eh ya hey ya eh yo
long days in heaven, short days in hell. earth days are ok, for the frog in the well
alexalexyang [et] gmail [dork] com
alexalexyang [et] gmail [dork] com
every time i go to a nicely prestigious conference, the speakers are from politics, from business and the hard sciences. where the speakers are social scientists, they are hardly the type to spend time on fieldwork. no, they spend their time in the library and in the office, far from the site of their research subjects.
why is it that we accord these people so much prestige but the moment one shows a hint of alliance with the common man, the villager and the peasant instead of with the abstract ideals of development, progress and big capital, one is struck off as irrational?
we marginalize the people who hold more precise knowledge and we refuse to listen to them, going so far as to suppress their work. we listen to and applaud instead the empty niceties and honeyed words of prominent personalities whose last time among the people they claim to serve was when they were children, if at all they had that opportunity.
if we really took the humanities and the social sciences seriously, if we really took the knowledge in things like tedtalks seriously, if we really aren’t hypocrites, the world wouldn’t be in the state it’s in today.
