""Indians": Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History"

Alright so before i begin, i just wrote this whole blog out, and thought i had saved and published the post, but it didn't, i pressed the wrong button or something, so now i'm a little pissed but here goes. I will attempt to recreate what i just said:
Ok, so i pleasantly surprised with how this essay turned out. Judging from the title i figured it was going to be a long rant about how hard it's been to be an Indian since the white man showed up. I should have known by now that whenever i think that about something in this book, i'm almost always surprised to be looking at something in a way i had never thought of before (although in my defense i had heard a quote once about how if you always plan on the worst, your life will always be full of happy surprises). It's not that i don't feel bad for the indians, because i do feel that they were mistreated, it's just that i wanted to hear something different and different was definitely what we got.
We were told in the preface that this was less of an essay about indians than a "behind-the-scenes" look at this woman compiling "evidence" about what she was going to write about, which happened to be the american indians. She starts it off by giving an anecdote which outlines the difference between an ideal of something and the reality of something. For modern americans, we romanticize the indian and what it meant to be one. This part reminded me of "the loss of the creature", when we see indians we want to see our ideal of what they should be, based on movies, etc. We want to experience "it", the authentic feel of what we think it is to be indian.
She goes on after this to explain that she is writing a paper and gathering all the facts she can get about the indians and the relations they had with early settlers until present. what she ended up getting was a problem that arises when none of the "facts" seem to fit very well with each other. She attempts to circumvent this problem by going to other sources, and then first hand accounts, and yet what she finds is an intense degree of perspectivism. Every has an influence acting upon how they see and feel and event, therefore everyone roughly sees in essence, a different reality of the same event. we see things as we are taught to and how we feel we should. some people have bad experiences with a group of people and search out (i believe unconsciously) for anything that backs up what they felt or thought when having the experience. Same goes for the people who had the good experience. What does that mean? truth is subject to perspectivism and is intrinsically relativistic?
This is an interesting dilemma and she ends by saying:
"The moral problem that confronts me now is not that i can never have any facts to go on, but that the work i do is not directed toward solving the kinds of problems that studying the history of European-Indian relations has awakened me to."
Basically, her search for answers led her to more questions. By addressing the problem of truth, she is doing what many others have done, ignore what it is we should be focusing on in order not to repeat it, but how does one do that without all the facts?

Panopticism

Scariest thing ever. i honestly got a little bit of the chills reading this although i thought it would make for a really cool /creepy movie, with people living out their lives in this state, millions of people constantly monitered, like a big brother type thing but even more intense.
Extremely difficult to get through. kept finding myself lost in a daydream where i was one of the guards watching the prisoners, and i felt sick at being there. i wanted to help but my fear of getting caught and being put into a cell was too overwhelming for me to try anything.
I liked the use of plague to demostrate at what point people will give up all freedom in order to have security. For all that we talk about freedom, it really doesn't take too much for people to surrender all of it in the hopes that someday they will get it back, at least partially; along with their lives. The scary thing to me is that once someone has that much power over another, it can sometimes be hard to let them go completely free again, or at least without some sort of tag attached. From that point on you will be in perpetual debt to the person that not only saved your life, but set you free afterwords. You will never quite be free from their clutches because power is a funny thing and once men have it over another man, it can be hard to get it out of that man's head. He will want compensation for freeing you, even if it's what he promised to do in the first place.
Of course i don't mean all men are like this but you never can really be sure i suppose who is or isn't which is what scares me about the whole concept of control.

Utopia Achieved

Oh man, where to begin with this one, it really wasn't fair making us read this one, because it made me feel outraged, ashamed, proud (in a strangely abstract way), and slightly sickened. i was forced into many mental tangents which forced me to take much longer to read this normally.
i noticed every compliment he gave to America managed to be an unapologetic back handed compliment, juxtaposed with a put down on Europe that made it out to be a tragic hero, led down a dark path in a desperate imitation of America, because of what America has that Europe will just never quite attain. It's funny how biased a person can be but at the same time speak alot of truth (although right here i'm simply speaking on my own behalf).
i have often lamented the non culture that makes up American identity (or non-identity). this is what causes me to hold our founding fathers in such high esteem and completely reject christianity. christianity to me is a transference of values that are alien to me, and should seem alien to anyone who can think for themselves and has a culture that pre dates it's suppressive take over (again i'm talking for myself).
this essay also reminds me of one i began to write in 101 about why we shouldn't strive to be perfect, because utopia is a false ideal that makes you inhuman by definition. Baudrillard seems to be making the same point in a way, but his attack (or critique) is on the American way of life and how it compares with the European way (or what he considers the European way). i did agree with him on certain points though and at one point i was seriously called into question about my case for freedom. i agreed that we have too much space for our own good. we can't appreciate what we take for granted. suburban sprawl is about the most disgusting thing i've ever seen. an example of this is when i lived in las vegas, it took me ten minutes to get to my nearest friend's house. the speed limit was 45 mph the whole way there and i usually went 55 but it still took about ten minutes. sometimes more and never less. why? we both lived in the suburbs, and there was endless expanses of unused desert land in between our houses and gigantic, black, ugly parking lots that were precursors for ugly utilitarian buildings with subway and vons labels on them. convenient? maybe, my values don't particularly fall in the convenient category. i'd rather pay extra for something nicer. this is fucking America, the richest country in the world (or was) and yet we have a wal mart and mcdonalds on every corner. i'm not attacking these businesses, this is a free market society and WE determine what exists and what doesn't based on what WE want, and WE want dirt cheap products any way that WE can get them.
i'm a big supporter of freedom though and the right to choose, letting the invisible hand guide our lives, but while reading this i definitely began to question my libertarian values, since that's what America was founded on but it doesn't seem that we can hold on to them. when we're free, we're bored. we don't just follow the program, we want to write everyones program and get into everyone's business. unfortunately, when you're free and rich, you lack meaning, and therefore must "save the world" to make yourself feel valid. maybe suffering is a good thing. maybe it's what teaches us appreciation. maybe we shouldn't be so free? now i'm not arguing for hobbes or bentham but maybe social injustice actually does us good? maybe meaning is really only gained through struggle? but struggle for what? freedom? equality? if it's good to have these things (if only to struggle to free ourselves of them) then what happens when we actualize our goals? America? where we claim to actualize but have really have only supressed the knowledge of these things? hmmm. good read.

On "Ways of Seeing"

I had very mixed opinions about this piece, a sort of love/hate relationship, if you will. I got lost half the time and at other times extremely bored with the terminology and the subject matter. Art has always been very subjective to me, either I like it or I don't, and nine times out of ten I probably won't like it. I flew through the art museum in Munich, caring little for all the "priceless originals" in there, only stopping now and again to look at the obscure paintings that really seemed to say something to me, which almost never happened. I've never had much appreciation for different artists but reading this did open my eyes a little and I found myself wishing that I knew some more about the different styles of art and so on. I also really liked the way he tied in the way we see things to how our culture treats art nowadays and how it's been treated ever since people realized that it was "worth" something (monetarily). It saddens me that it takes the mention of money to make people think that something actually has something valuable about it (non monetarily).
I like how the "experts" now talk only of the history and what we can learn about history or certain figures through the art (including the artist) when all of this is somewhat immaterial compared to what the painting actually seems to bring to the table. It is a personal interpretation of the present (for the artist, through this eyes, his way of seeing) as well as a chance for us to interpret what exactly it says to us and how we see which is something I think few people ever do when looking at "art" (including myself).
I also have found myself partly placing a mysticism on things including art, although in a different way than he puts it (I least I hope so), I do my "mysticism" in a personally interpretive way, like entering a meaningful dream when I'm in the presence of a favorite picture. It's the same as when you wake up after that dream and spend the next three days trying to understand what you were shown (or what you let yourself see), you put the art in context of your own life and get what messages you need from it, and usually getting something new every time (well at least this should be the case if you are actively working on expanding yourself mentally) .
I'll talk more on this later. sleep.

The Achievement of Desire

Well after painfully racking myself to try and finish the essay about cockfighting and police
raids, I found it surprising easy to finish the Achievement of Desire and really enjoying it. It is
the story of a man growing up second generation of Mexican descendant (I'm not sure if that
makes sense but I'm not sure how to phrase it) in California and desiring to be more like his teachers and less like his parents. He shows us his progression through the education process from his early years to his final year as a grad student working on his final paper and the final realization of what he has become and what he lost in order to get him there.
We follow little Richard in grade school and watch as he turns into an anxious and ambitious student and embarrassed and reclusive son. He becomes obsessed with imitating his beloved teachers and seems to take the meaning of education (or the process) at face value, believing that reading and understanding themes was the way to become "educated" and thus confident and teacher-like.

Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight

In one word or less? Overly verbose, informative but drawn out and never ending. Ok so maybe I need a few more than one (or less). I'm not what I would considered a detailed, analytical thinker who can run off hard facts all day long. I feed off raw emotion (definitely mixed with some actually facts or wisdom you could say) and not emotion displayed behind a thick glass wall of dry facts and drawn out observations.
I found myself constantly at the bottom of the page wondering what the hell I had just read and questioning whether or not I could just keep going since the plot wasn't always readily available in my mind and where the book was didn't always seem relevant. When I finished however, I did realize it was all tied together and did make sense. It's a society that's not unlike any other in that they have their rituals and superstitions and are basically friendly, but also have a collective "shadow" side where they can more easily display their more base sides (through violence, gambling, etc.), yet there is something honorable and complex about even this. I think his point was that when you stop looking at a society merely from an outsider's point of view you start to realize that every culture is linked somehow and that how we are as a people comes out very pronounced in the ways we do things as a community, if we do anything at all as a community (doing nothing at all can still speak volumes about us as private citizens too). You really can start to understand the Balinese on a deeper level if you simply take the time to study their pass time, which happens to be cockfighting.
That being said, it was still pretty boring and difficult to get through, his writing style is so dry and almost lackluster. I'm sure cockfighting is very exciting and intense in real life, yet I was falling asleep at his descriptions, and wanting nothing more than to just be finished.

In Search of Our Mother's Gardens

Well I liked this one quite a bit, I could definately feel this woman's emotions seeping out meaningfully into her essay. I liked her ability to fuse quotes from (opressed) female authors from different times with different circumstances to her own time and circumstance, or not really her personal one only, but that of the women she is defending.
I also liked her beginning which talked about Jean Toomer and his travels through the South and his descriptive encounters with the black woman. There was something musical and sad about the whole thing that I found very captivating.
I'm finding out more and more that the stories I'm usually gravitated towards are the ones about tragedy and the loss of something irreplacable. There is a message of hope in there but it's almost drowned in sorrow, which I definately loved (although now whoever is reading this thinks I'm either depressed or feed off it, which is probably somewhat true). Even though her particular story dealing with a specific struggle, it's a familiar story and one I keep going through my head in one way or another, as I think many others also do though they may not be fully conscience of it.
I get so caught up thinking and seeing through a man's eyes, it's refreshing to see the same dramas played out from the other perspective.
"Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength - in search of my mother's garden, I found my own."
Good stuff.