Ranthropologist

Tag: ideology

  • Shifting Perspective: Kiddie Couture

    Shifting Perspective: Kiddie Couture

    On April 24, 2013, a building in Bangladesh known as Rana Plaza collapsed, killing 1,129 people and injuring 2,515. Rana Plaza housed several garment factories, in which workers – including children – were employed in manufacturing clothing for a variety of brands, including The Children’s Place, Benetton, and Walmart. The collapse triggered a wave of collective shock and outrage throughout the developed world as people were faced with the reality that working conditions in Bangladesh were poorly regulated, often dangerous, and beset with bribes, graft, and abuse.

    At the time of the collapse, the minimum wage for Bangladeshi workers was $38 a month. Following the collapse, international pressure and a series of worker strikes led the Bangladeshi government to raise the minimum wage to $68 a month, beginning on December 1, 2013. The real shock to many people in countries like the United States was having to face the fact that the reason we are able to buy $10 t-shirts and $19 jeans is because workers in places like Bangladesh make the equivalent of 39 cents an hour – and that’s assuming a standard 40-hour work week. In reality, Bangladeshi workers can labor for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Of course, the cost of living in Bangladesh is much lower than it is in most parts of the world – but we are fooling ourselves if we believe that this is truly a living wage.

    I bring this up not because I have a solution for the wage slavery taking place in much of the economic periphery – I don’t. I bring it up because I think it’s important for people to have perspective. To that end, I offer the story that made me decide to rant about this topic. ABC news broadcast a story about a new trend in children’s clothing: renting clothes instead of buying them. On the face of it, I think this is a terrific idea. The company offers parents the chance to pay a fee to rent clothes for special events such as weddings instead of having to pay full price for an outfit that will probably only be worn by their child once, and which they will outgrow soon in any case. Great! Sounds like a wonderful way to reduce our impact! But here’s where I got fired up: the company in question, Borrow Mini Couture, only rents high-fashion clothing. They carry brands such as Moschino, Roberto Cavalli, John Galliano, and Fendi – brands that charge hundreds of dollars for a single piece of children’s clothing. The least expensive Roberto Cavalli dress on the website retails for $352 – and it’s sized for a one year old girl. You can rent it for five days for $98 – $30 more than the monthly minimum wage of a Bangladeshi garment worker.

    The ABC piece makes it sound like this company is a boon to parents who want to save money. That very idea makes me want to weep. It’s not about saving money. It’s about aspirational parents being able to say they dressed their tot in couture clothing. Now, I don’t know where these couture brands manufacture their clothes, but that’s not really the point. Even if they are made by workers who are employed in safe, well-regulated factories where they earn enough to make a dignified living, what does it say about us as a society that we would even consider paying hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for a single piece of our own clothing, much less the clothes for our kids? And what does it say about us that there are people who will spend $50 to $100 just to briefly rent a status symbol for their child (or more accurately, for themselves)?

    For the shift in perspective I wish to impart in this rant, I offer this 2-minute video produced by the Toronto Star of children working in the garment industry in Bangladesh. Juxtapose this video with the ABC story and, like me, you might just want to weep – and I hope, want to think about what this means for the world we live in.

  • Affording to Care

    Affording to Care

    As readers of this blog know, I advocate looking at an issue from multiple perspectives and using facts, logic, and an arsenal of critical thinking skills to reach a conclusion about just about everything. For some issues, this is easy. For others, it is very, very difficult. I am facing that difficulty right now. I don’t usually like to post about current events because I want my posts to be generally applicable instead of linked to a specific issue, but this post will be an exception. I am having an incredibly difficult time keeping any sense of perspective over the fact that the federal government shut down at 12:00 am on October 1, 2013 because of what seems to essentially be a game of chicken – or more accurately, a hostage situation. I just don’t get it. I am trying to remind myself that as much as I believe in my point of view, the people on the other side believe in theirs and have a right to it… but I am also reminding myself that sometimes, it’s okay to come to the conclusion that the other side is just. plain. wrong. This feels like one of those times to me.

    Much of my current state of mind comes from emotion, and I admit that it can color my analysis, but in this case I also think the facts are on my side. The thing is, this showdown over the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is not just about facts; it’s about ideology. It’s about a fundamental disconnect between two ideological realms: one that believes the government has a duty to provide for all its citizens, and one that believes that individuals are solely responsible for taking care of their own needs. Of course, there are nuances to these two ideologies, and a broad spectrum of positions between their poles. But my training in anthropology has taught me about the structure of culture and society – from the simplest hunter-gatherer band to the most complex industrial civilization – and I am convinced that the hunter-gatherers have it right. These groups stress interdependence among their members, with an egalitarian structure that doesn’t allow for status hierarchies or any one person having more power or possessions than others in the group. In fact, hunter-gatherers must provide for each other, because the survival of individuals depends on the survival of the group. Group survival is paramount. In many industrial societies, this notion has been turned on its head. Status, materialism, and individual achievement are paramount. However, this does not mean the burden of the ruling class to provide for societal needs is negated; in fact, it becomes more important than ever, because a class-based, stratified social system is by its very definition a system that allocates more resources at the top, and fewer resources at the bottom. The bootstrap individualist will argue that any individual has the capacity, with hard work and gumption, to climb to the top of the ladder. This is loosely true, but it ignores the complexities of living within an entrenched class system. In a class-based system, the playing field is not level. When you are standing 100 yards behind the starting line when the gun goes off, you have to run harder and surmount more obstacles than the runners who start ahead of you… and those runners are apt to leave even more obstacles in their wake. And, of course, there are only so many spots on the winners’ podium, so even if you see it and keep running towards it, chances are the people already standing there will fight tooth and nail to retain their position.

    In many ways I believe that the hegemonic lie perpetuated by this system – that is, the lie that there is space on the podium for everyone and all it takes is hard work to get there – is the root cause of our current crisis. The fight to defund the Affordable Care Act is championed by those who believe it is unfair for government to provide care to its poorest citizens. It is fought by those who believe that the poor just don’t work hard enough, or don’t try hard enough, or are lazy or entitled or accustomed to government handouts. Unfortunately, there are examples of people for whom this is true; but I don’t think it is true for the vast majority of those who are too poor, too sick, or too underemployed to afford health insurance. A successful culture is defined as one that secures the survival of the individuals that comprise it in a way that is fulfilling for most of them, most of the time. Clearly we are not meeting that definition in the United States. Other industrialized nations are having similar troubles, but at least most of them seem to have figured out that taking care of people’s physical (i.e. medical) needs is one thing that government should be responsible for. Our individualistic hegemony has obscured the path to a successful culture and society, so that opponents of the health care act criticize it as “unfair” because money they consider theirs – that is, the taxes they pay – is being spent to subsidize health care for those unable to pay for it. It’s “unfair” because those without health insurance now have a way to afford it because it spreads the risk amongst a much larger pool and allows for much cheaper premiums. It’s “unfair” because low-income people are being subsidized with taxes from individuals and businesses when they should just be working harder so they can get off the dole. It’s “unfair” because Congress is “exempt” (forgetting, conveniently, that the ACA is meant for people whose employers don’t provide health coverage, which Congress – also known as the federal government! – does provide for both elected officials and their staffs). It’s “unfair” because the burden of keeping the population healthy is being borne by those higher up the status hierarchy. To me, this is like those people on the winners’ podium – who know damn well that space on the podium is limited – flaunting their trophies and doing end-zone dances instead of shaking the hands of their fellow competitors and offering to help them over some of the barriers that they themselves may not have had to face. Instead of acknowledging that we are all in the same race, and working to make that race an equal chance for all, the winners instead blame the other competitors for having to race on an uneven track that they had no hand in devising and have very little ability to change.

    As I said at the start, I have a very hard time maintaining my objectivity about this subject. All I can see is that a group of individualist ideologues is willing to take down the entire system just so that our weakest, most vulnerable citizens have no chance at even seeing the podium, much less standing on it. I know this part of my argument is not logical, but right now, with this situation, I can’t help but give some heed to emotion.

  • Follow Your Dreams?

    Follow Your Dreams?

    I was just sitting and mindlessly watching television, and a commercial for a health insurance company came on. It showed adults walking around the streets of a city dressed in costumes – astronaut, doctor, ballerina. The tagline of the commercial was a variation of “Be YOU. Be what you want to be.” It occurred to me as I watched the commercial, and the costumes representing the childhood dreams of people who end up actually becoming waitresses, construction workers, receptionists, and day laborers, that this is an enormous line of bullshit that we are being fed. This commercial reflects the middle-class ambitions of modern Americans, and promotes the idea that the only thing holding us back from realizing our childhood dreams is ourselves. What a load of crap! I had the same reaction when I heard a snippet of Steve Jobs’ commencement speech to Stanford in 2005, in amongst all the news stories about Jobs’ death. This is what he said: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” I mean no disrespect to Steve Jobs, but he is spouting the same line of hegemonic hypnosis as the health insurance commercial (though I am willing to give him a partial pass, since this kind of cliched spew is exactly what is expected from a commencement speech). Steve Jobs did amazing things that changed the way we interact with our world today, and in many ways I am grateful for that. But Steve Jobs’ amazing success is the exception. It is the plane crash, not the safe landing. It is the thing that makes the news because it is unusual. It is the kind of success that allows the hegemony to be perpetuated, because it gives us an example to point to and say, “That could be me!” Really? Could it really be you? I’m not sure I agree. Hegemony means believing that you can achieve the same pinnacle of success as the richest people in the United States, but it just isn’t true. Yet, here we all are, listening to the “follow your heart, follow your dream” message, and somehow feeling a little empty or inadequate because we are the waitress, or the mid-level manager, or the hair stylist, and chances are we will never be more than that, no matter how hard we work, no matter how much we study or train or dream, because there just are not that many seats at the head table. The people participating now in the Occupy Wall Street and related protests are, I think, finally understanding this reality. It’s not just about working hard. Believe me, immigrants to this country, illegal or not, work really fucking hard. Working class parents with the food service and delivery driver and labor jobs work really fucking hard. Will they ever occupy a position like Steve Jobs did? Probably not. Should they believe the easily digestible pablum about following your dream, or should we finally just be realistic and tell people, “This is as good as it will ever get for most of us.” Our dreams should be about more than what we do to make money… shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t we work on making sure that, even if you aren’t an astronaut or a doctor or a ballerina, you are compensated well enough for what you do that you don’t have to worry about feeding your kids or paying your mortgage or going to school? Shouldn’t we have a system that supports the reality of life for most people in America? Isn’t that what the protestors want? So let’s stop listening to the platitudes, and start sharing a dream about making sure the needs of all the people are met instead of lying and making people think that it is their fault that they aren’t in the one percent at the top of the economic pyramid.

  • Less Than Perfect

    Less Than Perfect

    Lately I have been musing about how people define their terms. A long time ago, I read somewhere that most arguments boil down to differences in how people define things. That simple concept has always stuck with me, and I have often found it to be the case in arguments I have been a part of. Of course, having that perspective does not always solve the argument, because people can cling pretty ferociously to their personal definitions. At that point the argument often distills into a debate over whose definition is more accurate. I strive to be very specific in defining my terms when getting into an argument, so that the real issue at hand can be addressed. It is always gratifying when the argument is solved by acknowledging differing terminologies.

    Let’s bring this discussion into focus with a specific example. Today I saw a bumper sticker that said “Next time you think you’re perfect, try walking on water.” Given the opportunity, I would have asked the driver of the car how he or she defined “perfect.” Perfection, in my definition, is attainable. You can bake a perfect cake, or turn a perfect cartwheel, or find the perfect gift for someone. Perhaps this could be considered a sort of proletarian definition of the concept, but certainly I am not the only one who uses it in this way. As for the bumper sticker, it got me thinking about the nature of perfection. Since when does perfection include the ability to perform supernatural acts? I believe that there is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal – there is only the natural and the normal, and things we haven’t explained yet. Given that walking on water is humanly impossible, how can that enter into the definition of perfection? Of course the logical conclusion is that perfection is also humanly impossible, hence the unspoken but clear context of the sticker: Only God/Jesus is perfect, and don’t you forget it, you flawed sinner you! This goes back to an old post on LiveJournal when I ranted about a different, but related, bumper sticker. What gives with people and the religious blame game? I’d like to define my terms: human beings can be perfect. We came up with the whole concept of perfect. We also invented the hocus pocus that positioned god/gods as the frame of reference for perfection (and incidentally gave us an out to explain all those “paranormal” and “supernatural” phenomena, such as, say, lightning, for which we had yet to find a natural explanation). Well, I have decided to reclaim the definition of perfection. You don’t have to walk on water to be perfect; you only have to do the absolute best that you can with what you are given, with the circumstances in which you find yourself, in your relationships with other people, and with your life in general, and those moments of perfect will happen.