• Historical Materialism conference — Lenin's Tomb
  "The sixth annual Historical Materialism conference takes place next weekend, 27th to 29th November."
  (tags: blog europe communism marxism)
• 'Comelec wants OFWs to vote but not get elected' | ABS-CBN News
  "The non-government group Migrante on Tuesday criticized the Commission on Elections (Comelec) for encouraging overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) to register and vote in 2010, but denying them possible representation in Congress when the poll body revoked Migrante’s party-list accreditation."
  (tags: news southeastasia elections humanrights politics)
• La Patria del Criollo: An Interpretation of Colonial Guatemala by Severo Martínez Peláez Trans. Susan M. Neve and W. George Lovell
  "Martínez Peláez was one of Guatemala’s foremost historians and a political activist committed to revolutionary social change. La Patria del Criollo is his scathing assessment of Guatemala’s colonial legacy. Martínez Peláez argues that Guatemala remains a colonial society because the conditions that arose centuries ago when imperial Spain held sway have endured. He maintains that economic circumstances that assure prosperity for a few and deprivation for the majority were altered neither by independence in 1821 nor by liberal reform following 1871. The few in question are an elite group of criollos, people of Spanish descent born in Guatemala; the majority are predominantly Maya Indians, whose impoverishment is shared by many mixed-race Guatemalans."
  (tags: literature latinamerica history imperialism class)
• The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan by Ken C. Kawashima
  "Koreans constituted the largest colonial labor force in imperial Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Caught between the Scylla of agricultural destitution in Korea and the Charybdis of industrial depression in Japan, migrant Korean peasants arrived on Japanese soil amid extreme instability in the labor and housing markets. In The Proletarian Gamble, Ken C. Kawashima maintains that contingent labor is a defining characteristic of capitalist commodity economies. He scrutinizes how the labor power of Korean workers in Japan was commodified, and how these workers both fought against the racist and contingent conditions of exchange and combated institutionalized racism."
  (tags: literature eastasia history communism workers marxism union imperialism capitalism)
• Zambian editor to face trial over court article – Mail & Guardian
  "The editor-in-chief of Zambia's only private newspaper will face trial for contempt of court over an article about a colleague's trial on pornography charges, a judge ruled on Wednesday."
  (tags: news southernafrica journalism law politics)

The Mail & Guardian (South Africa) reported today:

Post newspaper editor [and chief] Fred M’membe will stand trial for violating a gag order on the pornography case, in which the paper’s news editor Chansa Kabwela was cleared on Tuesday, Magistrate David Simusamba ruled.

What had happened was Post editor Chansa Kabwela had been charged with violating Section 177 of the Penal Code of Zambia which is meant to punish those that “try to corrupt the morals” of Zambian society.

The editor was covering a doctors strike in Zambia and was going to publish a photo, along with an article, that showed a woman giving birth on a sidewalk due to the fact that no doctors could come to her aid. Kabwela was found innocent of the charges recently and the Los Angeles Times reported that:

Chansa Kabwela, the news editor of the independent newspaper the Post, decided the photos were too shocking to publish but sent them to senior government officials and two women’s groups to draw attention to the hospital crisis. She was arrested and charged with circulating pornography after President Rupiah Banda publicly urged police to take action.

Yet despite never actually publishing the photos Kabwela had action taken against her. The Times of Zambia (via AllAfrica) quotes Kabwela after her courtroom victory:

The smiling Kabwela told journalists outside the courtroom that she could not rule out the possibility of political influence on the matter because there was nothing obscenity about the pictures.

Kabwela said her letter to Vice-President, George Kunda was to remind the people in authority how serious the strike action by the health workers had been.
“I could not imagine how someone could look at those pictures as pornographic because there was nothing pornographic about those pictures. I am really very happy because I knew I did not do anything wrong,” she said.

Not satisfied with harassing Post journalists the government decided to take action against editor-and-chief M’membe. In an editorial the Post stated:

Rupiah’s pettiness and hatred blinded him from seeing the suffering, the pain, the despair or helplessness that those pictures carried. What Rupiah saw was an opportunity to crucify The Post by criminalising its very noble and otherwise sensitive communication with the government. We did not publish our communication with the government. It was done quietly because the editorial staff decided that that was the best way to deliver the message without being seen to be politicising the issue.
…
Chansa’s case exemplifies the recklessness of a president who is drunk with power, who thinks because he is president, he can do anything and cage anyone, he has dominion over everything in this country.

• Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital by Nikolai Bukharin
  (tags: literature marxism communism imperialism)

• Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives edited by Kathleen O'Brien Wicker, Musa W. Dube, Althea Spencer Miller
  "T
  his volume is an engaging and provocative collection of essays on contemporary feminist biblical studies. Drawing upon their own social, cultural, and religious backgrounds and experiences, contributors read the New Testament as feminists, placing it in the context of globalization. These biblical interpretations cast gender, race, class, and power relationships as issues inherent in both the content and context of scripture. Calling into question feminist social engagement that does not extend beyond academic halls, churches, and Christians,Feminist New Testament Studies offers new directions for future research and teaching in feminist biblical studies."
  (tags: literature philosophy religion feminism)
• Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre by Paige Arthur
  "Closely following the postwar movements for decolonization, and then supporting the war of independence in Algeria, Sartre proposed an influential and uncompromising view of imperialism. Analyzing the Western attitude to the “subhuman” colonial subject, he offered an account of the social constraints that applied to both ruler and ruled, and came to argue that political violence — on both sides — was a systematic consequence of the colonial order. Arthur’s rich and nuanced book locates Sartre within the political discussions of his time, whilst also looking forward to contemporary debates about new forms of imperialism and resistance."
  (tags: literature europe philosophy marxism)

At The Excerpt Mill I quote Musa W. Dube, here is a short excerpt from my quote:

For the most part biblical texts are read in isolation from other secular works of literature. Whether this is intended or not, this approach maintains and perpetuates the imperialistic power of the West over non-Western and non-Christian places, peoples and cultures.

I therefore hold that the Johannine approach to exalting Jesus to divine status, above all Jewish figures and above all other cultural figures of the world, is a colonizing ideology that is not so different from the ideology of the Aeneid and Heart of Darkness. More importantly, John’s colonizing ideology calls upon academic readers to go beyond just expounding and explaining the construction of John’s text.

Lévi-Strauss in Brazil in the 1930s (Apic/Getty Images).

I found out in yesterdays New York Times that influential anthropologist and structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss passed away at the ripe old age of 100.  Considering how I am greatly influenced by such (post)structuralist philosophers such as Althusser, Foucault, and Barthes I am indeed in his debt.

The Times article reported:

His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

As an anthropologist:

he found among ["primitive" societies] a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.

…

Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.

More on his theory and input into the field of philosophy Constance Holden blogs:

Lévi-Strauss introduced “structuralism” to anthropology–the concept that all societies follow certain universal patterns of thought and behavior, as exemplified in their myths. Anthropologists say his way of looking at human culture did away with conceptions of indigenous groups as having “savage” or “primitive” minds–as well as the corollary view that Western civilization is uniquely advanced. Lévi-Strauss’s way of re-conceptualizing anthropology–informed by what he called the “three mistresses” of geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism–helped shape trends in social sciences and literary theory, and influenced intellectuals such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

On history Lévi-Strauss, who was influenced by Marx (which in turn influenced his structuralism, along with, as stated above, psychoanalysis), stated:

Anthropology cannot remain indifferent to historical process and to the most highly conscious expressions of social phenomena…His goal is to grasp, beyond the conscious and always shifting images which men hold, the complete range of unconscious possibilities.  These are not unlimited, and the relationships of compatibility or incompatibility which each maintains with all the others provide a logical framework for historical developments, which, while perhaps unpredictable, are never arbitrary.  In this sense, the famous statement by Marx, “Men make their own history, but they do not know they are making it,” justifies, first, history and, second, anthropology (Topolski, 193)

Jerzy Topolski, in an article on Marx and Lévi-Strauss, wrote that Lévi-Strauss had a very fatalistic view of history (which I cannot critique as I have not read enough of his theories to substantiate this) and that:

All behavior, according to Lévi-Strauss-writes Susan Sontag-is a language, a vocabulary and grammar of order; anthropology proves nothing about human nature except the need for order itself.  There is no universal truth about the relation between, say, religion and social structure.  There are only models showing the variability of one in relation to others…

Lévi-Strauss claims that among the universal laws of the human mind the basic one is the capability of grasping reality in binary oppositions.  Under conditions of societal existence the distinctive pairs have cultural significance.  The most important for social life is the process of communication which takes place through the medium of a broadly understood “exchange” of words, persons, and things governed by the same formal rules (Topolski, 196).

While Lévi-Strauss has much to admire he was, as the Times obituary stated, much disliked by many anthropologists because of his mix of structural philosophy within his anthropology.  Hugo G. Nutini, an an article for American Anthropologist, wrote all the way back in 1971:

One of the main reasons why Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism has elicited such resistance, and sometimes outright antagonism, from the Anglo American anthropological world is the fact that almost invariable he writes in his dual capacity as scientist and ideologists.  Had he confined himself to expounding his theory and methods in strictly anthropological terms, his ideas would by now be much more acceptable to and better understood by his colleagues (Nutini, 537)

…

Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism cannot, from the anthropological standpoint, be viewed profitably as a kind of philosophy…I believe that empiricist anthropologists, instinctively realizing the differences in the scientific foundations of the empiricist approach and of structuralism…have viewed structuralism as just another philosophy in disguise…Structuralism should not be regarded as another approach to the handling of empirical social facts in conceptual contexts that do not involve the bifurcation of the socio-cultural universe, not in the light of the other, scientific, side of structuralism.  It will not do, then, to examine a structuralist construction in strictly empirical terms, as empiricist anthropologists are fond of doing when they assert that Lévi-Strauss’s generalizations cannot stand the test of particular ethnographic situations (543)

It is true that there is much to critisize in Lévi-Strauss’ work (as there is in any work of a philosopher or anthropologist) and as David G. Mandelbaum points out, “The writings of Lévi-Strauss have left a broad wake of effervescent admirers and roiled specialists.  Not many have attempted to check the evidence he advances in support of a thesis or have tried to verify his findings.  Those who have closely examined specific writings have generally found them deficient in both respects” (Mandelbaum, 32).

But what Lévi-Strauss has given us, in structural thought, is quite the gift indeed.  He has made many of us to reflect on the structural objects of our societies and the way that history and cultural can limit our choices and can harm certain populations for the benefit of other populations (such as the structural system of capitalistic white supremacy in North America).  He also provided a counter-point to many Western anthropologists who simply overlooked the knowledge of so called “primitive” cultures by pointing out how their fables and myths were as complex as Western philosophical discourse.

Sources

Mandelbaum, David G.  1987.  “Myths and Myth Maker: Some Anthropological Appraisals of the Mythological Studies of Lévi-Strauss.”  Ethnology 26, no. 1 (1987): 31-36.

Nutini, Hugo G.  1971.  “The Ideological Bases of Lévi-Strauss’s Structuralism.”  American Anthropologist 73, no. 3 (1971): 537-544.

Topolski, Jerzy.  “Lévi-Strauss and Marx on History.”  History and Theory 12, no. 2 (1973): 192-207.

An excerpt from my other blog about race relations and white evangelicals:

The racially important cultural tools in the white evangelical tool kit are “accountable freewill individualism,” “relationism” (attaching central importance to interpersonal relationships), and antistructuralism (inability to perceive or unwillingness to accept social structural influences).

…

Absent from their accounts is the idea that poor relationships might be shaped by social structures, such as laws, the ways institutions operate, or forms of segregation. Again, understanding evangelicals’ cultural tools illuminates why this element is missing. White evangelicals not only interpret race issues by using accountable freewill individualism and relationalism, but they often find structural explanations irrelevant or even wrongheaded…Evangelicals are thus also antistructural because they believe that invoking social structures shifts guild away from the root source—the accountable individual. However, evangelicals are selectively aware of social institutions—they see those both impact them in their own social location and tend to undermine accountable freewill individualism. For instance, they are aware of affirmative action because such programs can impact them in their social location, and they tend to oppose such programs because they go against evangelical understanding of accountable freewill individualism.

"Revolt" by Gaber (click on pic for larger image)

Artwork by Gaber.

At The Excerpt Mill I quote  John Maynard Keynes:

In particular, it is an outstanding characteristic of the economic system in which we live that, whilst it is subject to severe fluctuations in respect of output and employment, it is not violently unstable. Indeed it seems capable of remaining in a chronic condition of sub-normal activity for a considerable period without any marked tendency either towards recovery or complete collapse. Moreover, the evidence indicates that full, or even approximately full, employment is of rare and short-lived occurrence. Fluctuations may start briskly but seem to wear themselves out before they have proceeded to great extremes, and an intermediate situation which is neither desperate nor satisfactory is our normal lot.

• The Information-Literate Historian by Jenny L. Presnell
  "In the past, historians could rely on their basic understanding of bibliographic tools to do effective research, as resources were primarily available in print, on microform, or at a library. Today, the information explosion resulting from access to the Internet has complicated traditional research methods by heightening expectations and raising new questions about retrieving, using, and presenting information."
  (tags: literature history academia)