Welcome to Nexus, an interdisciplinary newsletter designed to encourage reflection and communication among all members of the academic community.  I hope that you enjoy (and consider responding to) the diverse and controversial essays of this premier issue.

Over the past three decades, two particularly exciting and interrelated developments have emerged in academia that have a bearing on anthropology's contributions to environmentalism.  The first is the initiation of activist-oriented disciplines including women's studies, black studies, and environmental studies.  Each explicitly defines a dual mission of theory building and the articulation of strategies for societal reform.  The second development is the slow but steady dissipation of disciplinary boundaries.  This constructive breakdown is not limited to the social sciences but includes the humanities and life sciences, especially ecology.  In this brief essay, I would like to comment on the contributions reaped by one set of intersections, namely, anthropology and environmental studies.  These contributions have implications both for theoretical constructions of environmentalism and for environmental activism.

Anthropology and environmental studies come together in their mutual interest in human ecology, human-nature relationships, and those institutions of power and authority that mediate these relationships.  Anthropology's cross-cultural perspective uniquely enhances appreciation of these concerns by problematizing the concept of "environmentalism" in order to determine the range of beliefs, values, and norms which undergird its practice.

For example, anthropologists' study of linguistic conventions to analyze culture recently has been employed toward understanding tribal meta-phorization of human-nature relatedness.  Human beings use metaphors as cognitive devices to express complex phenomena inadequately described in literal language.  Because metaphors are frequently engaged in the expression of relationships between human beings and nature, their cross-cultural analysis can yield enormous insight into the range of ways this relationship is conceived and the sources of these conceptions, including economic patterns, subsistence systems, and kinship relations.

In his contribution to Kay Milton's In Environ-mentalism: The View from Anthropology (1993), Bird-David notes that among gatherer-hunters, metaphorization of human-nature relatedness is often articulated as extensions of human-human relationships, including sexuality, procreation, adult-child caring, and the extension of naming practices involving sets of obligations and responsibilities.  The Cree Indians of North America, for instance, describe hunting "as an act of sexual intercourse and their mythic relationship with prey animals as one of marriage" (113).  Each stage of the hunt reproduces Cree rituals surrounding courtship, seduction, intercourse, and birth: "in this reality, a prey is courted -- and seduced, when courting fails" (114).  Hunters discuss the act of killing itself as sexual intercourse, such that, if killing "is," metaphorically sexual intercourse, then the carcass "is," metaphorically, the product of the union of the hunter and the prey -- the "child."  When the hunter returns to camp, the women then take charge of cleaning the corpse, being careful to avoid waste and to show it respect (114).

Because prior analyses of Cree hunting practices have neglected to consider the sexual metaphors structuring the meaning of the hunt, the Cree concern to avoid waste and show respect has been ethnocentrically interpreted as a conservation ethic.  Perhaps Cree customs do indeed intersect with specific components of conservationism; however, it is important to remember that conservation itself is rooted in a cultural history, specifically that of late 19th century American progressivism, and has accrued its own set of distinct meanings.  Thus, rather than reducing Cree hunting to a foreign set of cultural norms, it is both more accurate and potentially more useful to postulate arenas of intersection which can then be examined and to explore ways in which human-nature metaphors have been productively applied to ecologically sound behavior.

Cross-cultural analyses of human-nature relationships thus expand the conceptual boundaries of environ-mentalism.  Such expansion is necessary when we recognize that environmental ethics constitutes one pillar of environmental studies programs, and environmental activism constitutes another.  How is it possible to postulate ethical human-nature relationships and prescribe formulas for action, let alone regulation, without some concrete appreciation for the diverse constructions of these relationships?

  The teenage years are a time when young people establish links with society that help define their future adult statuses.  Their relatively comfortable role within the family will be replaced by a complex set of responsibilities.  They are expected eventually to become self-supporting and upstanding moral members of their communities.  Our society's basic institutions provide instruction, guidance, and encouragement to help teens with this transition.  Sadly, gay teens are deprived of much of this assistance by societal prejudice, driving many of them to suicide.  Their despair stems from a lack of social integration into our culture's vital institutions, including family, friends, religion, and the workplace.

Most heterosexual parents expect children to adhere to parents' norms, to date the opposite sex, and eventually marry and produce children of their own.  Explicitly and implicitly, parents support these norms and militate against other outcomes.  Heterosexuality dons the mantle of a core "family value." This can only distance gay teens from their families.  Further, since there is no legal sanction for gay marriages in the U.S., young gay people are denied the promise of marital happiness and long term security that forms a vital part of our cultural heritage.

Most popular religions -- Catholicism, Judaism, and Protestantism -- preach that homosexuality is a sin demanding renunciation or a disease needing a cure.  As neither idea has been successful in altering one's sexuality, such dogma denies religious benefits to gays.  Teens especially need moral guidance, but this authoritative censure is the antithesis of such guidance.  It offers no choice but to change their sexuality or die and be damned.

Exclusionary pressures face gay teens in many other social settings.  Stereotypes and harassment at school reinforce the message that homosexuality is inherently wrong.  The related physical and emotional threats must lessen gay teens' participation in sports and other activities.  Because few teens are openly gay, peer groups that unconditionally welcome gay teens are extremely scarce.  Nor does our richly diverse society provide gay role models for teens desperate for guidance.

The 19th century sociologist Emile Durkheim referred to anomie as a societal condition wherein people become detached from systems of moral guidance, social support, and clear norms.  Durkheim demonstrated statistically that some social groups (males, single people, Protestants, and the wealthy) who were relatively less socially integrated than their counterparts had higher rates of suicide.  These same groups are still more likely to commit suicide than are others.  Gay teens, whose only moral guidance is negative and antithetical, are also strongly susceptible to anomie.  They face life as unmarried, religious pariahs with broken family ties, problematic employment, and social ostracism.  It seems only reasonable that their suicide rate would be significantly higher than that of other social groups.

Suicide statistics support this conclusion (Altrocchi, Abnormal Behavior,  1980).  In fact, it seems likely that the figures understate reality, since negative bias against homosexuality would influence survivors' assertions.  Some may argue that emphasizing sexuality oversimplifies the situation; but if we assume that all other aspects are equal, then the dominant society's discrimination of gays remains a strong anomic factor that would tend to increase the number of suicides within gay groups.

Life's fast pace leaves people little time to reflect, to check their assumptions, and to examine their stereotypes.  Hence, the dolorous trend of teenage gay suicide in the U.S. will continue, as its causes are rooted in fears and customs inherited from times and places that are harsher than most thoughtful people would care to inhabit.

  I admit to owning a television set and VCR, but besides living in a valley where television signals cannot penetrate and not wanting to spring for the monthly cable bill, I have several principled reasons for avoiding television.  By principled reasons I mean reasons to which I believe other people would subscribe if (a) they understood them and (b) they were not swept away by the habits, beliefs, and pressure of their peers.  I will restrict myself here to just two of these reasons:  passivity and education.

The “activity” of watching television seems to me to be invidiously passive in at least two senses.  First, unlike, say, reading a book, television neither encourages nor expects its viewers to engage in critical dialogue with it (and everyone hushes me when I try).  This is because, from its very conception, the central function of television has been to sell stuff, a function which, as Jerry Mander points out, it performs with success unprecedented in human history.  The television watcher is neither a speaker nor an actor, but a passive recipient of carefully calculated messages aimed at an aggregate consumer profile.  This role is opposite to that of an active, informed citizen.

Second, in practice television watching seems to breed a kind of hopeless passivity about many aspects of the world, in particular politics and economics.  Since it is in the interest of advertisers to portray a stable, comfortable world lacking only their products to make it ideal, nearly every conceivably progressive or disruptive idea appearing on television is embedded in an aura either of self-satisfaction (“you’ve come a long way, baby”), or a kind of upbeat hopelessness (“Scientists report that worldwide environmental degradation continues, though most television viewers will not be affected directly right away.  Now stay tuned for five consecutive commercials!”).

I often hear from friends that television is educational, both for adults and children.  They speak approvingly of Sesame Street, news programs, Nova, and other such fare.  I think television’s educational achievements are exaggerated for two reasons.  In the first place, as Neil Postman argues, Sesame Street does not teach children to love learning, reading, or school, all of which demand habits and activities contrary to those of a couch potato -- it teaches them to love television.  Secondly, consider the research done in Denver during around-the-clock news coverage of the war in the Persian Gulf.  Researchers found that viewers who watched more than six hours per day of war coverage were twice as likely to believe, for example, that Kuwait is a democracy (32%) than those who watched less than 1.5 hours per day (16%).  This failure to glean from “educational” programming the most basic of background information about the region reported on suggests that television’s principal function is not to inform but to disinform.

A friend and colleague argues that I should watch television because otherwise I will not know what my students are talking about and what sorts of examples and analogies will make sense to them.  I grant the point, although even he admits that it is not necessary to watch very much television to keep up with popular references.  I seem to manage fairly well with a half-hour or so every three or four months.  I can’t say I enjoy it much, but I’m doing my duty as a teacher.  Is television capable in principle of many wonderful things?  Of course.  Aren’t there some really good shows, clever and entertaining as well as informative?   Undoubtedly.  Do these concessions convince me that I should invest precious time and money watching television?  Get a life!

  Matt Silliman’s critical remarks against television raise a number of interesting points, but his analysis is reductionist and far too simplistic.  It is emblematic of the current attack on popular culture that has become, not surprisingly, the easy way out:  Kids shooting kids -- look at the movies; girlfriends getting beat up by boyfriends -- point to rap music; teenagers smoking cigarettes -- read the billboards; the horrors of hegemony -- well, to paraphrase Silliman, those are just the networks at work.

The problem with these arguments is that the logic behind them is singular and linear while, in reality, the media and its effects are neither.  Each cultural text, after all, has many different subtexts.  And unless we examine all or most of those subtexts (which too many of us don’t have the time or energy to do), we cannot make any direct cause and effect claims (which too many of us, much of the time, tend to do).  To put it another way, popular culture may be ubiquitous but it is not omnipotent.  Silliman points to the television slogan “you’ve come a long way, baby!” as an example of the way television ultimately coopts “every conceivably progressive or disruptive idea” by “embedding it in an aura of self satisfaction.”  But this very example is itself particularly instructive of the dangers of making glib assertions.  For a detailed historical analysis of that particular television slogan shows how television -- and the effects of television viewing -- is far more complicated than Silliman’s formulation allows.

That particular slogan was introduced in the 1970s and quickly became a popular culture icon.  The words not only brought to mind a specific brand of cigarettes but also came to signify the changing status of women in the era of women’s liberation.  What the producers of that ad campaign did not know at the time was the extent to which their slogan would come to symbolize both the ideological power of cultural texts and the structural contradictions that continuously challenge and limit that power.  From the beginning, the Virginia Slims slogan was mired in contradictions and ambiguities that contributed to its mass appeal.  On the one hand, the words “you’ve come a long way” (accompanied by pictures of rebellious women being carted off to jail in the early years of twentieth century) could easily be construed as a statement of the strides women were making in the late 1960s.  On the other hand, the word “baby” tacked onto the end of the phrase (accompanied by pictures of “liberated” women dressed in tight mini-skirts, seductively dangling cigarettes between their fingers) served to temper, even reverse, the meaning of the phrase “you’ve come a long way.”  What the producers of the Virginia Slims ad campaign managed to do, and do quite well, was to construct a cultural text that could appeal to women without threatening men by juxtaposing images of women’s growing political power with images meant to reinforce their continued objectification and infantilization.  The ideological ambiguities embedded in the ad campaign both reflected and affected the struggle for social power between men and women.  By equating smoking with emancipation, male dominated tobacco interests profited enormously by ensuring that a new generation of liberated women would either become -- or remain -- addicted to tobacco.  At the same time, however, the very success of the Virginia Slims ad campaign led to an unintended consequence, namely, to mobilize a number of women’s organizations into joining various political actions that ultimately led, in 1971, to the banning of all cigarette advertisements on television.  This example of the simultaneous success and failure of the Virginia Slims ad campaign serves to remind us how cultural consumers are neither mindless dupes nor passive recipients of the messages targeted at them.  Just as ideology is continuously constructed and reconstructed through the dynamic interplay of dominant and subversive discourses (Williams, The Sociology of Culture, 1982), that same interplay can be seen in the semiotic and psychoanalytic properties of cultural texts.  In other words, television, television texts, and their effects contain within them all sorts of mixed and contradictory messages.  As John Fiske  argues in his contribution to Channels of Discourse, Reassembled  (1992), depending upon their social experiences and social location, viewers can -- and often do -- choose their own meanings, that is, coopt the texts to meet their own needs and inclinations.

In asserting that television is always a passive activity, Silliman ignores all of the recent work in cultural studies, ethnography, and feminist theory that demonstrates how viewers are not always passive recipients.  To the contrary, many viewers are actively engaged in processes of cultural consumption: television may “talk to them” but, sometimes, they “talk back.”  In this sense, popular culture neither intrinsically affirms nor radically rejects dominant ideologies.  Rather, it both affirms and rejects those ideologies, and the key to decoding its practices of signification rests in deciphering how it manages to balance its ideological contradictions and in exploring the specific historical conditions that can -- and do -- occasionally tip that balance.

Let me conclude with two final points.  First, Silliman’s remarks completely miss the boat because he launches his attack only against television.  There is much if not as much “ideological positioning” embedded in literature or “high culture” forms (e.g., theater and classical music) as there is in television.  And, second, television can serve as a wonderful pedagogical tool in the classroom by showing students how to “read,” and “read through,” what they watch all the time.  A teacher, so inclined, can use television to help his or her students “see” in a new light the many subtle ways in which they are always in the process of being socialized and how those socializing institutions inadvertently also provide avenues of resistance.