I just finished reading Marc Bloch's famous essay, The Historian's Craft, a meditation on historical method. It's a dense but highly readable piece of finely articulated and incisive observations on the difficulties of objectively studying the past and studying it on its own terms. For example:
"Clouds have not changed their shapes since the Middle Ages, yet we no longer see in them either magical swords or miraculous crosses. The tail of the comet sighted by the great Ambroise Pare was probably very little different from those which occasionally sweep across our skies. yet, he thought he saw in it a full suit of curious armor. Compliance with universal prejudice had bested the habitual accuracy of his gaze; and his testimony, like that of so many others, tells us not what he actually saw but what his age thought it natural to see." (emphasis added)
He delves into the question of historical origins (particularly the tendency of European modernists to locate single origins for phenomenon which have multiple causes stretching over long periods of time); the value judgments and simplifications inherent in periodization (which Bloch was particularly alert to as a historian of the "Middle Ages", the often cast-aside thousand years between the Christian/Roman Era and the Modern Era); the difficulties of analyzing historical evidence and the prejudices of long-dead witnesses; and the temptation to write history in order to justify or criticize the social order of the present.
Reading the essay, its author often peaks through the lines. A French Jew, Bloch wrote the incomplete piece between 1941-42, following the German blitzkrieg, and shortly before he joined the French Resistance. He mentions several times that the Dreyfus Affair (the framing of a French Jewish army officer at the turn of the century), was the formative event of his youth. He also touches on the Protocals of the Elders of Zion (the influential Russian-forged anti-Semitic pamphlet which still refuses to die, aledging that Jews control the world) and the forced confessions and torture of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition.
Considering the overwhelming anxiety of the times, it's remarkable that Bloch wrote this piece in the early '40s. It reminded me of something that Victor Frankl says in Man's Search for Meaning: that counterintuitively, it was, in his experience, often the intellectuals who survived best in Auschwitz because they could escape to a world in their minds.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo
Pictures from the art museum across the street from my house. . .
Main hall
Sculpture
Main hall
Sculpture
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
City Love
I've been reading up on Los Angeles because I'm thinking of applying to UCLA's sociology program for grad school, but being a true Bay Area girl at heart have always looked down on the place as an endless wasteland of mindless consumerism. Now I'm tring to find reasons to like it, aside from the main things attracting me to the place: the strength of the labor movement and the immigrant movement and their intersection (which is what I want to study in grad school.) In any case, I was reading through a popular and very well-written LA blog, when I came to a response that interested me regarding a recent post. Essentially, the reader remarked that the measure of a city is not what you get from it but what you give to it It's perhaps poorly phrased, but it was a novel idea to me and I think perhaps to a lot of people my age who move to big, exciting cities with high expectations about what their going to get from it.
But I think that you can only begin to feel close to a city, love a city, and make it your home, when you give to it. San Francisco is a beautiful place to live, but even after a year, I still felt like an outsider because most of my friends lived in the East Bay (or elsewhere -- shout out to New York, DC, Boston, Providence and Des Moines) and my work was in the Central Valley.
Santiago is not an easy city to love: it's big and dirty and crowded and life is rat race for most. But I love it here and feel very much at home because I teach here and I care about the kids I work with and I love my friends and I feel engaged with the life of the city. It's not Paris or Barcelona, but it doesn't matter.
But I think that you can only begin to feel close to a city, love a city, and make it your home, when you give to it. San Francisco is a beautiful place to live, but even after a year, I still felt like an outsider because most of my friends lived in the East Bay (or elsewhere -- shout out to New York, DC, Boston, Providence and Des Moines) and my work was in the Central Valley.
Santiago is not an easy city to love: it's big and dirty and crowded and life is rat race for most. But I love it here and feel very much at home because I teach here and I care about the kids I work with and I love my friends and I feel engaged with the life of the city. It's not Paris or Barcelona, but it doesn't matter.
Sundays in the Park with Jorge
Every Sunday, the Parque Forestal across the street from my house plays host to an unofficial, very popular and somewhat chaotic feria, or outdoor market. People come from across the city, trudging large backpacks full of homemade jewelry, stenciled t-shirts, political propaganda, used books and clothes, handicrafts, and pirated music and DVDs, among other things. They set up shop haphazardly on blankets around the museum, leaving narrow paths for the thousands of people who pass through every weekend. It's quite a scene: hippies, dredlocked and tie-dyed, smoking pot and selling soy burgers; punks, mohawked, wearing leather and metal and drinking 40s of Escudo out of paper bags; capoiera groups and drum circles and indigenous music groups; acrobats and clowns; hipsters and politicos; modest middle-aged working class people selling carnival food and sopapillas (delicious zucchini/flour biscuits). It's like a cross between a medieval marketplace and Woodstock. And it's a completely unsanctioned and unorganized event, and despite the enormous number of people that pass through every week, I've never seen a single cop. It's an anarchist's vision of paradise (minus the noisy drunk people who linger on into the night.)
Strolling through the Parque Forestal on a Sunday afternoon
Drum circle
Acrobat
Watching a performance at dusk
Hanging around at sunset
Strolling through the Parque Forestal on a Sunday afternoon
Drum circle
Acrobat
Watching a performance at dusk
Hanging around at sunset
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Reflections on Autumn in Santiago
All of a sudden, it´s late fall in Santiago. It´s chilly and the sun sets early and shines weakly during the day.
Fall has always been my favorite season. It fills me with nostalgia for my childhood. Every year on the first day of school, I´d take a walk by myslef around the hilly, tree-lined street below my parents´ house, crunching leaves and wondering at the passage of time, imagining who I would be when I was grown. And now I´m grown and I think about what the world looked like to me when I was a child and I think about what the world will look someday to my children. What I like about children, what I liked about being a child, is that the world seems both unimaginably ancient and always new. It´s worth remembering.
Fall makes me sad, but it´s a peaceful kind of sad. It´s the kind of sad that leaves me with the certainty that life is good, that the world is good, despite the limitations of our own modest gifts and our mortality.
Fall has always been my favorite season. It fills me with nostalgia for my childhood. Every year on the first day of school, I´d take a walk by myslef around the hilly, tree-lined street below my parents´ house, crunching leaves and wondering at the passage of time, imagining who I would be when I was grown. And now I´m grown and I think about what the world looked like to me when I was a child and I think about what the world will look someday to my children. What I like about children, what I liked about being a child, is that the world seems both unimaginably ancient and always new. It´s worth remembering.
Fall makes me sad, but it´s a peaceful kind of sad. It´s the kind of sad that leaves me with the certainty that life is good, that the world is good, despite the limitations of our own modest gifts and our mortality.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
La Pildora del Dia Despues
Another major topic of discussion lately has been the recent Chilean Supreme Court ruling on the day-after pill. President Bachelet, formerly a pediatrician, made the day-after pill available to poor women for free through the public health system soon after she came into office. However, this decision came under fierce criticism from the Right. The conservative-leaning Supreme Court ruled last week that the pill will no longer be available for free at public clinics (i.e., for the poor).
The Court used the scientifically-unfounded argument presented by a group of conservative Congressmen that the pill constitutes an abortion. As we all know (I hope!), the day after pill is in fact a form of contraception, preventing ovulation and fertilization. It is particularly necessary to have an emergency contraceptive available in a country like Chile, where abortion is illegal in all cases, including in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk.
Wealthy women can fly to Miami to have an abortion, but poor women are forced to carry out the pregnancy or seek an illegal back-alley abortion. In fact, the abortion rate in Chile is far higher than in the United States or Europe. I´ve read estimates of 150,000-200,000 illegal abortions a year. That is, one in twenty women have an abortion every year in a country where abortion is illegal. This is one of the highest abortion rates in the world.(In contrast, in the United States, where abortion is legal, the rate is about one in 50 women.)
Illegal abortions are expensive and dangerous. Women pay more than the monthly minimum wage to procure an abortion, and it´s estimated that about one in five of these women will end up in the hospital for what should be a safe and relatively simple procedure. Doctors and nurses may report these women to the police, and they can face three to five years in jail. It´s completely out of sync with Chile´s reputation as a relatively progressive highly developed developing country, and certainly provides an arresting example of what life could be like without Roe.
The Court used the scientifically-unfounded argument presented by a group of conservative Congressmen that the pill constitutes an abortion. As we all know (I hope!), the day after pill is in fact a form of contraception, preventing ovulation and fertilization. It is particularly necessary to have an emergency contraceptive available in a country like Chile, where abortion is illegal in all cases, including in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk.
Wealthy women can fly to Miami to have an abortion, but poor women are forced to carry out the pregnancy or seek an illegal back-alley abortion. In fact, the abortion rate in Chile is far higher than in the United States or Europe. I´ve read estimates of 150,000-200,000 illegal abortions a year. That is, one in twenty women have an abortion every year in a country where abortion is illegal. This is one of the highest abortion rates in the world.(In contrast, in the United States, where abortion is legal, the rate is about one in 50 women.)
Illegal abortions are expensive and dangerous. Women pay more than the monthly minimum wage to procure an abortion, and it´s estimated that about one in five of these women will end up in the hospital for what should be a safe and relatively simple procedure. Doctors and nurses may report these women to the police, and they can face three to five years in jail. It´s completely out of sync with Chile´s reputation as a relatively progressive highly developed developing country, and certainly provides an arresting example of what life could be like without Roe.
Friday, April 11, 2008
El Dia del Joven Combatiente
March 29 is the ¨Dia del Joven Combatiente¨ -- the Day of the Combatant Youth. It commemorates¨the ¨Hermanos Vergara¨, young brothers who belonged to the radical youth organization MIR and were murdered by the police in 1985 during the dictatorship. Their younger brother, also a member of MIR, was later killed by the police as wel.
The Hermanos Vergara were from the Villa Francia, a working class neighborhood in Santiago that was a hotbed of opposition to the dictatorship. (Poor neighborhoods such as the Villa Francia are known as ¨poblaciones¨, which is the Chilean equivalent of ¨favela¨.)
Unfortunately, rather than commemorating March 29 in a productive way, it´s become a day primarily for disaffected working class youth to wreak havoc in their own neighborhoods and get into violent confrontations with the police. This year, one innocent bystander was shot to death, and a protester died in police custody.
Most events around the city were canceled that night, and people stayed in. The event got surprisingly little press in Chile, which obviously suggests that the events were intentionally not reported. (The Chilean news reports even car accidents, so major protests and confrontations over two days is hardly an oversight.)
I´m including the article from Reuters, which is pretty good:
From Reuters:Rocks and tear gas in Chile's annual youth protests
By Rodrigo Martinez
SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Masked youths threw stones at police who responded by firing tear gas and water cannon in the Chilean capital on Friday at the start of annual protests against the government and the country's free-market system.
Dozens of youths, some in school uniforms, threw objects into the Santiago's main street, the Alameda. Some wearing hoods or bandannas over their faces scattered pink pamphlets that read "Popular Union of Students."
Police in armored vehicles sped through the street spraying clouds of tear gas as officers riot gear rounded up youths and bundled them into police buses as sirens blared. Barriers were erected cordoning off the presidential palace nearby. Police said they had detained 185 people.
The protests were aimed at Chile's capitalist-style economic model and the government, which the groups say manipulates the education system to favor the wealthy and exclude the poor.
President Michelle Bachelet condemned the violence.
"Democracy in Chile is solid and there is no justification for violence," she told reporters as riot police in flak jackets and helmets manned intersections and street corners.
Two small bomb blasts have rocked banks in the two weeks running up to Saturday's anniversary of "Day of the Young Combatant." The day marks the deaths of two brothers, Eduardo and Rafael Vergara, during Augusto Pinochet's 1973-90 dictatorship.
Bachelet was herself briefly detained and tortured along with her mother during Pinochet's harsh dictatorship, in which nearly 3,200 people were killed.
"If one wants to pay homage to the tremendous tragedy of the Vergara brothers, during a period when Chile was not democratic, the right thing to do is guarantee that democracy means being able to express yourself but without violence," Bachelet said.
Chile is one of the most stable countries in the region, but Bachelet's popularity has taken a bashing because of the way her government has handled past student protests as well as a botched transport system for the capital.
There have also been corruption allegations against members of her administration.
"We think this neo-liberal education system that the government has introduced should be stopped," said Saray Acevedo, of the National Popular Coordinator of Students. She handed out the flyers to passers-by that read "Against a neo-liberal education. Struggle by the people and students."
Some ordinary Chileans say the protesters have a point.
"The government speaks but does not act. I think the people should protest more, they are too passive," said Rodrigo Nunez, a 39-year-old engineer, as he walked past armored police trucks.
"There are so many problems. It is true education is expensive and marginalizes the poor. The cost of living is high. Electricity and gas prices are up. Look at how they protest in Argentina! I voted for this government and feel conned," he said.
Last year, students wearing balaclavas clashed with police in Santiago and other cities, throwing stones and gasoline bombs. Police retaliated with tear gas and water cannon.
At least officers were wounded in those clashes and police arrested more than 850 people across the country. Many businesses shut down. Several explosive devices detonated but no one was injured.
Chile has vowed to clamp down on groups who set off bombs and extra police will patrol the streets of Santiago on Saturday.
(With reporting by Simon Gardner and Reuters TV; Editing by Chris Wilson)
The Hermanos Vergara were from the Villa Francia, a working class neighborhood in Santiago that was a hotbed of opposition to the dictatorship. (Poor neighborhoods such as the Villa Francia are known as ¨poblaciones¨, which is the Chilean equivalent of ¨favela¨.)
Unfortunately, rather than commemorating March 29 in a productive way, it´s become a day primarily for disaffected working class youth to wreak havoc in their own neighborhoods and get into violent confrontations with the police. This year, one innocent bystander was shot to death, and a protester died in police custody.
Most events around the city were canceled that night, and people stayed in. The event got surprisingly little press in Chile, which obviously suggests that the events were intentionally not reported. (The Chilean news reports even car accidents, so major protests and confrontations over two days is hardly an oversight.)
I´m including the article from Reuters, which is pretty good:
From Reuters:Rocks and tear gas in Chile's annual youth protests
By Rodrigo Martinez
SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Masked youths threw stones at police who responded by firing tear gas and water cannon in the Chilean capital on Friday at the start of annual protests against the government and the country's free-market system.
Dozens of youths, some in school uniforms, threw objects into the Santiago's main street, the Alameda. Some wearing hoods or bandannas over their faces scattered pink pamphlets that read "Popular Union of Students."
Police in armored vehicles sped through the street spraying clouds of tear gas as officers riot gear rounded up youths and bundled them into police buses as sirens blared. Barriers were erected cordoning off the presidential palace nearby. Police said they had detained 185 people.
The protests were aimed at Chile's capitalist-style economic model and the government, which the groups say manipulates the education system to favor the wealthy and exclude the poor.
President Michelle Bachelet condemned the violence.
"Democracy in Chile is solid and there is no justification for violence," she told reporters as riot police in flak jackets and helmets manned intersections and street corners.
Two small bomb blasts have rocked banks in the two weeks running up to Saturday's anniversary of "Day of the Young Combatant." The day marks the deaths of two brothers, Eduardo and Rafael Vergara, during Augusto Pinochet's 1973-90 dictatorship.
Bachelet was herself briefly detained and tortured along with her mother during Pinochet's harsh dictatorship, in which nearly 3,200 people were killed.
"If one wants to pay homage to the tremendous tragedy of the Vergara brothers, during a period when Chile was not democratic, the right thing to do is guarantee that democracy means being able to express yourself but without violence," Bachelet said.
Chile is one of the most stable countries in the region, but Bachelet's popularity has taken a bashing because of the way her government has handled past student protests as well as a botched transport system for the capital.
There have also been corruption allegations against members of her administration.
"We think this neo-liberal education system that the government has introduced should be stopped," said Saray Acevedo, of the National Popular Coordinator of Students. She handed out the flyers to passers-by that read "Against a neo-liberal education. Struggle by the people and students."
Some ordinary Chileans say the protesters have a point.
"The government speaks but does not act. I think the people should protest more, they are too passive," said Rodrigo Nunez, a 39-year-old engineer, as he walked past armored police trucks.
"There are so many problems. It is true education is expensive and marginalizes the poor. The cost of living is high. Electricity and gas prices are up. Look at how they protest in Argentina! I voted for this government and feel conned," he said.
Last year, students wearing balaclavas clashed with police in Santiago and other cities, throwing stones and gasoline bombs. Police retaliated with tear gas and water cannon.
At least officers were wounded in those clashes and police arrested more than 850 people across the country. Many businesses shut down. Several explosive devices detonated but no one was injured.
Chile has vowed to clamp down on groups who set off bombs and extra police will patrol the streets of Santiago on Saturday.
(With reporting by Simon Gardner and Reuters TV; Editing by Chris Wilson)
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Ex-pats, Teaching and Volunteering
The Santiago ex-pat scene is a very small world. Last night, I went to a party at my friend Zachs place. Zach and I teach at the Instituto Norteamericano Chileno, an enormous English language school that caters to the citys upper middle class professionals and their children. Zach is my age and graduated from college at the same time as I did. He went to the same high school in LA as a bunch of my friends from college, and we have a similar analysis of social justice issues, gender, hipsters and the pros and cons of the Bay area vs. LA, to name just a few crucial points of intersection.
He lives nearby in a big apartment with Chilean, Spanish, French and Dutch roommates. He also has an American roommate, James, who completely by coincidence is one of the guys from my volunteer program. James also graduated from college in 2006 and knows a bunch of the kids I know who went to Harvard. Ridiculous. Anyways, the party was a lot of fun. I made friends with Javiera, a Chilean-Venezuelan social psychologist, who just moved to Chile from Switzerland and also lives in my nieghborhood, which as you might guess by now, is pretty cosmopolitan.
I started work the week before last and its going well. I have four group classes: a Tuesday and Thursday afternoon basic English class at an all girls Catholic elementary school in Barrio Basil; a Friday afternoon class in the La Florida neighborhood with just three students; a Saturday morning teenager class near La Moneda; and a Wednesday evening adult class. I also have several private classes with adults. I enjoy teaching, especially the kids, who are a lot of fun.
And speaking of kids, I started my volunteer work at the hogar, which has also been a lot of fun. The hogar is in the quiet, very beautiful tree-lined neighborhood of Nunoa. The house is spacious and well-equipped. Currently, there are seven kids living there (there can be up to twelve). Theyre all between three and eleven years old. They are children who have been mistreated, neglected or abandoned by their parents. The social workers from the hogar work with the parents to improve their relationships with their children, with the goal of reuniting the family. If this is not possible, the kids are placed with a relative, or if a relative is not availbable, they can stay in the hogar. As in the US, its very difficult to find families to adopt older chilren.
Most of the kids in the hogar have a sister or brother there as well. The director is fabulous, and there are four women who work there full time, in addition to numerous volunteers, mentors, social workers and a psychologist who come through every week. The kids (like my little students) refer to all the adults that work there as tia or tio (aunt-uncle), which I think is very sweet.
Volunteering at the hogar is pretty low key. The idea is for the kids to see that there are adults that care about them and to help impart the values of self-respect, respect for others, etc. that all kids are meant to learn. In practice, this means that I show up and draw with the kids, or play soccer or basketball, or read books or give little English lessons or pick them up from school or whatever happens to be going on. Im glad I decided to get involved.
As you can probably imagine, between work and volunteering, Im now quite busy. On top of that, my laptop charger broke and I had a cold for a couple weeks, so Ive been somewhat remiss with blogging, which I hope to remedy in the near future. This cold, by the the way, was quite a phenomenon. Apparently, its common for just about every other person in the city to get sick when the seasons change (its now cold in the mornings and evenings, though still very hot during the day). Most everyone I know got sick, so I took to calling it the plague, though of course it really wasnt that bad.
He lives nearby in a big apartment with Chilean, Spanish, French and Dutch roommates. He also has an American roommate, James, who completely by coincidence is one of the guys from my volunteer program. James also graduated from college in 2006 and knows a bunch of the kids I know who went to Harvard. Ridiculous. Anyways, the party was a lot of fun. I made friends with Javiera, a Chilean-Venezuelan social psychologist, who just moved to Chile from Switzerland and also lives in my nieghborhood, which as you might guess by now, is pretty cosmopolitan.
I started work the week before last and its going well. I have four group classes: a Tuesday and Thursday afternoon basic English class at an all girls Catholic elementary school in Barrio Basil; a Friday afternoon class in the La Florida neighborhood with just three students; a Saturday morning teenager class near La Moneda; and a Wednesday evening adult class. I also have several private classes with adults. I enjoy teaching, especially the kids, who are a lot of fun.
And speaking of kids, I started my volunteer work at the hogar, which has also been a lot of fun. The hogar is in the quiet, very beautiful tree-lined neighborhood of Nunoa. The house is spacious and well-equipped. Currently, there are seven kids living there (there can be up to twelve). Theyre all between three and eleven years old. They are children who have been mistreated, neglected or abandoned by their parents. The social workers from the hogar work with the parents to improve their relationships with their children, with the goal of reuniting the family. If this is not possible, the kids are placed with a relative, or if a relative is not availbable, they can stay in the hogar. As in the US, its very difficult to find families to adopt older chilren.
Most of the kids in the hogar have a sister or brother there as well. The director is fabulous, and there are four women who work there full time, in addition to numerous volunteers, mentors, social workers and a psychologist who come through every week. The kids (like my little students) refer to all the adults that work there as tia or tio (aunt-uncle), which I think is very sweet.
Volunteering at the hogar is pretty low key. The idea is for the kids to see that there are adults that care about them and to help impart the values of self-respect, respect for others, etc. that all kids are meant to learn. In practice, this means that I show up and draw with the kids, or play soccer or basketball, or read books or give little English lessons or pick them up from school or whatever happens to be going on. Im glad I decided to get involved.
As you can probably imagine, between work and volunteering, Im now quite busy. On top of that, my laptop charger broke and I had a cold for a couple weeks, so Ive been somewhat remiss with blogging, which I hope to remedy in the near future. This cold, by the the way, was quite a phenomenon. Apparently, its common for just about every other person in the city to get sick when the seasons change (its now cold in the mornings and evenings, though still very hot during the day). Most everyone I know got sick, so I took to calling it the plague, though of course it really wasnt that bad.
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