Temptations

I have never been very good at resisting temptations. Especially ones involving books. Although I admit that I did not even try very hard when I saw the most recent list of books on sale from The David Brown Book Company. I found a couple of very interesting titles at laughable prices: Letters from the Desert by Margaret Drower (2004), which contains letters and journals of Flinders Petrie and his wife, Hilda; and Women Travellers in the Near East by Sarah Searight (2005). I will try to find time to comment the books here after I have received and read them.

When I was a child, I dreamed of becoming an explorer. I read books about expeditions to the little known corners of the world and was an avid follower of the TV documentary series "The Silk Road", a Japanese-Chinese co-production filmed in the late 70's and shown in the Finnish telly in the early 80's. It was probably this dream which unconsciously drove me when I applied to study ethnology in the first place. Later, when it had become clear that I was not to follow the Finnish academics of the 19th century into expeditions in Siberia (I mean the ones who went voluntarily; a number of Finns were exiled there because the Tsar did not like their views), I turned my interest into archaeology. It seemed to promise at least the uncomfortable accommodation and not-too-good meals on digs, if not the excitement of discovering new territories and peoples. In hindsight, my ending up spending several seasons in Jordan, camping on a mountaintop*, was just a logical continuation of the kind of career choices I have made.

"The Silk Road" is currently being rebroadcasted on YLE Teema. And I still dream of traveling the Silk Road all the way through Central Asia to China, preferably on horse- and camelback.

*Although, truth to be told, the camp was relatively comfortable and the food was actually good if a little monotonous.

Reality TV

I don't, as a rule, watch reality TV. I can basically understand Idols or something similar - singing contests are, after all, nothing new in television. But there is an aspect to these TV shows that makes me wonder, and that is the aspect of purposefully humiliating the contestants. The Weakest Link was pretty lame by today's standards. The nastiness of the judges in Idols is legendary, but even then you can - at least in theory - hate the evil judges and feel sorry for the poor sod who has made a fool of him/herself. (Except that it is in the nature of most of us to side with the winner.) The worst I find shows like Fear Factor, where people are practically competing to shame themselves by doing disgusting things. (I admit I also wonder at the people who are willing to brave this televisioned humiliation in front of millions of watchers for their five minutes of fame. What kind of a sad person wants to be famous for eating s*t in the telly?)

Public humiliation used to be a form of punishment. Not long ago in our schools you might be told to go and stand in the corner for misbehaving in the classroom. A little longer while ago you would be put in the stocks for socially unacceptable behaviour, and other people would come to leer at you. Even in the more gruesome forms of punishment, such as whipping, cutting of the hand, or execution, the publicity of the punishment added an element of shame to it. By all accounts the public punishments tended to be great fun for the audience, though. The ancient Romans had really understood the amusement value, and made a spectacle of the executions of criminals.*

Most of us enlightened western people would probably detest the stocks as a form of punishment, not to mention cutting of body parts or throwing people to the lions. However, we seem to find other people's humiliation quite acceptable amusement. When our attitudes towards other people's psychic integrity are like this, do you really need to ask why our kids torment each other in schools? If it is wrong to humiliate another person, how can you watch it in the telly and say it is just a harmless passtime?

* I am not going to be greatly surprised if in the near future we see in a reality TV show people actually maiming each other. The reality TV survives by being shocking, and the more people see, the more they get used to seeing. And after all, who could oppose a modern version of gladiators - as long as it is between consenting adults?

Athens, here I come

Just a brief note: I am going to Athens in early April. A Nordic post-grad seminar will take place. The theme of the seminar is Landscape archaeology, to which the subject of my dissertation fits very well indeed. So I applied and was accepted. Amazingly enough, although I have been to Greece thrice, I have never been to Athens. That is the problem of business travels: you don't get to choose your destinations. Greece in April does not sound too bad, either, when we are still waiting for spring to come here in Helsinki.

Back in the business

I finally submitted the revised version of the article. This editing process has been a very interesting lesson in academic publishing. And I swear that article is cursed, because everything went wrong with it, repeatedly, right down to when I finally sent the text and the - ahem - quite large illustration files. One of which ended in some kind of a loop somewhere in the ether and kept bouncing into the mailbox of a certain respectable and very soon - understandably - extremely annoyed person. I hope it has stopped doing that by now. And now let's not talk about it anymore. Ever.

Incidentally, I've decided to write a monograph after all.

This is also an explanation for my long silence. It is not that I ran out of things to rant about. I was just too busy with everything else. I made some notes though, and might return to some of the subjects if irritated enough. There are also plans for this year, besides finishing my dissertation, of course. You'll hear more about those in due time.

An appeal for KOTUS

Dear readers, if you have not yet signed the appeal for KOTUS (Research Institute for the Languages of Finland), please do it now. The institute is going to be hit hard by the so-called governmental productivity program I was ranting about in an earlier post. With the new additions to the program, they will lose 34 offices - about a third of the total they have.

The state has the policy for giving at least BA level education to 60% of each age group. At the same time they are heavily cutting down the number of civil servants - the governemental sector has traditionally been a large employer for those with education in humanities or social science. Young people, don't do like I did and train for something you will never get a job in. Go to vocational training and learn to be plumbers and electricians! At least those jobs cannot be outsourced to China.

More ranting about university policy

Today's Helsingin Sanomat again made me choke on my morning coffee. University of Helsinki is going to cut the number of different departments from the current 80 down to 40. The aim is to get departments with at least 10 professors each. (Here a link to the news at the University internet site, in Finnish only. I tried to find it in English but apparently this is not something the University wants to make internationally known.)

This massive amalgamation of departments is ostensibly related to the change of the legislation concerning universities. After the new law comes into force the departments will become financial units, which is argued to justify this shake-up. The people responsible for the decision also claim that it will enable more flexible resources for teaching and research and improve the possibilities for departmental co-operation with external partners. Bulls*t.

Let us take an example from real life. Several years ago now, the departments of archaeology, ethnology and folklore were incorporated into the Institute of Cultural Studies, and to this cocktail were added the fields of museology and marine history, which have no professorships. This statistically raised the number of professors within one department from one to three. However, because the three fields are rather different from each other, it did not in any way influence the resources available for teaching. Each field continued to teach and research as before. It did not become easier for students to do minors in the other subjects within the same department. I have understood that the fight about who gets the money did intensify, though.

What I would see as a reform beneficial for teaching and research would be getting more teaching and research staff in a particular field. I can't help turning black* with envy every time I recall the number of staff at the University of Leicester School of Archaeology and Ancient History.

*According to a friend of mine, being green with envy means just feeling envious. Black with envy embodies also feeling murderous.

Virtual teaching

or: If a tree falls in a forest but there is no-one to hear it, will it still make a sound falling?

I am not convinced by my experience in virtual teaching so far. For one thing, it is a really dreary monologue for the teacher, who has no means of judging how the audience is responding. If it is as dull for the students, they are probably half-asleep, or else most of them have left and gone home. All potential for interaction is lost by the fact that the students are sitting in a classroom and each group has only one computer for communicating back to me and to the other groups, with no microphone, so the only means of asking questions is by typing them. Finnish students are not famous for being communicative anyway, quite on the contrary, but in comparison with this virtual course the discussion on the other one I have been teaching is lively. Despite all the technology involved, I feel this is going backwards in time, to the good old days when a professor would enter the classroom, give his lecture and leave, without any interruption from the students intent on absorbing his words of wisdom.

However, in the light of recent discussion revolving around Finnish university policies , I fear I am really witnessing the future. The government is also planning to cut down thousands of governmental jobs in the name of a productivity program - as if e.g. social security or educational sector is a company operating by the laws of quartal capitalism*. That is so absurd it would make you laugh if it was not real. So, I can see how alluring the idea must be for the decision-makers: By employing one teacher only you can teach (in a very broad sense of the word, but who cares as long as the statistics look nice?) students anywhere in the country with negligible material costs. Lo and behold, we have invented the next best thing after the duck laying gold eggs.

*And see where that principle has led us... It never fails to confound me how these companies can make more and more money by constantly closing factories and kicking out workers. In the past having to close down factories would have been a sign of impending disaster for the company but now it just causes their share price to soar. I confess my utter and absolute bafflement.