maandag 30 november 2009

The world would be tastier is it was made of vegan apple-vanilla cake

I can't stand it when people watch over my shoulder while I am writing. I don't know why, but it causes an instant writer's block in my head. No words want to be spotted while they are being in the proces of creation, as if they are scared to show their bare skin to the unknown light. Maybe that is why my writing lost its fluency, why my blog is relatively empty the last months, why I write and delete, write and delete, write and decide to leave it for a moment when I can say it all at once, in the right words, in the right order, in the voice that fits the situation.

Words are struggling with me. They try to put themselves in vague conceptual styles while ordering my fingers to write as a real social scientist. I fall in the trap of clichés of 'however', 'furthermore' and 'nevertheless'. I struggle back, but time falls short and deadlines give lazy words some meters ahead in the race towards graduation. Why does it feel as if I can't live fully, when words are blocked and leave my mind without oxygen? I can still scream 'Climate Change' in multiple languages, write it with question or exclamation mark, with a bit STOP-sign in front of it or make humans responsible for it in some anthropogenic phrasing. Seeing the whole picture would help... but it seems like that picture still needs to be taken. Why isn't the world made of vegan apple-vanilla cake. It would make everything so much tastier.

zondag 22 november 2009

Think about It!


I might not have been an active blogger on this site during the last months, Therefore I invite you to read my Climate Change posts on this blog page

Comments are more than welcome :)

dinsdag 3 november 2009

Freewriting, the neverending story of Meat and God

They asked an academic assignment, they got the flow of my thoughts. A freewriting exercise, writing down my thoughts for 10 minutes, without stopping, without looking back, without correcting, ... A stream of my consciousness online after some months of silence.

Assignment Cultural Anthropology: Freewriting on Auroville (Auroville is the intentional community in South India where I will do fieldwork for three months during the Winter and Spring of 2010)

I am a vegan, a strict vegetarian who is confused about the way the world has become what it currently is. Sometimes I think everybody is living in a bubble, a contradictory society in which most of our behaviours don’t make any sense, but nevertheless we continue our daily habits, just because we are used to it. One of the behaviours that shocks me most is the fact people eat animals. Most of the time I repress the thought and the reality of it, because it is too cruel to have those images in your head all day, but if I take the effort to reflect upon the meat my roommates are preparing while I bake my vegan burger and vegetables, it feels as if I am falling in a deep black hole through the burning middle of the earth and get boomeranged back to the kitchen where I stand dizzly staring at the red bloody intestines of what still was an animal some days before it landed upon that table. How often have I dreamt it was all not true, that slaughterhouses were a strange, horrible Halloweenfantasy, that nobody would even think of hurting, capturing and especially killing animals for no clear reasons except the craving for the ‘taste’ of ‘meat’. How often have I dreamt it was different, that eating ‘meat’ belonged to the past, that it was something humanity looked back upon with feelings of guilt and shame, just as they look back at genocides, slavery and wars. “We didn’t know better”. Maybe it will be like that in some decades. Maybe my grandchildren will ask me how I could stand growing up in a society where billions and billions of animals were kept in industrial ‘meat’factories as if they were insentient commodities, to be freely exploited from body to skin and mother milk, because humans are the top of the hierarchy and a so called God (in which many of them don’t believe anyway if they don’t feel like it) gave humans the power to do with those ‘beasts’ whatever they want. I don’t believe that a God, if he ever existed or still exists, intended this. I checked the Bible and the Christian God at least literally states on the third page of the Holy Book that the Paradise ought to be vegetarian. People are given plants and vegetables to eat. God does not say the animals are ‘free food’ , catch them, breed them and use them however you want. I have dreamt about Utopias for many years. As a child I already had the tendency to dream away and imagine myself in a world in which I was a talking cat fighting injustice towards animals. Nowadays, I am a student, fighting climate change (as sustainable goals seems to be more accepted to fight for than the causes that are closest to my heart and are in a way connected because eating meat does not only clash with some ethical visions, but also has an big impact on climate change as 18 percent or (according to recent research) even more) of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming are directly and indirectly connected to the meat and milk industry. Also taking action for human rights is seen as more socially acceptable. However, it always makes me sad to find people in Human Rights activism, who don’t see or don’t want to see the connections between environmental issues, animal exploitation and human rights violations.

Still, in Auroville I find hope. In my imagination it is the vegetarian Utopia I always dreamt of. At the same time I am realistic. I will not find the lost paradise that God in the Bible took away from human beings. Even in an intentional community there will always be human conflicts, misunderstandings about interpretations of values and morals, intergenerational and intercultural differences. In my research I took the sidestep from looking at food habits to focusing on youth, because in my imagination youth have the power or agency to choose if they follow in the tradition of Auroville as an Utopian, sustainable settlement or if they move out and search for another lifestyle abroad or in a neighbouring city. Still, I realize that I maybe see it too black and white. As an anthropologist it is absolutely not wise to think in dichotomies of ‘the traditional community’ versus ‘the modern West’. Of course it is not so polarized and I am curious how the Western lifestyles influences, or better said ‘interacts’ with the idealized and utopian lifestyle in Auroville, using alternative energy, eating local vegetarian food and working towards human unity by means of community living, sharing and spirituality.

I don’t know if I will find in Auroville what I am looking for. And I wonder if other Western people like me, who feel this attraction to India and in particular Auroville, also feel a certain discomfort with certain aspects of life in the West. I want to find out how this mechanism of attraction and imagination works and if expectations can ever be fulfilled if you have a certain idealized image about a community. But on the other hand I also want to know if young people who grow up in an environment that, according to me, is a great place to breed environmental values and sustainable food habits think of their community. Do they internalize these values or do they, just like some adolescents in the West get frightened and shocked by their culture and do they develop imaginations of ‘the other side of the world’, the call of the West?

Thanks for visiting!