Zeder: "The Origins of Agriculture in the Near East" (2011)

Traditionally, archaeologists have taken the hallmark of domestication to be genetic changes: A plant or animal counted as domesticated when it differs from the wild land species it was cultivated from.

In this interesting review paper, Melinda A. Zeder of the Smithsonian Museum mentions a number of reasons that the genetic criterion might mislead us into adopting dating domestication unduly late:

• Ancient threshing methods might have involved beating cereal straws into a basket to get the grains out, a practice that would disproportionately select grains from weak-stemmed straws. This would counteract the effect of crop selection, where the plants are usually selected to have stronger stems. (p. S226)
• When harvests failed, as must have done once in a while, the crop may have been restocked from the wild land species, wiping out the genetic record of domestication. (p. S226)
• Occasionally, the morphological changes we are looking for are in fact quite modern phenomena. Zeder mentions that the large size of modern broad beans, a trait that did not appear before well into the middle ages. (p. S225)

In addition to these rather technical reasons, a more important issue is that a too rigid criterion can lead us to ignore or misunderstand practices somewhere on the continuum between opportunistic gathering and habitual farming. Such hybrid relationships between land and people, Zadeh writes,

… not only makes it impossible to identify any threshold moments when wild became domestic or hunting and gathering became agriculture but also shows that drawing such distinctions actually impedes rather than improves our understanding of this process. Instead of continuing to try to pigeonhole these concepts into tidy definitional categories, a more productive approach would be to embrace the ambiguity of this middle ground and continue to develop tools that allow us to watch unfolding developments within this neither-nor territory. (p. S231)

I second that.

Foucault: Lectures at College de France, 1973–74 (Lecture 1–3)

The academic year 1973–74 gave a course on the history of psychiatry. His approach during the course both rested on and differed from his work on madness ten years earlier.

The course mainly focuses on a period spanning roughly from the Revolution to the middle of the 1800s. Foucault's hypothesis is that the function of the psychiatric reforms of that period was to implement the new techniques of control that he calls "disciplinary power."

The Asylum as a Battlefield

This means that he frames the idea behind the psychiatric system essentially as one of fighting and defeating the patient:

So what is organized in the asylum is actually a battlefield. (p. 7)

What is involved is the confrontation of two wills, that of the doctor and those who represent him on one hand, and then that of the patient. What is established, therefore, is a battle, a relationship of force. (p. 10)

This is not completely without basis in the texts of the period. Foucault quotes a number of texts by Philippe Pinel and others that talk explicitly about "subjugating and taming the lunatic" (p. 8) or describe the patients as "individuals who think they are superior to everyone else" (p. 4).

Being King in One's Head

One way to interpret this spite towards the insane is to see their madness as a refusal to accept as true what they are supposed to accept:

Whether you believe yourself to be a kind or believe that you are wretched, wanting to impose this certainty as a kind of tyranny on all those around you basically amounts to "believing one is a king"; it is this that makes all madness a king of belief rooted in the fact that one is kind of the world. Psychiatrists at the start of the nineteenth century could have said that to be mad was to seize power in one's head. (p. 28)

And while such a "madness of error" would be relatively harmless in a system of sovereign power, it is a provocative and potentially dangerous act in a system of disciplinary power, since it shows the bounds on that system's ability to "subjugate and tame." 

All Power is Physical

The term "power" is used here in the same partly idiosyncratic way as in other works by Foucault:

… in the asylum, as everywhere else, power is never something that someone possesses, any more than it is something that emanates from someone. Power does not belong to anyone or even to a group; there is only power because there is dispersion, relays, networks, reciprocal supports, differences of potential, discrepancies, etcetera. It is in this system of differences, which have to be analyzed, that power can start to function. (p. 4)

This leads to some interesting observations:

It seems to me rather that what is essential in all power is that ultimately its point of application is always the body. All power is physical, and there is a direct connection between the body and political power. (p. 14)

Disciplinary power, as a particular paradigm of control, is then one example of this:

… I think that in our society, disciplinary power is a quite specific modality of what could be called the synaptic contact bodies-power. (p. 40)

This specific "disciplinary technology" (p. 57) would then have a history that could be traced, just like, for instance, the use of contracts and the use of paper money have a specific history.

What is Disciplinary Power?

One of Foucault's big ideas is that this specific form of power was invented in a specific period and in specific places and then slowly made its way into more and more corners of society.

In these lectures, he reiterates the claim that these disciplinary techniques were invented in religious institutions such as monasteries (p. 41) and then applied to armies, prisons, schools, hospitals, and asylums.

As an example, he gives the new organization that the Gobelin school of tapestry started using in 1667, with age-dependent class divisions, supervised work, and regular written assessments (pp. 49–50).

Another example is the transformation of police work in the 18th century, with the introduction of the police report and a notion of curing the subject of the their bad behavior rather than simply punishing them. A whole machinery of writing and documenting ensued (p. 50).

With respect to armies, he also mentions that highly ceremonial practices or "war games" such as jousting were replaced by physical exercises such as marching in order to train the bodies of the soldiers. This had "hardly existed before," Foucault claims (p. 48).

The Consequences of Discipline

Under the old system of power, the power of sovereignty, "[t]he pinning of the subject-function to a definite body can only take place at time in a discontinuous, incidental fashion, in ceremonies, for example" (p. 44).

According to Foucault's hypothesis, this is changed radically under the new system, since one of the main functions of this system is cause people to internalize the norms of the system. Disciplinary power, by its very nature, thus

… looks towards the future, towards the moment when it will keep going by itself and only a virtual supervision will be required, when discipline, consequently, will have become habit. (p. 47)

Or, similarly:

One must be able to spot an action even before it has been performed, and disciplinary power must intervene somehow before the actual manifestation of the behavior, before the body, the action, or the discourse, at the level of what is potential, disposition, will, at the level of the soul. (p. 52)

A consequence of this set-up is that disciplinary power cannot simply be content with harassing or assaulting transgressions. Like the O'Brien character in 1984, it must attempt to cure it. This obviously entails the constant production of fringe bodies, and when new strategies are taken up, fringes of those fringes (p. 53).

Gunkel: The Legends of Genesis (1901)

If I understand this correctly, the origin of this text is the following: In 1901, Hermann Gunkel had published a book simply entitled Genesis, and often referred to as a his "commentary" on the Book of Genesis.

However, as far as I could tell from a quick skip through the German original, it is in fact a translation rather than a commentary. I don't know if Gunkel produced the translation himself.

It is, however, a very heavily annotated translation. Almost every single line of the book is equipped with a footnote, and the footnotes frequently take up more than half of the page. So perhaps it isn't entirely unfair to consider it a work of interpretation in its own right after all.

At any rate, this new annotated translation was prefaced by a quite substantial essay, and this essay was translated into English as The Legends of Genesis. Unlike the German original, this text could be checked out of the library here in Amsterdam, and I've read most of it by now.

The Framing of Text Genres

Gunkel is one of those dead white men which everybody seems to cite, but no one seems to read (a bit like Durkheim in sociology). In Hebrew Bible scholarship, his name is strongly connected with the concept of "Sitz im Leben," the situation in which a particular genre of poem or narrative was recited.

Actually, I think he only used the exact phrase "Sitz im Leben" two or three times in his life, but it is not entirely inaccurate to say that his interest in the topic went much, much beyond that. His preface to the translation of Genesis is rife with observations about the possible real-life uses and contexts of the various genres we find in the Hebrew scriptures.

This gets most obvious in the chapter on "the literary form of the legends" (pp. 37-87). This is the part of the essay in which he most intensely speculates about the social function that the stories must have had in the everyday life of the ancient Hebrews:

Accordingly, we should attempt in considering Genesis to realise first of all the form of its contents when they existed as oral tradition. This point of view has been ignored altogether too much hitherto, and investigators have instead treated the legendary books too much as "books." If we desire to understand the legends better we must recall to view the situations in which the legends were recited. […] But the common situation which we have to suppose is this: In the leisure of a winter evening the family sits about the hearth; the grown people, but more especially the children, listen intently to the beautiful old stories of the dawn of the world, which they have heard so often yet never tire of hearing repeated. (pp. 40-41)

An interesting piece of advice on exegesis, and incidentally also the clearest possible illustration of 19th century family norms that one could imagine.

Nevertheless, Gunkel's formal and contextual approach to the scriptures must have stood in a quite stark contrast to the alternatives at the time. In a sense, his insistence on seeing meaning in context can be seen as a precursor of archaeology of knowledge and other strongly textual techniques from later in the 20th century.

Deborah Cameron: "Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth" (2003)

The annual Feminist Lecture at Leeds University was delivered by Deborah Cameron. It is a very nice piece of intellectual history which brings together many of the themes she has been writing about elsewhere.

I does not refer explicitly to Foucault (ever, I think) but reading her lecture in parallel with The History of Sexuality makes very good sense. Her acute sensitivity to the subtle changes of valorization in the quasi-scientific literature on gender differences is exactly the kind of archaeology of knowledge that Foucault was engaged in, and just as good.

The Caveman Model

The topic of the lecture is the change in background values that writings about gender and language have underwent between the 1970s and the 1990s. According to Cameron, who has been both an observer and participant of these discussions throughout the period, our culture has changed from seeing "female" speech strategies as deficient to seeing "male" speech strategies as such.

Specifically, while the different speech styles associated with the genders in the 1970s would be attributed to the subdued and unassertive nature of women, in the 1990s, the difference is attributed to the emotional and social ineptitude of men. An example:

In a 1993 Ofsted report called Boys and English, the authors include the following description of the differences they observed in the behaviour of boys and girls during group discussion sessions. '[Boys] were more likely to interrupt one another, to argue openly and to voice strong opinions. They were also less likely to listen carefully to and build upon one another's contributions.' (p. 135)

What is striking about this example, if you have followed debates about education and gender over a longer period of time, is that the actual descriptions of boys' behaviour could just as easily have been published in the 1970s. The behaviour itself is completely unchanged. But the evaluation of it has changed significantly: the boys' ways of conducting a discussion are represented here as an obstacle to their educational progress. In the 1970s or even the mid-1980s, the same observations would probably have been framed within a feminist 'domincance' model focusing on girls' lack of assertiveness as an obstacle to success. Rather than praising girls for their sympathetic listening, such a report might have noted, regretfully, that 'girls were more likely to listen than to speak. They were also less likely to disagree with others or show a strong commitment to their own opinions.' Our hypothetical 1970s author would undoubtedly have presented girls as victims rather than villains, but her phrasing would have made clear she saw their unassertive linguistic strategies as a problem. Yet today these same strategies are held up as the ideal for boys to emulate. (p. 136)

Cameron goes on to state that this ideal for communication "can be traced pretty directly to the clinical practice of psychotherapy" (p. 139). Thus:

In my own view, then, the current belief in female verbal superiority does not reflect the cultural ascendance of feminism so much as the cultural pervasiveness and influence of therapy, whose definition of good communication happens to include some key features of what is widely perceived a typically female speech style. (p. 140)

In a less convincing section, she proposes a quite speculative explanation of the emergence of this therapeutic ideal, citing globalization and related socio-economic changes (pp. 140–42).

Subtexts and Ideals

What is more important than the material causes of the change is its effects. As she says about the valorization of "female" speech strategies,

this change has little to do with feminism, and does little or nothing to advance the interests of women. On the contrary, what looks on the surface like anti-male discourse […] is more fundamentally an anti-feminist discourse. (p. 134)

The reason for this is, as always, that praising the delicate sensibilities of women can be a pretext for keeping them in place. In her words,

the slogan 'different but equal' is always a lie: when difference becomes naturalized, inequality becomes institutionalized. (p. 144)

This comment is itself the conclusion of a short discussion of Simon Baron-Cohen's book The Essential Difference (2003), which claims that men are evolutionarily selected to be "systematizers," while women have evolved to be "empathizers."

Although Baron-Cohen is careful to disavow any overt political commitment behind this idea, he still eventually "gives the game away" (in Cameron's words, p. 144) when he draws the political conclusion from his evolutionary claims:

People with the female brain make the most wonderful counsellors, primary school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel staff […] People with the male brain make the most wonderful scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, musicians, architects, electricians, plumbers, taxonomists, catalogists, bankers, toolmakers, programmers or even lawyers. (Cohen 2003, p. 287)

So many things could be said about this list, but Cameron says it nicely:

If this is really the cutting edge of twenty-first-century science, 1970s school careers advisers were clearly ahead of their time. Creative professions like music and architecture are off-limits to those who possess a female brain; so is anything to do with science, numbers or classification (though mysteriously a lot of librarians seem to be women); and so too are the high-paying craft occupations like plumbing. Female brains are better suited to occupations like nursing and primary school teaching, which apparently do not involve any systematizing, but only the ability to empathize – and of course, to live on a much smaller salary than a plumber or an engineer. (p. 144)

Innis: Empire and Communications (1950)

I've always thought it sounded quite odd when Derrida said that Western philosophy has a preoccupation with the spoken word. How could a genre almost be more rigidly text-oriented than European philosophy?

Now that I've been reading some of Harold Innis' Empire and Communications, I'm beginning to see the contours of a different historical hypothesis that I hadn't originally read into Derrida's arguments. This concerns the extremely high value that European 19th-century philology put on phonetic alphabets as opposed to syllabic or idiographic scripts.

I think Innis sort of reiterates the valorization. Take a look at the kind of words that he uses to describe the "progress" of the Babylonian writing system:

Conventionalization of pictographs began with signs most frequently used and advanced rapidly with the replacement of strokes by wedges. Pictographic expression became inadequate for the writing of connected religious or historical texts and many signs were taken to represent syllables. By 2900 BC the form of the script and the use of signs had been fully developed, and by 2825 BC the direction of writing and the arrangement of words according to their logical position in the sentence had been established. (p. 27)

It's not that it must necessarily be a progress history—he might just mean "fully developed" in the sense of "to its known final form," or perhaps in some pragmatic sense (as the word "inadequate" suggests). But surely, there is quite a lot of directionality built into the metaphors he is using.

He continues as follows:

By 2900 BC the introduction of syllabic signs in a vocabulary which was largely monosyllabic had reduced the number of signs to about 600. Of these signs about 100 represented vowels, but no system was devised for representing single consonantal sounds or creating an alphabet. Cuneiform writing was partly syllabic and partly ideographic or representative of single words. Many of the signs were polyphonic or had more than one meaning. Sumerian had no distinctions of gender, and often omitted those of number, persons, and tenses. An idea had not fully been developed to the symbol of word or syllable. Pictographs and ideograms took on abstract phonetic values, and the study of script became linked to the study of language. (p. 28)

Weird, isn't it? It's almost as if he takes gender/number/person/tense marking as the mark of a civilized and modern language.

Here's what he writes on alphabets in the beginning of the chapter on ancient Greece:

The alphabet escaped from the implications of sacred writing. It lent itself to an efficient representation of sounds and enabled the Greeks to preserve intact a rich oral tradition. The ancient world troubled about sounds. (p. 53)

Maybe there's something to this. It is strange that Plato, the number one critic of the poetic tradition, should also be the main proponent for the use of structured conversation as a learning tool. Don't we have any ancients that thought that books could do something that the spoken word couldn't?