In our readings over the last few weeks, we have been exposed to several perspectives on the history of the global cultural encounter--Sahlins, Zhang, Todorov, Greenblatt, Eco. From the vantage of these interpreters we have learned that the encounter was far more complex than allowed within the conventional interpretative frame of challenge/response, or civilized/uncivilized, or West/East, or transgressor/victim, or domination/subjection. All cultures are active agents at the point of their encounter In our most recent reading in the "New Historicism" of Stephen Greenblatt, we have been encouraged to abandon the conventional lenses through which the encounter has been viewed and to attend to the primary documents of particular historical moments, such as Columbus's expedition. The purpose of this reorienting of our vision is to invite questioning and, later, disestablishment of the colonial discourse underlying the conquest of the "New World."
Scholars like Eco recast the dialectic of domination and subjection as a culturally productive misunderstanding and in this way mitigate the savagery of the historical record. Chinese was not actually the originary language of Adam, of course, but from this mistaken presumption, an imaginative cultural braid was begun joining Europe with Asia. This is the confluence narrative that Eco has called "exchange." (p. 54) Yet, there is no denying that it was conquest and cultural pillage that determined the course of the Great Encounter we have studied. Greenblatt, like Sahlins and others, is keenly aware of this fact, and he wishes for us to obtain a better understanding of the role that literature and humanist culture played in Eurocentric global expansion between 1300 and 1700. The concept of the marvelous or wondrous, standing in as it does in accounts from Columbus's diaries for "gold" or some other credible material wealth, joins both the barbaric and the humanistic urges of the colonialist. It is not so easy to segregate these motivations, still there has been a habit among some scholars (Todorov for example) of identifying colonialism as the problem and humanism as the solution.
What I would like you to reflect upon and write about in the days ahead is the curious simultaneity of barbarism and humanism in most all of the works we have read. Consider how the humanist impulse to understand and appreciate the other is fully implicated in the outrages of the worst of the European adventurers. One way of working through this reflection would be to take up Carl's observation from class of the salient disparity in the observations and conclusions of Columbus and La Casas. How could there be such a dramatic difference in perception (and thus treatment) of the natives by two Europeans living among them at the same time and place?
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Conrad, Casement, and the "Horror"
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. 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 were published in 1913, it offers a window on the mistreatment of indigneous peoples vey 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 hnted 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."
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 whcih Conrad strains in telling his narrative of Kurz at the far inner reaches of the Congo:
"The number of Indians killed by either starvation--often purposely brought about by the detsructio of crops over whole distircts 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 hnted 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."
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 whcih Conrad strains in telling his narrative of Kurz at the far inner reaches of the Congo:
"The number of Indians killed by either starvation--often purposely brought about by the detsructio of crops over whole distircts 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!!
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Walkabout Free Association: What is the film about?
In this assignment I would like each of you to share with the class your feelings and thoughts about Walkabout. You need not be generous or kind if you did not like it or could not relate to it, but you must try to explain why you feel or think about the film the way that you do. Consider, if you will, what the film is about. Is it simply what it seems--a parable about the elegiac possibilities of the Aboriginal life and the "crushed spirits of city dwellers," as the film critic Roger Ebert once wrote? (By the way, Ebert, and others, believe that Walkabout is "one of the best-photographed films ever.") Is it the complex tale of cultural encounter wherein both "native" and "foreign" suffer and learn from the encounter? What does the film say about communication and the necessity for meaning in human interchange? Of course, any film of value must operate on many levels of significance and this is certainly true for Walkabout, the story of which gets more difficult to pin down definitively the more you think about it. Indeed, one must wonder if even the sequence of the story, which we may be inclined to understand as linear, is not timeless, occurring perhaps in the "dreaming" wherein imagined and real, mythic and historical are seamlessly intertwined.
Roger Ebert does offer one very intriguing take on the film that may provoke some reflection. It is worthy of quotation here:
"The movie is not the heartwarming story of how the girl and her brother are lost in the outback and survive because of the knowledge of the resourceful Aborigine [sic]. It is about how all three are still lost at the end of the film--more lost than before because now they are lost inside themselves instead of merely adrift in the world...The film suggests that all of us are the captives of environment and programming: there is a wide range of experiment and experience that remains forever invisible to us, because it falls in a spectrum we simply cannot see."
So, let's see what you think and feel about this work that was characterized in the voiceover for the trailer as "just about the most different film you'll ever see." In your comments if you are led down the path of identifying resonances of the film with other works we have read, please elaborate so that we might see how many others were similarly struck.
Roger Ebert does offer one very intriguing take on the film that may provoke some reflection. It is worthy of quotation here:
"The movie is not the heartwarming story of how the girl and her brother are lost in the outback and survive because of the knowledge of the resourceful Aborigine [sic]. It is about how all three are still lost at the end of the film--more lost than before because now they are lost inside themselves instead of merely adrift in the world...The film suggests that all of us are the captives of environment and programming: there is a wide range of experiment and experience that remains forever invisible to us, because it falls in a spectrum we simply cannot see."
So, let's see what you think and feel about this work that was characterized in the voiceover for the trailer as "just about the most different film you'll ever see." In your comments if you are led down the path of identifying resonances of the film with other works we have read, please elaborate so that we might see how many others were similarly struck.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
The "Other" of Marco Polo
For this week I ask that we take up a more complicated angle on the self/other, native/foreign dialectics as a way of situating ourselves in relation to Marco Polo and in situating Marco Polo himself. The topic is theoretical curiosity, something familiar to us all. This work is clearly a geography, to be precise a "description of the world" as it was known for some time. Thus, it is not an itinerary. Instead it is more like a map of a journey within the imagination drawn on the surface of the world and so it is that the internal self/other and external native/foreign dialectics converge. The Travels (il milione) tell the tale of the exotic (much like Baudet describes in his historical account of the European imagination of the other) region of the desired, of paradise and it is this projection, fed by an aggressive desire to transcend the constraints of the theologically confined everyday, that is a critical contribution of Polo to the European narration of mythic geography. Moreover, this extension of the imaginary beyond the realm of the immediately known, was the first adventitious movement of the European mind toward anthropolgy and away from theology, a movement that would be more dramatically choreographed in the astronomical work of Kepler, Brahe, and Galileo.
Monday, September 22, 2008
"Foreignness begins at the skin's edge..."
This week we will be moving deeper into the Australian outback and farther into the creative wilderness of Chatwin's imagination. We will also be taking 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 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 cited in the title of this newest post: "Foreignness begins at the skin's edge, not the water's." Let's use the blog this week to reflect on these readings and to explore what they have in common,something that should become very apparent by the time we read Marshall Sahlins for Thursday.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Self/Other; Identity and Difference
Take sometime tomorrow and through the weekend to reflect on the dialectic of identity and difference as displayed in The Secret Sharer and Cabeza de Vaca. How does a presumption of civilization or of superiority generate tension at the point of encounter?
To this juncture, we have a grasp on the tendentiousness of the concept, that is, that civilization is an historical inventon of recent origin that carries an implicit judgmental valence and so has been used to discriminate between peoples. The judgmental 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."
A worthy question in this context of doubt 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?
To this juncture, we have a grasp on the tendentiousness of the concept, that is, that civilization is an historical inventon of recent origin that carries an implicit judgmental valence and so has been used to discriminate between peoples. The judgmental 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."
A worthy question in this context of doubt 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?
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Albar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca: Film and Narrative
Here is some background information on the protagonist of the film and the author of our narrative. This information should be of consequence in assisting your comprehension of the action and dialogue. Take a moment to write down your thoughts about the film and let's see what happens in our class discussion of the odd circumstance of what we will come to know as Cabeza de Vaca's "double exteriority."
Albar (or Alvar) Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was the treasurer on the Narvaez expedition from Spain to the "new world" that was shipwrecked off the western coast of Florida in 1528, 9 years following Cortes's arrival in Mexico.
A biography from the New Perspectives on the West has a very informative summary of the events touched on or alluded to in the film.
A Biography of Cabeza de Vaca
Cabeza de Vaca was born into the Spanish nobility in 1490. Little of his early life is known, except that he made his career in the military. In early 1527 he left Spain as a part of a royal expedition intended to occupy the mainland of North America.
After their fleet was battered by a hurricane off the shore of Cuba, the expedition secured a new boat and departed for Florida. They landed in March 1528 near what is now Tampa Bay, which the expedition leader, Pánfilo de Narváez, claimed as the lawful possession of the Spanish empire.
Despite this confident declaration, the expedition was on the verge of disaster. Narváez's decision to split his land and sea forces proved a grievous error, as the ships were never able to rendezvous with the land expedition. The party soon overstayed its welcome with the Apalachee Indians of northern Florida by taking their leader hostage. Expelled and pursued by the Indians, suffering from numerous diseases, the surviving members of the expedition were reduced to huddling in a coastal swamp and living off the flesh of their horses. In late 1528, they built several crude rafts from trees and horse hides and set sail, hoping to return to Cuba.
Storms, thirst and starvation had reduced the expedition to about eighty survivors when a hurricane dumped Cabeza de Vaca and his companions on the Gulf Coast near what is now Galveston, Texas. They were initially welcomed, but, as Cabeza de Vaca was to remember, "half the natives died from a disease of the bowels and blamed us." For the next four years he and a steadily dwindling number of his comrades lived in the complex native world of what is now East Texas, a world in which Cabeza transformed himself from a conquistador into a trader and healer.
By 1532, only three other members of the original expedition were still alive -- Alonso del Castillo Maldonando, Andrés Dorantes de Carranca, and Estevan, an African slave. Together with Cabeza de Vaca, they now headed west and south in hopes of reaching the Spanish Empire's outpost in Mexico, becoming the first men of the Old World to enter the American West. Their precise route is not clear, but they apparently traveled across present-day Texas, perhaps into New Mexico and Arizona and through Mexico's northern provinces. In July 1536, near Culiacán in present-day Sinaloa, they finally encountered a group of fellow Spaniards who were on a slave-taking expedition. As Cabeza de Vaca remembered, his countrymen were "dumbfounded at the sight of me, strangely dressed and in company with Indians. They just stood staring for a long time."
Appalled by the Spanish treatment of Indians, in 1537 Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain to publish an account of his experiences and to urge a more generous policy upon the crown. He served as a Mexican territorial governor, but was soon accused of corruption, perhaps for his enlightened conduct toward Indians. He returned to Spain and was convicted; a 1552 pardon allowed him to become a judge in Seville, Spain, a position which he occupied until his death in 1556 or 1557.
Follow up by Dr. J.
This biography is for the most part accurate for our purposes. What we also need is some testimony from him about his experiences. Here are a few exemplary quotations worth a read. Speaking of the natives he reports that "to bring all these people to Christianity and subjection to Your Imperial Majesty, they must be won by kindness, the only certain way." "These are the most obedient people we had found anywhere, also in general the best looking." "The people are well disposed, serving such Christians as are their friends with great good will."
In another passage in which Nunez describes in detail the details of indigenous life and spirituality, he uncertainly asserts that "We chse this course to find our more about the country, so that should G-d, our Lord please to lead any one of us to the land of the Christians, we might carry information od it with us."
Here are two other insightful comments: "it is because their method of cooking is so novel and strange, I must describe it." And when he confesses an interest or attraction to local practices he says that it is "to indulge the curiosity of human beings about each other."
By way of assuming two native postures: first peddlar anf then shaman, he is able to survive for six years running goods back and forth from the interior to the coast. In the course of this work he becomes a healer laying his hands ont he afflicted, breathing on the sick, bleeding them, and cauterizing wounds with hot coals. He is reported to have revived a dead man with the magical arts, arts that included by his tetsimony: "our method was to bless the sick, breathe upon them, recie a Pater Noster and Ave Maria, and pray earnestly to G-d our Lord for their recovery."
But the second coming of the Spanish with the natives, including Nunez in 1536 (the end of the film) in westrrn Mexico, the complex of self and other, us and them, becomes illlustratively complicated:
"We sought to ensure the freedom of the Indians and at the moment when we believed we had achieved it, the contrary occurred. They [the Christians] had in fact determined to attack the Indians whom we had sent away reassured as to their peaceful intentions."
The above quotations are taken from Nunez's Naufragios y comentarios better known to us as Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America. What can we learn about the relationship between the cultural being and organism that is humanity? What is the message of this film?
Albar (or Alvar) Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was the treasurer on the Narvaez expedition from Spain to the "new world" that was shipwrecked off the western coast of Florida in 1528, 9 years following Cortes's arrival in Mexico.
A biography from the New Perspectives on the West has a very informative summary of the events touched on or alluded to in the film.
A Biography of Cabeza de Vaca
Cabeza de Vaca was born into the Spanish nobility in 1490. Little of his early life is known, except that he made his career in the military. In early 1527 he left Spain as a part of a royal expedition intended to occupy the mainland of North America.
After their fleet was battered by a hurricane off the shore of Cuba, the expedition secured a new boat and departed for Florida. They landed in March 1528 near what is now Tampa Bay, which the expedition leader, Pánfilo de Narváez, claimed as the lawful possession of the Spanish empire.
Despite this confident declaration, the expedition was on the verge of disaster. Narváez's decision to split his land and sea forces proved a grievous error, as the ships were never able to rendezvous with the land expedition. The party soon overstayed its welcome with the Apalachee Indians of northern Florida by taking their leader hostage. Expelled and pursued by the Indians, suffering from numerous diseases, the surviving members of the expedition were reduced to huddling in a coastal swamp and living off the flesh of their horses. In late 1528, they built several crude rafts from trees and horse hides and set sail, hoping to return to Cuba.
Storms, thirst and starvation had reduced the expedition to about eighty survivors when a hurricane dumped Cabeza de Vaca and his companions on the Gulf Coast near what is now Galveston, Texas. They were initially welcomed, but, as Cabeza de Vaca was to remember, "half the natives died from a disease of the bowels and blamed us." For the next four years he and a steadily dwindling number of his comrades lived in the complex native world of what is now East Texas, a world in which Cabeza transformed himself from a conquistador into a trader and healer.
By 1532, only three other members of the original expedition were still alive -- Alonso del Castillo Maldonando, Andrés Dorantes de Carranca, and Estevan, an African slave. Together with Cabeza de Vaca, they now headed west and south in hopes of reaching the Spanish Empire's outpost in Mexico, becoming the first men of the Old World to enter the American West. Their precise route is not clear, but they apparently traveled across present-day Texas, perhaps into New Mexico and Arizona and through Mexico's northern provinces. In July 1536, near Culiacán in present-day Sinaloa, they finally encountered a group of fellow Spaniards who were on a slave-taking expedition. As Cabeza de Vaca remembered, his countrymen were "dumbfounded at the sight of me, strangely dressed and in company with Indians. They just stood staring for a long time."
Appalled by the Spanish treatment of Indians, in 1537 Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain to publish an account of his experiences and to urge a more generous policy upon the crown. He served as a Mexican territorial governor, but was soon accused of corruption, perhaps for his enlightened conduct toward Indians. He returned to Spain and was convicted; a 1552 pardon allowed him to become a judge in Seville, Spain, a position which he occupied until his death in 1556 or 1557.
Follow up by Dr. J.
This biography is for the most part accurate for our purposes. What we also need is some testimony from him about his experiences. Here are a few exemplary quotations worth a read. Speaking of the natives he reports that "to bring all these people to Christianity and subjection to Your Imperial Majesty, they must be won by kindness, the only certain way." "These are the most obedient people we had found anywhere, also in general the best looking." "The people are well disposed, serving such Christians as are their friends with great good will."
In another passage in which Nunez describes in detail the details of indigenous life and spirituality, he uncertainly asserts that "We chse this course to find our more about the country, so that should G-d, our Lord please to lead any one of us to the land of the Christians, we might carry information od it with us."
Here are two other insightful comments: "it is because their method of cooking is so novel and strange, I must describe it." And when he confesses an interest or attraction to local practices he says that it is "to indulge the curiosity of human beings about each other."
By way of assuming two native postures: first peddlar anf then shaman, he is able to survive for six years running goods back and forth from the interior to the coast. In the course of this work he becomes a healer laying his hands ont he afflicted, breathing on the sick, bleeding them, and cauterizing wounds with hot coals. He is reported to have revived a dead man with the magical arts, arts that included by his tetsimony: "our method was to bless the sick, breathe upon them, recie a Pater Noster and Ave Maria, and pray earnestly to G-d our Lord for their recovery."
But the second coming of the Spanish with the natives, including Nunez in 1536 (the end of the film) in westrrn Mexico, the complex of self and other, us and them, becomes illlustratively complicated:
"We sought to ensure the freedom of the Indians and at the moment when we believed we had achieved it, the contrary occurred. They [the Christians] had in fact determined to attack the Indians whom we had sent away reassured as to their peaceful intentions."
The above quotations are taken from Nunez's Naufragios y comentarios better known to us as Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America. What can we learn about the relationship between the cultural being and organism that is humanity? What is the message of this film?
Monday, September 1, 2008
Civilization and the "Other"
Here in our second post for the Honors Seminar Webblog, you are to give thought to the meaning of civilization and attempting here to define it with an eye to its function in the dynamic of self and other that we have been discussing. Take advantage of your online inquiries into "alterity" and "otherness" in deepening your reflection on how civilization, much like sedentary life, is employed to define an individual or collective self against the backdrop of the other. Your readings in Gellner and Conrad will undoubtedly help here, along with your own inherited wisdom on the topic. If you do quote from sources please make sure to cite them appropriately and let us know where we can find the information so that we may add to the discussion.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Some Preliminary Thoughts
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, but I thought that I would repeat it here for those who would prefer a blog format to work on the questions I posed.
As you know from my earlier email message I wanted 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 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?
Some 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.
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, but I thought that I would repeat it here for those who would prefer a blog format to work on the questions I posed.
As you know from my earlier email message I wanted 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 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?
Some 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.
Thanks a lot. I'll see you very soon.
Dr. J.
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