Pages

Friday, January 25, 2013

Bottled Up! Let's Change the Formula

Check out this new film "Bottled Up! The Film - Let's Change the Formula"

It is a very powerful video.
I think its incredible that such a large part of the population is made up by mothers (indeed, without mothers, we wouldn't be here at all), and yet such an enormous aspect of mothering is not protected or supported by our society.

BOTTLED UP! Sizzle from mire molnar on Vimeo.


In the most successful ad campaign in history, formula companies convinced mothers to trade in their breasts for bottles, and the baby bottle swiftly became the most recognizable symbol of infancy. The phenomenon of the nursing mother has all but disappeared from our cultural landscape as the sexual breast supplanted the mothering breast. The simple act of nursing a baby engenders a plethora of reactions from society, especially when done in public.

Conflicting advice abounds leaving new moms bewildered and wondering if they are doing it “right,” or they simply opt out entirely. Countering nearly a century of medical procedures that separated babies from their mothers and medical advice that informed women that their milk was not good enough, Bottled UP! captures how mothers can access their inner knowledge and trust their own body’s wisdom and why they should. Women’s stories, leading lactation professionals, archival footage, religious iconography, and formula advertisements, tell the story of how mothers relinquished authority to medical professionals, and succumbed to cultural pressure to forfeit their nourishing breasts in favor of a highly sexualized model.

This film shows how women can reclaim their birthright and restore the nursing mother archetype. More than a breastfeeding promotion film, this is a film by, for, and about women. It is about the knowledge that inherently resides in every woman, how to access that knowledge and how to trust what we already know. It is a film that will inspire women to say, “I can do that!” “I want to do that!

Bottled UP! is a documentary exposé about Breastfeeding in America. Our mission is to restore the Phenomenon of the Nursing Mother to the cultural landscape of America.



Friday, January 18, 2013

My Thesis EDD


My master's thesis EDD is coming up - the general date around which I need to have my full first draft completed and submitted to my advisers and committee members. After it is out of my hands, that uncomfortable period of waiting for their completely red-marked up copies to be returned to me begins. I know it is going to happen any time, just please let the pain begin so I can get it over with! Once my committee hands it back to me, labor starts. I will have to labor for an unknown about of time over their suggested revisions, knowing that I will have to give birth to a fully completed thesis at some point! This can't last forever! The baby/thesis will need to be born soon!


http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=344




http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=718

Sorry I don't have a lot for you on the blog lately, I'm a bit absorbed with condensing my research into one sentence ;)

Friday, January 11, 2013

Traditional Societies

Not having much time lately for blog writing, I've just been sharing as much as I have time to read via my Facebook and Twitter pages. But this article had too many great things to pull out of it not to put them on my blog.

The article "The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond - Review" is a review by Wade Davis of Diamond's new book. But it is also a great article on Anthropology. As the article is somewhat long, I've pasted some excellent parts of it below (but I encourage you to click over and read the entire thing!)


Wade begins by giving a short historical background on anthropological thinking in the early part of the last century. One of these theories, that of cultural evolution, envisioned "societies as stages in a linear progression of advancement, leading, as they conceived it, from from savagery to barbarism to civilisation." Or, that there was an evolution that all societies went through, advancing over time from savage to civilized in the same sequence, and clearly the civilized peoples were the ideal goal.


Franz Boas was the first to posit that cultural variation is produced by diverse mechanisms and "that all cultures share essentially the same mental acuity."

From the article:
This ethnographic orientation, distilled in the concept of cultural relativism, was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was Einstein's theory of relativity in the field of physics. It became the central revelation of modern anthropology. Cultures do not exist in some absolute sense; each is but a model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of intellectual and spiritual choices made, however successfully, many generations before. The goal of the anthropologist is not just to decipher the exotic other, but also to embrace the wonder of distinct and novel cultural possibilities, that we might enrich our understanding of human nature and just possibly liberate ourselves from cultural myopia, the parochial tyranny that has haunted humanity since the birth of memory.

Whether this intellectual capacity and potential is exercised in stunning works of technological innovation, as has been the great historical achievement of the West, or through the untangling of the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth – a primary concern, for example, of the Aborigines of Australia – is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive insights and cultural priorities. There is no hierarchy of progress in the history of culture, no Social Darwinian ladder to success. The Victorian notion of the savage and the civilised, with European industrial society sitting proudly at the apex of a pyramid of advancement that widens at the base to the so-called primitives of the world, has been thoroughly discredited – indeed, scientifically ridiculed for the racial and colonial notion that it was, as relevant to our lives today as the belief of 19th-century clergymen that the Earth was but 6,000 years old.

Franz Boas
In his reflection on Diamond's works, Wade writes:
The other peoples of the world are not failed attempts at modernity, let alone failed attempts to be us. They are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? When asked this question, the cultures of the world respond in 7000 different voices, and these answers collectively comprise our human repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species as we continue this never-ending journey.

Traditional societies do not exist to help us tweak our lives as we emulate a few of their cultural practices. They remind us that our way is not the only way.

The voices of traditional societies ultimately matter because they can still remind us that there are indeed alternatives, other ways of orienting human beings in social, spiritual and ecological space. This is not to suggest naively that we abandon everything and attempt to mimic the ways of non-industrial societies, or that any culture be asked to forfeit its right to benefit from the genius of technology. 

By their very existence the diverse cultures of the world bear witness to the folly of those who say that we cannot change, as we all know we must, the fundamental manner in which we inhabit this planet. This is a sentiment that Jared Diamond, a deeply humane and committed conservationist, would surely endorse.

Jared Diamond
And if you're super into Anthropological theory, read through the comments on the article and jump in on the arguments about whether this is a fair review of Diamond, or if IQ can measure intelligence in every culture. 
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...