erectile dysfunction drugs, cross-culturally

I’ve been silent on Culture Matters for way too long: first I was on a research trip to Egypt, and then I was recovering from a bug caught during said research trip to Egypt (Flagyl is my friend!). And speaking of pharmaceutical products, ever since coming back I’ve had a stack of drug boxes on the desk in my office that has elicited a lot of curiosity from visitors:

These are all the local brands of sildenafil that I found in a single pharmacy. There’s the Pfizer-licensed Viagra, but we also have Virecta, Erec, Kemagra, Vigorama, Vigoran, Phragra, and Vigorex. The Kemagra box features a tiger: Rrawr!

The global food crisis II

Following on from Nursel’s recent post, I’d like to draw readers to a recent New York Times article about the “global food crisis”. According to the article, rising commodities prices, especially fuel and food prices, are producing unprecedented stress and anger across the globe, resulting in unrest and even riots. The article includes disturbing descriptions of people in Haiti eating concoctions made in part from mud in order to still their hunger pains. It is worth being reminded that what is experienced as a bit of additional pain at the checkout for the world’s wealthy can be an issue of survival for the world’s poor.

The article states:

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

Significantly, the article also acknowledges the interconnectedness of the global economy in that rising prices have “pitted the globe’s poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations’ farm and environmental policies”. The production of biofuels putting upward pressure in prices is mentioned, though the competition between animals and humans for grains is not.

Given the likely future impact of rising fuel prices, climate change, the expansion of economies such as China and India on food production and prices, the fact that the situation appears already to be so bad is worrying indeed.

See also the NYT’s index of articles on food prices.

The Global Food Crisis

George Monbiot’s latest article ‘The Pleasures of the Flesh’ on 15 April 2008  is about the causes of the current global food crisis. Currently there are food crises in 37 countries. Monbiot says “the price of rice has risen by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130%(1).” and according to the World Bank one hundred million people could become poorer by the high prices. Actually there is no scarcity of food; for example “at 2.1 bn tonnes, last year’s global grain harvest broke all records” and “it beat the previous year’s by almost 5%”.

A significant amount of food produced are used as biofuels; for instance according to the World Bank “the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol … could feed one person for a year”. And according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), this year 2.13 bn tonnes is likely to be consumed, and only 1.01bn will feed people. Monbiot complains that now in the UK, all sellers of transport fuel have to mix fuel with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. He says: “In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate. “

Monbiot also discusses the other cause of the food crisis, which “is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer”. This year 100 m tonnes food will be used as biofuels, and a bigger amount, 760 m tonnes, will be used to feed animals. Since meat consumption in Asia and Latin America has been booming, and the UN estimates that the population will rise to 9bn by 2050, Monbiot tries to answer the question “What level of meat-eating would be sustainable?” and he says “ If you care about hunger, eat less meat”.

At the end of his article, George Monbiot says:

Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other.

More Yum Cha exhibition

More Yum Cha, an exhibition featuring several Chinese artists, is currently showing at the Ray Hughes Gallery in Sydney. As this image shows, at least some of the exhibition involves an engagement with China’s relationship to globalisation.

The exhibition is running till 16 February.

Copyrighting Egyptian antiquities

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the Chinese terracotta warriors on display at the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology in Germany.  Now here’s another interesting case of cultural heritage, authenticity, and profit sharing: the CBC and the BBC are both reporting that the Egyptian government is considering copyrighting pharaonic antiquities, “from the pyramids to scarab beetles, in an attempt to collect royalties from the creation of replicas.”  The money gained from copyright royalties would be used to maintain antiquities sites in Egypt.  In a rare moment of understatement, Hawass said that the Las Vegas Luxor hotel would not be affected by the proposed law “because its interior bears no resemblance to a pyramid. “

Authenticity and profit: the case of Chinese terracotta warriors in Germany

Reuters reports on Chinese claims that the supposedly ancient statues currently on display in the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology are fake. Some 7,000 life-size “terracotta warriors” from the reign of Qin Shihuangdi, China’s first emperor, were found in a necropolis in the 1970s and are amongst China’s most famous archaeological relics. The Museum of Ethnology mounted a small exhibit of warrior figures, horses, and other artifacts that were obtained, according to the Reuters article, through the Center of Chinese Art and Culture in Markkleeberg, near Leipzig, which in turn “said the figures had been obtained from public authorities, institutes and businesses in China.”

The Cultural Heritage Administration in Shaanxi province, where the terracotta army was excavated, announced its “outrage” that the Hamburg museum was showing reproductions and that the exhibition was “a very serious act of cheating the media and the public.” It also vaguely threatened legal action. The statues remain on exhibit but a sign announces that their authenticity is disputed and refunds have been offered to the 10,000 people who have already paid to see the exhibit.

What is interesting in this story is what is not said. The affront is said to be to the “media” and the “public” who are being “cheated.” The only time that money is mentioned is with reference to the museum-goers who are eligible for a refund. But exhibits are huge money-makers for museums, and dividing the profits between the entities that loan artifacts and foreign museums that display them is always a matter of fierce negotiation. The Cultural Heritage Administration in Shaanxi is therefore probably angry that the Hamburg museum didn’t go through them to obtain their exhibit objects, and thus is not paying them a portion of the exhibit revenues. But this interest in the profit of the museum exhibit is veiled and outrage is instead expressed on behalf of the museum-goers who were denied authenticity. Perhaps this is because openly admitting to their pecuniary interest in the exhibit of Chinese artifacts would somehow detract from the moral outrage being expressed by the Cultural Heritage Administration. Note how money seems to sully the keepers of cultural heritage, even as it clings to the objects that they keep.

L.L. Wynn

Kentucky’s new Creation Museum (Adam and Eve were really hot!)

Hallelujah! The Creation Museum has just opened its doors this week in Kentucky, U.S.A, with 4,000 visitors the first day. Armed guards dressed in black with attack dogs patrolled the grounds, presumably to deter the handful of atheist protestors who showed up from thinking they could get away with sabotage. Inside, animatronic, vegetarian T. rexes graze in the same fields where children play. In the picture published on salon.com, a very tanned and sexy Adam and Eve look at each other longingly, and I’m not sure because they’re mostly covered up with her hair, but it looks like Eve may have had breast implants (thanks, God!). No, wait: maybe that’s just her breasts before the fall.

The new museum puts me in mind of some of the anthropology publications that I subscribe to which have recently been serving up homilies about how anthropologists should rally round to oppose the teaching of creationism and intelligent design (ID) in American schools. As Chris Toumey puts it,

“Our discipline of anthropology ought to take the intelligent design agenda seriously, and should actively oppose it, for two reasons: First, it is wrong for our public schools to mislead students. Secondly, intelligent design is a prominent feature of the so-called culture wars. Each victory for intelligent design in the classroom or the courtroom makes it easier to discredit the accounts of human origins that we generate in anthropology, along with the methods and concepts that guide our work.”

Edwin Segal, meanwhile, complains that ID “shows no understanding of science, scientific thought, or scientific progress.”

I’d like to see Anthropology News and its ilk publish careful ethnographic analysis of the debates over intelligent design and the teaching of evolution in the United States. For example, in the set-up of Us vs. Them, with Them attempting to overthrow logic, science, and “progress,” we might see the glimmerings of an intellectual line of descent between contemporary anthro attacks on ID and the notion of “progress” that characterized early anthropology’s attempts to give an evolutionary framework to culture. And I for one would love to know more about what broad visions of time and human history are imagined by proponents of ID. Is it still fundamentally a story of progress? Is it eschatological? Is it a cyclical process of cultural decay and divine renewal (as the Mormon account of ancient American history is)? In the Creation Museum, for example, visitors are taught about the “‘Six C’s of History’: creation, corruption, catastrophe, confusion, Christ, and consummation.” Some of the interesting things that could be revealed about one nation’s multiple visions of human history get trampled down by the “down with ID!” line of attack.

For choir members who have heard enough serious talk about how Bad creationism and ID are, Colin Purrington has attempted to lighten things up a bit by proposing a hilarious set of science textbook stickers on evolution and intelligent design. The background: a school district in Georgia (southern U.S., not the former Soviet Union) mandated that the science textbooks that were being taught in the schools have a sticker attached to the outside of the books reading,

“This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.”

Purrington proposes that opponents print up competing stickers, to be affixed over the school board’s stickers. A sampling:

“This book discusses evolution. President George W. Bush said, ‘On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth.’ Therefore, until 2009 this material shood be aproched with an open mind, studeed carefuly, and critcly consid’rd.”

He also has a set of stickers that can be stuck to other texts that promote ID. A sampling:

“This book was anonymously donated to your school library to discreetly promote religious alternatives to the theory of evolution. When you are finished with it, please refile the book in the fiction section.”

There are more on Purrington’s Flickr website.

Back to the Creation Museum: how could anyone possibly poke more fun at it? This unbeliever is hard pressed to imagine anything that could be funnier than the museum itself, with its depictions of humans and dinosaurs peaceably living together and a Grand Canyon carved out instantaneously (geologically speaking) in the wake of Noah’s Flood. If Baudrillard could coin the term simulacra to describe a copy that has no original, what term might we coin to describe an object that is its own parody? I’m not an etymologist, so someone who knows Greek, please help me out here.

L.L. Wynn

“Theme Park” Architecture in China

One of my favourite blogs is BoingBoing, not the least because a lot of the posts tickle my anthropological funnybone. A good example is a recent post on new architectural trends in China, where the emergent middle-class is being tempted to live in simulacra of historical Western cityscapes.

In Nanjing, there are Balinese retreats and Italian villas. In the southeastern city of Hangzhou, there are Venice and Zurich. In downtown Beijing, everything is about Manhattan, with Soho, Central Park and Park Avenue.

Seems that there is quite a bit of interest in producing replica of iconic structures from a usually Western “elsewhere”. Another BoingBoing article reports about the Shijingshan Amusement Park in Beijing, described as “basically a weird, Chinese clone of Disneyland”.

Perhaps more interesting than the phenomenon itself is why stories like this are so ticklish for people like me. What should “we Westerners” have a monopoly on consuming the exotic other? Various kinds of exotica have long been decorating Western homes, both inside and out, for a long time now. An example that springs to mind is the not uncommon practice of a few decades hence of placing concrete Aborigines, like indigenous garden gnomes, in front gardens. Can’t do that anymore though; the consumption of exotica these days must be done with requisite postmodern irony. And maybe that’s what’s so strange about these Chinese consumption patterns: they’re just dripping with pomo simulation, but without the ironic self-parodic attitude you’d expect in the West. Or maybe it’s the strange thrill of seeing changing power relations at work. Maybe it’s not so much the weirdness of the copying, but the fact that it’s being done to “us”. “We Westerners”, not the least anthropologists, have been accustomed to representing the other. So its strange to find “our” forms as exotic consumer items.

I’m just guessing here, of course. Good ethnographic work would provide some sense of why the Chinese middle class seem to be enjoying these kinds of consumption. Perhaps our resident China expert, Third Tone Devil, has something to say about this?