Just Before Returning to Iqaluit, NU

This photo of Dennis Forcese and Patricia Reynolds [1] was taken in the hallway outside Centre for Initiatives in Education offices, Dunton Tower, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON was taken in April 1, 2002 just before I returned to Iqaluit, NU to complete the “winter term [2]” at Nunavut Arctic College.

Professor Forcese [3] was the key player in setting up Carleton’s Centre for Initiatives in Education and in nurturing the Nunavut BA Project, a joint project with Carleton’s Centre for Initiatives in Education and Nunavut Arctic College initiated in 2001 [4].

The first sessional contract for the Nunavut BA program ran from January to April 2002 when this picture was taken. The program started late. There were no students enrolled when I arrived in Iqaluit in January! Patricia was very concerned but I was incredibly optimistic. I really believed in this project. It made sense and it was worthwhile. So I worked full-time nurtured potential contacts at various institutions: Nunavut Research Institute, Inuksuk high school, the Justice department etc . . . I made guest appearances on CBC radio both National and local. (The former aired in Ottawa and a number of friends listened to it. Dennis was delighted.) I talked about it in taxis. I advertised and presented info sessions at Nunatta campus. I set up and paid for a phone line with an Internet connection in my own tiny room in the boarding house. I borrowed a small table and chair from Nunatta campus and added it to my tiny nun-like cell. to be continued . . .

Throughout that term I took dozens of digital photos and shared them as much as I could.

Those months from October 2002 through spring-summer? 2003, where I was traveling back and forth between Iqaluit and Gatineau, staying three weeks at a time in an Iqaluit boarding house while teaching at two institutions - one in Iqaluit and one in Ottawa while working on my PhD proved to be too much for me.

I could have managed perhaps if I was not struggling with the worst youth suicide epidemic [5]. I could have managed if Jennifer had not been brutally murdered. I could have managed if I my primary support system, my husband had been with me on all the trips. I could have managed if the person running the boarding house was not also completely overwhelmed and driven by her own inability to absorb the youth suicides. (Her brother was a suicide victim). I could have managed if there had been some support from at least one of the institutions I worked with. I could have managed if my Ontario Graduate Student funding was not mysteriously cut off in April 2003. I could have managed if the university provided me with sessional teaching or research assistantships on a predictable, regular basis. I could have managed if the university had provided me with a web-savvy Teaching Assistant like AG (who let me down three weeks into the course when it was too late to find someone else) when I was teaching Power and Everyday Life (2003-4) as they had promised, I could have managed if our departmental administer (notorious for such tardiness) had signed contracts in a timely fashion so PhD student sessional lecturers (such as myself) received their first month check on time not four weeks later (September-October 2003 and again in January - February 2004).

I could never understand how Professor John Shepherd would take the time to personally help me refine my SSHRC application in January 2003, with the Awards department encouraging me so enthusiastically about the possibilities of receiving the scholarship that year, and then to not only not receive the SSHRC but to also lose the OGC so unexpectedly and with no explanation. Then to have the Graduate Student Adviser tell me that because I had not kept up with the “pace” [6] I was not good scholarship material. What happened between January when I was working so hard to make the Nunavut BA project work and April of 2003 when the entire campus administration seemed to forget I existed? What happened to all the encouragement and support that I received when they listened with excitement to the CBC radio interview describing the Carleton University-Nunavut Arctic College success story? How could they turn me so effectively into a ghost?

In December, 2001 Dennis Forcese (left) approached me with the opportunity to replace Jill Vickers, who had to undergo emergency eye surgery. Professor Vickers was to be the first of what was hoped to be a series of professors who would reside in Iqaluit, Nunavut for a sessional term while offering BA level courses on-site at Nunatta Campus, Iqaluit to Nunavummiut. Dennis Forcese, Patricia Reynolds and Beth Hughes made me aware of how much the future of the Nunavut BA Project, launched in 2001 by Carleton’s Centre for Initiatives in Education in partnership with Nunavut Arctic College, depended on the success of these first courses.

Dennis and Charlie Gordon were a great solace to each other from 2002 until Charlie’s death from cancer in September 2004. At the time of Charlie’s death I began to make inquiries about the cancer rate on the 7th floor of the LOEB building. I asked if there had ever been a Health and Safety Audit of the floor given the seemingly unusually high number of professors who worked there and had cancer. It was such an unhealthy environment that most professors worked from home offices. Walking through the unusual maze-like architecture of the floor one was struck by the number of closed doors and the profusion of faded art prints. I felt empathy for Emily Carr every time I walked by the sad mechanical representation of her vibrant energy-filled West Coast paintings.

But it was the anthropology lab that was the darkest space in the tower.

I have been grateful ever since to that small group of urban Inuit students in the fall of (2003?) whose extreme discomfort in the presence of skulls and bones in glass cases made it impossible to use that room which had been assigned to us as the last possible space available to our group. Even after Professor Blundell covered the glass with paper, we were all too aware of their presence.

and Patricia Reynolds
April 1, 2002.

The photo accompanying this article was one I took in April 2002 while teaching Human Rights and Sociology at Nunatta Campus, Nunavut Arctic College, Iqaluit, Nunavut (January 2002 - June 2003). I provided Beth Hughes and Thierry Rodon with a CD of some of the photos I took.

the Nunavut BA Project, Carleton’s Centre for Initiatives in Education in partnership with Nunavut Arctic College,

In December, 2001 Dennis Forcese approached me with the opportunity to replace Jill Vickers, who had to undergo emergency eye surgery. Professor Vickers was to be the first of what was hoped to be a series of professors who would reside in Iqaluit, Nunavut for a sessional term while offering BA level courses on-site at Nunatta Campus, Iqaluit to Nunavummiut. Dennis Forcese, Patricia Reynolds and Beth Hughes made me aware of how much the future of the Nunavut BA Project, launched in 2001 by Carleton’s Centre for Initiatives in Education in partnership with Nunavut Arctic College, depended on the success of these first courses.

Professor Forcese was the Supervisor of Graduate Studies in the Sociology and Anthropology department when I first entered their PhD program as part-time student taking one course at a time. He was aware that I had been sessional lecturer in 1997 teaching Inuit art history and sessional lecturer as a fly-in professor since January 2000 with Carleton University’s Social Work Off-Campus Aboriginal Program offering BA level courses to First Nations social work students in Akwasasne, Fort Francis and Moose Factory. My Canadian Studies MA (1995) was linked to Inuit culture and I worked from the beginning in both a teaching and advisory capacity with the Inuit Art Foundations CITProgram which offered courses to urban Inuit.

Notes

[1] I knew Patricia Reynolds through my involvement with the Nunavut BA Project, a joint project with Carleton’s Centre for Initiatives in Education and Nunavut Arctic College. According to a recent Google search Patricia Reynolds was still working in 2006 with the Centre for Initiatives in Education’s branch project offering BA courses in Nunavut.

[2] The official university term runs for 13 weeks from January through April. Sinc

[3] Dennis is now enjoying his retirement and continues to participate in at least one of his many projects, providing courses for lifelong learning to retirees. He now gives lectures on wines. His abrupt departure sometime in the fall of 2002? for urgent health reasons from the University and from the BA project unexpectedly and negatively transformed my relationship with the BA project. Until that time I could depend on Dennis as the bridge between my PhD project and my Nunavut experience. When he left there was no institutional memory. I think I full shock began to unsettle my everyday life when I learned that I had lost the Ontario Graduate Scholarship upon returning from Nunavut. I had not managed to keep up with the anticipated pace for my cohort. Dennis, maverick that he was would have seen the unfairness of this and found some creative solution. There was an aura of unreality in those months now. I remember something about an urgent need to return the Project’s laptop. I remember standing in line at the Registrar’s Office trying to get a transcript of marks for an Inuit student who thanks to the successful completion of one of the BA Project courses I taught in 2002-3, was applying for entrance to Harvard [4]. Without Dennis I just could not seem to break through the labyrinth of departmental and divisional bureaucracies. After I returned from Iqaluit for the last time (spring 2003) I no longer officially worked for the BA Project. I no longer had access to offices or materials. I was simply a grad student who’d fallen behind in terms of anticipated outcomes. But at the time I was advised to not bother Dennis with my concerns because of his ill health. The message that I heard over and over was simply to forget it all, move on and complete my PhD. One Sociology Professor advised me to work in an ice-cream store to pay for my studies. As the full extent of my own loss became apparent, I was then advised that I should contact Dennis but by then my own health was jeopardized. Strange. He is such a good man and his work for at-risk groups is what attracted me to working with him. I remember a conversation in which he tried to encourage me to not place all my confidence in him. I think he was trying to tell me that he had many roles to play. One was as my adviser for my PhD studies, the man who helped me to get into the PhD program, who encouraged me in my studies; but the other, and inevitably more important, was his role as the catalyst and maverick behind this exciting, pioneering project in Nunavut. And of course, the role he finally played in 2003 until my final role exit as PhD student, sessional lecturer and contract cultural worker, Carleton University and Ottawa in 2005, was that of a man struggling with cancer. How do you weigh and measure these things?

[4]. Susan Burhoe and Patricia Reynolds made an initial visit to Iqaluit in the fall of 2001 to investigate potential needs and resources. Nunavut Arctic College English Professor, , began offering first year BA level English courses to interested BA level courses on-site at Nunatta Campus, Iqaluit to Nunavummiut. (I believe his first student(s) were students already registered in the Dalhousie Nursing Program or perhaps already registered in the McGill Law Program. Both these programs operated separately from Nunavut Arctic College Nunatta Campus administration although they occupied offices and classrooms?)

[5] In Iqaluit and other hamlets in the eastern portion of Nunavut, Nunavummiut struggled with the youth suicide epidemic. I was the wrong person to be at the epicentre in both time and space. In the 18 month period in which I was connected to the BA project in Nunavut, the youth suicide was the highest on the planet, this small physical area was the epicentre of youth suicide worldwide!

[6] My PhD graduating class should have completed our PhDs c. 2005-6. How many actually did? Anne Galloway who began a year after I did, received a generous SSHRC grant, is still working as sessional lecturer in 2008 and probably will be after her graduation. I didn’t know when I entered the program, but Carleton University’s Sociology and Anthropology Department is notorious for misuse and abuse of sessional lecturers, for PhD attrition and/or for PhD students taking up to ten years to complete their dissertation. Compare that the a Canadian student who took three years to complete a PhD in Sociology at the University of Essex! One student sacrificed everything to complete her PhD and began working as a sessional lecturer c. 2002-2003. It took her a few years to realize that they had no intention of ever hiring her on as professor or even as instructor. Sessional lecturers earned the same as or less than their own teaching assistants. They were often assigned courses three weeks before the class began when all the professors or sessionals with more sway had declined. They were not informed of a special fund (I believe is was c. $50,000 university wide) set aside for sessional lecturers so they could purchase books, etc for their courses. I was told that this information was kept secret because there would not be enough money to go around if all sessional lecturers knew about it.)

[6] He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and did successfully complete an MA from Harvard, the first Inuk to do so.

Glass Ceiling Fire Water II

Glass Ceiling Fire Water II

Perhaps Sarah was the only one who knew how serious it was. She was an Inuk and a grandmother. She knew the ripple effect of youth suicides.

I brought her with me to Carleton once and she felt something very uncomfortable there that made her shiver. By November 24, 2003 I was shivering all the time. I couldn’t get warm even when I returned south every three weeks. She brought me country food, and sewed special slippers and mittens without thumbs so I could get warm at night.

I still cannot remember the chronology of even the most important events that occurred after I returned from the Pangnirtung cemetery in June 2002?

I remember spending hours on this layered image using a very old version of Photoshop that came for free with a scanner? My screen was of such poor quality I couldn’t really see what I was doing.

I had taken a series of photos while canoeing on Bell Lake. There was one series in particular that I am fond of. The light that day illuminated a small forest of algae below us as we paddled silently just skimming the surface in our 1930s cedar canoe. The light played with ripples that mirrored the deep greens of the Gatineau in the summer.

I tried to be philosophical about what was happening . . . Glass half empty, half full.

I played with reflections from every angle. Reflexivity the metaphor inverted, rotated, fire, water, snow.

I had painted Angels of Fire and Snow first as a sketch and then as a large acrylic canvas in the 1980s in Pointe-Noire, Congo but we left it behind along with most of our belongings. When we returned to Canada I painted it again. It took me at least two months to complete it.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

Angels of Fire and Snow by Joany Lincoln 1970s from the album Reflections of a New World

Angels Oh, Angels

Angels of fire and snow

Oh, Angels Oh, Angels of fire and snow

Behold the moth as it circles the candle, clings to the flame and dies

Behold the candle as it shares its light, weeps away its life drop by drop.

You fly, you weep, you burn in your love

You fly, you weep, you die for your love,

You fly, you weep, you share of your love,

Were it not for the tears, you would burn in the fire of your love

Were it not for the fire, you would drown in your tears.

Joany Lincoln and her family lived a number of years in French-speaking Africa, Bangui, Central African Republic where we met them. She’s also traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo-Kinshasa (formerly Zaire).

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

Random reading on youth suicide in Nunavut:

Bell, Jim. 2003. “Tragedy takes toll among youth with suicides at an all-time high: Nunatsiaq News. November 7.

Depalma, Anthony. 1999. “In New Land Of Eskimos, A New Chief Offers Hope.” New York Times. April 4.

Health Canada’s First Nations & Inuit Health Branch, in partnership with Assembly of First Nations and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami/National Inuit Youth Council published The National Aboriginal Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy in 2006.

CITP Students Meeting Charlie Gordon in his LOEB office

CITP Students Meeting Charlie Gordon in his LOEB office

Originally uploaded by ocean.flynn

Remembering Charlie Gordon

Shape-Shifting and Other Points of Convergence: Inuit Art and Digital Technologies

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 1999. “Shape-Shifting and Other Points of Convergence: Inuit Art and Digital Technologies.” Art Libraries Journal. 24/3:38-41. [1]

Western thinking which is predominantly linear and analytical, does not adequately give access to the complexities of Inuit visual culture. However, hypertext offers new possibilities for information management, and the aboriginal communities are using it creatively to share information, for example in the Internet record of the development of Canada’s newest territory, Nunavut. This article examines how and why interactive multimedia were the means chosen to develop a master’s thesis on the Inuit artist Jessie Oonark.

While Inuit culture encircle the circumpolar section of four nations: Canada, Denmark, Russia and the United States, it is in Canada that Inuit art production has grown exponentially over the past fifty years into a multi-million dollar cultural industry. The Inuit Art Bibliography, compiled and published in 1996 by the Inuit Art Section of the Department of Northern Affairs, includes over two thousand entries. This is surprisingly large in proportion to the size of the population: there are 40, 900 Inuit living in Canada’s north. Nunavut, encompassing 360, 000 square kilometres, is the largest and newest of the three Canadian Arctic territories.

From dog sleds to snow machines to digital connections, the Inuit continue to adapt technologies for their needs. Today more Nunavummiut per capita use computers and the Internet than in any other region of Canada. On my computer in southern Canada, I can follow the official April 1st opening ceremonies in the new capital of Iqaluit, Nunavut through the satellite communication link. I could read about it in the Nunatsiak News web page or I could participate in person at the Museum of Civilization, Hull, Quebec and be part of a live broadcast also available on the Internet.

Jessie Oonark

Jessie Oonark (1906-1985) Una or Unaaq lived the traditional hunter-nomadic life of the Inuit for almost fifty years. But in the 1950s her Keewatin home, in the region west of Hudson’s Bay, was devastated by famine after the disappearance of the herds of caribou which had previously supplied basic needs. Survivors of this disaster like Jessie Oonark, a widow with children, settled in emerging small permanent hamlets like Baker Lake Qamanittuaq, now in Nunavut. Here small-scale carving and printmaking co-operatives were developed to supplement income. In Baker Lake, in a matchbox house, Jessie Oonark produced wall hangings, drawings and prints that single her out as one of Canada’s greatest artists. Her internationally-renowned wall hangings echo the iconography and techniques of the appliqué and inlays of traditional skin clothing. In 1975 she was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, and the year before she died she received Canada’s highest award, the Order of Canada.

Today most Baker Lake community graphic artists continue to use rich palettes of coloured melton, duffle, coloured pencils, printers ink and paint. Jessie Oonark’s children continue her artistic legacy: her son William Noah has experimented with computer graphics to represent the vivid, spectacular colours of the sky over the mountain tundra.

Inuit legend

Jessie Oonark’s work presents us with a different vision of the world, a new way of seeing. Her visual imagery reflected her traditional spirituality, her thought processes, and the Inuktitut language. When she spoke she talked in circles, turning the subject to many sides as she communicated all the necessary information to her peers in imagery reminiscent of the fluid, space-changing and shape-shifting nature of oral legend. In an Inuit story (unikkaaqtuaq) ambiguous key figures shift to human and animal forms within one story. A story can begin at the end, or particular episodes of a legend can be struck in the middle of a large story or cycle of legends. Anthropologist Charles Moore suggests that essentially the same myths and legends are told right across the North but vary considerably from region to region (Flynn-Burhoe 1999:3 both in detail and in form. These variations may have occurred as stories were shared at great meeting places such as Akilineq in the Keewatin.

The Sedna (nuliayuk, taleleeyo) legend, the theme of countless works of art, illustrates this. In this story, which has hundreds of regional variations, a young woman who refuses to marry is punished. Her punishment transforms her into a being so feared and respected by the land dwellers who once oppressed her that their lives centre around appeasing her. Most often her brutalized fingers become whales, walrus and seals which she then controls. Referring to her 1974 drawing and print Big Woman, Jessie Oonark told a seemingly unrelated story of a woman who turned into stone.

‘This woman who is turning into a stone, in Chantrey Inlet. The Stone itself is really colourful because this woman has a fancy parka . . .’ She turned into stone . . . ‘because she never wanted to get married to anybody, not anyone at all. The woman is supposed to be in a kneeling position, but I just drew it in a standing position anyway.’

A popular columnist with the Nunatsiaq New, Rachel Attituq Qitsualik, tells a version of this shape-shifting Sedna story in which the torngat (powerful spirit), who used trickery to bring the woman to his distant island, is transformed into stone. Jessie Oonark’s cousin, Luke Anguhadluq, a highly-respected camp leader and keeper of the Utkuhihalingmiut legends, provides a detailed account of Nuliajuk (the name given to Sedna by the Utkuhihalingmiut, Oonark’s cultural group) turning into stone. The less rigid Inuit world view allows for ambiguity even in terms of geographical locations. The woman who turns into stone is also part of the living legend of Marble Island, an island located near Chesterfield Inlet.

The magical mutations of forms in Jessie Oonark’s work provide arguments for seeking a different relationship between ways of seeing, ways of thinking and language. Western thinking, which is predominantly linear and analytical, is inadequate for a full appreciation of Jessie Oonark’s many layers of meaning and visual puns. Her work can be looked at syncretistically, a term used by art historians and anthropologists such as Swinton, Carpentar, Blodgett and Jackson to refer to an uncritical blending of diverse, even conflicting, ideas, beliefs or principles. In Inuit art it refers to a way of seeing in which total events, thoughts and structures are understood without it being necessary first to analyse all their component parts and details. Artistic forms mutate, reflecting the Inuit world view with its highly interdependent relationship between humans and their environment. Humans become spirits, shamans, animals, or constellations, which in turn become human. Inuit are more tolerant of the uncertain boundaries between worlds and this gives meaning to the shape-shifting quality of oral tradition.

It is interesting that Sherry Turkle’s book Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone 1997) uses the same terms to communicate the networld of human exchanges. The shifting sense of self in digital identities, the distinction between real life and virtual, tolerance of boundary uncertainties and shape-shifting are also terms to describe the first-generation inhabitants of digital existence.

While these connections are awkward in print format, they flow easily in digital format through images, maps, and layers of text. Interactive multimedia provides a richer means of access to a mode of thinking that is non-linear, which parallels Oonark’s work. My first graduate student project on Oonark had been in the form of a slide show with voice-over and reflected the oral, nonlinear tradition of her people the Utkuhihalingmiut. While this format allowed me to avoid cumbersome verbal descriptions of the artist’s dynamic transformation of forms, it is fundamentally linear. I found that the many layers of meaning, visual puns and high tolerance of ambiguity could be more easily evoked through the interactive multimedia digital applications being used in teaching, learning and research.

The tools

To carry out the work I chose Asymetrix Toolbook, an authoring software package which enabled me to manipulate images, text, audio and video freely. I was able to gather and digitize visual, audio and textual data from various sources including sound clips of throat singing and Jessie Oonark speaking. To manage the large quantity of data and images, I also used other software such as Adobe Photoshop, FoxPro (RQBE) and EndNote. While issues such as copyright, digitization, memory, resolution and projection systems often seemed to be insurmountable obstacles, it did prove possible to find solutions. Carleton University’s Teaching and Learning Resource Centre supported my project generously, upgrading its equipment to meet the technological needs. By January 1995 I was faced with serious problems of lack of hard disk space and the University purchased an 800 megabyte external drive so I could continue working. At times other University departments such as Engineering and Geography had to be asked for technical assistance. Because of the prohibitive cost of scanners some of the slides were sent to Kodak Photo CD to be digitized on CD-ROM.

One of the examiners suggested that a printed version be produced for them. There are 283 pages containing over 130 images including photographs, maps, models and works of art; approximately 2,000 hyperlinks, including hotwords and buttons; sound and video clips, animation and over 150 text fields of varying lengths. Fortunately, my explanation of the impossibility of such a print-out was accepted.

In March 1995 “Woman in the Centre: a Study of the Symbols of Womanhood in the Work of Jessie Oonark using Interactive Multimedia as a Method of Exploration” was submitted (Flynn-Burhoe 1999:39) on the external drive and in the form of taped back-up as part of my Master’s Degree in Canadian Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. After three readers had seen it in this form it was burned into a CD-ROM. The Teaching and Learning Resource Centre of Carleton University, Ottawa, has an updated version of the disk, as I have continued to perfect the application even after graduation in June 1995. I am working towards an improved version of the CD-ROM which I am hoping to publish. I have presented my MA research often to various groups. Ideas generated from the demonstrations and discussions have encouraged others to consider this new set of intellectual tools, with new ways of framing research that suggest fresh ways of looking and thinking.

The methodology

In my project I attempted to blend form and content whenever possible, with a concept map providing possible navigation routes and as a metaphor for the way data is connected. Jessie Oonark’s images of dynamic transformations are juxtaposed with deliberately transparent layers of text, which are revealed only when certain hotwords or buttons are clicked. The words of art historians, curators, anthropologists and Jessie Oonark are presented in a non-hierarchical, egalitarian way. Sound bytes of the artist’s own voice, as well as numerous quotations from her 1983 interview with Professor Mame Jackson, are incorporated (Flynn-Burhoe 1999:40).

Smaller images called thumbnails, wallet images and snap shots were sufficient. The CD-ROM was intended to enhance understanding of Jessie Oonark’s work in order to heighten enjoyment of the works of art themselves, not to replace the museum visit.

My goal was to create an interface that combined form with content, using Jessie Oonark’s own drawings to indicate ways of making connections visually. Since traditional systems did not represent how she would have presented information, transparent fields of white text on a dark textured background were used to represent the way she would have spoken — these look like words floating on a water-like surface.

For example on the homepage (Fig. 1) the reader can click on numerous hotwords, buttons, icons and images and hear Jessie Oonark’s voice, reveal pop-up indexes, or move to another page. A variety of icons were used: the inukshuk (stone cairn-like marker) to bring the reader back to the main menu; the drum-dancer (Flynn-Burhoe 1999:40) for audio; the caribou facing right and left as forward and background buttons.

I developed a glossary, bibliography, table of contents, scrolling title pop-up index, subject pop-up index, Who, What, Where, When, Why questions and thumbnail images on electronic contact sheets. All these are effectively pointers, replacing the usual references to books and articles in a textual thesis with a means of linking to large quantities of full content text.

The problems

Faster and more sophisticated computers, with high resolution image, audio and video capabilities, have created a paradigm shift in communication and information industries, in the ’silicon basements’ of academia and in cultural industries. However, most multimedia applications still combine video and audio clips, images and texts in ways that are familiar. Exploring their capacity to form new, unexpected pathways through information, promoting knowledge instead of decimating huge quantities of information, is the challenge currently facing interactive multimedia authors.

I also mentioned earlier the problem of copyright. Working on this project has made me approach knowledge management in terms of possible hypertext connections. My arguments are increasingly visual and therefore dependent on access to digitized images, but free access to copyright-cleared downloadable versions of these, as in a library model, is increasingly being replaced by the much less-democratic pay-per-use model. Long-term public interests are being sacrificed to short-term private goals. Libraries and museums have public fiscal accountability; they also need safeguards so that they can achieve goals that straddle changing political and economic moods.

I have considered an Internet format for the Oonark application. I am not convinced, however, that the frustration of slow downloading of complicated, layered pages and images is near to being alleviated on the majority of computers. Slow output devices and on-line servers can slow down even the most efficiently-designed web pages.

Conclusion

New digital technologies can provide a two-way path to other cultures that creates the potential for dialogue on issues of identity. But they can also submerge diversity by encouraging the production of homogenous and superficial entertainment. When used to its fullest potential the technology can contribute to new ways of knowing. Inuit stories have been recorded in written form because ‘paper stays put.’ But linear formats freeze fluid stories; non-linear digital technologies provide a less rigid medium for interpreting Inuit legends and imagery.

Inuk journalist Rachel Attituq Qitsualik compared the fluid nature of the unikkaaqtuaq (Inuit story) to the surface of water in constant transformation and flux, a reflection of its human beauty. ‘Capture it, and it becomes as stone: it endures, yet stripped of value’ (Flynn-Burhoe 1999:41).

to be continued . . .

Webliography and Bibliography

Blodgett, Jean. 1979. The Coming and Going of the Shaman: Eskimo Shamanism and Art. Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1979. 1979, 1st Edition. (ISBN: 0889150680) Soft cover. First edition. 246 pp. hundreds of plates (some color), biblio, oversize (4to) softcover.

Blodgett, Jean and Bouchard, Marie. 1986. Jessie Oonark: a Retrospective. Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Cohen, Kathleen. 1997. “The ‘Nina,’ the ‘Pinta,’ and the Internet - ships in Christopher Columbus’ expedition - Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History.” Art Bulletin. 79:2: 187-191.

Driscoll, Bernadette. 1982. Inuit Myths, Legends, and Songs.” Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Elkins, James. 1997. “What are we seeing, exactly? - Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History.” Art Bulletin. 79:2:191-198. June.

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 1998. ‘CD-ROM: The Process Behind the Creation of “Woman in the Centre.” Womenspace. 3:4. Summer. http://www.womenspace.ca (deadlink 2008 )

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 1999. “Jessie Oonark: Woman in the Centre.” Inuit Art Quarterly. 14:2. Summer.

Jackson, Marion E. 1985. “Baker Lake Drawings: a Study in the Evolution of Artistic Consciousness.” PhD thesis. University of Michigan.

Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg. 1997. “Making Computers Work for the History of Art: Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History.” Art Bulletin. 79:2:198-201.

Noblitt, James S. 1997. “Scholarship, Publishing and Computing: Interactions in the Educational Marketplace.” IAT Briefings. 5: 1-2. (deadlink: http://www.iat.unc.edu/publications/noblitt/noblitt2.htm)

Qitsualik, Rachel Attituq. Nunatsiaq News.

Turkle, Sherry. 1997. Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone.

Veltman, Kim. 1997. “New Roles for Libraries in the Digital Age.” http://www.sumscorp.com

Notes

[1]. The original article was published in 1999. Unintentionally it became part of the deep internet or deep web. With the increased use of Web 2.0 open source technologies, I have chosen to make it more accessible using the Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC-SA License. I have added links to urls that were accessible in May 2008. The original article is also available here and here.

[2] At the time of writing the original article in 1999 I was an active participant in artengine.

Kim Veltman, PhD http://www.sumscorp.com

Concentric Circles of Compassionate Support

Adrienne Carter works on a contract basis for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) along with her full-time job in British Columbia. In a recent email to her I described the model of the work she does in some of the most horrendous war torn areas, as “concentric circles of compassionate support.” Her response was, “What a good description of what we all could be doing with and for each other.”

I have never read any of her publications about her work, if they exist. (Perhaps this happens all too often in our closest, most intimate friendships?) From what I understand of the model she offers in other countries includes grassroots training of individuals and groups to form these concentric circles of compassionate support. They learn to surround, not only those who were direct victims and witnesses of gross human right violations and violent acts of blind-hatred against children, women and men, but also those who heard those stories at varying degrees of distance, with healing layers of real listening. For it is not only those who have directly experienced rational cruelty but also those who at-risk of vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue or secondary post-traumatic disorders who could be supported and protected in these ever-widening ripples.

Adrienne has continued to offer her services to First Nations (and Inuit ?) communities in Canada but as yet there has been no response. Perhaps there is a reluctance or a repugnance to compare the youth suicide epidemic, human rights abuses regarding access to education, housing, employment and health services (legacies of muddled administrative meddling, intergenerational mistakes on the part of those one-sidedly handed power over Canadian aboriginal affairs (for example the ongoing CAS child-sweep-ops), systemic and conversational racism, that have caused intergenerational loss of parenting skills, endemic poverty, violence against women, child abuse, and the social challenges that accompany such conditions, as comparable to tragedies in far-off less democratic countries.

Perhaps when Rwandans (for example) and Canadian First Nations take part in open, frank, public, robust conversations about healing from trauma, we will all become more compassionate and more effective in dealing with these home-grown sources of shame and embarrassment.

In her email Adrienne Carter reflected on a book she’ s been reading that very deeply touches her heart. It is called An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty First Century by Dr. James Orbinski.

Dr. James Orbinski is one of the founders of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an international humanitarian aid organization that provides emergency medical assistance to populations in danger in more than 70 countries that has been honoured with the Nobel Peace prize. Dr. James Orbinski described his own role in the midst of the the most horrendous suffering of people including the famine in Somalia and the genocide in Rwanda and how it changed him as a person as he reflected.

Adrienne is one of the few people to which I have entrusted my ongoing dilemma of being unable to rise above the life-shattering Carleton U-Nunavut experience (2002-2006). Her final sentence in that paragraph was: “I thought about you because you have also witnessed similar horrors up north and it also changed you as a person. ” Similar horrors up north in Canada in the 20th century . . . This is what makes it so hard to deal with . . .

There is also a paragraph at the end of Dr. Orbinski’s introduction that Adrienne found helpful,

“Today I am forty-seven, a husband, a father of two young boys, a doctor, a citizen, a sometimes humanitarina, and always, at the end of the day, a man. Over the last twenty years, I have struggled to understand how to respond to the suffering of others. I have come to know perhaps too well that only humans can be rationally cruel. Only humans can choose to sacrifice life in the name of some political end, and only humans can call such sacrifices into question. As a physician I am given virtually unhindered access to some of the most intimate experiences in people’s lives, usually through suffering, but not always. I can see a person, a family or a community grow into health. I have witnessed the good of which we as human beings are capable: the good that calls a mother to feed her child, regardless of how unbearable her own suffering may be; the good of a mother and a grandmother who carry their sick boy to a clinic in South Africa. The good of those who refuse to remain silent as another is violated, and who act to right a wrong. It is the good we can be if we so choose.”

Mothers and grandmothers . . . they’re often the ones left holding the child. And the children and grandchildren in their own way give the mothers and grandmothers strength.

And the strong ones like Adrienne Carter and Dr. James Orbinski are with them witnessing, sharing, walking with them and listening, really listening in concentric circles of caring . . .

Notes

For late 20th century profound insights into genocide see Zygmut Bauman.

See also Hannah Arendt (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).

“It was as though in those last minutes he [Eichmann] was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”

Mariano Aupilardjuk, Pond Inlet Drum Dancers at Larga

Mariano Aupilardjuk, Pond Inlet Drum Dancers at Larga

Originally uploaded by ocean.flynn

Mariano Aupiliardjuk (1923-) was honoured with an Aboriginal Achievement Award in 2001 for his contributions as a bridge between generations, Inuit governance, local residents, on how to use IQ in modern society. In local Rankin Inlet elementary and secondary schools, at NAC, across Canada, advises RCMP, facilitates community and pan-territorial healing, works with youth to help them acquire land skills

“Aupilardjuk, a well-known elder who sits on the task force, recalled the arrival of Qallunaat: “When the Europeans arrived I felt very happy because I didn’t think we’d suffer anymore. But, in the long run, we lost our identity and culture,” he said. He pointed out, though, that while the two cultures may have clashed in the past, there’s opportunity now for mutual respect. “When I’m still alive I’d like to assist the next Inuit generation and their own identity,” Aupilardjuk said. No one is saying the task of implementing IQ will be easy. The Nunavut government has said it wants traditional knowledge to be at its foundation, but it has yet to be fully incorporated (Rideout 2001b).”

“If it were up to the Nunavut government’s Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit task force, Inuktitut would be their working language, government programs would reflect the Inuit way of life, and Inuit culture would flourish in the workplace. In meetings that were ripe with Inuit culture — the lighting of the qulliq, eating country foods and singing traditional songs — GN employees, Nunavut Social Development Council members, and elders talked about ways of bringing Inuit traditional knowledge into the daily workings of the territorial government (Rideout 2001b).”

“The task force’s mission is to direct the Nunavut government on how to apply Inuit traditional knowledge to its programs, policies and services, and to make government offices more conducive to the Inuit lifestyle. The task force — made up of Simon Awa, Sandra Inutiq, NSDC members Louis Tapardjuk and John Ningark, and elders Elisapee Ootoova and Mariano Aupilardjuk (Rideout 2001b)”
A respected elder and an Inuit filmmaker are two of the winners of this year’s national aboriginal achievement awards. Mariano Aupilardjuk of Rankin Inlet and Zacharias Kunuk of Igloolik are among a group of 14 notable people who will be honoured at a gala evening in Edmonton next month. Aupilardjuk, widely recognized throughout Nunavut for his wisdom and teachings of Inuit traditional knowledge, said he was proud of the award. “It made me accept myself more,” Aupilardjuk said through an interpreter. Aupilardjuk, who is now in his seventies, has spent years promoting Inuit culture. He’s given numerous talks at Nunavut schools, as well as throughout Canada, on Inuit traditional knowledge. He has a deep sense of how Inuit Quajimajatuqangit links the past, present and future of the Inuit people. Aupilardjuk said many Inuit are taking a keen interest in preserving their age-old traditions by incorporating them into everyday life. “I am happy about it. I’m hearing it more from others about how important it is and how it’s becoming a reality,” Aupilardjuk said. The National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation is also praising the elder for his work with healing circles throughout the territory. Aupilardjuk’s sense of spirituality and compassion was evident last week when he sang a powerful song at an Inuit Quajimajatuqangit meeting in Iqaluit. The song told the story of a homeless man Aupilarduk saw on the street in New York City. He said people walked past the man, showing little compassion for his suffering. During the song, the elder touched his heart and the words brought many people, including Aupilardjuk, to tears (Rideout 2001a).

Mariano Aupilardjuk of Rankin Inlet Aupilardjuk, widely recognized throughout Nunavut for his wisdom and teachings of Inuit traditional knowledge, said he was proud of the award. “It made me accept myself more,” Aupilardjuk said through an interpreter. Aupilardjuk, who is now in his seventies, has spent years promoting Inuit culture. He’s given numerous talks at Nunavut schools, as well as throughout Canada, on Inuit traditional knowledge. He has a deep sense of how Inuit Quajimajatuqangit links the past, present and future of the Inuit people. Aupilardjuk said many Inuit are taking a keen interest in preserving their age-old traditions by incorporating them into everyday life. “I am happy about it. I’m hearing it more from others about how important it is and how it’s becoming a reality,” Aupilardjuk said.The National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation is also praising the elder for his work with healing circles throughout the territory. Aupilardjuk’s sense of spirituality and compassion was evident last week when he sang a powerful song at an Inuit Quajimajatuqangit meeting in Iqaluit. The song told the story of a homeless man Aupilarduk saw on the street in New York City. He said people walked past the man, showing little compassion for his suffering. During the song, the elder touched his heart and the words brought many people, including Aupilardjuk, to tears.
[2004 Aupilardjuk is 81. He grew up near Nattiligaarjuk, Committee Bay where there was lots of 'old ice' and therefore Qallupilluq (Ernerk 1996)] Nunavut’s commissioner, Peter Irniq, said both men are well-deserving of their awards.

Peter Irniq has a special respect for Aupilarduk, because their families lived together in an outpost camp near Repulse Bay when Irniq was a child (Rideout 2001a).

Selected Bibliography

1995. “A Special Report on Nunavut.”
Bell, Jim. 1998. “MLA peeved at inaccurate documentary on Marble Island.” in Nunatsiak News. Iqaluit, NU. www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/nunavut981031/nvt81002_15.html

—. 2000. “Université Laval to host Nunavut blab-fest.” in Nunatsiak News. Iqaluit, NU. www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/nunavut000230/nvt20211_09.html

Editor. 2001. “Mariano Aupilardjuk: Heritage and Spirituality.” in First Nations Drum. www.firstnationsdrum.com/Sum2001/NAAA-Aupilardjuk.htm

Ernerk, Peter. 1996. “Life in another time.” in Nunatsiak News. Iqaluit, NU. www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/back-issues/week/60216.html

Legatto, Lisa. 2001. “Saint Mary’s to Archive Unique Interviews.” in Saint Mary’s The Times. Halifax, NS. www.stmarys.ca/thetimes/may01/article_archive.html

McKibbon, Sean. 1999. “Iqaluit museum hosts Rankin ceramics exhibit.” in Nunatsiak News. Iqaluit, NU. www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/nunavut991230/nvt91203_10.html

Minogue, Sara. 2004. “Swiss collectors eye Inuit artworks.” in Nunatsiak News. Iqaluit, NU. www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/40528/news/nunavut/40528_10.htm

Murphy, Kirsten. 2002. “A hard lesson in ceramics.” in Nunatsiak News. Iqaluit, NU. www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/nunavut021018/news/features/21…

Poll. 2004. “GN Government priorities.” in Nunatsiak News.

Rideout, Denise. 2001a. “Inuit filmmaker, elder win aboriginal achievement awards.” in Nunatsiaq News. www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/nunavut010228/nvt10202_13.html
—. 2001b. “Nunavut’s Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit group gets started.” in Nunatsiak News. Iqaluit, NU. www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/nunavut010228/nvt10202_08.html

Secretariat, Rural. 2001. “Canadian Rural Partnership: Rural Canadians on the Internet: Rankin Inlet.” in Canadian Rural Partnership. Ottawa, ON. www.rural.gc.ca/internet/story3_e.phtml

Zygmunt Bauman: Theorist of Postmodernity’s Ethical Turn

For Zygmunt Bauman, “sociologizing makes sense only in as far as it helps humanity” and “sociology is first and foremost a moral enterprise,”

“To think sociologically can render us more sensitive and tolerant of diversity. Thus to think sociologically means to understand a little more fully the people around us in terms of their hopes and desires and their worries and concerns (Bauman & May, 2001).”

It would be hoped that his writings and work written about him would be made available through the Creative Commons License 3.5, preferred by academics in 2008. Unfortunately so much of what is really useful to robust conversations in civil society, foundational texts and articles such as Bauman’s are restricted to those with access codes to the deep internet, the dark place of open source and Web 2.0+. Many of the services of the Deep Internet operate within the private sector model as user-pay. Others are restricted to those who are members of exclusive academic associations, the insular knowledge elite, who also operate with obligatory membership fees.

to be continued . . . add notes from EndNote

The following is an excerpt from the exclusive Deep Internet, the less accessible internet restricted to members through a user-pay service:

“Zygmunt Bauman is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Universities of Leeds and Warsaw and has written some of the more influential modern books on sociology.

Baumans thinking is mainly influenced by what he refers to as the big triad of influences. This triad includes: Antonio Gramsci, Georg Simmel and Bauman’s wife, Janina. Bauman explains the triad as follows: “Gramsci told me what, Simmel how, and Janina what for” (Beilharz, 2001).

Bauman perceives Gramsci’s work as an antidote to the determinism of so much Marxisant thought. Simmel provides Bauman with the methods, whilst Janina has taught him that, sociologizing makes sense only in as far as it helps humanity.

This last quotation gives us a strong clue as to Bauman’s general approach to sociology.

Bauman was born in Poznan, Poland in 1925.

He completed his graduate studies - with an MA in social sciences - and in 1954 became a lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw. He was influenced by the work of his teachers Stanislaw Ossowski and Julian Hochfeld.

In 1971 Bauman came to Britain where he took up a position as a lecturer eventually becoming Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire. Today he is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Universities of Leeds and Warsaw. “

(Source: http://www.sociologyonline.co.uk) now? www.sociologyonline.com

Anthony Giddens described Zygmunt Bauman as: ‘the theorist of postmodernity�he has developed a position with which everyone has to reckon’” (www.sociologyonline.com).”

“While heading the Department of Sociology at Leeds, Bauman brought great qualities of intellectual leadership. “From the start he saw his task as one of inspiring students, and among his academic colleagues promoting a collegial atmosphere in which new academic projects were welcomed and free and open discussion encouraged in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance and understanding” (www.leeds.ac.uk). Since his retirement, Bauman and his reputation has continued to benefit sociology at Leeds.”

Webliography and Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. Inspired Bauman.http://www.sociologyonline.co.uk

Bauman, Zygmunt. 1987. Legislators and Interpreters. Polity

Bauman, Zygmunt(198 Freedom Open University Press

Bauman, Zygmunt (1993) Postmodern Ethics Blackwell

Bauman, Zygmunt (1995) Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality Blackwell

Bauman, Zygmunt (1997) Postmodernity and Its Discontents Polity

Bauman, Zygmunt (1998)a Globalization Polity

Bauman, Zygmunt (1998)b Work, consumerism and the new poor Open University Press

Bauman, Zygmunt (1999) In Search of Politics Polity

Bauman, Zygmunt (2001)a Liquid Modernity Polity

Bauman, Zygmunt (2001)b The Individualized Society Polity

Bauman, Zygmunt; & Tester, K (2001) Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman Polity

Bauman, Zygmunt & May, T (2001) Thinking Sociologically Blackwell

Beck, Ulrich. 2002. “The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies.” Theory, Culture and Society. 19:1-2

Beilharz, P (ed) (2001) The Bauman Reader Blackwell

Berger, P ([1964]1974) Invitation to Sociology Viking

Carveth, Donald L. 1984. “Psychoanalysis and Social Theory: The Hobbesian Problem Revisted.” Psychoanalysis & Contemporary Thought. 7:1: 43-98.http://www.yorku.ca/dcarveth/social.htm

Castoriadis, Cornelius. Inspired Bauman

Gordon, Avery. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press

Gramsci, Antonio. Inspired Bauman

Krzemien. Microsociology: Symbolic-Interaction

Lemert, C (1995) Sociology: After the Crisis Westview

Levinas, Emmanuel. Inspired Bauman

Mills, C. Wright. 1959. “The Bureaucratic Ethos.” The Sociological Imagination. New York. Oxford University Press.

Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York. Oxford University Press.

Simmel, Georg. Inspired Bauman

Smith, D (1999) Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity Polity

Tester, K (1997) Moral Culture Sage

Weber, Max. Inspired Bauman

Wolff, Janet. 1999. “Cultural Studies and the Sociology of Culture” href=”http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue1/wolff/wolff.html” target=”_blank”>Cultural Studies and the Sociology of Culture.”

Bauman & May, 2001

The Sociological Imagination

In his influential book, The Sociological Imagination C. Wright Mills (1959) warned that the tendency to misrepresent social disorders as merely individual psychological disorders led to a depolitization of intellectual discourse and the undermining of social criticism. He challenged notions of the false dichotomy between private and public and self and society. He warned against an overdependence on superficial psychological explanations which ignore complex social accounts. These can only be dealt with through an in-depth sociology based on the nurturing of a sociological imagination that balances the tendency to depend too much on a psychological imagination. By treating public social problems as individual and personal psychosis, the sociopolitical status quo is maintained (Flynn-Burhoe 1999).

“The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals (Mills 1959:8).”

“No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography . . . has completed its intellectual journey (Mills 1959:8).”

“C. Wright Mills (1959 [1961:8]) once characterized the sociological imagination as entailing the transformation of private troubles into public issues. In this formulation, Mills intended to assert the superiority of the sociological over the psychological imagination, the latter being represented as serving the interests of the sociopolitical status quo by depoliticizing intellectual discourse and undermining social criticism by misrepresenting societal deficiencies as individual ones. But despite the validity of this insight into a widespread ideological abuse of psychology, it ultimately rests upon a false dichotomy and an insufficiently dialectical view of the relationship between the private and the public, the self and society. For even when we forego the sociologistic reduction of the psychological to the political, or the subjective to the objective, in favor of a penetrating self-reflexive inquiry into the depths of subjectivity, we inevitably discover that the most intimate truths have an almost universal reference. It is only superficial psychologizing that blinds us to our common plight, just as it is only superficial sociologizing that is oblivious to the inner depths of the man behind the social mask. If we require a social psychology, we are even more in need of a depth sociology (Carveth 1984 [1999]) . “

In the chapter on ‘The Bureaucratic Ethos’ (Mills, Wright 1959:100-) Mills portrays a scathing image of the social sciences within academia in the United State in the late 1950s. He was concerned about a ‘decisive shift’ in the role of the social sciences that was unfolding between 1935 - 1959 in which the older liberal practice of examining ’social problems’ was overshadowed by a joining of the more bureaucratic, illiberable, managerial practicality with an abstracted empiricism. Mills described this mutant as bureaucratic social science. He was concerned that this type of costly, efficient, highly standardized and rationalized methodologies resembled those of accounting and advertising firms of corporations. As such, even in university settings, the ‘New Social Science’ applied social sciences, served bureaucratic clients like the army, the state and corporations. By addressing the particular needs of specific clients rather than the public, Wills contended that the objectivity of the social science practice was jeopardized. Chronologically Mills traced the embodiment of bureaucratic social science through the marketting agencies of the 1920s, corporations and polling in the 1930s, academic life in the 1940s and the American federal government in WWII and through other institutions throughout the 1950s. Wills sketches an image of academia in the 1950s in which the high cost of abstracted empirical work which is dependent on costly research units, forces these units to fall under corporate control. The university’s division of labour became transformed from the model of professional peers with apprentices, to research bureacracies composed of intellectual techicians, research promoters and intellectual administrators skillful in setting up and funding research projects (Mills 1959:104).

1995:83) A strong post war economy coupled wiMills revealed how the dogmatic, uni-perspectival social science operated under questionable assumptions. The ambiguous term “human engineering” as employed in the 1950s became tied to concepts of ‘mastery of nature’ and ‘mastery of society’. The model they emulated was that of the hard sciences, particularly physicists, who had proven their ability to control the atom by using Scientific Method. As Mills pointed out, this spirit of empty optimism reflected an ignorance of the nature of, and relationships between, power, knowledge, moral action and history. It became problematic when technocratic slogans replaced reasoned moral choice. (Mills 1959:117)The popular slogan, “The purpose of social science is the prediction and control of human behaviour”, came to mean that once social scientists learned how to accurately predict and control human behaviour, mankind would somehow be ensured of peace and prosperity. (Mills 1959:113) This resulted in an ‘epistemic optimism within sociology in the 1950s. (Wagner 1995:1) which was shared by the general public. The Gulbenkian report refers to this as a period when both ordinary people and scholars were state centric. Both ordinary people and the scholars thought and acted at state level. (Gulbenkian 1995:83) A strong post war economy coupled with a growth spurt in population and production in North America led to the rapid expansion of the university system and an increase in the number of social scientists. (Gulbenkian 1995:33-34)

These social scientists were involved in projects dependent on foundation funds that tend towards the large, politically safe, and noncontroversial research carried out by an army of research technicians of abstracted empiricism (Mills 1959:104).

Max Weber’s statement about endemic bureaucracy creating an “iron cage of the future” proved to be prophetic. Current debates in social sciences reflect the contradiction inherent in the late 20th century in which increasing bureaucratic process in all forms of governance collides with theoretical enquiries demanding constant reappraisals of these same processes. In the university setting, sociology as a discipline is situated at the centre of these debates. In practice sociologists as civil servants can become trapped into working on narrow, exclusive and specialized enquiries that allow them to operate only with hard facts such as statistics that resemble scientific methods. At worst this transforms them into bureaucrats operating in a safe and acceptable environment while investigating short-term answers to questions they did not formulate, questions that were not informed by a contemporary theoretical framework. It indeed becomes Weber’s cage. This is the view of sociology of the late 1950s presented by <a href=”abstracts.htm#mills”>C. Wright Mills.

Notes

C. Wright Mills’ intellectual geneaology might include:

One of the more influential social scientists of the late 20th century Zygmunt Bauman, became a lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw from 1954 until(?) he came to Britain in 1971 where he took up a position as a lecturer eventually becoming Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire. He was (2001-?) Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Universities of Leeds and Warsaw. In 2001 he reflected (Bauman & Tester 2001: 27) upon a visit to his University department by the [now] famous US sociologist C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. As far as Bauman was concerned Mills’s sociology was ‘..the story of our own concerns and duties. There was a lot I learned from Mills’s books and what I learned was not primarily about America.’ (Bauman & Tester 2001: 27).’ Bauman is alluding here to that sociological classic of Mills: The Sociological Imagination.

Intellectual influences on Bauman might include Karl Marx, Max Weber, Theodor Adorno, Cornelius Castoriadis and Emmanuel Levinas.

Bauman’s ‘big triad’ of influences includes: Antonio Gramsci, Georg Simmel and Bauman’s wife, Janina (Beilharz 2001: 335). In a conversation with Peter Beilharz, Bauman expands as follows: ‘Gramsci told me what, Simmel how, and Janina what for..’ (ibid). Bauman perceived Gramsci’s work as an antidote to the determinism (Stalinism?) of so much Marxisant thought. Simmel provides Bauman with the method(s) (the reference to the ‘big triad’ by Bauman above is a deliberate allusion to one of Simmel’s central concepts!), whilst Janina taught him that, ‘..sociologizing makes sense only in as far as it helps humanity…’ (Beilharz 2001: 335).

Janet Wolff (1999) acknowledged that since she came to Rochester from Britain in 1989 she felt it her mission to to encourage a “sociological imagination” among students,

“. . . I suppose I have felt since coming to Rochester that my “mission” was to encourage a “sociological imagination”2 among students in the graduate program in Rochester, a program, after all, initially founded by the collaboration of colleagues in art history, film studies, and comparative literature, only more recently including the participation of colleagues from anthropology and history. (There is no longer a department of sociology at the University.) I have wanted to direct them to the texts and methods of sociology and social history, and to urge them to supplement their interpretative and critical readings of visual texts with attention to the institutional and social processes of cultural production and consumption. It was a very pleasant moment for me recently when a graduate student, who came to discuss his search for a useful concept of “style,” told me that he had been reading Max Weber, and said (without any prompting) before he left my office “I suppose I should look at Simmel’s work.” Earlier, I was delighted when a graduate student (now a faculty member at the University of Virginia) completely switched his dissertation topic and ended up writing a social and institutional (and, of course, critical) history of art education in the United States–a dissertation, by the way, that will be published next year by the University of California Press.3 Actually this last case was particularly interesting because a year earlier (my first year in Rochester) this student had taken a class with me on the sociology of culture in which I had devoted quite a bit of time to the work of American sociologists. Despite my strong reservations about this work, I wanted students to recognize the importance of paying attention to institutional processes and structures in the study of culture. Some members of the class (including him) complained that this work was boring (which, actually, much of it is). Moreover, given my own criticisms of the work, which I explained, they wondered why we were spending time on it. I did not have a very good answer, except to say that nobody else was doing this kind of work well, and that I had hoped that we could read it critically in order to consider how we might indeed investigate what sociologists call “the production of culture.” As it turned out, that is indeed what that graduate student did, incorporating what he found most useful in that tradition into a fine study whose intellectual influences were at the same time more wide-ranging and sophisticated.”

She also (1999) called for a stronger connection between sociology and cultural studies,

“In this essay, I want to suggest that cultural studies can benefit from a stronger connection with sociology. A good deal of what I have to say consists of a critical review of recent developments in sociology, a discipline which for the most part has still not come to terms with the fact that, as Avery Gordon has put it, “the real itself and its ethnographic or sociological representations are . . . fictions, albeit powerful ones that we do not experience as fictions but as true.” (Gordon 1997:11) I review this work not so that I can simply dismiss it, but because, first, it retains a very high profile in the study of culture within the discipline of sociology and, second, because, as I shall show, it makes claims either to supersede or to displace cultural studies.”

“My critique of trends in sociology is entirely motivated by my hope for a productive encounter between cultural studies and sociology. The benefit to both fields will be the mutual recognition that–again to quote Avery Gordon “the increasingly sophisticated understandings of representation and of how the social world is textually or discursively constructed still require an engagement with the social structuring practices that have long been the province of sociological inquiry.”(Gordon 1997:11) What sociologists can contribute to the project of cultural analysis is a focus on institutions and social relations, as well as on the broader perspective of structured axes of social differentiation and their historical transformations–axes of class, status, gender, nationality, and ethnicity.” (cited in Wolff, Janet 1999)

text here . . .

Webliography and Bibliography

Beilharz 2001: 335

Carveth, Donald L. 1984 [1999]. “Psychoanalysis and Social Theory: The Hobbesian Problem Revisited.” Psychoanalysis & Contemporary Thought. 7, 1 (1984), 43-98.

Carveth, Donald L. 1999. “Psychoanalysis and Social Theory: The Hobbesian Problem Revisited.” Revised on-line version.

(Gulbenkian 1995:33-34)

Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York. Oxford University Press.

Wagner 1995:1

Weber, Max.

Wolff, Janet. 1999. “Cultural Studies and the Sociology of Culture.” Invisible Culture: an Electronic Journal for Visual Studies.

Massumi’s desperate strategic retreat from hopelessness of global cognitive mapping

“From my own point of view, the way that a concept like hope can be made useful is when it is not connected to an expected success — when it starts to be something different from optimism — because when you start trying to think ahead into the future from the present point, rationally there really isn’t much room for hope. Globally it’s a very pessimistic affair, with economic inequalities increasing year by year, with health and sanitation levels steadily decreasing in many regions, with the global effects of environmental deterioration already being felt, with conflicts among nations and peoples apparently only getting more intractable, leading to mass displacements of workers and refugees … It seems such a mess that I think it can be paralysing. If hope is the opposite of pessimism, then there’s precious little to be had. On the other hand, if hope is separated from concepts of optimism and pessimism, from a wishful projection of success or even some kind of a rational calculation of outcomes, then I think it starts to be interesting — because it places it in the present (Massumi).”

Massumi, Brian. 2002. “Navigating Movements.” in Hope Edited by Mary Zournazi (New York: Routledge :211).

Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. Organs without Bodies: on Deleuze and Consequences. New York and London: Routledge: 202.

Zournazi, Mary. 2003. “Navigating Movements: An Interview with Brian Massumi.” www.21cmagazine.com.

Notes

Brian Massumi teaches in the Communication Department of the Université de Montréal. He is the author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992) and First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with Kenneth Dean; Autonomedia, 1993) and editor of A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 2002) and The Politics of Everyday Fear (University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

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