Fragments of the Gaze

Earlier I posted about my ongoing research into the settlement of Russian Old Believers in Woodburn, Oregon.  The Oregon Historical Society provided me with some very interesting material related to the Old Believers, although from a source base I would not have originally thought to investigate- the records of the now defunct Valley Migrant League.  Part of the much larger 'War on Poverty' initiative begun under President Johnson, the Valley Migrant League (VML) was one of the first projects of its kind to be funded through an Office for Economic Opportunity grant.  The VML initially sought to provide migrant laborers, then streaming into Oregon during the spring and summer months, a means by which they could improve themselves via adult education, health information, and establishment of child care facilities to take care of the migrant's children.

While the primary ethnic group the VML concerned itself with was the growing Hispanic migrants, curiously the Russian Old Believers also came into the new bureaucratic organization's gaze- this despite the fact that the Old Believers were certainly not a migrant population and their numbers paled in comparison to the Hispanic 'majority-minority' group.  Mostly they were farmers, who practiced their craft in some of the poorest conditions in Brazil and Turkey, and had no tradition of engaging in migrant labor patterns as found, then,  in the United States.  Nevertheless, the Old Believer immigrants shared some common characteristics with Hispanic migrant workers that made them visible to the eyes of the VML; few spoke english, few possessed skills (at least in the appraisal of the VML) that would lift them out of subsistence farming, and they almost all practiced an insular lifestyle that would keep them (again in the estimation of the VML) from truly integrating into American culture.

Often in the VML documents I surveyed, there is the expressed desire to provide all needy populations in the Woodburn area with opportunities to advance themselves, but often these desires were tempered around a belief that economic empowerment would transform these populations into good 'tax-paying' citizens and speed along their acculturation process.  Yet transformation of a group from one set of cultural norms to another is an especially difficult process, particularly if the assimilating group has little to no knowledge of the culture with whom they are attempting to transform.  The VML, to this end, commissioned a few reports on the Hispanic and Russian groups then living in their intended work area.

For today's post I would like to look at some fragments from one particular report drafted in 1966 by Paul F. Griffin PhD and Ronald L. Chatham PhD, entitled "Comparative Analysis of the Mexican-American and Russo-American Migrant in the Willamette Valley, Oregon".  It is a hybrid sociological/anthropological report, focusing on the cultural traditions of the populations surveyed.  It is 216 pages long, with the Russian component of the report containing 70 of those pages.  Again, it is interesting to note that the Russian immigrants took up one-third of the report despite being a very small group as compared to the Hispanic presence.  Forty-five of these pages are devoted to three areas: case histories of two specific Russian immigrant families, some perceptions of the American citizens in the area of the Russians and a listing of known Russian immigrant families.  While the two case histories and the listing of Russian immigrant families are invaluable sources for my continuing research, the responses by American citizens really piqued my interest.

Take this response, given by a 23 year-old clerk at the U.S. National Bank branch in Woodburn:

This type of complaint was common among citizens quoted in this report.  What strikes me in this comment, easily one of the more virulent, is that the 23 year-old clerk assumes that learning American culture is 'even more simple' than engaging in monetary transactions.  

Not everyone was so quick to judge, or assume that the Russians immigrants would remain ensconced in their isolation.  This next response, from a 26 year-old teacher, was one fragment among many I found in educational materials that indicated the teaching profession was much better informed as to the history and tradition of the Russian Old Believers- indeed, this teachers acknowledgement that the Russians practiced a different form of Christianity was one of the first instances I came across in which the distinction was even made:

Note how the teacher states that Russian children are picking up english with greater rapidity than 'Spanish background children'- other sources I came across made similar comments in that the Russian immigrants were quick to pick up some aspects of American culture, such as the language and acquisition of material goods, while still managing to hold on to their religious beliefs.  The 'flexibility' in cultural practices of the Old Believer's, a characteristic noted in their history but largely missing from the early 60's assessments, came to the fore in Woodburn over time.

The first two fragments presented above were from the Urban standpoint- if you could call the small town of Woodburn in the 60's urban- while this last selection comes from a member of the community who probably had the most in common, in terms of work and lifestyle, with the Russian immigrants:

This was one of the few responses found in the report that actually engages in some empathy.  Many responses centered on the 'unclean' nature of the Russian immigrants- that they 'stank' or did not manage to keep their property in tidy order.  Few actually concentrated on seeing the issue for what it was- this was a new group of immigrants whose experiences beforehand differed greatly from that encountered in the United States.  The farmers last comment, that "we would maybe look bad in Russia", was certainly not indicative of many respondents attitudes.  

What makes these observations so interesting is that this kind of information is what the VML would base its 'engagement' policy upon towards Russian immigrants.  Since the perception was that the Russian immigrants were 'dirty', programs that targeted distributing health information were emphasized.  Adult education classes, held at night, attempted to get Russian adults to enroll in order to learn english.  This report, and several others commissioned by the VML and the local government, not only helped fix the gaze of the bureaucracy on the Russian immigrants but they also gave indicators towards directions where the gaze could shift.  However, like many of these early reports, little attempt was made to reconcile the larger questions regarding the practice of Old Belief and the assimilation of these practitioners into American culture.  In failing to do so, acculturation  programs would be met with little enthusiasm and, in some areas like education, outright conflicts developed.  

Next time I would like to take a look at an education source- the 'Manual for Educators of Old Believer Children', drafted by the Marion County (where Woodburn is located) Independent Education District.    

Wednesday Videos: The Future of Books

Update: I've posted two additional videos of TechCrunch interviewing Gleick about his work, The Information.  They are shorter in length (around 10 minutes total) so if the hour long talk just below isn't your cup of tea, keep scrolling and watch the two shorter videos)

Today's selection for 'Wednesday Videos' is author James Gleick speech given at the conclusion of the Sydney Writers' Festival on "The Future of the Book".  I posted a little review of Gleick's most recently published work, The Information, and it's great to see him here articulating his views on a subject near and dear to my heart.  Personally, I have been increasingly thinking of buying an e-reader seeing as how I've actually just finished my first e-book- and I read it on my phone!  It was Tom Clancy's chock-full of Cold War nostalgia 'The Cardinal and the Kremlin', and I'm currently reading Gleick's Chaos in e-book form thanks in large part to Amazon's 'deal of the day' = cost me a total of three dollars.  But enough of my reading rambling- watch the video below, provided so kindly by The Monthly and its 'SlowTV' collection of videos.

I'm Not Dead....Yet!

Well I certainly didn't mean for the Muse to go inactive this long.  Truth = I've been very busy finishing up some essays desperately needed for my Graduate Portfolio.  I'm glad to report great progress on that front, so much so that I should be able to post drafts this week.  I have also been working on a few posts for the Muse (shock! gasp!), so if you are a frequent visitor please hang in there and know more words are coming your way.

I will, however, leave you with this little tid-bit of a review on a book I recently purchased from Powells- The Ask by Sam Lipsyte.  I'm not quite finished, but what I've read so far has me pretty impressed.  How could you not, with the main character being a all out loser-ish reject who works, gets fired from, and returns to work again at a small, mostly insignificant Art College in New York.  (Oh the soft spot I have for misguided souls locked in academia's seedier basement of the Ivory Tower)  I've never read Lipsyte before, but based on this work I would probably be inclined to pick up one of his previous works.

Here is a New York Review of Books, umm, review on 'The Ask' if you want a more official take on the novel.  I will say that if you like hijinks in academic settings, then another novel that I have read and highly recommend would be 'Lucky Jim' by Kingsley Amis.

Culturomics

I know there have not been many updates this month, but it's only because I've been busy working on research for my dissertation and preparing a demo for a board-game I'm currently play-testing.  More on both in later posts.  

For now, I wanted to post this latest video from the Berkman Center, a recording of a lecture given on Culturomics: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.  A quote from the summary of the video I present below:

In this talk Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel — co-founders of the Cultural Observatory at Harvard and Visiting Faculty at Google — show how culturomics can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology.

Reasoned and well thought out searches of large data depositories are increasingly making their impact in several fields- while Journalism grabs the most attention due to its increasing daily contact with such large fields of data, I am a firm believer that the Humanities (especially History, but all disciplines really) will find potent new means to both analyze the past and interpret it in ways not possible for earlier scholars, even those whose works rested on the results of early adoption of quantitative analysis in the 80's and 90's.  With both mass storage and cheap processing power, not to mention developments made on the granularization of tasks through online social platforms, researchers today can tackle far larger 'tracts' of data.  This is the spirit behind my essay on Digital Archives and History, and for that reason I find the presentation of Aiden and Michel to be fascinating and prescient as to the power and potential of what they term 'Culturomics'.

My Picks From The Latest "Foreign Affairs"

I've mentioned previously on this blog that I subscribe to only a few magazines, one being the bi-monthly "Foreign Affairs"- a publication that provided great debate cards in high school and continues to provide insightful essays for my present consumption.  This recent issue is no exception.  While the main cover stories focus on the past and present Arab Revolt, there appears later in the issue essays on various topics united by the thread of American presence in a post-hegemonic world.  

G. John Ikenberry
via New America Foundation 

Now I'm not sure I totally agree with the use and definition of the term 'post-hegemonic world', but the views presented by G. John Ikenberry in "The Future of the Liberal World Order" and Russell Crandall in "The Post-American Hemisphere" demonstrate a willingness to see new configurations of power in our present geo-political landscape as a result of various nation-states growing ability to assimilate 'international norms', reconfigure them to suit their local needs and desires, and then promulgate these 'mutations' to be circulated and re-interpreted again.  Ikenberry describes how the liberal order, constructed over the past three centuries, underwent several innovations such as the UK's pursuit of free trade and freedom of the seas on the 19th century (ultimately undermined by their Imperialistic stance), Woodrow Wilson's dream of a collective-security organization in the League of Nations at the end of World War I (ultimately undermined by increasing 'bloc' mentalities developed in the interwar period), and, of course, the enshrinement of the liberal order after World War II evidenced by the incorporation of the UN and pursuant piecemeal declarations defining Human Rights over the course of the 20th century (a process that contributed to undermining the legitimacy of the Soviet Union).  He concludes,

"Seen in this light, the modern international order is not really American or Western -- even if, for historical reasons, it initially appeared that way.  It is something much wider.  In the decades after World War II, the United States stepped forward as the hegemonic leader, taking on the privileges and responsibilities of organizing and running the system.  It presided over a far-flung international order organized around multilateral institutions, alliances, special relationships, and client states -- a hierarchal order with liberal characteristics. 

But now, as this hegemonic organization of the liberal international order starts to change, the hierarchical aspects are fading while the liberal aspects persist.  So even as China and other rising states try to contest U.S. leadership -- and there is indeed a struggle over the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of the leading states within the system -- the deeper international order remains intact.  Rising powers are finding incentives and opportunities to engage and integrate into the order, doing so to advance their own interests.  For these states, the road to modernity runs through -- not away from -- the existing international order."

This is a wonderful summation of how the idea of 'liberalism' underwent changes not simply within an isolated power, but instead among a stage of global players.  When people see the current state of affairs and deduce that American 'power' is waining, they are misreading the 'tea leaves' so to speak.  What we have lost is the ability to increasingly dictate our configurations of liberalism upon a larger world, as rising states are growing in number and applicable power, seeking to integrate and promulgate their own version of the 'liberal order'.  

Russell Crandall
via Davidson

This point finds potent illustration in the work of Russell Crandall, who probes the increased self-reliance Latin American nation-states have vis-a-vis their relations with the U.S.  Beginning with an example of how Columbia decided to extradite a wanted drug trafficker to Venezuela instead of the United States, Crandall explains that Latin America is moving from "hegemony to autonomy", a process that brings diminishing American influence in regional policy making.  The upside to this process, however, is that the region is now capable of dealing with its own problems and crafting its own solutions to local problems without the inherent necessity for U.S. aid.  Again, like Ikenberry mentions above, Latin American nation-states are engaging with the liberal order, assimilating its norms, and re-interpreting those norms to fit their desires.  Other powers are taking notice.  From Crandall's essay:

"In the past, when Latin America was in economic trouble, outsiders prescribed bitter medicine, such as severe fiscal austerity measures.  In the last several years, however, the region has shown that it can address its own problems, even exporting its solutions globally.  There is no greater example of the region's autonomy in economic policymaking that Brazil's Bolsa Familia or Mexico's Oportunidades, conditional cash-transfer programs that give money to poor families if they meet certain requirements, such as enrolling their children in school.  As the World Bank has noted, Bols Familia targets the 12 million Brazilians who desperately need the assistance; most of the money is used to buy food, school supplies, and clothes for children.  The program is also credited with helping reduce Brazil's notoriously high income inequality.  The Brazilian and Mexican efforts have been widely emulated outside the region, including the United States."

What interests me most here is that the United States is taking cues from their once client states, the discourse no longer primarily unidirectional but multidirectional.  Mutations of the liberal order through information circulation will only increase, and time will yet tell if an alternative ideological belief will rise to challenge the current paradigm.  While I certainly don't necessarily believe both author's assertions that the above examples indicate a shift to a 'post-hegemonic' world, (see my post on Gramsci and his elaboration of the 'War of Position' vs. 'War of Maneuver'), I would recommend both of the articles discussed as good examples of the informatics-mutation possibility inherent in circulation of knowledge- even with something as abstract as the ideal of liberalism.