A new community space initiated by the Years of Culture programme was opened on October 4 in Qatar.
Located near the Museum of Islamic Art park, the Flag Plaza was inaugurated on October 4 under the patronage of Amir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. The ceremony was held in the presence of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs H E Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani; and Qatar Museums Chairperson H E Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.
A Qatar Armed Forces band performed at the inauguration ceremony, which was followed by the raising of 119 flags representing nations with diplomatic missions accredited by the state, as well as the flags of the European Union, the United Nations, and the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Lebanese designer Najla Al Zein’s stonework creation Us, Her, Him is another highlight of the community space lined along Corniche. The installation explores the relationship between form, use, space and emotion through themes relating to abstract conceptions of the body.
“The Flag Plaza is an expansive symbol of the diverse community we welcome in Qatar and the rich connections made through cross-cultural interaction. Its meaning is beautifully embodied in Najla Al Zein’s stonework creation, which will be a permanent reminder of our global interconnectedness. I invite the people of Qatar and all who visit to make use of this new space, coming together in celebration of our common humanity,” said Sheikha Mayassa.
The Flag Plaza is expected to serve as a community gathering space and a location for festivals, celebrations and other events for the people of Qatar.
The missing heterogeneity of our neighbourhoods should be viewed as a cultural, emotional and intellectual loss — a kind of social poverty.
There’s much to celebrate in the new Pew survey on the religious and cultural attitudes of Indians. Hindus and Muslims respect each others’ religion and take pride in their Indian identity. But there is one thing missing: ‘the neighbour’. There still appears to be some reluctance to have members of another religion living next door.
Thirty-six per cent of Hindus said they did not want a Muslim as a neighbour, and 22 per cent of Muslims and other religious minorities said they did not want a Hindu neighbour. This is on top of what we already know about segregated urban and rural caste neighbourhoods, as the study by Harvard scholar Naveen Bharati found.
Religious differences are not just limited to living, loving and food choices. This approach to your neighbour often expands to lifelong attitudes. If you live together, you play together. In the US, non-diverse playgrounds and recreational spaces were part of the civil rights struggle. In India, neighbourhood diversity can also affect the number of religious rioting in your city. We have heard testimonials about how Hindus protected many Sikhs in mixed neighbourhoods during the 1984 Delhi riots. And research also shows how Delhi and Ahmedabad, with their segregated neighbourhoods, see more community tensions and violence.
Illustration by Soham Sen | ThePrint
We frequently hear news about building societies that are all-vegetarian, all-Jain, all-dominant castes, all-Hindu and also about how some property dealers deny rented apartments to members of religious minorities. These should be treated like canaries in a coal mine. On the evolutionary scale, it is natural to go from homogeneity to heterogeneity, not backward.
Early intervention is necessary
If we don’t live in mixed neighbourhoods, we will not blink an eye if our schools don’t reflect the demographic diversity of the country, or if our offices are homogenous.
This missing heterogeneity should be viewed as a cultural, emotional and intellectual loss and a kind of social poverty. It then just gets easier for politicians and religious clerics to demonise the other. Homogeneity must be questioned, resisted and protested at all levels.
If you don’t have neighbours who belong to the ‘other’ community – religion, caste, province or sexual minorities or people with disabilities – then your children’s playgrounds are most likely devoid of diversity too. And this is fertile ground for stereotyping of the other. Learning theories show that prejudice is a virus that infects us as early as our infancy.
There can be no passive acceptance of that which is ‘missing’.
This doubling down on diversity must resemble the way we moved from being merely gender-aware to gender-alert in the way we addressed the sex ratio deficit. For three decades now, we have actively looked for the missing girls in our data sets. We produce rankings of states on their sex ratio. Over the years, there is a sense of policy-shaming that accompanies the falling sex ratio in a state. We didn’t just stop at passing laws.
Similarly, economists alerted us to the missing women voters from our rolls and elections, and journalists and pollsters like Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwala went actively looking for them.
We now need to move from passively valuing diversity (as Pew findings show) to being alert to the deficit and becoming its aggressive advocates. Saying we have a reservation policy for caste discrimination isn’t enough. We know that so many reserved government posts are not filled. So, we have to look for the ‘missing’ in our neighbourhoods, schools, workplaces, playgrounds, social get-togethers; in our literature, cultural performances, protest movements, newsrooms and RWAs.
A smart city is one that should also include a number of mixed, diverse neighbourhoods. Our smart city index should reflect this. In the US, if a neighbourhood or city is diverse, it is also viewed as economically thriving. These areas come with a premium tag and are always more interesting rent and buy-in.
All this is easier on paper. Because after every religious rioting, Indian cities become more segregated. People prefer to retreat and find cover in sameness. Hindus and Muslims feel more secure in their own homogenous, non-diverse neighbourhoods.
Keeping up with the times
Scholar and a key member of the Pew survey team, Hilal Ahmed, calls the findings a “living together separately phenomenon”. But is together-separate a good enough template for 21st century India? No. And neither is that 100-year-old, outdated idea of the American ‘melting pot’, which really came to mean melting of new immigrants into the larger identity of the ‘bigger culture’. Regardless, it was discredited by post-modernism’s emphasis on the assertion of different identities.
Today, both assimilation and assertion are passe. Something new has to take its place, especially with the rise of social media and algorithmic living. We are all trapped in silos and echo chambers, and interest-group politics.
American anthropologist Robert Redfield had created the “great tradition” and “little tradition” grid more than half a century ago. Minority communities fear being swallowed by the larger traditions. If not merge, the two must at least interact to create a common cultural continuity.
Many may not like my idea of an aggressive hunt for the ‘missing’. But not talking about it isn’t going to make the problem go away. Sociologist and best-selling author of White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo, compares the White silence on racism to choosing not to talk about things like domestic violence or child pornography.
On a personal note, I also did a quick audit of my circle of best friends. They mostly make up of dominant caste Hindus. I can’t just shrug my shoulders and say I am blind to caste, religious, ethnic or sexual minorities. I must also recognise and act on the social filters that put barriers up all along the way. It all began in my early playground.
Alexei Stakhanov even made the cover of Time magazine in 1935 as the figurehead of a new workers’ movement dedicated to increasing production.
One summer night in August, 1935, a young Soviet miner named Alexei Stakhanov managed to extract 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift. This was nothing short of extraordinary (according to Soviet planning, the official average for a single shift was seven tonnes).
Stakhanov shattered this norm by a staggering 1,400%. But the sheer quantity involved was not the whole story. It was Stakhanov’s achievement as an individual that became the most meaningful aspect of this episode. And the work ethic he embodied then – which spread all over the USSR – has been invoked by managers in the west ever since.
Coal miner Alexei Stakhanov (right) | Commons
Stakhanov’s personal striving, commitment, potential and passion led to the emergence of a new ideal figure in the imagination of Stalin’s Communist Party. He even made the cover of Time magazine in 1935 as the figurehead of a new workers movement dedicated to increasing production. Stakhanov became the embodiment of a new human type and the beginning of a new social and political trend known as “Stakhanovism”.
But all this “positive” talk comes at a price. For over two decades, our research has charted the evolution of managerialism, HRM, employability and performance management systems, all the way through to the cultures they create. We have shown how it leaves employees with a permanent sense of never feeling good enough and the nagging worry that someone else (probably right next to us) is always performing so much better.That trend still holds sway in the workplaces of today – what are human resources, after all? Management language is replete with the same rhetoric used in the 1930s by the Communist Party. It could even be argued that the atmosphere of Stakhanovite enthusiasm is even more intense today than it was in Soviet Russia. It thrives in the jargon of Human Resource Management (HRM), as its constant calls to express our passion, individual creativity, innovation and talents echo down through management structures.
From the mid-1990s, we charted the rise of a new language for managing people – one that constantly urges us to see work as a place where we should discover “who we truly are” and express that “unique” personal “potential” which could make us endlessly “resourceful”.
The speed with which this language grew and spread was remarkable. But even more remarkable are the ways in which it is now spoken seamlessly in all spheres of popular culture. This is no less than the very language of the modern sense of self. And so it cannot fail to be effective. Focusing on the “self” gives management unprecedented cultural power. It intensifies work in ways which are nearly impossible to resist. Who would be able to refuse the invitation to express themselves and their presumed potential or talents?
Stakhanov was a kind of early poster boy for refrains like: “potential”, “talent”, “creativity”, “innovation”, “passion and commitment”, “continuous learning” and “personal growth”. They have all become the attributes management systems now hail as the qualities of ideal “human resources”. These ideas have become so entrenched in the collective psyche that many people believe they are qualities they expect of themselves, at work and at home.
The superhero worker
So, why does the spectre of this long-forgotten miner still haunt our imaginations? In the 1930s, miners lay on their sides and used picks to work the coal, which was then loaded on to carts and pulled out of the shaft by pit ponies. Stakhanov came up with some innovations, but it was his adoption of the mining drill over the pick which helped drive his productivity. The mining drill was still a novelty and required specialist training in 1930s because it was extremely heavy (more than 15kgs).
Once the Communist Party realised the potential of Stakhanov’s achievement, Stakhanovism took off rapidly. By the autumn of 1935, equivalents of Stakhanov emerged in every sector of industrial production. From machine building and steel works, to textile factories and milk production, record-breaking individuals were rising to the elite status of “Stakhanovite”. They were stimulated by the Communist Party’s ready adoption of Stakhanov as a leading symbol for a new economic plan. The party wanted to create an increasingly formalised elite representing the human qualities of a superhero worker.
Such workers began to receive special privileges (from high wages to new housing, as well as educational opportunities for themselves and their children). And so the Stakhanovites became central characters in Soviet Communist propaganda. They were showing the world what the USSR could achieve when technology was mastered by a new kind of worker who was committed, passionate, talented and creative. This new worker was promising to be the force that would propel Soviet Russia ahead of its western capitalist rivals.
Soviet propaganda seized the moment. A whole narrative emerged showing how the future of work and productivity in the USSR should unfold over the coming decades. Stakhanov ceased to be a person and became the human form of a system of ideas and values, outlining a new mode of thinking and feeling about work.
It turns out that such a story was sorely needed. The Soviet economy was not performing well. Despite gigantic investments in technological industrialisation during the so-called “First Five-Year Plan” (1928-1932), productivity was far from satisfactory. Soviet Russia had not overcome its own technological and economic backwardness, let alone leap over capitalist America and Europe.
‘Personnel decides everything’
The five-year plans were systematic programmes of resource allocation, production quotas and work rates for all sectors of the economy. The first aimed to inject the latest technology in key areas, especially industrial machine building. Its official Communist Party slogan was “Technology Decides Everything”. But this technological push failed to raise production; the standard of living and real wages ended up lower in 1932 than in 1928.
The “Second Five-Year Plan” (1933-1937) was going to have a new focus: “Personnel Decides Everything”. But not just any personnel. This was how Stakhanov stopped being a person and became an ideal type, a necessary ingredient in the recipe for this new plan.
On May 4, 1935, Stalin had already delivered an address entitled “Cadres [Personnel] Decide Everything”. So the new plan needed figures like Stakhanov. Once he showed that it could be done, in a matter of weeks, thousands of “record-breakers” were allowed to try their hand in every sector of production. This happened despite reservations from managers and engineers who knew that machines, tools and people cannot withstand such pressures for any length of time.
Regardless, the party propaganda needed to let a new kind of working class elite grow as if it was spontaneous – simple workers, coming from nowhere, driven by their refusal to admit quotas dictated by the limits of machines and engineers. Indeed, they were going to show the world that it was the very denial of such limitations that constituted the essence of personal involvement in work: break all records, accept no limits, show how every person and every machine is always capable of “more”.
On November 17, 1935, Stalin provided a definitive explanation of Stakhanovism. Closing the First Conference of Stakhanovites of Industry and Transport of the Soviet Union, he defined the essence of Stakhanovism as a leap in “consciousness” – not just a simple technical or institutional matter. Quite the contrary, the movement demanded a new kind of worker, with a new kind of soul and will, driven by the principle of unlimited progress. Stalin said:
These are new people, people of a special type … the Stakhanov movement is a movement of working men and women which sets itself the aim of surpassing the present technical standards, surpassing the existing designed capacities, surpassing the existing production plans and estimates. Surpassing them – because these standards have already become antiquated for our day, for our new people.
In the ensuing propaganda, Stakhanov became a symbol burdened with meanings. Ancestral hero, powerful, raw and unstoppable. But also one with a modern, rational and progressive mind which could liberate the hidden, untapped powers of technology and take command of its limitless possibilities. He was cast as a Promethean figure, leading an elite of workers whose nerves and muscles, minds and souls, were utterly attuned to the technological production systems themselves. Stakhanovism was the vision of a new humanity.
‘The possibilities are endless’
The Stakhanovites’ celebrity-status offered enormous ideological opportunities. It allowed the rise of production quotas. Yet this rise had to remain moderate, otherwise Stakhanovites could not be maintained as an elite. And, as an elite, Stakhanovites themselves had to be subjected to a limitation: how many top performers could really be accommodated before the very idea collapsed into normality? So quotas were engineered in a way which we might recognise today: by the forced distribution or “stack ranking” of all employees according to their performance.
After all, how many high-performers can there be at any one time? The former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, suggested 20% (no more, no less) every year. Indeed, the Civil Service in the UK operated on this principle until 2019 but used a 25% top performer quota. In 2013, Welch claimed this system was “nuanced and humane”, that it was all “about building great teams and great companies through consistency, transparency and candor” as opposed to “corporate plots, secrecy or purges”. Welch’s argument was, however, always flawed. Any forced distribution system inextricably leads to exclusion and marginalisation of those who fall in the lower categories. Far from humane, these systems are always, inherently, threatening and ruthless.
And so Stakhanovism is still flowing through modern management systems and cultures, with their focus on employee performance and constant preoccupation with “high performing” individuals.
Something that often gets forgotten is that Stalinism itself was centred on an ideal of the individual soul and will: what is there that “I” am not able to do? Stakhanov fitted perfectly this ideal. Western culture has been telling itself the same ever since – “the possibilities are endless”.
This was the logic of the Stakhanovite Movement in the 1930s. But it is also the logic of contemporary popular and corporate cultures, whose messages are now everywhere. Promises that “possibilities are endless”, that potential is “limitless”, or that you can craft any future you want, can now be found in “inspirational” posts on social media, in management consultancy speil and in just about every graduate job advertisement. One management consultancy firm even calls itself Infinite Possibilities.
Indeed, these very sentences made it on to a seemingly minor coffee coaster used by Deloitte in the early 2000s for their graduate management scheme. On one side it said: “The possibilities are endless.” While on the other side, it challenged the reader to take control of destiny itself: “It’s your future. How far will you take it?”
Insignificant though these objects may appear, a discerning future archaeologist would know that they carry a most fateful kind of thinking, driving employees now as much as it drove Stakhanovites.
But are these serious propositions, or just ironic tropes? Since the 1980s, management vocabularies have grown almost incessantly in this respect. The rapid proliferation of fashionable management trends follows the increased preoccupation with the pursuit of “endless possibilities”, of new and unlimited horizons of self-expression and self-actualisation.
It is in this light that we have to show our selves as worthy members of corporate cultures. Pursuing endless possibilities becomes central to our everyday working lives. The human type created by that Soviet ideology so many decades ago, now seems to gaze at us from mission statements, values and commitments in meeting rooms, headquarters and cafeterias – but also through every website and every public expression of corporate identity.
Stakhanovism’s essence was a new form of individuality, of self-involvement in work. And it is this form that now finds its home as much in offices, executive suites, corporate campuses, as in schools and universities. Stakhanovism has become a movement of the individual soul. But what does an office worker actually produce and what do Stakhanovites look like today?
Today’s corporate Stakhanovites
In 2020, the drama series, Industry, created by two people with direct experience of corporate workplaces, gave us a glimpse into modern Stakhanovism. It is a sensitive and detailed examination of the destinies of five graduates joining a fictional, but utterly recognisable, financial institution. The show’s characters become almost instantly ruthless neo-Stakhanovites. They knew and understood that it was not what they could produce that mattered for their own success, but how they performed their successful and cool personas on the corporate stage. It was not what they did but how they appeared that mattered.
The dangers of failing to appear extraordinary, talented or creative were significant. The series showed how working life descends into unending personal, private and public struggles. In them, every character loses a sense of direction and personal integrity. Trust disappears and their very sense of self increasingly dissolves.
Normal days of work, normal shifts, no longer exist. Workers have to perform endlessly, gesturing so that they look committed, passionate and creative. These things are compulsory if employees are to retain some legitimacy in the workplace. So working life carries the weight of potentially determining a person’s sense of worth in every glance exchanged and in every inflection of seemingly insignificant interactions – whether in a board room, over a sandwich or a cup of coffee.
Friendships become impossible because human connection is no longer desirable since trusting others weakens anyone whose success is at stake. Nobody wants to fall out of the Stakhanovite society of hyper-performing top talents. Performance appraisals that may lead to dismissal are a scary prospect. And this is the case both in the series and in real life.
The last episode of Industry culminates in half the remaining graduates getting sacked following an operation called “Reduction In Force”. This is basically a drastic final performance appraisal where each employee is forced to make a public statement arguing why they should remain – much like on the reality TV series The Apprentice. In Industry, the characters’ statements are broadcast on screens throughout the building as they describe what would make them stand out from the crowd and why they are worthier than all others.
Reactions to Industry emerged very quickly and viewers were enthusiastic about the show’s realism and how it resonated with their own experiences. One YouTube channel host with extensive experience of the sector reacted to each episode in turn; the business press too reacted promptly, alongside other media. They converged in their conclusions: this is a serious corporate drama whose realism reveals much of the essence of work cultures today.
Industry is important because it touches directly on an experience so many have: the sense of a continuous competition of all against all. When we know that performance appraisals compare us all against each other, the consequences on mental health can be severe.
This idea is taken further in an episode of Black Mirror. Entitled Nosedive, the story depicts a world in which everything we think, feel and do becomes the object of everyone else’s rating. What if every mobile phone becomes the seat of a perpetual tribunal that decides our personal value – beyond any possibility of appeal? What if everyone around us becomes our judge? What does life feel like when all we have to measure ourselves by are other people’s instant ratings of us?
We asked these questions in detail in our research which charted the evolution of performance management systems and the cultures they create over two decades. We found that performance appraisals are becoming more public (just as in Industry), involving staff in 360-degree systems in which every individual is rated anonymously by colleagues, managers and even clients on multiple dimensions of personal qualities.
Management systems focusing on individual personality are now combining with the latest technologies to become permanent. Ways of reporting continuously on every aspect of our personality at work are increasingly seen as central to mobilising “creativity” and “innovation”.
And so it might be that the atmosphere of Stakhanovite competition today is more dangerous than in 1930s Soviet Russia. It is even more pernicious because it is now driven by a confrontation between people, a confrontation between the worth of “me” against the worth of “you” as human beings – not just between the worth of what “I am able to do” against what “you are able to do”. It is a matter of a direct encounter of personal characters and their own sense of worth that has become the medium of competitive, high-performance work cultures.
The Circle, by Dave Eggers, is perhaps the most nuanced exploration of the world of 21st-century Stakhanovism. Its characters, plot and context, its attention to detail, bring to light what it means to take up one’s personal destiny in the name of the imperative to hyper-perform and over-perform one’s self and everyone around us.
When the ultimate dream of becoming the central star of corporate culture comes true, a new Stakhanov is born. But who can maintain this kind of hyper-performative life? Is it even possible to be excellent, extraordinary, creative and innovative all day long? How long can a shift of performative work be anyway? The answer turns out not to be fictional at all.
Stakhanovism’s limits
In the summer of 2013, an intern at a major city financial institution, Moritz Erhardt, was found dead one morning in the shower of his flat. It turns out that Erhardt really did try to put in a neo-Stakhanovite shift: three days and three nights of continuous work (known among London City workers and taxi drivers as a “magic roundabout”).
But his body could not take it. We examined this case in detail in our previous research as well as anticipating just such a tragic scenario a year before it happened. In 2010, we reviewed a decade of the Times 100 Graduate Employers and showed explicitly how such jobs can embody the spirit of neo-Stakhanovism.
Then in 2012, we published our review which signalled the dangers of the hyper-performative mould promoted in such publications. We argued that the graduate market is driven by an ideology of potentiality which is likely to overwhelm anyone who follows it too closely in the real world. A year later, this sense of danger became real in Erhardt’s case.
Stakhanov died after a stroke in Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, in 1977. A city in the region is named after him. The legacy of his achievement – or at least the propaganda that perpetuated it – lives on.
But the truth is that people do have limits. They do now, just as they did in the USSR in the 1930s. Possibilities are not infinite. Working towards goals of endless performance, growth and personal potential is simply not possible. Everything is finite.
Who we are and who we become when we work are actually fundamental and very concrete aspects of our everyday lives. Stakhanovite models of high-performance have become the register and rhythm of our working lives even though we no longer remember who Stakhanov was.
The danger is that we will not be able to sustain this rhythm. Just as the characters in Industry, Black Mirror or The Circle, our working lives take destructive, toxic and dark forms because we inevitably come up against the very real limits of our own purported potential, creativity or talent.
When poetry took up arms against the sword, it survived but no longer ruled
Japan is not a changeful society. A bird’s eye view of its history shows hundreds, sometimes thousands of years of continuity.
Change, when it comes, is abrupt, violent, jolting. Two revolutions in particular make the point. The more recent and familiar is the Meiji Restoration of 1868. So transformative was its impact that the industrial capitalist state already in evidence within a decade would have stunned a visiting ghost who’d died, let’s say, in the waning days of the Edo Period (1603-1868), when the nation was closer in spirit to its feudal, bucolic, ancient, tradition-bound past than to its dynamic, scarcely imaginable future.
The second revolution takes us very far back in time. Four centuries of peace and its gentle progeny — poetry, song, literature, wine, love, flowers, beauty, ease — expired. The warrior’s time had come. He boasted other virtues, sought other fulfillment. One soldier’s battlefield cry, recorded in the 13th-century epic “Tale of the Heike,” would have perplexed, indeed appalled, the soft, cultured, pampered courtiers of the 11th-century novel “Tale of Genji”: “What death could be better than to fall outnumbered by valiant enemies? Forward then!”
The follies of youth: A portrait of Emperor Go-Toba (1221), whose abdication in 1198 at the age of 18 set the scene for radical change in Japan. | PUBLIC DOMAIN
To Genji and his friends, highest exemplars of everything the Heian Period (794-1185) held dear, warriors were scarcely human. Existing on the fringe of society, figures of amused, bemused contempt, deployed occasionally as needed in defense of this or that court faction, they were otherwise scarcely acknowledged.
A power struggle that ended in 1185 swept the courtiers offstage. The emperor at the time was Go-Toba, age 5. He’d ascended the throne as a 3-year-old. His real story begins with his abdication in 1198, age 18 — a tragic story of a doomed imperial revolt: poetry in arms against the sword. It was hopeless. Poetry survived, even thrived — but it no longer ruled.
Beneath the bubbly froth of the Heian Period lay an abiding sadness. Life, for all its beauty, was after all transient. Every joy carries within it the reminder that it will soon pass. Life itself will soon pass. Today’s flourishing is tomorrow’s decay. Mappō, Buddhism’s “Latter Days of the Law,” warned of inevitable decline, degeneracy. Sages basing calculations on the sutras marked the mid-11th century as mappō’s onset. And here were the strutting “East-country warriors” — so called because they were based in Kamakura — to embody with their sword-brandishing, armor-plated violence the most dismal prophecies.
A woman’s world became a man’s world. That’s another way of describing what the Kamakura Period (1185-1333) did to Heian times. Historian Janet Goodwin, in “Selling Songs and Smiles: The Sex Trade in Heian and Kamakura Japan” (2007), chronicles the evolution from the sexual freedom of the Heian Period, a distant foreshadowing of the diversity we today rank as a human right, to a sterner morality that weighed especially heavily on women.
Two scenes can be sketched here that set the stage for Go-Toba’s downfall and the transformation it symbolizes. Next month’s column will consider the social ramifications at greater length.
The first scene, drawn from an 11th-century courtier’s “lusty account (in Goodwin’s words) of Heian-kyō street life,” paints it in very jolly colors indeed. It concerns “the 16th daughter of a palace official,” the leader of “a group of asobi (women of pleasure) who delights in making love at (the river ports) Eguchi and Kawashiri … In the daytime she carries a huge parasol and offers her body to customers of high and low estate, and at night she drums the side of her boat and tenders her heart to travelers. Her vigor in soliciting lovers, her knowledge of all the sexual positions … are her endowments. Not only that, she has the voice of a bird in Amida’s paradise, as well as the face of an angel.”
The second scene, roughly a century later, revolves around Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147-1199), the supreme victor of 1185, Japan’s first shogun, founder of what came to be known as the Kamakura Period and of the martial ethic later called Bushido, the way of the warrior.
He appears here as rather a courtly man. The old era still lived in him. His interlocutor, otherwise unknown, perhaps younger, seems of a ruder cast. Firmly in control of the new Japan, Yoritomo is met on an official procession by a group of asobi — “in indescribably gorgeous costumes,” says the 14th-century court chronicle known as “The Clear Mirror,” which records the encounter. Yoritomo, delighted, eager to heap presents upon the women, asks his companion what would be appropriate. The companion responds with a cranky poem: “It would be my desire/ to give them nothing at all.”
“It was an ungracious response,” comments the chronicler. “But Yoritomo brought out saddles, bolts of … cloth, and other presents, all of which the women received with transports of delight.”
Go-Toba’s abdication in 1198 did not sideline him. Quite the contrary: a “retired” emperor exercised far more power behind the scenes than any reigning emperor could from the throne. Retired, “he governed just as he pleased,” says “The Clear Mirror.” “With compassion more abundant than showering raindrops, he pitied the distant folk and cherished those near at hand.”
Alas, “the whole realm had fallen under the sway of (acting shogun Hojo) Yoshitoki, a man whose power all but surpassed that of Yoritomo in the old days. Naturally enough, his shocking excesses inspired secret thoughts of opposition in Retired Emperor Go-Toba’s mind.”
The shocking excesses are not described, but “news of Retired Emperor Go-Toba’s plans leaked out in spite of every effort at secrecy. … A veritable cloud of (Kamakura) warriors” descended upon Kyoto, the imperial capital. The year was 1221. “Countless esoteric rituals were performed” – to no avail. “The retired emperor burst into tears of dismay.” They did him no good. Captured, he was ignominiously exiled to a remote island, where he died 18 years later, bemoaning his fate in plaintive poetry:
“The new island guard/ is none other than myself./ Ye wild winds raising waves/ on the seas around Oki:/ be forewarned and blow with care!”
It’s telling that the two words being attached to Sunday’s Super Bowl LIV halftime show are “disgusting” and “empowering.”
For 15 electric minutes, Jennifer Lopez and Shakira performed a nonstop celebration of life and lust and Latin pop and Puerto Rican/Colombian/Lebanese culture and identity and costumes and dancing and footwork. It was muscular and sexy. It was unapologetic.
By Monday, in the harsh light of day, viewers and cultural observers and pundits had fallen into two distinct camps: The show was a triumph; the show was a travesty. Who run the world? (Girls); there was a stripper pole onstage.
The most curious reaction, to me, is one that I’m hearing a variation of over and over: Where does this performance fit into the #MeToo movement? Where does the #MeToo movement fit into this performance?
As one reader wrote to me Monday morning, “In a time that you and I and so many others advocate for not seeing women as sex objects ... WHAT HAPPENED?”
As a commenter wrote on a friend’s Facebook page: “Women will never be taken seriously if they keep turning themselves into sex objects.”
We’re awash in contradictions. Disgusting. Empowering.
Let’s talk about that for a moment.
First, I think it’s worth pondering why a 15-minute halftime show should guide how we view women, as though we share one collective brain or soul or goal in life. Those two particular women wanted to entertain 100 million or so people on Super Bowl Sunday, and they did so with fierce, fearless, sexy aplomb.
Another woman, San Francisco 49ers offensive assistant Katie Sowers, wanted to serve as the first female coach in Super Bowl history. And she did.
Some women want to serve in Congress. Some women want to orbit space.
Some women want to teach third grade. Some women want to combat climate change. Some women want to write novels.
Is it harder for us to take them seriously as leaders, scientists, teachers, authors, as full humans, as women because of a sexy halftime show?
I hope the answer is no. I hope we’re able to see two women headline a performance, even a performance that involves a stripper pole, and still take women, as a gender, seriously.
Did Adam Levine performing shirtless at last year’s halftime show make it harder to take men seriously? Was his tattooed chest a blow to men’s rights? Did you eye your male colleagues, male mentors, male elected officials, male doctors, male authors, male thought leaders with a little more skepticism, a little less authority the next day? Did you see them as walking contradictions — acting all sexy on the one hand and then wanting to be taken all seriously on the other?
I hope that answer is also no.
I hope we can also acknowledge that the #MeToo movement doesn’t need to muscle out a performance like J.Lo and Shakira’s.
The #MeToo movement, as I see it, is not meant to strip sex or pleasure from the female experience. It is not meant to police women’s sexuality and send up a flare when a woman falls from her purity pedestal. It is not a wobbly construct that relies on women shunning sex and sexuality, lest the whole movement fall like a house of cards.
The #MeToo movement is, at least in part, a reclaiming and reframing of female sexuality. It is an ongoing discussion that asks us to acknowledge some hard truths: For far too long, women have been treated as conquests.
Bodies to lay claim to and wield power over and use for pleasure, whether the women who inhabit those bodies liked it or not. That sort of separating of the woman from her body leads to sexual harassment and sexual assault — in the workplace, in schools, on the street, in families, in intimate relationships.
The #MeToo movement is a rejoining. Woman to her body. Woman to her agency. Human to her humanity.
The #MeToo movement doesn’t say women can’t be sexual. The #MeToo movement says women don’t want to be raped.
That’s not a contradiction. It’s an awakening. And we’re just now beginning to grapple with what it means. I’m glad we’re having the discussion. It’s not simple, and it won’t be linear, but it’s important. And it’s time.
I want my children to value Raksha Bandhan, the celebration of the bond between brothers and sisters, as much as I do.
Although you’d never know it if you’re counting on Bollywood to mirror real life, Indians don’t only celebrate weddings. Holi, the festival of colors, photographs well. My family has a sparkler party with the neighbors every Diwali, the festival of lights. Depending on our backgrounds, Indians might celebrate Eid, Christmas, Hanukkah, or any number of Sikh, Buddhist, Jain or Zoroastrian holidays. But my personal favorite holiday is Raksha Bandhan — a Hindu celebration of the special relationship between brothers and sisters.
Every August for 34 years, I’ve tied a Rakhi, a symbolic red thread, around my younger brother’s wrist, and he gives me money or a present. I’m not sure how other families do it — maybe they include sweets or prayers — but like many Hindu holidays, each region and even each home celebrates it differently. For us, it’s always been the thread and the gift, little bribes stipulated by my parents. It’s a small ritual meant to symbolize the bond of protection between brother and sister, and even though I’ve never seen a cinematic musical extravaganza built around it, nothing in our family of four is more sacred.
via Priyanka Mattoo
My brother and I have always been unreasonably close, especially for kids born almost six years apart. We’ve had exactly one fight. I was 13; he was 8. He wrestled the remote control out of my hand; I punched him in the leg. He screamed, developed a bruise and moved on, while I cried about it for two days. I can’t recall an argument since. As adults we live in the same city, have figured out boundaries and quality time and catch up over weekly family dinners and snatched phone calls. We know, it’s unusual. But now I look to my own small children, a boy and a girl almost five years apart, and am desperate to recreate the alchemy of it all.
Is our sibling bond just circumstance? Or did our parents, a pediatrician and educator, make a deliberate series of choices to force us together? Pediatricians and educators are rarely chill about child-rearing, and my experience tells me it was a combination of both.
The age difference certainly helped. By the time my brother was born, I was 5, a fully formed, fully bored person who wanted a baby in the house. But my campaign for a younger sibling had begun at 2 years old, when my nursery school peers in England started bringing baby sisters and brothers around. I was a bookish child whose only friends were my teachers, but a baby seemed like the best sort of companion — a pet, an acolyte and an outlet for my desire to be in charge of things, all in one. My mother claims not to remember the details of this, but my recollection is that the baby was my idea, that my parents had him for me, and that when he was born I gratefully took him off their hands, keeping him company, packing his lunch and making his afternoon snack, until I went to college.
My brother and I never fought for resources (except that TV remote) because we never needed the same thing. We both felt the full glow of our parents’ attention: me for five years solo, and my brother for much of his early life as I grew into my own. During our shared childhood, we lived in 20-odd places on three continents, often finding ourselves in new neighborhoods and schools, where we didn’t know any other kids. Raksha Bandhan was our yearly reminder that we’d never be alone, as long as we had each other.
Aditi Damle
I can’t speak for every Indian, but a survey of my extended family points to the potential of a larger cultural norm: that a sibling was a gift — a relationship to be celebrated rather than navigated. I asked my cousins’ WhatsApp group (you all do this, right?) whether they felt any sibling rivalry growing up. Of the 10 of us, now living in five different countries, I got the same response from eight: nope. “Only American kids fight,” joked one Toronto cousin.
The only two who reported any conflict growing up were also the only pair of the same gender (boys). They were born only two years apart, whereas the others had four to eight years between them. Maybe they fought because they didn’t celebrate Raksha Bandhan? After all, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of celebration for siblings of the same gender. My cousins all laughed at me. O.K., maybe the holiday was only big in my family.
After I had my son five years ago, I was immediately anxious about having another child. Apart from the whole gestation, childbirth and postpartum worries — what if they fought? If all American kids fight, and these kids were definitely going to be American, was my stressful fate sealed?
His dad and I were in no rush to decide, but history repeated itself when my son’s biological clock kicked in at 2. Just like the baby boom I lived through at Snowsfield Primary School, the minute baby brothers and sisters started showing up in his preschool’s Yellow Room, he wanted one, too. If he heard the word “baby,” he’d shout, even to strangers and empty rooms, “I’d like to have a baby!” For almost two years straight, he told his entire school, “We’re going to have a baby soon, because Mama and Dada are working on it.” We were not.
Eventually, though, his lobbying for a sibling somehow worked on us. By the time he was about 3½, we felt sort of ready to try it all again. Ten weeks into the new pregnancy, my husband and I found out it was a girl, and the next time our son brought up the Baby Issue, we were ready to lay some groundwork.
“We’ll see what we can do,” we said, as did my pregnant mother before me. “But if we decide to have a baby, do you think you want a brother or a sister?” We were prepared to nudge him in the right direction if necessary, but he was immediately set on having a sister. “Like Baby Margaret,” on his favorite cartoon, “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.” PHEW.
After I started showing, we told him we had, indeed, procured him a baby sister, and he couldn’t believe his good luck. “Like I’ve always wanted!” he said. After her birth, I was nervous about how this was actually going to go down, but other than some impatience at my inability to do everything at the same time, and hiccups resolved by the book “Siblings Without Rivalry,” he’s besotted with his sister, whom he refers to as “my baby,” “my little sissy” or “the little missy.”
“Can you believe this wondrous baby was in your belly?” he said last week, watching her pull herself up on a toybox. (Yes, he said “wondrous”; it’s possible we read too much.) She roared like a bodybuilder as he cheered her on. “She was just a tiny little thing, and now she’s cooler than I ever imagined!” It sounds like I’m making this up. I’m not — that’s how he talks. His dad and I know, it’s unusual. We also know that this could be a brief window of peace, and that the kids might spend the rest of their lives trying to punch each other in the face. Who knows? But Raksha Bandhan is coming, and I have solid plans to overdo it. Snacks, desserts, special toys, a new piggy bank.
After all, bribing us to like each other worked for my parents, and who am I to abandon our cultural heritage?
While Makoto Shinkai’s latest film, “Weathering With You,” has already been released in Japan, it’s likely anime fans overseas won’t be able to see the movie until 2020. However, there are a few moments in the film that may leave international audiences scratching their heads when they finally get to see it.
Ghost-like figures with strings tied around their necks can be seen throughout the movie, from rain-soaked hospital windows to umbrellas adorned with the smiling dolls. Even the Twitter emoji for #WeatheringWithYou is one of the white objects. But what the heck are these things?
They’re teru teru bōzu charms, which serve a special purpose in Japanese culture. They are believed to help stop the rain and guarantee that tomorrow will be sunny.
Teru teru bōzu charms are believed to help stop the rain and guarantee that the next day will be sunny. | GETTY IMAGES
Teru teru bōzu, which literally translates to “shine shine monk,” are typically made by children with tissue paper and are hung around window sills. It’s a fairly simple craft project for kids to do when they are stuck inside on a rainy day.
Japan is known for an annual rainy season that brings rain clouds in June and July. This summer saw a historic rainy season, which ended up being the cloudiest period in Tokyo in 129 years.
According to tenki.jp, one of the most popular weather websites in Japan, teru teru bōzu can trace its origins to China back during the Heian Period (794-1185). There are several legends in Japan about the doll’s origin, but one of the most well-known tales is of a monk who promised he could bring clear skies the next day. Legend has it that the monk chanted nonstop in front of a feudal lord and was beheaded when he failed to stop the rain.
There’s even a children’s song about teru teru bōzu that alludes to this tale with some explicit lyrics. The last line of the song reads, “If tomorrow is cloudy and crying, I’ll cut your head off.”
While teru teru bōzu may have a dark history, the paper dolls have become a ubiquitous part of the Japanese zeitgeist that make people think of antsy kids who want to play in the sun rather than a monk who lost his head for failing to part the clouds.
A baby’s first word seems as if it ought to be universally fascinating. Laden with the promise of a new life, a first word is a new person’s first expression of self, even if it’s just to label the dog, ask for food, or say hi. First words are more than cute; they’re existentially profound. They represent the threshold where noise becomes signal, the moment that interiority breaks its confines to greet the outside world.
And yet, for much of history, infant language wasn’t regarded as worthy of attention, and in many contemporary cultures it still isn’t. All babies, across time and space, transition from babbling to language at about twelve months of age, in spoken languages as well as signed ones, but not all parents and caregivers pay attention to that transition. That supposedly irresistible thing we call a “baby’s first word” is a romanticized milestone, shaped by social and economic circumstances, and it is surprisingly recent. The natural state of first words is to be disregarded, misheard, or entirely overlooked. Doting over them isn’t perverse—it’s just a modern, underappreciated luxury.
I was inspired to attempt a cultural history of “first words” by Germanist Karl Guthke, who wrote a definitive book about last words in the early nineties. He saw them as artifacts of each era’s conception of death. “There are styles of dying,” he noted, “so are there corresponding styles and fashions of last words?” In an aside, he dismissed first words, arguing they couldn’t tell us much about individual lives. They belong, he wrote, “with anecdotes of childhood, whose biographical value is inversely proportionate to their charm.” He had been musing on 1988 U.S. presidential candidate Michael Dukakis whose reputation as a cold fish technocrat seemed to have been predicted by his alleged first words, in Greek: monos mou, or “all by myself.”
But first words, from the semiformed babble to the perfectly adult, have a tremendous amount to tell us about society. There are “styles and fashions” to first words, just as there are of last words, in the sense of what gets heard, recorded, or passed down. More importantly, the emergence of an interest in first words tracks closely with how Western industrialized societies became what anthropologist David Lancy calls “neontocracies,” or societies organized around the imperatives of caring for the very young. If you want to know how and why babies became their parents’ cognitive projects, tracking what those parents made of first words is a good metric.
CUTE BABY BOY PLAYING WITH MOBILE PHONE IN THE PARK, DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES IN THE HANDS OF A CHILD. PORTRAIT OF TODDLER WITH SMARTPHONE
In the cultural history of first words, we can say with confidence that they’ve always existed. But early utterances are rarely mentioned in historical materials. When they are recorded, it’s mainly been in more modern media, such as baby books, diaries, and scientific observations. By contrast, last words appear as far back as the Old Testament. The first recorded first word, were it to be found, would be a marker of modernity’s dawn.
In the eighties, Linda Pollock, now a professor at Tulane, examined dozens of English-language diaries from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries for evidence of how adults thought about their offspring. She found that only nineteen out of ninety-one diaries noted infant and child speech at all, and only nine diaries mentioned first words.
The earliest came from a Puritan judge in Massachusetts, Samuel Sewall, in early 1686, who recorded in his diary that his eighteen-month-old son, Hull, “speaks Apple plainly.” The father may have shown interest because for the sickly son to say anything at all was remarkable. The boy died three weeks shy of his second birthday. His first word was one of his last.
Sewall’s record of Hull’s “Apple” isn’t the oldest one I’ve found. The oldest comes from 1602, when a French physician named Jean Héroard was assigned to keep a diary about the growth and development of the first legitimate heir to the French throne in eighty years, the dauphin who would become Louis XIII. That first word, as Héroard wrote it, was hé, or, as we’d translate it into English today, “hey.” After Héroard, we have no record of another first word for another eighty-four years.
More than half of the mentions of children’s speech in Pollock’s diaries date from the nineteenth century. After the dauphin’s hé and Sewall’s “Apple,” the next first word was recorded in 1839, when Charles Darwin recorded his first son’s development, including his first word, “mum.” It meant “food” or “give me food,” Darwin tells us.
Such a banality was more significant for what Darwin made of it. He published his notes in 1877, and their appearance in German, Russian, and French simultaneously created a fad of diary-keeping among other natural historians, suddenly making the study of child development “a respectable branch of human biology,” as Dutch psycholinguist Willem Levelt put it. Many, if not most, of the diarists were men. “This new zeal for psychological knowledge has taken possession of a number of my acquaintances,” wrote British psychologist James Sully in 1881. “These are mostly young married men to whom the phenomenon of babyhood has all the charm of newness, and who import a youthful enthusiasm into their scientific pursuits.” Their diary studies fed the argument that the development of the individual follows a path along which the species had evolved. Thus first words provided a window into the minds and abilities of human ancestors in evolutionary time. “Mum” was, in a sense, a living fossil.
Darwin’s account was a response to one published a year earlier by French historian Hippolyte Taine about one of his daughters, including detailed notes about her early vocalizations. Taine wrote that her first words were “papa” and “tem,” which he took as her attempt to say tiens. He unpacked this word lovingly, considering it a “remarkable” word. It meant many things—“give, take, look.” “In fact,” Taine wrote, “she says it very decidedly several times together in an urgent fashion, sometimes that she may have some new object that she sees, sometimes to get us to take it, sometimes to draw attention to herself. All these meanings are mixed up in the word tem.” Taine’s delight is matched by his sadness when she stops saying it. “This is no doubt because we did not choose to learn it, for it did not correspond to any one of our ideas … we did not use it with her and therefore she left off using it herself.” Yet for a time, the word marked the arrival of an “outbreak of volition,” which the father reveled in.
Both Darwin and Taine granted firstness to certain phonetic strings that (they decided) the child invented rather than imitated. Darwin was sure that Doddy (as he called his son) “invented” his “mum.” They believed the first words of a child mirrored the emergence of language in our distant ancestors. “Speaking generally,” Taine wrote, “the child presents in a passing state the mental characteristics that are found in a fixed state in primitive civilizations, very much as the human embryo presents in a passing state the physical characteristics that are found in a fixed state in the classes of inferior animals.”
Around the same time that Darwin, Taine, and other Europeans were grappling with children and the evolutionary history of language, the first commercial baby books for recording important moments, including first words, began to appear in America. This is where noticing first words really began to take off. Where for Darwin and Taine the first word marked the baby’s transition into a human, in the baby book age it marked the arrival of an individual, not just a creature distinct among animals but a singular personality distinct from other selves.
At the time, an estimated one in four or five babies died before they reached twelve months old. Capturing various firsts, including words, encouraged parents to invest more in their children, who were now emotionally more valuable. At first, the baby books were aimed at upper-class women, descended from the tradition of recording baby gifts from family and friends. As their popularity grew among middle- and working-class families, they made it easier to think that individual babies and children mattered. At the turn of the century, local health departments began to offer their own versions of baby books. First words became one important moment in a baby’s development, which could only happen when infants had a good chance of surviving into childhood.
Online library records for about twenty baby books from the early twentieth century in a UCLA special collection showed that about two-thirds of them provided space for a “first word” or “first words.” The most effusive, a book from 1910, asked, “What were the first wonderful words?” One asks for “baby’s sayings” and another asks for “speech” and “vocabulary at 18 months.” About a third of the books prompted nothing of the sort, asking instead about first pictures, birthdays, Christmases, teeth, and trips. For example, The Biography of a Better Baby, published in 1910, figures that “better babies” eat, grow, wear clothes, get fresh air, and walk. (Note the absence of “talk.”) A French book from 1906, Le Livret de L’enfant, merely asks when the baby started to speak (“a quel age l’enfant a-t-il commencé a parler?), and The Edwardian Baby from 1908 gives language milestones (“should use syllables, such as ma, pa, na, ta, without any distinct meaning), but says nothing about first words.
This was also the apparent beginning of the belief that a baby’s first words could foretell their lives. In Babies Made Us Modern, a history of babies in America from the 1890s to the end of the baby boom, historian Janet Golden relates the various cues, both scientific and folkloric, which parents used to tell their babies’ futures. A baby book from 1912 tracked “first definitive signs of emotion at visible things,” “first attempt to reach for something,” and “first signs of reason.” Some other books mentioned the popular belief that if a child’s first movements were upward in space, it would ensure a rise in social station, which led to the practice of carrying newborns up the stairs. If the house had only one floor, the baby was carried up a ladder.
In the late sixties, my mother, on noting that my first words were “money” and “dubbaday” (after the defunct publishing house, Doubleday), erroneously predicted I would have a lucrative career in publishing. She remembered these words without writing them down—my baby book was Catholic and asked, instead, for my “first prayer,” “first Christmas,” and “first Mass.” I suppose that putting prayers in children’s mouths was better than letting them spontaneously jabber their unsocialized, profane thoughts. Though my first words were perhaps not prophetic, Picasso’s first word was “piz” (for the Spanish word for “pencil”) and Julie Andrews’s was “home.”
In some cultures, first words are prescribed—no matter what else the baby might be able to say, they’re not considered to be speaking until they say certain things. In American and Western Samoa, the first word is said to be tae, meaning “shit.” In Samoan culture, children are seen as, “cheeky, mischevious, and willfull,” as anthropologists Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin put it, and such a word seems apt. Elsewhere, early utterances reflect a child’s otherworldly status. Anthropologist Nigel Barley notes that the Chamba of Cameroon and Nigeria believe that the babbling of infants and the very old is the language of the spirit world. “The former have not yet forgotten it, the latter are resuming it, hence their affinity with each other,” he writes. Meanwhile, the Baule of Ivory Coast maintain that babies babbling the ancestral language should be kept apart lest they use it to plot against the living.
In the well-loved children’s book Knuffle Bunny, by Mo Willems, a little girl, Trixie, loses her stuffed rabbit and then gets it back. When she’s reunited with her toy, she blurts out something she’s never said before, which her father considers to be her first words. Spoiler alert: they are “knuffle bunny.”
The book is a reminder that a “first word” is a product of the intersection between a baby’s intention to mean with an adult’s willingness to comprehend. “Knuffle bunny” isn’t actually the first thing Trixie says in the book. She had already tried to tell her father that her bunny has been left behind. “Aggle flaggle klabble!” she cried. “That’s right,” replied her father. “We’re going home.”
What’s true for “knuffle bunny” was also true with Darwin’s “mum,” Taine’s “tem,” Sewall’s “Apple,” and maybe even Héroard’s “hé.” The status of a first word as “first” is always somewhat arbitrary, dependent on an adult’s willingness to bestow meaning on the utterance. As linguist Catherine Snow noted in 1980, “The first word is a reflection of the culture’s decisions about many matters—the status of child versus parent, the attribution of intentionality, language socialization beliefs and practices, and beliefs about the social and communicative capacities of prelinguistic members, as well as theories of language and of meaning.”
She and other linguists solved this problem in a variety of ways: some ignored the single first word and counted instead the first four, ten, or fifty words (which the average child achieves by eighteen months), while others marked a first word stage. What became de rigueur were checklists of words given to parents to fill out. What that approach sacrificed in idiosyncratic detail (you would not be able to record that your child’s first word was “hé” or “tem,” for example), it made up for in scientific usefulness, because interesting patterns emerged nevertheless from the banalities.
Most early words are nouns, for instance, and girls appear to say more words than boys, no matter the language they are speaking or the culture they’re in. And we can venture to say that first words throughout time, whether they’ve been heard or not, have probably not differed much from the ones that contemporary babies say: animal sounds, names of pets and family members, food items, and greetings. Your first words were everyone’s first words, spoken over and over by endless generations of babies trying to break through.
