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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Adding to zinker and others –

I respond to your threads for two reasons. A) the purported innate racial temperamental difference is an interesting problem in the context of charging demographics and the geopolitical situation, as well as in general interesting for me. And b) I have a policy of trying to make lemonade out of lemons that life gives me.

But boy do you supply rotten ones. To the point that engaging further, recasting your disingenuous rhetorical questions as a worthwhile conversation starter, is a bit of a defection against the social compact of the place – because it would be rewarding a bad actor. So best I can do is add to the dogpile a bit of didactic material for lurkers.

Rather than saying niceties about my «intellectual caliber» while glibly dismissing the argument as obviously reliant on false consciousness of Chinese women, and therefore laughably inferior to your cruel-abuse-from-family-members angle, you could seriously grapple with the proposition and check out Bossen's work or something some collection of interviews with those women. I don't even care if it validates your general impression, that's fine – just stop acting as if you have done all object level homework you had to and now can loudly muse about first principles while reiterating the same few examples that you claim imply the threat of universal masking tyranny or whatever. If you think no testimony of Chinese victims themselves is admissible, that is fine too – but argue this explicitly.

Update substantively on mod calls. Mods hold dictatorial power, and aggravating them with unrepentant repeat offenses is utterly pointless. This is just a fact of life.

Respond to criticisms as if they are made in good faith, by reasonably intelligent and skeptical people who have thought about the issue. Even when you are sure they do not merit such a prior (believe me, I know how it feels) – try to reinforce your conjectures against their specific arguments. Report and move on, if you are exasperated with bad faith and low effort.

Crucially, do not treat your opponents like morons. We may pontificate and soapbox a lot, but it's not an excuse to condescend.

If you can't play by these rules, we can't help you.

For no particular reason, 'engaging with bossen's work'. Just from the article, it doesn't seem right - women doing stationary handwork, 'boring, sedentary tasks' like making fabric, is universal, so it's not clear their reluctance to do it is an issue, and foot binding is an extreme treatment for a questionable problem.

... apparently it's a 250 page book. Wasn't really interested in reading it, but ended up skimming it because the 'economic and ethnographic history of textile production' parts are pretty interesting, even though the strong claims about footbinding / textiles aren't really true. They exactingly prove that footbinding declined when mechanized textile was growing, but correlation, causation... Even if (very plausible) the decline of textile labor in favor of other more modern forms of less sedentary labor for women led to a decline in footbinding, this doesn't at all prove footbinding existed for the purpose of that labor. [what follows is more boring disagreement with bossen's claims)

From this book review,

At times, however, one suspects that too much effort has been spent on analysing the statistical data. Although the authors conducted 1,943 interviews with women, analysis of these qualitative materials is rare throughout the book. Historians who expect to read rural women’s life stories relating to footbinding would be disappointed.

I think they collected a bunch of data of the form 'foot binding went away as a practice when industrialization happened, foot binding traditionally happened around the same age women started producing cloth'. But the former could be explained by cultural flow from industrialized places, or industrialization generally upending old cultural practices, and the latter is probably just an uninteresting coincidence, as both happen when the person is young, and there aren't that many few-year-long age buckets during youth. They combine this with narratives about how foot binding is related to female textile work, and lots of detail about female textile work and footbinding, but no real evidence is given that the latter is even mostly a result of the former.

Again from the review

The negative proposition raised by the authors, that mothers bound their daughters’ feet because of the need of young girls’ labour, is not self-evident. One of the three reasons why the relation between girl’s hand labour and footbinding has been neglected by so many observers and scholars, Bossen and Gates points out, is that previous researchers were reluctant to believe that mothers would cripple their daughters in order to make them work. The authors attempt to explain this argument by suggesting that infant killing or the extreme disciplining of children are not uncommon in Chinese history or even today

However, this could not explain the universality of foot-binding. After all, infant killing was not carried out in every single family, whereas footbinding was. This argument needs to be illustrated with further evidence, probably by using the first-hand narratives of women. The following questions are left unanswered: did mothers use footbinding as a tool to make their daughters work diligently, from a very young age, intentionally or subconsciously? Is it possible that mothers sincerely believed foot-binding was necessary for their daughters to enter into marriage, and that the usage of their labour was just a side product? Was it really necessary to keep girls working through this extreme method? How can we explain that some girls had their feet bound before or after the age of doing handwork, at the age of four, or fifteen?

In addition, in challenging the idea that women bound their daughters’ feet so they could get married in the future, this book has limited success. As a cause- effect study, this study only measures the relationship between female labour and foot-binding, without taking marriage as a variable. Therefore, it could not decide which reason is more significant.

A (shorter) paper by the same authors is more of the same. Lots of general historical and economic information, information on when a shift away from manual to factory textile production happened and when foot-binding shifts happened, claims they happened at the same time, but correlation isn't causation. Paragraphs like these don't inspire confidence - they say they did it for marriage, but is that plausible? No, because old fashions don't change that easily. The reason must be something they didn't mention at all.

Informants generally do not remember this transformation, which came about rapidly within a decade, as a product of political change. Some men­ tioned that various government inspectors enforced a ban on footbinding and even unbound women’s feet, confiscating the bindings, or levying fines for the offence. However, women resisted the change and continued to believe that footbinding was important for arranging a good marriage; many reported hiding from inspectors and surreptitiously resuming binding after the cam­ paign was over. On the other hand, many of those who abandoned footbind­ ing explained that “society changed” or “fashion changed.” How were “society” and “fashion” able to stop so suddenly a severe bodily practice that had persisted for centuries despite previous government bans?

It is unrealistic to expect that village women and girls, who were almost universally illiterate, understood the global economic forces that were changing their household economies. Old women asserted that as young girls they simply did what their elders told them to do. If they protested, they were beaten. Why did their elders suddenly change their mind and stop insisting upon this prac­ tice? Even though villagers do not explicitly mention the changing markets and prices that affected their livelihoods, we can surmise that they were in fact affected.

This seems reasonably analogous to circumcision. The somewhat unconvincing justifications, the historical tradition. This is just the way things are done. As a cut dude that isn't all that mad about it I could easily describe the practice in as dehumanizing words as you. It's a pretty fucked up thing they did for centuries and they stopped as far as I can tell, that puts them ahead of us in circumcision and in some sense slavery(is it too absurd if I decide arbitrarily to bound foot binding between these two practices?). I've spent much time in America with first and second generation Chinese people, they are as varied as any other. They understand and are unhappy about being discriminated against by affirmative action. In response to the crime wave some bought guns and I got to be present when one family who bought one was showing it and discussing the issue with another family. The second generation and onwards understands and absorbs our memes as well as any other group of kids I've known. The first generation seems to respect the idea that they've moved to a place with different values and tries to assimilate. These are our people, these are Americans. Some of them have stories reminiscent of my own ancestor's coming to this place, and they got citizenship the proper and legal way. They are ours and no one else's

in as dehumanizing words as you

i can't tell if you meant to imply i was moralizing against a chinese practice, but I was solely interested in bosen's work as anthropology / something to factcheck, as opposed to making a point about how friend or enemy the chinese are. I agree that chinese seem to have a similar set of variation in 'innate' traits that whites do, and culturally adopt values in the same way everyone does*. Plenty of stuff subgroups of white people did in ancient times was as "cruel" as footbinding.

* There probably are racial differences (aside from intelligence) in ... all sorts of things ""behaviorally"", just because individual genetic variation is plentiful, but what they are I (genuinely) have no idea what they might be, and they could be very different from the what one might guess.

On second thought this was a poor and lazy suggestion (made after being rudely awakened by an errant delivery man and trying to fall back asleep); I've forgotten where a proper collection of interviews was, and it looked like Bossen cites some of those women after collecting thousands of interviews under the scope of the project, so I linked to the article, but really there's no reason to recommend the book itself if it doesn't provide their narratives in as raw a form as possible. If you have better suggestions, please share.

Bossen, being a cultural anthropologist, is doing the usual orthodox Marxist «social being determines consciousness» thing where unappealing cultural practices are chalked up to expressions of the preceding profit motive. Her interpretation is not as valuable as opinions of those women, specifically for purposes of commenting on the morality of the practice.

Personally I think that the Chinese really are stricter with their kids, and Chinese kids really are more tolerant of discomfort, severe discipline and obeying social demands. Sometimes the racists compare Chinese people to ants and such because of this; but if anything, overpowering inhibitory control is a particularly human trait, the hallmark of neurological maturity (there's an obvious effortpost here). Like I've suggested in my original response to @Lepidus, the «Chinese mentality» may be a product of a common evolutionary trend in complex societies that has advanced further in the Chinese than in Europeans, a trend we would do well to account for and perhaps counteract.

In any case, parents abusing and distorting children with the rational goal of providing them a higher-status future are the historical norm; and causing physical deformities to fit children into the socially approved mold is quite on par with what we're doing by confining them to schools (yes, yes the EB schtick). 10-12 of the most formative years of our lives spent in the framework where our most rewarded virtues are obedience and patience toward absurdity, our peers are mostly uncultured swine obsessed with prison-tier hierarchical competition, and our authority figures are the equivalent of power-tripping reddit jannies – and I think this is the typical school experience for an above-average kid in a non-exceptional school – is abject moral catastrophe, one that also perpetuates these evils into adulthood. This is only not seen as horror for the same reason some Chinese excuse footbinding: false consciousness and accurate recognition of good intentions behind the horror. There is no real cruelty in what is done to children.

Love can be pretty terrifying is all.

I’m reminded of FGM in Africa, where by all accounts it’s the women doing it over the protests of men. Surely part of the explanation could be ‘male heads of household stopped their female dependents from doing this thing that they’d previously been only dimly aware of after being threatened by the government’.

I remember this being said somewhere, does anyone have the article demonstrating this to be the case?

I want to read it again and see what it said.

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