Pan

I always ate muesli cold with milk, whether it was Familia or Alpen. I rarely eat cereal for breakfast anymore, though.

A thought off the top of my head: Could the Japanese have gotten korokke from the Dutch?

Thanks for posting a link to that interesting article, John. I wonder how the civil war in Cote d'Ivoire and the country's de facto division into a southern part controlled by the government and a northern part controlled by an opposition army has affected the practice of slavery in the cocoa industry.

I just noticed that no-one has commented on Bruni's remark about the star system yesterday: That would be great, and I look forward to it.

I have to agree. This is the first time I've read a Bruni column in some time, and it was lots of fun! I also like the fact that because of the blog format, responses by readers are posted right under the column.

Absolutely! We get to see that waiter or waitress repeatedly.

So as not to bias your argument you might have as easily said "If she did, she would have been able to do good work in this kind of study." ← Keep in mind that I was responding to an assertion that her shopping skills were irrelevant to the quality of the study. And the contrary wouldn't be that shopping skills would definitely be sufficient for her to do a good study, but that they might have helped her or even been one of the requirements for her to do a good study. Clearly, good shopping skills by themselves wouldn't have been sufficient for good ethnological work. That much certainly seems clear. Is she a journalist? Because if she's an anthropologist or a sociologist (in the French context, where sociology is much more like anthropology than it is in the US), the answer is that the journalism never begins. Journalism and anthropology are two different things. I'm thinking that a long investigative journalism project might come closest to anthropological research, but that would require the journalist(s) involved to start work without a firm viewpoint on what conclusions they will draw and even what they will find. It's common for anthropologists to find out that what they thought they were going to be working on turned out to be something completely different from what the books or articles they read said it would be, etc. Nope, I'm not interested enough to read the book, at least not for the foreseeable future, but I did want to address some assertions about the skills relevant to doing good ethnological research. Maybe she has them, maybe she doesn't, but her conclusions, as perhaps inaccurately described in this thread, seem suspect.

Yeah, but who's been talking about it? It seems that this study may have been gathering dust in France. Besides, this is by no means the first thread where I've gotten the sense that some Americans, and maybe not only Americans... (I'm not going to repeat myself here. )

I too enjoyed your story, Michael, but I do see a need for you to read the book, or at least the linked excerpt, before rendering an opinion of her methodology. ← Notice that I didn't actually characterize her methodology. In that case, did she over-extrapolate? Note, again, that I'm not asserting she did but posing a question. I did a Google search for clear definitions or discussions of participant-observation and found a lot of confusing stuff, so you're not alone in asking the question you pose above. Here's a link to a page I haven't read completely, but which seems useful as a starting point. My sense is that participant-observation means that you first of all take on the role of a researcher whose investigations take place primarily through personal relationships with one's subjects (conversations; observations of them at work; taking on of roles in their work or business, with their permission, etc.), not for example pre-cooked surveys (which is not to say that well-worded surveys, especially if they include space for further comments, don't have their uses). Secondly, I think you have to be willing to do whatever within reason some of your research subjects feel would be helpful. So for example, did this researcher help any of the sellers with their work in any way while doing her studies? Inevitably, there is a degree of subjectivity in social science research of any kind, but a good researcher has to have the ability to come to some conclusions based on good field notes and cite others' work in places near and far as relevant, by way of comparison. It simply takes a special kind of person to sincerely participate in the life of the social group s/he is studying and then maintain enough independence of thought to write something other than pure propaganda in favor of the group. There have been many notable failures. I don't know if this is one of them.

I don't disagree with your point as applied to nations (or even, to some extent, individuals), but I would offer the rejoinder that I do not speak for any level of government, but only for myself and am therefore answerable to my own conscience, not for what people in the past or even present do over my opposition or did before I was around to even vote. I have full confidence that you have never enslaved anyone. Not for me. I'm happy to discuss it, and did remark on the boycotts of some California agricultural products that were tended and picked under terrible working conditions. I just think that it's a more complex issue than slavery and, therefore, would probably be better discussed in another thread. If we were to put pressure for improvements of working conditions or wages for farm workers in specific segments of the industry, I imagine it would be most effective to launch a narrow campaign such as the boycott of Gallo wine in the 70s. On the other hand, one could also agitate for stronger enforcement of existing labor laws, increases in the minimum wage, and various other across-the-board measures that one believes would or could be reasonably expected to benefit farmworkers. Some of these topics may be of such general application (as in minimum wage increases or new minimum wage or maximum hours legislation) that they go beyond the mission statement of this society, but by all means, start one or more new threads as appropriate, if you'd like to discuss what if anything we should be doing about poor working conditions for farmworkers, short of slavery.

I have no basis on which to recommend any really expensive lodgings and so forth, so I'll just give a general suggestion about food: When you're in Burgundy, don't neglect the little boulangeries. I had the best pate de fruit ever in a little shop on a quiet crossroads off N6 in a small town (Vermenton seems likely). It beat the pants off the pate de fruit we were given at Grand Vefour, and it was a whole lot cheaper! And the other thing to get everywhere is gougeres, which we really loved. You can get good gougeres in New York, but the ones we got in Burgundy were so much bigger, and again, these are to be found at most any boulangerie in the region and are great as part of your breakfast (even lunch, if you like). Get some gougeres and some pate de fruit at a boulangerie and something meaty at a charcuterie, supplement that with whatever else strikes your fancy (croissants, pains au chocolat, etc.), and you have some tasty, inexpensive food to get you on the road in the morning! For us, that really was one of the pleasures of our wonderful trip through Burgundy (and on to the Loire Valley). Another pleasure was the architecture and art, which were actually our main reasons for visiting those areas.

I hadn't noticed a new restaurant there. Thanks, I'll definitely check it out.

Frankly, I've been reading this thread but haven't looked at the article and don't really see a need to, but as the son of a noted anthropologist and someone who spent two years and part of a summer with her "in the field," I have some comments about proper anthropological procedure. First of all, field research is based on participant observation. That means that if you want to understand the way roles are played out in a given setting, you must yourself participate by understanding and effectively playing a role. This goes directly to the question of whether Mme de La Pradelle understood the role of shopper. If she didn't, she would not have been able to do good work in this kind of study. Secondly (and thirdly, fourthly, etc.), approaching your research with humility, convincing the folks who are your research subjects that all you want to do is learn from them, being a good enough observer and listener to discover the right questions to ask, allowing the information you derive from this process to drive whatever conclusions you end up with, and avoiding over-extrapolation are all requirements for good work. I'll give you an example of lousy fieldwork resulting in ignorant conclusions. There was a woman (I'll leave her name out; no reason to gratuitously slam her by name, especially as I just discovered in a web search that she died last year) who did research in the village of Ru Muda, Terengganu, Malaysia in I believe the early 70s. She concluded that Malays ate vegetables very little, and therefore must have been suffering from widespread malnutrition, and as I recall, she proposed that the Malaysian government teach them what to eat. She didn't do any research to discover if there actually was widespread malnutrition in Peninsular Malaysia at that time (there definitely was not). So how did she reach such a ridiculous conclusion? She asked people in a survey how often they ate sayur. In standard Malay, the most usual meaning for "sayur" is "vegetable(s)," but in Terengganu, "sayur" is a specific dish of things like beans (or/and sometimes cabbage, et al.) and root vegetables boiled in coconut milk with little dried shrimps and hot peppers. So her survey results showed that the folks in Ru Muda didn't have sayur all the time, but she never asked them how often they had ulam, the term for a kind of salad of raw wild or/and cultivated leaves, nor how often they had curries of this and that vegetable, such-and-such vegetable with belacan (shrimp paste), asam (tamarind sauce) dishes of such-and-such vegetable, etc. She also cited as supporting evidence that not much land in Ru Muda was used to grow vegetables. We had many occasions to drive through Ru Muda, and it very quickly became very obvious to us why they weren't growing much in that village: At the time, the whole populated area of that village was on a coastal strip very close to a stretch of beach, and the soil was very sandy. Had the researcher in question looked at most of the rest of the un-/deforested parts of the state, she might have found out not only that vegetables were growing all over the place but that many types of wild plants were being gathered; but she apparently never saw fit to visit even the next village to the north or south and never asked the right questions. And finally, she never had the sense to realize that if the Malays had really eaten the diet she concluded they were eating, and had the results of their diet been the widespread beriberi and pellagra she presumed they suffered from, the Malay people would have died out hundreds of years ago! I'll let my remarks above speak for themselves, but I will say that I wonder sometimes whether there are some Americans who are way too quick to stereotype the French and want to take them down a peg. This comment has been taking shape in my mind for a while and is not triggered by this thread (and I hope no-one considers this remark a personal accusation from which they need to defend themselves), but you know what they say: If the shoe fits... I think we should all be grateful that there are some members who are French citizens, and if we want to emulate good research procedures, we should consider these folks to have more knowledge about their country than we do and think of ourselves as students who can learn from them. In the words of the last couplet of the first pantun (a traditional type of 4-lined Malay poetry) I learned: Saya budak baru belajar Kalau salah, tolong tunjukkan. (I'm a child who just started to study If I'm wrong, please point it out.) [Reads better in Malay, no? ]

Which Malaysian eatery, Ya-Roo? Something Orchid on 15th St.?

"J" is called "I longa" (="long I") in Italian. It's not a usual letter, but when I've seen it, it's been pronounced like an "I" (no doubt, some Italians will clarify this further). In Latin, from what I've seen, the letters were use interchangeably (Julius, Iulius; Jove, Iove; etc.).

That's always open to question, no matter what the issue is. I agree that each individual has a limited impact on the World, but there are enough instances of one person doing a tremendous amount of good or harm for it to be evident that a single human being can make a big difference. I don't think the question of paid child labor or children helping with family farms or businesses is as clear cut as you're making it, though.

Why not?

Are there people who actually commute to Washington daily from that distance? And are there more than a couple of people in the area where you're now living who go to DC more than once every couple of months for a special dinner or to stock up on hard-to-find specialty items?

I think anyone who's had mammals as pets perceives some similarities between their pets and human beings, including similarities is their reactions to hunger and pain. Pets can't tell us in words what they're thinking, but we can infer things from their behavior. Having raised some chickens, I also think it's pretty evident that they feel pain, so that, for example, I oppose unnecessary vivisection of chickens, if anyone were doing that. But if we're going to anthropomorphise geese, we might as well face the fact that there are many human beings who voluntarily fatten themselves up to extreme degrees and some of them might find the process pleasurable...

Again: This is not an all-or-nothing question. We don't have to choose to either ignore slavery or boycott everything that isn't produced under utopian conditions. That said, boycotts or other forms of public pressure based on abusive work conditions short of actual enslavement are certainly not a bad thing, in my opinion, so if you feel strongly about the kinds of things you mentioned above, by all means organize some kind of action and, if it involves food or drink, feel free to publicize it on these forums. Actually, the Malaysian standard of living is high enough now that Malaysians rarely will do the kind of backbreaking hard labor they or their parents used to do 30 years ago, and like developed Western countries, Malaysia has been using legal and illegal workers from poorer countries to do such work, so it's they who are being underpaid and abused (but also quite obviously being paid sufficiently higher than what they might have gotten at home often enough to keep them coming and, in many cases, staying), much as is true of the illegal aliens who do migrant agricultural work in California and so forth. The question of comparative wages between regions, as I mentioned before, is complicated. The question of slavery seems very straightforward to me.

In order to make a logical comparison of wages from one area of the world to another, you have to figure out what constitutes equal purchasing power. For example, I always had the impression that for local foods, 1 Malaysian ringgit was approximately equal in value to $1 US, in spite of the exchange rate of a ringgit = some $0.40 US. And there are many countries with much lower standards of living than Malaysia. But of course, none of this is relevant to slavery, which means forced work for no pay.

Malawry, I'm curious what the approximate ratio of men vs. women is in your courses. I hope you get a good sleep tonight.

I figure it's harder to make cruelty to Kobe cows into a sound bite.

My parents used to tell me to stop hocking a cheinik, by which they meant going on and on about something. I was always told that "bubkes" meant goat crap, which is very small and worthless. Perhaps that was a slang meaning for the word. "Making a tsimmes" was also part of their vocabulary ("Don't make a tsimmes"...except on Pesach:laugh:).

You mean there is a way to feed yourself without killing living things? ← It's impossible to live without killing bacteria, but if we limit this to visible creatures, it probably is possible to eat without killing any, if you restrict yourself to dairy, fruits and seeds (no plant killing), and you could throw in unfertilized eggs. You could also eat certain kinds of leaves without killing the plant. For example, I used to pick young leaves off cashew trees, and it didn't seem to do any damage to the trees, because there were plenty of older leaves and new leaves grew quickly. ← Touché! Good point, Pan! However, don't you think the probability is very high that on your way to milk the cow and pick the fruit, you will inadvertantly step upon and kill countless tiny but nonetheless visible soil organisms, ants, nematodes, mites and such? ← Yep! (Though one could make the point that you didn't see them when you were walking.)