The BA is the most overrated product in America.

- Marty Nemko in his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.


And while I couldn't agree more, along with some other assessments that he makes, I took a slight issue with the overtones of Nemko's rhetoric, which seemed to emphasize the disparity between "college material" and "not college material," or stellar/nonstellar student, without acknowledging other qualities a person might have about himself. This kind of language only perpetuates the problem of kids being ashamed not to attend college.

He also encouraged releasing more accurate statistics on college success and providing certain guarantees as you would any other commodity. One of higher education's greatest flaws is that it has become a commodity, and that is what makes it an overrated one. As Nemko said, colleges are there to make money, but he doesn't tackle this as a problem. His solutions only call for standards which other manufacturers are expected to hold, rather than revamping the whole system as an institution in the service of the public and greater knowledge.

Going to his blog explained my reservations. He is a staunch libertarian who definitely sees one's lot in life as deserved according to the hard work or laziness of the individual. Nemko is dismayed at the idea of a universal healthcare system that would force "people with good health care (because they were good enough of an employee to be hired for a job with health insurance, had saved up enough money to buy their own, or on Medicare) having to give up that good health care and pay for health care for others', including, for example, lazy heroin addicts and illegal aliens."

Now I understand the source of the language and how it may extend to what I heard on NPR. To say "elitist" may still be a gut reaction, but the free market talk struck an appropriately dissonant chord. Libertarians have to see why the free market cannot and will not exist, and in this case, that education should be an investment by the society in itself. People who think that they got to a certain place exclusively due to their own hard work are deluding themselves. No one can make it alone, and no one has absolute control over circumstance.

Outsourcing Thoughts

I must:

Explain what I saw.
Explain what I think about what I saw.
Explain why I think what I think about what I saw.
Use what others think about what they saw to explain why I think what I think about what I saw.

So much for my own interpretations. They are useless without other people's ideas to support them. I thought I should get some credit for having come up with them on my own, but there is apparently no merit in saying something that someone else has already said.

On I go, burrowing deeper into JSTOR to pick up the pieces of my thoughts from other writers.

Pig farming in Morocco

This morning the BBC reported on the growing pork industry in Morocco, despite the Islamic prohibitions of pork consumption. They interviewed a pig farmer outside of Casablanca, who seemed quite satisfied and without qualm with his occupation. Others express their opposition that pork farming is forbidden as well as pork eating.

Pork-serving restaurants are popping up in the big cities like Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakech, although they will certainly meet significantly more resistance outside those boundaries. Demand stems from foreign tourists, expatriates, and, according to the farmer, young Moroccan bourgeouise who are eating more pork. When asked if he thought it was a problem, the farmer said people also drink wine, which of course is also forbidden. The everything-but-pork paradox he alluded to is something to be fathomed, but then again, who is to judge where is the beam or the splinter?

Which one religious leader seemed to echo when he said, "It is up to them," for his thoughts on the pig farmers. They will be held responsible before God.

Assertive enough for the religious side, but there might be a more earthly consequence for cultural identity. This certainly must be one piece of that paradox. Two things I am sure of: One is that a few weeks in a foreign country without pork never killed anyone. The other is that this is one more example of the changes and challenges that tourism brings to Morocco.

too little too late

"What a great country this is. We're all having hard financial times so the government just says 'Here's $600 for you.'"
-coworker

And Bush says it will help to offset rising gas and food prices.

I mean, if I was in deep now, this $600 would be like a spritz of Dolce and Gabbana. $600 would be just perfect for someone that just needed help with one month's rent to finish paying off Christmas bills. The people that it would make that kind of a difference to are a) ahead of the game already and b) a minority. For a lot of people $600 won't knock a single digit off their debt, that is, if that's where they choose to put it.

Not to say I wouldn't take it as happily as the next guy. I am not eligible anyway so I can rant. I would still rant even if I was, because I don't need it, and if I really did need it, it certainly would not offset my need. Better that they keep it. Buy out the health insurance companies. Heal the war veterans. Fix public transit. Subsidize gas prices if you want it to help so much.

For those of us who don't need it, the money will go into savings. For those of us who do, it is hardly worth putting toward our debts. It becomes play money, not ready to be spent rationally, which, if it was, would be going toward public interest. Maybe, as I was told, that is the point.

the whole world is watching

Today's Democratic primary in Pennsylvania may decide the nomination, and more, we hope, the election.

I shamefully confess that I did not register Democrat in time, so I will not be able to vote in this primary. But I have been surveying and cheering every time someone says they will vote for Obama, for whom I have heard a lot of support. Some people have straight-up told me they don't vote, which is disappointing. Others are in my same boat - didn't register in time. Regardless, I am cheering on the elections to favor Obama.

During my last trip to Morocco it was fascinating to hear about coverage on the primary races. Everyone knows that this is a real shot at changing the dark course of the past 8 years, and that the next President of the United States will have an impact on people all over the world. Now that my home state, and more especially, the Philadelphia suburbs, can make or break the campaign, I feel like the world spotlight is shining on us. I hope so much that we follow up.

"Soon," a friend of mine told me, "the nightmare will be over."

Kula ringtones

An article in the NYT this past week describes the life of the Jan Chipchase, an anthropologist working for Nokia who researches how a cell phone can be most useful to people in growing cities of the "developing" world.

Corporate jobs are a swelling pool of opportunity for anthropologists, who can provide valuable insight on untapped markets. These opportunities lead us to question whether or not we are compromising those values that originally brought [most of] us to the field. To some the corporate job is the selling of self and culture for profit. In the harm-reduction camp, the insight that anthropology provides can help companies approach these markets in ways that can suit both parties more appropriately.

The end of the applied anthropologist, which [I think] ought to be defined primarily by an understanding of a culture, is compromised by that uncompromisable end of the corporation's, which is profit, whose only interest in culture is that which is relevant to it. There is no going back to the boss here to say "I think these people are just fine without cell phones." And true, that would be a tough pitch to make anyway because what quality of life could not benefit from the immediate access to information given by the cell phone? In case you had any doubts, allow them to rub the softest spot in the debate on the graces of technology, which is health and medicine. The article lists some convincing examples, although in a country where maybe 10 people might exist without a cell phone, I still can't text message any doctor for medical advice.

Not long after comes the Wishmaster mechanism, which in this case, couldn't be more blatant. Researchers ask inhabitants of a city in Ghana to sketch their dream phone which, as the author realizes, reveals dreams themselves. Dreams that a mobile phone corporation would love to sell back. In the meantime, nightmares ravage the Democratic Republic of the Congo where rebel groups, committing some of the most gruesome acts on the planet, are funded by the mining of coltan, a mineral used to build computer chips such as those used in cell phones.

On one side we have the corporate machine, which has left the anthropologist with not a single way of life to study that has been untouched by its hegemony. On the other we have anthropology, which [we hope] champions an understanding of other cultures for more than just how they can increase profits. The best hope for these corporate anthropology departments is that they will advise companies on more sensitive approaches to those cultures that they will penetrate anyway, one way or another. I don't think there is much getting around that these cultures stand to lose as much as they stand to gain, if at least the sight of its own sacrifice. I wonder if the corporate ethnographer can relate.

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