Sociological Images

Katrin drew our attention to the Christmas character of the Christkind, found in regions as diverse as Austria, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Rebublic, Croatia, Slovenia, Germany, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and, according to Wikipedia, “…parts of Hispanic America, in certain areas of southern Brazil and in the Acadiana region of Louisiana.”

The Christkind was introduced by the German Protestant priest Martin Luther (1483-1546).  At the time, tradition held that gifts were given by St. Nicholas.  Protestants, however, didn’t acknowledge saints, so they needed an alternative mythological gift giver.  The Christkind was originally depicted as baby Jesus, but in many places today is instead an angelic blond child or adult woman.

In Nuremberg, Germany, a Christkind is chosen every two years in a pageant reminiscent of American beauty pageants (source).  This year the Christkind is Rebekka Volland (source):

More photographs of the Christkind:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

As a member of a cattle-raising family, I hear a pretty steady stream of complaints about people eating less beef, which is variously attributed to a conspiracy against the American rancher (possibly by terrorists), the result of stupid city people who get all terrified over every little health concern (Mad Cow Disease is a myth! Unless it’s a terrorist plot to ruin ranching), environmentalists, animal rights activists, and me (I’ve been a vegetarian since 1996 and thus single-handedly nearly destroyed the beef industry).

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is similarly concerned about reduced beef consumption. And given that we frequently hear about the connections between red meat consumption and health concerns such as heart disease, and are advised to substitute white meat for red meat (to the point that the pork industry began branding pork as “the other white meat”), you’d probably expect to see a dramatic decline in consumption of beef.

And we do see a decline, but not as much as you might expect, as this graph from the Freakonomics blog, sent in by Dmitriy T.M. and Bryce M. (a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), illustrates:

Clearly beef consumption has declined since its peak in the late 1970s, when people in the U.S. ate nearly 90 pounds of beef each per year, to closer to 60 lbs. each today. On the other hand, all those health warnings, disease scares, and environmentalist-vegetarian terrorist plots haven’t yet knocked beef out of its position as the most-eaten meat in the U.S. Clearly, chicken seems poised to take over that position, but beef doesn’t exactly appear to be falling off the charts.

So how do we compare to other countries in terms of overall meat consumption? In a 2003 article in the Journal of Nutrition, Andrew Speedy provided data on global meat consumption (defined as “beef and buffalo, sheep and goat, pig meat and poultry”) — note it’s in kilograms, not pounds, and the legend should be read across, not down (so the first bar is for the U.S., the second is for France, and so on):

So insofar as there has been a decrease in beef consumption in the U.S., and more dramatic increase in chicken consumption: what’s going on? The Freakonomics article presents an explanation:

A study by the agricultural economists James Mintert, Glynn Tonsor, and Ted Schroeder found that for every 1 percent increase in female employment, beef consumption sank by .6 percent while chicken consumption rose by .6 percent. Why? Probably because beef takes longer than chicken to prepare, and because poultry producers did a good job marketing cheap and ready-to-cook chicken products. Furthermore, all those working women meant more household income, which meant more families eating in restaurants — where meals are less likely to contain beef than meals at home.

Health concerns do play a part; the authors found that negative media coverage of beef (either recalls due to contamination or general links to heart disease, etc.) reduced consumption, while positive coverage that linked eating meat to getting iron, zinc, and other minerals increased it. But they found that health effects were small compared to the effects of changing family dynamics — that is, women working outside the home and families eating fewer meals at home.

It’s a nice example of how the factors driving social changes are often much more complex than we’d expect. Common sense explanations of changes in beef consumption would, I think, a) overestimate how much less beef Americans eat than in the past and b) assume the major driving factors to be health-related concerns, whether about chronic disease or recalls. Yet it turns out a major aspect of the story is a structural change that doesn’t seem clearly connected at all.

I guess if I were a health advocate hoping people in the U.S. were starting to listen to messages about healthy eating, that might depress me. But I guess I can tell my grandma that the terrorists’ evil plans to infect U.S. cattle herds with Mad Cow or some other disease might not be as catastrophic as they might imagine.

UPDATE: As a couple of readers point out, the increase in chicken consumption can’t be explained just as a result of people eating chicken when they otherwise would have eaten beef; the drop in beef consumption is way overshadowed by the increase in how much chicken people eat. The total amount of all meat eaten each year has increased dramatically.

I don’t know what is driving all of that change, but I suspect a lot of it is marketing campaigns — not just directly to consumers, but efforts by industry groups and the USDA to get more meat into a wide variety of items at grocery stores and on restaurant menus, as they have done with cheese.

Different countries formalize different racial categories.  Below are examples of the ”race” questions on the Censuses of 9 different countries.   They illustrate just how diverse ideas about race are and challenge the notion that there is one “correct” question or set of questions.

The categories in the drop down menu include:

White
Chinese
South Asian
Black Filipino
Latin American
Southeast Asian
Arab
West Asian
Japanese
Korean
Other

The categories in the drop down menu include:

White
Black, African Am., or Negro
American Indian or Alaska Native
Asian Indian
Chinese
Filipino
Japanese
Korean
Vietnamese
Other Asian
Native Hawaiian
Guamanian or Chamorro
Samoan
Other Pacific Islander
Some other race

These images were borrowed from an American Anthropological Association website on race.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

American school children learn all about the U.S. gold rush in the Western part of the country. Goldmining was a speculative, but potentially highly rewarding endeavor and attracted, almost exclusively, adult men. But the entrepreneurship of gold mining (though not mining as wage work) is long gone in the U.S.  Still, gold is in high demand:  “The price of gold, which stood at $271 an ounce on September 10, 2001, hit $1,023 in March 2008, and it may surpass that threshold again” (source).  Who are the gold entrepreneurs today?  Where?  Under what economic conditions do they work?  And with what environmental impact?

I found hints to answers in a recent Boston.com slide show and a National Geographic article (thanks to Allison for her tip in the comments).  While there is still some gold mining in the U.S., there is gold mining, also, in developing countries and all kinds of people participate:

According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), there are between 10 million and 15 million so-called artisanal miners around the world, from Mongolia to Brazil. Employing crude methods that have hardly changed in centuries, they produce about 25 percent of the world’s gold and support a total of 100 million people…

Environmentally, gold is especially destructive.  The ratio of gold to earth moved is larger than in any other mining endeavor.

It makes me rethink whether I really want to buy gold (because, you know, I do that constantly, darling, constantly).  In fact, jewelry accounts for two-thirds of the demand.  In the comments, HP reminds me:

Gold (along with even more problematic metals) is found in pretty much all consumer electronics. It’s in your computer, your cellphone, your .mp3 player, your TV/stereo, etc. You’re buying gold all the time already, whether you know it or not.

Below are images of gold prospecting around the world.

Near Lodwar, Kenyan children mine for gold to help support their families:

In Colombia, about 8,000 prospectors seek gold illegally on the Dagau river:

Miners in Abangares, Costa Rica, scrape tiny amounts of gold out of abandoned mines; the work is dangerous and potentially toxic:

An illegal gold mine in a national park, Paral, Brazil:

This woman, in Indonesia, is collecting mud to sift for gold:

Also in Indonesia, this illegal mine is opposed by villagers who argue that the waste is polluting:

Mining in Myanmar:

UPDATE! A reader, Heather Leila, linked to a picture she took of gold prospecting in Suriname (at her own blog).  She writes:

The gold mines aren’t what you are thinking. They aren’t underground, you don’t carry a pick axe and a helmet. The garimpos are where the miners have dammed a creek and created large mud pits. The mud is pumped through a long pipe lined with mercury. The mercury attaches itself to the specks of gold and gets filtered out as the mud is poured into a different pit. The mercury is then burned off, while the gold remains. This is how it was explained to me. From the plane, they are exposed patches of yellow earth dotting the endless forest.

See also our posts on post-oil boom life and gorgeous photos of resource extraction by Edward Burtynsky.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Way back in June Missives from Marx sent in a link to a story at Dark Roasted Blend about tourism in the rainforest along the Amazon River near Manaus, Brazil. One stop was at a small riverside village where tourists are taken to have an “encounter of two different cultures.” Here’s a photo from the post:

Underneath the photo was the following caption:

A cruise ship arrival is a great event for the small village located on the mouth of Valeria River. The friendly villagers are always happy to welcome all visitors, eager to make contact and get news from foreign lands.

“Friendly villagers” “eager to make contact” and learn about “foreign lands”? It’s an incredibly patronizing description that sounds like it could have been in a travel brochure for the British Empire decades ago.

From the post:

Because of the small space, the visitors are literally poking into the river people’s lives. But they look happy enough to share with us their ways of life: we are being shown their schools, the local market and even the way their houses are made.

They seem to understand that visits like these sustain the little trade they are able to make by selling souvenirs and exquisite crafts. There are very few inhabitants and they are all very proud of their amazonian heritage. Although modern living is slowly making its way through, they dress up with traditional costumes.

Yes, they do understand that the tourist visits sustain their economy. They let people poke into their lives because they need the money. And they dress up in traditional “costumes” (?) because it makes tourists happy and then the tourists give them more money.

The kids, apparently, haven’t learned the etiquette for dealing with tourists. The post has several images of children with labels like “Little Warrior,” with descriptions such as:

They are not used being on display for the large audience and they all look like they would be happier playing, rather than demonstrating their skills. One particular girl attracted the crowds with her beautiful, magnetic eyes. She was demonstrating archery, but her eyes were throwing the real darts.

The poster acknowledges that the children don’t like being on display, but doesn’t think that might mean that a) you shouldn’t then treat them like tourist attractions or b) maybe the adults don’t really like being on display much either but have learned to play along better. I also wonder whether the children are demonstrating “their skills” or whether a kid holding a bow and arrows is part of the play-acting for tourists.

I once went on a river tour outside of Manaus; the one described here sounds almost identical. I felt uneasy about the idea of visiting the village but there wasn’t really a choice (they forced us off the boat at each stop) and my boyfriend at the time was excited, and so we walked around. It was an incredibly creepy experience. The people there were obviously poor, and tourists were walking around gawking at them, feeling entirely comfortable looking right into their yards and houses. I felt terribly awkward; even my boyfriend felt weird and just wanted to leave. I would not say the people looked thrilled to see us. Some did, especially those selling soda at the cantina (part of that “modern world”). But more than one person, mostly children, glared. And it was very clear that they were being nice to us and offering to be in photos with tourists in hopes of making a little money.

The whole thing felt like cultural tourism–hey, Americans/Europeans! Look at these people in their pre-modern villages and traditional “costumes”! Isn’t this a neat cultural encounter? Feel free to roam around and look at anything you want–the jolly villagers are just thrilled to death to have you here!

In another case of this, James T. sent in this video, found at 3quarksdaily:

It’s distressing to see this type of tourism prestened in such a positive light without at least discussing the ethical issues that might arise when relatively wealthy tourists encounter an impoverished group dependent on tourists’ money for some of their livelihood.

After reading Lisa’s post on politicizing kids, Z of It’s the Thought that Counts sent in this screenshot of political birth announcements found on the sidebar at FiveThirtyEight.com, accouncing kids as “Our Littlest Democrat” or “Our Littlest Republican”:

Z points out the company “only offers Republican and Democrat announcements — no Libertarians, or Greens, or anything else.”

I went to the website where you can buy these announcements, and I noticed that they had a section for adoption announcements, so I clicked on it. Here is one of the three options:

The other two also showed infants, and one of them also included text about the child being born in China.

I’m a volunteer court advocate for children in foster care in Las Vegas, so my immediate reaction was annoyance that the announcements all focused on the adoption of infants, without a single image of an older child, which sort of normalizes one type of adoption (of newborns) while ignoring the other. But I also realized there were only three of them, so whatever. But then I googled “adoption announcements” and looked around. And there are adoption announcement websites that show older kids and sibling groups.

In my search I came across this website, where you can buy customized announcements that have images representing the country your internationally-adopted child is from, with your child’s photo next to it and the announcement text on the back. Here is the image for Brazil:

Colombia:

Honduras:

One of the images available for Russia:

Vietnam:

This really creeped me out–it’s like you’re sending a 1970s-era postcard that romanticizes the “traditional culture” of a country, and also,  “Look what we got while we were here–a kid! Just like these!”

I think the idea is probably to celebrate or acknowledge an adopted child’s origins, but it comes off as a weird exoticization–linking your adopted child to people working in rice paddies or a dancing Russian doll. There is also the issue of how all these images depict the country as preciously pre-modern and rural (the girl carrying fruit on her head, the wagon pulled by oxen). On the one hand, none of the pictures have any clearly negative portrayals of these countries (the images all depict the home countries as very cute, really), but the message is also, implicitly, that these children, since they’ve been adopted by Americans, are being saved from lives in these cute but undeveloped nations, where they might end up working in rice paddies.

I have a couple of distant relations who have adopted children from other countries, and I’ve noticed that other family members often talk about this in terms of them “saving” these children from a presumably dismal life in those countries. So it’s not just about adopting a child you will love; it’s also about the White American as savior, giving a child not just a loving family but a modern American lifestyle. I’ve specifically heard this attached to ideas about how girls are supposedly treated in China (from family members who, to my knowledge, know nothing about China except what the average person can pick up on the news, and also don’t show much concern about gender inequality more broadly)–that if the little girl hadn’t been adopted, she’d have suffered a horrible life in China because they “treat girls like dirt” there, etc. And though cutesy, I think these images sort of play into this same discourse about other countries as backward (or, to use a more positive word, “traditional”) in comparison to our modern culture.

Anyway, thanks to Z. for pointing to one form of labeling of children (politically) that led me to another form–labeling kids as exotic and inherently “ethnic.”

UPDATE: In a comment, Elena brought my attention to one I didn’t post. This is one of the images available for India:

If you look closely, this appears to be a picture of colonial-era India, where a dark-skinned Indian is rowing a boat while two White men gaze at the people on shore. What a great sentiment to use to announce you’ve adopted a child from India!

Thanks, Elena!

I’m thrilled to share this remarkable newspaper article that I use to illustrate how skin color (which is real) is translated into categorical racial categories (which are not).  The children in the images below are fraternal twins born to two bi-racial parents:

The story explains the biology:

Skin colour is believed to be determined by up to seven different genes working together. If a woman is of mixed race, her eggs will usually contain a mixture of genes coding for both black and white skin. Similarly, a man of mixed race will have a variety of different genes in his sperm. When these eggs and sperm come together, they will create a baby of mixed race.  But, very occasionally, the egg or sperm might contain genes coding for one skin colour. If both the egg and sperm contain all white genes, the baby will be white. And if both contain just the versions necessary for black skin, the baby will be black.

But then the journalist makes a logical leap from biological determinants of skin color to racial categories.  While they are both, technically, bi- or multi-racial, the headline to the story, “Black and White Twins,” presents them as separate races.

We’re so committed to racial differences that the mother actually speaks about their similarities as if it is surprising that twins of different “races” could possibly have anything in common.  She says:

There are some similarities between them,” said their mother. “They both love apples and grapes, and their favourite television programme is Teletubbies.”

Of course, identifying them as bi- or multi-racial also re-inscribes racial categories in that you must believe in two or more racial categories to believe that it is possible to be bi- or multi-racial.

Futher, this is a nice example of a U.S.-specific racial logic. Other countries have different racial logics.  For example, from what I understand of Brazil, skin color and class determines race more than your parentage and so it is not uncommon to have siblings of various racial designations.

A similar news story was published about these twins:

And these twins: