This course attempts to sort out the significance and mobilization potential of a new jumble of cultural practices located in the terrain that calls for yet refuses boundaries. This terrain is situated in the borderzone between identity-as-essence and identity-as-conjecture, and its practices challenge the ludic play with essence and conjecture as yet another set of postmodernist binarisms.But before you can get into this class, you must pass the introductory anthopology course, and Mike Newman explained to fellow Stanford undergraduates David Sacks and Peter Thiel, authors of The Diversity Myth, just how to go about doing this. First of all, "I didn't bother attending class or reading any of the books. It was enough for me to flip through the lecture notes, so long as I told the [teaching assistants] what they wanted to hear." Newman even said that when he worked on a take-home midterm exam after returning drunk from a Halloween party, he found himself "even more creative than usual." The following excerpts are from his essay on the final exam, for which he admits he was not in much better shape:Much work on resistance has been response-oriented, reacting to the Eurocenter by occupying either the essence pole or the hybrid pole. The course stakes out this new terrain, where opposition is not only responsive, but creative. It is a guerrilla warfare of the interstices, where minorities rupture categories of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the center as well as on the margins, and where such ruptures intersect with and challenge the late 20th century murky overlap between nationalism(s) and imperialism(s).
The course examines the strategies of theorizing this hodgepodge of everyday experience and its textual representations. It scrutinizes new limits of analysis that transcend and resist national boundaries through their creative articulations of practices which demonstrate possible modes of corroding the Eurocenter by actively Third-Worlding it. It explores the processes through which identity and place become multiple as they are actively forced into constantly shifting configurations of partial overlap.
Three hundred years ago, the San, or Bushmen, occupied all of southern Africa along with the Nama. However, incessant conquests by Bantu and Dutch imperialists have pushed the San further and further into the Kalahari desert, leaving them only the land which the imperialists consider uninhabitable or unexploitable [grader's check mark]...."I thought that I might have gone a little overboard with this answer, but I was wrong—the TAs just ate it all up," Newman commented. "It seemed as though they really liked it whenever I put negative-sounding phrases near the word 'Western.' "
As these resources were quickly depleted, more and more !Kung found themselves working for European farmers rather than attempting to maintain farms themselves. Of course, Europeans did not pay generously for this labor [check mark], providing a pittance that was hardly enough for a man to support himself, much less a family unit that was growing increasingly burdensome as the women no longer had anything to gather and the elderly no longer could pass on information that was rapidly becoming irrelevant [check mark]. Alienated from their traditional roles, many in the community began to lose the self-esteem that originated from the performance of these functions, a contributing factor to the alcoholism that ultimately gripped the community [check mark]....
Obviously, the !Kung and other San people have not benefited from their exposure to Western "progress" [check mark]. To return to their former culture is at this point a geographical impossibility, but the modern world has brought them only starvation and despair. That white people actually expected the San to drop overnight a way of life stretching back numerous melennia [sic] in return for Western agriculture and the Judeo-Christian ethic demonstrates the cultural arrogance behind their oppressive practices, but the sad reality is that the San have accepted Western notions of their own inferiority [check mark]....
Another question asked for a contrast between a neo-Marxist and a more moderate analysis of urban poverty, and Newman had learned exactly what to do:
Bourdieu and Lewis present two different paradigms for understanding the phenomenon of urban poverty world-wide. Bourdieu's analysis is far more radical, arguing as does Fanon that the Algerian peasants he studied, and by extension all oppressed peoples, can achieve revolutionary consciousness and fight back, even though in reality the peasants often depend on their oppressors even as they curse them [yes].... Lewis would have us believe that the poor don't mind their condition, thus assuring their inability to achieve revolutionary consciousness. Bourdieu's critique of the Algerian lumpenproletariat reaches a more sensible conclusion, that the oppressed resent their oppressors, but their dependency on them holds them back.Newman received an A in the course, but those who questioned orthodoxies did not do so well. Chris Aguas argued that referring to the !Kung as "Bushmen," with its primitive connotations, was not an act of cultural imperialism, despite the professor's declaration. Aguas instead argued, consistent with multicultural principles, that the belief that the "primitive" is undesirable itself constituted a cultural bias, since one would have to apply one's own cultural standards in order to evaluate the concept of primitivism. This refined point was greeted by the grader's comment, "But it's still wrong to call them 'Bushmen.' " Aguas got a B, which was considered an especially low grade in that course. Sacks and Thiel concluded that "although Chris Aguas may have understood anthropology better than Mike Newman, Mike Newman understood Antho 1 far better than Chris Aguas."
