Afer closing a door God always opens a window.

Just as I was whingeing about the cost of interdisciplinary opinion-swapping, a mail from King's College came in with an invitation to a Methodological Choices and Challenges conference.  Yeeppie, this is SOOOOO me! I finally get to chirp to fellow interdisciplinary whales! And it's just down the road in Aldwych.

Interdisciplinarity will cost you!

Apparently, there are kindred souls out there: a conference dedicated to Interdisciplinary Social Sciences is taking place for the eighth time, in Prague. They are going to talk about pretty much everything under the sun: such is the nature of holistic approaches to understand the world.

It costs some to talk to the like-minded though: one is to cough up 450 US dollars upfront before one even opens one's mouth to air out one's cherished thoughts on "the psychology of the social" or "social sciences addressing social crisis points". It is to the editorial board of the Economist that I am leaving the sheer delight of tracing the price list for a conference in a Central European university posted in US dollars to the former Communist allies' pro-American sentiment (just remember the sellout of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis in 1938). I will instead meditate entirely on the irony of the sheer astronomicity of the price for an impecunious PhD student like yours truly, whose main academic interest is exactly interdisciplinary research. Time to think of funding alternatives.

That said, I am also curious what is the most common disciplinary background among the participants, as, from my own experience, not all faculties are equally interested in intellectual cross-pollination. In fact, to date I am yet to meet a single lecturer in my school with academic pursuits reaching beyond their department, let alone faculty.  

Friz Klein's Sexual Orientation Grid

Apparently, in Gender Theory lectures in SOAS they tell young defenceless minds that there are five genders.  If it is so, then the way those genders interact can't be possibly squeezed into a the flat two dimensional Kinsey scale. So here's a better thing to try t account for all the rainbow hues that human sexuality can take on: Fritz Klein's Sexual Orientation Grid.

The mythopoetic lords of our world

Subconscious energy percolating through the mythic symbols of our minds creates reality around us. Our vital energy, the libido, is biological, however the way we use it is defined by enculturation, which happens via internalsing myths in the form of fairy-tales, religion, social norms, life-stories, common sense, stereotypes, etc. Whoever creates the symbols controls what we do with our lives, by channelling the libido for particular purposes. 

People raised on the symbols cooked up in corporate meeting rooms and newsrooms are virtual puppets of whatever ideology is prevailing: consumerism, nationalism, anti-intellectualism.

Harvard's Greg Mankiw: a-political economics

A glaring example of conceited academic ignorance: Harvard's professor Greg Mankiw, reacting to a mass undergrad walkout from his economics lecture, insisted that he taught a "mainstream economics course", without political agenda. The undergrads accused him of teaching the kind of economic ideology that brings about inequality in society.

What is shocking here is that Professor Mankiw, whose textbooks are used in Yale, Harvard and Princeton to prepare the future US elite, seems utterly unaware of how a science power relationships and socially constructed meanings define the episteme of a science. His influence reaches beyond the academia: he served as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the second Bush Administration and an adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

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For too many economists, society, environment and human beings are secondary by-products or unfortunate pesky nuisances getting in the way of creating neat PowerPoint presentation of quantifiable data. Steve Keen's and Tom Keene's responses prove that Mankiw's grandiloquent parochialism is by no means an exception in the highest echelons of America's academia. With hardly any exposure to other social sciences, such scientists are neither taught, nor able to teach how to  understand how the system works, and instead simply pass a knowledge of how to perpetuate the status quo for as long as possible, without ever questioning it, demonising any opposing view as communism or socialism.

This is how the US got herself, as well as the rest of the world, to the edge of the financial cliff. Kudos to the brave Harvard undergrads! Humankind apparently is not beyond redeeming.

 

Regrets anthropologiques

I just found out that Edward T. Hall, the cross-cultural anthropologist, whose work provided inspiration for my Master's thesis, died aged 95 in his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico on July 20, 2009. Just to think that I was in the area when he was still alive but I had no idea he lived there. I have very few regrets in my life but this is one of them.

Another one is that in all my visits to Paris it never occurred to me to pay respects (even if by lurking in front of his windows for a few minutes) to  Claude Lévi-Strauss when he was still alive. I simply did not realise that. He died in October 2009 in the venerable age of 101.

I also remember passing by the door of Eric Hobsbawm's room in 30 Russell Square every week on my way to a Comparative Anthropology lecture. Oh, the awe the very sight of it inspired in me! In his 90s and retired, he probably never was inside anyway, yet now I think I should have at least tried to knock.

There is a lesson in everything and I think I have learnt mine..

 

The Desert Island Test

Hard to believe that everything is a social construct, isn't it?

Here is a test: how would it be on a desert island? Would gold be as valuable to you? Would your marriage matter if your partner is not on the island? What would you do with your sexuality? Would your table manners and knowledge of medieval history matter? Would you be happy to be rescued not by the members of your preferred religion or race?