OK everyone. This is our final group blog assignment for the semester and I invite you to comment on the Greenblatt, Sahlins, Chatwin, Eco, and Zhang in the context of the rise and development of theoretical curiosity. In the spirit of this exercise permit me to share a reflection of my own that appears on page 119 of my book _Manufacturing Confucianism_. In this instance I am addressing how we can see in the European reception of 17th century Jesuit missionary works in translation a critical movement away from the religious to the real, from divine to empirical authority. "Travel literature became increasingly popular in the late seventeenth century because something akin to ethnographic authority was developing, which was, in turn, part of a larger epistemological shift away from faith and insight to experiment and observation as the basis of reliable knowledge. In this intellectual context the Jesuits and their Chinese texts were construed as scientific authorities providing testimony on behalf of the universality of divinely authored creation." This development was a misconstrual, but still a meaningful misapprehension (of the sort discussed by Eco and Zhang) that revealed the self-assertion of the European imagination at the same time that it closed the gap between western self and Chinese other. So, as we glance back across the sweep of the last fifteen weeks let us reflect on the complex history of cultural encounter and take some inspiration from the philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, who once wrote (rather apropos of the disorientation of the encounter):
A traveller, who has lost his way, should not ask, "Where am I?"
What he really wants to know is, "Where are the other places?
He has got his own body, but he has lost them.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
Chatwin's Fear Hypothesis: Acquired Trait Becomes Genetic?
Armed with the dinofelis skeleton, the remains of Australopithecus Robustus, the earlier sudden climatic changes of the Miocene and the First Northern Glaciation, as well as his magnificent obsession with the human migratory propensity, Bruce Chatwin has constructed a speculative map of hominid social and psychological evolution. It is this speculation about the possible relationship between fear, its object and the crossover from acquired trait to genetic predisposition that occupied most of our reflection yesterday. As there were many people who still wanted to speak at the end of class, I invited each to send me their comments for posting as a continuing discussion thread on our website. So, with the addition of a framing quote from Chatwin,
QUOTATION
Every child appears to have an innate mental picture of the "thing" that might attack: so much so that any threatening "thing," even if it is not the real "thing," will trigger off a sequence of defensive behaviour. The screams and kicks are the first line of defence. The mother must then be prepared to fight for he child; and the father to fight for them both. The danger doubles at night, because man has no night vision and the big cats hunt at night. And surely this most Manichaean drama--of light, darkness and the Beast--lies at the heart of the human predicament.
here they are...
Chris Mork:
In class, I was going to mention that I actually take Chatwin's side of the issue. In my psychology class last year, we discussed fear and its origin. It is evident that many fears have an evolutionary perspective. Fears of the dark and snakes, for example, create an evolutionary advantage in that those things may have threatened the species (fear of the dark improved survivall ability by avoidance of the dinophelis, for example) and by avoiding them, the likelihood of survival is increased. Social Darwinism therefore plays a large role in the matter. Additionally, you seemed to be stressing the issue of where the origin of these instinctual fears arises. Thus, they have their beginning in our prehistoric ancestors and their struggle for survival.
Ryan also brought up the idea of an innate sense of fear in all humans that would cause people to fear the dinophelis for the fact that it was dangerous. However, how would one understand that the dinophelis was dangerous? That could only arise out of a previous experience that demonstrated that the animal was a threat. Thus, many fears appear to be instinctual in the human species in the present day as a result of previous experiences that initially created that fear.
Ryan Lynch:
The two sides of the fear argument are that 1.) it is innate and comes to humans subconsciously from the past, and 2.) that it is experienced through culture by each human and therefore it originates in every individual. If the second case were true, every human would need to experience fear for his-or-herself in order to have an understanding of it. Simply hearing stories about frightening things is not enough to originate fear in a human, for it is not a unique and personal experience. Rather it is must more reasonable that everyone is born with an idea and concept of fear. Thus, when these stories of monsters are heard, humans are able to associate the fear that is already in their possession with these concepts. The fear of these objects (which often have no reasonable basis due to improbability) are simply the associations of the concept of fear to the stories passed down by culture. This reasoning gives possibility to Chatwin's line of thinking. He argues that the fear of a predator shaped the culture of the ancient humans to be cautious in the dark. If fear is indeed innately common among all humans, such practices could be easily understood and assumed by future generations even without experiencing the predator directly. Thus, even when the predator is forgotten, the practices maintain reasonable use in society, where new threats and monsters replace the void left by the original predator.
QUOTATION
Every child appears to have an innate mental picture of the "thing" that might attack: so much so that any threatening "thing," even if it is not the real "thing," will trigger off a sequence of defensive behaviour. The screams and kicks are the first line of defence. The mother must then be prepared to fight for he child; and the father to fight for them both. The danger doubles at night, because man has no night vision and the big cats hunt at night. And surely this most Manichaean drama--of light, darkness and the Beast--lies at the heart of the human predicament.
here they are...
Chris Mork:
In class, I was going to mention that I actually take Chatwin's side of the issue. In my psychology class last year, we discussed fear and its origin. It is evident that many fears have an evolutionary perspective. Fears of the dark and snakes, for example, create an evolutionary advantage in that those things may have threatened the species (fear of the dark improved survivall ability by avoidance of the dinophelis, for example) and by avoiding them, the likelihood of survival is increased. Social Darwinism therefore plays a large role in the matter. Additionally, you seemed to be stressing the issue of where the origin of these instinctual fears arises. Thus, they have their beginning in our prehistoric ancestors and their struggle for survival.
Ryan also brought up the idea of an innate sense of fear in all humans that would cause people to fear the dinophelis for the fact that it was dangerous. However, how would one understand that the dinophelis was dangerous? That could only arise out of a previous experience that demonstrated that the animal was a threat. Thus, many fears appear to be instinctual in the human species in the present day as a result of previous experiences that initially created that fear.
Ryan Lynch:
The two sides of the fear argument are that 1.) it is innate and comes to humans subconsciously from the past, and 2.) that it is experienced through culture by each human and therefore it originates in every individual. If the second case were true, every human would need to experience fear for his-or-herself in order to have an understanding of it. Simply hearing stories about frightening things is not enough to originate fear in a human, for it is not a unique and personal experience. Rather it is must more reasonable that everyone is born with an idea and concept of fear. Thus, when these stories of monsters are heard, humans are able to associate the fear that is already in their possession with these concepts. The fear of these objects (which often have no reasonable basis due to improbability) are simply the associations of the concept of fear to the stories passed down by culture. This reasoning gives possibility to Chatwin's line of thinking. He argues that the fear of a predator shaped the culture of the ancient humans to be cautious in the dark. If fear is indeed innately common among all humans, such practices could be easily understood and assumed by future generations even without experiencing the predator directly. Thus, even when the predator is forgotten, the practices maintain reasonable use in society, where new threats and monsters replace the void left by the original predator.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Conrad, Casement, and the "Horror" of Congo
OK. It is time to get ourselves back to work on the blogsite. We will soon be viewing the American retelling of the Heart of Darkness narrative as presented by Francis Ford Coppola in his dramatic meditation on the misadventure that was the Vietnam War ("Apocalypse Now Redux"). This will give us another way of exploring the problem of the other as that other is found to lie within ourselves. But, before we get too far into this exploration, I wish to share a few comments about Sir Roger Casement (1864-1916) and his report on the savagery of the rubber trade in the Putumayo. While the record of these facts was published in 1913, it offers a window on the mistreatment of indigenous peoples very much like what we have read about already in Heart of Darkness. In the early 1890s, Casement and Conrad were together in the Congo ("The Congo Diary," 13th June, 1890--"Made the acquaintance of Mr. Roger Casement, which I should consider as a great pleasure under any circumstances and now it becomes a positive piece of luck.") and what they observed there would be explicit again in the Putumayo. Intriguing for us in this respect is Conrad's reflection on this time and the manner in which his description of Casement suggests the portrait of Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. Here is Conrad in a letter :
"Before the Congo I was just a mere animal."
Then, inflating prose on Casement, he reports,
"He was a good companion, but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don't mean stupid. I mean he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo report, Putumayo--etc) he made his way, and sheer emotionalism has undone him. A creature of sheer temperament--a truly tragic personality: all but the greatness of which he had not a trace. Only vanity. But in the Congo it was not visible yet."
Writing about his experience in the Putumayo, where he was dispatched as a British Consul to report on the treatment of "British Colonial Subjects, and Native Indians" by the government, Casement reveals nothing of this tragic quality. Indeed, quite the opposite. Here, in a letter to a close friend he casts light on the circumstances of his task to represent the outrage in the region:
"I knew the Foreign Office would not understand the thing [meaning his report], for I realized that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race of people once hinted themselves, whose hearts were based on affection as the root principle of contact with their fellow men, and whose estimate of life was not something to be appraised at its market price." (Casement Report on the Administration of the Congo Free State, 1904. http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob73.html)
Another reason why the British might have had difficulty grasping Casement's account was that its facts were appalling to the Victorian conscience, the very conscience against which Conrad strains in telling his narrative of Kurtz at the far inner reaches of the Congo:
"The number of Indians killed by either starvation--often purposely brought about by the destruction of crops over whole districts or inflicted as a form of death penalty on individuals who failed to bring in their quota of rubber--or by deliberate murder by bullet, fire, beheading, of flogging to death, and accompanied by a variety of atrocious tortures, during the course of these 12 years, in order to extort these 4,000 tons of rubber, cannot have been less than 30,000, and possibly came to many more."
And yet, with the scope of this meditated slaughter, as with the irrational violence of the rubber extraction in the Congo, Conrad's portrait of this pitiable terror in the Heart of Darkness "attempted to penetrate the veil [of the deceptions of the civilizing project] and was anxious to retain its hallucinatory quality." The real and the imagined, then, were perpetually intertwined.
This week as we move deeper into the jungle of the Congo and the "epistemic murk" of the colonial rationalization of economic exploitation, let us consider how the history lived and told by Conrad differs from the terror wrought by the Conquistadores. Consider these questions from Michael Taussig's Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing: "Is there not a distinct desire in Heart of Darkness for Kurtz's greatness, horrible as it is? Is not horror made beautiful and primitivism exoticized throughout this book, which Ian Watt calls the enduring and most powerful literary indictment of imperialism."
OK, let's get to work!!
"Before the Congo I was just a mere animal."
Then, inflating prose on Casement, he reports,
"He was a good companion, but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don't mean stupid. I mean he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo report, Putumayo--etc) he made his way, and sheer emotionalism has undone him. A creature of sheer temperament--a truly tragic personality: all but the greatness of which he had not a trace. Only vanity. But in the Congo it was not visible yet."
Writing about his experience in the Putumayo, where he was dispatched as a British Consul to report on the treatment of "British Colonial Subjects, and Native Indians" by the government, Casement reveals nothing of this tragic quality. Indeed, quite the opposite. Here, in a letter to a close friend he casts light on the circumstances of his task to represent the outrage in the region:
"I knew the Foreign Office would not understand the thing [meaning his report], for I realized that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race of people once hinted themselves, whose hearts were based on affection as the root principle of contact with their fellow men, and whose estimate of life was not something to be appraised at its market price." (Casement Report on the Administration of the Congo Free State, 1904. http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob73.html)
Another reason why the British might have had difficulty grasping Casement's account was that its facts were appalling to the Victorian conscience, the very conscience against which Conrad strains in telling his narrative of Kurtz at the far inner reaches of the Congo:
"The number of Indians killed by either starvation--often purposely brought about by the destruction of crops over whole districts or inflicted as a form of death penalty on individuals who failed to bring in their quota of rubber--or by deliberate murder by bullet, fire, beheading, of flogging to death, and accompanied by a variety of atrocious tortures, during the course of these 12 years, in order to extort these 4,000 tons of rubber, cannot have been less than 30,000, and possibly came to many more."
And yet, with the scope of this meditated slaughter, as with the irrational violence of the rubber extraction in the Congo, Conrad's portrait of this pitiable terror in the Heart of Darkness "attempted to penetrate the veil [of the deceptions of the civilizing project] and was anxious to retain its hallucinatory quality." The real and the imagined, then, were perpetually intertwined.
This week as we move deeper into the jungle of the Congo and the "epistemic murk" of the colonial rationalization of economic exploitation, let us consider how the history lived and told by Conrad differs from the terror wrought by the Conquistadores. Consider these questions from Michael Taussig's Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing: "Is there not a distinct desire in Heart of Darkness for Kurtz's greatness, horrible as it is? Is not horror made beautiful and primitivism exoticized throughout this book, which Ian Watt calls the enduring and most powerful literary indictment of imperialism."
OK, let's get to work!!
Monday, October 5, 2009
Marco Polo Postings
It seems that it is difficult for teams to make their own posts tot he website, so here is a prompt, under which you can enter your posts on il milione.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
"Civilization": Metaphor & Marker
Take some time this weekend to reflect on the dialectic of identity and difference as displayed in the Relacion of Cabeza de Vaca. How does a presumption of civilization or of being a Christian generate tension at the point of encounter?
To this juncture, we have a grasp on the conceptual limitations of the concept, that is, that civilization is an historical invention of recent origin that carries an implicit judgmental valence and so has been used to discriminate between peoples. This valence is also evident in the manner in which the globe has been sectioned and represented accordiing to the rules of a tendentious western-bound geography. Civilization comes with a view--"things seen are things as seen"--and so it is that the geography of first, second, and third world peoples repeats the larger conceptual dialectic of "civilized" and "primitive."
This week we have taken up two new readings: Henri Baudet's Paradise on Earth and Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America. The latter work is challenging, but should seem vaguely familiar, given that it is, like the Relacion, about the encounter of Europeans with the indigenous peoples of "the new world." It will be our task to try to re-examine the conjuncture of these cultures with an eye to understanding why the encounter turned violent. We will benefit in this context from the partial quote from Clifford Geertz that I have mentioned a few times in class so far: "Foreignness begins at the skin's edge, not the water's."
A worthy question in this context of the doubt occasioned by the early encounters is: How does civilization, as a mechanism of judgment of the other, shield us from the experience of what is different? In other words, what does civilization deny the civilized who act in its name? Another is: How does the affirmation of one's identity in the sovereignty of one's name protect us from the threat of our own inner impulses of otherness?
Let these questions act as a guide for your reflections for this weekend. Happy writing!
To this juncture, we have a grasp on the conceptual limitations of the concept, that is, that civilization is an historical invention of recent origin that carries an implicit judgmental valence and so has been used to discriminate between peoples. This valence is also evident in the manner in which the globe has been sectioned and represented accordiing to the rules of a tendentious western-bound geography. Civilization comes with a view--"things seen are things as seen"--and so it is that the geography of first, second, and third world peoples repeats the larger conceptual dialectic of "civilized" and "primitive."
This week we have taken up two new readings: Henri Baudet's Paradise on Earth and Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America. The latter work is challenging, but should seem vaguely familiar, given that it is, like the Relacion, about the encounter of Europeans with the indigenous peoples of "the new world." It will be our task to try to re-examine the conjuncture of these cultures with an eye to understanding why the encounter turned violent. We will benefit in this context from the partial quote from Clifford Geertz that I have mentioned a few times in class so far: "Foreignness begins at the skin's edge, not the water's."
A worthy question in this context of the doubt occasioned by the early encounters is: How does civilization, as a mechanism of judgment of the other, shield us from the experience of what is different? In other words, what does civilization deny the civilized who act in its name? Another is: How does the affirmation of one's identity in the sovereignty of one's name protect us from the threat of our own inner impulses of otherness?
Let these questions act as a guide for your reflections for this weekend. Happy writing!
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Metageography and the Real
The first two weeks of our reading and discussion have introduced us to the nomadic urgency of the human spirit (Chatwin), a three-fold typology of human development (Gellner),necessity of alterity in the constitution of identity (Wikipedia and "The Secret Sharer"), as well as the problematic unrepresentativeness of our presumed geopolitical understanding of the Earth. Our classroom experience of ostranie is underway and it is in the spirit of this strangeness that we take up our next writing task.
Our queries this week grow from our reading in The Myth of Continents: What is the politics of our mistaken metageography? How does its correction by Lewis and Wigen affect our understanding of the "real" world? To help you with your thinking and writing on these questions I offer the following historical comment by David Hooson from a review of Lewis and Wigen:
Geography's primary quest, ever since it was given intellectual coherence by the Greeks, has simply been for an accurate and meaningful understanding of our world and the diversity of its parts. As the known world was gradually extended from the Mediterranean and then rapidly yet tentatively reshaped following the discoveries, to be finally rounded out scientifically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the regional divisions grew to reflect the inexorable dominance of Europe. These divisions, primarily the perceived "continents" along with such value-laden concepts like West and East or Eurocentric labels like the Far East, have stuck. In the period following World War II, with the onset of the cold war and the dismantling of the colonial empires, East and West acquired a fresh ideological twist. A newly discovered Third World appeared, leading to another economically based macrodichotomy, the North-South divide. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union these categories have perforce had to be revised or retired, as increasing anomalies make the generalizations less true and useful. Clearly, it has become more urgent and necessary to reconfigure the many faces of our world "for the Millennium" and to change our geographical mind-sets to cope with new situations and rapidly emerging predicaments on the global scene.
OK. Go to it. I look forward to your posts.
Our queries this week grow from our reading in The Myth of Continents: What is the politics of our mistaken metageography? How does its correction by Lewis and Wigen affect our understanding of the "real" world? To help you with your thinking and writing on these questions I offer the following historical comment by David Hooson from a review of Lewis and Wigen:
Geography's primary quest, ever since it was given intellectual coherence by the Greeks, has simply been for an accurate and meaningful understanding of our world and the diversity of its parts. As the known world was gradually extended from the Mediterranean and then rapidly yet tentatively reshaped following the discoveries, to be finally rounded out scientifically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the regional divisions grew to reflect the inexorable dominance of Europe. These divisions, primarily the perceived "continents" along with such value-laden concepts like West and East or Eurocentric labels like the Far East, have stuck. In the period following World War II, with the onset of the cold war and the dismantling of the colonial empires, East and West acquired a fresh ideological twist. A newly discovered Third World appeared, leading to another economically based macrodichotomy, the North-South divide. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union these categories have perforce had to be revised or retired, as increasing anomalies make the generalizations less true and useful. Clearly, it has become more urgent and necessary to reconfigure the many faces of our world "for the Millennium" and to change our geographical mind-sets to cope with new situations and rapidly emerging predicaments on the global scene.
OK. Go to it. I look forward to your posts.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Welcome to the Geography of the Other!!
Dear Engineering Honors Students,
I wanted to welcome you officially to our new blogsite, from where we will launch our commentaries on class and reading and to exchange our ideas about the history of theoretical curiosity and wanderlust. You have your first assignment, which I sent to you via email (reading a passage in Clifford Geertz, and investigating the online resources for the meaning of "other" and "alterity"--a fancier word for the same thing).
Once you log on to this blogsite, I want you to begin some reflection on a small matter that will occupy us off and on for the first month or so. I would like you to consider the familiar culture of our present day. Specifically examine our sedentary existence (the fact that we live in homes, in neighborhoods and communities within cities and suburbs, travel out of leisure rather than economic necessity, and rely upon other enterprises to produce our sustenance) and do so in light of the longer history of human habitation of the globe during which we were nomadic (wandering on foot in occasional alliance with animals living off what the land would yield). Now take some time between now and next Tuesday to jot down some thoughts about this rather significant transformation.
Here are some thoughts/questions to guide your reflections: What are the advantages of nomadic life? What are the advantages of sedentary life? How was this grand transformation effected so thoroughly that we have gone from hunter gatherers to city dwellers with scarcely a memory of the history that brought us here? Does it matter?
Here are a few quotes to addle your thinking apparatus:
Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death. (Blaise Pascal, Pensees)
The founders of monastic rule were forever devising techniques for quelling wanderlust in their novices. "A monk out of his cell," said St. Anthony, "is like a fish out of water." Yet, Christ and the Apostles _walked_ their journeys through the hill of Palestine. (Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines)
Life is a bridge; cross over it but build no house on it. (Indian Proverb)
The Desert People (the Bedouin) are closer to being good than settled peoples because they are closer to the First State and are more removed from all the evil habits that have infected the hearts of settlers. (Ib'n Khaldun, Muqaddimah)
Useless to ask a wandering man advice on the construction of a house. The work will never come to completion. (Book of Odes)
He who does not travel does not know the value of men. (Moorish proverb)
In _The Descent of Man_ Darwin notes that in certain birds the migratory impulse is stronger than the maternal. A mother will abandon her fledglings in the nest rather than miss her appointment for the long journey south. (Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines)
I urge you to mull these questions over in light of these quotations and mix in your own sense of the history and lets see what comes out of the effort. Please bring your reflections to class on a sheet of paper with your name and please make certain that they are printed (by means of a computer and a printer) and NOT handwritten.
It will be a pleasure to meet you and to get to work with you over the next two semesters in a course of study that will
take us down a complex path of investigation in arts, anthropology, history, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion.
Thanks a lot. I'll see you very soon.
Dr. J.
I wanted to welcome you officially to our new blogsite, from where we will launch our commentaries on class and reading and to exchange our ideas about the history of theoretical curiosity and wanderlust. You have your first assignment, which I sent to you via email (reading a passage in Clifford Geertz, and investigating the online resources for the meaning of "other" and "alterity"--a fancier word for the same thing).
Once you log on to this blogsite, I want you to begin some reflection on a small matter that will occupy us off and on for the first month or so. I would like you to consider the familiar culture of our present day. Specifically examine our sedentary existence (the fact that we live in homes, in neighborhoods and communities within cities and suburbs, travel out of leisure rather than economic necessity, and rely upon other enterprises to produce our sustenance) and do so in light of the longer history of human habitation of the globe during which we were nomadic (wandering on foot in occasional alliance with animals living off what the land would yield). Now take some time between now and next Tuesday to jot down some thoughts about this rather significant transformation.
Here are some thoughts/questions to guide your reflections: What are the advantages of nomadic life? What are the advantages of sedentary life? How was this grand transformation effected so thoroughly that we have gone from hunter gatherers to city dwellers with scarcely a memory of the history that brought us here? Does it matter?
Here are a few quotes to addle your thinking apparatus:
Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death. (Blaise Pascal, Pensees)
The founders of monastic rule were forever devising techniques for quelling wanderlust in their novices. "A monk out of his cell," said St. Anthony, "is like a fish out of water." Yet, Christ and the Apostles _walked_ their journeys through the hill of Palestine. (Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines)
Life is a bridge; cross over it but build no house on it. (Indian Proverb)
The Desert People (the Bedouin) are closer to being good than settled peoples because they are closer to the First State and are more removed from all the evil habits that have infected the hearts of settlers. (Ib'n Khaldun, Muqaddimah)
Useless to ask a wandering man advice on the construction of a house. The work will never come to completion. (Book of Odes)
He who does not travel does not know the value of men. (Moorish proverb)
In _The Descent of Man_ Darwin notes that in certain birds the migratory impulse is stronger than the maternal. A mother will abandon her fledglings in the nest rather than miss her appointment for the long journey south. (Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines)
I urge you to mull these questions over in light of these quotations and mix in your own sense of the history and lets see what comes out of the effort. Please bring your reflections to class on a sheet of paper with your name and please make certain that they are printed (by means of a computer and a printer) and NOT handwritten.
It will be a pleasure to meet you and to get to work with you over the next two semesters in a course of study that will
take us down a complex path of investigation in arts, anthropology, history, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion.
Thanks a lot. I'll see you very soon.
Dr. J.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)