By The Public Sphere | The post Issue № 5 <small> | September 2009</small> appeared first on The Public Sphere.

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By Carrie Hawks | The post Sprawl appeared first on The Public Sphere.

I did not have a lot of opportunities to “return.”  My parents did not go back so often that my siblings or I would be able to accompany them.  When they did go back, the cost of a trans-Pacific trip was too prohibitive for my sister, brother, or me to be able to join them.  My brother was the first of my siblings to visit the Philippines, and he went with Dad after his sophomore year in high school.  He had a great time meeting our relatives but complained about having been a feast for the mosquitoes there.  After they returned, I told Mom and my sister that someday we would have to make a girls’ trip to the Philippines as this was only fair.  At that moment, my brother became one of “them,” someone who had “been back,” and I admit that I envied him.

I used to feel this interminable divide between Filipino-Americans like me who were born in the United States and Filipino-Americans who immigrated mostly as small children with their parents to the United States.  I often wondered if they were somehow superior Filipinos, and that they were somehow culturally predisposed to be more proficient in Tagalog and have an undiscerning taste for Filipino cuisine, no matter what ingredients and strange animal parts were involved.  Being U.S.-born, I felt that there was some ineffable, missing element that made me more of a poseur than a “real” Filipino-American.  In fact, for a time, I insisted on identifying myself as just “American” because I was born in the United States and did not see the point of placing my parents’ national origin in my own ethnic identification.  I also saw the label “Filipino-American” as something of a lie – how could I dare to label myself with a country I have never seen with my own eyes?

As originally planned, we Espineli women finally set off on our own Philippine journey on June 7, 2007 with the intention to canvass a selection of its thousands of islands in a scant two weeks.  Like some kind of strange time warp across the International Date Line, Mom, my sister Lauren, and I left Los Angeles for Manila in the early evening of a Thursday and arrived in Manila early Saturday morning.  The sixteen-hour plane ride was punctuated with many hot meals – an unexpected treat given the fact that all U.S. domestic plane trips no longer serve meals.  The hot meals were Filipino dishes which helped make it all the more real that we were finally going to visit our parents’ home country.   I remember feeling nervous about meeting my large extended family and wondering what they will think of us.  Mom is the fifth of nine children, so we had plenty of aunts, uncles, and cousins to meet.  Dad only had three siblings, all of whom are now in the United States, but his uncle had eleven children and his aunt had sixteen. So this makes for many more cousins, many of whom are scattered around the world (such as in Norway).

As per usual, Lauren and I procrastinated about packing, and we each ended up each packing a huge suitcase, a decision we regretted as soon as we landed.  In addition to all of our suitcases, we had a huge cardboard box, filled with gifts and supplies for relatives.  If you have ever passed the Philippine Airlines counter in the international terminal, you have probably seen many passengers waiting to check in huge cardboard boxes called Balikbayan ((“Balikbayan” literally means “returnee” or someone coming home after an extended stay.)) boxes.   These boxes are a long-standing tradition which also adds to the cost of a trip to the Philippines – because you can’t just go there empty-handed.  We brought old clothes, little gifts and souvenirs as well as foodstuffs like instant coffee, corned beef, and Coffeemate that are very expensive and hard to come by in the Philippines.

As we deplaned and made our way to the baggage claim, we felt the profound humidity engulf us as we tried to find our bearings.  So this was what the tropics really felt like.  Our first trip to the bathroom was an experience!  We had to tip someone in the bathroom when we finished using the facilities…the last time I encountered this was going to the bathroom at a nice hotel so it was a bit unexpected in an airport.  Thankfully, we had been warned in advance to bring our own toilet paper as this convenience is very much a Western one.  As soon as we gathered all of our luggage, we needed to find our connecting flight to Tacloban.  Our first stop on our journey was to go to Mom’s hometown of Calbayog on the island of Samar.  Samar is part of the middle region of the Philippines known as the Visayas.

As we dipped beneath the thin layer of clouds, we got our first peek at the lush greenery that awaited us.  I had seen some photos of Mom’s hometown but they were mostly of people and of buildings so my imagination forgot to fill in the fact that it was enclosed by all of this amazing nature!  I wondered why my mother never mentioned this…then again, it was probably something she saw as normal and not something worth pointing out to us.

Fortunately, we got help in acclimating to our new environment.  Our uncle Tito Ecot (Mom’s brother-in-law) and our cousin Francis met us at the airport in Tacloban.  Tacloban is on the island of Leyte and is best-known for being the humble birthplace of Imelda Marcos – this was a factoid with which we were immediately supplied.  Tito Ecot and Francis hired a van for the day to pick us and our luggage up since it was a five-hour trip by car to Calbayog.  I think that our luggage outweighed us so this was good planning.  Tito Ecot warned us that it would be a bumpy road, but that was an understatement.  The potholes in some places were so deep that the driver would drive on the dirt shoulders which were actually smoother than the roads themselves.  We were amazed that this was the main highway of Samar!  When we asked why the roads were in such a state, Mom explained that due to political corruption, the funds for public works were siphoned off to more personal interests.  This got me to thinking about how much I took for granted in the United States.  Despite the frequent potholes I encounter in the Boston area, I don’t complain about them anymore.  Having a road in good repair is not a right but a privilege in my mother’s home province.

When I asked about whether they would ever do any repair on the road, my uncle and cousin laughed.  They explained that the road had been and would always be dangerous to travel and that they avoided taking this route when possible.  Our cousin Francis also mentioned that there was a possibility that Calbayog’s airport would soon offer flights to and from Manila (it does today).  It was great to see Francis, having only known him through photos and relatives’ stories.  I knew he was a little older than me and that he and his twin brother Terrence were both married with kids.  I looked forward to connecting with him and all of our cousins.  I could not help but wonder what we would talk about, if we had any interests in common, and what they would think of me and Lauren and our American ways.  It was a nice surprise to discover that he had so much to share with us about the Philippines, including local attractions and historic sites that he wanted us to see.

Before we started out on our treacherous five-hour journey to our relatives’ hometown, Calbayog, we took a quick trip to a nearby monument.  General MacArthur’s words, “I shall return,” was one of the few tidbits I remembered learning about the Philippines in my high school world history class.  It was a surprise for Lauren and me to learn that we could go to the exact spot where General MacArthur had indeed returned with forces to liberate the Philippines at the end of World War II.   The monument’s statues of MacArthur and his officers looked to me like performance artists standing in water.  It was meant to duplicate how MacArthur and his men waded through the Pacific waters to return to the Philippine shores marking the fulfillment of his promise of his famous words.

Just as I had once felt awe standing  in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris where so much of the history of that city had taken place, I felt chills about what a momentous occasion this moment was for both the United States and the Philippines that had only happened 63 years previously.   Now here were my sister and me, making our way to the country that our parents left behind to pursue a brighter future in the United States.  Would they have left the Philippines behind had MacArthur not returned as promised?  The Philippines would never be the same and still struggles with the repercussions of that moment today.  Gone were its Japanese oppressors and in came the democratic saviors.  But at what cost?  Did the United States seduce the Philippines with so much of its culture and language that we first-generation Filipino-Americans feel even more of a disconnect between our ethnic origins than other first-generation Asian-Americans?  I couldn’t help but think of all of the implications that MacArthur’s return had for both the Philippines’ destiny as well as my own.

We crossed a bridge connecting Leyte to the island of Samar, and I was blown away by this island of palm trees.  It looked completely untouched by human hands as the palms grew thick and wild to the very ends of its shores.  How many islands were there like that in this archipelago of thousands?  In crossing this bridge, it made me think of the threshold I waited for so long to cross – to be one of those Filipino-Americans who have been “back.”  Of course, I did not feel any differently, but I knew that thereafter, I would never be the same.

(Sheila Espineli’s travels in the Philippines will be continued in a later issue)

By Sheila Espineli | The post My So-Called Asian Identity: I Shall Go: In Search of My Filipina Roots appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Describing the Spanish that we used as “broken” is like saying water is wet. Our mangled word pronunciation, notoriously bungled syntax, and grammatical non-sequiturs were linguistic train wrecks in the making every other second that we opened our mouths to “articulate” our breathlessly pidgin Spanish. In contrast, Nona and her adult children spoke a sturdy and grammatically flawless Spanish. So all things considered, our grandmother had a world of patience for the linguistic disasters that we sent crashing her way during our everyday conversations with her.

There was one exception. In Peru, the term for grandmother is “mamavieja,” an affectionate if rather formal compound title comprising four syllables that translates into “Old Mother.” My older brother by nine years and his contemporary cousins enunciate this word perfectly. Alas, “mamavieja” was at least three if not four syllables too long for us latter born “americanos” to ever come within a Peruvian kilometer of pronouncing even semi-correctly.

So here our grandmother, one of the most practical people I have ever known, intervened at a point in time before I myself was out of diapers and drew the line with the then present and all future grandchildren. “Nona,” which means grandmother in French and other cultures, was so comparatively easy to say that not even we could blow the pronunciation. So “Nona” her title would be, and “Nona”she always was to us, even after her death in 2002.

Being that my grandparents lived with my mom, my brothers, and me, in an extended family household until I turned sixteen, Nona played a towering role in the world that I grew up in. Because my mom worked the night shift during my early grade school years, Nona was the one who got me up for school in the morning, and Nona was the one who waited for me when I ambled home from school, as my mom got in what rest she could before she would be off again to her night time job.

Nona was old school strict and old world tough.  She grew up in the 1920s on a wind swept and isolated mountain ranch located in the nether reaches of the northern Peruvian Andes far above Peru’s second largest city of Trujillo.   The glorified hamlet of about 150 people that was her ancestral hometown carried a Quechua name, Paranday.   Paranady in the 1920s more closely resembled say, Fargo, North Dakota circa 1890 than the relatively antiseptic 1980s era California surroundings that I walked out to every time I left the family house.   In fact, Paranday was so geographically and technologically shut off from the rest of the country that its entire location, along with all of the surrounding mountain ranches like Nona’s, were completely inaccessible by car until after 1981, nearly sixty five years after Nona was born.  Until that year any hardy soul trying to reach Paranday from the nearest sizeable population center had to do so Old Testament style, traveling twelve hours by donkey just to make it to the town limits.

Nona’s upbringing was forged in the crucible of this frontier like environment.   She grew up living a utilitarian and hard-scrabble life that put iron in her blood.   Six of the seven children she gave birth to were born right on the ranch she grew up in, without the benefit of epidurals or any other kind of modern anesthetic.   All things considered it is safe to say that Nona brought her frontier values with her everywhere she went and this was as true in how she raised me as it was for anything else. One thing that meant was nothing ever went to waste. Let me repeat: Nothing. Wasted. Ever.

This was most especially true in the area of food. Nona”s rural upbringing, which meant she was intimately familiar with the back breaking manual labor involved in cultivating agricultural products, and Nona”s legendary cooking wizardry in preparing her home-cooked meals, combined to form in Nona”s heart an exalted appreciation for the sanctity of food. Thus, for Nona, throwing away food was akin to an insult against God’s benevolence and an affront to the starving Ethiopian children depicted in what at the time felt like an infinite loop of World Vision television commercials.

In my early grade school years I was often Nona’s captive audience for one of her home-cooked meals. Ever faithful to her Spartan values and rural heritage, Nona naturally considered me morally obligated to eat all of the food she served on my plate. This stayed true even if the designated meal-time consequently tumbled into an overtime period of interminable length because of my passive resistance to what I then considered Nona”s culinary tyranny.

Those endless meal times often devolved into a test of wits between Nona and I. However, school morning breakfasts were especially perilous for my second-grade self because Nona insisted on serving me a daily bowl of Quaker Oats oatmeal, and there was a school bus to catch, so I was up against a clock, in addition to Nona’s formidable resolve.  Now, Nona always mispronounced this non-Spanish word for oatmeal as “Quack—errr”, dutifully left out the Oats part, and she saw it as her For example, if your company is a manufacturer, it will be important to use the coming from sensors to monitor the purity of chemicals being mixed in the production process. grandmotherly duty to make me ingest this particular kind of breakfast meal down to the last soggy oat. As for me, I was just as determined not to. In fact I felt I had a sacred responsibility to my kid palate not to drink the despised Quack–errr to anything like the bottom part of the bowl, where all the doomed soggy oats submerged to rest in watery oblivion.

However, I could not argue this point with Nona directly. I never did, as I had been raised not to. At this particular point in my family”s immigrant experience the rules were so strict that young children could never for any reason so much as say the word “No” to any responsible adult. So despite my kid”s eye view of the tragic injustice involved, no way and no how was I going to start the soundtrack of “No” with Nona around the consumption of Quack–errr.

Instead I employed subterfuge and tactical misdirection wrapped up in a metaphorical falafel of non-violent resistance. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized historic sit-ins for racial integration. John Lennon choreographed a televised 1969 bed-in for peace. And at age seven I began staging spoon-ins for escaping the de facto jail that Nona”s kitchen table was to me.

You may ask, what was a “spoon-in”? While Nona watched (or more accurately stated, pretended not to watch) me “finish” my breakfast from the business side of the kitchen (where the oven was), I dramatically and repeatedly buried my spoon deeply into the tilted bowl and pretended to scoop out every one of the surviving oats to eat them all, and thus in Nona”s eyes justify my getting off the kitchen table. My goal was to sustain my spoon-in pantomime just convincingly and long enough so that Nona would soon be distracted by a phone call or a bathroom break or some other minor miracle that would result in me being outside her line of sight. This in turn would allow me to jog sight unseen to the kitchen sink and flush the offending Quack-errr oats down the drain before Nona would be the wiser.

My spoon-ins were occasionally successful but in truth, Nona usually achieved her goal of making me eat everything she set on my plate.   She could and often would wait me out my spoon-ins because right after breakfast she walked me straight to the school bus stop.  Even at age seven I knew the school bus waited on no one, not even anti-Quack-err kid crusaders like myself.  And seeing as how Nona physically stood in the middle of the only possible route to the kitchen sink, unless Nona was distracted or otherwise called away from her ambush spot, my spoon-ins were doomed to fail.   Of course, the quiet irony is that at this current point in my life I would gladly trade any number of material things in exchange for being able to again taste any and every part of Nona”s cooking and to hear, even if only one more time, the soft grandmotherly laugh that she would so often share with me at the beginning of our meal times together.

Nona had a wonderful meal time laugh, I assure you.  Her laugh was vibrant, infectious, and carried within in it a love of life that found its original expression in Paranday and brought its resilience and generosity to my little childhood corner of Pasadena.    No matter where I am, I can hear its echo in my memory and know how blessed a grandkid I am to have had her in my life.   Nona’s laugh was graceful, loving, and communicated the elemental essence of who she was, how she lived, and where her truest treasure could be found.

By Cesar Gomez | The post Becoming Nona: Memories of a Grandmother appeared first on The Public Sphere.

It exemplified the extent to which our culture has become irrationally obsessed with celebrity.  At the time, I couldn’t resist joking about how Michael Jackson’s death had brought world peace, simply because it created a media blackout of everything else.  Many people were disturbed by the level of attention Jackson received, especially when the Iranian government was violently repressing election protestors, over 70 people had just been killed in another bombing in Baghdad, the US government had just sent arms to aid the Somali government’s fight against Islamists, and, of course, the governor of South Carolina had just admitted to having an affair.  But in a way, it made sense to focus on the sudden permanent loss of a person whose fame will most likely never be equaled, a person whose death actually does signal the end of an era.

Unless you happen to be a member of one of those South American tribes who have managed to exist completely isolated from the modern world, you knew who Michael Jackson was.  That’s only slight hyperbole.  I remember, as a kid, seeing video footage of his concerts in Europe and Asia, even in Russia during the Cold War.  He had fans in Iran during the Revolution.  My own father, who deliberately ignores almost everything that could be considered pop culture, has fond memories of listening to the Jackson 5 in his younger days.  For the entire decade of the 1980s, Michael Jackson was probably the most famous non-politician on the planet.  He’d worked for it, and he’d earned it.  There is something to be said for that.

Only a handful of artists have truly made an enduring mark on popular culture in the past century; Charlie Chaplin, Elvis Presley, Audrey Hepburn, the Beatles, Madonna, Michael Jackson, to name a few.  These are people whose images and work are recognized almost everywhere.  They displayed talent, hard work and dedication, and what they created inspired people all over the world.  They also gained their fame and popularity long before the age of “new media.”  Perhaps it’s not coincidence then, that of all the faces featured in current celebrity-focused magazines and websites, none stands out as potential Beatles or Madonnas.  I’m convinced none ever will because with the rise of 24-hour news, internet tabloids and social networking sites, our concept of fame and our ability to recognize and bestow it has been utterly altered.

We live in the Age of Information.  The internet is the great democratizer.  Anyone with a mobile phone can broadcast their thoughts and observations to any number of people at any time via Facebook or Twitter.  Anyone with a video camera can subject the general public to their pets’ quirks, their friends’ idiocy or anything else via Youtube.  This is all well and good, but it has had a few consequences.  One is that everyone wants to be famous and believes not only that they should be, but also that they deserve to be.  Another is that fame itself has been completely diluted.

Thanks to the prevalence of reality TV and voracious internet tabloids, there are so many famous people in this country, that I gave up trying to keep track years ago.  Names I have never seen or heard of before pop up in the latest celebrity gossip headlines everyday.  They’re always treated as though everyone naturally knows who they are.  Most of the time, not only do I not know who they are, I can’t even discern what they might have done to warrant their apparent fame.  As it turns out, most of them haven’t done anything beyond mug for the cameras on some random cable network reality show or date someone with a well-connected PR person.  This generation of celebrities has earned their fame by being the bitchiest, sluttiest, craziest, crudest, most racist or sexist person in the cast of whichever reality show they appeared on.  They don’t seem concerned with displaying any real talent or holding any responsibility, only with their own notoriety.  Media outlets like Us Weekly and TMZ highlight every scandal, every bar brawl, every traffic ticket and botched Botox job that these personalities can conjure.  And the public consumes it like a drug.  No one seems particularly concerned with the fact that fame of this kind is especially fleeting in this age of instant gratification.  With so many outlets, so many sources, so many contenders, the public consciousness can only process each one for so long.  Like bubbles on a playground, these celebrities rise and burst in an instant.  Occasionally, they snap, like the contestant from a VH1 show who apparently murdered his ex-wife and became a fugitive only to commit suicide himself.  Or the DJ who was known among Hollywood celebrities, but who I heard of only because he’d died of a drug overdose.  Or the unfortunate Jon and Kate whose marriage disintegrated in the glare of the spotlight, which boosted their show’s ratings but at what cost to their eight kids?

Of course there have always been one-hit wonders, flash-in-the-pan starlets, and child stars who disappeared after they hit puberty.  But most of them made some kind of positive contribution to the entertainment world while they had their moments, whether it was a fun, catchy song or a movie that made people happy.  Many were part of a larger pop culture trend (80s hair metal bands, for example) that had its day and faded. I can only hope that the current obsession with superficiality in celebrity is one of those.  As it stands, it is beyond me how people who become famous for shooting each other with staple guns on cable TV (does anyone even remember those guys?) can possibly be making a positive contribution let alone a lasting impact that inspires anything good in anyone. And I find it a bit sad that, given the viewing public’s devotion to a show like American Idol, even the competitors who show real talent and stage presence usually last barely long enough to release an album before that same public has lost interest.  Some don’t even last that long.

Ancient heroes sought glory, fame and fortune in quests and on the battlefield.  In the early days of Hollywood and in the old Broadway musicals, a small town kid was always trying to break into show business to become a famous actress, singer or dancer.  For all his inexplicable eccentricities, Michael Jackson was an extremely talented musician and performer.  People gained fame because they had unusual talent, determination, charm, intelligence, or at least savvy.  Even people who sought fame for its own sake, had to do something to earn it.  Madonna, for example, could never really sing, but she’s an intensely ambitious self-promoter, and she worked her ass off, quite literally, to become a world-class entertainer. With the rise of new media, our admiration of talent and dedication is fading along with our capacity to appreciate a well-crafted coupling of gifted performance and marketable personality. Now we just pay attention to whomever makes the most noise until they are drowned out by someone else.  Mass media truly does represent the masses now that just about everyone has a digital camera and internet access, but there are very few filters and even fewer incentives to create anything of quality.  As Andy Warhol predicted, people who have done nothing more than lipsync in front of a webcam seem to feel entitled to their fifteen minutes.  Fame has always been something to aspire to and admire, but very rarely to achieve. The whole point was that not everyone could do it.  It meant more than having your picture taken on a red carpet and posted on Perez Hilton’s website with graffiti over it.  It took more than sitting around gossiping with your friends in front of a video camera. And yet, it seems that this is what fame means now.  But, in this world, where anyone can become famous for the slightest or most random act, how can fame mean anything at all?

By Paloma Ramirez | The post I Am Indignant – These Are the People We Have to Look up to Now? appeared first on The Public Sphere.

All the while I ask myself: what is a large eye? A small eye? What is a normal sized eye?

Two hundred years ago, a young Austrian medical student found himself with the same question. He was struggling in school, and he was jealous of those among his class who so easily excelled at memorization. In interminable lectures he watched these men trying to figure out what made them different from him, why it was so easy for them to remember and so difficult for him.

It was the eyes, he decided. They all seemed to have larger eyes.

This young medical student was Franz-Joseph Gall, and this simple, odd insight would within two decades bloom into an unstoppable cultural force. Convinced of this causal connection, Gall began to look for other correlations between mental attributes and physical appearance. “Proceeding from reflection to reflection,” he would later write, “from observation to observation, it occurred to me that, if memory were made evident by external signs, it might be so likewise with other talents or intellectual faculties.” Gall set out looking for other correspondences between physical appearance and personality, and from then on, “all the individuals who were distinguished by any quality or faculty, became the object of my special attention, and of systematic study as to the form of the head.”

Gall’s obsession drove him to search for a visible means of discovering the brain’s secrets: a process he called “cranioscopy”—what became colloquially known as “bump reading” and what his pupil Johann Spurzheim would rechristen “phrenology.” It was predicated on a few simple principles. First, Gall theorized that, all other things being equal, size determines propensity: A bigger brain implies a higher capacity for intelligence. This was, Gall asserted, equally true of different parts of the brain—if the segment of the brain devoted to memory was larger in one individual than in another, then it stood to reason that the former would have a higher capacity for memory. Second, it was well known that the skull, like all bones, is initially malleable upon birth, only gradually becoming more rigid. So it stood to reason, Gall theorized, that the ridges and folds of the brain might imprint themselves on the bone when it was still pliable and that one could come to know the brain by understanding these imprints. From this apparent insight Gall began to explore the possibility that the brain’s workings might be made visible by the patterns it made on the skull. Each part of the skull became assigned a different aspect of personality—mirthfulness in the temples, sexual propensity at the base of the skull, and so on. With precise measurements of the size of each of these areas, Gall theorized, you could develop an entire picture of an individual’s character.

One’s identity, in other words, was written in the bumps of one’s head.

The rest of the story of phrenology is well known enough: blossoming into full scale quackery, it became a juggernaut of an industry unto itself, even as it was more and more discredited by legitimate science. By the twentieth century it was all but abandoned, but in the nineteenth century it was perhaps the most popular mode of understanding the human brain. In his preface to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman proclaimed, “the anatomist chemist astronomer geologist phrenologist spiritualist mathematician historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.” It seems odd that the one profession on this list that actually purports to deal with who we are, why we’re motivated to do what we do, and how we define ourselves, is the one profession that seems so startlingly out of place nowadays. But it makes some sense that the rest of the disciplines on Whitman’s list are hard sciences, since phrenology presents itself as the hard science of the mind, a system of objective measurements and offers, in its own way, a certain amount of rigor. Phrenology has none of the messiness of psychoanalysis or modern therapy; the phrenologist doesn’t care about your dreams, needs no narratives about your past, your abusive parents, your failed aspirations. Everything the phrenologist needs is right there, laid out in a perfect, analytic grid. Your mind revealed in the same topographic language the lexicographer would use.

For all the ridiculousness of such a premise, there is a simple elegance in such a map of identity, where everything is so neatly arranged, so perfectly knowable. I’m not the only one who’s drawn to the trappings of Gall’s pseudoscience—lately, phrenology charts have popped up everywhere, from CD covers to bicycle helmets. They’re a graphic designer’s dream: iconic, ironic, eye-catching, nostalgic. But as much as layout artists may fetishize Gall’s chart nowadays, no one is eager to revisit the science. I’m not bothered that phrenology—with its dubious method and explicit racism, sexism, and all the rest—has disappeared. Good riddance. But what intrigues me is that such a ubiquitous measure of personality has literally disappeared off the face of the earth in less than a century. Compare the number of people who can read Egyptian hieroglyphs or ancient Greek to the number of practicing phrenologists—there are dead languages and there are dead languages, and the language of phrenology is about as dead as it gets.

And this is where my problem begins. For the past year, I’ve been trying to teach myself phrenology, this now-dead art.  At first I assumed this would be a fairly easy task, far easier than reconstructing Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone. After all, the relics of phrenology are visible everywhere; libraries and online resources still preserve the literature. It’s everywhere in popular memory—the pseudoscience to end all pseudosciences, the template for every self-help scheme from The Secret to the Master Cleanse. How hard could it be to learn it?

It was easy enough to track down what I thought would have been the Holy Grail: Lorenzo Fowler’s “Self-Instructor in phrenology.” Lorenzo and his brother Orson did far more to popularize phrenology in the United States than anyone else, selling their now-iconic busts and performing thousands of readings out of their New York headquarters. The title says it all; who needs phrenological experts, when the book promises to let you teach yourself?

“To TEACH LEARNERS those organic conditions which indicate character is the first object of this manual,” the preface boldly proclaims. “And to render it accessible to all, it condenses facts and conditions, rather than elaborates arguments because to expound Phrenology is its highest proof states laws and results, and leaves them upon their naked merits; embodies recent discoveries, and crowds into the fewest words and pages just what learners need to know, and hence requires to be STUDIED rather than merely read. ‘Short, yet clear,’ is its motto. Its analysis of the faculties and numerous engravings embody the results of the very extensive observation and experience of the Authors.”

The library copy I acquired, an original from 1850, even has its first owner’s chart, filled out by Lorenzo Fowler himself, with each region given a number on a scale from 1 to 7. His pencil marks faint but still visible; I found myself wondering what a graphologist would make of them. But as tantalizing as Lorenzo’s presence in these pages is, it is also the problem: the book’s owner did not phrenologize himself. As the preface goes on to explain, the actual work is done by the examiner, in this case, Fowler: “The examiner will mark the power, absolute and relative, of each function and faculty, by placing a figure, dot, or dash on a line with the name of the organ marked, and in the column headed ‘large,’ or ‘small,’ according to the size of the organ marked, while the printed figure in the square thus marked refers to those pages in the book where, under the head ‘large,’ ‘small,’ etc., will be found description of the character of the one examined in respect to that organ….”

This is the problem—the Fowlers don’t teach you how to read heads, they teach you how to interpret their readings. And the bust they sold is great for learning where the various propensities of Amativeness, Philoprogenitiveness, Adhesiveness, Inhabitiveness, Alimentiveness, and all the rest are located, but it’s useless for separating a “3” from a “4.” You still need a phrenologist, one who knows how to classify the size of each bump.

In all the phrenological literature I’ve scoured, there’s not one description of bump size in objective terms, no measurements that can be applied to a contemporary head. How does one even objectively measure such bumps? In centimeters? In degrees? What is the “normal” shape of the head, from which one could single out a noteworthy bump? Once proprietary trade secrets, now these secrets of identity are likely lost for good. As with any dying language, without a living community practicing phrenology, its mysteries have disappeared from the storehouse of knowledge.

So I spend my time trying to reconstruct this data, taking my measurements, looking for enough statistical data to form a working knowledge of an elusive “average” by which to judge the remainder of humanity. Not unlike the work of the Egyptologist, there’s an archeological aspect to this work, a reconstitution of a forgotten discourse.  I have no dreams of spreading the bump-reading gospel. The question for me has never been: how do we resurrect phrenology? Rather, the question is: what does it say about our ideas of identity when a “science” (however dubious) can go from such importance to the dustbin of history, in such a short space of time? The disappearance of phrenology suggests that the study of identity isn’t like biology—it doesn’t necessarily move inexorably forward, building on past discoveries. Each age has its own ideas about identity, and its truths are always in flux.

By Colin Dickey | The post Bumps: Confessions of an Amateur Phrenologist appeared first on The Public Sphere.

“Remember Mortimer, there are no small actors. Only small parts.” — from the play, “The Fantasticks” (end of Act 1)

Much to my parents’ and black community’s surprise, I found friends among my peers in my private, predominately white elementary school. That’s fine for children, said some of the elders at my black Pentecostal church. For even before the civil war, white children played with the black slave children, they would say. However, these elders would say in hushed tones, once the children became of age, those friendships were impossible. And so it will be with you, the elders said, as I came of age in the early 1980s. Some boundaries, the elders said, are impossible to cross.

In college, some of my roommates who shared my theologically conservative upbringing were skeptical about my secular peers, especially my friends who were neo-atheists, and, in come cases, Wiccan wannabees. My conservative friends were fine with having relationships with “non-believers,” as long as I was trying to convert them to Christianity. Other than that, my religious friends said, these relationships were impossible and would eventually fade once the superficial boundaries of dormitories and classes ended with graduation. Some boundaries, my friends said in quiet, prayerful tones, are impossible to cross.

Much to my delight, while having dinner with two college friends in the early 1990s, we realized that our friendship had lasted more than ten years. We marveled at how our college-era acquaintanceship had evolved into lasting friendships. We were from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, and all of us had grown up in communities that cautioned us against alliances with the communities that we each represented. During that dinner, we talked about how we were able to cross the impenetrable boundaries that we had been raised with, the fences that were supposed to keep us within communities often defined more by who we were not than who we happened to be.

At first, we thought we had been friends because we were able to forgive each other. We had other close friends in college, some of whom we assumed we’d be friends with for the rest of our lives. However, disagreements, busyness, distance and shifts in ideology ended many of those relationships. Despite our ability to forgive each other for various clashes, this did not seem to define why we had managed to remain friends into adulthood.

Perhaps we were friends because the world had changed so much that the boundaries of our childhood were no longer applicable. Those ethnic and class boundaries that once confined us to a station in life were now looser. A shared college degree from the same institution also leveled our playing field. We found that we had arrived on the doorstep to adulthood with more baggage from college than from childhood. Perhaps we were surprised at how four years at the same institution created new bonds that now redefined our communities of origin. The old fences of ethnicity and religion still mattered; however, four years in the same place created new alliances and boundaries.

And in the new communities formed by this common experience of college, we discovered that we as a group of friends shared something that barely registered in today’s multicultural discussion. This “something” is probably what gave us that additional comfort level with each other. The best way I can describe this “something” is that my friends and I all come from ethnic and religious communities that had once been on someone’s list for being wiped from the face of the earth. Now, this aspect of our identity is not the kind of thing you introduce yourself with; hello, my great grandparents were once forcibly detained in some manner (concentration camp, reservation, ghetto, sexual, ethnic or religious discrimination laws, immigration status designations) for some difference deemed dangerous by the majority culture. Although these nineteenth and twentieth-century atrocities are rarely discussed in polite company, even among Jews, African Americans, and Native Americans, this legacy of oppression still defines these communities. These narratives of communal and shared oppression are often talked about among close family members and friends. The stories of pain are spoken in whispers over dinner and drinks, often while reflecting on the latest news of some genocide, somewhere in the world. Our whispers tell stories where our family members were not the main characters, but the secondary, unnamed cast members, the corp, the nameless masses, the expendable people who were not important to some oppressor’s major plot point. And this aspect of our identity as the secondary character in someone else’s story of glory and power is a powerful moniker.  For the lack of a better metaphor, this aspect of our identity as someone else’s minor character is like being the doomed “Red Shirt” character in a popular television series.

The Red Shirt character is a colloquial reference among fans of a 1960s era television science fiction program. In Star Trek’s opening scenes, two or three of the lead characters (often wearing yellow or blue uniforms) would land on a planet, accompanied by one or two characters wearing red uniforms. Within the first ten minutes of the show, generally someone wearing a red uniform died, and her or his demise introduced the central conflict of the episode’s plot. So, at the beginning of the episode, if someone appeared in a red shirt, you knew that this person, no matter how likeable, competent, or regardless of how much this character connected for the moment with the yellow and blue uniformed lead characters (often the stars of the show), this Red Shirt was toast.

When I first walked into my private, white religious school as a sixth grader, an African American from the inner city, my classmates probably looked at me with a mixture of shock and pity. They had designated me a Red Shirt in their meta-narrative of their educational experience which was suppose to result in a high school diploma, the gateway to college, business or some kind of suburban success. This suburban success would elude me, the new black kid, because, I was slated to eventually suffer some kind of fate early in the narrative of our shared school experience. This new black kid, they might have thought, is probably a nice person, but the poor girl is doomed. She’s probably a future welfare mom, I imagined people would think, or, perhaps they thought I would become a member of the service industry that would help cater to someone’s suburban success. I remember being treated politely, but eventually, people stopped reacting to me at all. I became invisible; maybe my expected short and irrelevant existence was too much to bear. As a Red Shirt, I could not be an equal in a community where the white children were groomed for the leadership and privilege that no minor character could acquire. My presence was merely to be a prop, or a token of their kindness. Eventually, for the convenience of the plot, I would be dismissed, either in actuality or existentially through being ignored and rendered invisible. I suppose this is much better than being wiped off the face of the earth. Then again, there is not much difference. Either way, I was being removed from the plot.

Perhaps the warnings about crossing boundaries to make friends came from the reality that if you are the designated Red Shirt in someone’s narrative, the initial camaraderie could quickly devolve into the experience of genocide on a personal or communal level. The warnings were quite accurate, and there was wisdom in not becoming too comfortable with your friends until you understand where you fit into someone else’s narrative. Being a Red Shirt created insanity, psychosis, neurosis, paranoia, addictive behaviors, all related to the strangeness of knowing that you are the extra, easily disposable character, in someone else’s epic narrative. It’s probably why so many marginalized people end up being designated the “crazy” Red Shirt person. As part of the elimination process, the crazy Red Shirt person is blamed for their own negation, thus relieving the main characters of guilt and insuring their roles as heroes in their own meta-narratives.

So, in an effort to find true friends and avoid insanity, I heeded the warnings, I made friends cautiously, and tried to live out my own meta-narrative where I was the lead character and conquering hero. I had not planned on the narrative’s transformation. The change started after college in the 1990s, when my Red Shirt status expired and was replaced with a new narrative shaped by the shared experience at an institution that treated me not like a minor character, but as an equal with my peers. My new uniform after graduation was not red. I was no longer the character whose demise was required by the plot of the larger narrative. I had become a productive member of society with a college degree and thus no longer a threat to the meta-narrative of US culture…sort of.

While I enjoyed this new narrative status, I found that most of my friends felt similar about their former Red Shirt status. The Red Shirt status crosses ethnic, religious, and gender boundaries, as was also the case with the science fiction show. I remember taking comfort that it was not always the black character who died in the first ten minutes, but it was the Red Shirt character, who might be a man or woman, or a black or white or Asian character. The Red Shirt status of non-existence was an equal opportunity position.

For my friends (whom I have known for almost 25 years), this former Red Shirt identity was often a coat that hid our original ethnic and religious attributes. For some, the assimilation process was adopted in an effort to stay off the Red Shirt list. For others, assimilation was adopted as part of living out our own personal meta-narrative while ignoring the majority culture’s efforts to assign us to the role of the doomed Red Shirt (like, for example, attending college and gaining access to networks of privilege). I found that beneath the surface of my friend’s skin lurked Catholic guilt, habits honed in former British colonies, a hidden ability to dance rhythmically shaped by a Celtic heritage, or perhaps a secret and unexpressed taste for kugel, bratwurst, and kimchi.

I vacillated between the paranoia of being someone else’s minor character in their major culture epic narrative and my new found identity outside of my previous Red Shirt status. As I grow older as an African American, I must not forget my Red Shirt reality, that in someone else’s meta narrative, I am not suppose to exist. I must hang onto the sane part of my paranoia as a reminder that someone’s meta-narrative once required my demise. This paranoia is not needed to keep me safe from false friends or tokenism anymore. What I hope is that by remembering my former Red Shirt status, I won’t absentmindedly write my own meta-narrative that assigns the role of the Red Shirt to some kind, jovial, and unsuspecting person out of convenience or in a delusionary attempt at some kind of suburban nirvana.

By Valerie Bailey | The post Of Red Shirts: The Saga of the Minor Character in Someone Else’s Epic appeared first on The Public Sphere.