Books History Women's history

Notes from Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works (2023)

April 20, 2023 – 4:03 pm

p. 5-6 The first explicit statements about Sappho’s involvement in female homoeroticism date from the Hellenistic and Roman period… written four centuries or more after Sappho. Earlier testimonia portray Sappho as interested in men; in Attic comedies dating from the 4th century BCE, she is imagined to have had several male lovers at the same time. The earliest literary document that may reflect the reception of Sappho’s songs is a song by the Greek poet Anakreon. In this song, dating to the second half of the 6th century BCE, a male speaker complains that a girl from Lesbos, whom he desires, pays him no attention because of his white hair (a feminine noun in Greek) and instead gapes at another woman or another feminine object… the whole point of the song is that this is left ambiguous… How precisely the meaning of this verb or Anakreon’s girl of Lesbos relates to Sappho’s poetry is not clear, but they most likely reflect the reception of her poetry, which was very popular in this period. The Greeks at this time imagined Sappho to be hypersexual and equally interested in men and woman. … four Athenian vase paintings, although older than our written accounts, are also only indirect witnesses to Sappho. They date from the end of the 6th to the first hald of the 5th century BCE and associate Sappho with drinking parties (so-called symposia) or picture her in the private quarters of women, in which her poetry was apparently performed in classical Athens. We do not know how these performances relate to the original performance of her songs, let alone whether these portraits of Sappho resemble her real appearance in any way.”

p. 7 “Greek scholars from Alexandria edited around nine “books” (papyrus scrolls actually) with poetry of Sappho in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE… roughly 10,000 lines, of which only 650 survive. … the Suda ascribes the invention of the plectrum (string pick) to her. Sappho was indeed known not only as a poet but also as a musician. Like other lyric poets in this period, she performed her poetry to music or had other perform it for her… Of the melodies accompanying these songs nothing has survived.”

p. 15 “This may explain the mention of ‘pupils’ in the Suda and other sources; they are anachronistic references to the young women she trained in her choruses.”

“Another question is whether we can reconcile Sappho’s choral activities with the erotic relationships she sings about. Some scholars have suggested that Sappho had a homoerotic relationship with one girl in the chorus, which somehow would be the model for the whole group… They point to groups of boys that formed around one aristocratic boy and his adult lover on acnient Crete as a possible parallel. Another possibility is that the homoerotic feelings Sappho and the other female performers of her songs sing about do not reflect actual relationships, but are intended to be forms of public praise or statements about the general power of love.”

Four modern reconstructions of Sappho dominate the lierature about her: Sappho the chorus organiser, Sappho the teacher, Sappho the priestes, and Sappho the banqueter. Of these four the suggestion that she led young women’s choruses is the most plausible”

p. 17 However one would like to reconstruct Sappho’s life, above all she is a poet and the earliest Greek woman of whom at leasta substantial body of poetry is preserved. Other women poets date mainly from the Hellenistic period, and much less of their work has survived.”

p. 59 “My skin was [delicate] before, but now old age
[claims it]; my hair turned from black [to white].

My spirit has grown heavy; knees buckle
that once would dance light as fawns

I often groan, but what can I do?
It is impoosible for humans not to age

For they say, [pierced] by love rosy-armed Dawn
went to the ends of the earth holding Tithonos,

beautiful and young, but in time gray old age
seized him, even with a deathless wife…..

Yet I love the finer things. [Know] that passion for
the light of life has also granted me brilliance and beauty.”

p 88 The sweetest apple reddens on a high branch
high upon highest, missed by the applepickers:

No, they didn’t miss, so much as couldn’t touch.

Herdsmen cruh under their feet
a hyacinth in the mountains; on the ground
purple blooms…

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Books Environmental politics Science

Notes from An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms around Us

October 13, 2022 – 9:00 pm

p. 220 The tungara frog “after sunset, the males inflate their huge vocal sacs and force air through voice bosed larger than their brains. The esult is a short whine that falls in pitch, like a tiny, receding siren. After that, the male might add one ro more stort staccato embellishments that are known as chucks… female frog .. sit in front of various males, compare their whines and chucks, chose the most attractive-sounding specimen and allow him to fertilize her eggs…almost always for males who embellish their whines with chucks over males who merely whine. The chucks are so desirable that if a male is reluctant to make them, a female will sometimes body slam him until he does…. The frog’s inner ear is especially sensitive to frequencies of 2,130 Hz, which is just under the dominant frequency of the average chuck… They ought to chuck as frequently and repeatedly as possible, buty they’re strangely unwilling to do so…. The fringe-lipped bat turned out to be a voracious frog-eater. Turtle and Tyan showed that it tracks its prey by eavesdropping on its courtship calls, much as Ormia does with cricket songs. And the bat, just like the female tungara forgs, is particularly drawn to males that add chucks to their whines… The frog’s Umwelt shaped the frog’s calls, which then shaped the bat’s Umwelt. The senses dictate what animals find beautiful, and in doing so, they influence the form that beauty takes in the natural world.”

p. 233 “Although blue and fin whale songs can traverse oceans, no one knows if the whales actually communicate at such ranges. It’s possible that they’re signalling to nearby individuals with very loud calls … But Clark points out that they repeat the same notes, over and over again, and at very precise intervals. … It reminds him of the reperitive signals that Martian rovers use to beam dat back to Earth. If you wanted to design a signal that could be used to communicate across oceans, you’d come up with something  These songs might have other uses, too. Their notes can last for several seconds, with wavelengths as long as a football field. Clark once asked a Navy friend what he could do with such a call. “I could illuminate the ocean,” the friend replied. That is, he could map distant underwater landscapes, from submerged mountains to the seafloor itself, by processing the echoes returning from the far distant infrasounds… Clark sees evidence in their movements… he has seen blue whales emerging in polar waters between Iceland and Greenaldn and making a beeling – a whalelines? – for tropical Bermuda, singing all the way. He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. “When you watch these animals move, it’s as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says. He also suspects that the animals can build up such maps over their long lives, accruing soundbased memories that lurk in their mind’s ear. After all, Clark recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. “They said: If you put a pair of headphones on me, I can tell you if I’m near Labrador of off the Bay of Biscay,” says Clark. “I thought that if a human being could do this in 30 years, what could an animal do with 10 million years…. Underwater, ultrasound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales to we do.”

p. 239

“Mice, rats and many other rodents do indeed make a wide repertroire of ‘ultrasonic’ calls, with frequencies too high to be audible to humans. They make these sounds when playing or mating, when stressed or cold, when aggressive or submissive. Pups that are separated from their nests make ultrasonic isolation calls that summon their mothers. Rats that are tickled by humans make ultrasonic chirps that have been compared to laughter… Male mice that sniff female hormones produce ultrasonic songs that are remarkably similar to those of birds, complete with distinct syllables and phrases. Females attracted to these serenades join their chosen partners in an ultrasoci duet. Rodents are amont the most common and intensively studied mammls in the world and have been fixtures of laboratories since the 17th century. All that time, they’ve been spiritedly talking to each other without any human realizing.”

“Like infrasound, the term ultrasound is an anthropocentric affection. It refers to sound waves with frequencies higher than 20 kHz, which marks the upper limit of the average human ear. It seems special – ultra, even – because we can’t hear it. But the vast majority of mammals actually hear very well into that range, and its likely that the ancestors of our group did too. Even out closest relatives, chimpanzees, can hear close to 30kHz. A dog can hear 45 kHz, a cat 85, a mouse 100, and a bottlenose dolphin 150. For all of these creatures, ultrasound is just sound. Many scinetifists have suggested that ultrasound offers animals a private communication channel that others can’t eavesedrop on – the same claim that was made about ultraviolet light. We can’t hear these sounds, so we bill them as “hidden” and “secretive”, even though they’re patently audible to many other species.”

p. 246 1939 – discovered bat echo-location “One distinguished physiologist was so shocked by our presentation that he seized Bob [Galambhos] by the shoulders and shook him while expostulating ‘You can’t really mean that!’ … Even Griffin underestimated echolocation at first. He saw it merely as a warning system that alerted bats to possible collissions. But his views changed in the summer of 1951. Sitting by a pond near Ithaca, he began to record wild echolocating bats for the first time… When bats were crusing through open skies, their pulses were longer and duller. When they swooped after insects, the steady put-put-puts would quicken and fuse into a staccato buzz. Wasn’t just a collision detector. It’s also how bats hunt. “Our scientific imaginations had simply failed to consider, even speculatively, [this] possibility,” he later wrote.

p. 262 “The US Navy started training dolphins in the 1960s to rescue lost divers, find sunken equipment and detect buried mines. In the 1970s, it invested heavily in echolocation research, not to understand how the dophins themselves perceived the world but to improve military soar by reverse-engineering the animal’s suprerior capabilities…  Dolphins could discriminate between different objects based on shape, size and material. They could distinguish between cylinders filled with water, alcohol and glycerine. They could identify distant targets from the information in a single sonar pulse. They could reliably find items buried under several feet of sediment, and they could tell if those objects were made of brass or steel – feats that no technological sonar can yet match. To date, “the only sonar that the Navy has that can detect buried mines in habors is a dolphin,” Au says … In 1987 Nachtigall’s team started working with a false killer whale – an 18-foot-long black-skinned dolphin species known for being smart and sociable. The animal, Klina, could use her sonar to tell the difference between hollow metal cylinders that looked identical to the human eye and that differed in thickness by the width of a hair. On one memorable occasion, the team tested Kina using two cylinders that had been manufactured to the same specifications. To everyone’s confusion, Kina repeatedly indicated that the objects were different. When the team had the cylinders remeasured, they realized that one had a miniscule taper and was 0.6mm wider at one end than the other. “It was incredible,” Nachtigall recalls. “We ordered them to be the same, the machinists said they were the same, and the animal said, “No, they’re different. And she was right.”

p. 296 “Although flowers are negatively charged, they grow into the positively charged air. Their very presence greatly strengthens the electric fields around them, and this effect is especially pronounced at points and edges, like leaf tips, petal rims, stigmas and anthers. Basded on its shape and size, every flower is surrounded by its own distinctive electric field. As Robert pondered these fields, “suddenly the question came: do bees know about this?… And the answer was yes.”

“Bumblebees…electroreceptors are the tiny hairs that make them so endearingly fuzzy. These hairs are sensitive to air currents and trigger nervous signals when they are deflected. But the electric fields around flowers are also strong enough to move them. Bees, though very different to electric fish or sharks, also seem to detect electric fields with an extended sense of touch … many insects, spiders and other artropods are coveed in touch-sensitive hairs. If these hairs can also be deflected by electric fields … then electric sense might be even more common on land than in the water.”

p. 307 As he showed in 1991, [sea] turtles have a compass. But their other magnetic sense proved to be even more improvessive. It hinges on two properties of the geomagnetic field. The first is inclination – the angle at which the geomagnetic field lines meet Earth’s surface. At the equator, those lines run parallel to the ground; at the magnetic poles, they are perpendicular. The second property is intensity – differences in the field’s strength. Both vary around the globe, and most spots in the ocean have a unique combination of the two. Together, they act like coordinates … allow the geomagnetic field to act as an oceanice map. And turtles, as Lohmann found, can read that map.”

p. 314 “Songbirds might be able to see Earth’s magnetic field, perhaps as a subtle visual cue that overlaps their normal field of vision.  “That’s the most likely scenario, but we don’t know because we can’t ask the birds,” Mouritsen says.”

p. 332 “Controlling a human body is relatively simple for a human brain because our bones and joints constrain our movement. .. But… an octopus has “a body of pure possibility”. Aside from its hard beak, it is soft, malleable and free to contort. Its skin can change colour and texture on a whim. Its arms can extend, contract, bend, and rotate anywhere along their lengths, and have practically infinite ways of performing even simple movements. How could a brain, even a large one, keep track of such boundless options? The question turns out to be irrelevant. The brain doesn’ty have to. It can mostly let the arms sort themselves out, while imposing the occasional guiding nudge.”

p 339 In 1886, shortly after Edison commercialised the electric lightbulb, nearly 1,000 birds died after colliding with an electrically illuminated tower in Derateur, Illinois. Over a century later, environmental scientist Travis Longcote and his collagues calculated that almost 7 million birds a year die in the United States and Canada after flying into communication towers. The red lights of those towers are meant to warn aircraft pilots, but they also risrupt the orientation of nocturnal avian fliers, which then veer into wires or each other. Many of these deaths could be avoided simply by replacing steady lights with blinking ones.”

p. 344 “Noise pollution masks not only the sounds that animals deliberately make but also the “web of unintended sounds that ties communities together,” Fristrip tells me. He means the gentle rustles that tell owls where their prey are, or the faint flaps that warn mice about impending doom… Every extra 3 decibels can halve the range over which natural sounds can be heard. Noise shrinks an animal’s perceptual world. And while some species like great tits and nightingagles stay and make the best of it, others just leave. .. In noisy conditions, prairie dogs spend more tim underground. Owls flub their attacks. Parasitic Ormia flies struggle to find their cricket hosts. Sage grouse abandon their breeding sites (and those that stay are more stressed.”

p. 346 “Between World War II and 2008, the global shipping fleet more than tripled, and began moving 10 times more cargo at higher speeds. Together, they raised the level of low-frequency noise in the oceans by 32 times, a 15 decibel increase over levels that Hildebrand suspects were already around 15 decibels louder than in primordial pre-propeller seas. Since giant whales can live for a century or more, there are likely individuals alive today who have personally wirnessed this growing underwater racket and who now hear only over a tenth of their former range. As shops pass in the night, humpback whales stop singing, orcas stop foraging, and right whales become stressed. Crabs stop feeding, cuttlefish change colors, damselfigh are more easily caught.”

p. 348 In the woodlands of New Mexico, Clinton Francis and Catherine Ortega found that the Woodhouse scrub-jay would flee from the noise of compressors used in extracting natural gas. The scrub jay spreads the seeds of the pinyon pine tree, and single bird can bury between 3,000 and 4,000 pine seeds a year…in quiet areas where they still thrive, pine seedlings are four times more common than in noisy areas that they have abandoned. Pinyon pines are the foundation of the ecosystems around them – a single species that provides food and shelter for hunreds of others, including indigenous Americans. To lose three-quarters of them would be disastrous. And since they grow slowly, “noise might have 100-plus-year consequences for the entire ecosystem”.

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Books History

The Normans: Power, Conquest and Culture in 11th-century Europe by Judith A Green

September 14, 2022 – 4:14 pm

P. 40 Of particular importance in the formation of the new regime were links tro the dukes themselves. Those related to Richard I were called the Richardidae, a term already used by Dudo. As well as Richard II, Richard’s illegitimate children included Godfrey and William, who were recognized as counts, respectively of Brionne on the river Risle, and Eu near the mouth of the river Bresle. His sons by Gunnor were Richard II, who succeeded him, Robert, who was appointed archbishop of Rouen around 989 or 990 and was at the same time count of Evreaux, and Mauger, who became count of Corbeil, south-east of Paris, through marriage. His daughters made prestigious marriages. Emma married King Aethlred of England, at a time when the king needed an ally to protect the country from Danish attacks. Another daughter Hawise married Goeffry, Count of Rennes, whose sister Judith married Riachert II, the double marriage thus strenmgthening Norman influence over Brittany. A third daughter, Matilda, married Odo II, Count of Blois (and several other counties_, a marriage which, though short-lived and childless, was intended to assist friendly relations with another powerful neighbour. .. Kinship networks were at the heart of Richard’s power and continued to be so.”

P. 101 Harold made a major tactical error in meeting William in pitched battle… His march north to deal with Tostig and Harold Hadrada was stunningly successful, and he returned safely to the south. He evidently thought he could deal with William in the same way. Instead, once he had succeeded in battle, the Conqueror was able to buy off Edwin and Morcar and sideline Edgar Aetheling, and have himself crowned and begin to stake out southern and midland England. If Harold had gambled, so did William, and against the odds an invading force established itself in permanent occupancy.”

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Books History Politics

The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism by Colin Campbell

September 14, 2022 – 4:13 pm

P. 23 “McKendrick seems tempted to resort to notions of inherited need in order to explain the existence of fashion, referring to the desire to be fashionable as a ‘constant of the human condition’. Such an argument naturally directs attention to those economic and commercial developments which ‘allowed’ this ‘need’ to be fully expressed for the first time. Happily he does not pursue this sterile course of argument but turns instead to place an emphasis upon the role of manipulation in the ‘creation’ of the Western European fasgiona patterns suggesting “it needed to be released and mobilized and exploited before it could significantly add to aggregate demand. The conditions making this possible grew steadily more favourable ….But it still required active and aggressive selling to reach that market and exploit its full potential.”… fundamental weaknesses at the level of theory.” 

P. 38 “a natural corollary of endless wanting is the high rate of product (and hence want) obsolescence. How is it that wants depart as suddenly and as effortlessly as they arrive? How is it that individuals manage to cease to want that which they ardently desired only a little while before? For modern consumer society is symbolized at least as much by the mountains of rubbish, the garage and jumble sales, the columns of advertisements of secondhand goods for sale and the second-hand car lots, as it is by the ubiquitous propaganda on begaklf of new goods. There is a widespread tendency to take such behaviour for granted and to assume that, even though it might not be morally desirable, it is at least a perfectly ‘normal’ or ‘rational’ mode of acting. It takes only a little reflection to realise, however, that such a view is neither supported by psychology nor anthropology, but is merely the product of a deep-=seated ethnocentricity.”

P. 102 “the Puritans were even more hostile to opulence than they were to voluptuousness; their objection being that ‘vain ostentation’ – that is anything which, neither glorifying God nor being useful to man, served merely to promote human pride – was sinful. An obvious target gere was the decoration of the person, especially clothing, as any unnecessary elaboration in this context was seen as a sure sign of the idolotaory of the flesh2

P. 134 “Puritans having developed a ‘taste’ for the strong meat of powerful religious emotion, and when their convictions waned, seeking alternative fare with which to satisfy their appetite. Draper refers to the middle classes ‘craving’ for the strong meat of powerful religious emotion, and when their conviction waned, seeking alternative fare with which to satisfy their appetite. ,, an obvious place to find them was in literature where artificially created feelings could be eperiened by ‘living’ real-life situations vicariously; this is certainly what the graveyard ports and the Gothic movelist sought to provide. … an obvious psychological as well as an historical connection between the decline of religious terrorism and the rise of terror-romanticism.”

P. 152 “sensibility … it covered feeling sorry for oneself, feeling sorry for others, and being moved by beauty, and yet all responses had equal significance as indications of goodness. Responsibveness to beauty thus became a crucial moral quality, such that any deficiency in this respect became a moral lapse, whilst correspondingly virtue became an aesthetic quality, such that, in turn, any moral lapse was in ‘bad taste’. 

“

P. 153 McKendrick described the consumer revolution as occurring because families which “had long been in command of income sufficient to acquire new possessions … now… felt compelled to do so”… in the late 18th century large numbers in society felt that they must be in fashion, whether they liked it or not. Surely the nature of such compulsion could only be in moral in essence…. Because the middle classes had such a strong Puritan inheritance that they were so eager to ‘follow fashion’ and hence consume ‘luxury’ goods with avidity. This they did out of a deep-seated fear that they might be (and be thought to be) lacking in virtue.”

P. 168 “Refinement, and its expression in elegance, constituted the core of the dandy ideal, whether in dress or deportment. Dress was to be perfect, but understated, as were all gestures and expressions of feeling, while refinement in conversation led to a premium being placed upon wit. To attain this ideal of refined behaviour was to successfully display a superiority of self, and hence arrogance was also a defining characteristic of the dandy. Naturally competition between them was intense, as each strove by means of dress, gesture, tone of voice, glance and overall manner, coupled, of course, with wit, to triumph not only over all situational risks to their poise but over each other. It was a measure of Brummell’s skill in this respect that he was universally acknowledged, for many years, as being the leading dandy”.

P. 176 “The evolution of sensibility into a full-blown romanticism can be seen as following, at least in part, from the necessity of defending a philosophy of feeling against its detractors, something which placed an excessive strain upon the attempted association of the values of sincerity and propriety.  For the accusation that such an ethic envourgaed dissembling, hypocrisy, indifference to suffetring, and even cruelty, could only really be countered by arguing that these were not the products of ‘true’ sensibility, but rather the outcome of behaviour governed by conventional expectations. … just as the dandies represented the triumph of proprietary over sincerity, so the Romantics (and especially the romantic Bohemians) come to represent the reverse.”  This development can also be seen in the popular novels of the time, which typically portray young ladies who are forced to suffer by ‘society’ for their spirited natures and fine sensibilitries, before eventually succeeding in realizing their dreams.”

P. 193 “Since the key characteristics of the divine was taken to be creativity, both in the sense of productivity and originality, imagination became the most significant and prized of personal qualities, with the capacity to manifest this in works of art and through an ability to enter fully into those created by others, both acting as unambiguous signs of its presence .. the Romantic was someone who had an ideal sensitivity to pleasure and indicated this fact by the spontaneity and intensity of his emotions. .. his idealistic determination and sense of obligation towards his personal ‘genius’ combined to make him feel estranged from an artificial, materialistic and utilitarian society.”

P. 200 “The romantic ideal of character, together with its associated theory of moral renewal through art, functioned to stimulate and legitimate that form of autonomous, self-illusory hedonism which underlies modern consumer behaviour.”… The romantic world-view provided the highest possible motives with which to justify daydreaming, longing and the rejection of reality, together with the pursuit of originality in life and art; and by so doing, enabled pleasure tio be ranked above comfort, counteracting both traditionalistic and utilitarian restraints on desire.”

P. 227 The cultural logic of modernity is not merely that of rationality as expressed in the activities of calculation and experiment; it is also that of passion, and the creative dreaming born of longing. Yet, more crucial than either is the tension generated between them, for it is upon this that the dynamism of the West ultimately depends. The source of its restless energy does not derive from science and technology alone, mor yet from fashion, the avante-garde and Bohemia, but from the strain between dream and reality, pleasure and utility.”

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Books History Politics

Notes from Colonialism and Modern Social Theory by Gurminder K Bhambra and John Holmwood

September 14, 2022 – 4:11 pm

P. 94 “The very spaces where Marx and Engels imagined the American cotton monopoly would be broken were those of empire … yet nothing in Marx’s immanent critique of Hegel and of his treatment of alienated labour foreclosed the inclusion of colonial forms of labour, of chattel slavery alongside wage slavery, of forced labour alongside free labour. The problem arose precisely because of what he uncritically accepted from Hegel and the wider tradition of European social theory, namely a stadial theory of society and of human ‘progress’. Marx was so keen to look forward beyond capitalism that he could not see the wider aspects of the past and present that structured future possibilities.”

P. 124 “the modern capitalism that Weber addressed was strongly associated with colonialism. This is true of internal colonialism, where the association was manifest in the reinforcement of Germany’s eastern borders through settlement and in the reinforcement of German identity against ethnic Poles and Jews; and it is also true of external colonialism, that is, German expansion into Africa and the Pacific region. The link with colonialism is further implicity in the very organisation of Weber’s Protestant Ethic study … the spirit of capitalism is associated with settler colonialism in the United States via the figure of Benjamin Franklin, the primary source of Weder’s delineation of the distinctiveness of the spirit of capitalism. It was predation, not piety, that was unleashed globally through what Lebovics calls ‘rapacious and rebellious men of wealth’” (“The Uses of America in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government’ Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (4) 567-81)

P. 129 “Weber understood the nation as a simple natural category – he gave no recognition to historical complexity or contemporary contradiction – and presented it as the fundamental value with which a German social science should operate – despite the call for social science to be value-free… The German empire may have lasted only 30 years, from 1884 to 1915, but imperialism was a constitutive aspect of the project of nation state formation, as identified by Weber himself. Nations, he argued, were not defined merely by ethnic or cultural homogeneity, but by the act of welding a community with shared political destinies and struggles for power… there is an obvious split between domestic populations, on behalf of which the claim for legitimacy is made, and overseas populations, who must accept their domination as ‘fact’. 

P. 193 “The significance of slavery for the social development of America, Du Bois argued, rested upon ‘the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy’. In his view, this relationship demonstrated the limits of democracy in the matter of determining who was to be free, who was to be schooled, and who had the right to vote – in other words, who was considered a full citizen. Citizenship was defined in terms of whether the worker – here the black worker – had control over his or her own labour. Du Bois connected the black worker in the United states under slavery with that ‘dark vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America … that great majority of mankind on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry… according to Du Bois the social and political emancipation of the colonial working class would be a precondition for the general emancipation of labour, including in the United States. This was a global argument similar to the one about African American suffrage in the South, according to which it was the actions of emancipated African Americans that produced a general improvement for all, albeit one from which they were subsequently excluded.”

P. 200 Du Bois Wrote “that, when working people in European countries began to demand ‘costly social improvements from their governments’ the financial burdens were likely to be balanced through increased investment in (and extractivism from) the colonies. In this way “democracy in Europe and America will continue to impede and nullify democracy in Asia and Africa. The social and economic improvements that he argued were necessary to realise a proper emancipation of African Americans and of other colonised people came to be part of the postwar settlement for white majority populations in Europe and the United States. These improvements were paid for from a patrimony of enslavement and colonialism…. The problem of democracy, he state, was the poverty in which most people live: the poverty of the colonised, the poverty of the smaller nations, and also the poverty within the colonising countries.”

P. 209 We have not attempted to deny the importance of class, gender, or other divisions that have preoccupied European sociology over the decades since the Second World War. We have sought to show how bringing the colonial contact and the imperial realities of modernity into focus will produce a fundamental shift in our ways of understanding what falls under the jurisdiction of sociology. Our book has been influenced by calls to ‘decolonise’ the university, but what does that mean when colonialism has been so thoroughly effaced from the self–understanding of academia. For those who practice sociology in places that were under European colonial combination, what this means is relatively clear. It means addressing how their institutions were produced or reproduced as part of a colonial system and how structures and curricula were shaped y their particular location in that system. For sociologists who work in institutions of the former metropoles, the answer is less clear because the shaping of these institutions y colonialism is less obvious to them. … the issue is not simply to add colonialism to sociology’s repertoire of topics, but to show how that repertoire must change and how the concepts and methodologies with which it is associated must be transformed. What does it mean to ‘decolonise’ a curriculum in which colonialism is not recognised? Paradoxically if our book is to be understood as an attempt at ‘decolonisation’, it is one that has had to proceed by putting colonialism into the picture .. modern social theory begins by being saturated with the presence of colonialism and the interpretative issues it posed. How do we engage with others when their presence is an obstacle to our interests? How do we use others to further our own interests? These were unavoidable questions in the early modern period. As colonialism became institutionalised, these questions receded from the centre to the periphery. … European nations … included the United States … were engaged in colonial and imperial projects continuously throughout self-proclaimed modernity, and so their impacts could not be denied … we argue for a renewal of social theory and sociology … central … is to recognise and address five fictions that currently organise understandings…

Fiction 1 : The idea of stages of society

The first fiction is associated with the idea of a ‘state of nature’ … against the ‘state of society’… fosters a concern to delineate the characteristics of modern society against which other societies can be described and classified. We regard the idea of modern society as equally fictional, because it carried the imprint of the original fiction. Once stages of society are delineated, it becomes possible to arrange them hierarchically in conformity with ideas of development and progress and to associate particular kinds of social relationships with each type of society … colonialism and its practices of appropriation – of territories, of resources, and of people – have an explicitly but ambiguous place within these constructure… people are characterized as being at a lower stage of development and an entire vocabulary of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarity’ is applied to them, notwithstanding the brutality of those who describe themselves as ‘civilized’. We need to move away from the idea of types of society that can be investigated separately from the relationships between them. We must instead understand how those connections structure ideas of difference and domination.

Fiction2 Liberty, autonomy and modern subjectivity 

“Modern society is assumed to inaugurate a distinctive kind of subjectivity, associated with the modern individual and his or her self-determining capacity to act on the basis of reason and self-interest. This is the individual ‘capable of property’ in contrast to individuals who are either incapable of or indifferent to property. … this kind of individualism is represented as having developed within a religious tradition … but it is also a development that leaves religion behind. In the tradition of modern social theory, especially that associated with Kant and Hegel, modern reason is about developing autonomy and freedom and subjecting institutions such as those of religion to a criticism led by reason. … When critical theory regards private property as a limit on self- emancipation, it does so after having postulated that the development of private property was itself a necessary stage in the process that leads to its transcendence. The very idea of an ‘unfinished’ project of modernity presupposes that modernity is a civilizing project and that we should look at all premodern societies as inferior precursors, beset by traditional authority and inadequate selves, and not as bases of knowledge and sources of experience from which we can also learn.

Fiction 3 The idea of the nation state

“In the realisation of rights, contingencies of exclusion can be overcome through a process of recognition of their false limitation (ie false from the perspective of a proper understanding of their underlying nature). This is a standard interpretation of the extension of political rights from properties males to all males, then from men to women, and so on. However, in the case of issues of race and ethnicity, inequalities are constructed both inside and outside the newly established boundaries of the nation. From the outside, subjects of empire are denied inclusion among beneficiaries when the patrimony of empire is distributed; from the inside, they are denied full citizenship in the newl understood nation. As a result, people who in reality share the common political heritage of empire and now represented as ‘immigrants within its metropoles and are seen as threats to the nation’s solidarity and social contract.

Fiction 4: Class and formally free labour

“The class division that Marx described depends on the centrality of formally free labour and on the commodification of labour power in capitalist modernity. We have argued that these two features are called into question once we understand the colonial (and imperial) nature of modernity. Commodified labour power does not develop as the central form of capitalism; moreverm capitalist nation states are able to divide their populations between national citizens and colonial subjects. As Du Bois noted, this opens possibilities for a ‘decommodification’ of labour power within the metropole by using colonial patrimonies in the provision of strtuified and other collective goods. At the same time, colonial subjects are denied the status of free labour and subordinated to various forms of indenture… in the metropole indenture retyurns in the form of treating migrant labour as not worthy of the rights and rewards associated with the citizenship status afforded to nationals.

Fiction 5: the fiction of sociological reasoning.

“Methodological claims that are made in this discipline. They all tend to present sociological reasoning as ahistorical and as a necessary condition for an objective inquiry. In this way sociological reasoning is assimilated to the general claim of the Enlightenment, and sociology aligns itself with a critical project that continues that claim… we do not argue for some form of relativism or for multiple perspectives …. We argue for a transformation of our own perspective as a result of learning from others. The first step in any process of learning is the recognition of a limitation in one’s understanding. We have shown that colonialism has structured European modernity as well as European thought, hence recognising its significance opens an opportunity to practice sociology differently.

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Books History

Notes from Duncan Sandys and the Informal Politics of Britain’s Late Colonialism

August 30, 2022 – 1:12 pm

p. 1 The history of  decolonialisation has traditionally been dominated by accounts of formal negotiations between metropolitan and colonial governments. But this account demonstrates that the decolonisation period also offered unusual opportunities for informal influence on policy making. No one took better advantage of these opportunities than Sandys who became the most successful of a number of ‘diehard’ Conservative rebels seeking to slow the process of decolonisation through irregular channels. Sandys cut a prominent figure in the early 1960s as Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations and the Colonies in the Conservative Governments of Harold Macmillan and Alex Douglas-Home. He played a critical role in bringing Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ to the colonial world. His ministerial career came to an end with the General Election of 1964, and after a short period as Shadow Secretary of State for the Colonies until 1966, his official role was over…. Won considerable parliamentary and popular support, and became a serious if short-lived Rightist threat to Edward Heath’s leadership on an emotive and distinctly colonial blend of racial fears and dreams of ‘Great Power’ status. He was the first prominent conservative in the mid-1960s to galvanise opposition to withdrawal from Aden, majority rule in Rhodesia, race relations legislation and, most effectively, immigration from the ‘New Commonwealth’.

p. 143 “Sandys launched a vociferous attack on the Labour Government’s race relations and immigration policies in mid-1967. Sandys was the first prominent politician in the late 1960s to lead a popular campaign against both immigration and racial integration. At the heart of the controversy lay two related questions: how far immigration should be limited and the degree to which immigrants should be integrated having arrived. Going beyond the official Conservative Party policy of limited entry and assisted voluntary repatriation, Sandys called for “a complete stop on all immigration, including the entry of relatives” and going further, demanded that the government should “reduce the number” already living in Britain. At the same time, he also called for the repeal of the Race Re;ations Act of 1965, drawing on his colonial experience of ‘multi-racialism’. Sandys’ activisim opened the floodgates of anti-immigration reaction, later exploited to even greater effect by Enoch Powell.

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