Although we're quarantining we ventured out for a late afternoon walk. For the next months, starting with tomorrow's Daylight Savings Time, the sun will set before the workday ends. The last days have been rainy, too, and gloomy weather is forecast for the anxious days ahead, so it seemed right to mask up and - carefully keeping well more than 6 feet from anyone else - get a taste of some golden outdoors light and air.
I've been posting in the blog this week as if this were any week but of course it's anything but, something which has become clearer and clearer as conversations with students in and out of class wind down, as they always do, with "next week..." What world will we find ourselves in next Wednesday, Friday? As we contemplate the uncertainties of next week, the current week seems like the last week before something new and, at least for a time, terrifying. "I'm afraid we're going to be in a civil war," said one student this morning, naming my greatest fear. "I sort of hope we will be," replied another, confirming it. I don't know what miracle to pray for. The shambling but steady functioning of democracy which I've grown up counting on now feels like a miracle, too.
(10/31: I added the picture of Grant's Tomb for its inscription LET US HAVE PEACE.)
My suggestion is that the subject matter of such courses would be best taught through an approach that does not remove (what we assume to be) modernity, but instead uses it as the entry into our engagement with the material. That is, to teach from the present backwards—through looking at the postcolonial present and how that has been created by the forces of the past. The organizations and traditions of the postcolonial world that are now classified as religions have been formed into their contemporary practices and structures by the legacies of colonialism, even when they draw on rich and diverse pre-colonial histories and sources. (13)
I have been planning a structure something like this, beginning with contemporary events before swooping back to the artifact of world religions en route to ending with Anthropocene challenges. In the middle section, I was imagining I'd find some way of giving students what I was assuming they'd come for ("I've always wanted to take a course on religion" or "learn about world religions") without selling my soul, but just how to pull this off I didn't know. Nye suggests a way to me. We'll use something like the great anthology Figures of Buddhist Modernity in Asia to undermine the idea that any modern form of a tradition is somehow inauthentic, also making clear that even if everything happens in a landscape shaped by western colonialism, the construction of Buddhism as a religion (say) is something that's done not only by western colonial institutions - including the western "Academy."
Perhaps I could try to talk about traditions like Vietnamese Caodai - whence the image above (it's from a temple in California!). In some ways this is the natural extension of things I've taught regarding "lived religion" and "religion-making" but in a broader way. It's not just that "religion" lives in the syncretic adaptations of members, and that it's not just scholars who have commitments regarding "religion" and its value. It's facing that western colonialism and the capitalist forces it unleashed have remade the religious world. Fantasies of religious worlds untouched by this process (hello, "world religions") are themselves products of this process, and perhaps more beholden to it than are religious innovators, especially those on the colonial peripheries, who have no choice but to face fully the complicated realities of our time.
Our choir is back! Well, virtually. Our director sent us a short piece and directions on how to record our bit so we can all be synched as a virtual choir. He warned that it involved many steps and it's true. Singers need two devices, one to play the recording of the notes they have to sing (earbuds are best for delivering this direction discreetly) and another to record the singer. You also need a way to prop up your filming device and a neutral background. Oh, and sheet music... It was too much for me; the piece was short enough that I memorized my part, which doesn't mean I didn't keep getting it wrong. And then there's how you look as you sing, oy!
Rest assured,
I voted for
約瑟夫
R.
拜登
and
卡瑪拉
D.
哈里斯
(Unexpected perk of absentee voting: you can take a pic of the ballot!)
Some of our neighbors, who have been keeping a Black Lives Matter vigil going every day for months at the corner of our complex, are in the Times today. Among them is our intrepid next door neighbor Joan!
The New School finds itself a few painful steps into what may be a protracted journey through uncertainty - and not because we're special. Much of American higher ed is facing economic crises staggering enough to provoke identity crises.
Indeed our leadership hired a consulting firm to avail itself of a broader view to guide the sequence of hiring freezes, pay cuts, furloughs, layoffs and early retirements we've already endured; next on the agenda is restructuring. It's not clear how the "Liberal Arts" space currently occupied by three different divisions with dramatically different cultures - the graduate faculty of social and political science, the schools of public engagement and Lang - will be reconfigured, or even how the decision will be made (a faculty-staff taskforce has been convened but given an impossibly short time to come up with recommendations). Perhaps the changes will all be under the hood and we'll continue to offer the degrees and curricula we've been offering, just in an administratively "leaner" way, but enough has already been destabilized that everything has a question mark over it.
LREL, my little fiefdom, might continue or might be absorbed into something else; in any case, its curriculum might in the not too distant future look quite different from this year's pleasing array...
Our journey is complete! It was only a fifth of the way across the US but it felt like more. The freedom of the open road! And of people living their lives in parks, museums, restaurants, beer gardens, apple orchards, covered markets, shopping malls... (Our hosts kept us busy!)
Except of course our drive across Ohio, a spit of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Jersey meant crossing a multiply-blighted land, the blight
often metastasizing in the form of lawn signs with the name of our super
spreader president. Ohio's one of many states
which have been recording new records in coronavirus infections recently, so we've gone straight from turnpike to quarantine, as New York State requires; good thing I got myself an absentee ballot for the election next week!
Our week out of town was a great success. Not just the getting out of town, though that was a lot. And not just driving across foliage-draped Appalachian and Allegheny mountains, though that was magical. But Columbus turned out to be a marvel, too! It helped that we were visiting friends who've recently moved back and have deep roots there, proud of the city's past as well as its recent ascent to being Ohio's biggest city. And it was also nice to have company during these anxious days in the lead-up to November 3rd (we even braved the final presidential debate together) and to add to our sense of the fundamental decency of America. (Don't ask me about how progressive Columbus is dismembered by Republican gerrymandering, though.)
Pope Francis has endorsed civil unions for gay people in the most wonderful way:
"They’re children of God and have a right to a family."
This isn't an official papal pronouncement, nor is it really a surprise given Francis' views before he became pope. It's also not marriage. But it's a big deal, as James Alison explains:
Francis’s position is inconceivable for someone who believes same-sex acts to be mortal sins, leading those involved to go to hell. If you believed those things you would seek to break up such couples, not stabilise them. ... The presenting issue is one of anthropology, and is fairly simple: either it is true that being gay or lesbian is a vicious or pathological form of a humanity which is only authentically heterosexual; or it is true that being gay or lesbian is simply something that is a non-pathological minority variant in the human condition. If the former, then “giving in” to being gay or lesbian is to follow the path of your objective disorder, and ultimately to exclude yourself from grace. If the latter, then becoming who you are starts from who you find yourself to be, including your sexual orientation, and the appropriate humanisation of your sexual desire will be worked out in appropriate relationships over time.
It was time for Durkheim in "Theorizing Religion" today, one of the thinkers I've been struggling to do justice to in past years - and one year I simply forgot! The problem is Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, his magnum opus on religion, which you really need more time than I can afford to really engage with; if you just include the introductory section students will wonder if he didn't already know what he was going to "find" in the accounts of Aboriginal Australia he goes on to analyze - and rightly so. Convincing students that there's value in the kind of primitivist view he offers is queasy-making too. So this year I skipped it, instead assigning to earlier works. One was the religion chapter from Suicide (1897), which I've used before and proves a good way to introduce the promise of sociology.
The other was an 1898 essay I remember being assigned my first semester in graduate school, "Individualism and the Intellectuals," Durkheim's response to the Dreyfus affair and one of the most inspiring celebrations of liberalism you can imagine. The argument, in a nutshell, is that as societies become more complicated, traditional religions will loses their capacity to ground us - but the need for religion, understood as a grounding collective experience, remains. A "religion of humanity" dedicated to the value of individuals is our best hope. It's an unexpected and interesting argument to got through, not least in this moment where we're hoping to face down the misanthropic cynicism of Trumpism. But I'd forgotten just how many religious buzzwords Durkheim manages to use in making his argument!
This ideal [individualism] goes so far beyond the limit of utilitarian ends that it appears to those who aspire to it as marked with a religious character. The human person, whose definition serves as the touchstone according to which good must be distinguished from evil, is considered as sacred, in what one might call the ritual sense of the word. It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods. It is conceived as being invested with that mysterious property which creates an empty space around holy objects, which keeps them away from profane contacts and which draws them away from ordinary life. And it is exactly this feature which induces the respect of which it is the object. Whoever makes an attempt on a man's life, on a man's liberty, on a man's honour inspires us with a feeling of horror, in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned. Such a morality is therefore not simply a hygienic discipline or a wise principle of economy. It is a religion of which man is, at the same time, both believer and God. [emphasis added!]
Behold Elijah Pierce's (1892-1984) representation of the expulsion from Eden, including scenes of what led up to it and some of what followed, from 1931. Seeing this at the Columbus Art Museum (another museum!) gave me a sense of what Pierce's carving "Story of Job" (1936), in Milwaukee but included in a CMA exhibition catalog, must look like.
Elijah Pierce: Woodcarver (Columbus Museum of Art, 1992), 123
That Times article about The New School has generated a lof of comments, some predictable, many misinformed, and a few brilliant. My co-historian J sent me this one, a beaut:
In earning a BA in Liberal Arts from the New School College in the early 70’s I was allowed to take graduate courses to fulfill my requirements. One class I took was with the late Dr. Stanley Diamond, a distinguished anthropologist. His lectures were always packed. One lecture he changed the format and asked us students to start our own discussion asking and answering questions about any topic. He sat and listened. As the hour and a half class came to an end, he got up, silenced us and stated “What I have heard in this class today indicates the complete collapse of Western civilization”. He then abruptly left the lecture hall where we all just sat in stunned silence. That was The New School for Social Research at its peak.
Part of the trouble of an institution that marches to its own countercultural drummer is that, even as they grumble about its inadequacies, everyone thinks they just experienced The New School at its peak before things headed irrevocably south. I was guilty of that for a time, too, until newer cohorts of faculty and students started mourning as lost peaks things the things whose arrival I had rued!
Today, we savored a nearly forgotten pleasure - we went to an art museum! It was the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. On a rainy Sunday we were the only visitors - a nice way back in! "The Wex" was designed by deconstructionist architect Peter Eisenman, his first major commission after decades of snarky sketches. (Since it was designed to frustrate, I don't know whether to say it succeeds...!)
We especially enjoyed two of the four exhibitions on show, in oddly shaped rooms accessed by narrow stairways along a long sloping corridor. One was Steve McQueen's "Remember Me" (above), part of a series, arrays neon versions of the phrase Remember me in a variety of handwritings, evoking people of different ages and levels of education, victims of unspecified but undeniable erasure.
The other was a sound installation by Taryn Simon, called "Assembled Audience," a randomized combination of the applause of hundreds of individual people at hundreds of different events in Columbus - a big wall was filled with a list of the component events, running the gamut from entertainment to trade to politics - which you encounter surging and subsiding, now a pitter-patter, now a roar, in a pitch-black room (where, if there were more people in the museum, you'd almost certainly collide with someone). It's disorienting but also intoxicating: it's hard not to feel the shifting waves of applause are telling you something meaningful about something important, whether you like it or not. Scary, profound.
Inspired by our trip northward to the Adirondacks, we've embarked on a longer trip, this time to the west. Guess where we're headed? Ohio!
There is an interesting story to tell about institutions which don't strive to produce wealthy alums, but a better researched piece might have pointed out that for most of our 100 years we didn't rely on (or even have!) an alumni association because most of our students didn't get degrees. We also entered the endowment game very late, for quixotic idealistic reasons of our own - and for much of our history we were dependent on philanthropy. For a good while later we were dependent on the design school, and in recent years we've tried to build a budget based on undergraduate tuition (like most tuition-driven universities). The smart folks in our graduate programs in economics and sociology to whom the author spoke don't see that, or perhaps they mentioned it but the tragedy of idealism made a better story.
None of this changes the fact that we are in very dire straits right now, but it would be nice for ha-ha stories about us to be more accurate.
I have noticed many students over the years write apart when they mean a part, jumbling the meaning, but this instance takes the cake:
I believe that humans are very much apart of nature as it is apart of us.
At the end of an eloquent account of "caring for country" (an Australian Aboriginal understanding of the gift of being born as kin in places of mutual sentience and care with all other species) as a resource in responding to the 'Anthropocene' (which she proposed we translate as "in the midst of great ad growing destruction"), the wonderful Deborah Bird Rose asks:
is it possible to re-imagine urban and suburban places as kinds of ‘Country’? I absolutely do not want to trivialise Aboriginal Country, and yet I do want to consider the possibility that the Western nature-culture binary presupposes that Country cannot be a city, or part of a city. But is this so? Is it not possible to go beyond the idea of natural areas within urban spaces, an approach which still seems to maintain the nature-culture divide, and to look more thoughtfully at how a city might be reconfigured if the aim of urban life was to inhabit and care for Country. Could the city, and city-dwellers, all of us urban flora and fauna, become part of a story of Country? Could we be working together for Country? Could we find lawful ways of being where we are whilst reconfiguring who we are so that even in cities we are able to nourish and strengthen our true backbone as kin within the gifts of Earth life?
"Country and the Gift," in Humanities for the Environment: Integrating knowledge, forging new constellations of practice, ed. Joni Adamson and Michael Davis (Routledge 2017)
[10/31: Not sure how this sad news passed me by, but Deborah Bird Rose passed away two years ago after a long illness. May her memory be for blessing.]
What people can get used to, live with, accept... It's no surprise, perhaps, that a soulless demagogue should see these infections and deaths as numbers to fudge. (Isn't that what numbers are for, just as power is for fudging all you can, the more brazenly the better?) But why do so many others accept it, even think that we're doing as well as possible? Such big numbers are impossible to absorb - even if you try - and denial is even understandable as the first reaction of a broken heart. But it's also that American society is inured to death. Citizens we don't know are not, to use a term of art, grievable - think of the legions lost to gun violence year after year. Or to use another, they are disposable - think of the millions of uninsured, disproportionately people of color, who live shorter lives, even when they don't confront police violence and the prison industrial complex. One of our presidential candidates tries to make space to grieve, refuses to dispose. How can anyone support the other, who makes a manly virtue of looking away?
Every two weeks we've been getting a box from Misfits, the company which rescues and redistributes mishapen and leftover organic fruits and vegetables. Although you can make selections, we've been taking the more adventurous path of letting them send whatever they have on hand. This provides greater variety and enjoyable culinary challenges - jicama and spaghetti squash were both so new to me I didn't know what they were - but it's been fun, especially during these dreary days of limited eating our or with friends. But this week is especially challenging. Twenty jalapeños?!
Stumbled on this virtuosic effort to fit all Religion (Faith, Myths & Mysticism) into a single family tree. It turned up in World Religion News, an online tabloid with outlandish religion stories, which seems indeed to have commissioned it. Much is strange about it, like the cute logos for traditions, or the way almost all of them took some sort of "religious" form in the last century and half which, presumably, superseded all that came before in its lineage... The trunk of the tree is Animism, dated 100,000 years old, but after the departure of European, San and Australian and New Guinean animisms, we find something called Proto-Nostratic, and defined
A proposed origin language from Eurasia that unites the majority of world languages. It is speculated that the people who spoke this ancient tongue were practitioners of shamanism ... This graphic illustrates how this Nostratic faith may have spread out across the continents, following the path of human migration, evolving into the multitide of religions we are familiar with today.
This is not exactly a generally accepted piece of speculation, to put it mildly, but one recognizes the appeal of such a construct. One biiiiig family! It also looks frighteningly like the evolutionary projects of 19th European century scholarship, though it seems less teleological; monotheisms get no pride of place, and religion is not replace by science. The designer, I've discovered, is busy working on a novel - indeed a series of novels - based on his reconstruction of what the Nostratic faith must have believed.
I've been studying comparative mythology as a means of reconstructing the first story ever told! This story is so old, it predates all recorded history; indeed, you have to draw upon the very fringes of science & history to reconstruct it. Many scholars, including Joseph Campbell, have studied this tale, which is referred to as the Monomyth. Sadly, this origin story was lost long ago, as our stone-age ancestors had no means of writing it down.
But don't despair. He's nearly finished a draft of the first volume.
I've started reading Damian Duffy and John Jennings' graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and it's terrific. I'm not sure if readers unfamiliar with the novel will get everything - they've put a lot of Butler's detailed world-making into the imagery, along with the way the narrative works. But look at the way they start! The looping things are the laser wire surrounding the fortified suburb where the protagonist Lauren Olamina grows up; Butler writes that this wire is nearly invisible and birds sometimes die trying to fly through it. But it's Duffy and Jennings who bring back the white bird carcass a few pages later, as Lauren describes her disaffection with the Christianity of her father; her favorite book of the Bible, she tells us, is the Book of Job! (And another 16 pages later, as we learn how the community learns to protect itself with guns and uses BB guns against pests who eat their tree crops, we see the black bird shot.) Best of all, an adaption of the sequel, Parable of the Talents, is in the works!
(NY: Abrams Comics, 2020), 2-3, 13
For the past several months, the residents of our floor have been gathering for "socially distanced cocktails" on Fridays. It started when nobody was going out, and has survived into the more relaxed present. All of us have been out of town at least once, reporting on forgotten pleasures like eating in restaurants to our envious neighbors. After a while it became intermittent at best, and the mainstays decided that a monthly meeting might be better attended. Then the arrival of a new neighbor provided an excuse to choose a date: second Friday of the month. We officially welcomed her to the floor tonight, seven people spread along the walls of the elevator landing, each on their own chair with their own drink in hand - and masked, of course. The mood was festive until things wound down and one of us (it might have been me) said: same week next month? A month from now is the second Friday after November 3rd. How close the precipice is, all bets off.
"Religion and the Anthropocene" met outdoors today! Many in the class are in NYC and the rest are aching to be, so we gathered in Washington Square Park. Logistics were predictably a challenge (my cellphone hotspot saved the day, anchoring our zoom class on my laptop) but the happy energy of a field trip prevailed. Students able to be present strolled with those far away on their phones - all while in zoom breakout sessions! For other discussions, all of us zoomed in from different places in the park or, when we found some tables free, passed my laptop ("our classroom!" I kept thinking) from hand to hand speaking to those far away. I'm not sure how much of the content will have stuck, since all of us in the park were in sensory overload: not just the trees and the sky and the people we didn't know and the people we did know but being in bodies together and moving and getting a paper handout and and and...
The readings were about settler colonialism and part of the lesson was learning to feel discomfort in the paradisaical park, the dream of European settler ancestors come true on territory long cared for by Lenape people pushed far from this land and then for a time by free black New Yorkers; it was a potters field too. Its oldest tree, the over 300 year old Hangman's Elm, is an import. "We are always in dialogue with our ancestors as dystopianists and fantasists," Kyle Powys Whyte, author of one of our texts, argued. Most of us settlers don't realize this or even understand what it means. It's almost a religious thought.
Our New School history team, joined by the university archivist, will be kicking off a teach-in tomorrow responding to the lay-offs of a significant portion of the full-time staff. What we should say isn't obvious. Many of our colleagues, less versed in the history than we are, think the New School pledged from the beginning to be a community committed to social justice as we understand it today - a tradition betrayed when we comport ourselves like a corporatized university. But in reality social justice wasn't the mission (and in any case didn't mean the same thing then that it means today), and the founders were not planning a university at all! There's much inspirational in the history, but on labor questions, for instance, we've been anything but inspiring, in some ways anticipating the landscape of other universities today with a small island of tenured faculty floating in a sea of contingent labor.
Our story is that we only became a conventional university subject to the problems of conventional universities in the last few decades. Some of the ideals of 1919, suitably updated, might inspire us, but we'll learn more from seeking to understand how we became a university - and how we came to understand our mission in terms of social justice (rather than, say, academic freedom, meeting unmet need or even innovation and "the new"). Perhaps there's something in our unconventional history that can offer alternatives to the structural problems we share with so much of higher education today... perhaps we can think outside a box we've only recently been in.
I'm not going to be able to do justice to what I just heard, any more than a photo taken facing into the sun, but let me try. We live diagonally across Broadway - just at the point where the northbound 1 train comes out in the open - from the Manhattan School of Music. That's their dorm in the middle of this picture, which lights at night confirm is nearly full. (In the background is the spire of Riverside Church.) Harder to make out is the terrace about two stories up, but if you look closely you might see some dark shapes. It's the orchestra, taking advantage of a crisp fall day for a rehearsal. The sound has to turn a corner and battle with passing traffic and trains, not to mention gusts of wind, but I recognize snatches that come through: Brahms' Fourth, and now Tchaikovsky's Fifth. Surreal but glorious.
Kathryn Yusoff repurposed the golden spikes of the stratigraphers in service of a deeper history; at each of the points considered by the anthropocenologists as a possible marker for the start of the "age of humans" - 1950s, 1800, 1610 - she asks who was "impaled" on these spikes. Black and brown bodies destroyed and dehumanized at every turn by the schemes and structures of European hegemons.
Françoise Vergès presented the argument that the Anthropocene would be more fittingly called the capitalocene, since it's the logic and spread of capitalism that has driven anthropogenic calamity in the earth systems, not just "man." Then she extended it: if we acknowledge the colonial premodernity which funded and provided the templates for industrial capitalism (legacies which continue in our day) we may find it more apposite to speak of a racial capitalocene.
Emily Raboteau, responding to a public art project of the Climate Museum, provided a vivid portrait of a New York City threatened in myriad ways by climate change, ways almost all of which are compounded by long histories of environmental racism, also demonstrating the powers of art - in words, images, narratives - to humanize problems which seem beyond our capacity to comprehend. (The image above is her work too.)
The debates about geological markers seemed a distraction now, the presentism of Anthropocene alarm - as if harm had only recently begun to accrue - culpably naive. If we are to understand what has happened we need a deeper, fuller history - which turns out to be a history of horrors. Understand it and then what? The history may offer ways of imagining alternatives to the racial capitalocene, like practices of indigenous survival (next week's readings) or the new connections to new land that emerged in the "provision grounds," small plots of land Africans enslaved in New World plantations were given to feed themselves.
None of this week's assigned readings address religion but we had gotten to know a religion just last week which now seemed to speak from and to this deeper, fuller history of horrors. I called up the transcription of Earthseed we'd produced from Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower - our working template for what a religion can be - and wound up stopping at the epigraph to chapter 4.
A victim of God may,
Through learning adaptation,
Become a partner of God,
A victim of God may,
Through forethought and planning,
Become a shaper of God.
Or a victim of God may,
Through shortsightedness and fear,
Remain God’s victim,
God’s plaything,
God’s prey.How might the XXX-cene be understood from the perspective and experience of those who are its victims, not the perpetrators? (Perhaps for the first time all are now aware that we might be "victims of God.") Might this imagination open ways of facing realities which don't flee into fantasies of escape or mastery, denialist supplication before a transcendent god or the desire to be such a god? It was a lot to do in one session... we'll see if any of these seeds takes root.
(Image by Ana Teresa Rodriguez)
