Hippie Colors

It was more than 59 hours since the lights went out in our subdivision last Thursday at 11 a.m. and were only restored Saturday night. Cable only came on-line Monday so I was part of the crowd that had to watch the UAAP championship game from the many viewing stations on campus.

Some lessons learned from this entire experience:

1. Electric stoves run on electricity. Without electricity, nothing gets cooked. Corollary to this is that automatic rice cookers run on electricity too.  My wife and I are afraid of using LPG (and can’t quite figure out where it will be placed in the kitchen) and our one-burner electric stove is a hold-over from our condo days when LPG was not allowed by the building administration. During the blackout, we were relying on food from cafeterias, restaurants and my mother-in-law who lives eight houses away from us.
2. During times of "disaster", cash matters. As of Friday, ATMs were all not functioning and establishments along Katipunan were not accepting credit card purchases. Thank God it was the weekend (and thank God for my mother-in-law and my mother who are our safety nets).
3. Refrigerators (to preserve food and microwaves (for heating food) run on electricity. The extended blackout reminded me of the lesson I teach in class about the talipapa along Commonwealth Avenue. When I used to live in Fairview, that tilapapa occupied most of the lanes along Commonwealth leaving only two lanes open for traffic. I asked myself once why that talipapa exists and then I realized that it was because the people who live in Manggahan do not have refrigerators and have to buy their food on a daily basis. When the lights went out, my family was also reduced to buying food on a daily basis (because we couldn’t cook the stuff in our freezer because we had an electric stove).

My students also learned that computers and printers run on electricity so some of them were texting me for an extension of the submission of their term papers.

Randy David said something interesting in class yesterday. He said that the reason the repairs were proceeding so slowly is because there aren’t enough electricians to go around. Most of our electricians, he said, are in the Middle East.

The other interesting thought from last week was that the guy in charge of the company that is in charge of transmission lines was replaced a few days before Milenyo hit. Kawawa naman yung successor. Kakapasok pa lang, binagyo na.

A classmate of mine said yesterday that for Durkheim, religion had two functions: (1) to provide moral guidance and (2) to provide a cosmology, i.e. a grand explanation of things. He said that in the age of modernity, the function of providing a cosmology has been taken over by science.

That entire discourse made me wonder if my students think that Theories of Development, amounts to social cosmology. I wonder if they think that when I explain to them the various definitions of development and the various lenses by which we can understand underdevelopment, I sound like I am talking about something fascinating (if they find it fascinating at all) but distant, something that that does not apply to them or something which they can do nothing about (precisely because it is too macro). I wonder if what I teach in Theories is equivalent to astronomy, fascinating but irrelevant to everyday life. Like one person said, why should I care if Pluto is a planet?

I figure that students like philosophy and psychology because it speaks to their everyday experience, it resonates with questions of their heart. I figure that students like management and mis (and development management) and all the other applied courses because they are practical and will lend them a good (financially secure job) after graduation.

I wonder if students are looking for that in their schooling, not so much a social cosmology but knowledge that is useful for understanding their everyday experience or knowledge that will be useful for everyday work.

Sometimes, depending on the teacher, students also appreciate socio-anthro, I think precisely because it speaks to their everyday experience of norms, inclusion/exclusion, etc.

I still have to teach Theory because social cosmology (more than astronomy) does lay the conditions for everyday practice but I think I have to situate the two more clearly (maybe start the class precisely by saying that social cosmology provides the framework for everyday practice and providing examples). 

Studying sociology, and studying Bourdieu in particular, has been good for me because I am learning to appreciate the world in a different way which seems to be more human and less like that of a social clinician conducting an autopsy on a patient that is still alive.