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| 0824873114
| 9780824873110
| 0824873114
| 4.00
| 1
| unknown
| Jul 31, 2017
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really liked it
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I forgot to review this book earlier. I read it for comps. It touched on a lot of issues I’m interested in: colonialism, conservation, rivers, and res
I forgot to review this book earlier. I read it for comps. It touched on a lot of issues I’m interested in: colonialism, conservation, rivers, and resource extraction. It actually reminded me a lot of the types of ongoing environmental and Indigenous self-determination struggles that are still going on in so-called Canada, especially contestations over pipelines (which I have involved myself with at times). A lot of the book is about one Indigenous leader in Australia that allied himself with neoliberal development of natural resources, framing conservation efforts as colonial constraints preventing Indigenous resource development and self-determination. The book raises many of the issues that exist in ‘Canada’ also, whose environmentalist movements early on suffered from the same sort of colonial mentality that existed in ‘Australia’. There were periods in Australia of strong coalition building between environmentalists and Indigenous peoples, while other periods where these relations were severely strained. The dynamics between Indigenous peoples, private capital, and environmentalists share many of the tensions and alliances that also exist in ‘Canada’ and I think is a testament to the distinctive nature of Anglo-settler ‘liberal democracies’. Australia seems to have taken steps towards joining conservation and Indigenous self-determination earlier and to a greater extent than Canada has, at least from what I gather reading this book. Yet there remains many unresolved contradictions, that I think stem from the contradictions of capitalist development (my view) as well as the legacies of colonialism and perceptual problems of the state regarding ‘nature’, ‘wilderness’ and ‘wildness’.
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Notes are private!
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May 19, 2023
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Aug 29, 2023
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May 19, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0485006340
| 9780485006346
| 0485006340
| unknown
| 4.20
| 5
| Jun 08, 2001
| Jul 23, 2001
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really liked it
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Surprisingly interesting read for comps. It was one of the last books I read, and breezed through it very quickly because I was short on time. It enga
Surprisingly interesting read for comps. It was one of the last books I read, and breezed through it very quickly because I was short on time. It engages with a lot of core STS scholars and historians of science and technology. It was often enjoyable to read, though sometimes there wasn’t always a substantive argument that I could discern behind the palatable prose. It spent a lot of effort thinking about the intersection of technology and politics (governance, empire, space, networks, movements etc.). My favourite chapter was definitely “On Interactivity” (Chapter 6) about interactive exhibits in museums and science centres (the San Francisco Exploratorium, London’s National Museum of Science and Industry, and another similar place in Paris). Barry writes: “For the museum of science, putting the interactive model into practice promises to turn the unfocused visitor-consumer into the interested, engaged and informed technological citizen. Interactivity is more than a particular technological form. It provides what Deleuze calls a diagram for organising the relations between objects and persons. Today, interactivity has come to be a dominant model of how objects can be used to produce subjects. In an interactive model, subjects are not disciplined, they are allowed.” Barry goes on to work through various examples and cases from his museums of interest, citing theorizations from Bourdieu, Zizek, Foucault, Lyotard, and interestingly J.B.S. Haldane. There was one particularly interesting section on IMAX theatres (a company I am quite fascinated by because IMAX Corporation is headquartered in Mississauga, where I live). It engages with Virilio and also mentions the bizarre role the defense contractor Lockheed Corporation played in making a popular IMAX film happen: “Just outside of the Cité, the position of the museum visitor in the museum ’s exhibitionary strategy is dramatically symbolised by a huge 3-D Omnimax cinema — La Géode — in which ‘visual effects combine with sound effects to transport the spectators into the midst of the action surrounding them’.”! Reflecting on the significance of La Géode, Paul Virilio reminds us that ‘the fusion/confusion of camera, projection system and auditorium in the Imax/Omnimax process, is part of a long tradition of “mobile framing” in cinema, dating from the invention of the tracking shot in 1898’.”” Placing the Omnimax in relation to the early history of cinema is certainly appropriate. Like the cinema of the 1890s and 1900s, contemporary Imax/Omnimax cinema is less concerned with narrative than with exhibition, spectacle and affect.” However, the economic conditions of Imax and early cinema are quite different. Whereas small-scale production companies played an important role in the develpment of early cinema, the relative scarcity of Imax/Omnimax audioria and the expense of film production has meant that the development of Imax/Omnimax depends on corporate sponsorship. In La Geode one popular programme is a film of the Space Shuttle produced by NASA and the Lockheed Corporation.” The chapter on air-quality monitoring called “Political Chemistry” was also enjoyable, with further engagement with Virilio, Althusser, and Haraway. And the following chapter on Demonstration was also interesting. Some excerpts from that chapter: “It is commonplace to think of a demonstrator as a political actor: a protestor against an injustice, the breaking of a promise, a threat (or the absence) of violence, or an intolerable situation. Demonstrators, in this sense, are markers of the unacceptability of another’s actions, expressions of whether the exercise of power should be limited, or intensified. They claim to display that subjects have a stake in government. This political sense of the term emerged the nineteenth century in connection with the Chartists and the revolutions of 1848, a manifestation of the emergence of the masses as a political subject. But the notion of demonstration also has an earlier historical sense. In the Middle Ages the demonstrator had a particular function in the anatomy lecture theatre. He pointed out the feature of the body which vas being shown and about which the lecturer was speaking. The demonstrator made visible to the audience the object of which the lecturer spoke, and thereby made a significant contribution to the production and dissemination of anatomical knowledge in public.” To be in the presence of a demonstration was a matter of witnessing a technical practice. The truth of the lecturer’s knowledge was established through observing a demonstration. This sense of the term still exists, in some rm, today. In the university science laboratory, a demonstrator is one usually a graduate student) who assists undergraduates in their practical classes, pointing out the objects they are expected to discover and understand. The truths of laboratory science are proved to the novice, in part, through demonstration.” The same chapter has an interesting comment on proletarian public space and some engagement with Miriam Hansen: “In considering the importance of electronic media to political movements, many critical accounts have tended to posit a distinction between official or corporate mass media and radical media. In an analysis of broadcast media, for example, one model is suggested by Oskar Net and Alexander Kluge. In their book Public Sphere and Experience, they draw a distinction between a bourgeois and a proletarian public sphere; a distinction which broadly corresponds to one in which political and cultural life is governed from 'above' through the activities of public institutions - or from below, through the experience of subjects themselves, through their everyday life. As Miriam Hansen observes, the ‘proletarian' public is not so much an empirical category in Net and Kluge's work but a category of negation. It is that complex set of spaces which are both suppressed in the interests of government, and yet emerge, in Hansen's terms, 'in the fissures, overlaps and interstices of a nonlinear historical process. In this context, experimental and independent media occupy, according to Negt and Kluge, a critical role in the continual regeneration of a proletarian public sphere and the exploitation of the complex political opportunities and problems that develop from it. Perhaps. The example of the road protests suggests, however, that while Negt and Kluge's sense of the 'overlaps and interstices of nonlinear' processes is very suggestive, their bimodal model of experimental and independent media and state media is too crude, or simply historically specific to the German 1970s.” There was also a fun little section on this European technology bureaucrat who was into Marxist theory, which was really random but interesting, haha: “| want to tell one specific story about networks — __about a particular part of the European Commission’s bureaucracy in Brussels, a section (Directorate A) of DG-XII (the Directorate General for the Science, Research and Development) which, when I visited it in 1994-95, was devoted to research strategy and supporting measures: ‘which basically means studies, evaluations, reports and foresight studies and so on’. …One researcher, who worked for a unit called FAST (Forecasting and assessment of science and technology) in DG-XIIA had been interested in labour-process theory, in Gramsci and in ethnomethodology. He expressed his institutional position in the following terms: '[Individually] we have an awful lot of autonomy, which makes it important for us to go through the whole hierarchy and especially to jump between institutions and promote the viewpoints of each of us [in FAST]. We have our own networks, and we write our syntheses and we promote our own recommendations for Community policies. Another senior figure's intellectual and political position derived, in part, from Marxism and systems theory, but was also, in his view, comparable to the position adopted by some scientists. FAST was a 'scientific militant about the human and social utility of science ... a scientific militant like Prigogine is [a] militant for the new alliances ... . Its function was to open up controversy about the social dimensions of science and technology in the Commission and to conduct a 'resistance' against dominant positions including, above all, the 'competitiveness ideology' which conceived of the function of scientific and technological activity in narrowly economic terms.” ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 17, 2023
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Aug 02, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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Paperback
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| 1575240718
| 9781575240718
| 1575240718
| 4.00
| 1
| Apr 01, 2000
| Dec 01, 2002
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Very mixed bag of essays and chapters in this book. My favourite in this book was likely Lisa Mighetto’s Researching Endangered Species, because it wa
Very mixed bag of essays and chapters in this book. My favourite in this book was likely Lisa Mighetto’s Researching Endangered Species, because it was focused on extinct fish species in various waterways (a significant aspect of my own research project). The most valuable chapters for me were near the beginning of this book. There were quite a few chapters on professionalization pathways for environmental historians outside of academia and public history, including fields like law, engineering, and business (which was the weirdest of the bunch). These were interesting, but strange contributions. Not sure I’d really recommend this book to anyone. I read it for comps, because a number of notable scholars that work at the intersection of public history and environmental history are included in this volume, but the quality of contributions varied a lot in this book (at least as it pertains to the sort of writing that interests me).
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Notes are private!
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May 16, 2023
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Jul 28, 2023
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May 16, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0674032160
| 9780674032163
| 0674032160
| 3.91
| 34
| 2006
| Aug 05, 2009
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really liked it
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I read this book for comps, and it was one of the books I faltered on in terms of questions from my committee. I admittedly read it very quickly, and
I read this book for comps, and it was one of the books I faltered on in terms of questions from my committee. I admittedly read it very quickly, and I was very preoccupied with different parts of the book than the professor was who asked me about this text. The opening story about Matthew Perry in the mid-19th century marching over a hundred naval officers towards the Japanese 'emperor' to show off various American technological spectacles was a very interesting story that I was actually not familiar with before reading this book. Following this, the book then proceeds to analyze the role technological prowess had on American colonization of Indigenous lands, its deployment in civilizing efforts among Anglo-Americans (Chapter 1). Next, the book traces American Pacific expansion into China and Japan (Chapter 2), before tracing colonial interventions in the Philippines and Caribbean (Chapter 3-4). Next, the book sketches out the post-WW2 period in its second half. The book argues that the spectacle of technological prowess was used as a means of asserting American imperial dominance and control over other countries, both at a pragmatic and a symbolic level. This remains an extremely relevant geopolitical issue, especially as other global poles of technological prowess emerge. I was especially fascinated by Adas’ analysis of how this dynamic fit into the decades of the Cold War, taken up in Chapter 5: “The second half of the book is devoted to the half-century after the Second World War, when the United States became first a superpower and then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the global hegemon. The centrality of technological achievement and material prosperity in shaping the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence in the emerging nations is explored in Chapter 5 on the deployment of modernization theory as an antidote to Marxist socialism and converging approaches to development assistance in the postcolonial world.” As might be evident, this book speaks to the emergence of international development theory, particularly how it emerged to counteract Marxist theories of development. After this chapter (which covers interesting materials, but discusses Marxism in annoying way), the book details American military adventures in Vietnam (Chapter 6), and after, the Persian Gulf war of 1990-1991 (Chapter 7). Overall the book offers a scathing critique of American imperialism and military violence, particularly the legacy of American capitalism during the Cold War. Its analysis of the Soviet Union, the Peoples’ Republic of China, and Marxism more broadly was of mixed merit in my view. Adas seems unnecessarily antagonistic to really-existing socialism at times. I only agreed with some of his assessment in this respect, and mostly disagree with the sort of rhetoric he deploys, using terms like genocidal in ways that I think many respectable and less-than-radical scholars would disagree with (I am by no means talking about Stalinists here). The only political project Adas seemed uncritically sympathetic to is small-is-beautiful Ghandian appropriate technology, which I was quite taken with as a master’s student, but am a lot more critical of now. I think Langdon Winner offers some valuable critiques of this movement in his book the Whale and the Reactor, but I think Marxism more broadly does also. I suppose I am a bit of a 'modernist' in that respect, while Adas does not quite seem to be. The most valuable part of this book for me was the abundance of empirical sources and material that underscore American militarism and imperialism. I will finish with a few excerpts below. The first is a comment about the threat that American colonizers associated with forests: “At least since medieval times, Europeans had usually represented heavily forested regions as dark, overgrown, and disordered spaces whose crude human inhabitants were prone to melancholy, isolation, and rough living. Woodlands were seen as places of danger, where wild beasts prowled and bandits and legendary wild men lay in wait for travelers or those who strayed too far from settled areas. These associations are underscored by the derivation of the concept of savagery from the Latin word silva, which referred to a wooded area.” Colonizers also recognized the tactical use of forests in Indigenous warfare: “The Ind*ans’ approach to battle was often perceived as involving a cowardly reliance on ambushes and surprise assaults. Here again the Amerindians’ ingenuity in making use of the forest and other forms of natural cover was usually reported as evidence of unmanly and treacherous temperaments rather than as effective exploitation of the environment.” This is interesting context for a later section that covers the huge deforestation that occurred in Vietnam through the use of agent orange: “When high-tech assaults on suspected guerrilla bases and supportive villages proved indecisive at best, U.S. counterinsurgency operations were escalated to a level of warfare that had never before been pursued in such a deliberate, sustained, and routinized manner. Innovative ways of harnessing scientific research and new technology made it possible to wage war on the very environment of South Vietnam, which was so amenable to guerrilla tactics. Research by Dow Chemical and other American corporate giants led to the development of a variety of defoliants and herbicides, of which the most widely employed was agent orange. These chemical concoctions were used to deplete the rainforest cover of areas considered major NLF sanctuaries. By the late 1960s as much as 25 percent of South Vietnam’s highland rainforests, mangrove wetlands in the Mekong Delta, and large swaths of woodland along the Cambodian border had been defoliated. Toxic spraying devastated wildlife, fish and shellfish industries, and Vietnam’s hardwood logging industry, which in the French period had become a significant export sector. The slogan adopted by the helicopter crews assigned to spraying operations—“Only we can prevent forests”—was, in its subversion of the virtuous adage of the U.S. forest service’s Smokey the Bear, an example of the black humor that American combat troops used to cope with the violation of personal morality that was virtually inescapable for those engaged in counterinsurgency operations. It was also a disturbing reminder of the moral numbing that has invariably been associated with those participating in technowar. In the more densely populated lowlands, some 5 million acres— or roughly 10 percent of the cultivated area of South Vietnam—were sterilized by repeated chemical spraying. Peasants living in affected areas and soldiers on all sides of the conflict operating there, as well as the U.S. military personnel who carried out the herbicidal campaign, experienced high rates of cancer and contracted respiratory and nervous disorders associated with the chemicals. And such afflictions have persisted through the decades since the end of the war.73 An additional area the size of Connecticut was rendered incapable of food production by the craterization caused by bombing. The large ponds that formed in the bomb craters in the monsoon season were ideal breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes. Rats, which thrived in the garbage dumps near American military bases and the fortified hamlets, were the carriers of a rabies epidemic in the late 1960s. A region that had once been one of the great rice-producing and -exporting centers of Asia was importing hundreds of millions of tons of rice by the mid-1960s. Even then the maldistribution of the imported rice, coupled with food shortages in areas where bombing and chemical spraying were concentrated, resulted in widespread brain damage or kwashiorkor among malnourished children. By 1970 American and U.N. observers estimated that the counter-insurgency war was claiming six civilian casualties for every guerrilla. And of the civilians killed or maimed, four out of ten were children, which meant that a quarter of a million South Vietnamese under the age of sixteen had died of combat-related causes during the American phase of the war and over a million had been wounded.74 All this devastation was being inflicted on the people and the land that U.S. policymakers insisted they were trying to save from the evils of communist domination.” Adas makes an interesting connection between colonial condescension to Indigenous peoples and colonial patriarchy: “Perhaps no aspect of Indian agricultural practices elicited more disdainful English responses than the fact that in Amerindian societies cultivation was overwhelmingly women’s work.” This was an interesting comment on American views of East Asia: “But in contrast to the British philosopher, who viewed Greece as the original home of civilization, American expansionists favored China and Japan. They envisioned the ancient lands of East Asia as the ultimate destination of the moving frontier that would both join the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and provide the resources and impetus for America’s mission to revitalize the decadent civilizations of the Old World.” There was also a really important comment about watermills, which Adas claims was the preeminent source of power for processing agricultural commodities, lumber, and textiles (and not steam even as the Industrial Revolution was in full swing: “The success of these early forays into the diverse ecosystems of the frontiers often depended on handcrafted implements and pre-industrial machinery. Watermills, for example, remained the preeminent source of power for processing agricultural produce, turning timber into lumber, and manufacturing textiles until the mid-nineteenth century. The superb American axe, which colonists along the Atlantic had wielded to clear land and transform forests into exports, remained a critical tool both for settlers in the upper Midwest and on the great plains and for those engaged in the lumber industry that flourished first in the Great Lakes region and later in the Pacific Northwest. Single-bitted axes were not replaced by long-handled, double-bitted ones and steel crosscut saws until the 1870s.” Despite the pre-eminence of hydropower in these industries, Adas also mentions that steam was also vital to deforestation (lumbering was the largest US industry by gross sales by the 1870s): “Advances in iron-working for locks facilitated the construction of canals that linked newly settled areas with steamboat carriers on the Mississippi and centers of commerce and industry on the Great Lakes and on the Atlantic coast. Steam engines drove mechanized “donkeys” that skidded cut timber to rivers and railway lines that carried it to steam-powered sawmills where it was sawed into lumber. New technologies enabled logging companies to deplete within decades forests in the upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest more extensive than those in the Atlantic colonies that had taken centuries to clear. By the 1870s lumbering was the nation’s largest industry in terms of gross sales. Steam-powered machines drained western mines and carted the ores to railway junctions where they were transferred to trains that carried them to the smelters and rolling mills of the Midwest and the East.” The bloodshed of American colonization of the Philippines was also described rather well by Adas: “The four-year “insurrection” that followed resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Filipino soldiers and more than 700,000 civilians. The latter perished mainly as a result of epidemic diseases spread by the warring parties; the destruction of crops, farm implements, and housing; and direct assaults by American units on villagers, especially during the later guerrilla phase of the conflict. Over 4,000 United States soldiers were killed in military campaigns to crush Filipino resistance, which drained hundreds of millions of dollars from the American treasury. Particularly on Luzon and several of the Visayan islands, where the fighting was concentrated, the war also took a heavy toll on the communications infrastructure, which had already been heavily damaged in the struggle to oust the Spanish, the islands’ original colonial overlords.” The central role of engineers to American colonialism in the Philippines was also particular interesting: “Although none of the early governors was an engineer, members of the profession pervaded all other levels of colonial administration. From the time of the shift to civilian government in 1901, it was stipulated that the supervisors of the colony’s twenty-seven provinces must be civil engineers. The engineer-supervisors were thus pivotal members of the three-person boards in charge of the day-to-day administration of the provinces. Engineers were also in charge of the land revenue and geological surveys, the mapping expeditions, and the public works projects aimed at rationalizing space across the islands, sorting out property claims, and assessing the colony’s resources. In addition, they served on the provincial boards of health. In that capacity, engineers emerged as key strategists in the medical campaigns against the succession of epidemics that struck the Philippines in the first years of American rule. An engineer also headed the committee appointed to investigate the potential of the Baguio area as the site of a hill station where the colonists could vacation and escape the coastal heat. There were never enough engineers to staff all the positions assigned to them, a situation which in part accounted for the high salaries and other special incentives offered to recruits from the United States. The shortage of engineers is a recurring concern in the many letters written by Taft in his years as governor urging prominent friends back home to nominate qualified young men for engineering posts in the Philippines.” The concluding paragraph to the Philippines chapter was also interesting: “Warnings that the compradores might monopolize political power and enhance their domination of the inequitable socioeconomic system had been voiced by American officials, such as Schurman and Taft, from the early days of commission government. Nonetheless, in their rhetoric as least, colonial policymakers remained confident that more machines, better roads, and mass education would in time avert this outcome and render the colonial experiment a resounding success. In fact, however, material increase without social reform exacerbated the divisions and tensions within Filipino society. Persisting undercurrents of peasant resistance were channeled into local uprisings, quasi-millenarian religious movements, and endemic everyday and avoidance protest. If there was any doubt that America’s mission to bequeath its developmental brand of civilization to the Philippines had fallen far short of its stated goals, it would be clearly resolved by the revolutionary struggles of the decade after the Second World War and the intensifying civil strife that culminated in the overthrow of the Marcos regime in the mid-1980s.” ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 15, 2023
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Jul 25, 2023
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May 15, 2023
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Paperback
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| 1597265136
| 9781597265133
| 1597265136
| 3.80
| 5
| Jul 26, 2011
| Jul 26, 2011
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I found the first few chapters most interesting, especially the section that explored the intersection of theological and religious history with ecolo
I found the first few chapters most interesting, especially the section that explored the intersection of theological and religious history with ecological restoration. There were interesting comments in passing about St. Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa, the Benedictines, St Francis, Anselm and so on. There were also some useful sections on Aldo Leopold, and a helpful contextualization regarding his notion of land as “a community to which we belong.” There were some useful overview sections on important academic contributors to ecological restoration such as Eric Higgs, who I also read for comps. I ultimately disagreed with a good portion of this book however, especially its dichotomy between ecocentric restoration as an altruistic orientation and utilitarian restoration as more self-interested. It ultimately lacks an adequate accounting of global inequality. I think an excellent counterpoint to this is Rob Nixon’s chapter in the book Curating the Future, because it takes seriously the heterogeneity of human interests. Humans obviously do not act as a homogenous actor (and this is his fundamental critique of the Anthropocene). Nixon more fully accounts for class interests and imperialist interests in his work, the utilitarian interests of rich imperialist countries are not the same as poor colonized countries or neo-colonies, and growing food to meet the basic needs of humans or generating electricity to operate a public hospital is not the same as expending huge amounts of fossil fuels on extracting gold from ore or operating a munitions factory. Indigenous emphasis on good relations I think is more productive rhetorically than the term ecocentric per se (and certainly compared to altruism and self-interest) The one other thing I found helpful about this book was concrete examples it provided about how struggles for Indigenous self-determination overlapped with ecological restoration (with specific examples). It didn’t quite put it in those terms, but I think decolonization (in the sense of returning control of lands to Indigenous nations) must be fundamental to any project of ecological restoration in North America. ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 13, 2023
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Jul 14, 2023
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May 13, 2023
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Paperback
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| 041561015X
| 9780415610155
| 041561015X
| 4.11
| 3,510
| 1993
| Apr 04, 2011
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The opening epigram in this book is from Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto: “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulat The opening epigram in this book is from Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto: “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” The book, as a meditation on citationality, cites and works through a number of other works as it thinks through questions of constructivism, gender, and the body: “The texts that form the focus of this inquiry come from diverse traditions of writing: Plato's Timaeus, Freud's "On Narcissism," writings by Jacques Lacan, stories by Willa Cather, Nella Larsen's novella Passing, Jennie Livingston's film Paris Is Burning, and essays in recent sexual theory and politics, as well as texts in radical democratic theory.” I did not know, before reading this book for comps, that there would be a sustained reflection on Nella Larsen’s novella Passing (a book I very much enjoyed) as well as Paris is Burning, which I have not seen, and unfortunately missed last summer when it played at Christie Pits. The commentary in this book on psychoanalysis, Freud, Lacan, and Zizek remained very opaque to me, and I did not get a lot out of those sections. I think the introduction and first chapter were the most productive for me, though I think Ian Hacking is a lot more clarifying for thinking about the broad issues of constructivist theory. One excerpt I found particularly interesting was from the first chapter: “The classical association of femininity with materiality can be traced to a set of etymologies which link matter with mater and matrix (or the womb) and, hence, with a problematic of reproduction. The classical configuration of matter as a site of generation or origination becomes especially significant when the account of what an object is and means requires recourse to its originating principle. When not explicitly associated with reproduction, matter is generalized as a principle of origination and causality. In Greek, hyle is the wood or timber out of which various cultural constructions are made, but also a principle of origin, development, and teleology which is at once causal and explanatory. This link between matter, origin, and significance suggests the indissolubility of classical Greek notions of materiality and signification. That which matters about an object is its matter. In both the Latin and the Greek, matter (materia and hyle) is neither a simple, brute positivity or referent nor a blank surface or slate awaiting an external signification, but is always in some sense temporalized. This is true for Marx as well, when "matter" is understood as a principle of transformation, presuming and inducing a future. The matrix is an originating and formative principle which inaugurates and informs a development of some organism or object. Hence, for Aristotle, "matter is potentiality [dynameos], form actuality" In reproduction, women are said to contribute the matter; men, the form. The Greek hyle is wood that already has been cut from trees, instrumentalized and instrumentalizable, artifactual, on the way to being put to use. Materia in Latin denotes the stuff out of which things are made, not only the timber for houses and ships but whatever serves as nourishment for infants: nutrients that act as extensions of the mother's body. Insofar as matter appears in these cases to be invested with a certain capacity to originate and to compose that for which it also supplies the principle of intelligibility, then matter is clearly defined by a certain power of creation and rationality that is for the most part divested from the more modern empirical deployments of the term. To speak within these classical contexts of bodies that matter is not an idle pun, for to be material means to materialize, where the principle of that materialization is precisely what "matters" about that body, its very intelligibility. In this sense, to know the significance of something is to know how and why it matters, where "to matter" means at once "to materialize" and "to mean.”” I am loving this little etymological presentation here (and the constellation of terms... matter, mater, mother, matrix), bringing together materialism, matrices, timber (and by implication forests), Marx, and gender in this generative way. After this section Butler provides an interesting explanation of the Aristotelian conception of the soul: “For Aristotle the soul designates the actualization of matter, where matter is understood as fully potential and unactualized. As a result, he maintains in de Anima that the soul is "the first grade of actuality of a naturally organized body." He continues, "That is why we can wholly dismiss as unnecessary the question whether the soul and the body are one: it is as meaningless to ask whether the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp are one, or generally the matter [hyle] of a thing and that of which it is the matter [hyle]." In the Greek, there is no reference to "stamps," but the phrase, "the shape given by the stamp" is contained in the single term, "schema." Schema means form, shape, figure, appearance, dress, gesture, figure of a syllogism, and grammatical form.” I actually had no idea that this analogy between the soul and form goes back to Aristotle, it always seemed so modern to me when I encountered it in the theology of John Polkinghorne. From Aristotle and the soul, Butler moves to Foucault and materialization and subjection. Foucault says “The soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body” after which Judith Butler writes: “This ‘subjection,’ or assujettissement, is not only a subordination but a securing and maintaining, a putting into place of a subject, a subjectivation.” (later on Butler at numerous times uses the Althusserian term interpellation). After this, Butler works through a reading Luce Irigaray provides of Plato’s Timaeus, with some commentary from Julia Kristeva. There are interesting theological flourishes throughout in this book, alluding to cosmogonies, transubstantiation, creation, and so on. However a lot of the stuff in this book felt dense and difficult to read for me. Perhaps if I had read this book under calmer circumstances than the frenzy of comps exam preparations, I would have gotten more out of it. Anyway, I’ve appended a few excerpts I noted to conclude this reflection: “Something similar is at work with the concept of materiality, which may well be "something without which we cannot do anything." What does it mean to have recourse to materiality, since it is clear from the start that matter has a history (indeed, more than one) and that the history of matter is in part determined by the negotiation of sexual difference. We may seek to return to matter as prior to discourse to ground our claims about sexual difference only to discover that matter is fully sedimented with discourses on sex and sexuality that prefigure and constrain the uses to which that term can be put.” “Then, what ensues is an exasperated debate which many of us have tired of hearing: Either (1) constructivism is reduced to a position of linguistic monism, whereby linguistic construction is understood to be generative and deterministic. Critics making that presumption can be heard to say, "If everything is discourse, what about the body?" or (2) when construction is figuratively reduced to a verbal action which appears to presuppose a subject, critics working within such a presumption can be heard to say, "If gender is constructed, then who is doing the constructing?"; though, of course, (3) the most pertinent formulation of this question is the following: "If the subject is constructed, then who is constructing the subject?" In the first case, construction has taken the place of a godlike agency which not only causes but composes everything which is its object; it is the divine performative, bringing into being and exhaustively constituting that which it names, or, rather, it is that kind of transitive referring which names and inaugurates at once. For something to be constructed, according to this view of construction, is for it to be created and determined through that process.” “If gender is a construction, must there be an "I" or a "we" who enacts or performs that construction? How can there be an activity, a constructing, without presupposing an agent who precedes and performs that activity? How would we account for the motivation and direction of construction without such a subject? As a rejoinder, I would suggest that it takes a certain suspicion toward grammar to reconceive the matter in a different light. For if gender is constructed, it is not necessarily constructed by an "I" or a "we" who stands before that construction in any spatial or temporal sense of "before." Indeed. it is unclear that there can be an "I" or a "we" who has not been submitted, subjected to gender, where gendering is, among other things, the differentiating relations by which speaking subjects come into being. Subjected to gender, but subjectivated by gender, the "I" neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves.” “Within speech act theory, a performative is that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names? According to the biblical rendition of the performative, i.e., "Let there be light!" it appears that it is by virtue of the power of a subject or its will that a phenomenon is named into being. In a critical reformulation of the performative, Derrida makes clear that this power is not the function of an originating will, but is always derivative: “Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a "coded" or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way as a "citation".... in such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear, it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance [l'énonciation].”” “To what extent does discourse gain the authority to bring about what it names through citing the conventions of authority? And does a subject appear as the author of its discursive effects to the extent that the citational practice by which he/she is conditioned and mobilized remains unmarked? …Further, if a subject comes to be through a subjection to the norms of sex, a subjection which requires an assumption of the norms of sex, can we read that "assumption" as precisely a modality of this kind of citationality?” “…Gianni Vattimo has argued that poststructuralism, understood as textual play, marks the dissolution of matter as a contemporary category. And it is this lost matter, he argues, which must now be reformulated in order for poststructuralism to give way to a project of greater ethical and political value… If everything is discourse, what happens to the body? If everything is a text, what about violence and bodily injury? Does anything matter in or for poststructuralism?” “And here the question is not whether or not there ought to be reference to matter, just as the question never has been whether or not there ought to be speaking about women. This speaking will occur, and for feminist reasons, it must; the category of women does not become useless through deconstruction, but becomes one whose uses are no longer reified as "referents," and which stand a chance of being opened up, indeed, of coming to signify in ways that none of us can predict in advance.“ “Surely, it must be possible both to use the term, to use it tactically even as one is, as it were, used and positioned by it, and also to subject the term to a critique which interrogates the exclusionary operations and differential power-relations that construct and delimit feminist invocations of "women.”” ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 09, 2023
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Jul 06, 2023
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May 09, 2023
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Paperback
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| 0773512489
| 9780773512481
| 0773512489
| 3.83
| 42
| Aug 29, 1994
| Aug 29, 1994
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really liked it
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This was a surprisingly interesting book that I read for comps. I was not familiar with Ian McKay before reading this, but glad someone on my comps co
This was a surprisingly interesting book that I read for comps. I was not familiar with Ian McKay before reading this, but glad someone on my comps committee recommended him to me. McKay cited many left theorists early on in this book, and after following up on this, I found out McKay is a prolific historian of the Canadian left and I hope to read more of his work in the future. He basically demonstrates in this book that Maritime folk identity was carefully crafted and dictated from above by a class of elite outsiders who enacted a form of Gramscian hegemony to further its own class interests and perpetuate a form of neo-nationalism and antimodernism, while often benefiting off the backs of poor rural folks whose stories and craft work were transformed into commodities in service of a capitalism very accommodating to the tourist gaze. He traces the work of women who worked as folk music compilers and tastemakers in maritime handicrafts, whose projects worked to hide the urban and capitalist character of Nova Scotia in place of a bucolic and slower-paced traditional society that preserved some imagined notion of a pure past: “The place of praxis in Marx's thought, however, mitigated an élitism which in Folk theorists, with their often violently mournful and backward-looking sense of cultural decay, could run unchecked. The most élitist of the Folk theorists deprived the living human beings among the peasants of all creativity and transformed them into mere vessels of national essence, bearers of cultural treasures whose true value they themselves could never understand. A conservative vision of cultural entropy allied easily with an equally conservative sense of the cultural inferiority of the unlettered Folk. It was in the name of this vivid sense of history as entropy that so much energy could be spent in the search for pristine origins and in spinning out fantasies about what the true “Folk culture” must have been like before its sad decline. If the young Marx's “essences” were inherently dynamic, containing with themselves their own opposites, those of the conservative Folk theorists were inherently static and timeless.” As far as I remember McKay does not comment upon Indigenous crafts in this book, but I think the insights of this book are very conducive to thinking about how capitalism exploits the artistic traditions and craftwork of Indigenous peoples as well, in different but also comparable ways. McKay draws on three major theoretical resources in this book, each of which are intimately related to the other: “Reflecting on the three theoretical currents that have structured this study — Marxian political economy, contemporary cultural studies, and neo-Gramscian theories that attempt to synthesize them both in a new understanding of how modern culture works — I conclude this book by showing how the crisis of the concept of the Folk represents some surprising opportunities for progressive cultural change. In a now classic (if still controversial) 1984 article, the literary critic Frederic Jameson made the important suggestion that postmodernism represents the cultural logic of late capitalism… Aesthetic production today, Jameson argued, has been integrated into commodity production generally: “The frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.” As Jameson suggests, the culture of consumption, far from being inconsistent with Marx's analysis of nineteenth-century capitalism, in fact constitutes the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, “a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas,” particularly Nature and the unconscious. For the cultural logic of this epoch he reserves Plato's conception of the “simulacrum” — the identical copy for which no original has ever existed. The “culture of the simulacrum” comes to life, writes Jameson, “in a society where exchange-value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use-value is effaced,” and the image itself becomes the final form of commodity reification.” And in another place McKay again attempts to explain his book’s attempt to bring together Marxist and Foucauldian analysis (which was a common theme in many of the books on my comps list, and was something I was made interested in as an undergrad student, though I am glad theoretical currents are leaning away from Foucault now, though faculty I encounter are still very wedded to Foucauldian theory): “The position from which I have written this study, and which commends itself to me as the most promising for future academic and political work, represents an attempt to reconcile these two positions — Marxian political economy and Foucauldian genealogy — by combining their strengths in a third, neo-Gramscian framework. I have used this neo-Gramscian framework throughout this book. It might prove useful in other attempts to think through alternatives to the present conservative status quo. I use “might” alternatives to the present conservative status quo. I use “might” advisedly, because (as Stuart Hall has remarked) “the purpose of theorizing is not to enhance one’s intellectual or academic reputation but to enable us to grasp, understand, and explain — to produce a more adequate knowledge of — this historical world and its processes; and thereby to inform our practice so that we may transform it.” Over the past two decades the Marxian approach has made tremendous gains in its analysis of the Maritimes, and it seems unlikely that a genuinely counter-hegemonic reorganization of regional culture could avoid drawing heavily on this body of theory and evidence. Within this perspective, “ideology” is traditionally a negative term — a word that designates a systematic distortion of reality that strengthens the ruling class by confirming its economic and political privileges. This is surely part of what is going on in Innocence, which has enriched a legion of gift-shop owners, advertisers, and tourism developers.” McKay appeals to Stuart Hall to justify his turn to Foucault: “As Hall suggests, Foucauldian insights into the workings of power/ knowledge can be incorporated into a neo-Marxist approach without necessarily committing the researcher to accepting a self-refuting relativism or abstention from active politics. It is necessary to go beyond the enraged critique of the Folk as bourgeois ideology to a more sophisticated analysis of how this network of things and words actually worked as a body of applied social thought. In particular, such valuable work on the constitution of subject-positions could be brought into relationship with the Gramscian concept of hegemony, because Gramsci, an orthodox Marxist in many respects, nonetheless made a decisive and irrevocable break with both culturalism and economism. Transforming such hypotheses as that of direct translation into politics of the economic needs of the capitalist class, or that of the predominant place of coercion and force in cementing capitalist control over a pliant state, Gramsci opened the way to a far different sense of how power works in a modern capitalist state. By focusing attention on those components of the dominant culture that require the consent of subordinates, Gramsci suggested a culture in constant process, where the state of play between the classes can be changed very rapidly. Against the closed and complete world of essentialist antimodernism, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony stressed incomplete- ness and unevenness, the overlapping and confusion of identities, and (by inference) the non-reducibility of the cultural to the economic. Thus, to go back to our question, “Why go beyond the folk?” the neo-Gramscian might answer — and in my opinion this answer is better than that of either the classical Marxist or the poststructuralist theorist - “Constructed as a subject-position within a new hegemonic framework in the 1920s, the concept of the Folk was and remains a powerful obstacle to the formation of a counter-hegemonic cultural politics, without which a new, profoundly emancipatory politics of class, gender, and racial equality is inconceivable.” A neo-Gramscian approach which has learned from but not capitulated to critical theory can, in resisting the temptations of economistic and culturalist reductionisms, help us understand both the power and fragility of ideologies in a fragmented and fragmenting postmodern world.” I basically inserted the theoretical sections of the book here. Most of the book is not focused on theory, but is far more preoccupied with empirical history. The two are not always well integrated. The theory mostly serves as bookends, but I think it perhaps was necessary. It would have felt repetitive to keep returning to theoretical elaborations throughout the book. I wanted to finish with two excerpts of particular interest to me, which are more empirical in nature. The first is a hilarious story about Lillian Burke, one of the elite tastemakers and overseers of folk handicrafts: “A carpet of hundreds of square feet would occupy ten women working for weeks or even months on end. As was so often the outcome of the scientific redesign of work, conception and execution were separated: conception of the carpets took place in New York, while the rugs were executed in Chéticamp [Cape Breton, Nova Scotia]. Burke would send precise design instructions from her New York gallery, leaving nothing to accident or to the untutored aesthetic choices of her workers. (Burke knew rather little about the actual techniques of making the carpets.) If, having seen finished carpet on the floor, Burke was displeased with some nuance, even one she herself had earlier desired, the colouring would have to be redone. As Anselme Chiasson notes in his fascinating study of the process, Burke would stand on a chair to acquire a good view of the large carpets together, and, indicating a particular person and a particular carpet, would remark, “A little more pinkish there” or “a little more yellowish here.” To make a carpet a “little more pinkish” meant an immense amount of work: it had to be replaced in the frames, the wool with the unsatisfactory tint had to be removed, and other wool had to be tinted to the desired colour and crocheted once again back into the carpet. Small wonder that the exasperated craftswomen would, after Burke had left the room, mock her with their own versions of “A little more pinkish there,” “Yellowish here and there.’” The second excerpt I wanted to share, and perhaps the most interesting thing I encountered in this book, was about one of the folklorists this book focuses on, Helen Creighton, and her anticommunist politics which involved asking the RCMP to investigate Pete Seeger for his communist beliefs: “Perhaps the most revealing and important single document from Creighton’s career as a definer of cultural commonsense was written as part of her intervention against leftist influences in folklore in 1960. Creighton attempted to have the RCMP investigate Pete Seeger, and expressed grave concerns about the political leanings of Edith Fowke, whom she sought to discredit. Any dispute between two professionals in the same small field is, of course, susceptible to a variety of readings. One might, for example, emphasize personal rivalry. This was probably an element in the Creighton—Fowke controversy of 1960. Creighton’s attitude towards Fowke was hardly warm by the late 1950s. Creighton and Fowke came from opposite ends of the country and had different ways of thinking about society. Fowke had grown up in Lumsden, Saskatchewan. She was not a Communist, but she did have an interest in the left, and had been involved in experiments in socialist education on the Prairies. Unlike Creighton, she was interested in songs of industrial protest, which she thought were rather thin on the ground in Canada. Nonetheless she highlighted the extent to which traditional songs in Canada, including those of the east, raised social issues: “A Crowd of Bold Sharemen” was about fishermen who went fishing for cod and turned on their captain when he refused to share the cod livers; and Larry Gorman’s famous songs were often (in her eyes) satirical attacks on employers.” ...more |
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May 07, 2023
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Jul 12, 2023
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May 07, 2023
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Paperback
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| 0198237901
| 9780198237907
| 0198237901
| 4.23
| 567
| Jul 05, 2007
| Aug 23, 2007
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I feel like the main argument in this book is a liberal intuition that most people I know practice or understand pragmatically, but Fricker here artic
I feel like the main argument in this book is a liberal intuition that most people I know practice or understand pragmatically, but Fricker here articulates it in a more rigorous fashion (at times a little pedantically in my view). Books like this are what I imagine, as a very ignorant person, what students of analytic philosophy are forced to read and write. I don’t really have any strong objections to this book, but I don’t think I particularly enjoyed reading it. Her theorization of social power appears to me like a reductive and more contemporary form of Foucault’s theorization on knowledge and power, at times explicitly drawing from Foucault. It is simply about how particular forms of social power attached to things like identity affect the levels of credibility knowledge, testimony, and interpretation are merited. I think this is by now a very widespread intuition. Rich white men have social power and are therefore taken more seriously and are more likely to be believed and trusted. As someone born in North America, I enunciate words differently than my family in Singapore. I have noticed people take my perspectives on issues as more insightful than others solely on the basis of how I enunciate words. As I was dealing with internalized white supremacy as a late teen, I noticed I held uninterrogated prejudices based on patterns of speech and enunciation, national identity, class and so on. The subsequent years I spent working out (through internal monologues of self-criticism) these issues practically in classrooms, in friend circles full of international students, at everyday sights of working class labour and monotony, and so on, felt like a good portion of what this text was doing. I admittedly read this book very quickly for comps, so I likely missed out on the nuances of Fricker’s arguments, and the full gravity of why she thought virtue ethics was an important strategy for dealing with this epistemic justice issue. But I suspect the average person that would read a book like this, does not need convincing of most of the arguments this book bears. ...more |
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May 04, 2023
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Jun 26, 2023
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May 04, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0773521577
| 9780773521575
| 0773521577
| 3.89
| 9
| Apr 23, 2001
| Apr 23, 2001
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really liked it
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A fairly interesting book to my pleasant surprise. Did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did. The book’s subjects focuses on the first four national
A fairly interesting book to my pleasant surprise. Did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did. The book’s subjects focuses on the first four national parks that were established in the Atlantic maritime provinces, during the years 1935-1970. After detailing the history of their establishment (Part 1) MacEachern introduces to his reader James Harkin and the National Parks Branch under his tenure as Commissioner, from the agency’s establishment in 1911 to the 1930s (Chapter 2). The book then describes the process of choosing where to site the parks, expropriation struggles and conflicts, and finally their establishment and development (Chapters 3-6). Then in Part 2, we get chapters about all four parks. We get a glimpse at the role of tourism and business concessions in the park and issues of class and discrimination (Chapter 7), preservation issues regarding vegetation, fish, and other wildlife (Chapter 8), and finally the way these national parks related to communities surrounding them (Chapter 9). One particular passage in Chapter 7 about racial discrimination at the level of the Parks Branch itself is extremely interesting (and also revolting). I will tuck it away as a spoiler in case you want to encounter it in context. “The Parks Branch reacted in like manner to another incident of racial discrimination in the summer of 1960. A professor of theology at Boston University, Harold DeWolf, wrote the owner of the Fundy Park Chalets to confirm a reservation for himself and his wife. There was also, he added, a young couple he wished to invite to come with them: “Canada’s history being what it is, we feel confident that you would treat them well, but we want to make sure, to avoid any possi- bility of embarrassment. The friends of whom I speak are a fine Negro minister and his wife. They might want to take also their young children, but would more likely leave them with relatives. The young man is university-trained, with four degrees, an author and in every sense a cultivated gentleman. His wife is also a cultured person of superior character.”33 DeWolf waited for a response throughout May, throughout June, and finally received it just before leaving for New Brunswick at the beginning of July. Robert Friars, who had bought the bungalow court from the Parks Branch in 1957 and now operated it, confirmed the DeWolfs’ reservation, but noted, “With regard to your friends whom you mentioned ... I feel that I cannot accept the possibility of embarrassment which may arise from this situation. Each day we have over one hundred guests at our site of which a great many are from the New England States, as well as those farther South. For this reason we feel that it would be better not to accommodate your friends.”34 So the DeWolfs travelled to Canada alone, without their young black friends, Dr and Mrs Martin Luther King, Jr. Harold DeWolf was King’s professor and mentor at the Boston University school of theology, and they had stayed friends after King received his Ph.D. there in 1955.36 It would seem that King periodically relied on DeWolf to help him get away from the rigours of the civil rights movement. Biographer Stephen Oates recounts that in 1956, King was feeling run down from a long speaking tour and talked to DeWolf “about arranging a retreat for him in Boston, a sanctuary where he could be alone for ’spiritual renewal and writing.› In 1960, DeWolf (who eight years later would be the only white per- son to speak at King’s memorial service) again tried to help relieve his old friend of the stresses that came with being Martin Luther King. It was a very hectic spring for the young preacher. He was the inspirational leader of student sit-ins in the South against lunch- counter segregation. He had been arrested on trumped-up charges of income tax fraud in February and acquitted by an all-white jury in late May. In June, he met privately with presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy. King never learned why the planned summer vacation to the Maritimes fell through. Harold and Madeline DeWolf travelled alone to Fundy, and while there tried to meet with Robert Friars and Super- intendent J.D.B. MacFarlane, but without success. Upon his return to the US, DeWolf wrote the Parks Branch in Ottawa and told of the of- fending correspondence, concluding, “Mr. Friars’ letter, when it came, while putting the blame on possible guests who might object – as is customary in discrimination practices – quite flatly declined to accept our friends at the Chalets.”38 To its credit, the Parks Branch responded quickly and unequivo- cally. Chief B.I.M. Strong told Superintendent MacFarlane, “The ac- tion of Mr. Friars in refusing accommodation on the basis of colour is certainly something we cannot condone. ... I want you to make it clear to Mr. Friars that his arbitrary decision ... was certainly not in keeping with the democracy and freedom of which Canada is so justly proud. He should also be informed that if another incident of this nature comes to our attention corrective attention will be taken by the Department.”” My favourite chapter overall though was the one on preservation (Chapter 7). It is a good demonstration of just how highly managed park spaces are in terms of how plants, animals, and humans are controlled. In this chapter, MacEachern pays special attention to the role science had in the Maritime parks system, claiming in contrast to existing literature that science was used to justify many managerial interventions including the killing of “surplus” wildlife, large-scale fish stocking programs to attract anglers, Rotenone poisoning to kill local fish and predatory eels, the introduction of non-native trout, DDT pesticide spraying, the removal of dead trees, and most notably running a sawmill in a quiet section of the park to supply another historic park with spruce lumber. There were actually a few chapters that discussed various sawmills that operated on these parks. The main thing this book is lacking is how these parks were part of an ongoing project of colonialism. I think this has to do with the period it focuses on, a period when the ongoing nature of settler colonialism is not addressed because it's relegated to the 19th century and earlier. ...more |
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May 03, 2023
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May 23, 2023
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May 03, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0822342367
| 9780822342366
| 0822342367
| 3.18
| 11
| Jan 01, 2008
| Jan 16, 2009
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really liked it
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This is an edited collection composed of papers originally published in the Public History section of a journal called the Radical History Review, whi
This is an edited collection composed of papers originally published in the Public History section of a journal called the Radical History Review, which I occasionally read, though the material in this book was of varying interest to myself. There was a chapter on traditional religion in Cuba that had an interesting premise, but I didn’t enjoy some aspects of the paper… politically I suppose. There was also a chapter on Kathmandu and another on Oaxaca, both places of interest to me, particularly the prior because my master's research was done in the context of Nepal. The chapters on the anglo-settler colonies were likely of greatest interest to me. There’s a fairly interesting chapter on the once-called Canadian Museum of Civilization. I recall going there as a middle-schooler on a field trip. It is now called the Canadian Museum of History. It’s interesting to see how long Indigenous nations have been struggling with museums on this issue, and the wins they have had over the decades. Anti-imperialist critiques of the museum have come from other sectors also; there’s this interesting mention of a boycott of a ROM exhibit entitled "Into the Heart of Africa": “A year later, equally fierce debates erupted around Into the Heart of Africa, organized by Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. In retrospect, the boycott of this exhibit seems to have been sparked more by racial tensions in Toronto than by the exhibition’s curatorial content, which put forward a critique of the colonial origins of the Royal Ontario Museum’s African collections and the complicity of Victorian Canadians in the British imperial project. These two painful episodes marked a turning point in Canadian museology, and both contributed in a significant degree to the articulation of a new, pluralist museum ethos.” I will just interject here to say there are still many objects in ROM collection that have been called to be rematriated to no effect. There is an interesting account of conservative backlash on a museum exhibit in Australia that dealt with Indigenous dispossession and colonial violence: “Since it opened in 2001 the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra has averaged about eight hundred thousand visitors per year, both foreign and domestic. These are very good numbers for a country of just twenty million, and they reflect the successful reorientation of the museum sector away from education and toward leisure and tourism in the last few years, as well as the museum’s role in the national capital circuit. But the museum has been the object of attacks. There is a kind of inevitability about these set pieces. Initially, there was quite strong media criticism: one reporter insisted that the NMA represented “A Nation Trivialized.” Conservatives both in and outside the museum condemned it for its “sneering ridicule at white history.” Some visitors claimed that it was “profoundly offensive,” “letting the country down, [with] too much ‘blackfella history.’ ” One of the most controversial areas is the section in the Gallery of First Australians which deals with dispossession and death and the problematic nature these events pose for object-based institutions in terms of representation. The main caption for this exhibit states: “Guerilla wars were fought along a rolling frontier for a century and a half.” This caption reflects al- most thirty years of scholarship, but according to Peter Read, a scholar of Aboriginal history, it is, “if anything, a pretty conservative depiction of frontier violence.”” These are some other excerpts from the book, mostly from the introduction: “For countries that have been linked by colonial or imperial bonds, historical memory is often contested between metropole and colony (or for- mer colony). For former colonial powers like Britain or France, their own glorious tales of nation-building usually conveniently underplay or ignore the role played by their overseas possessions—and most particularly, the slave labor on Caribbean plantations. This point has been brilliantly argued by Caribbean scholars such as Eric Williams and C. L. R. James but has occupied a marginal place in much European historiography. French historians—even radical or Marxist ones—have been notably uncomfortable about discussing the history of slavery in the French empire and its repercussions in both metropolitan France and the Francophone Caribbean. One moment when the silence was—at least momentarily—broken came when two Caribbean heroes of African descent—Toussaint Louverture of Haiti and Louis Delgrès of Guadeloupe—were installed in the hallowed Pantheon in Paris. Laurent Dubois’s essay, “Haunting Delgrès,” uses this unlikely event to explore how the legacy of slavery and racial oppression has been understood—and silenced—in France and the French Caribbean.” “The conflicts that animate these stories reflect some of the contemporary tensions and contradictions facing public historians who seek to en- gage public audiences and win their favor and financial support, even while telling them stories that may upset them, stories they may not wish to hear… such tensions can be traced even further back in these nations’ histories: they also underlay John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s censorship and destruction of Diego Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center depicting Marx and Lenin in the 1930s.” “Some of the most far-reaching challenges to Western museology have come from the scholarly disciplines most implicated in its practices— history and anthropology. Historians and anthropologists were forced to question their own epistemologies and disciplinary practices in the wake of decolonization, the Vietnam war, and the “new social movements,” in particular the newly invigorated movements of indigenous or “first” peoples, particularly in the Americas and the Antipodes. Although indigenous groups have been challenging and resisting Western and colonialist categorization and systems of knowledge production since the 1500s, these efforts have become more visible and urgent, starting in the 1960s and 1970s.” I read this book fairly quickly for comps, so this reflection certainly does not do it justice, nor the brief and hurried time I spent with this book. ...more |
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Apr 30, 2023
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Jul 2023
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Apr 30, 2023
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Paperback
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| 022669254X
| 9780226692548
| 022669254X
| 4.08
| 249
| Mar 01, 1986
| Mar 11, 2020
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really liked it
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This book includes Langdon Winner’s now classic essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” which famously discusses how the bridges Robert Moses designed als
This book includes Langdon Winner’s now classic essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” which famously discusses how the bridges Robert Moses designed also helped facilitate racial segregation by the way the infrastructure prevented public buses largely used by poorer African Americans from accessing Jones Beach. But it also is a text that talks about how machinery was deployed by capitalists to keep out agitating highly skilled workers and dissolve unions, and famously comments upon Engels’ famous text “On Authority” where he suggests: “Because these tasks must be coordinated, and because the timing of the work is "fixed by the authority of the steam," laborers must learn to accept a rigid discipline.” and Marx’s famous lines about how: "Modern Industry... sweeps away by technical means the manufacturing division of labor, under which each man is bound hand and foot for life to a single detail operation. At the same time, the capitalistic form of that industry reproduces this same division of labour in a still more monstrous shape; in the factory proper, by converting the workman into a living appendage of the machine…” Honestly I hate driving because I literally do feel like a living appendage of a machine and it requires that stoic discipline and attention that Engels described. At the heart of Winner’s essay is a dichotomy asserted by Lewis Mumford: "from late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable." Along with this classic essay by Winner are two other chapters that explore the meaning of technology. He shows how technologies can become “enduring frameworks for social and political action” and also asks what sort of theoretical frameworks can help move us to a political philosophy of technology. As a quick detour, Winner in his introduction laments the scarcity of serious thinkers who write on the philosophy of technology. He comments on engineers in this way: “Engineers have shown little interest in filling this void. Except for airy pronouncements in yearly presidential addresses at various engineering societies, typically ones that celebrate the contributions of a particular technical vocation to the betterment of humankind, engineers appear unaware of any philosophical questions their work might entail. As a way of starting a conversation with my friends in engineering, I sometimes ask, “What are the founding principles of your discipline?” The question is always greeted with puzzlement. Even when I explain what I am after, namely, a coherent account of the nature and significance of the branch of engineering in which they are involved, the question still means nothing to them. The scant few who raise important first questions about their technical professions are usually seen by their colleagues as dangerous cranks and radicals. If Socrates’ suggestion that the “unexamined life is not worth living” still holds, it is news to most engineers” As someone who both studied and worked in engineering, I'd have to say this is on average true. The second part of the book is very interesting to me because it addresses alternative technology movements that I became interested in as a master’s student. One chapter is on appropriate technology which Winner calls: “a form of radicalism characteristic of the 1970s, tried to reform society by suggesting we change our tools and our ways of thinking about them. What did the appropriate technologists accomplish? Where did they fall short? For more than a century utopian and anarchist critiques of industrial society have featured political and technical decentralization. While it has wonderful appeal, decentralization turns out to be a very slippery concept. How can it have any importance in a society thoroughly enmeshed in centralized patterns?” I was really into appropriate technology as a master’s student and it features significantly in my thesis. But I have since become very critical of it, for some of the reasons Winner outlines. The next chapter of Winner’s is related to appropriate technology: “Many of the passions that have inspired appropriate technology and decentralism have been reborn in the excitement surrounding the so-called computer revolution.” And he explains this romantic fantasy that this computer revolution would enable a more democratic and egalitarian society. Finally, in Part 3, Winner performs a sort of discourse analysis and points out how language around technology, society, and the environment are often reduced to issues of efficiency and risk. Winner is critical of this linguistic narrowing and the way terms like “nature,” “risk” and “values” become terms that are too commonly thought to encapsulate the important issues at stake, when they by no means do. The book title, in my opinion, sounds a lot more interesting than it actually is. Winner sees a large whale surface from the water during a moment he is gazing out at a nuclear reactor and it reminded him of something he read: "In “The Virgin and the Dynamo” Henry Adams tells of an epiphany he experienced during his visit to the Great Exposition in Paris in 1900. As he gazed upon the forty-foot dynamo, Adams sensed something more than the power of the mechanical accomplishment: “the dynamo became a symbol of infinity.” He began to feel the machine “as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. . . . Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before the silent and infinite force.” From these feelings of awe and mystery Adams was able to formulate a “law of acceleration” in human history, one that he believed could explain the increasingly complexity and rate of change in civilization.” “The chance juxtaposition of the whale and reactor that day at Diablo Canyon opened my eyes to the fact that this fascination had much earlier sources. Here were two tangible symbols of the power of nature and of human artifice: one an enormous creature swimming gracefully in a timeless ecosystem, the other a gigantic piece of apparatus linked by sheer determination to the complicated mechanisms of the technological society. The first offered an image of things as they had always been, the other an image of things as they were rapidly coming to be. I realized that somehow I’d gotten caught in the middle.” ...more |
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really liked it
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A fairly interesting book on public history in urban environments. Hayden describes a really cool project in LA called the Power of Place that brought
A fairly interesting book on public history in urban environments. Hayden describes a really cool project in LA called the Power of Place that brought a lot of neglected and overlooked communities (racialized, migrant, women, etc.) into the commemorated domain of public history. The first part of the book focuses on theory that suggests new ways to conceptualize cultural landscapes in urban contexts, the relationship between the social, political, and aesthetic — particularly as it pertains to ethnic and women’s history. It theorizes on memory in relation to place, and the ways public history connects to architectural preservation, environmental protection, and public art. There's a lot of Henri Lefebvre in Chapter 2 in case you're into that sort of marxist theory. The second part of the book focuses on praxis, with real case studies from LA where most residents are women and people of colour. Another chapter focuses on working class lives and landscapes, in ranches, agricultural fields, and factories. Another chapter focuses on the life of an African American midwife, formerly enslaved and later freed in court. There’s a chapter on a union hall used by Latina and Russian Jewish garment workers, one on Little Tokyo, Japanese American immigrants, and the Japanese American National Museum. A little passage from the introduction: “These chapters sketch the story of Los Angeles as African American, Latina, and Asian American women and their families have known it, the often overlooked history of the majority of Los Angeles citizens. Each project deals with bitter memories—slavery, repatriation, internment—but shows how citizens survived and persevered to make an urban life for themselves, their families, and communities. “Storytelling with the Shapes of Time” sums up the transformations of roles and expectations that these projects demanded from many of the participants, and explores some of the obstacles to community processes and interdisciplinary work, as well as some of the rewards.” A few other excerpts I appreciated: "Broadway also included the Bradbury Building, an architectural treasure with a romantic interior courtyard, constructed by an obsessed draftsman of the 1890s who wanted to test ideas about architecture for a socialist city that were expressed in Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward." "Edward Soja’s fascinating Postmodern Geographies portrays Los Angeles as the product of the spatial machinations of international capital, decipherable only by a new kind of Marxist analysis that stresses the regional and global structure of economic power and emphasizes space (geography) rather than time (history). ...Mike Davis’s absorbing City of Quartz also provides an extensive analysis of the white, male power structure, its police force and prisons, as well as its cultural apparatus and spatial aggressiveness. Missing in both Postmodern Geographies and City of Quartz are sympathetic accounts of women and ethnic communities, situated historically as well as spatially. The old conquest histories of the city relied on an outworn ideal of a universal, white male citzen, and relegated women and people of color—workers who should be at the center of any city’s story—to the fringes. For a new spatial analysis to be balanced, the active roles of diverse workers searching for a livelihood in the city need to be discussed as fully as the decisions of banks, corporations, police, and the military.* But Soja writes: “The centre has thus also become the per- iphery, as the corporate citadel of multinational capital rests with consummate agility upon a broadening base of alien populations.” In context, these “alien” populations seem to be new immigrants, but Soja has little interest in distinguish- ing them from people of color who have lived and worked in the city for a long time. He conflates them all, and women, in another description of the labor force: “the reserve army of migrant and minority workers (augmented by a massive entry of women into the workforce) has grown to unprecedented levels.’’" ...more |
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it was amazing
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An excellent work that draws on Bourdieu’s theories to analyze the increasing neoliberalization of stream restoration in the United States. The first c An excellent work that draws on Bourdieu’s theories to analyze the increasing neoliberalization of stream restoration in the United States. The first chapter is a great overview of the work of Bourdieu that is relevant to the book’s arguments. Lave writes: “In this book I build that bridge on the analytical framework of Pierre Bourdieu, whose insistence on the centrality of political economy, power, and domination makes his work very compatible with political ecologists’ typical concerns. …Bourdieu’s key intervention in STS was also one of the first formulations of his field concept, which, along with capital and habitus, forms the heart of his analytical framework (Bourdieu 1975). A field is a bounded, structured social arena that provides a particular set of opportunities and constraints to those who participate in it: religion, science, art, and the state are the core fields, but he also acknowledged the utility of field analysis for understanding the dynamics and structure of any field of practice, from amateur boxing to beauty pageants… To understand the specificity of a field, Bourdieu argues, focus on the forms of power and prestige (capital) that are valued within it and the particular ways in which it shapes the conscious and subconscious practice of participants (the habitus it instills). Struggle—to delimit the boundaries of the field, to determine conditions of entry, and, most especially, to define the types of capital of most value — is a defining feature of Bourdieu’s profoundly agonistic (combative) field concept. This struggle takes place within the hierarchical structure provided by fields, each of which is organized around an axis whose poles Bourdieu defines as autonomous and heteronomous. At the autonomous end of any field are those actors whose production is controlled most thoroughly by the forms of capital specific to that field; at the heteronomous end are those whose production is shaped primarily by outside forces (figure 1.5). For example, in the literary field, writers with deep artistic credibility but few readers would sit at the autonomous end of the field; Danielle Steele would reign at the heteronomous pole. The relative autonomy of a field can be measured by “the extent to which it manages to impose its own norms and sanctions on the whole set of producers,” including those closest to the heteronomous pole, who are “therefore the most responsive to external demands” (Bourdieu 1983, 321).” The main guy this book sort of revolves around is Dave Rosgen, who's sort of this outsider maverick hydrologist. He's a bit of an entrepreneur that develops Natural Channel Design courses that get widely adopted (via market contacts) by several federal agencies like the EPA, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and US Forest Service. Rosgen is disdained within academic restoration science circles as a charlatan with a PhD that required no course work and was supervised by someone who was effectively his employee. He also refuses to subject his publications to peer review, nor transparently share his data sets for review. The conflict that emerged between Rosgen and more established restoration scientists in academia has come to be known as the Rosgen Wars. Lave then takes Chapter 2 to provide some context for these skirmishes. She gives a little primer on what stream restoration science is about and what Rosgen’s Natural Channel Design is like as well. Lave then introduces her reader to Rosgen, how he relates to the field of stream restoration, and the remarkable shift he was able to actualize in the internal power structure of the field — drawing particularly from a case study in North Carolina (Chapter 3). Next, we follow Rosgen as he climbs in legitimacy as his critics descend. We look at what sort of claims and counterclaims were made in this contestation, and why no one has bothered accumulating data to resolve what are seemingly empirical questions in the debate. We get a good glimpse here of Bourdieu’s theory in action as we follow various forms of capital and credentials deployed, ranging from practical experience, empirical knowledge, modelling skills, and academic status (Chapter 4). In Chapter 5, Lave explains how Rosgen was able to garner his support base by focusing on day-today practice of stream restoration, and how Natural Channel Design has become central to stream restoration and the field’s new habitus, as Bourdieu would call it. After this, Lave takes time to propose why Rosgen’s habitus prevailed, and she believes it has to do with the forces of political economy at the time which favoured “market-based environmental management” as well as the “neoliberalization of the production of scientific knowledge claims.” (Chapter 6). Finally, Lave’s conclusion returns to how the field concept productively brings together STS and political ecology, and then speculates that the Rosgen Wars are just the start, and neoliberalization will likely spread further into the environmental sciences. ...more |
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| 9781773630700
| 1773630709
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| Nov 10, 2018
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it was amazing
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I loved this book. It was so interesting. It’s not really an academic book per se, though it’s written by academics and their children. I don’t think
I loved this book. It was so interesting. It’s not really an academic book per se, though it’s written by academics and their children. I don’t think the professor overseeing the particular comps list this was on wanted this to be on the list, but I’m glad I kept it on. It describes this very ordinary seeming urban park in Vancouver and the various ways it was part of the larger settler-colonial project of Canada. The book talks about various forms of racism, Indigenous discrimination, sexual and physical violence, community, recreation, use of psychotropic substances, and all sorts of other things that happened at this park and ways to think about that complex assemblage of stuff happening on a small patch of land. There is also a running photography project that threads through the book, as well as historical work that looks into the history of the land, both in colonial deeds and the process of Indigenous dispossession that made this park possible. I’ll just include some excellent excerpts from the introduction: “This is a book about parks and how parks act on stolen land. It is a book about occupation, which we mean in both senses: first, the occupation of Indigenous land by settlers, and second, how parks are occupied by pluralities of users. Our submission here is that thinking closely about the latter can shed some light on the former; that is, looking carefully at what parks do — how they behave and how they are deployed in cities — offers unique opportunities to catch a glimpse of a decolonial horizon. Parks are particularly fertile places to talk about land. Whether referring to national parks, provincial campgrounds, isolated conservation areas, destination parks or humble urban patches of grass, people tend to speak of parks as unqualified good things — maybe the best possible use of land. It is easy to think of parks as land that makes all of us better. But no park is innocent. Parks are lionized as “natural” oases, and urban parks are often spoken of as “nature” in the midst of the city — but that’s absurd. Parks, urban or not, are exactly as “natural” as the roads or buildings around them, and they are just as political. Every park in North America is performing modernity and settler colonialism on an everyday basis. Parks occupy all kinds of middle grounds: they are not private property, they are called “public” places, and they are highly regulated. People like to think of parks as part of the “commons,” but they normatively demand and closely control behaviours. Cities are defined by land management policies; they discipline movement and demarcate who can occupy which space, why, where, how and when. Parks are a certain kind of property — usually owned by a level of the state and thus creations of law — but they are also subject to all kinds of cultural presumptions about what they are for and what kinds of people should be doing what kinds of things in them. Parks as they are currently constituted are always colonial enterprises. As four white settlers living on səliwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and xʷməθkʷəəm (Musqueam) territory, we are interested in our relationships with this land and how to we might challenge and change our modes of living as colonial visitors. We encounter parks in everyday and bodily senses, and most particularly, we encounter one small park beside our house every[…]” “We encounter parks in everyday and bodily senses, and most particularly, we encounter one small park beside our house every day: Victoria Park, known mostly as Bocce Ball Park. This book is one small attempt to confront our colonial attitudes toward land and to remake our relationships with parks, especially Victoria Park. There are four threads entwined in this project: 1. The first thread considers the uses and histories of parks (and specifically Bocce Ball Park) to understand and complicate how they have been, and are, deployed. We want to throw the occupation of parks into doubt. 2. The second piece notes the complicity of parks in creating and regulating narratives of control and domination that are bound up with race, class and gender. Parks, including Bocce Ball Park, are inflected heavily by performances of whiteness, and we want to continually poke at that. 3. At the same time, parks are key instruments of settler colonialism. Parks make arguments about the occupation of land and, as such, are colonial exercises. We ask how parks — and Bocce Ball Park in particular — actively construct colonial relations. 4. Finally, we are curious about how parks, and Bocce Ball Park especially, can be remade. Much is laudable about parks, and we are especially interested in how the overlapping and shared uses, the malleable sovereignties and the fluidity of parks might point to new ways to think about land and occupation.” There’s also a closing section called “Forward!” written by Glenn Coulthard. ...more |
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| 4.34
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| Nov 01, 2002
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really liked it
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This book (which I read for comps) feels like it wanders into many places, and it is the sort of writing style that I often enjoy reading, but am atte
This book (which I read for comps) feels like it wanders into many places, and it is the sort of writing style that I often enjoy reading, but am attempting to avoid in my own writing. It juxtaposes many things together, which I have a bad habit of doing, and can sometimes be hard to follow the arguments of this text all the way through. It touches on many themes of interest to me, hydraulics and water, energy, agricultural chemistry, warfare, imperialism, ecological relations — all through the lens of political economy, Marxist theory (accompanied by Ricardo commentary), environmental history, colonial history (and its influence on the economic theories of Keynes) and the history of science and technology. And it does so by tracing these themes through the history of Egypt. The first chapter is often included in STS and environmental history syllabi. It is entitled “Can the Mosquito Speak?” I wrote a short excerpt on it for my comps writeup. After discussing Keith Pluymers’ chapter (in the book No Wood, No Kingdom) on the rapid deforestation of Barbados through enslaved labour for the establishment of British colonial sugar plantations and his discussion of Anna Tsing’s alternative nomenclature of the Plantationocene, I wrote this little paragraph on Mitchell’s chapter: “Sugar plantations also importantly feature in the story Timothy Mitchell (2002) tells of the mosquito’s arrival in Egypt. While transportation technologies and advancing war frontiers brought the mosquito to Egypt, it was the modernizing water infrastructure of dams and canals that enabled the mosquito’s rapid reproduction. The construction of the Aswan High Dam also kept back highly fertile river sediment from reaching downstream agricultural plots, which were soon transformed into ever expanding sugar plantations that could afford expensive new fertilizer inputs. At one of the country’s largest sugar estates, in just the second year of the new malaria epidemic, some 80-90% of the workers had contracted the disease and were too weak to harvest sugarcane. While the logics of the plantation share similarities with the logics of modern dam infrastructure and industrialization, Mitchell argues there is no singular logic undergirding it all. Theories of a unified logic give capitalism’s irrationality and its attendant violence more credit than its due.” The irrationality and lack of coherent logic of capitalism is a consistent theme in Mitchell’s book, which I do not think I completely agree with, because I think the point of Marx’s Capital is trying to understand how capitalism works in order to figure out what to do about it. There are snippets of Egyptian revolutionary history in some of the chapters. I wanted to include a few excerpts: “Orders reached local officials to make a levy of camels to support the continued occupation of the Sudan; to begin work immediately on improved flood defenses at Jirja, requiring 1,085,000 hundred weight of stone; and to provide another fifty thousand men as forced laborers on the Ibrahimiyya Canal. “The system of wholesale extortion and spoilation has reached a point beyond which it would be difficult to go,” wrote a European resident. “Egypt is one vast ‘plantation’ where the master works his slaves without even feeding them.”38 A month later an armed uprising broke out, beginning in the village of Qaw, near Jirja, and four neighboring villages, but reaching as far as Asyut forty kilometers to the north.39 The revolt was led by Ahmad al-Shaqi, known as al-Tayyib, the Good, native of the village of Salamiyya, near Luxor, and said to be the disciple of an anticolonial religious militant from India who had escaped abroad after the defeat of the 1857–58 revolt and spent several years near Asyut.” “Local reports agreed that although religious appeals pro- vided al-Tayyib’s legitimation, his object was the new land regime. “He is a mad fanatic and a communist,” a European resident in the area was told. “He wants to divide all property equally and to kill all the Ulema.”” “Salah al-Din Husain, a villager from Kamshish who had been seized and then released again in the military-ordered arrest of thousands of political activists in the summer of 1965,49 was one of those co-opted by the mobilization program onto the new ASU committee in his village. He used this position to renew an old campaign from the 1950s against the political power of the landowning family that dominated the village. The government’s response was to have Salah Husain immediately placed under surveillance. Investigators discovered that he was the leader of a group of “communists” in his village, who were holding meetings among the peasants at which they “exploited the hatred of the village inhabitants” toward the large landowners and called for “the collectivization of agriculture and the abolition of private property.” Two party officials were sent to Kamshish, a surveillance report mentions, to hold a public meeting at which they explained the government’s idea of socialism. But Salah Husain “insisted after the conclusion of the discussion in telling the peasants that our socialism is influenced by Marxist thought.” He was creating “dangerous divisions” among party members in the village, the report concludes, and was causing a threat to the country’s “internal security.”50 It was such local threats rather than any process of development, as Harik and others would have it, that ex- plains the central government’s initiatives.” Chapter 6 of this book, entitled “Heritage and Violence” made for some very interesting commentary on public history, which would have also been useful for further reflection during comps, though it never came up during my exam. There was a fascinating section on the architect Hassan Fathy and his connection to “appropriate technology” and how his model village project of New Gurna, elaborating on his conception of vernacular architectural styles. This story is entangled with coercive displacement of local residents funded by USAID projects as well as the development of the Aswan Dam (Fathy’s brother was an engineer involved in its development). I will just finish with a large excerpt from this chapter, which I found so fascinating: “By the end of the 1960s, two decades after the building of New Gurna, the government had taken the place of large landowners in deciding what to grow and had constructed a second dam at Aswan. The High Dam ended the annual flooding of the Nile and enabled the authorities to extend the cultivation of sugarcane, which displaced the growing of wheat. Villagers no longer had the long weeks of the Nile flood, which in the past provided time for the laborious work of brick making and communal house building. Many no longer had their own wheat to provide the straw needed for bricks and plaster. For both these reasons, building with mud brick began to lose its advantages over the faster method of building with reinforced concrete. Thanks to the dam, moreover, even the mud itself was less and less available. The fields were no longer flooded, there was no longer an annual deposit of Nile silt, and no longer any renewal of the alluvial mud out of which mud-brick houses were built. Before the High Dam, the Nile carried some 124 million tons of sediment to the sea each year, depositing nearly ten million tons on the flood plain. After the dam, 98 percent of that sediment remained behind the dam.49 By the 1980s the government was forced to ban the use of alluvial mud for brick making, to protect agricultural land. Fathy’s celebration of a vernacular based on centuries of accumulation of local mud was launched at precisely the moment when (and for reasons connected with the fact that) the mud for the first time in history was no longer in supply. If the irrigation works at Aswan caused mud-brick building to gradually disappear, ironically they had also played an unnoticed role in Fathy’s production of an Egyptian vernacular. Gharb Aswan, the village in which Fathy discovered an Egyptian architecture “preserved for centuries,” was in fact a modern village. It was built at the turn of the century to house people from the Nubian villages to the south, which were submerged by the reservoir created by the first Aswan Dam.50 The dam had given Fathy the opportunity to build his vernacular village, by creating first the estates and then the epidemics that brought the politics of rural reconstruction into being. These irrigation works had simultaneously destroyed the country of Nubia, whose rebuilt houses were the inspiration for his Egyptian vernacular. The nation, and its heritage, must be made out of the material lives of others. In doing so, however, it incorporates processes and materials whose use and meaning it does not entirely control. Fifty years later the government was still trying to evict the population of old Gurna, and still describing them as lawless and unhygienic. To the old arguments about tomb robbing, official statements in the 1990s now added the claim that their “living conditions are poor, unhygienic, and spoil the view,” and that the presence of this large population in what was now recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site prevented its archaeological preservation and its development as an “open air museum.” The issues were still those of heritage and civilization. But by the close of the twentieth century, Hassan Fathy’s vision of a national culture in- spired by the revival of peasant initiative and know-how had disappeared, along with most of the houses of his model village. Instead the government planned an open-air museum, in which the role of the peasant, as we will see, was rather smaller. The development plans of the 1980s and 1990s are discussed more fully in the final section of this book. But the plans for the development of tourism and national heritage in Gurna can provide an introduction to these issues, as well as a contrast with the peasant politics of an earlier period. In 1982 the World Bank hired the U.S. consulting firm Arthur D. Little to draw up a program for increasing tourism revenue in Luxor (the same firm had been hired to do a similar study in 1953).52 The consultants re- vived the proposal for the depopulation of Gurna, along with Hassan Fathy’s scheme to set up a cooperative to improve the quality of locally made souvenirs. With the local population removed, the increase in tourism revenue was to come from better “visitor management” and improved infrastructure to enable the development of luxury hotels and Nile cruise ships.” ...more |
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it was amazing
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4.5 stars. A very interesting book I read for comps, with a surprising amount of communist history laced throughout. Communists have been involved in
4.5 stars. A very interesting book I read for comps, with a surprising amount of communist history laced throughout. Communists have been involved in organizing within a major labour union in the nuclear power industry and behind the large nationalization effort of the country's power utility. Hecht is someone who’s fairly active on twitter, and so I’ve been able to get the sense that she’s someone whose politics diverges from mine — she’s the sort of progressive most faculty in academia are. I don’t think of her as a radical, though I don’t know how she sees herself. In either case, she loves writing about radicals for some reason, so I’m here for it. An explanation of the book title is worth inserting here before surveying what this book is about: “"The radiance of France"-a phrase usually interchangeable with "the grandeur of France"-appeared regularly in many realms of postwar dis- course. These two notions referred back to France's glorious past, from the golden reign of Louis XIV to the "civilizing mission" of the empire. France's radiance had taken a severe beating during the war, and decolonization threatened to hasten the decline. How could the nation regain its former glory? What would radiance or grandeur mean in the radically reconfigured geopolitics of the postwar world? Technical and scientific experts offered a solution to these dilemmas: technological prowess. In articles, lectures, and modernization plans, experts repeatedly linked technological achievement with French radiance. Industrial, scientific, and technological development would not only rebuild the nation's economy but also restore France to its place as a world leader. For the nascent nuclear program, "Ie rayonnement de la France" carried special punch: "rayonnement" means radiation as well as radiance. The nuclear program epitomized the link between French radiance and technological prowess.” Her book starts with a general overview of engineering and French technocrats more generally. Her first chapter surveys how some of these men who she calls “technologists” thought about how politics and technology were related. They were involved in shaping both the future of France and its identity. And, they took pride in the exportability of French nuclear expertise — it’s ability to radiate throughout old French imperial networks. Her next two chapters (2 & 3) follow the development of gas-graphite reactors in the mid-20th century, with a particular focus on its direction by two state institutions, the CEA and EDF. Throughout the design process, Hecht sees technology and politics hybridized in the resultant artifacts, which were integral to implementing both military and industrial policy, as well as French identity. Hecht was also surprised at how many engineers saw their work as explicitly political, which was very removed from her (I think rightful) anticipation that they would be apolitical and feel engineering was a largely apolitical endeavour also. The following two chapters (4 & 5) we move into the domain of the workers who were also driving the technology’s developments. These were my favourite parts, because you get all that history of labour militancy and union organizing stuff that makes this book so interesting, as well as how this worked within a nationalized industry. And for those into public history, Chapter 6 is a great chapter on how France’s nuclear industry was portrayed in popular media and the various public engagement campaigns it undertook including museum-like displays in their lobbies, guided tours of their reactors, and sponsored fair exhibits with scale models of uranium mining facilities and nuclear reactors. Following this, Chapter 7, takes time to sort through various types of reactions to this great spectacle which was French nuclear power, and some fascinating poll data. Finally, Hecht synthesizes her commentary thus far, on the three domains of her book: program development (engineers & state technocrats), reactor work (unions, militants, and workers), and communities around the plants (the public). She also takes this chapter to compare the “French” gas-graphite reactor with the “American” light-water reactor, the disputes over these competing systems within French institutions, and how workers managed the fall out of the gas-graphite reactor’s demise after a reactor accident. As a post script I just want to include some of the interesting communist history points that Hecht touches upon: The communist physicist Frederic Joliot-Curie, Nobel Prize winner and son-in-law of Marie Curie, is mentioned throughout this book, which I found pleasantly surprising. I recall encountering the fact that Marie Curie’s kids and in-laws were communists and wanting to read a book about it. Had no idea that this is in part about them. There were actually a substantial number of people who worked on the CEA’s (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) experimental heavy water reactors who were communists, and it became a matter of national security during the Cold War to do something about this, though they didn’t find an easy way to exclude communist technicians or scientists from these projects. However, there were attempts to purge the institution of communists and various technicians were dismissed because of their political affiliations, though these often happened under excuses of reorganization. There were a variety of groups that supported nationalization of the French nuclear industry, across the political spectrum and for different reasons. A coalition of left-wing groups and labour unions maintained the strongest voice in the structuring of the new nationalized utility when it did happen. The CGT (which at the time was the communist labour union, though it is not affiliated with the Communist Party anymore as far as I know, though there is always a huge CGT presence at the recent street demonstrations I’ve seen coming out of France) — anyway the CGT dominated the new power utility: “As the labor unions themselves so often repeated, EDF was the joint creation of management and labor. The communist labor leader Marcel Paul was one of the most prominent heroes of the utility's earliest years. With varying degrees of intensity and insistence, both management and labor agreed that Paul played a large role in the success of the company's nationalized structure.” Hecht details various ways the politics of CGT militants interfaced with technical and policy decisions around France’s nuclear industry and issues of nationalization. Hecht also mentions this curious posture of the French Communist Party after WW2, which told workers to avoid strikes and stoically pour their efforts into rebuilding the country: “The Vichy government outlawed two bastions of working-class politics: the Communist Party and the Confederation Generale du Travail labor union. Militants were forced underground, and many joined the Resistance. After the liberation, these militants-like other Resistance fighters-became national heroes. In 1944 the reinstated CGT and the Communist Party launched the so-called battle of production, intended as the working class' patriotic contribution to ending the war and beginning national reconstruction. Its goal was to raise production levels in order to defeat Nazism, then ensure postwar national independence through industrial self-sufficiency. Militants asserted that class and national interests had converged during this difficult period, and that, for the sake of both, workers should avoid strikes and stoically pour all their energies into rebuilding the nation.2 The CGT thus emerged from the war with impeccable nationalist credentials. The dominance of left-wing parties in the postwar government initially gave worker organizations high hopes for the future of French social relations. Nationalization seemed to bear out these hopes. In most cases, nationalization entailed a tripartite directorial structure, in which management, workers, and consumers were all represented on the board of directors.” The Communist Party shortly after the war formed a coalition government, though a number of communist ministers were dismissed from the government for various reasons. This would be the same communist party that Fanon was disgusted by when they refused to support the anti-colonial struggle of the FLN. The Communist Party and CGT were in a position to protest with some gravity the shift of the nuclear industry into developing atomic weapons. Joliot-Curie became a major voice and had publicly refused to help develop the atomic bomb. His daughter, Hélène Langevin-Joliot, continued in her parents’ footsteps by speaking at anti-nuclear weapons rallies sponsored by the Communist Party. The Communist Party was very adamant though that the country needed more engineers and technicians and advocated on this account. ...more |
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May 19, 2023
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Apr 01, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 0226550273
| 9780226550275
| 0226550273
| 4.31
| 564
| Dec 01, 1934
| Oct 30, 2010
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it was amazing
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4.5 stars. A classic in the history of technology, which I first encountered when reading Terry Reynolds’ book on the history of the vertical waterwhee 4.5 stars. A classic in the history of technology, which I first encountered when reading Terry Reynolds’ book on the history of the vertical waterwheel. Lewis Mumford (along with Harold Laski and Clifton Fadiman) was one of the influences for Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead character, Ellsworth Toohey, an egalitarian socialist who personified evil for Rand. The scope of this book is magisterial, perhaps too ambitious, but it offers the sort of scope that matches the period in which it was written. Histories of technology today are far more modest and narrow, but it is rather enjoyable to read such a sweeping account of technological history. I have rarely seen Lewis Mumford directly called a Marxist or even a socialist, but near the end of this book, he very clearly calls for the socialization of capital (both natural and mechanized): “Unless we socialize creation, unless we make production subservient to education, a mechanized system of production, however efficient, will only harden into a servile byzantine formality, enriched by bread and circuses.” “So, too, mechanization, by lessening the need for domestic service, has increased the amount of personal autonomy and personal participation in the household. In short, mechanization creates new occasions for human effort; and on the whole the effects are more educative than were the semi-automatic services of slaves and menials in the older civilizations. For the mechanical nullification of skill can take place only up to a certain point. It is only when one has completely lost the power of discrimination that a standardized canned soup can, without further preparation, take the place of a home-cooked one, or when one has lost prudence completely that a four-wheel brake can serve instead of a good driver. Inventions like these increase the province and multiply the interests of the amateur. When automatism becomes general and the benefits of mechanization are socialized, men will be back once more in the Edenlike state in which they have existed in regions of natural increment, like the South Seas: the ritual of leisure will replace the ritual of work, and work itself will become a kind of game. That is, in fact, the ideal goal of a completely mechanized and automatized system of power production: the elimination of work: the universal achievement of leisure. In his discussion of slavery Aristotle said that when the shuttle wove by itself and the plectrum played by itself chief workmen would not need helpers nor masters slaves. At the time he wrote, he believed that he was establishing the eternal validity of slavery; but for us today he was in reality justifying the existence of the machine. Work, it is true, is the constant form of man’s interaction with his environment,' if by work one means the sum total of exertions necessary to maintain life…” This was an interesting comment on energy as it relates to socially necessary labour: “The real significance of the machine, socially speaking, does not consist either in the multiplication of goods or the multiplication of wants, real or illusory. Its significance lies in the gains of energy through increased conversion, through efficient production, through balanced consumption, and through socialized creation. The test of economic success does not, therefore, lie in the industrial process alone, and it cannot be measured by the amount of horsepower converted or by the amount commanded by an individual user; for the important factors here are not quantities but ratios: ratios of mechanical effort to social and cultural results. A society in which production and consumption completely cancelled out the gains of conversion in which people worked to live and lived to work—would remain socially inefficient, even if the entire population were constantly employed, and adequately fed, clothed, and sheltered. The ultimate test, of an efficient industry is the ratio between productive means and the achieved ends. Hence a society with a low scale of conversion but with a high amount of creation is humanly speaking superior to a society with an enormous panoply of converters and a small and inadequate army of creators. By the ruthless pillage of the food-producing territories of Asia and Africa, the Roman Empire appropriated far more energy than Greece, with its sparse abstemious dietary and its low standard of living. But Rome produced no poem, no statue, no original architecture, no work of science, no philosophy comparable to the Odyssey, the Parthenon, the works of sixth and fifth century sculptors, and the science of Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Hero; and so the quantitative grandeur and luxury and power of the Romans, despite their extraordinary capacity as engineers, remained relatively meaningless: even for the continued development of technics the work of the Greek mathematicians and physicists was more important. This is why no working ideal for machine production can be based solely on the gospel of work: still less can it be based upon an uncritical belief in constantly raising the quantitative standard of consumption. To fancy that such a non-profit system is an impossibility is to forget that for thousands of years the mass of mankind knew no other system. The new economy of needs, replacing the capitalist economy of acquisition, will put the limited corporations and communities of the old economy on a broader and more intelligently socialized basis; but at bottom it will draw upon and canalize similar impulses. Despite all its chequered features and internal contradictions, this is to date perhaps the chief promise held out by Soviet Russia. To the extent that industry must still employ human beings as machines, the hours of work must be reduced. We must determine the number of hours of blank routine per week that is within the limits of human tolerance, beyond which obvious deterioration of mind and spirit sets in.” Mumford quotes Marx at length a few times. This is one instance: "Karl Marx well summed up this new process of transmutation; “Since money does not disclose what has been transformed into it, everything, whether a commodity or not, is convertible into gold. Everything becomes saleable and purchasable. Circulation is the great social retort into which everything is thrown and out of which everything is recovered as crystallized money. Not even the bones of the saints are able to withstand this alchemy; and still less able to withstand it are more delicate things, sacrosanct things which are outside the commercial traffic of men. Just as all qualitative differences between commodities are effaced in money, so money, a radical leveller, effaces all distinctions. But money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of an individual. Thus social power becomes private power in the hands of a private person.” This last fact was particularly important for life and thought: the quest of power by means of abstractions. One abstraction re-enforced the other. Time was money: money was power: power required the furtherance of trade and production: production was diverted from the channels of direct use into those of remote trade, toward the acquisition of larger profits, with a larger margin for new capital expenditures for wars, foreign conquests, mines, productive enterprises . . . more money and more power." And finally, an excerpt I’d like to finish for, it’s Mumford explaining the necessity of revolution: “In concluding his monumental survey of Capitalism Sombart looks upon 1914 as a turning-point for capitalism itself. The signs of the change are the impregnation of capitalistic modes of existence "with normative ideas: the displacement of the struggle for profit as the sole condition of orientation in industrial relations, the undermining of private competition through the principle of understandings, and the constitutional organization of industrial enterprise. These processes, which have actually begun under capitalism, have only to be pushed to their logical conclusions to carry us beyond the capitalist order. Rationalization, standardization, and above all, rationed production and consumption, on the scale necessary to bring up to a vital norm the consumptive level of the whole community—these things are impossible on a sufficient scale without a socialized political control of the entire process. If such a control cannot be instituted with the cooperation and intelligent aid of the existing administrators of industry, it must be achieved by overthrowing them and displacing them. The application of new norms of consumption, as in the housing of workers, has during the last thirty years won the passive support, sometimes subsidies drawn from taxation, of the existing governments of Europe, from conservative London to communistically bent Moscow. But such communities, while they have challenged and supplemented capitalist enterprise, are merely indications of the way in which the wind is blowing. Before we can replan and reorder our entire environment, on a scale commensurate with our human needs, the moral and legal and political basis of our productive system will have to be sharply revised. Unless such a revision takes place, capitalism itself will be eliminated by internal rot: lethal struggles will take place between states seeking to save themselves by imperialist conquest, as they will take place between classes within the state, jockeying for a power which will take the form of brute force just to the extent that society’s grip on the productive mechanism itself is weakened.” I included a very narrow range of excerpts from this book, because they were of political interest to me, and somewhat surprising to find. But the majority of this book is more historical in nature, and would be very enjoyable to those more interested in the history of technology than little ardent manifestos in defense of communism. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 27, 2023
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Jun 23, 2023
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Mar 27, 2023
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Paperback
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| 1138241164
| 9781138241169
| 1138241164
| 4.50
| 2
| unknown
| Mar 12, 2018
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it was amazing
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4.5 stars. An edited collection that I did not expect to enjoy so much. A lot about how industrial heritage has been used to develop working class iden 4.5 stars. An edited collection that I did not expect to enjoy so much. A lot about how industrial heritage has been used to develop working class identity, bring labour organizing and unions into public history, and memorialize leftist politics. But also the weird ways it interfaces with tourism and capitalism. One of my favourite chapters is on France’s Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining basin, which became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In this chapter, Marion Fontaine describes how mining heritage became a celebrated cause of Socialist politicians in the region to promote the region’s rich tradition of labour movements and an electoral history of Socialists and Communists administering the majority of the region’s mining communities. If I have time in the future, I'll have to return to this review to comment more extensively. ...more |
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Mar 25, 2023
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May 23, 2023
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Mar 25, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0773551255
| 9780773551251
| 0773551255
| 3.88
| 8
| unknown
| Aug 09, 2017
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really liked it
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I was assigned to read this book in an environmental history class last year, but the reading load was very heavy that semester so I only strategicall
I was assigned to read this book in an environmental history class last year, but the reading load was very heavy that semester so I only strategically read the Intros and Conclusions of both the book and its individual chapters. I had a chance to re-read through the whole thing for comps. For some reason, this book was not a very memorable read for me, in the sense, that I often struggle to remember what its about. I’ve been told though that Campbell is a bit of a gadfly within the Canadian Parks system, which is often annoyed by Campbell’s interpretation of Parks Canada history, though at the same time takes it quite seriously. Here, Campbell looks at notable Canadian historic sites — five of the largest in the country: (1) L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland: so-called “gateway to the New World” and Canada’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, its a medieval Norse settlement in maritime North America, which Campbell says erases Indigenous histories while also missing an opportunity to underscore the critical issues of climate change and species exhaustion. (2) Grand Pré, Nova Scotia: another UNESCO Site remembered mostly as Acadian farmland made possible through the draining of Bay of Fundy saltwater marshes in the 17th and 18th centuries. It offers a way of underscoring the environmental costs of industrial agriculture which completely surrounds the site, and the early logics of dominance over nature embodied by settler land relations that also existed in Acadian agricultural practices. (3) Fort William, Ontario: a fur trading post at the northwest tip of Lake Superior that was reconstructed in the 1970s at some distance from its original site, for the sake of tourist access. More than anything it is an imagined wilderness developed by a private contractor and devoid of content that addresses the site’s role in historic environmental change. (4) Forks of the Red River, Manitoba: the only one I believe I’ve visited out of the five, its an urban park that represents patches of various historical periods while primarily serving as a site of post-industrial gentrification and market economics. (5) Bar U Ranch, Alberta: Campbell points out that there has been oil and gas production in this area almost as long as there have been ranches, and this site is emblematic of the great Canadian resource frontier and the extractive economy to which it is committed. I think what Campbell does is interesting because in this book she is emphasizing connections between historic sites and ongoing economic activity occurring around these sites and its environmental implications. These sites should not remain imagined as insulated places devoid of context, but in relation to the contemporary world that surrounds them. She comments on this Canadian heritage advertisement by Cenovus: “Sites that heroize imperial and industrial expansion without environmental context quietly sanction and perpetuate the same ethos in contemporary Canada. A recent advertising campaign by oil company Cenovus showed an unbroken expanse of boreal forest overlain with a chronology of Canadian technological achievements: the telephone, the transcontinental railway, the Canadarm. The message is that the land inspires our actions but is never affected or harmed by them – a message that is simply untrue. We need to stop divorcing the historical record from current economic activity, a rhetorical romance of wilderness from active resource development. Yet our system of protected places has merely encouraged this self-deception. This is precisely the paradoxical raison d’être we have always assigned to our national parks: “dedicated to the people of Canada for their benefit, education, and enjoyment [while] maintained and made use of so as to leave them unimpaired for future generations.” Secondly, Campbell emphasizes the role historic sites play in constructing Canada’s national identity, citing Benedict Anderson: “As Benedict Anderson observed, easily reproduced images of landmarks provide the nation-state with “a sort of pictorial census,” one of several tools by which to foster an imagined community between people who will never meet face to face, but among whom the state wishes to cultivate a feeling of membership or belonging in a common heritage and territory. In short, the environment is essential to this national narrative, as territory, storehouse, and symbol. But there is no political purpose served by drawing attention to the environmental consequences of nation building. Instead, the narrative must focus on national growth without cost. While scholars of public history have focused on the civics of commemoration, we need to think about the environmental implications of constructing a national identity and the environmental messages embedded in – or possible for – history education.” While a grad student, academics were dismissive about public history and its possibilities, whereas Campbell thinks (rightly in my view) that they are important sites of political contestation: “When I was a graduate student in the public history program at the University of Western Ontario, a professor in the history department tried to get me to rethink my chosen path. “Why,” he asked, in an ac- cent coloured by a few years at Cambridge, “would you want to spend your career in a gingham dress working a butter churn?” Clearly, that was not how historians were to tell Canadians anything of substance, let alone how the future ought to look. Professional bigotries aside, can historic sites challenge the status quo, engage in political debate, or merely reify positive and well-sanctioned stories? Public historians may speak to more people, but they are more constrained than their university counterparts by a wider range of political and material factors, both immediate and ideological. There is the capricious nature of government funding (which has resulted in a problematic emphasis on marketing and sites-for-rent, as we’ll see) and the burden of bureaucratic oversight. There is the relative availability of different kinds of artifacts; a disproportionate number of forts and fur trade posts, inherited from earlier generations of designation, compared to stories of the urban poor or immigrant groups or those marginal from central Canada. There is the obligation to cultivate political allegiances and public participation, the result being “heritage”: a gentler, more appealing form of history.” “Scholarship on public history and heritage has focused on the politics of commemoration: how and what people decide to remember and celebrate; who is involved in or excluded from the decisions; how this changes over time; and how physical monuments become lieux de memoire or “structural supports” of public memory” She mentions a site like the Gooderham & Worts distillery district, which I think has been a heritage site that has functioned similarly to Forks of the Red River as an even more exalted site of gentrification and market economics. The historical interpretation I’ve seen there speaks little of class dynamics of workers there, the serious inequalities and dangers they faced. I am interested in this site because Gooderham & Worts also owned a watermill on the Missinihe (Credit River) in what is now Meadowvale Village in Mississauga (the first Ontario Heritage Conservation District) and had a retail emporium in the area that rivalled Eaton’s at the time which was operating in Toronto. The environmental history of these sites is severely lacking, and I wonder if there is government incentive to fund future historical interpretation that underscores the military and environmental violence of colonialism, or if that will have to happen through direct action (as many activists have already done around Toronto). ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 21, 2023
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May 22, 2023
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Mar 21, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1107569877
| 9781107569874
| 1107569877
| 3.99
| 1,770
| 1986
| Oct 08, 2015
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This book feels a lot older than it actually is. It came out in 1986, but it feels like Crosby is borderline operating on race science logic and its c
This book feels a lot older than it actually is. It came out in 1986, but it feels like Crosby is borderline operating on race science logic and its categories. He unironically uses terms like ‘Caucasian’ in this sort of way: “the Caucasian division of humanity ahead of the others has been largely canceled by their tardy but immense increases” He will qualify his use of terms like this with suggestions that it is not about biological bodies but politics, culture and technology (and as an aside, has a very problematic conception of what constitutes culture): “Europeans, a division of Caucasians distinctive in their politics and technologies, rather than in their physiques…” And much of his characterization of what he calls Neo-Europes (U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand) emphasizes the temperate and climactic similarities with Europe that, to me, seem to imply biological explanations, not directly connected to bodies of racialized difference (at least I don’t recall it explicitly framed in such a way though it does seem implied at times and resonant with acclimatization theory of certain forms of racial science), but rather on the flora and fauna that they depended upon. So early attempts to colonize the Norse Atlantic colonies failed, but other areas environmentally closer to Europe later succeeded according to Crosby because they were able to host the flora and fauna European peoples depended upon. The chapter on trade winds was interesting, and I think the basic insight that European colonialism significantly redistributed the global distribution of flora and fauna often in ecologically harmful ways is important but somewhat obvious I think for most people. I don’t think they need this book to reach such a realization. I think Grove's Green Imperialism is a far more interesting read for those looking for an environmental history of imperialism. ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 24, 2023
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| 4.00
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really liked it
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Aug 29, 2023
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| 4.20
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really liked it
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really liked it
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really liked it
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really liked it
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really liked it
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May 23, 2023
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| 3.91
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really liked it
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May 23, 2023
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| 3.85
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it was amazing
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May 23, 2023
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Apr 21, 2023
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it was amazing
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May 23, 2023
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really liked it
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Jul 07, 2023
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it was amazing
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May 19, 2023
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Apr 01, 2023
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it was amazing
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Jun 23, 2023
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Mar 27, 2023
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it was amazing
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May 23, 2023
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Mar 25, 2023
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really liked it
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May 22, 2023
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| 3.99
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Mar 21, 2023
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