Monthly Archives: February 2004

by | 19 February 2004 · 11:32 pm

Times & Seasons: A Mormon Blog

I grew up among both missionaries and heathens, and still retain what I hope is a healthy respect for both camps, so long as the methods of the missionaries are not coercive and (not or) the reaction of the heathens is not violent. I’m interested in different religious (and irreligious) perspectives, so long as they are reasonable and (not or) tolerant of alternative views. (I don’t regard “antireligious” as a synonym for either “tolerant” or “enlightened.”) In that spirit, I’d like to recommend for those with religious interests a fairly new Mormon group blog Times and Seasons. I have no interest in adhering to Mormonism or (substitute your religion here) ________, but I find that Mormon perspectives (mea culpa: I first wrote “a Mormon perspective”) sometimes challenge my facile assumptions about such issues as legislating morality, or about how much religion shapes political views, or about who qualifies to be counted as a minority or as part of a diaspora, and so forth. Here’s a sample of some of the issues discussed on Times and Seasons, “quite possibly the most post-liberal, yet acclaimed, onymous Mormon group blog in history.” The comment sections are generally lively and civil.

Don’t Drink, Don’t Smoke

Perhaps nothing outwardly sets Mormons apart from the rest of society more than our adherence to the Word of Wisdom. And for insiders, as someone once said on this site, the Word of Wisdom just *feels* important. I’m far more likely to offend the Sabbath day, forget a fast, skip hometeaching, use inappropriate language, break the speed limit, or commit dozens of other sins of omission and commission than I am to join my friends sipping tea at a Chinese restaurant….

–The WoW replaced polygamy as something that sets us apart and makes us a peculiar people. Feeling like an outsider is, in some ways, integral to Mormon culture, and WoW adherence fosters this feeling.

Contentment

As I drove home from work today, I heard an announcement for an upcoming program on Wisconsin Public Radio dealing with the topic of contentment. Implicit in the announcement was an assumption that contentment is a worthy life goal. This caught me off guard. Honestly, it has never occurred to me to pursue contentment. I’m not sure I even know what it means.

Legislative Judgments of Morality

Randy Barnett has an interesting post up at the Volokh Conspiracy, giving a persuasive argument about why legislative judgments of morality are not a particularly good basis for legal punishments or restrictions. Barnett makes the very interesting initial assertion that: “A legislative judgment of ‘immorality’ means nothing more than that a majority of the legislature disapproves of this conduct.”

(Blog) Marital Demographics

It suddenly occured to me last night that our group’s marital homogeneity is rather striking. Consider: We have eight bloggers; we live in different locations; we come from different professions; we have different political beliefs; we find a lot to differ on.

We are all married and all have children…. This makes us unusual in the world. At work, school, or social groups, there is often a sizable single contingent. Many people are happy to avoid marriage altogether, and even married colleagues are unlikely to begin having children very soon.

Polygamists in the Pen

This is a photograph of George Q. Cannon, then First Counselor in the First Presidency to John Taylor, and other polygamists taken while Cannon was incarcerated for unlawful cohabitation (polygamy) during the 1880s….

Comment: “Group photos of men incarcerated for polygamy were extremely common, and were displayed as a symbol of loyalty to the Gospel. Interestingly, although there were women incarcerated as part of the anti-polygamy raids, I have never seen any photos of them. The few who were imprisoned were jailed for either contempt of court (refusal to testify against fellow Saints) or fornication. The charge of fornication, in the 19th century, was most often used to punish prostitutes. The few inditements against polygamist women were self-conscious attempts by federal officials to brand Mormon women as whores. This (along with the relative rarity of such cases) may account for the lack of photographs.”

Resenting Our Baptism of Your Dead

Comment: “I had exactly this discussion …. Everyone seemed satisfied that their people (everyone there was Jewish or married to a Jew, or me) would be able to reject the baptisms for themselves. Plus, one woman noted, it was a great way to boost your membership numbers. I said yeah, but it doesn’t help your attendance percentages.”

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by | 19 February 2004 · 8:53 pm

Tribute to Iranian and Iraqi Bloggers

I’d like to pay tribute here to the multitude of Iranian bloggers (aka Weblogestan) many of whom will be blogging their phony elections instead of voting on February 20, thanks in no small measure to pioneer and blogfather Hossein Derakhshan (aka Hoder), born in Tehran, but resident in Toronto since December 2000.

And I’d like to pay equal tribute to the smaller but growing numbers of Iraqi bloggers, pioneered by Salam Pax before the invasion and many blogfathered by Zeyad afterwards, who have been recording the successes and failures of both the occupation and the international media.

Here’s a sense of how revolutionary the message of the new medium has become in Iran, from Persianblogger‘s recent essay about Weblogestan:

The final example I will discuss is Hossein Derakhshan, the person who sparked off the vulgarity debate in the first place with his piece about the inherent contradictions between Islam and human rights. The work of Derakhshan, or Hoder, is a prime example of defiance against the cultural hegemony of the Iranian intellectual class. He can even be seen as trying to establish a new kind of cultural hegemony in the blogosphere; one that values self-expression, individualism, and even hedonism against any kind of traditional authority [15] . As far as language is concerned, Hoder says his blog is the “scratchpad of my mind” (2003b) and his language “is consciously messy” (2003a). He prefers to spend his time writing a new entry instead of going back over what he has already written to correct possible grammatical or spelling mistakes (ibid). Additionally, he has no qualms about coining new terms (like donbaalak for trackback, and linkdooni for linkdump – both blog-related terms) without feeling any need to consult a linguistic authority, and is especially good at putting carnivalesque twists on familiar expressions, like “aytiollaahi” [16] , which combines “IT” (information technology) and “hezbollaahi” and refers mockingly to religious conservative technocrats, and “fakhr-ol internet hazrateh muvebel taaip (saad)” [17] , which both expresses extreme devotion for MovableType (a prominent blogging tool) and pokes fun at the Prophet Muhammad (or his devotees at least) by making use of a popular phrase that is used to praise him. Interestingly enough, Hoder does not share the same attitude towards the English language as he does towards Persian. Being an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, he has bemoaned several times the difficulties of writing essays in English, and he once linked to an online resource with guidelines on writing well in English, which he described as “very useful”. Hoder’s approach to cultural hegemony, then, is highly differentiated between Persian and English speech communities: whereas he directly assaults authority in the former, he feels a need to assimilate in the latter.

UPDATE: Click here for English translations of live election reports from Persian blogs.

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by | 19 February 2004 · 7:44 pm

Mars Rover Blog

Here’s a tribute to the farthest outlier of all, the Mars Rover Blog. Sample transmissions:

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by | 18 February 2004 · 7:54 pm

The Sole Surviving Umayyad Heir Enters al-Andalus, 755

Once upon a time in the mid-eighth century, an intrepid young man named Abd al-Rahman abandoned his home in Damascus, the Near Eastern heartland of Islam, and set out across the North African desert in search of a place of refuge. Damascus had become a slaughterhouse for his family, the ruling Umayyads, who had first led the Muslims out of the desert of Arabia into the high cultures of the Fertile Crescent. With the exception of Abd al-Rahman, the Umayyads were eradicated by the rival Abbasids, who seized control of the great empire called the “House of Islam.” … The prince’s mother was a Berber tribeswoman from the environs of today’s Morocco, which Arabs had reached some years before. From this place, which the Muslims called the Maghrib, the “Far West,” the descendants of the Prophet and his first followers had brought women such as Abd al-Rahman’s mother back east as brides or concubines for the highest-ranking families, to expand and enrich the bloodlines….

Beginning in 711, the Muslims–here the Berbers under the leadership of the Syrian Arabs–had pushed across the small sliver of sea that separates Africa from Europe, the Strait of Gibraltar, to the place the Romans had called Hispania or Iberia….

Abd al-Rahman followed their trail and crossed the narrow strait at the western edge of the world. In Iberia, a place they were calling al-Andalus in Arabic, the language of the new Muslim colonizers, he found a thriving and expansive Islamic settlement. Its center was on the banks of a river that wound down to the Atlantic coast, the Big Wadi (today, in lightly touched up Arabic, the Guadalquivir, or Wadi al-Kabir). The new capital was an old city that the former rulers, the Visigoths, had called Khordoba, after the Roman Corduba, who had ruled the city before the Germanic conquest. It was now pronounced Qurtuba, in the new Arabic accents heard nearly everywhere. The governor of that amorphous and fairly detached frontier “province” was understandably taken aback by the unexpected apparition of this assumed-dead Umayyad prince. Out in these hinterlands, after all, so far from the center of the empire, the shift from Umayyad to Abbasid sovereignty had, until that moment, made little difference in local politics….

The vexed emir of al-Andalus saw at least some of the handwriting on the wall and offered the young man permanent refuge in the capital city as well as his daughter’s hand in marriage. But the grandson of the caliph, the successor to the Prophet and the supreme temporal and spiritual leader of the Islamic world, could not be so easily bought off. Abd al-Rahman assembled forces loyal to him, Syrians and Berbers combined, and one day in May 756, a battle just outside the city walls of Cordoba decisively changed the face of European history and culture. Abd al-Rahman easily defeated his would-be father-in-law and became the new governor of this westernmost province of the Islamic world….

But this young man was, for nearly everyone in these outer provinces, the legitimate caliph, and he was not about to spend the rest of his life in embittered exile…. Although it would be two more centuries before one of his descendants actually openly declared that Cordoba was the seat of the caliphate, al-Andalus was transformed and now anything but a mere provincial seat….

This book tells the story of how this remarkable turn of events, which actually had its origins in the heart of the seventh century in what we call the Near East, powerfully affected the course of European history and civilization. Many aspects of the story are largely unknown, and the extent of their continuing effects on the world around us is scarcely understood, for numerous and complex reasons. The conventional histories of the Arabic-speaking peoples follow the fork in the road taken by the Abbasids. At precisely the point at which the Umayyad prince sets up his all-but-declared caliphate in Europe, the story we are likely to be told continues with the achievements of the Abbasids, who did indeed make Baghdad the capital of an empire of material and cultural wealth and achievement….

The very heart of culture as a series of contraries lay in al-Andalus …. It was there that the profoundly Arabized Jews rediscovered and reinvented Hebrew; there that Christians embraced nearly every aspect of Arabic style–from the intellectual style of philosophy to the architectural styles of mosques–not only while living in Islamic dominions but especially after wresting political control from them; there that men of unshakable faith, like Abelard and Maimonides [Musa ibn Maymun] and Averroes [Ibn Rushd], saw no contradiction in pursuing the truth, whether philosophical or scientific or religious, across confessional lines.

SOURCE: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Back Bay Books, 2002), by María Rosa Menocal, pp. 5-11

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by | 18 February 2004 · 9:14 am

Morobe Field Diary, June 1976: Fieldworker’s Frustration

Before setting out for Karsimbo I felt the first severe case of fieldworker’s frustration. I was tired of being unignored, or scaring kids, of being hailed for doing the least bit of work. And though my reports and dictionaries were proceeding well I realized my speaking/hearing ability was a disappointment to both me and the rest of the village. Partly it was the necessary swing back from total communication and little work to lots of work and little communication. I didn’t take my work to Karsimbo and spent more time communicating and doing things I could describe to people in the village that they didn’t already know about beforehand. I talked about my solo walk up the mountain to see if I could see Kui. I ended up seeing Salamaua Peninsula and the mountain ranges behind Lae (or at least their clouds) but not Kui because the angle wasn’t right. And I didn’t get lost (as I had been warned I might). I followed the huge caterpillar swaths [logging roads] and only turned back when the road I was following was overgrown too much and I heard a not unsizeable creature ‘break bresh’. I came down the mountain feeling quite invigorated and rehearsing my description of my excursion, finding, a little to my surprise, that I could say about all I wanted to say.

Back at camp my hosts had gone en masse to bring back a pig a guy with us had killed and so I went over to another group who had just finished fighting saksak [pounding sago] and told [them] I had climbed the mountain, not seen Kui but seen Salamaua, heard plenty of hornbills and not got lost, all in Binga N. and in return was offered betelnut, talked about a bit and informed that now I had heard Binga N. finish. It was just the sort of success I needed to bolster my spirits and encourage my teachers.

I came back to Siboma telling stories of the two pigs that guy killed–one with a spear made from a speargun–and of beating kundu [sago], which is not waitman’s work.

The last day there they forced me not to help with a third sago palm they were helping someone else do but on the way back I got the big paddle [not the kid’s paddle they gave me on the way there] and paddled like a maniac to dispel my lethargy. I sat in the front where I would affect the steering less and just did most of the power stroking while my mama (‘father’) and awa (‘mother’) took turns keeping the canoe on course and paddling. Part of the fun of this kind of fieldwork is getting to readolesce all over again as well as play with kids on their level–all for science of course. So my brief dumps down in which I found myself last weekend are dispelled and I’ve set aside my dictionary work for a while to start talking more. This weekend I’m in good spirits–partly because I’m heading into Lae for a day or two. And when I get back with my new supplies I will be able to go visiting with more grace (i.e. goods) and confidence. And people are beginning to talk to me in B.N. off the bat now after I began to start every communication in B.N. leaving Tok Pisin for the reserves.

I torture the kaunsil with thoughts of the cold beer waiting for me at the other end of my boat ride. I plan to bring back a case, along with a thousand other items.

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by | 18 February 2004 · 8:38 am

Morobe Field Diary, June 1976: Sago Work

I’m just back from a trip to the former Numbami village of Karsimbo for the purpose of getting a breath of fresh air (kisim nupela win) and getting sago starch (paitim saksak). I had a chance to observe the process of producing edible sago from start to finish so I’ll attempt a description.

First a suitable tree [Metoxylon sagu] is selected. One near a stream is best so the pulp won’t have to be carried far to wash. A man chops down the tree, which is a thorny son of bitch and the kaunsil borrowed my zori [rubber slippers] to do the job. Then the outer bark is removed with an axe or, less effectively, with a bushknife (busnaip). The men usually do such work but women may participate. It’s a matter of practicality, not custom. The inner bark is then stripped in slats with the aid of a siala, a large digging stick used also for making holes to plant taro in the garden–a smaller version is stuck in the ground and used to husk coconuts.

The strips of inner bark are then used to catch the pulp. This leaves the pinkish white inner fibery trunk of the tree ready and waiting submissively for you to hammer the crap out of it with a wanginda, a tool with an adze-like handle and a head of anything from a flat, sharp-edged stone to any old shell casing or length of pipe. The handles vary from child- to man-sized thicknesses. Pounding is not limited to one sex or the other and is the most tiring of the chores associated with kundu/saksak/sago palm. Being unskilled immigrant labor my job is mostly pounding which I do rather effectively after my first attempt in which I broke the head (a huge nut of iron) off one wanginda and blistered my hands badly. It requires some skill to combine chopping a piece off the log and smashing the stuff previously chipped off to a fine enough consistency to yield plenty of powder, kundu ano or ‘true sago’ [or ‘sago essence’], when washed. This time I was permitted to do a third of one medium-sized tree and half of a small one (12-14″ diam. 10-12′ long).

Meanwhile a man constructs a washing machine [or chute] of a section of the outermost covering [of a sago branch] something like a [huge] stick of celery. In the wide mouth of it, he arranges the coconut webbing to filter the fiber out of the powder as he pours water thru it and turns it and squeezes it. The orange colored water runs down the celerylike [stalk] to a hole thru which it drains into a mat of the leathery husk [sheath] of some tree–people in Yap used something similar to sit on when meeting out in the open and theirs was from the areca palm. The coconut tree webbing and the mat, called yáwanji > yáunji, are the only parts of the washing machine to be reused. The hole is plugged with green fiber that both blocks the water from escaping down the rest of the open tube and conducts it down into the mat. [See more images of sago pounding and washing (scroll down).]

The washed pulp (ulasa) is built up around the edges of the mat for support as it gets fuller. When a lot of sago is a-beating several washers are set up. Only men wash and only women (& children) carry the pulp from tree to washer. When all is washed (-lomosa) the powder, kundu ano, will have settled to the bottom in a heavy pasty mass and the water is then drained off (-lapa tina tomu) [‘beat water apart’] and the paste scraped off and shaped into large rectanguloid lumps. Green sago fronds are then laid on the ground and the lumps burnt on top of them with dry fronds (damu meaning both ‘torch’ and ‘dry frond’ the two being one). The burnt skin of the lumps (baloga) is sweet and considered a treat. The mat is carefully scraped of all the powder, odd bits being dumped in a pan for the dogs. After that the lumps are carried back with the coconut webbing (gogowa–sorry, this is the tube, nuta is the webbing, the laplap (lavalava) bilong kokonas). Bihain [= later] the kaunsil agrees to put the whole thing on tape for me in Binga Numbami; he practiced a bit just now and I could follow most of it fairly well, having seen it all and catching the right cues here and there.

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by | 16 February 2004 · 9:28 pm

Aging Asia

“The impending tempo of population aging in China is very nearly as rapid as anything history has yet seen,” says Nicholas Eberstadt in “Power and Population in Asia” in the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review, No. 123. “Although China’s population will hardly be as elderly as Japan’s by 2025, its impending aging process promises to generate problems of a sort that Japan does not have to face. The first relates to its national pension system: Japan’s may be financially vulnerable, but China’s is nonexistent.”

At this juncture … sub-replacement fertility is thought to characterize every country and locale in East Asia save tiny Mongolia. In Southeast Asia, Singapore and Thailand are already sub-replacement societies, and Indonesia appears to be rapidly closing in on the replacement fertility level. As for South and Central Asia, Sri Lanka and Kazakhstan are outposts of sub-replacement fertility within the region.

Russia’s decline is much farther along.

Modern Russia has given the lie to the ameliorative presumption that literate, industrialized societies cannot suffer long-term health declines during times of peace. According to Moscow’s official calculations, the country’s life expectancy was lower in 2001 than it had been in 1961-62, four decades earlier. For Russia’s men, life expectancy had dropped by almost five years over that interim–but female life expectancy was also slightly down over that period. This anomalous circumstance could not be entirely attributed to the deformities of communist rule, for both male and female life expectancy were lower in 2001 than in 1991, the last year of Soviet power….

In absolute arithmetic terms, this Russian mortality crisis qualifies as a catastrophe of historic proportions. Over the extended period between 1965 and 2001, age-standardized mortality for Russia’s men rose by over 40 percent. Perhaps even more surprising, it also increased for Russia’s women by over 15 percent.

Another looming problem for East Asia is the sex ratio, expressed in terms of the number of males for every 100 females.

China’s tilt toward biologically impossible sex ratios at birth seems to have coincided with the inauguration of its coercive antenatal “one child policy,” which was unveiled in 1979. Is Beijing’s population control program responsible for these amazing distortions? A tentative answer would be yes–but not entirely. In other Chinese or Confucian-heritage populations where oppressive population control strictures were not in force–Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea–unnatural sex ratios at birth also emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. In these other spots, the confluence of son preference, low fertility, and sex-selective abortion likewise have distorted the sex ratio at birth–although nowhere so much as in China today. In most of those other locales, moreover, recent data suggest that sex ratios at birth are lower than they were in the early 1990s (Taiwan, South Korea) or even the 1980s (Singapore), while China’s rise shows no signs of reversing…. Only two provinces in the entire country–the non-Han regions of Tibet and Xinjiang–reported sex ratios within the biologically normal human range. At the other end, three provinces (Hubei, Guangdong, and Anhui) tabulated child sex ratios of almost 130–while three others (Hainan, Hunan, and Jiangxi) returned with ratios of over 130.

So where can we look to balance these trends?

Interestingly enough, the Asian Pacific power with the most strategically favorable profile may be one that we have not yet discussed: the United States.

By the UNPD’s [United Nations Population Division’s] medium variant projections, the United States is envisioned to grow from 285 million in 2000 to 358 million in 2025. In absolute terms, this would be by far the greatest increase projected for any industrialized society; in relative terms, this projected 26 percent increment would almost exactly match the proportional growth of the Asia/Eurasia region as a whole. Under these trajectories, the United States would remain the world’s third most populous country in 2025, and by the early 2020s, the U.S. population growth rate–a projected 0.7 percent per year–would in this scenario actually be higher than that of Indonesia, Thailand, or virtually any country in East Asia, China included.

In these projections, U.S. population growth accrues from two by no means implausible assumptions: (1) continued receptivity to newcomers and immigrants and (2) continuing “exceptionalism” in U.S. fertility patterns. (The United States today reports about 2.0 births per woman, as against about 1.5 in Western Europe, roughly 1.4 in Eastern Europe, and about 1.3 in Japan.) Given its sources, such population growth would tend, quite literally, to have a rejuvenating effect on the U.S. population profile–that is to say, it would slow down the process of population aging. Between 2000 and 2025, in these UNPD projections, median age in the United States would rise by just two years (from 35.6 to 37.6). By 2025, the U.S. population would be more youthful, and aging more slowly, than that of China or any of today’s “tigers.” (Furthermore, to state the obvious, neither a resurgence of HIV/AIDS nor an eruption of imbalanced sex ratios at birth look to be part of the U.S. prospect over the decades immediately ahead.)

Of course, such population projections always assume that humans will just keep doing what they always do, regardless of changing conditions. Fortunately, most humans have minds capable of adapting their behaviors to new circumstances.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 16 February 2004 · 10:23 am

Morobe Field Diary, June 1976: Naive Ethnomusicology

It’s Sunday and Friday nite I was expecting to get into town (or leave for town, which means getting in Saturday morning). A bunch of people from the Kui, Siboma and Paiawa church circuit [or parish?] have to go build a house for a big church meeting in September of the Lae or Morobe Parish [or circuit?] so they will use the [M.V.] Sago to carry all and drop them on the way to town, do their business (and me do mine) and pick them up on the way back. So I’m writing letters like mad to mail when I get into town.

The church service reminded me to write something about the music. All songs are in Yabêm and the words are in a hymnal without the notes, only marks indicating repetition [where to repeat]. Some of the songs are translations from German standards and are immediately recognizable from their steady beat, be it fast or slow (usually quite plodding), as it proceeds, Westernly from bar to bar. The others are local compositions with the author’s name and place at the bottom and these are recognizable by a rhythm that goes from crescendo to crescendo. They usually build up slowly on the men’s voices which carry the low tones [pitch] and gradually pick up the women who usually trail a bit behind the men and carry the crescendo to its peak in high tones [pitch] and at a much greater amplitude since all voices are contributing. The men then beat the women to the beginning of the next cycle, the song often carried by just one person at first then by more and more till the next crescendo peak. So one is a bar and staff rhythm, the other a crescendo to crescendo rhythm. Thus endeth my first attempt at ethnomusicology.

UPDATE: Recommended reading for specialists: Mission and Music: Jabêm Traditional Music and the Development of Lutheran Hymnody, by Heinrich Zahn [1880-1944]. Translated by Philip W. Holzknecht. Edited by Don Niles. Boroko: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, 1996.

“This entire work is a fitting tribute to one of the little-recognized–but hardly “unsung”–heroes in the development of Jabêm music and literature.” –Oceanic Linguistics 36 (December 1996) (Read full review)

“[Zahn’s] feeling for context almost makes him a contemporary of the sociologically oriented ethnomusicologists of today such as for example Thomas Turino.” –Oceania Newsletter 21 (September 1998) (Read full review)

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by | 16 February 2004 · 9:56 am

Morobe Field Diary, May 1976: An Injured Child

The other day some women came back from their garden with a [c. 3-year-old] kid who had sliced off the top joint of his ring finger. It took some discussion before they asked me for medicine and bandage. I had only some of those sterile gauze pads and bandaids along with disinfectants but nothing to stop the bleeding and felt pretty useless but it turned out they decided to put kambang, the [slaked] lime chewed with betel nut, on as a disinfectant and I have an ample supply of that. I measured some out on my knife blade and put it on the cotton and one guy tied up the bandage. When they took the original bandage off blood shot out of the finger. They said later that the kambang would act as a poultice and when it went to work that nite the kid would not feel in the best of spirits. A doctor came or they took the kid to the doctor in the next village and he gave a penicillin shot and rebandaged the wound and yesterday the guy who did most of the original doctoring came to get my disinfectant powder and some bandaids so the wound seems to be healing all right. Since then I have been of slitely more use in dispensing aspirins, one cold tablet, and bandaids. Next time in town I plan to get more aspirins and some stomach marasin for me. My host’s wife gets migraines.

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by | 15 February 2004 · 7:23 pm

The "Cultural Glue" of Chinese Writing

In the introduction to a new reader in traditional Chinese culture, Victor H. Mair suggests that the culture embodied in the unique Chinese writing system has served as the “glue” that maintained continuity in the face of constant buffeting from every direction.

China’s society was not static and its culture was far from unvariegated. Coupled with the cyclical collapse of dynasties, this sociocultural volatility might well have led to the utter disintegration of Chinese civilization. What, then, held it together? What was the quintessential glue that prevented the dissolution of “this culture [of ours]”? We have no hesitation whatsoever in declaring that it was none other than dedication to the hallowed culture itself, bearing in mind that wen [Ko. mun, Jp. bun] means both “culture” and “writing.” That is to say, it was the traditional culture (wenhua) [Ko. munhwa, Jp. bunka] and all its attendant values, as embodied in the sacred script (wenzi) [Ko. munja, Jp. mo(n)ji] that bound Chinese civilization in a cohesive and enduring whole. By dint of diligence and through the good fortune of privilege, approximately 2 percent of the populace in premodern China attained full literacy and all the perquisites that pertained to it, which were not inconsiderable.

Given that full literacy normally brought with it both prestige and pecuniary benefit, it is small wonder that many men devoted their lives to the acquisition and exercise of the ability to write well. (With a few very rare exceptions, women were excluded from the enterprise of fine writing.) Those accustomed to universal literacy using an alphabetic script and a living, vernacular language, may find it hard to imagine the exceptional effort required to gain an advanced degree of competency in a highly allusive, dead (i.e., not used for speech) language written with an elaborate logographic script. For those who did put forward the required exertion, their command of the script, plus the satisfaction of knowing that they were contributing to the preservation of Chinese culture, made it all worthwhile.

In a footnote, Mair notes that “strictly speaking, the Chinese characters are not logographs, because not every character is equal to a word. Much less are the characters ideographs, a term that is often irresponsibly applied to them. Technically speaking, the Chinese script may be designated as morphosyllabic or semantosyllabic. The grounds for such a designation are outlined in John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language” (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1984).

With the twentieth century, however, the combination of culture and script began to unravel. With the overthrow of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty in 1911 by revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), the institutional support for the examination system that upheld “this culture [of ours]” evaporated. By 1919, progressive intellectuals were promoting writing in the vernacular, and radical activists were proposing the adoption of an alphabetic script. A direct assault on the script itself came with the promulgation of thousands of simplified characters by the Communist government during the 1950s and 1950s. An outrageous affront to those who cherish the script and all that it embraces, the simplified characters were seen by reformers as essential for expanding literacy to workers and farmers and necessary for the sake of efficiency in diverse types of communication.

By the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new threat to the traditional script was emerging: the computer. IT (information technology) specialists are acutely aware of the tremendous stumbling blocks in the way of free and easy access to electronic data processing by users of Chinese characters. The input, storage, and management of a script consisting of tens of thousands of discrete elements poses mind-boggling problems in comparison with the couple hundred letters and typographic characters of the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). The economic costs in terms of vastly larger memories, slower manipulations, more frequent crashes and bugs due to overly intricate programming, and so forth are staggering.

One of the most poignant ironies of the saga of characters in computers is that the alphabet has come to their (partial) rescue. Of the hundreds and hundreds of schemes that have been devised for inputting Chinese characters in computers, by far the most popular are those relying on the alphabet. And, of the alphabetic schemes, those that rely on whole words rather than single syllables are much more user-friendly and computer-friendly. For example, both computers and human beings find it easier to analyze the following eight syllables of a journal title as Zhongguo lishi dili luncong (Collected Papers on Chinese Historical Geography) than as zhong guo li shi di li lun cong (central kingdom successive scribe/history ground principle discussion cluster). Herein lurks a danger. Once computers and human beings get used to parsing strings of syllables into words rather than resolutely keeping them separate, alphabetic inputting is on its way to becoming an independent script.

The defenders of the characters, who also view themselves as defenders of the last bastion of Chinese culture, have not been slow to recognize this threat, and they have been adamantly opposed to any hint of a move toward legitimation of the formal establishment of what is called fenci lianxie (‘word division’). Throughout history, Chinese scholars have always resisted the insertion of spaces between words. In fact, until the twentieth century, there was no concept of ci (‘word’), only that of zi (‘[syllabic] graph/character’). Despite the vociferous opposition of the defenders of characters, the Chinese government has officially established a set of Basic Rules for Hanyu Pinyin Orthography and private software companies and individuals are producing their own refinements apace.

Willy-nilly, pinyin orthography is becoming a reality.

Does that mean the cultural glue is cracking apart?

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