Sociology 1005 – Spring 2009

As promised, here’s a lighter reading, one that brings us back to food, globalization, and culture. 

Sasha Issenberg and Trevor Corson were interviewed in Slate magazine about their books on sushi; their conversation with the interviewer covers a little of the origins and history of sushi, as well as its subsequent globalization. 

I’ll bring in Issenberg’s book to read you a couple of excerpts. I also look forward to hearing what your experiences of sushi are: Do you eat it at all? Do you have it from delis and supermarkets, or at fancy sushi restaurants, or in-between sort of places? Do you think of it as a luxury food, or a lunchtime food, or as an exotic, strange thing that Other People eat?

Please make sure you’ve read the articles from last Thursday, about shrinking cities, and then read two articles about extremely large cities: 

Learning from slums – This is a relatively recent article from the Boston Globe that made a lot of challenging and interesting assertions, such as:

…given the reality that poverty exists and seems unlikely to disappear soon, squatter cities can also be seen as a remarkably successful response to adversity – more successful, in fact, than the alternatives governments have tried to devise over the years. They also represent the future. An estimated 1 billion people now live in them, a number that is projected to double by 2030. The global urban population recently exceeded the rural for the first time, and the majority of that growth has occurred in slums. According to Stewart Brand, founder of the Long Now Foundation and author of the forthcoming book Whole Earth Discipline, which covers these issues, “It’s a clear-eyed, direct view we’re calling for – neither romanticizing squatter cities or regarding them as a pestilence. These things are more solution than problem.”

The strange allure of the slums – This is a similar article from the Economist from two years ago that talks not just about Mumbai and the Dharavi slums, but also about Nairobi and its immense Kibera slum. 

Most of what makes Kibera interesting, though, is what it shares with other African slums. The density (shacks packed so tightly that many are accessible only on foot); the dust (in the dry seasons) and the mud (when it rains); the squalor (you often have to pick your way through streams of black ooze); the hazards (low eaves of jagged corrugated iron); and the litter, especially the plastic (Kibera’s women, lacking sanitation and fearing robbery or rape if they risk the unlit pathways to the latrines, resort at night to the “flying toilet”, a polythene bag to be cast from their doorway, much as chamber pots were emptied into the street below in pre-plumbing Edinburgh). Most striking of all, to those inured to the sight of such places through photography, is the smell. With piles of human faeces littering the ground and sewage running freely, the stench is ever-present.

Of course, one problem with enormous cities is in the news right now: the quick spread of epidemic illness! Remember, though: You cannot get swine flu by eating pork, and the best thing to do to stay well is to wash your hands frequently! 

See you Tuesday night.

Over the break I was in Cleveland, OH. The current population there is just under half a million people. In *1950* the population there was nearly a million. Rather than growing over the last 60 years, Cleveland’s population has shrunk by almost half. The result is a ghost city — it looks like zombies have eaten the inhabitants, leaving the infrastructure (including a lot of really incredible architecture, and a very nice light rail system). 

We often think of cities as always getting bigger, but that’s not the case. Patterns of production change over the years, and the population changes with them. The website www.shrinkingcities.com has a lot of resources on this topic. Please have a look at some of the pages there to get a sense of the situation. 

Here are two readings for you: A blog post from the Economist on Buffalo, and another analysis of Buffalo, which includes more of its history, from City Journal. 

—-

Obviously I’m posting these really late; I’ve been pretty sick. Try to have a look at them before class tonight if you can. We’ll keep talking about shrinking cities next Tuesday, and compare them to the very different situation of “maximum” cities, such as Mumbai or Mexico City or Tokyo.

Hi everyone — I have strep throat and need to cancel class this evening. There will be a notice on the door at Baruch, of course, but I’m hoping to catch you so you don’t have to go in person to find out.

I’m really sorry for the inconvenience. On Thursday we’ll talk about shrinking cities — I’ve got some really interesting stuff for you to see that I’ll post here.

Email me at  rwhite.baruch at gmail.com if you need to get in touch before Thursday.

I emailed both sections using the  “mail everyone” function in Blackboard — hope it worked!

– Rose

The New York Times just ran a great article about the enormous cell phone market for regional Mexican music.

Because fans of regional Mexican music tend to be working-class immigrants and their United States-born children, they don’t fit the typical musical consumption patterns of the digital age. They most likely don’t own a home computer, don’t use a credit card and don’t have broadband at home, all prerequisites for an iTunes account. Instead they buy prepaid phone cards with cash and use their cellphones as mobile, personal jukeboxes, often downloading ring tones from their cellular providers for about $3 each, three times the price from iTunes or Zune.

Yet another example of an unexpected use of mobile technology!

As I said in class last Thursday, we’ll continue talking about the chapter from bell hooks’ recent book, Belonging.

Hi — I’m posting late on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning — my scanner at home is nearly dead, but I managed to get one more chapter out of it!

Our reading for Thursday night is the 2nd chapter of bell hooks’ recent book, belonging. I recommend having a glance at hooks’ wikipedia page; it’s not 100% up-to-date, but from that you can get a sense of her background.

She grew up in Kentucky, in the Appalachians, near the part of Virginia that Barbara Kingsolver moved to with her family. In this chapter we hear about how being from Kentucky felt complicated to her even though it continued to partly define her during all the decades she stayed away.

There’s a lot for us to discuss in this chapter, about race and class and gender. I’m looking forward to hearing your reactions to her biographical writing. Even though bell hooks is speaking in the first person, she’s talking about things that a lot of other people have experienced.