A while back Laura M.D. sent us this image from the March issue of Teen Vogue (found at Jezebel):

Really? This is all it takes to have a cross-cultural experience these days? It’s also interesting to me that this is defined as “African-inspired,” because I’ve seen “Asian-inspired” items that have a very similar look (though not the dark-skinned person in a hammock; maybe that’s the African element). We see this a lot in fashion–the attribution of vaguely “ethnic”-looking things to some part of the world, or specific culture, that may or may not be particularly associated with the supposed traditional fashion or artistic style.

If they wanted to talk about this outfit as a global collision, they might have discussed where all the different items (and the materials for them) were manufactured compared to where they are sold and worn.

See other posts on representing Africa, “ethnic” fashion, and more “ethnic” fashion.

UPDATE: In a comment, jfruh says,

Can I just say that one of my very least favorite adjectives is “tribal” (in the top right corner), which seems to be used indiscriminately to refer to any art with the whiff of the primitive about it? Vaguely Polynesian-looking tattoos, vaguely African-sounding drums, etc. It’s bad enough that the political organizational structures of wildly disparate cultures are lumped together under the word “tribe” just because they’re at a smaller scale than modern nation-states; now any art form that resonates at all with any culture perceived as primitive gets labelled tribal as well.

Larry H. (of the L.A. Times‘ Daily Mirror blog) sent in a link to an interactive map at the NYT that shows December 2008 unemployment rates by county. Here’s a screenshot:

If you go to the link you can hover over counties and get their individual unemployment rates.You can also filter by manufacturing counties, rural counties, and counties that experienced a housing boom, as well as the 1-year change in unemployment rate.

Of course, you might want to combine this with a discussion of how unemployment is calculated–the 7.6% is most likely what is called the U3 rate, which is always lower than the more comprehensive U6. If we look not just at unemployment but at underemployment–people who can’t get enough hours to support themselves–and people who have given up looking for work, the rate would be higher.

The Environmental Working Group’s interactive database lets you look up farm subsidies paid by the USDA. You can get all kinds of information–subsidy payments by county or congressional district, top 100 recipients of subsidies, breakdowns into particular types of payments (conservation, crops, disaster, etc.), and so on. It’s an interesting source of information, given that the Obama administration wants to drastically reduce farm subsidies and we’re likely to see a big argument over what the impact will be on farmers. Some groups argue that mid-sized family farms will be devastated by the loss of price supports. Others point out that subsidy payments are highly concentrated, with the top 20% of recipients getting the overwhelming majority of payments, and that if large industrial operations were forced to compete with family farms on an even playing-field without welfare payments, many of them would go out of business, leading to lower production and higher prices for other producers.

This was a big debate among rural sociologists when I was in grad school, and I guess we may be about to see.

Andrew over at FiveThirtyEight posted about the association between religious attendance and voting behavior. Looking at the 2008 Presidential election, Pew data indicates that frequency of religious attendance is strongly related to likelihood of voting for McCain:

But looking more closely at the data, we can see that the relationship is more pronounced for some groups, such as born-again Protestants and Catholics, than others, such as non-born-again Protestants:

From the original post over at FiveThirtyEight:

The size of each circle is proportional to the number of people represented in the survey. In particular, most of the people who attend church more than weekly are born-again Protestants.

Another interesting thing to look at is the how income interacts with religion to influence voting patterns. These graphs show the McCain vote by income among various religious groups:

Notice that among Jews and the non-religious, increased income didn’t substantially increase the chances of voting for McCain (and those in the “other” category are just confusing). For these groups, being rich doesn’t appear to have been enough to draw them to McCain, whereas for most Christians we see a clear trend: the richer adherents were, the more likely they were to vote Republican. Both Jews and non-adherents started out much less likely to vote for the Republican ticket, and their opposition was strong enough that it trumped what we would expect to see if people voted on a narrow interpretation of self-interest (i.e., “I make $300,000 and Obama says he’ll raise income taxes on incomes above $250,000, so I’ll vote for the other guy”). Presumably Republican positions on social issues, or close association with evangelical Christians, put off some wealthy non-religious and Jewish voters who might otherwise be likely to vote for them based on fiscal policy, but that’s just a guess, since we don’t have data here on voters’ explanations of their candidate preferences.

Pris S. sent in an ad that ran in the Collegiate Times, the Virginia Tech campus newspaper:

Of course, it’s a great example of advertising making people feel as though they aren’t sufficiently attractive so they’ll buy a product. But it’s also interesting because it’s an example of a cosmetic procedure that is increasingly marketed to men as well as women. Women do get laser hair removal, obviously, but so do men. Our standards of male attractiveness increasingly demand control of body hair. Hairy backs and shoulders are a source of ridicule. I have known several men who felt very self-conscious about their body hair, some of whom shaved or waxed some of it. Even chest hair is questionable; most images of shirtless men (in ads, pin-ups, calendars, etc.) show very little chest hair. The “man-0-lantern” chest-waxing scene in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” of course used men’s concern about body hair for comedic effect.

The other thing that’s interesting here is the connection between having body hair (which, as far as I can tell from the ad, could include just about any type, including pubic hair) with being an “ape,” as though we should be ashamed of the fact that we are, in fact, mammals who have varying amounts of body hair. I suspect that it’s also part of the caveman stereotype–having lots of body hair is sort of associated with being less civilized, less fully human or modern. It’s also a beauty standard that is certainly going to be harder for some groups, those that tend to have more and/or darker body hair, to meet, which could bring up some interesting discussions about whose bodies are considered attractive, etc.

Thanks, Pris!

NEW: Andrea G. sent in a link to the line of Mangroomer products, which include electric shavers for back, nose/ear, and “private” hair:

These would be great for discussion new standards of male attractiveness–which increasingly pressure men to shave body and pubic hair, though not their legs or armpit hair, since that type of shaving is girly!–and also as an example of gendered marketing. Notice the very sciency-techy element to the website, with the graph-type lines in the background, the “swoosh” sounds, and so on.

Andrea also sent in this Nads commercial, in which we learn that the product saved a woman from a life of misery, since neighborhood children taunted her for having a beard:

It’s a great example of the social construction of bodies: we think it’s gross when women have beards, but at least in theory okay when men have them. Of course certain groups, such as Mormons, discourage men from growing beards, and in general full beards are relatively uncommon in the U.S. today and might be seen as unprofessional or otherwise inappropriate in some situations. But men usually won’t be openly mocked for growing hair on their faces (Joaquin Phoenix’s recent transformation aside), whereas for a woman, allowing hair to grow and be visible on her face would be socially unacceptable.

Thanks, Andrea!

Rei N. sent in this vintage Wonder Bread ad from 1968, found here:

Text:

A pretty girl knows how to succeed with boys without half trying. But she’s got a lot going for her–marvelous new cosmetics, smashing fashions, and Wonder Bread. Wonder Bread? Wonder Bread! Wonder’s the neatest way to trap a boy since…well, since apples. Try tempting him with his favorite Wonder sandwich. He’ll bite. And–ZAP!–you’ve got him.

Well. Huh.

As Rei says, there’s the nice cultural trope about women “trapping” men (ZAP!), apparently since the time of Eve and her apple (nevermind that, according to Genesis, she was made for him because he was lonely, and she didn’t use an apple to trap a boyfriend, and all the other logical stuff). It’s also interesting that they don’t even bother to imply that some of the things she’s “got going for her” might include personality, manners, etc.–they’re all external, purchased assets.

Apparently Wonder Bread put out a whole series of these types of ads. Here are there others, which I found in this paper:

The whole “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” message, as well as the clear assumption that women prepare meals and men consume them (note the man on the right is the only person seen eating as opposed to offering a sandwich), is nice too.

Thanks, Rei!

I was recently at the grocery store with my boyfriend when he noticed that Tropicana orange juice (owned by Pepsi) had a new look. Here’s an image of the new carton, found at the NYT:

Burk hated the new design. Loathed. Expressed his horror at length. He thought it was ugly and looked like a generic orange juice brand. I agreed that it looked a little generic but didn’t have a lot of other thoughts about it. It didn’t have any impact on our shopping patterns regardless, since neither of us drink orange juice (but give me some Tang and I’m a happy, happy girl; my great-grandma used to make a simple powdered-sugar frosting and added Tang mix to it so it was Tang-flavored, so I have very happy memories of Tang. Excellent on yellow or lemon cake. Pink lemonade mix works too.).

Anyway, it turns out lots of people shared Burk’s reaction–they absolutely hated the new carton. And they cared enough to actually contact the company and complain. As a result of all the complaints, Tropicana will be going back to the original design:

What struck me about this was two things: First, the power of consumers. When we think about the food system (or clothing, or whatever), clearly meatpackers, grocery stores, big-box retailers like Wal-Mart, etc., have tremendous power, and consumers often feel powerless to affect a system that may not bring them the type or quality of food products they prefer to feed their families. And yet moments like this indicate that consumers can force companies to change. We saw something similar in the late 1990s: when lots of people got on the South Beach and Atkins diet, many restaurants started adding low-carb options to their menus to avoid losing customers (Subway particularly jumped on this bandwagon). If enough consumers make it clear that they will stop purchasing a company’s products, they can make those companies change. We aren’t powerful individually–Tropicana wouldn’t have cared if just I wrote in about a concern–but we can be powerful collectively.

The second thing that struck me, though, is what we get upset enough about to actually contact companies and demand change. Out of all the problems with our modern food system–the health of the food we buy, environmental impacts of production practices, conditions of agricultural workers, food contamination, etc.–most of the time we really don’t demand that companies do anything about it (unless there’s a crisis like the peanut butter contamination issue*). As a foodie, it’s a little depressing to think that people in general may be more concerned about the design of their orange juice carton than in thinking about what’s inside the carton.

* For you “Battlestar Galactica” fans: last night I had a very involved dream in which I realized that the peanut butter contamination problem had been a cylon plot to kill us.

Fellow Contexts blogger Flaneuse over at Graphic Sociology posted this map showing increases in milk production by region:

As we see, overall production has been more or less stable in most regions but has increased dramatically in the Pacific and Mountain regions.

This data hides another pattern, however: changes in average dairy herd size. Dairy operations in the West and Pacific regions tend to be significantly larger than dairy farms in the more traditional dairy states in the Great Lakes region and the Northeast. I went to the 2007 Census of Agriculture site and grabbed some data to do a few quick calculations. I chose two states in the western U.S. and two in the traditional Dairy Belt, just for illustrative purposes:

All calculations use data available in Table 17 in the Census reports for the total U.S. and each individual state, which you can easily access at the link above if you want to check my numbers. I rounded everything off to the next highest whole number except for the two percentages in the lower right-hand cells, where doing so would greatly over-represent the percent of farms of that size.

In general, dairy farms with more than 500 milking cows are considered very large in the industry. Those with over 2500 cows are really extremely large, though there are dairies with more than 10,000 milking cows (including the Vander Eyk dairy, which supplies organic milk to be sold under the Horizon brand, as well as conventional, non-organic milk to other companies). But I digress.

Anyway, clearly we see that farms in California and Idaho (and the other Pacific/Mountain states) are larger, on average, than dairy farms in the traditional dairy states. The increase in milk production in the western U.S. is due predominantly to increases in the number (and herd sizes) of very large industrial dairies.

The growth of these large dairies depends on very cheap rates for water used to irrigate agricultural land. Those dairies have to grow lots of alfalfa and other feed crops to feed so many cows, since they certainly can’t afford enough land to have thousands of cows on pasture. And big dairies produce enormous amounts of manure that have to be carted off somewhere each day, meaning they often have big manure lagoons where they store it (as well as spraying as much as possible on fields). The lagoons are lovely, if you haven’t ever been really close to one, or perhaps nearly fallen into one while conducting research for your thesis. Not that I know anyone who has had such an experience. Point being, the competitive success of large western dairies is dependent on favorable political conditions (such as decisions to keep agricultural water rates lower than other water usage rates), and they have significant environmental consequences when we consider the use of water for irrigation in states that are often relatively arid and potential pollution from manure runoff.

I have some issues with Flaneuse’s implication that the growth of western dairies is a fairly natural result of population growth because milk is a localized commodity. I don’t know that you can really call milk a localized product these days–California milk is for sale in every state, and CA has aggressively marketed the state’s dairy industry with their “Happy cows” campaign. I can also buy milk from dairies in Minnesota here in Vegas, if I look a bit. So while I’m sure population growth has a role, I think it’s important to look at the political factors–particularly environmental laws as they apply to agriculture and local opposition to large dairies–that encourage the growth of huge industrial dairies in some regions more than others.

Also keep in mind, the production of milk when measured in pounds doesn’t just indicate there are more dairies or more dairy cows…it can also be the result of getting more pounds of milk per year per cow through the use of technologies such as bovine growth hormone (rBGH). I’m not up on rates of use of rBGH by region right at the moment, but I do know its use is nearly universal in industrial dairies; if smaller dairies in the midwest are less likely to use rBGH for various reasons (including concerns about customer opposition), that would also have an impact on where milk production is increasing most rapidly.

That was a lot of rambling to have just added one little image to what was in the original post at Graphic Sociology, but soc of ag is my specialty area and I geek out about it sometimes. You have no idea how much I reined myself in to tell you just this much about the dairy industry!

[Note: If you’re really super interested in this and don’t mind reading academic articles, I suggest an article by Jess Gilbert and Raymond Akor (1988) “Increasing Structural Divergence in U.S. Dairying: California and Wisconsin since 1950,” Rural Sociology 53(1): 56-72. They lay out some of the effects of politics, water subsidies, technological change, etc., and how they’ve favored a particular type of dairy system in the West. Also check out the Program on Agricultural Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin, which has links to lots of easy-to-understand reports about trends in the dairy industry.]