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Visual Basic .NET/Introduction

Introduction
Visual Basic .NET is one of the two flagship languages (with C#) for the .NET framework from Microsoft. Despite being called Visual Basic, it is actually not backwards-compatible with VB6, and any code written in the old version will not compile under VB.NET.

As a language, Visual Basic.NET has the following traits:

Object-Oriented

As with all .NET languages, VB.NET includes full-blown support for object-oriented concepts, including simple inheritance. Everything in VB.NET is an object, including all of the primitives (Short, Integer, Long, String, Boolean, etc.) as well as types, events, and even assemblies. Everything inherits from the Object base class.

Event-Driven

All previous versions of Visual Basic were event-driven, but this feature is heavily enhanced under the .NET framework. Events are no longer recognized because they use a certain naming convention (ObjectName_EventName), but now are declared with a Handles ObjectName.EventName clause. Event handlers can also be declared at runtime using the AddHandler command.

.NET Framework

As the name implies, VB.NET runs on top of Microsoft's .NET framework, meaning the language has full access to all of the supporting classes in the framework. It's also possible to run VB.NET programs on top of Mono, the open-source alternative to .NET, not only under Windows, but even Linux or Mac OSX.

Additional Features

As of version 10.0, VB.NET supports generics, anonymous classes, lambda functions, anonymous types, and other great features that make it a great language to learn and use.

Getting Started using VB.NET
Using Windows

If you do not have the full version of Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft provides free tools to create .NET applications using | Visual Basic Express.

Using Linux, Mac OSX

You can use MonoDevelop with Linux, Mac OS, or Windows. Despite being limited in its support for all of the features of the language, it allows for cross platform development.

title: Visual Basic .NET/Introduction


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Guide to Schools

'NOTE: This is the person (Tom Croke) who started this Wikibook. In an email from Jimmy Wales today (March 7, 2003) I was warned that this Wikibook in this format might be subject to deletion if not converted into a format that is more obviously a textbook. I will begin that task over the next few months, although I can't fully deliver on that as soon as might be desired. '

This Wikibook was started by Tom Croke of FamilyLight Educational Consulting on October 29, 2005, in the hope of inspiring a comprehensive guide to schools and other related resources. On March 7, 2006, Tom was notified that the book needed to be converted to a textbook format in order to remain. Hopefully by the time you look at this, it will contain the collective wisdom of hundreds, perhaps thousands of parents, students, educators, psychologists, school and treatment facility officials, educational consultants, advocacy groups and others from all walks of life -- including much that is beyond the concept and the competence of the person who started this Wikibook. Hopefully at that time it will be usable as text in a class for parents learning to plan their children's education, for adults seeking to continue their education, and for professionals guiding educational planning. Much of the reference material will remain as an appendix.

As this book grows, it may be divided into several books, focusing on planning in various areas of education. We'll start as one book and see how it grows.

If you are planning to teach a course, hopefully this will be of use to you. After you have used the book for that purpose, hopefully you and your students will discover ways to improve it and will make suggestions on the discussion page, or, better yet, dig in and make the improvements yourself.

If you are struggling with planning someone's education, hopefully you can turn this into a self-taught course (and you to can improve on the book through your experience)

If you are just looking for resources, the resource appendices will still be of help. If you are thinking of contributing, contributors, know that you are welcome, no matter who you are or what your experience. Please look at “Discussion” before you contribute so you know the thoughts and concerns of readers and of the contributors who came before you, and you can be aware of context as you proceed.

Please also click on “Discussion” at the top of this page to comment on what you see, to offer suggestions and to learn the thinking behind this Wikibook.

Wikibooks requires that all contributions to these pages keep to a neutral point of view (NPOV). There will be disagreement between contributors, and readers will sometimes benefit from knowing about it. Hopefully contributors who see something they don't agree with will not edit that out but enter a comment of the form, “some people believe X and others believe Y.” That keeps it neutral, but the alternative points of view are made visible to readers.

Hopefully you will all benefit from the accumulated wisdom here and you will also add to it from your own experience.

Appendix A: Listings of Schools
Schools and other resources appropriate this wikibook, are listed in each section below. In the first, they are arranged geographically. If you are listing a school, please enter it in all three areas. If you are looking for a school we hope you will find one of these approaches convenient.

Alphabetical Listing
The difference between special schools and treatment facilities can be very small and is a gray area. At this time, we are growing this ebook as a reference on both. As information is filled in and this wikibook becomes more complete and less of a stub, it may become appropriate to divide this ebook into two or more ebooks, or even a separate bookshelf. But while this is a stub, it might all stay together. Contributors: If a section below becomes too large, substitute the template, "States by Region." Also make sure the school you add is linked both in "Geographic Listing" and in "Listing by Type of School."

Loan Opportunities and Other Financial Aid (for Primary and Secondary Education)
Prepgate-- loan opportunities for parents of students attending boarding schools]

Educational Consultants
An Educational Consultant is a professional person who helps parents and students plan education and select appropriate schools and colleges.

See the Educational Consultant listing in Wikipedia.

Educational consultants contributing to this Wikibook:

Tom Croke of FamilyLight

Andrew Bryan, Emerge and Launch

Support and Advocacy Groups
Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation

Understanding IDEA and "504," assuring access to education for the handicapped
In the United States, various state and federal laws mandate access to a free public education for all children, up to age 21 or until high school graduation, notwithstanding any handicap. That includes mental health and emotional handicaps. The programs at issue are understood as "IDEA" and "504."

Web site addressing legal rights Children's Advisory Group (This is for residents of Metro New York City).

Other Organizations and Businesses of Interest
Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA) The National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs (NATSAP)

Web Links
The links below also appear wherever they best fit according to their topic.

The Children's Advisory Group Andrew Bryan, Consultant FamilyLight Educational Consulting (operated by Tom Croke) Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA) Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation The National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs (NATSAP) Web site addressing legal rights

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Guide to Schools


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Talk:Guide to Schools

Purpose and task outline for book
I originally intended to create a guidebook that others and other resources for young people that might expand in any direction involving information about schools. Jimmy Wales email of March 7, 2006, that we were subject to deletion if not more of a textbook changed my course.

My own contributions to the Appendices will be primarily information for people looking for schools and other resources that provide special services for young people with behavioral and emotional problems. (That was initially intended to be the entirety of the book) I will write some pieces for the Textbook chapters, but the only one I have the knowledge to fully develop will be on special needs. Contributions of others will be important in all areas.

Others may expand this in other directions.

To know about me, see http://www.familylight.com. I would encourage other contributors to be consistent with the format I establish or to add to it. I am not suggesting that others should not innovate -- that would be going against the purpose of wikibooks. What I am asking is that we can maintain some consistency in how the data is listed.

Tom Croke Frog One 00:23, 30 October 2005 (UTC) revised Frog One 18:35, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

If you want to add a school to Appendix A
Contributors, please read!

If you wish to add a school, please do as follows for sake of consistency: (I personally prefer that you log in first, but that is not required.) If you think you can improve this procedure, it is your privilege to do that under the rules of Wikibooks, but lets hope for a sense of collaboration among the contributors. As time passes, I am sure there will be improvements on this suggested approach. I encourage contributors to be familiar with the existing procedure before improving upon it.

BEFORE YOU START Decide where your entry link will go. I am suggesting that every school or treatment resource have its own module, so the question is, where does it link? If you are adding to a category of school that is not well developed, I suggest putting it on the main page under the heading for that category. Once a category develops ten or more links, I suggest creating a link for that category to separate module for that category with the template substituted in the module. To add a separate module for a category: step 1: Click on the edit symbol on the right side of the screen slightly above the name of the category you are working with. step 2: Change the name of the catgory to a link. If the Category is "Regular Schools," substitute "Regular Schools" where it currently says "Regular Schools." If there are other symbols, such as quotation marks, leave them in place outside the brackets. Step 3: Click on "Show Preview"  This should produce exactly what was there before except the name of the category is now in red rather than black. If that is not true, click on "cancel" and start over. If that is true, click on "save page." Step 4: Now click on the category, now in red. This will bring up a page with a notice that says, "You've followed a link to a page that doesn't exist yet." The title of the page will be "Guide to Schools/Regular Schools" In the upper left corner of the space below enter. Click on "Show Preview." You should see the standard list of states organized by region. If not, click cancel and start over. If so, click on "save page." Step 5:Go back to Main Page. Now move the links already under your category to their proper location on the newly created page, whose name should now show in blue on the main page.

To add a school:

Step 1: Open the edit or edit this page, then go to the place where you want to add the school to the site. Enter the following:  You must do this exactly. If not, either what appears on the page will be wrong or the link will not appear correctly. Example: If the school you want to enter is "Gateway Academy" then your entry will be Gateway Academy

Step 2: Click on "Show Preview" and see if this shows correctly. The name of your school should now appear in red -- not blue -- in the proper location. Look for Gateway Academy. If it does not appear that way, click on cancel, and start over. If it looks as it should, except that the name of your school is in red, not blue, click on "Save Page."

Step 3: Now click on the link in red that you just created. This brings you to a page with "Guide to Schools/" at the top, and a notice that says "You've followed a link to a page that doesn't exist yet." In the box below, enter in the upper left corner and click "show preview"  Our template outline for a school description should have appeared. If so, click "Save page." If not, click "Cancel and start over"

Frog One 03:05, 1 November 2005 (UTC) Further revised, Frog One 15:44, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

NPOV
Wikibooks requires that all contributions to these pages keep to a neutral point of view (NPOV). There will be disagreement between contributors and readers will sometimes benefit from knowing about it. Hopefully contributors who see something they don’t agree with will not edit that out but enter a comment of the form, “some people believe X and others believe Y.” That keeps it neutral, but the alternative points of view are made visible to readers. Frog One 02:08, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Templates
Templates in use in this book are listed below, plus a "template sandbox" to allow contributors to experiment with Templates. Keep in mind that anything you leave in the Template Sandbox may be erased. Frog One 23:24, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Talk/template sandbox

Dangling modules
Guide to Schools/States by Region  Frog One 14:47, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

title: Talk:Guide to Schools


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Principles of Sociology/Ethics and Philosophy Guiding Sociological Inquiry

A short essay on Principles of Sociology/Sociology and Ethics based on "Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman"


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High School Mathematics Extensions/Further Modular Arithmetic/Problem Set

1. Suppose in mod m arithmetic we know x ≠ y and
 * $$y^2 \equiv x^2 \pmod{m} \!$$

find at least 2 divisors of m.

2. Derive the formula for the Carmichael function, λ(m) = smallest number such that aλ(m) ≡ 1 (mod m).

3. Let p be prime such that p = 2s + 1 for some positive integer s. Show that if g is not a square in mod p, i.e. there's no h such that h2 ≡ g, then g is a generator mod p. That is gq ≠ 1 for all q < p - 1.


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Principles of Sociology/Three Big Paradigms

Tourism Facts and Figures from the 2002 World Tourism Organization Report

• Tourism is the world's largest industry, annual revenue approaching $500 billion.

• Leisure accounts for 75% of all international travel

• Tourism accounts for roughly 35 per cent of world exports of services and over 8 per cent of exports of goods

• 350 million people are directly or indirectly employed in tourism.

• International tourist arrivals increased from 25 million in 1950 to 698 million in 2000, and are predicted to grow to 1.56 billion by 2020

Why is International Tourism Growing so Quickly?

• People increasingly have more leisure time in most developed nations (not US and not in most developing countries) due to longer paid vacations and lower weekly work hours

• Disposable income levels have been increasing worldwide, albeit faster in developed nations – in the UK citizens now spend 25% of their income on leisure – 5 times more than in 1960

• Air travel costs have fallen 30% in 30 years

• More media exposure to tourism via advertisers' images of exotic foreign locales

Goals of Conventional Tourism

• Maximize comfort, travel value, relaxation, the diversity of sightseeing as to take in the most interesting and/or beautiful things as possible, and attempt to optimally fit the travel time into one's work and family schedule

• This is dominant angle of analysis from the perspective of rational choice theory

Our Individual and Social Perceptions of Tourism

• What images and concepts come to mind when thinking of tourism?

• What are some common connotations associated with “taking a vacation” under different circumstances and in different locales? (status, deservedness, escapism)

• If you have ever traveled internationally, how did you interact with the “locals”?

• How did these encounters shape your perception of a certain nation or region?

• What attracts people to a particular destination in the first place?

• Common sense ideas about tourist travel and how to do it best vary between individuals and national groups, but there are some underlying patterns…

• “Tourism” is just a name for a set of socially structured activities that we are guided through by how specific dimensions of race, class, gender, and politics figure into our specific cultural (and subcultural) models for appropriate behavior

It may seem pessimistic, but one of the best means to think of ways to improve a standard pattern of behavior is to attempt to criticize the manner in which it is currently done, that is, find all that you can think of that doesn't seem quite right with it, or that which is outright wrong by some ethical standard you would like to respect.

Structural Functionalist Perspective (how things are supposed to work)

• What is an idealized set of ways for tourism to function optimally for all parties involved? How well is tourism functioning to tie the world together socially now?

• Tourism should serve educational purposes by making people in one country or region aware of what life is like in another so they aren't ignorant of the realities of everyday life in other places - thus offering a two-way trade of perspectives involving diverse cultural knowledge that might give a new perspective on home

• Tourism should bring people divided by national lines closer together for future international cooperation and to prevent conflict by integrating them into the day to day lives of another people (ex. EU sister cities)

• Tourism should provide people with insights into how to improve life back home

• Tourism should redistribute wealth from an ever growing number of people from wealthier countries visiting poorer ones in order to help them to “develop” and fight off poverty

• Travel is supposed to build character by forcing people to adapt new strategies in unfamiliar foreign territory

Conflict Perspective (how things [intentionally] don't work out so well for the less advantaged)

• Only the world's wealthier people can afford to engage in conventional tourism at all and everyone is somehow restricted as to how extravagant or wide their travels can by race, class, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, amount of free time, or global political situation

• Thus, tourism between richer and poorer nations is a very one-way exchange of services rendered to the privileged tourist by less privileged people

• Tourism tends to exoticize and commodify the “authentic” cultural activities of another group of people, which inevitably degrades and alters the traditional meanings of these rituals

• Money allows wealthier people to escape the reality of their lives to see people who cannot afford to escape the often harsh reality of theirs - looking at poverty has become a popular part of travel, perhaps allowing us to and look and feel grateful for the fate they have escaped and perhaps change class to be “peasant for a day”

• Big multinational corporations eventually edge out native local businesses that sell the more lucrative tourism related products and services especially since tourists on the whole are more likely to trust home brand names

• You can get away with treating people worse in poor countries that you cannot back home ex. sex tourism

Symbolic Interactionist Critique (how interaction patterns betray deeper meanings)

• Tourism can be quite an ugly thing when there are great wealth disparities between tourists and local peoples because of the nasty feelings of inherent superiority and inferiority between the servers and the served. What is worse is that some people go for this kind of “super [feudal] service” especially

• I think most people instinctively feel this kind of relationship is wrong but are almost forced by their almost inescapable involvement in it to somehow justify their participation in such an ugly set of interactions by instinctively devaluing the “others” status as a equal human being via a self-serving bias

• Poverty is often romantically portrayed in tourist marketing and “natives” impoverished lifestyles are chosen rather than the outcome of often violent historical oppression

• Tourism is part of an interpersonal status competition whereby conspicuous consumption in evidenced by pictures, videos, stories, or artifacts from exotic locales one has visited.

• Most of the time, when visiting foreign lands, there is only a very small amount of interaction occurring outside of economic transactions due to language barriers - very few people would think it logical to make significant efforts since our time abroad is minimal and we expect many foreigners to speak our language

• Most tourists' travels take them only on highly trafficked preset tourist routes past old buildings and natural wonders and then back to their hotels, maybe after immersing themselves in the local sociohistorical context only by eating “traditional” food in upscale restaurants created for tourists – this commodification cheapens the experience by making it unauthentic and predictable, especially in touristically “themed” places

• Conventional tourism is a series of very passive exercises, but people try to offset the feeling of being a pure spectator by photographing and videotaping as much of their experience as possible

Environmental Critique - tourism is currently very unsustainable due to a high reliance on fossil fuels for extensive travel back and forth over long distances for short periods of time and for providing very comfortable and spectacular accommodation for tourists in the way of luxury hotels, often constructed in ecologically sensitive areas.

To move beyond critical analysis, we need to think creatively about ways to improve current behavior patterns, but first, we need look at all the currently available options before starting to formulate our own solutions…

So, here are some examples of non traditional means of tourism…

Skill/Language Acquisition Tourism, Ecotourism, Developmental Services Tourism, Student/Professional Exchange Tourism, Religious Missionary Tourism, Athletic Exercise/Deprivation Tourism, etc…

What does all of this say about our society?

We have institutionalized a societal desire for regularly scheduled breaks with normality that has taken the form of tourism. Some may criticize this as an attempted escape from either the rigors or boredom of modern life. Others might say this has taken the place of other institutions from the past such as religious pilgrimages or extended festivals originally based on seasonal solstices or equinoxes (now in the form of mass summer vacations). Possibly the most revealing part of the tourist experience are the so called “cults of authenticity”. Most excursions are planned as great searches for one type of authentic experience or another, e.g. the wilderness experience, the primitive culture experience, the historical experience, the paradise experience. The great irony of these quests is that people don't realize that when this type of nostalgic mentality is propagated and embraced on today's larger social scale, it dashes the hopes of anyone finding that kind of authenticity amongst the hordes of people chasing similar imagery. When modern people reach en mass for one form of authenticity or another, they find their dreams badly distorted by the sheer quantity of others pursuing it.

My recommendations for the future of tourism…

• The average length of tourist travels is too short and this is a problem from a resource overuse perspective and from the perspective of actually trying to integrate yourself in a local society to make a deeper attempt to understand and how it works differently than your own. The problem is that this is a direct result of people working more and not having as much consolidated vacation time, although most Europeans get six weeks

• One of my personal suggestions for the future of tourism is to advise travelers to try to spend as little money as possible, because it seems luxury only puts up more barriers from the average lives of the population

• I suggest using the following ideas to bring yourselves in contact with local people – eat at local restaurants and at local markets, use ride sharing programs to get around the country (ex. Mitzfahrcenrale in German speaking countries), and share accommodation with locals (couchsurfing.com or globalfreeloaders.org) - see my article on hospitality services in Wikipedia.

• Do something traveling that is not “you centered”, that is, do something nice for other people in the country, the only problem is that most aid-giving programs involve too lengthy a commitment for most tourists

• Also, what I think makes more and more tourism destructively fake is the increasing involvement of large foreign corporations over the past 30 years and their homogenization of the tourist experience – shun them!

• Tourism experiences should be put more in the hands of locals to build more fair and respectful exchanges


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User:Tohru

wikt:User:Tohru

title: User:Tohru


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Principles of Sociology/Guns, Germs, and Steel

Material below drawn from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel – his thesis goes something like this…

Different natural environments allow societies to take up more advanced social organization at different times…

''Why has there been such a great historical divides of power between different peoples in the world? Then and Now…

Why did peoples from Europe end up conquering the entire world and not Africans, Native Americans, or the Chinese?

Human history has been and remains an ongoing story of unequal conflicts between the haves and the havents… Why?

The victors tend to rely on racial, cultural, or even religious explanations, but this is the easy and self-serving way out!

I say the factors responsible for today's global inequities are 70% environmental, 10% cultural, and 20% exploitative.''

The biggest advantage in human history = hunter gatherers changing into agriculturalists

• Farmers get 10 to 100 times more food than hunter-gatherers per acre of land by utilizing plant/animal domesticates

• Agriculture – stationary societies – big food surpluses – dense populations – military advantage by numbers – leaders to administer social hierarchy and resources – specialists in technology/culture produce novel ideas

Why did this happen at different times in different places around the world?

• There are relatively few plants and animals in the world that we have found suitable for domestication

• 300,000 wild plant species – 3000 eaten by humans – 300 domesticated – 12 account for 80% of the world's total food crop tonnage annually – wheat, corn, rice, soybean, potato, banana, and sugarcane are 60%

• We haven't succeeded in domesticating another major food crop to displace any in the top 12 in 500 years

• Of the 150 big mammals (100 lbs.) in the world that could be used extensively for protein (meat, milk, eggs), transportation, or as beasts of burden working with human inventions (plow) only 14 have been domesticated

• Keep in mind there is a difference in taming animals and changing them en mass to sustainable domesticates

• Resistance comes from diet, low growth rates, captive breeding problems, danger (panic), and social structure

'''Which people got lucky and which did not? Where and Why?'''

• Remember Mesopotamia a.k.a. “the fertile crescent” – well, the region of Southwestern Eurasia had huge advantages

• The sheep, goat, cow, and pig were all successfully domesticated there 10,000 years ago – the horse later

• Of the world's total distribution of wild, large seeded grass species that later became the world's bread basket of domesticated cereal crops (wheat, barley, etc.) Western Eurasia had 70% – many were especially easy to grow (self-pollinating annuals) and had relatively high protein content compared with corn, rice, or yams

• Sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Australia had few domesticatable plant/animal species in comparison

• They did indeed have some, but to spark the huge transition from the hunter gatherer lifestyle we all lived in for homo sapiens' first 10 million years on Earth to the agriculturalist lifestyle we almost all now embrace took a solid demonstration of the rewards of this new lifestyle – it had to come in package deals involving a larger diversity of plant and animal species than most peoples had or could acquire by trade with neighbors

Why did Agriculture and its Associated Innovations Spread Faster to Some Places?

• Once trade among fledgling agriculturalists could get started, along with it came tech/culture innovation

• However, trade routes could only be through navigable terrain and the innovations had to work in both places

• This was not possible for people that in remote areas where oceans, deserts, or mountains had to be crossed

• Furthermore, crops and animals domesticated in one place were only suitable for use in regions with similar climates. This was easy across Eurasia with its wide open latitudes, but difficult for the Americas, Africa, and Australia, where predominantly north/south orientations and equatorial divides separate similar climates.

• Thus, it took much longer for viable agricultural packages to be spread and assembled in these places, for instance, it took thousands of years longer in Mesoamerica to get the balanced corn, beans, squash “trinity”

The Greatest Weapon in European Conquest – Early Germ Warfare

• It is believed that at least 90% of the deaths occurring in early European conquest were due to disease

• The roots of many diseases that killed millions of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, and Polynesia can be traced back to Eurasians living for millennia in close proximity with domesticated animals

• Examples = measles, tuberculosis, smallpox from cattle, most influenzas from pigs, malaria from fowl

• This isn't just a one-way street, tropical and foreign diseases have devastated Eurasian populations at many times in history and impeded colonial efforts in the tropics, but the losses have been much greater for others


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How to Write a Program/Enhancing code

Usually create variables that will represent certain data types that you want to represent or simulate in your program in comparison to the particular problem needing to be solved or real world simulation-i.e. the basis for your program

Then create or use function/methods that you want your program to perform in order to achieve a specific tasks or real world simulation.

This is usually done in block methods or modules, in which you encapsulate or wrap all necessary data (representations) and methods (and arguments/parameters) into an object / class, which best simulates the basis of what the program is supposed to represent...this is turn is called generating code.

Continuous improvement
Many developers recommend always keeping the code in a state that is ready to build and release to customers at any time. Some projects have a nightly build, while other people recommend checking in a ready-to-build coherent group of edits every 20 minutes.

title: How to Write a Program/Enhancing code


text:
Principles of Sociology/Culture

Subtopics:

This American Life - Simulated Worlds - Civil war reenactments, wax museums, simulated coal mines, fake ethnic restaurants, an ersatz Medieval castle and other re-created worlds that thrive all across America. Act One. National Tour. Host Ira Glass uses Italian author Umberto Eco's essay "Travels in Hypereality" as a guidebook to American simulated worlds. Eco says that the urge to create these miniature simulated worlds is a very American impulse--a significant American aesthetic--and one that's not often discussed. Ira visits the Wax Museum at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, plays clips from Jessica Yu's documentary on Civil War reenactors (called Men of Reenaction and available from the Independent Television Service at 800/343-4727), stops by a fake coal mine under Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, and discusses "the poor man's Hearst Castle"--a California hotel called the Madonna Inn. (17 minutes) Act Two. Dinosaur Exhibit. Writer Jack Hitt discovers that the world of dinosaurs is a man-made creation, a simulated world that may or may not accurately reflect what happened on earth 100 million years ago. Talking with dinosaur experts like Jack Horner (the dinosaur expert whose work was the basis of much of the film Jurassic Park Hitt finds that most of what you think you know about dinosaurs is probably wrong, and that Americans' ideas about dinosaurs go through fashions--fashions that reflect the national mood. We believed dinosaurs were more aggressive when we were on the brink of World Wars One and Two. And these days we focus on their family values. (13 minutes) Act Three. Medieval Times. Ira takes a Medieval scholar from the University of Chicago, Michael Camille, to Medieval Times – a chain of fake castles where visitors eat Medieval food and drink Medieval Pepsi and watch a supposed recreation of a Medieval jousting tournament. The scholar finds that there are many historical inaccuracies, but that Medieval Times does capture something essential and interesting about the spirit of the Middle Ages. (19 minutes) Act Four. Simulating Reality on Morning Edition. Ira Glass worked for NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered for 17 years, and shares a few thoughts on the devices he and his colleagues used to simulate the real world on those shows. (2 minutes)

Richard Shweder's "Principles of Sociology/Moral Maps, First World Conceits, and the New Evangelists"

title: Principles of Sociology/Culture


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Principles of Sociology/Moral Maps, First World Conceits, and the New Evangelists

• This article was written for a volume in which all other contributors were promoting the view that culture is the primary factor inhibiting the development of poor nations across the world – they don't believe that environmental factors, imperialism, or racism can adequately explain the persistent global wealth inequities

• Instead, they blame counterproductive cultural values for a range of ills in the underdeveloped world – political corruption, human rights violations, lagging innovation, protectionist economic policies, etc.

• A US example of these ideas is how some would explain different upward social mobility in different minority groups eg. African-Americans and Hispanic immigrants vs. Asian immigrants

• Those who don't buy into culture-based explanations for these phenomena would instead point to different factors including broad historical disadvantages, discrimination, and an exploitative political economy

• Since both of these perspectives show merit, most people will opt to try approaches from both angles and hope that some sort of combination of strategies will result in these poor folks living more like us (“better”)

• Richard Shweder is uncomfortable with this kind of reasoning, which he sees as a distinctly Western thought process leading towards the decimation of a diversity of cultural perspectives on different “right ways to live”

Think about these thought Provoking Questions on the Role of Culture and Cultural Criticism

• How do we measure the goodness of a society and its culture?

• Should “good” cultures concede to change with the times in order to maximize their advantage over others?

• How rational should or could any culture be in its outlook towards itself and others?

• Can cultures remain diversified along traditional lines or is this an outdated and/or quickly vanishing ideal?

• Do we have cultural “goals” in mind for the future or do we mostly focus on avoiding bad outcomes now?

Full Text

Does cannibalism have nutritional value or is it just a form of high cuisine? Although this question is a topic of solemn debate in anthropology, at grand ceremonial occasions anthropologists are known to have a sense of humor. Being an anthropologist, I thought I would begin this chapter with an admittedly baroque variation on an old joke about the market for brains in Papua New Guinea.

This guy from the " First World " walks into a gourmet food store in Papua New Guinea. He goes to the meat section, where he sees a bill of fare designated "assorted westerners." It contains two general offerings: evangelical missionaries (religious and secular), who think it is their mission in life to make our world a better place by their moral lights, and romantic relativists, who think whatever is, is okay and actually seem to like it here. He notices many delicacies, all neatly arranged in bins.

The first bin has a sign that says "Economists' Brains from the World Bank: $2.39 a Pound!" The label on the bin reads, "These people want to loan us lots of money at very favorable rates (which of course we are never going to pay back), if only we will do things more like the way they do things in the West. They want us to formalize contracts, create an independent judiciary, and prohibit the preferential hiring of members of one's own ethnic group. And that's just for starters."

The sign on the second bin says "Protestant Ethicists' Brains: $2.42 a Pound." The label reads, "These people want us to change our work habits and our ideas about the good life. They want us to stop wasting our time on elaborate rituals for dead ancestors. They want to loan us lots of money at very favorable rates (which of course we are never going to pay back), if only we will start thinking about things the way they think about things in Western World (or at least in the very northern sections of the West). Western folk are convinced that everything is nefarious except the impersonal pursuit of work and that only the rich will be saved. They tell us that 'sustainable growth' is the contemporary code word for the adoption of Protestant values. They believe that God blesses men in the sign of their material prosperity, especially their purposefully amassed wealth. They want us to be saved. They want to save us."

The sign on the third bin says "Monocultural Feminists' [this refers to feminists who believe that gender equality should be imposed internationally] Brains: $2.49 a Pound." The label reads, "These people want us to change our family life, gender relations, and reproductive practices. They want us to devalue the womb, which is associated in their minds with 'bad' things such as big families, domesticity, and a sexual division of labor. They want us to revalue the clitoris [this refers to Western outrage at the practice of female genital mutilation], which to Westerners is associated in with 'good' things such as independence, equality, and hedonic self-stimulation) as the biological essence of female identity, and as the symbol and means of female emancipation from men. And they want NATO to send in a 'humanitarian' invasion force unless we promise to join the National Organization of Women and the League of Women Voters."

The sign on the final bin says "Anthropologists' Brains: $15.00 a Pound." The label reads, "These people think we should just take the money and run!" Dismayed, our visitor walks over to the guy behind the counter and he says, "What's this! Haven't you heard about the moral superiority of the West (or at least of the northernmost sections of the West)? Don't you know that the reason we [in the ' First World '] are better than you [in the ' Third World '] is that we are humanists who endorse the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Man? Don't you know that when it comes to brains there is basic oneness to humankind? Don't you know that the major reason for differences in the world [variations in 'human capital'] is that people in the southern sections of the globe grow up in impoverished cultures ['cultures of poverty']? That is why they are badly equipped for life on the information highway and in the global fast lane. That is why they are untrustworthy, corrupt, undisciplined, unskilled, and poor. Okay, I can understand a slight difference in price for economists' brains, Protestant ethicists' brains, and monocultural feminists' brains ($2.39 a pound/$2.42 a pound/$2.49 a pound), but $15.00 a pound for anthropologist's brains? That's ridiculous! It's illogical! It's unfair! It defies 'transparency'!" The guy behind the counter replies: "Do you know how many anthropologists we had to kill before we could find a pound of brains?"

So I admit to feeling a bit brainless writing for a volume whose contributors include so many distinguished scholars and evangelists from disciplines other than my own. Lawrence Harrison recruited me to this effort by stating, with characteristic candor, that he wanted me to write as a skeptic and critic because he thought I believed in "culture" but not in "progress." He said that he was planning to invite other types of skeptics and critics as well, such as those who believe in "progress" but not in "culture." I do believe in progress, at least in a limited sense (more on that below). And I suspect that the precise sense in which I believe in culture (more on that too) may not seem very helpful (or even sensible) to those who have argued here that "culture matters."

What does it mean to say that "culture matters?" It depends on who is speaking. The theme of this volume is expressive of an intellectual stance known as "cultural developmentalism." For a cultural developmentalist, the assertion that "culture matters" is a way of saying that some cultures are impoverished or backward, whereas others are enriched or advanced. It means there are good things in life (e.g., health, domestic tranquillity, justice, material prosperity, hedonic self-stimulation, and small families) that all human beings ought to want and have but that their culture keeps them from wanting and/or having.

Here is how you can tell if you are a cultural developmentalist. Do you like to inspect the globe with an ethical microscope and draw "moral maps" of the world [this refers to Lawrence Harrison's "Clash of Civilization" Thesis]? Or, doing what amounts to pretty much the same thing, do you like to construct "quality of life" indicators that can be used to rank cultures, civilizations, and religions from better to worse? If you are a cultural developmentalist, you probably feel deeply disturbed by the staying power and popularity of various ("archaic") ways of life and ("superstitious") systems of belief because you think they are relatively devoid of truth, goodness, beauty, or practical efficiency. You probably want to "enlighten" the residents of the "dark continents" of the world. You probably want to lift them up from error, ignorance, bad habits, immorality, and squalor, and refashion them to be more progressive, more democratic, more scientific, more civic-minded, more industrious, more entrepreneurial, more reliable, more rational, and more like (the ideal) us. Culture matters for me too but in a rather different sort of way… If I were ever to refer to a "culture of poverty," I would probably reserve the expression for ascetic communities in which the renunciation of wealth and the repudiation of worldly goods had been positively valued as an objective good. Furthermore, given my conception of precisely how culture counts, I might even try to find some merit in that conception of the good.

Although the idea of an "impoverished culture" is not exactly an oxymoron, it has played almost no part in my own field research. To make matters worse, my commitment to the very idea of "culture" has its source in an interest in other cultures as sources of illumination (Shweder 1991, 1993, 1996a, 1996b, 1997; Shweder et al. 1998). I have never put much stock in the view that holds that a good reason for becoming interested in other cultures is that they are impediments to the realization of some imagined universal aspiration of all people to be more like northern Europeans. And while I certainly believe in the importance and moral decency of our way of life, I do not believe in our moral superiority over all the rest. 2

Thus I do not think that northern Europeans have a corner on the market for human progress. I do not believe that cognitive, spiritual, ethical, social, political, and material progress go hand in hand. Societies in command of great wealth and power can be spiritually, ethically, socially, and politically flawed. Many vital, intellectually sophisticated, and admirable cultures, places where philosophers live in mud huts, have evolved in environments with rudimentary technology and relatively little material wealth. Hence, I do not believe that either "we" or "they" have implemented the only credible manifestation of the good life. Obviously, I am one of the heretics at this revival meeting and it is not the greatest of feelings. So let me continue my presentation with a couple of confessions, which will perhaps reduce some of my anxiety over being drafted as a designated skeptic.

CONFESSION 1: I AM AN ANTHROPOLOGIST

My first confession, of course, is that I am an anthropologist. Unfortunately, given all the turmoil in the profession of anthropology these days, this confession is not very informative. It carries no implications (as it would have fifty years ago or even twenty years ago) for how I might feel about the concept of culture, whether I am for it or against it or whether it makes me laugh or cry. 3 For the sake of accuracy in describing the current scene in anthropology, let me note that there was a time in anthropology when such words as "primitive," "barbarian," "savage," or even "underdeveloped" were put in quotation marks, if they were used at all. There was a time when the idea that there is only one way to lead a morally decent and rational life, and it's our way, would have been seen, quite frankly, as obscene.

But things have changed. Monocultural feminism has put an end to any facile relativism in anthropology and has given a new meaning to the idea of "political correctness." So, along with the international human rights movement and various agencies promoting Western-style globalization (UNICEF, WHO, perhaps even NATO), there are plenty of anthropologists these days who take an interest in other cultures mainly as objects of scorn. The slogan "It is not cultural, it's [fill in the blank: criminal, immoral, corrupt, inefficient, barbaric]" (or alternatively, "It is cultural and it's [fill in the blank: criminal, immoral, corrupt, inefficient, barbaric]") has become the rallying cry for cultural developmentalists, Western interventionists of all kinds, and some schools of cultural anthropology as well.

I regret this ironic turn of events. Cultural anthropology was once a discipline that was proud of its opposition to ethnocentric misunderstanding and moral arrogance as well as its anti-colonial defense of other ways of life. That was yesteryear. These days there are plenty of anthropologists (the post-culturalists) who want to disown the concept of culture. They think the word "culture" gets used in bad faith to defend authoritarian social arrangements and to allow despots to literally get away with murder. Indeed, as the world of theory in cultural anthropology turns, it seems to be "deja vu all over again." Despite a century of objections by anthropological pluralists, relativists, and contex-tualists such as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovits, Robert LeVine, Clifford Geertz, and others, an intellectual stance reminiscent of late nineteenth-century "white man's burden," cultural developmentalism is back. The self-congratulatory, up-from-barbarism theme of (certain versions of) Western liberalism (including the sensational accusation that African mothers are bad mothers, human rights violators, and mutilators of their daughters) has once again become fashionable on the anthropological scene, at least among those anthropologists who are the most politically correct. 4 The current scene within anthropology is sufficiently complex (and perverse) that there are even anthropologists who think they own the concept of "culture" but do not want anyone, including themselves, to do anything with it. I am not one of them. Regardless of whether the idea of culture makes me laugh or cry, I like it a lot. I can't get rid of it. I find we can't live by ecumenism alone. Membership in some particular tradition of meanings is an essential condition for personal identity and individual happiness. In my view, "thick ethnicity" and cultural diversity both have their place and are part of the natural and moral order of things. I do not think Mother Nature wants everyone to be alike.

What do I mean by "culture"? I mean community-specific ideas about what is true, good, beautiful, and efficient. To be "cultural," those ideas about truth, goodness, beauty, and efficiency must be socially inherited and customary; and they must actually be constitutive of different ways of life. Alternatively stated, culture refers to what Isaiah Berlin called "goals, values and pictures of the world" that are made manifest in the speech, laws, and routine practices of some self-monitoring group. There is a lot more packed into that definition than I can unpack in a single chapter. There is the notion that actions speak louder than words and that "practices" are a central unit for cultural analysis. That is one reason I don't much like value questionnaires and find it hard to feel enthusiastic about research based on the analysis of official creeds or on endorsement patterns for abstract stand-alone propositions. 5

Furthermore, one of the things "culture" is certainly not about is "national character." I am not going to have much to say about "national character" studies here, but they went out of fashion about forty years ago, and for good reason. They went out of fashion because it is far better to think about human behavior and motivation the way rational choice theorists or sensible economists do, rather than the way personality theorists do. Rational choice theorists think about action as something emanating from "agency." That is to say, action is analyzed as the joint product of "preferences" (including goals, values, and "ends" of various sorts) and "constraints" (including "means" of various sorts, such as causal beliefs, information, skills, and material and non-material resources), all mediated by the will of rational beings.

This stands in contrast to the way in which personality theorists think about behavior. Personality theorists think about action as "forced." They try to explain action as the joint product of two types of vectors, one pushing from "inside," called "person" (described in terms of generalized motives and "sticky" global traits), and the other pushing from "outside," called "situation." Looking for types of persons as a way of explaining cultural practices has not proved very useful. If one tries to characterize individuals in terms of personality traits or generalized motives, one usually discovers that "individuals within cultures vary much more among themselves than they do from individuals in other cultures" (Kaplan 1954). One also discovers that if there is any modal type at all (e.g., an "authoritarian personality type" or a personality type with a "need for achievement"), it is typically characteristic of no more than about one-third of the population. It has long been recognized among psychological anthropologists and cultural psychologists that (quoting Melford Spiro 1961) "it is possible for different modal personality systems to be associated with similar social systems, and for similar modal personality systems to be associated with different social systems." Looking for types of personalities to explain differences in cultural practices is a dead end (see Shweder 1991).

CONFESSION 2: I AM A PLURALIST

My second confession is that I am a cultural pluralist. My version of cultural pluralism begins with a universal truth, which I refer to as the principle of “confusionism." A "confusionist" believes that the knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from "nowhere in particular." Given the choice between incompleteness, incoherence, and emptiness, I opt for incompleteness while staying on the move between different ways of seeing and valuing the world.

This version of cultural pluralism is not opposed to universalism. Culture theorists do not divide into only two types, those who believe that anything goes (the "radical relativists") and those who believe that only one thing goes (the "uniformitarian universalists"). I strongly believe in "universalism," but the type of universalism I believe in is "universalism without the uniformity," which is what makes me a pluralist. In other words, I believe there are universally binding values but that there are just too many of them (e.g., justice, beneficence, autonomy, sacrifice, liberty, loyalty, sanctity, duty).

I believe that those objectively valuable ends of life are diverse, heterogeneous, irreducible to some common denominator such as "utility" or "pleasure," and that they are inherently in conflict with each other. I believe that all the good things in life can't be simultaneously maximized, I believe that when it comes to implementing true values there are always trade-offs, which is why there are different traditions of values (i.e., cultures) and why no one cultural tradition has ever been able to honor everything that is good. 6 Cultural pluralism has other implications, some of which are highly provocative. For example, there is the claim that the members of the executive board of the American Anthropological Association did the right and courageous thing in 1947 when they decided not to endorse the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Man on the grounds that it was an ethnocentric document. In 1947, anthropologists were still proud of their anti-colonial defense of alternative ways of life (see Shweder 1996b).

PROGRESS AND PLURALISM: CAN THEY COEXIST?

Pluralism does not imply the rejection of the ideas of progress and decline. Progress means having more and more of something that is "desirable" (i.e., something that should be desired because it is "good"). Decline means having less and less of it. Name a specific "good" (e.g., taking care of parents in old age, eliminating contagious disease), and we can make objective judgments about progress with respect to that "good." If maximizing the likelihood of child survival during the first nine months after birth is the measure of success, then the United States is objectively more advanced than Africa and India. If maximizing the likelihood of child survival during the first nine months after conception (in the womb) is the measure of success, then Africa and India (where abortion rates are relatively low) are objectively more advanced than the United States (where abortion rates are relatively high).

Of course there is much that is discretionary (i.e., not dictated by either logic or evidence) in any decision about how to name and identify specific "goods" and thus morally map the world. For example, the sheer quantity of life, or "reproductive fitness," is the measure used by evolutionary biologists for estimating the success of a population. By that measure of success (the genetic reproduction of one's tribe or ancestral line) how are we to evaluate the birth control pill, the legalization of abortion, and the reduction of family size in the high-tech societies of the First World ? Do we narrate a story of decline? Or, to select a second example, what type of story should we tell about "quality of life" measures such as life expectancy at birth? The longer lived a population, the greater the frequency of chronic illness, the greater the likelihood of functional impairment, and hence the higher the aggregate amount of pain (a true qualitative measure) experienced by that population. Good things (e.g., more years of life, no physical pain) do not always correlate. A longer life is not unambiguously a better life, or is it? Or, if longevity is a measure of success, then why not also numerousness or sheer population size, with China and India at the top of the list?

And why life expectancy at birth? What principle of logic or canon of inductive science dictates that standard for drawing moral maps and for assessing cultural progress? Why not life expectancy at age forty or, for that matter, at conception? Why not take the more comprehensive life-course perspective of the fetus and not just its later viewpoint as a newly born infant? As noted, if one considers the hazards of the womb the First World and former Second World look worse off than many societies in Africa and Asia. Consider how different our life expectancy tables would be if we factored in the 20 to 25 percent abortion rates in the United States and Canada or the 50-plus per-cent abortion rates in Russia, as compared to rates as low as 2 to 10 percent in India, Tunisia, and some other parts of the "underdeveloped" world.

The pro-life/pro-choice debate (I am pro-choice) is not the issue here. The issue is the discretionary aspect of moral mapping and the degrees of freedom one has in deciding whose ideals are going to be selected as the gold standard of the good life. As societies become technologically sophisticated, rates of abortion often rise, thereby lowering the life expectancy rate of the population (assuming that life expectancy is calculated from the point of conception rather than at birth). In some parts of the world, often in those parts of the world where reproductive success and large families are valued, early childhood is a relatively dangerous time of life. In other places, often in high-tech places where small families are valued and the womb is no longer thought of as a sanctified ground, the real dangers come earlier in life, and if you-are an unwanted child, the womb can be hazardous to your health.

Once a particular "good" is selected and named, objective assessments of advance and decline can be made. That type of value-specific assessment is quite different, however, from any form of triumphal progressivism, which tries to pick out some one cultural tradition as superior to all the rest. Things can be made to seem either better or worse, depending on the criteria of value that you choose to select. When it comes to reviewing all the many potentially good things in life, cultural pluralists believe that there are pluses and minuses to most long-standing cultural traditions (see Shweder et al. 1997). And when it comes to constructing narratives about progress, they believe that there is lots of room for discretion (and ideology) in how one tells the story of who is better and who is worse.

It is also possible to make such value-specific judgments about progress without believing in the overall superiority of the present over the past, or that most changes are for the good. It is even possible to make criterion-specific judgments of progress and decline while being a "neo-antiquarian," that is, someone who rejects the idea that the world woke up, emerged from darkness, and became good for the first time yesterday or three hundred years ago in northern Europe. A "neo-antiquarian" does not think that newness is a measure of progress and is quite prepared, in the name of progress, to revalue things from distant places and from out of the distant past.

Pluralists do make critical judgments. Indeed, the "stance of justification" is so central to my style of cultural analysis that I would define a "genuine" culture, a culture deserving of appreciation, as a way of life that is defensible in the face of criticism from abroad. Pluralism is the attempt to provide that defense of "others," and not only as a corrective to the partiality and exaggerations of various modern forms of ethnocentrism and chauvinism (including the claim that the West is better than all the rest), although that is reason enough. Right now, with the fall of communism and the rise of global capitalism, including the expansion of our Internet, we (in the West) feel full of ourselves. It is at times such as these that we might do well to remember that Max Weber, the author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, did not voice a preference for Protestantism over Catholicism or for the North over the South. He was a critical pluralist who put out warnings about the "iron cage" of modernity, about the impersonal rules of the bureaucratic state that redefine one's moral obligations to kith and kin as a form of "corruption," and about the hazards of an unbridled economic rationality.

Throughout history, whoever is wealthiest and the most technologically advanced thinks that their way of life is the best, the most natural, the God-given, the surest means to salvation, or at least the fast lane to well-being in this world. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese missionaries to China believed that their invention of clocks, of which they were very proud, was knock-down proof of the superiority of Catholicism over other world religions (Landes 1998, 336-337). For all I know, their mechanical timepiece may have been counted as an argument in favor of absolute monarchy. Dazzled by our contemporary inventions and toys (e.g., CNN, IBM, Big Mac, blue jeans, the birth control pill, the credit card) and at home in our own way of life, we are prone to similar illusions and the same type of conceits.

MILLENNIAL PROPHECIES: THREE IMAGES OF THE "NEW WORLD ORDER"

These are confusing times, especially when one tries to imagine the broad outlines of the "new world order" that is likely to replace the old capitalist/ communist/underdeveloped "three worlds" scheme. One reason for the confusion is that the self-congratulatory, "enlightenment" origin story about the ascent of secularism, individualism, and science has taken its lumps in the 1990s and may not be all that useful for predicting the direction of change in the early twenty-first century. Thirty years ago, many social scientists predicted that, in the modern world, religion would go away and be replaced by science. They predicted that tribes would go away and be replaced by individuals. They were wrong. That has not and will not happen, either globally or locally. Multiculturalism is a fact of life. The former Second World, once an empire, is now many little worlds. The development of a global world system and the emergence of local ethnic or cultural revival movements seem to go hand in hand. At the limit, political succession may even have its rewards for cultural minority groups. The potential rewards include direct receipt of financial aid and military protection from various power centers, and perhaps even a voice at the United Nations. Moreover, many of us now live in nation-states composed, as Joseph Raz has put it, "of groups and communities with diverse practices and beliefs, including groups whose beliefs are inconsistent with each other." We will continue to do so, if for no other reason than the reality of global migration and the fact that community and divinity are essential goods and must be acknowledged for the sake of individual identity and human progress. Of course, life in such a world can be hazardous, especially for members of immigrant or minority groups living in multicultural states or for members of different civilizations or cultures who are in geopolitical conflict. In such a world, one hopes that it is not just culture that matters but also a particular pluralistic conception of culture because the right conception of culture can be useful in minimizing some of the risks associated with "difference" and with multicultural life.

There is a second reason these are confusing times. It would be nice to have in hand a valid general causal explanation for the wealth and poverty of peoples, cultures, or nations, but we don't. If by "causation" we mean what J. S. Mill meant by it—all the necessary conditions that are jointly sufficient to produce an effect—I think we must admit that we do not really know what causes economic growth. Sicily in the fifteenth century, Holland in the sixteenth century, Japan today; social scientists can pick a people, culture, or nation and tell a plausible story about some of the reasons for economic failure or success, in that case. But that is a far cry from a general causal theory. Try listing all the potential causal conditions for wealth production mentioned by David Landes (1998) in his monumental economic history of the world. Then ask yourself this question: Are any of those conditions sufficient to produce economic growth? The answer is no. Are any of those conditions even necessary?

Having guns did it here. Having Jews did it there. In this case it was immigration policy; in that case it was having access to quinine. In this case it was freeing the serfs; in that case it was the availability of fossil fuel. In this case it was the weather; in that case it was willingness to trade with outsiders. In this case it was having good colonial masters; in that case it was high consumer demand. In this case and that case it was luck. Singapore is not a liberal democracy, but it is rich. India is the world's most populous democracy, but it is poor. Sweden in the eighteenth century was a sparsely populated democracy, and it was poor too. People who are religiously orthodox and don't believe in "gender equality" (e.g., Hasidic Jews) can be rich. Fully secularized egalitarian societies (e.g., former communist countries in Eastern Europe ) may fail to thrive from an economic point of view. In 1950, Japan had "Confucian values" (which at the time didn't look very "Western") and was poorer than Brazil. In 1990 Japan had the same "Confucian values," which all of a sudden seemed very "Protestant-like," as Japan outstripped Brazil. If I were a cynic, I would say that our most able economic historians are really good at identifying some of the unnecessary conditions that might have been jointly sufficient to produce wealth in any particular special case. Less cynically, I think it is fair to say that despite many impressive post hoc historical accounts of the case-specific conditions that have promoted growth, one is entitled to feel confused about the general causes of economic success, if by "causation" we mean what J. S. Mill meant when he defined the term. How then are we to grasp the big changes that are taking place in the "world order"? What is the relationship between "globalization" (the linking of the world's economies), "westernization" (the adoption of Western ideas, ideals, norms, institutions, and products), and economic growth? If you keep your ear to the ground these days, you can hear many prophecies or speculations about the shape of the "new world order." I will conclude by mentioning three.

Prophecy i: The West Is Best and Will Become Global (or at Least It Should Try to Take Over the World)

The prediction here is that Western-like aspirations will be fired up or freed up by globalization and will be the cause and the concomitant of economic growth. Western-like aspirations include a desire for liberal democracy, the decentralization of power, free enterprise, private property, individual rights, gender equality, and so on, and perhaps even a taste for Western products. With regard to "globalization," "westernization," and "economic growth," this prediction imagines causal effects in all directions. Basically, this is the Western "enlightenment" origin story universalized and projected into the future.

Prophecy 2: Others Will Have a "Piece of the Rock" and Hold On to Their Distinctive Culture Too

In the early 1970s, I had a Sudanese student who did his Ph.D. on attitudes toward modernization among African students, using a beliefs and values questionnaire. He discovered that the "materialism" factor in his questionnaire was orthogonal to the "individualism" factor; one could value material wealth without giving up the collectivist values of the tribe. The Saudi Arabians liked that message so much they hired him to teach in their universities. Perhaps that is why Samuel Huntington's thesis (1996) that the West is unique but not universal and that other civilizations do not need to become like us to benefit from the technologies of the modern world is so popular in the non-Western world. This prediction imagines globalization and economic growth without deep cultural penetration from the West. Cultures and civilizations are encouraged to remain diverse while everyone gets a piece of the pie. 7

Prophecy 3: A Liberal Ottoman-Style Empire with Two "Castes" (Cosmopolitan Liberals and Local Non-Liberals)

I associate the first prophecy with Francis Fukuyama (1992) and the second with Samuel Huntington (1996). Let me conclude with my own augury. Imagine a world order that is liberal in the classical sense. Its leaders assume a "stance of neutrality" with regard to substantive cultural issues. They don't condition aid and protection on changes in local gender ideals, forms of authority, kinship structures, or coming of age ceremonies. They don't try to tell the members of different cultural groups that they have to live together or love each other or share the same emotional reactions, aesthetic ideals, and religious beliefs. They don't try to tell them how to run their private lives or that they must have private lives. Imagine that in this world order various sanctioning mechanisms make it possible to enforce minimal rules of civility: exit visas are always available, and no aggression is permitted across territorial boundaries. Imagine that such a world system is set up to support decentralized control over cultural issues and hence to promote local cultural efflorescence. Such an emergent "new world order" might look like a postmodern Ottoman "millet system" on a global scale.

I imagine this system would be two tiered and operating at two levels, global and local. I imagine its personnel will belong to two "castes." There will be the cosmopolitan liberals, who are trained to appreciate value neutrality and cultural diversity and who run the global institutions of the world system. And there will be the local non-liberals, who are dedicated to one form or another of thick ethnicity and are inclined to separate themselves from "others," thereby guaranteeing that there is enough diversity remaining in the world for the cosmopolitan liberals to appreciate. The global elite (those who are cosmopolitan and liberal) will, of course, come from all nationalities. In the new universal cosmopolitan culture of the global tier of the world system, your ancestry and skin color will be far less important than your education, your values, and your travel plans. It is already the case in the postmodern cosmopolitan world that you don't have to grow up in the West to be Western any more than you have to grow up in the southern world to adopt an indigenous Third World point of view. Finally, I imagine that it would be possible in this "new world order" for individuals to switch tiers and castes in both directions, moving from global liberalism to local non-liberalism and back, within the course of a single life.

With regard to globalization, westernization, and economic growth, I would hazard this guess. If it should turn out as an empirical generalization that economic growth can be pulled off relying only on the shallow or thin aspects of Western society (e.g., weapons, information technology, Visa cards), then cultures won't converge, even as they get rich. If economic growth is contingent on accepting the deep or thick aspects of Western culture (e.g., individualism, ideals of femininity, egalitarianism, the Bill of Rights), then cultures will not converge and will not develop economically because their sense of identity will supersede their desire for material wealth.

Postscript: Richard Shweder's paper evoked reactions by fellow conference attendees Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Mariano Grondona. Their comments appear after the references, along with a further comment by Richard Shweder.

REFERENCES

Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man, New York : Free Press.

Harrison, Lawrence E. 1992. Who Prospers? How Cultural Values Shape Economic and Political Success. New York : Basic.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. "The West Unique, Not Universal." Foreign Affairs 75: 28-45.

Kaplan, B. 1954. A Study of Rorschach Responses in Four Cultures. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 42:2. Cambridge : Harvard University Press.

Landes, David S. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some Are So Poor. New York : Norton.

Obermeyer, C. M. 1999. "Female Genital Surgeries: The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable." Medical Anthropology Quarterly 13: 79-106.

Obiora, L. A. 1997. "Rethinking Polemics and Intransigence in the Campaign Against Female Circumcision." Case Western Reserve Law Review 47: 275.

Shweder, Richard A. 1991. Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology. Cambridge : Harvard University Press.

____. 1993. "Cultural Psychology: Who Needs It?" Annual Review of Psychology 44:497-523.

____. 1996a. "True Ethnography: The Lore, the Law and the Lure." In Ethnogra-

phy and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Social Inquiry edited by R. Jessor, A. Colby, and R. A. Shweder. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.

____. 1996b. "The View from Manywheres." Anthropology Newsletter 37, no. 9: 1. *

Shweder, Richard A., ed. 1998. Welcome to Middle Age! (and Other Cultural Fictions). Chicago : University of Chicago Press. Shweder, Richard A., with M. Mahapatra and J. G. Miller. 1990. "Culture and Moral Development." In Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, edited by J. S. Stigler, R. A. Shweder, and G. Herdt. New York : Cambridge University Press.

Shweder, Richard A., with N. C. Much, M. Mahapatra, and L. Park. 1997. "The 'Big Three' of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the 'Big Three' Explanations of Suffering." In Morality and Health, edited by P. Rozin and A. Brandt. New York : Routledge.

Spiro, M. 1961. "Social Systems, Personality, and Functional Analysis." In Studying Personality Cross-Culturally, edited by B. Kaplan. New York : Harper & Row.

Stolzenberg, N. M. 1997. "A Tale of Two Villages (or, Legal Realism Comes to Town)." In Ethnicity and Group Rights—Nomos XXXIX, edited by I. Shapiro and W. Kymlicka. New York : New York University Press.

Postscript

Among the many fascinating remarks heard at the conference were several "indigenous" testimonials from cosmopolitan intellectuals out of Africa and Latin America. These representatives from the " Third World " played the part of disgruntled "insiders," bearing witness to the impoverishment of their own native cultures, telling us how bad things can be in the home country. That role has become increasingly complex, even dubious, in our postmodern world, where the outside is in and the inside is all over the place (think of CNN, VISA, and the Big Mac). For most globe-hopping managers of the world system, including cosmopolitan intellectuals from out of the " Third World ," travel plans now matter more than ancestry. Consequently, one feels inclined to raise doubts about any claims to authority based on an equation of citizenship (or national origin) with "indigenous" voice. After all, whose voice is more "indigenous"? The voice of a "Western-educated" M.B.A. or Ph.D. from Dakar or Delhi, who looks down on his or her own cultural traditions and looks up to the United States for intellectual and moral guidance and material aid? Or the voice of a "Western" scholar who does years of fieldwork in rural villages in Africa or Asia and understands and sees value in the traditions of "others"?

COMMENTS OF MONTANER, ETOUNGA-MANGUELLE, AND GRONDONA, WITH FURTHER COMMENTS BY SHWEDER

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Richard Shweder's comment is typical of those who expect Third World reactions from Latin Americans. He simply doesn't understand that Latin America is an extension of the West. I don't understand why Shweder thinks that we ought to resign ourselves to authoritarian governments and economic models that condemn half of our people to misery when the entire world—beginning with the Japanese—believes that it was admirable when Japan copied the production techniques and social organization of the West. Perhaps the Brazilian favelas, with their infinite, barbaric misery, seem picturesque to him. I cannot accept those subhuman conditions. I believe that they must be eradicated and that the people living in them must have a chance for a better, more human life. How do I know what Latin Americans want? It's very simple: by following migration trends. Surveys demonstrate that half or more of the populations of Mexic Colombia, and Guatemala, among others, would abandon their countries for the United States. Why? Because the United States offers them what they don't find in their own countries.

What Shweder says of "these representatives from the 'Third World' play[ing] the parti of disgruntled 'insiders'" could also be applied to the Americans who are concerned about improving subhuman conditions in the black and Puerto Rican ghettos. If he is to be consistently uncritical of the values and attitudes of a culture, then he should have no problem with the Sicilian omerta. As a “disgruntled insider” and “cosmopolitan intellectual” from Africa, I appreciate the opportunity to comment on Richard Shweder's note. I do so with some diffidence. After all, I am responding to a Western scholar who identifies himself as more "indigenous" than I am because he "has done years of fieldwork in rural villages in ... Asia and understands and sees value in the traditions of 'others.'" I have to confess that I failed to receive the "intellectual and moral guidance and material aid" I expected at the Harvard symposium, so I am going to tell the truth: We Africans really enjoy living in shantytowns where there isn't enough food, health care, or education for our children. Furthermore, our corrupt chieftaincy political systems are really marvelous and have permitted countries like Mobutu's Zaire to earn us international prestige and respect.

Moreover, surely it would be terribly boring if free, democratic elections were organized all over Africa. Were that to happen, we would no longer be real Africans, and by losing our identity—and our authoritarianism, our bloody civil wars, our illiteracy, our forty-five-year life expectancy—we would be letting down not only ourselves but also those Western anthropologists who study us so sympathetically and understand that we can't be expected to behave like human beings who seek dignity on the eve of the third millennium. We are Africans, and our identity matters! So let us fight for it with the full support of those Western scholars who have the wisdom and courage to acknowledge that Africans belong to a different world.

Mariano Grondona

There is a methodological difference between Richard Shweder and Latin Americans like Carlos Alberto Montaner and myself. Shweder's goal, were he focused on Latin America, would be to understand it. We want to change it. Anthropologists need the societies they study to remain relatively static and predictable, like an entomologist studying bees or ants. Montaner and I, on the other hand, have an existential approach to our region: It is "our" world—where we come from—which we love. Be-cause of our commitment to it, we want it to advance to new levels of human fulfillment, closer to those in the developed world.

One must ask who represents Latin America better, Shweder and other foreign social scientists or Montaner and myself? We belong to our region. We feel it. The fact (hat millions of Latin Americans are "voting with their feet" as they migrate to the developed countries and that the overwhelming electoral majorities are supporting progressive governments throughout our region eloquently testifies that our views and concerns are widely shared. To be sure, we travel back and forth between Latin America and the developed countries. But these experiences do not alienate us from Latin America. Rather, they both increase our concern about conditions, particularly for poor people, in Latin America and focus us on what needs to be done to change those conditions. Like the vast majority of our countrymen, we want our nations to have the democratic stability, justice, opportunity for advancement, and prosperity that we find in the advanced countries.

Richard A. Shweder's Reply to Montaner, Etounga-Manguelle, and Grondona

As far as I can tell nothing in note 1 (or in my chapter) recommends authoritarian rule, a life of squalor, or death at an early age. In authoritarian power orders, those in power act in such a way that only their own interests are served, and no one can stop them from doing so. I think the world would be a far better place if there were no such orders of power. And nothing suggests that we must be uncritical or accepting of the received ideas, attitudes, and practices of any cultural tradition, including our own. As I state in my chapter, "Pluralists do make critical judgments. Indeed, the 'stance of justification' is so central to my style of cultural analysis that I would define a 'genuine' culture, a culture deserving of appreciation, as a way of life that is defensible in the face of criticism from abroad."

If one truly cares to achieve some appreciation of a cultural tradition, one must usually engage in some participant observation and in a process of sympathetic understanding. One initially tries to bracket all ethnocentric reactions and discover what is good, true, beautiful, or efficient in the ideas, attitudes, and practices of "others." There is no guarantee that appreciation will be achieved. There is no guarantee that everything that is, is okay or "genuine." Ideas, attitudes, and practices that are demonstrably bad, false, ugly, or inefficient should be criticized and perhaps even changed. So much for red herrings and the bogeyman of radical relativism. My essay is in fact a critique of both radical relativism ("whatever is, is okay") and ethnocentric monism ("there is only one way to lead a morally decent, rational and fulfilling life, and it's our way"), although by my lights I did not see many radical relativists at the conference.

In a moment I will respond to one or two other points raised by Carlos Alberto Montaner, Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, and Mariano Grondona. First, however, I want to focus on what was actually said in note 1, namely, that in the postmodern world, one should be skeptical of all claims to authority based on the equation of citizenship (or national origin) with "indigenous" voice. And I want to tell you a story, which illustrates that point. Rabindranath Tagore is modern India 's most acclaimed poet. He was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, a spokesman for the India nationalist movement, and an admirer, interpreter, and literary beneficiary of the classical Sanskrit literatures of India. In 1877, Tagore visited England for the first time. He was sixteen years old. He went there to study law. In his book India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding, Wilhelm Halbfass quotes Tagore's impressions:

I had thought that the island of England was so small and the inhabitants so dedicated to learning that, before I arrived there, I expected the country from one end to the other would echo and re-echo with the lyrical essays of Tennyson; and I also thought that wherever I might be in this narrow island, I would hear constantly Gladstone's oratory, the explanation of the Vedas by Max Mueller, the scientific truth of Tindall, the profound thoughts of Carlyle and the philosophy of Bain. I was under the impression that wherever I would go I would find the old and the young drunk with the pleasure of "intellectual" enjoyment. But I have been very disappointed in this.

Apparently, the young Tagore, a political and civic "outsider" to the British Isles, was culturally more English and spoke the English language far better than most Englishmen. His reference to Max Mueller is highly pertinent to note 1 because it was Max Mueller, a German philologist and "orientalist" who taught at Oxford, to whom Hindu Brahmans turned to learn about Sanskrit and their own classical literary traditions.

This situation of "outsiders" and "insiders" trading places and keeping each other's valuable cultural heritages in play is not unusual, especially in the contemporary world. We live in a world where Afro-Caribbean scholars translate ancient Greek texts, where scholars from Africa, Asia, and Europe write perceptive books about the United States, and where the Max Mueller effect is alive and well. For example, Gusii intellectuals from Kenya, some of whom are quite expert in Western philosophy and science, read Robert LeVine's work (conducted from the 1950s through 1990s) to learn about the meaning, value, and history of Gusii norms and folkways. The main point of this observation is a simple one: Statements about the pros and cons of a cul-^l tural tradition do not gain authority and should not be granted authority on the basis I of claims to ancestry, membership, or national origin.

Note 1 was an aside, a parenthetical remark about my fascination with one aspect of the structural organization of the conference. The conference was choreographed in such a way that there was one session in which all the speakers from the "Third World" participated, and they spoke pretty much with one voice, supporting the idea that "Western civilization" is superior to all the rest. Now, of course, this idea is not unpopular in many capitals of Asia, Africa , and Latin America. It is especially popular among those Western, westernized, or westernizing elites who tend to view the received beliefs, attitudes, and everyday practices of non-Western peoples, even their own countrymen, as unenlightened, superstitious, magical, authoritarian, corrupt, or otherwise unworthy or embarrassing. But that type of wholesale acceptance of "Western modernity" over non-Western "traditionalisms" of various kinds has never been the only voice in town in either the "West" or the "East," the "North" or the "South," the "developed" or the "underdeveloped"world. Had there been other types of voices in the session, the voice of " Third World " intellectuals who might speak with pride and admiration about "indigenous" ideas, attitudes, and practices, the session would perhaps have been less fascinating. Perhaps I would not have been led to wonder about the use of "insider" testimonials from the " Third World " to lend authority to the idea that the Protestant " First World " really got it right.

Carlos Alberto Montaner and Mariano Grondona are impressed by migration patterns, by the fact that "millions of Latin Americans are 'voting with their feet'" in favor of the "developed" world. The first time I ever heard the "voting with your feet" argument was in the 1960s, when a famous conservative made the argument that black migration patterns into South Africa far exceeded black migration patterns out of South Africa. He interpreted this as evidence that black Africans were voting with their feet in favor of the apartheid government of South Africa over other African states! I suspect they were not voting or expressing their moral and cultural preferences at all—just going where there were higher-paying jobs.

Daniel Etounga-Manguelle seems to imply that one cannot live a dignified life and a life that is distinctively African at the same time. As I stated in my essay, I am not a fan of broad categories such as "Latin American" or "African" as ways of identifying cultural communities—Bahia is not San Paolo, the Yoruba are not the Masai. Nevertheless, I do believe, as did Edward Sapir, that "the societies in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached." For a pluralist, "distinctness" or "difference" is not a term of disparagement. With complete respect for all three of my critics, whose sincerity I never doubted, whose company and conversation I much enjoyed, and whose testimonials and arguments I found fascinating, I fully confess to rejecting the idea that the only or very best way to be dignified, decent, rational, and fully human is to live the life of a North American or a northern European.


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Principles of Sociology/Social psychological ways to understand the world

Information Drawn from Social Psychology (7 th edition) by David G. Myers

“We can barely be distinguished from our social situations, for they form us and decide our possibilities” – Sartre

Social psychology studies how situations affect our behavior and the way in which we perceive ourselves/others. Our interaction patterns in specific situations orient us to each other, our culture, and ideas about “human nature". Social psychology is different than sociology in that it orients mostly to small group interaction. Also, it tends to use laboratory experimental methods, while sociology uses more naturalistic observation, surveys/interviews, and statistical manipulation of large data sets. They want to use “average people” to get deterministic theories.

Constructing the Self in a Social World:

Socially shared beliefs (ideologies) help us make sense of the world, but hinder the search for better explanations

Hindsight bias – tendency to exaggerate the degree to which after learning an outcome that “I knew it all along”

Self-reference effect – information relevant to our conception of who we are (self schemas) is remembered well

Spotlight effect – tendency for people to irrationally think that others will notice their every action and feeling

Looking-glass self – we use what we believe others think of us to build perceptions of ourselves in comparison

Miswants, exaggeration, and dual attitudes – people overestimate the happiness relationships and acquisitions will bring them, underestimate their psychological immune system's capacity to rationalize, discount/forgive emotional trauma, and our automatic implicit attitudes about a person or thing differ from our reasoned attitudes

Self-Serving Bias – tendency to credit success to individual qualities, but failure to uncontrollable externalities

Unrealistic Optimism - tendency to think we are better than the average person and mostly immune to misfortune

False Consensus – tendency to overestimate the number of people who agree with us on matters of fact/opinion

False Uniqueness – tendency to serve self image by believing our talents and moral judgments uniquely superior

Self-Esteem Maintenance – facing failure, we tend to perceive others as failing and put down vulnerable others

Self-Handicapping – the tendency to protect self-image with behaviors that create useful excuses for later failure

Social Beliefs and Judgments:

The Fundamental Attribution Bias – tendency to underestimate situational influences and overestimate individual character/disposition/abilities when explaining the behavior of a person or a group of people in a social context.

Confirmation Bias - We are likely to use mixed evidence on any topic to reinforce our existing beliefs on the nature of a phenomena. The remedy for this bias is to actively try to explain why the contrary may be true. Reconstructing beliefs and memories - We reconstruct the past by combining fragments of memory with our current information, feelings, and expectations. Memory is often revised to justify fundamental change in beliefs that might seem hypocritical… attitudes seem consistent and mildly pleasant events are more rosy in photos

Misinformation Effect – we recall details and associations from memory inaccurately, but with great confidence

Heuristic – a rule of thumb mental strategy that allows us to make quick/efficient judgments (not so accurate) Availability Heuristic - tendency to judge the validity or likelihood of an argument based on instances of evidence that come most readily to mind.

Representativeness Heuristic – tendency to presume, against the odds, that someone or something belongs to a specific group because they somehow resemble a typical member

Illusory Correlation – tendency to perceive relationships between events or conditions where none actually exists

Illusion of Control – the idea that chance events are subject to our influence, and positive outcomes are evidence

Behavioral Confirmation – a type of self-fulfilling prophesy whereby people's social expectations lead them to act in ways that causes others to confirm such expectations

The Relationship Between Attitudes and Behaviors:

The evidence doesn't support the idea that changing attitude will change behavior, in fact, the contrary pattern is much more common… under which conditions might attitude be able to influence behavior? (policy importance)

1. Minimize other influences on supposed attitude convictions and on related behavior 2. Make the attitude specifically relevant to the action you are hoping to produce 3. Make the attitude as potent as possible

Cognitive Dissonance – tension arising when someone is has inconsistency between beliefs and/or actions

Insufficient Justification Effect – reducing dissonance by internally justifying behavior when external justification is insufficient

Overjustification effect – if you pay someone to do something they already like, they may begin to attribute that behavior to the money instead of intrinsic internal motivations

Other Assorted Social Psych Concepts:

Outgroup Homogeneity Effect – perception that people in groups different than one's own are very similar

Just World Phenomena – people tend to believe that the world is just and people thus get what they deserve

Displacement - redirection of aggression to a target other than the source of the frustration; a safe, acceptable one

Proximity and Interaction Effect – just proximity and positive behavior towards individuals results in fondness

Bystander Effect -- likelihood that someone will provide help to another is reduced when more people are around

Adaptation Level Phenomena – the tendency to adapt to a given level of stimulation, then only react to that level

Depressive Realism – tendency of mildly depressed people to make more accurate (less self serving) attributions

Sleeper Effect – delayed impact of a message; effective later after we forget initial reasons for discounting it

Mere Exposure Effect – novel stimuli liked more after one is repeatedly exposed to them; regardless of quality

Moral Inclusion/Exclusion  - perception of certain people as inside/outside our bounds of moral or ethical concern


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