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dogmapod · 5 years

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01 Falun Gong

Hey everyone, welcome to the show Dogma: A Podcast About Cults, I’m your host Denis Ricardo.

This show is about cults. The origins, practices and abuses of cults. So, if you are uncomfortable with descriptions of sexual, physical and mental violence and abuse, this is not the show for you.

I’m gonna try to keep it light and fun, but this stuff can get kind of dark… so you’ve been warned.

Today we’re gonna look into a cult by the name of Falun Gong. It’s one that not a lot of people have heard of, but are surprisingly very familiar with.

It’s a fairly young cult, not more than 27 years old. It began in 1992 in the northeast of China and was founded by a guy by the name of Li Hongzhi. I’m going to apologize on the pronunciation of some of these proper nouns, I am really bad at pronouncing the tones in Chinese languages.

The cult all began with Li Hongzhi running a public qigong seminar in the city of Changchun.

Qigong is an ancient Chinese practice of meditation and slow movement for the purpose of self-healing. It was and is still used in many Chinese communities as a form of alternative medicine.

The modern qigong movement started in the 1950s, shortly after the Cultural Revolution started by Mao Zedong.

Mao was a pretty hardline atheist, and believed that superstitious practices were not good for the advancement of China and communism. So, soldiers in Mao’s army adapted qigong to just be about meditation and focus, taking out all the of the spiritual elements of it. The practice was pretty popular and remains very common to this day.

Li felt a little differently about qigong, though. He feels as though the spiritual elements should be restored. So, he did just that.

Falun Gong was actually in the Chinese Communist Party’s favor, and initially saw it as a good movement. But they quickly changed their mind after they thought the movement was getting a little too independent. The Chinese government is notorious for monitoring the religious practices in China. So, in 1999 the Chinese Communist Party branded Falun Gong as heretical and began a massive propaganda campaign against the group. It mostly focused on negative articles in state-run press, which Falun Gong was quick to protest.

In April of 1999 10,000 Falun Gong protested outside a government compound in the capital Beijing demand that the government recognize them as a religious movement and stop persecuting them.

In China there are only 5 officially recognized religions because it is an atheist state. Those are Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Islam.

Side note, just because I’m formerly Catholic,

China’s relationship with Catholicism kind of interesting, China does not recognize the power of the Holy See’s authority to appoint bishops. So Catholics in China aren’t “Roman” Catholic or “Orthodox” Catholics they’re “Chinese” Catholics. Their relationship is contentious, but China has granted the Pope the right to reject any of the Chinese appointed bishops.

But moving on… at this point, the leader of Falun Gong, Li, was already in New York at and he was getting the cult off the ground here in the US.

But things were pretty bad for Falun Gong practitioners in China.

Reports of forced re-education, extrajudicial executions, harvesting of organs and attacks by the Chinese police at the behest of the Communist Party against Falun Gong practitioners surfaced. But, it’s not the easiest to corroborate these claims, because neither Falun Gong or the CCP are necessarily the most upfront about their practices. The New York Times has said there has been at least 2000 deaths in 2009, though Falun Gong claims that number is nearly twice that. An independent investigator, Ethan Gutmann estimates there were at least 65,000 Falun Gong members killed for organs based off of interviews. Chinese authorities do not publish statistics of Falun Gong members killed or not killed.

OK, do some less depressing stuff, Falun Gong’s main practices.

Falun Gong is a blend of traditional Chinese beliefs, Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism.

They have three central tenants of power Truthfulness (真, Zhēn)*, Compassion (善, Shàn)*, and Forbearance (忍, Rěn)*. Thank you, Google Translate. These are achieved through meditative exercise and performance.

*these words were reproduced with Google Translate pronouncing them

Falun Gong’s teachings say that everybody is innately good and divine, but that we have descended into darkness and accrued bad karma. Reincarnation is handled by different gods for different people and ultimately the goal is to be released from the cycle of samsara and to reach enlightenment.

This sounds pretty normal for an Asian religion like Buddhism. So far so good? [With hesitation in their voice] Yeah, it gets a little weirder.

Falun Gong emphasizes traditional Chinese teachings and disregards scientific claims like evolution. This also explains why they are vehemently against communism because it is not Chinese, it’s a European philosophy.

As I said before China is an atheist state, and typically Buddhists do not have an issue with evolution and Buddhism. I couldn’t find any numbers specifically citing the public acceptance of evolution in China, however. But I have found that it is taught in school like here in American coastal elite public schools without much of a hitch.

David Ownby, a professor at the Center of East Asian Studies at the University of Montreal interviewed the leader Li Hongzhi and said that Li claims there are 10,000 supernatural powers, such as clairvoyance, precognition, levitation and transmutation and these can be achieved by humans.

Li stated at a lecture in Australia that

“…homosexuality, organized crime and promiscuous sex are not the standards of being human.”

His stance on homosexuality lead to the rescinding of a Nobel Peace Prize nomination by San Franciscan legislators back in 2001.

Li and Falun Gong have also been criticized for their teaching of mixed-marriages. A New York Times article from 2001 states

“[Li] said interracial children are the spawn of the ‘Dharma Ending Period,' a Buddhist phrase that refers to an era of moral degeneration. […] he said each race has its own paradise, and he later told followers in Australia that, 'The yellow people, the white people, and the black people have corresponding races in heaven.’ As a result, he said, interracial children have no place in heaven without his intervention.”

Many practitioners of Falun Gong have denied this and have pointed out that many of its members are in mixed-race families.

But, let’s not forget the aliens.

So Li in general seems to be against most modern things. In a 1999 TIME Magazine interview in he said:

“The aliens have introduced modern machinery like computers and airplanes…everyone thinks that scientists invent on their own when in fact their inspiration is manipulated by the aliens. In terms of culture and spirit, they already control man…the ultimate purpose is to replace humans. If cloning human beings succeeds, the aliens can officially replace humans”

Li also thinks very highly of himself. The BBC, quote:

“…he is a being from a higher level who has come to help [mankind] from the destruction it could face as the result of rampant evil.”

Having a leader proclaim to know the way to save humanity is one of the signs that the leader’s group is a cult.

So, remember when I said that another one ways to get to their three central tenants was performance? Well, you know how they do it? By selling you $150 tickets to see the spectacle of 5000 years of traditional Chinese dance while listening to anti-atheist, anti-communist propaganda… it’s Shen Yun.

So apparently Shen Yun ads popping up everywhere is now a meme, but I’ve grown up in California all my life, and I swear I’ve been seeing these things since at least 2008. These things aren’t new to me. But I guess they’re finally getting to middle America, so people can joke about it.

I said before Falun Gong was anti-Communist and anti-evolution? Well, it shows up in the performance

Here’s a sample of lyrics from a song in the show called “Awaken”

"So long ago you came down to this world For millennia you have reincarnated here Fighting to get ahead, the true you has faded Self-interested actions have cost you your purity Atheism is a pack of lies The heresy of evolution now eclipses the Divine word Amidst disaster, people complain that the gods have forsaken us Do not use science to drive humanity toward danger You came to this world for salvation, your destiny To return to heaven is your soul's deepest wish You came to this world for salvation, your destiny To return to heaven is your destiny."

And, as I said before, the group is condemned by the Chinese government. The Chinese embassy made a post on their website, calling Falun Gong an anti-communist cult, that it undermines US-Chinese relations and that Shen Yun is a political tool for this cult and is anti-Chinese agitprop. This was all in English, and I find it a little weird they’d call it “agitprop” because that’s typically reserved for communist propaganda. So I found it a little strange.

But clearly this is also propaganda, it’s a statement by a government body, and all reports on its more outrageous beliefs are from western publications so there is a bias. But straight from the horse’s mouth is the anti-evolution message and we know that these performers don’t get paid.

In the end, it’s hard to classify this as a cult. It has cult-like elements, like surveillance by a government, a savior-leader. But it lacks a hierarchy and I could not find anyone who had left the movement and faced consequences for it, which are typically signs of a cult.

It’s got some very out-there, potentially dangerous beliefs, but is it a cult? [With hesitation in their voice) Personally, I’m gonna say yes, though I don’t think it necessarily ticks all those checkboxes, so maybe it can’t really be classified as a cult.

Now comes the fun part, where I get to beg you for money. I come to you hat in hand to maybe just consider throwing a dollar or two to my Patreon. I can’t offer much right now as far as donor rewards go, but I will try my best to give you access to episodes early and maybe some other fun side projects that I have available that are still loosely related to cults. That you so much if you decide to be ever so gracious.

Thanks so much for listening, that was the first episode. I will put all of my sources in the description. Most are from Wikipedia, but I checked to see if those sources were legit, so lay off me.

New time, we’re going to be focusing on a cult a little closer to home and maybe some of you remember this cult very vividly.

All right, take care and goodbye.

Citations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Falun_Gong

http://www.atheistrepublic.com/forums/atheist-hub/shen-yun

https://culteducation.com/group/1254-falun-gong/6922-is-falun-gong-a-cult.html

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2010/11/30/china-conundrum/

http://faluninfo.net/category/persecution/killings/individual-cases-of-falun-gong-deaths/

https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/

https://books.google.com/books?id=Bwqkwx4SWS0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=ownby+falun&client=firefox-a&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Song Credits:

“Frozen Jungle” and “Dreaming of You” by Monplaisir under the name Komiku (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/)

“我们是毛主席的红卫兵 (We Are Chairman Mao’s Red Guard)” found at Songs of China’s Cultural Revolution (http://academics.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/China/CRSongs/crsongs.htm)

“Dies Irae” found on Archive.org (https://archive.org/details/GregorianChantMass

“Ride to the Party” by Monplaisir under the name Anonymous420 (https://chezmonplaisir.bandcamp.com/album/this-is-not-you)

Consider joining the Patreon!

#Falun Gong #Shen Yun #Cults #Cult

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tannerlansky1-blog · 7 years

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Blog#1:A

Gambari: "In daily life, the Japanese use the term Gambari very often, and this overuse seems to point to certain Japanese characteristics, some of which have negative effects." (p. 83)

From a personal perspective, I grew up in a setting where people were always pushing me to be a better person, they would always tell me to keep working my hardest until I achieved my goal (obtaining a bachelors degree) and it would often be overwhelming and cause me to struggle to keep my head straight and achieve my goals because of the constant re-assertion from my family and peers to keep pushing me forward. In American society, I feel that people are getting more "soft' and family and peers try not to push their kids/friends too hard and are ok with what they do or accomplish. This is more noticeable in parents with their kids than it is with grandparents with their grandchildren. This could be because in the past, occupation, marriage, and success were the three main driving factors in society and since then it is more common for people to not have a full-time occupation from a trade, or degree and more and more people are not getting married. In Japan, with the constant overuse of this term I feel it is negatively impacting people because everyone is expecting some sort of standard from each-other, that if one cannot fulfill their goals/duties they feel like they are not part of the "norm" and are a disgrace/ashamed for not being able to hold themselves up to their peers standards.

"the monk who does not work should not eat' (Japan); 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' (America)." (p. 85)

When I was younger growing up in poverty I help myself strictly to the belief that pulling my weight is essential to success. I would constantly just work and work without giving myself a chance to enjoy my youth and free time. It wasn't until I got to college and my scholarship program showed us the importance of hard work but they also went into depth on the importance of "play" and to enjoy oneself. Once I was able to realize that there is a healthy balance to "work and play" I was able to feel like a normal person and have fun while still being able to achieve my goals. This also goes for the American society. When people are accustomed to work only, they live their lives with high stress and anxiety which is unhealthy and can lead to health/ societal issues. People have learned to accept this and also try to balance business and pleasure. In Japan, however, this is not the case. They feel there is some sort of disgrace if they are not constantly bettering themselves to reach their personal goals/accomplishments. Saying that Japanese people just want to pull their weight in society is a complete understatement. They constantly find work to do that even though it may not be related to themselves, it will help out their close family/ society. They never seem to reach a sense of fulfillment because of the overuse of the term.

Kenkyo: "Although a sense of egalitarianism seems to be growing today, people are still conscious of these hierarchies." (p.144)

I personally do not fully understand how to address my peers/elders/mentors. However, I am able to make the distinction between the hierarchies, I was never fully taught the importance, or how to address the members of each hierarchy. This is also true for American society. I believe this is solely due to the fact of lack of education. If you look at Ivy league and religious schools from a decade or two ago, there was a strict definition/ universal code of how you should address who you are talking to or else you would be punished. Nowadays, schools are becoming very laid back and do not teach this to the kids anymore. and people from middle- to-low class families probably do not have the proper education of this so they cannot really teach it to their own kids. In Japan, this may also be the case, as technology is advancing, they are becoming more connected with the outside world and see how other cultures are also evolving and adapting. this could possibly be the cause of them slipping up and conforming with the idea of egalitarianism.

"The expression of humility in English is kind of an understatement, within the spirit of 'you and I are equals.' Japanese modesty, on the other hand, carries a connotation of 'I'm your inferior' through the expression of negative self-images." (p.147)

As I was growing up people had me accustomed to the idea of "humble yourself". This idea was that everyone is the same, and we all make mistakes. Own up to who you are and accept others how they are. This can be seen throughout American society. I vaguely remember a book we read in our high school where the characters were in a war setting and on of the "disposable" foot soldiers was talking to his peers while watching a highly decorated "tyrant-like" leader and he said something along the lines of: even though they were from the complete opposite ends of the spectrum, they both had to use the same latrines. This is one of my favorite examples to use when I think of "humbling myself to the fact that "we are equals." In Japan however, there is a clear line between the hierarchies and when a lower-class is address an upper-class, the lower class makes it very clear and apparent that they are the underling and have full respect for their higher-up. I see this portrayed in Asian-style films where the inferior pupil will normally not even make eye contact with the higher class, especially when they have done something wrong/shameful.

Amae: "Amae is vital for getting along with others in Japan and is the basis for maintaining harmonious relationships in which children depend on their parents, younger people rely on their elders, grandparents depend on adult children, and so on." (p. 17)

I feel that I am able to understand Amae a little bit when it comes to everyday life. There is a clear understanding in my family that we know who has to rely on who in order to get through everyday life. Without this harmonious balance, it is really easy for things to go south really fast. We have experienced this many times and it is not until we reach the harmony again, that everything returns to normal. I feel like this is also the case for most American families. Most people understand the concept but they do not always follow it strictly and when that happens, it is when most of the time things can fall apart. Sometimes eventually to the point where there is no coming back and establishing this balance and harmony again. In Japan, I feel like this is an important term and can probably go hand-in-hand with the term Gambari. In Asian culture it is common for families to live together in one house just for this reason. It is an endless cycle of need and harmony between everyone just as the quote suggests. The thought process is simple, the children need a parent in order to survive and succeed. Younger people need their elders to teach them from their own past experiences and finally grandparents need their adult children to help take care of them whether it is running errands for them or just keeping them company through their hard times.

"Dependency among adults is commonly seen in Japanese society, as in relationships such as those between husband and wife, teacher and student, and doctor and patient." (p.19)

This is understandable because I would not be where I am today without this type of dependency being present in my life. My sole understanding of this type of dependency has allowed me to learn and understand the rest of how society works in order to succeed myself. In American society, however, I feel like the distinct lines between relationships are fading and people are losing their sense of this dependency. There has been a lack of respect and acknowledgement between the relationships people have with their peers. This is because of religion, education, probably even past experiences. In Japan, this dependency is essential. A student will never not listen, or do the opposite of what their teacher has told them to do. This shows in "Jiro" with Jiro's apprentice and how he talks with such respect about Jiro. It is most likely considered a waste of time to not see and respect the underlying dependency society has on eachother.

Honne to tatemae: "For example, when a person is visiting someone's house in Japan and it becomes time for supper, people will often say,' won't you dine with us?' But this is not really an invitation; rather it is a subtle hint that it is time to go home." (p. 116)

I was always taught that this is the polite thing to say when I have company come over around dinner time. This is the same for American society as well. However, in American society most people see this as an actual invitation and will more than likely stay for dinner. This is were the term "southern hospitality" has become popular. The idea is that what is mine is yours and what is yours is mine. Most people will probably not find this as being rude or intrusive for this reason. In Japan, this is seen as being intrusive and the proper response is simply "No, thank you" but this is well known as being a "no-no." Japanese culture has been able to master when this type of behavior is not okay because of the strict and distinct use of the "honne' and "tatemae."

"People switch easily and skillfully between the two and are rarely aware that they can cause misunderstandings and confusion among people who are not accustomed to this way of interacting." (p.116)

It is not always easy for me to read a situation and find our what the actual proper response is supposed to be without hurting someone's feelings. This means that most times conversations are always volatile in American society and it is not always easy finding the correct response. In Japan, since they have the clear distinction it is easy for them to inter-operate just fine with ease, but when talking to someone from a different culture it is often hard to find the proper communication without both parties being confused due to the lack of a clear-line between the situations.

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republicstandard · 7 years

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White-Washing Black Failure

A Major Study Punches a Huge Hole in the Myth of White Racism Keeping Blacks Down

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Even when the facts and findings point in the exact opposite directions, The New York Times seems hell-bent on insisting that insidious anti-black racism is plunging blacks back into the cycle of poverty again and again. Most recently the New York Times has reported on a large study that, it claims, proves that even black males born into upper-class families are the victims of white racism that eviscerates their seeming advantages and drags them back down to the socioeconomic bottom. The study, conducted by researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the Census Bureau, used American income and demographic data to compare the incomes of families in which children grew up to the incomes of those same children now that they are adults in their late 30s.

The Times’ big headline conclusion is that while those who grow up rich tend to stay rich, black men — but not black women — constitute a glaring exception. while 63% of rich white boys grew up to be rich or at least upper-middle-class adults, only 36% of black boys achieved that distinction. Controlling for family structure, education level, accumulated wealth and geographic region does not put a dent in this outcome. The disparity, The New York Times claims;

“...explodes... one of the most popular liberal post-racial ideas … that the fundamental problem is class and not race.”

Moreover, anyone of a mind to offer up innate differences in cognitive ability as the culprit faces an obvious obstacle: they have;

“[got] to explain … why these putative differences aren’t handicapping [black] women.”

And so, argues The New York Times, we have got the usual suspect dead to rights: White racism must be to blame. So eager is the rush to blame Whitey that they have somehow lost sight of the inconvenient fact that the same issue they have identified as an impediment to the I.Q. argument is a death knell to their own racial account of the matter. If white racism is afoot, why are black women immune to its ill effects, so much so that they are even slightly outperforming white women, even though, as the article contends, black women “face both sexism and racism”? Why, moreover, are Asians, according to the study, doing even better than whites in accumulating income across their lives? Why are Hispanics closing the income gap with whites? Why are black boys growing up in regions of the country, such as the Pacific West or Northeast, where overt white racism might be less prevalent, not doing any better than their peers in our more traditionally racist redoubts?

None of the four author/propagandists listed in the byline appears to have pondered these questions. The closest they come to acknowledging the problem is a weak suggestion that black men may experience racism differently than black women. Other studies show that boys, across races, are more sensitive than girls to disadvantages like growing up in poverty or facing discrimination. While black women also face negative effects of racism, black men often experience racial discrimination differently. As early as preschool, they are more likely to be disciplined in school. They are pulled over or detained and searched by police officers more often.

“It’s not just being black but being male that has been hyper-stereotyped in this negative way, in which we’ve made black men scary, intimidating, with a propensity toward violence,” said Noelle Hurd, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia.

The new data shows that 21 percent of black men raised at the very bottom were incarcerated, according to a snapshot of a single day during the 2010 census. Black men raised in the top 1 percent — by millionaires — were as likely to be incarcerated as white men raised in households earning about $36,000.

None of this, of course, comes close to explaining how even though white racism could be so devastating to black men that it is supposed to account for a whopping gap of 27% percentage points in their ability to maintain income status. Such a curious racism leaves black women wholly untouched as far as their incomes are concerned. No answer eithr for how such alleged white racism fails to stymie the progress of Asians and Hispanics.

The quoted passage gestures in the general direction of an explanation for the issue and yet cowers when it comes time to make the point that is there to be made. The data points to an disproportionately high rate of violence and incarceration, even for black men in the top 1%. More generally, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black males have an over 1 in 4 chance of being in jail at some point in their lives, as compared to 1 in 23 for white males. Black females, on the other hand, have about a 1 in 28 chance of meeting the same fate.

The point is this, however: such incarceration does not occur in a vacuum. People are incarcerated for crimes, and black men are overwhelmingly incarcerated for violent and other serious crimes rather than low-level drug possession offenses as some would have us believe. In lieu of reinventing the wheel, I will quote the journalist and criminologist Heather MacDonald making this point in an article that is worth reading in full for all of those who have been gaslighted by the meme of mass incarceration:

"It is not marijuana-smoking that lands a skewed number of black men in prison but their elevated rates of violent and property crime. A 2011 study of California and New York arrest data led by Pennsylvania State University criminologist Darrell Steffensmeier found that blacks commit homicide at 11 times the rate of whites and robbery at 12 times the rate of whites. Such disparities are repeated in city-level data.

In New York City, blacks commit over 75 percent of all shootings, according to the victims of and witnesses to those shootings, though they are only 23 percent of the city’s population. They commit 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, commit under 2 percent of all shootings and 4 percent of all robberies, though they are 34 percent of the city’s population. In the 75 largest county jurisdictions in 2009, blacks were 62 percent of robbery defendants, 61 percent of weapons offenders, 57 percent of murder defendants, and 50 percent of forgery cases, even though nationwide, blacks are 12 percent of the population. They dominated the drug-trafficking cases more than possession cases. Blacks made up 53 percent of all state trafficking defendants in 2009, whites made up 22 percent, and Hispanics 23 percent, whereas in possession prosecutions, blacks were 39 percent of defendants, whites 34 percent, and Hispanics 26 percent."

The “black incarceration rate,” in other words, is no more and no less than an obfuscating euphemism for what used to simply be the “black crime rate.” It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that getting involved in the criminal justice system may not help one’s career prospects and financial portfolio.

But the black crime rate is the most obvious and tangible tip of a much bigger iceberg that keeps on sinking black boats from generation to generation. Contra The New York Times, that iceberg is not white racism, but rather, what sociologists call black “cool-pose culture.” The fact is that African-American culture at this moment in time — and I am speaking specifically of African-American culture, not the cultures of all dark-skinned people from Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere — exhibits numerous non-progressive and self-destructive tendencies that are out of keeping with the goal of social and economic advancement that nearly all Americans of every culture, African-Americans included, share. These tendencies were not endemic to African-American culture in the past, and they need not be part of its future. Indeed, they must not be part of its future if we expect to co-exist peacefully and fruitfully, as I have every confidence that we can.

So what are these tendencies? As described by Thomas Chatterton Williams, the author of Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture (2011), writing in The Washington Post, African-American cool-pose culture is “the inverted-pyramid hierarchy of values stemming from the glorification of lower-class reality in the hip-hop era” and “has quietly taken the place of white racism as the most formidable obstacle to success and equality in the black middle classes.” He continues:

The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group.

But in black America, the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention. Like neurotics obsessed with amputating their own healthy limbs, middle-class blacks concerned with ‘keeping it real’ are engaging in gratuitously self-destructive and violently masochistic behavior.

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Expanding elsewhere upon the consequences of this pressure to play the part of the ghetto-bred bad boy, he explains that

“[w]ay too often being cool is equivalent to being anti-intellectual, misogynistic, homophobic, hyper-materialistic, and even criminal.”

The Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, writing in The New York Times back in 2006, during an earlier era when a diversity of perspectives on racial issues was still acceptable, identified cool-pose culture as a particular affliction of black men. He relates an anecdote to make his point:

"Several years ago, one of my students went back to her high school to find out why it was that almost all the black girls graduated and went to college whereas nearly all the black boys either failed to graduate or did not go on to college."

So why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the “cool-pose culture” of young black men was too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation’s best entertainers were black.

Nor are these voices alone. Stanley Crouch and Bill Cosby (the latter’s ghastly sexual escapades notwithstanding) have been abiding and vocal presences in this particular wilderness, and the linguist John McWhorter has likewise written about many of these matters in Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (2000), where he argues, for instance, that

“[The]black Cult of Anti-intellectualism casts top scholarly achievement as treachery.”

I recommend this excellent article of his, chock-full of relevant data, to anyone interested in these issues, though, for my own part, I think the fact that, according to Nielsen (NLSN), African-Americans engage in the ultimate dumbing-down act by watching 37 percent more TV than the U.S. average and are 75% more likely to be heavy viewers who watch a whopping 917 minutes (more than 15 hours!!) per day on average, is telling, since you can’t really learn very much or work on your socioeconomic advancement if you’re spending every waking moment vegetating in front of your TV screen.

If your culture ridicules academic achievement and promotes anti-intellectualism, how can you possibly hope to compete on equal terms in a labor market in which knowledge is increasingly a sine qua non? As Thomas Chatterton Williams puts the point in his Washington Post piece,

With such pressure to be real, to not “act white,” is it any wonder that the African American high school graduation rate has stagnated at 70 percent for the past three decades?

Until black culture as a whole is effectively disentangled from the python-grip of hip-hop, and by extension the street, we are not going to see any real progress.

But these few clear-sighted critics are swimming upstream, and because of how rarely we are exposed to their critiques, many racists attribute some or all of the destructive and self-destructive features of African-American cool-pose culture to inherent qualities of all African-Americans or even of all dark-skinned, i.e., “black,” people, when what they should be doing is blaming the problem on a dysfunctional culture, not on people or their genetic heritage.

If instead of jumping, in a knee-jerk manner, all over anyone who dares to say something less than positive about black people, we had in our intellectual arsenal the ability to explain to them patiently that what they are identifying (assuming they are not raving lunatics gesticulating at phantasms) is not a feature of black people, but rather, may be an outgrowth of African-American culture at this point in time, we would undermine their racist tendencies without unproductively labeling them as racists, which only angers and hardens them and de-legitimizes their concerns. The end result would be better for everyone, I guarantee it.

Instead of recognizing this opportunity, too many white people have, out of cowardice and fearing being unjustly branded racists in our contemporary political climate, stayed silent on the sidelines or else, especially in the case of many younger generations suckled on aggressive anti-racism and eager to be devotees of the African-American cult of cool, have cozied up to and embraced African-American culture. Both cases reflect a failure to understand that what is truly racist is not expecting more, not believing that better is possible.

Through their complicity in propagating the notion that African-Americans and their culture simply are and will always be living embodiments of the “cool” poses embodied in ghetto culture and hip-hop culture and the concomitant willingness to craft social policy premised on this demeaning notion. Through their belief that we, as a society, must condescend to accept or even celebrate the vulgar poseurs of hip-hop culture rather than rejecting them as a model for African-Americans and for the growing generations of non-African-American youth naturally drawn to the outré self-expression, playground-bully machismo and shallow rebelliousness of such culture. Through their refusal to insist on the highest expectations for everyone and their facile, always-at-the-ready gestures in the general direction of racism as a go-to explanation for every social and economic inequity we might find, White Americans have functioned as inadvertent enablers of the very forces that keep African-Americans firmly entrenched at the very bottom of our increasingly polarized socioeconomic pyramid.

If The New York Times wanted to perform a public service rather than working as hard as it can to keep the blinders on, this, this white liberal and white corporate enabling of self-destructive patterns in African-American culture, is the main form of white racism on which its race-baiting writers would do well to focus. As Orlando Patterson explained in his 2006 Times Op-Ed;

“The important thing to note about the subculture that ensnares [black boys] is that it is not disconnected from the mainstream culture. To the contrary, it has powerful support from some of America’s largest corporations. Hip-hop, professional basketball and homeboy fashions are as American as cherry pie.”

Since 2006, America’s and the world’s embrace of the African-American “cool pose” has only gotten more unquestioned and ubiquitous. One need only go to a Chinese, Korean, Indian or former Soviet-bloc restaurant and see a screen projecting a foreign-language American Idol knockoff with kids or 20-somethings imitating the dance moves and stylings of American hip-hoppers to confirm that this is so. And yet it remains the case that, while whites, Asians and others who try the “cool pose” on also know when to dial it down and take it off, too many African-Americans currently have no other culture to which they can flee, as Prof. Patterson explains:

Young white Americans are very much into these things, but selectively; they know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book.

For young black men, however, that culture is all there is — or so they think. Sadly, their complete engagement in this part of the American cultural mainstream, which they created and which feeds their pride and self-respect, is a major factor in their disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.

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And so, we are faced with a choice: we can keep on talking about racism, or we can start talking about reality. We can bend over backward to maintain our comforting illusions, or we can begin to listen to what the stats and studies are actually telling us. We can continue leading black boys onto the dead-end path of anger and blame, or we can show them the detour that leads to the high road, away from African-American cool-pose culture and towards a universal culture of success that will leave the income gap, the “racism” meme and even the entire outmoded and regressive paradigm of classifying human beings by race far behind.

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afishtrap · 7 years

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This article will explore the ways in which music-making and gender differences mutually shape one another in a hill society in island Southeast Asia. The questions raised have to do with the role music-making plays in producing or subverting gender-based hierarchies of prestige and authority: Does music support or threaten predominant ideas about gender? How does it shape the way in which women and men experience sexual hierarchy? Can music-making itself be a form of sexual politics? These issues are especially intriguing in light of our understanding of music and gender in the island region. AsJane Atkinson and Shelly Errington note, gender has not stood out as a dominant theme or problem in the Southeast Asian archipelago, a place where social hierarchy usually rests on principles of seniority and spiritual potency and where sexual antagonism appears muted (1990). As for music, the dominant traditions in the region-and particularly those of the hill societies-are often traditions of sacred music performed in the context of ritual. A look at case materials from Southeast Asian hill communities should shed fresh light on music-making, ritual, social hierarchy, and gender ideology in small-scale societies known for their relative egalitarian outlook and their nonstratified (or minimally stratified) social order (cf. Feld 1984, Roseman 1984).

Kenneth M. George, Music-Making, Ritual, and Gender in a Southeast Asian Hill Society, Ethnomusicology, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Winter, 1993), pp. 1-27.

A significant number of ethnographic reports from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines give the impression that despite gender differences, disparities between men and women with respect to prestige and power are culturally played down or muted among the island societies (see, for example, Freeman 1970 [1955]; Geertz 1973; Geertz and Geertz 1975; Rosaldo and Atkinson 1975). In many instances, and especially among the region's cognatic societies, local ideologies and practices place women on a fairly equal footing with men. Some societies, like the Meratus Dayak described by Anna Tsing (1987), offer ways for women to become prominent spiritual leaders, and others, like that of Negeri Sembilan, quite clearly vest women with an enormous degree of social, political, and economic autonomy (Peletz 1987, 1988). Further, there are societies, like the Wana of central Sulawesi, that emphasize the human sameness shared by women and men rather than their differences (Atkinson 1990). Shelly Errington may not be far off the mark, then, when she proposes that for many of the cultures in the region, gender is "not the difference that makes a difference" (N.d., quoted in Kuipers 1986). For this part of the world, she finds that age or seniority usually serve as the basis for social hierarchy while gender differences promote social complementarity (1990:47-53).

[...]

At the same time, some caution is called for in charting gender relations throughout the region. To begin, there are troublesome cases where social practices privilege men despite egalitarian ideologies. Among the egalitarian Temiar, for example, men enjoy a greater visibility in political and ritual spheres than women (Roseman 1987). The same is true of the Wana, mentioned above. Despite ideas about a human sameness that transcends and levels gender difference, Wana men have greater access than women to spiritual potency, and with it, greater political power (Atkinson 1990). And Tsing's more recent examination of Meratus Dayak culture reveals that men, rather than women, steer dispute settlements (1990). Historical change further complicates the picture throughout island Southeast Asia. For instance, a recent paper by Vinson Sutlive suggests that in the last twenty years disparities between Iban men and women have grown wider under the influence of urban migration (1987). More crucially, the impact of colonial regimes, nationalism, and postcolonial states on the societies in question have had important consequences for gender hierarchy and ideology at the local level.

[...]

Members of the mappurondo community live in households scattered throughout a dozen or more of the villages located along the headwaters of the Mambi and Hau rivers, and number roughly thirty-five hundred to four thousand persons.1 Like their Christian and Muslim kin who comprise the majority of the region's population (about 50,000 people), mappurondo villagers usually farm rice terraces, swiddens, small garden plots, and coffee groves. Everyday activity in the village revolves around the household, the household cluster (or hamlet), and the group of relatives that make up a person's bilateral kindred. Mappurondo villagers show a striking preference for village endogamy, for marriages with second or third cousins, and for marrying their own, that is, persons who have not been lured away from ancestral tradition by Christianity and Islam. As a result, the mappurondo households in any given village make up a close-knit group of kin as well as a cohesive moral and ritual polity.

Prestige and social status in the mappurondo community rest largely on age and seniority. Persons show deference to parents, grandparents, parents-in-law, and elder siblings, and expect the same from their juniors and offspring. Seniority in descent also plays a crucial part in making successful claims to inheritable and prestigious positions of ritual leadership. At the same time, significant terrace and coffee holdings, ritual displays of wealth and prosperity, and the ability to convene a retinue of followers bestow prestige on a person or household. For the community, then, age and seniority tend to create a fixed set of status positions, while wealth and achievement offer a means for elevating prestige and influence. Given these two axes of prestige, a person's social status is inevitably and incessantly negotiated, contested, and kept in flux.

With the arrival of Islam in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Christianity in the twentieth, upland society fractured along religious lines. Very simply, Muslims and Christians turned their back on mappurondo rituals. Their censorious attitudes and institutional clout gained further strength under the deepening influence of Indonesian state policy, a policy which insists on monotheistic religion as a keystone of progress-oriented citizenship and which effectively denies the mappurondo community legitimacy and support. As a result, followers of ada' mappurondo today comprise a minority community with a distinct ideological focus and identity. It is a religious community rather than an ethnic one.

[...]

Generally speaking, the relations between mappurondo men and women steer toward balance and collaboration, and in many contexts may be said to be relatively egalitarian. In fact, men (muane) and women (baine) are in many ways the same. For example, both inherit equally, both strive toward industriousness, and both have voice in managing household affairs. Similarities aside, gender differences do exist and do order village life, especially in the division of labor and ritual practice. Yet most persons tend to view these differences as complementary in nature, and it is in part this perceived complementarity that keeps gender distinctions from becoming a problem in everyday life. It needs to be asked, of course, whether this complementarity has a basically egalitarian or hierarchical character. I will explore this problem in the pages that follow. For now it is important to note that both men and women in the mappurondo community use a discourse of complementarity to level gender differences without erasing them and to portray them as fitting, natural, and reasonable.

[...]

Unlike the division of ritual activity, the sexual division of labor in the mappurondo community is flexible and relatively balanced. Women customarily plant, weed, harvest, and gather, while men till rice terraces, burn off garden plots, fish, and make homes, huts, and rice barns. Yet men and women are free to assist one another in these tasks. Childtending and cooking preoccupy women more often than men, but are quickly passed on as chores for children roughly age seven and up. The division of labor is far more rigid, however, when it comes to hunting or weaving: Without exception, hunting falls to men and weaving to women. I have no evidence that villagers place differential value or worth on these various tasks. The sexual division of labor thus appears balanced and egalitarian.

Both men and women take part in ritual life, and both have opportunity to become recognized specialists vested with the authority to perform certain ceremonial roles. Traditionally, men have had nearly exclusive hold on village political positions. It always falls to men to adjudicate local political affairs. The pattern continues today, at a time when the mappurondo community has to make concessions to the civil administration and those who have embraced Islam or Christianity. Still, women are not enjoined from bringing an issue before village men, nor are they prevented from holding village political office. That they seldom do so points suggestively to a potentially important dimension of hierarchy in the purportedly level field of gender complementarity.

Villagers rarely question gender differences, but more often presume their givenness and naturalness. Indeed, the givenness of an egalitarian yet differential order can be glimpsed in ideas about the supernatural, specifically the realm of the debata, or spirits. The most powerful, if remote, deity is Debata Tometampa ("one who shapes with hands"), whose primordial and genderless character suggests a projection of human sameness into the world of the supernatural. A more complex figure is the spirit known both as Debata Tomeola ("one who journeys)" and Debata Tomemana' ("one who has ancestral bequests" [i.e., hearth and rice land]). As Tomeola, the spirit is male and follows men in their activities and adventures. As Tomemana', the spirit is female and sits above the hearth watching over women and the household. More present in the world of human affairs than Tometampa, Tomeola/Tomemana' is a fusion of complementary gender differences. Most other spirits are clearly male or female. Among them, the debata bisu ("the quickening spirits") enliven villagers during ritual, bisu muane stirring men, bisu baine stirring women. Two other kinds of supernatural beings, debata buntu ("spirits of the mountains") and debata totibojongan ("spirits in the firmament") link male and female to nature and culture, respectively. Debata buntu is male, an unruly, malevolent, and insatiably hungry, red-faced spirit who dwells in the forests and threatens to disturb village order during rituals. In contrast, the girlish and easily startled debata totibojongan descend from the sky each year to coax the rice crop into maturity.

#southeast asia #anthropology #ethnomusicology #gender studies #research #jstor #indonesia #sulawesi

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pluiethewolf · 8 years

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PATERSON

Recently I went to see Paterson with a friend and when I got home started writing a message to him about it which quite quickly became 1000 words long. It really struck a chord with me which I didn't necessarily notice while watching it.

For me the whole film is about people's personal passions and art, as well as the joys of life even when it's unexceptional. In fact I think the word 'even' doesn't fit what the film's doing, it doesn't feel like there's a hierarchy in it of what success means, that Paterson's life is good DESPITE being unexceptional. In a 'mainstream film' (i hate using phrases like that but it's an easy standin for 'films not like this') it would be about Paterson and/or his wife trying to hit the big time and the joys and difficulties that come from achieving or not achieving that. They would be special in their talent and ambition. But they're not. The film shows that through little girl's poems and the guy in the laundrette rapping and the barman's chess. Even the conversations on the bus are about passion and interest and enjoyment. The characters live in a town filled with the memories of people who 'made it big' by their art but they're ALL making art and living passionate lives. It reminds me of a really, really good show I saw called 'The Castle Builder' by Kid Carpet and Vic Llewelyn. It's all about people making amazing works of art in their free time. Not for money or fame or even sometimes to be seen by anyone else but just in order to make it. (That's a real simplification of what it's about but this is a fantastic review of it which gives a much better picture http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review/).

In general I feel like the film wasn't just about people having their own art but through that about people having their own lives. Film's so often are about exceptionalism and encourage exceptionalism in us. There's some shitty motivational quote that I've seen about how we always let ourselves get away with much more than other people because we know the context and the motivations of our own actions and to me that's how we relate to the main characters most films (really a lot of fiction in any medium). We can support them doing things that would normally make us hate a character because we’ve been shown it in their context. It's an odd (but I think true) contradiction that in order to make the main character of a film more relatable to more people you have to make them more special, because everyone is special to themselves. I'm not talking about the idea of 'young people these days' having been told by their teachers and parents that they're unique and so have an inflated sense of their specialness. It's incontrovertible* that everyone has a clearer understanding of their own inner life than they do of anyone else's, and their vision of the world is formed around them. Movies reflect this. Either the main characters in films are incredibly talented/have some other personal quality which makes them stand out or they're an 'ordinary guy' thrust into a strange situation where they have to sort it out. If anything when the 'ordinary guy' is the main character it encourages exceptionalism even more: it doesn't matter that there's nothing that you can pinpoint which makes you amazing, you're the main character, you're John McClane, you're Will Smith in that film where he accidentally gets caught up in all the spy shit.

Paterson completely goes against this trend. It completely unpatronisingly asserts that everyone is special and makes it seem like something both completely obvious and beautifully original rather than an oft repeated cliche. There's a word - sonder- which means 'the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own' (it's made up but then again aren't all words?2) and I think Paterson really encapsulates that word. The friend I saw the film with talked about how great Paterson himself is as a character, his favourite character in recent films, and I agree with him that he's an amazing character but despite that he's hardly the main character. He doesn't do anything more extraordinary than anyone else. And we don't really get any more insight into his character than we do anyone else's. In fact for most of the film I found myself wondering what he was thinking, whether he was happy, even what kind of person he was beyond what we saw. When we were talking I mentioned that although it was 'quirky' and weird it felt more like real life than most other movies because stuff just happened. I think a lot of that comes from the lack of exposition, which also lead to the very loose narrative structure and the fact that Paterson isn't 'the main character'. Obviously he is; he's in the title (though after thinking about it I would argue the film is actually about the town rather than him), the film follows him around, we hear his thoughts/poems and see the world through his eyes, with the camera focusing on the coincidences he sees, time passing on his watch etc. BUT without the exposition we don't frame a narrative around him, when something happens we don't think 'oh that's bad for him because’ or 'YAY that's what he wanted', because there's no exposition to set up his objectives and fears. All the characters in it are people rather than pawns which either help or hinder his objectives. Yes, some of them may be played for laughs (for example the guy at the bus depot who seems to have all the problems of the world) but they are just people whose lives happen to be intersecting with Patterson's, and they never seem like a tool to further the 'plot' (a helpful side-effect of not really having much of one). One of the oddest points of the film for me is at the end where Patterson talks to the Japanese poet. I can't tell whether it's satirising the 'wise mystic Asian' trope or just repeating it. But what makes me feel like it's not JUST repeating it is it feels like the poet sees Paterson the same way as Paterson sees him. It feels like the poet has his own story, in which he talks to this strange bus driver in the town he poetically romanticises. None of the characters are 'fleshed out', we don't find out anyone's physiological motivations or anything like that, but this doesn't stop them from being real people to us, if anything it increases it. We're given a small glimpse into a much larger life that they live, much like those of the people we meet every day.

Earlier I said I think the film's more about the town of Paterson than the man but I think possibly they're the same thing, in more than just their names. He's a metaphor for the rest of the town, for most people as he just keeps doing his ordinary life and has this rich life which isn't what he is known for or defined by. He's not really lying when he says he's not a poet (at least in one way) because in the town most people will never be seen as their private passions, they're seen as their jobs. Even above I didn't refer to the guy who played chess as the chess-player or as the local celebrity enthusiast, but as the 'bar-man'. This is also shown in the fact that the only person who seems defined by their 'art' is Patterson's wife and in order for that to be the case her whole life has to be centralised around creativity and ambition (also possibly motioning to the fact that in our society you have to have the financial freedom and time in order to make this happen, which Laura has by being financially supported by Paterson). Like in the first line of the Maddy Costa article above, the general view is that 'To be obsessed with art, in whatever medium, without making it oneself is to live in a state of quiet disappointment at your own lack of facility and bravery'. I think Paterson is about a rebuttal to that view.c

THE CASTLE BUILDER (In which I argue back and forth with myself about ART) 

I've been thinking recently about The Castle Builder anyway. About people making 'art for art's sake'. I've been thinking about how wonderful the Internet is. I think of people making weird gifs and strange youtube videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FavUpD_IjVY) and fanfiction. Does the internet mean that people can make those passion projects which exist outside of money and fame, just as people always have, but that they can be out in the world as well, to be enjoyed and shared (and possibly ‘discovered’?). A fair amount of the media that I consume is created by people who want to make something cool and consumed by me for free. Is this the same as the 'everyday artists' in The Castle Builder (and Paterson)? Is this an alternative (dare I say subversive??) form of entertainment/art culture?

I mean the internet has been painted as a frontier for alternate lifestyles and cultures since its inception, but the cyber 'frontier' has undoubtedly been marketised and for the most part people's internet experiences are mediated by a small number of popular sites, almost all of which are run for profit (whether or not that's a good thing, pioneering anti-establishment spirit sacrificed for being accessible and usable by a much wider group of people, is a discussion for a different time). Art created online can now seem very separate from the ideal of creation untainted by commerce. People who use Twitter and Tumblr can sometimes seem more like 'content creators' making money for the platform than anything else. By gamifying entertainment with a sense of competition with followers and retweets and likes, it feels less like creation for creation's sake and more like something else, like another realm of labour (this is a good video on how game/film/tv consumption can be seen as labour - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=quWtUnDA8Uk - which is even more the case when you feel pressure to create and maintain an online presence) . And with being a Youtube star now a valid way to become a celebrity it feels like more and more people are turning to it as a way to get famous and turning likes into money.

But what's the problem with that? Surely I shouldn't be complaining about people getting paid and recognised for what they make? The internet can still serve as a democratizing place where people have more choice in how to invest their cultural capital and so creates different stars, different artists get money for what they do. Thinking about it it kind of echoes the recent debate about theatre bloggers. If anyone didn't see it it started with this (https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/2016/matt-trueman-why-im-worried-about-the-decline-of-theatre-blogs/?utm_content=bufferc1b1b&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer) Matt Trueman article saying there weren't enough dissenting, independent blogging voices and responses (very good ones (okay admittedly the only ones I've read but that doesn't mean they're any less good) here: https://walkingwithheadphones.wordpress.com/2016/12/16/a-response-from-a-young-and-unpaid-critic-or-theatre-blogger-up-to-you/ and https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/2016/megan-vaughan-has-theatre-blogging-really-changed-or-is-it-us/) included talking about the financial strains of unpaid blogging, as well as feelings that people just aren't reading what they write. (also the talk of false nostalgia makes me wonder if all these boring philosophical conundrums are just coming from missing what felt like the refreshing innocence of WoW music videos to Jonathon Coulton songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA). In the messages I receive from the world that I agree with there's a romanticisation of 'making art for the love of it' (I mean the romance is even in the name), but also full-throated defence of arts spending and funding. I'm not sure how these concepts sit with each other. Are they in opposition? And if they are I have no idea what side of the debate I fall on. Whose art deserves pay and whose doesn't? Does placing increased importance on people making art for themselves give further weight to only people with a lot of money being able to create, or does it encourage people who aren't rich or successful to see what they make as more important, or encourage people to make more? And I get to the point where I know I'm going in circles because there's no way of consolidating my beliefs within society’s current system (and this is the point that if I was saying this out loud I would start speaking in a funny voice because these are all things that I believe but it all seems a bit sincere and poe-faced so just assume my voice is now more nasal%), because in the current world (maybe all possible ones except for those populated only by art-egalitarian squid) some art will get funded and some will not and that will necessarily support a set of values, will give power to some people and groups and not to others.

I mean we've strayed very far from Patterson but I guess I've been thinking about things because I'm graduating soon and I want to make art and I have to make money but I'm not sure how I want those things to interact. Getting into a creative profession takes so much work and there's so many people also trying to do it that I find myself questioning not whether what I would make would be ‘good enough to be professional’ (I've seen enough bad 'professional' work not to think that) but whether it should be. Whether my art, or my voice would add to the vision of what I think the art/theatre world should be more like. I feel like the question that I should be asking myself isn’t ‘what is the point of art?’ or ‘why should I make art?’ because there are many, many possible good answers , but ‘why should people pay for my art?’. And that I’ve got much less of an idea on.

* I have a really clear mental image of this word being said in a really funny way in a film but can't place what it's from

2 specifically it's from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

cI could also write a whole other thing about how the two best films I've seen recently (this and Arrival) have both been thoughtfully hopeful and how much I love it but that's for another time

%My urge to do this, especially when saying words like 'capitalism' or 'heteronormative' reminds me of one of my favourite lines in Edinburgh this year, in 'Mouse' when Daniel Kitson said something along the lines of 'the greatest success of the patriarchy was in making the word seem ridiculous so that anyone who used it's arguments would become immediately invalid. Well not the greatest. The greatest was the systematic oppression of women but you know what I mean.'

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dogmapod · 5 years

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