Posts Tagged ‘anthropology’
“Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.”*…
Rene Girard has been called the “Darwin of the Human Sciences.” A historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science, he made contributions to literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy– most prominently, his psychology of desire: mimetic theory. But relatedly, he also developed a powerful interpretation of human culture and its use of what he called the “scapegoat mechanism.”
His thought has impacted scholarship, and also more worldly endeavors like marketing and sales, even online influencing.
But perhaps most saliently in our moment, it has informed and animated the thought and efforts of the techno-right. Here, a fascinating “intellectual history”– and critique– of the appropriation of Girard by Peter Thiel, J. D. Vance, and their fellow travelers…
This past summer, I was surprised to encounter a face I knew in two most unexpected places. The first was in a photo montage accompanying an article written by Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo in the wake of J.D. Vance becoming the Vice Presidential nominee, entitled “A Journey Through the Authoritarian Right.” Arranged in the collage among images of a ripped man with lasers shooting from his eyes, of anti-democracy blogger Curtis Yarvin, and of Peter Thiel rubbing Benjamins between his thumb and forefinger, was my former professor and friend from Stanford University, René Girard. I was in France at the time; mere hours after reading Kovensky’s piece, I saw through the window of a taxi René’s face again—this time in the form of a larger-than-life decal on a light rail car in Avignon, where as it happens he is one of a dozen local heroes permanently celebrated on the new transit system. What do the medieval, culturally-rich, Provençal city of Avignon and the American authoritarian right have in common? Both claim a bond with this influential philosopher and member of L’Académie Française, who died in 2015. Only one of the claims is legitimate. The misappropriation of Girard’s ideas by the American right is not just a matter of academic concern; it has significant implications for our political discourse and society.
As it turns out, I know exactly where this illegitimate claim to Girard’s legacy started. For several years in the 1990s, I was part of a small reading group that met bi-weekly on the Stanford campus in a trailer left over from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The group—a kaleidoscope of visiting scholars, a few former students [the author had been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford] and some of Girard’s campus friends—was led by Girard himself, and though he was already an influential thinker at the time, and though his theories and ideas pervaded our discussions and were the reason we gathered, one member of that intimate group of ten or so has gone on to eclipse Girard in terms of visibility and political influence: Peter Thiel.
That Thiel participated in this study group has been noted in a small subset of the countless articles that reference his connection to Girard. Journalists, podcasters, and young entrepreneurs alike have hoped to find in Thiel’s acknowledged devotion to Girard’s work a master key that, properly handled, could unlock the mystery of Thiel and explain everything from his success as a venture capitalist to his 2016 endorsement of Donald Trump. That some wannabe billionaires have ordered Violence and the Sacred or Deceit, Desire and the Novel from Amazon and scanned its chapters in search of an “open sesame” to affluence is as surreal a proposition as it is doubtless something that actually occurs—the aspiring mogul’s equivalent of clicking on one of those “one weird trick” links that promise a hack to making money and improving your health.
A mirror image of this shortcut-thinking is visible in those who scan Girard’s books with the opposite goal: to demystify and discredit Thiel. “Girardianism has become a secret doctrine of a strange new frontier in reactionary thought,” exclaimed Sam Kriss in Harper’s, in an essay referenced in a ninety-minute discussion between the co-hosts of the “Know Your Enemy” podcast and essayist John Ganz, entitled “René Girard and the New Right.” This podcast discussion stands out as an informed, thoughtful, and wide-ranging presentation of Girard’s work. Nevertheless—like Sam Kriss in Harper’s—the trio are unconvincing when they suggest a causal link between Girard and Peter Thiel’s right-wing politics. Indeed, all the critical discussions I have seen regarding Thiel’s reverence for Girard share a single pattern; they seek an opportunity for a negative judgment of Girard—believing this will help them cut Peter Thiel down to size and further their efforts to obliterate the reactionary right. Just like Thiel’s followers, these critics have followed Thiel to Girard. Only the one weird trick they hoped to pull off was not getting rich, but getting reassurance—confirmation that an assumed pillar of Thiel’s worldview was as shaky as they assumed it must be.
However, the real concern isn’t about misreadings from afar but about how Girard’s ideas are actively distorted by Thiel and other influential figures within powerful right-wing circles. This manipulation carries real-world consequences. Thiel’s profound engagement with Girard’s work has been instrumental in shaping his worldview, yet he selectively twists Girardian concepts in ways that distort their original meaning. This extends beyond Thiel to figures like his political protégé, J.D. Vance. Examining how both Thiel and Vance misconstrue Girard’s themes shows how their misreadings shape the way power is understood and exercised, affecting not just academic debates but the actual conduct of political life…
Eminently worth reading in full: “From Philosophy to Power:The Misuse of René Girard by Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance and the American Right,” from Salmagundi.
(Image above: source)
* Rene Girard… who also said: “Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers. What the myths systematically hide, the Bible reveals” and “Why is our own participation in scapegoating so difficult to perceive and the participation of others so easy? To us, our fears and prejudices never appear as such because they determine our vision of people we despise, we fear, and against whom we discriminate.”
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As we practice what we preach, we might contemplate the ultimate consequences of these kinds of “misunderstandings”; one grim example (on the more benign end of the scale): on this day in 2013, Dominique Venner took his own life. A journalist, essayist, and historian, Venner was instrumental in founding founding the neo-fascist and white nationalist Europe-Action, before withdrawing from politics to focus on a career as a historian. Outraged by the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in France, which he believed would result in a white genocide, he killed himself inside the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. In a suicide note, he said his death was an act in “defence of the traditional family” and in the “fight against illegal immigration.”
“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing”*…
Antropologist Kristin Bell explores laughter as a far more complex phenomenon than simple delight, reflecting on its surprising power to disturb and disrupt…
… As an anthropologist specializing in health and medicine, laughter isn’t really in my professional wheelhouse—unless you subscribe to the view that laughter is the best medicine. My interest in the topic is more personal, not just because of my history as a former Giggling Gertie, but because it’s a behavior that is much less straightforward than it seems.
Ideally, laughter is something we share. According to anthropologist Munro Edmonson, laughter is sociable; it ideally invites a similar response. Indeed, it has contagious qualities: When we hear someone laugh, we often laugh, or at least smile, ourselves—an effect consistently shown through psychological research. This is how we ended up with canned laughter on sitcoms. Studios realized that the sound of laughter made their shows seem funnier to their audiences, while also giving them a degree of control over when people laughed…
… According to the anthropologist Munro Edmonson, the central feature of laughter is aspiration: We release a forceful puff of air as we laugh.
But laughter is also characterized by repetition. In fact, given the extraordinary variability in the sounds people make when they laugh, repetition is what makes laughter universally recognizable. This is why writers conventionalize laughter as “he-he-he,” “ha-ha-ha,” and “ho-ho-ho” (well, at least if you’re Santa Claus). Notably, this feature isn’t exclusive to English representations. Edmonson observed that laughter is represented in Russian as xe, xe, xe; in Tzotzil—a Mayan language spoken in Mexico—it’s ‘eh ‘eh ‘eh.
We don’t fully understand why humans make this sound when we laugh. When 19th-century biologist Charles Darwin set out to explore the biology of feelings in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he wrote, “why the sounds which man utters when he is pleased have the peculiar reiterated character of laughter we do not know.” However, the response seems to occur well before culture is embedded in our behaviors: Recognizable laughter is evident in babies from 4 months old.
Nor is laughter unique to humans. Great apes respond to being tickled in much the same way that humans do. Of course, because chimps, bonobos, et cetera have a different vocal apparatus than humans, it sounds more like a dog panting or a person having an asthma attack or energetic sex. However, these primate sounds have the same “peculiar, reiterated character” that Darwin highlighted in humans. This is why laughter is characterized by scientists as a cross-species phenomenon.
Yet, while laughter is evident in the play of other primates, it’s unclear whether they have a sense of humor. Recent research provides evidence of a capacity for teasing through nonverbal behavior. But, as the evolutionary psychologist Robert Provine noted, “there is no evidence that they respond to apparently humorous behavior, their own or that of others, with laughter.”
Giving meaning to laughter seems to be distinctively human.
While some laughter is deliberate, much of it is outside conscious control—an attribute that goes a long way toward explaining the widespread Euro-American ambivalence toward the act. According to the literary scholar Sebastian Coxon, a growing anxiety about mirth is evident in the European historical record from the late Middle Ages. For example, the 16th-century Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus, better known for advising children to “replace farts with coughs,” also warned against “loud laughter and immoderate mirth.”
Notably, Erasmus singled out the “neighing sound that some people make when they laugh” for particular opprobrium—an impulse evident in the contemporary tendency to compare unrestrained laughter with the cries of animals: “howling” with laughter, “hooting” in delight, “snorting” with amusement, and so on. Indeed, while the term “guffaw” might not be borrowed from animal noises, it certainly sounds like it could be.
These characterizations reveal an attempt to draw laughter into the realm of taste and civility—categories that are strongly tied to gender and class strictures. For instance, in an 1860 etiquette guide titled The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness: A Complete Hand Book for the Use of the Lady in Polite Society, readers are counseled to moderate their laughter during a dinner party so that it’s neither too loud nor too soft: “To laugh in a suppressed way, has the appearance of laughing at those around you, and a loud, boisterous laugh is always unlady-like.”
Social judgments abound not just in relation to how we laugh but what we laugh at—as an early 19th-century artwork attests. “Laughter,” etched by British artist and social commentator Thomas Rowlandson, depicts a man laughing at his cat adorned in a bonnet and cloak.
The caption reads: ‘Laughter is one of the most pleasing of the Passions and is with difficulty accounted for, as risibility is frequently excited from the most simple causes—as is the case with the Countryman and his Cat.’ The implication is that “unsophisticated” countrymen lack “class” and are therefore easily amused. (For the record, I am equally unsophisticated, because I will never not find cats pictured with human props funny.)
Still, despite the association between humor and taste, it’s often physical comedy that gets the most laughs. It’s not a coincidence that the first truly global hit comedy was The Gods Must Be Crazy, whose sublime “Tati-like slapstick routines” drew audiences from New York and Caracas to Tokyo and Lagos, despite being widely condemned by film reviewers as apartheid propaganda.
Indeed, screenwriters have long predicted that physical humor will become increasingly prominent in Hollywood comedies because it “transcends dialogue and even most cultural differences,” and movies must increasingly appeal to a global market to produce reliable returns. (As far as I can tell, the future of Hollywood films is basically Marvel movies and slapstick comedies.)…
… As McDonald observes, laughter disrupts the notion of a stable, coherent self—reflected in terms like “cracking up” and “bursting.” Moreover, unrestrained laughter doesn’t just signify a lack of personal control; it can be politically dangerous as well. The literary historian Joseph Butwin writes of “seditious laughter” as a weapon of the oppressed that can serve to destabilize hierarchies and power relations.
In the end, it’s clear that laughter is a deeply curious thing. It’s simultaneously the most social of human expressions and the one most disruptive of social edifices and rules. Shared, sanctioned laughter might bring us together, but unsanctioned laughter shows the cracks, revealing that we’re not quite who we think…
“The Strange Power of Laughter“
* Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
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As we muse on mirth (and lest we forget that sometimes laughter is simply a function of simple delight), we might recall that it was on this date in 1929 that Rube Goldberg‘s “The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, A.K.,” cartoon series first published in Colliers Weekly.
“The sentiment of justice is so natural, and so universally acquired by all mankind, that it seems to be independent of all law, all party, all religion”*…
Yunsuh Nike Wee, Daniel Sznycer, and Jaimie Arona Krems on an example of human values that seems due more to shared intuitions than local customs or social practices…
The Bible’s lex talionis – “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Exodus 21:24-27) – has captured the human imagination for millennia. This idea of fairness has been a model for ensuring justice when bodily harm is inflicted.
Thanks to the work of linguists, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, researchers know a lot about how different body parts are appraised in societies both small and large, from ancient times to the present day.
But where did such laws originate?
According to one school of thought, laws are cultural constructions – meaning they vary across cultures and historical periods, adapting to local customs and social practices. By this logic, laws about bodily damage would differ substantially between cultures.
Our new study explored a different possibility – that laws about bodily damage are rooted in something universal about human nature: shared intuitions about the value of body parts.
Do people across cultures and throughout history agree on which body parts are more or less valuable? Until now, no one had systematically tested whether body parts are valued similarly across space, time and levels of legal expertise – that is, among laypeople versus lawmakers.
We are psychologists who study evaluative processes and social interactions. In previous research, we have identified regularities in how people evaluate different wrongful actions, personal characteristics, friends, and foods. The body is perhaps a person’s most valuable asset, and in this study we analyzed how people value its different parts. We investigated links between intuitions about the value of body parts and laws about bodily damage…
… If people have intuitive knowledge of the values of different body parts, might this knowledge underpin laws about bodily damage across cultures and historical eras?
To test this hypothesis, we conducted a study involving 614 people from the United States and India. The participants read descriptions of various body parts, such as “one arm,” “one foot,” “the nose,” “one eye” and “one molar tooth.” We chose these body parts because they were featured in legal codes from five different cultures and historical periods that we studied: the Law of Æthelberht from Kent, England, in 600 C.E., the Guta lag from Gotland, Sweden, in 1220 C.E., and modern workers’ compensation laws from the United States, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates…
… Our findings were striking. The values placed on body parts by both laypeople and lawmakers were largely consistent. The more highly American laypeople tended to value a given body part, the more valuable this body part seemed also to Indian laypeople, to American, Korean and Emirati lawmakers, to King Æthelberht and to the authors of the Guta lag. For example, laypeople and lawmakers across cultures and over centuries generally agree that the index finger is more valuable than the ring finger, and that one eye is more valuable than one ear.
But do people value body parts accurately, in a way that corresponds with their actual functionality? There are some hints that, yes, they do. For example, laypeople and lawmakers regard the loss of a single part as less severe than the loss of multiples of that part. In addition, laypeople and lawmakers regard the loss of a part as less severe than the loss of the whole; the loss of a thumb is less severe than the loss of a hand, and the loss of a hand is less severe than the loss of an arm…
… Much of what counts as moral or immoral, legal or illegal, varies from place to place. Drinking alcohol, eating meat and cousin marriage, for example, have been variously condemned or favored in different times and places.
But recent research has also shown that, in some domains, there is much more moral and legal consensus about what is wrong, across cultures and even throughout the millennia. Wrongdoing – arson, theft, fraud, trespassing and disorderly conduct – appears to engender a morality and related laws that are similar across times and places. Laws about bodily damage also seem to fit into this category of moral or legal universals…
“An eye for an eye: People agree about the values of body parts across cultures and eras,” from @us.theconversation.com.
* Voltaire
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As we contemplate corporeal consensus, we might recall that on this date in 1974 (after the 1973 airing of a series of made-for-TV movies that established the character), The Six Million Dollar Man debuted as a weekly hour-long series.
Unlike superhero movies today, The Six Million Dollar Man TV series was not based on a comic book title. Instead, the science fiction, fantasy, adventure series was based Martin Caidin’s 1972 novel Cyborg and its three sequels. The series starred Lee Majors as an astronaut whose life is forever changed after a NASA test flight accident. Colonel Steve Austin awoke after the accident to find that his body had been rebuilt with bionic parts including two legs, one arm and one eye. The cost of the operation ran roughly $6 million. Now a super-human, Austin could run over 60 mph and had incredible strength. He found work as a secret agent for the Office of Scientific Intelligence. Before the show debuted on this day in 1974, three movie pilots had already been shown on ABC the year before. In 1975, a two-part episode featured Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), a professional tennis player who experienced a parachuting accident and was given bionic parts as well. However, her body rejected these parts and died. Then again, he character was so popular, Sommers’ character came back to life to star in her own series, The Bionic Woman. Both series were hugely popular and ran through 1978. Then, three new made-for-TV movies starring the couple aired in 1987, 1989 and 1994 and all three also starred Lee Majors’ son (Lee Majors II) as OSI agent Jim Castillian… – source
“This is a cardboard universe”*…
As we rid ourselves of the detritus of the Holiday season, let us pause to consider its signature component: at the turn of the 21st century, corrugated cardboard accounted for just fifteen percent of the United States recycling stream; today, it’s nearly half. Shannon Mattern on the cardboard box…
… As historian Maria Rentetzi writes (“Cardboard Box: The Politics of Materiality,” in Boxes: A Field Guide), “the cardboard box — the waste of our commercial world — is recycled in such a way as to make visible the disorder in our societies, the faults of capitalism.” It is an abject object that touches all parts of the city, from the granite kitchen island to the sewer grate. And for many of us, the cardboard box is our closest touchpoint to globalized trade, structuring our relations with people in distant places. It brings the logistics chain to our doorstep. The magnificently ripped metal freight container may get the Economist cover shot, but the plain brown box delivers messages to our homes. Its very existence in our homes, Marshall McLuhan would say, is the message. In the immortal words of Walter Paepcke, founder of the Container Corporation of America, “packages are not just commodities; they are communications.”
Let’s unpack that, shall we? Boxes are media in multiple senses of the word. They’re lithographed surfaces designed to be read, and they’re dimensional containers that mediate between outside and inside worlds. They’re “media of transport and information, shapers of public opinion and consumer desire, and means of targeting attention.” And they’re “logistical media” that “arrange people and property into time and space,” that “coordinate and control the movement of labor, people, and things situated along and within global supply chains.” The cardboard box is a minimalist form with maximalist ambitions, an arboreal apparatus made from one of the world’s most abundant renewable resources, then filled with plastic and moved around by copious quantities of oil. It doesn’t just coordinate and control landscapes; it transforms them.
Cardboard’s ubiquity rests on simple claims: I can hold that, and I can go there. The Container Corporation of America was founded in 1926, and upon those claims it built an empire with surprising reach. The CCA made collapsible shipping boxes, and it transformed packaging into a science and an art. It advanced market research, shaped mid-century taste, and altered the chromatic universe through color standards. It employed some of the best graphic designers of the period, and as national borders shifted after the Second World War, it commissioned Herbert Bayer, author of the Universal typeface, to revise the World Geo-Graphic Atlas. Even then, the CCA was remaking that new world to meet its logistical needs, rehabbing mining towns and germinating forests, and orchestrating civic discourse about all of this.
How did a packaging company get into the publishing business — into the containment and distribution of information? How were geographic imaginations changed in the process? Soon we’ll dive into the Paepcke archive, to find answers to those questions. But first I want to show you how a cardboard box is made…
In turn, inspiring and horrifying– the social history of the cardboard carton: “World in a Box,” @shannonmattern.bsky.social in @placesjournal.bsky.social.
For an earlier (R)D focused on Mattern’s work: “To clarify, ADD data.”
* Philip K. Dick, The Dark-Haired Girl
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As we tape it tight, we might recall that it was on this date in 1910 that a federal official who might slowed the onset of the cardboard box was fired: Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the United States Forest Service, was fired by President William Howard Taft. Pinchot had opposed Taft’s newly appointed Secretary of the Interior, Richard Ballinger, who favored commercial exploitation of federal reserve lands.
During President Theodore Roosevelt’s term, Pinchot had help enable policies for the conservation of natural resources. Roosevelt had designated millions of acres to protect as National Forests. That legacy was threatened, so Pinchot pressured Taft to remove Ballinger from office. In November of 1909, Collier’s Magazine had created a scandal when it accused Ballinger of shady dealings in coal lands in Alaska. When Pinchot criticized both Ballinger and Taft, the president reacted by firing him.
“What is it about maps? I could look at them all day”*…
Jonn Elledge devotes the current issue of his nifty newsletter to a series of fascinating facts from his wonderful book, A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders (as it’s known in its U.S. edition, as compared to the less qualified title of the U.K. original pictured above)…
… Back in May, the good people at the UK’s leading maps and travel specialist bookshop Stanfords were kind enough to select my new book A History of the World in 47 Borders as their book of the month. And to promote it, they asked me to make a quick video, talking about it…
My initial thought was to list a single fact from each of the book’s 47 chapters, but that, I soon realised, would go on forever and take an absurd number of takes to get right. So in the end I decided on a top 10: that took an absurd number of takes to get right too, and also features me the wrong way round, for some reason, but at least it’s only three minutes long…
… as a special Christmas treat, not to mention shameless attempt to get more of you to buy the book for yourself or a loved one, here are all 47 of the facts I originally chose…
You’ll find tidbits like these:
The oldest known international border was the one between what today we call Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. We know about it today because, sometime around 3100BCE, someone abolished it.
The Great Wall is not really one wall, but many. And the first Chinese emperor used to kidnap young men to make them build them.
The Open Borders Policies of Genghis Khan basically created the modern world.
In 1884, the great powers agreed to divide up the entire map of Africa without ever visiting. No Africans were in attendance, and one who’d asked for an invite, the Sultan of Zanzibar, was openly laughed at.
There’s a piece of Africa which two countries, Egypt and Sudan, both aggressively claim belongs to the other.
There’s an opera house in which the US/Canada border divides audience from stage.
There’s a coral atoll a thousand miles from Japan which is technically classed as a suburb of Tokyo.
Air traffic control zones cover the entire planet except the Galapagos Islands and the bit of the Arctic where Santa lives.
So much more at “47 Facts from A History of the World in 47 Borders,” from @jonnelledge.bsky.social
* Bill Bryson
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As we muse on maps, we might send acutely observant birthday greetings to an astute student of the human animal, anthropologist Margaret Mead; she was born on this date in 1901. Best-known for her studies of the nonliterate peoples of Oceania, she was 23 when she first traveled to the South Pacific to conduct research for her doctoral dissertation. The book that resulted, Coming of Age in Samoa, was– and remains– a best-seller.
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