When you read it so closely, Doug, did you notice that - among other things - the author's commitment to the culture of honor approach led them to fail to engage PJ Henry's critique of the whole culture of honor approach - arguing that it the culture of honor is far more likely a social psychological compensation for low status than a vestige of some ethno-eco-cultural past - particularly one the author clearly admits has real problems when it comes to connecting the variable coherently across time? She only notes that Henry pointed out some statistical flaws in the major proponents' arguments, not that the article sought to reject the approach in toto?
What makes any of this convincing to you, Doug? What's so important about a ethno-econo-culture of honor that you want to accept this? Because its statistically complex and therefore factual? What convinces you that a stateless herding production system drove the social psychological fear and loathing of Scots just north of Hadrian's Wall and Irish driven out by famine and the English? Have you ever been to southern Scotland? I criss-crossed it on my bike three times - long story that, and a couple century rides... It's not open land, raiding lowland flocks from the highlands might work north of Glasgow (not north of Edinburgh in whiskey country) but, if you've been there you know that there's no one there, and hasn't been since the English cut down all the trees for their damn boats long before the Scots-Irish emigrated. This whole theory is built off of generalizations about migratory herders in north-central Africa... there was no parallel migratory herding in Scotland, there were herds and there was pasture but all you have to do is look at all the rock walls, all the manors, all the small towns, or go into a bunch of the pubs in Southern Scotland and you'd see that the kind of herding this theory started with is materially inapplicable to the region of Scotland from when the Scots-Irish came. (I know less about Ireland.)
On top of all this, only an economist who's never read anything about socialization written by a sociologist since 1980 could argue that socialization is the product of direct active transfers from dominant parents to passive children. this kind of functionalist stuff died a good death long ago, I'd just as soon it stayed dead.
You know, a very significant number of the black students from Detroit, from Flint, from Saginaw, from Benton Harbor, from Kalamazoo - at both MSU and CMU - express far greater openness to corporal punishment than their middle class fellow-students, there is a much greater concern with personal honor and defending your manhood and your girl and more of them are willing to speak about domestic violence in their families than are whites of all class backgrounds -- and, you know, many of them were taught by there parents that there's some primordial black identity they need to re/claim and black on black killing is higher in Michigan than other rates -- I wonder if we disaggregated those killings, if we'd be able to trace those people back to honor-driven herding cultures in Africa? You know, I hear the Mexicans and Filipinos and Samoans (and Alaskans - I know this one from my family) are more tolerant of corporal punishment, domestic violence and young male machismo - and that you better not challenge them or look at their girl or sister wrong - must have been herding people, no?
And, surely, all this explains lynching because the white guys in question just couldn't believe how their honor, and that of white women in general, were besmirched by black men's eyes - the white guys couldn't help it, it was part of their culture, part of their socialization, rooted in their economic past and there's nothing you can do about it, its just how they are. Didn't have anything to do with issues of power, or labor markets, or racist ideology, or naturalizing inferiority, or encouragement by political, economic and/or religious demogogues... it was culture, transmitted by romantic parents longing - unconsciously - for the old country, all along.
In the end, she simply can't have it both ways - you can't say that the very specific kind of murder signals something pivotal when the defense of the argument your making about that pivotal thing appeals to socialization processes infinitely more general and vague than the specification in the first place. The problem's not in the statistics - as far as I can tell - the problem's in the weakness of the explanation - even before the problems with its easy extension into really problematic arguments is noted.
Is that a little bit more than "I just don't want to believe it, nyah, nyah."?
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> Two things. Did your copy of the paper not contain section 6, on cultural
> transmission mechanisms? And did you notice how narrowly she defined the
> kind of violence under study? Not just murder, but a certain kind of murder?
>
> So far, most of the objections I've read to this paper come down to, "I
> just don't want to believe it, nyah-nyah."
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319