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At the University of Texas, Permian Basin, Derek Catsam has a non-traditional student, Steve Dunkley, an older fellow who emigrated from England. His essay,"Do They Speak French?" is a gem.
At Historiblogography, Chris Bray has launched a series of posts on"Health Services, State Power, and Social Control": Part I, Part II, Part III. There's more to come in the series.
Gulp. I'll get to work on the manuscript right away.
Ralph E. Luker -
5/5/2007
Sorry, Alan. Even _if_ it were the case that 34% of Americans own passports, that _still_ doesn't mean that I am wrong. It _only_ means that 34% of Americans own passports. You'd need much more extensive and diverse comparative data to show that it means _anything_ beyond that.
Alan Allport -
5/4/2007
Alan, I was talking about Americans traveling abroad
Oh - but in that case, you're definitely wrong. Americans are unusually insular in their travel. For example, according to a Canadian study only 34% of US householders have a valid passport, compared to 41% of Canadians. And I would guess that a significant portion of those US passport holders are naturalized citizens.
Jonathan Dresner -
5/4/2007
Fair enough: more Jung than Buber there. Though I thought he was trying to break down the I/Other method of creating identity, problematize it, and that's where I see the connection to Buber.
Ben W. Brumfield -
5/4/2007
The same rules might apply. Few foreigners ever visited my hometown, and certainly never as tourists. And I'd be astonished if a schoolmate of mine (who once bragged that he'd made it through 10 years of education without ever actually reading a book) owned a passport.
Ralph E. Luker -
5/4/2007
Alan, I was talking about Americans traveling abroad, not about people from abroad visiting Peoria.
Alan Allport -
5/4/2007
However, I agree with you about the map. I think Jonathan's got the wrong end of the stick entirely.
Alan Allport -
5/4/2007
It's true that the USA ranks third in international tourist destinations; but surely the great majority of those foreign tourists descend on a few high-profile places, and interact with a fairly small percentage of the population. I can't see many Frenchmen making it to Peoria ...
Nathanael D. Robinson -
5/4/2007
Farhi's fingerwagging at everyone who didn't learn the lessons of Anti-semite and Jew and I and Thou.... It's educated leftist Europeans (and in Europe, they really are leftists) wagging the finger at all parochialisms, European and American and elsewhere.
Apparently, Fahri didn't learn the lessons of I and Thou either, considering his dichotamous approach to identity.
Ralph E. Luker -
5/4/2007
a) I don't see it on the maps. The Reagan map and the New Yorker maps both have a self/neighborhood v everything else quality. This one doesn't.
b) Sure, there are urban, non-American provincialities. American provincialities are particularly poignant because of our wealth, high degree of overseas tourism, claims to universal education, the best system of higher education in the world, etc. Even the best system of higher education in the world has largely abandoned the minimal expection of literacy in a non-English language.
Jonathan Dresner -
5/4/2007
I didn't say it wasn't provincial; provinciality isn't, however, uniquely American, Texan or even small-town-ian.
And on the maps, I think the one you linked is closer to World according to Reagan than the New Yorker, but I still think they're basically the same joke.
Ben W. Brumfield -
5/4/2007
I like to think a similar set of stories could be told anywhere, but we each like to tell them on our own neighbors. I've got my own little wince-worthy collection from school in a small Texas town: Alice, what language do we speak? It's Latin, right?.
The fact is that the people reading this blog interact with a particular set of the American public that has little overlap with what you might find in a small town outside Midland. Outside of the obvious filters an intest in history and good net access impose, how many of us relocated to get to our location? How many of us even consider moving from our hometown to a city for college "relocating"?
I've no doubt that the average Frenchman I encounter abroad is more internationally informed than the average resident of my hometown. But if I travelled back to his village — one that's lost many of its children to economic opportunities in the cities — then my results might look much more similar.
Ralph E. Luker -
5/4/2007
You think it's not remarkably provincial for a Texan to think that they speak French in Great Britain?
I've seen the maps you refer to, but I don't think this one is a variation on them at all. There's no indication that it places self at the center and ranges all else beyond that.
Jonathan Dresner -
5/4/2007
Farhi's fingerwagging at everyone who didn't learn the lessons of Anti-semite and Jew and I and Thou.... It's educated leftist Europeans (and in Europe, they really are leftists) wagging the finger at all parochialisms, European and American and elsewhere.
Dunkley's thing is practically a reflex action: anyone who goes overseas discovers that their own country is misunderstood, and that people without transnational experience don't have the simple geographic knowledge that jetsetters do. I discovered it in Japan, and almost everyone discovers it somewhere if they have the chance to travel. Comparatively speaking, there's a disconnect: there's every reason for the rest of the world to have a fairly good idea of what's going on in the US, and less of a reason for every American to follow the details of every international affair or minor country.
And the map is a mildly clever variation on a visual joke which has been making the rounds for decades, at least since the classic New Yorker cover: people think themselves important, but aren't really in someone else's eyes or in comparison. Finger wagging, indeed.
Alan Allport -
5/4/2007
As for the piece by Dunkley, none of what he says may be particularly new for someone with your perspectives, but its reminders of the bottomless provincialism of the unwashed American is well put, I think.
With all due respect to my compatriate Mr. Dunkley, I think if you asked the average Brit (or Frenchman or anyone else) where Ghana is, then you'd get some very odd answers as well. BTW, "68 Euros, What’s that in real money?” seems to me a perfectly sound question. Have you seen those dinky coins?
Ralph E. Luker -
5/4/2007
Actually, none of them came by way of my inbox. I don't see how the map or Farhi, for that matter, can be interpreted as "fingerwagging at Americans". As for the piece by Dunkle, none of what he says may be particularly new for someone with your perspectives, but its reminders of the bottomless provincialism of the unwashed American is well put, I think.
Jonathan Dresner -
5/4/2007
The theme of today's links seems to be finger-wagging at Americans. Fairly unoriginal finger-wagging, at that.
It's not your fault, Ralph, that Farhi, Dunkley and the map all landed in your inbox today. Just bad luck.
