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An anthropologist urges us to challenge the assumptions that guide our lives. For her, it’s a family tradition. In 1960,when Laura Nader became the first woman faculty member in Berkeley’s anthropology department, things were a bit different. For example, when she and other women faculty wanted to attend a meeting north of the Great Hall in the Faculty Club, they had to crawl through a window. (The Great Hall was for men only.) “I’m kind of amazed that we did that,” Nader says now. “We just laughed about it at the time.” How and why people do some of the strange things they do without a second thought has been a focus of Nader’s work for decades.  This fall, the prominent anthropologist has a few things to celebrate: her 40th year at Berkeley; being chosen to present, in November, the Distinguished Lecture to the American Association of Anthropology; and the fact that her younger brother, Ralph Nader, is the Green Party candidate for President of the United States. The four Nader children were born and raised in Winsted, Connecticut, children of immigrants from Lebanon. “My parents were my best teachers,” Laura says. Her father was a businessman. “But what he liked best,” she says, “was talking to the customers in his restaurant about politics, about the town, about good wages for the workers, about health and safety.” At the dinner table, she recalls, her father asked his children questions about issues of the day. “We were never treated like kids that didn’t know anything; he wanted us to form opinions. He’d say to us, ‘If you don’t have any answers, what are your questions?’” Her mother, a former school teacher, educated the children in her own way. “She taught by story-telling.” Nader says that her parents “were alert to what was happening in the world,” a trait Laura and her siblings share. “My dad left Lebanon for political reasons,” she says, “and when he came to the land of the free, he took it seriously. So I guess we were raised that way—to believe that you should be involved in public issues.”  After a moment’s reflection, she adds, “Public issues are the key. I don’t think of my father as being ‘political.’ And I would never say that Ralph is political. He’s interested in public issues, the issues we all need to think about: health and the safety and quality of life.” Something else the Nader children were raised to do, she says, is “to question assumptions.” Nader attended Wells College, in upstate New York, spending her junior year abroad, in Mexico. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology under Clyde Kluckhohn at Harvard, based on fieldwork among the Zapotec people in the Sierra Madre mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. She also has done fieldwork in Lebanon among the Shia Muslims, in the United States among consumers of products and services, and spent a short period in Morocco studying the use of courts during Ramadan. She sums up her intellectual career as the pursuit of an interest in law, justice, and control, and how they are connected to power structures. These are, she says, “everyday problems for everyday people.” Laura Nader has taken on specialists in the fields of law, children’s issues, nuclear energy, and science, questioning the assumptions under which these experts operate. She believes a good liberal arts education should lead citizens precisely to ask questions rather than being steamrolled by those in control. A few years ago, when she was addressing experts in nuclear energy at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, encouraging them to think differently about their practice, one member of the panel passed a note to another (who later passed it to her): “Can’t you shut this woman up?” Although many have asked that question, the answer is clearly no. Nader is soft-spoken but direct, her gaze steady as she asks tough questions about why people think as they do. “The final colonization,” she has written, “is the colonization of the mind.” Since the early 1980s, she has taught an undergraduate course in anthropology called “Controlling Processes,” and has published two volumes of essays by her students on how control penetrates their everyday lives through ideas and institutions. She was interviewed about these and other matters in her third-floor office in Kroeber Hall. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You’ve been called “an anthropologist of everyday life.” What does that mean? I suppose it’s an anthropologist who does ethnography. To me ethnography is the key—the serious study of everyday life in context. So, in the 1950s, when I went to southern Mexico, I was studying how the Zapotec organize their lives, what they do with their problems, what they do when they go to court. And when I came back to this country, I started looking at American equivalents, at how Americans solve their consumer and service complaints. But then one thing led to another, and I began to examine dominant paradigms. The study of the everyday became, for me, a study of how people think. It occurred to me that people are trapped by mind-sets, by their mode of thinking, by invisible processes we sometimes call culture. Can you give an example? While serving on the Carnegie Council on Children, I noticed that psychologists have somehow convinced the population that the way children turn out is wholly connected to what their parents do when the children are young—that the parents are somehow totally responsible for raising their children. I was seeing good parents losing their children in the 1960s, and the notion came apart. It didn’t make sense to think that parents are somehow totally responsible when there are so many things operating outside the family that affect children. Certainly the corporate world has an enormous effect: It feeds and clothes children and provides them with music and entertainment. But the poor parents came to feel solely responsible. And so we pursued the questions of how people think about children, and what does the government and the corporate world have to do with raising America’s children? One of my students interviewed executives who market to children. What’s between the market and the child? The parents. You should see the stuff they teach children about their parents! “Parents are too old, they don’t know anything, they’re stupid.” And if marketers can get children to think of their parents in these ways, then the kids become the companies’ salesmen—nagging their parents to buy them things. I was amazed by that, by the processes that were consciously used to separate offspring from parents, for the benefit of corporations. As a parent, were you trapped by that kind of thinking? No, I wasn’t. But I realized that my rearing of children was defensive: Don’t do this, don’t do that; you can’t go to this party, there’s drug use there, and so forth. I could see I wasn’t doing what my mother did—raise us in a small town where the society agreed that parents should be supported. Today, when they go off to college, freshmen are told that they should stand on their own two feet, that they shouldn’t call their parents—they’re babies if they do that. It’s been said at Berkeley. And this was said to the parents of new students when my daughters went to college, at Smith. The president said, “Don’t call your parents; and parents, you should let your daughters grow up.” Wait a minute! Who are you supposed to call, if not your parents? I stood up and said: “You’re making the argument that, in order to grow up, these young women have to cut the cord from their parents. Could you not make the opposite argument, that if they cut the cord with their parents, they will never grow up?” I then offered my own advice: “Stay in your children’s lives. Because nobody cares about your children like you do.” Let’s talk about a course you teach, called “Controlling Processes.”What is that about? Controlling processes are the modes people invent in order to manage certain segments of the society in predictable ways. I differentiate between social and cultural control; the two add up to controlling processes. It’s hard to talk about mind control if you live in a society that believes in free will. All students understand what social control is: If you go through a red light, a policeman comes along and says, “You’ve got a ticket.” But to tell students, for example, that they are spending their money in certain ways because they’re being manipulated—their minds are being manipulated—that’s harder to grasp. And that’s cultural control. Can you give an example? In a recent course, a student was sitting in the second row. As I was lecturing, every once in a while I’d hear him saying, “Wow!” I wondered, “What had I said to elicit such a response?” Then he turned in his paper. “When I came to Berkeley as a freshman,” he said, “my father had just gotten fired and my mother only had a part-time job. I should have been poor. But I lived in a nice apartment, I had a VCR and a car, and by the end of my freshman year, I was $14,000 in debt. Let me tell you how it happened.” And then he wrote about how the credit-card companies come on campus and teach these young kids to be debtors. They give them credit cards that you and I could never get. His paper was about how he had been conned and how he came to acquiesce. I think what was happening to him in class, and as he wrote his paper, was that he was beginning to think that, yes, this has long-term consequences. He could end up taking his first job, for example, not because it was the job he most wanted but because he needed it in order to pay off his debt. Let me compare that to what happened when I was growing up. Starting in kindergarten, the local banker would take the whole class to deposit our quarters in savings accounts. Isn’t that a controlling process? It is. That’s why I say controlling processes are double-edged; they can take you down one road or another road. You should be aware of which road you’re being taken down. When I was young, I was aware that the banker was teaching us to save, because he taught us that explicitly. Controlling processes are not all bad, but they are usually hidden. What was being hidden from my student was the road he was being taken down: long-term debt and how he would have to deal with it. All he was presented with was the notion that he could have anything he wanted. And that’s what advertising and marketing are teaching young and older people as well: satisfy your appetites! Now! It’s hedonism. All the stuff that Huxley talked about in Brave New World, a novel, along with Orwell’s 1984, that I have students read at the beginning of the class. After they list the controlling processes in those novels, I ask them to find one in their own lives—I never define the process for them; I ask them to find one and write a paper about it. And they do: cults, mind-controlling drugs, advertisements, standardized tests, political rhetoric.... Once they examine how control works, they understand very well how to recognize controlling processes. And once they’re able to do that, they’re able to think more freely. It sounds like “critical thinking” is something you value and teach. Exactly. Let me give you one example of what happens when people abandon critical thinking. Eight or nine years ago, at the Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., a pilot was getting ready to take off. He saw ice on the wings. But the control tower said there was no ice on the wings. The pilot saw the ice with his own eyes, but he believed the control tower. He took off, and the plane crashed, and everyone on board died. That tragic incident has always struck me. We’re not taught to listen to our own drum beating, we’re taught to listen to someone else’s drum. How critical are students today? Students today come into class mostly without opinions. They want to know what I think. They’re afraid to come forth with what they think, or to be critical. And if they disagree with me, they don’t want to say it. They’re taught not to disagree. You’re not supposed to be “negative,” you’re supposed to just sit there and take notes. Contentious thinking is not being encouraged as much as I think it should be. You ought to be allowed to be contentious, to argue, to have different opinions. Many students feel liberated when I say that, because they feel they’ve been squelched. If they disagree with somebody—for example in areas that are tense, like feminism or race or ethnicity—they feel they can’t say what they think. If you go to Boston and get on the subway, you hear people saying things that would make people freak out if they were said on the campus; they tell ethnic jokes. My father used to tell them to the ethnics themselves—Polish jokes to the Poles, Jewish jokes to the Jews. And everybody would laugh and tell one on him! Today that would be considered insulting. This sounds like “political correctness.” It’s very P.C. P.C. is part of this whole thing of what you can and cannot say. You mustn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers. Berkeley is often criticized for being P.C. P.C. charges are always leveled at the left, not the right. But there are things you can’t say on the right. For example? The Gulf War. You couldn’t criticize the Gulf War, which I consider a right wing act because it was the right wing of this country that carried it out, and everybody had to fall in line and not criticize the harm that could have been prevented. Last year, I asked my class, “How many of you know that more people have died as a result of the Gulf War and the sanctions than died in Nagasaki and Hiroshima?” A student of mine did a paper on this. She wanted to find out whether what I said was true or not. She found that over a million children have died as a result of the bombing, the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, and the sanctions. Most Americans don’t know that. It’s not politically correct to ask or talk about it. We seem to be a trusting society. Right. One of the questions I ask students is: “Why is there not an opposite word for paranoia?” I invented such a word; I call it “trustanoia.” America suffers from trustanoia. Did you ever play trust games in school? No. Neither did I. That tells us how old we are. But today, when children go to school, they are taught to trust. They play a game where they fall back and have to trust that somebody’s going to catch them. Troy Duster [professor of sociology at Berkeley] told me that, in the black community, among others, the father says, “Jump and I’ll catch you.” But he doesn’t. “Don’t ever forget that lesson!” One might ask, “Why teach people to distrust?” Well, there may be good reasons to distrust others. You should know when to trust and when to distrust. In other words, you have to use your own judgment—not like the pilot who listened to the control tower and crashed. For alumni, whose formal education is over, what advice do you have? If their education “took,” then they should be asking questions. I think a lot of people in this country, Cal graduates included, feel that there’s something wrong and that they’ve lost control. And in order to regain control, they must start to ask questions and to participate. And I think America’s been flattened. We’ve been flattened by what I describe as “harmony ideology”—you mustn’t be contentious, you mustn’t raise issues; and by fear—fear of the loss of jobs, fear that you won’t be able to afford what your parents were able to afford, and so forth. What can people do? First, people have to recognize what the issues are. I can make a list of issues for me: I happen to be very concerned about basic things—like the quality of water, food, and air, nuclear proliferation, the changing nature of nature. But other people certainly have other issues of concern. And they should be talking to each other! Everybody talks about whether their computer is up or down, or how much e-mail they’ve gotten, or about the television shows they’re watching. But that’s all small talk; there’s little conversation about the wider world they live in. When people do get interested and involved in issues, something wonderful happens—they come alive! Because, basically, they discover themselves. I see it in my class all the time. What makes a good teacher? I asked a colleague of mine at Santa Cruz, who had just won a teaching award, what he did to deserve that. He said, “I seduce.” And I thought, “Oh, now I know what I do. I irritate.” Because my students, especially freshmen, are asleep. And I want to wake them up. No student comes out of my course without having exercised critical thinking. That’s why they say the course has changed their lives. Not because they have a dogma they’ve picked up from the class, but because they’ve learned to see the invisible. They’ve learned to make the invisible visible. That’s pretty powerful. It is powerful. And that’s what education should be about. And that’s what good teachers do, here and elsewhere. Another of your topics of study is what you call “central dogmas.” Have you ever been caught up in one? Yes. It was while I was writing a paper on gender, and it took me ten years to write the paper because of the central dogma I was caught up in: “Things may be bad now for women, but they’re better than they were.” You know what shook me out of that? It was a study by four of my campus colleagues on the place of women faculty at Berkeley. They found that, in 1887, women made up 3.5 percent of the faculty. And in 1968, the percentage was almost identical. In between, it had gone up to something like 18 percent. So it was a yo-yo model. That really shook me up! Because I had believed in progress. I wrote a paper comparing women in the Islamic Middle East with women in Euro-American societies. My argument was that the way they keep women controlled in both societies is to represent the other woman as being in worse shape. So we say, “You think it’s bad here? Look at Bangladesh.” And others say the same thing. “You think it’s bad in Egypt? Look at the rape rate in the United States.” So they point out what’s lacking in our society, and we point out what’s lacking in theirs. And, regardless of who says who’s got the better status, how we portray the other is a mode of control. When I went to Morocco in 1980, I discovered there were many more women faculty at the University of Rabat than there were at Berkeley. That wasn’t supposed to be, because they were Muslim, and everyone knows that all Muslim women are subjected—that’s a central dogma. The point is that I was being shaken out of participation in the central dogma of progress and progressivism, that it’s always somehow better now and here than then and there. You have a reputation for being contentious and feisty. Well, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I was raised in a feisty family in a feisty town in New England, where you had town meetings and you are supposed to be feisty. Besides, in a country that’s democratic, you’re supposed to ask questions, challenge assumptions. My brother Ralph once remarked that we live in a time when an expression of candor is viewed as an act of courage. How would you characterize the current environment at Berkeley? I think that universities, especially today, are very conformist. Berkeley faculty are scared. I remember when Chancellor Tien came to speak to the Academic Senate on budgets. He asked, “Are there any questions?” Silence! There’s a self-censorship here; and if you ask questions—which I did at that meeting—people sort of look at you. You’ve written that “There is little room for disgust and outrage in the American university. The university buries emotions, and faculty look for ‘balanced’ opinions.” Is that true? Oh, yes. And I find it more and more so as the university gets corporatized. How many economists in this University teach courses on inequality? How does this affect education for the University of California? Well, it becomes more of a trade school. The first question I ask in Anthro 3 is, “How many students are here to get a job?” Most hands go up. I’m not saying that jobs aren’t important. I am saying that there’s something that happens to you as you’re going through the educational process if getting a job is what’s primary in your mind. You weren’t interested in the early retirement, the “golden handshake,” which you could have taken in the early 1990s. No. As I said at the time, “I don’t take bribes.” And I think there should be different ages, different generations, around the University. And different points of view? That’s right. You want to know what drives me absolutely out of my mind? Facilitators. I never like meetings where there are facilitators. I was just at such a meeting in Santa Barbara. We weren’t allowed to say “but.” You couldn’t say, “Yes, but….” You had to say something positive. This was a meeting of grown people discussing ecological issues! I remember a meeting on children a few years ago, here on campus. A facilitator wrote things on the board he thought were important. I asked, “Why don’t you ever write anything I say on the board?” He said, “You’re usually off the track.” And I said, “But isn’t that the point—to find out what different people think?” People have the mistaken impression that our democracy will blossom via incremental consensus. But, in fact, if you look at history, advances in human civilization often come about through leaps and by means of creative—yet often fierce—disagreements. |
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