Lynn Hooker, associate professor of Central Eurasian Studies, describes the variety and reach of Romani music.

            Sometimes it seems that social scientists and environmentalists have taken ownership of the world, or at least the study of the world.  Despite the fact that global competency is meant to touch all academic disciplines, discussions usually begin and end with anthropologists, political scientists and the like.  We often forget that in the arts—music, drama, literature, painting—the crossing of cultural boundaries is commonplace and has been for a very long time.  Thus it was good to see that the 2013 Global Mini-Conference, a public portion of the Institute for Curriculum and Campus Internationalization (ICCI—the directors don’t like it referred to as Icky), included amidst sessions on safe water, sexual violence, coffee production, climate change, human trafficking, and the like, a couple of sessions that spoke to the function of art in a global context.

            One of those sessions investigated issues of artistic tradition and popular culture.  Lynn Hooker, of IU’s Central Eurasian Studies department, introduced Romani history and culture, with its diaspora extending back more than a millennium.  The musical world of the Roma was determined by the ‘Gypsy’ epithet imposed on them by the cultures they passed through.  Ever persecuted, they were perceived to be capable only of “lower” art forms.  However compelling, accomplished, original—the music of the Roma, at least as it was generated from within its own culture, was not awarded status as serious art.  Romani music was permitted a place in high culture only when “purified” by composers who themselves were not Romani: Liszt, Bartók, Brahms;  the list of composers influenced by Romani music is very long indeed.

            Instead, Romani music blended with local folk music and became a feature of popular venues, weddings, public houses, holiday celebrations.  As an essential part of popular art, it carries meaning and value to larger numbers of people than “high art” can, and has become equally indispensable.  Its popularity offers a livelihood to Romani musicians, many of whom have established worldwide reputations, such as Hungarian restaurant musician Sándor Lakatos, Macedonian singer Esma Redzepova (Queen of the Gypsies), or the hiphop group gipsy.cz.

            Jennifer Goodlander, of the Department of Theatre and Drama, then introduced the popular tradition of wayang kulit, shadow puppets, whose performances can last days and must go on even when no one is watching.  The tradition of shadow puppets is as ancient and revered as the Hindu epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, whose roots are older than the Bible.  The puppeteer has almost the rank of a priest.  The puppets themselves have special status.  Though seen only in shadow on a translucent screen, they are lovingly and brightly painted.  There is even a ceremony of marriage between puppeteer and puppets.

            Goodlander has studied with a puppeteer in Bali. She demonstrated how this tradition revivifies itself with each new generation by bringing in local color and details relevant to the audience of the day.  After introducing and animating the ancient character of one particular clown, she flashed onto the screen an image of Homer Simpson.  The aptness of the analogy was undeniable.

            Romani music provides connections to Romani past, but was culturally pigeonholed by external ethnic hostility.  Despite that prejudice, it absorbed local folk traditions wherever it went and earned a significant role in popular culture all over Europe.  Shadow puppetry, another art of the people, provides a revered link to ancient culture via an avenue that is constantly repaved with elements of the popular familiar present. 

This shadow puppet, slightly smaller than normal, was made for the tourist trade. The elaborate pattern of holes carved into the leather (which show on the shadow screen) and the detailed coloring (which doesn’t) are typical.

The stories are ancient and the characters in them well known to their audience. The shadows lend mystery and magic to the legends they tell.

Jennifwer Goodlander, assistant professor of theatre and drama, demonstrates the art of wayang kulit and Homer Simpson.

Is our historical record being destroyed?

The government is destroying our history.  Matthew Connelly did not say this in his recent presentation as part of IU’s Framing the Global Project.  But those who heard him couldn’t be faulted if they left with that impression.  In his lecture on the history and future of official secrecy, Connelly, professor of history at Columbia, ranged from sovereignty, to diplomacy, to government secrecy, to the habits of archivists, and the power of computing to foil the best efforts to hide and destroy. 

The statistics are daunting.   The government produces about 270 million pages of classified documents each year.  Changes in regulations over the past decade—more documents tagged secret, fewer individuals with the authority to change the tags—have led to about 200 million documents a year being withheld from public scrutiny.  The result is that by 2010, the government had accumulated 9 billion pages of classified material.   

One immediate impression is that the government is trying to hide its tracks, to cover its mistakes, and that may be true.  Since we cannot see the documents, we can’t know for sure.  But other motives are at work as well.  Some matters we are better off not knowing—how to create a deadly flu virus for instance, or how to create a nuclear weapon.  Connelly also has concluded from reviewing the metadata of classified documents that much has been retained in classified status to create noise and make it difficult for enemies to ascertain the motives for classification.  And the Supreme Court has made it more difficult for private citizens to accomplish a successful declassification review. 

Other more venial motives are at work as well.  The pile of paper and electronic material has not escaped the notice of government agencies.  The State Department, among others, has set goals for processing the declassification backlog.  The targets for declassification are ambitious, but the agencies have not established sufficient funding to accomplish them. They spend on declassification one twentieth of the amount they spend on classifying documents.  “Archivists are completely overwhelmed,” Connelly explained.   To get the job done, they have had to resort to sampling methods—methods not random and often misguided, Connelly concluded.   In order to manage the workload, whole classes of records are being destroyed. Historians of immigration thus have lost much potential history as immigration and visa application records are thrown away.  Historians interested in sports diplomacy may never know all they need to about the national role in the Olympics because documents tagged to sports may be discarded.  “Only 3-5% of the governments documents are retained,” Connelly said. “I don’t think the agencies know what has been lost.”

 “People who have been trying to stop pushback have been completely outgunned.”  Still, 1.4 billion pages have been declassified.  With so much material, no historian could ever work through it all, so isn’t the destruction a moot point?  Outdated thinking, Connelly would reply. 

Firstly, the habit, fostered by academe’s methods of graduate education, of historians working in isolation will not be the only way for historians to work in the future.  As scientists assemble big, worldwide teams to solve their biggest problems, so historians now have tools that will make it possible to work as teams.  And those tools work best the more they have to operate on.  The application of computers to natural language processing, latent semantic analysis and machine learning has changed the face of linguistic and literary research.  Connelly sees it doing the same to history.  Feed all of these documents into a computer and as the data set becomes ever more massive, the computer will find patterns, clues that will not only reveal what is in the available historical record, but also what might be in the destroyed or redacted documents.

“These records are now valuable in a way they were not in the past. In data mining research, we don’t always know what kind of data is going to be useful.  We need to ask different questions about what is worth preserving.”  By aligning the databases representing the work of large numbers of historians, scholars can find unredacted versions of redacted text.”  With enough of these samples, computers can begin to predict what lies under the large chunks of text blackened out in documents that are released.   That will make it more possible to know if the redacted material contradicts the apparent direction of the text. These processes can analyze classification data that accompanies most government documents to identify linguistic styles–and so make it possible to identify authors.

“How do you have democracy if you don’t know what your government did 40 years ago?” Connelly asked.  With these new tools, and with a new attitude and procedures for handling the massive documentary materials that the government has accumulated, historians “can begin to restore the integrity of the historical record.

Click here for more information and sponsors of the Framing the Global Project.

Journalist Lesley Yarranton describes the difficulties in raising awareness of human trafficking.

            Imagine coming home after work and discovering a body in your backyard.  Some years ago, many who lived in the landing path of Heathrow Airport had that or a similar experience.  Autopsies concluded that all had fallen from a great height, probably from wheel wells as flights lowered their landing gears; victims probably died of cold before they fell. Many were traced to airports in Africa, and investigations there suggested that the individuals had help getting to the wheel wells to stow away, help that may or may not have been voluntary. When the press reported that human trafficking was the most likely explanation behind the deaths, readers in Britain began to recognize the enormity of this issue.

            Lesley Yarranton, a British freelance journalist who has investigated human trafficking since the 1980s, related this series of events during a panel discussion of “Human Trafficking and Media.”  She traced the frustration journalists had in convincing readers of the seriousness of the situation.  “The term itself did not help in generating public attention,” Yarranton explained.  “Human and trafficking are blind words in journalism.” The terms don’t have the impact needed.  Traffic is an annoyance, not a profound, violent offence to another person.  In Britain at least, shocking photos and lurid reports over many years, have convinced the public first, that human trafficking is not confined to other, poorer countries, and second that the issue is not a source of titillation but of shame.

            Yana Hashamova, Associate Professor and Director of the Slavic Center at Ohio State, spoke about her research into attitudes towards trafficking and audience reactions to films that address that issue. She first reported on research she had conducted regarding attitudes towards trafficking in Bulgaria and in the U.S.  Some of her findings:

—  Trafficking in Bulgarians is perceived as something which is not right, unfair. However, when trafficking involves foreigners in Bulgaria, attitudes change.  “It is their own fault” is the predominant answer. And, when it comes to sexual exploitation, public opinion is more likely to “blame” those who engaged in prostitution.

—  American students hold a more general (abstract) view of the “positive aspects” of trafficking while Bulgarians connect the “positive side” to concrete economic opportunities (to avoid poverty in one’s own country). The reasons for trafficking are also perceived differently: Americans believe that the whole society is responsible for it, while Bulgarians ascribe it to “business with people.”   American men exhibit lower interpersonal empathy and higher rape myth acceptance; they show more hostile attitudes towards rape victims.

             Hashamova then turned to the portrayal of trafficking in cinema.  She noted a voyeuristic tendency that exploited the sexual side of trafficking.  Only with more recent films, like Lilya 4 Ever, where all is seen through the woman’s eyes as she is subjected to harrowing and humiliating treatment, does the horrific over the voyeuristic aspect of trafficking come clear.  Americans found many of these movies dissatisfying; they wanted happy endings and acceptable solutions to the problem.  She is pessimistic about the impact cinema can have on the problem because cinematic elements so easily block the “shocking trauma” that trafficking represents.

            The third member of the panel was an undercover detective working in a large urban area on problems of sex trafficking.  He made it very clear that the problem has no easy solutions.  Even cases that he saw as clear cut could be compromised before they could be prosecuted.  Victims were often reluctant to speak or ran away before matters could come to trial.  Getting clear evidence that behavior was forced was difficult.  Prosecutors sometimes did not know the specifics of the trafficking laws on the books or in other instances wanted an airtight case before moving forward.  The detective was pessimistic that the legal system could solve the problem.  He offered up an unsentimental and (to the large audience present) uncomfortable view of the world of the traffickers–which might include parents who sold their daughter into prostitution or domestic servitude to pay off a gambling debt. 

            Although his close experience over many years made him sympathetic to the victims, he engaged in an extensive discussion with a member of the audience over the legalization of prostitution.  “Legalization,” the detective said, “would only make it harder to prosecute trafficking.”  He spoke of the unhelpful side of journalist sensationalism, for example when the press reported for the last Dallas Superbowl that there would be tens of thousands of women trafficked in, when in fact, the police identified 28 cases.  For the Indianapolis Superbowl, eight cases were identified.   Trafficking is more associated with what happens every day than what happens once a year.  And pending cases can be destroyed when journalists release too much information early on.

            Journalists in Britain have had some success at raising public awareness of trafficking as an offence to humanity.  Filmmakers          have made found ways to involve audiences in victims’ suffering and degradation, though such films are hard to watch.  The undercover would like to see (but doesn’t expect to see) more prosecutions, especially of pimps and those in control.  All agree that public awareness of the reality of the issue is the most practical near-term objective, and all agree that media plays an important but ambiguous role in raising awareness.  Exactly how media has succeeded so far, how much its presence impedes and assists, and exactly what the media should do to “solve” the problem are still unanswered questions.

            The panel was organized by Stepanka Korytova, as part of a faculty study group on “The Many Faces of Human Trafficking,” of the International Studies Program and of the College of Arts and Sciences Themester Fall 2012: Good Behavior, Bad Behavior: Molecules to Morality.

Jason Baumgartner, key developer of Sunapsis and Director for International Services in the IU Office of International Services, presented the keynote address at this year's conference.

The International Office management system that came to be called Sunapsis was conceived in 2003 when the U.S. government implemented new rules that required much closer tracking of foreign students studying in the United States.  Increased tracking meant larger and more complex data management; it also meant that a minor failure of reporting could seriously compromise a student’s right to study in the U.S.  To complicate matters, the data that needed to be managed resided in two separate places—one in Homeland Security computers and one in university computers. 

            The earliest version of the software that became Sunapsis provided an innovative link—a synapse—between these two massive sources of data.  Developed by the IU Office of International Services, that office quickly realized that far more than immigration status could be effectively managed with the software tools that were becoming part of Sunapsis.  Orientation and data collection could begin as soon as students were admitted.  Student advising could be more focused and functional in a system that remembered advising sessions as well as important personal data.  International admissions, with its own deadline and tracking needs, could also be served by these tools—and in turn serve to collect vital information for active-student tracking later on. 

            Sunapsis thus became much more than a solution to Homeland Security regulations.   In addition to serving the technical reporting requirements of international visitors better, Sunapsis provided ways to assure that their needs didn’t fall between the cracks and to enhance their experience in the U.S. by reducing the time to sort out red tape and expanding communication and so allow students and scholars to be more fully a part of campus life.

            The unique features of Sunapsis attracted the interest of other institutions and IU found itself heavily lobbied to make the product available to others.  Since 2007, the number of institutions using the software system has grown from one (IU) to 23, representing major universities all over the United States. Once a year, Sunapsis users get together to compare notes and hear about new features. 

Jason Baumgartner, left, is chief architect of the international office management system.

           This week, the Frangipani Room has standing room only crowd, more than a hundred participants from 40 institutions, each participant with laptop in hand, to hear about checklists, encryption, e-forms, and user management.  These new tools assure that documents don’t get stuck in someone’s inbox, that collecting information from students and scholars can be handled electronically and managed without expert intervention, and that messages can be programmed to be sent automatically when needed or desired. 

            The group will also be introduced to a new module that expands the system’s service to students studying abroad.  The module manages students throughout the study abroad cycle, from program search, through application processing and dossier review, to completion and standardized reports.  Photos: Rendy Schrader

Vice President for International Affairs addresses the Sunapsis Conference 2012.

Rodrigo Almeida and Daniel Duarte perform a waltz of Ernesto Nazareth

            “Yesterday was hot; today is cold.  That’s bad for the guitars,” said Rodrigo Almeida, as he and Daniel Duarte struggled with keeping their instruments in tune.  If there were tuning problems, no one in the audience could tell as the guitar duo performed  a brief concert of pieces from the Baroque (Soler) to the contemporary (IU grad Jon Godfrey), from a delicate transcription (by Duarte) of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” to the rhythms and dances of Brazil in music by Nazareth, Pixinguinha, and Pereira.  The concert continues a decade-old tradition of intimate, Friday lunchtime concerts sponsored by the Office of International Services, now in the Willkie Formal Lounge.

            Almeida and Duarte established their Villa Guitar Duo in 2004.  They have won competitions in Europe, the U.S., and Latin America and completed their first US tour in 2009.  They have done many of their own transcriptions, and hearing their version of Debussy on guitar makes one wonder if perhaps the French composer had been composing for the wrong instrument.  Their most recent CD renders Scarlatti, Bach, Albeniz, Villa-Lobos, and Boccherini with the same conviction, and offers challenging examples of Spanish and Latin American music written for guitar.  Both currently reside in Bloomington and are associate instructors for the Jacobs School, working under Ernesto Bitetti.