Summer Reading, cont'd

A lot of great suggestions come in over the "comment" function, so I'll add in links to all of them in the next week or so. If I add another thing to my to do list, I think I might crumble into a Million Little Pieces (get it???). Million Little Pieces is a memoir that came out a few years ago, caused all sorts of controvery.

Quotation of the Day

I don't have much to write today (or the energy, rather). But, I found this poem and instantly loved it.

I doubt sometimes whether
a quiet & unagitated life
would have suited me - yet I
sometimes long for it.

-Byron

Four-legged Fiasco!

Here are two pictures of my favorite dog, ever, Bailey (named after George Bailey from the movie It's a Wonderful Life).
The first picture is Bailey (who I called "The Four-legged Fiasco") with his then girlfriend "Snort".

The second picture is Bailey, in one of his more wistful, PhD-like moments, pondering the cold, snow and wind in Rogers Park, Chicago.

Summer Reading - Updated!

We're a serious bunch. Not a light read in here. Well, here is a list of JUST the new suggestions, most from other people!

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer This is a link to a page the has the first page (or so) of this book. The following link describes the book
Description of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Children of Men by PD James (the links for this wont work yet)

The Rent Tent by Anita Diamant

What I Wish today

What I wish is that my actions for social justice and human understanding might move people in a fraction of the way Mahalia Jackson's words moved so many.

"I wish I knew how
it would feel to be free,
I wish I could break all the chains holding me,
I wish I could say all the things that I should say
say 'em outload, say 'em clear for the whole round world to hear

I wish I could share all the love that's in my heart
Remove all the bars that keep us apart
I wish you could know what it means to be me
then you'd see and agree that every man should be free"

-Mahalia Jackson, "I Wish I knew"

Disclosure and trust

Well, slowly I'll start adding in some postings about my life as a graduate student in medical anthropology. My particular focus right now is on learning to listen to and understand the stories of people living with HIV/AIDS, particularly African-Americans in the urban north.

I gave a presentation at a conference a few years back on Disclosure and trust and I just found a link to it on the internet, so I'm including the link here. I think that you have to cut and paste it! Sorry about that.

http://ari.ucsf.edu/programs/policy_pwpresources_research.aspx

Why Krishna in the Bathroom?

It's hard to explain, let's start with that. The phrase Krishna in the Bathroom really sums up a lot of what my experience has been as the child of an Indian man who survived the 1947 Partition and an midwestern farm-girl. It's not a phrase meant to offend or to be more witty than the next person.

The truth of the matter is that I while I am absolutely an American (whatever that means!) - I was born in New York City, I was never taught Hindi and I wasn't raised around a lot of other Indian families. I am American. Sort of.

Now, my father may disagree, but I do also feel uncomfortably at home in India. The trouble is that I'm a cultural clutz in India. I say and do the "wrong" thing ALL the time. Sometimes, I'm able to laugh it off, but more often I CAN'T seem to let my cultural mis-steps go because I feel the need to "get it right." But, in India, I can't get it right. No matter how much I love my family there, or how different I am from the other American backpackers, I am not Indian. This leaves me in a wierd space. I am sort of like Krishna in the Bathroom - inappropriate in the setting, with an interesting history, and perceived completely differently by the people who pass by me.

In the late 1990s I went to visit my family in India. After the usual lazy mornings of chai and re-acquainting, re-adjusting the heavy, humid air and palpable dust settled on every surface, we set out to shop. Shopping is, I must admit, how I spend a lot of my time in India. On one trip to a local market I saw a beautiful ceramic wall hanging of Lord Krishna (I'll upload a picture of it as soon as I can!). I knew that the God on the hanging was important, but I didn't know who He was. Like a horribly stereotypical American tourist, I bought this wall-hanging because I thought that the colors would look good on the newly painted orange walls at my house in New Jersey. In the bathroom, to be specific.

About a year of so later, some of my family from India (my aunt, my cousins and and my cousins children, to be exact) came to spend some time with us in New Jersey. I had recently bought a house so my father brought them all over to "visit." I gave them the customary American tour of my house and then we sat around to make uncomfortable conversation. I loaded everyone up on coffee and biscuts which led to numerous trips to the bathroom. One by one, they went to the "loo". My aunt came up to me later and tapped my on the shoulder. "Cheenia," she said, using my pet name. Her voice was kind, sugary and deep. Nothing in her tone was angry, yet I knew I had done something wrong. "You know, that is Krishna in there. He is a very important God to us, you know. Like your Jesus. You wouldn't put Jesus in the bathroom, would you?" Like my Jesus.

I wasn't sure whether to get into a discussion about the fact that I had not been raised with religion and thus there was no "my Jesus" or whether to apologize and take Krishna out of the bathroom. I had offended my aunt, who was a deeply religious person and although I was angry at being told what to hang where in my house, I also was ashamed for not feeling differently about it.

The truth is that I took Krishna out of the bathroom while they were over and left him out of the bathroom for about a month while I felt guilty for being such a cultural clutz. Then, I put him back up. And to this day, over five years later, I think about this incident, and I'm not sure that there was a right thing to do.

Sometimes, to quiet my nerves about this, I think of Bari-Mama who, when faced with some of our cultural differences would wave her hand, turn her head a bit to the side and say, "You see, beta, this is our way of life here, this is our custom. Finish."

More later. . . .

The Dreaded Memoir

So, we are in the time of the memoir, particularly the ethnic memoir.

Here is a list of some of the memoir-like books that I have read recently that I think do a good job of not over-romanticizing the hardships of life and honestly portraying the characters as multi-dimensional.

All Over but the Shoutin - Rick Bragg
Truth and Beauty - Ann Patchett
The Namesake (one of the best I've ever read) - Jhumpa Lahiri
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
Expecting Adam - Martha Beck
Where is the Mango Princess? - Cathy Crimmins
girl, interrupted - Susana Kaysen

OK. I must stop myself before I add everybook that I've ever read. why don't any of you out there who like memoirs send in a few suggestions? I think you can use the comment fuction!

Cricket, smoking, studies and all things Indian

in the late night elevator in my on-campus housing, I ran into a guy who I, unabashedly, asked for a cigarette. I had been quit from cigarettes for a year, but I started up last week and I just can't fall asleep without a cigarette or two. Call me crazy, but cigarettes make me sleepy.

We talked about India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India since it turns out that our families are from the same city (New Delhi) and experienced the 1947 partition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India. He's got some intersting views on how to life and on smoking. he thinks that "we are young" and that it's not a big deal to smoke now. I said that smoking now might not be so bad, but if we keep smoking we'll end up smokers for life, right?
I mentioned my friend Jen Cardew's research on smokers as social people, which you can read more about on her blog http://www.anthroblogs.org/jcardew/

This, again, indicates that smokers are socialpeople. Hmmm... My first "friend" in Detroit (not through classes) and it was over smoking a cigarette together. Hm.......

My second cousins' wife, Mitra, wrote a book called Suburban Sahib, http://www.desiwriter.com/index.html that talks about the new-ish trend for indians living int he US to move back to india, partly for the way of life and/or for property.

My grandmother inspired me to be an anthropologist

I'm still figuring out how to use this blogging technology, so the pictures here aren't quite showing up the way I wanted, but oh well!

I'm going to start a set of entries about my grandmother and her life and how it has inspired me to become an anthropologist. I'm including her picture because she was one of my favorite people in general; she was an oddly captivating storyteller, and learning to listen to her stories drew me into anthropology.

I went to visit her a few times in the last years before she died because I wanted to listen to her voice and capture her stories. Right before that trip, I started doing in-depth interviews for my job and so, invigorated with my new skill, I took an old tape recorder and decided that I was going to record our conversations.

On previous visits to India, Bari-Mama (as I called her) and I would sit in her room and she would tell me about her childhood in Lahore (present day Pakistan). As in the pictures above, she was always wearing at least one poly-blend sweater over her salwaar-kameez or sari. If it was sunny enough and she was feeling "fresh and bright" we sat outside for our talks. Usually, we were in her room - me sitting on a plastic chair under the ceiling fan, sweating - and her in chair outside of the fan's range in her sweaters.

She talked about getting married at the age of 16 to a man she had never met, and about learning to be a mother and a dutiful daughter-in-law. This is what I hoped to get on the recording.

Unfortunately, by the time I arrived in New Delhi for my last visit in November, 2005 she wasn't so interested in telling stories from times so far away. She was caught in a loop of present day worries and complaints. I recorded those, nonetheless, and although they struck me as perhaps, unfruitful at the time, the recordings are rich and full of her life, her sense of humor and her way of viewing the world.

So, in a sense, I had a quintessential anthropologists field experience with those conversations I recorded. They were like the field notes that you wonder why you are taking because they surely wont contain anything. I'm hoping to transcribe some of them, along with other stories she told me about her life, that I will post here.

Spring Semester

Is anyone else out there sick of the semester yet? I just had the cruel treat of being at the SfAA (Society for Applied Anthropology) annual meeting in Tampa Bay, FL where I was reminded that the sun actually does shine!



The second most exciting part of the SfAA conference was helping my friend Jen Cardew, a masters student in the online applied anthropology program at UNT, with a podcasting project that she is heading up. For more information on her podcasting project and how to listen to some of this year's sessions, go to www.sfaapodcasts.net.



Now, it's back to the "real" world of Linguistics papers, reading ethnographies and being a grad student.