Actually, I’m still not done with the move. I want to migrate all of my posts at the very least and I’m screwing around right now with Perl scripts to do just that. Let me tell you, it’s not simple at all, especially for someone who used to play Tetris back in programming class in high school (six years ago, I might add). I’ll probably have to move comments manually which will add another layer of frustration to this bastard of an undertaking. If anyone is better than me at Perl, I’d be glad to accept their help.

I’m also trying to finish a chapter of my thesis to include as a writing sample in grad school applications, so I might not have the new blog set up the way I want until the new year. Until then, don’t mind the exposed wires and wet paint as you follow me — into the future!

Here’s what you can expect to see over there:

Cavite (the movie)

I learned of this movie from The Wily Filipino. Got to say, I wasn’t impressed. I already rented Suicide Girls on his recommendation and found it a bit “wtf?”, although there is a Clockwork Orange-y rape scene in Suicide Girls that is eerily beautiful. One more strike, though, and I’ll just have to say that The Wily Filipino and I have divergent tastes in movies .

CORRECTION: It was actually Suicide Club.  Suicide Girls is the porn website where the models all have tattoos and piercings.  And no, I’m not a subscriber (sin is a financially taxing endeavour).

The plot centres around a 2nd generation Filipino American in the Philippines whose family is being held hostage and who is forced to do all kinds of illegal things by the bad guy who relays all his instructions by cellphone. Yes, just like that one cellphone hostage movie that was out recently which I never plan on seeing. Oh, and he has to do all his running around in the province of Cavite.

Read more

Via Rough Theory, I found out that Scott Eric Kaufman at Acephalous is conducting an experiment on blogging. It goes like this:

1. Write a post linking to this one in which you explain the experiment. (All blogs count, be they TypePad, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, &c.)
2. Ask your readers to do the same. Beg them. Relate sob stories about poor graduate students in desperate circumstances. Imply I’m one of them. (Do whatever you have to. If that fails, try whatever it takes.)
3. Ping Techorati.

The object of the experiment is to discover how fast a (cough, ahem) “meme” can spread on the (English language) blogosphere. I’m obviously willing to participate, but danged if I don’t see holes in the methodology. For instance, I suspect it will hardly penetrate Myspace and possibly not even Xanga. Probably not Friendster blogs, either. I also doubt that the meme will be spread by retail-oriented blogs or blogs run as online community newsletters. Which is to say that Scott Eric Kaufman will not be measuring the spread of his meme through the English-language blogosphere, but rather the spread of his meme through one particular region of that blogosphere.

In “Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs” (a more developed version is found here) there is presented a blog classification scheme created by S. Krishnamurthy, where blogs are classified according to their location on a particular matrix:

(Krishnamurthy 2002, cited in Herring et al. 2004:3).

I would place Acephalous on the line between Quadrants I and II, meaning that I think it’s about both SEK’s personal life and about certain topics that he uses the blog to explore.

Building upon Rebecca Blood’s typology, Herring and her co-authors also present their own classification scheme:

1. Journal blogs, which are about the personal doings of the individual bloggers (i.e., most blogs on LiveJournal),
2. Filter blogs, which provide commentary on things external to the blogger, such as US politics (blogs in Quadrant III of Krishnamurthy’s schema can also be called filter blogs)
3. K-logs, or knowledge blogs, which are used in projects to allow project members to disseminate up-to-date information to each other
4. Mixed-purpose blogs, which are combinations of two or more blog genres
5. And finally, Other types of blogs which do not fall under the previous categories (Herring et al. 2004:4-6).

Using this typology, I would classify Acephalous as being a mixed-purpose blog, in this case a filter blog with some journal blogging thrown in.

My objective in classifying Acephalous, though, is to point out that being mostly a filter blog and oriented towards other filter blogs (a quick scan through the blogroll reveals mostly filter blogs), SEK’s experiment will likely end up measuring the speed of his meme among filter blogs, leaving journal blogs mostly untouched. This means that the spread of a meme through the English-language blogosphere’s biggest genre will never be measured — note, for example, that 7 out of 10 of the biggest blog hosting services focus mostly on personal journals, and that’s not even counting social networking sites like Myspace (Perseus 2005).

So in conclusion, I’ve forgotten where I was going to take the rest of this post. I’d just save this draft and work on it more tomorrow but SEK did ask participants to post ASAP, so I’ll do it now. I is sleepy, I go beddy-bye.

References

Herring, Susan C; Scheidt, Lois Ann; Bonus, Sabrina; & Wright, Elijah L. (2004), “Bridging the gap: a genre analysis of weblogs,” hicss, p. 40101b, Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Electronic document, retrieved March 8, 2006 from http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/classes/ics234cw04/herring.pdf

Krishnamurthy, S. (2002). “The Multidimensionality of Blog Conversations: The Virtual Enactment of September 11.” In Maastricht, The Netherlands: Internet Research 3.0.

Perseus Development Corporation (2005). The blogging geyser. Electronic document, retrieved March 4, 2006 from http://www.perseusdevelopment.com/blogsurvey/geyser.html

Technorati tags: blogging, blog classification

But back to the video: Russkies speaking Tagalog! It’s always surprising to learn when people who don’t have friends or family in the Philippines are actually interested in learning Tagalog. Actually, I got this from the tagalog community in LiveJournal and one of the people there is actually a student in that class (but wasn’t in the video). In response to the question of why anyone not Filipino would want to learn Tagalog, ptiza_schastya says:

No, i don’t have any friends and relatives in The Philippines and i have never been there
The thing is I’m studying in the Institute of Asian and African Studies and there are many different languages to choose to learn (the most popular are japanese and chinese of course) But the groups are small and there are many languages except these ones, so some people don’t pick the languages, they are just given it. So, i was given tagalog. But i absolutely don’t regret it

Just for the hell of it, I’ll try translating the above into Tagalog to see if I can do it:

Hinde, wala akong mga kaibigan o kamag-anak sa Pilipinas at hindi ako ever nakapunta duon (Fuck!)

Ano kasi, nag-ii-study (Goddamit!) ako sa Institute of Asian and African Studies at marami yung mga lenguahe na pwede ko matutunan (crapper!) (yung pinaka popular ay siyempre yung hapon at intsik). Pero maliit ang mga grupo at meron mas maraming lenguahe kaisa sa mga ito, kaya hindi pini-pick (fuck bucket!) ng mga ibang tao yung mga lenguahe [na tinututunan nila], in-a-assign (bugger!) sa kanila. Kaya binigay lang sa akin ang tagalog. Kaso hindi ko ni-re-regret (mother of fuck!).

The comments in parentheses are the muttered curses I let out when I kept resorting to Taglish. I marked out the cussing so you’ll know just how bad my Tagalog is. Six substitutions in one paragraph? That’s weak. I just know the Tagalog words will come to me later when I’m chopping vegetables or something. The “crapper” is for the fact that I actually swapped the Tagalog for “learn” for “choose to learn” because I couldn’t remember what “choose” was in Tagalog, subtly changing the meaning of the translation. And “popular” is spelled the same way as in English but pronounced like in Spanish. By the way, did you notice that I curse in English? I only have a ten year old’s grasp of Tagalog imprecations, I sound childish when I try to swear in it. Perhaps I should work on that.

Also, this video from Youtube combines anthropology with Filipinos, or so the title screen claims. It seems to show the hijinks of a group of Filipino students in the Philippines and apparently doesn’t have anything anthropological in it, or so the comment below it says (I haven’t watched the whole thing):

astig ng vid, kahit di me anthro.. astig pa rin! galing mo kuya kimchi gumawa ng vid! -ann

“Cool video, even though there’s no anthro . . . but still cool! You’re great at making videos Kuya (big brother) Kimchi! – Ann”

That one was easier to translate. I assume this Kuya Kimchi is Korean from the nickname. Perhaps these are anthropology students? Youtube has so many of these enigmatic videos on it, they’re kind of sickeningly fascinating to watch. It’s like reading the personal blog of someone you don’t know and where almost all of the comments are clearly from people the blogger knows in person.

Technorati tags: Tagalog

Anyway, in the paper, the researchers gave participants a task to complete by a certain date and divided them between those with evenly spaced deadlines and those who could choose their own deadlines anytime duging the work period (the last study also adds the option of having a deadline imposed at the end of the work period). The basic results are provided in the abstract:

In this article, we pose three questions: (a) Are people willing to self-impose meaningful (i.e., costly) deadlines to overcome procrastination? (b) Are self-imposted deadlines effective in improving task performance? (c) When self-imposing deadlines, do people set them optimally, for maximum performance enhancement? [. . . T]he answer is “yes” to the first two questions, and “no” to the third. People have self-control problems, they recoginze them, and they try to control them by self-imposing costly deadlines. These deadlines help people control procrastination, but they are not as effective as some externally imposed deadlines in improving task performance.

So self-imposed deadlines help, but not as much as deadlines imposed by some outside authority. Almost all of the participants were students except for one study, where they were professionals taking an executive-education course. I immediately wondered whether results coming from generally older and more experienced executives could be meaningfully compared to results coming from students, but right now I can barely muster up the steam for a good anti-quant rant. And I was totally not procrastinating when I wrote this post.

Technorati tags: psychology, procrastination

There’s really nothing to do at six in the morning.  I haven’t been awake this early without having pulled an all-nighter in god only knows how long.  On the up side, I can actually go to the Farmers’ Market here and participate in all that organic food cult business that they do.  They open at 7 and I’ve never gone earlier than 10 AM, when apparently things start slowly winding down.  They do have some very good food, but most of it is stuff I could never afford unless I sell my organs or something.  Yay for conspicous consumption of class.

Anyway, I have a plan for today now:

1. Play video games very quietly for 2 hours
2. Go to Farmers’ Market
3. Have breakfast there
4. Wander around looking longingly at food I can’t buy
5. Get some tomatoes and salad greens, possibly some fresh bread
6. Go home
7. Write a bit
8. Hope the scallops I laid out last night have cooked themselves, plus maybe also cooked the pasta and prepared the pesto that I bought, and possibly even made garlic bread while they were at it
9. Eat the lunch lovingly made for me by my own food
10. Afternoon siesta
11. Wake up in time for dinner (watch Eye 2 dvd rental if get up before then)
12. Watch whatever’s on while Battlestar is gone until December 2
13. Off to bed, secure in the knowledge that I’ve had a full day of work

Yessirree, sometimes the world doesn’t suck.  And looky, sunny today.  I’ll have to remember not to go outside on Sunday.

Post No Bills

The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea * — but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

* “Not a day without a line,” i.e., writing a line — variously attributed to Horace, Cicero, Pliny, and a mess of other dead guidos.

Technorati tags: Walter Benjamin, how to write

Anyway, I was reading The Coast, Halifax’s alternative newsweekly (Canadian home of Dan Savage’s column) when I came across an interesting claim made in the current editorial. Halifax right now is obsessed over crime, at least as far as the local news is concerned. I think it’s partly a case of a manufactured moral panic (is there any other kind?), though it seems to be true that violent crime has been increasing. Regardless of whether or not the statistics say what people claim (I suspect it’s not so black and white), it’s true that people experience the world anecdotally, not through a judicious weighing of the evidence at hand. Constructed truths (again, are there any other kind?) have a reality of their own for the people who experience them, regardless of what a mythical neutral observer might see.

Now then, in the editorial I mentioned, it’s claimed that visible and public video surveillance hasn’t been shown to decrease crime rates. I don’t know if the data bears out this assertion, I’ll have to check the sociological literature later. But instead of preventing crimes by their presence, video surveillance cameras just help to solve them after the fact.. That touches upon what I said before, when I theorized that constant surveillance might make the surveilled upon uncaring of who’s watching them. If someone could always be watching, does it matter if you stab someone on the street or in a dark alley? Certainly not very 1984-ish. In fact, it sounds rather more grim.

Of course, there are other things to consider. The idea of surveillance as deterrence I think rests on the assumption that humans are more rational than they really are. Who acts after a careful assessment of the costs and benefits of action? People, I think, use more emotion when making decisions than suggested by the criminal justice system’s orthodox view of human behaviour.

Or it might be that people are actually more rational than given credit for. Violence against others is an extraordinary act, and if one is moved to actually commit violence, then perhaps it wouldn’t matter if one is being watched by others. Once you’ve decided violence is called for, then it might be so necessary to you that even the abstract threat of punishment is worth it. Put simply, perhaps by the time one has decided that violence against others is worthwhile, then at the same time one has also decided that the risks from using violence are acceptable.

I know, weak. I need to develop that more. There’s another thing to consider as well. Video surveillance as it’s conceived of takes the camera to be a proxy for the human gaze. The hope is that a publicly visible surveillance camera be seen as a human being in absentia, that the surveilled upon might experience the same disciplining effect that the direct gaze of others can do. However, perhaps video cameras are too difficult to anthropomorphize into a human being. Perhaps they’re too different from a person to have the threat of the gaze of others be anything more than an abstraction. In that case, what is to be done? Perhaps surveillance cameras should be installed in mannequins so that the gaze of others be felt more directly. You could even put a police uniform on the mannequins to make things abundantly clear. Or, to make it interesting, perhaps surveillance cameras should be installed in gargoyle statues. What gaze can be more terrifying than that of a leering monster made of stone? Isn’t the essential purpose of surveillance the production of fear in the surveilled?

I think it would be an interesting experiment, and even if it’s a bust, then you have interesting urban art to attract tourists with. A win-win situation! Actually, probably the simplest thing to do is install better lighting on public streets since it’s been shown to have a significant impact on crime rates, but I think gargoyles are better anyway. If I ever become mayor of a city that demands concrete measures against crime, I may actually implement The Gargoyle Initiative. And just to bring the whole thing back to panopticon, what if on a random basis, police officers dressed in gargoyle costumes should take the place of the surveillance statues? Think about it, an entire city whose residents are terrified that the statues around them might be alive. It would be the world’s greatest performance art piece. After all, what’s the use of power when it’s not absolute?

I’m posting this as a message of warning to the world. Don’t ever let me get any power, because I’ll be sure to enjoy it too much. There you go, now you’ve all had fair notice. Don’t come crying to me when you’re all forced to listen to broadcasts of my karaoke renditions of sappy love songs a la Nero.

It’s
the way you love me,
It’s
a feeling like thi-is.
It’s
centrifugal motion,
It’s
perpetual bli-is.
It’s the way you love me, baybee!
This kiss, this bli-is!
Subliminal!

Clap or you’ll be shot.

Technorati tags: The Coast, surveillance, moral panic, crime prevention, panopticon, self-disciplining, gargoyles

And you know what? This is the most work I’ve done in weeks. In fact, the amound of work I did for this proposal might even be more than I did for all of October. I’ve finally realized why my writing has stalled — quite simply, I’m sick of my thesis. Okay, maybe that’s too strong, but I’m definitely getting bored with it. But the project that I’m pitching to get funding for my PhD next year is pretty different from what I’m doing right now, and the books I’ve been reading for the proposal are stuff that I’m way interested in. To be honest, my project on Filipino bloggers right now was pretty much a fallback position since the idea I came in with was too big for a one year Master’s. I was going to do fieldwork in Southeast Asia (definitely Malaysia and maybe Singapore and Brunei) on Filipino migrant workers there. So it was going to be about migration from South to South and not South to North like most migration literature focuses on. And I’d found an article about citizenship in Malaysia, where the Malaysian government is quite aware of the presence of undocumented migrants but looks the other way anyway, extending de facto citizenship to these tax-paying and voting residents (Sadiq 2005). That’s exactly the kind of crap I’ve always liked. Just look at the abstract:

Why would a state encourage illegal immigration over the opposition of its citizens? According to the theories of immigration and citizenship, we should expect exactly the opposite: that states will monitor, control, and restrict illegal immigrants’ access to citizenship on behalf of its citizens, as has been the experience of most countries. I use my research on Filipino immigration to Sabah, Malaysia to show how Malaysia utilizes census practices and documentation to incorporate an illegal immigrant population from the Philippines. Illegal immigrants play an electoral role in Sabah because of the loosely institutionalized nature of citizenship, a
feature common to many other developing countries. Our examination of Malaysia reveals several elements of illegal immigration and citizenship that are common to migratory flows in other developing countries. I conclude by showing how this case is generalizable and what it tells us about illegal immigrant participation in the international system.

That’s some good stuff there and a nice jumping-off point for more research on related issues. Off the top of my head, there’s the gendered aspect of migration — which sorts of migrants are valued by the Malaysian state, and does that include female domestic workers being abused by their employers? Or what about how Malaysia is apparently decoupling the nation from the state? And maybe something about the types of citizens this kind of governmentality produces? Yep, this thing was rich in possibilities. But alas, ’twas not to be. The project was too big and I had to change my topic entirely. Not that I hate my project right now, but I’ve always been interested in power and the state and even now I keep trying to stick the political into my work.

But now that I’m trying to get into PhD programs, I get to design my dream project. All political anthropology all the time. Just look at the books I’ve got piled up beside my desk: The Foucault Effect by Graham Burchell (ed.), States of Injury by Wendy Brown, Neoliberalism as Exception by Aihwa Ong, The Anti-Politics Machine by James Ferguson, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays by Louis Althusser, Anthropology in the Margins of the State by Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds.), and The Coming Community by Giorgio Agamben. No, I didn’t actually use all of them in my proposal, but I absolutely loved reading through them just for the fact that they weren’t saying something that I’d been reading over and over for the last 6 months. And I still haven’t read Manuel Castell’s The Rise of the Network Society despite having had it on my bookshelf since last February.

So perhaps I should take an intellectual break every now and then just to remind me of why I thought a life of reading books 24/7 was a good thing to get into. I’m hoping I can keep up this rate of work with my regular writing because there’s really nothing more I’d like right now than to have this thesis done.

Oh, and Anthroblogs’ owner hasn’t gotten back to me yet. The constant hammering of spam comments is getting quite tiresome, but I figure that’s no reason to make a hasty decision on which blog host to go with, so I’ll give all my options the consideration due to them.

References

Sadiq, Kamal. 2005. “When states prefer non-citizens over citizens: conflict over illegal migration into Malaysia.” International Studies Quarterly 49, 101–122.

From PhD Comics.  Edited for spelling and personal relevance.  Also for sense of personal aesthetics.

I also joined the LiveJournal community NaReWriMo, a horrendous name that stands for National Research Writing Month, a.k.a. National Write My Goddamned Thesis Month, a.k.a. November.  Come to think of it, it’s actually IntReWriMo since by joining I’ve just made the community international.  Anyway, joining the community means that you’ve committed yourself to writing something research-related everyday.  I joined on November 5 and I’ve actually managed to honour the fateful agreement.

I’m probably going to go with Blogsome for my new host if they ever get around to answering my question about importing posts using an XML WordPress export converted to a mysql dump.  Yes, those words mean something.  If not, there’s always Anthroblogs, the owner of which I still haven’t contacted.  More to follow later.

By that I mean that I just saw the documentary on the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, titled Zizek!  I can only comment on the superficial stuff since I don’t have time for deep reflection.

First, I liked the film.  It only gives a very broad presentation of Zizek’s ideas, but you’d have to read him to really get him anyway.  The documentary was entertaining, just don’t expect to anything too, too deep.  I think it was pretty much a necessity for the movie to explore Zizek more than his work, otherwise it would be a glorified Powerpoint presentation of his ideas.  Second, Zizek is a rather engaging speaker.  He’s very animated when he talks and keeps waving his hands around.  By the end of each of his public talks he’s always dripping in sweat.  Third, Zizek has seen Armageddon (the movie, not the end times).  He’s also seen (and liked?) Hero, the Jet Li film, the politics of which always stuck in my craw – the filmmakers might as well have just addressed the audience directly and said, “So you see, this shows that unity is preferable to human rights and that therefore Taiwan should submit to China.”  Fourth, he types with one finger (not even two-fingered hunt and peck, just one).  Fifth, he keeps his clothes in his kitchen cupboards.  Sixth, my supervisor apparently knows him personally.  He’d once given a talk at King’s College, which is part of my own school, Dalhousie University, and she told me that he’d forgotten to pack clothes when he came over.  I know, how can anyone forget that?

So in conclusion, Zizek! — good to watch if you’re not paying for it.  Another excellent way to put off work for an hour.

For I fear that here Graeber overly idealizes academia, and the discipline of anthropology in particular. Despite all his rote Foucault-bashing, and sneering at mainstream academics as “people who like to think of themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other people in an institutional environment” (71), he in fact buys into the authority of normative academic “knowledge” much more than I think is necessary or justified [...] It’s not that Graeber doesn’t know that “the discipline we know today was made possible by horrific schemes of conquest, colonization, and mass murder” (96); but he seems to think that the “vast archive of human experience” possessed by anthropologists is uninflected by these origins, and only needs to be shared more publically in order to be efficacious.

I’m not sure if I agree, but anyway, check it out if you’re interested. Maybe I should make an “anarchism” tag, I keep bringing it up, or perhaps a tag devoted entirely to David Graeber.

Continuing on with this updating thing, I’ve found some more information about hikikomori, which relates to my post about the manga Welcome to the NHK. It’s an interview written in a journalistic style, so the article is really easy to read. It provides an added layer of depth to the hikikomori thing. I also didn’t know Italy had abolished mental hospitals, but apparently it has. I recommend Japan Focus anyway for its excellent articles on stuff relating to the Asia-Pacific region. A refereed and free electronic journal, good for whiling away the time on a Sunday afternoon.

While we’re on the subject of Japan Focus, have a gander at this article, “Invisible Immigrants: Undocumented Migration and Border Controls in Early Postwar Japan.” It certainly challenges the notion that immigration has not been a major factor in Japanese society until relatively recently and it nicely illustrates how states have the power to turn people invisible. Also interesting (and rather unsurprising) that immigration control was at first justified as a health initiative to protect the country from foreign diseases, though in actuality enacted to protect Japan from foreigners, period.

And that’s that for today. My search for a new bloghost continues, I’ll probably switch later this week.

Ok, screw this, I’m bailing. The only question is which bloghost I should go with. I like Daria.be because it’s like edublogs, but better. It has more WordPress stuff like better spam protection, more themes, better site statistics, podcasting and Youtube support, daily backups, and you can even have your own forums.

Blogsome seems to have pretty much the same thing, but apparently you can tinker directly with the coding of your blog, which gives you a nice degree of flexibility. What say you, Blogsome users? And if anyone else has other free bloghosting services to recommend, do speak up.

I think I already know how to export and import a blog. This post from JAWW explains things easily enough:

1. Go to RSS2MT
2. Put in the URL for your blog’s RSS feed
3. Save the crap that pops out as a .txt file
4. Go to your new bloghost, which must be using either Movable Type or Wordpress for their blogs
5. Click the “Import” tab
6. Import the text file that you saved
7. World domination

There are a couple of klunky annoyances with the importing, as the original post mentions, but I’m sure they’re a lot less annoying than manually copying and pasting all of the posts that you have. My biggest problem is that it seems comments can’t be exported as well, which is too bad. Actually, I don’t have many comments, maybe I’ll just edit each post so that the comments are included within them. Anyway, the reason I’m being so detailed is that I’m putting this up for any other edublogs users who want to join me as I make a run for the fences. Property is theft, down with sexism, crush the Gang of Four, etc.

UPDATE:

Have been researching other bloghosts and have come across Blogiversity. They say that

Blog applications usually take 2 to 3 days to process. Why is there an application? Anyone can get a free blog these days. Our purpose is to create a community specifically for academic bloggers. We only want the best.

You have to tell them what subject you’ll be blogging about, which you pick out of a dropdown menu, and then you have to

Tell us a little about yourself (student, professor, research, hobby, etc.) and how you relate to this subject

Also, you have to give a sample blog post of 1-2 paragraphs. I’m not sure I like the whiff of elitism I get from this project. There’s always Anthroblogs, which is just for anthropologists. When I was deciding on bloghosts, I was actually considering either them or edublogs; maybe I would have been more satisfied with Anthroblogs. They could certainly use more people posting regularly.

UPDATE 2:

RSS2MT is flawed, it only exports a summary of the posts. However, since edublogs has just upgraded, you can just do Export now, and it exports everything too. So this workaround is no longer necessary.

Anyway, I suddenly remembered that the interviewer could find this blog as well just by Googling me, and I thought, “Oh crap, have I written anything incriminating?” I felt the teensiest bit iffy about the anarchist sympathies I expressed in previous posts, but I thought I didn’t really have anything to hide. I got the job at the end of the interview anyway, but that brief moment reminded me how potentially vulnerable you can be online. I’m also reminded of what happened to a friend of mine when she was applying for Phd schools: one of the professors she was hoping to work with had found her blog and complimented her on it. There wasn’t anything incriminating there either, but she’s now gotten herself a new blog (just in case, I suspect).

Because the gaze of the Internet is potentially always present, many have likened it to a panopticon. The panopticon is a type of prison designed in such a way that the prisoners never know whether or not they are being watched by their jailers; since the prisoners do not know whether they are being watched, they will act as if they are always being watched and accordingly police themselves. Michel Foucault likens certain parts of “Western” societies to panopticons, since their power to discipline behaviour relies on the visibility of subjects to the gaze of others. The individual is always self-consciously aware of the possibility of being spied upon and will therefore change his or her behaviour accordingly.

However, it seems to me that people won’t necessarily police themselves in a panopticon system. Rather, I think it’s just as likely that people will start tearing down the wall between public and private in their own lives. If one is potentially always being watched, then does it matter if one farts in an empty room or in a crowded dining room? Perhaps someone will see you expel bodily gas when you are in your own bedroom, and perhaps no one will notice if you fart while having dinner with other people. What used to be private might start becoming public, and instead of a society where people police themselves, you might see a society where self-discipline is largely nonexistent.

The power of the panopticon also rests on certain culturally-specific notions of private and public. For example, there is a certain group of people in South America (damned if I remember which one — the Aymara? the Jivaro?) who traditionally lived in longhouses shared by several families. Because there will always be comeone in the longhouse, couples usually have sex in a secluded spot outside, perhaps in the jungle or an empty garden. For these people, then, the indoors is a public space, while it is outdoors where privacy exists. This is the reverse of “Western” notions of public and private, since “a man’s home is his castle”, “it is not the business of the state to regulate what happens in people’s bedrooms”, and so on.

Many people often speak of blogging as a panopticon system. The blogger is always under the gaze of the Internet. However, I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate to call blogging a panopticon, since the gaze of the Internet is one that bloggers invite. The gaze of others in a panopticon is involuntary and unwanted, while the gaze of the Internet in blogging is one bloggers try to capture. There have been many news stories, for example, about bloggers being fired for criticizing their employers in their blogs. Blogging cannot therefore be a panopticon system, since otherwise the bloggers would have censored themselves. In a panopticon, the prisoners must be aware that they are potentially being watched by anyone on the Internet, which the bloggers who were fired obviously didn’t consider.

However, even if bloggers start censoring themselves, blogging still cannot be a panopticon. One of the implied requirements of a panopticon is that the prisoners be entirely revealed to their jailers, or else they could simply engage in their illicit activities while out of sight of the authorities. In blogging, whatever is visible about a blogger is visible only because the blogger has made it so. The blogger reveals only what he or she wishes to reveal, and therefore what is revealed is not the entirety of a blogger but a front that he or she has constructed.

It should be obvious in this blog that I reveal only a fraction of the things I do and think about. What you see is what I wish you to see. Hoever, how you understand it is beyond my control. Which takes us into a discussion of authorship, intent, and the death of The Author. But that’s as far as I want to go, so you’ll have to be satisfied with what I’ve given you today.

I know I’m kind of late to this party, but danged if I’m a gonna quit. I’ve been reading a bit of what the reaction to the new season of Battlestar Galactica has been on some parts of the English blogosphere and I just had to offer my take.

Battlestar Galactica began as a clash of civilizations: the genocidal and merciless Cylons versus the battered yet defiant humans. The people of the Colonial fleet were shown as noble but flawed, peace-loving but driven to violence, grief-stricken but stalwart, courageous, craven, paranoid, and cooly rational — in short, they were shown as human. The humans were the flawed heroes while the Cylons were the perfect Others, the anti-humans: relentless where the humans faltered, inscrutable where human pain was displayed, and all-knowing where the humans groped around blindly in the dark.

That was where Galactica began, but it’s certainly not where it is now. Slowly, we began to see more of what Cylons were really like, and slowly, we began to sympathize with what had been an unknowable enemy. Finally, by the third season the tables had turned and “we” were supposed to feel conflicted as to which side root for: the violently incompetent Cylons, or the suicide-bombing humans?

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the issue of suicide bombing in the show has become so controversial. After all, suicide bombing has been relentlessly portrayed in the news media as a cowardly tactic used by the enemies of civilization, possibly in league with Satan, Darth Vader, and Lord Voldemort. Setting aside the issue that cowards cower, not willingly blow themselves to smithereens, it’s a bit odd that the characters’ use of suicide bombing should be so fraught with moral crisis. I’d always gotten the impression that the problem with suicide bombing was that it was inconsiderate of distinctions between civilians and soldiers, whereas the tactic on Galactica has been used only against military targets. I think that the discomfort with suicide bombing among the show’s viewers comes from two main reasons.

The first reason is that suicide bombing lays bare the fiction that soldiers are human beings. That is, suicide bombing acknowledges that soldiers are not and cannot be human as long as they are soldiers; rather, they are military assets, pawns to be moved back and forth in war, the true game of kings. If a cause is worth killing others for, then it’s also worth killing your own soldiers for (Dean Stockwell’s character voiced a similar sentiment on the show, though he was arguing for the war to become genocidal again). Soldiers are trained to be the tools of their leaders, and the more perfect they can be as machines, the more perfect they become as soldiers. Therefore, when you see Colonial rebels blowing up themselves and their enemies, you aren’t seeing humans killing Cylons. Instead, what you are witnessing is the spectacle of killer robots killing other killer robots.

The second reason I think that suicide bombing in the show is controversial to its viewers is that its viewers are mostly composed of those who conquer, instead of those who are conquered. That is, it is the privilege of the viewers to see suicide bombing as a horrendous crime instead of being forced to consider it as a viable tactic. Which is why I don’t relate at all to the controversy over suicide bombing, since I’m descended from people who might have considered suicide bombing had the option been available.

What I’m referring to is the Philippine-American War of 1898-1902 (the latter year being somewhat arbitrary since armed resistance was still taking place in many “pacified” territories). It’s an obscure war to most Americans, though its impact is still felt today. Many historians see it as the precursor to the Vietnam War and therefore the ancestor of the current war in Iraq, though I see the Indian Wars as the truly prototypical conflicts that lent their shape to later wars of American imperialism.

Briefly, the Philippine-American War grew out of the the Spanish-American War of 1898. The United States, having finished its land-based empire-building in the Indian Wars like the Russians in Siberia, wanted to get into the overseas possessions game. Spain was already in the process of imperial decline and it was the ruler of colonies immediately adjacent to the US (remember, the Monroe Doctrine had already established the Americas as the playground of the United States). With the Philippines in hand, the US hoped to use it as a springboard into China. US troops invaded the Philippines, arriving in the middle of an ongoing insurrection by Filipino rebels. Hoping to use the native insurgents against Spain, the US tacitly encouraged the cause of Philippine independence. By the time the Spanish-American War ended, Spain had ceded the Philippines to the US, which claimed the colony for its own. Feeling betrayed, Filipino rebels went to war against a new colonial master. In the end, they lost and the Philippines became a US Commonwealth.

The conflict soon became a guerilla war for the Filipinos, who could not use conventional tactics against better-equipped and better-trained Americans. The US Army saw guerilla war as dishonourable and uncivilized. A US general, in an exchange with a leader of the revolution, remarked that war

could only be justified by a combatant where success was possible; as soon as defeat was certain, “civilization demands that the defeated side, in the name of humanity, should surrender and accept the result, although it may be painful to its feelings.” Combatants who strayed from this principle “place themselves in a separate classification” as “incompetent in the management of civil affairs to the extent of their ignorance of the demands of humanity.” In this specific case, the end of conventional war and the dispersal of the Philippine Army meant that continued Filipino resistance was not only “criminal” but was “also daily shoving the natives of the Archipelago headlong towards a deeper attitude of semicivilization in which they will become completely incapable of appreciating and understanding the responsibilities of civil government.” Civilization meant “pacification” and the acceptance of U.S. sovereignty: “The Filipino people can only show their fitness in this matter by laying down their arms…” (Kramer 2006)

However, the Filipino revolutionary countered that the statement

was simply the claim that might made right, that the U.S. war was “just and humanitarian” because its army was powerful, “which trend of reasoning not even the most ignorant Filipino will believe to be true.” If in real life, he noted, “the strong nations so easily make use of force to impose their claims on the weak ones,” it was because “even now civilization and humanitarian sentiments that are so often invoked, are, for some, more apparent than real” . . . [T]he Filipinos had been left no choice. The very laws of war that authorized strong nations’ use of “powerful weapons of combat” against weak ones were those that “persuade[d]” the weak to engage in guerrilla war, “especially when it comes to defending their homes and their freedoms against an invasion.” (Kramer 2006)

Update the language a bit and they might have been talking about suicide bombing. I think that instead of asking how suicide bombing can exist, it is better to ask what kind of dire situation a person can live in that they would think blowing themselves up is a good idea. Make no mistake that suicide bombing is a weapon of the weak, else they would be using cruise missiles and nuclear threats.

Therefore, I cannot really understand why just the very use of suicide bombing in a fictional context can be so fraught with debate. Personally, it seemed perfectly logical that people in the position of the Colonials on New Caprica would turn to suicide bombing in the face of the overwhelming power of their enemies. Why suicide bombing? Why not? To me, something less would have seemed more unrealistic.

My only substantive issue with the paper is the implied position that, were it not mostly for the transnationalizing efforts of migrants aided by the Internet’s technologies, the natural trajectory of the immigrant is towards assimilation. This does not address the active and institutionalized efforts at exclusion enacted by the nation-state and by many of its native-born population towards immigrants and their descendants. Often, this exclusion is based upon an ideology of race, upon the idea that immigrants and those born of immigrants are always already Other than the authentic indigenous population by virtue of being visibly different. I recall Lisa Lowe’s point that she is always an Asian American and never just American (Lowe 2003), or as James Clifford observed, with diasporas many times being the product of exclusion, the rise of a diasporic consciousness can be seen as making the best of a bad situation (Clifford 1997:257). In other words, diasporas are one of the consequences of the political ideology of race.

This ties into a broader point I want to make about nation-states and national identity. In many ways, nationalist ideology and racialized ideology are tied together, or at least are allied ideologies. Nation-states base their legitimacy in part on being the political manifestation of the nation, or being the nation writ large. The logic of nationalism demands that nation-states have homogenous populations, else the legitimacy of the state is called into question — if a nation-state rules because it is the representative of a people, what happens when other peoples exist within its territory? The empirical answer is that the nation-state suppresses these other nations, through direct and indirect violence (think of Native Americans in the former and African Americans and their economic and geographical segregation in the latter, but especially immigrant populations as well). If a nation-state’s people are essentially the same, then those not of the nation-state and its people are essentially different, essentially Other. This talk of essential difference, of course, is linked to the pseudo-scientific discourse of race, which supplies the essentialized categories necessary for many of nationalism’s constitutive fictions (in this way, I think Nazism is really nationalism taken to its logical extreme, but that is a digression).

Now then, what is really interesting is when one considers what nation-states are like today, in light of the new era of mass migration. Nation-states claim to represent the nation, but what happens to that notion when part of the nation exists outside the territory of the nation-state? As Thomas’ paper mentions, a nation-state can try to incorporate its diasporic members into its national and political imaginary, as in the case of Chile’s 14th region, and I will add the example of Haiti’s Tenth Department too. But wouldn’t the host country of those diasporic people object to the meddling of external actors in the host country’s territory? Shouldn’t the host country object, particularly because the new (or rediscovered) ideology of multiculturalism is already attempting to incorporate the otherness of migrants within the framework of the nation-state?

Here I will mention the results of the Canadian Ethnic Diversity Survey, which found that Filipinos in Canada scored highly both in their sense of belonging to their ethnic group and to Canada. They are loyal both to the Philippines and to Canada, in other words. I think this speaks to Sasskia Sassen’s observation that globalization, instead of weakening the nation-state, merely requires its rearticulation. David Graeber’s article on globalization being the re-emergence of older patterns of transnationalism is also interesting in this regard, particularly his point that today’s situation of an international elite in Europe using an international language mostly incomprehensible to the elite’s countrymen and living in cities with working class neigbourhoods composed of people drawn from around the Mediterranean echoes the situation in medieval Europe. My essential point is that what we might be observing is a new or reinvigorated transnational order, where members of a nation-state do not need to be exclusively loyal to that nation-state to be incorporated within it. So is race being decoupled from nation today? I think that race is actually still being deployed in the service of the nation-state, especially within the discourse of multiculturalism. It is, of course, an attempt to incorporate heterogeneity within a nation-state, or rather, an attempt at homogenizing heterogeneity. “Regardless of race or colour or creed, we’re all Canadian here,” is the message being promoted here in Canada. But multicultural discourse also obfuscates the differences between immigrants and already existing oppressed minorities (African Canadians and Natives in Canada’s case). It hides the historical oppression of minorities under the sameness of multiculturalism: Koreans are the same as Haitians, Ojibwa are the same as Poles, and the French are the same as Nigerians. So race still has political consequences even in the brave new multicultural world.

References:

Lowe, Lisa (2003). “Heterogeneity, hybridity, multiplicity: Marking Asian-American differences”. In Braziel, Jana Evans; & Mannur, Anita (eds.), Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (pp. 132-159). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Clifford, James (1997). “Diasporas”. In Clifford, James, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (pp. 244-277). Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Canadian Ethnic Diversity Survey
Statistics Canada
http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/89-593-XIE/89-593-XIE2003001.pdf
Now then, I’ll have to apologize but this only contains half of the information I referred to and does not have the data on Filipino’s sense of belongingness to Canada. I’m still in the process of tracking down the survey data. Actually I know where to look now thanks to my school’s librarians, but I still haven’t gotten around to getting the stuff.

Graeber, David (2002). “The anthropology of globalization (with notes on neomedievalism, and the end of the Chinese model of the nation-state).” American Anthropologist, 104(4):1222-1227.

Sassen, Sasskia (1998). Globalization and its discontents: essays on the new mobility of people and money. New York: The New Press.

Sarapen is my research blog. I set it up to communicate with the Filipino bloggers I was studying. However, it’s moved away from that ideal. There aren’t as many Filipino bloggers reading me as I expected. This is partly because I haven’t participated in the extended blogging conversations necessary to be drawn into a blogging community. I don’t have the time, and since my data collection is already done, there’s really no point, and it would just be extra work for me.

And as you may have noticed, this blog is becoming more and more self-indulgent. My titles have continued to be enigmatic, with the in-jokes largely apprehended by only myself. Or look at the subjects of my preceding posts: Zapatismo, anarchism, Japanese comics, free journals, and a short description of what I was watching on tv. Only two of the last ten posts have been on topic, and I’ve even set up Tangents as a new category to classify posts under (incidentally, I’ve just realized that as a classifier I’m a lumper and not a splitter). In other words, Sarapen is rapidly becoming about me instead of my research.

I’d like to think that the tangents I go on aren’t just intellectual “self-abuse,” as the Victorian British put it (that “it” being masturbation). Rather, my wanderings help me stay on track with my research by keeping my brain a lean, mean, analytical machine. Not only that, I get to think of something besides identity construction, which I think too much about these days. Regardless of that, though, Sarapen is no longer a tool for disseminating information on my research so much as a device for keeping my mind from getting tired.

So now I think I understand what my participants meant when they said they were writing for themselves. Frankly, I thought blogging would just be a necessary chore, but I really honestly have learned more about bloggers by jumping on the bandwagon. Instead of an intellectual appreciation of blogging, I have an embodied understanding of it. I compulsively check my blog statistics, I compose blog posts in my head when I find something sponge-worthy, I gleefully examine the map of my readers’ locations. I get it. Kind of.

Still, the idea of blogging for yourself reminded me of what Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about how dialogue works. As Bakhtin says, dialogue is only possible because the speaker not only addresses the other person specifically, but also keeps in mind that what he or she utters can be understood by a perfect audience, the superaddressee. Which is to say that misunderstandings can occur in any dialogue, but a speaker will attempt dialogue anyway so long as he or she believes that what was said can be understood perfectly by someone (whether that audience is God, history, reasonable people, or so on). So what if, in this particular kind of blog speech, the superaddressee is the self? The perfect audience who will understand perfectly what the blogger wrote is the blogger’s own self, whereas the specific audience consists of anonymous or not-so-anonymous others. Blog dialogue as semi-monologue, then?

The problem is that I only know enough about Bakhtin to be dangerous to myself. I can’t tell if what I’ve proposed really hangs together, especially since this stuff is tangential to what I’m actually working on. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I always knew being weak in linguistics would come back to bite me in the ass. People in sociocultural anthropology should really be more familiar with linguistics, especially linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. But now I share it for posterity’s sake and in hopes that someone might tell me if I’ve embarrassed myself or not.

PS

Happy Turkey Day, Canada.

I don’t like old superhero comics. They’re juvenile, sexist, racist, and usually badly drawn and badly written. But I have to agree with Chris Sims. This is possibly the most awesome comic book panel ever.

Yesterday I discussed David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. In the new issue of American Anthropologist, David Graeber gets totally served in Rod Aya’s review of the pamphlet. Choice excerpts:

[Graeber] deems stateless societies anarchist if they are nonviolent – an Orinoco society where murder is “unheard of” is anarchist, an Amazon society where men gang rape women who “transgress proper gender roles” is not (pp. 27, 23) – and he expects that state societies split up into autonomous communities would be nonviolent as well . . .

The only violence Graeber considers is “symbolic” or “spectral” violence, meaning witchcraft . . . The “most peaceful societies” are “egalitarian societies” whose “imaginative constructions of the cosmos” are “haunted” by specters of perennial war” (pp. 25-26). Forget obvious counterexamples like E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s egalitarian, ultraviolent Nuer and hierarchical Azande where witchcraft occurs among equals. Forget the condescending reference to “imaginative constructions.” And forget that the theory is textbook functionalism . . .

Anarchist anthropology is realism itself compared with anarchist ideology, whose keyword is “counterpower,” meaning (for stateless societies) consensus through palaver and leveling through witchcraft, and (for state societies) “democratci self-organization” in “free enclaves” through “exodus,” not “seizing power” (pp. 60, 83) . . . Anarchist ideology predicts that millions will gladly forgo protection and income, and that the chief institution marked for abolition will perform an economic miracle. Cargo cult religion is sober by comparison (Aya 2006:591).

First, like I said before, Graeber’s work is just scattered fragments, it doesn’t pretend to theoretical coherence. Second, I think his proposals, while they can be criticized for being naive, should still be applauded for their boldness and optimism in contrast to the careerist quietism and unconstructive criticism inherent to much of academia. I’m reminded of David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope (2000), where, as the text on the back says, “Harvey dares to sketch a very personal vision in an appendix, one that leaves no doubt to his own geography of hope.” The main body of Spaces of Hope describes the injustices of globalizing capital; the appendix outlines what a truly just world might look like.

Marget Thatcher may have proclaimed, “There is no alternative” to neoliberalism; however, Harvey quotes the philosopher Ernst Bloch, who warns that there is “a very clear interest that has prevented the world from changing into the possible” (in Harvey 2000:258). Utopianism may be criticized not just for its naivete, but for the totalitarian excesses waged in its name (i.e., Marxism and liberal democracy), but when the alternative is to meekly accept the world’s ills, what is the alternative to this? The present is not the past, and today’s utopia’s are not yesterday’s, and believing that utopianism will inevitably lead to disaster is itself disastrous.

References

Aya, Rod (2006). “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology: Review by Rod Aya”, American Anthropologist, 108(3): 590-591.

Graeber, David (2004). Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Harvey, David (2000). Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press.

It was because of this that I learned that at one point, a third of the Communist Party in the United States was composed of FBI agents. In fact, the reds in the US were to a certain extent subsidized by the FBI, since FBI agents could pay their membership dues, as opposed to many of the party’s poorer members. Of course, as the prof pointed out, it’s not easy to fake a genuine commitment to Marxism, and how well run can a Communist Party be if it can be so easily infiltrated by those hostile to it?

Now, this prof is an old school Marxist. He is all about the original Marx. I mentioned that I’d actually read more Neo-Marxism than classical Marxism (which is rather common in anthropology) and he started going on about what he called academic Marxism and how it had in practice given up revolution. Fair enough, but as he went on I was reminded why Neo-Marxists started writing in the first place. The love affair with development and progress (making it kin to capitalism), the ordering of societies along a continuum from primitive to modern, the idea of the vanguard elite bestowing Marxist enlightenment upon the ignorant masses, and the ideological commitment to violence — these were all things that stuck in my craw. I was only a guest who hadn’t read the required readings and it would have been inappropriate for me to bring in more-sophisticated criticisms when the undergrads the class was designed for were still learning the basics, so I mostly kept my trap shut (though I was actually the second-most talkative person then even despite my self-censorship).

The prof mentioned anarchism as a competing ideology contemporaneous with early Marxism. He described it as a utopian project since it mostly rejected violent revolution. Rather, anarchists set up areas where they live as if the state did not exist and by doing so hope to inspire people to give up the state system by their example. Put that way, anarchism does sound rather naive, though it’s changed quite a bit since the 19th century.

I found the professor’s remarks interesting because I’d only recently read David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. It’s a short little booklet outlining some ideas of what an anarchist world might look like given anthropological data on non-state anarchist societies. It’s not a scholarly work but a call to action and some proposals for anarchism. It really is just fragments of an anarchist anthropology and not a unified theoretical construct.

In Fragments, Graeber discusses hunter-gatherer groups such as the !Kung, who have — or rather, had — elaborate strictures and spiritual taboos designed to prevent the accumulation of surplus and the formation of hierarchy. He also brings in cases like Madagascar, where the government is so weak that in many places there exists an anarchist social order on the ground, while officially the areas are still under the control of the state. Graeber also discusses anarchism within industrialised state societies, especially in modern activism and Zapatismo.

Now, the more I study nations and the state, the more I get convinced that the state system is too inherently unjust to keep should we truly want to create a better world. I keep going closer and closer towards anarchism. So it was fortunate that a couple of days after my encounter with Marxism, I attended a talk given by my department’s new anthro prof about the Zapatistas and Zapatismo. One thing that I found particularly interesting was the elucidation of the relationship between Marxism, anarchism, and Zapatismo. Mexican leftists are of course quite steeped in Marxist thought, so when those cadres retreated to the jungles of Chiapas to foment rebellion, they tried to use Ye Olde Handbooke of Marxist Mobilization. Which didn’t really get them anywhere with the local people. The Chiapenos told them, “We understand your words but we don’t understand what you’re saying.” They could not see what kind of relevance to their everyday lives Marxist rhetoric could have. The leftist cadres had to change their strategy. What they came up with was Zapatismo.

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, the most visible of the Zapatista leaders, has referred to Zapatismo as an intuition. It is true that as a political philosophy it has no coherent theoretical whole. Rather, it seems to me that it is more like a set of general principles and methods. Zapatismo’s emphasis on practice over theory resembles some strains of anarchism, and its position that it will “Lead by obeying” certainly sounds anarchist (anarchy = “without leaders”). This is not surprising, since the Mexican leftists who helped found Zapatismo were also familiar with anarchism. However, the Zapatistas avowedly do not call themselves anarchists, but instead prefer to be simply called Zapatistas.

Zapatismo has of course spread beyond Mexico, becoming a symbol for the social justice movement in general (also called the anti-globalization movement by advocates of neoliberal globalization). It is not an ideological philosopher’s stone capable of healing all wounds and righting all injustices — in the talk on Zapatismo, for instance, my department’s new hire mentioned how women living in Zapatista territory appreciated the change in their lives: “Our husbands don’t drink as much and beat us less” — but I think it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Anyway, that was what I did last week.

*This is the title of an ethnography by Caroline Humphreys about her work in post-Soviet Russia. It’s a joke made by one of her informants, who was referring to the sign of the farm she did her work in — the sign originally said “Collective Farm of Karl Marx”, but the famous last name had weathered away. I’ve only read the preface of the book, which is reprinted in The Anthropology of Politics: a reader in ethnography, theory and critique, Joan Vincent (ed.), Oxford: Berg, 2002, pp. 387-98.

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It’s wonderful to waste free time. And yet, time is not wasted when one’s mind is productive. Even when I’m not thinking about my thesis, I’m thinking about my thesis, and connections spring up during my relaxation in many delightfully surprising ways.

In this case, I’m talking about Eden, another Japanese comic book series (also known as manga) that I’ve recently come to like (thank you MangaProject). It’s about a young man living in a world where a pandemic has brought the world to the brink of disaster, and where a new world order has sprung up as a result. I have to tell you, in the following discussion of Eden I’m going to dispense spoilers like crazy. So read on at your own risk. There’s too much stuff to cover in one post so I’ll revisit the series again later. If you want my thoughts on Eden in a nutshell: Cyberpunk, biopolitics, near-apocalypse — rock! Read it if you need something to flip through when you want to pretend to yourself that you’re working.

Anyway, the new disease is called the Closure Virus, which has killed 15% of the world’s population decades before most of the story’s action takes place. Bear in mind that 15% may not sound like a lot, but that’s still hundreds of millions of people dead, not to mention the many more that are implied to have died from the chaos that erupted. Governments collapse and a new organization exploits the power vacuum to put itself in charge — the Propater.

In the book, Propater is a neoliberal theocracy of federated nation-states controlling what we would call the “West” plus most of the Americas. I know, “Propater” sounds made-up. The name actually comes from Gnosticism, a religious movement from the same era as early Christianity. In fact, if you’ve got some knowledge of the Gnostics and of early Christian theology then you’ll be able to appreciate better some of the references in the series. I feel embarrassed I hadn’t caught on to the Gnostic elements until I’d read the series glossary, where it was all spelled out. Gnosia and agnosia, the aeons, God as insane: these are all things that are mentioned in the book, and they’re all important in some way to the story and its themes. Actually, googling around reveals that the major characters are named after Gnostic deities and they all play similar roles in the story as in Gnosticism.

The Catholic Encyclopedia (take that Wikipedia) says this about Gnosticism:

The doctrine of salvation by knowledge. This definition, based on the etymology of the word (gnosis “knowledge”, gnostikos, “good at knowing”), is correct as far as it goes, but it gives only one, though perhaps the predominant, characteristic of Gnostic systems of thought . . . Gnostics were “people who knew”, and their knowledge at once constituted them a superior class of beings, whose present and future status was essentially different from that of those who, for whatever reason, did not know. A more complete and historical definition of Gnosticism would be:

A collective name for a large number of greatly-varying and pantheistic-idealistic sects, which flourished from some time before the Christian Era down to the fifth century, and which, while borrowing the phraseology and some of the tenets of the chief religions of the day, and especially of Christianity, held matter to be a deterioration of spirit, and the whole universe a depravation of the Deity, and taught the ultimate end of all being to be the overcoming of the grossness of matter and the return to the Parent-Spirit, which return they held to be inaugurated and facilitated by the appearance of some God-sent Saviour.

However unsatisfactory this definition may be, the obscurity, multiplicity, and wild confusion of Gnostic systems will hardly allow of another. Many scholars, moreover, would hold that every attempt to give a generic description of Gnostic sects is labour lost.

Oh, and apparently Christian Gnostics were responsible for early Christian fanfiction:

The Gnostics developed an astounding literary activity, which produced a quantity of writings far surpassing contemporary output of Catholic literature. They were most prolific in the sphere of fiction, as it is safe to say that three-fourths of the early Christians romances about Christ and His disciples emanated from Gnostic circles.

Setting aside the fact that this version of the Catholic Encyclopedia is rather old and it’s often amusing to read the snide jabs at other religions, it’s interesting that anyone would structure a manga around Gnosticism. However, Eden isn’t the only manga or anime to take its inspiration from Christianity and related religions. I’ve never read the manga or watched the anime, but I know Neon Genesis Evangelion also explicitly explored themes from Christianity and Kabbalistic Judaism, though its treatment of such was apparently problematic. I did watch two episodes of Ninja Resurrection, a godawful anime miniseries about rebellious Christians in feudal Japan and the rise of the Anti-Christ or something.

Anyway, I think it’s fair to say that there’s a widespread fascination with Christianity in Japan, perhaps analogous to the fascination with Buddhism in the reified West. Perhaps this fascination comes from a desire for authenticity, with that authenticity being searched for in the foreign. So foreign = Other, Other = authentic, and conversely, domestic = Same, Same = inauthentic. This BBC article on one manifestation of Christianity in Japan presents an interesting but somewhat exoticizing view on the topic.

However, it’s debatable just how alien Christianity really is to Japan. It’s been in the country for 450 years, meaning that Christianity in Japan is almost as old as it is in South America. Christians have played major roles in Japanese history, perhaps most famously in the rebellion of Amakusa Shiro (depicted in Ninja Resurrection), not to mention the extensive meddling in feudal Japanese politics that Catholic missionaries engaged in. And as the BBC article shows, certain Christian sects are quite popular in modern Japan. So just how Other is Christianity really?

Oh whatever, I’m hungry and my rice just finished cooking. I’m definitely coming back to Eden, but see you some other time.

World keeps getting smaller. I am Filipino too. And you’re fortunate I still live in the Philippines and can translate. (and let me tell you these words are deep and aren’t used in daily conversation so I have to ask my dad and helper who’re from the Tagalog region to make sense of some of the words)

I hope you’re ready for this, this is long

—-

Penpen de sarapen
de kutsilyo de almasen.
Haw haw de carabao
de batuten.

I have to wait for my father for the penpen de sarapen. He would know what that means. (Update: “btw, the first line penpen de sarapen, means nothing my dad says.”)

“Kutsilyo” is knife, you’re right. “Almasen” in Tagalog, means mortar and pestle. The de in front of each syllable means nothing, it’s a place holder for the syllabication to match.

Haw haw de carabao is the sound the carabao makes when it laughs. The carabao will laugh at the “batuten”.

Before I explain further, I’ll have to explain how we played penpen de sarapen when we were children.

As you know penpen de sarapen is a rhyme and it’s played with intonation. A child lands their finger on each of the fingers splayed out as a syllable is sung out (the more children the more fingers the merrier, the longer to finish). At tne end of the song, the finger under the person who’s singing the song should fold. When all your ten fingers are folded, you’re out. Which is actually a good thing. The last person whose finger folds is the “it”.

The “it” is the principle of “batuten”. The “batuten” is the “it” and the song is telling you that it’s going to choose an it.

Saya kong pula, tatlong pera.
Saya kong puti, tatlong salapi.

Although sayang means something, saya ko is completely different. “Sayang” means it’s regrettable, and truly, Sayang ang pula doesn’t mean anything.

“Saya kong pula” means my red blouse and “Saya kong puti” means my white blose.

In the old days (when my parents were young), when one cents and five cents had buying power, one cent was called “pera” and not just money. “Salapi” is fifty cents. Therefore the stanza means My red blouse, three cents (presumably costing this). My white blouse, three fifty cent coins (Php 1.50).

Sipit namimilipit
Ginto‘t Pilak
Namumulaklak
Sa tabi ng DAGAT!

As you know this is a rhyme, so this stanza is describing the seaside (tabi ng dagat). Therefore it shouldn’t be taken literally. “Sipit” is a crab’s pincers and “namimilipit” is what it does, although I guess namimilipit brings to my head the idea of agonizing pain, (imagine yourself with a stomach ache and you’re doubled over, that’s namimilipit). The first line is a warning against crab’s pincers.

The last lines, “ginto’t pilak namumulaklak sa tabi ng dagat” means as you thought. Gold and silver flowering beside the sea. I remember when I was small, I was told that it was a flower blooming beside the seashore. I’ll have to get back to you on this, but this might just be sea shells that have been washed to shore. (Update: “Dad also says that the ginto’t pilak namumulaklak could also be the sand by the seashore. So you have flower/sand/sea shells.”)

There are other stanzas but this is the main stanzas used here in Manila. Another stanza I got from my helper was this:

Mugmog kalimog
manggang hinog

could be used instead as ginto’t pilak namumulaklak sa tabi ng dagat. (Haha there are coconut crabs)

“Manggang hinog” means ripe mango.

Mugmog kalimog are onomatopeic sounds that mean the mango is almost ready for harvest (or sounds that you’re waiting for harvest).

If your institution does not subscribe to any SAGE journals, click here to register for free online access to the trial today!”

They’ve got journals on ethnic studies, communication, history, sociology, and even one on video games (look under Media and Communication). I’ve mostly looked through the anthropology ones, I like Anthropological Theory and Critique of Anthropology.

My research focuses on Filipino bloggers and their expression of Filipino identity on blogs. Following from the data I gathered from bloggers both in the Philippines and overseas in a content analysis of Filipino-written blogs and from several interviews, my thesis begins from Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of identity as contingent and arising from difference. I explore the complexities behind the expression of Filipino identity on blogs and the numerous factors that such expression is contingent upon. I answer three basic questions in my exploration of this contingent identity: Why is Filipino identity expressed on blogs? How is it expressed? And why is there no single Filipino blogging community?

It’s clumsy here and there, but bear in mind it’s a work in progress. It gets the job done, which is telling the reader what the whole thing is about. I’ve also got an outline and some notes specifying what goes where, plus two notebooks full of analytical scribblings I’ll have to pore over, not to mention the notes I’ve taken on the books and articles I’ve read.

So what does the data I’ve gathered tell me about Filpino bloggers? I can only offer tidbits, of course, since there’s so much information to convey. Anyway, I’ve noticed that there seems to be five major categories of Filipino bloggers: Cosmopolitans, the Philippine Elite, Im/migrants, Second Generation Diasporic Filipinos, and Younger Filipinos in the Philippines. These are not absolute categories; there is overlap, and besides which, this is not the ultimate typology of Filipino bloggers which can be constructed.

Cosmopolitans are those Filipino bloggers originally from the Philippines who readily discuss such things as trips to Hong Kong and favourite restaurants in New York. They don’t speak of these experiences as extraordinary, but instead discuss them as normal and common. They live all over the world, though quite a few live in the Philippines. They tend to be neutral towards Philippine politics, at least judging by the fact that they rarely discuss such matters.

The Philippine Elite are Filipino bloggers based in the Philippines who – from the way they present themselves on their blogs – are clearly part of the ruling class. I don’t mean that they’re necessarily amazingly wealthy, but they definitely have power in the Philippines. They can be doctors, lawyers, journalists, and so on. They often discuss Philippine politics and they frequently display their nationalism in some way on their blogs. Cosmopolitans and the Philippine Elite are quite clearly connected to each other, and there is much overlap between the two.

Im/migrants also often discuss Philippine politics and make nationalist statements, but they also discuss things that the previous two groups do not. For example, Im/migrants often blog about adjustment difficulties to their new countries. They also speak of the Philippines in nostalgic rhetoric that Cosmopolitans and the Philippine Elite do not use (”I remember when I used to be a kid in the Philippines that we used to do x”). Blogs written by Im/migrants many times end up discussing those Im/migrants’ children as well. Many Im/migrants, you see, are mothers. This is because of the particular way that migration from the Philippines is gendered. The Philippines is one of the world’s leading exporters of trained female nurses, and I’ve found a few blogs written by such. I’ve also seen a couple of blogs written by what I suspect are mail order brides, which are another export commodity of the Philippines. The country is also a leading exporter of female domestic workers (maids), but I’ve yet to find one blog written by one, probably because maids tend not to have the time to blog, and seldom the resources.

The children of those Im/migrants also constitute another category of Filipino bloggers, the Second Generation Diasporic Filipinos. I’m also including under this category 1.5 generation Filipinos and those Third Generation and later, but it’s simpler to have the one title. Second Generation Diasporic Filipinos rarely link to blogs written by the preceding groups nor leave comments. More than the other groups, these Filipino bloggers discuss race and ethnicity. Im/migrants also discuss such things, but these topics seem especially relevant to the Second Generation, judging by how much they blog about race and ethnicity. I’ve noticed the same in my interviews.

Finally come Younger Filipinos in the Philippines. Generally, they don’t link to blogs written by Second Generation Diasporic Filipinos, even though they’re the same age and often have similar interests. They’re far more likely to link to blogs written by the other groups. However, Younger Filipinos and Second Generation Diasporic Filipinos do link to each when their blogs are hosted on bloghosting services that attempt to foster community. In contrast to, say, Blogger, where the focus of the service is more on the individual blogger who attracts readers to their blog, services like LiveJournal or Xanga make it possible to make a group blog or to form a blogring. A group blog is a blog written by multiple bloggers, while a blogring is a group of blogs linked to each other; both are organized around a certain theme. The theme can be something like knitting, but the blogrings and the group blogs I’m interested in are ones organized around being Filipino. Bloghosting services don’t want their users to use competing bloghosting services, and one of the ways they do this is to make it difficult for their users to link to blogs hosted on other services, while at the same time making it easier to link to blogs hosted on the same bloghost. What effectively happens is that self-contained communities form that are centred around the fact that they all use the same bloghosting service. So when someone should create a new group blog or blogring for Filipino bloggers, what ends up happening is that both diasporic Filipinos and Filipinos in the Philippines end up joining. Second Generation Diasporic Filipinos and Younger Filipinos in the Philippines thus end up in the same blogging groups, unlike their fellows who use individual-oriented bloghosts or host their blogs on their own paid servers.

I have more stuff about racialization, exclusion, nationalism, internalized norms, print capitalism, and technologies of the self and regimes of truth and power, but all that stuff is really too big for a blog post. But stay tuned and I’ll probably get around to discussing them eventually.

UPDATE: Sweet Jesus, there’s nothing on. Bonanza? The Young and the Restless? I thought I got cable so I wouldn’t have to watch this. Oh look, it’s old episodes of The Weakest Link. My, it’s been a while since I’ve shouted at idiots on the tv, it feels so nostalgic. Lets see,

In Dante’s “Inferno,” which of these is not one of the three men being devoured in the lowest level of hell?’

A: Judas, B: Brutus, C:Nero, D:Cassius

Good thing I wasn’t playing, I thought it was Cassius. The answer was Nero by the way.

Recently, I’ve been reading a Japanese comic book series called NHK ni Youkoso, or Welcome to the NHK (thank you Evil_Genius). The main character, Tatsuhiro Satou, is what is called in Japan a hikikomori, which is essentially a person who has withdrawn from the rest of society. The term can be glossed as “social withdrawal.” Hikikomori are shut-ins who not only refuse to venture out of their houses, they also refuse to leave their rooms. Most live with their parents or other family, who support their recalcitrant sons (and hikikomori are mostly young men, often the eldest son). “Hikomori” is not an absolute category, but rather a catch-all term encompassing many young men who are socially withdrawn to varying degrees. In fact, it seems to be a culture-bound syndrome unique to Japan, in the same way that anorexia is mostly confined to “Western” societies. For more on this, see this article from The New York Times.

The existence of hikikomori has been treated as a crisis in Japan, but no one seems to be entirely sure what it is a crisis of. Are hikikomori men who have lost faith in Japan Inc.? Are they “social parasites” leeching off their suffering parents? In the comic book itself, the reason given for Satou’s social withdrawal is unsatisfactory, and in fact the psychological motivations behind becoming hikokomori are inadequately explained. There are many commentators who are willing to give their own opinions on the appearance of hikokomori. Ryu Murakami (no relation to Haruki Murakami), for example, discusses some of the emic or insider views of the hikikomori phenomenon from a certain Japanese perspective.

It’s all very well and good to say that Japanese culture contains within it the potential for social withdrawal, but I think the hikikomori phenomenon is a historically contingent one. I don’t think the hikikomori could have appeared at any time other than now. Certainly, anomie has long been recognized as one of the effects of modern industrialized life. Hikomori are like Grigor Samsa, the gray everyman who ate, slept, and worked every gray day of his gray life, and who eventually turned into a twisted version of himself, or rather became the person he really was, and was supported by his family until his death, “And thank God for that!” as his father said. But hikokomori and Grigor Samsa are different in several ways. Hikokomori obviously don’t turn into vermin, though they’re certainly spoken of that way by a lot of people. More to the point, Grigor Samsa turned into a bug because that was what he already was — living to work, eating, sleeping, and sacrificing just to work some more. Doesn’t that sound more like a worker ant’s life than a human being’s? Industrialism and the wage labour system transform people into insects, reducing them to brute labour and ignoring the many ways that they are unique. However, hikomori, unlike Grigor Samsa, refuse to participate in this system in the first place, or perhaps it is better to say that they are unable to participate.

Hikomori could have only appeared now because it is only now that Japan has slowed its industrial growth. Industrial growth is not infinite, cannot be infinite, but that is not how it is presented in the rhetoric of capitalism. Onwards! Upwards! To the stars! The increasing penetration of the popular media and the greater sophistication of its mesmerizing consumerist promises are the propaganda for this ideology. But where is this golden land of plenty to be found? Not in Japan today. Faced with a world where the dazzling promises of consumerist capitalism can never be realized, where people are taught to desire what can never exist, is it any wonder when so many refuse to become the bugs they were destined to be? “I never signed up for this” might be the motto of the hikikomori, could they but articulate the malaise they feel.

I think it’s telling that hikomori are mostly young men, because for men, in many ways a loss of power is also a loss of masculinity. Men are supposed to be powerful, but how can one accept a world where one has no power and therefore one is not a man? Japanese women, on the other hand, already live in a world where power belongs to other people. Furthermore, while Japanese parents might gladly support a son they see as suffering through a phase in their development, would they accept as easily a daughter who did nothing all day but eat, sleep, and watch tv?

There is an incident in Welcome to the NHK which I find rather interesting. Satou, the main character, meets by chance a former high school classmate on the street. She invites him to join what is apparently some kind of motivational group, but which turns out to be a pyramid scheme. Not having been born yesterday, Satou tells her that he’s seen through her plan to recruit the idiot classmate she met on the street just to meet her quota. She snaps and tells him that yes, she was planning to squeeze him for money. She had been working for tuition money since graduating from high school, but had it all squeezed out of her by people above her. She asks Satou,

How do you feel about being socially withdrawn for the rest of your life? I know you understand . . . in the end this world boils down to those who take and those who are taken, a zero-sum game! You’re being used by everyone. Your unemployment and withdrawal from society is a result of the demands of society! It’s because society needs people to look down on. You’re smart . . . you should have noticed the ridicule of the people around you. Society’s gears are greased by the existence of slaves . . . But you’re different! You want to take such corrupt relationships and turn them into money! This time, we will be on the squeezing side!!

Certainly it’s a bleak philosophy, but what stands out for me is that this statement is a rejection of the ideology of modernity. Progress? Development? Sentimental hooey. Society cannot be improved, it can only be exploited. Though she reject’s the propaganda of capitalist modernism, Satou’s classmate has learned its ultimate lesson: what is valuable is what is profitable, and to hell with everyone who gets in the way.

The above is not an isolated incident. Welcome to the NHK’s characters are very aware of their exact role in Japanese society. They even state it explicitly: confronting Satou for his unproductivity and petty theft of food, his business partner tells him, “In a capitalist country, money is the ultimate value! You’re not going to end this with a simple ‘I’m broke’. On the other hand, when you turn a profit, anything is permitted! What a wonderful world!!” This is telling when one considers that neither Satou nor his business partner actually have money. If money indexes value in a capitalist society, then those who don’t have it are worthless.

It is, in fact, their marginality that the comic’s characters are always conscious of. Welcome to the NHK is about the people who reject mainstream Japanese society. The main character, Satou, has isolated himself entirely from other people. His former classmate, Iincho, is the one who has given herself over to the pursuit of profit. His other schoolmate, who he calls Senpai (upperclassman), is depressed, harbours suicidal thoughts, and medicates herself constantly to allay the effects of the sexism, jealousy, and utter grinding work she experiences at her job. His stalker/female friend, Misaki, apparently dropped out of high school because of bullying. Finally, his business partner, Yamazaki, has given himself over to the pursuit of representations of underage pornography (see Sharon Kinsella’s analysis of Japanese “cute” as a rejection of adulthood and Japanese society in general).

So is Welcome to the NHK is a critique of Japanese society? Not as such. It’s not really a drama per se, it’s actually more of a zany comedy: Look at the antics Satou gets into this week! Humour, of course, can give biting critiques of the society it (p)resents. However, being humour, what it shows can just be waved off as a joke. Further, look at the picture above. Satou is the guy in the centre wearing the “H”, but notice that he’s surrounded by other people. This is mirrored by the comic’s plots, where Satou is always getting into trouble with some person or another. For a shut-in, Satou seems to have a lot of friends.

That is perhaps my greatest criticism of the comic. While it explores different rejections of Japanese modernity, it doesn’t go far enough in examining them. The pain that the characters feel is masked behind the hijinks they get into. Too much happens for anyone to stop and think about what exactly is going on. Even suicide attempts are presented comically and actually manage not to seem grim and depressing. Being a hikokomori actually looks like fun, judging from Satou’s experience at any rate.

However, Welcome to the NHK is a fascinating peek into how some Japanese see themselves and their own native Others. What is it to be young and Japanese today? More importantly, what is it to be young and Japanese, and yet not Japanese at the same time? How does it feel to be on the outside looking in? Welcome to the NHK’s answer, though unsatisfactory, at least confronts these questions.

Until I finally get settled down, I thought I might discuss you, my readers, whoever you are. I installed Google Analytics at the end of last month and it’s kind of fascinating looking at where exactly you’re all accessing my blog from: 43 visits from the US, 19 from Canada (most of those are probably me accessing the blog from different computers), 13 from the Philippines, 7 from Australia, 6 from the UK, 2 from Sweden, 2 from Germany, 2 from Belgium, and 1 each from France, Poland, Guam, Bulgaria, Austria, and Vietnam.

This is pretty cool, actually. Apparently Sarapen was accessed 5 times each from Las Vegas, from Portland, Oregon, and from Coburg in the state of Victoria in Australia. No one from Canberra? Come on, I’m considering applying to ANU for the Phd and I could use some insider information. I’m pretty sure the German visits are probably by orange and I think I know who the person from Poland is, if it’s just one person. A, is that you?

Almost a quarter (24.51%) of visitors to Sarapen access it directly, probably from bookmarks, while 11.76% come from s0metim3s’ blog, 10.78% find Sarapen through Google, 8.92% from a comment I left on the blog of one of my participants, 4.90% are directed from Aries’ blog, 3.92% from antropologi.info, and a very large number of one-time visits coming from the blog of someone who found me on LiveJournal, specifically this post.

Yup, that’s me writing a whole mess about the Japanese comic book Death Note. It’s actually rather interesting how you’d have no idea I was into this kind of stuff until and unless I tell you. Blogs are fascinating for how they give the appearance of intimacy and yet manage to hide quite a lot about the bloggers writing them.
Actually, I’m considering eventually expanding Sarapen’s purview: instead of focusing entirely on stuff that’s directly related to my research, I thought that every now and then I’d post an analysis of something just for the hell of it. I’ve already kind of promised to eventually blog about the new season of Battlestar Galactica, anyway. I don’t know, this might seem to take away from my research, but lots of times I end up making all kinds of weird connections across all kinds of stuff. I think the last time this happened was when I was reading Asia Times Online and suddenly got a reference to follow up and a new theoretical position to consider about a paper I was writing on terrorism.

Anyway, the purpose of this rambling post was mostly to let people know I was still alive. I’m not feeling too analytical right now, but keep on keepin’ on, peeps.

PS
Ibalik, thanks for offering to host Sarapen but I think I’ll have to decline for the moment. It’s just simpler to stay here at edublogs.org right now since this is where my participants know where to find me. Maybe after I’m done my research and writing. I think I may stick with blogging after all.

Post-postscript
Jose Rizality at s0metim3s. Rizal-age? Rizal-ness? Whatever, stuff about Rizal and Benedict Anderson, of Imagined Communities fame.

In case it’s not clear, I’m talking about the new place I moved into. It’s not so bad now that I’ve got an air mattress, I actually had some really good sleep last night. Lots better than when I had to sleep in my office chair because I didn’t have any other furniture (it felt like I was at an airport).

But I didn’t pick the title of this post just because it amuses me to discuss my new place under a title that combines lines from 1984 and the Disney movie Aladdin. I thought I would discuss these two articles: More Koreans Look to Retire in Philippines and Living, Doing Business the Philippine Way

Briefly, the articles talk about (South) Korean emigration to the Philippines. I’ve long been aware that more and more Koreans are moving to the Philippines, but I’ve never known exactly why. Now it’s clear what’s happening: middlingly-wealthy Koreans are retiring and living in the Philippines because they get more value for their retirement fund and pension money.

It’s not just that, though. Those retired Koreans need people that can cater to their needs, which is something that has occurred to a lot of other Koreans. It’s also well-known in migration studies that once a certain group has established itself in a particular country, it becomes easier for other members of that group to migrate to that country, as in the case of children joining their parents or sisters sponsoring their siblings. So you get a secondary wave of Korean migration that comes to the Philippines to make money off their fellow Koreans. I’m willing to bet a lot of these businesses were established in the early days by retirees who were rushing to fill this economic niche.

This whole situation is only possible because of globalization, which I take here to mean “the intensification of global interconnectedness . . . [combined with] the the speeding up of economic and social processes” (Rosaldo & Inda 2002:2-6). This intensification has happened due to several factors. First is the development of new technologies that make it easier to transfer money overseas as well as communicate with distant relatives and friends. However, just as important, if not more so, is the development of new regulations and the signing of new agreements between governments which make the bureaucratic processes involved in international money transfer and immigration easier. After all, to take one example, the technologies involved in jet travel haven’t really changed that much in the last few decades, but the deregulation of the airline industry and the resulting competition between the different carriers have driven ticket prices down.

Because international migration is much easier to achieve, South Koreans have been engaged in what Anna Tsing refers to as a “scale-making project” (Tsing 2002:473). Retiring to the Philippines may have been inconceivable to previous generations of Koreans, but it’s increasingly possible to imagine such a thing today. The sense of scale for South Koreans has been expanded. While the distance between South Korea and the Philippines seemed vast in former times, today the Philippines doesn’t really seem too far to Koreans. This is thanks to the larger scale-making project behind globalization (”It’s one world,” “We’re all connected,” etc.) which is presenting the world as being more interconnected. This is also thanks to the smaller scale-making project in South Korea which is trying to construct the Philippines and Southeast Asia in general as part of the natural sphere of South Korean migration. These scale-making projects are training South Koreans to think of the Philippines as a natural destination for business and retirement.

However, as David Harvey points out, the compression of time and space in globalization is not a neutral process, but has moral implications: a revolution “in temporal and spatial relations often entails . . . not only the destruction of ways of life and social practices built around preceding time-space systems, but the ‘creative destruction’ of a wide range of physical assets embedded in the landscape” (Harvey 1996:241). In theory, capitalism is not a zero-sum game, but in practice, for someone to win at the game of capitalism, someone else has to lose. This is especially true in an age of global capitalism, where companies go all over the world looking for places where they can make the most money while spending the least.

What are the moral implications of intensified global interconnectedness? Consider who it is that participates in international migration. Relatively wealthy people are not the only ones that migrate internationally, there are also millions of the relatively poor who migrate under dangerous conditions to work at dangerous, exploitative, and underpaid jobs. Consider also that making it easier for corporations to move money around means that it’s also easier for corporations to shop around internationally. Don’t like the fact that your workers in Virginia are entitled to bathroom breaks and a living wage? Sell your assets and set up shop in Shenzhen where such things are entirely optional.

Beyond that, also consider who it is that is able to migrate: relatively wealthy South Koreans. Why is it that citizens of South Korea are able to retire overseas, while citizens of the Philippines generally aren’t? The answer is contingent on the different histories of the two countries. The Philippines was a colony of the United States, and after independence the country was still controlled by neocolonial practices that meant the Philippines was still dependent on its “former” colonial master. However, South Korea was vitally important to the United States in its Cold War against the Soviet Union as a bulwark against communist North Korea. It would not have been wise for the US to have South Korea end up like the Philippines, since it would not be able to put up much of a resistance against the North. Therefore, no neocolonial and neoimperial policies were enacted against South Korea and plenty of aid in building infrastructure and such was offered by the US. Simply put, then, it served American interests to have a weak Philippines dependent on the US while at the same time having a strong South Korea to defend against the North. Which brings us to today, where — economically speaking — we have a mini-US in South Korea acting towards the Philippines like the US acts towards Mexico: like a personal playground for its citizens.

And on that note, Happy Labour Day and enjoy the long weekend to those of you that have it.

References:

Inda, Jonathan Xavier; and Renato Rosaldo. 2002. “Introduction: A World in Motion”. In Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Pp. 1-34.

Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Tsing, Anna. 2002. “Conclusion: The Global Situation”. In Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Pp. 453-485.

Today I changed something on my blog. I’m not sure if anyone will notice. Oh diary, will boys ever start paying attention to me? Or girls? Or genderqueers?

If it wasn’t for you, diary, I wouldn’t be able to get through my days. I know you’ll always be there for me.

XOXOX

Sarapen

PS

Metallica rules.

Okay, joking. But I think I realize now why I’ve been so fascinated with European history and nationalism lately, even though it’s only peripherally related to my research. You see, it’s rather strongly related to the research I’d like to do for my Phd. So in order to avoid working on my present project, I’m actually starting work on a future project that doesn’t even exist yet. Oh me, oh my, the things I’ll do to avoid working on what’s right in front of me.

I said I’d start discussing my findings this week, and I meant it. So what have I discovered about Filipino bloggers in my research?

For one thing, I’ve found out that it’s not very easy to speak of a single Filipino blogging community. There are instead multiple communities of Filipino bloggers, many of which apparently don’t read the blogs of other communities of Filipino bloggers.

Yes, it’s not a profound observation. But how exactly do these different blogging communities differ from each other?

The most important distinction seems to be between Filipino bloggers based in the Philippines and those based overseas. Actually, I’m still trying to decide on a proper term for the second category. Referring to “overseas” Filipino bloggers implies that those bloggers are originally from the Philippines but at present are residing overseas, when many or most overseas Filipino bloggers were actually born and raised outside the Philippines.

Anyway, in terms of linking behaviour, Filipino bloggers as a whole can roughly be divided into two groups: Philippine bloggers and overseas Filipino bloggers. Bloggers may link to other bloggers in their group, but rarely do they link to bloggers in the other group. However, the dichotomy isn’t actually quite so simple. Philippine bloggers do link to the blogs of overseas Filipinos, but only to those blogs written by overseas Filipinos who left the Philippines as adults. Likewise, these adult migrants link to Philippine bloggers, but they almost never link to overseas Filipino bloggers. The opposite is also true for overseas Filipino bloggers. They link to each other, but they hardly ever link to Philippine and adult migrant bloggers.

A similar dichotomy exists when considering the political content of Filipino blogs. Bloggers in the Philippines and adult migrant bloggers are far more likely to mention Philippine politics in their blogs, particularly the corruption scandal surrounding Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and the calls for her impeachment. By contrast, I have yet to see one blog written by an overseas Filipino blogger that mentioned Philippine politics.

This situation shouldn’t really be too surprising. Different people in different countries have different political concerns. Only if you think that Filipinos are racially bound to the Philippines do you start expecting overseas Filipinos to obsess about Philippine politics the way people living in the country do. But why should overseas Filipinos pay attention to something that has little meaning and little impact in their daily lives? You might as well expect them to closely follow village politics in Inner Mongolia.

There you go, my first significant finding about Filipino bloggers. I’m working on a draft for one other post, but otherwise don’t expect me to post before September, I’m in the process of moving right now. So, hasta la proxima vez.

Comay says that “[w]ith the tennis-court oath, the ex nihilo transition of the tiers état from “nothing” to “everything” is announced and performatively accomplished: the oath both marks and makes the people’s transition from political nullity to the “complete nation” that it will retroactively determine itself always already to have been.” She’s referring to one of the major events marking the beginning of the French Revolution, when the Third Estate (the French commoners) vowed to establish a new constitution for France based on their authority as representatives of the majority of the French population. The French revolutionaries were treasonous rebels according to the laws that existed at the time of their revolution. However, according to the revolutionaries themselves, it was the French government that was illegitimate, since it did not represent the will of most of France. Therefore, the revolutionaries were the ones enacting legitimate violence, while it was the royalists that had no authority. Or as Sir John Harrington observed,

Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

Therefore, where the authority of the king made the violence of the royalists legitimate, the authority of the people — or rather, the authority conferred by claiming to represent the people — made the violence of the revolutionaries legitimate. Which is a pretty story, but wasn’t it actually the might of the royalists that conferred authority, and wasn’t it the greater might of the revolutionaries that made them legitimate in place of the royalists? Didn’t their political power grow out of the barrels of their guns?

Yes and no. Ideology isn’t just a justification for violence. It’s also a reason for it. The Third Estate rebelled because they wanted more power (to put it crassly), but they wanted more power because they thought they had the greater legitimacy.

In the passage from Povinelli, she examines how violence and liberal democracies can coexist, how violence is made acceptable in a liberal democracy. While Hegel, by way of Comay, says that democracies by their very nature demand violence, Povinelli describes the twists and turns in logic liberal democracies take to make their violence seem reasonable and rational.

It seems to me, though, that asking why democracies are violent isn’t the right question. Rather, I think it’s more interesting to ask why democracies shouldn’t be violent. All democracies are states and all states are violent, so why should democracies be an exception?

There are many theories of state formation that are empirically supported by archaeological and historical evidence. In truth, states probably formed for different reasons and for combinations of reasons. However, one of these reasons was for the organization of people for the purposes of violence — in other words, for war. In this theory, the ultimate cause of state warfare is the development of agriculture. Hunter-gatherer societies can’t accumulate material surpluses, since the resources they depend on cannot be stored for long periods. The domestication of plants, however, means that grain be stored, and more crucially, that it can be stolen. Therefore comes raiding parties to capture that grain, and therefore states are needed to both organize for and defend against the seizure of resources. Or so goes the simplified evolutionary schema taught in undergrad anthropology courses.

Just as with the birth of the French Republic, so the birth of states was also fraught with violence. State formation is not simply marked by violence; rather, it was for purposes of violence that states were formed. All states are violent and all democracies are states; therefore, all democracies are violent. Individual states may be extinguished by the violent actions of other states, or even by the violent reactions of their own citizens, but despite this, states still act out in violence. So how could one expect a democracy to act in any other way?

Asked the frog of the scorpion, “Why did you sting me in the back as I was carrying us both across the river? Now we will surely drown.” “I couldn’t help it,” replied the scorpion. “It was my nature.”

While reading s0metim3s’ blog (chock full of theory and Battlestar Galactica — two great tastes that taste great together), I came across her post about an article by Rebecca Comay on Hegel’s analysis of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. This quote in particular is interesting:

For Hegel, unlike for Kant, the revolution is a block: the terror cannot be surgically excised as a local anomaly, deformation, or betrayal of its founding principles, the revolution does not splinter into essential and inessential, structural and incidental. Indeed any attempt to define the chronological boundaries of the terror — to confine it to a sixteen-month interval as a temporary deviation from the revolution — arguably only prolongs the persecutory logic that is contained (a paradox exemplified by the Thermidorian counterterrorist reaction and the virulent culture of denunciation it perpetuated: Thermidor is itself the prototype of every war on terrorism).

For Hegel, therefore, the terror proper begins not with the law of 22 Prairial, not with the law of suspects, not with the regicide in January 1793, not with the king’s arrest and trial, not with the September massacres of 1792, not with the riots at the Tuileries on August 10, 1792, not with the suspensive veto of the 1791 Constitution, and not with the storming of the Bastille. Hegel backdates the terror to the very onset of the revolution, if not before—June 17, 1789, the day the États Généraux spontaneously and virtually unanimously recreated itself as the Assemblée Nationale as sole agent and embodiment of the nation’s will.

With the tennis-court oath, the ex nihilo transition of the tiers état from “nothing” to “everything” is announced and performatively accomplished: the oath both marks and makes the people’s transition from political nullity to the “complete nation” that it will retroactively determine itself always already to have been. As structurally complete, the nation must eliminate what falls outside it as an excrescence whose existence is a contradiction: the founding act of revolutionary democracy is thus the purge (Comay 2004:386-387).

Just a quick explanation of the historical context. There you are, king of France, living high on the hog in the late 18th century, when suddenly a bunch of dirty pantsless frogs* start demanding republican representation or something. You, Louis XVI, are captured by the revolutionaries and forced to stop claiming your will is divine. You escape and almost make it to your loyal army but are recaptured and executed. Then, from your zombie afterlife, you watch as the revolutionaries start turning on each other, accusing each other of not being revolutionary enough. A campaign of Terror erupts where people are being guillotined left and right on suspicions of treason. Eventually this ends and the French Revolution keeps marching on. You, however, remain a zombie.

The French Revolution was supposed to bring an age of justice, but it soon turned into a bloodbath. Some historians say that this was just a temporary anomaly, or perhaps growing pains on the road to democracy. However, for Hegel, the violence of the Terror was an essential part of the French Revolution. The seeds for the Terror were planted in the beginning. “As structurally complete, the nation must eliminate what falls outside it as an excrescence whose existence is a contradiction: the founding act of revolutionary democracy is thus the purge.” The French Revolution was perhaps the event that heralded the coming of the age of nationalism in Europe. Having created itself, what was the first thing that the new French nation-state did? Violently eliminate people it saw as outsiders (i.e., those who didn’t believe in the ideals of revolutionary democracy).

This ties into my previous post about nationalism, and it’s certainly nice how things converge. Nationalism and nation-states are violent things, even or especially those nation-states that are democratic. Reading the above reminded me of a similar passage in a paper I’d read by Elizabeth Povinelli:

The temporalizing function of the horizon of successful self-correction seems an essential part of the means by which the practice of social violence is made to appear and to be experienced as the unfurling of the peaceful public use of reason. Characterizations of liberal governmentality as always already stretching to the future horizon of apologetic self-correction figure contemporary real-time contradictions, gaps, and incommensurabilities in liberal democratic discourses and institutions as in the process of closure and commensuration. Any analysis of real-time violence is deflected to the horizon of good intentions, and more immediately, as a welcomed part of the very process of liberal self-correction itself (Povinelli 2001:328).

I know, that’s some dense verbiage there. Luckily, I’ve already written a translation:

Liberal democracies present themselves as always peaceful, always good, and always right. How then is the use of violence reconciled in a liberal democracy, since using violence is never peaceful, and which many would say is never good and never right? Liberal democracies rationalize their use of violence as a necessary part of goodness and rightness: violence is always enacted in the name of peace and for the greater good of all. This of course comes up against the contradictory fact that violence is not always enacted for the greater good in liberal democracies, nor does it address the issue that what is good for the majority is not always good for the minority. Liberal democracies gloss over these contradictions in their logic by saying that yes, there are failures in the system, but everyday in every way liberal democracy is getting better and better, and by pointing out these inconsistencies you have made liberal democracy even stronger. Liberal democracy is a utopian ideology; like all utopias, the perfect liberal democracy exists somewhere else, in an unreachable future. This then deflects criticism that the ideals of liberal democracy and the practice of it do not mesh together, since eventually (but don’t ask for a timetable), liberal democracy will be peaceful in fact as well as in name. But until then, try to understand that we’re beating these protesters and arresting these coloureds and exploiting these illegal immigrants because we love peace so much. Thus is violence made rational and good in a liberal democracy.

Neither of the two papers are really about nationalism and nation-states, they’re more about violence and democracies. But I think they do a very good job of explaining how it is that a peace-loving democracy can be violent. Modern democracies are also nation-states, and nation-states are inherently violent entities. Well, to be fair, states are inherently violent in themselves. Weber, after all, defined a state as being an organization with a monopoly on legitimate violence. The difference between a state and a nation-state, though, is that while a state like the Roman Empire was content with having different people such as Greeks and Spaniards for its citizens, the nation-state of Italy can’t stand to have non-Italians such as Ethiopians and Kenyans in Italy walking around being non-Italian (though there is also a racial dimension to this discrimation). So I suppose I am disagreeing about the ultimate source of violence within modern democracies, at least those that don’t espouse multicultural ideology, which is still not a fully-established norm anyway.

You know what, this is interesting. I need to come back to this. I hate to be a tease, but I don’t have any more time to hang around the library today, so tune in tomorrow for Part 2.

And by the way, I’ve almost finished doing my interviews, so either this week or next I’ll start posting some of my preliminary findings on Filipino bloggers.

* Here I’m referring to the sans-culottes. I know, they weren’t actually pantsless frogs, I was being facetious. It was actually knee breeches that they didn’t have.

References:

Comay, Rebecca (2004). “Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 103(2,3):375-395.

Povinelli, Elizabeth (2001). “Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability.” Annual Review of Anthropology 30:319-334.

So, I mentioned in a previous post how the University of the Philippines Open University has an online course on Philippine culture. In the comments, Aries told me about a similar program, where Filipino American university students can travel to the Philippines and take a compressed course in Philippine Studies.

What’s especially fascinating about these courses are that they are specificallly aimed at second generation Filipino Americans. They are an attempt to incorporate Filipinos in diaspora into the story of the Philippine nation-state.

As I’ve mentioned before, in older conceptions of nationalism and the nation-state, the nation is equated with the territory the nation-state controls. Filipinos are people from the Philippines; the Philippines is where Filipinos are from. This circular argument becomes unhinged when you consider that a lot of Filipinos actually live outside the Philippines — 8 million by the last count, or 10 percent of the population of the Philippines, though that estimate only counts Overseas Foreign Workers and not Filipino citizens of those other countries.

This is not a new situation by any means. Diasporas have existed for a long time. Consider that the term “diaspora” originally referred to the Jewish dispersal from Israel by the Romans, which occurred about 2 000 years ago. What is different is the way that diasporas are thought about. Simply a fact of life before, diasporas are now a problem, since they have no place within the ideology of nationalism and the fiction of the nation-state. If a nation-state is supposed to represent a single people, then how does it handle the existence of other people within its territory?

The answer is: “Not very well.” Nation-states, when confronted with the reality of “other” people living in their territory, do everything in their power to make those “other” people invisible. It can be as directly brutal as the way Native Americans have been violently suppressed in the United States, and it can be as subtle as not portraying black people in movies.

But wait, black people are portrayed in American media today. Why, there’s even a channel called Black Entertainment Television. The older form of nationalism (one land, one people) is being replaced with a more complex form called multiculturalism (one land, one people composed of many people). The motto of multiculturalism might be “E Pluribus Unum”: Out of Many, One. That is to say, one nation is constructed out of parts of many others. One people (Americans) composed of many different peoples (African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, etc). There are many criticisms which can be made of multicultural ideology, but one of the things it does is promote the expression of identities beside a single national identity.

Which brings us to the case of Filipino Americans. Here they are, being Filipino outside the Philippines. Here they are, making money, a lot of which they send to the Philippines. If the Philippine nation-state is supposed to represent Filipinos, how does it speak for Filipinos outside the Philippines? More pragmatically, how can the Philippines profit from these outsider Filipinos? I say “outsider”, since calling them overseas Filipinos implies that they’re all from the Philippines, which isn’t the case with the second generation. So, how can these outsider Filipinos be incorporated within the story of the Philippine nation-state?

First, you have to create within outsider Filipinos a sense of connection to the Philippines. The school system is one of the major ways in which residents of a country are taught to become attached to that country, and here it is being used to promote nationalism again. This is not a neutral act, it is suffused with political concerns (then again, a lot of things are). A lot of Filipinos outside the Philippines send money to the country (actually, to their relatives there), but they could also do a lot more. Like, for instance, lobbying on behalf of the Philippines on the government of their host country. These courses on the Philippines are partly strategic investments in second generation Filipino Americans by the Philippine nation-state. One might object by saying that these projects are actually run the University of the Philippines, not the Philippine government. However, UP certainly receives government funding, and even if the university was not directly ordered to create the courses by the government, part of the reason behind the development of these courses was out of a sense of nationalism which inevitably means doing things for the betterment of one’s country. Which is to say that being a Philippine nationalist often means doing things that will benefit the Philippines. None of which is necessarily good or bad, but it’s important to realize the political context of things.

Verbal Consent Form

UPDATE 16/8/06: Too slow, it’s gone now suckas!

1. Hello world

This is a standard thing run by programmers. It’s probably the simplest test of a program: make it display the words “Hello world”.

2. I am the Gatekeeper

This is me quoting from the movie Ghostbusters. It’s set in New York, which is why I thought it was appropriate, given that the post was about me getting rejected for a travel grant to the city.

3. Hoy pare, pakinggan niyo ko (also, my hands are deadly weapons)

The first part is Tagalog, it means “Hey man, listen to me.” It’s from the Black Eyed Peas song Bebot, sung by the Filipino American Apl. The next line is “Ito na ang tunay na Filipino” (Here is the real Filipino). I was presenting myself and my daily routine in that post, which is why I thought the line was appropriate. The second part — about my hands being deadly weapons — is actually from an old cartoon show I used to watch, Karate Kat. That may not be the ultimate origin of the quote, but it’s where it came from in this particular case. I said that because I mentioned going to a karate class in the post.

4. Nationalism and its discontents

This title originally comes from Sigmund Freud’s book, Civilization and its Discontents. I’ve never read it. The book that I was actually alluding to was Sasskia Sassen’s Globalization and its Discontents, which I actually have read. But I think she got her title from Freud’s book.

5. In which I prove that I actually work

I originally thought this “In which . . .” construction was from Alice in Wonderland. I really did. Now, I’m not so sure. I’ve never fully read anything by Lewis Carroll. I tried to read Alice in Wonderland when I was little and it made no sense, so I stopped. I’ve never seen any of the movies, either. I think it’s also in the movie Benny & Joon, another work of fiction that I’m only vaguely familiar with. I think I actually did see it, but I don’t remember anything from it except Johnny Depp dressed up as Charlie Chaplin in The Little Tramp (I think that was what the movie was called). I like to pretend he was actually dressed up as Malcolm Macdowell in A Clockwork Orange.

6. I’ll go a little later

This is from the Simpsons. It’s a line from the episode where Homer becomes an astronaut. He’s describing to Marge the time he missed the chance to meet Mr. T at an appearance in a shopping mall: “I said, I’ll go a little later, I’ll go a little later. But when I went later, Mr. T was already gone. And when I asked the man at the stall if Mr. T was coming back, he said he didn’t know.” Since the post was about me briefly overcoming my own laziness, I hope you can see why I quoted this line.

7. On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog

This is from a cartoon in the New Yorker which shows a dog using a computer and saying that line to another dog looking on. I got it from Lisa Nakamura’s book Cybertypes, which I mentioned before. She discusses the cartoon according to the idea that bodies don’t matter online, and so being a dog doesn’t matter when you’re on the Internet. She disagrees with this idea and goes on at length about how and why bodies matter online.

8. Adventures in babysitting

I believe this is or was a book series for girls. Or was that The Babysitters’ Club? The closest I ever got to girls’ literature was when I read a crossover book between Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. It was kind of disappointing because Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys already knew each other at the beginning of the story. Wait, it was actually a bunch of stories. Anyway, the teen detectives were supposedly already friends with each other. I think it would have been more interesting if Nancy Drew and Joe and Frank stumbled upon each other while investigating the same case. Maybe they think the other party is working with the bad guys at first. Then you get the scene where everyone figures out they’re on the same side, and then the cool part comes when they’re working together. Maybe put some sexual tension in there. Sure, Joe and Frank had girlfriends, but we’ll pretend they were on a break or something. I think Nancy Drew also had a man friend, but I can’t be sure. Maybe she was tired of him and was looking for an intellectual equal (or two). Oh hang on, Google reveals that Adventures in Babysitting was apparently a movie from 1987. I was only six years old when it came out, so don’t blame me for not knowing about it. I apparently came across the title at some point in my life, though.

Oh, and speaking of teen detectives, weekend fun from the satirical website McSweeney’s (I actually got the link from the blog of danah boyd, who is a fairly prominent blog researcher): Publisher’s response to a Hardy Boys manuscript submission

First and foremost, we are unpersuaded that the subject matter of The Case of the Secret Meth Lab is appropriate for our readers. We understand that the manufacturing of narcotics in otherwise bucolic towns has indeed become a problem. That said, we ask you whether Joe Hardy would realistically go undercover and turn into what his brother repeatedly refers to as a “crankhead.”

. . .

Page 60: We encourage including Nancy Drew in the adventure as it represents great cross-marketing with our other adventure series. We would think it goes without saying, however, that she would not have, nor even contemplate, surgical enhancement. Please delete all references to her “killer rack.”

1. First weird thing: I was downloading something the other night and some guy started hitting on me. This is how our exchange went

Interlocutor: are you really in ns [Nova Scotia]?
Me: why do you ask?
I: i’m in truro [a town in Nova Scotia]
Me: yes i’m in halifax
I: i’m m/40
Me: sorry you’re barking up the wrong tree
I: no i just wanted to talk
Me: sorry anyway, i only use this [program] to dl [download] and don’t like to chat on it

And that was that. Yeah, so maybe he genuinely wanted to talk. What can I say, I was multitasking, I had multiple article PDFs and websites open. I didn’t want to add chatting to my activites otherwise I’d have opened up MSN Messenger. He must have found out where I was by my IP address. I think he thought I was female because my handle had “pink” in it. But I was going by “pinky” after Pinky & the Brain, a cartoon show I used to watch when I was younger. Or he may have thought I was male and wanted to flirt anyway.

On the one hand, this incident shows how being online changes the way people relate to identity. The guy was asking for my gender and my age, something he probably wouldn’t have done if we’d met in person (I look like a twentysomething guy in my picture, right?). Because all he had to go on was my name, the guy (possibly) assumed I was female and started doing the mating dance. I would have had to explicitly tell him my gender for him to get it.

But on the other hand, the incident above also reveals how being online changes nothing at all. The guy immediately declared his age and gender and implicitly asked for mine as well. If he was genuinely interested in just chatting, how relevant would that information have been in reality? Doesn’t the Internet make it so that age and gender don’t matter? Don’t we get to transcend our bodies by being online? Evidently not, since the status of my body (namely, my age and gender) obviously mattered to this guy. A/S/L (age/sex/location) is a common query in chatrooms, so it’s not limited to this one person. Bodies matter, even on the bodiless Internet (though the other person may not have been m/40 anyway, or even just a single person).

This perspective, where the body is seen as the source of identity, mostly comes from feminist theory. In this specific case, I’m drawing upon the work of Lisa Nakamura, whose book Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet I’m using quite extensively in my research.

2. Later that night, I went to the University of California at Berkeley’s website to find out more about Ethel Regis, whose work on the Filipino diaspora I read about here. I go over to the page of the Department of Ethnic Studies and find this instead:

Yes, I admit I was reading The Onion while I was working. This was on July 25 at 11:51 PM ADT. It’s puzzling why this crew hacked this particular website. Berkeley is a rather liberal campus, and if anyone is likely to support the Lebanese it’s people from Berkeley. Second, why hack the website of the Ethnic Studies department? A lot of the people there are postcolonial and anti-imperialist thinkers, and they’re even more likely to oppose Israel’s actions in Lebanon. Don’t worry, the website was fine the next day.

Take a look at the countries that the hackers* claimed to be from: Argentina, Mexico, Germany, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Chile. They’re all over the place, aren’t they? The Internet is certainly quite good at severing people from the bonds of geography. However, look closer and you’ll realize that all of the countries mentioned are in Latin America, except for Germany. Why are these crews so concentrated in one particular area?

One answer may be language. While the Internet allows users to potentially communicate with anyone else connected to the Internet, the truth is that Internet users are segregated in several different linguistic communities. I’m guessing that these hackers operate mostly in Spanish and they probably met through some kind of Spanish-language space online: a message board, an IRC channel, whatever. Yet another example of how geography is reproduced online.

Notice also that the hackers specifically stated what countries they were from. Why did they do this? What does it matter what country they were from? Does that change their message in any way? It may be that the hackers felt proud to be non-Americans bringing down an American website (though being based in Mexico doesn’t mean you can’t be American too). You see? Nationalist pride exists online, and therefore geography does as well.

3. Someone found my blog by Googling “nova scotia rifle ass”. They ended up on my post about Canada Day, where I mentioned a rifle exactly once. Sorry, I’ve got no analytical insight into this. I’d just like to know what exactly they were looking for.

Anyway, I still haven’t done the post on nationalism and diaspora that I said I’d put up weeks ago, so that is definitely the next thing that’s appearing.

*I know that coders actually prefer these types of programmers to be called crackers, while hackers should be reserved just for really good programmers. But as far as the vast majority of the world is concerned, a hacker is an online vandal and burglar. I defer to the dictatorship of the majority.

Face to face interviews. With this one you get the most and the richest information. When you’re interviewing someone, you’re supposed to take notes not just on their answers but on the interview itself: your impressions of the other person, awkward pauses in the conversation, the tone in which things were said, and so on. You get the most of this kind of nonverbal information from face to face interviews. A lot of times you feel like you’re being deluged with a constant flow of information that you have to get down. And with face to face interviews, you can keep the whole thing going for a relatively long time (I think the longest I ever did was two hours).

Phone and VOIP interviews. Obviously, with this you don’t get as much nonverbal information. You can still tell a lot from voice, though. How is the participant feeling? Are they sick? How strongly do they feel about what they’re talking about? The thing is, you can’t keep this kind of interview going for very long. As a general rule, most people start getting restless if they talk on the phone longer than 30 minutes, unless it’s about a subject they’re interested in or they have a personal connection to the person they’re speaking to. So you have to keep phone interviews short and sweet. But they’re a lot more convenient for both the researcher and the participant.

Instant Messaging and Chat. Ok, so I’ve only done one so far. Still, here are my impressions:

1. First, there’s a lot less information you can get that isn’t explicitly told to you by your participant. You can guess at how they’re feeling by their responses but it’s not a foolproof method (though it’s not foolproof in person anyway).
2. It’s also hard to tell when someone is actually paying attention to you. The other person could be watching tv and you wouldn’t know it. It’s not so bad when they answer immediately, but when there’s a longer than normal pause, it’s impossible to tell if the participant is considering their response or have shifted their attention somewhere else. This is particularly bad because interviewers aren’t supposed to pester their participants and pressure them for answers, otherwise the person may just whip out a half-formed thought solely to satisfy the researcher.
3. The nature of IM makes it easy for numerous conversational threads to form. The participant can type something interesting, then you think, “Aha! Better follow that up,” but then they go on to say something else entirely that’s also as interesting. Interviewers are supposed to give their participants enough leeway to explore interesting tangents, but then you have to keep in mind the interesting thing that was said several dozen lines back. And it’s even harder when there are multiple items of interest that come up.
4. Connected to the previous point, it’s very easy to interrupt the other person when they’re in the middle of typing. When I’m using IM normally, I often interject when the other person is in the middle of typing, which adds to the number of conversational threads that come up. Often, it’ll be like two conversations are going on as I ask a question, then I ask another, and then the other person answers the first question and I respond to that while they answer the second question. It gets confusing until one thread ends. That is a definite no-no in interviewing, since you’re supposed to give your participants time to respond, and the constant appearance of more questions will make participants feel like they have to type faster to keep up. So what happened during the interview was that I kept starting to type and then deleting what I had when I saw that my participant still had something to say. I just had to keep watching out not to fall into my normal IM habits.
5. Finally, you can keep IM and chat interviews going for a relatively long time, longer than phone interviews. This probably has to do with the fact that most people spend more time sitting around typing on computers than they do talking on the phone. And being on the computer means you can multitask, so you can keep an eye on the kettle you set to boil or play solitaire or something.

Anyway, that’s what my experience has been with interviews. Your mileage may vary.

Also, thanks to the fact that interviews have become my top priority, I’ve been reading the books that I really should have finished reading by now but kept setting aside. So the reading I procrastinated on before I’m doing now because I want to procrastinate on something else. I’m reading lots of good stuff that I really could have used earlier. But remember, the early bird may get the worm, but the lazy worm will live another day. Of course, in my case it’s the lazy worm that gets eaten. Maybe the bird is also lazy?

Partly it’s because I’ve been setting the ground for discussing Filipino bloggers. Filipinos don’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s hard to talk about them without talking about the Philippines. This is especially true when you want to discuss nationalism and national identity.

But how do I define Filipinos and how do I define blogs? And how do I define Filipino bloggers?

Well, I define blogs using the most inclusive definition: a website that displays dated entries in reverse chronological order. I’m not interested in hairsplitting between online journals and blogs. When people make this distinction between online journals and blogs, they usually define online journals as being about personal issues in the author’s life while blogs are about larger issues (i.e., politics or information technology) which are covered in more of an essay format. I don’t agree with this distinction, which I think is partly an attempt to exclude female and youthful bloggers from the blogging world. Online journals are dominated by females and youths, and the attempt to define them as merely journalers creates a scheme where females and youths talk about who’s dating whom on journals whereas older and more masculine bloggers talk about big stuff like the war in Iraq. In other words, the mushy emotional stuff is for online journals, but the serious stuff is for blogs. And it’s no coincidence that the mushy emotional stuff is mostly covered by women and youths: it’s girly and childish, but the serious stuff is grownup and mature (i.e., masculine). This follows larger patterns in popular media, where the contributions of women and youths are devalued and where the emotional and personal are seen as superficial and shallow.

Since I don’t follow this distinction, then it should be obvious that a lot of the bloggers I examine are women and younger people. Quite a few are on Xanga and Myspace, too.

Now then, how do I define Filipino? It’s not really so important how I define Filipino, though, the relevant question is how I define Filipino bloggers. The definition I use is also very simple. Filipino bloggers are those bloggers that identify themselves as Filipino.

Actually, I don’t really mean that. What I mean is that for the purposes of my research, I am only studying those bloggers that identify themselves as Filipino. This means that I don’t cover those bloggers who consider themselves Filipino but don’t identify themselves as such in their blogs. Partly it’s for reasons of pragmatism. How would I be able to tell a blogger was Filipino if they didn’t tell me they were? It’s not like I could tell just by sight, since someone who calls themself Filipino could very well be mistaken for Chinese, Indonesian, or another ethnic group. And not all bloggers put up pictures of themselves in the first place. Sure, I know some bloggers that don’t mention being Filipino, but not enough to be able to base a research project on them. At least, not according to how I’ve designed the project; I can think of several ways you can conduct a project by just studying a couple of people or even just one person, but I’m not interested in the questions that only that type of research can answer.

I’m also relying on self-identification because I don’t want to impose my own definition of “Filipino” on the people I’m studying. Identity isn’t something that’s already there, but instead something that people actively create. No one is born Filipino, they’re raised that way. “Filipino” is a label that a bunch of people have decided to share, but it’s not some eternal and unchanging category like solid, liquid, and gas. It’s a label that has had different meanings at different times. Not even Filipinos have always been Filipinos — “Filipino” used to only refer to Spanish people born in the Philippines, or what are known as criollos or creoles in other parts of the colonized world. If I try and impose my definition of Filipino on the world, then I’ll be trying to set in stone what has always been in motion, rather like trying to put the wind in a box. It’s not the wind if it’s no longer moving, it’s just empty air. Would I then be studying Filipino bloggers, or would I be studying my definition of Filipino bloggers?

You see? It’s tough work having to think about this all the time.

First, the course seems to define culture as art: the student studies, among other things, “Filipino paintings and other forms of visual arts . . . Philippine rituals, dances, musical forms, plays and films.” Well and good, but the implicit message is that culture is superficial. How much of daily life do you spend dancing or watching films? Not a lot, so this culture as art idea seems to be saying that Philippine culture is just something Filipinos indulge in every now and then, but it otherwise doesn’t impact their everyday lives.

The course also seems to define culture as being prestigious. Notice that tv shows aren’t mentioned, and I suspect the films being reviewed are serious stuff like Lino Brocka’s work and not trashy like, say, Darna. Wouldn’t the stuff with popular appeal impact on more people, and therefore reflect the concerns of more Filipinos than high-minded artistic fare? If the purpose of the course is to understand the Philippines, you would think understanding the vast majority of Filipinos would be a very high goal.

The course also focuses on the spectacular instead of the everyday. Dances and plays are certainly nice to watch and participate in, but as I said, they don’t really influence that many Filipinos and aren’t a concern for most. Filipinos in the Philippines, ask yourselves this, when was the last time you danced the tinikling? Probably when you were still kids in school, right? Now, when was the last time you sent a text message? The Philippines has been claimed by some to be the most texting-crazy country in the world. I would argue that studying the use of texting in the Philippines would give someone a greater understanding of Filipinos than studying any number of dances would. The same for studying the demographic composition of the Philippines or the way social class works in the country (for example, how most middle class Filipinos have maids, and how that is not the same among the middle class in, say, Australia). However, if you define culture as being spectacular, then this kind of stuff would not apply, since it is just the boring everyday stuff which also happens to be the stuff that most Filipinos deal with everyday.

Having said all that, I wouldn’t mind enrolling in the course if I had the time. I certainly have the money, which is no small thing when you consider that quite a lot of Filipinos in the Philippines don’t. I’m curious to see exactly what this course would say about the Philippines. Would the course mention that Emilio Aguinaldo, the official first president of the Philippines, had his rival Andres Bonifacio shot because of Bonifacio’s popular appeal despite the fact that they were both supposed to be on the same side? Would it also mention that Aguinaldo collaborated with the Japanese during the occupation of the Philippines in the Second World War?

I’m not trying to be overly critical of the Philippines, I’m just pointing out that all countries have things they shouldn’t be proud of, and I wonder whether the course would take this harsh realist approach instead of the nationalist rhapsodizing that I expect.

Still, this kind of whitewashing should be placed in its context. The Philippines is a country of multiple languages, ethnicities, and religions. It doesn’t fit too well into the ideal of “one country, one people” that nation-states aspire to. It’s a lot harder to sustain the fiction of a Philippine nation when there are so many obvious divisions within the population, and the constant efforts by the Philippine nation-state and its intellectuals to promote the Philippines should be understandable from this perspective. To put it simply, Filipinos have to be constantly reminded that the Philippines exists because they get so many reminders everyday that it doesn’t.

The focus of the course on traditional dances and such reminds me of how the Germans invented Germany. What we know as Germany today was divided into several different principalities, kingdoms, bishoprics, and city-states until the middle of the 19th century. Sure, the people all spoke the same language (in the same way that Scottish people and Texans speak the same language, i.e., with varying degrees of intelligibility), but they had different rulers, somewhat different customs, and even different religions. “Germany” was a mishmash of different peoples. However, once German unification started, the commonalities between these different peoples also started to be highlighted. One of these projects of cultural unification involved the collection of folk tales. “See, Germans, this is something we all have in common — Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, the Pied Piper of Hamlin.” That was part of what the project was saying. The collection of folk tales was one of the ways in which the German Volk was constructed, the German people. And we see the same process taking place in the Philippines with the Filipiniana Online course today.

Anyway, I have more critical analyses of this Filipiniana Online course, but they’ll have to wait for another day.

Now, I’ve just found out that I’ve gained a couple more readers. Yay me. However, I feel compelled to state a few things up front.

First, this research blog is not meant to be a long-term project. It’s a part of my research, and when the research ends, so will this blog. In my proposal, I state that I plan on keeping the blog alive for at least a year after my research is done, so expect Sarapen to still be up by December 2007. However, just because the blog will be up doesn’t mean I’ll still be posting. Maybe, maybe not, it depends on when I lose interest and when I start not having enough time to update.

Second, the audience for Sarapen was originally supposed to be the Filipino bloggers that I was reading. Since I’m going to start contacting those bloggers now, it seems that they will once again be my target audience. My new readers are anthropology people, I’m guessing, since they were led her either by the antropologi post on me or by the anthropology posts I’ve left at various LiveJournal communities. So if it seems that I’m going light on theory, it’s because I am. I’m trying to write in a way that will make my project accessible to the non-anthros that I want to speak to. That’s also why I keep linking theory to personal anecdotes.

Third, another reason that I set up Sarapen was to gain some insights into the minds of my participants. I’m keeping a reflexive diary so that I can keep track of my reactions. For example, discovering that I have readers has prompted me to start posting more often. I’ve never posted more than twice in one week, but now here I am doing exactly that. I also keep the reflexive diary so I won’t have trouble finding out exactly what actions I, the researcher, have done that have affected the subject that I’m researching. I think I’ll come back to that in a later post.

Actually, I’m getting kind of hungry right now. I got up at 11 AM, had brunch, went to the library, and have been catching up on my email and the various LiveJournal communities I’m part of (I got a headsup on some more theory). And I’ve been writing these posts. That’s enough work for one day, right? I can’t seriously be expected to work with an empty stomach, and after my merienda it’ll be time for karate. When I get back, I may make some chili or just heat up some leftovers. Toss some salad, wash the dishes, do my laundry, and whoops, no time left to work at my computer if I want to get up early tomorrow to go to the gym. And I hate working at home anyway.

So there you go, a day in the life of an Internet researcher. Just to remind you that the person behind the blog you’re reading also eats, sleeps, and occassionally works when he feels like it.

And if you know what I was getting at with the title of this post, I will congratulate you on your taste in music.

It’s also funny to relate how Sarapen was discovered, I actually posted something about an anthropologist working with Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan over in LiveJournal’s Anthropologist Community. That turned out to also be something Lorenz blogged about, then he (or she? they?) mentioned that the issue had also been discussed in LJ. Then I suppose they followed the link to my LiveJournal page, and from there followed the link to here, the real blog.

Anyway, I’m kind of embarrassed to be discovered since I don’t like how long and rambling my previous posts have been. My first couple of posts were edited, but I decided that practice didn’t fit entirely into blogging’s spirit of spontaneity. Lately I’ve just sat down with a definite subject in mind but let my mind and fingers roam as they will. I haven’t been liking the excessive verbiage that’s been resulting. I think that any essays that I write from now on will have to go through some rethinking before being posted online. I was already thinking of doing that in the first place.

I set up Sarapen partly hoping to use it to communicate with the bloggers I’ve been reading. I’ve only contacted a few so far, but I planned for things to intensify once I started interviews, so I thought it would be nice if there was already something for the bloggers to look at. I’ve been blogging with this future audience in mind. However, I’ve just met with my supervisor and she was pleased at how much data I’d gathered while she was in New Zealand. She told me that I might not even need to do interviews, since I’ve already got so much and I’m supposed to be finished writing by December anyway. So now I’m wondering who my target audience will be.

When you get an education in critical thinking, what often happens is that you start analyzing almost everything you come across. I remember shopping for clothes immediately after seeing a documentary film about the material conditions of sweatshop workers and suddenly thinking that the workers I’d just seen describing their exploitation at the hands of multinational corporations were very likely the same ones who’d made the shirts I was pawing through. Suddenly, the abstract concepts of gendered exploitation and flexible labour became a concrete piece of fabric in my hands. I hadn’t planned on buying anything anyway, I was just enjoying the act of shopping itself, but that realization lessened my enjoyment of consumerism.

A similar thing happened to me during Canada Day. While I was being shown a C7 assault rifle and being quoted arcane military jargon, I was also thinking about how I was actively being indoctrinated into the ideology of Canadian nationalism. Go Canada! Canada Kicks Ass! Proud to be Canadian! Those were the slogans on various t-shirts I’d seen, and they were the essential messages I was supposed to be receiving from the whole Canada Day celebration. Still, I couldn’t help thinking about how identity was being manipulated for the purposes of the Canadian government.

Nation-states always manipulate identity, and it is in the interests of the Canadian government to make Canadians feel patriotic (governments and nation-states aren’t exactly the same thing, but they fit together well enough for the purposes of this post). Think of Canada as a hockey team, Canadians as the fans, and the Canadian government as the team’s owner, and you’ll see why marketing Canada is such a big deal. The profit that the Canadian government gets from successfully marketing Canada doesn’t come just from having Canadians pay their taxes and follow the law. No, the Canadian government profits from having Canadians believe that Canada exists.

If you think about it, a country is in many ways a state of mind. If Canadians stopped believing Canada existed, then it would pretty much stop existing. Canadians would stop paying their taxes, following Canadian law, listening to Canadian political leaders, and so on. Not just that, but other countries would also stop respecting those things and might start grabbing pieces of Canada to add to their own territories. This is serious business, which is why governments take national identity so very seriously. So you see, countries are like Tinkerbell: they can only survive if you clap your hands and believe in them (clapping is optional). Except that Tinkerbell doesn’t have cops and soldiers to remind you that she exists and that it would be a very bad idea to forget her.

In my case, I’ve gotten a lot of information just from googling the names of prominent researchers, even ones that don’t do Internet stuff. They’re all connected to universities, so they usually have a faculty or departmental page where you can get copies of some of their articles (or even books if you’re lucky). Many even have their own websites and blogs. It’s in the interests of academics to have their work read by others, so this kind of open sharing is unsurprising. What’s particularly interesting, though, is when I move from reading other people’s work to communicating with the authors themselves. I’ve had fruitful discussions with Internet researchers, not just with professors but also with other grad students doing research on similar topics. The different ways I’ve found other Internet researchers is interesting: through email, through blogs, and through mailing lists. I’ve only met one of them in person, and I didn’t actually meet her per se, since I attended a presentation she was giving without knowing that I already “knew” her, and only found out afterwards who she was, when it was already too late to do anything. Two ships passing in the night.

What happened was that I attended a conference and went to a certain presentation that was supposed to be about community online. I went, found out that there had been a mixup in the program, but I stayed anyway. Later on, I discovered who the presenter had been. Life went on, I found that person’s blog and said we’d been two feet away from each other without realizing it. Then she said, “Aren’t you So-and-so’s student? When I told him that I was doing Internet research, he said that he had a student working on Filipino bloggers and said he’d put me in touch with you. But now it’s redundant, since you’ve found me anyway.

It’s fascinating to discover firsthand how small the world is. Still, it wasn’t such a big coincidence, since academia is structured in a way that facilitates linkages across continents. Think of how many people an average professor is connected to, how many students they’ve taught, how many professors they’ve studied under, and how many classmates they’ve had. Quite a lot, so if two randomly selected academics should discover that they’re connected in some way, it’s not really a surprise. Besides, my story took place at a conference, which are designed to create connections between the people who attend.

Why do I care about networks? Because nowadays, people’s social networks extend online, in ways similar to what I’ve discussed about myself. And this is one of the things I’m studying in my research: networks, not just social networks, but networks of blogs and networks of bloggers. While I was contacting other Internet researchers I was also building a network of Internet researchers for myself. That, or I was linking into an already existing network. When you study networks, you’re never entirely sure that you’re not constructing what you’re studying.

It’s also in the nature of networks to constantly be expanding. People make connections, and those people go on to make other connections, and so on. So it’s kind of hard to study something that’s always changing. But more on that in a later post.

Networks, people. Not just computer networks, but networks in general. That’s what I’m studying. And I hope now you understand why.

Bonus points if you remember what movie the title of my post is from. It’s very relevant to the topic.

Sayang pula, walang pera.
Sayang puti, walang salapi.

That is a children’s rhyming chant from the Philippines. Specifically, it’s a Tagalog rhyming chant. There are different versions, but I suspect mine is slightly wrong. What can I say, it’s been years since I learned all this stuff. My brother says it’s “Sayang pula, tatlong pera” and so on, and my uncle adds the verse:

Sipit namimilipit
Gintong Pilak
Namumulaklak
Sa tabi ng DAGAT!

He also says that there are more verses that he can’t remember. But what does the rhyme mean? You got me, I only have a Grade 4 education in Tagalog. I think it’s a nonsense rhyme anyway. “Kutsilyo” is knife, “almasen” is warehouse (in Spanish), and “carabao” is water buffalo. The “sayang pula” verse makes no sense to me at all: Too bad it’s red, there’s no money, too bad it’s white, there’s no money? What is that supposed to mean? I originally remembered this as “oras pula” and “oras puti” or “red time” and “white time”, but no one else in my family remembers this version, so perhaps I just made it up.

My uncle’s verse is more intelligible. I don’t know what the first line means, the Tagalog is too deep for my pitiful Taglish to decode. “Gintong pilak” should probably be “Ginto’t pilak” or “gold and silver”. Then it would be, “gold and silver flower beside the sea” for the rest of the verse.

I know, this is really muddled. Still, this confusion helps to illustrate several points I’d like to make about migration, diasporas, and identity. First, my admittedly poor Tagalog language skills are not unusual for second generation Filipinos or for 1.5 generation people like me. This probably has to do with the fact that 1st generation Filipinos are already relatively proficient at English compared to other immigrants, and therefore their children have less incentive to learn Tagalog. The reason so many Filipinos are already fluent in English, though, is that the Philippines was once a colony of the United States. Even though the Philippines was officially granted independence in 1946, the colonial period still exerts a strong influence on events today. It’s common for ex-colonies to supply immigrants to the former colonial master — look, for example, at France, where Algerians are a significant minority, or look at the United Kingdom, where people from the Caribbean can be found in abundance. In other words, even today colonizers still profit from their former empires. In order to understand the present, one must turn to the past.

Now, second of all, you might wonder why I decided to name my blog after a Tagalog rhyming chant. I did it partly because of nostalgia for the Philippines. I remember my childhood fondly and the chant reminds me of it. This is something many immigrants do, which is, they construct a homeland of memory. People migrate for all sorts of reasons, but that migration is felt first and foremost as an emotional change. Weather, culture shock, downward mobility: that’s all important, but to many, migration is personal before it is anything else. Migration is perceived through personal differences instead of through larger structural and environmental differences (though we should not forget that the personal is political and that the individual is always caught up in the society at large).

My third and final point is on identity. I chose Sarapen to mark out my Filipino-ness. But why is being Filipino so important to me? Why did I feel the need to tell everyone on the Internet about it? I certainly didn’t tell anyone that I’m a gamer or a fan of V for Vendetta (until now, that is). And why mark out being Filipino and not being Canadian? Or Ontarian? Certainly, I feel as much of an Ontario Canadian as I do a Filipino Caviteño. But when you live in Canada, then most everyone you know is Canadian. Why would you feel the need to constantly point out that you’re Canadian as well?

Instead, as Stuart Hall observed, identity begins in difference. Instead of an identity being constructed positively from what is (Filipinos speak Tagalog, are from the Philippines, etc.), identity begins from asserting what it is not (Filipinos are not born in Canada, are not white, etc.). Having established what you are not, then you can establish what you are: a Tagalog speaker, an immigrant, a visible minority, and all the other things that make up being a Filipino in Canada.

A personal anecdote might help to make things clearer. When I was living in the province of Ontario, I never really thought about my Ontario-ness. When I moved to Nova Scotia, I suddenly felt very keenly that I was an Ontarian. Suddenly I started feeling a certain kinship with other people from Ontario, even though I probably wouldn’t have even given them a second glance back in Ontario. But talking to people who knew that Sudbury was in Northern Ontario and that Mike Harris had been a mistake as premier was all of a sudden a novel and worthwhile experience. I only started to recognize my Ontario-ness, though, after I kept coming up against the fact that I wasn’t Nova Scotian. Tantallon? Cape Breton? Are these real places? What were all these people talking about? It’s not that Nova Scotians were trying to make me feel unwelcome, it was just that they were coming from a different mindset, which made me realize how different my mindset was. And once I realized I was different, I started to realize in what ways I was different. And hence my Ontario-ness in Nova Scotia. As they say, there’s no one more Scottish than a Scotsman out of Scotland.

I’ll also note that identity is a problematic thing. Not all Filipinos in Canada, after all, are Tagalog speakers, and not all of them are immigrants. And not all Filipinos even actually identify themselves as Filipino. Once you start making claims about a particular identity, you start excluding certain people. If you don’t recognize that identity is not an objective fact, but instead a bunch of subjective claims, then you won’t see the differences and the hybridity that people actually live their lives in. No one is always and only Filipino, but they are also Canadians, doctors, children, Ilocano, and New Yorkers, sometimes all at the same time. That is what identity is — a shifting and ever-changing mass.

Well, that was certainly a long post. But as you can see, even something as simple as the title of this blog has hidden complexities. There’s a lot more that I could write about Sarapen, but this is probably enough to let you know just how complex social phenomena are. If the title of a blog is this complex, how much more complex is something like immigration? Too complex even for a lifetime of research. Even with how much I’ve narrowed down my project, I still feel that I could spend a lot, lot more time on my research. But that is how research inevitably is. I just hope I’ve given you some idea of a few of the issues that I’m thinking about.