RUINS

Darwin, Slavery, the HMS Black Joke, and Seaman Morgan.

2012-02-12T09:30:00.000-05:00

I decided to repeat this story each year in honor of Darwin.
HMS Beagle

During the same stay in Brazil that brought Darwin face to face with the horrors of slavery, he was for a time left behind in Rio while Captain Fitz-Roy and the HMS Beagle retraced the previous months voyage down the Brazilian coast. Capt. Fitz-Roy wanted to confirm that Bahia was to the east of Rio and remap that portion of the Brazilian coast. Upon the return of the HMS Beagle, Darwin was so overjoyed that he later wrote an unusually long entry in his Diary. The night before, he met one of his shipmates, King, who had come ahead. Darwin learned from King

"...the calamitous news of the death of three of our ship-mates. — They were the three of the Macacù party who were ill with fever when the Beagle sailed from Rio. — 1st Morgan, an extra-ordinary powerful man & excellent seaman; he was a very brave man & had performed some curious feats, he put a whole party of Portugeese to flight, who had molested the party; he pitched an armed sentinel into the sea at St Jago; & formerly he was one of the boarders in that most gallant action against the Slaver the Black Joke. — 2nd Boy Jones one of the most promising boys in the ship & had been promised but the day before his illness, promotion. — These were the only two of the sailors who were with the Cutter, & picked for their excellence. — And lastly, poor little Musters; who three days before his illness heard of his Mothers death. Morgan was taken ill 4 days after arriving on board & died near the Abrolhos, where he was lowered into the sea after divisions on Sunday — for several days he was violently delirious & talked about the party. — Boy Jones died two days after arriving at Bahia, & Musters two days after that.— They were both for a long time insensible or nearly so.— They were both buried in the English burial ground at Bahia; where in the lonely spot are also two other midshipmen" (1).

Darwin was obviously taken with this Morgan, especially given the contrast with Captain Fitz-Roy's support for slavery as a "civilizing" institution. The story of the HMS Black Joke is a little different, though. The British navy's frigates could not match the speed of the average slaver, and "the smaller ships were mostly "Sepping brigs (2), which everyone agreed sailed like haystacks, compared with the clean lines of the slaving schooners." So said Christopher Lloyd in his The Navy and the Slave Trade (1949). When it happened that the slaver Henriquetta was captured, it was bought by the Royal Navy in 1828 and renamed the HMS Black Joke. Until it was scrapped in 1832, with a crew of 34 and just one 18-pound gun, the HMS Black Joke, whose name can not help but make possible all sorts of puns itself, captured nine slavers, including the 18 gun El Almirante after a 31 hour chase and battle. In their 16 months of active duty against the slave trade, the crew of the HMS Black Joke freed 466 enslaved Africans from those nine ships.

Later, Darwin relates the discovery of a Mate on another ship, the Unicorn:

May 28th & 29th Captain FitzRoy hired a small Schooner to go to the Rio Negro to bring Mr Wickham in order that he might take command of our Schooner. She arrived yesterday, & to day Mr King, who came with Mr Wickham paid me a visit. — They are heartily tired of their little vessels & are again as glad to see the Beagle as every one in her is to see them. —

30th, July 1st & 2nd Have been employed in arranging & writing notes about all my treasures from Maldonado. — The Captain informs me that he hopes next summer to double the Horn. — My heart exults whenever I think of all the glorious prospects of the future.

3rd–7th All hands of the Beagle continue to be employed in working at the Schooner (for the future the Unicorn). My occupations likewise are the same & I do not stir out of the Ship.

8th It was discovered to day that one of the Mates, belonging to the Unicorn, had formerly been in the President, a vessel supposed to be piratical & which brought the English man of war, the Black Joke, to action. It has, since the Trial, been suspected that this same ship took & murdered every soul on board the Packet Redpole. — Captain Fitz-Roy has determined to take the man a prisoner, to the Consul at M. Video. I have just been astonished to hear the order, "to reeve the running rigging, & bend sails". And we now a little before 12 at night have weighed anchor & are under sail (3).

According to Nora Barlow's note: “The 'Black Joke' was sent out by the Admiralty in 1829 to intercept slavers in West Africa” (4). There are a couple of explanations for why Darwin would get elements of the story reversed or wrong. It is clear that he enjoyed some familiarity with the crew of the Beagle. He mentions in his accounts arguing with Fit-Roy over slavery and as a result being banished by him from the cabin, only to be invited to eat with the crew. Perfect opportunities to hear tales told by an experienced crew like the Beagle's, who knew him well enough to nickname him “Philosopher.” Darwin does seem to have the story correct by the time of the incident with the Mate of the Unicorn, though. A painting of the Black Joke attacking the slaver El Almirante comes from the Royal Naval Museum.

It is little wonder that someone who hated slavery as much as Darwin would mention the passing of Morgan. It says something about History that all we have of Morgan is this brief mention. Perhaps, too, it was people such as Morgan who prompted Darwin to write that contrary to the claims of some Darwinists and followers of Spencer:

“I felt that I was walking on a path unknown to me and full of pitfalls; but I had the advantage of previous discussions by able men. I tried to say most emphatically that a great philosopher, law-giver, etc., did far more for the progress of mankind by his writings or his example than by leaving a numerous offspring. I have endeavored to show how the struggle for existence between tribe and tribe depends on an advance in the moral and intellectual qualities of the members, and not merely on their capacity of obtaining food”(5).

In the Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin brought into the open all of the events he witnessed in the slave countries, but also reveals how he still continued to suffered from the horrors of what he had seen there. His son's statement that even decades later his father endured nightmares of Brazil has a more than adequate foundation in Darwin's own writings. Here is a writer who noted every detail, who centered his work upon his own observations and those of others, who even notes the sound of the sands near Rio Madre when trodden upon by his horse, but who at times leaves out details of his own experiences because the memory so easily enrages and horrifies him. The contrast between the Brazil of infinite tangled banks and the horrific land of slavery found its way into Darwin's work. Even if he could never leave behind the Brazil of his nightmares, he was glad to sail away, never to return.

On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master's eye. These latter cruelties were witnessed by me in a Spanish colony, in which it has always been said, that slaves are better treated than by the Portuguese, English, or other European nations. I have seen at Rio de Janeiro a powerful negro afraid to ward off a blow directed, as he thought, at his face. I was present when a kind-hearted man was on the point of separating forever the men, women, and little children of a large number of families who had long lived together. I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authentically heard of; -- nor would I have mentioned the above revolting details, had I not met with several people, so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of the negro as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil. Such people have generally visited at the houses of the upper classes, where the domestic slaves are usually well treated, and they have not, like myself, lived amongst the lower classes. Such inquirers will ask slaves about their condition; they forget that the slave must indeed be dull, who does not calculate on the chance of his answer reaching his master's ears.

In this final passage, Darwin refers not very approvingly to Malthus and Spencer while reaffirming his own repudiation of slavery. The final sentence is often quoted, but it is rarely rendered in its full context. The possible reasons for this omission are numerous, and like similar omissions, it is not often noticed. History is made of omissions and the fragments of everyday human life.

“It is argued that self-interest will prevent excessive cruelty; as if self-interest protected our domestic animals, which are far less likely than degraded slaves, to stir up the rage of their savage masters. It is an argument long since protested against with noble feeling, and strikingly exemplified, by the ever-illustrious Humboldt. It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our poorer countrymen: if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin; but how this bears on slavery, I cannot see; as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in one land, by showing that men in another land suffered from some dreadful disease. Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children -- those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own -- being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin”(6).

Darwin writes of witnessing just such events as the selling off of family members while in Brazil. It was Darwin's own blow that the slave mentioned in the previous passage was afraid to defend himself against, but Darwin said he had not raised his hand to hit the person, but in frustration because of their arguing about passage across the river. The encounter profoundly effected Darwin. He was shocked to find himself in the position of being seen as a slaver in the eyes of an actual slave. Slavery, he notes, can quickly make anyone, no matter how civilized or progressive, into the most brutal and inhuman master. Moreover, no matter one's personal view of slavery, the institution itself taints everyone in such a society, slaver and abolitionist alike.

During the voyage, Darwin also gave up hunting, which had been a favorite past time before the expedition.

This year is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. He and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day, February 12, 1809. November will mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. Darwin's Origin of Species sold only 50,000 copies during his life. In comparison, George Combe’s Constitution of Man (1827), a phrenological guide to life and conduct, sold 350,000 copies and remained in print from 1828 until 1899.
_____________________

1 Darwin, Diary, June 4, 1832.
2 “Sir Robert's important improvement in giving to line-of-battle ships a circular bow, we have already slightly touched upon his ingenuity has since produced a more surprising, and an equally important, change at the opposite extremity of the ship, a circular instead of a square stern. ... It having occurred to the philosophic mind of this ingenious architect, that, by not removing the solid bow in the wake of the second deck, in order to substitute the usual flimsy fabric, called the beak-head, the ship would acquire additional strength. in that part of her frame, as well as afford some protection to her crew when going end-on upon an enemy, the circular bow of the Namur was allowed to remain. The advantages of this important alteration struck every one who saw the ship when finished ; and subsequently, as we shall hereafter have occasion more fully to relate, every ship in the British navy was ordered to be constructed with a solid circular bow instead of a beak-head.” James, William. 1837. The Naval History of Great Britain. Apparently, though, this improvement made the ships slower than the slave schooners, who had to deliver their “cargos” before too many of them died. The best that one could hope for in terms of the self-interest of the slavers moderating their treatment of their captives was to be delivered into the hands of the master quickly before dying at sea. It was no doubt unclear to many below decks which alternative was preferable.

3 Keynes, R. D. ed. 2001. Charles Darwin's Beagle Diary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4 Charles Darwin's Diary of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle. Edited from the MS by Nora Barlow. 1933. New York: MacMillan Company.
5 Letter 241. To John Morley. Down, March 24th, 1871.
6 Darwin, Charles R. 1839. Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836, describing their examination of the southern shores of South America, and the Beagle's circumnavigation of the globe. Journal and remarks. 1832-1836. London: Henry Colburn.

New blog project: Cultural Studies - Introductory Essays

2012-01-20T20:13:00.001-05:00

New Project:

Cultural Studies - Introductory Essays

http://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/

A new project, and one that brings some of my activities to a close. I have decided to write out my Cultural Studies lectures and put them online for my students. These will be written over the next few months and will no doubt be edited from time to time. My students have asked that I make my notes available, but that was always impractical and would no doubt be confusing, but in this form both present and past students (and other interested readers). These will not be the actual lectures, which of course changed and developed over the thirteen years I taught the class, but they will give some idea of the course and some reminders for those who sat through my through my class over the years. It is doubtful that I will teach on this subject again, as my interests have as is proper moved on to other subjects.
Lecture One: On the Question “What is Cultural Studies?” is already up.

Below is from the the "About these lectures" page of the blog.

"We all fail in ourefforts to present the essentials of culture to our students.It remains for their genius to convert our failure into success"
Alfred North Whitehead

After over a decadeof teaching and lecturing on Cultural Studies, the realization that acertain rigidity had enveloped the course became an inescapableconclusion. This rigidity had occurred despite a good deal of effortto the contrary. These lectures were given from notes and in aextemporaneous manner, but even so what might have appeared to othersas improvisation became scripted by habit and repetition. For thisvery reason, the extemporaneous manner of delivery was not a longterm solution. As it turned out, nor was the constant revision ofthe syllabus in response to student interest as well as my ownchanging interests and interpretations. My writing these lecturesshows these efforts to have been, in the end, both a failure and asuccess. The remains of this work consists of a fairly impressivearchive of notes, fragments, and other materials steadily accumulatedamid the ruins of these remarks and revisions.

Now, one response tothis problem of authority would be to revolutionize one’s syllabusand lectures, but a condition of permanent revolution can not, forobvious reasons, be maintained by a finite person and besides, theselimited revolutions of necessity begin to take on a certain samenessas the encounters with this personal limit become increasinglyfrequent.

A different responseprovides the reasons for writing these lectures: one might embracethe view that perhaps one has said enough and that the many classesand talks had congealed into something that made sense even asCultural Studies itself experienced great changes with its acceptanceand institutionalization in American universities and cultureindustries. These changes were also found in miniature in theinstitutionalization of Cultural Studies at Pratt and directlyaffected the course.

Without a doubt theorientation of the course changed as well. After some years ofteaching about an “emerging field” of Cultural Studies, I thoughtit better to go back and look at the different disciplines, fields ofknowledge, schools, texts, authorities and politics that coalescedinto Cultural Studies. Gradually, the course moved toward tracingthe genealogy of Cultural Studies along with some limitedspeculations on its future in the academy. It must be said thatthis genealogy had to take into account the social changes that madepossible the movement of Cultural Studies from being marginalizedcritiques to being commonplace or even farcical term: witness theNew York Times “Style” section column titled “CulturalStudies” or the recent exchange in the Chronicle of Higher Educationover the status of Cultural Studies that managed to carry the air ofboth a graduate school debate and an argument at a funeral. All toooften, critique has given way to mere criticism. In terms ofeveryday life, we are in a historical moment that nicely bookendsCultural Studies between its origins in the social dislocations ofthe 20^th Century and those of the present. If it is truethat we have moved from Raymond Williams posing the question of thefuture of Cultural Studies to Hall’s eulogy on its theoreticallegacies, then there is ample justification for writing thesereflections in the form of lectures.

Because theselectures were presented as extemporaneous class talks, they variedfrom semester to semester and year to year. Those who attended thecourse in the early years will not recognize some aspects of thesesummary lectures, but much will seem familiar or at least make a bitmore sense of what you heard. And so the second justification forwriting down these lectures is to give students present and past theopportunity to revisit or have clarified points that might have beenmissed, unclear, or skipped due to the pressures of the classroom.

Of course, everyonewill notice the absence of any of the autobiographical referencesthat I might have made in class. Students from the class willimmediately understand the reason for this absence. For those otherI might refer you to the little essay “Against Autobiography” written for the student journal. Besides, there is never a reason togive your detractors words to use against you but at the same timeone must have an implicit trust of one’s students and so in printthere will be no autobiographical content. I have, however,attempted to retain as much as possible hints of the extemporaneousmode of presentation.

The third reason forwriting these lectures stems from the essential commitment ofCultural Studies to education as well as critique. It is the habitof professors to guard their lectures rather jealously, but this isantithetical to the history of Cultural Studies. Thus, the publicnature of these writings are a nod to the many interventions intoeducation that are found in such different locations as Adorno’sradio talks, Birmingham’s commitment to worker education, the labormovement, and the Center for Cultural Studies. Teaching the CulturalStudies course gave me the opportunity to interact with all of thefirst year students in the Cultural Studies/Critical & VisualStudies major in conjunction with my duties as Director/Coordinator. With our coming curricular changes, it is now appropriate that thestudents share a wider common experience.

Every semester, Ibegan by asserting that I have a particular view of the genealogy ofCultural Studies and that my view is not shared by everyone, evenamong my colleagues here at Pratt. I encouraged them to seek outother faculty to get their views on any questions or disagreements. Just as important, to take courses from a range of faculty especiallyin those areas such as Feminism that I could not adequately cover inthe short time allowed us, or ideas such as “postmodernism” whichI do not use. The goal of the course was never, however, to presentan established set of texts or to invent a new discipline. The goal,simply put, was to present students with sometimes difficultmaterials that call into question our usual assumptions and callengage them over the course of many years. Epicurus said that asteachers “we should not raise children,” by which he meant weshould not prepare our students for their subordination to authority.

The course endedwith students reading work by faculty at Pratt who are affiliatedwith Cultural Studies. Students enjoyed the opportunity to read thework of their own teachers. I was always surprised by the degree towhich students were excited by the assignment and would typicallyengage some of the most difficult work. The Fall 2011 question wasthe following:

Final Essay Question:
The final essay requires that you read Hall's essay on CulturalStudies and its Theoretical Legacies. Then you are to choose 2-3 examples of work by professorshere at Pratt and analyze them based upon Hall's critique of American cultural studies. Doesthe work of the faculty support Hall's contentions? Essays contributed by Pratt Faculty areon the course LMS site. The essays are by Professors Ivan Zatz, Lisabeth During, May Joseph, JonBeller, Suzanne Verderber, Michael Eng, Chris Vitale, Miriam Greenberg, etc. You maychose other works by faculty in the department as well, but the faculty member must be inthe School of Liberal Arts.

It should be theobligation of all senior faculty to teach at least one 1^stor 2^nd year class and these lectures fulfilled thatobligation. But for many years my interest in Cultural Studies hasbeen eclipsed by other specific work. The writing of these lecturesallows me to turn my attention to these other studies and courseswhile leaving behind this artifact from the accumulated debris.

BRBIII
New York City

Music of the Week: L' ENFANCE ROUGE - Terre d'élection

2012-01-17T18:38:00.000-05:00

Music of the Week:

L' ENFANCE ROUGE - Terre d'élection

Preacher/Wind/Phone/Noise

2012-01-08T09:30:00.000-05:00

On January 1, 2012 a message was left on my answering machine from the Hurricane Baptist Church.

SummerClub Annihilation Raditation Preacher/A Wind on the Phone by SummerClub NODE801

The Crimson Permanent Assurance 1983 by Terry Gilliam

2012-01-07T11:34:00.003-05:00

A real gem of a commentary and classic Gilliam.

The Crimson Permanent Assurance 1983 by Terry Gilliam at www.youtube.com

Wikileaks Spy Files release: a must read for everyone

2012-01-06T23:57:00.001-05:00

PRIVACY DOES NOT EXIST.

I have many, many problems with Assage (or at least some of the actions he has been accused of committing), but Wikileaks and other organizations are doing some important work. The new Spy Files release has some interesting stuff, like this promotional video:

"Remote Control System: Full Intelligence on Target Users even for encrypted Communications. A stealth system of attacking, infecting and monitoring computers and smartphones. Full intelligence on target users even for encrypted communications (Skype, PGP, secure web mail, etc.)"

The Spy Files - Remote Control System: Full Intelligence on Target Users even for encrypted Communications. wikileaks.org

Music of the Week: Fred Frith -- Legs

2011-12-28T20:31:00.001-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iUR_IIQMKw

Music of the Week: SummerClub - Iodoform

2011-12-11T18:51:00.001-05:00

SummerClub-Iodoform by SummerClub NODE801

Theodor Adorno on Theory and Practice.

2011-12-02T10:39:00.001-05:00

Theodor Adorno, Self-portrait.

Theodor Adorno on Theory and Practice.
From Problems of Moral Philosophy. Stanford University Press,1995: 4-5. [Lectures: May 7, 1963 - July 23, 1963.]

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I urge you therefore to exercise a certain patience with respect to the relations between theory and practice. Such a request may be justified because in a situation like the present - one about which I do not entertain the slightest illusion, and nor would I wish to encourage any illusion in you - whether it will be possible ever again to achieve a valid for of practice may well depend on not demanding that every idea should immediately produce its own legitimizing document explaining its own practical use.
The situation may well demand instead that we resist the call of practicality with all our might in order ruthlessly to follow through an idea and its logical implications so as to see where it may lead. I would even say that this ruthlessness, the power of resistance that is inherent in the idea itself and that prevents it from letting itself be directly manipulated for any instrumental purposes whatsoever, this theoretical ruthlessness contains - if you will allow this paradox -- a practical element within it. Today, practice - and I do not hesitate to express this in an extreme way - has made great inroads into theory, in other words, into the realm of new thought in which right behavior can be reformulated. This idea is not as prardoxical and irritating as it may sound, for in the final analysis thinking is itself a form of behavior. In its origins thinking is no more than a form in which we have attempted to master our environment and come to terms with it - testing reality is the name given by analytical psychology to the function of the ego and of thought - and it is perfectly possible that in certain situations practice will be referred back to theory far more frequently than at other times and in other situations. At any rate, it does no harm to air this question.
It is no accident that the celebrated unity of theory and practice implied by Marxian theory and then developed above all by Lenin should have finally degenerated in [Stalinist] dialectical materialism to a kind of blind dogma whose sole function is to eliminate theoretical thinking altogether. This provides an object lesson in the transformation of practicism into irrationalism, and hence, too, for the transformation of the practicism into a repressive and oppressive practice. That alone might well be a sufficient reason to give us pause and not be in such haste to rely on the famous unity of theory and practice in the beleif that it is guaranteed and that it holds good for every time and place. For otherwise you will find yourself in the position of what Americans call a joiner, that is to say a man who always has to join it, who has to have a cause for which he can fight. Such a person is driven by his sheer enthusiasm for the idea that something or other must be done and some movement has to be joined about which he is deluded enough to believe that it will bring him a kind of hostility towards mind that necessarily negates a genuine unity of theory and practice."

Text and Slides from SLAS Seminar on "Until Darwin" blog

2011-11-14T12:45:00.001-05:00

The text and slides of "Until (and a bit after) Darwin" my portion of the SLAS Faculty Research Seminar with Chris Jensen of Math & Science are now up and available on the Until Darwin website. Click here or on the image above to go to the page.

SLAS Faculty Research Seminar: Diversity, Culture, Theory, and Data: Science on Human Variety. Monday, November 7th from 12:30-2:00.

2011-11-05T10:42:00.000-04:00

Please join us for this semester's faculty research seminar, which is being held on Monday, November 7th from 12:30-2:00 in Dekalb 206. This is a brown bag affair, so bring your lunch. We will provide coffee. Below you will find a description of the seminar. I hope to see you there.
Andrew W. Barnes, Ph.D.
Dean
School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Pratt Institute
200 Willoughby Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
718.636.3570

Diversity, Culture, Theory, and Data: Science on Human Variety

B. Ricardo Brown and Christopher X J. Jensen

Human variety plays a pivotal role in history: how we interpret human diversity dictates what kind of society we construct. Over the last three hundred years, science has played an increasingly influential role in explaining and interpreting human variety. How has the rise of science influenced our conception of human variety? Does science shed light on the nature of our differences or simply legitimize prevailing cultural conceptions of difference? Through this talk, we will address these questions by considering the historical trajectory of how science conceptualizes human variety. Starting with the battle between the monogenists and the polygenists of the 18th and 19th centuries, Ric will describe how the cultural conflict over slavery was reflected in battles between scientific camps. He will discuss how prevailing culture influenced the questions scientists asked, the theories they posited, and the way they used data to validate these theories. Ric will explain how increasing access to information about the natural world -- paired with changes in the way science was pursued -- eventually led to the key insights of Charles Darwin, whose theories in large part displaced previous conceptions of human variety. Chris will then consider how post-Darwinian science has conceptualized human variety, beginning with eugenics and ending with the revolution in genomic technologies. Shifts in the culture of science and the culture in which science operates, as well as increased access to genetic data, have all transformed how we interpret human variety. Nonetheless, echos of past scientific shortcomings still reverberate through the present-day science of human genomics. The talk will conclude with the opportunity for the audience to discuss how present-day science influences our understanding of human variety.

The Study of Community in American Sociology, c.1900 - c.1975: Part VII - Conclusion: Social Formations, Systems of Classification and Social Evolution

2011-09-11T12:01:00.000-04:00

Conclusion: Social Formations, Systems of Classification and Social Evolution
In sociology there have been at least two discursive formations in the investigation of community. Of course, they are not mutually exclusive in time and so have always coexisted, though one predominated in the time before 1975 and the other became dominate in the years since. During the first period, which dates roughly from 1945 until 1975, the discursive formation regarding community was organized by the relation of four obects of study: definition, classification, evolution, and territory. Discussions of community constantly referred to these as forming the parameters of sociological study during the period when the definition of community and the classification of definitions became a primary research activity. Of course, definition had been important prior to this period, for writers such as Giddings and Tonnies, whose vision of social progress brought together evolutionary and taxonomic aspects of classification in the service of social reform. This vision of social progress did not survive the realities of an era book-ended by trenches and camps. However, it was the “normative-meliorative” vision of social progress that infused the discipline of sociology that gave rise to the myriad definitions of community.

The sociological study of community had come to an impasse. Researchers had no idea if they were speaking about the same object of study and there were seemingly as many definitions as there were researchers. Hillery’s oft cited work did not offer a definition of community, only a classification that brought order to the chaos of idiosyncratic conceptualizations. His classification was intended to bring order to the definitions that had preceded him, but he also established the boundaries of the sociological study of community for decades to follow. At bottom, his classification of definitions constituted a representation of a scientific consensus. Hillery’s lesson is that neither the definitions of community nor the utopias it produces correspond to any particular community of the past or present. Like him, we confront a moment in the history of sociology when community is expressed not as something “out there” but as an object constructed through the norms of sociology itself.

Franklin Giddings noted that

“the subject matter of classification may consist of concepts only. The dichotomies are made in thought only. Societal facts are actualities. Classification of them is a sorting of them into actual, or as we usually say, factual, groups, the dichotomies of which have been actually made by processes which men have observed and may now observe” (Giddings 1924:69).

The point is not to denounce classification, but to understand that the sociological definitions of community are also constitutive of the community it seeks to investigate. The meaning or truth of community can not be understood apart from the ways in which we express its meanings. Hillary assumed that the definitions he found in the library reflected real communities and therefore to classify definitions is the same as classifying real communities. Then, as the definitions and classifications became synonymous with --- but also detached from --- real social relations, each tended to recapitulate the other and this repetition give validity to conceptions of social evolution.

Giddings argued that because “plants, animals, and human beings do not behave forever in the same way,” classifications must also change. To understand these changes, any classification of social facts (concepts) must be articulated along with a scheme of “social genesis..... in sociology a study of societal variability, carried out into a classificatory scheme, and thereby checked up, is of correlative importance with the study of societal genesis, in a like manner carried out” (Giddings 1924:76). Classification is necessary for a scientific study of community that centers on social evolution, and it is this evolutionary aspect that unites community with territory. Definition and classification, evolution, and territoriality were essential for the sociological study of community. They can not be connected in a broader or even utopian social formation without each undergoing significant transformation. Neither does placing them in new discursive formations always deprive them of their oppressive force.

The consolidation of any discipline carries with it changes in the production of knowledge. In the case of sociology, its consolidation as a discipline brought with it a reliance on specific scientific ideologies (Canguilhem 1991). Sociologists have often misread both the theory and the substance of the history of science. There are no better examples of this than the sociological tendencies which have embraced forms of positivism, Spencerism, and orthodox Marxism. But to misread is not necessarily to get it all wrong. Hillery and others may have misread the ability of science to speak the truth about community, but they recognize the fundamental importance of classification in the practice of science and in the acceptance of scientific ideologies. Systems of classification like Hillery's were necessitated by the demand that sociology be more than a mere scientific ideology. Whenever experimentation is impossible, as is usually the case in social research, classification becomes the necessary foundation of science. Classification became essential for legitimizing theories of social evolution by providing first a means for linking the sociological study of community to the production of the most “advanced” forms of scientific knowledge and secondly an evolutionary trajectory for human society. In some it compelled a historical movement: Gemeinschaft gives way to Gesellschaft, tradition to modernity. In others, community became a utopian vision of social progress made possible by the precise application of sociological knowledge to social problems. In still others, the problem of community was speed of social evolution and the constant danger of degeneration.

Social evolution was believed to operate within the territorial boundaries each community established and maintained through either force or the internalization of a “consciousness in kind,” or consanguinity. The sociological problem of establishing the boundary and government of a community in time and space was one whose solution was sought in a consensus on the classification of types to express either to social evolution or degeneration. This solution was mandated by the needs of the day, proved inadequate to the challenges posed by the new conditions of authority and resistance in the post-war period. The demise of this consensus was a signal announcing the appearance on the horizon of Gouldner’s coming crisis of Western sociology.

The middle of the 1970s, definition, classification, evolution, and territory, formed the limits of the sociological study of community. These objects of knowledge were decentered, but did not cease to exist. They were transformed or replaced by new objects: Identity as redefined by multiculturalism and postcolonialism; new social movements combined with identity to produce new struggles over everyday life as well as new forms of academic knowledge; degeneration reemerged as the threat of the underclass to a bourgeoisie no longer confident in its authority or destiny; new enclosures of community expressing an anxiety of loss and a reterritorialization of community not with the poor and working classes, but within the newly expanded middle classes.

Sociology, like all disciplines, rest upon particular regimes of truth. A common element in these regimes is that the origin of the discipline in question is always to be found in a genius having lived, a discovery being made “out of the blue,” a theory and prediction being put to the test, or a group of texts establishing an entire field of knowledge. The moments become the mythical history of a discipline, its “report, naming, the narration of a Beginning, but also presentation, confirmation, explanation” (Horkheimer and Adorno: 1969:8). Sociology is no different, its origins reveal the precariousness of its history --- a precariousness and a forgetting that is a general condition in the history of the disciplines. Examples of unseemly origins abound in the disciplines: take geography, with its legacy of environmental determinism, or Indo-European studies and historical linguistics, which were often allied with scientific ideologies supportive of Germanic/Anglo-Saxon supremacy (Gossett 1963). As for sociology, it had amongst other tendencies its” eugenicist “normative-meliorative” reformism, its Spencerism and “Social Darwinism” ---- and all of these have been forgotten, minimized or treated as aberrations in the histories of the discipline. Take for example Gouldner’s periodization, where we find no mention of Spencer or Sumner. A subtle reminder that the work of forgetting sociology’s past “scientific ideologies” is not limited one’s political and ethical commitments.

If the crisis of Western Sociology continues to haunt us --- and like all disciplines sociology is always in crisis --- then it demands genealogies of sociology and its interventions into public policy. “Sociology has a venerable genealogy” wrote Albion Small in 1924. It is indeed true that sociology has come to acquire several genealogies intersecting to produce its specialized fields. Although it only addresses the narrow question of community in sociology, this essay has presented a possible alternative to the usual history of sociology and its study of community. The history of sociology, like the history of any science, is as much the history of errors as it is the history of truths and like the history of any science, it is also the history of forgetting.

Previous posts in this series:

PartI: Introduction & Bibliography
PartII: Understanding Community
PartIII: The Reception of Tonnies Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft[Community and Society]
PartIV: Hillery and Hollingshead: Two Conceptions of Past SociologicalStudies
PartV: The "Societal Community" of Talcott Parsons
PartVI - A Break

The Study of Community in American Sociology, c.1900 - c.1975: Part VI - A Break

2011-09-09T21:08:00.000-04:00

A Break

Essaysby Effrat and Gusfield in 1975 are among many that mark thetransformation in the study of community in sociology. Gusfield’sinvocation of the communal ideals of the New Left was located in theutopian forms of communitarianism, while Effrat identified communitywith a politics of localism and participatory democracy. BecauseEffrat provided a summation of sociological work, and it is best tobegin with her analysis.

Centralto Effrat’s analysis is the assertion that conceptualizingcommunity was akin to “trying to scoop up jello with your fingers”(1975:1). Faced with the same heterogeneity of definitions thatHillery had already found, but with twenty intervening years, Effrattoo attempted to bring order to the chaos of sociologicaldefinitions. Instead of producing categories of definitions asHillery had, she commented more broadly on the “process of debate”within post-Chicago School sociology was responsible for the currentchaos because sociologists had avoided the “controversial issues”surrounding community: territoriality and function. Because of thereluctance to engage those two aspects of community, sociologists hadcome to enveloped community within

a gelatinous mess of hypotheses, research, and value judgments.... The term “community” is frequently invoked in tones of profundity by ideologues (social scientists as well as “laypersons”) from the far left to the far right. Like motherhood and apple pie, it is considered synonymous with virtue and desirability. Indeed, much of the problem in identifying the various definitions lies in separating the content of the conception from the value-laden imagery of warmth and camaraderie attached to it in many cases (1975:1-2).

Effrat recommended a more empirical approach because the study of community had shifted away from the ecological concerns of territory and population which should have remained central to the sociological study of community. Instead, the study of community was understood as a problem of identity and not about conflicts in the everyday existence of an ideology whose function it was to unite a population within a territory. Only when territoriality was reduce to being a mere theoretical problem could sociologists ask “whether community must be grounded in a particular, delimited place, or whether it can exist among people who are territorially dispersed” (1975:6). The authority of sociology to effect social policy and reform rests upon such fundamental questions.

Although Hillery acknowledged that territoriality and social interaction are common characteristics of community, his own classificatory scheme could not fully “separate [out] the value-laden imagery” because it depended upon the same value-laden language. While aware of the political aspects of definition and classification in relation to evolution, Effrat wanted to separate out “the content of the conception” of community and highlight the conflicts between definitions of community while Hillery highlighted the points of agreement. To complete her task, Effrat presented a history of four traditions distinguished by their reliance on territoriality and the size of the population. The focus of studies on municipal power in urban and suburban areas with large populations characterized this investigation of the territorial community. However, newly emerging traditions without a strong territorial grounding, “community as society” and “personal community” are based instead on occupation, leisure, lifestyle, and professional associations as forces/institutions of social cohesion.

Gusfield’s typology of intellectual concepts reveals a series of disciplinary paradigm shifts. The
development of sociological theories centered on the fundamental difference between “community and society,” or “concepts and counter-concepts” although this distinction is an artificial one, for
community and society are always idealized concepts. For Gusfield, “the concept ‘community’ [has]
significance in three dimensions. In one dimension, it points to and describes a specific form of human association. In another it is part of a theory of social evolution. In still another dimension, it is part of an ideological debate over the value of the present as compared to the past and to possible alternative futures.... the concept of community” as “part of a system of accounts used by members and observers as a way of explaining or justifying the members behavior. (1975:21)” This ”consciousness of kind” formed the implicit basis of the concept of community that Gusfield compared to class consciousness: both are ”facilitated by the capacity to evoke symbols of community. Within the emergence of a consciousness of kind is the rise of a collective experience; a sense of participating in the same history” (1975:35). Community in this sense can not be separated from ideology and discourse. It is ”a system of accounts” to be drawn upon depending on one's social status and cultural capital, and the very phrase reminding us that the everyday experience of community is indistinguishable from the community of money.

Despite his invocation of a Left utopia, Gusfield’s analysis emphasized the traditional binary of community and society. “I use the idea of system to characterize the concepts of “community” and “society” and “tradition” and “modernity”.... Community must decline if society is to grow. “Tradition” and “modernity” are in struggle and one must give way to the advantage of the other” (1975:54). At the same time Gusfield also proposed that “this use of the community-society dichotomy as a theory of social evolution distorts and confuses processes of social change....We can better understand change by emphasizing the mixture and interpenetration of types than we can by emphasis on conflict between systems” (1975:55). By juxtaposing community and society, Gusfield removed them from the “dialectical” development of modernization and progress that he believed united community and society into a single object of study.

Gusfield once again quickly modified his view: “The persistence and continuation of communal elements and the emergence of social institutions and activities are not necessarily in conflict” (1995:55 [emphasis in original]) because they interpenetrate each other. He then suggested an additional conception of community: as a utopia that is nothing less than “an anguished cry against those facets of modern life in which men and women are categorized, isolated, typed and in which their specific qualities as human beings and as emotive and dependent persons is ignored” (1975:104).

In contrast to Effrat, Gusfield concluded that “the scientific, semantic meanings of sociology are not sufficient to grant significance and moral direction on their own. But the infusion of dramatic, poetic, even distorting, meaning is essential for the vitality of scientific concepts and their significance for relevant human concerns. That the concept of community has had so constant a usage is testimony both to its power and to the ubiquitousness of its ideal” of a “utopian communitarianism” (1975:104). These communes served as potent critiques of contemporary life. “Each age is the judge of its own utopias.... the ideology of community and the utopian communitarian movements are expressions of the concern of modern men [sic] with the specific quality of life today” (1975:102). As critiques, communalism and “utopian communitarianism” point toward the possibilities for social change inherent in their resistance to the community of money, including the possibility that they might become reactionary movements.

In the period preceding Effrat and Gusfield’s reassessment of community, the sociological work had centered on the concern for a scientific or rational definition of community. This search was organized around and greatly aided by the dichotomy of community and society. There was an emphasis on classification, definition, evolution, and the territorial aspects of community. The taxonomies of community existed alongside the broader sociological studies on the evolution of society. Not only did the community/society dichotomy contain an assumption of a progressive movement, but the task of classification necessitated a continuous search for intermediate types that might prove to be the links in an evolutionary development. Territory became a mandatory characteristic of community within which teemed a consciousness-in-kind rooted in a geographical landscape and sense of place. The positive aspects of this “sense of place” have been quite extensively explored by geographers (James 1972, Johnston 1983) and so too have its reactive aspects found obvious practical expressions, for it is not difficult to move from an emotive sense of belonging to an ideology of consanguinity and soil.

For Effrat, the study of community ---like much of sociological theory--- was straining under the weight of questions that could no longer be incorporated within the discipline’s structures. In a last attempt to preserve the integrity of the four traditions she described, Effrat proposed an system of four traditions, with each inhabiting its specialized niche. In Gusfield’s work, community became both an abstraction and aspiration.

If there is a typology of ideal (symbolic) types, along with a classificatory regularity, then there must also be criteria for their inclusion. Loomis gave three criteria which for Parson’s had to be met for a social group’s inclusion in a classification of community: history, derivation, and content. Hillery used several criteria to select the definitions of social groups for inclusion in his classification of community. Gusfield recognized how “the dichotomy between ‘community’ and ‘society’ has played a significant role in the development of such theories, especially in the distinction between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity.’ In positing ‘community’ as opposite ‘society,’ ‘tradition’ as opposite ‘modernity,’ both the evolutionary sociologists and the modernization theorists have given us a simplified and distorted picture....” (Gusfield 1975:80-81).

Hillery’s method for producing his classification of definitions further illuminates the methods and problems early researches encountered. Much like Borges” librarian, Hillery literally browsed the available literature on sociology on the shelves of the library. He first looked up the definitions that the are regularly referred to as important works. Then he used the cited references in that first group of important works to uncover additional definitions in less well known works. In the course of tracking these definitions down, he perused the nearby shelves for interesting titles and included these in his classification. He does not mention that the indexes of the texts and the bibliographical order of the library catalog provided a preexisting classification. Nor did he in anyway question how a work comes to be important. Hillery’s work was not theoretical; he was not testing a hypothesis or theory, his empiricism was descriptive and yet his study remains a fundamental reference because he captured the extent of sociological opinion regarding the definition of community, but never reaches a final true definition.

Gusfield shared Effrat’s desire to produce a classification of all previous sociological work on community. Effrat’s very different scheme limited the question of community to social theory or associate it with particular types of community. The break marked by the very different essays by Effrat and Gusfield was the shifting away from a classification of types and definitions of community toward reinvestments in and revaluation of identity, politics, and locality. Now proceeded a gradual deterritorialization of community as “a place where one’s life may be wholly lived within” (MacIver and Page in Hillery 1955) in favor of an identity which one lived in every setting. The era of the New Left ended, to be replaced by the emergence of the New Social Movements and an understanding of multiculturalism in which giving meaning to community became an explicitly political and organizational imperative: a style of life.

Next: Community: Discursive Formations, Systems of Classification andSocial Evolution

Previous posts in this series:
Part I: Introduction
Part II: Understanding Community
Part III: The Reception of Tonnies Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft [Community and Society]
Part IV: Hillery and Hollingshead: Two Conceptions of Past Sociological Studies
Part V: The "Societal Community" of Talcott Parsons

A rare victory against one of my chess programs. Nimzovich-Larsen Attack

2011-08-20T11:43:00.001-04:00

White Black
BRBIII -- Arasan 3.5
[Nimzovich - Larsen Attack ECO A01]
New York City, August 5, 2011 (5 minutes per move)

1.P-QN3 P-K4
2.B-N2 P-Q3
3.P-K3 N-KB3
4.N-QB3 B-K2
5.B-N5+ P-B3
6.B-B4 P-Q4
7.B-K2 0-0

8.P-Q4 PxP
9.QxP P-B4
10.Q-Q1 N-B3
11.N-B3 P-Q5

12.PxP NxP
13.NxN PxN
14.N-N1 B-QN5+
15.P-B3 PxP
16.BxP QxQ+
17.KxQ N-K5

18.BxB NxP+
19.K-K1 NxR
20.BxR KxB
21.B-B3 B-B4
22.N-B3 R-B1
23.R-B1 B-Q2
24.N-K2 RxR+
25.NxR P-QN3
26.K-B1 B-N4+

27.K-N1 N-N6
28.PxN K-K2
29.N-K2 K-B3
30.K-B2 B-Q2
31.N-Q4 P-QR4
32.B-K4 K-K4
33.K-K3 P-R3
34.N-B3+ K-Q3
35.K-Q4 P-QN4
36.N-K5 B-K1
37.P-R3 P-B3
38.N-Q3 B-B2
39.P-QN4 PxP

40.NxP B-K1
41.N-B2 P-R4
42.N-K3 P-N3
43.N-Q5 P-B4
44.B-B3 B-B3
45.N-B3 BxB
46.PxB P-B5
47.PxP K-B3
48.K-K3 P-R5
49.K-B2 K-B4

50.N-K4+ K-Q5
51.N-Q6 K-B4
52.N-N7+ K-B3
53.N-R5+ K-N3
54.N-N3 K-B3
55.K-N2 K-Q4
56.K-R3 K-B5
57.N-B1 K-B6
58.KxP K-N7
59.N-Q3+ K-N6
60.K-N5 K-B5 and Black Resigns
1-0

"Nimzowitsch, along with other hypermodern thinkers such as Richard Reti, revolutionized chess, proving to the chess world that controlling the center of the board mattered more than actually occupying it. Nimzowitsch is also a highly-regarded chess writer, most famously for the 1925 classic My System, to this day regarded as one of the most important chess books of all time. Other books include Chess Praxis which further expounds the hypermodern idea, and the seminal work The Blockade explores the strategy implied by his famous maxim, "First restrain, then blockade, finally destroy!"
As a profound opening theoretician, Nimzowitsch has left a legacy of variations, many of which are still popular today. The Nimzo-Indian Defense (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Bb4) is named after him, as are several variations of the French Defense. He also is credited in part for the Sicilian, Nimzovich-Rubinstein (B29) Variation (1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nf6), the Nimzovich-Larsen Attack (A01) (1.b3), the Nimzowitsch Defense (1.e4 Nc6), and many others."
From The Games of Aron Nimzowitsch http://www.chessgames.comperl/chessplayer?pid=10249

The Study of Community in American Sociology, c.1900 - c.1975: Part V - The "Societal Community" of Talcott Parsons

2011-08-07T11:48:00.001-04:00

   Parsons’ general concern was to understand the fundamental mechanisms maintaining the stability of societal communities as self-regulating entities. Parsons argued that the similarity between biological and social “classes of living systems lies in the applicability to both of the fundamental concepts of adaptation and integration.” In this work, Parsons followed Durkheim, who he praised as “probably the most seminal theorist in the field of studying the integration of social systems....” We can see the influence of 19th century evolutionary theory in Durkheim’s famous duality of the “normal and the pathological” carried over into Parsons’ analogy of social and biological systems. It is at this same moment in the history of the discipline that we encounter the figure of the sociologist as the physician of society interwoven with discourses of degeneration and recapitulation. If we see society is an organism, then we must also conclude that the division of labor is a process of adaptation and specialization and integration of systems. These systems provide the functional needs of the social organism and maintain social equilibrium, i.e., normalcy.

   When Parsons remarked that no one in his own day read Herbert Spencer anymore, the reason for this neglect was not due to Spencer’s evolutionism, but because of Spencer’s “extreme individualism,” naïve positivism and confidence in the direction of social change. Parsons’ later writings on the “societal community” sought to cleanse the evolutionary aspects of Spencerian sociology of their association with individualism and determinism. It is from this perspective that in his later writings that Parsons sought to bring together an understanding of both the reproduction of social life and the process of social evolution. The social order is “the patterned normative order through which the life of a population is collectively organized [as a] ‘societal community’” (1966:7) built upon the everyday experience of its legitimacy to govern that population.

   Drawing upon the 18th and 19th Century scientific ideologies, Parsons used the body as a metaphor for the societal community to refer to “the body of social theory and knowledge of empirical fact”   that evolves in the sense of its immanent properties unfolding according to an established sequence. Parsons regarded the societal community as “an organic whole” (1968:15) recapitulating in itself the development of a “body of social knowledge.” This is the reason that no one reads Spencer anymore, “the body of social theory” evolved beyond his preliminary remarks. Spencer’s cosmic philosophy was merely the “victim of the vengeance of the jealous god, Evolution” (1968:3). Parsons’ earlier Structure of Social Action is rooted in the development of an organic “body of knowledge.... in this case the evolution of scientific theory.” It is the study of the “anatomy”(1968:39) of a single body of knowledge whose development recapitulates the development of scientific theory itself. The Structure of Social Action can be read as a general theory of scientific change comprising two distinct moments “the definition and classification of the elementary units and the determination of the relevant relations of the units in systems” (1968:39). It is an early elaboration of a theory rooted in the belief that the progress of scientific knowledge consists of the “cumulative piling up of discoveries of fact” (1968:6). Only sociology and ecology can so easily speak of social organisms and of the significance of a Nature as a social order and a social order that is natural.

   It almost goes without saying that Parsons and Durkheim based their views upon a commitment to modernity and to the special role that sociology could now serve in the promotion of modernity. Both had a deep attachment to the institutions of liberal democracy and its companion traditions of Enlightenment. In Parsons, this commitment shows through quite well in his essays on National Socialism, where he defended liberal institutions from both the right and the left. Reason played for him a greater role in the evolutionary progress of societal communities than morality. Whenever we are discussing community, Parson argued, we are discussing “a legitimation system [that] is always related to, and meaningfully dependent on, a grounding in ordered relations to ultimate reality. That is, its grounding is always in some sense religious” (1966:11).   While the norms of religion, race, and law can establish social equilibrium, the norms of religion and race are at the same time frequent sources of conflict or “disequilibrium.” Parsons argued that in modern societies such as the United States, the focus of legitimacy is the legal system and it was precisely this central normative code that was in peril. Parsons’ envisioned a procedural ethic of communication inspired by courtroom procedure: interrogation, confession or disavowal, judgment, punishment and reform. It is the legal jurisdiction that structures a community’s territoriality. Cowan summarized Parsons” position:

Jurisdiction, says Parsons, refers to obligation. Obligation implies enforcement. Enforcement entails sanction. Sanction to take effect must reach its object. The object to be reached must have a location in space. We start with jurisdiction and end with space. In between we have obligation, enforcement, sanction. It adds up, a political theorist might say, to a notion of territorial sovereignty (1959:181).

Alvin Gouldner would later assert that evolutionary theory had little importance in Parson’s sociology, but Gouldner’s assessment came when Parsons was only just beginning to elaborate his theoretical “critique of unidimensional accounts of social evolution. He did not believe that modernity is a matter of unleashing private interests, the consequent destruction of community, and its replacement by new class and bureaucratic ties” (Mayhew, 41). Modernity would not bring an end to community. Indeed, community could be easily allied with Modernity. Rather than an assumption that they are always in opposition, the two forces of social cohesion might instead reinforce each other.

Next: "A Break"

Previous posts in this series:
Part I: Introduction
Part II: Understanding Community
Part III: The Reception of Tonnies Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft [Community and Society]
Part IV: Hillery and Hollingshead: Two Conceptions of Past Sociological Studies

The Study of Community in American Sociology, c.1900 - c.1975: Part IV - Hillery and Hollingshead: Two Conceptions of Past Sociological Studies

2011-07-23T19:13:00.000-04:00

    If community is not something lost, but something transformed; and if the modernity of the social relations of capital has ripped it from its historical foundations in nature and collapsed the binary of community and society, then how is community to be defined, arranged and classified? For George Hillery the answer lay in identifying and classifying the commonalities of all previous sociological definitions of community. He understand community as a vital yet mysterious aspect of modern social life. The task Hillery set for himself was to in some way measure the “extent of agreement among definitions of community” (1955:111) and this task ultimately proved to be too difficult. In sociology, conceptions of community had by then reached such a degree of “heterogeneity” that it had become “difficult to determine whether any one of the existing definitions, or even any one group of definitions, affords an adequate description” (1955:111). He pointed out that even the best of the previous classifications ---e.g., Hollingshead (1948), Reiss (1954), Gillette (1926), and McClenahan (1929)--- demonstrated conceptual differences rather than supplying genuine classifications. Hillery attempted to bring order to this anarchy by compiling and classifying all of the definitions he could identity the sociological literature. He based his classification on morphological descriptions and the discursive regularities within those definitions. In so doing, Hillery sought to demonstrate the fundamental importance of classification to the study of community in sociology and created a work that became a ubiquitous reference in the study of community. Any early 19th Century Natural Historian would have looked approvingly on Hillery’s use of comparative morphology and extinct varieties as the basis for his work of classification.

    In the few years leading to Hillery’s essay, the meaning of community became a persistant problem in sociology. During his presidency of the American Sociological Association, Lewis Wirth created a committee to review the state of research on “the “community” as exemplified in rural and urban sociology and in ecology... in light of 1. background; 2. division of labor, and 3. theoretical problems.” Hollingshead’s essay (Hollingshead 1948) was one product of this committee’s work. The sociological study of community was the “empirical study of socio-cultural phenomena in localized areas, variously referred to as neighborhoods, towns, cities, communities, [and] regions” which are “assumed to be an organized structural and functional entity with spatial, temporal, and sociological dimensions” (1948:136). Looking back over fifty years of the formal sociological study of community, Hollingshead identified three distinct periods in the study of community and the construction of community as an object of knowledge.

    The first period stretched from Giddings taking the newly created Chair of Sociology at Columbia until sociology as a science of society separated from the activist/reformist commitments of social work and the social survey movement. Despite the fact that these reformist approaches would “gradually gave way to the analytical” approach of social science, the early normative-meliorative approach influenced the later analytical study of community. The studies of rural communities undertaken by Giddings and his students identified community as a “field laboratory to which the sociologist must turn for inductive study if he is to develop a “science of society”” (1948:138) supporting “the conviction of social actionists that American farm, village, town, and city life was changing rapidly and – in their judgment – for the worse” (1948:128). These students emphasized the disorganizing effects of modern communications on small communities, and showed how “people and institutions made successive adjustments to the expanding urban world” (1948:138). Soon the city became “the natural laboratory of social science” (1948: quoted from an announcement issued by Columbia University in 1894 when Frankling Giddings was appointed to the newly created chair of sociology). Sociologists approached community with:

a set of implicit assumptions as a guide to what they thought community life ought to be; they compared what they saw with an ideal construct and found the concrete realities were not congruous with their cherished abstractions. Therefore since the ideal was assumed to be the normal, the real must be abnormal. Value judgments were implicit in this frame of reference, one of which was the assumption that the role of the investigator was to “expose” the situation he investigated and “improve” it, that is, to make the real [community] like the ideal community (1948:137).

Hollingshead maintains that the normative-meliorative period of the study of community came to an end,, when the reformism of the “actionists” could no longer be reconciled with the scientific approach of the discipline of sociology. This reorientation “eventuated in the separation of social work from sociology” (1948:138).

    Hollingshead’s second period has its origins in the publication of Charles J. Galpin’s Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community and Robert E. Park’s “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment” and his monograph The City (1925). Galpin’s work in particular inspired a popular line of research during the 1920s “characterized generally by the assemblage of masses of detailed facts, usually statistical in nature, on some particular phase of problem of rural life, usually without explicit orientation or clear-cut conclusions” (138).   Galpin’s work exemplifies the tensions between the normative-meliorative and the social scientific approaches. He wanted to define community empirically and thus map the territorial limit of social interactions and reform the rural communities by bringing a kind of enlightenment and cosmopolitanism to the everyday life of the farmer. He warned against being pessimistic in the face of the new “rurban problem” by resolving the antagonism between the city and the farm through civilizing the farm so that it might survive in an increasingly urban world.   Meanwhile in Chicago, Park’s work provided the basis for human ecology “as a new approach to and interpretation of communal life” (1948:139). In general, the study of community in “the 1920’s was characterized by an assiduous accumulation of multitudinous facts about rural and urban life, the coinage of terms (“rurban”), the enunciation of concepts (“natural area”), the formulation of hypotheses (the Burgess zonal hypothesis of city growth), and the investigation of processes believed to underlie communal growth and structure (competition, invasion --- succession, segregation)” (1948:139).

    The third period was inaugurated by the publication of Middletown in 1929. “Middletown focused attention upon a viewpoint that had been largely neglected by ecologists, namely, the interrelations between the daily life of people, their institutional organizations and function, and the social structure of the community” and these sociologists “framed their work around [the] organizing concepts [of] social change, institutional organization and function, and social stratification. In the intervening seventeen years since Middletown, the sociological study of community could still be divided into three categories: ecological, structural, and typological, but the ecological work had been eclipsed in favor of structural and typological studies. “Although little in the way of theory has been developed in the past decade, the idea persists that there is a legitimate place for human ecology in the social sciences” (1948:140).

    Hollingshead gave great credit to the ecologists for freeing themselves from thinking of the world as divided between cultural and non-cultural forces. Neither the social determinist nor the “instinctivists and geographical determinists” positions were uniquely “theoretically justified, since man is both an animal and a member of a socio-cultural community, and any particularistic explanation which arbitrarily excludes the natural environment, the individual, society, and culture is untenable” (1948:141). In the uncritical acceptance of core ideological constructs as the true measures of social life, the structuralist errors resembled the errors of the ecological tendency   Hollingshead separated his “stratificationists” into social anthropologists and sociologists, differing only in the former’s use of caste and the latter’s adoption of class “to explain away the complexities and contradictions in human behavior in a way very reminiscent of the early ecologists” (1948:143). The structuralists are further distinguished from the typologists in their attempt to use culture, relations with other communities, geographic and economic bases, size, and “population composition... to determine how these factors organize and give meaning to the activities and interpersonal relations of its inhabitants” (original emphasis, 1948:144). The typologists sought to construct “ideal-typical community types” (1948:144) on the assumption that “a given complex of population, culture, and communal organization gives rise to a characteristic way of life, with a correlated complex of meanings and personality types” (original emphasis, 1948:144). Hollingshead associated this approach with “formal models of this type of thinking” (1948:144) such as Durkheim’s “sacred and secular” and Tonnies' Gemeinshaft and Gesellschaft.

    In his early, but certainly more insightful analysis, Hollingshead does not so much propose a classification as characterize the kinds of sociological and typological studies that displaced the ecological studies of the earlier period. It is not surprising that Hillery’s classification of concepts bears out Hollingshead’s view that typological studies had in his time become central to the study of community and Hillery’s classification remains widely referenced in the sociological study of community.

    Hillery noted that more than half of the definitions included in his classification appeared between the time of McClenahan’s 1929 study and his own. The importance of a precise definition of community was recognized, but the study of community had not been organized or systematized. His classificatory scheme sought to overcome this by generating a new definition based upon a consensus of sociological opinion. Where previous authors had set up a priori classificatory schemes to justify their own definitions, Hillery let the morphology and regularities of the definitions determine the number and extent of the classes that make up his scheme. He maintained a “strict prohibition against discarding any definitions. If they would not “fit,” then a separate class was created---though that class might have only one occupant” (1955:117). If we are correct in understanding that community exists as the consensus of sociologists, then Hillary’s method expresses this perspective quite nicely.

The 94 definitions used in this analysis are not all of the definitions of the community. However, it is believed that the picture given is a fairly representative one, as indicated by the method of obtaining the definitions. Beginning with a few definitions already known, the writer traced the references given by these authors, referred in turn to those sources furnished by these references, and so on, collecting the definitions in various works as the search progressed. As a supplementary procedure, to decrease the possibility of limiting definitions to any “school” or “schools,” all of the promising titles on the library shelves adjacent to those works already located were checked in the same manner. When no further references could be obtained by this method, the search was halted. Thus, the coverage given is wide, but no measure is available as to how wide; the author may only claim more conclusiveness than has hitherto been available, not finality (1955:112).

Hillery found that sociologists agree on the general definition of community, and that the greatest variation in definitions tended to be found amongst those working outside of the discipline of sociology. Internally, the consistency of opinion rested on three characteristics of community: territoriality, common ties, and social interaction. The ecologists in Hillery’s sample offered only what he characterized as “deviant” definitions because they did not find social interaction necessary to community.

Implicit in his study is the assertion that community had not been lost, but that it had undergone evolutionary transformations. Hillery traced the literature up to 1950 but Talcott Parsons brought an end to the era with his introduction of the concept of “societal community” ---a theoretical alliance of evolution, classification, modernity, organicism, and community was intended to reconcile the binary of community/society. For Parsons, the recapitulation of the social order in the social subject is accomplished through the internalization of social limits. This social subject is a creation of the community. He experiences these internalized limitations as essential or natural, and if the process is successful, he behaves as a good citizen. Normative behavior comes at a cost, and we are constantly called upon to admit to or proclaim to which community we belong, identity we elect and to submit to the ideological practices that maintain social equilibrium.

Next: "The Societal Community" of Talcott Parsons
Previous posts in this series:
Part I: Introduction
Part II: Understanding Community
Part III: The Reception of Tonnies Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft [Community and Society]

The Study of Community in American Sociology, c.1900 - c.1975: Part III – The Reception of Tonnies Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft [Community and Society]

2011-07-12T14:35:00.005-04:00

PART III – THE RECEPTION OF TONNIES

Ferdinand Tonnies

Louis Wirth asserted that “when we use the term ‘community’ we seek to isolate and to emphasize the physical, spatial, and symbolic aspects of human group life, whereas by the term ‘society’ we wish to bring into focus and to stress the psychic, deliberative, rational, normative, and congenial phases of group existence” (Wirth 1951:295). Wirth did not understand that the period when community and society could be theoretically separated had already come to an end. This oversight is easily understood if we remember that Wirth’s statement was the general view of sociologists of the time. The work of Giddings (1910, 1922, 1924), Cooley (1897, 1918), MacIver (1932), and many others laid the groundwork for the investigation of the relationship between community and society, but not all did so in response to Tonnies’ dichotomy. Odum argued that Tonnies division was not widely held and the attention that it was currently receiving was contributing to “the neglect of the scientific study of community” (1951:292). He lamented that “as late as 1947 the distinction between society and community could still be debated at a symposium called ‘The World Community.’’’ Despite this, Tonnies’ dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft has figured in almost every postwar sociological discussion on the nature of society. Tonnies reception by American sociology began in earnest with the postwar publication of the English translation in 1957 framed by the commentaries of Sorokin, Loomis, and Loomis and McKinney. The distinction that the commentators make between the “two modes of mentality and behavior, and two different types of society” (Sorokin 1957:vii) becomes a fundamental discursive regularity in sociological theory. For Tonnies, the dichotomy of community and society was complex and rested on five others “dealing with one’s relation to one’s fellow beings’: 1) acquaintanceship and strangeness; 2) sympathy and apathy; 3) confidence and mistrust; 4) interdependence, “the condition of being bound to others.... a feeling or a realization of moral obligation, moral imperative, or prohibition, and a righteous aversion to the consequences of incorrect, illegal and unlawful, as well as of immoral and indecent conduct and action”; and 5) the “bond” of economic relations of exchange (1957:237).

Louis Wirth

In his Table of Concepts, Loomis used these binary types to reveal Tonnies’ grand classificatory structure even as he acknowledged that Tonnies work lacks a “perfectly logically ordered construction.... The original book, to use Stoltenberg’s apt characterization, resembles the beauty of an old castle” (Loomis 1957:263). This description discloses the relation of Loomis’ Table of Concepts to Tonnies’ text, as well as the assumptions that underlie both the table and the text. Though Loomis does not acknowledge it, his Table of Concepts, while only intended to provide a schematic representation of Tonnies concepts, merges with the original text.

<p>Table of Contents is on page 269</p>
The Table of Concepts is on page 269.

The Table of Concepts presents Tonnies work as a structure of intricately arranged binary concepts, with some pairs hierarchically related to others, but all are equally idealized abstractions. There emerges from the Table three taxonomic concepts --- “vegetative,” “animal,” and “mental”---that modify each other in a movement from the most primitive to a modernity wherein the development of each community is recapitulated in the development of the others. This movement through successive developmental stages is constitutive of a theory of social evolution. “In the same way as the individual natural will evolves into pure thinking and rational will, which tends to dissolve and subjugate its predecessors, the original collective forms of Gemeinschaft have developed into Gesellschaft and the rational will of the Gesellschaft. In the course of history, folk culture has given rise to the civilization of the state” (Tonnies 1957:III).

In further commentary, Loomis and McKinney view the structure of the dichotomies underlying Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft as providing a paradigm for a science of community that can distinguish “fundamentally different types of social organization” and provide a “standard by which the processes of change or intermediate structural forms can be comprehended from the perspective of the continuum” (Loomis and McKinney 1957:12). It is along this continuum that sociologists established the link between the classification of social groups and their evolution. “It was Tonnies' belief that it remained for the scientific man to devise the means of freeing the majority from the role of mere machines or puppets; but that the scientist must have different eyes than those of the social engineer who constructs or copies Utopian plans and attempts to fit people into them; he must learn that society is a living, organic thing, unfolding naturally from within like a growing embryo or plant bud” (Loomis 1957). This is the preformist concept of evolution that was radically transformed by Darwin’s descent with modification but survived in both neo-Hegelianism and sociological organicism.

Franklin Giddings

The Loomis and McKinney commentary places Tonnies in a tradition of their own construction that begins with Confucius and Plato, and ends with Durkheim. In this scheme, Tonnies accomplishment was in making the differences between community and society into a sociological problem around which the discipline could orientated itself. The Table of Concepts served as both an outline of Tonnies work and an attempt to establish the outer limits of the sociological discourse of community. After the translation of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, the concepts of definition, morphological analysis, and classification of types came to dominate the sociological study of community. Tonnies became a key referent, but previous to the 1950s the work in American sociology presents a different genealogy. Giddings discussion of classification in relation to social evolution or “social telesis” a reminder to us that not everyone took the view that Gemeinschaft replaces Gesellschaft. Many American sociologists followed Giddings in understanding community as not previous to, but rather as constitutive of society, the boundaries of civilization, and the goal of social progress.

There were other theoretical perspectives on community that deserve at least a short digression. In particular, Marx and Simmel offered different approaches despite being misread on occasion so as to appear to endorse Tonnies' ideal dichotomies. For example, Marx used the words gemeinwesen and gemeinschaft almost interchangeably and usually both are translated as “community.” Marx’s gemeinwesen is literally “common character” and is used in the context of his discussion of the social relations of capital and its “the community of money” which expresses the social and historical aspects of this “common character.” In contrast, Tonnies gemeinschaft (“common stock”) implies both share-holding in an institution as well as a line of descent of a stock or “volk.”

The analysis of community in the Grundrisse described the changes in the social relations between humans. In the Grundrisse, the earth itself is the first medium of community, for it is the essence of humanness to cooperate in the social labor necessary to extract the necessities of social life. With the separation of city and country, the earth ceased to be the medium of community, at least in the cities where money rather than the authority of the chief became the representation of Gemeinwesen: “Money thereby directly and simultaneously becomes the real community [Gemeinwesen], since it is the general substance of survival for all, and at the same time, in money the community [Gemeinwesen] is at the same time a mere abstraction, a mere external, accidental thing for the individual, and at the same time merely a means for his satisfaction as an isolated individual” (Marx 1993:226).

Marx did not romanticize past social formations or suggest the restoration of a previous real or imagined community. As for the present --- our present --- there is only “the community of money” where at At the level of the everyday we do not know that we are producing and reproducing the multiple determinations of this “community of money.” In this light, the much discussed loss of community in America was not the passing of some idyllic community, but only a different formation of the gemeinwesen of money. And yet the “loss of community” was and still is denounced as the loss of something supposedly quite ancient. For Marx, community was not something lost, but something produced. And perhaps most importantly, Marx disassociated community from consanguinity and place.1 “The metropolitan type arises from the dominance of money as the form of modernity.... For Simmel modern social life is synonymous with the moment when exchange relations become the dominant social fact of metropolitan life” (Aronowitz c.1992).

Edmund Des. Brunner noted that even in the most idyllic of societies the idea of community offers no “break on self-interest.” Instead, every utopia contains a system of social relations wherein “each social rank has its customs, determined functions, rights and duties may in effect be the skillful manipulations of those in the top social ranks to maintain their existing status and privileges.” Moreover, Brunner recognized that “the earliest rural sociologists” often used terms “descriptive of community which if employed today would be said to show [Tonnies’] influence” when in fact they wrote “without benefit of Tonnies.” American sociologists had developed the “heritage of our own science... in terms of our national locale.” Tonnies would no doubt recognize similarities, but they result from convergence rather than influence (Brunner, 1942:76). Rudolf Heberle, whose essay on Tonnies was the target of Brunner’s critique, responded that while there might have been similarities between the American rural sociologists and Tonnies, the Americans never systematized their study of community and so remained empirical without becoming scientific. On the other hand, Heberle argued that Tonnies gave the discipline a system of types that could be used to classify communities. The meaning of community would be found “in studying communities and “typing” them within some larger theoretical frame of reference” (Hollingshead, 1948:144).

Next: Hollingshead and Hillery

Previous
Part I: Introduction
Part II: Understanding Community

The Study of Community in American Sociology, c.1900 - c.1975: Part II - Understanding Community

2011-07-03T22:31:00.002-04:00

The Study of Community in American Sociology, c.1900 - c.1975

"The Crowd"

A version of this series of blog posts was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 2003.

Part II: UNDERSTANDING COMMUNITY

The meaning of community has been asked in many ways and the manner of raising the question tell us a great deal about the social conflicts expressed by the proliferation of authoritative answers. The traditional questions concerning community were always questions of definition and classification, nomenclature and description, and over time these proved insufficient to furthering the sociological study of community. It is not that our contemporary questions are better and the traditional ones are simply obsolete. Our understanding of community results from the continuities and discontinuities in the sociological investigation of community.

For example, a break occurred c.1975 that marked the end of a period in which the sociological investigation into community centered on the requirements of definition and classification, the mapping of real or imagined territories, and the tracing of a speculative evolutionary development. In our own period the question of community centers on identity, new social movements, enclosures of community, and the degeneration accompanying a lack of community. These breaks were not simply due to the internal dynamics of discourse, but to the social dislocations and expressions of the forces of modernity.

Early in the study of community, we find an emphasis on problems of definition, classification, territoriality, and development. The volume of references and studies in the field testifies to the regularity with which sociologists felt compelled to comment upon the meaning and definition of community. The study of community became a site where the assumptions and scientific ideologies which guide our desire to rationally change our social relations meet the difficulties of governing the very populations that often appear to stand between us and the enlightened society. The accumulation of knowledge about community is constitutive of the social relations it describes. Community provides investigators with an ephemeral baseline from which to measure social change, validate sociological assumptions and theories, and create objects of social policies we proposed, implemented, evaluated, and sometimes terminated. It is in this sense that ‘community’ is a point of articulation between sociological theory and social policy.

Next: The Reception of Tonnies in American Sociology: Is there a debt?

Previous: Introduction

The Study of Community in American Sociology, c.1900 - c.1975 : Part I - Introduction & Bibliography

2011-07-01T22:33:00.002-04:00

The Study of Community in American Sociology, c. 1900 - c. 1975

A version of this series of blog posts was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 2003. It is an essay that began as a portion of my dissertation. The passage of time and the inevitable shifting of interests have been such that it will never progress past this draft stage. It does, however, make a number of observations regarding the history of the sociological understanding of community. The value of these observations, is, of course yours to decide.

These posts investigate the productions of knowledge, techniques of discipline, and the various deployments of authority and desire referred to as ‘community.’ Community is a fundamental element of sociological analysis, but the meaning and importance of community has always been a problem for sociologists. Thus, this essay explores the attempts to define and classify community in sociology in the period from c.1900 to c.1975. During that time, the sociological investigation of community centered on the contribution of definition and classification to a systematic nomenclature and a descriptive terminology, the mapping of communities as territories, and the tracing of the history of community as the evolutionary development of a particular human essence. The examination of the history of sociology and its study of community shows us that, like the history of any science, the history of sociology is as much the history of errors as it is the history of truths, and like the history of any science, its history is also a history of forgetting.
Keywords: Community, Degeneracy, History of Sociological Thought, Classification

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Introduction
      This series of blog posts outline the sociological study of community from c. 1900 to c. 1975. The concept of community is a fundamental element of sociological analysis, but the meaning and importance of community has always been a problem for sociologists. What is community? What is its definition? What are its characteristics and structures/functions? Is it to be preserved, developed, or surpassed? Is community merely in decline as it is replaced by different bonds of society, with new social pathologies emerging from its decline? These have been questions that sociologists have grappled with since the beginnings of the sociological investigation of human social production. Many productions of knowledge, techniques of discipline, institutions and deployments of authority and desire are referred to as ‘community’ --- so many that belonging to a community is assumed to be a normal condition of everyday life. Moreover, community enters into sociological study because it ‘is not a referential sign, but a call or an appeal’ (Sargent 1972:125) to something supposedly deep within us, but is nonetheless always on the surface and always at play.
Sociologists implicitly believe that the anarchy of humans producing socially can be rationally understood and changes in society might be rationally guided. At the same time, sociologists have tended to categorize, define and represent society as a sequence of evolutionary or progressive stages.   In much early sociological analysis, those classes that ‘stagnate’ or decay ---the ‘demoralized family,’ the dependent, the delinquent, the degenerate---have been made to admit their trespasses either in their own words through ethnographic studies or through the statistical analysis of the aggregated actions of a population. In its mission to accumulate knowledge for the promotion or prevention of social change, sociology preserves the knowledge of their pathological deviations from normal social life. This knowledge is still extracted from narratives and social statistics so that society may benefit. Gradually, the discipline was positioned to be the watch-keeper of society through its provision of knowledge useful for the government of a population.
It is fitting that a discipline so immersed in its own object could be represented as the physician/healer of social ills. As the physicians of society, our role revolved around the diagnosis of social pathology and the proscription of social policies that might restore and regulate the equilibrium of the ‘societal community’ in Talcott Parsons’ phrase. In order to apply its cures, sociologists developed a number of discreet areas of knowledge---criminology, social work, applied sociology, social movement participation, etc.---which, when allied to social theory, promised to provide a full anatomy of the social organism. This concern was not only present in the works of Herbert Spencer, it is also to be found in later works such as Ehrenscaft and Etzioni’s Anatomies of America (1969) unabashedly provided ‘the anatomies and diagnoses of contemporary America as provided by sociologists.’ The best-selling Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al., 1984) was seen by an admirer as an elaborate ‘physiology of American spiritual distress’ (Birnbaum, 1985). The sociologist examined the social body and rendered a diagnosis using the language of medicine to build a political analysis. ‘Social science,’ Bellah et al. insisted, ‘is not like natural science: it is a form of political discourse’ tied to a knowledge whose subject is society itself. What Alvin Gouldner (1970) called the ‘coming crisis in Western sociology’ arrived, and with it came the realization that sociology and sociologists are as embedded in the milieu as our subjects.
      In analyzing the sociological study of community, the later need to avoid the personae of the physician of society is equaled by the need to avoid writing about sociology as an achievement of a heroic or grand tradition, but both persist in the substrata of social problems and the history of sociology. Rather than romantic narratives of the origins of sociology, our analysis of the field of sociology should investigate the thematics and repetitions which cut across the works of particular authors. This requires giving a unity to the sociological texts and the practical deployments of sociological knowledge in public policy. Focusing on the concept of community allows us to investigate elements which provide the historical a priori of community in sociology.
       Gouldner’s periodization of ‘Western Sociology’ are familiar to most sociologists: ‘sociological positivism, Marxism, Classical Sociology and Parsonian Structural-Functionalism (1970:88-89). This periodization has always been of great value for its clarity and has thus for good reason become almost commonsensical. However, like all periodizations, it obscures the complexity of the history of sociology. The periods are not so much eras as they are loosely connected and more or less chronologically arranged theoretical syntheses. Gouldner’s own time is now seen as the period of a Neo-Marxism associated with transformations inside and outside of the academy. This consensus was soon to be modified still further by feminist interventions and the further growth of empirical and social policy studies.
       Much of the classical sociological work on community is found in the specialized areas of rural and community sociology where ‘community’ became a fundamental unit of analysis. The fundamental sociological questions concerning community remain: What is community? What are its characteristics and functions and how are these to be preserved or encouraged? What are its moralities and techniques of discipline and control? These questions remind us that the questioning of community is important to any sociological enterprise that seeks the nature, definition, and utility of concepts like family, group, nation, race, gender, class, society, culture, etc., and which deploys these concepts as the objects of sociological inquiry.
Next section: Understanding Community

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aronowitz, Stanley (c. 1992) ‘Essay on Simmel’, unpublished manuscript.

Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven Tipton (1984) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Birnbaum, Norman (1985) ‘The Moral Bypass.’ The Nation, December 28, 1985.

Brunner, Edmund Des (1942) Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in Rural Communities with a Rejoinder by Rudolf Herberle. Rural Sociology, Vol. 4, no.1 (March), pp. 75-77.

Canguilhem, Georges (1991) Ideology and Rationality in the Life Sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Cooley, Charles H. (1897) ‘Genius, Fame, and the Comparison of Races.’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, IX (317-358).

Cooley, Charles Horton (1918) Social Process. Carbondale, Il., Southern Illinois University Press.

Cowan, Carl (1959) ‘Comment on Parsons.’ in Friedrich, Carl J. ed. Community. New York: The Liberal Arts Press.

Effrat, Marcia Pelly (1975) The Community: Approaches and Applications. New York: Free Press.

Ehrensaft, Philip and Amitai Etzioni (1969) Anatomies of America: Sociological Perspectives. New York: Macmillan Company.

Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
New York: Vintage Books.

Friedrich, Carl J. (1959) Community. New York, The Liberal Arts Press.

Galpin, Charles J. (1925) Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community.

Giddings, Franklin Henry (1924) The Scientific Study of Human Society. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press.

___________________ (1910) ‘Introduction’ to Robert L. Dugdale, The Jukes: A Study in Crime Disease, and Heredity. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons [Reprinted in 1970 by Arno Press, New York].

___________________ (1922) ‘The Measurement of Social Forces.’ Journal of Social Forces, vol. 1, no. 1.

Gillette, J. M. (1928) Rural Sociology. New York: Macmillan Co.

Gossett, Thomas (1999) Race: A History of an Idea in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gould, Stephen Jay (1977) Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge: the Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press.

Gouldner, Alvin W. (1970) The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books.

Gusfield, Joseph R. (1975) Community: a Critical Response. New York, Harper Collins.

Hawkins, Mike (1999) ‘Durkheim’s Sociology and Theories of Degeneration.’ Economy and Society, Vol. 28, no. 1 (February).

Heberle, Rudolf (1941) The Application of Fundamental Concepts in Rural Community Studies. Rural Sociology, Vol. 6, no.3 (September), pp. 203-215.

Hillery, George (1955) 'Definitions of Community: Areas of Agreement,' Rural Sociology, XX (June), pp. 111- 124.

Hofstadlter, Richard (1955) Social Darwinism in American Thought. Boston: Beacon Press.

Hollingshead, August B (1948). Community Research: Development and Present Condition. American Sociological Review, Vol. 13, No. 2 (April), pp. 136-156.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodore Adorno (2002 [1944]) Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

James, Preston (1972) All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas. New York: Odyssey Press.

Johnston, R. J. (1983) Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Geography Since 1945. London: Edward Arnold.

Loomis, Charles P. (1957) ‘Notes on Tonnies’ Fundamental Concepts.’ in Tonnies, Ferdinand. 1957[1887]. Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). Translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis. New York: Harper Touchbooks/Academy Library.

Loomis Charles P. and John C. Mikinney (1957) ‘Introduction’ to Tonnies, Ferdinand. 1957[1887]. Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). Translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis. New York: Harper Touchbooks/Academy Library.

MacIver, R. M. (1932) Society: Its Structure and Changes. New York: Ray long and Richard R. Smith, Publishers.

McClenahan, B. A. (1929) The Changing Urban Neighborhood. Los Angeles: University of Southern California.

Mayhew, Leon H. (1982) See introduction to Talcott Parsons on Institutions and Social Evolution.

Marx, Karl (1993 [1857]) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Penguin Classics.

Odum, Howard W. 1951. American Sociology: The Story of Sociology in the United States Through 1950. New York: Longmans.

Park, Robert E. 1925 ‘The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City
The City (1925).

Parsons, Talcott (1959) ‘The Principal Structures of Community: A Sociological View,’ in Friedrich, Carl J. Community. New York, The Liberal Arts Press.

____________ (1966) Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. Englewood: Prentice-Hall.

____________ (1968) The Structure of Social Action. New York: Basic Books.

____________ (1982) On Institutions and Social Evolution: Selected Writings. Leon H. Mayhew, ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ricklefs, Robert E. (1979) Ecology, Second Edition. New York: Chiron Press.

Reiss, Albert J. (1959) The Sociological Study of Communities. Rural Sociology. Vol. 24, No.2 (June), pp.118-130.

Sargent, Lyman Tower (1972) New Left Thought: An Introduction. Illinois, The Dorsey Press.

Simmel, Georg (1982) Philosophy of Money. New York: Routledge.

Small, Albion (1924) The Origins of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sorokin, Pitirim A. Forward to Tonnies, Ferdinand (1957[1887]) Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). Translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis. New York: Harper Touchbooks/Academy Library.

Tonnies, Ferdinand (1957[1887]) Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). Translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis. New York: Harper Touchbooks/Academy Library.

Wirth, Louis (1951) The Significance of Sociology. International Social Science Bulletin (UNESCO), Vol. 3, no.2, Summer, p. 197-202.

Until Darwin Blog on "Morton vs Gould" -- Comment I: On the New York Times article and editiorial.

2011-06-27T18:03:00.001-04:00

The first comment on the "Morton vs. Gould" controversy, which looks at the New York Times article that announced the new findings, is available on my Until Darwin blog.
The New York Times Article and Editorial. Comment I on Morton Vs Gould"

http://until-darwin.blogspot.com/2011/06/new-york-times-article-and-editorial.html

From ScienceNow -- ScienceShot: Darwin's Library, Just a Click Away

2011-06-27T17:27:00.003-04:00

The June issue of Science takes note of an important new resource on Darwin and Natural History. The online Biodiversity Heritage Library has made available digitized copies of 419 volumes from Darwin's personal library. Each work is reproduced with Darwin's marginalia, which is also transcribed for ease of reading.

This is a great new archive that nicely compliments these others:

**Cambridge University Darwin Project: Complete Works, Manuscrpts, Works on Darwin, etc.
**Darwin Correspondence Project
**Voyage of the Beagle in Blog format
**Darwin's Home: Down House
**American Museum of Natural History: Darwin Exhibition
**American Museum of Natural History: Darwin Digital Library of Evolution
**Evolution of Evolution: 150 Years of Darwin's On the Origin of Species
**The BBC's extensive Darwin Page
**BBC Slideshow of Darwin's Beagle Notebooks
**Melvyn Bragg's series of Darwin programs.
[Check out the In Our Time audio archives as well.]
** New York Times' Darwin page

"Morton versus Gould" on Until Darwin blog.

2011-06-16T15:30:00.001-04:00

Over the next few days I'll be adding some materials and commentary on the "Morton versus Gould" debate on my Until Darwin blog at http://until-darwin.blogspot.com/ . The first two posts are up now, one being Morton's description of his collection, and the other consisting of short selections from Gould's Mismeasure of Man. In a day of so, I'll start posting an analysis of the article and the "controversy" surrounding it.

Catskill Delta bluestone and a thought about Charles Lyell (updated)

2011-05-26T19:59:00.005-04:00

There is a good deal of bluestone in Fort Tryon Park and in the neighborhood around Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Most bluestone, which is not necessarily blue, comes from an area that stretches from central Pennsylvania to the Catskills of New York. It is a thinly laminated sandstone, the remains of the Catskill Delta of the Devonian era (roughly 350-400 million years ago). Because it splits into interesting patterns and it fairly resistant to wear, bluestone is often used for sidewalks, as they are here and in Fort Green, and garden paths. bluestone quarries can be found throughout the Catskills, where it was once an important industry. However, most Bluestone today originates in Pennsylvania.
There are two features to look for. While some say that they can be seen more easily on a rainy night, I think that they can be appreciated no matter the weather or time of day. The first feature is ripple marks. The movement of the water left ripple marks in the sculpted sand of the river delta. The intervals between them can be quite long, which I suppose indicates their origin in a beach rather than river environment. The larger the slab the better to get the full effect. There are some very large sidewalk pieces near Pratt and the entrance to Fort Tryon Park has many as well. Some of which match up to adjacent slabs and so allow one to view several feet of Devonian era river delta.

Walking through Fort Tryon, I happened upon the same process at work in the present day that, as Lyell showed us, has been amongst those at work on the earth for millions of years. This is the Gradualism that would so profoundly influence Darwin's thinking.

The second feature to look for is called "flow lineation." As the water flowed over the sands, it lined the grains up in subtle lineations that become clear once the stone has been cut. One can literally see the direction of the flow of the water in the stone itself. I don't have a good picture, yet, but one can also find indentations from raindrops. If one finds gets lucky, you can see the results of a 350 million year old rainstorm..

[Click on an image to view it full-size.]

A few words from Charles Lyell:

All are aware that the solid parts of the earth consist of distinct substances, such as clay, chalk, sand, limestone, coal, slate, granite, and the like; but previously to observation it is commonly imagined that all these had remained from the first in the state in which we now see them, — that they were created in their present form, and in their present position. Geologists have come to a different conclusion. They have discovered proofs that the external parts of the earth were not all produced in the beginning of things, in the state in which we now behold them, nor in an instant of time. On the contrary, they have acquired their actual configuration and condition gradually, under a great variety of circumstances, and at successive periods, during each of which distinct races of living beings have flourished on the land and in the waters, the remains of these creatures still lying buried in the crust of the earth. --Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology

from Lyell, Student's Elements of Geology

Sounds from the Summer Club

2011-05-26T19:47:00.000-04:00

From the Summer Club: A British Tar

Summer Club A British Tar by SummerClub NODE801
(c) Creative Commons

Asa Gray's System of Classifcation for Elementary Botany (1887) (repost from Until Darwin blog)

2011-04-22T15:06:00.002-04:00

Asa Gray's discussion of classification in his 1887 primer was another of the many topics and tangential lines of study that could not be included in Until Darwin. His classification is of interest for a number of reasons, besides simply being one of those examples of "wretched knowledge" that Neuberger devoted his scholarly life to investigating. In terms of the discussion in Until Darwin, Gray's description of race in the context of describing varieties of species is of particular interest:

From Gray's Lessons in Botany, revised (1887)

"RACES are such strongly marked varieties, capable of coming true to seed. The different sorts of Wheat, Maize, Peas, Radishes, et., are familiar examples. By selecting those individuals of a species which have developed or inherited any desirable peculiarity, keeping them from mingling with their less promising brethren, and selecting again the most promising plants raised from their seeds, the cultivator may in a few generations render almost any variety transmissible by seed, so long as it is cared for and kept apart. In fact, this is the way the cultivated domesticated races, so useful to man, have been fixed and preserved. Races, in fact, can hardly, if at all, be said to exist independently of man. But man does not produce them. Such peculiarities --- often surprising enough --- now and then originate, we know not how (the plant sports, as the gardeners say; they are only preserved, propagated, and generally further developed by the cultivator's skillful care" (176).

This idea of botanical races needing to be maintained and that these varieties are highly unstable despite their being so "strongly marked." Their distinctions have to be cultivated and "preserved, propagated, and generally further developed." Gray evidences some of the tensions of the years immediately following Darwin's demolishing of the polygenic theory in his answer to the Species Question. The anxiety of the cultivator constantly preserving and propagating, maintaining the distance between those with desirable peculiarities and the "less promising" (176).

In the chapter on Classification and Nomenclature, Gray sets out the stakes in understanding the botanical world. There is a difference between classification and nomenclature. They can in many ways stand apart from each other and address fundamentally different approaches to understanding the natural world. This separation had become not only burdensome, but now in the era after Darwin, could no longer be theoretically maintained if indeed the separation between them was ever stable.
"The vast multiplicity of plants and the various degrees of their relationship imperatively require order and system, not only as to names for designating the kinds of plants, but also as to terms for defining their differences" (175). At the same time that one must pay close attention to the relations between plants, the naturalist/botanist must also acknowledge that "[s]ome system of nomenclature, or naming, is necessary for fixing and expressing botanical knowledge so as to make it available" (175). Language makes botanical knowledge available generally and not solely to the person who knows it through experience and observation alone. It fixes it and allows it to be expressed. But to be expressed, not only is language necessary, but so too is the ability to determine the differences between plants that are expressed in their names. What is needed are not names but "terms for defining their differences. Nomenclature is concerned with the names of plants. Terminology supplies names of organs or parts, and terms to designate their differences" which disclose their "kinds and relationships" (175).
Gray gives us the scheme of kinds and relationship which is grounded in the fundamental aspects of life itself. and with "individual beings" who are distinguished from the inorganic not only by organic processes and reproduction, but also because they occur as individuals and not as "masses, which are divisible":

From Gray's Lessons in Botany, revised (1887))
"520. Plants and animals have two great particularities: 1st they form themselves; and 2d they multiply themselves. They reproduce their kind in a continued succession of

521. Individuals. Mineral things occur in masses, which are divisible into smaller and smaller ones without alteration of properties. But organic things (vegetables and animals) exist as individual beings. Each owes its existence to a parent, and produces similar individuals in its turn.

Perhaps holding on to that notion of a Great Chain of Being, within the context of Darwinism, Gray then states that

"each individual is a link of a chain; and to this chain the natural historian applies the name of

522. Species. All descendents from the same stock therefore compose one species. And it was from our observing that the several sorts of plants or animals steady reproduce themselves, or in other words, keep up a succession of similar individuals, that the idea of species originated.... observation having familiarized us with the general fact that individuals proceeding from the same stock are essentially alike, we infer from their close resemblance that these similar individuals belong to the same species. That is we infer it when the individuals are as much like each other as those are which we know, or confidently suppose, to have sprung from the same stock (175).

Notice how different the explanation would be now when we do not have to depend on the observation of surface characteristics, which has often, as in the case of polygenism, led to disastrous errors and the need to repress those knowledges. But Gray knew that of course "[n]o two individuals are exactly alike; a tendency to variation pervades all living things. In cultivation, where variations are looked after and cared for, very striking differences come to light, and if in wild nature they are less common or less conspicuous, it is partly because they are uncared for" (175).
In wild nature, because difference is not cared for and cultivated, it is at the least inconspicuous or even selected against (by implication). But under cultivation --- which carries with it the meanings of culture, training disciplining, regulation, and civilizing --- we find "striking differences" which because they are maintained by the cultivator

From Gray's Lessons in Botany, revised (1887)

"When such variant forms are pretty well marked they are called
524. Varieties....The question often arises, and it is often hard to answer, whether the differences in a particular case is that of variety, or is specific [i.e., it a variety or a species]. If the former, it may be commonly be proved by finding such intermediate degrees of difference in various individuals as to show that no clear distinction can be drawn between them; or else by observing the variety to vary back again in some of its offspring.... For the fundamental law in organic nature is that offspring shall be like parent (175-176).

It is at this point that Gray inserts his discussion of Races. Significantly, it is listed not with its own section, but under the section on Varieties. It is one of four types of varieties, though it gets the most involved discussion, most of which is quoted above. Preserved by the care of human cultivation, races are one manifestation of variety. The others are, quoted in their entirety

Bud Varieties are those which spring from buds instead of seed. They are uncommon to any marked extent. They are sometimes called Sports, but this name is equally applied to variations among seedlings.

Cross-breeds, strictly so-called, are variations which come from cross-fertilizing one variety of a species with another.

Hybrids are the varieties, if they may be called, which come from the crossing of species. Only nearly related species can be hybridized; and the resulting progeny is usually self-sterile, but not always. Hybrid plants, however, may often be fertilized and made prolific by the pollen of one or the other parent. This produces another kind of cross-breeds (176).

From Blumenbach, Dissertation on Human Varieties

So species are difficult to distinguish from varieties, and varieties are difficult to distinguish from varieties and even within varieties, there is variety, e.g., the case of cross-breeds. Thus

From Gray's Lessons in Botany, revised (1887))
525. Species are the units in classification. Varieties, although of utmost importance in cultivation and of considerable consequence in the flora of any country, are of less botanical significance. For they are apt to be indefinite and to shade off one form into another. But species, the botanist expects to be distinct. Indeed, the practical difference to the botanist between species and varieties is the definite limitation of the one and the indefiniteness of the other. The botanist determination is partly a matter of observation partly of judgment. In an enlarged view, varieties may be incipient species; and nearly related species probably came from a common stock in earlier times (176-177).

But there is one more difference, and it is that the botanical world can, just as the animal, be divided into Order, Cass, Genus, Species, Variety, it can not be arranged in the same way, neither in terms of value (except as an economic value of a cultivated species, which is not intrinsic to the plant, but to the cultivator), nor in terms of a hierarchy or levels of increasing superiority. Rather than hierarchies in a ladder of being, the botanical world is for Gray self-organized and grouped into "clusters or constellations" of species (177).

As we survey them, they do not form a single and connected chain, stretching from the lowest to the highest organized species, although there obviously are lower and higher grades. But the species throughout group themselves, as it were, into clusters or constellations, and these into still more comprehensive clusters, and so on, with gaps between. It is this clustering which is the ground of the recognition of kinds of species, that is, of groups of species of successive grades or degree of generality; such as that of similar species into Genera, or genera into Families or Orders, or orders into Classes.

Having started out with a nod to the Great Chain of Being, Gray, transforms it into clusters that may not be connected to other clusters, or which may be only subparts of larger clusters within which their differences become unimportant. The sequence of classification:
KINGDOM
SERIES (Phanerogamous or Cryptogamous)
CLASS, Subclass, Cohort
ORDER or Family, Suborder, Tribe, Subtribe
GENUS, Subgenus or Section
SPECIES, Variety
is a description of degrees of difference as much as a description of continuity. We know this, but Gray is thinking about such things on a more profound level:

552. So, although the classes, orders, genera, etc. are natural, or as natural as the systematist can make them, their grouping or order of arrangement in a book, must necessarily be in great measure artificial. Indeed, it is quite impossible to arrange the orders, or even the few classes, in a single series, and yet have each group stand next to its nearest relatives on both sides.

553. Especially it should be understood that, although phanerogamous plants are of a higher grade than cryptogamous, and and angiospermous or ordinary phanerogamous higher than the gymnospermous, yet there is no culmination in the vegetable kingdom, nor any highest or lowest order of phanerogamous plants (182-183).

Like Charles Lyell in his Notebooks on the Species Question (1853-1861), Gray wrestled with the problem of reconciling Darwinian science with design or "the plan according to which the vegetable creation was called into being, with all its grades and diversities among the species, as well of past as of the present time" (182).
The "One Mind" that he invokes comes in as much as a preserver of a natural order as it does in a religious sense.

There are, at nearly the lowest computation, as many as one hundred thousand species of phanerogamous plants, and the cryptogamous species are thought to be still more numerous. They are all connected by resemblances or relationships, realizations in nature, as we may affirm, of the conception of One Mind (177).

But at its core, the increasing "indefiniteness" as one moves from Genus to Species and to Varieties, gives little support for an conception of a plan of One Mind or a universal Cultivator who orders the world, though, as Sextus Empiricus pointed out, some attempt to explain the indefiniteness of the world by arguing that the Gods or God allow for error and flux so that we might know that there is a plan, because otherwise we would not be able to see the patterns if there was not something against which they might stand out. Sextus Empiricus does a fine job of demolishing this argument, of course.

After a section pointing out the need for a systematic process of assigning names, though one that preserves some of the traditional nomenclature, Gray goes into the question of systemic classification. The discussion is of interest for its explanation of the Natural System of classification as opposed to the Artificial System of Linneaus that was based more on names than terms.

The distinction between the Artificial System of first Tournefort "founded mainly on the leaves of the flower, the calyx and corolla" and later Linnaeus' system "founded on the stamens and pistils.... Useful as this system was down to a time within the memory of still surviving botanists, it is now completely obsolete" (182).
Now, Gray writes, the Natural System had triumph, though it still could not completely express the plan that he still felt was there underneath the variety of nature. There are many natural systems, but only one real Natural System of that "one Mind" he and others desparately sought to preserve in the face of the overwhelming evidence of their own studies.

550. Natural System. A genuine system of botany consists of the orders or families duly arranged under their classes, and having the tribes, the genera, and the species arranged in them according to their relationships. This, when properly carried out, is the Natural System; because it is intended to express, as well as possible, the various degrees of relationship between plants, as presented in nature; that is, to rank those species and those genera, etc., next to each other in the classification which are really most alike in all respects, or, in other words, which are constructed most nearly on the same particular plan.

551. There can be only one natural system of botany if by this term is meant the plan according to which the vegetable creation was called into being, with all its grades and diversities among the species, as well of past as of the present time. But there may be many natural systems, if we mean the attempts of men to interpret and express that plan, --- systems which will vary with advancing knowledge, and with the judgment and skill of individual botanists. These must all be very imperfect, bear the impress of individual minds, and be shaped by the current philosophy of the age. But the endeavor always is to make the classification answer to Nature, as far as any system can which has to be expressed in a definite an serial arrangement (182).

"Fig. 80. An American Elm, with Spruce-trees, and on the left Abor Vitae."

(Gray's caption)

Perhaps Gray's views owe something to the American Elm. Note the church steeple in the background to the left of the tree (right click for a full size view). The context of the illustration is: "...wherever axillary buds take the lead, there is, of course, no single main stem, continued year after year in a direct line, but the trunk is soon lost in the branches. Trees so commonly formed have rounded or spreading tops. Of tress with deliquescent stems, --- that is, with the trunk dissolved, as it were, into the successively divided branches, --- the common American Elm (Fig. 80) is a good illustration."

"Topography Reconstructions at 1Kyr intervals since the Last Glacial Maximum by W. Peltier." at NOAA

2011-04-01T00:00:00.074-04:00

Because of some genealogical research I have been helping with by supplying my DNA*, I became curious about the history of human migrations. This was prompted by a number of questions that the results of the tests raised. I had a great exchange with the husband of a college friend who just happened to be a geneticist working on East Asian population origins. So I learned a lot. Two questions were raised initially for me by the DNA test, which I will take directly from my questions to my friend's husband:

2) you are compared to the population in a location in the present day, but the population in the current area may not be the same as the one that was there before.

3) the migration maps show the earth as it is today, and it is unclear whether they take into account, e.g., that the Mediterranean was not connected to the Atlantic during the ice age and the water level quite a bit lower, or the variation in geographic features over time --- the Straits of Gibraltar and other places were dry enough to walk across, so not everyone would have had to squeeze through the small space now connecting Africa and the Mideast. One probably could have crossed from North Africa into Southern Europe without much trouble, certainly not as much trouble as it would have taken the E haplolgroup to cross from East Africa to India via the India ocean, as some genetic migration maps show, such as the one at FTDNA.

So I started to look around for maps of sea levels at various times during human history. Surprisingly, not many such maps exist and most of them are local maps of limited geographic area. One of the best of these limited sources is
"Topography Reconstructions at 1Kyr intervals since the Last Glacial Maximum" by W. Peltier at the NOAA site: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/paleo/pelttopo.pl
(Use "ctrl +" to enlarge the maps in your browser)
This series of maps at least covers the period since the last ice age and the image above is of sea level and land forms 21,000 years ago. Notice the changes in the shape and levels around the Mediterranean over time, which could have affected migrations, climates, and flora and fauna distributions. It is too bad that there are so few resources as this, but it is great that NOAA and Dr. Peltier have provided this series of maps for us.

_________________
*The tests at FTDNA indicate connections to four populations: England/Scotland (Orcadian), French, Yoruba, and Mandenka. Ancestry.com indicates these and also North Africa (Berber) and Spanish.

‘...keeping alive the critical analysis of the social world was and remains an important program’: Stanley Aronowitz and Cultural Studies

2011-03-26T20:07:00.003-04:00

B. Ricardo Brown
Associate Professor of Cultural Studies
Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies
Pratt Institute

Honoring and Engaging Aronowitz: Remaking the Knowledge Factory
Left Forum
Pace University
New York City
March 18 – 20, 2011

http://www.leftforum.org/

Honoring and Engaging Aronowitz: Rethinking Labor and the Labor Movement
E326, O. Panel Session 7—Sunday 3:00 p.m. – 4:50 p.m.
Dr. B. Ricardo Brown—Pratt Institute
Dr. Michelle Fine—CUNY Graduate Center
Michael Menser—Brooklyn College/CUNY
Mike Fabricant–Hunter/CUNY Graduate Center, PSC-CUNY
Panel Abstract: This panel will engage the work of Stanley Aronowitz with respect to social and political movements and the current crisis in higher education. Particular focus will be on the idea of the university as a knowledge factory and the role of students, faculty, communities, and movements to not only combat privatization and defunding but to make the university a place where learning and research serve the public, cultivate solidarity, and make 21st century education democratic, inclusive, combative, and liberatory.

See also:

Honoring and Engaging Aronowitz: Rethinking Labor and the Labor movement
L. Panel Session 5—Sunday 10:00 a.m. – 11:50 a.m., LHN
Ed Ott—Murphy Institute for Worker Education
Michael Pelias—Long Island University
Penny Lewis—Murphy Institute for Worker Education
Phil Nicholson—Nassau Community College
William DiFazio—St. Johns University, Situations Collective
Panel Abstract: An engagement and critical dialogue with the work of Stanley Aronowitz on the "labor question" and the failure of institutionalized labor today.

‘...keeping alive the critical analysis of the social world was and remains an important program’: Stanley Aronowitz and Cultural Studies

I came to CUNY to work with Stanley. I had dropped out of graduate school at Syracuse University --- a brief but inevitably important exploration of Cultural and Historical Geography. While working as a law librarian, I read Stanley’s Crisis in Historical Materialism and was immediately taken by both his range of knowledge and his critical approach to knowledge and everyday life. So As others have said, I too led a rather strange life at CUNY, where I would work the reference desk until 4:15 and then leave to walk the 10 minutes to the old Grad Center on 42nd Street. So within 15 minutes, I would go from the very belly of the Beast and into Stanley’s classroom. The contrast could not be greater, of course, both intellectually and ethically.

To speak on Stanley and Cultural Studies. Well, I’ll not speak about his many books and essays on the subject, nor about his acknowledged place in the reception of Cultural Studies in the Americas. I think this is well known to us all and would take a lecture series more than a short talk! And as a member of a unionized faculty and of the grievance committee, I know his influence extends into other areas of higher education as well, but I’ll leave that for others to discuss. At Pratt, we are one big union in a small sense, with FT, PT and a special category for tenured adjuncts all under the same contract.

While I was a Graduate Student at CUNY, the name of the Center for Cultural Studies was changed to the Center for Culture, Technology and Work. At the time I did not think that this was a very good idea. Cultural Studies was just consolidating its position within the academy, after all. What was really happening was that it had become a career path as well.

In fact, a reading of Stanley’s Roll Over Beethoven will make this transformation quite clear. It is, by the way, simply the best historical genealogy of Cultural Studies ever done, especially the first few chapters.

In his teaching, Stanley pointed many of us towards a way of thinking about Cultural Studies that is firmly rooted in Critical Theory and the critique of everyday life. This version of Cultural Studies, as he says of the genealogy of Cultural Studies in his Roll over Beethoven, at its best, Cultural Studies sought to “transcend the boundaries of formal academic sites” to be “not anti-disciplinary [or ‘interdisciplinary’] but transdsciplinary” in our approach to the “authority of knowledge.”

But the name change alerts us to two things about Cultural Studies that Stanley taught his students.
1] Cultural Studies transgressed disciplinary boundaries. But also that because it had no disciplinary boundaries to defend, and it was rather defenseless and easily overwhelmed and colonized by the more established, though crisis ridden, academic fields.

2] The second insight that Stanley gave us was that the Critique of Cultural Studies is not just an external one, but that it demands a self-critique as well. So, it was not that Stanley did not supply a definition of Cultural Studies, but that all such efforts can be contested. Certainly our work at Pratt did not contain enough self-criticism. Our efforts opened the work to administrative imperatives and concerns, and thus we undermined our own work.

Suddenly “everyone does Cultural Studies” became a mantra. It was a phrase especially useful to those who preferred to ignore the political commitments of Cultural Studies in favor of its potential as a part of the cultural industry, with niche markets in the various traditional disciplines that embraced the idea that “everyone does Cultural Studies”. Cultural Studies was not undefined, but came to be defined in ways that suited the needs of the marketplace.

Two examples: The bookstore and the Program at Pratt

[Expand as an aside:
Cultural Studies Develops a Market: Book stores in the 1990s, the realists as well as the creation of a market for CS. No longer marketing books as Sociology, Anthropology, or Literary Theory and Comp. Lit, but as Cultural Studies.]

It was at this same time that we established the Program in Cultural Studies at Pratt.
And after three years, purely for reasons of marketing, the name of the program was changed to Critical and Visual Studies. Apparently at the time, according to Admissions, College students knew about CS, but not High Schoolers.

Pratt’s program, which ironically I helped create and have recently begun to again direct, is a Microcosm of the American reception or construction of Cultural Studies, and a good example of the reasons why many have walked away from the contest over its meaning, since its meaning is now restricted to its deployment by various traditional fields. I notice that Stanley rarely uses the phrase in his writings over the past decade, just as I have noticed that many of his students no longer embrace the term, either.

What has drawn us away from Cultural Studies are the very interests that once drew us to it: an encounter with Materialism, the legacy of Marx, and the Critical Theory of society and everyday life.

Cultural Studies had as much to do with an approach to the material as it did to any group of theories.
In many ways, our near abandonment of the term Cultural Studies to the markets expresses how we have to constantly reorient our approaches to our studies, teaching, and everyday lives.

As he wrote in Left Turn:
After “...the abandonment of the concrete utopia... keeping alive the critical analysis of the social world was and remains an important program.” (Left Turn: 53)

So, the name change at CUNY was a Sign that I missed. A reminder that Critique is self-referential-- something not all of us appreciated at the time. We might have read Stanley a little closer when he wrote the “most profound stake in the crisis of cultural authority... is the authority of knowledge. Who has the right to determine criteria of validity? Who may speak truth to power? What is the responsibility of intellectuals with respect to their own knowledge?” (Roll Over Beethoven: 9) Once we had the right and authority, we assumed that it was in the hands of “good people.”

Thus, the Critique that we speak of is self-referential both intellectually and in terms of our self: it is about how one lives in and responds to what Horkheimer called the “vicissitudes of everyday life” This is, after all what education is about, developing the means to understand the relations of our many selves to the world.

From where I now sit amid the workings of the Knowledge Factory
Stanley’s intervention as a teacher and major figure in Cultural Studies are, broadly speaking:

A. That knowledge belongs to everyone but is denied to most and so we must constantly find way to subvert the authorities of knowledge and in so doing subvert the authority of the dominant ideologies.

B. That a new educational intervention is better than trying to defend the boundaries of an old one, even one that once held such promise.

C. And finally, understanding our teaching as a critical political intervention is something we got from Aronowitz, and further that our studies and work should express critical interventions on multiple levels. We critique the present because it is what we know while we accumulate knowledge for those who might have a different future.

Thanks, Stanley!

Darwin, Slavery, the HMS Black Joke, and Seaman Morgan.

2011-02-12T17:27:00.002-05:00

"...the calamitous news of the death of three of our ship-mates. — They were the three of the Macacù party who were ill with fever when the Beagle sailed from Rio. — 1st Morgan, an extra-ordinary powerful man & excellent seaman; he was a very brave man & had performed some curious feats, he put a whole party of Portugeese to flight, who had molested the party; he pitched an armed sentinel into the sea at St Jago; & formerly he was one of the boarders in that most gallant action against the Slaver the Black Joke. — 2nd Boy Jones one of the most promising boys in the ship & had been promised but the day before his illness, promotion. — These were the only two of the sailors who were with the Cutter, & picked for their excellence. — And lastly, poor little Musters; who three days before his illness heard of his Mothers death. Morgan was taken ill 4 days after arriving on board & died near the Abrolhos, where he was lowered into the sea after divisions on Sunday — for several days he was violently delirious & talked about the party. — Boy Jones died two days after arriving at Bahia, & Musters two days after that.— They were both for a long time insensible or nearly so.— They were both buried in the English burial ground at Bahia; where in the lonely spot are also two other midshipmen" (1).

May 28th & 29th Captain FitzRoy hired a small Schooner to go to the Rio Negro to bring Mr Wickham in order that he might take command of our Schooner. She arrived yesterday, & to day Mr King, who came with Mr Wickham paid me a visit. — They are heartily tired of their little vessels & are again as glad to see the Beagle as every one in her is to see them. —

30th, July 1st & 2nd Have been employed in arranging & writing notes about all my treasures from Maldonado. — The Captain informs me that he hopes next summer to double the Horn. — My heart exults whenever I think of all the glorious prospects of the future.

3rd–7th All hands of the Beagle continue to be employed in working at the Schooner (for the future the Unicorn). My occupations likewise are the same & I do not stir out of the Ship.

8th It was discovered to day that one of the Mates, belonging to the Unicorn, had formerly been in the President, a vessel supposed to be piratical & which brought the English man of war, the Black Joke, to action. It has, since the Trial, been suspected that this same ship took & murdered every soul on board the Packet Redpole. — Captain Fitz-Roy has determined to take the man a prisoner, to the Consul at M. Video. I have just been astonished to hear the order, "to reeve the running rigging, & bend sails". And we now a little before 12 at night have weighed anchor & are under sail (3).

“I felt that I was walking on a path unknown to me and full of pitfalls; but I had the advantage of previous discussions by able men. I tried to say most emphatically that a great philosopher, law-giver, etc., did far more for the progress of mankind by his writings or his example than by leaving a numerous offspring. I have endeavored to show how the struggle for existence between tribe and tribe depends on an advance in the moral and intellectual qualities of the members, and not merely on their capacity of obtaining food”(5).

On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master's eye. These latter cruelties were witnessed by me in a Spanish colony, in which it has always been said, that slaves are better treated than by the Portuguese, English, or other European nations. I have seen at Rio de Janeiro a powerful negro afraid to ward off a blow directed, as he thought, at his face. I was present when a kind-hearted man was on the point of separating forever the men, women, and little children of a large number of families who had long lived together. I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authentically heard of; -- nor would I have mentioned the above revolting details, had I not met with several people, so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of the negro as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil. Such people have generally visited at the houses of the upper classes, where the domestic slaves are usually well treated, and they have not, like myself, lived amongst the lower classes. Such inquirers will ask slaves about their condition; they forget that the slave must indeed be dull, who does not calculate on the chance of his answer reaching his master's ears.

“It is argued that self-interest will prevent excessive cruelty; as if self-interest protected our domestic animals, which are far less likely than degraded slaves, to stir up the rage of their savage masters. It is an argument long since protested against with noble feeling, and strikingly exemplified, by the ever-illustrious Humboldt. It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our poorer countrymen: if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin; but how this bears on slavery, I cannot see; as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in one land, by showing that men in another land suffered from some dreadful disease. Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children -- those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own -- being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin”(6).

Two notes by Rosa Luxemburg on Revolution that are relevant to the Revolts of 2011

2011-02-05T10:53:00.003-05:00

"During the revolution it is extremely difficult for any directing organ of the proletarian movement to foresee and to calculate which occasions and factors can lead to explosions and which cannot. Here also initiative and direction do not consist in issuing commands according to one’s inclinations, but in the most adroit adaptability to the given situation, and the closest possible contact with the mood of the masses. The element of spontaneity, as we have seen, plays a great part in all Russian mass strikes without exception, be it as a driving force or as a restraining influence. This does not occur in Russia, however, because social democracy is still young or weak, but because in every individual act of the struggle so very many important economic, political and social, general and local, material and psychical, factors react upon one another in such a way that no single act can be arranged and resolved as if it were a mathematical problem. The revolution, even when the proletariat, with the social democrats at their head, appear in the leading role, is not a manoeuvre of the proletariat in the open field, but a fight in the midst of the incessant crashing, displacing and crumbling of the social foundation."

The final paragraph "Organizational Questions...." Dick Howard's translation reads better, but I guess this one from the Marxist Archive will have to do. Too many of the Marxist Archive translations give everyone, including Luxemburg, a "Bolshevik" tone and style. Howard's translation are much preferred. Her friend and biographer, Paul Frolich included many substantial passages in his Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Work which is translated by Johanna Hoorweg.

"In Lenin’s overanxious desire to establish the guardianship of an omniscient and omnipotent Central Committee in order to protect so promising and vigorous a labor movement against any misstep, we recognize the symptoms of the same subjectivism that has already played more than one trick on socialist thinking in Russia.
It is amusing to note the strange somersaults that the respectable human “ego” has had to perform in recent Russian history. Knocked to the ground, almost reduced to dust, by Russian absolutism, the “ego” takes revenge by turning to revolutionary activity. In the shape of a committee of conspirators, in the name of a nonexistent Will of the People, it seats itself on a kind of throne and proclaims it is all-powerful. [The reference is to the conspiratorial circle which attacked tsarism from 1879 to 1883 by means of terrorist acts and finally assassinated Alexander II. – Ed.] But the “object” proves to be the stronger. The knout is triumphant, for tsarist might seems to be the “legitimate” expression of history. In time we see appear on the scene an even more “legitimate” child of history – the Russian labor movement. For the first time, bases for the formation of a real “people’s will” are laid in Russian soil. But here is the “ego” of the Russian revolutionary again! Pirouetting on its head, it once more proclaims itself to be the all-powerful director of history – this time with the title of His Excellency the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party of Russia. The nimble acrobat fails to perceive that the only “subject” which merits today the role of director is the collective “ego” of the working class. The working class demands the right to make its mistakes and learn the dialectic of history.
Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."

[Howard: "Finally, we must frankly admit to ourselves that errors made by a truly revolutionary labor movement are historically infinitely more fruitful and more valuable than the infallibility of the best of all possible 'central committees.'" Rosa Luxemburg, Selected Political Writings, Monthly Review Press, 1971]

Spartacus Revolt

Cairo

Riz Khan on Egypt: Tariq Ramadan & Slavoj Zizek

2011-02-05T10:14:00.000-05:00

From Riz Khan's interview show on Al Jazeera English: "The Muslim scholar and philosopher discuss the power of popular dissent and the limits of peaceful protest."

I often find Zizek annoyingly and too given to hyperbole and the kind of theatrics that have indeed earned him the title of the "Elvis of cultural theory" but he often takes the appropriate positions. Tariq Ramadan is often quite amused by Zizek's performance, but it is important to put that aside and listen to what they are actually saying about the response of "the West" to the events in the "Middle East"

Julian Assange and K. ---- The Trial --- Before the Law

2010-12-23T21:03:00.000-05:00

In Orson Well's version of The Trial, just as K. denounces the vast conspiracy, the attention of the audience as well as his own are seized by the spectacle of brutal sex, as at the back of the Court the Law student begins a brutal sexual assault disguised as passion on the Wife of the Jailer.

"What has happened to me," K. went on, rather more quietly than before, trying at the same time to read the faces in the first row, which gave his speech a somewhat disconnected effect, "what has happened to me is only a single instance and as such of no great importance, especially as I do not take it seriously, but it is representative of a misguided policy which is being directed against many other people as well. It is for these that I take up my stand here, not for myself."

....There can be no doubt --- " said K. quite softly, for he was elated by the breathless attention of the meeting; in that stillness a subdued hum was audible which was more exciting than the wildest applause--- "there can be no doubt that behind all the actions of this court of justice, that is to say in my case, behind my arrest and today's interrogation, there is a great organization at work. An organization which not only employs corrupt warders, oafish Inspectors, and Examining Magistrates of whom the best that can be said is that they recognize their own limitations, but also has at its disposal a judicial hierarchy of high, indeed of the highest rank, with an indispensable and numerous retinue of servants, clerks, police, and other assistants, perhaps even hangmen."

The speech is immediately forgotten by all, including the speaker, in the spectacle of sex although the import of the speech lingers throughout the book. Do Assange's sexual acts and the wrongs that they might reveal invalidate or erase the actual cables that were leaked or the other thousands of pages that Wikileaks has published documenting corporate and governmental deceptions and crimes? Not at all. However, the megalomania and desire for power that Assange despises in the State are no less in evidence in his treatment of women and in his comparing himself to Martin Luther King, Jr. and other "martyrs". Perhaps the problem with Asange is that he is so easy to disparage, while the work of Wikileaks is actually quite important and necessary. Once the story became about his personality, then the full weight of the leaks were lost, just like the audience at K.'s hearing turned away from him to gaze upon the more enticing spectacle.

"Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: "You'll risk lives! National security! You'll endanger troops!" Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can't be both. Which is it?....In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth." ---Assange

"No," said the priest, "it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.... "A melancholy conclusion," said K. "It turns lying into a universal principle."

K. famously does not know the nature of his crimes and as Assange's lawyer stated, neither did they, although others say that they in reality know a great deal about their crime but will not accept it. K. as well denies knowledge of his crime, pleads innocence, hires an attorney to delay his trial and indeed comes to understand that he always knew his crime.

"What's this about a 'pornograph'"? asked K.'s Inspector in Welles' Trial
"All this gibberish. It won't look good in the record" said the Inspector.

How Obama has left the door open for Bloomberg in 2012 (to my horror)

2010-12-10T15:06:00.014-05:00

"The mayor allegedly said that Mr. Obama was the most “arrogant man” he had ever met, according to Mr. Murdoch — that despite having been invited to play golf with the president on Martha’s Vineyard this summer."

[OF COURSE, politics is like baseball, and since I wrote this, Bloomberg has so completely imploded in his third term that he no longer has any chance of being president.... unless he wants to spend about half of his billion $'s! --- BRBIII, May, 2011]

Obama's deal with the Republicans and his alienation of his base constituencies will have an unexpected (or perhaps rather obvious) outcome. He will be challenged from the so-called "left" of the Democratic party. This challenge will weaken him even if he wins the nomination--- and he probably will. Hillery will of course sit back and wait on this round. She is set no matter what for 2016. However, the Republicans have no candidates who are strong either.

Gingrich does not have much of a chance of rehabilitating himself and besides, he is part of the Clinton-era, too, and has deep baggage from that time (e.g., his own intern problem). He will mostly amount to the Pat Buchanan of the 2012 campaign.

Palin probably will not want to abandon her TV and twitter career. Besides, her negatives will never go down, but only up. This is especially true if she continues to brutalize animals as part of her shtick. See Aaron Sorkin's Huffington Post note "I'm sure the Moose had it Coming". The other Republican notables such as Romney, Huckabee, etc. will have a problem generating real national appeal, though Romney has a better chance at it than the rest given his wealth --- but let's not forget the Tea Party's populist streak.

And speaking of wealth, the one person for whom Obama has left the door open for is New York City's Mayor Bloomberg. He is in his final three years, he was for most of his life a "liberal" democrat, only switching to run for Mayor as a Republican because a billionaire would not be able to win a democratic primary race in this city (at least it was thought). The moment Obama and the democrats won nationally, and the Republicans in New York state were also routed, Bloomberg abandoned the Republicans and switched to independent. Did I mention he is a billionaire and owner of a large information/media corporation and someone whose donations to charities and cultural institutions creates a great deal of influence and number of allegiances? (See Panel on Pick for Schools Has Close Ties to Bloomberg, New York Times, November 19, 2010.)

Moreover, he spent a good deal of effort and money supporting moderates in the 2010 Congressional races.

So there we will have it, a weak President after a hard fought primary and saddled with a disaffected base, a Republican challenger who, while wealthy, is no "man from the people", and finally the billionaire independent Mayor of NYC. Obama has left the door wide open for Bloomberg to run as an independent in 2012 and Bloomberg knows this. There is a very good chance that Bloomberg could pull off a "triangulation" of the electorate. Having been subjected three of his campaigns, which inundate your mailbox with glossy materials almost every day, I know he has the communications people to get the job done.

I have to agree with

Robert Shrum, a former Democratic strategist who advised Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000 and John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004....
"What Bloomberg offers is the inspiration of competence, not charisma," Shrum said. "And if the country found itself in a situation in 2012 where people thought the economy wasn't improving and if the Republicans didn't offer a sensible alternative, then Bloomberg might be a very attractive candidate."Bloomberg Strikes Presidential Tone, Again Wednesday, December 08, 2010 by Lisa Chow (WNYC)

Did I mention that I do not like Bloomberg's policies in the slightest? However, that does not translate in to wishful thinking. The board is being arrange for a Bloomberg 2012 campaign and it is Obama who has blundered his way into it.

Larry Evans, Chess Grandmaster, 1932-2010

2010-11-19T17:20:00.024-05:00

I learned a great deal about chess from Larry Evans. I still have my copies of his edition of Modern Chess Openings (as well as Korn's 12th, the last to be printed in English Descriptive Notation) and Fischer's 60 Memorable Games. My copy of New Ideas in Chess still finds its way into my bag for subway reading.
Here is something from New Ideas in Chess under the heading "A wing attack is best met by a reaction in the center". It, like all of the examples in New Ideas, is drawn from his own tournament games. This one is from Kagetsu v. Evans, Hollywood Open, 1954.

after ...P-Q4

Evans writes of this position: "This attacker does not always benefit from open lines. He should try to close the center before embarking on a wing attack. This cannot always be done. The defender must keep his lines of communication open, and this requires a fluid center so that he may divert pieces from the other wing to the defense of the attacked wing".

Kagetsu    Evans
White      Black
1. QxN     B-Q3
2. 0-0-0    R-N2
3. P-KR4 BxN
4. BxB      Q-N5
5. B-Q2    PxP
6. R-N1    Q-K3
7. B-K2    Q-R7
White Resigns

New York Times Obituary. In the printed edition, the caption puts Evans on the left, but Fischer is on the left and Evans is on the right.
Gambit: the New York Times Chess blog on Evans, with reader's favorite games.

"This is what the corrupt regime's media has been reduced to..."

2010-10-01T09:47:00.001-04:00

Another example of altering photos for political purposes.

According to the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11313738, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram ran this photo of the recent Mid-East talks in Washington:

It was not the photo that appeared elsewhere:

The independent daily, al-Masry al-Youm, reported that the state-run daily had "carried out surgery" on the photo "to show Mubarak leading and the rest behind".

"This is what the corrupt regime's media has been reduced to," it said in a statement on its website, adding that the paper had "crossed the line from being balanced and honest".

Al-Ahram has since replaced the image on its website with a picture of the assembled leaders seated on chairs in the Red Sea resort.
Officials at the paper could not be reached for comment".

RUINS companion blog - Until Darwin: Science & the Origins of Race

2010-08-15T18:21:00.004-04:00

Given that I am just finishing up this project, I thought it would be good to separate out the postings that relate to it from RUINS, which I intend as a more general blog. The "Until Darwin" blog will be for notes and materials deleted from the final work, as well as references consulted but not mentioned.
Here is the site
Until Darwin: Science and the Origins of Race

Immigration in the United States: The Nature of the "National Interest"

2010-07-29T20:26:00.007-04:00

I was considering some of the rhetoric I have been hearing on the issue of immigration. A few things came to mind the other day....

There is currently a tendency to make the nation appear to be natural or organic through the racialization of the national interest. By this I mean that the manner by which states create a people who are governed and in whose name the state governs, and whose interests it is said to represent. The people who created the state become the people whose existence as a nation legitimizes the power of the state. The national interests are those of both this people and the state, and the naturalness of the people imparts to the state its own basis in the nature of that newly constituted people.

Now that might be a long way of saying in the Weberian sense that the state creates its own legitimacy through the legitimate and legitimizing monopoly on force. There is much that underlies this state power which has, of course, a necessary relation to a territory or place, or now in America, a homeland. If we were to examine this from another direction, we might also trace out the ways in which race is itself a category used in scientific classifications of human variety; a category that has always been associated with the disciplines that serve the state by accumulating knowledge about the nature of the people. These classifications, and not citizenship, are at the heart of the anti-immigrant rhetoric just as they were in the early 1900s.

Why do we keep returning to these questions? Because the attempt to rethink the state always begins with the state as another way of saying “the nation” or “the people”. So long as human relationships and human variety are considered from within the context of the nation-state, the nature of the people will remain racialized.

Now I would propose that struggles around immigration are presented in this this racialized and naturalized setting of national interests, for within the ideology of national interests also lies the ideology of national threats. So it is no accident that the terror of terrorism is often associated with the fear of immigrants, of threats to national identity under the weight of migrant workers and terrorists that enter the nation through the same routes and who also threaten to erase “who we are”, except by violence and not demographics. The largest attack in the United States prior to 9-11 also unleashed widespread harassment and violence against Moslems and those thought to be Moslem, at least until Timithy McVeigh was charged with the crime. Since the nation is always naturalized through race, the threats it confronts are always racialized threats by natural enemies who therefore can not simply be reasoned with. In the case of immigrants the threat can only controlled or expelled, and in the case of terrorists, it can only be met and defeated in “a war without end.” On the side of this difference is the immigrant as an instrument of production-- the most degraded and exploited of workers, and on the other side there is the terrorist who “hates us for who we are”. Both are seen as welling to do anything, though one dies in the desert while journeying toward the hope of a livelihood and the other blows him/herself up hoping to journey to a paradise. While both can not help but be disappointed by the outcome, they can not and should not be otherwise compared.

The opponents of immigration to the United States oppose it because they see the nation as natural, as having a people that are organic to it, and they see themselves as potentially having a state that can protect them and enforce a peculiar view of the nature of the people. They see both the immigrant worker and the terrorist as degenerates who either unconsciously or consciously will cause a general degeneration of the “body politic” of the nation.
So when you hear it said that the immigration debate has nothing to do with race, don’t believe it. It has to do with the scientific ideology of race because the nation-state has always been associated with at the very least “a people” if not a race.

"Darwinism Falls 2013!"... at least now we know that the world doesn't end in 2012

2010-07-02T07:09:00.009-04:00

I use clustermaps to track visits to my blog and website. I like the service quite alot, but often when I check my map, I get an ad that reads "2013: Darwinism Falls" or "2013: The Berlin Wall of Darwinism Falls" or even "Darwin was wrong but Evolution is real".
Now these are silly messages showing a profound ignorance, but they are clever. The ad links to a site by Perry Marshall who offers to send you a series of 5 emails over a five day period that will convince you that God exists and that science has "proved" it.
It is funny how so many believe that science can not "prove" anything other than the existence of god. Apparently, whenever science "proves" something that is in opposition to the belief in god, that evidence is never accepted because "God/Religion is beyond science" or some such dodge.
A little further into the site, one finds that it is simply a so-called "Intelligent Design" site. Information theory proves that DNA is a code created by an Intelligence, we are told. Here goes:

1) "DNA is not merely a molecule with a pattern; it is a code, a language, and an information storage mechanism.
2) All codes are created by a conscious mind; there is no natural process known to science that creates coded information.
3) Therefore DNA was designed by a mind.
If you can provide an empirical example of a code or language that occurs naturally, you've toppled my proof. All you need is one."

How quickly DNA changes! It is simultaneously a pattern, a code, a language and a storage system, as though those things are the same thing! There is really no reason to go on with the kind of nonsense found on cosmicfingerprints. It is just a mix of old stuff from Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (perhaps a touch of atavistic criminal anthropology prompted god to have a fingerprint).

That last statement is probably sillier than the illogical argument contained in the first three. Perhaps he should consider the language he is using if he wants to find a language that is natural. Or maybe define what is a language. Yada, Yada, Yada.

One person left a message on the museum of hoaxes site that makes an additional connection:

I came across this site through a google ad on digg (I think…), and so far haven’t found anything he might be selling, though I haven’t signed up for his mail list.

I hope no one takes him too seriously. His other works seem to be all about “The secret that doubled a successful company in 4 months”, and how to “Use Google AdWords and the Power of Guerilla-Marketing to Attract New Customers 24/7/365!” (http://www.perrymarshall.com/) Note that his commercial site and his Cosmic fingerprints one don’t seem to be linked in anyway.

There’s so much more I could say about this great self-made man of science and his wonderful website, but I have to go port some old JPG programs into the more universal USB code.

Another writer mentioned what is going on with the cosmic fingerprint:

“There is a phenomenon known as pareidolia, “The tendency to interpret a vague stimulus as something known to the viewer.” Pareidolia is when we see faces in clouds, or “evil” in the tragic path of a tornado.

I have to agree. I must get the ads because Darwin is a label for some of these posts. Of course, there was a Star Trek: Next Generation episode that purported to show that the DNA of the Humans, Klingons, Romulans, and Vulcans were all encoded by an ancient civilization with a message that they were all created from DNA that was deliberately seeded throughout the universe. They did this because they were lonely having found no other species during their travels. Of course, their civilization is long gone and the only trace of it is the code in the DNA of the various intelligent species.
At least the lonely pseudo-gods in that story died.
Anyway, I sing the body electric. I hear my DNA talking [but I just don't know what it is saying] ...with apologies to Walt Whitman.

Two Recent Stories from the New York Times on Humans and Other Primates

2010-06-17T09:07:00.014-04:00

It is interesting and I have not finished thinking about it enough to venture an opinion, but I found these images in Tuesday's New York Times. The print article on June 15, 2010 carried the headline "Paternity Leave Law Helps to Redefine Masculinity in Sweden" with the subtitle "Legislating to give men equal rights at home in the land of Viking lore." The on-line version appeared on June 9, 2010 with the title "The Female FactorIn Sweden, Men Can Have It All"The Times describes the series "The Female Factor" as a series for the International Herald Tribune "The Female Factor Twenty-First Century Fathers In a series of articles, columns and multimedia reports, The International Herald Tribune examines where women stand in the early 21st century." This is the image that appears in the electronic version

In the print version, these two photos appear. Online they were included in a slideshow presentation accompanying the story.

The caption reads: "'When he is in the forest with his rifle over his shoulder and the baby on his back.' Sofia Karlsson A police officier who says she finds her husband, Mikael Larlsson, most attractive this way".

In the same issue of the Times, there appeared this story: "Parental Bonds, Special and Strange" amongst Barbary macaques. It carried this photo:

It carried this pull-out quote: "Among animals, some fathers use infants as 'battle symbols' or to raise social standing." It is worth comparing the subtle ideologies and assumptions of fixity that underlie some portions of these articles.
It might be interesting, in terms of our anthropomorphizing the behavior of other species, this article which appeared the next week in the New York Times:

Chimps, Too, Wage War and Annex Rival Territory

There followed two letters, the first is more important for understanding the assumptions in the report than is the second letter:
"To the Editor
Re “Chimps That Wage War and Annex Rival Territory” (June 22): It seems clear that chimps, humans and other highly social animals engage in organized warfare when increasing population densities or climate change threaten food resources. When you’re constantly hungry, you will kill or drive away competition for the foods in your species’ diet.

Highly social animals will create ad hoc or longer lasting groups that will cooperate to minimize individual risk and maximize terror in the competing animals. Well-fed researchers should understand that the constant threat of starvation, and to a lesser extent all other desires, radically shape animal intelligence in ways we cannot easily fathom. Tom Fitzgibbon

New York"

Thomas Jefferson and the Texas Board of Education

2010-05-23T10:10:00.007-04:00

In terms of the Texas Board of Education's hostility to Thomas Jefferson, among all other people and artifacts having to do with Enlightenment, the "Founding Father" who rewrote the Bible by removing all religious references (The Jefferson Bible) left us with his views of such priestly tribes.

I promised you a letter on Christianity, which I have not forgotten. On the contrary, it is because I have reflected on it, that I find much more time necessary for it than I can at present dispose of. I have a view of the subject which ought to displease neither the rational Christian nor Deists, and would reconcile many to a character they have too hastily rejected. I do not know that it would reconcile the genus irritabile vatum [the irritable tribe of priests] who are all in arms against me. Their hostility is on too interesting ground to be softened. The delusion into which the X.Y.Z. plot shewed it possible to push the people; the successful experiment made under the prevalence of that delusion on the clause of the constitution, which, while it secured the freedom of the press, covered also the freedom of religion, had given to the clergy a very favorite hope of obtaining an establishment of a particular form of Christianity thro' the U.S.; and as every sect believes its own form the true one, every one perhaps hoped for his own, but especially the Episcopalians & Congregationalists. The returning good sense of our country threatens abortion to their hopes, & they believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: & enough too in their opinion, & this is the cause of their printing lying pamphlets against me, forging conversations for me with Mazzei, Bishop Madison, &c., which are absolute falsehoods without a circumstance of truth to rest on; falsehoods, too, of which I acquit Mazzei & Bishop Madison, for they are men of truth. Letter to Benjamin Rush, Monticello, September 23, 1800

Placebo Effects and Policy Limits or what Olivia Judson can teach David Brooks

2010-05-14T10:03:00.014-04:00

The May 4th New York Times Op-Ed section presented us with a great contrast between scientific thinking and pseudo-scientific ideology in the columns by Olivia Judson and David Brooks. I am sure you can already guess which one is which, but lets go through it anyway because when the Times inadvertently gives us such a useful contrast, it is well worth paying attention.

So, Brooks' piece first and he begins, of course, with the Northern European as a standard. Swedes in Sweden and Swedes in the United States have the same rate of poverty, 6.7% "Two groups with similar historical backgrounds living in entirely different political systems, and the poverty outcomes were the same." Brooks further notes that the average life expectancy of Swedes has not changed much since 1950 despite their commitment to build "a large welfare state with a national health service, while the U.S. did not." In 1950 Swedes lived an average of 2.6 years longer than Americans, and now live 2.7 years later.

Of course, the second thing to note is that Brooks is using averages rather than differences between the mean life expectancy. But this is not so much my problem with his piece, although it would be useful to compare the results of we used mean rather than average. Instead, the thing that can be pointed out in this little post is the stark contrast between the essays by Brooks and Judson.

Brooks tells us that:

"Ethnicity correlates to huge differences in how people live.....All we can say for sure is that different psychological, cultural, and social factors combine in myriad ways to produce different viewpoints. As a result of these different viewpoints, the average behavior is different between different ethnic and geographical groups, leading to different life outcomes.... So when we're arguing about politics, we should be aware of how policy fits into the larger scheme of cultural and social influences. Bad policy can decimate the social fabric, but good policy can only modestly improve it." [Notice that average has appeared again, as in the "average behavior" of the bodies that make up a population.]

So let's take three concepts that Brooks uses: ethnicity, culture, and politics. What exactly does he mean by these terms in this little article.

POLITICS: is for Brooks simply the means to institute social policy for the control of a population. The problem is that social policies can do very little to affect social change. Social change comes from elsewhere, if it comes at all, and it comes from the internal forces within populations, or "tribes of people," to use Brooks' phrase. Thus, politics and social policy can have only modest effects on the lives of the humans in a given population. Politics, on the other hand, is not about social change, it is about articulating the "viewpoints" of various "ethnic and geographical groups". Politics is about which group can enforce its "viewpoint" and the first rule of the policies that flow from these viewpoints is "don't promulgate a policy that will destroy social bonds" because these bonds are the foundation of politics. At bottom, all politics is rooted in ethnicity and emotion, as in "emotional bonds".

If each "tribe" is given a "basic level of economic and physical security" they will each "create a culture of achievement --- if you are lucky." And if the policy can strengthen the "emotional bonds" of a people, all the better. Brooks cites two examples of successful policies that have strengthen emotional ties: "preschool and military service" but in the end, "we should all probably calm down about politics. Most of the proposals we argue about so ferociously will have only marginal effects on how we live, especially compared with the ethnic, regional and social differences that we so studiously ignore."

So politics is in the end arguing from our ethnic, regional, and social "viewpoints" about policies that will not really help very many people, but might at least strengthen the "emotional bonds" that unite different tribes, or keep them in their place. It is a good argument for the status quo, and that is exactly the kind of argument one can expect from the "progressive conservatism" that Brooks claims to support.

CULTURE: is for Brooks, at least in this piece, about the habits of different ethnic, cultural, or emotional tribes or populations. But it exists in a tautology for him. Namely, Culture rests on ethnicity, but ethnicity is culture. Culture consists of the habits and material production of tribes, and you can define a tribe, an ethnicity, by its habits and material production. Emotional bonds are between families and tribes, and families and tribes are defined by the extent of their emotional bonds. None of this tell sus very much except again that acceptance or restoration of the status quo is always the point of Brooks'commentary.

ETHNICITY: Really, the talk of tribes and emotional bonds, of the importance of the status quo would not be so disturbing if it were not in the context of Brook's use of the concept of ethnicity as a stand in for race. Whenever Brooks discusses differences, he relates those differences to ethnicity and geographical differences, but ethnicity clearly is for him the most important factor. In fact, the Times accompanied the commentary with the blurb "How ethnicity swamps politics." When Brooks wants to talk about ethnic differences, he uses for his evidence data based upon racial differences, in particular the differences between what Cuvier called the three primary races of man, European, African, and Asian. Native Americans and Hispanics make appear only to to compared to the other three "ethnic... tribes".

One can not be sure of what Brooks means by ethnicity, but certainly it does at points stand in directly for race, just as "viewpoint" stands in for "ideology". "The influence of politics and policy is usually swamped by the influence of culture, ethnicity, psychology, and a dozen other factors." The other factors are not worth naming, as apparently culture, ethnicity, and psychology predominate.

And this takes us back to the Swedes that Brooks began with. There is something that makes a Swede a Swede whether they are in South Dakota or Stockholm. Policies, he says, will not change the basic "ethnic" disposition of a Swede.

But let us look just across the page to Olivia Judson's commentary on the placebo effect.

If policy and politics can not trump ethnicity, one might expect that the placebo effect would suffer a similar failure. Swedes in Sweden should respond to a placebo just as Swedes in the US, to follow Brooks' reasoning about ethnicity.
In fact, Judson does not mention Swedes, but she does mention Germans. However, the results are not what one would expect if we followed Brooks on ethnicity/race/tribe/nation. Let us allow her to speak for herself regarding the ethnic/tribal differences and the placebo effect.

Different studies of the placebo effect report wildly different results. One survey of 117 trials of two ulcer drugs found that, depending on the trial, patients in the placebo group had anywhere from zero to a 100 percent recovery rate.

The drugs also varied in their effectiveness from one trial to the next; sometimes patients on the placebo did better than those on the drug. Intriguingly, the results varied from country to country, with Brazilians showing no placebo effect and Germans having a strong one. Why? No one knows, but it doesn’t appear to be because of anything inherently German: trials of drugs for hypertension found a weaker placebo effect in Germany than in other countries.

The problem is that humans are not machines, and emotions are not abstractions. Hope and expectation, anxiety and fear, trust and suspicion — these cause physiological changes in the brain that can interact with drugs, changing their effects.

Given that Brooks wants to hide the workings of power behind the mask of culture and ethnicity, it is remarkable how Judson almost relpies to his avoidence of power. It is power, and not ethnicity, that has the strongest influence on the placebo effect.

...the most reliable source of a strong placebo effect appears to be: the doctor.
Placebo treatments are more powerful if your doctor believes in them. They are also more powerful if the doctor tells you so. In one study, for example, patients who had just come out of surgery were given a saline infusion, and — whenever they asked for it — the pain killer buprenorphine. However, some patients were told the saline infusion was a powerful painkiller, others that it might be one, while a third group wasn’t told anything. Over the course of three days, those in the “know-nothing” group asked for more buprenorphine than those in the “maybe” group, who in turn asked for more than those told they were getting a real drug.

Finally, Judson, whose blog is one of the best from the New York Times, comments on these differences

Differences in hopes and fears, and the resulting physiological changes, may explain why the placebo effect varies so much: individual experiences matter. Some people are more anxious than others, or may find the thought of a particular disease especially alarming. Moreover, in different cultures, similar diseases may be treated with different degrees of gravity.

So different cultures matter, but not in the way that Brooks would have it. And what matters most is the power relationship of those confronting a problem, whether medical or political, and not the ethnic differences between them, even if we could detach Brooks' use of ethnicity from his silent deployment of racialist thinking.

Only those in power would have the "viewpoint" that politics is not about power, or believe that social change is not possible.

Found Object: Note by Robert E. Tucker (illustrator, ornithologist, and forester) with chart of Birds common to Savannah, Georgia

2010-04-10T16:21:00.015-04:00

Somehow I misplaced an old field guide and so replaced it with a 1980 edition of Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds East of the Rockies. Folded in the back cover I found a note from Robert E. Tucker to Dorothy. In it, he describes this book, which appears to be a Christmas gift, as "the guide for learning birds. Most bird students cut their 'birding teeth' on it. I did - over forty years ago."

Robert Tucker was the illustrator of Louisiana Birds by George Hines Lowery (Louisiana Wild Life and Fisheries Commission by Louisiana State University Press, 1960). Lowery says that Tucker's "ably executed" illustrations are not for "mere" decoration, but "designed to facilitate species recognition" for the field observer. The Wilson Library Bulletin (1960) refers “to the superb drawings and water-colors”.

Tucker supplies a one and a half page chart of "those that will most probably occur in [Dorothy's] yard.... The list consists of those that seem to prefer living in the proximity of people and accept the hospitality of the feeding tray. Not included are such aerial species as Chimney Swifts and Nighthawks or Gulls, Hawks, and Owls."

Click on the picture to view it in full.

Tucker lists 45 species for Dorothy, noting whether they would be found in summer or winter, and on which page they can be found in Peterson. He also lists the photo number in an edition of "Bull & Ferrand" - which would be John Bull and John Farrand's National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: Eastern Region (1977). In his note, Tucker makes clear that he feels illustrations are preferred to photos because "photographs are fine when they are good, but a poor illustration in many cases because of shadows, color shift in the film or development or position which fails to show key field marks."

According to a web search, Tucker is mentioned in Excelsior: memoir of a forester. by Laurence C. Walker (College of Forestry, Stephen F. Austin State University, 1995.)

He is also mentioned as manager of forest resources and manager of woodlands for the Southland Paper corporation in the 1960s.

This seems to be a nice little piece from a little known naturalist, and useful as historical data for its list of common species as identified by naturalist in 1984. Of course, I would be happy to return the original to any relative that might want it.

Darwin, Slavery, the HMS Black Joke, and Seaman Morgan.

2010-02-12T09:35:00.000-05:00

I decided to repeat this story each year in honor of Darwin.

HMS Beagle

During the same stay in Brazil that brought Darwin face to face with the horrors of slavery, he was for a time left behind in Rio while Captain Fitz-Roy and the HMS Beagle retraced the previous months voyage down the Brazilian coast. Capt. Fitz-Roy wanted to confirm that Bahia was to the east of Rio and remap that portion of the Brazilian coast. Upon the return of the HMS Beagle, Darwin was so overjoyed that he later wrote an unusually long entry in his Diary. The night before, he met one of his shipmates, King, who had come ahead. Darwin learned from King

"...the calamitous news of the death of three of our ship-mates. — They were the three of the Macacù party who were ill with fever when the Beagle sailed from Rio. — 1st Morgan, an extra-ordinary powerful man & excellent seaman; he was a very brave man & had performed some curious feats, he put a whole party of Portugeese to flight, who had molested the party; he pitched an armed sentinel into the sea at St Jago; & formerly he was one of the boarders in that most gallant action against the Slaver the Black Joke. — 2nd Boy Jones one of the most promising boys in the ship & had been promised but the day before his illness, promotion. — These were the only two of the sailors who were with the Cutter, & picked for their excellence. — And lastly, poor little Musters; who three days before his illness heard of his Mothers death. Morgan was taken ill 4 days after arriving on board & died near the Abrolhos, where he was lowered into the sea after divisions on Sunday — for several days he was violently delirious & talked about the party. — Boy Jones died two days after arriving at Bahia, & Musters two days after that.— They were both for a long time insensible or nearly so.— They were both buried in the English burial ground at Bahia; where in the lonely spot are also two other midshipmen" (1).

May 28th & 29th Captain FitzRoy hired a small Schooner to go to the Rio Negro to bring Mr Wickham in order that he might take command of our Schooner. She arrived yesterday, & to day Mr King, who came with Mr Wickham paid me a visit. — They are heartily tired of their little vessels & are again as glad to see the Beagle as every one in her is to see them. —

30th, July 1st & 2nd Have been employed in arranging & writing notes about all my treasures from Maldonado. — The Captain informs me that he hopes next summer to double the Horn. — My heart exults whenever I think of all the glorious prospects of the future.

3rd–7th All hands of the Beagle continue to be employed in working at the Schooner (for the future the Unicorn). My occupations likewise are the same & I do not stir out of the Ship.

8th It was discovered to day that one of the Mates, belonging to the Unicorn, had formerly been in the President, a vessel supposed to be piratical & which brought the English man of war, the Black Joke, to action. It has, since the Trial, been suspected that this same ship took & murdered every soul on board the Packet Redpole. — Captain Fitz-Roy has determined to take the man a prisoner, to the Consul at M. Video. I have just been astonished to hear the order, "to reeve the running rigging, & bend sails". And we now a little before 12 at night have weighed anchor & are under sail (3).

“I felt that I was walking on a path unknown to me and full of pitfalls; but I had the advantage of previous discussions by able men. I tried to say most emphatically that a great philosopher, law-giver, etc., did far more for the progress of mankind by his writings or his example than by leaving a numerous offspring. I have endeavored to show how the struggle for existence between tribe and tribe depends on an advance in the moral and intellectual qualities of the members, and not merely on their capacity of obtaining food”(5).

On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master's eye. These latter cruelties were witnessed by me in a Spanish colony, in which it has always been said, that slaves are better treated than by the Portuguese, English, or other European nations. I have seen at Rio de Janeiro a powerful negro afraid to ward off a blow directed, as he thought, at his face. I was present when a kind-hearted man was on the point of separating forever the men, women, and little children of a large number of families who had long lived together. I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authentically heard of; -- nor would I have mentioned the above revolting details, had I not met with several people, so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of the negro as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil. Such people have generally visited at the houses of the upper classes, where the domestic slaves are usually well treated, and they have not, like myself, lived amongst the lower classes. Such inquirers will ask slaves about their condition; they forget that the slave must indeed be dull, who does not calculate on the chance of his answer reaching his master's ears.

“It is argued that self-interest will prevent excessive cruelty; as if self-interest protected our domestic animals, which are far less likely than degraded slaves, to stir up the rage of their savage masters. It is an argument long since protested against with noble feeling, and strikingly exemplified, by the ever-illustrious Humboldt. It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our poorer countrymen: if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin; but how this bears on slavery, I cannot see; as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in one land, by showing that men in another land suffered from some dreadful disease. Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children -- those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own -- being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin”(6).

Adorno and Music listening project

2009-12-31T10:19:00.008-05:00

Adorno and Music

I have been on a little project to listen to the music that Adorno refers to in many of his works. I decided to use the new large collection Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert (University of California Press). I am also drawing from three of Adorno's longer works: Philosophy of Modern Music, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, and Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link.
It is a lot to listen to, of course, but as I read an essay or chapter, I am trying to listen to the music he is discussing. So I will add here little notices of things from time to time that seem of interest in the reading and link up to music, if I can (e.g., silence in Webern or Paul Whiteman's version of "jazz"). So far, listening to these works ---as well as some of the recently recorded works of Adorno himself--- has given me a better appreciation of Adorno in particular and Critical Theory in general.
See also this little video I put together on Adorno discussing popular protest music: Adorno, Popular Music, and Protest

Here is a list of pieces I found in Adorno. It is far from exhaustive and I have not yet listened to them all in the context of reading Adorno's writings.

Bach
The Art of the Fugue
The Musical Offering; Mass in B Minor; Well-tempered Clavier
Bartok
Out of Doors; String Quartet no. 4; Violin Concertos No. 1 & 2
Beethoven
Bagatelles, op. 33 & 126; Grosse Fuge; Leonore Overture; Mass in C major; Missa Solemnis;
Piano Sonatas 14,21,26,29, and 32; Symphonies 3,4,5,7,8,and 9; String Quartets op. 95, 127, 131; Diabelli Variations, op. 120; Violin Sonata no. 47
Alban Berg
Seven Early Songs; Piano Sonata, op. 1; Four Songs, op. 2; String Quartet, op. 3; Alternber-Lieder, op. 4; Clarinet Pieces, op. 5; Three Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6; Wozzeck, op. 7; Chamber Concerto; Lyric Suite; Der Wein; Lulu; Lulu Suite; Violin Concerto
Pierre Boulez
Structure 1A; Le Marteau sans maitre; Piano Sonata no. 3
Johannes Brahms
Symphoniy no. 1
Anton Bruckner
Symphony no. 7 and 8; Mass in F minor
Claude Debussy
Preludes, Book II
Hanns Eisler
Duke Ellington
George Gershin
Rhapsody in Blue
Paul Hindemith
"jazz"
Rene Leibowitz
Four Pieces for Piano
Gustav Mahler
Des Knaben Wunderhorn; Symphony 2,3,4,5,6,and 7; Das Lied von der Erde
Mozart
Marriage of Figaro; The Magic Flute; Symphony 39, 40, and 41
Giacomo Puccini
La Boheme; Madama Butterfly; Tosca;
Sergi Rachmaninoff
Prelude in C-sharp minor
Arnold Schoenberg
Gurrelieder; Verklarte Nacht, op. 4; Lieder, op. 6; String Quartet in D minor, op. 7; Chamber Symphony no. 1, op. 9; Das Buch der hagenden Garten, op. 15; Dance around the Golden Cafe from Moses und Aron; Funf orchesterstucke, op. 16; Erwatung op. 17; Die gluckliche Hand op. 18; Kleine Klavierstucke, op. 19; Hergewachse op. 20; Die Jakobsleiter; Pierrot Lunaire, op. 21; Lieder, op. 22; Klavierstucke, op. 23; Serenade, op. 24; Wind Quintet, op. 26; Suite, op. 29; Variations for Orchestra, op. 31; Von heute auf morgen, op. 32; Moses und Aron; Champber Symphony no.2 (op. 38a); Kol Nidre, op. 39; String Trio, op. 45; Phantasy for violin and piano, op. 47; String Quartets 1, 2, 3, 4
Franz Shubert
Symphony no. 8
Robert Schumann
Kinderszenen, op. 15; Kreisleriana, op. 16; “So oft sie kam” op. 90
Richard Strauss
Adriadne auf Naxos; Alpine Symphony; Elektra; Four Last Songs; Die Frau ohne Schatten; Ein Heldenleben; Der Rosenkavalier; Salome; Symphonia domestica
Igor Stravinsky
L'Histoire du Soldat; Petrouchka; Pulcinella; The Rake's Progress; Renard; Le Sacre du printemps; Symphony in Three Movements; Symphony of Psalms; Three Japanese lyrics
Richard Wagner
Die fliegende Hollander; Gotterdammerung; Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg; Parsifal;
Der Ring des Nibelungen; Seigfried; Tannhauser; Tristan und Isolde; Die Walkure
Anton Webern
Passacaglia, op. 1; Five Songs from Der siebente Ring, op. 3; Five Songs on Poems of Stefan George, op. 4; Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5; Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6; Four Pieces for Violin and Piano, op. 7; Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, op. 9; Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10; Three Little Pieces for violoncello and Piano, op. 11; Orchestration of the Ricercare from Bach's Musical Offering
Kurt Weill
Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny; The Three-Penny Opera

and to this I would add these:

John Cage
“She is Asleep” duet for voice and prepared piano;
As Slow as Possible; Music for Prepared Piano
Charles Ives
String Quartets; Songs, Vol. 1 and II.
Henry Cowell
Steve Reich
Octet; Nagoya Marimba; Music for 18 Musicians
Dagmar Krause
Songs of Kurt Weill; Tank Battles: Songs of Hans Eisler
Frank Sinatra A Hot Time in the Town of Berlin
Sidney Bechet High Society
Paul Whiteman

Darwin's Beagle notebooks go online, but the Galapagos notebook is missing.

2009-11-28T09:11:00.007-05:00

Darwin's notebooks from the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle are being placed online by the English Heritage society, which cares for Darwin's Down House. There is a problem, though, because one of Darwin's notebooks is missing and it is the Galapagos notebook. It is thought to have been taken from Down House sometime in the 1970s or 1980s. The BBC World Service story is here. The appeal from English Heritage can be read here.
Here is their description of the notebook.

Darwin used different types of notebooks and the missing Galapagos notebook is small, almost square, and bound in leather with a brass clasp. It is labelled on the outside with a rough itinerary in Darwin's handwriting, marked "Galapagos. Otaheite. Lima." It contains entries he made between March and November 1835 when he was in Chile, Peru, the Galapagos and Tahiti. Inside the front cover is written: "63.5 C. Darwin H.M. Beagle". About a third of the notes were written from the front with the rest starting again from the back of the book. Darwin usually crossed out each page when he had written up the contents, either in his diary or in one of his more formal notebooks. All the Beagle notebooks are mostly written in pencil.

New Web Site Address: http:/node801.org

2009-11-10T17:38:00.005-05:00

Since 1997, I believe, Geocities has been my website provider. Geocities was unfortunately bought by Yahoo! a couple of years ago and now Yahoo! has closed it down. So I am in the process of moving my site. While going to www.geocities.com/brbgc should result in you being forwarded to the new address, it might not work yet. The new site is not fully functional right now ["pending" yahoo calls it] but I hope to have it back by the weekend. The new address is the much simpler node801.org

How homeopathy cures and other pseudo-scientific wonders

2009-11-08T23:03:00.007-05:00

A remarkable video of Dr. (of optometry) Charlene Werner as she explains homeopathy.
It seems that if you took high school chemistry and recognize Einstein's name, then you too have the background to understand everything she is talking about. Of course, if you have had more than that, then it might not make very much sense. We should all be glad to know that god sent Stephen Hawking as a messenger, but really that is beside the point. It is all about vibration, we are told, and that the universe has no mass.
PZ Myers' pharyngula blog has dedicated a couple of entries to this, and it seems that the original poster has been threatened with legal action for linking to it, so it seems natural to mention it here and link to it. Myers also has a link in his blog for a lecture by Lawrence Krauss that actually makes sense given what we actually know about the universe.

Music of the Week: Living Colour on Soundcheck

2009-10-12T14:21:00.002-04:00

I remember going to a Living Colour Concert just before their first record and was hit (slightly) by a cab right outside the doors. It hurt quite a bit, but I stayed for the show anyway, and it was well worth it. My knee got better in a couple of weeks.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2009/09/11/segments/140477

Music of the Week; Steel Pulse --- Klu Klux Klan

2009-10-04T19:40:00.002-04:00

A concert performance of Steel Pulse Live at the Rainbow Theater, London, England.
September 18th, 1980.

David Attenborough's BBC Collection goes online.

2009-09-28T16:39:00.003-04:00

Fifty of Attenborough's selected favorites are available to watch from the BBC.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/collections/p0048522
This is a great collection of work by an equally great naturalist.

Music of the Week: Talking Heads "Cities" (Live) Rome, 1980

2009-09-24T10:51:00.001-04:00

Music of the Week: Talking Heads "Cities"
Live
Rome, 1980

Music of the Week: Battles - "Tonto"

2009-09-15T07:41:00.003-04:00

Music of the Week this week is the band Battles. They have some very good stuff, but also one of the most annoying songs ever, which is I suppose the price to pay for some form of success these days. So I will not torture myself or you with their song Atlas, although the video for it is interesting as it features the band in a mirrored room not unlike the one on the cover of Fripp and Eno's No Pussyfooting. This band, though, reminds me more of Soft Machine, perhaps because of the placement of the drums but also because of the style of play and composition.

Herculine/Alexina Barbin & Caster Semenya

2009-09-13T13:07:00.012-04:00

"In the midst of the happiness that intoxicated me, I was frightfully tormented. What was I to do, my God, what was I to decide on?"
--Alexina "Herculine" Barbin

Thus wrote the mid-19th century hermaphrodite Alexina Barbin not long before taking her own life. At the time Barbin was born, it was customary for the child to have their sex chosen for them at birth, and to simply be raised as such. By the time Barbin died, the question was in the hands of legal and medical authorities. Barbin was raised as a girl in a convent orphanage and in the convent. When she reached maturity, she chose to go into teaching, a profession which required an initial medical examination. During the routine and invasive examination it was discovered that she had both male and female characteristics. These attributes had apparently been missed in all previous medical exams, but when it was time for her to leave the protection of the convent, the diagnosis changed and with it an entire social apparatus emerged. Ultimately, Alexina, as she referred to herself, was forced to live as a man. After writing her memoir, she committed suicide in a Parisian hovel.

It is certainly difficult not to think of the current controversy over the runner Caster Semenya when reading back over this text, and to consider how little distance there is between the Alexina and Caster in terms of how they are being diagnosed and regulated, at least by some. This BBC "World Have Your Say" is interesting in that regard.

Michel Foucault brought Herculine's story to light with his book Herculine Barbin, which collected Barbin's memoir and associated medical, legal, and literary documents.
He wrote in his introduction:

"Do we truly need a true sex? With a persistence that borders on stubbornness, modern Western societies have answered in the affirmative. They have obstinately brought into play this question of a "true sex in an order of things where one might have imagined that all that counted was the reality of the body and the intensity of its pleasures.

For a long time, however, such a demand was not made, as is proven by the history of the status which medicine and law have granted to hermaphrodites. Indeed it was a very long time before the postulate that a hermaphrodite must have a sex ---a single, a true sex--- was formulated. For centuries, it was quite simply agreed that hermaphrodites had two. Were they terror-inspiring monsters, calling for legal tortures? In fact, things were much more complicated. It is true that there is evidence of a number of executions, both in ancient times and in the Middle Ages. But there is also an abundance of court decisions of a completely different type. In the Middle Ages, the rules of both canon and civil law were very clear on this point: the designation 'hermaphrodite' was given to those in whom the two sexes were juxtaposed, in proportions that might be variable. In these cases, it was the role of the father or the godfather (thus of those who 'named' the child) to determine at the time of baptism which sex was going to be retained. If necessary, one was advised to choose the sex that seemed to have the better of the other, being 'the more vigorous' or 'the warmest.' But later, on the threshold of adulthood, when the time came for them to marry, hermaphrodites were free to decided for themselves if they wished to go on being of the sex which had been assigned to them, or if they preferred the other. The only imperative was that they had then declared until the end of their lives, under pain of being labeled sodomites. Changes of option, not the anatomical mixture of the sexes, were what gave rise to most of the condemnations of hermaphrodites in the records of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Biological theories of sexuality, juridical conceptions of the individual, forms of administrative control in modern nations, led little by little to rejecting the idea of a mixture of the two sexes in a single body, and consequently to limiting the free choice of indeterminate individuals. Henceforth, everybody was to have one and only one sex. Everybody was to have his primary, profound, determined and determining sexual identity; as for the elements of the other sex that might appear, they could not only be accidental, superficial, or even quite simply illusory. From the medical point of view, this meant that when confronted with a hermaphrodite, the doctor was no longer concerned with recognizing the presence of the two sexes, juxtaposed or intermingled, or with knowing which of the two prevailed over the other, but rather with deciphering the true sex that was hidden beneath ambiguous appearance. He had, as it were, to strip the body of its anatomical deceptions and discover the one true sex behind organs that might have put on the forms of the opposite sex.....
....
Here is a document drawn from the strange history of our 'true sex.' It is not unique, but it is rare enough. It is the journal or rather the memoirs that were left by one of those individuals whom medicine and the law in the nineteenth century relentlessly questioned about their genuine sexual identity. ---Michel Foucault, 1980 [1978]. Herculine Barbin: Being the recently discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. Pantheon Books.

from BBC News: "Makeover for SA gender-row runner"

Music of the Week: Joy Division (Live)

2009-09-08T12:58:00.003-04:00

Joy Division performing September 15, 1979. The songs are "Transmission" & "She's Lost Control." Ian Curtis was probably one of the few with a stranger dance style than David Byrne.

Music of the Week: Regis Gizavo en concert

2009-08-30T08:49:00.001-04:00

Music from Madagascar
Regis Gizavo en concert

Music of the Week: Cape Verde's Cesária Évora - Carnaval De São Vicente

2009-08-24T10:17:00.005-04:00

The Music of the Cape Verde islands does not get enough attention. Here is one of the greats: Cesária Évora.

Heineken Concerts 2000

Teatro Alfa / São Paulo
Cesária Évora: voz
Fernando José Andrade: piano
Antonio Domingo G. Fernandes: sax/percussão
João José Pina Alves: guitarra
Aderito Gonçalves Pontes: guitarra
Julian Corrales Subida: violino
Leonel Eusébio B. Hernandez: violino
Antonio Pina Alves: cavaquinho
Daniel Rodriguez: cello
Virgilio Julio Duarte: baixo
Carlos Monteiro: bateria

Music of the Week: Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros

2009-08-17T09:33:00.004-04:00

Music of the Week Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, live at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, in 1999 singing Safe European Home by the Clash.

I know that it is strange to say, but in many ways, the Mescaleros rocked-out even more than the Clash, but I appreciate them both. Strummer was asked why they sang so many Clash songs, and he replied that by putting his name on the band and playing a couple of old songs, "The lads get twice as much for each gig."
They were the first Carbon-free band as well, planting trees and supporting reforestation projects to off-set their fuel and electricity use.

'Dead' A-Bomb Hits U.S. Town, 1958.

2009-08-11T15:26:00.002-04:00

Three years before I was born, an a-bomb happened to fall near my hometown in South Carolina. The pilots did not know that it had fallen until they landed at the nearby airbase and noticed that it was missing. My father took me by there a few times when I was a kid, and then I found this newsreel a few years ago at the Internet Archive (archive.org). One thing I like about the reel is that it is followed by a story about computer-assisted manufacturing, featuring Hughes Aircraft, who may very well have manufactured the bomb mounts in the plane. But not to worry in the computer-assisted factory of the future.
By chance we vacationed on Tybee Island last year, and I ran across this little story about another lost a-bomb somewhere just off the coast there. It seems that the proper authorities have never found this one!
It makes for a good reason to show Dr. Strangelove to my Intro. Cultural Studies students.

Music of the Week: Robert Wyatt Left on Man

2009-08-07T16:54:00.004-04:00

Music of the Week: Robert Wyatt Live: Left on Man

Lectures by Richard Feynman online

2009-08-02T12:19:00.000-04:00

The 1964 Messenger Lecture series was given by Richard Feynman and recorded by the BBC. Microsoft is using it to get people to use their new interactive software (which is rather clunky, I must say), but the lectures are worth the trouble of dealing with MS's "hosting" of the archive. Just ignore the MS distractions and enjoy these very accessible lectures. They are also important in considering the history and social context of science.
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html

"Exhuming Rwanda's Gorillas: Fossey's Legacy"

2009-08-01T12:32:00.001-04:00

NPR is currently running this series on its website. Researchers are at work ehuming the remains of the gorillas that were studied by Dian Fossey. Erin Marie Williams records the field dispatches available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106843731

Music of the Week: Niyaz

2009-07-30T20:57:00.004-04:00

This weeks selection is the song Azam Ali by Niyaz.

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Interpreting Weill and Eisler: Dagmar Krause and Ute Lemper.

2009-07-27T11:40:00.003-04:00

Once one of my students approached me and excitedly related how she had just heard Ute Lemper. My student (whose name I will not mention) was so happy to have found this new music that I only encouraged her to listen to more. Actually, what I wanted to tell her was to listen to Dagmar Krause's interpretations instead. It must be said that Ute Lemper's interpretations of Weill are very popular, and that they are just that, popular. They are finely tuned for the ear of the lover of a musical theater that is either without social content, or that has been, as in the case of her interpretations, often stripped of its social aspects.
This might seem too harsh a judgment, and it can be countered by:
1] the songs themselves always carry their social meaning; and
2] that the setting of these songs was in popular musical theater, and so to emphasize this aspect of the songs is more important than their intended content. The last objection is of course akin to those who make comments like "I never listen to the lyrics, I just like the beat." Such a level of interpretation seems legitimate and difficult to rebut precisely because it is so lacking in any worthwhile content.

Krause elevates what might be a mere show-tune to the level of a song. Lemper's emphasis is on the show-tune. Now one might say that these are show-tunes and so Lemper's performance is more "authentic." This is to a certain extent quite true, if one is looking for authenticity. But the authenticity of a time is also its illustrative of its ideological apparatus. And so to be more authentic is just as much to put on the ideological blinders of the period and place, and these affirmations of this period and place were beyond a doubt to be found on Broadway and in Hollywood.

Krause on the other hand brings out the negative, critical aspects of the songs, for Broadway was not the only context for the songs of Weill and Eisler. Some of course come before their engagement with Hollywood and the musical theater. All the songs have a negative, or critical, aspect that only Krause is able to reveal to the listener. The larger context for the songs are of course the era of the World Wars, with all its social and political upheaval. Krause's interpretation places the songs not in the theater, but in the social world.

The differences in Krasue's and Lemper's interpretation carries over into their voices. Krause again places these in a larger context by reminding the listener of her earlier performances with Henry Cow, and The Art Bears bands noted not only for their music, but for their politics as well. That some insist on referring to her voice as "highly original and idiosyncratic" or even "the voice of the angel of the Apocalypse" is due only to the distance these bands were from the conventions of popular music. Knowing these earlier associations, the very fact of her interpreting them moves the songs of Weill and Eisler away from the theater and back into the stream of music associated with Krause's earlier solo and group recordings. In doing so, Krause has changed what it means to authentically interpret these songs.

Below are to clips that illustrate the point.
For Ute Lemper you have to follow the link as it cannot be embedded.

Ute Lemper ~ Surabaya Johnny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxz81DtK_9k

Dagmar Krause ~ Surabaya Johnny: Unfortunately the only one from the records that I could find.

See Krause's
Supply and Demand: Songs by Brecht/Weill and Eisler (1986, LP, Hannibal Records)
Angebot und Nachfrage (1986, LP, Hannibal Records)
Tank Battles: The Songs of Hanns Eisler (1988, LP, Island Records)
Panzerschlacht: Die Lieder von Hanns Eisler (1988, LP, Island Records)
Voiceprint Radio Sessions (1993, CD, Voiceprint Records)

These is another performance of Lemper that shows the show-tune side of a Weill song: Ute Lemper "The Saga of Jenny" at the Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/details/the_saga_of_jenny

Music of the Week: Thelonious Monk Quartet - Straight, No Chaser - Paris, 1969

2009-07-22T19:23:00.003-04:00

Thelonious Monk on Piano
Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone
Nate Hygelund on bass
Paris Wright on drums.

Music of the Week: the Lituus

2009-07-14T20:33:00.004-04:00

The Lituus, a Roman instrument, has been recreated. Here is what it sounds like.
there is a story on the BBC site as well at

Cutting-edge computer modelling software has enabled a long-lost, trumpet-like instrument to be recreated allowing a work by Bach to be performed as the composer may have intended for the first time in nearly 300 years.

Music of the Week: Hatfield & the North live at the Rainbow c.1975

2009-07-05T09:10:00.000-04:00

The legendary Hatfield and the North perform this week's music selection. The video is grainy, but the sound is fine.

Phil Miller (guitar)
Pip Pyle(drums)
Richard Sinclair (bass and vocals)
Dave Stewart (keyboards)

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A Special Music of the Week: Thelonious Monk - Live in '66

2009-06-30T07:00:00.002-04:00

Today deserves a song or two.

Thelonious Monk's television performances taped in Oslo and Copenhagen in 1966.
with Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone
Larry Gales on bass
Ben Riley on drums

I've automated the upload of this and the next few posts.

BRBIII v. I.C. Wiley, c. 1977

2009-06-28T12:56:00.014-04:00

White: BRBIII
Black: I.C. (Issac Cyrus) Wiley
c.1977
Opening: ELO A01 - Nimzowitsch-Larsen Attack

1.P-QN3 N-KB3 2.B-N2 P-Q4 3.P-K3 B-B4 4.N-KB3 N/1-Q2 5.B-N5 P-K3 6.0-0 B-Q3 7.R-K1 0-0 8.P-KR3 P-QR3 9.B-K2 N-K5 10.P-Q3 N-N4

11.NxN QxN 12.B-N4 BxB 13.QxB QxQ 14.PxQ N-K4 15.P-N5 P-QB4 16.N-Q2 P-N4 17.R/R-Q1 N-B3 18.P-R3 R/R-N1 19.P-N3 R/B-Q1 20.K-N2 P-QR4

21.R-QN1 B-B2 22.R-KR1 R-N2 23.P-K4 N-Q5 24.BxN PxB 25.R/R-K1 PxP 26.RxP R-Q4 27.N-B3 B-N3 28.P-R4 R-B2 29.R-N2 P-N5 30.R-K5 R/2-Q2

31.R-N1 B-B2 32.RxR RxR 33.K-R3 K-R1 34.R-K1 K-N1 35.R-K4 B-N3 36.R-K5 RxR 37.NxR P-B3 38.PxP PxP 39.N-B4 B-B2 40.K-R4 K-B2

41.K-N4 K-N3 42.P-B4 P-R4+ 43.K-R4 K-R3 44.N-Q2 B-Q1 45.N-B3 B-N3 46.K-R3 K-R2 47.K-R4 K-R3 48.K-R3 K-R2

Draw Agreed ½-½

Music of the Week: Carla Bley Reactionary Tango #1

2009-06-25T18:20:00.008-04:00

Jazz Jamboree Warsaw/Poland, 24th October [1981]

Carla Bley - Piano
Steve Swallow - Bass
Arturo O'Farrell - Piano, Organ
Dee Sharp - Drums
Earl Mackintyre - Tuba
Gary Valente - Trombone
Vicent Chancey - French Horn
Steve Slagle - Alto Sax
Tony Dagradi - Tenor Sax
Michael Mantler - Trumpet

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Louis Agassiz and the Timetree of Life

2009-06-22T23:00:00.005-04:00

There is a resemblance between the representation of Natural History by Louis Agassiz and the Timetree of Life. Of course, there is a vast gulf that separates them. Agassiz comes at the end of the era of dominance of Natural History and of polygenism, the scientific theory that the "races" constitute separate species. Agassiz was a proponent of polygenism and one of the most powerful critics of Darwin. It is difficult to see, but at the apex of his representation is a crown that rests atop the entry for Man. in the center are the four elements and an indistinguishable mass (God). In the Timetree, the Earth is at the center of the table and humans are just one small line in a vast natural world. One can actually see the decentering of humans accomplished by Darwin's work.

The Timetree of Life.
Stephen Jay Gould had a nice little "unpopular" essay on this topic "Cones and Ladders: Constraining Evolution by Canonical Icons." Gould mentions too the enduring influence of Ernst Haeckel's Tree of Life ---which is topped by "Menschen"--- on the common understanding of nature. Gould also held the Louis Agassiz chair at Harvard. While writing his "Mismeasure of Man," Gould found in the Agassiz archive the full text of a letter from Agassiz to his mother in which he described is first encounter with Negros. In 1846 Agassiz had arrived in the United States a noted Naturalist and needing to avoid some debts back in Europe. He immediately traveled to Philadelphia to meet Dr. Samuel G. Morton. Morton was the leading scientific proponent of polygenism and had amassed one of the largest crania collections in the world. Gould spent a great deal of time replicating Morton's experiments measuring their cranial capacity.
This is the text of Agassiz's letter to his mother as first published by Gould:

It was in Philadelphia that I first found myself in prolonged contact with Negroes; all the domestics in my hotel were men of color. I can scarcely express to you the painful impression that I received, especially since the feeling that they inspired in me is contrary to all our ideas about the confraternity of the human type [genre] and the unique origin of our species. But truth before all. Nevertheless, I experienced pity at the sight of this degraded and degenerate race, and their lot inspired compassion in me in thinking that they are really men. Nonetheless, it is impossible for me to reprocess the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. In seeing their black faces with their thick lips and grimacing teeth, the wool on their head, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large curved nails, and especially the livid color of the palm of their hands, I could not take my eyes off their face in order to tell them to stay far away. And when they advanced that hideous hand towards my plate in order to serve me, I wished I were able to depart in order to eat a piece of bread elsewhere, rather than dine with such service. What unhappiness for the white race---to have tied their existence so closely with that of Negroes in certain countries! God preserve us from such contact!

It was during this time that Agassiz met Samuel Morton, whom Agassiz recognized immediately as a scholar who was “after Georges Cuvier... the only zoologist who had any influence on his mind and scientific opinions.”

Haeckel's Tree of Life

Electron microscope view of Ant (with zoom)

2009-06-18T20:35:00.000-04:00

From the New Scientist "Short Sharp Science" blog
If you like ants, this will give hours of fun viewing. It might even be good for doing a bit of invertebrate zoology as well. I have sadly have not had an ant "farm" in many years. I once had one that was made from a tall window, about 5 feet tall, three inches wide, and 1 1/2 feet across. It was great but the thought that several thousands ants were living in my room really annoyed my house-mates at the time. Of course, it was great and I might build a new one sometime in the future.

Music of the Week: The Orchestra Baobab

2009-06-18T20:07:00.002-04:00

The music of the week this time is the Orchestra Baobab, which was the house band of the Cafe Baobab in Dakar. Their cosmopolitan blend of music and vocals was way ahead and their influence can be heard in the late Talking Heads. It also went directly against the trend towards identity and separatist music that was to become the dominant style. So in part because of the political situation they broke up for a long period but reunited at the turn of the century.

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Timetree of Life

2009-06-17T23:43:00.005-04:00

The Timetree of Life is available online now. It allows one to trace the known evolution of species as well as calculate the time of divergence of two species. There is a companion book as well. See also the Encyclopedia of Life.
This is the description from the Timetree web site:

TimeTree is a public knowledge-base for information on the evolutionary timescale of life. A search utility allows exploration of the thousands of divergence times among organisms in the published literature. A tree-based (hierarchical) system is used to identify all published molecular time estimates bearing on the divergence of two chosen taxa, such as species, compute summary statistics, and present the results. Names of two taxa to be compared are entered in the search window and the results are presented on a separate page. Alternatively the last name of an author is entered to find divergence times published by that person. For those interested in published summaries of relationships and divergence times of major groups of organisms (family level and above), see the authoritative synthesis The Timetree of Life.

Music of the Week: Glenn Gould --- Webern Variations for Piano, opus 27

2009-06-09T21:59:00.003-04:00

Glenn Gould plays Anton Webern's Variations for Piano, opus 27.

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Music of the Week: The John Coltrane Quartet with Eric Dolphy

2009-06-02T13:12:00.001-04:00

The musical selection of the week The John Coltrane Quartet with Eric Dolphy preforming "Impressions"

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From Ancient Scripts & the Voynich Manuscript to Borges & Marx

2009-05-31T22:01:00.004-04:00

There is a nice article in The New Scientist about eight ancient scripts that have not been deciphered. Decoding antiquity: Eight scripts that still can't be read.

There is a notable aspect of Borges writings that involves lost, forgotten, unread, fragmentary, or even imagined manuscripts. I always think of texts such as these or of disputed works such as the disputed Voynich Manuscript at the Yale Library.
It has been the object of dispute ever since it came on the scene in the late 1800s and the script/code has never been deciphered, though the work on it continues. It is in many ways the epitome of a Borgesian work. There are many works that we are accustom to thinking are complete, but are really fragments. One of the most famous, in some circles, being The German Ideology by Marx and Engels. The latter once wrote--- and this contributes to its fame--- that finding no luck with publishing the manuscript, and having worked out certain problems in it that necessitated that they move on to other topics and styles of exposition: “We consigned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice.”

The critical marks of the mice are visible in these pictures of two pages from the manuscript of The German Ideology. (Click on them to get the full image.)
One of the things that becomes important when teaching Marx is getting students to understand that much of his work was not completed (the German Ideology, Capital, vols. 2 and 3), or subject to frequent revision (Capital, Vol.1,), never published (the Dissertation On the Difference Between Epicurean and Democritean Philosophy of Nature), or published under censorship restrictions (much of his work, actually). So the disputes around the interpretation of Marx and the party struggles to define Marxism are rooted not only in the later politics of the revolutionary period, but in the huge archive of manuscript fragments that Marx left behind.
And of course, no one seems to notice the elaborate drawings in the margin, just as they ignore Marx's love of Shakespeare and Aeschylus.

Music of the Week: Henry Cow -- No More Songs

2009-05-26T16:11:00.011-04:00

This week's selection is one of the most intelligent and highly mobile bands ever, Henry Cow, live in 1976 performing No More Songs.
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The Hanging of Amy Spain

2009-05-24T13:00:00.011-04:00

While reading the history of my home town, Darlington, South Carolina, I came upon a section of letters regarding the hanging of Amy Spain, a 17 year old slave, in March of 1865. It is a truely remarkable story about which I want to compile as much documentation as possible, perhaps for a small volume along the lines of Herculine Barbin. Of course, the difference being that Amy Spain never got to speak or write her side of the story. All that remains are the accounts of others. The hanging was important enough to appear in Harpers Weekly of Sept.30, 1865, parts of the account then being disputed in the pages of Darlington's New Era newspaper. Amy Spain was owned by a prominent local lawyer and hero of the invasion of Mexico, Major A.C. Spain, who acted as her counsel at her trial before a rebel military commission. Amy Spain was entrusted with the care of the Major's two daughters, and he wrote that: "Amy's temper was hot, hasty, and ungovernable, yet to me, as her master, she was always dutiful up to the unfortunate time when she exhibited traits of character, adopted a line of conduct, used expressions, and committed acts which contributed to the violent termination of her existence at the early age of seventeen."
A.C. Spain had been called up in the final days of the war and, he said, left the care of his plantation in the hands of his "aged" father. Upon the appearance in town of a scouting party of Sherman's forces (I have almost narrowed down and after a bit more research think that I can identify which Union and Rebel units were in the area at the time), Amy Spain and many others thought that liberation had come. Unfortunately, from what I have read in the Union records, the main body of Federal troops remained outside the town because of flooded river crossings and so only dispatched a small detail to scout and retrieve supplies. The troops then returned and continued on into Florence (the site of a large prisoner of war camp which they were no doubt anxious to liberate) and to pursue retreating forces. Amy Spain had in the mean time declare that she was free and promptly took possession of many of the household goods of the Major, taking them to her own home and declaring that the fruits of slavery now belonged to the freed slaves. Unknown to her, Confederate troops had returned to the town and to help establish "order," arrested her for her "crime." The Harper's writer describes what happened next, though this is disputed by some.

Hanging of Amy Spain
Harper's Weekly
September 30, 1865, page 613
One of the martyrs of the cause which gave freedom to her race was that of a colored woman named Amy Spain, who was a resident of the town of Darlington, situated in a rich cotton-growing district of South Carolina. At the time a portion of the Union army occupied the town of Darlington she expressed her satisfaction by clasping her hands and exclaiming, "Bless the Lord the Yankees have come!" She could not restrain her emotions. The long night of darkness which had bound her in slavery was about to break away. It was impossible to repress the exuberance of her feelings; and although powerless to aid the advancing deliverers of her caste, or to injure her oppressors, the simple expression of satisfaction at the event sealed her doom. Amy Spain died in the cause of freedom. A section of Sherman's cavalry occupied the town, and without doing any damage passed through. Not an insult nor an unkind word was said to any of the women of that town. The men had, with guilty consciences, fled; but on their return, with their traditional chivalry, they seized upon poor Army, and ignominiously hung her to a sycamore-tree standing in front of the court-house, underneath which stood the block from which was monthly exhibited the slave chattels that were struck down by the auctioneer's hammer to the highest bidder.

Amy Spain heroically heard her sentence, and from her prison bars declared she was prepared to die. She defied her persecutors; and as she ascended the scaffold declared she was going to a place where she would receive a crown of glory. She was rudely interrupted by an oath from one of her executioners. To the eternal disgrace of Darlington her execution was acquiesced in and witnessed by most of the citizens of the town. Amy was launched into eternity, and the "chivalric Southern gentlemen" of Darlington had fully established their bravery by making war upon a defenseless African woman. She sleeps quietly, with others of her race, near the beautiful village. No memorial marks her grave, but after-ages will remember this martyr of liberty. Her persecutors will pass away and be forgotten, but Amy Spain's name is now hallowed among the Africans, who, emancipated and free, dare, with the starry folds of the flag of the free floating over them, speak her name with holy reverence.

The historical truth is, of course, impossible to establish, but I think the story should be better preserved.
According to all accounts, Amy Spain was executed and then buried wearing the clothes of Spain's daughters.