Harvard University Press Blog

Honoring Latour

In awarding Bruno Latour the 2021 Kyoto Prize for arts and philosophy, the Inamori Foundation said he has “revolutionized the conventional view of science” and “his philosophy re-examines ‘modernity’ based on the dualism of nature and society.” Below is an excerpt from An Inquiry into Modes of Existence.

For more than twenty years, scientific and technological controversies have proliferated in number and scope, eventually reaching the climate itself. Since geologists are beginning to use the term “Anthropocene” to designate the era of Earth’s history that follows the Holocene, this will be a convenient term to use from here on to sum up the meaning of an era that extends from the scientific and industrial revolutions to the present day. If geologists themselves, rather stolid and serious types, see humanity as a force of the same amplitude as volcanoes or even of plate tectonics, one thing is now certain: we have no hope whatsoever—no more hope in the future than we had in the past—of seeing a definitive distinction between Science and Politics.

As a result, the touchstone that served to distinguish past from present, to sketch out the modernization front that was ready to encompass the planet by offering an identity to those who felt “modern,” has lost all its efficacy. It is now before Gaia that we are summoned to appear: Gaia, the odd, doubly composite figure made up of science and mythology used by certain specialists to designate the Earth that surrounds us and that we surround, the Möbius strip of which we form both the inside and the outside, the truly global Globe that threatens us even as we threaten it. If I wanted to dramatize—perhaps overdramatize—the ambience of my investigative project, I would say that it seeks to register the aftershocks of the modernization front just as the confrontation with Gaia appears imminent.

It is as though the Moderns (I use the capitalized form to designate this population of variable geometry that is in search of itself) had up to now defined values that they had somehow sheltered in shaky institutions conceived on the fly in response to the demands of the modernization front while continuing to defer the question of how they themselves were going to last. They had a future, but they were not concerned with what was to come—or rather, what was coming. What is coming? What is it that is arriving unexpectedly, something they seem not to have anticipated? “Gaia,” the “Anthropocene” era, the precise name hardly matters, something in any case that has deprived them forever of the fundamental distinction between Nature and Society by means of which they were establishing their system of coordinates, one step at a time. Starting from this event, everything has become more complicated for them. “Tomorrow,” those who have stopped being resolutely modern murmur, “we’re going to have to take into account even more entanglements involving beings that will conflate the order of Nature with the order of Society; tomorrow even more than yesterday we’re going to feel ourselves bound by an even greater number of constraints imposed by ever more numerous and more diverse beings.” From this point on, the past has an altered form, since it is no more archaic that what lies ahead. As for the future, it has been shattered to bits. We shall no longer be able to emancipate ourselves the way we could before. An entirely new situation: behind us, attachments; ahead of us, ever more attachments. Suspension of the “modernization front.” End of emancipation as the only possible destiny. And what is worse: “we” no longer know who we are, nor of course where we are, we who had believed we were modern…End of modernization. End of story. Time to start over.

Is there another system of coordinates that can replace the one we have lost, now that the modernist parenthesis is closing? This is the enterprise that I have been doggedly pursuing, alongside other endeavors, for a quarter of a century, and that I would like to share and extend through this book and its accompanying digital apparatus. I believe that it is actually possible to complement the starkly negative title We Have Never Been Modern with a positive version of the same assertion. If we have never been modern, then what has happened to us? What are we to inherit? Who have we been? Who are we going to become? With whom must we be connected? Where do we find ourselves situated from now on? These are all questions of historical and comparative anthropology that we cannot begin to approach without a thorough inquiry into the famous modernity that is in the process of shutting down.

How Muslim Women Dress

Can a modest and religious woman also be fashionable and stylish? One’s immediate response to such a question can reveal quite a bit about their position in and perspective on the world. As Elizabeth Bucar shows in Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress, there’s no inherent incompatibility between modesty and beauty, and modest fashion represents much more than social control or religious orthodoxy. Bucar’s ethnographic work in the stores and streets of Tehran, Yogyakarta, and Istanbul reveals the locally-determined moral and aesthetic values exemplified by Islamic dress, and the comparative design of the project serves to deepen our understanding of Islamic politics. Ramin Raza, a Northeastern University student who interned with us at HUP this summer, spoke with Bucar about the book and its conclusions; their conversation is below.

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Q: For many non-Muslims living in the West, the major source of exposure to Islam and to Muslim dress is through media outlets that depict women’s attire from a Western or even Orientalist perspective. From your time in three Muslim countries, how did your experience of “pious fashion” challenge these notions and highlight the varying expressions of piety through dress?

It’s a good question to begin with since I suspect many non-Muslims and Muslims alike view pious fashion—and a headscarf—as a sign of Muslim women’s oppression, that they don’t make their own decisions, that they are controlled by patriarchy in some way that is radically different from other women. That is just too simplistic a view. All women feel the effects of gender ideologies and this affects how we present ourselves in public—including our dress. But within these pressures and constraints we still have some degree of choice. Even in Tehran, where hijab is required, a woman has to decide every morning what to wear to abide by those regulations—and the options are endless.

Q: In Pious Fashion, you illustrate how a nation’s cultural and sociopolitical ideology materializes in women’s fashion, and consequently, falls on the woman’s body to reflect and uphold. Briefly, how do Muslim women in Tehran, Yogyakarta, and Istanbul navigate these structural forces and assert agency through pious fashion?

The three locations studied in my book are case studies to explore the specifics of how women’s dress can be seen as a response to and even critique of these ideologies. But I don’t think I can summarize each location in a pithy sentence. In fact that is part of the reason I wrote this book. Clothing everywhere can be read, and in our own culture we do it all the time. I might note how my student’s T-shirt, my colleague’s suit, or the height of my friend’s boots convey social privilege, gender norms, or power. But when we try to read clothing in other cultures, we often make mistakes because we base our interpretations on our own aesthetic and moral assumptions. So it is only by thinking about a particular trend or clothing item within a web of moral and aesthetic values that we can see how Muslim women can use pious fashion to express their individual taste, identity, cosmopolitanism, and even politics.

Q: You explain in the book that piety and fashion do not challenge each other, but rather inform one another to bring nuance and broader meaning to Muslim women’s dress. How, then, does pious fashion communicate in a way that is both Islamic and secular?  

We think there is a hard line between what is religious and what is secular. But in everyday life, that line is blurred. The same scarf I might buy in a hijab store in Tehran—which I must wear by law in that country as part of a governmental effort to make the public space more Islamic—I might buy in Urban Outfitters in Boston as part of my own effort to add some hipster vibe to my casual weekend outfit. The actual material items are not as invested with special meaning as we might think. And this winter we saw Shepard Fairey’s image of a woman in an American flag headscarf adopted as one of the most prominent symbols of the Women’s March in DC. Influence goes both ways. Secular trends effect pious fashion, but religious clothing makes piety fashionable in mainstream culture as well.

The Origins of the American Antiquities Act

Citing “abuses of power by previous administrations,” President Trump last week signed an order directing the Interior Department to review national monuments created under the American Antiquities Act since 1996. The “Presidential Order on the Review of Designations Under the Antiquities Act” calls for the Secretary of the Interior to consider the appropriate classification of landmarks, structures, and objects, the process by which designations were made, the effects of designations, the concerns of State, tribal, and local government affected by designations, and “the requirements and original objectives of the Act.” Those original objectives were recently outlined by historian Samuel Redman in Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, which traces how museums in the United States collected, researched, and exhibited human remains, starting around the time of the Civil War and stretching deep into the twentieth century. In the adapted excerpt below, Redman describes how the lawless looting of human remains led to the passage of the American Antiquities Act in 1906, an act that transformed the practice of archaeology in North America and had broad implications for environmental and historical preservation in the American West.

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Well before the end of the nineteenth century, serious researchers had come to a collective understanding: significant discoveries of human remains were managed poorly on a national scale. In 1887, Washington Matthews of the U.S. Army took over an expedition for the legendary anthropologist and adventurer Frank Hamilton Cushing after Cushing fell ill. Matthews was horrified to observe the state of important human remains littered throughout the American West. One account notes, “[Matthews] found that no attention had been paid to the collection or preservation of human bones, which were extremely fragile, crumbling to dust upon a touch, and which had been thrown about and trampled under foot by curious visitors, so that but little remained of value from the work which had been previously done.” Matthews took for granted the importance of certain remains, knowing even better than most anthropologists of his era the intellectual desires for skeletons—especially those of American Indians—for comparative anatomy or racial science. Since the majority of Anglo-Americans accepted the idea that the American Indian was, in fact, vanishing, it is unsurprising that Matthews was horrified to find naturally decaying skeletons—bones upended and exposed by looters—left to dust outside the protection of museum walls.

Other scientists, too, had grown concerned about looting from historic sites around the country, specifically those in the American West. Rediscovering striking archaeological sites in the American Southwest caused a stir both in the academic community and with writers who wrote for popular audiences. The territory of the United States, many were starting to realize, had a deep and rich history extending centuries before European contact. New discoveries in the American West suddenly seemed important to the growing investigation into ancient history in the Americas.

By the middle of the 1890s, newspaper editorials started to echo professional calls for the preservation of antiquities. An editorial appearing in the New York Herald in 1896 argued that “ignorant relic hunters” were clearly to blame for the destruction of antiquities and that only congressional action could save rapidly vanishing sites. The article urgently informed readers, “All these invaluable possessions are fast disappearing, simply for lack of proper legislation to protect them.” As proof, a growing tourist market had created a demand for ancient artifacts and works of art, which were easily bought and sold throughout the American West. If the government failed to act, the editorial warned, American heritage, in the form of “our heirlooms from the American aborigines,” would be unstudied and forever lost.

The mission of collecting human remains both synchronized with and actually advanced the arguments of those who were lobbying for the American Antiquities Act. Advocates in favor of legislating burial mounds, cliff dwellings, and other discoveries believed to possess historical significance on public lands represented museums in New York and Washington, DC, as well as anthropologists writing from the field. The chorus was strong enough to push Congress to finally pass the American Antiquities Act of 1906, which ultimately was signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt.

More than a generation before the passing of the American Antiquities Act, looters, amateur archaeologists, and tourists started ravaging sites of ancient human occupation in the American Southwest. The market for antiquities formed a series of steady streams for museums in the United States. Artifacts in private collections were frequently donated to museums (later generations often failed to possess the esoteric drive for collecting mummies or skulls for display above the fireplace). With the rediscovery of Mesa Verde—a vast and complex series of stone structures in Colorado—the Wetherill brothers marked the most prominent of a series of finds in the late nineteenth-century American West. Major discoveries at spectacular places like Mesa Verde, which soon became a national park, became examples that punctuated the countless other smaller incidents of the removal and sale of artifacts—including human remains—occurring at the same time in the United States.

(SPOILER ALERT) You Are Not An Ape!

Why did human evolution diverge from that of our closest primate relatives? What can studying apes tell us about early human social structures? What actually makes us different? In the richly illustrated and referenced Apes and Human Evolution, University of Chicago Professor of Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology Russell Tuttle synthesizes virtually all we know about such questions to produce an authoritative history of the evolution of us. Below, Tuttle outlines some of the major topics addressed in the book, which he’ll be presenting at Chicago’s Seminary Co-Op Bookstore on March 20th.

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In Apes and Human Evolution, I argue that since the 19th-century evolution revolution, theories of human evolution have been biased by folk beliefs about the meaning of individual, sexual and group differences in appearance and customs and by world events, like warfare, and personal experiences of theorists. As apes became subjects of detailed study their behavior served variously to reinforce or refute notions of close similarity between them and us.

Over the past 45 years scientists who trained in programs devoid of anthropology have developed models that emphasize increasingly close affinity between African apes and humans. Some of them claim that chimpanzees are actually people (Homo troglodytes and Homo paniscus) or that people are somewhat more cultured chimpanzees (Pan sapiens). Such claims, abetted by popular books and other media, exemplify poor evolutionary anthropology and are offensive toward the very communities and heads of state to whom we must appeal for scientifically informed preservation of apes and their habitats.

Although the old argument about which nonhuman primates are closer to humans has settled on the apes, many puzzles remain regarding the extent to which we can draw on them as models for specific aspects of our variable genomes, morphology and behavior. Rare major and many minor fossil discoveries underpin phylogenic models of primate evolution over a span of geologic time greater than sixty-five million years, but small samples of fragmentary specimens and very patchy spatiotemporal representation usually limit their informational value. Our Linnaean family, the Hominidae, contained a notable number and variety of species that is difficult to organize into phylogenic lineages, only one of which terminated in modern Homo sapiens.

The Sickened Earth and Sky

There’s a strange sort of dovetail connecting the first-person account of a shaman from the Brazilian Amazon with an attempt by a French maven of science studies to taxonomize “modern” ways of being. The latter—Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence—is a project of diplomacy inspired by a clear need to reconcile the “plurality of truth conditions” that leads the world away from consensus on issues as critical as climate change. The former—The Falling Sky, by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert—details for Latour’s “moderns” a way of being that grows ever more threatened by that lack of consensus.

Kopenawa, the shaman, has become the face of the Yanomami people of Brazil, but his advocacy benefits indigenous cultures everywhere facing cultural repression, environmental devastation, and deaths resulting from epidemics and violence. In The Falling Sky Kopenawa offers his personal story interwoven with a history of his people and their cosmo-ecological thought, amounting in the end to an immersion so complete as to be deeply unsettling for readers who understand themselves to be the intended recipients of its warnings:

What the white people call the whole world is being tainted because of the factories that make all their merchandise, their machines, and their motors. Though the sky and the earth are vast, their fumes eventually spread in every direction, and all are affected: humans, game, and the forest. It is true. Even the trees are sick from it. Having become ghost, they lose their leaves, they dry up and break all by themselves. The fish also die from it in the rivers’ soiled waters. The white people will make the earth and the sky sick with the smoke from their minerals, oil, bombs, and atomic things. Then the winds and the storms will enter into a ghost state.

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When the white people tear dangerous minerals out of the depths of the earth, our breath becomes too short and we die very quickly. We do not simply get sick like long ago when we were alone in the forest. This time, all our flesh and even our ghosts are soiled by the xawara epidemic smoke that burns us. This is why our dead shaman elders are angry and want to protect us. If the breath of life of all of our people dies out, the forest will become empty and silent. Our ghosts will then go to join all those who live on the sky’s back, already in very large numbers. The sky, which is as sick from the white people’s fumes as we are, will start moaning and begin to break apart. All the orphan spirits of the last shamans will chop it up with their axes. In a rage, they will throw its broken pieces on the earth to avenge their dead fathers. One by one they will cut all its points of support, and it will collapse from end to end. For this time there won’t be a single shaman left to hold it up. It will truly be terrifying! The back of the sky bears a forest as vast as ours, and its enormous weight will brutally crush us all. The entire ground on which we walk will be carried away into the underworld where our ghosts will become aõpatari ancestors in their turn. We will perish before we even notice. No one will have the time to scream or cry. The angry orphan xapiri will also smash the sun, the moon, and the stars. Then the sky will remain dark for all time.

Here’s Kopenawa introducing his message for the non-Indians:

 

At our website we’ve excerpted passages of The Falling Sky that address some of the many threats facing indigenous people. If any single person’s account could further the diplomacy Latour means to facilitate, The Falling Sky may well be it.

Does Malala Need Saving?

Earlier this month, New Atheist Sam Harris took to his blog to uphold the courageous Malala Yousafzai as both ally and object of his quest to save Muslims from Islam. Harris attempts to make of the internationally celebrated Pakistani activist an Islam-escapee in the mold of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, offering Malala’s work as the sort of truth-telling that “Islam’s apologists” must heed:

Malala is the best thing to come out of the Muslim world in a thousand years. She is an extraordinarily brave and eloquent girl who is doing what millions of Muslim men and women are too terrified to do—stand up to the misogyny of traditional Islam.

And yet, as Murtaza Hussain points out at Salon, Harris can’t possibly have respected Malala enough even to understand her own feelings on her culture and religion. Where Harris assumes Malala strives to be rescued from “traditional Islam,” Malala herself seems far more intent on rescuing Islam from groups like the Taliban, those whom Harris depicts as Islam’s most devout and representative.

Here’s Hussain:

Given her own words, Malala is ostensibly among the “Islam apologists” he is targeting; but this doesn’t come into play in Harris’ myopic worldview. Although Malala may claim to be a devout Muslim acting in accordance with Islam, this is merely an inconvenient detail that can be safely ignored… When you don’t even feel you have to listen to the voices of the people whose cause you’re championing, it’s a reasonable indication of the fact that this has less to do with them than with you.

Harris serves here as a particularly blatant example of a kind of crusading for Muslim women’s rights that anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod says became commonplace after 9/11. While Harris is fairly transparently using a young woman as a tool in his own ongoing war against Islam, the impulse noted by Abu-Lughod is just as likely to manifest as well-meaning—if ill-informed—concern expressed by ordinary Westerners for the status of women in the Arab world. For Abu-Lughod, author of Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, it’s critical that we ask where that impulse comes from, and what work it’s doing in the world:

This book seeks answers to the questions that presented themselves to me with such force after September 11, 2001, when popular concern about Muslim women’s rights took off. I worry about the ways that representations of Muslim women’s suffering and arguments about their lack of rights have been working politically and practically. I follow the concept of “Muslim women’s rights” as it travels through debates and documents, organizes women’s organizations and activism, and mediates lives in refugee camps and the halls of the United Nations. I try to uncover what this framework that describes distant women’s lives only in terms of rights, present or absent, hides from us about both everyday violence and forms of love. I ask what evaluating lives in terms of rights does for (and against) different kinds of women. Along the way, I uncover how key symbols of Muslim women’s cultural alienness—from the veil to the honor crime—are deployed in twenty-first-century political projects, and why these symbols grip us.

Abu-Lughod traces these representations and arguments as they appear in venues as disparate as UN reports, New York Times opinion columns, book-length philosophical inquiries, and a genre of “pulp nonfiction” that seems to flourish in airport bookstores. Her argument is not that Muslim women are in fact carefree, but that their lives are as diverse and complicated as all lives are, and that when we make facile and unfounded judgments about culture’s role in those complications we forestall consideration of any actually effective strategies for playing an appropriate role in their alleviation.

Here’s more from Abu-Lughod:

 

But Then What Have We Been?

In We Have Never Been Modern, published twenty years back, Bruno Latour argued that we fundamentally misunderstand the condition in which we live. This age we’ve called modernity, characterized by careful distinctions between nature and society, human and thing, fact and value, is in reality defined by an overarching hybridity, a defiance of clear delineation, an undermining of the essence of modernization.

Lovely. But, if not modern, then what have we been?

Identifying a positive definition of the project of Western civilization is the goal of Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, a newly published book presenting an ongoing, interactive, metaphysical investigation. And, people, this inquiry, this “anthropology of the Moderns,” is neither piece nor walk of cake. The book itself is a challenging work in that destabilizing manner we expect of Latour, and one for which a familiarity with Latour’s earlier output will be of great aid.

AIME begins, in fact, with the rejection of a common misunderstanding of Latour’s perspective on objectivity, a concept at the heart of his field of science studies:

Now, in its early days, in the 1980s, this field was perceived by many scientists as a critique of scientific Certainty—which it was—but also of reliable knowledge—which it most certainly was not. We wanted to understand how—with what instruments, what machinery, what material, historical, anthropological conditions—it was possible to produce objectivity. And of course, without appealing to any transcendent Certainty that would have all at once and without discussion raised up Science with a capital S against public opinion. As we saw it, scientific objectivity was too important to be defended solely by what is known by the umbrella term “RATIONALISM,” a term used too often to bring debate to a halt when an accusation of irrationality is hurled against overly insistent adversaries. Well before questions of ecology came to the forefront of politics, we already suspected that the distinction between the rational and the irrational would not suffice to settle the debates over the components of the COMMON WORLD. As we saw it, the question of the sciences was rather more complicated than that; we sought to investigate the manufacture of objectivity in a new way. And that is why we are always astonished, my colleagues in the history or sociology of the sciences and I, at the hostility of certain researchers toward what they call the “relativism” of our inquiries, whereas we have only been trying to prepare scientists for a finally realistic defense of the objectivity to which we are just as attached as they are—but in a different way.

This is not an academic distinction, and Latour need but genuflect towards the epistemological crisis exacerbating our ecological catastrophe to make that clear. The institution of science, that presumed pillar of modernity, is failing to convince us Moderns of the most dangerous thing we know. Those producing the knowledge of climate change and those on whom corrective action depends exist in different modes.

And so Latour’s project is one of diplomacy, of opening channels between these modes and the dozen others whose conflicts can be so consequential for our very planet. We may not be modern, but without such assuagement we’ll surely be doomed.

Tracing the Ties that Bind Blacks and Jews in History and Myth

Tudor Parfitt, once described as “a sort of British Indiana Jones,” writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas that he first encountered black Jews “in any form” in late 1984, when he’d traveled to the Sudanese border with Ethiopia. He’d been sent to the border’s refugee camps to investigate reports that the Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) there were being mistreated by the Christian Ethiopians, all of whom were fleeing the year’s famine. Though their status as Jews was being contested, Parfitt was present for what he describes as “the first stages of the Israeli attempt to save thousands of these impoverished and desperate people from famine and persecution.”

Not long after, while speaking in South Africa about the Ethiopian Jews, Parfitt met another group of black Jews, this time from the Lemba tribe. The Lembas explained to Parfitt that they were blood relatives of the Ethiopian Jews, and that the Israeli acceptance of the Ethiopians should also legitimize their own Judaism, hitherto difficult to claim. Despite being intrigued by the notion that the people he’d met in the Sudan were now acting as a “proof community” for others, Parfitt found the idea of any connection between the Beta Israel and the Lemba of Soweto doubtful.

Out of curiosity he spent time with the Lemba, and while he came to consider it quite possible that their customs and traditions had something to do with the Semitic world he was unable to uncover any record of Jews having settled in southeastern or central Africa as far back as the Lemba’s oral tradition extended. Another year or two passed before, while researching a history of the Jews of the Yemen, Parfitt uncovered some evidence that could actually corroborate the Lemba’s story of their own heritage. “And it was at this point and rather out of frustration,” he writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, “that I turned to genetics.”

In 1999 the findings of the Lemba’s genetic tests were front page news around the world, the subject of television documentaries such as NOVA’s The Lost Tribes of Israel, and even featured in a segment on 60 Minutes. As reported by the New York Times:

Several groups around the world practice Judaic rites or claim to be descended from biblical tribes without having any ancestral Jewish connection… But the remarkable thing about the Lemba tradition is that it may be exactly right. A team of geneticists has found that many Lemba men carry in their male chromosome a set of DNA sequences that is distinctive of the cohanim, the Jewish priests believed to be the descendants of Aaron. The genetic signature of priests—a hereditary caste, different from rabbis but with certain ritual roles—is particularly common among Lemba men who belong to the senior of their 12 groups, known as the Buba clan.

The discovery of the Lemba's Jewish ancestry has come about through the intertwining of two unusual strands of inquiry. One was developed by geneticists in the United States, Israel and England who wondered what truth there might be to the Jewish tradition that priests are the descendants of Aaron, the elder brother of Moses.

The other strand was provided by Dr. Tudor Parfitt, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Dr. Parfitt, who has done research among the Lemba for 10 years, says that he has discovered Senna—Lemba tradition maintains they came from that mysterious northern city—and that he can retrace their steps from Senna to Africa, maybe a thousand years ago.

Since that burst of coverage over a dozen years ago interest in the Lemba has been steady, and, coupled with the worldwide interest in the exodus of the Ethiopian Jews, there was evidence of an enduring fascination with the very idea of black Jews. For Parfitt, the intensity and duration of that fascination sparked a new series of questions:

Why did these stories generate such media interest? Was it because the stories were about Jews? Or because they were about blacks? Or both? Was it because, at some deep level in Western consciousness, Jews are actually assumed to be black and that therefore these stories about black Jews could be taken as a final vindication of an age-old presumption? Or was it that people believe that Jews are not black at all and cannot be black and therefore that the idea of black Jews appeared more than usually quixotic—and therefore good copy? Whatever the reason, this topic achieved worldwide coverage, and articles on the Lemba and Beta Israel have appeared in the world’s major newspapers with some regularity. The topic touched a nerve in a way that none of the work with which I had hitherto been engaged had done. Somewhere at the nexus of these issues of history, prejudice, and convention there seemed to me to nestle aspects of Jewish and black history that had not been fully studied before.

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, our most thorough tracing of the ties that bind blacks and Jews in history and myth, is the result of Parfitt’s work to understand those histories.

A Portal into a Vanished Jewish World

At the turn of the twentieth century, Russia’s Pale of Settlement was home to 40% of the world’s Jews—and so foreign to the rest of the country that Russian Jewish intellectuals called it “our own kind of dark continent.” How to capture this rich, mysterious land, its people and traditions? For peripatetic playwright and journalist S. An-sky, the answer was the 2,087-question Jewish Ethnographic Program, a survey now translated into English for the first time in The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement. While world war and revolution prevented the survey from ever being distributed, in Nathaniel Deutsch’s hands the unanswered questions (a selection of which can be found below) and the story behind their assembly disclose a riveting account of a lost world.

Beginning with a query about a person’s soul before it enters the body, and ending with the question “What kind of life will there be after the resurrection of the dead?,” An-sky’s survey covers all aspects of Jewish life, from birth to childhood to education to marriage to aging and death.

In an introductory section, Deutsch sites The Jewish Ethnographic Program in its intellectual, historical, and cultural contexts, and in the context of An-sky’s life and work. He describes his own history with the translation project, including ultimately quixotic attempts to elicit responses to the questions from subjects ranging from elderly people who had once lived in shtetls, to rabbinical students, to observant Jews. As he was translating the questions, Deutsch also lost himself in the project of their annotation:

Initially I planned on providing explanatory notes to only those questions that seemed especially obscure. After all, one of the things that I had always found most compelling about The Jewish Ethnographic Program was the very fact that it was a book of questions without answers and, therefore, a kind of stripped-down, elemental version of a classical Jewish text. And yet as I went through The Program looking for questions that needed clarification or commentary, I soon found myself creating more and more notes. Before I knew it, I had completed notes to one hundred questions, and then two hundred, and then three hundred, and so on.

By this point, practically every countertop in the house—and not a few floors—were covered with books: memoirs about growing up in the Pale of Settlement, yizker bikher (memorial books) for Eastern European Jewish communities, scholarly works on Russian Jewish history and culture, and traditional sforim, or books on Halakhah and minhag. In one sense I was reverse-engineering the creative process that had led to the composition of The Jewish Ethnographic Program in the first place, with of course the critically important difference being that I was a single individual living in twenty-first-century America, whereas The Program had been created by a team of people born and raised in the Pale of Settlement. In another sense, and despite my best—at least conscious—efforts not to do so, I was also attempting to answer all of the questions myself.

On Fathers, Evolution, and Bedtime

Dads got their annual time in the spotlight over this past week as we geared up for and then celebrated Father’s Day. Here at HUP we’ve been glad to see a book we published last year get a nice bit of attention in the Father’s Day media blitz. It’s called Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior, and it was co-written by Peter B. Gray and Kermyt G. Anderson.  Just in the past week the BabyCenter blog cited the book; it featured in a Vancouver Sun op-ed; and there was a particularly thorough post about the book on MSNBC.com’s Cosmic Log, where Alan Boyle looked at how anthropologists suggest that current social trends might be reshaping fatherhood in the mold of the “good old days of hunter-gatherer fathering,” an era when researchers like Gray and Anderson assert that fathers were more active in their children’s development than in much of modern history.

All of this attention on modern fathers, and this welcome coverage of Gray and Anderson’s rich evolutionary perspective, makes a recent article on a persistent societal barrier between motherhood and fatherhood even more interesting. The piece appeared on Jezebel last week and is titled “Could A Mom Have Written Go The F--k To Sleep? And Would It Have Been A Bestseller?” (Well, actually, Jezebel doesn’t bother with the coy hyphens, and, in what follows, neither will we. Be warned.)

For those who’ve somehow missed it, Go the Fuck to Sleep is a parenting and publishing sensation.
It’s a picture book, written by the novelist Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Roberto Cortés, that gives us a father at his wit’s end come bedtime. The book began as a lark, picked up steam online, went to number one on Amazon, had a first printing of 300,000 copies, has been performed by Samuel L. Jackson and Werner Herzog, and has already been optioned for film. That kid who wouldn’t go to sleep is suddenly making an awful lot of money for daddy.

What Amy Sohn asks in her Jezebel piece is whether a mother could have gotten away with a book like this—and been met with a reception that would pay for her kid’s college just based on preorders. From her piece:

As much as I want to believe that “Funny is funny” and it would have been a runaway success regardless, I can't help but think that things might have gone down differently.

A mom who even thinks the word “fuck” around her kid? A mom who can’t get her child to sleep or is unwilling to co-sleep to do it? A mom who isn’t more lovable than caustic, always and forever? I can't help but think the Internet masses on parenting sites like this would have a field day with it, raking me over the coals for the same sentiment that is so funny when expressed by a dad.

— If you hate being a mom so much, why did you have a child in the first place?

— Clearly your daughter can’t rest because you work.

— You have an anger management problem and you're giving your kid ADHD.

— You need Zoloft.

— I pray that you bring no more children into the world because it will spare another individual the years of therapy he will need to get over the trauma of having been raised by such a selfish and insensitive person.

And, of course: That book is so lame, I could have written it.