Category Archives: scholarship

by Joel | 15 July 2009 · 4:08 pm

Adventures in Wiki Epistemology: Architects

Wikipedia has been making a big push to cite published sources to support the content people have added online. This year, I have been adding a lot of new content to Wikipedia after finding published sources to cite. Unfortunately, sloppy citations and unsupported speculation are just as common in print as they are online. Here are three examples from my recent, rather intense research into aspects of architectural history relating to the National Register of Historic Places listings on Oahu.

Punahou School’s Pauahi Hall: architect(s) and date completed?
A. ?, 1896 (Punahou School website)
B. ?, 1898 (NRHP #72000419, Alexander & Dodge 1941)
C. Ripley & Dickey, 1896 (Neil 1975, HJH)
D. Ripley & Reynolds, 1896 (Cheever 2003:98)

Ripley’s architectural partners were Dickey (1896-1900), Reynolds (1910-), and Davis (1913-). So the latest publication, with contributions by most of the major architects in Honolulu (Cheever 2003) seems the least reliable in this instance. Contributor Nate E. Smith, Associate AIA, was probably thinking of Ripley’s work on the University of Hawai‘i’s Hawaii Hall (1911), while Ripley was in partnership with Reynolds.

Judge Henry E. Cooper House, Manoa Valley: architect(s) and date completed?
A. Ripley & Dickey, 1897 (Neil 1975, HJH)
B. Ripley & Dickey, 1898 (Jay 1992:67)
C. Traphagen, 1898 (Cheever 2003:153)

Once again, the latest publication, with contributions by most of the major architects in Honolulu (Cheever 2003) seems the least reliable in this instance. Contributor Joseph J. Ferraro, AIA, was probably thinking of Traphagen’s work on the Punahou School President’s Home (1907).

The name of the junior architect who finished up much work contracted by Bertram Goodhue before the latter’s untimely death was:
A. Hardie Phillips (according to Honolulu sources)
B. Hardie Phillip (according to sources elsewhere)

“Hardie Phillips” sourced in Honolulu: Gaspar 1996; Haines 2009; HawaiiHistory.org: Territorial Architecture – The Golden Age; Honolulu Star Bulletin, 1 September 1997, 28 September 2003; Localism: Territorial Style Elegance in Honolulu. Historic Buildings Tour 1.0; NRHP #80001272; Smith 1996:359; Wilcox 1972:22; www.nationalregisterofhistoricplaces.com.

“Hardie Phillip” in Wikipedia and elsewhere: C. Brewer Building; Anna Rice Cooke; Bertram Goodhue; Honolulu Academy of Arts; Lihiwai; Mayers Murray & Phillip; Penkiunas 1990:145-182; Sakamoto 2008:34.

Once again, the received wisdom of nearly every architect in Honolulu, and every published source based on that received wisdom, has perpetuated a minor error that every Wikipedian seems to have avoided. There is no “Hardie Phillips” in Wikipedia.

bibliography

Alexander, Mary C., and Charlotte P. Dodge (1941). Punahou, 1841-1941. University of California Press.
Cheever, David (2003). Pōhaku: The Art & Architecture of Stonework in Hawai‘i. Editions Limited.
Haines, Frank S., FAIA (2009). Exploring Downtown: A Walking Tour. Honolulu Chapter, American Institute of Architects.
Jay, Robert (1992). The Architecture of Charles W. Dickey: Hawaii and California. University of Hawaiʻi Press. (out of print)
Neil, J. Meredith (1975). “The Architecture of C.W. Dickey in Hawai‘i.” Hawaiian Journal of History 9:101-113.
Penkiunas, Daina Julia (1990). American Regional Architecture in Hawaii: Honolulu, 1915–1935. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia. (Printed by UMI, Ann Arbor, 1993.)
Sakamoto, Dean, ed. (2008). Hawaiian Modern: The Architecture of Vladimir Ossipoff. Yale University Press.
Smith, George Everard Kidder (1996). Source Book of American Architecture. Princeton Architectural Press.
Wilcox, Gaylord (1972). “Business and Buildings: Downtown Honolulu’s Old Fashioned Block.” Hawaiian Journal of History 6:3-27.

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Filed under blogging, Hawai'i, publishing, scholarship

by Joel | 12 November 2008 · 8:33 pm

Early Research on New Guinea-area Preposed Genitives

In my dissertation on word-order change in the Austronesian languages of New Guinea, I reviewed some of the earliest published typological research in the area. Here is a glimpse of what obsessed some of the earliest European researchers.

Over most of the territory occupied by Austronesian (AN) languages, genitive (or “possessor”) nominals (= GEN) follow head (or “possessed”) nominals (= N) in noun–noun genitive constructions. However, the reverse order (GEN + N) prevails in the neighborhood of New Guinea and nearby islands of Indonesia (from Sulawesi and Flores east). The distinctive “preposition of the genitive” in the AN languages of the latter area engendered much discussion by European scientists during the earliest era of their work in the area, when hardly any other syntactic information was available.

Various explanations were offered. Kanski and Kasprusch (1931) reviewed some of these explanations and concluded that the preposed genitive most likely resulted from the influence of Papuan languages, which also have preposed genitives and which share a very similar geographical range. This still seems the most likely explanation, although it remains a mystery why the preposed genitive has a wider distribution than any of the other grammatical features attributed to Papuan influence.

Even leaving Papuan influence aside, however, the narrower and contiguous geographical distribution of the preposed genitive, when compared with the unrestricted distribution of the postposed genitive, suggests that the former is innovative and originated somewhere in “extreme eastern Indonesia” (Blust 1974:12). (Genitives may have been optionally preposed in Proto-Austronesian, as they are in many Philippine languages. This would have made it easier for preposed genitives to become the dominant pattern in New Guinea-area Austronesian languages.)

The boundary between languages with preposed genitives and those with postposed genitives forms a wide arc running to the west, north, and east of the island of New Guinea. The southwest-to-northwest portion of this arc is frequently referred to as the “Brandes line” (after Brandes 1884), and the northwest-to-southeast portion has been called the “line of Friederici” (after Friederici 1913). (See, for example, Kanski and Kasprusch 1931, Cowan 1952).

The Brandes line was first assumed to be a genetic boundary (a linguistic analog of the Wallace Line perhaps). However, there was some disagreement about which genetic units it separated. Brandes (1884) himself thought it set off two groups of Indonesian languages. Jonker (1914) argued that two such Indonesian subgroups could not be distinguished. Schmidt (1926) thought the Brandes line marked the border between Indonesian and Melanesian languages.

(Brandes and Jonker were more familiar with the languages of Indonesia and were impressed with how similar in other respects the languages with preposed genitives were to Indonesian languages in general. Schmidt was more familiar with Melanesian languages and was impressed with how similar the genitive-preposing languages were to Melanesian languages in general. See Kanski and Kasprusch 1931:884.)

Kanski and Kasprusch (1931) offered a compromise. They identified four groups of languages:

Like Kanski and Kasprusch (and Jonker), most scholars today would not consider genitive word order to be a valid criterion for subgrouping. Another feature of genitive constructions was put forth as a better basis for distinguishing Indonesian from Melanesian languages. In western Austronesian (“Indonesian”) languages, genitive pronouns can be suffixed (or encliticized) to all nouns. In eastern Austronesian (“Melanesian”) languages, genitive pronouns can be suffixed directly to nouns only in case the possessed entity is an inalienable relationship to the possessor. In practice, this means that most body-part and kin terms are directly suffixed. Most other nouns are not. Instead, head nouns (denoting possessed entities) in constructions expressing an alienable relationship are preceded by genitive pronouns.

Schmidt (1926:424) and Kanski and Kasprusch (1931:889) regarded the influence of Papuan languages as responsible for the origin of the grammatical distinction between alienable and inalienable possession in eastern Austronesian languages as a whole. Under Papuan influence, they argued, the AN languages in transition from Indonesia to Melanesia began to lose their original postposed genitives and to acquire preposed ones. Nouns denoting alienables formed the vanguard of this change. Nouns denoting inalienables, such as body parts and kin terms (which involve animate—usually human—possessors, one could add), were slower to lose the original genitive pronouns because reference to an inalienable almost always requires reference to a possessor as well. The inalienables retained their postposed pronouns long enough for the latter to become an integral part of the noun itself. The general change was thus arrested, with inalienables forming a relic category.

One major weakness of this hypothesis is that it ignores the distinction between pronominal and nominal genitives. In eastern AN languages generally, it may be more common for independent genitive pronouns to precede head nominals in cases of alienable possession. (There is considerable variation.) In all but the more narrowly defined “Papuan-influenced” languages, however, genitive nominals follow head nominals (N + GEN), whether or not alienable possession is involved. This hypothesis, then, leads one to the false expectation that genitive nominals precede head nominals in all languages in which the alienable–inalienable distinction exists.

The alienable–inalienable distinction is reconstructible for Proto-Oceanic (Pawley 1973:153–169), the ancestor of most of the languages of eastern Austronesia. However, it is not unique to that group. It also occurs in many languages of eastern Indonesia that are not daughters of Proto-Oceanic (Collins 1980:39 ff., Stresemann 1927:6). So even the presence or absence of the alienable–inalienable distinction does not adequately indicate genetic affiliation.

The traditional recognition of differences between “Indonesian” and “Melanesian” languages is now generally phrased in terms of “Oceanic” and “non-Oceanic” languages. The former term denotes what is generally recognized as a genetic unit (primarily on the basis of phonological criteria). The negative term “non-Oceanic” lumps together all other AN languages without implying that they form a single genetic unit. The boundary between the two groups of languages distinguished by the new phraseology has also shifted somewhat farther to the east since the time of Brandes, Schmidt, and Friederici. The new boundary, which in an earlier era would have been called “Grace’s line” (after Grace 1955:338, 1971:31), is assumed to have a firmer genetic basis than the two earlier boundaries. Grace’s line, separating Oceanic from non-Oceanic languages, runs north-northeast to south-southwest, intersecting 140° E longitude between New Guinea and Micronesia. The scope of this thesis is restricted to the AN languages west of Friederici’s line and east of Grace’s line. These languages can be characterized as “Papuan-influenced Oceanic.” However, before restricting discussion to these languages, it will be helpful to review the various boundaries and the nature of the groups of languages they set apart.

The Brandes line marks the western boundary of a group of languages with innovative genitive word order. This group of typologically similar, but genetically not so closely related, languages is bounded on the east by Friederici’s line. Somewhere east of the Brandes line is the western boundary of a group of languages showing an innovative grammatical distinction between alienable and inalienable genitives. Most of these languages are members of the Oceanic subgroup, a genetic unit, but the westernmost languages are not. East of this boundary lies Grace’s line, the western boundary of the Oceanic subgroup. The eastern boundary of the Oceanic subgroup, and of all AN languages showing the alienable–inalienable distinction, is the eastern border of Austronesian as a whole (east of Easter Island). (I am assuming that the distinction between a and o genitives in Polynesian can be considered somewhat akin, semantically but not structurally, to the alienable–inalienable distinction in the rest of Oceanic.)

References

Blust, Robert A. 1974. Proto-Austronesian syntax: The first step. Oceanic Linguistics 13:1–15.

Brandes, Jan Lourens Andries. 1884. Bijdrage tot de vergelijkende Klankleer der westersche Afdeeling van de Maleisch-Polynesische Taalfamilie. Utrecht, P.W. van der Weijer. 184 pp.

Collins, James. 1980. The historical relationships of the languages of Central Maluku, Indonesia. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago.

Cowan, H. K. J. 1951–1952. Genitief-constructie en Melanesische talen. Indonesië 5:307–313.

Friederici, Georg. 1912. Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse einer amtlichen Forschungsreise nach dem Bismarck-Archipel im Jahre 1908, vol. 2, Beiträge zur Völker und Sprachenkunde von Deutsch-Neuguinea. Mitteilungen aus den Deutschen Schutzgebieten, Ergänzungsheft 5. Berlin, Mittler und Sohn.

Friederici, Georg. 1913. Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse einer amtlichen Forschungsreise nach dem Bismarck-Archipel im Jahre 1908, vol. 3, Untersuchungen über eine melanesische Wanderstrasse. Mitteilungen aus den Deutschen Schutzgebieten, Ergänzungsheft 7. Berlin, Mittler und Sohn.

Grace, George W. 1955. Subgrouping Malayo-Polynesian: A report of tentative findings. American Anthropologist 57:337–339.

Grace, George W. 1971. Notes on the phonological history of the Austronesian languages of the Sarmi coast. Oceanic Linguistics 10:11–37.

Jonker, J. C. G. 1914. Kan men bij de talen van den Indischen Archipel eene westelijke en eene oostlijke afdeeling onderscheiden? Mededeelingen der Koninklijk Akademie van Wetenschappen, afdeeling Letterkunde, 4e Reeks, deel 12, pp. 314–417.

Kanski, P., and P. Kasprusch. 1931. Die indonesisch melanesischen Übergangssprachen auf den Kleinen Molukken. Anthropos 26:883–890.

Klaffl, Johanne, and Friederich Vormann. 1905. Die Sprachen des Berlinhafen-Bezirks in Deutsch-Neuguinea. Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen 8:1–138. (With additions by Wilhelm Schmidt.)

Pawley, Andrew K. 1973. Some problems in Proto-Oceanic grammar. Oceanic Linguistics 12:103–188.

Schmidt, Wilhelm. 1900, 1902. Die sprachlichen Verhältnisse von Deutsch Neuguinea. Zeitschrift für afrikanische und oceanische Sprachen 5(1900):354–384; 6(1902):1–99.

Schmidt, Wilhelm. 1926. Die Sprachfamilien und Sprachenkreise der Erde. Heidelberg, C. Winter. 595 pp.

Stresemann, Erwin. 1927. Die lauterscheinungen in den ambonischen Sprachen. Zeitschrift für Eingeborenensprachen, Beiheft 10. Berlin, Reimer. 224 pp.

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Filed under Germany, Indonesia, language, Netherlands, Papua New Guinea, scholarship

by Joel | 5 November 2008 · 9:10 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Hodohodo, Czechia, Kanakysaurus

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal about a “shocking” new slacker attitude among Japanese workers referred to such workers as the hodohodo-zoku ‘so-so folks’. By itself, the word hodo (程) translates into ‘degree, limit, distance, status, amount’, and its reduplication, 程程, suggests ‘moderation’ or ‘judiciousness’. Grammatically, hodohodo behaves like an ideophone, but then ideophones in Japanese generally behave like nouns. To make it into a verb, you have to add -suru ‘do, be’, to make it into an adverbial you add the postposition ni, and so on. But I suspect hodohodo fails one test for onomatopoeic ideophones in Japanese: the ability to occur before -to ‘with’, in the equivalent of English ‘with a [plop-plop, fizz-fizz, etc.]’. I await correction from Matt of No-sword.

Last weekend, I also had the opportunity to meet a scholar visiting from the Czech Republic, who repeatedly referred to her nation as Czechia—a most sensible formulation which I subsequently found to have had official sanction since 1993 (along with Česko, the Czech equivalent), but which seems to be very slow to spread among English speakers, who perhaps still feel guilty about agreeing to carve up Czechoslovakia in 1938 and want to compensate by resisting any attempt to shorten the fuller form of its current name. However, feeling no guilt on that score despite my English heritage, I henceforth resolve to refer to that glorious center of historic dissidence as Czechia, plain and simple. In fact, I’ve just added Czechia to my list of country categories for this blog. I had already added Bohemia before, but that does no justice to Moravia, which has, if anything, an even greater tradition of religious dissidence.

Finally, I see that the latest issue of Pacific Science (vol. 63, no. 1, 2009, but already online at BioOne) reports the discovery of a new species of a lizard genus indigenous to New Caledonia, a viviparous skink genus with the wonderfully appropriate name, Kanakysaurus.

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by Joel | 19 October 2008 · 1:58 pm

TGA on Criminalizing Memory

In last Thursday’s Guardian, Timothy Garton warns, “The freedom of historical debate is under attack by the memory police: Well-intentioned laws that prescribe how we remember terrible events are foolish, unworkable and counter-productive”:

Among the ways in which freedom is being chipped away in Europe, one of the less obvious is the legislation of memory. More and more countries have laws saying you must remember and describe this or that historical event in a certain way, sometimes on pain of criminal prosecution if you give the wrong answer. What the wrong answer is depends on where you are. In Switzerland, you get prosecuted for saying that the terrible thing that happened to the Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman empire was not a genocide. In Turkey, you get prosecuted for saying it was. What is state-ordained truth in the Alps is state-ordained falsehood in Anatolia.

This week a group of historians and writers, of whom I am one, has pushed back against this dangerous nonsense. In what is being called the “Appel de Blois”, published in Le Monde last weekend, we maintain that in a free country “it is not the business of any political authority to define historical truth and to restrict the liberty of the historian by penal sanctions”. And we argue against the accumulation of so-called “memory laws”. First signatories include historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Jacques Le Goff and Heinrich August Winkler. It’s no accident that this appeal originated in France, which has the most intense and tortuous recent experience with memory laws and prosecutions. It began uncontroversially in 1990, when denial of the Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews, along with other crimes against humanity defined by the 1945 Nuremberg tribunal, was made punishable by law in France – as it is in several other European countries. In 1995, the historian Bernard Lewis was convicted by a French court for arguing that, on the available evidence, what happened to the Armenians might not correctly be described as genocide according to the definition in international law.

People who indulge in this kind of high-minded overreach by criminalizing particular memories, policies, and thoughts they consider beyond the pale seem to have forgotten the lessons of Stalinism, Maoism, and religious wars of all ages. (I don’t mean to let off the Nazis, who criminalized irredeemable status offenses—being Jewish, Gypsy, Slav, homosexual, genetically disabled, etc.—for which there was no possibility of reeducation, only eventual extermination.)

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Filed under Europe, nationalism, religion, scholarship, Turkey

by Joel | 29 September 2008 · 10:35 pm

Anthropologist Rethinks Missionaries, PNG

From Village on the Edge: Changing Times in Papua New Guinea, by Michael French Smith (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 16-17, 20-21:

My desire to avoid areas of strong Catholic Mission influence was rather misguided, because Christianity was ubiquitous in Papua New Guinea and an integral part of the social and cultural change I intended to study. Just a few years later, in 1980, the Pacific Council of Churches would report that 85 percent of all Papua New Guineans considered themselves Christians. Catholicism was the dominant denomination in the East Sepik. German Catholic missionaries of the Society of the Divine Word entered the Sepik region in 1896, just a dozen years after the German New Guinea Company began the first sustained European effort to establish a commercial presence in the region. In Wewak itself, the mission headquarters at Wirui was a local landmark. It was the seat of the bishop of Wewak and headquarters of a diocese that covered most of the province and was staffed by approximately 227 priests, brothers, sisters, and lay personnel. Most of these mission staff were from overseas. Nevertheless, Catholicism was clearly a significant part of the local scene.

Many anthropologists have seriously neglected the importance of Christianity in Melanesia. Perhaps, like some tourists, they have been looking for “the last unknown” and have found Christianity insufficiently exotic. Whatever the reason, they have often failed to recognize the extent to which Melanesians have made Christianity their own. I harbored some personal prejudices against Christian missionary activity. Raised in a liberal, church-going Protestant family, I acquired a stern Protestant Christian conscience—enough in itself to account for an aversion to churches—but I failed in my efforts to believe in God in more than a terminally abstract sense. I also found the idea of going around the world denouncing indigenous beliefs and raising the specter of eternal damnation—as many Christian missionaries have done in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere—extremely distasteful.

I had little firsthand knowledge of Christian missionaries in the Pacific. One of my uncles, however, had been sent to Australia as a Mormon missionary in the first decade of the twentieth century, when he was only seventeen years old. He had left school before he was ten to help support his neglected branch of a polygamous family and, as he told the story, he set off on his mission ignorant, illiterate, and reluctant. He left the Mormon Church long before I came to know him, and the stories he told of his misadventures in Australia were very funny and portrayed the missionary endeavor in a most unflattering light. Told that God would put words in his mouth, he had received no such assistance and had, he claimed, turned more people against Mormonism than any missionary before or since.

Fortunately, despite such prejudices and influences I managed to keep a somewhat open mind. This allowed me to learn as the year progressed that Catholicism was very much apart of the local culture in Kragur and that there was no simple way to describe or evaluate its contribution. Kragur villagers’ own understanding of Catholicism tended to encourage the kind of painful self-doubts colonialism often sows. Kragur people also, however, had found ways to use Catholicism to assert their independence and moral worth. Looking too sharply askance at Catholicism in Kragur would have made it very difficult for me to understand life there in general.

Keeping my anti-mission bias in check also let me accept, without feeling too hypocritical, the considerable assistance and hospitality that mission personnel offered me. This began with a free passage to Kairiru on the St. John’s Seminary boat, a small, hard-used inboard with an ungainly open wheelhouse. We arrived late in the day at St. John’s, where the staff offered me a hot shower, a clean-sheeted bed for the night, a cold bottle of good homemade beer, and a seat at the dinner table. Such hospitality took some of the edge off my prejudices….

I also saw that many of the St. Xavier’s [school] staff had no interest in imposing their own religious beliefs on their students. Largely members of Catholic orders, principally the Society of Mary, they took their religion very seriously; but they did not seem alarmed that some of their students, themselves raised in Catholic villages, asked pointed and skeptical questions about the faith.

Had I known more of either Catholicism or the mission in Papua New Guinea I would have been aware that both had changed significantly since the early years of the twentieth century. In those days, missionaries conducted mass baptisms of the living and sometimes baptized the dying by stealth and tallied the souls they thus saved. Since then, the Catholic Church and the Catholic Mission in Papua New Guinea had been moving away from emphasizing individual conversion, religious ritual, and the veneration of religious artifacts toward what some of my mission acquaintances in the East Sepik called “building Christian communities.” And the daily business of many Catholic Mission personnel I met in and around Wewak was not gaining converts but running health and education programs.

I was to find that some Kragur people were not comfortable with the mission’s diminishing emphasis on religious rites and were themselves rather intense in their devotion to Catholic ritual. Had I first come to Kragur only six months later I would have encountered along the way rather dramatic evidence of many villagers’ deep involvement with Catholic rites and symbols: the statue of the Virgin Mary that Kragur people would erect in a broad clearing at the top of the trail over the mountain in April 1976. Villagers passing the statue on their travels often paused to stand reverently in front of it and recite the rosary.

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by Joel | 18 September 2008 · 9:22 pm

Underwater Pyramids in Okinawa?

Somebody who is trying to market an underwater diving business in Okinawa has been interviewed on video about a new discovery of “10,000 year old pyramids” in the offshore waters near Yonaguni, no doubt within easy reach of their embarkation point.

“One of the greatest discoveries in the history of archaeology was made last summer, off Japan There, spread over an amazing 311 miles on the ocean floor, are the well-preserved remains of an ancient city. Or at the very least, a number of closely related sites.

In the waters around Okinawa and beyond to the small island of Yonaguni, divers located eight separate locations beginning in March 1995. That first sighting was equivocal – a provocative, squared structure, so encrusted with coral that its manmade identity was uncertain. Then, as recently as the summer of 1996, a sports diver accidentally discovered a huge, angular platform about 40 feet below the surface, off the southwestern shore of Okinawa. The feature’s artificial provenance was beyond question. Widening their search, teams of more divers found another, different monument nearby. Then another, and another. They beheld long streets, grand boulevards, majestic staircases, magnificent archways, enormous blocks of perfectly cut and fitted stone – all harmoniously welded together in a linear architecture unlike anything they had ever seen before….

One would imagine that such a mind-boggling find would be the most exciting piece of news an archaeologist could possibly hope to learn. Even so, outside of the “Ancient American” and CNN’s single report, the pall of silence covering all the facts about Okinawa’s structures screens them from view more effectively then their location at the bottom of the sea. Why? How can this appalling neglect persist in the face of a discovery of such unparalleled magnitude? At the risk of accusations of paranoia, one might conclude that a real conspiracy of managed information dominates America’s well-springs of public knowledge.”

Indeed! Why trust “managed information” when you can so easily find the mismanaged variety, which is way more interesting? Ancient American is obviously a very rigorous and reputable source. In their own words:

Our task is to translate often complex research into accessible, attractive language in a visually appealing format ordinary readers can understand and enjoy. Ancient American writers and artists appeal as much to the imagination as to the intellect in the conviction that mankind’s past belongs to all inhabitants of the Earth; it is not the exclusive property of establishment academics. Each issue features articles submitted by the world’s leading authorities on prehistory in clear, non-technical language, and illustrated by a wealth of original color photographs and artwork published nowhere else.

Features include reports of Scottish mariners who sculpted the images of New Mexican cactus in a Highland church nearly a century before Columbus was born, and Vikings who left evidence of their visits behind in Minnesota and Oklahoma. Our research traces influences from 4th Millennium BC Japan in Ecuador, and prehistoric African themes throughout the earliest Mexican civilizations. We describe Semitic visitors, whose trek across ancient South Dakota is commemorated by native American Indians in four bluffs still referred to as “the Hebrew Brothers”. Our writers examine a huge stone wall underwater 55 miles east of Miami, Florida, together with a Phoenician altar for human sacrifice found in Chicago, Illinois. These are only some of the puzzling enigmas showcased in every issue of Ancient American magazine.

CNN’s Worldview coverage in 2000 (surprisingly!) includes a good bit more skepticism about the age of the structures and the extent to which they are manmade.

Masaaki Kimura has a different story, based on the theory that the Japanese archipelago was once part of continental Asia. He says the most likely reason it and other similar sites nearby are now underwater is because they suddenly sank after an event like an earthquake.

MASAAKI KIMURA, RYUKYU UNIVERSITY (through translator): From our investigations of surrounding organisms, such as coral, we estimate this ruin was made approximately 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

KAMIMURA: A geologist by training, Kimura says he’s found evidence of chiseling, even a stone instrument.

(on camera): Kimura’s findings already have locals excited about the opportunities. Okinawa’s governor says if there’s more conclusive evidence, he’d like to propose the ruins for designation as a world heritage site…

(voice-over): … a finding that would be a boon for local tourism.

World-renowned dive enthusiast Jacques Mayol is already convinced.

JACQUES MAYOL, DIVER: My impression is that it’s a natural sight, of course, it’s a natural sight but that has been improved, enhanced, embellished, if you want, by man. We don’t know who did it, what kind of men did it, how long ago they did that.

KAMIMURA: Questions that only seem to add to the rock’s intrigue for those that believe it’s more than just a natural phenomenon.

Marina Kamimura, CNN, Okinawa, Japan.

via Japundit‘s Japan News Junkie

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by Joel | 27 January 2008 · 9:45 pm

How the Caged Historian Wrote

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), p. 205:

Books were written in captivity. Fernand Braudel’s thesis on The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II (which was to revolutionize historiography when it was published) was written in Oflag XIIB in Mayence and then at Oflag XC at Lübeck. Braudel sent chapters, handwritten in school exercise books, to his supervisor Lucien Febvre in Paris. It is interesting to speculate on how captivity marked this work. Was Braudel’s approach influenced by the access to German history books, brought to him from the town library by a sympathetic German guard? Was it the chance to escape from academic routines that turned Braudel away from what had previously been orthodox historical writing? Was Braudel’s determinism and emphasis on the longue durée characteristic of one who was leading a life of enforced passivity controlled by inscrutable forces? Does the vividness with which the material richness of the Mediterranean is evoked owe something to the deprivations of a German winter?

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Filed under France, Germany, scholarship, war

by Joel | 15 September 2007 · 4:11 pm

Disgust Usually Outweighs Detached Reasoning

Via Arts & Letters Daily, I came across a very interesting essay in Edge by Jonathan Haidt, entitled Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion. Here are a few excerpts.

In my dissertation and my other early studies, I told people short stories in which a person does something disgusting or disrespectful that was perfectly harmless (for example, a family cooks and eats its dog, after the dog was killed by a car). I was trying to pit the emotion of disgust against reasoning about harm and individual rights.

I found that disgust won in nearly all groups I studied (in Brazil, India, and the United States), except for groups of politically liberal college students, particularly Americans, who overrode their disgust and said that people have a right to do whatever they want, as long as they don’t hurt anyone else.

These findings suggested that emotion played a bigger role than the cognitive developmentalists had given it. These findings also suggested that there were important cultural differences, and that academic researchers may have inappropriately focused on reasoning about harm and rights because we primarily study people like ourselves—college students, and also children in private schools near our universities, whose morality is not representative of the United States, let alone the world….

Surveys have shown for decades that religious practice is a strong predictor of charitable giving. Arthur Brooks recently analyzed these data (in Who Really Cares) and concluded that the enormous generosity of religious believers is not just recycled to religious charities.

Religious believers give more money than secular folk to secular charities, and to their neighbors. They give more of their time, too, and of their blood. Even if you excuse secular liberals from charity because they vote for government welfare programs, it is awfully hard to explain why secular liberals give so little blood. The bottom line, Brooks concludes, is that all forms of giving go together, and all are greatly increased by religious participation and slightly increased by conservative ideology (after controlling for religiosity).

These data are complex and perhaps they can be spun the other way, but at the moment it appears that Dennett is wrong in his reading of the literature. Atheists may have many other virtues, but on one of the least controversial and most objective measures of moral behavior—giving time, money, and blood to help strangers in need—religious people appear to be morally superior to secular folk.

My conclusion is not that secular liberal societies should be made more religious and conservative in a utilitarian bid to increase happiness, charity, longevity, and social capital. Too many valuable rights would be at risk, too many people would be excluded, and societies are so complex that it’s impossible to do such social engineering and get only what you bargained for. My point is just that every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

But because of the four principles of moral psychology [outlined earlier in the essay] it is extremely difficult for people, even scientists, to find that wisdom once hostilities erupt. A militant form of atheism that claims the backing of science and encourages “brights” to take up arms may perhaps advance atheism. But it may also backfire, polluting the scientific study of religion with moralistic dogma and damaging the prestige of science in the process.

In my experience, secular academics are just as likely as anyone else to thoughtlessly dismiss in moralistic disgust not just behaviors, but beliefs they find repugnant, especially those emblematic of their social and moral inferiors.

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by Joel | 3 September 2007 · 10:37 am

Explaining Modernity Without Religion?

From Robert W. Hefner’s introduction to Islam in an Era of Nation-States: Politics and Religious Renewal in Muslim Southeast Asia, ed. by Robert W. Hefner and Patricia Horvatich (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 18-19 (references omitted):

Another reason Islam poses such problems for students of modern politics has to do with the conviction once widespread among Western political theorists that religion is, at best, a declining historical force, destined to give way to the twin forces of economic modernization and nation-state formation. One of the more remarkable facts of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western political theory was the near universality of this belief. On the left and on the right, among Marxists and Weberians, and among modernization theorists and their postmodern critics, the view that modernity is inherently secularizing—or, at the very least, so thoroughly destabilizing of religious certitudes as to demand the privatization of religion within a realm of personal belief—has dominated all the important schools of modern Western social thought.

Outside of Marxism, which had its own version, the most sustained expression of the secularization thesis was associated with the modernization theory of the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on the works of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, modernization theory asserted that modern political-economic development involves, above all else, the increasing differentiation and specialization of social and economic structures. Commerce and, later, industrialization bring about a growing division of labor, and this in turn promotes the differentiation of society into the pluralistic entities characteristic of much of the world today. It is the cultural consequence of this change that is the primary concern of secularization theorists. Where previously there was a “sacred canopy” stabilizing life experience and providing shared meanings, in modern times the canopy is rent and the collective bases of morality and identity are diminished or destroyed.

Given the severity of its forecasts, it is not surprising that from early on observers began to express doubts regarding the relevance of secularization theory for the Muslim world. Some theorists, such as the Turkish-born sociologist Bassam Tibi, continued to insist that secularization is intrinsic to modernization, and the Islamic world is no exception. How then to explain the Islamic revival occurring in the Muslim world today? Citing the experience of Christianity in Western Europe, Tibi notes that Protestantism, too, once had grandiose political aspirations, but it was eventually “domiciled within the sphere of interiority.” Islam, he predicts, will develop in a “parallel direction” because this is what modern development requires. It would seem that only inasmuch as the Islamic world is commandeered by antimodernizing reactionaries can it evade this privatization. Other observers of the Muslim world, however, appeared less certain of this prognosis. In his Islam Observed (a work that still shows the influence of his earlier training in modernization theory, which he subsequently rejected), Clifford Geertz argued that the “secularization of thought” is characteristic of the modern world. He attributed this trend to the “growth of science” and its destabilizing influence on revealed truths. Geertz qualified this generalization, however, by noting that “the loss of power of classical religious symbols to sustain a properly religious faith” can provoke the “ideologization of religion,” as the bearers of revealed truths mobilize against secularist assault. While thus embracing a variant of the secularization thesis, Geertz recognized the possibility of antisecularizing movements. Contrary to what he might argue today, however, he also implied that these were by their very nature countermodernizations, rather than alternative modernities.

Some observers, such as the philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner, have been even more adamant in rejecting the relevance of the secularization thesis for the Muslim world. Unlike Tibi or Geertz, Gellner attributes this exceptionalism not to Islam’s antimodernizing dispositions, but to its uniqueness in adapting to the modern nation-state. The key, Gellner argues, is that Islam has been able to play a role in the nation-state functionally (but not substantively) equivalent to that of nationalism in the West. In the West, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century nationalists revived and idealized popular ethnic culture, using it as an instrument of nation building. This change in political culture was facilitated by the social dislocation reshaping Europe, as the vertical allegiances of the feudal era were undermined and replaced by new lateral ones. Nationalism seized on the realities of vernacular language, folk customs, and myths of national origin to respond to this crisis and forge a new basis for the political order, one founded on the sovereignty of a “people” defined by common culture. In this manner, nationalism displaced Christianity as the key idiom of European political identity and, along the way, accelerated the secularization of modern European politics.

Gellner points out that a similar detraditionalization has altered social ties in the Muslim world. However, he argues that for several reasons Islam has been able to respond to the change while avoiding the secularist juggernaut.

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by Joel | 3 September 2007 · 10:08 am

Explaining Indonesian Nationalism Without Islam?

During the 1960s and 1970s some of the most influential essays on politics, personhood, and culture in Muslim Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia, were written without serious exploration of Islamic influences. For example, Benedict Anderson‘s widely cited and otherwise remarkable essay, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture,” drew extensively on Javanese literary and ritual traditions to develop a model of indigenous ideas of power in Java. In “A Note on Islam,” which appears toward the end of the essay, Anderson cites Clifford Geertz to back up his claim that “the penetration of Islam scarcely changed the composition and recruitment of the Javanese political elite or affected the basic intellectual framework of traditional political thought.” This observation raises complex and important issues. Its full assessment, however, would require at least some reference to Sufi notions of kingship, popular Islamic concepts of sainthood, and folk Islamic views of sacrifice and spiritual power, all of which exercise palpable influences on Javanese traditions.

In a later and equally influential book on the origin and spread of nationalism, Anderson displays a similar blind spot. His comments on early Indonesian nationalism abound with insightful references to the “creole functionaries” who were recruited by the colonial state into institutions of modern learning and resocialized in the ways of European administration. These “functionary journeys,” Anderson argues, nurtured a sense of solidarity across linguistic and ethnic barriers that had previously segmented indigenous society, and thus created the links required for this group’s leadership of the Indonesian nationalist movement. In this otherwise subtle account, however, we once again hear nothing about Muslim pilgrimages across ethnic and linguistic boundaries. In places like North Sumatra, Java, and South Sulawesi, these movements also shaped an anticolonial imagination. Though, like their non-Islamic counterparts, many of these Muslim pilgrims at first enunciated political visions premised on only pre- or protonationalist ideals, their religious pilgrimage and political struggles still worked to create a commitment to transethnic solidarities. Eventually, like their counterparts in most of the Muslim world, Muslim leaders elaborated their own versions of the nationalist ideal. These were not secondhand derivatives of secular nationalism, but full- blown alternatives to the version created by Anderson’s European-schooled, “creole nationalists.” In religious centers in Aceh and eastern Java, among others, Muslim thinkers elaborated a vision of the nation premised on shared religion, not merely common ethnic culture. They linked its meanings to Islam’s ancient glories and the distant rumblings of Turkish, Persian, and Arab nationalism.

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