or at least, I'm not on the road and I have internet access at the moment. So this weekend my cousin got married and a lot of stuff was going through my head so this blog will be a shade more personal and eclectic than usual.
On the educational tip:
At a picnic the day after the wedding, a section of family members were hanging out, not clear on how to describe how we are related to one another. I mean, we could say that so-and-so's mother is the sister of the mother of the bride etc. But does that make us second cousins once removed or first cousins twice removed or what?
One of the guests helped us to figure it all out, and if you are interested, here is a nice chart which helps to describe how it works. Roughly, saying 1st cousin, or 2nd cousin, or 3rd cousin, etc. is an indication of how many generations you have to go back before finding a common ancestor. (So 1st cousins share a pair of grandparents, 2nd cousins share great-grandparents, etc.) And once, twice, three times, etc. removed is an indication of whether the cousins themselves are in different generations and how far apart they are (So the children of your 1st cousins are your first cousins once removed)
Actually, that reminds me of a talk I attended where Juan Cole (whose blog, Informed Comment is in my links section) described the problems US troops were facing in Iraq. Part of the difficulty was that when US actions led to the deaths of Iraqis, very often their cousins (where "cousins" is a potentially huge set of people) would come out of the woodwork wanting to avenge the deaths of their kin. Cole remarked that some of the military forces with a deeper understanding of Iraqi culture decided it was less trouble to pay the blood price to the families instead of ignoring their desire for satisfaction.
On the political/historical tip:
At this same picnic I had an interesting conversation with a friend of the family which helps provide a decent follow-up to a previous entry about race in Cuba. Basically he was arguing that even before Fidel's revolution there were significant numbers of Afro-Cubans in the Cuban government, and that in certain respects things have gone backwards since the revolution. Furthermore, even among the original revolutionaries who were in the mountains with Fidel, or those who stayed in the cities and helped organize and train the masses to prepare the way for the revolution there were many Afro-Cubans but that afterwards, Fidel found several of these individuals threatening and had many of them executed. The general point (which is not often articulated by the left) was that Fidel wasn't faithful to the true ideals of the revolution and ultimately betrayed it. Even many of the Black revolutionaries from the US who sought asylum in Cuba, became dissatisfied and disillusioned and moved elsewhere. This friend of the family (who had personal knowledge of many of the anti-Batista Afro-Cubans alluded to above, also recommended Carlos Moore's book Castro, the Blacks and Africa which was mentioned in earlier entry.
On the religious tip:
The wedding itself was beautiful. It was an outdoor, afrocentric ceremony by the water. Other than a single prayer made "in Jesus' name" nothing else really marked the ceremony as particularly Christian. Along with a number of other things happening in my life, it made me wonder what is going on in American religiosity? A lot of people seem to be moving away from the religious traditions of their childhood and are attracted to newer movements and practices which are consciously chosen in adulthood.
Open Question(s) the United States getting further away from mainstream Judeo-Christian religious practice? Or closer? Should Islam in the US be thought of as a mainstream movement or as a "new religious movement"? What will the religious landscape look like a couple of decades down the road? Will the alternative movements stay on the edge or do any of the new religious movements have the potential to become more mainstream and more organized?
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