nation: United States

Just as “I’m not a racist, but…” is a sure sign that someone is about to say something racist, an essay that begins “I don’t want to trivialize the inhumane horrors that African slaves endured on slave ships destined for the Americas. But…” is certain to do just that.  Indeed, Steven Heller at Imprint began his post this way, going on to suggest that the design of modern airplanes “resemble[s]” that of slave ships.  As evidence, he recalls his own discomfort in coach and compares drawings of slave ships and blueprints of airplanes.

Heller prefaced his observations with a disclaimer because he knew comparing modern air travel to the slave trade was sketchy.  And it is, indeed, sketchy. The descendants of slaves live life with the knowledge that their ancestors were stolen, shackled, beaten, and denied their very humanity; at least they survived the trip across the Atlantic.  Nope, not like air travel one bit.

So, yes, it’s lovely to be clever, but it’s also lovely to be thoughtful and sensitive.  In this case, Heller’s desire to be the former won out over the latter.  Or perhaps he never really thought that anyone would seriously be upset by the comparison.  It’s obviously tongue-in-cheek right?  I mean, slavery has been over for, like, ever.  Or maybe he forgot that descendants of slaves read the freakin’ internet just like everyone else.

Who knows.  In any case, it’s a great example of the trivializing of the histories and traumas of a marginalized population.

Thanks to Dolores R. for the tip.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

I recently posted some data revealing the average caloric intake across the globe.  Since then, I’ve learned of a new photo project by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio documenting individuals’ daily meals across many countries.  While the former post gave averages, the photographs in Menzel and D’Aluisio’s new book, What I Eat, offer data points.  What one person reported eating in one day.  They are suggestive of the range of caloric intakes, intersecting with genetics and physical activity, that make each individual body unique.

Menzel and D’Aluisio, through Tawanda Kanhema, gave us permission to share these three examples with you; you can see a larger sample at TIME.

Saleh Abdul Fadlallah (Egypt), 3200 calories:

Caption:

Camel broker Saleh Abdul Fadlallah with his day’s worth of food at the Birqash Camel Market outside Cairo, Egypt. (From the book What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.) The caloric value of his day’s worth of food on a typical day in the month of April was 3200 kcals. He is 40 years of age; 5 feet, 8 inches tall; and 165 pounds. Although virtually all of the camels that Saleh Fadlallah sells at the camel market are sold for their meat, he rarely eats this meat himself as it’s too expensive for everyday meals. Contrary to popular belief, camels’ humps don’t store water; they are a reservoir of fatty tissue that minimizes heat-trapping insulation in the rest of their bodies; the dromedary, or Arabian camel, has a single hump, while Asian camels have two. Camels are well suited for desert climes: their long legs and huge, two-toed feet with leathery pads enable them to walk easily in sand, and their eyelids, nostrils, and thick coat protect them from heat and blowing sand. These characteristics, along with their ability to eat thorny vegetation and derive sufficient moisture from tough green herbage, allow camels to survive in very inhospitable terrain.

Rick Bumgardener (Tennessee, USA), 1600 calories:

Caption:

Rick Bumgardener with his recommended daily weight-loss diet at his home in Halls, Tennessee. (From the book What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.) The caloric value of his day’s worth of food in the month of February was 1,600 kcals. He is 54 years of age; 5 feet, 9 inches tall; and 468 pounds. Wheelchair-bound outside the house and suffering from a bad back and type 2 diabetes, he needs to lose 100 pounds to be eligible for weight-loss surgery. Rick tries to stick to the low-calorie diet pictured here but admits to lapses of willpower. Before an 18-year career driving a school bus, he delivered milk to stores and schools, and often traded with other delivery drivers for ice cream. School cafeteria staff would feed the charming Southerner at delivery stops, and he gained 100 pounds in one year. The prescription drug fen-phen helped him lose 100 pounds in seven months, but he gained it all back, plus more.

Curtis Newcomer (Fort Irwin, California), 4000 calories:

Caption:

Curtis Newcomer, a U.S. Army soldier, with his typical day’s worth of food at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California’s Mojave Desert. (From the book What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.) The caloric value of his day’s worth of food in the month of September was 4,000 kcals. He is 20 years old; 6 feet, 5 inches tall; and 195 pounds. During a two-week stint before his second deployment to Iraq, he spends 12-hour shifts manning the radio communication tent (behind him). He eats his morning and evening meals in a mess hall tent, but his lunch consists of a variety of instant meals in the form of MREs (Meals, Ready-to-Eat). His least favorite is the cheese and veggie omelet. “Everybody hates that one. It’s horrible,” he says. A mile behind him, toward the base of the mountains, is Medina Wasl, a fabricated Iraqi village—one of 13 built for training exercises, with hidden video cameras and microphones linked to the base control center for performance reviews.

For more from Peter Menzel, visit our posts on family food for a week and family belongings across the globe.  And also see Mark Menjivar’s You Are What You Eat.

Visit Menzel’s blog here.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

I’ve argued that the visual aids used in computer programs designed to help us learn new languages are ethnocentric, generic, and uninformative.  Since then, I have been working on an alternative to these images, compiling a database of culturally organized images called the Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon (CAPL).

What strikes me as both a student and a professor of language and culture is that the visual world differs so greatly across cultures and even minor differences are telling in how we organize and perceive our world. Color is one of the easiest ways to find differences in cultures. I have previously discussed the linguistic and cognitive differences of color, but now I want to show some simple examples of color in culture through analysis of various postal systems.

In China, the postal system uses a deep hunter green:

(source)

 In Japan, it is a bright red, much like England.

England:

(source)

Japan:

(source)

 In Germany, it is a bright yellow (think DHL):

(source)

In Russia, it is a lighter but similar shade of the deep postal blue in the U.S.

Russia:

(source)

 The U.S.:

(source)

This example of postal systems is an easy way to illustrate how color becomes one of the central ways to communicate and, although the same message is shared across cultures, the path to that message varies through color.

Michael Shaughnessy is an Associate Professor of German and Chair of Modern Languages at Washington & Jefferson College.  In addition to German language, literature, and culture, he has a professional interest in educational technology, especially the authenticity of multimedia imagery.  His book German Pittsburgh (Arcadia Publishing) highlights the contributions of German speaking immigrants to our area.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to the website If It Were My Home. The site allows you to select two nations and then explains how your life would compare if you lived in each one in terms of rates of HIV/AIDS, employment, energy consumption, infant mortality, class inequality, and other factors (based on CIA data). As an example, Dmitriy chose to compare the U.S. and Ukraine, “the 2 greatest countries in the world, as determined by the poll conducted in my head”:

You can then choose one of the items for more details; I selected life expectancy:

The site is set up with the U.S. as one of the default comparisons, but at the top there’s a button that lets you select a non-U.S. comparison. (Note: Reader Parodie says it appears to detect whatever country you’re accessing the site from and set that as one of the default comparisons.) It’s a fun site that you can spend quite a bit of time playing around with.

UPDATE: Just a caution–a couple of readers seem to have found situations where the math doesn’t add up in the comparisons of some countries. And other readers noted that this does an enormous amount of averaging, which definitely hides the differences in quality of life in various countries, which are so extreme in some nations that “averages” might be nearly meaningless.

Does American prosperity translate into long retirements?  Not compared to other developed countries in the world.  Flowing Data borrowed OECD numbers on life expectancy and age of retirement to calculate the average number of years in retirement for men and women across many different countries.  The portion of each bar with the line is the average number of years working, while the non-lined portion represents years in retirement.

Largely because of life expectancy, women enjoy more years than men in all states except Turkey, but the number of years varies quite tremendously, from an average of zero years for men in Mexico, to an average of 26 years for women in Austria and Italy.  The United States is way down on this list, not doing so well relatively after all.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Recently at Feministing, Maya Dusenbery wrote about an ad from Germany’s International Human Rights campaign that, as she put it, is “a lesson in how not to advocate for women’s rights.”

As Dusenbery writes,

It seems the folks who created this ad not only have a hard time seeing agency but actually went out of their way to erase it as thoroughly as possible and then stomp on it some more. And then equated women who wear the burqa with bags of trash. Literally.

I completely agree, and would like to add some broader context.  This is not at all surprising, given the recent of attempts in the West to obscure the agency of Muslim women in juxtaposition to their white, Western saviors. One of the more blatant examples of this was the discourse of the United States government that it was going to war in Afghanistan in part to save Afghan women from the Taliban. Laura Shepherd argued in an excellent 2006 article in The International Feminist Journal of Politics (which I’vecited before) that the US discursively constructed Afghan women as the “Helpless Victim” that was submissive and lacking agency, under the oppressive control of the “Irrational Barbarian.” This discourse, was used, of course, to posit the United States (specifically, its military) as the saviors who could rectify the situation for these women. Much as the agency of the women in the German PSA was erased, this narrative denied the agency of Afghan women, who, as Shepherd writes, are afforded “only pity and a certain voyeuristic attraction” (p. 20).

Of course, this specific discourse hasn’t ended. As this TIME Magazine cover from last year shows, it continues to serve as a means of justifying the US occupation of Afghanistan.

This discourse assumes, obviously, that the US presence in Afghanistan is a clear benefit for women in the country, a position at least some women’s organizations in Afghanistan contest. Samhita Mukhopadhyay at Feministing had an excellent post on this issue last summer.

I should also mention France’s recently-instituted ban on the full-faced veil, which Dusenbery argues – citing Jos Truitt – is a similar erasure of agency. I agree with her, and again would add that this fits in with this general (Orientalist) discourse about Muslim women, their uncivilized oppressors, and their White saviors.

John McMahon is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he also participates in the Women’s Studies Certificate Program.  He is interested in post-structuralism, issues relating to men and feminism, gendered practices in international relations, gender and political theory, and questions of American state identity.  John blogs at Facile Gestures, where this post originally appeared.

See also our post in which we criticize a set of public service ads that compared women the genital cutting to blow up sex dolls.

In the U.S., Spam is usually considered a food for poor people; people make fun of it as an inexplicable meat. In contrast, Spam is very popular in South Korea. Spam was introduced to Korea during the Korean War (1950-1953) and today it is a popular food item loved by all walks of life. Growing up in Korea, I distinctly remember that it was “cool” to bring a slice of Spam in a lunch box when I was kids. Even today whenever I go home, my friends take me to eat a spicy Spam stew; it’s a special occasion.

Not at all considered a food for the poor or the “trashy,” as it commonly is in the U.S., in Korea Spam is a luxury item. Spam can be a great gift for your boss or your business clients. The photo below shows Spam for sale at a luxury hotel. The set on the top shelf cost about $60 and the set on the second sells for about $42.

Perceptions of Spam, then, are cultural. From an American perspective, the popularity and prestige of Spam in Korea may seem weird. But from a Korean perspective, it is perfectly sensible… and with boiled rice and kim-chi, totally delicious.

Sangyoub Park is an assistant professor of sociology at Washburn University, where he teaches Social Demography, Generations in the U.S. and Sociology of East Asia. His research interests include social capital, demographic trends, and post-Generation Y.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

While the quintessential Old West “cowboy” is White in most imaginations, in fact there were Black pioneers in the west during the wild days (usually dated mid-1800s till the end of the century).  According to wikipedia, thousands of Black men and women lived in mostly segregated communities in the West, but participated in all parts of Western society.  They were traders, gold miners, soldiers, cowboys and farm hands, bartenders, cooks, and, of course, outlaws.   I enjoy how these photographs color American history:

Identity unknown, around 1865, Kansas (source):

Nona Marshall, late 1800s, Arizona territory (source):

Black cowboys (1890-1920):

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.