The End of Man

It is a hotly debated topic these days, the one about the reversed feminist regime of our age–“The End of Man.”The Atlantic has a special column on this disputed topic that seemingly disrupted if not disturbed your normative perception of gender dynamics and its societal implications.

“The End of Man” draws social indicators from a variety of sources from the increased desirability of baby girls, more effective managerial styles and skills of female managers, and disproportionate over-achievement of female college graduates to support her argument that men is in a crisis of becoming underdogs.

Wells, seems to me this assessment is pretty biased. The coming of age of female inroad into education and professional career does not necessarily imply a decline of men, not unless you assume gender segregation as the only stratifying unit. Race and nationality complicates the picture. Women as a group fare better than men, but women is not a unitary, undifferentiated group. What about the 18-year-old single mum waiting in line for welfare service? Does she fare better than the 35-year-old bachelor with a professional career? Is it meaningful and fair to use gender as a watershed marker?

Perhaps there are reasons to take this over-generalized pattern more seriously as a social warning, as my friend who sent me the article insisted. Well I am not so sure about this caveat. I am skeptical because gendered symbols of our time cannot be rigorously ascertained without comparison with the past. It is easy to assume that everything that happen right in front of us at this moment as we see it is unique and unparalleled, while it is actually our ignorance of the cosmic vastness and our over-celebrated dignity that we are seeing.

So I checked some sources on the changing gender wrestling in the US and it appears that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote an essay titled "The Crisis of American Masculinity" in 1958, describing a parallel sign of emasculation that he observed in the postwar America where "women are marching toward expanding their domestic forces and seizing domains likes a conquering army, while men, more and more on the defensive, are hardly able to hold their own and gratefully accept assignments from their new rulers." The military narrative in the late 50s is astonishing but not quite alien to a non-resident alien in the 21st century. The fear of emasculation, the presumption of male supremacy, the heroic virility in the inscription of manhood are familiarized by the present generations.

So back to the original proposition, I guess I'm not sure if the effeminate symptom of our time does not carry any remnants from the past, if it was ever such an ubiquitous, trans-sectorial issue occurring at all social fronts.

some of the science jokes that I like:

• Men are mammals and women are femammals (Linnaeus would have ben apologized and Schiebinger’s critique would have been obliterated)
• Galileo showed that the earth was round and not vice versa. He dropped his balls to prove gravity (Kepler would have been angry that his first law was violated: a posthumous contravention rather than a posthumous eulogy)
• All animals were here before mankind. The animals lived peacefully until mankind came along and made roads, houses, hotels and condoms. (almost mistake it for a feminist critique of modernization and sexual oppression. The resemblance of condoms and mankind is uncanny)
• Mare Curie did her research at the Sore Buns Institute in France. (feminists would be mixed in their reactions: the historically misogynist institutional culture at Sorbonne coupled with a gender-charged title)

• Algebra was the wife of Euclid. (why not make it the descendant of 九章算術？）
• Geometry teaches us to bisex angles (Will George more attracted to Geometry because of his role in “bisexing”?)

Global warming and local water issue in Arizona

Coming from a land with uninterrupted water supply imported from mainland China, I probably don’t know enough about the public concern on water shortage in the desert hinterland of Arizona. The cultural contrast cannot be over-emphasized. After all, it is not too difficult to imagine the severity of water shortage in the sizzling summer under 110F! But the state-wide concern over water supply seems to sprawl beyond the immediate quenching for water. Sustaining Arizona’s water supply has been identified as the key to sustaining the state’s economy, the health and well-being of its residents, and its natural environment. An independent institute–Arizona Water Institute (AWI)– was once dedicated to exploring the management of the state’s hydrologic features and resources (AWI is closed now due to budget cuts). To a non-resident alien, the state-wide concern and commitment to the water management is both alien and gripping.

“Water is more important to us than global warming,” says a native Arizonian in the World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews), which is held before the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) in December 2009. WWViews is a global citizen consultancy on climate change in which I volunteered as a moderator for the round of discussion in Arizona. Arizona is one of the five states that represent the US’s participation in WWViews, among the other thirty-seven countries participating in the project. To solicit structured views from ordinary citizens on climate change and policy recommendation, 4000 citizens from thirty eight countries were selected to answer twelve pre-designed multiple-choice questions and voted on recommendations for their national leaders.

Curiously enough, the recruited citizens in my table seem to be more interested in a wider range of issues that are not covered in the agenda of the day. “I’m more concerned about water shortage than CO2 emission.” says Donna, a middle-aged resident from Goodyear. “Roger that! When I think of the dire consequences of global warming, I think of heat stroke and dehydration. And all these questions are about cutting emission of greenhouse gases....” says Bill, a manager in a Phoenix-based advertising company. These exchanges took place during the lunch break and were not recorded in the official report. Although respondents were given the opportunity to express any additional comments aside from the structured questions, few of them brought up the water issue in the formal discussion period. It was only during the time-off period where they felt more comfortable to opine casually with food and drinks.

Now it would be unfair to generalize my experience based on one discussion table to the other 70 tables in the theatre, let alone to the WWViews project. What happened in my table is not meant to be reflective of the participants’ feedback on the design of WWViews in any sense. Nonetheless, their articulations struck me as an example of local inflection of the global environmental concerns. Global warming is impending to every concerned citizen but the impacts and issues that are of significance pertaining to global warming are usually locally and culturally mediated. What does global warming mean to a local community? How do people view and relate themselves to a globally highlighted issue? My moderating experience in this case draws my attention to the specific context in which the issue of global warming was digested and understood by citizens in Arizona.

Water is a critical issue in Arizona. In the context of the perennial dry heat weather, several community outreach programs were delivered by AWI such as "Focusing Arizona's Water Research: A One Day Workshop“, "Climate Change Adaptation for Water Managers Workshop”, and "Making the Connection: A Translational Environmental Research Symposium". These programs are intended to connect the public with the decision-making policy-advisors and scientists, supporting a stronger community to advise and reflect on effective hydrological management in the state of Arizona.

Of course, to me it's always interesting to learn about stuff that I don't know: in this case the heritage of water management in Arizona seems a fascinating topic. But why should anyone outside Arizona care about this issue? I suspect this case study could be potentially enlightening to the thorny issue of the international dissent over climate change and regulation. Too often, policy makers in the UN make decisions based on a thin body of scientific evidence from a narrow range of conflicting interests and then expect the affected communities to just take it or leave it. It's time to take the voices of the community seriously if we want their inputs and support. My hunch is that people are ready to voice their opinions only when their immediate contexts and local conditions (such as material and geographical constraints) are attended to. We don't need another well-filed cross-cultural comparison on either the lack of public understanding of global warming or the lack of political will to initiate reform. The critical problem is that we don't understand what a globally articulated agenda means to a local community.

Can we make a manifesto on "There is plenty of room at the bottom", borrowing from Richard Feynman's paradigm-setting speech, in a humanistic light?

Sokal and alternative therapies

cross-posted at http://alternative.asu.edu/

The infamous physicist Alan Sokal, who gained a “reputation” in SSK and STS by his critical parody “Transgressing the boundaries: the Hermeneutics of Quantum Physics” published in Social Text in 1996, recently launched another round of assault to what he called “pseudo-medicine” in his public lecture “What is science and why should we care?” given on February 27 2008 in London (podcast available from the Guardian)

His talk commenced with his discontent and fury with the school of “social construction of science/ scientific knowledge/ scientific facts” by quoting excepts from notable scholars in SSK and STS such as HM Collins, B. Latour, B. Barnes, D. Bloor, K. Hayles and demonstrate how their writings on “social construction of science” constitute a hazardous move toward intellectual relativism and vanity. Then he traversed to what he conceptualized as a “second set of adversaries of the scientific worldview”, namely the advocates of pseudo-medicine. By “pseudo”, he meant the sloppy and unscientific mechanism by which alternative therapies such as homeopathy can function within the existing knowledge system in science.
According to Sokal, the utter scientific implausibility of homeopathy lies at its “unproven (or disproven) mechanism by which homeopathy could possibly work, unless one rejects everything that we have learned over the last 200 years about physics and chemistry….” and that “existence of such a phenomenon would contradict well-tested science, in this case the statistical mechanics of fluids”.

In short, Sokal is angry about the sum of money spent on promoting homeopathy because he saw homeopathy as antagonistic to “credible” methodology in Western science. Since western science is the canonical archetype among the existing knowledge systems, everything against it is relegated as “bad science”.

What is the other side of the story? According to some defenders of homeopathy, the preference for homeopathy stems partly from the recognition of impossibility of separating such an ever-changing body from its environment–health is affected by diet, water, air, mood, stress, relationships, the past, colors, work, and so on. Often, people turn to alternative medicine to address these concerns. Emily Martin elaborated on the interconnection between (internal) immune system and (external) environment:

“Inside the citadel of science, there is a group of scientists who are focusing on the links between the immune system and the world outside the body. much as alternative medicine treats the body in its life environment. They are claiming that the immune system is a self-organizing network, a complex system of the sort Vera Michaels evoked, But today these scientists are considered ‘unconventional’ and their views controversial….” (Anthropology and the Cultural Study of Science: From Citadels to String Figures 1997: 139)

Alright, enough of the acrimonious dispute. Now is there any way to reconcile the dichotomous views? If we believed in Sokal’s criticism on the deconstructive (and thus destructive) signpost the school of “social construction of science” is taking us to, how can we be more constructive? Apparently some people believe in homeopathy and some people don’t. But is it simply a matter of faith? What is at stake here? Power asymmetry? Credibility & authority? Misconception? Disciplinary and institutional barriers?

Are sarcasm and parody and mutual hatred the best way to handle the dispute?

Jane Maienschein's video lecture

Jane Maienschein's lecture on transplanational stem cell research and translation issues. She is such a good public speaker. Dig in!

From the beginning comes the missing masses

Cross-posted at http://alternative.asu.edu

It is perhaps appropriate to begin by narrating how I picked up the line of thought: Alternative Imagination of Science and Technology. Besides the identity politics as a woman of color and non-English speaker, I was mainly attracted to the idea of studying science in non-Western context through postcolonial and feminist accounts of sciences. Since this is not an academic essay, I will elaborate my encounter through personal anecdotes.

I’ll never forget what Said wrote in the preface to Orientalism in 2003 edition:

“Therefore, it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones, based on mutual hostility, that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long.” (Said 2003: xxiv)

Said is of course speaking to the scholarly community in Middle East studies. My disciplinary background approached his writing differently and interpreted as “it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and conflicting ones, based on exclusion and dominance, that have prevailed in science and science studies for so long.” The interpretative flexibility of this text is underscored by the ubiquitous characteristics of Western knowledge-making enterprise to reduce and exclude other, exotic, foreign ways of knowing. It is incumbent upon any conscientious intellectual not to be blinded by his/her academic genealogy and think outside of the box. I see it almost as a cogenital responsibility for those of us who are baptized to the intellectual voyage in the West to complicate the epistemological formula entrenched in Western discourses of nature, science and machineries of knowing.

“So what’s wrong with reduction?” As some of my friends in the physics department asked (After all, these people are trained to reduce nature to a few powerful formulas and equations). Besides the imperialistic and unbearable hubris behind the claim to reduce, the pivotal problem with the reductionist approach is that it twisted our understanding of how nature works. Now that nature is treated as if its individual components were isolated and unrelated, it is easy to separate the distribution of cost-benefit and cause-effect. If there’s a shortage of oil, go get some from other parts of the world as if the world can be truncated into individual pieces. Nature doesn’t work this way. We live in an interconnected circuit in which cause-effect/cost-benefit are interwoven into one big yarn. It’s important to remember that this yarn is the common breeding ground for humans on this planet we called Earth, and the cause-effect/cost-benefit are distributed across geopolitical and disciplinary borders. The social movement in Myanmar, the political turmoil in Tibet, the natural disaster in China bear direct consequences to the socio-econ-political climate in the US as much as the intellectual currents taking place in humanities affects the research practices in sciences. The world is a whole. Anthropologists come to grips with this organic principle pretty much from the inception of the discipline.

It seems to me that we have just begun to pick up the missing masses of how we know what we know.