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aegagrus's reviews
57 reviews
Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s by Petrine Archer-Shaw
3.5
Negrophilia explores the relationships between Black people, Black art, and the white Avant Garde movements which flourished in 1920s Paris. Those who claimed to reject Western modernity (Dadaists, Surrealists, and others) saw Blackness and Black culture as a potent aesthetic language, a reservoir of "primitive" vitality, or an instrument for subverting the established ethical and cultural order. Such Primitivism was always founded upon racist stereotypes, but Archer-Straw is attentive to the nuanced and contradictory ways in which both white 'negrohiles' and Black Parisians (many of them American expatriates) navigated these cultural currents. Her assessments of individual personalities are critical but fair. Moreover, her narrow geographical and temporal focus allows her to address both direct encounters/relationships and diffuse cultural trends, providing important context to her individual examples.
Negrophilia's greatest strength is its images, which are fascinating, often quite affecting, and very effectively integrated into the text's natural flow. Academic writing often groans under a rigid argumentative structure; the writing here feels more narrative-driven, progressing through different case studies and examples and examining each on its own terms. While this approach allows for the images' smooth integration and is very readable, I do believe the project would have benefitted from a clearer argumentative structure in which the author spent more time explicitly addressing the ways in which each chapter contributes to or develops her overall theses.
Negrophilia's greatest strength is its images, which are fascinating, often quite affecting, and very effectively integrated into the text's natural flow. Academic writing often groans under a rigid argumentative structure; the writing here feels more narrative-driven, progressing through different case studies and examples and examining each on its own terms. While this approach allows for the images' smooth integration and is very readable, I do believe the project would have benefitted from a clearer argumentative structure in which the author spent more time explicitly addressing the ways in which each chapter contributes to or develops her overall theses.
How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others by T. M. Luhrmann
2.75
My central critique of this book is that T. M. Luhrmann spins a relatively specific intervention in the fields of anthropology and ethnography into an excessively general discourse on the phenomenology of religion.
The initial intervention runs as follows. For many years, anthropologists and others wrote about non-western religiosity in terms of irrationality; what were the cultural factors that caused people to (wrongly) believe non-rational things about the world? A new generation of anthropologists endeavored to take non-western peoples' beliefs more seriously, leading to an ontological turn in which these beliefs were considered to be a "real" and functional part of their cultural environments. The problem, Luhrmann notes, is that some have overcorrected and now claim that, "belief" as such being a Western concept, there is no distinction in other cultures between what someone "knows" about the material world and what they "believe" about the spiritual world. Luhrmann persuasively argues that this type of rhetoric flattens the way in which non-western people are said to understand the world, denying their capacity to build "flexible ontologies" and failing to account for the observed fact that people everywhere in the world interact with and account for spiritual entities differently than they interact with material ones.
This argument is well-taken. From here, Luhrmann moves into a discussion of the ways in which people make their relationships with invisible others feel Real (which, she notes, is inherently something that takes work). Her comparison with play is instructive; children are able to track parallel realities in great detail, substituting a bit of play-dough for a doll's nighttime snack (Luhrmann's example), but they are not actually surprised when the play-dough remains uneaten come morning. Luhrmann describes various elements of religious life such as prayer, confession, and "inward cultivation" in terms of people of faith practicing being attentive to mystical experiences, learning how to narrativize their lives, and building compelling and dynamic relationships with their God or gods.
The strength of Luhrmann's analysis here is the personal experiences on which she is able to draw. She has been many places and talked to many people, and is able to compellingly relate stories of her interactions with evangelical Christians on three continents, practitioners of Santeria and Western Occultism, newly-observant Hasidim, and others.
However, there are in my opinion several issues with the broader scope of Luhrmann's work. First, although her qualitative experiences are illuminating, many of her methods seem likely to uncover what she starts out expecting to uncover. Second, the general discussions of religious phenomenology seem somewhat basic in that field, while the specific discussion of the faultiness of the ontological turn in ethnography somewhat falls by the wayside, as Luhrmann has not done the right fieldwork to truly expand upon her insight there. The last chapter in particular, in which Luhrmann reflects upon the interactive nature of spiritual relationships, seems somewhat unoriginal in the field of comparative religion. Finally, Luhrmann's comparison of "bodily" religious responses among Charismatic Christians in the US, India, and Ghana, raises some eyebrows by the loose way in which Luhrmann uses insights about "cultural differences" from earlier literature (despite criticizing the impressionistic nature of some of that very literature earlier).
The initial intervention runs as follows. For many years, anthropologists and others wrote about non-western religiosity in terms of irrationality; what were the cultural factors that caused people to (wrongly) believe non-rational things about the world? A new generation of anthropologists endeavored to take non-western peoples' beliefs more seriously, leading to an ontological turn in which these beliefs were considered to be a "real" and functional part of their cultural environments. The problem, Luhrmann notes, is that some have overcorrected and now claim that, "belief" as such being a Western concept, there is no distinction in other cultures between what someone "knows" about the material world and what they "believe" about the spiritual world. Luhrmann persuasively argues that this type of rhetoric flattens the way in which non-western people are said to understand the world, denying their capacity to build "flexible ontologies" and failing to account for the observed fact that people everywhere in the world interact with and account for spiritual entities differently than they interact with material ones.
This argument is well-taken. From here, Luhrmann moves into a discussion of the ways in which people make their relationships with invisible others feel Real (which, she notes, is inherently something that takes work). Her comparison with play is instructive; children are able to track parallel realities in great detail, substituting a bit of play-dough for a doll's nighttime snack (Luhrmann's example), but they are not actually surprised when the play-dough remains uneaten come morning. Luhrmann describes various elements of religious life such as prayer, confession, and "inward cultivation" in terms of people of faith practicing being attentive to mystical experiences, learning how to narrativize their lives, and building compelling and dynamic relationships with their God or gods.
The strength of Luhrmann's analysis here is the personal experiences on which she is able to draw. She has been many places and talked to many people, and is able to compellingly relate stories of her interactions with evangelical Christians on three continents, practitioners of Santeria and Western Occultism, newly-observant Hasidim, and others.
However, there are in my opinion several issues with the broader scope of Luhrmann's work. First, although her qualitative experiences are illuminating, many of her methods seem likely to uncover what she starts out expecting to uncover. Second, the general discussions of religious phenomenology seem somewhat basic in that field, while the specific discussion of the faultiness of the ontological turn in ethnography somewhat falls by the wayside, as Luhrmann has not done the right fieldwork to truly expand upon her insight there. The last chapter in particular, in which Luhrmann reflects upon the interactive nature of spiritual relationships, seems somewhat unoriginal in the field of comparative religion. Finally, Luhrmann's comparison of "bodily" religious responses among Charismatic Christians in the US, India, and Ghana, raises some eyebrows by the loose way in which Luhrmann uses insights about "cultural differences" from earlier literature (despite criticizing the impressionistic nature of some of that very literature earlier).
Empire of Dreams by Giannina Braschi
5.0
Empire of Dreams is an immersive postmodern dreamscape. Braschi’s writing is urgent, propulsive. She writes and thinks and dreams and declaims with an almost-erotic desperation, burning through a landscape of memory and sensation and truth and lies. Motifs and symbols appear unexpectedly, but develop and return and reinvent themselves; they never seem “random”.
The New York City which circumscribes Braschi’s visions is raucous, rebellious, joyous but never sanitized. The text itself becomes a city, through which Braschi moves in many personas and disguises. The lines between human and nonhuman, diegetic and textual, blur. Travelling from page to page feels like a physical journey, a walk down a New York street buffeted by unexpected encounters of all kinds. It is a fitting milieu in which to experience the swirling contradictions of gender, of ethnicity, of identity and authorship.
Braschi’s writing and the formalisms she employs evolve over the course of this book. Throughout it all, though, these are words that I found myself wanting to hear and to speak out loud, to bellow from a rooftop or a mountaintop or a stage. Even if I found no other value in this work, this quality would remain: Empire of Dreams is simply thrilling to read aloud. The power of Braschi’s voice, and of O’Dwyer’s translation, shines through on each and every page.
Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It by Rob Borofsky
4.5
Borofsky's project in Yanomami moves through a number of stages. First, he clearly lays out the basic contours of the controversy under discussion. He profiles the major characters, itemizes the various things Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel stand accused of, and sketches a brief timeline of developments following the publication of Patrick Tierney's book Darkness in El Dorado. Second, he identifies some key issues to keep in mind when moving forward to evaluate the controversy: power differentials, just researcher-informant relationships, and how to locate credibility in these discussions. Third, he devotes a chapter to presenting the perspectives of several Yanomami leaders through excerpted interviews, lightly commenting upon notable throughlines (for instance, the Yanomami concern over blood samples still found in American labs; Borofsky notes that although Yanomami voices do not always agree on how to resolve this situation, it consistently assumes much more importance to them than it seems to hold in the broader academic back-and-forth). Fourth, Borofsky previews the "roundtable" portion of his book, introducing the six experts he has recruited to participate and highlighting the general stances taken in their respective essays. Usefully, a reader could stop here and come away with a good general sense of the discussion that has taken place. Finally, the book concludes with Borofsky's roundtable, taking the form of three rounds of essays in which the participants are asked to respond directly to one another. The multi-round format is important, as different essayists tend to initially focus on different elements of the controversy. The second and third-round essays tend to be a little unwieldy, as the experts try to engage with multiple strands of the debate as it has already occurred. However, as Borofsky notes, if the roundtable had stopped after round one the essayists would have run the risk of talking past one another by each defaulting to a narrow "specialization" (a criticism Borofsky levies against the report produced by the American Anthropological Association's initial task force, which leveraged errors in Tierney's account of Neel's role in the spread of Measels to attempt to dismiss Tierney's other allegations).
Borofsky's own perspective is not entirely absent from his book, but his earnest belief in bringing together divergent scientific perspectives ensures that his own contributions focus mostly on prompting and guiding students who may be asked to wade through the controversy's details. This is certainly a "teaching book"; a classroom or seminar setting is the ideal way in which to engage with this book, especially its roundtable section. As a teacher, Borofsky has one exceptional quality: he expresses earnest and deep admiration for the anthropology students who mobilized to challenge the AAA over its initially dismissive attitude following Tierney's book. It is to these students that Yanomami is dedicated. It is truly refreshing that a scholar trying to move a controversy away from circular partisan recrimination and towards a discussion about how anthropology can be less exploitative believes so deeply that students can and must be at the forefront of change.
I believe there are two major deficiencies with Borofsky's roundtable. First, although he is to be commended for explicitly including the perspectives of Yanomami leaders and activists, he does so in a separate chapter, rather than as part of the roundtable. I understand the logistical difficulties in changing this dynamic (some of which Borofsky discusses), but the division remains notable. Second, while his participants cover a wide range of affiliations and perspectives, Napoleon Chagnon himself does not contribute to the discussion. This, to be fair, is entirely Chagnon's fault. His increasing hostility and defensiveness when presented with any opportunity to engage with his critics clearly saddens Borofsky, and remains an impediment to the pursuit of justice among the Yanomami.
Borofsky's own perspective is not entirely absent from his book, but his earnest belief in bringing together divergent scientific perspectives ensures that his own contributions focus mostly on prompting and guiding students who may be asked to wade through the controversy's details. This is certainly a "teaching book"; a classroom or seminar setting is the ideal way in which to engage with this book, especially its roundtable section. As a teacher, Borofsky has one exceptional quality: he expresses earnest and deep admiration for the anthropology students who mobilized to challenge the AAA over its initially dismissive attitude following Tierney's book. It is to these students that Yanomami is dedicated. It is truly refreshing that a scholar trying to move a controversy away from circular partisan recrimination and towards a discussion about how anthropology can be less exploitative believes so deeply that students can and must be at the forefront of change.
I believe there are two major deficiencies with Borofsky's roundtable. First, although he is to be commended for explicitly including the perspectives of Yanomami leaders and activists, he does so in a separate chapter, rather than as part of the roundtable. I understand the logistical difficulties in changing this dynamic (some of which Borofsky discusses), but the division remains notable. Second, while his participants cover a wide range of affiliations and perspectives, Napoleon Chagnon himself does not contribute to the discussion. This, to be fair, is entirely Chagnon's fault. His increasing hostility and defensiveness when presented with any opportunity to engage with his critics clearly saddens Borofsky, and remains an impediment to the pursuit of justice among the Yanomami.
In substantive terms, I came away from this book the most persuaded by Leda Martin's discussion of the concrete ways in which Chagnon's depiction of the Yanomami as "fierce" and violent seeped into Brazilian discourse and contributed to the undermining of Yanomami sovereignty, strengthening the political backers of intruding miners. The response from Raymond Hames, Chagnon's onetime student, feels like question-begging when Hames insists that an anthropologist's objectivity is only useful to a society if the anthropologist is free from worrying about the political ramifications of their work ("useful" how?). The notion of an anthropologist as an objective, detached researcher may be somewhat untenable -- but this is exactly what Yanomami activist Davi Kopenawa has said, describing a model in which those who learn from a community take an active role in "defending" that community. Aside from my appreciation of Borofsky's methodology in constructing this book, this position from Kopenawa forms my strongest lasting impression.
Cheerleader's Guide to the World: Council Book by Stacy Doris
3.5
Reading Edgar Garcia's Emergency, I appreciated his use of the Popol Vuh as an emotional and intellectual resource for times of crisis and transition. Reading Cheerleader's Guide, I appreciated that the same source material (among other sources) became the basis for the gruesome, violent, surreal, and immersive world in which Doris' verses are contained. A creation story is an appropriate venue for themes such as destruction, conflict, group identity, power, and the ever-contingent but nonetheless cyclical-seeming way of the world. So too is a ball game, reenacting some underlying conflict over and over in ways that are both symbolic and real. The 'leaders narrative position, slightly peripheral to these on-field conflicts but very much living in their world brings a grimly gendered angle to what is depicted.
I was not always sure how the play diagrams were supposed to interact with the text, and I sometimes felt that as a formal device it was more limiting and narrow than the stanzas themselves ended up being and didn't always fit. I would have preferred a different formal device which allowed the reader to live in the team's nightmarish-but-familiar world a little more completely, especially given the sparseness of the written material.
I was not always sure how the play diagrams were supposed to interact with the text, and I sometimes felt that as a formal device it was more limiting and narrow than the stanzas themselves ended up being and didn't always fit. I would have preferred a different formal device which allowed the reader to live in the team's nightmarish-but-familiar world a little more completely, especially given the sparseness of the written material.
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
3.0
Reading The Way of All Flesh, I passed through two distinct phases. At first, I relished Butler's clever writing and unstinting anger. Later on, I found my enjoyment marred by the choices Butler made in developing his plot.
My initial experience was very positive. Butler is primarily telling a semi-autobiographical story about the life of Ernest Pontifex, but narrates Ernest's story through his godfather, Overton. Overton's voice is a sophisticated one, cleverly observing and reflecting upon events. Overton advocates a pragmatic and commonsensical approach to life over the tortured doctrines of churchmen or academics. Separating his narrator from the character standing in for his younger self also lets Butler express his blistering anger in an articulate and knowing way without falling into the cool, detached sarcasm which can rob satire of its moral urgency. He is particularly conscious of the injustices done to children and youth, of which his bitter depictions are extremely compelling. We begin to meet some truly exquisite characters early on, such as the brazen and hypocritical headmaster Dr. Skinner or the painfully feckless young Theobald Pontifex (who is to become Ernest's father). Female characters like Christina, Alethea, or Ellen unfortunately seem to be more instrumental; they are present to serve a specific purpose in advancing the plot and their characterization is not nearly as rich.
Ernest's gradual journey from childhood trauma to independence as an adult eventually comes to hinge on a significant plot point with which I was very uncomfortable. Ernest is continually depicted as acting out of obliviousness or ignorance as a consequence of his upbringing. However, whenhe is sent to prison for assaulting a woman he wrongly believes is a prostitute this "explanation" rings hollow; however oblivious and impressionable he may be, his actions seem out of character and somewhat thoughtlessly written. Although it effectively serves the plot and Ernest's eventual arc, this episode puts a damper on the rest of the book, which also seemed to me to lose some of its edge, to flatten some of the interesting nuances in existing characters, and to end on a less biting and overly cathartic note.
The Way of All Flesh is remarkably ahead of its time in the way in which it handles intergenerational trauma, contrasting Theobald's development in response to his own overbearing father a generation earlier with Ernest's gradual journey towards assertiveness and a secure sense of self. Butler's observations and sarcastic tangents are often exceptional -- all in all this is an extremely quotable book. But I was unable to shake the feeling that the latter portion never recovered from a deeply ill-judged plot choice and an undeservedly sanguine denoument.
As an aside, there is a good bit of church politics in this book -- readers who are familiar with the historical context of high-church and low-church Anglicanism, as well as the evangelical movements of the time (e.g., early Methodism) will at times benefit from this familiarity.
My initial experience was very positive. Butler is primarily telling a semi-autobiographical story about the life of Ernest Pontifex, but narrates Ernest's story through his godfather, Overton. Overton's voice is a sophisticated one, cleverly observing and reflecting upon events. Overton advocates a pragmatic and commonsensical approach to life over the tortured doctrines of churchmen or academics. Separating his narrator from the character standing in for his younger self also lets Butler express his blistering anger in an articulate and knowing way without falling into the cool, detached sarcasm which can rob satire of its moral urgency. He is particularly conscious of the injustices done to children and youth, of which his bitter depictions are extremely compelling. We begin to meet some truly exquisite characters early on, such as the brazen and hypocritical headmaster Dr. Skinner or the painfully feckless young Theobald Pontifex (who is to become Ernest's father). Female characters like Christina, Alethea, or Ellen unfortunately seem to be more instrumental; they are present to serve a specific purpose in advancing the plot and their characterization is not nearly as rich.
Ernest's gradual journey from childhood trauma to independence as an adult eventually comes to hinge on a significant plot point with which I was very uncomfortable. Ernest is continually depicted as acting out of obliviousness or ignorance as a consequence of his upbringing. However, when
The Way of All Flesh is remarkably ahead of its time in the way in which it handles intergenerational trauma, contrasting Theobald's development in response to his own overbearing father a generation earlier with Ernest's gradual journey towards assertiveness and a secure sense of self. Butler's observations and sarcastic tangents are often exceptional -- all in all this is an extremely quotable book. But I was unable to shake the feeling that the latter portion never recovered from a deeply ill-judged plot choice and an undeservedly sanguine denoument.
As an aside, there is a good bit of church politics in this book -- readers who are familiar with the historical context of high-church and low-church Anglicanism, as well as the evangelical movements of the time (e.g., early Methodism) will at times benefit from this familiarity.
Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422 by Tzafrir Barzilay
3.5
Poisoned Wells effectively reflects both the merits and the pitfalls of academic monographs. Everything is well-structured, well-sourced, and well-argued. Much of the book is also quite rigidly constructed, narrow in scope, and excessively concerned with justifying the uniqueness of its project. One common academic vice is absent: all of the writing is very accessible.
Barzilay focuses on two intense episodes of well-poisoning allegations, one stemming from southern France in 1321 and one occurring in the German-speaking lands between 1348 and 1350. The story he tells is fascinating: the evolution of well-poisoning from a highly localized concern targeting lepers to an established conspiracy implicating lepers, Jews, foreign Muslim rulers, and marginalized Christians including the indigent, the itinerant, and religious dissidents. The central claim of the conspiracy which emerged over several months in 1321 was that Islamic leaders were masterminding an operation in which Jews acted as intermediaries, recruiting lepers to join them in systematically poisoning European water sources in an attempt to overthrow Christendom. The comparison with modern notions of "triadic populism", in which the demonization of marginalized groups is justified by portraying the groups in question as agents of a more powerful and more distant enemy, is striking. Barzilay primarily works with records left by the persecutors: chronicles, court documents, and official correspondence. Using these sources, he is able to build up a compelling portrait of the way in which Inquisitorial action justified itself by creating an escalating paper-trail of intra-community allegations and coerced confessions which were nevertheless entirely legitimate and valid by their own legal standards; for Medievalists, the dialogue with the way in which investigations were carried out during the Witch panics and during the suppression of the (alleged) Cathar heresy is potentially fruitful.
Most importantly, wading into the debates surrounding causality, Barzilay nuances the issue but does not nuance it into oblivion. That is to say, in considering whether elite action or popular sentiment was the driving cause of these episodes of accusation and violence, Barzilay argues that while various cultural factors made these allegations convincing to the public, elite machinations were the driving force behind the "transfer" of allegations from lepers to other groups and the development of the elaborated conspiracy and its accompanying investigations (specifically focusing on power politics waged between centralized Court and Ecclesial bureaucracies and local power-holders like the lesser nobility, guilds, and burghers). Barzilay's account is nuanced enough to grant significant causal importance to both elite and popular factors but does not devolve into a wishy-washy causal emptiness in which no strong thesis is sufficiently "nuanced" to venture.
Most of the significant limitations of this project are acknowledged by Barzilay. He is generally not working with victims' experiences, and his explicit repudiation of the more generalized theses advanced by prior scholarship has lead to a work which is very narrowly focused on two historical episodes. This is very much Barzilay's intention, but the non-specialist reader may be left wishing he had undertaken more engagement with broader contexts.
Barzilay focuses on two intense episodes of well-poisoning allegations, one stemming from southern France in 1321 and one occurring in the German-speaking lands between 1348 and 1350. The story he tells is fascinating: the evolution of well-poisoning from a highly localized concern targeting lepers to an established conspiracy implicating lepers, Jews, foreign Muslim rulers, and marginalized Christians including the indigent, the itinerant, and religious dissidents. The central claim of the conspiracy which emerged over several months in 1321 was that Islamic leaders were masterminding an operation in which Jews acted as intermediaries, recruiting lepers to join them in systematically poisoning European water sources in an attempt to overthrow Christendom. The comparison with modern notions of "triadic populism", in which the demonization of marginalized groups is justified by portraying the groups in question as agents of a more powerful and more distant enemy, is striking. Barzilay primarily works with records left by the persecutors: chronicles, court documents, and official correspondence. Using these sources, he is able to build up a compelling portrait of the way in which Inquisitorial action justified itself by creating an escalating paper-trail of intra-community allegations and coerced confessions which were nevertheless entirely legitimate and valid by their own legal standards; for Medievalists, the dialogue with the way in which investigations were carried out during the Witch panics and during the suppression of the (alleged) Cathar heresy is potentially fruitful.
Most importantly, wading into the debates surrounding causality, Barzilay nuances the issue but does not nuance it into oblivion. That is to say, in considering whether elite action or popular sentiment was the driving cause of these episodes of accusation and violence, Barzilay argues that while various cultural factors made these allegations convincing to the public, elite machinations were the driving force behind the "transfer" of allegations from lepers to other groups and the development of the elaborated conspiracy and its accompanying investigations (specifically focusing on power politics waged between centralized Court and Ecclesial bureaucracies and local power-holders like the lesser nobility, guilds, and burghers). Barzilay's account is nuanced enough to grant significant causal importance to both elite and popular factors but does not devolve into a wishy-washy causal emptiness in which no strong thesis is sufficiently "nuanced" to venture.
Most of the significant limitations of this project are acknowledged by Barzilay. He is generally not working with victims' experiences, and his explicit repudiation of the more generalized theses advanced by prior scholarship has lead to a work which is very narrowly focused on two historical episodes. This is very much Barzilay's intention, but the non-specialist reader may be left wishing he had undertaken more engagement with broader contexts.
Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis by Edgar Garcia
4.5
Emergency is an excellent collection of short essays meditating upon the Popol Vuh and its resonance in America today. Edgar Garcia does not hit you over the head with direct modern parallels or political moralism. Instead, he carefully elucidates themes such as ambivalence, duality, displacement, and empathy, briefly putting those themes in dialogue with the world in which we live and letting you work out the rest. Importantly, Garcia is very comfortable leaving questions unanswered or acknowledging a multiplicity of possible answers. The result is that reading this book feels very much like working through Popol Vuh alongside Garcia; paying close attention to the historical text, then resurfacing to the present context with new lines of thought suggesting themselves.
Garcia also does an excellent job of explaining the Popol Vuh itself. I came away with meaningful insight on K'iche' cosmology, on how to conceptualize the hazy "penumbral anticipation" in which the Popol Vuh takes place, on the troubled history of the colonial-era manuscript that is our only extant source, and on the ways in which the Popol Vuh has been a resource and a dialogue partner for Maya and Latin American activists, poets, mystics, and everyday people up to the present. I would not have gotten any of these insights to the same degree had I just read a translation of the Popol Vuh, even a well-annotated one.
Emergency is a quick read and an elegant work, each essay clearly identifying a conceptual focus but also fitting cleanly into the sequence of ideas through which Garcia is working. I highly recommend this book.
Garcia also does an excellent job of explaining the Popol Vuh itself. I came away with meaningful insight on K'iche' cosmology, on how to conceptualize the hazy "penumbral anticipation" in which the Popol Vuh takes place, on the troubled history of the colonial-era manuscript that is our only extant source, and on the ways in which the Popol Vuh has been a resource and a dialogue partner for Maya and Latin American activists, poets, mystics, and everyday people up to the present. I would not have gotten any of these insights to the same degree had I just read a translation of the Popol Vuh, even a well-annotated one.
Emergency is a quick read and an elegant work, each essay clearly identifying a conceptual focus but also fitting cleanly into the sequence of ideas through which Garcia is working. I highly recommend this book.
Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka
3.0
Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth arises from a satirical tradition focused on the abuse of power and the devaluation of human life. This novel differs from an intuitive point of comparison, Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, in that the latter is primarily interested in diffuse, pervasive, enduring political dysfunction. Soyinka's work, by contrast, is interested in the brazen machinations of powerful individuals -- along with the downstream effects their schemes can have on a political culture. Soyinka's perspective here is welcome, but the comparison is not all favorable. Armah's famous novel is sparsely constructed but tonally complex, ending on a note of simultaneous rage, elegy, and hope. Soyinka's latest novel is more elaborately constructed but ends on a less nuanced emotional note.
The satire here is extremely dense. Sometimes the sardonic asides and digressions feel a little extraneous. The world these characters inhabit is obsessed with brands and labels and titles and sobriquets, which contributes to the sense of conceptual density. Soyinka plays fast and loose with chronology and often describes things in an erudite, sideways way. This tactic is often effective, as the reader does not realize the depravity in what is happening until thoroughly in media res. It does, however, lead to a book which it took me some time to be fully invested in, which sets up its key plot points slowly, and which feels somewhat anticlimactic at its end.
Soyinka is a genius and justly regarded as a giant of literature, and there are many things he does well here. At times he pulls of beautiful, creative, and evocative prose descriptions, or sly sarcastic jokes, or tense and engrossing madcap sequences in which characters are working at cross purposes. His righteous anger at the casual way in which humans are made to suffer is entirely authentic and, coming from him, authoritative. The book taken in sum, however, struck me as somewhat unwieldy and undisciplined, sacrificing coherence and resonance for freewheeling and lengthy satirical diatribes and indictments of varying levels of importance.
The satire here is extremely dense. Sometimes the sardonic asides and digressions feel a little extraneous. The world these characters inhabit is obsessed with brands and labels and titles and sobriquets, which contributes to the sense of conceptual density. Soyinka plays fast and loose with chronology and often describes things in an erudite, sideways way. This tactic is often effective, as the reader does not realize the depravity in what is happening until thoroughly in media res. It does, however, lead to a book which it took me some time to be fully invested in, which sets up its key plot points slowly, and which feels somewhat anticlimactic at its end.
Soyinka is a genius and justly regarded as a giant of literature, and there are many things he does well here. At times he pulls of beautiful, creative, and evocative prose descriptions, or sly sarcastic jokes, or tense and engrossing madcap sequences in which characters are working at cross purposes. His righteous anger at the casual way in which humans are made to suffer is entirely authentic and, coming from him, authoritative. The book taken in sum, however, struck me as somewhat unwieldy and undisciplined, sacrificing coherence and resonance for freewheeling and lengthy satirical diatribes and indictments of varying levels of importance.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical content, Violence, Injury/Injury detail, and Murder
Moderate: Pedophilia, Sexual assault, Fire/Fire injury, Rape, and Police brutality
Minor: Racial slurs
The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values by Nancy Folbre
3.25
Words like "clear", "intuitive", or "lucid" often lie at the upper limit of credible praise due to an economist's writing. Nancy Folbre's writing is more than just lucid. It's compelling, warm, and thoroughly hers. Folbre is also particularly good at weaving dissociated strands of information into very tight conceptual packages and models. Even if all of the facts in question are already known, the elegance with which she fits them together may be novel.
The Invisible Heart effectively demonstrates the practical and theoretical problems which arise when we try to fit care work into a market. For instance, ingrained social norms and the "prisoner of love" effect change market participants' preferences over time. It's difficult to objectively assess the "quality" of care work, or its diffuse effects. Caring requires person-specific non-standardized knowledge. Labor power is systematically limited by institutions like the family, or by the difficulty of actions such as strikes.
Turning to the history of welfare provision and care organization, The Invisible Heart lags somewhat. Some of the basic stories are a little too well known at this point: the inadequacies of GDP, the regressive nature of benefits, tax credits, and school funding. There are some valuable insights into the specifically gendered nature of these dynamics (e.g. issues with the ways in which child support is enforced, issues with taxing married couples' income jointly). However, it often seems as though these insights are given short shrift in favor of a more general history which is not particularly unique to this book.
In the book's closing sections, Folbre's stances are quite explicit. Globalization, marketization, and changes in social norms have created deep inadequacies in communal sentiment and care work. Neither "patriotic protectionism", which seeks to reverse globalization, nor social conservatism which would bolster the supply of care work by increasing the degree to which women are artificially pressured to specialize in it are real solutions. You cannot just increase compensation for care labor (in ways which might trap women in those sectors), nor can you just strive towards more equitable divisions of labor (which doesn't address care work's systematic undervaluing). You have to do both. For Folbre, this means a shift towards market socialism, limited social ownership, and a careful mix of tax incentives and state investments oriented towards a more robust and equitable care sector.
It is worth noting that this is a rather dated book at this point, some of the specifics rendered inaccurate by changes in the landscape of social services. It's also a book which is sometimes unfocused, which devotes too much time to rehashing general arguments at the expense of providing specific insights, and which is not always charitable in the models of conventional economic thinking with which it takes issue. However, The Invisible Heart is a strong resource for improving theoretical and practical understandings of care work's economic position, presents a number of useful policy insights, and is an enjoyable and accessible basis for engagement with Folbre's eminent work which has carried on from the publication of this book to the present.
The Invisible Heart effectively demonstrates the practical and theoretical problems which arise when we try to fit care work into a market. For instance, ingrained social norms and the "prisoner of love" effect change market participants' preferences over time. It's difficult to objectively assess the "quality" of care work, or its diffuse effects. Caring requires person-specific non-standardized knowledge. Labor power is systematically limited by institutions like the family, or by the difficulty of actions such as strikes.
Turning to the history of welfare provision and care organization, The Invisible Heart lags somewhat. Some of the basic stories are a little too well known at this point: the inadequacies of GDP, the regressive nature of benefits, tax credits, and school funding. There are some valuable insights into the specifically gendered nature of these dynamics (e.g. issues with the ways in which child support is enforced, issues with taxing married couples' income jointly). However, it often seems as though these insights are given short shrift in favor of a more general history which is not particularly unique to this book.
In the book's closing sections, Folbre's stances are quite explicit. Globalization, marketization, and changes in social norms have created deep inadequacies in communal sentiment and care work. Neither "patriotic protectionism", which seeks to reverse globalization, nor social conservatism which would bolster the supply of care work by increasing the degree to which women are artificially pressured to specialize in it are real solutions. You cannot just increase compensation for care labor (in ways which might trap women in those sectors), nor can you just strive towards more equitable divisions of labor (which doesn't address care work's systematic undervaluing). You have to do both. For Folbre, this means a shift towards market socialism, limited social ownership, and a careful mix of tax incentives and state investments oriented towards a more robust and equitable care sector.
It is worth noting that this is a rather dated book at this point, some of the specifics rendered inaccurate by changes in the landscape of social services. It's also a book which is sometimes unfocused, which devotes too much time to rehashing general arguments at the expense of providing specific insights, and which is not always charitable in the models of conventional economic thinking with which it takes issue. However, The Invisible Heart is a strong resource for improving theoretical and practical understandings of care work's economic position, presents a number of useful policy insights, and is an enjoyable and accessible basis for engagement with Folbre's eminent work which has carried on from the publication of this book to the present.