debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

30.9.05

A Pessimistic Conclusion

A common scene: in the Metro station there are two bins. One is for garbage. The one immediately beside it is for recycling newspapers. The garbage bin is piled high with newspapers, while the newspaper recycling bin is practically empty.

And yet some people still think the human race will be able to take action against, say, climate change.

Stentor Danielson, 22:18, ,

29.9.05

Rebutting Some Forms Of Polygamy

Dan Savage relays an interesting argument on the topic of "gay marriage will lead to polygamy" made by E.J. Graff. Graff argues that western ideas of marriage are in the process of shifting from a model of marriage as men's ownership of wombs to marriage as a partnership of equals. Same-sex marriage is (as Ampersand recently pointed out in arguing for a switch to the terminology of "gender-neutral marriage") the logical next step in that movement. Polygamy, on the other hand, would be a step back, creating a situation in which "one man owns many wombs and grows lots of household labor." So if there's any slippery slope created by same-sex marriage, it slips away from polygamy.

I think Graff's argument is half right. She gives an effective response to the doubts of "Stymied In Canada," who wrote to Savage because as a feminist, she was worried that her support for same-sex marriage might open the door to the Mormon-patriarch-with-a-harem-of-15-year-olds style of polygamy. But Savage jumps the gun when he ends his column by saying "Now get off the table, SIC, and go argue with your right-wing acquaintances." I think Graff's argument is much less effective against right-wing users of the slippery slope argument, because she deals with only one of the two models of polygamy on offer.

In addition to the "Mormon patriarchs" model of polygamy, we can imagine another, which the polyamory community has been practicing (albeit without legal recognition) for some time now. In Graff's historical schema, polyamory is just the opposite of "Mormon patriarchs" polygamy. Polyamory extends the idea of marriage as a free and equal partnership by asking why that partnership can only include two people. So Graff's argument not only doesn't rebut the idea that same-sex marriage would open the door to polyamory, it practically encourages it.

As far as I know, feminists have little problem with polyamory. However, right-wing users of the slippery slope argument are as concerned, if not more so, about polyamory than about "Mormon patriarchs" polygamy. The connotations of free love and promiscuity attached to the former are strong motivators behind the conservative feeling that polygamy is obviously bad. To respond effectively to her right-wing acquaintances, SIC would need to either show that polyamory is inconsistent with marriage equality, or to convince them that there's nothing wrong with polyamory.

Stentor Danielson, 09:41, ,

Feminist Political Ecology of Wildfire

Towards the beginning of my grad school career, I was really interested in feminist geography. As I got involved in studying wildfire, that interest fell by the wayside. Beyond the standard testing for gender differences in survey responses (which usually came out as not significant in past research), there wasn't much of an obvious gender angle to my emerging research idea. But in thinking about how the two areas of research might be combined, a hypothesis occurred to me. It's too far off from what I'm doing for me to look into it right now, but perhaps some enterprising political ecologist looking for a new project might want to investigate it.

The pre-colonial inhabitants of our case study area -- let's say somewhere in the Top End of Australia -- had an economy based on the use of a diverse range of plants and animals. This diversity was maintained by a sophisticated pattern of controlled burning that optimized the whole suite of products. The incorporation of the area into the capitalist system in the colonial and post-colonial era brought several major changes. First, much of the land was converted to the specialized production of one or two major cash crops (in Australia, cattle and sheep). Second, a gendered division of labor arose in which the cash crops were handled by the men, while the women were responsible for the household and continuing subsistence production. This subsistence production on the side remained important, because cash crop production by colonized people has rarely been sufficient by itself to provide a decent standard of living. The post-colonial fire pattern, however, has altered to optimize only cash crop production. With the remaining non-cash crop areas surrounded by cash crop areas and at the mercy of the latter's burning patterns, they are no longer optimized for the production of subsistence resources. This puts a heavier burden on the women whose work it is to produce those subsistence resources.

Stentor Danielson, 09:20, ,

26.9.05

Flat Earth

I don't link to the non-political blogs in my blogroll much, but Gary has an interesting little social psychology experiment he did in his Earth Science class.

Stentor Danielson, 19:29, ,