Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas - The Beths (link)
The Beths are, using a phrase my former roommate taught me this fall, jafas, which derives from the acronym Just Another Fucking Aucklander. (Around one-third of New Zealand’s population lives in the Auckland region). A colleague of mine, also from Auckland, was telling me about the “Midwinter Christmas” dinner parties he and his friends host in July, a time when the season is much more appropriate for a feast of roast ham, yorkshire pudding and candied yams. On Christmas itself, they usually have a family barbecue on the beach.
I was surprised how difficult it was for me, boreal born and bred, to put together the concepts of “Midwinter” and “July”. I googled “midwinter Christmas New Zealand”, thought “wait, no, he said it was in July”, and wrongly corrected my search to “midsummer Christmas”.
There was a bit of Twitter brouhaha in October about a Nature commentary saying that it was “necessary and inclusive” to stop using the words “summer” and “winter” when inviting researchers to events. Many people thought this was a trivial and unnecessary bit of language policing; one person I follow pushed back gently with “I’ve repeatedly seen people fail to take the frame of reference of someone in the global south. It goes beyond just using seasons. It’s a failure of perspective taking, and using unintentionally exclusive language is just a really small part of that.”
(The alignment of the Global South with the Southern Hemisphere is very inexact, and not only because of New Zealand and Australia. Countries that, to my surprise, have no part of their land in the Southern Hemisphere include Malaysia, India, the Philippines, and Ethiopia; the equator runs through Brazil, Indonesia and Somalia. It feels like knowing where countries are is one of the more basic things to work on; looking through unusual world maps and clicking through map quizzes has gotten me to a slightly more confident in my basics.)
I want to get better at this minuscule bit of perspective-taking, especially since two of the three other people who work with me full-time live in the Southern Hemisphere. I wonder what other lenses of perspective I should be trying on. I feel so ignorant of what it’s like to be other people, both in specific ways and the general case. Living down South, in Northern California, where the seasons are “spring” and “rain/smoke”, I sometimes feel I’ve lost the signifiers that give shape to passing time. I also feel like my social world is a bit narrower; most of my friends (t)here know how to code, which I’m using as shorthand for both social class and patterns of thinking. A haziness of perspective amidst the sea fog.
I hope, in the next year, to feel more connected to other perspectives, both those that are spatially adjacent to me and those that come from farther away.
Wishing you a fullness of perspective,
Merry xmas,
- Tessa