13 thoughts on “Are these things “cultural?”

    1. Yes, but some people insist upon taking disagreement as personal attack. Is it cultural? These are Spanish men and men from Latin America who would rather be Spaniards.

  1. If it’s cultural, it’s related to academia. I’ve seen that behavior happening (to absurd degrees) between two Americans (one from the Political Science dept., the other from Philosophy).

    1. I’ve never seen it in any nationality but Spain. And among right-wing types and their heirs, at that. My father’s department was rife with it, back when Franco was alive … I had not experienced it until now, but my colleague is a PP member and his lackey is of comprador classes in a banana republic, and keeps saying he is really Spanish.

      1. And. The way I hurt them so was by not having time to join their rat pack, a.k.a. kvetch club. I do not respect them enough, it is said; I should be spending more time tata-ing them (in Cajun that means something like, sympathizing like an indulgent aunt). I have experienced all kinds of machismo from others but I have only ever had Spaniards try to extort this kind of emotional work.

  2. “I will not permit the use of our conference room at 8 pm ( when nobody is using it) for X’s bridge club meeting (X being a professor in another department), because X was behind this initiative I disagree with” (both were white, male and Americans).

  3. Oh, yes, American and European guys from any country do that kind of thing all the time. Protecting entitlement, I guess. But what I am looking at is this attempt to extract emotional work or babysitting, which seems to come primarily from really conservative Catholics. I think our Cajun atmosphere supports & brings it out, too: some of these family atmospheres we have here seem to come right out of the pages of Jorge Isaacs.

  4. I ran into this in my first job at Ohio State with group of 3 Spanish men we called “La falange.”

    1. La falange, this is about right. I would have been hiding behind Grinor R and Josaphat K the whole time, I suppose … and it might not have been enough.

  5. Grinor left the year after I came and was largely absent even when technically present that last year. Joe Kubayanda died tragically young, though I was privileged to know him for some period of time.

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