The following is a post by Stephen Most, author of Stories Make the World: Reflections on Storytelling and the Art of the Documentary.

Two portraits of the young man I once was, one oil-painted, the other shaped in clay, watch over my study. More than half a century after they were made I portrayed the painter, Pedro Azabache, and the sculptor, Eduardo Calderón, in the opening chapters of Stories Make the World.

My friendships with them began unexpectedly and unforgettably. As a college student I received a grant I hadn’t applied for to go to a country I knew nothing about where languages I did not understand were spoken. I had not even studied anthropology, the field in which I was supposed to do summer research. However, I did know the destination: a pueblo named Moche.

The only book I could find about Moche mentioned a descendant of Mochica Indians who had studied painting in Lima. When I met him, Pedro Azabache led a school of fine arts in Trujillo. Seen in retrospect, my request, uttered in barely coherent Spanish, was absurd. I told him I wanted to live at his home in Moche and write about his life. The maestro replied, “Encantado.”

My friendship with Eduardo Calderón, who taught wood and ceramic sculpture in Azabache’s school of fine arts, also began encantado, with enchantment. Calderón invited me to his adobe-walled home to make the bust that now rests on my cabinet. Soon after I got there, after he had plopped clay on a small round table and after his wife, María, served us a wooden bowl filled with chicha, a corn liquor, Calderón asked, “Do you know that I am a brujo?” I did know that word, having read, in John Gillin’s Moche, A Peruvian Coastal Community, about brujeria, which means both sorcery and its antidote, a way of healing physical and psychological maladies. On the radio a cumbia was playing as Calderón, gliding into a corner of his open-air studio, pulled the head and wings of a pelican skin over his shoulders and started dancing. Soon we were wearing the bird in turn as we danced to the catchy beat.

“Esteban Most” by Pedro Azabache

That summer, one of Azabache’s students who spoke English, José Li Ning, helped me translate the artist’s journals. A sentence I puzzled over, learning the subjunctive, was something Azabache’s father had said to him: “I hope my son knows to make good use of his time.” Those wise words applied, I felt, to me. Li Ning also came to the first mesa, or all-night healing ceremony, I attended. As Calderón presided over a ritual the pre-Incaic Mochica sculpted on pottery a thousand years ago, I realized that I, the unlikely recipient of a grant to do ethnology, was making good use of my time.

After that summer, wanting better to know my Peruvian friends and their world, I returned to the Trujillo region, starting with a two-year stint in the Peace Corps. Calderón invited me to be the godfather of his daughter Josefina, which made us compadres, friends with family bonds. Years later, his granddaughter Rosi Liliana became my second goddaughter.

Decades after that, while writing the reflections on storytelling and the art of the documentary that comprise Stories Make the World, I realized: both Azabache and Calderón were storytellers. Both combined a visual medium with narrative in different forms and with different techniques than are used in documentary making. And we all moved within a current flowing from cave painting ceremonies tens of thousands of years ago and surely from visual and verbal representations of the world made long before those. I had defined myself in terms of the specific medium in which I worked, whether as a playwright, a screenwriter, or an author. Only while writing Stories Make the World did I grasp a larger identity that potentially connects every human being, for we all tell stories; our lives are shaped by them and by the stories others tell.

Wanting to share memories of Azabache and Calderón with my goddaughters and other Peruvian friends, I asked Li Ning to translate the first two chapters of my book. He and his son, a professor of English, did so. Better yet, Li Ning found a magazine that will publish the Spanish version of those chapters. I’m glad my portraits of the men who portrayed me many years ago, whose friendship enriched my life, will be widely seen in their country before long.

See an earlier blog post from Stephen Most here, and learn more about the book Stories Make the World: Reflections on Storytelling and the Art of the Documentary here. To stream and download films in Stories Make the World, go to www.videoproject.com/Stories.

by Cecília Tomori

For World Breastfeeding Week, we’re delighted to offer FREE access to a chapter from Nighttime Breastfeeding for a limited time. Click here to access this chapter, titled Embodied Cultural Dilemmas: An Anthropological Approach to the Study of Nighttime Breastfeeding and Sleep.

Nighttime Breastfeeding addresses the central question: why do so many American parents struggle with nighttime breastfeeding and sleep? I set out to answer this question, which emerged from my preliminary fieldwork, using the classic anthropological technique of participant observation. I spent many months immersed in fieldwork, and then many more surrounded by all the materials I had collected – piles of fieldnotes to interview recordings, brochures, photos, and, most importantly, memories of being with families who have graciously let me into their lives. I revisited key moments over and over again – recalling certain phrases, pauses, and gestures, which I could examine through the lenses offered by my anthropological training. Continue Reading »

The following is a post by Davydd J. Greenwood, Goldwin Smith Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, Cornell University

The following are some management verities that abound in current university administrations:

• Good universities require highly-paid leaders hired by Boards of Trustees through executive search services.
• Good universities have large administrative staffs, often outnumbering the faculty.
• Good university leaders must impose accountability and quality control to make their university rise in the rankings.
• The cost of higher education will always go up.

All these verities are false as a single example can show. The Mondragón University in the Basque Country with 4,000 students and 4 colleges operating 8 campus locations throughout the Basque Country has a central administrative staff of 3 senior administrators and their secretaries. Highly ranked and successful, it operates daily through collaborative governance including the students, faculty, and staff who “run” the university. If this is possible, then having more managers than workers, having vast administrative overheads, and governing from the apex by imposed authority, are not laws of nature. Mondragón University shows that a successful university business model can be unlike any of our currently over-administered and radically inefficient universities. In science, an exception to the rule demonstrates that the rule is false.

Most explanations of the decline and fall of public higher education blame the corporatization of our institutions and implementation of business models for the problems. First-hand knowledge of innovative private sector organizations show they share more features with Mondragón University than with our current universities.

Successful businesses do not resemble our current universities. These institutions are poorly organized, over-staffed with administrators, and suffer from huge pay disparities and runaway costs. Successful businesses generally are team-based matrix organizations whose cross-disciplinary, cross-functional teams focus on products or key processes. Each team has experts from all relevant stakeholder/functional areas in the organization. The business leaders are coordinators and process champions, not authoritarian bosses. Salary differentials are generally modest. In these well-run organizations, the people who produce the “value” for the organization play a role in structuring and managing operations.

This contrasts sharply with the administrative bloat in universities, the authoritarianism of “parachuted in” academic leaders, and salaries for senior academic administrators that often are 40-50 times higher than those of the secretarial staff and groundskeepers. The power apex is remote from daily work processes and thus leaders cannot make competent management decisions. Nor can they understand why their decisions fail to produce the desired results. Failure instead is blamed on the faculty and the students. Ultimately, these policies prevent working and middle class students from having a high-quality education and gaining the consequent social mobility and civic awareness it can produce.

We are reaching the nadir in this race to the bottom. The only way forward is to create higher education anew through the democratic practices of participatory democracy, as in the Mondragón University. These practices are the core of Action Research. They require all the relevant stakeholders to collaborate in establishing the mission, structures, and practices of the institution. Together they must enact these missions and keep constant evaluation processes going to see how well they are accomplishing the goals they agreed on, making the necessary adjustments to improve on a continuing basis.

The “freedom to teach” and the “freedom to learn” essential to Bildung involves the ongoing recreation and reinforcement of universities that respect and practice academic freedom, academic integrity, and participatory democracy in every organizational dimension. These recreated universities would be schools for democracy and organized to produce Neue-Bildung for the university stakeholders and for society at large.

Critique and wringing of hands is easy; action research to create democratic universities is not. Where a powerful few currently dominate, they will react to any threat to their power and money and fight back. Changing universities into such organizations requires radical moves, the first being understanding that such change is possible. We have laid out the analysis and needed actions in our book, Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy: Action Research in Higher Education.

The current quagmires created by the neo-liberals in universities (and most other institutions) offers some hope. Most of the stakeholders, regardless of their politics, are aware that the current university system is broken. What matters now is to have concrete plans for a way out of the quagmire and to be ready for an arduous campaign to recreate universities, an essential element in the rebirth of democracy itself.

Learn more about Davydd J. Greenwood’s new book Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy: Action Research in Higher Education here.