DOMA farewell day!

At last, some good news from SCOTUS, very good! Wish I were there to celebrate! There, where? (Headlines from New York Times, above, and Los Angeles Times, below.) The celebrations in NewYork and California, Maryland, Delaware and New England, Iowa and Minnesota must be quite different from those in the big majority of states with still unchallenged DOMAs of their own. Still, I suppose it was as much as one could have hoped for from the Roberts court. Wedding bells!!

Aboriginal shadow dances

Came into Melbourne to see some friends, and for my now customary visit to the Aboriginal art at the National Gallery of Victoria

Crusoe Kuningbal (Kuninjku), Mimih Spirits, 1984

 Ronnie Janbardi (Gurrgoni), Wandurrk at Guyun 

and Wandurrk at Gubalorlo, 1988, Wandurrk, 1973

Julie Gough (Tasmanian Aboriginal), Drift, 2005

Cookaburra sits in the old gum tree...

WInter solstice?

It's been colder here than in ten years and there's frost on the fields in the mornings, but it feels more like Autumn and Spring than Winter...

Up and away

By way of Los Angeles and Auckland on my way back to Oz!

二千五百番通

This is the 2500th post on this blog. How the time does fly! But how pleasingly appropriate that this should come up on the eve of a trip back to Australia, for which the blog was created 2484 days ago, 1 Sep '06. In that time I've shared a good many views of Australia, as well as Taiwan, India, Turkey, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Nepal, China, Portugal, Spain, and sundry places in the good ol' United States of America (look 'em up - that's what the little white search box at upper left is for!). But a blog isn't only or even mainly for holiday snaps and stories; slices of life, more like, cross sections, rhythms... It's a strange beast, a blog, hovering between evanescent and forgettable daily concerns and being a lasting record of the march of time.

It feels especially right to be heading back to Australia at this milestone because I'm feeling, as I did back at #1, like I'm embarking on something new. Maybe it's finally finally being finished with the Job project, a project which I've been working on in one way or another for eleven years - though it's rarely been my main thing. What was/is my main thing? A good question. You might recall that the project when I headed off for sabbatical in Melbourne in 2006 was "the problem of the good." Since then I've been entranced by "lived religion," among various other things. But I haven't had a "next project" and happily allowed New School anniversaries, Aboriginal Australia, the India China project on Himalayan religion and ecology, religion & fashion, queer Christianities, Buddhism & liberal arts and even Leibniz to pull me this way and that.

I feel like I'm ready to move on! On to what? Let's call it "Wider Moral Communities" for now, the name of the paper I'll be giving at AAR in November. I don't want to jinx it by defining too much at this stage, but it's basically pursuing the intuition that answers to the question "how shall we live?" can't be answered only with reference to human experience, rich and varied though it is across time and culture and even among individuals. It's not just that there may be more members to our moral communities than living adult human beings, not just that we might be called to relationships of care with what Graham Harvey calls "other-than-human persons" (which might be animate or inanimate, embodied or disembodied, focused or diffuse) but that we might learn something profound from them about ourselves.

If you've followed this blog when it gets weird and oracular, you know this isn't really new - though it's new to feel things coming together into a "project." You'll have caught whiffs of this in my evolving understanding of religious studies as "the discipline that reminds us there is no consensus on the real," ruminations on ethics of care, rhapsodies on religious naturalism (including James on our "religious function" and the "demands of the universe"), grappling with "indigenous" knowledge and kinship, my curious ideas about "resource uses" for ERSEH and emerging understanding of the everyday, of "lived" religion... In a way the deeper questions of the "problem of good" are at play here, too. I think the opportunity to work with images afforded by the blog (and a sequence of trusty cameras) may also have contributed, and even the strange temporality of the blog itself - thank you!

But Australia's part of it as well, I'm sensing, a big part. I've spent the last 3 weeks here in Del Mar starting gently to explore various things I've been wanting a chance to think about for a long time, from Merleau- Ponty to ecofeminism to a book called Plants as Persons. Time and again the trail of references and acknowledgments leads down under. 2006-7, the year I spent in Australia, was the year many people "got" ecological awareness - me among them. It was the year of "An Inconvenient Truth." But what I got seems to have been shaped by specifically Australian experiences, too. "The land," one wants to say, and ancient cultures (what got me tripping about centuries and millennia), but surely also a certain historical and cultural self-consciousness among thoughtful "settler Australians," an all-bets-are-off off-the-mapness. And Leunig!

Year of the Weed's

The luminous furry yellow Weed's mariposa lilies - once a relative rarity - are all over Torrey Pines State Reserve (and extensions) this year! Even where's it's been too dry for other plants to grow, Weed's shine forth.

Missed media

Can't remember just why, but was reminiscing with my friend K about the rapid obsolescence of media skills. At one point she knew all about how to send out 1000 copies of a newsletter by fax. And I knew all about how to put together a mimeographed newspaper with justified margins.
Wow, I haven't done that in 24 years but the skill is still there! I wonder if it's affected the way I approach anything else? The funkier historians of culture and ideas now focus on things like this and the way they formed and facilitated certain practices rather than others...

Proved

"The Book of Job: A Biography" moves steadily toward publication! I just sent in the corrected proofs - hope they don't balk at my 222 requests for inserting or removing commas, inverting or replacing words, as well as embarrassing cases of subject-verb agreement I can't believe I didn't catch before! (They've been very obliging about my request that three of the images be recropped.) Here's a taste of what's to come, some of my best-turned phrases.

Yosemite view!

Look who wound up in last weeks San Francisco Chronicle! Anyone got a digital subscription so we can read the attendant article?

Scams

B, an old friend from high school, directs a non-profit recognizing women's leadership here in San Diego. A few weeks ago she discovered (quite by accident - she was showing an intern from abroad the difference between a Bing search and a Google search) that someone had set up a copycat site, using the same charity name, text and photos - and a "donate now!" button of its own. Sleuthing a little, B discovered that the copycat site was the work of one of her organization's past honorees, who had listed herself and a friend as board members and had been calling people soliciting donations, and also pays her rent from these fraudulently gained donations. I couldn't believe my ears. B is more philosophical. She's read a book claiming that one person in 25 is a sociopath - "has no conscience" - and they've had 300 honorees so far so it's not that surprising... besides, self-aggrandizing and fraudulent charities are, unfortunately, nothing new. They've hired an attorney and are working to get the copycat site's host to take it down - more easily said than done. (The fake site is still up; I just checked.)

I am still speechless. But in these few weeks at my parents' place in California I've been reminded that such unscrupulous scams are far from rare. Our town association has warned people against scammers calling and pretending to be police demanding confirmation of address and SSN for court proceedings, and then offering a cash out-of-court settlement. Someone's called us at least twice "to schedule the delivery of an emergency notification system" which we never ordered; when I asked, he said that someone had paid for it for us. There should be a special circle in hell for those who prey on the vulnerable like this.

Near swoon

Mindful of events at Gezi Park and the Iranian election, I made İmam bayıldı tonight, a Turkish dish whose name means "the imam swoons."

Extension

Today I discovered the Eden of the scarlet larkspur in the Torrey Pines State Reserve Extension. Almost as exciting: I learned that some of the dualism-dynamiting ideas I most appreciate in Maurice Merleau-Ponty have antecedents in Nicolas Malebranche. Chair du monde - divine? 

Dog's eye view

The San Diego County Fair has opened! Nephews made it fun last year

but I think I'll give it a miss this year. The view from dog beach is quite enough. And I'll be seeing my nephews within a fortnight in Oz!

Mountain highs

My father invited a friend of his to lunch today who has extensive experience trekking in high altitude regions - Karakorum is his favorite, though he also did a 250-mile (!) trek around Annapurna some years ago. He's also a medical doctor, so I was able to get some non-anecdotal advice on what to expect at the high altitudes of the Kailash pilgrimage, and how to prepare. In the sober way of a doctor, he told me that many people's breathing pattern changes, to what's called "periodic" or Cheyne-Stokes breathing. One might well awake in the middle of the night (not that anyone sleeps well up there) and find that one's breathing has stopped. No cause for alarm: the usual triggers for breathing related to CO2 are disrupted in these oxygen-poor climes, but the body will resume breathing as needed. Forewarned is forearmed.

Perhaps relatedly, people have vivid dreams and even hallucinations!

More Del Mar scenes

 

All these pictures were taken on a somewhat unplanned 2-hour ramble

through the two parts of the Torrey Pines State Reserve extension.

(If blogspot won't let you look at the details of the 360˚ panorama from Red Ridge, let me know and I'll send it to you as an email attachment.)

Sage

Some of the native(ish) plants growing around UCSD's Geisel Library.

Implied transitions

I'm slowly but surely making my way through the Job proofs. It's an occasionally painful process, since early editing has aimed for a text you could breeze through, loosening my often turgid academic style (my old friend V used to call it "teutonic") by going for shorter sentences without transitions... Read it word for word and you sometimes don't know how the reader is supposed to get from one idea to the next! At this stage all I can do is trust the process...

But overall it's gratifying - I managed to pack quite a lot of good stuff in. A reader will be able to make better sense of what's going on in this rare Joban hymn, which turned up in (Catholic) church this morning - three

Old Testament sources making for a very New Testament message.

API together

One of the cool things about hanging around UCSD is that it reminds me of the worlds of young Asian-Pacific Islander Americans. So for instance, thanks to a poster in the Price Center I learned about and was able to watch the first half of what may be the world's first internet-adapted play, David Henry Hwang's "Yellow Face" on the angry-funny YOMYOMF (You Offend Me, You Offend My Family) channel. Part 2 tomorrow, so far so good!

In veritatis vinum

Ah, put me in a university library and I'm like these besotted bees...

Tiny trek

How does one prep for a 52km trek in the High Himalaya? I'm starting slow, walking a few miles each day up and down hills in my new hiking boots - though of course we're near sea level here. Today, I did the roughly 5km from the Torrey Pines State Reserve lodge to the library at UCSD in about an hour.

Finishing the hat

What to do about "Theorizing Religion"? It's the course I've taught longest: I brought it with me from Princeton (where it's called "Approaches to the Study of Religion"), turned it from a lecture course to a seminar at Lang, tweaked and updated and tweaked some more. It's also the one course required of all our majors and minors, designed to initiate students in the practice of studying religion academically. For me this has always meant understanding the history and favored categories of our discipline (and other disciplines), and encountering some of the "classic texts" of our field. (Remember the religious studies hat, below?) But the discipline keeps changing, "classic texts" are not just contested in detail but a contested category as a whole, and postmodern/postcolonial/postsecularist perspectives and new media have changed everything. Our students, meanwhile, are mostly not interested in becoming scholars of religion. (A startling number of our recent majors have wound up in seminaries!) And there's always a contingent of students who have studied religion in any form...

So here's what I'm thinking. Alongside the reading responses and some writing assignments designed to let them demonstrate their mastery of the texts and issues, I'll have students do two new assignments which look neither towards the academy nor the glorious religious past. In the first, they'll have to write a brief essay about some current religious event, personality, community or controversy in New York City, building it around an article from a newspaper or magazine and supplementing it also with a little library research. The second will ask them to analyze and assess one of the internet sites which offer supposedly objective information about religion - beliefnet.com, faithology.com, religionfacts.com, etc. - focusing on a particular article or posting, and backing it up with two theorists from our class. That doesn't answer the question of which theorists to include, but I think it'll let us face and discuss the relationship between what scholars of religion do and other discourses and communities of religious inquiry - and let students explore some interests of their own. Act local, think global?

Bicoastal

Unexpected taste of Lower Manhattan, at Marshall's in Solana Beach!

Wonder why it didn't sell - the aesthetic is so California!

Letzter Rest vom Schützenfest

I have three weeks here in California to sort through all kinds of academic projects, from books (the Job book proofs have to be returned next week, and another press awaits our reactions to the generally positive reader's reports of the "queer Christianities" anthology) to courses (need to update my "Theorizing Religion" syllabus and submit book orders)... and then there's planning for the rest of the summer!

Had an enjoyable first foray into New School history to get started. (J and I are teaching that course again this coming semester, under the cuter name "Who New?"). Meet Alfred Schütz, the Viennese banker-phenomenologist famous for exploring the life world of the everyday and bridging philosophy and the social sciences, who was affiliated with The New School in various ways from his arrival in New York in 1939 until his death in 1959.  He's someone I should really know better anyway, since some smart thinking on "lived religion" is based on his work.

We are thinking of using Schütz's essay "The Stranger" (American Journal of Sociology 49/6 [May 1944]: 499-507) in the class. We used his New School colleague Julie Meyer's "The Stranger and the City" (1951) last time, but its founding ideas are taken explicitly from Schütz' still influential piece, which uses a sympathetic phenomenology of the precarious achievement of "thinking as usual" to account for the difficulties people have on leaving one culture or milieu for another, and for the reactions they often encounter. A cultural world is navigated in "habituality, automatism and half- consciousness," making use of "recipes" which provide "typical solutions for typical problems available for typical actors" (505). The stranger brings the "recipes" of one place to another and, trying to make sense of the new surroundings, mistaking individuals for types, and finding everything questionable because her own "natural attitude" has met shipwreck (507). Schütz' case-study is the "stranger," his paradigmatic case the immigrant, but he thinks similar processes at work in every encounter with the strange or new. Good stuff!

Today I happened on an another interesting angle. It turns out that Schütz had a long correspondence with fellow phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, who also wound up in the Philosophy Department at The New School (1959-71). (You can listen to Gurwitsch dictating an essay of Schütz's here.) They seem to have had only one major disagreement; it occasioned a year-long break in the correspondence - and was about "The Stranger." Gurwitsch wondered what a philosopher like Schütz was doing consorting with the semi-unconscious "natural attitude" of ordinary people, let alone explaining how people displaced from one society's "thinking as usual" had to lose themselves in another's.  

We thought,—I appeal to the philosopher Schutz—that man must be responsible for the world. That is what we learned from our master Husserl .. . And now we learn that that is not the point at all, that the point is to have recipes which allow one to deal with things. We wanted to understand the world and now we learn that the only thing that matters is a smooth and effortless operation in which certain results can be produced.  

Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939-1959, ed. Richard Grathoff, trans. J. Claude Evans (Indiana UP, 1989), 70

 
Schütz had imbibed a lot of pragmatist ideas, quoting James and Dewey prominently in the essay. To Gurwitsch it seemed that he had turned his back on transcendental questions, on the questions only philosophers asked and which civilization needed philosophers to keep asking.

We don't want to forget, dear friend, that our genealogy as philosophers goes back to a fool and a martyr. Back to the martyr Socrates, who, as I learned, made a nuisance of himself becuase he continually contradicted everyone and asked questions about things which public opinion had long since dealt with, and was in addition very successless. But concerning the fool Thales they tell the story that, absorbed in deep reflection, he fell into a manure pit and was jeered at by a milkmaid, since he knew his way around with the stars but was incapable of finding his way on the street. (71)

I confess, as a recovering philosopher (and, in studying lived religion, a recovering philosopher of religion), to feeling the pinch of these questions. A similar indignation at pragmatism's low aspirations animates a tiff between our two mascots - Hannah Arendt's review of John Dewey's Problems of Men in 1946, "The Ivory Tower of Common Sense." Ira Katznelson has told the story of the New School in terms of just this clash of American pragmatist democrats and war-scarred European intellectuals. The issues are back in a new form in questions about the value of liberal arts in a university now dedicated primarily to design thinking and problem solving.

But still, Schütz was an emigré himself, wasn't he? His student Maurice Natanson gave a talk about the Gurwitsch-Schütz disagreement in 1995. He thought Gurwitsch misunderstood Schütz, who was ever the philosopher - he even dared to think there is a kind of ideal typical social science and a philosophical phenomenology in ordinary encounters with strangeness. But Gurwitsch knew this, too. Natanson concludes that Gurwitsch's negative reaction to "The Stranger" was really about something else - the absence in the piece, and in the world it described, of the experience of the exile.

This raises deep questions I shall have to ponder between now and our lecture on The New School of the 1940s and 1950s. Gurwitsch seems right to sense a kind of assimilationist fatalism in Schütz' account - it does not imagine that anyone might find herself a permanent stranger in a place, or even seek out such a status, even embrace it as an identity and a calling. At play, explicitly and implicitly, are weighty issues of the significance of exile, philosophy, civilization, culture, the everyday, the modern mass society typified by America, and - hidden in plain sight - the perhaps world-historic role of the Jewish outsider. Fun fun!

Since we've come as far as Natanson, I'll leave you with a reminiscence he offers of the New School in the early 1950s, when he was there.

“Alfred Schütz: Philosopher and Social Scientist,”
Human Studies 21/1 (Jan 1998): 1-12, 11

But this is only half his recollection. He's a phenomenologist, after all, in particular a student of Schütz's, one of whose great interests was time - the "inner time" of conscious experience (characterized by "recollections, retentions, protensions, and anticipations which interrelate the various elements") and the "outer time" of action, both coming together in what he called "growing older together" (Social Research 18:1/4 [1951], 88, 96).

As described in his lovely essay "Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship" (from which I just quoted), Schütz thought that we were able sometimes to enter the stream of consciousness of others, present and past - and here all bets of "outer time" are off. Natanson suggests that there is a particular kind of "present of things imaginable" one might call "irreality" (11), and ends his essay with this sketch (12):
(von Mises and Weber were teachers Schütz studied with in Vienna; Dauber and Pine's was a vast used bookstore at 66 Fifth Ave., now one of the Parsons buildings; the student who mispronounces Schütz's name - perhaps a little understandable because it was published as Schütz, Schuetz and Schutz - had objected in a class to the idea that there could be anything like a philosophy of death, to which the teacher had responded, laughing, "You are joking, you are joking!")

Was Schütz, then, a "stranger" on West 12th Street, or not?