[Xmca-l] Re: Some facts about cultural "triple packages"

[mike cole]

Interesting contextualization, David. thanks
mike

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 6:10 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> Amy Chua and her husband are both, like Obama, professors of
> constitutional law, and this explains a lot: their individualism,
> their idealism, and their anecdotal approach to psychological
> research. Naturally, I agree with all of the criticisms made on those
> fronts; nevertheless I find myself in perverse sympathy with the talk,
> particularly the point she made about the non-cultural sources of
> poverty which seem to have been ignored by people on the list, perhaps
> because they come near the end of the talk.
>
> "The Triple Package" is not a great book (as you can probably tell
> from the "Seven Habits" style title). But it's still a book worth
> putting in context. I don't think it is really a generalization of
> Chua's book on parenting (which was actually very self-critical and
> not at all self-congratulatory). I think it is a generalization of
> Chua's last book, which was right in her own field, although like many
> books which lie in the middle of one's field it did have a quite
> personal trigger.
>
> As they say in their talk: all nations are unequal, but some are more
> unequal than others. The Philippines are one of those more unequal
> nations: Chua's grandparents are Filipino Chinese, and the Chinese in
> the Philippines are about one percent of the population and own some
> forty or fifty percent of the country's capital. So Chua's grandmother
> (or perhaps it was an aunt--I'm don't exactly remember) was horribly
> murdered by her driver. Nobody was punished, and the reason was that
> the police felt enormous sympathy for the driver's hatred of rich
> Chinese and released him on a technicality.
>
> At first, Chua was overcome with rage. But then she began to
> generalize; she realized that her grandmother's murder was actually
> part of a much wider pattern of constitutional change, where political
> democracy is combined with extremes of economic oligarchy, and
> consititutions make possible and even encourage demagogy and ethnic
> scapegoating of what we might call the richer oppressed (e.g. Indians
> in Uganda, Lebanese in Liberia, Tutsis in Rwanda, Croats in Serbia,
> Chinese in Indonesia, Jews just about everywhere).
>
> This is "culture" as a weapon in the hands of the powerful
> poor--people like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Idi Amin, Slobadan Milosevic.
> But it must have occurred to Chua while she was writing the book that
> demagogy and scapegoating was only part of the story--I think this
> book is actually an argument that culture can also be forged into a
> weapon in the hands of the poor by precisely the family members who
> seem most powerless--not her own grandmother, but grandmothers like
> that of Sonja Sotomayor.
>
> Idealism? Of course. Chua ignores the real reasons for the success
> stories she tells, because they have nothing to do with these triple
> package values (values which she admits are shared by almost all
> ethnic groups). As Thomas Piketty points out in "Capital in the
> Twenty-first Century", economics seen over the long run is...well,
> it's a long arc, and it bends towards injustice. But precisely because
> the injustice towards which it bends admits so very few to the very
> rich, the very poor eventually play catch up, both iinternationally
> (China) and intra-nationally, while the majority of the ruling ethnic
> power are forced into the actual, not the nominal, middle class (i.e.
> in the USA, people who live on earned income and not returns on
> capital).
>
> There were two exceptions to all of this playing catch-up, and they
> happen to be the real "double package" on which American culture was
> materially founded: genocide and slavery. That is why I feel that
> treating the Native American and the black American experience as if
> it were somehow comparable to other immigrant experiences is really a
> form of Holocaust denial. The building where I live lodges mostly
> foreigners, and there are many Americans. One of the professors is
> black, American, and an incredibly successful and well known author in
> business studies. Like Barack Obama, he has a name--it's an African
> name, not the name of some slave-owning scoundrel; from the sound of
> it I suspect he calls himself a "Nigerian-American" and not
> "African-American". The other day I met his son in the elevator, and
> when I heard his name I told him I recognized it, because it goes at
> the top of every article his dad publishes. The kid was fairly
> incandescent with pride.
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
> On 17 September 2014 02:45, Dr. Paul C. Mocombe <pmocombe@mocombeian.com>
> wrote:
> > I am not a psychologist, but is this what is passing off as empirical
> psychological research?  On another note, can we get some real
> psychologists to weigh in on the impact of spanking children on their
> psychological development.  This Adrian Peterson thing is getting racial
> really quickly.  By the way, my parents would be in prison today based on
> how I was spanked....
> >
> >
> > Dr. Paul C. Mocombe
> > President
> > The Mocombeian Foundation, Inc.
> > www.mocombeian.com
> > www.readingroomcurriculum.com
> > www.paulcmocombe.info
> >
> > <div>-------- Original message --------</div><div>From: "Henry G.
> Shonerd III" <hshonerd@gmail.com> </div><div>Date:09/16/2014  1:12 PM
> (GMT-05:00) </div><div>To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <
> xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu> </div><div>Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Some facts
> about cultural "triple packages" </div><div>
> > </div>I am struck by how inauthentic (phony?) Chua and her husband are,
> even more so than most TED talks. As I listened, I remembered the work by
> Ogbu on oppositional responses of "involuntary immigrants" (Blacks as
> slaves, Native Americans and Hispanics caught up in the movement of
> national borders). I have heard Ogbu has been criticized, but he convinced
> me.
> > Henry
> >
> > On Sep 16, 2014, at 4:59 AM, Katherine Wester Neal <wester@uga.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Thanks for sending, Greg. I also found it hard to keep watching. I have
> read Amy Chua's "tiger mom" book, and this TED talk seems to be a way to
> validate and extend the parenting ideas that she lays out in the book
> (which I find to be harsh and a bit mean-spirited). I have many issues with
> their claims, but I'll just mention two.
> >>
> >> First, I don't think their generalizations/facts are very useful. They
> perpetuate the idea, for example, that stereotypes are acceptable,
> especially if they're "true," which is probably where the comment that
> they're racist came from. It is also unhelpful to tell white, middle class
> parents one more time that "other" kids are going to outperform their kids
> and their kids are falling behind. This sort of scarcity rhetoric hurts
> kids and parents, in part because it sets up an us/them dichotomy.
> >>
> >> Second, as Greg said, there's no theory. I am suspect of facts, such as
> these, without theory because they don't account for how the facts were
> produced.
> >>
> >> Katie
> >>
> >> Katie Wester-Neal
> >> Doctoral Candidate
> >> University of Georgia
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Sep 15, 2014, at 11:41 PM, "Greg Thompson" <
> greg.a.thompson@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Been enjoying the party, and apropos of David's call for some facts
> (which
> >> I'm in full support of - despite being a theory-wonk), I thought I'd
> offer
> >> this Ted talk that was sent to me by an LCHC colleague:
> >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHUMcxaqm9U
> >>
> >> Lots of facts in there, and not a little theory.
> >>
> >> They've got big claims about the facts of their program in inner-city
> >> schools and about inequality too (you have to listen to the end to hear
> >> about that).
> >>
> >> What do you think?
> >>
> >> Anything to it?
> >>
> >> Anyone have any facts to counter their facts?
> >>
> >> -greg
> >>
> >> p.s., I'm still listening to it right now. Not sure I'm going to be able
> >> to stomach the entire talk... getting a little queasy. Feeling like
> someone
> >> is selling me something that is going to cost me a ton and I'm not
> going to
> >> like. Ugh...
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> >> Assistant Professor
> >> Department of Anthropology
> >> 882 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> >> Brigham Young University
> >> Provo, UT 84602
> >> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
> >>
> >
> >
> >
>
>


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Development and Evolution are both ... "processes of construction and re-
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less reliably reassembled for each life cycle." [Oyama, Griffiths, and
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