culture

The Bakersfield Californian welcomes 2010 by reflecting on the past decade:

Naming this decade — and we must, because we are Americans, and we name things — isn’t going be so easy. Some decades, at least in retrospect, are easy calls. The Gay Nineties. The Roaring Twenties. The Psychedelic Sixties. But naming the ’00s is a challenge best postponed, because nothing we’ve considered rings with authenticity.

So,

All we can do is look at the evidence that historians and sociologists not yet born will consider. And one thing, beyond the bookend disasters of 9/11 and the Great Recession, stands out: Technology reshaped who we are and how we interact. Social media took hold of America in the last few years of the ’00s, with 350 million users on Facebook, 100 million on MySpace, and 18 million using Twitter.

Sociologist Rhonda Dugan weighs in:

“I’d call it the Decade of Self-Importance,” she said. “Everyone is networking online, but they’re not doing it just to find jobs. They’re doing it to talk about themselves. The ‘Me Decade’ was all about me. Now it’s about me and telling everyone about it. I use Facebook myself. And now I’m asking myself, ‘Why am I posting that I ran a half-marathon?’ We’ve become more narcissistic, and social media has helped push it along.”

Retired sociologist Russell Travis also comments:

“I’d call it the PTSD — the Post-Traumatic Stress Decade,” he said. That name “reflects the cumulative stress from the aftermath of two ongoing wars and the many coming home afflicted with (real) PTSD; the aftermath of a seriously tanked economy; … and the aftermath of the 2001 bombing of the Twin Towers.”

Maybe this is how we’ve come to deal with events just too big and too profound to process — by blocking out the wider world and turning inward, going to our own, personal safe place where the mundane trumps the abstract, the ordinary blocks out the incomprehensible, and 140 characters (or less) just about covers it.

The Sofia Echo reports on the debate in Poland over a new ban on symbols of communism.  It seems much of the disagreement is between those who were alive during the communist era and the younger generation:

Evocative symbols of Europe’s troubled past, such as the swastika, have long been illegal in a number of countries across the continent. But now, Poland has gone one step further. Poland has revised its criminal code to include a ban on symbols of communism. And, Poles can now be fined or even imprisoned if they are caught with a red star, a hammer and sickle or even a Che Guevara t-shirt.

To some, it is a natural reaction for a country that suffered so much from communism under the Soviet Union. But these days, many younger Poles are more likely to see communism as a source of satirical fun and creativity.

Sociologist Jutyna Kopczynska of Warsaw University says that Polish youth may be sympathetic to their elders’ suffering, but are more likely to see this as an issue of freedom and personal style:

“The young people are rebellious a bit. They think about their future and their freedom, and they want to show that they are free,” said Kopczynska. “So wearing a t-shirt with Che Guevara doesn’t mean that I am communist, but it means that I am trendy. The generation gap in our country is so huge that it’s hard to make a compromise.”

There are still questions about how the new ban will be applied, which is one explanation for the conflicted feelings of some young Poles:

The ban includes a number of exemptions for artists, educators and collectors of communist relics. And, so far no one has published an official list of exactly which symbols are outlawed. Critics have complained that the law is too hazy to actually be applied.
 
One woman speculates that this is why there has been little public outrage, even among the younger generation.

Twenty-four-year-old Lukasz Pawlowski says he agrees with the ban, if only because it protects the feelings of older Poles.
 
“I can understand that people who actually lived at that time, in the communist era, who were hurt by this system – it might upset them to see young people who might have basically no knowledge about this system and didn’t live in that, wearing the symbols they don’t understand. Wearing them probably just for fun,” he said.

A USA Today Op-Ed by Thomas Sander and Robert Putnam reveals a long-term consequence of unemployment:

Recent studies confirm the results of research during the Great Depression — unemployment badly frays a person’s ties with his community, sometimes permanently. After careful analysis of 20 years of monthly surveys tracking Americans’ social and political habits, our colleague Chaeyoon Lim of the University of Wisconsin has found that unemployed Americans are significantly less involved in their communities than their employed demographic twins. The jobless are less likely to vote, petition, march, write letters to editors, or even volunteer. They attend fewer meetings and serve less frequently as leaders in local organizations. Moreover, sociologist Cristobal Young’s research finds that the unemployed spend most of their increased free time alone.

These negative social consequences outlast the unemployment itself. Tracking Wisconsin 1957 high school graduates, sociologists Jennie Brand and Sarah Burgard found that in contrast to comparable classmates who were never unemployed, graduates who lost jobs, even briefly and early in their careers, joined community groups less and volunteered considerably less over their entire lives. And economist Andrew Clark, psychologist Richard Lucas and others found that, unlike almost any other traumatic life event, joblessness results in permanently lower levels of life satisfaction, even if the jobless later find jobs.

Equally disturbing, high unemployment rates reduce the social and civic involvement even of those still employed. Lim has found that Americans with jobs who live in states with high unemployment are less civically engaged than workers elsewhere. In fact, most of the civic decay in hard-hit communities is likely due not to the jobless dropping out, but to their still-employed neighbors dropping out.

Some possible explanations for this disturbing trend:

What might explain the civic withdrawal during recessions? The jobless shun socializing, shamed that their work was deemed expendable. Economic depression breeds psychological depression. The unemployed may feel that their employer has broken an implicit social contract, deflating any impulse to help others. Where unemployment is high, those still hanging onto their jobs might work harder for fear of further layoffs, thus crowding out time for civic engagement. Above all, in afflicted communities, the contagion of psychic depression and social isolation spreads more rapidly than joblessness itself.

The New York Times reports on “soul-searching” in Turkey after the murder of a gay man last year:

For Ahmet Yildiz, a stocky and affable 26-year-old, the choice to live openly as a gay man proved deadly. Prosecutors say his own father hunted him down, traveling more than 600 miles from his hometown to shoot his son in an old neighborhood of Istanbul.

Mr. Yildiz was killed 16 months ago, the victim of what sociologists say is the first gay honor killing in Turkey to surface publicly. He was shot five times as he left his apartment to buy ice cream. A witness said dozens of neighbors watched the killing from their windows, but refused to come forward. His body remained unclaimed by his family, a grievous fate under Muslim custom.

A sociologist comments on this “honor killing”:

Until recently, so-called honor killings have been largely confined to women, who face being killed by male relatives for perceived grievances ranging from consensual sex outside of marriage to stealing a glance at a boy. A recent government survey estimated that one person dies every week in Istanbul as a result of honor killings, while the United Nations estimates the practice globally claims as many as 5,000 lives a year. In Turkey, relatives convicted in such killings are subject to life sentences.

A sociologist who studies honor killings, Mazhar Bagli, at Dicle University in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, noted that tribal Kurdish families that kill daughters perceived to have dishonored them publicize the murders to help cleanse their shame.

But he said gay honor killings remained underground because a homosexual not only brought shame to his family, but also tainted the concept of male identity upon which the community’s social structure depended.

“Until now, gay honor killings have been invisible because homosexuality is taboo,” he said.

Gay rights groups argue that there is an increasingly open homophobia in Turkey.

Read more.

In the wake of Thanksgiving, Digital Journal describes a new twist on the problem of food waste.  First, the context of food waste in the US:

Three researchers from the Laboratory of Biological Modeling, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America, recently published a study that confirms the unrestrained waste of food in the United States.

Their findings are shocking: “We found that US per capita food waste has progressively increased by ~50% since 1974 reaching more than 1400 kcal per person per day or 150 trillion kcal per year. Food waste now accounts for more than one quarter of the total freshwater consumption and ~300 million barrels of oil per year.”

The article highlights a recent sociological insight into the fate of this wasted food, from research by Cornell sociologists Jeffery Sobal and Thomas A. Lyson, and Mary Griffin of the Arnot Ogden Medical Center:

Their study quantified food waste in one U.S. county in 1998–1999. They identified three options for waste food –donation, compost or landfill. The vast majority of food waste in the United Sates goes straight to landfill. According to their study, “Less than one-third (28%) of total food waste was recovered via composting (25%) and food donations (3%), and over 7,000 tons (72%) were landfilled. More than 8.8 billion kilocalories of food were wasted, enough to feed county residents for 1.5 months.”

While many regions worry about malnutrition and famine residents of most parts of the the United States need to worry about the deleterious environmental impacts their gargantuan waste of food products is having.

HBO’s “The Wire” continues to inspire sociological inquiry. According to the Times Higher Education,

Drugs, guns and institutional corruption may be standard fare on the streets of Baltimore, the setting of the cult television show The Wire, but they are surely far removed from most academics’ working lives.

This week, however, scholars are convening at Leeds Town Hall to analyse the HBO show, broadcast in the UK on FX and BBC Two, as an example of “social science fiction”.

The conference has attracted almost 50 papers and an international audience of more than 100, with sessions such as “It ain’t about right, it’s about money” by Peter Moskos, assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and “A man must have a code: the masculine ethics of snitching and not-snitching”, by Thomas Ugelvik, from the University of Oslo’s department of criminology and sociology of law.

Why does the show garner so much interest among social scientists?

The conference was organised, Professor Burrows said, to take advantage of this interest at a time when academics in the field were being urged to do more to develop “public sociology”.

“We were spending more time talking about the show than we were about work, so we thought we’d try to combine the two,” he said.

“We spend hours and hours (as academic sociologists) writing papers that not many people read, but actually many of the issues that we try to write about – particularly people who work in urban or political studies – can be dealt with more analytically in entertainment.”

The show’s broad public appeal does seem to get people outside of academia excited about social science:

“The show appeals to academics, people in the media and politicians because it talks to many of their concerns, but actually it’s far more ubiquitous than that,” he explained.

“I’ve been struck by how many young kids have got into it, usually because they think it’s about bad language, drugs and violence, but actually – and I’ve spoken to my own teenage children and their friends about this – it gets them thinking seriously about politics, culture, race. Then, suddenly, sociology, economics and political science are a little bit more sexy than perhaps they thought they were.”

The New York Times reports:

In recent years, a growing number of teenagers have been dressing to articulate — or confound — gender identity and sexual orientation. Certainly they have been confounding school officials, whose responses have ranged from indifference to applause to bans.

Further:

Dress code conflicts often reflect a generational divide, with students coming of age in a culture that is more accepting of ambiguity and difference than that of the adults who make the rules.

“This generation is really challenging the gender norms we grew up with,” said Diane Ehrensaft, an Oakland psychologist who writes about gender. “A lot of youths say they won’t be bound by boys having to wear this or girls wearing that. For them, gender is a creative playing field.” Adults, she added, “become the gender police through dress codes.”

Recently, a Mississippi 17-year-old wasn’t allowed to wear a tux for her yearbook photo:

At Wesson Attendance Center, a Mississippi public school, just that sort of fight erupted over senior portraits. Last summer, during her photo session, Ceara Sturgis, 17, dutifully tried on the traditional black drape, the open-necked robe that reveals the collarbone, a hint of bare shoulder.

“It was terrible!” said Ms. Sturgis, an honors student, band president and soccer goalie, who has been openly gay since 10th grade. “If you put a boy in a drape, that’s me! I have big shoulders and ooh, it didn’t look like me! I said, ‘I can’t do this!’ So my mom said, ‘Try on the tux.’ And that looked normal.”

Shortly thereafter, students were informed that girls had to wear drapes for yearbook portraits; boys, tuxedos.

The Mississippi chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote to the school. Rickey Clopton, superintendent of Copiah County schools, did not return phone calls. Last month he released a statement affirming that the school’s decision was “based upon sound educational policy and legal precedent.”

Last month, Veronica Rodriguez, Ms. Sturgis’s mother, paid for a full-page ad in the yearbook that is to include a photograph of her daughter in a tuxedo.

Schools have some freedom in how they will respond:

But generally, courts give local administrators great latitude. In Marion County, Fla., students must dress “in keeping with their gender.” Last spring, when a boy came to school wearing high-heeled boots, a stuffed bra, and a V-neck T-shirt, he was sent home to change.

“He was cross-dressing, and it caused a disruption in the normal instructional day,” said Kevin Christian, a district spokesman. “That’s the whole point behind the dress code.”

Sociologists weigh in on how non-conformity can lead to harassment:

“There are other places where there are real safety issues,” said Barbara Risman, a sociologist at the University of Illinois who studies adolescent gender identity. “Most boys still very much feel the need to repress whole parts of themselves to avoid peer harassment.”

Last fall, Stephen Russell, a professor at the University of Arizona who studies gay, lesbian and transgender youths, conducted a survey of about 1,200 California high school students. When asked why those perceived as not as “masculine” or “feminine” as others were harassed, a leading reason students gave was “manner of dress.”

So…

When a principal asks a boy to leave his handbag at home, is the request an attempt to protect a student from harassment or harassment itself?

The North County Times reports that there is a “convergence in values” between Mexican and American people:

In fundamental attitudes about work, religion, sex, politics, the free market and the like, we are becoming more like each other, according to polls during the last 30 years, and the melding is only likely to continue. The growing economic integration under the North American Free Trade Agreement, an explosion in travel and communication, and the fact that 10 percent of Mexicans now live here and that many Americans are retiring there help push the trend.

Recent survey and poll data provides insight:

Half of all Mexicans in 2005 supported actually abolishing the border, a doubling since 1980, according to the latest World Values Surveys, done by a global association of sociologists.

This is consistent with a September Pew study showing that a third of Mexicans would “say yes” to moving to the U.S., and 18 percent would do so “without authorization.” They are pulled by jobs and relatives here, helping reverse what historically had been a deep suspicion of the U.S.

Indeed, the World Values survey finds that the number of Mexicans who distrust Americans as a people plummeted from 52 percent in 1990 to 31 percent, while those who trust us grew. Mexicans overwhelmingly look favorably on President Barack Obama, Gallup and other polls show, but that is a more fickle political measure.

Far fewer Americans —- 18 percent in the World Values survey —- favor union with Mexico. But until the recent drug violence along the border, nearly two-thirds of Americans have supported closer ties and had favorable views of Mexico, according to various polls from the last 20 years.

Americans remain righteous about maintaining national identity, but so do Mexicans. In fact, the World Values survey shows that Mexicans have more national pride than Americans, by a margin of 83 percent to 66 percent.

Even the gap between individualist versus collective orientations seems to be narrowing:

In the 1950s, the celebrated sociologists David Riesman and William Whyte lamented the decline of individualism in America, and they were partially right, as Americans have steadily placed higher emphasis on what polls coincidentally show are Mexican values oriented toward community, family and group.

At the same time, Mexicans in 1980 placed little emphasis on encouraging children to be independent, imaginative or determined, but now do so almost as much as Americans, according to World Values.

So…

The list goes on, and what such convergence on broad values means, at the very least, is that mutual understanding becomes easier.

The Boston Globe explores the economic effects of religion, and reports:

A recent article in the Fresno Bee examined the current wave of apocalyptic themes in pop culture:

Prophecies about the end of the world have been debated by scholars, theologians and religious leaders for a long time. But it’s not just them. Pop culture also has a fascination with end times.

The fascination is clear in society today with the release of recent movies. The film “2012,” which opened Friday, depicts the end of the world and is stirring talk about the meaning of a Mayan calendar with the doomsday date. Another movie, “The Road,” which opens Nov. 25, looks at a man and his son’s post-apocalyptic struggle to survive.

One sociological explanation for the trend:

Sociologists say the interest in books, movies and lectures on the subject increases with bad times, such as those scarred by hurricanes, famines, tsunamis, war and economic collapse.

Commentary from a sociologist:

Margaret Gonsoulin, a sociology professor at California State University, Fresno, says the fascination with end times in pop culture reflects a hunger for meaning in the anxiety people feel in bad times.

“They want to know about the future,” she says. “But these sorts of ideas about end times mean different things to different people.”

Read more