Reading Response 1

The following are responses to assigned readings from The New World Reader: Thinking and Writing about the Global Community, edited by Gilbert H. Muller.

“Polygamy” by A. G. Mojtabai

1) The artful narrative lead that A. G. Mojtabai employs to open her essay “Polygamy” establishes Mojtabai’s background and outlook in the story, effectively placing the reader in the outsider position with which they must approach the essay’s topic.

Mojtabai almost immediately demonstrates to the reader that she is the misinformed stranger in a strange land by contrasting her preconceptions of the Iran with her perceived reality. Mojtabi describes her ideas before she came to the country that she would be greeted by “nightingales and roses,” and how instead she’s seen nothing but “high proprietary walls” and only heard the din of “street hawkers and traffic.” The culture from which Mojtabai comes clearly has influenced how she expected the environment to be. This influence has also influenced how Mojtabai expects certain institutions, like marriage, to be, and again, Mojtabai’s preconceptions will soon be challenged

Mojtabai immediately translates how this landscape misconception applies to the subject of polygamy by broaching the topic, in unconventional fashion, in the fourth paragraph. Rather than bring up the issue of polygamy head-on, Mojtabai slyly allows her father-in-laws words “What do you think of this?” and the shocking “s” on the end of wives to lay out the central issue of her piece (129). Here, Mojtabai explicitly lays out her roll, and that of her readers, in approaching the tricky polygamy subject. Mojtabai reminds the readers that she, like they, are “anthropologist[s] confronting opacity—the mind of the stranger” (129). And unlike in perceiving the country, where she allowed preconceived ideas to affect her impression of the landscape, Mojtabai is leaving her ethnocentric notions at the door. As she explains, “My judgment, when it came, wouldn’t be narrow, biased or culture-bound” (129). Mojtabai has cued the reader into the open, accepting mindset she expects them to have in reading the article, and now she and they are ready to proceed.

6) In mainstream America’s ever-raging sense of self-superiority, the idea of marriage continues to be an issue on which we refuse to bend. From the ages to genders of involved parties, Americans continue to see marriages outside the one, 18 or older man and one, 18 or older woman that occur around the world and in certain U.S. states, as shocking, repulsive, or an abomination.

Though I can recognize the fallacy in this way of thinking, I, too, have difficulty in accepting the idea of polygamy in many Middle Eastern countries. The reasoning that Mojtabai provides—decimation of the male population in warfare, a Koranic idea of shared love for multiple wives— is perfectly reasonable, and I agree, as she notes, that “a polygamous marriage [can] work” (131). Indeed, if all parties in the arrangement are content, and were not coerced into the marriage by relatives or society, I have not problem with polygamy specifically.

My major qualm with polygamy in many Middle Eastern countries is that it stands as another example of male-dominance in these societies. It makes sense that in countries where women face harsher restriction on what they wear, where they can go, what they can learn, and with whom they can speak, the fact that polyandrous relationships exist almost, if not entirely, with males having multiple wives. Though not having the right to marry multiple husbands may not bother these women, such as ideas like driving are casually dismissed as unimportant by many in the gender, the right to a multiple-spouse relationship still stands as one of the many gentlemen-only clubs in these societies.

“The Noble Feat of Nike” by Johan Norberg

3) “I traveled to Ho Chi Minh to examine the effects of multinational corporations on poor countries” (174).

By introducing this sentence in to his essay “The Noble Feat of Nike,” Johan Norberg is framing his arguments in favor of globalization as an insider’s account. “Listen to the man who’s seen, first-hand, what good multinationals can do in foreign lands,” the account seems to scream. But with any first-person account, a necessary question arises: how much is what the person saw, and how much is what they wanted to see?

For the most part, Norberg does a good job of substantiating his pro-globalization claims with specific numbers from the country—wages at the Nike plant are $54 a month, 3 times higher than state-owned enterprises; in 10 years, 2.2 million children have gone from labor to education; poverty in the country has been halved. If these numbers are to be believed, they provide strong support for Norberg’s more editorial claims, such as the workers look happier, want jobs for their families, and sure do like their air conditioning.

The responsibility of the newspaper or journal running Norberg’s story is to ensure that these numbers are to be believed. Far too often in mainstream media, fabrications and plagiarisms have found their way into major stories, and though this is ultimately the writer’s fault, the publication is also culpable. Norberg’s claims are fairly simple and should be easy to double-check with the government and world economic agencies. The publication running this story is compelled to examine these statistics to ensure a Jason Blair or Stephen Glass incident doesn’t happen here.

Of course, Norberg’s essay is not infallible. While examine the effects of higher paying jobs in third-world countries, he neglects to look into the effect this has on locally-owned businesses, and on inflation rates in the countries. Additionally, how many of the positive changes, such as increased child education, are tied directly to multinational corporations, and how many are simply a byproduct of a changing economy and society? The exact causal relationship is unexplored. However, by using first-person narrative accounts buttressed by concrete statistics, Norberg paints a convincing argument in favor or multinational expansion.

“Eat All of Your McAfrika, Honey . . .” by Carol Norris

2) When discussing issues as complex as multinational globalization and trade agreements and NGOs, it is important to adopt a keep-it-simple-stupid mentality. This rule is demonstrated by Carol Norris in her essay “Eat All of Your McAfrika, Honey . . .”

In the essay, Norris brings up complex ideas, references a variety of international policies and nuances, as well as problems in a globalized world. To make her readers understand the issues with which she is grappling, Norris uses simple examples and terms to illustrate her ideas. The effect of this strategy is two-fold. First, readers will more easily grasp the ideas she is referencing, and have a better time comprehending the base issues without getting too cut up in the confusing nuances. Second, Norris makes herself sympathetic to her readers. Were she to use long, rambling explanations and an academic vocabulary, Norris would be an outsider, a strange writer talking nonsense. Instead, she’s one of us—an understandable, believable contemporary.

Norris achieves her informal, colloquial style through continuous use of simple idioms and casual expressions. When describing how many readers will want her to view a McDonalds marketing scheme as truly honoring the suffering and those helping them in Africa, she was “see the cup half full” (218). When referencing that the United States uses irradiated beef, as opposed to pasteurized beef, Norris joking acts as if they’re the same, writing “Po-TAY-to, Po-TAH-to. Whatever” (219). This sense of down-home humor and sarcasm helps bring abstract and complex ideas down to the level many readers can understand, and pushes her readers into siding with her argument.

“Talking Trash” by Andy Rooney

3) Andy Rooney structures his essay “Talking Trash” as a personal narrative to illustrate a larger problem. By looking at his own habits of consumption and disposal, Rooney is trying to get the reader to extrapolate the effects of his behavior into those of the world as a whole. Rooney runs through an average day in his life—going to the grocery store, picking up dry cleaning, going about is routine—to show how much garbage is generated by every small action we take. By providing these examples in terms of chores most every American goes through, Rooney creates an effective and empathetic argument that Americans are living in a consume-and-discard culture.

Once area of weakness in Rooney’s arguments, however, is his lack of substantial statistics to back up his assertions. It is fairly easy to complain that people throw away too much garbage; it is much more difficult to provide concrete numbers demonstrating this wastefulness. Rooney’s ideas of the amount of excess packaging and excess waste are perfectly sensible, but in terms of cold, hard statistics, he provides only one: 24 million pounds as the amount of garbage New York City residents discard every day. The rest of Rooney’s figures are simple speculation, with ramblings like, “It would be interesting to conduct a serious test to determine what percentage of everything we discard. It must be more than 25%” (398). This test likely has been done, and would have provided a more concrete foundation to Rooney’s story, had he taken the time to research it. Instead, Rooney provides an amusing but ultimately unsubstantiated article on American overconsumption.