SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY NOW, CORPORATE AND CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY 4 LIFE

All of your comments about the circumstances of sweatshop labor revealed a deep concern for your relationship as students to others who are less fortunate in the world. This is the start of becoming a student OF the world rather than IN the world. Your insight and awareness is something to be proud of. Don't undermine it with guilt or shame, blame or fault, or even regret.

Consider this re-definition from Landmark Education.

Responsibility is not about blame, shame, guilt, fault, or regret. It starts with a willingness to consider being cause in the matter.

No one else is coming to save us. Responsibility might be creatively responding using the resources you have as a college student (technology, the power of your institution--Baruch/CUNY, the radio station, blogs, etc. ) or the resources of your position (galvanizing other students or people with similar interests) to make a difference, to impact the world we live in.

Perhaps you all could be like the students in the video and organize Baruch students to explore what unfair labor practices we as a group of people are unknowingly supporting. Awareness is an important form of activism.

Perhaps this poem might be useful in being cause in the matter.
"Our Deepest Fear"
by Marianne Williamson from A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

ABOUT MIRACLES AND FEAR
By the way, how would anthropologists study MIRACLES or even FEAR? Guilt, shame or blame? What etic category applies or would be useful? How, when or where would you participate and observe miracles or fear? Where would you conduct fieldwork? Better yet, what social construct is at work behind the perception/reality of MIRACLES, FEAR or SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY? What construct prevents us from seeing them/it?

One thought for me, because I don't have an answer for this, is the social construct of "the individual" (does it really exists in nature or is it merely a social discourse perceived in some cultures and not others?). Hmm? What a paradox. "Individual" is a social construct. That's something I've NEVER thought about before.

IN CONCLUSION
What I am learning from my own inquiry is that "noticing" is the most powerful tool in participant-observation and ethnography.

Applying Anthropology: Who Identifies the Needs of Locals?

Applied Anthropology is distinct from the academic or theoretical side of the discipline. Through the use of anthropological data, theory, and methods to identify, assess, and solve contemporary problems involving HUMAN BEHAVIOR and social and cultural forces, conditions and contexts. The ethnographic method is an invaluable tools for learning and studying the local firsthand. So who should identify the needs of the local people? Is it the ethnographer, the scientist, who returns home after fieldwork? Or the cultural consultants, the insiders, the locals themselves?

Here's an example of a local from the South Bronx determining development needs for her community. Applied anthropology empowers local people to fulfill their own needs.

Talks Majora Carter: Greening the ghetto

Conformity and Conflict: A Mother's Love

Read more on mother love by Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them”.
Epictetus (Greek philosopher associated with the Stoics, AD 55-c.135)

Chap 10 - The World Economic System and Colonialization

Globalization and Colonialization is Fostering Unity among Youth
Most of my experience with colonialization has not seemed good. I am a person of African descent. My family history is traced to slavery. Forced migration led my people here. In the mid to late 1990s, I was one of those who challenged globalization at the political level. The bourgeosie were stealing the labor of the proletariat. Now mothers as well as fathers were not home with the children. All parents and even children have to work to make a living. Americans spend more time with fellow workers than their families and since the climate at work tends to be so strict, the anxiety and venting about our circumstances tend to fall on the family and kin in a strange version of negative reciprocity. Family seems last on our list time-wise. The impact of industrialization and commodification in our state economy.

So we are having a conversation, an inquiry, that is designed to really get up under your social constructs, which can seem like getting under your skin. Stirring up confusion, angry, and other feelings that may not be comfortable. Know this: it's all part of the learning process. Like walking out to look at the edge of the earth before our superstitions were upended, it can really seem threatening to confront our social constructs and the discourses that keep them in place. Our mindset is designed to reinforce the status quo. We cannot really seem beyond "what makes sense" or seems "real" to us. It's not a social construct. That's the way life is.

Here is the first video I want you to examine and dig into. It's called SOMETHING TO HIDE documenting a delegation composed of university students who head to El Salvador to find out who makes clothing for Nike and Wal-Mart. They find out it's people their age with little knowledge of their labor rights.

The second video called THE HIDDEN FACE OF GLOBALIZATION is produced by the same media organization the National Labor Committee. They support workers rights in a global economy. The second video is also about sweatshops but in Bhangladesh. Watching both had me realize how universal or at lease pervasive this experience has become relative to some of the largest US corporations such as Nike. From El Salvador to Bhangladesh cultlure is becoming a universally dismal like of labor and not much else.

It has been through live aid concerts and sweatshop campaigns that young people around the world have been out to make a difference. In 2008, Live 8 founded by Bob Geldof advocated for canceling Africa's debt to save African lives. Check out his appeal at the concert.

Social Control

In this TED Talk video Julia Sweeney talks about her transition in understanding religion from the time she turned 7 till now. Towards the end however she stresses the fact that no matter what religion, ultimately some of the ideals that they are based on sound ludicrous. For example, the story of God impregnating the Virgin Mary without the use of intercourse, and giving birth to the son of God. I may believe in this, however pretend you as an intellectual of 18+ never heard the story before. Would you not think of the story as just a myth? Is it another form of Social Control in that as child you were influenced to believe this and ultimately think it to be true? Do we choose to believe in it now because it works? Or do we just have nothing else to believe in?