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magalarajoonideprohvetid · 6 years

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blackouts [transgressive anthropology]

«Wow! I thought the lights went out!» (sudden exclamation by prof. Carlo Cubero at Debates in Anthropology lecture on the 15th of March 2018)

This moment is embedded in my memory, an ultimate manifestation of honesty, said out loud with no restraints, the peak of the lecture, the peak of the whole course – a sudden darkness. I do not know about you but I have on several occasions felt a sudden blackout, like the blink of an eye and I am not sure – did I just blink, did the lights go out for a micro-second, did my brain shutdown for a second, did I have a stroke, did only I (not) see it? Usually I have had others around me to calm me down, «Yes, we saw it also, I think the electricity flickered for a moment.» Is it you, Niko, sending us inter-dimensional messages through your most known invention, chthonic news through alternative current? If there would not be electricity in our households, would I even be writing about this phenomena, is momentary blackout a ‘thing’ without the light bulb? Or am I writing about something completely different, the blackout our unconsciousness creates when our consciousness is not ready for the incoming message?

writing culture

If there are any dogmas in anthropology, it is the inclusion of fieldwork into the methodological frame - for it to count as anthropology, a researcher needs to step out of academia and come back with outsourced data. Yes, it is extremely valuable that there is something new added to the usual academics circular referencing, agency has been given to the unheard and original voices. But in the same time questions arises - what is and when is anthropology? Is it students reading the theories? Or is it anthropologist on the fieldsite? James Clifford analyzes the cover picture of Writing Culture, where Stephen Tyler is writing during his fieldwork:

«In this image the ethnographer hovers at the edge of the frame—faceless, almost extraterrestrial, a hand that writes. It is not the usual portrait of anthropological fieldwork. We are more accustomed to pictures of Margaret Mead exuberantly playing with children in Manus or questioning villagers in Bali. Participant observation, the classic formula for ethnographic work, leaves little room for texts.» (Clifford, 1)

This picture gives the impression than an anthropologist does everything in the field, he participates, observes and simultaneously writes. In reality the ‘real’ writing happens retrospectively, and that might be one of the biggest problems of anthropology – there is no anthropology of the present, the reproducible anthropology is classically done in the post-fieldwork stage. This is valid for both ethnographic writing and film, as both ‘texts’ are produced afterwards. Doing currently auto-fieldwork, being on ‘ramadan-mode’, I am deeply stressed as I cannot do much writing, my notes are scribbles bearing no great weight, I am too heavily influenced and too stuck in the actual experience to do any reflective writing. Vincent Crapanzano says similar things about Goethe’s experience of the carnival:

«A conventional Ash Wednesday meditation, perhaps, Goethe's conclusion marks are turn to contemplation, introspection, and concern for the meaning of what we do. His “return” parallels a return in the ceremony he describes. During the carnival there is no reflection, just play, masquerading, and, as we say nowadays, acting out. With Ash Wednesday begins a period of penitence, and, we must presume, a return to introspection, order, and individuality.» (Crapanzano, 68)

After the experience thou, the author becomes active and starts to describe the lived experiences; how the description is done, how it is reflected and to whom it is directed, that depends on the author. Crapanzano describes the ethnographic encounters of George Caitlin with the Mandan tribe in North America and their initiation rituals of O-Kee-Pa:

«Here Catlin moves from his (objectifying) metaphorical perspective to that of the tortured; despite this move, his intention is not phenomenological, but rhetorical: He does not describe either the Indian's or his own experience of the torture. The «imps and demons as they appear» (to whom? to Catlin? to the Mandan?) is stylistically equivalent to «there is no hope of escape from it.» They are directed to the reader, and it is the reader's reaction that will guarantee Catlin's perceptions.» (Crapanzano, 57)

So Caitlin’s intention was to captivate the reader, to tell the story in a way that it works specifically on the reader, it is not him nor Native Americans in the story he has written, it is the reader he is trying to drag into the story. In Caitlin’s case, the author is playing around with the reader’s morality and the reader’s possible endeavor toward morality. Crapanzano gives another example, where the author is more inclined to play on the ‘dirty’ thoughts of the reader by using contemporary puns:

«The title of Clifford Geertz’s essay «Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,» written about the time the film Deep Throat was all the rage, announces a series of erotic puns—puns, Geertz maintains, the Balinese themselves would understand—used throughout his essay. Puns are frequent in ethnography. They position the ethnographer between his world of primary orientation, his reader's world, and the world of those others, the people he has studied, whom at some level, I believe, he is also addressing (Crapanzano 1977a). Through the pun he appeals collusively to the members of one or the other world, usually the world of his readership, there by creating a hierarchical relationship between them. He himself, the punster, mediates between these worlds.» (Crapanzano, 68-69)

Crapanzano’s general theme for the article in Writing Culture is anthropologist/ethnographer as god Hermes, someone who is always bringing messages, someone who is a translator between ‘gods’ and ‘humans’, but whose messages might not contain the whole truth, they (singular!) might be lying for the sake of themself, the informants or for the sake of the readers, they needs to make a convincing case (Ibid, 52).

transgressive fiction

If I have to name three books from high school that really influenced me (both literally and literary), then these books were not and most probably will not be in the obligatory reading list. Two of them were loaned to me by friends, they had read them and suggested that I would be interested – Dead Babies by Amis Martin and The Beach by Alex Garland. Both stories travel in closed communities where sex and drug usage is common among the characters, where atrocities happen to them, and in general the environment of the book, its locus is a degenerate one. If one is to make charts, then Dead Babies is in my opinion a few grades more on the transgressive fiction side than The Beach. Now the third book was Check-out by Estonian author Kaur Kender, the first and last book in Estonia that has had «PARENTAL ADVISORY EXPLICIT CONTENT» sticker on it (only for advertisement reasons, there has not yet been such restrictions in the literary scene). The protagonist of this book is a filthy rich business-man, whose main efforts in life revolve around fornication and intoxication, both fueled by boredom and leading to the humiliation of others as he is capable to do whatever he wants with other people, it is self-destruction and liberation, mirroring society back at itself. Having grown up watching movies like Pulp Fiction and Dobermann, where protagonists are the ‘baddest’ on the conventional moral and ethical paradigm but in the same time there is something likable about them, they stand on the right side of life whilst doing bad things, Check-out did come as a shocker because there was nothing good about the main character, he was utterly bad, none of that misunderstood Robin Hood type of ‘badness’. For the first time I had been transgressed by the author, and I transgressed into the character. In retrospective Kender has said (heard it on a public event of the re-release of the Check-out in 2016), that the character was based on the stories he had witnessed and heard of local businessmen, and of his own alcohol and drug addictions (especially the ending of the book, where the protagonist starts using heroin). His book was based on participant observations and autoethnographical method.

Chuck Palahniuk is most known for his novel Fight Club, made famous by movie adaption and Brad Pitts’ six-packs’. I have not read that novel but I have read Haunted by Palahniuk (that one also has a PARENTAL ADVISORY sticker on the cover, Kender’s book was released almost a decade earlier). It tells the story of a group of people who apply for an experimental creative writing course and are then locked up in an abandoned art-house cinema. Every chapter consists of a poem about the main character of that chapter, a story of her/his origin, and a part of the main narrative with her/him as the leading character in it. The first chapter tells the story of a character named Saint Gut-Free, it consists of three different stories about ‘masturbation gone wrong’, onanism that might have killed the onanists. On page 17 of this 400 page modern horror story I have a blackout, the story becomes so disturbing, so real in my head, every word brings me closer to the conclusion of the story, and in my mind I already know where it is leading, Palahniuk has given enough hints, there is no happy ending, and every word brings it closer and my heart is rushing and I feel noxious… I blackout, I skip a paragraph (of course I read it later), I calm myself and continue reading. Palahniuk writes in the afterword a longer explanation how this story came to life, and how the reception has been so far. We tend to hope that the craziest stories are not the ones taken from real life, that these are made up, the fruit of fantasy. Palahniuk ruins the illusion the same way Kender did:

«No, this week, my writer friends just laughed, and I told them how the three-act story of ‘Guts’ was based on three true anecdotes. Two had happened to friends, and the last had happened to a man I’d met while attending sex addict support groups to research my fourth novel. They were three funny, gradually more upsetting true stories about experiments with masturbation gone wrong. Horribly wrong. Nightmarishly wrong.» (Palahniuk, 407)

Without mudding the water, I say out that in my opinion he was performing a participant observation, he, as many other writers, are ethnographers without the academia and without theory. Palahniuk’s emphasis is not on the credibility, it is on style and on affect:

«Reading ‘Guts’ takes a full head of steam. You don’t get many moments to look up from the page. But when I did, the faces in the front row looked a little gray. Beyond that were questions and answers. The book signing. The End.

It wasn’t until I’d signed the last book that a clerk said two people had fainted. Two young men. They’d both dropped to the concrete floor during ‘Guts’ but they were fine now, with no memory of anything between standing, listening, and waking up surrounded by people’s feet.» (Ibid, 408)

I could have been one of these two fainters, or at least fluctuating between consciousness and blackout. The main question for me is in the affect of the text, how something that is usually considered ‘unreal’ can make us feel physically sick?

transgressive ethnography

In a way, ethnographers have always written transgressive texts, most of the texts describe social norms and activities very different from the one of the audience of these texts. One of the dogmas for transgressive fiction is that the protagonist emerges through the violations of norms as a free(er) individual. One way of describing anthropologist is that they are like translators, who translate different cultures to an understandable format (as a colonialist discipline it used to be for the Europeans but things should have changed?). Another way of describing anthropologists is not so much as an interpreter but an inventor, s/he invents a culture, dogmatizes its principles into an ethnographic ‘holy book’, how this culture should be, has been, and will be, not understanding that it is not how it used to be, that is not how every single person inside that environment and/or space relates to that culture, and people do not have to spend their lives fulfilling the dogmas set in the ethnographer’s ‘holy scripture’ (most probably half a year later there will be a missionary there and everyone is wearing pants and singing songs of our Saviour Jesus). Vincent Crapanzano unites these two description into one:

«Like translation, ethnography is also a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages – of cultures and societies. The ethnographer does not, however, translate texts the way translator does. He must first produce them.» (Crapanzano, 51)

Lets take for instance the infamous case of Margaret Mead and the Samoans. As we know by now, Margaret Mead went to do fieldwork with Samoan, came back and wrote an awesome ethnography on how Samoan teenage girls are sexually liberated. Derek Freeman waits a few years after Margaret Mead’s death, publishes a book on how she was wrong and that Samoans have actually very strict rules for sexual conduct. Now, there are several interpretations for this controversy, and explanations, some of them, like Paul Shankman’s The History of Samoan Sexual Conduct and the Mead-Freeman Controversy gives more ambivalent interpretation to the sexual norms and behaviors in Samoa (Shankman 1996). It could be possible that both Mead and Freeman just saw different sides of the same society, if there only would not be this moment when one of Mead’s informants tells a retrospective view of the incident:

«Yes she asked us what we did after dark. We girls would pinch each other and tell her that we were out with the boys. We were only joking but she took it seriously. As you know Samoan girls are terrific liars and love making fun of people but Margaret thought it was all true.» (Heimans 1988, 3:36)

So what did she do – ‘translate’ the culture in the wrong way, had wrong data, or maybe she was in a way creating something the readers wanted to hear? Looking at both Mead and Palahniuk I must come to the following conclusions: Samoans lied and we were happy, Palahniuk presumably told the truth and it is disgusting. We as readers, we like to read about ‘sexually liberated’ women, and Samoan girls played that role in Mead’s ethnography really well. In a way, Mead’s ethnography tells more about her own society and herself than about the Samoans, she was giving liberation to the Western world and to herself.

In a discussion about transgressive fiction, we cannot continue without talking about Untitled 12, a modern horror story by Kaur Kender, where the first person protagonist is a pedophile (and sadistic sexual pervert in general). I read the whole story on Nihilist.fm on the night it came out and it was a devastating experience, I skipped parts of it as I was not capable to read even the obviously exaggerated and absurd descriptions of sexual violence, I felt hollowed after that experience, and that was something he wished to accomplish (Kender 2015). What happened was that someone reported to the police, that it might be child pornography (Estonian laws include a very wide range of material from pictures and videos to written text as it might depict underage children in pornographic situations), and police went after it. It was taken to court and got media coverage even outside of Estonia (as it is not usual any longer in Western societies that known writers have been taken to court for these specific charges) (ERR 2017). In the end he was declared innocent by two levels of court, and has since then left Estonia with a promise to never write in Estonian again. But what was very interesting with this case was the possibilities for alternative situations and how would they have been perceived. For instance, if it would have been someone’s personal experiences, someone who had been raped as a child and if that someone writes about this experience with graphic details, could that be also considered child pornography? Or if someone describes their sexual experience as a minor (depending on the explanation of the Penal Code it could be either under 14 or 18 years old), could that be considered child pornography? As a reader, was I consuming unknowingly child pornography if Kender would have been found quilty? These may sound as hypothetical questions, but if one is active in literary world (both as producer and consumer) then these questions become rather substantial.

Untitled 12 is made up, it is fictional, and from this fictional world it became very realistic, I was in court during a few of the open hearings and those benches, the jury and the prosecutor, they were all very real. But how is this all connected to anthropology? In some cases anthropologist are not the good guys, friendly scientist, who participate with respect and observe with sincerity. For instance José Padilha’s documentary Secrets of the Tribe deals with several controversial incidents what different anthropologist researching Yanomami tribe had caused. One of these anthropologist was Jacques Lizot, who according to his victims had raped and sexually abused several young Yanomami boys (Padilha, 42:44-55:08). This was known by other anthropologist and researchers, but it was overlooked for many years and until today there has been no court cases nor other serious consequences for his real transgressions. He transgressed in real life, not in a fictional world, his victims are real human beings and not made up characters. His contribution to anthropology? Yanomami dictionary, with specific terms for sexual activities like masturbation etc.

Lizot case is a real pedophilia case, this kind of behavior is not accepted in the current Western society nor in Yanomami society, it is a taboo. Gilbert Herdt’s case is a little bit different, but the similarities reside in the transgression, in his case it is the witnessing and writing part what matters. Herdt has done fieldwork with the ‘Sambia’ tribe (pseudoneum he created for the tribe) in Papua New Guinea and has published several articles on them and a collection of these articles Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays From the Field (Herdt, 1999). The Sambia tribe used to have a rather controversial initiation rituals for young boys (current situation with these rituals is unknown for me) – they were taken from their mothers at age 9, put through painful purification ritual of bloodletting from the nose, and then forced to perform oral sex on older boys. Later on they become the boys who receive oral sex, and after that they become adult man who will marry a woman and presumably only participate in heterosexual activity. Reasoning behind the ritual is that the bloodletting will purify them from the attachment to their mother (and women in general), and that men are born without semen and to have semen one has to digest semen. Herdt seems to view these rituals from a less negative stance, as a form of bisexuality and gives agency to free sexual desires. James Giles, who has written a review of Herdt’s book, is less enthusiastic about it and clearly questions the rituals as in his opinion they are not connected to desire at all:

«… sexual behavior can be engaged in for numerous reasons, many of which have nothing to do with sexual desire (Giles, 2004). This fact is especially important to be aware of when one is studying the sexual desires of people from a sexually nonpermissive and prescriptive culture like that of the Sambia.» (Giles, 2004, 414)

Now my point is neither condemning of Sambian rituals nor Herdt’s presentation and analyze of them, my point lies much more in the product, in the ethnography. If an anthropologist writes on a similar topic, something that is in generally considered a taboo topic, that s/he describes with graphic details, then there is a chance, at least in Estonia, that someone might complain to the police, as was the case with Kender’s book. Police will then forward it to the “Porn-committee”, expert committee in Ministry of Culture, who will then decide if it is pornographic or not. We might say “But this is science and it is protected by the constitution”, but this was also the case with Kender – both are protected by the constitution:

«§ 38. Science and art and their teachings are free. Universities and research institutions are autonomous within the limits prescribed by the law.» (The Constitution of the Republic of Estonia)

What is problematic, is the Penal Code, definition of child pornography is rather broad and thus it can include different forms of it:

«§ 178. Manufacture of works involving child pornography or making child pornography available

(1) Manufacture, acquisition or storing, handing over, displaying or making available to another person in any other manner of pictures, writings or other works or reproductions of works depicting a person of less than eighteen years of age in a pornographic situation, or a person of less than fourteen years of age in a pornographic or erotic situation, is punishable by a pecuniary punishment or up to three years’ imprisonment.» (Penal Code)

I have been so far talking only in the context of written text, most probably the situation becomes more difficult if the text includes pictures, Allah forbid if it is not text but a film. In case it includes pictures, or if it is a film, then we have a serious ethical and moral problem, and that is not even connected to the child pornography laws. It is a question for us anthropologist, can we and should we show visual data to others, are we abusing the right for privacy, are we exploiting our informants? A great friend of mine had a self-made zine which he called National Pornographic, he had taken old National Geographic editions, cut out all pictures of naked ‘indigenous’ people and glued them together with added sensual texts. He did it purposely to show how Western society has sexualized the ‘natives’, how their breasts and nipples can be shown without censoring, as if the same rules do not apply to ‘them’ as do to ‘us’. National Geographic is a safe haven for monsters like Lizot.

[non]clusion

There are occasions when anthropologists truly transgress. And there are occasions when anthropologists write truly transgressive ethnographies. Unfortunately it usually happens after they themselves have been transgressed. Such is the case when reading Eva Moreno’s chapter Rape in the field in collection Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork (Moreno 1995). First, and basically the foremost, she builds the story (ibid. 219-232), like the rapist built the assault on her, she builds it the same way as Palahniuk built his story, the reader is obviously hinted from the title that there will be rape but she is calmly leading the reader toward the rape, adding with the suspension until one fatal page she hits us with it. And I do blackout again, skipping paragraphs ashamed as I have a privilege to do it, she did not have a chance to skip it. The reflection part of the chapter (Ibid, 236-248) adds other layers, it elongates the rape but in a weird way calms the reader as you will see the surviving after the rape. I do not know her feelings about the chapter and writing it, but it does feel as if she has done something that is more on the positive side than on the negative one, that this text has been written with traumatic emancipation.

What seems to be essential in this inner discussion is the role of the author. These texts (both literary and audiovisual ones) would not exist without the author, people and culture and practices and incidents would abide in their own realm as they are, but these texts need the author. And as much as these texts need the author, so does the author need the texts, it is a validation of their experience. Having just finished Michael Muhammad Knight’s Osama Van Halen, sequel for his debut novel Taqwacores, I feel compelled to do something with the author. Knight’s take on the author was that he included himself as character into a fictional story, as Michael Muhammad Knight and as ‘the author’, he tossed himself around in the novel until he is beheaded by one of the main characters, by ‘burqa wearing riot grrrl’ Rabeya (Knight 2009, 207). Is the symbolical beheading of the discipline, the removal of the ‘mind’ and revival of the body, is that something that I am after as an author? Sometimes we need to blackout to flashin.

«Sun set a few hours ago, and moon is not around. Sky is striped with clouds, stratocumulus and stratus clouds, altocumulus and altostratus clouds, they are all there. Midnight prayer was already 2 hours ago and I look on horizon as the rays of dawn shine there. Smoke diffuses and the bud drops in the ashtray, I recede to lay on my bed and to watch the first season of Narcos. As the violence on screen escalates, I have doubts in my sanity, I think I am hallucinating as I continuously see flashes of lightning outside of my window. Delusions were happening already on the first week of Ramadan, I saw glimpses of movement, small swirls of energy in midair, flashes of something from the corner of my eye. Today there is lightning I see from the corner of my eye, moments of flash/ins instead of black/outs. It’s not raining and the clouds are not dark, air doesn’t feel as it has been electrified to that extent. Kristi is sleeping and I can’t get verification from anyone. After the first flash I think maybe it was some kind of trick my mind played on me, after second one I think maybe it was a reflection from TV, after the third one I assume it was an ambulance car light (I live next to a hospital). After the fourth and final flash I am afraid to look out from the window, instead I drink my last glass of water and pray dawn prayer. 17th day of Ramadan has a weird start. As I fall to sleep, I hear the rain arriving, it sooths my fears of going insane. I saw the lightning and heard the rain, but I didn’t hear the thunder nor see the drops.» (Fieldwork notes; 17th of Ramadan, 1439 / 2nd of June, 2018)

References

Clifford, James. 1986. Introduction: Partial Truths. In James Clifford & George E. Marcus (Eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography ( 1 – 27 ). Berkeley, California and London, England: University of California Press.

The Constitution of the Republic of Estonia.

Retrieved June 5, 2018 from

https://www.riigiteataja.ee/en/eli/530102013003/consolide

Crapanzano, Vincent. 1986. Hermes’ Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description. In James Clifford & George E. Marcus (Eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (pages of chapter). Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

ERR. 2016. Finnish PEN club: Kender’s ‘U12’ is a ‘grotesque thriller’, not child porn. Eesti Rahvusringhääling (ERR). Retrieved June 5, 2018 from https://news.err.ee/118569/finnish-pen-club-kender-s-u12-is-a-grotesque-thriller-not-child-porn

Garland, Alex. 1999. Rand [The Beach] (Turu, Rein, Trans.). Tallinn, Estonia: Varrak.

Giles, James. 2004. Book Reviews: Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays From the Field. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 33(4), 413–417.

Heimans, Frank (Director). 1988. Margaret Mead and Samoa [Documentary]. Cremorne, New South Wales: Cinetel Productions. Retrieved June 5, 2018 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8puR-AaSrg

Herdt, Gilbert. 1999. Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays From the Field. Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

Kender, Kaur. 2001. Check out. Tallinn, Estonia: Pegasus.

Kender, Kaur. 2015, January 14. Mõned sõnad Untitled 12 kohta [Few words about Untitled 12] [Web log post]. Retrieved June 5, 2018 from http://nihilist.fm/moned-sonad-untitled-12-kohta/

Kender, Kaur. 2014. Untitled 12. Nihilist.Fm : ZA/UM

Knight, Michael Muhammad. 2009. Osama Van Halen. Brooklyn, New York: Soft Skull Press

Martin, Amis. 2000. Surnud lapsed [Dead Babies] (Metsaots, Kati, Trans.). Tallinn, Estonia: Olion.

Moreno, Eva. 1995. Rape in the field. In Don Kulick & Margaret Willson (Eds.), Taboo: Sex, identity, and erotic subjectivity in anthropological fieldwork. London, England: Routledge.

Padilha, José (Director). 2010. Secrets of the Tribe [Documentary]. Brazil: Avenue B Productions Zazen Produções. Retrieved June 5, 2018 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd7SXbsn0hU

Palahniuk, Chuck. 2006. Haunted. London, England: Vintage Books.

Penal Code of the Republic of Estonia. Retrieved June 5, 2018 from https://www.riigiteataja.ee/en/eli/522012015002/consolide

Shankman, Paul. 1996. The History of Samoan Sexual Conduct and the Mead-Freeman Controversy. American Anthropologist, 98(3), 555-567.

#anthropology #transgressive #transgression #autoethnography #literature #eesti kirjandus #kirjandus #ethnography

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coinprojects · 3 years

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New Post has been published on https://coinprojects.net/bank-of-england-unveils-all-star-payments-and-tech-lineup-for-cbdc-forums/

Bank of England unveils all-star payments and tech lineup for CBDC Forums

The United Kingdom’s central bank is ramping up its research into a central bank digital currency (CBDC) with the selection of a long list of banking and fintech experts to assist it.

On Sept. 29 the Bank of England announced the membership of its CBDC Engagement and Technology Forums and they include some big names in technology and finance including Google, Mastercard, Consensys — and even Spotify.

This week’s announcement is a signal that the central bank is taking its CBDC plans seriously. It stated that the Technology Forum draws resources from leading experts in the field of digital payments and cryptocurrencies.

“The Forum will help the bank to understand the technological challenges of designing, implementing and operating a CBDC.”

The Engagement Forum includes “senior stakeholders from industry, civil society, and academia,” that will assist the bank and Treasury to “understand the practical challenges of designing, implementing and operating a CBDC.”

Technology experts include PayPal’s blockchain and cryptocurrency Chief Technology Officer, Edwin Aoki. Principal Software Engineer at Google, Will Drewry, joins him as does CBDC and Payments Manager Matthieu Saint Olive from Ethereum software solutions firm ConsenSys.

The Technology Forum also includes executives and payments experts from Amazon Web Services, MasterCard, Visa, Stripe, IMB, R3, and music streaming platform Spotify.

The Engagement Forum is comprised of banking executives and business experts including co-CEO of Global Banking and Markets at HSBC, Georges Elhedery, Morgan Stanley’s COO Arun Kohli, and Stephen Gilderdale, Chief Product Officer at interbank communication standard SWIFT.

Related: UK chancellor names CBDC on list of financial reforms for Treasury

The Bank of England began tentatively researching CBDCs in November 2020 as reported by Cointelegraph. In April, the central bank posted a list of vacancies related to CBDC research and development.

It remains skeptical of cryptocurrencies however, with Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warning about the risks of trading cryptocurrencies in May, telling investors “buy them only if you’re prepared to lose all your money.”

Source link By Cointelegraph By Martin Young

#Altcoin #Bitcoin #BlockChain #BlockchainNews #Crypto

#Altcoin #Bitcoin #BlockChain #BlockchainNews #crypto #Blockchain #CryptoPress

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anyreports · 5 years

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On the evening before All Saints’ Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year.

In most countries a PhD is a basic requirement for a career in academia. It is an introduction to the world of independent research — a kind of intellectual masterpiece, created by an apprentice in close collaboration with a supervisor. The requirements to complete one vary enormously between countries, universities and even subjects. Some students will first have to spend two years working on a master’s degree or diploma. Some will receive a stipend; others will pay their own way. Some PhDs involve only research, some require classes and examinations and some require the student to teach undergraduates. A thesis can be dozens of pages in mathematics, or many hundreds in history. As a result, newly minted PhDs can be as young as their early 20s or world-weary forty-somethings.

One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”

Whining PhD students are nothing new, but there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.

Rich pickings

For most of history even a first degree at a university was the privilege of a rich few, and many academic staff did not hold doctorates. But as higher education expanded after the second world war, so did the expectation that lecturers would hold advanced degrees. American universities geared up first: by 1970 America was producing just under a third of the world’s university students and half of its science and technology PhDs (at that time it had only 6% of the global population). Since then America’s annual output of PhDs has doubled, to 64,000.

Other countries are catching up. Between 1998 and 2006 the number of doctorates handed out in all OECD countries grew by 40%, compared with 22% for America. PhD production sped up most dramatically in Mexico, Portugal, Italy and Slovakia. Even Japan, where the number of young people is shrinking, churned out about 46% more PhDs. Part of that growth reflects the expansion of university education outside America. Richard Freeman, a labour economist at Harvard University, says that by 2006 America was enrolling just 12% of the world’s students.

But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do more research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money. A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009 — higher than the average for judges and magistrates.

Indeed, the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships. Using PhD students to do much of the undergraduate teaching cuts the number of full-time jobs. Even in Canada, where the output of PhD graduates has grown relatively modestly, universities conferred 4,800 doctorate degrees in 2007 but hired just 2,616 new full-time professors. Only a few fast-developing countries, such as Brazil and China, now seem short of PhDs.

A short course in supply and demand

In research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly underbelly of academia”, do much of the research these days. There is a glut of postdocs too. Dr Freeman concluded from pre-2000 data that if American faculty jobs in the life sciences were increasing at 5% a year, just 20% of students would land one. In Canada 80% of postdocs earn $38,600 or less per year before tax — the average salary of a construction worker. The rise of the postdoc has created another obstacle on the way to an academic post. In some areas five years as a postdoc is now a prerequisite for landing a secure full-time job.

These armies of low-paid PhD researchers and postdocs boost universities’, and therefore countries’, research capacity. Yet that is not always a good thing. Brilliant, well-trained minds can go to waste when fashions change. The post-Sputnik era drove the rapid growth in PhD physicists that came to an abrupt halt as the Vietnam war drained the science budget. Brian Schwartz, a professor of physics at the City University of New York, says that in the 1970s as many as 5,000 physicists had to find jobs in other areas.

In America the rise of PhD teachers’ unions reflects the breakdown of an implicit contract between universities and PhD students: crummy pay now for a good academic job later. Student teachers in public universities such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison formed unions as early as the 1960s, but the pace of unionisation has increased recently. Unions are now spreading to private universities; though Yale and Cornell, where university administrators and some faculty argue that PhD students who teach are not workers but apprentices, have resisted union drives. In 2002 New York University was the first private university to recognise a PhD teachers’ union, but stopped negotiating with it three years later.

In some countries, such as Britain and America, poor pay and job prospects are reflected in the number of foreign-born PhD students. Dr Freeman estimates that in 1966 only 23% of science and engineering PhDs in America were awarded to students born outside the country. By 2006 that proportion had increased to 48%. Foreign students tend to tolerate poorer working conditions, and the supply of cheap, brilliant, foreign labour also keeps wages down.

A PhD may offer no financial benefit over a master’s degree. It can even reduce earnings

Proponents of the PhD argue that it is worthwhile even if it does not lead to permanent academic employment. Not every student embarks on a PhD wanting a university career and many move successfully into private-sector jobs in, for instance, industrial research. That is true; but drop-out rates suggest that many students become dispirited. In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%. Worse still, whereas in other subject areas students tend to jump ship in the early years, in the humanities they cling like limpets before eventually falling off. And these students started out as the academic cream of the nation. Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam.

Even graduates who find work outside universities may not fare all that well. PhD courses are so specialised that university careers offices struggle to assist graduates looking for jobs, and supervisors tend to have little interest in students who are leaving academia. One OECD study shows that five years after receiving their degrees, more than 60% of PhDs in Slovakia and more than 45% in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany and Spain were still on temporary contracts. Many were postdocs. About one-third of Austria’s PhD graduates take jobs unrelated to their degrees. In Germany 13% of all PhD graduates end up in lowly occupations. In the Netherlands the proportion is 21%.

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radioromania · 6 years

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Câştigătorul Festivalului de Pian de la New York, pianistul Florian Mitrea, concert 100% Beethoven la Sala Radio

(20 martie 2019)

Există cel puţin trei motive pentru care concertul programat vineri, 22 martie (ora 19:00), la Sala Radio este unul de excepţie. Un eveniment dedicat 100% titanului Beethoven, pianistul multipremiat internaţional Florian Mitrea, care în 2018 a câştigat Festivalul Internaţional de Pian de la New York, ceea ce a dus la debutul său în celebra sală de concerte Carnegie Hall, şi dirijorul Ladislau Horvath, concertmaestru al orchestrei italiene Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, sunt „ingredientele” unei seri muzicale de neratat! În interpretarea Orchestrei Naţionale Radio veţi asculta două compoziţii semnate de Beethoven: Concertul nr. 1 în do major pentru pian şi orchestră şi Simfonia a V-a (cunoscută şi ca Simfonia Destinului).

Descris de Martha Argerich ca „un tânăr pianist extraordinar”, Florian Mitrea este câştigătorul Concursului de Pian al Royal Overseas League (Londra), şi dublu-laureat la Concursurile Internaţionale de Pian de la Glasgow - 2017, Saint Priest - 2017, Hamamatsu - 2015 şi München ARD - 2014. Lista de distincţii continuă cu premii la Harbin, în China, în 2018, Manchester şi Verona, în 2016. Florian Mitrea a susţinut concerte şi recitaluri în săli precum: Studiourile Radiodifuziunii Bavareze din München, Rokoko-Saal din Bayreuth, Stadtcasino din Basel, Bunka Kaikan din Tokyo, Centrul de Arte din Seul, St Martin-in-the-Fields şi Steinway Hall – Londra ş.a.

Florian Mitrea este stabilit în Marea Britanie, din 2008, unde este decorat cu Medalia de Argint de Ordinul Muzicienilor din Marea Britanie. A fost solistul orchestrelor Philharmonia din Londra, Collegium Musicum din Basel, al Filarmonicii George Enescu din Bucureşti şi al Orchestrei de Cameră Radio. Discul său de debut Following the River, premiat ca cel mai apreciat CD al anului 2018 de către ascultătorii Radio România Muzical, a fost descris ca fiind „o colecţie muzicală cu caracter foarte personal, prezentată elegant şi interpretată cu măiestrie” (The Cross-Eyed Pianist), „un pariu al unui pianist despre care vom mai auzi multe” (Cătălin Sava, în Republica).

Absolvent al Liceului de Muzică George Enescu, Florian Mitrea a câştigat o bursă de studiu la Academia Regală de Muzică de la Londra, unde a absolvit cu cele mai înalte distincţii, şi unde este în prezent profesor în cadrul Facultăţii de Pian. Oferă în mod regulat ă cursuri de măiestrie în Japonia, iar la Bucureşti a fondat programul pentru tineri pianişti Hoinar, proiect al Centrului Român de Muzică din Bucureşti.

Muzician cu o bogată carieră internaţională, Ladislau Horvath colaborează de peste 25 de ani cu marele dirijor Zubin Mehta, în cadrul apreciatei orchestre italiene din Florenţa: Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. În anul 2006 a fost numit şi dirijor principal şi concert-maestru al Orchestrei I Solisti Fiorentini (creată de cunoscutul dirijor italian Riccardo Muti), cu care a susţinut numeroase concerte.

Artist plurivalent: dirijor, solist, muzician de cameră, concert-maestru şi pedagog, Ladislau Horvath reprezintă a 5-a generaţie de muzicieni în familia sa. În calitate de concert-maestru a colaborat cu orchestre de prestigiu, precum Accademia di Santa Cecilia - Roma, Teatro Massimo - Palermo, Teatro Carlo Felice - Genova, Orchestra Simfonica de Tenerife, Orchestra Simfonica di Barcelona e Catalunya, Orchestra Gulbenkian - Lisabona ş.a. În anul 2014 a debutat cu deosebit succes ca dirijor de operă, cu Bărbierul din Sevilla, la Teatrul Manzoni din Pistoia. Ca muzician de cameră, a creat orchestra de cameră Musici Mundi şi formaţia Consonanza, cu care a participat la Festivaluri Internaţionale (Japonia, Grecia, Portugalia, Italia, Kenya).

Concertul poate fi ascultat în direct pe toate frecvenţele Radio România Cultural şi Radio România Muzical din ţară şi în streaming live pe Internet, pe www.radioromaniacultural.ro şi www.romania-muzical.ro.

Biletele la concertele Orchestrelor şi Corurilor Radio se pot achiziţiona online prin reţeaua www.bilete.ro, în oficiile Poştei Române, în magazinele Inmedio semnalizate bilete.ro şi la Casa de bilete a Sălii Radio.

Alte informaţii legate de Orchestrele şi Corurile Radio, pe www.orchestreradio.ro.

Serviciul Comunicare şi Relaţii Publice

Adăugat de Luciana Gingăraşu

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anyreports · 5 years

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Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time

Rich pickings

A short course in supply and demand

A PhD may offer no financial benefit over a master’s degree. It can even reduce earnings

A very slim premium

PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree.

Dr Schwartz, the New York physicist, says the skills learned in the course of a PhD can be readily acquired through much shorter courses. Thirty years ago, he says, Wall Street firms realised that some physicists could work out differential equations and recruited them to become “quants”, analysts and traders. Today several short courses offer the advanced maths useful for finance. “A PhD physicist with one course on differential equations is not competitive,” says Dr Schwartz.

Many students say they are pursuing their subject out of love, and that education is an end in itself. Some give little thought to where the qualification might lead. In one study of British PhD graduates, about a third admitted that they were doing their doctorate partly to go on being a student, or put off job hunting. Nearly half of engineering students admitted to this. Scientists can easily get stipends, and therefore drift into doing a PhD. But there are penalties, as well as benefits, to staying at university. Workers with “surplus schooling” — more education than a job requires — are likely to be less satisfied, less productive and more likely to say they are going to leave their jobs.

Academics tend to regard asking whether a PhD is worthwhile as analogous to wondering whether there is too much art or culture in the world. They believe that knowledge spills from universities into society, making it more productive and healthier. That may well be true; but doing a PhD may still be a bad choice for an individual.

The interests of academics and universities on the one hand and PhD students on the other are not well aligned. The more bright students stay at universities, the better it is for academics. Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors’ publication records. Academics pick bright undergraduate students and groom them as potential graduate students. It isn’t in their interests to turn the smart kids away, at least at the beginning. One female student spoke of being told of glowing opportunities at the outset, but after seven years of hard slog she was fobbed off with a joke about finding a rich husband.

Monica Harris, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, is a rare exception. She believes that too many PhDs are being produced, and has stopped admitting them. But such unilateral academic birth control is rare. One Ivy-League president, asked recently about PhD oversupply, said that if the top universities cut back others will step in to offer them instead.

Noble pursuits

Many of the drawbacks of doing a PhD are well known. Your correspondent was aware of them over a decade ago while she slogged through a largely pointless PhD in theoretical ecology. As Europeans try to harmonise higher education, some institutions are pushing the more structured learning that comes with an American PhD.

The organisations that pay for research have realised that many PhDs find it tough to transfer their skills into the job market. Writing lab reports, giving academic presentations and conducting six-month literature reviews can be surprisingly unhelpful in a world where technical knowledge has to be assimilated quickly and presented simply to a wide audience. Some universities are now offering their PhD students training in soft skills such as communication and teamwork that may be useful in the labour market. In Britain a four-year NewRoutePhD claims to develop just such skills in graduates.

The interests of universities and tenured academics are misaligned with those of PhD students

Measurements and incentives might be changed, too. Some university departments and academics regard numbers of PhD graduates as an indicator of success and compete to produce more. For the students, a measure of how quickly those students get a permanent job, and what they earn, would be more useful. Where penalties are levied on academics who allow PhDs to overrun, the number of students who complete rises abruptly, suggesting that students were previously allowed to fester.

Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.

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