have classified the world into multitudes of competing taxonomies consisting of neat(ish) and handy dichotomies, and now finally to the Post-Modernist Critique, where it has dawned on (some of) us that the taxonomies and dichotomies are but imperfect mental tools, and are not reality. At this point, however, science has faltered for a while: the Post-Modernist debate has largely degraded into the increasingly abstruse debates that mostly resemble spectacularly prolific projectile verbal vomiting. There are still departments and faculties organised alongside Modernist divisions, and also those organised around various brands of Post-Modern  critique. All of them keep getting increasingly specialised (the phenomenon known as academic tribalisation) getting sort of hyphenated identities: the Anthropology of Tourism, Environmental History, the Studies of Yoga and Meditation, let alone the Critical Studies of Medieval Korean Pottery. (Ok, just taking the piss with the last one here, by no means to look down on the ever-rising professional finesse of the actual sub-disciplines). Essentially, however, instead of trying to assemble a holistic picture of the elephant, we got on with specialising in the ever smaller bits of it, while a vociferous minority of Post-Modernists, Post-Colonialists, Literary Criticists, Feminists and such, keep decrying all research results, past and present, in increasingly abstract terms. The critical bunch analyse the socks off the Modernist analysis, while the adepts of the latter, in their turn, analyse the output of the former. This way we're not getting anywhere remotely close  to the final destination of the Fichtean triad, the Synthesis, where the concerned parties would come to understand the entirety of the methaphorical elephant. Diagnosis: analysis paralysis. I won't even go on with any graphic allusive metaphors to the overflow of the cognate 'anal' in this discourse. In psychiatry, however, this level of hyper-reflexivity - thinking, then thinking about thinking, then thinking about thinking about thinking, etc. ad nauseam - is commonly exhibited in schizophrenia. I'm saying no more.

 
Back to my academic affiliation and  sense of disciplinary belonging. Academically, I'm an anthropologically grounded generalist, a Jack of many trades, a master of a couple. I humbly see myself as a kind of, so to speak, God's vessel for the good of the Synthesis stage in science. I'm quite certain that there are others like me out there, probably, increasingly so. However, I'm yet to meet one.  

That is the case also because, to make my eclectic professional stance even more interesting, bureaucratically, I'm affiliated not with the Department of Anthropology but with the only supposedly interdisciplinary centre in my very non-interdisciplinary university. The centre too, in fact, has turned out to be anything but. I have chaired a panel and then presented a paper at what was supposed to be interdisciplinary conferences but they turned out to be 'this-and-that-disciplinary' rather than anything coherent theoretically or methodologically. Last few years, I have often felt like a motherless child, having to find my own course in the vast ocean of science. I do have a sense of purpose and direction, but it still does feel like a very lonely journey. 

But there's still hope. Coincidentally, while writing this piece, I decided to do what I always recommend my students: google around.  And this is what I've come across:  King's Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre KISS DTC. I shall try my luck there and tell you about the outcome.

Resistances and such

In Cultural Studies (a well-meaning Marxian political project that is not really a science, however), resistance has been spotted everywhere: any symbol or purported meaning can be exegisised as such. I too, sometimes try to play Devil's advocate too trying to see cop-outs that people attempt at least as a coping strategy: like people glued to their smartphones might be trying to create a sense of connection and intimacy in the social environment that alienates them from each other. However, I still find this strain of glorifying "resistance" rather flimsy. This kind of "resistance" reminds me of that scene in Precious where the protagonist is imagining herself a star singer on a stage while her stepfather is raping her again. We are getting screwed over big time, the sooner we realise it, the sooner you can do something meaningful about it. Foucalt was right, a shift in knowledge begets a shift in power relationship.

Holistic understanding and mythical thinking.

Growing up, I read the fairy tales of practically all peoples of the world: from Persian, Chinese and Russian, to Madagascan, Georgian and Aboriginal. It wasn't, however, before decades of life experience, meditational and yogic practice and, finally, an encounter with structural anthropology and depth psychoanalysis, that the actual meaning of fairytale metaphors has finally dawned on me. If Jesus Christ had to use similes to explain the intangible structures of reality, so should social sciences, instead of confusing themselves and everyone around with the sky-high castles of educated guesswork and terminology.

Supermarket bread and mass control

Human earthlings are mad: they go crazy about the calorific value of their food and joust over vegan suitable or non-suitable snacks but no one seems to wonder if "mono- and  di-acetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerdies of fatty acids" is something you need your bread to contain (and end up in your system). Why do "esters of synthetic fats with a composition similar to partially digested natural fat esterified with other natural acids" need to be used to make something that comes out just fine when simply made from only flour, water, and salt? I have googled around and sent a couple of emails and here's what I have seen/read.

Modern supermarkets flood their food packaging with excessive, overwhelming data on the amount of calories in a slice, the presence or absence of celery, and other superfluous trivia, while the full ingredient lists are deviously omitted. I had to beg Marks & Spensers' Nutrition department do divulge any information on what they actually put in their French baguette. Their (probably unpaid) intern responsible for communicating with pesky inquirers shared with me that "we don’t have a list of ingredients for categories of products available in a format I can share via email". How very smart for a major supermarket chain not to have one in 2015! Their colourful website, once again plastered with tangential factoids and the word "healthy" in every other sentence, suspiciously skirts around the most important issue: what is the food actually made of?

One of my most vivid memories of my trip to Croatia was seeing full lists of ingredients on every price label in the bakeries. Their content was such that I stopped buying bread after that. In the UK, however, no such info can be found. The Vegan Society have somehow managed to procure a list of ingredients on Lidl's house-brand baked goods, something Lidl do not publish on their own website nor displays in their shops. Instead, Lidl has opted for an Instagram-style display of heavily photoshopped pictures as well as typical fancier-than-PowerPoint marketing-bullshit and essentially irrelevant number juggling. Chocolate twists barely containing any actual chocolate aside, their produce is abound with such insalubrious things as cysteine (an amino-acid derived from human hair), palm oil and diphosphates. At the same time, highlighted in bold text, no doubt to make them out to be the culprits, are things like wheat, rye, milk, eggs, and sesame. The Orwellian Newspeak mission is accomplished: war is peace and peace is war! Tetrasodium diphosphate is good, wheat is bad!

From these little observation, two things become clear.

Firstly, quantitative data is the latter-day language of power, used to manufacture wilful, even enthusiastic ("Let's all lose weight by going low-carb!") consent across large swathes of the populace. Instead of arbitrarily drawn quotes from the Holy Writ to prove just about anything under the sun, now we have the highly elevated art of number-juggling, the so-called "hard figures" to the very same end.

Secondly, this kind of mass control works because the education system does not equip the majority of people with  knowledge necessary to navigate successfully through life, just with enough indoctrination to 'believe in science'. Not having basic understanding of chemistry and biology, because you chose Media Studies and PhE for your A-levels, will inevitably result in a lifetime of feeding on the worst in biochemical engineering, never knowing where your illnesses come from. The "freedom to choose" turns out to be the worst form of slavery, that very "iron cage" that repulsed Max Weber so much.

Universals and particulars in anthropology

Anthropology has had a difficult relationship with acknowledging human universals. The contradiction is that the claim that all cultures are particular and all universals are social constructs particular to the culture in question logically leads to a conclusion that humans share noting in common.

Dealing exclusively with the micro-level of cultural particulars is well known to result in culturalism and villagism, known malaises amongst anthropologists. However, those who work with the macro-levels, like political scientists and IR people, tend to zoom out of even such staples as ethnicity, gender and even political economy. But what if all of them are correct, but not completely? Like those blind men touching the elephant, they all make correct guesses but miss the entirety of the picture. This article (albeit I do have some beef with it) offers a handy way of thinking about what we have been discussing here: (Bloch's Blob)

Traditional anthropology is holistic only to a limited degree on the micro-level, looking at the social context of the tail, not just the tail itself and also somewhat aware of the hind legs (say, political economy). The rest of the elephant and the biology of the tail escapes the view. What would really come in handy, is an awareness of that fact and participant objectivation Bourdieu-style, the deconstruction of the Homo academicus. But then again, that would take another level of self-reflexivity and painful soul-searching. It is a huge individual endeavour and not everyone would be willing to put themselves through that...

Science boffins to philosopher kings: is the rule of science a good thing?

Lack of methodologies for collecting empirical data and  the Second Danger of Unreflexive Scientific Observation (over-intellectualising) keep plaguing many branches of social sciences. When you're not required to find any evidence to back up your claim, yet feel entitled to professing opinions by the sheer virtue of your fancy education, things can go really wrong. Reading a recently published article (Maciej Pletnia 2014, Asian Identity: Regional Integration and Collective Memory of the Pacific War in Contemporary Japanese Society) on a topic very close to my heart reminded me of that part of War and Peace (Volume IV, Part Two, VII), where Andrei Bolkonsky reminisces about the haughty conviction of Austrian generals in the Battle of Austerlitz that things in reality would go exactly the way they, highly learned and esteemed generals, believe they should happen: "Die erste Kolonne marschiert... Die zweite Kolonne marschiert..." Things, of course, did not pan out according to someone's educated guess, and a humiliating defeat ensued. 

So is, sadly, the case with many branches of social sciences, where arm-chair ponitification reigns supreme, with no signs of abating. It could be simply annoying, if ignorable, should the ideas produced in that manner remain safely within the Ivory Tower. Unfortunately, the recent surge of technocrats assuming top government positions (repeatedly exalted by the Economist's editorial board) indicates that we are in for some years of painful rule by "philosopher-kings", which both Plato and empirical research warned against.

 

Two variables are not reality: private prisons vs. universities

The US apparently boasts the most extensive prison system with the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. A fair share of the prisons are private companies running for and actually making profit, so in terms of market efficiency they are probably world's best. SCORE! Let's all go private! (in my best Eric Cartman's voice) That would however ignore that such a system is fed by the judicial systems where too many people are incarcerated long-term for minor felonies, that private prisons are allowed to select "low-cost" inmates and have access to funding, the slavery-like labour exploitation (re. the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution), the poor staff training and low wages, the lack of oversight and accountability, the inhumane living conditions due to cost-saving, etc., etc.

This is merely to illustrate the point that describing reality in terms of two variables, i.e., no state funding = high success of universities (most cited research papers + high rankings), is a formal logical fallacy. That and treating social and environmental costs as "externalities" are exactly the kind of destructive pseudo-scientific thinking that Economics and Political Science students are indoctrinated in, and which is, unfortunately, is presently the language of power and self-proclaimed "science".

#GoodForTheEconomyShitForThePeople

Sad truth for you, earthlings

All human social  systems only produce waste and difference. That's it.

10 worst things science has unleashed on us

I totally see where the recent wave of religion-bashing is coming from: it's a reaction of intellectuals and those aligned with them to the recent surge of the swivel-eyed religious fundamentalist spectrum of varying degrees of militancy in all corners of the world. However, the anti-religionist argument itself is none better than the religious fundamentalism: the only actual difference is that instead of invoking a paternal projection, commonly marketed as "God", the militant atheists invoke idolised science, the infallible source of rational truth, to justify their views and actions. It could be forgiven to laymen, whose naive idea of science  is of clever egg-heads shoving spadefuls of the ultimate Truth to the furnace of progress and development.  Disturbingly, however, the same kind of unreflexive, self-congratulatory drivel is peddled by professional academics cum media-enhanced prophets like Neil Degrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Despite or, perhaps even, because of their wide public acclaim, this is just yet another proof that natural scientists should be banned from making any statements about humanity, religion and society and stick to what they were trained to do in the first place: sticking bits of DNA up the microbes' asses, overinterpreting MRI scans, or gazing into starry skies. Thank God (sic!), their likes rarely get to any decision-making positions, but when they do, we are never too far away from carnage and rampage - Yugoslavia's genocide-mongering Biljana Plavšić, a widely published full professor of biology who incited the massacre of Bosnians using her political power and scientific reasoning, being the latest example. Science made into a god is none more rational, benign or reliable for designing social policies than any religion.

The common argument brought forward by the scientism camp is a list of all wrong-doings incurred upon humanity by religion: the Crusades to the Inquisition to witch-hunts. There's no denying, that religion did serve as justification and a rallying cry for those. For the sake of balance, however,  let's look at what the Age of Reason with its deification of Science has brought us:

1. ethnic cleansing, 
2. psychiatry, 
3. Ayn Rand, 
4. chemical weapons, 
5. genetically modified organisms, 
6. the nuclear bomb, 
7. scientific racism, 
8. colonialism, 
9. two world wars, 
10. environmental destruction...

Let us also not forget that the peace-loving and benevolent regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the Kim family were staunchly atheist.

As it usually goes, both sides of the argument fight over a false dilemma. The human nature is the problem, not religion or science.

Teeming humanity and hyper-social reality

At times, especially upon a peak into the news, it feels like the world has gone mad. But looking back, it becomes obvious that it has always been the case. However, this time around it's with a difference. I am the last one to bring forward scientism or biologism to explain humanity, but now it seems, to a point, justified. Social facts exist externally, i.e., beyond the control of the society's members. Compared to Durkheim's times, the latter-day rising interconnection of the humanity and its increasing density start bringing about a hyper-social reality: we start living as one global entity with new realities even less within our control than before. There are too many of us now and humanity start behaving like a hyper-chaotic system, acquiring certain characteristics of a physical entity with the critical mass of components having reached a certain saturated level.

With increase in numbers, the quality of the system changes. There are too many of us, the chaos, that has always been there as in any other system, has taken on a different level.  Overall, the interaction is more intense, magnified by technology. Inside, we start feeling crowded, annoyed by our exposure to the different: it particularly comes to head where the population density is high and the influx of foreigners is highly visible. There are more explosions of violence, state-sanctioned and glorified like drone attacks or democracy export wars, or spontaneous and publicly reviled like rape and xenophobia. Perhaps, the only reason keeping it all from building up into another world war is, not Ban Ki-moon benevolent, Mona Lisa-like semi-smile, but another fear, that of the nuclear deterrent. 

Governments and bureaucracies, the supposed rational actors that have never been such, even as far back as in Weber's, are too part of the chaos and subject to it, and also, consisting of live perceiving feeling actors, reacting to it emotionally, psychologically, irrationally. Do we need GM crops to feed all? Do we need mass surveillance to keep it all stable? Will "green technologies" actually save the envrionent from the exponentially growing excreta of the "thinking mold"? What do we need to keep in line with the growing demand for energy to sustain our increasingly unsustainable lifestyles and those aspiring to have those too? Those questions are answered with quick, unreflexive institutional knee jerks, reflexive spasms of bureaucratic systems, rather than any meaningful strategies addressing the underlying causes.

In the meantime, the corporate world and its driving engine, the global financial system, keep growing and operating according to their own logic, largely inconsistent with the highest good of everyone and everything else concerned: people, society, nature. Turning everything into the only language it can understand, that of the bottomline, money. The former "externalities" assumed to be subservient and subdued to the needs of economy -  humans, society and environment - are given a monetary value that can later be traded, exchanged, made into financial derivatives, all to support to the constant expansion of credit, i.e., the fractional reserve banking system clocking up trillions of digital money out of keyboard clicks and electromagnetic signals on server hard drives. 

This drive to monetarise everything, express everything through money, was presciently described in Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1927 novel We, where the entire society works to build a kind of super-spaceship, the Integral, that, when launched, will fly across the universe and calculate it all, "integrate the grandiose cosmic equation".  These days, even human emotions, dutifully recorded by everyone into the various apps of their smartphones, are smartly monetarised to create mega-profits for the likes of Facebook, Amazon and their creditors and investors. Billions of human souls' minutest moves all channeled into one powerful stream to propel the wheels of the world's banking - at least, we have one organised, rational, purposeful response to deal with

Ayn Rand and the spirit of Neo-Liberalism

Ayn Rand's spirit is in everything that people, ranging from her disciple Alan Greenspan to the starry-eyed and bushy-tailed business studies undergrads, do.Hers is the Neo-Liberal motto of the deserving vs. the undeserving, an arbitrary, misanthropic choice to divide the humanity, in this case based on their ability to participate efficiently in the market economy, dehumanising those who can't, none different from any other equally pernicious dividing ideology, we have seen so many of them bringing suffering ad destruction to the world.

The foundation of any ideology/personal belief system is in such pre-logical, emotional choices, arguing rationally with whatever rationalisation is built upon that won't achieve anything, because that logic is a mere projection of the now unconscious, internalised value. For example, the seemingly rational approach of treating the rest of reality - people, society, nature - as "externalities" to economy, rests on the irrational belief that market is a wise force that sorts out everything and is worth sacrificing anything for. As a result, we get a situation where market wins at the expense of  exactly everything else: people, society, nature. This kind of pernicious "truths" are fed to young, unsuspecting minds in university departments as unquestionable axioms by imposingly looking, glib professors, indoctrinating them to become the enthusiastic foot-soldiers of forces that sacrifice entire nations' livelihoods, the cooperative spirit of communities, humaneness, whole ecological systems, physical and emotional health of millions, for the sake of growth, i.e., the constant expansion of credit to sustain the fractional reserve system of making money out of nothing.

On "believing" in science

A believer in science is just like any other believer. Reality only opens to the kind of your inquiry, the scientific method is just one of those kinds, so you always get only a partial view, albeit self-entitled to righteousness... just like most others...

Preventive medicine, superstition and body awareness

The connection between draft (currents of cold air) and colds is known in many cultures. In Russian it is the сквозняк, in Romanian - curentul, in Turkish - kurandar, in Thai - ร่าง, in Indonesian - masuk angin, in Greek - ψύξι...  and many people take precautions not to be exposed to one. There's a not-metaphysical explanation to this: prolonged exposure to cold currents of air does cause colds, everyone who's slept under the air-conditioning would know that. Evidence is really down to the level of one's body awareness, a lot of people are largely oblivious to the majority of their body sensations, subtle changes go mostly unnoticed, while the mind's focus remains inside one's head and social environment. Also if you put it in a perspective: the pre-modern humanity kept itself alive by way of preventive medicine - trying to ward off illnesses before they happen or nip them in the bud when the first symptoms emerge. Many modern humans prefer to fall proper sick first and then to seek cure. Perhaps, a mindful combination of two would be ideal...

The predicament of identity: to join or not to join them

Cultures are defined against each other. As long as you define yourself as "belonging to" this or that culture, you set yourself in opposition to all others, driven by a subliminal urge to flock that you are hardly aware of, except for its external consequences. In human groups, this dynamic becomes a social fact beyond the control of the individuals comprising the group. Individuation, in the Jungian sense, helps the individual become aware of their place in a group as a fully realised individual: it becomes an ongoing conscious decision-making process to cooperate with others without succumbing to the "herd instinct".

Most branches of anthropology and sociology look into purely social facts, knowingly or unknowingly ignoring psychological facts. They are sciences of group cultures, not individuals. I personally am interested in a holistic, philosophical understanding of the human condition, rather than in lining up social facts in the most rational way. That, perhaps, makes more biased towards individuated persons, as I'd rather find out how an individual finds sense and purpose living among other humans, rather than research the infinite variation of the basically same human activity: flocking into groups, creating intra-group social difference and engaging in inter-group relations.

Discourse control

Last decade or so, discourse control has become so much more sophisticated, pervasive and cynical since Edward Bernays' times. The ISIS snuff videos aggressively promoted by all media outlets, the Russia-Ukraine rift with its shameless shock-propaganda on both sides, the "je suis Charlie" travesty with staged mass selfies by world's leaders... refined techniques, comprehensive scale, deviously clever use of media technology, globally orchestrated delivery.

Is there something behind academic verbosity

The vapid, self-indulgent verbosity of the latter-day academia has become proverbial.  Clever jibes from inside the ivory tower like the infamous Postmodernism Generator make a nice exposé of the likes of Homi Bhabha's 90-minute projectile verbal vomit.

However, is there anything more to academic pontification than an elaborate (and often well-funded) exercise in intellectual masturbation. Actually, rather often than not egg-headed boffins do make sense but their wording is so arcane that it does sound like. Let me furnish you with an example.

"The mythopoetical totality of Western hegemonic discourses serves as the epistemological base for the post-colonial legitimation of the Eurocentric world order." In reality, put in plain English, it boils down to "white folks know better so get on with it!" but you can't really say that, can you?

The years of immersion into that kind of jargon make academics incapable of expressing themselves in any other way. As a result, whatever ground-breaking revelations they may have about the world, stays safely within the campus, for the rest of the world can see their lips moving but can't comprehend what they are saying.

 

Ritual and its meaning

We do need more than "thick descriptions" of the social embeddedness of rituals, unless we assume that external bells and whistles are all there's to a ritual or a belief.

Thing is that the Dreaming (the primary process thinking) is always present within the mind, albeit unbeknownst to or ignored by the conscious. Initiation ceremonies provide an immediate experience of it, connecting the individual to their unconscious mind and its timeless archetypes. Monotheistic religions and later scientific rationality have ruthlessly uprooted those under the rubric of paganism, thus depriving us of an essential human experience, necessary to experience one's life meaningfully.

That said, many rituals have been hollowed out, become mere motions to go through, acquired or were assigned a different meaning to serve purposes different to the original ones, or are experienced as mere cultural/social conventions even by those who are put through them.

Time

The primary process thinking, up to 90% of brain activity, knows no time the way we think of it consciously. It's the same as the mythical time, it's particular and eternal at the same time.

How can we shut down racism?

Flocking into groups based on any shared, real or imaginary, trait is a basic human drive. The good side of it is that humans can only survive by cooperating. On the flipside are racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, groupthink, etc. It takes a self-realised individuated human to become aware to what extent one needs to be part of a group and when it is time to say, 'I'm out of here'. Overcoming group dynamic by propaganda and mass education will mostly create knee-jerk reactions of the anti-political-correctness kind. Even when suppressed very effectively, sooner or later this will burst into something ugly (kind of like suppressed wish pops up elsewhere as a neurosis): just look at how rampantly and shamelessly xenophobic have become the supposed bulwarks of tolerance like Holland and Denmark.

The preachers of Neo-Liberalism, beware of what you preach

The real problem for people who adopt the Neo-Liberal rhetoric of the deserving vs. the undeserving in relation to social security, universal healthcare, free comprehensive education, etc. is that in 99% of cases they are NOT the ones who will actually decide who deserves and who doesn't, and the chances are that at some point of time in their lives, those very people will get the shitty end of the stick of the policies defined and justified by the very views they so eagerly profess now. A classic case of human ignorance sawing off the branch one is sitting on.

Social difference, the alpha and omega of any human group

 "The system produces only waste and social difference", quoth Baudrillard in 1970. The strife to achieve the latter, however, is in fact one of the prime drivers, rather than mere outcomes, of the whole shebang.

Post-modernism and post-structuralism

A lot of contemporary social, literary and cultural theory (Latour a prime example) so obviously comes from white male upper-middle class arm-chair pontificators who have never experienced any kind of discrimination or even material discomfort so they feel free to blabber on how power is everywhere, everyone is an agent and everything in the world boils down to a bunch of abstruse, yet flashy buzzwords.  Argumentum verbosium at its best funded.

Ten percent of the brain

Time after time again, I come across people claiming, "according to recent research" as it goes, that humans only use 10% of their brain. I guess, neurologists BELIEVE that we don't use a great part of our brain because they yet HAVE NO IDEA what it's for. When information like that percolates from the academia through the media into the public domain, it loses all academic nuances and becomes a simplistic meme people take for a gospel and repeat until the majority believes it to be true. Foucault often used to bitch about it.

Proof and evidence in science

Everything in science is about enough evidence beyond reasonable doubt, never a conclusive proof, especially so in social sciences. So everything is essentially "may" or "may not". To claim otherwise, is journalists' job.
 

"Once one says "may", all the evidence have been redacted. All the educated guesses, all the logical inferences, thrown out the window. With the empirical data, and the established theories, what can one conclude? Of course it is not impossible that the conclusions of one's analysis is incorrect, but that's an interpretation of the conclusions, which is up to the reader. Don't put words in the mouth of the reader. Especially not words of doubt, not after so many pages trying to convince the reader of the legitimacy of the conclusion of the analysis. With the empirical data, and the established theories, what can one conclude? Nothing? Ok, then put the "may" in there, so the reader knows the text was a waste of time to read..."
 

That's essentially the logic of what happens to scientific information as it passes through the media on to the layman: it ends up trivialised and truncated so that it can be presented as "scientific facts from recent research" in the latest Marie-Claire. Even Foucault bitched about that in one of his interviews. But then again, it helps "sell science" to the masses, so there you go.
 

That one can conclude nothing is a bit too dramatic. We can gather enough evidence to suggest that certain things are most likely to be true. Considering how much effort and rigour go to get to that point, and that at some point of time, it is bound to give way for better, or perhaps, entirely different results, it's decent enough. In reality, science is a lot of educated guesswork, just the way it is put together, the scientific method, makes it much more reliable than, say, gossip, but it is not inherently THE best or multi-purpose method of cognition. Trying to create a belief in the infallibility of "scientific proof" is what makes science scientism, a religion like any other. Do we really want that now?

Why do we have different currencies and why do they differ in value?

Because you can then sell and buy money, which will make it a product instead of a mere measuring system or labour and value. And because every product in the market has a price, if you sit at the source of money manufacturing, the banks,  you can manipulate the price of money and, ipso factum, you will control all prices for everything. Consequently, the more things around are monetised/commodified, the deeper and wider it this control by way of money. 

BTW, up to 85% of world trade are futures: promises to guarantee against the risks of possible fluctuations between currency exchange rates of money that  have ever only existed as flickering digits in a computer. 

QED

Global South vs. Western Canon

This is an epistemologically flawed political project. First they denounce Orientalism: there's no Other, we're all same humans. But then they say but The Global South is different and cannot be understood by outsiders.  So essentially, it's self-Orientalisation now re-branded in the Global South packaging. If you push for universalism, stay consistent at least about the basics and think through how you are going to resolve your logical fallacies.

Besides, any theory without empirical evidence is unfalsifiable arm-chair pontification. It cannot be proved neither right, nor wrong:and hence has nothing to do with science. Theory need to be grounded on studying a particular object by applying a particular method to it. Both the object and the method should be laid open and clear for critical scrutiny. When the object is something as vague as "culture" (in fact, ANYTHING) and the only method is Homi Bhabha-style projectile verbal vomiting, the critical scrutiny is but one likely guess against another, and the resulting theory is not worth the paper its written on.

Food and wholesomeness

Imagine all that negative energy around those celeb kitchens, and then you have to eat food "blessed" with a few dozens 'fucks' and a few dozen 'shits'.

"Why do celeb chefs love to swear as they cook when the "negative energy" that goes with it can be imparted in it making the food less wholesome than if cooked with love?"

Because food in restaurant marketing is commodified and thus acquires a monetary value, which is the raison d'etre of the whole shebang. You can't commodify "energetic wholesomeness" and hence it has no market value and, ipso factum, does not "exist" for the participants of the above-mentioned shebang.

English grammar and social theory

Being able to speak correctly your mother tongue and knowing its grammar are totally different kettles of fish. The former is acquired by virtue of growing up in a certain linguistic environment, the latter is a an abstract skill that takes a substantial educational effort. The difference is the same as between experiencing gravity since your birth (animals do that too!) and being able to explain it in words (takes some education in Physics, far from everyone does that).

Many of my students, British kids from solid middle-class backgrounds, never get to learn English grammar at school, which, in my opinion, deprives them of the chance to develop a level of abstract thinking required for university students, to realise that apart from the obvious, superficial level of existence, there's a structural level, which may not be visible, yet is extremely important to be aware of. Such kids invariably struggle with learning social theory, because it takes grasping exactly that level of abstraction.

When I talk to their parents who, thanks to having enjoyed a more "old-fashioned" kind of education, do happen to know the difference between an adjective and a noun, I realise, on the micro-level, what the educational trend for replacing training in critical and abstract thinking for learning a trade to "finish school, get a job and pay taxes" is doing to this society. People who can't access reality critically, who can't see beyond the obvious or what they are told, become a docile flock that can be duped into literally anything: mindless consumerism, media-instigated xenophobia, unnecessary wars, giving up on hard-earned civil liberties and labour rights, etc., etc., ad nauseam. Just look around and see for yourself.

Sheeple, get a clue!

Sick and tired of people whose only idea of the world is the latest propaganda soundbite they caught from a news presenter reading whatever shows on the autocue cooked up by some spin doctors overpaid by their corporate employers to guide the public opinion to legitimise whatever self-serving political turn the present ruling party makes to continue "dividing and ruling" their clueless electorate who keep turning to news presenters for opinions

Deindividuation and deindividualisation in racialised context

Deindividuation, in plain English, is when individuals turn into a mob. Deindividualisation is when you paint a social group as a homogeneous slab whose members allegedly have no individual characteristics, like "Muslims", or "African-Americans", or "gays", or even "women". 

Neither is a pretty thing. The herd instinct is behind Nazi rallies, lynching, and Black Friday stampedes. Ostracising social groups is Divide and Rule 101, an age-old technique of cynical mass control.

The two can cross-pollinate selectively. That's when it turns really ugly. Thus, London riots of 2011 became racialised as "ethnic minorities going out of hand", and the perpetrators get meted out 1800 years of prison sentences.  On the other hand, drunk college jocks rampages or the Bullingdon club's violent antics are written off as "boys going wild". The class, race and increasingly religion-centred prejudice make out essentially the same events as if radically different in nature.

In essence, that's what anthropologists do too, just from the other (left-wing) side of the same paradigm. The psychological aspect of mob behaviour often escapes social scientists, who look for all answers in social contexts, as if individuals do not exist. Unfortunately for anthropologists, the tireless paeans of cultural difference, some things are just really "universal human nature". Dismissing that fact precludes any meaningful understanding of social events: humans are reduced to the reductive Homo Anthropologicus, a perennial cultural group actor, put into action by collectively shared beliefs and rituals differing based on class, gender, or ethnicity.

Public debt and questions about it

Just when we thought the global public debt stood at a paltry 55 trillion... US federal unfunded liabilities have amounted to 127 trillion.

Yet the questions still stand: TO WHOM is all this owed? HOW was all that money created in the first place? WHAT is the future of all this debt?

Markets are not a natural, impersonal force like rains or earthquakes

From a recent article by the Economist on what happens to countries when they default on their debt: "As punishment for default, capital markets will either impose punitive borrowing rates or refuse to lend at all."

It is made sound as if it were a natural force, a kind of passive tense without an actor, a force majeure of impersonal justice. We must, however, remember that what is made out to be an "invisible hand of the market" is in fact a bunch of people who by arbitrary controlling the value of the main exchange currency, the US dollar, hold nearly the entire world hostage: the 55 trillion that the world owes, as if to an impersonal natural force, is not even paper. It is digits in a computer, whose value is created out of nothing by the fact of borrowing. 

When Russia has recently lost half of its currency value, nothing happened to its real, physical assets, instead an imagined value went down RELATIVE to another imagined value controlled not by some impersonal and disinterested forces, but by a number of private profiteers, seeking nothing but personal gain at the expense of the welfare of whole nations. However, because the imagined value of digital money is used to measure the value of physical assets, control of the former allows a full control of the latter. It is as if someone had the right to decide, at their will, how many grammes are in the kilogramme: today 800, tomorrow 1200, and then buy and sell gold according to those values.