Papier final
Français 303
« Essayer des mots? » Points vus sur la poésie d’Aimé Césaire
Dans l’année 1971, Aimé Césaire a été interviewé par l’écrivain Hattien René Depestre. En réponse à une question sur la sens changeante de la mot «négritude,» une mot que Césaire a créé quand-même, il a dit que chaque personne a une version différente de la négritude. Pour Césaire, c’est «une réussite d’une concrete sur un abstraite», c’est « la conscience d’une situation.» C’est une situation qui est très difficile à comprendre sans avoir les expériences qui l’ont créés elle-même; la situation post-coloniale des pays qui ont été occupé, ou des gens a été partie de l’esclavage.
Sans la poésie d’Aimé Césaire, moi, un américain avec une expérience très différente que Césaire, ne peut pas comprendre ce qu’il veut dire par l’idée de Négritude. Apres avoir lu ses poèmes, je vois la négritude comme une conscience d’un manque, un manque de l’identité et un manque de pouvoir. Colonialisme et l’esclavage a cassé la continuité culturelle de tous les pays qu’ils ont dévoré. Dans la place de l’identité locale les colonisateurs a donne une faux identité : l’identité d’un animal, d’une brute qui n’a jamais vu une civilisation. C’est une partie terrible de racisme, qu’il vole l’humanité comme ça.
Personne ne peut voir cette fausse identité comme un cadeau ; la plupart des gens ne l’acceptent pas. Mais la tort est fait : ils n’ont pas une autre définition. Alors, il y a un vrai manque d’identité qu’on peut voir dans les poèmes de Césaire. C’est poignant que Césaire ne donne jamais l’impression d’avoir perdu l’espoir. Dans son poème, « Blanc à remplir sur la carte voyageuse du pollen » il décrit une forme de la négritude.
« N’y eût-il dans le désert
qu’une seule goutte d’eau qui rêve tout bas,
dans le désert n’y eût-il
qu’une graine volante qui rêve tout haut
c’est assez
roilleure des armes, fissure des pierres, vrac des ténèbres
désert, désert, j’endure ton défi
blanc à remplir sur la carte voyageuse du pollen. »
Dans cette poème le désert est un symbole pour cette manque, la manque d’identité qui tous les victimes de colonialisme partage. Peut-être la blanc à remplir c’est la nom de famille, pour un enfant les ancêtres de qui ont été volé par l’esclavage et déplacé. En comment peut-il retracé de qui ou où il est descendu? C’est ça le manque de l’identité. Quand Césaire parle d’ « une graine volante qui rêve tout haut » il parle de la vraie ascendance des peuples déplacés par le colonialisme. Césaire endure la défi de la désert : il voit cette manque d’identité dans une mode un peu chinoise. La lettre chinoise pour une « crise » combine les deux lettres pour les mots « danger » et « opportunité :» pour Césaire, la Négritude c’est une chance a créé une nouvelle identité. Ici reste l’espoir indestructible de Césaire, et c’est son espoir qui je trouve poignant et universel.
Un autre thème de la poésie de Césaire c’est une crise sociale qu’il décrit comme une catastrophe naturelle. C’est une crise qui a deux parties : un c’est de la politique, et l’autre est de la culture. La crise sociale de la culture il décrit dans la poème « Séisme : »
« tant des grands pans de rêve
de parties d’intimes patries
effondrées
tombées vides et le sillage sali rescapée de l’ideé
et nous deux ? quoi nous deux ? … »
Ici Césaire décrit la manque d’identité, une partie de qu’il s’appelle « négritude, » comme des ruines ou « grands pans de rêve…effondrées. » Et puis il décrit la difficulté dans celui on essaye a trouver un nouvelle identité.
« …Essayer des mots ? Leur frottement pour conjurer l’informe
comme les insectes de nuit leur élytres de démence ?
Pris pris pris hors mensonge pris
pris pris pris
rôles précipités
selon rien
sinon l’abrupte persistance mal lue
de nos vrai noms, nos noms miraculeux
jusqu’ici dans la réserve d’un oubli
gîtant. »
L’identité perdu c’est « nos vrai noms, nos noms miraculeux :» pour Césaire, ils sont des graines d’une séisme, cache dans la terre, qui attend leur moment à venir. C’est la nouvelle identité à venir, pour remplacer la négritude, et faire un nouveau point vu. L’espoir de Césaire reste dans une idée de l’identité cache africaine, qu’il identifie avec la venir d’une crise sociale dans celui peut être les gens qui ont été colonisé peut retrouver qu’il y a été volé.
L’autre partie de cette crise sociale Césaire décrit comme une tornade. C’est la crise des politiques ; c'est-à-dire qu’une révolution contre la misère de la poste coloniale troisième monde, qui va changer la vie.
« Le temps que
le sénateur s’aperçut que la tornade était assise
dans son assiette
et la tornade était dans l’air fourrageant dans Kansas-City…
et la tornade fut dehors faisant apparaître à tous sa large face
puant comme dix mille nègres entassés d’un train… »
Dans ces lignes Césaire présente la crise sociale comme une grande surprise (« …dans son assiette ») qui va changer le visage des politiques. Pour décrire il donne la description « puant comme dix mille nègres entassés d’un train » parce qu’il pense que la crise sociopolitique va apporter tous le mal qui l’as créé.
« Le temps pour Dieu de s’apercevoir
qu’il avait bu de trop cent verres de sang de bourreau
et la ville fut une fraternité de taches blanches et noires… »
Ici on peut voir la pouvoir de la poésie d’Aimé Césaire, ou même Dieu doit s’apercevoir sa racisme et racheter. Et dans ce poème la vérité des races est dit : que tous, « blanches et noires, » fait une fraternité des mêmes espoirs, esprits, et origines. J’étais inspiré après avoir lu ces poèmes. C’est possible que Césaire a créé cette « graine volante » dans la négritude et commence à crée une nouvelle identité pour tous peuples qui ont besoin.
“Séisme” p.92-93 Non Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems of Aimé Céesaire t: Davis, Gregson Stanford, California Stanford University Press 1984
“Blanc à remplir sur la carte voyageuse du pollen” p. 52-53 93 Non Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems of Aimé Céesaire t: Davis, Gregson Stanford, Californie Stanford University Press 1984
“Séisme” p.92-93 Non Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire t: Davis, Gregson Stanford, California Stanford University Press 1984
“”
“La Tornade” p.138-139 Non Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire t: Davis, Gregson Stanford, California Stanford University Press 1984
“”
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Conversation with Society about the Place of the Poet
“World of Poetry”
Final Paper
Conversation with Society about the Place of the Poet
“I want to be a baker* when I grow up;” this sentence puts a definite image into the head of it’s reader. We can see the hat, the poufs of flour in the air, the display case out in front of the bakery – maybe we can even smell the croissants. Perhaps not the most ambitious destiny for little Jimmy, but imagine another situation: “I want to be a poet when I grow up.” What image does that put into your head of the speaker? What image does that put into your head of the speaker in ten years? Surely the day of Shakespeare has passed and taken with it the minstrel rooster idea, a man pacing in chambers in tights and frilly frocks madly waving a quill around. When was the last time we saw a poet on the cover of Time Magazine? What does one look like?
A picture does emerge, though, when we try and put ourselves in the would-be poet’s shoes- a picture of an empty pair of shoes. “Who am I?” the poet asks; and who answers? The classics have only words for a response; perhaps a poet is nothing in particular, after all. Perhaps he is only words on a page. Here is a reason why poets seem to have so much trouble with society – even when they are doing poetry well they’re not likely to be convinced of it. Some see them as useless non-producing citizens- unlike the baker, whose worldly work we can smell from around the block. The problem with the poet is that his work is indefinite.
In his poem “Cortege,” Guillaume Apollinaire describes a procession which passed him. In the poem, he searches thoroughly for some sort of identity in the others he watches, but doesn’t find himself in the parade.
“One day
One day I waited for myself
I said to myself Guillaume it’s time you came
So I could know just who I am
I who know others…”
Despite the examples of life set out for him by everyone else who lives in the city, Guillaume has trouble seeing himself. He is not any of these people, though he loves them; who is he then? “…With a lyric step all those that I love came forward/ And I was not among them;” it isn’t that Guillaume doesn’t love himself, it’s that he can’t define himself. By the end of the poem, however, he does have an idea of himself, as something which was slowly built by the people of his procession.
Another problem posed by the indefinateness of the poet’s work is survival: food, water, shelter. The baker can sell his bread to the many hungry people; who hungers for words in that way? The poet has to bake up a whole new incredible baguette of words to sell it in the first place and even then has trouble finding a buyer. In 1926, Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote a poem describing the economic troubles of being a poet in the Soviet Union called “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry.” In it he describes his situation:
“Citizen tax collector! Forgive my bothering you…
Thank you… don’t worry… I’ll stand…
My business is of a delicate nature:
about the place of the poet in the worker’s ranks.
Along with owners of stores and property,
I’m made subject to taxes and penalties…”
Put in the situation of economic stress, Mayakovsky defends his work as a valid and productive facet of society. The problem seems to stem from the fact that the system doesn’t recognize the job of “poet” to be a real one. Perhaps it is a hobby to society, but not a job. He describes the work of writing poems in terms of the items on the tax form: production cost, materials cost, travel expenses, etc:
“Now my work is like any other work.
Look here- how much I’ve lost,
what expense I have in my production
and how much I spend on materials.
You know of course about rhyme…
…Citizen tax collecter, honestly,
The poet spends a fortune on words…
Citizen! Consider my traveling expenses.
-Poetry- -all of it- is a journey into the unknown.”
This approach to the problem is humorous and causes the reader to see things from the perspective of the poet. The sarcasm about the indefinite quality of poetry comes through, and we take Mayakovsky’s point, that art can’t be quantified valuationally the way that other human endeavors can. But he doesn’t undersell its value: instead he defends it, saying “These words will move millions of hearts for thousands of years,” and challenging the tax collector to “take a ticket to immortality and, reckoning the effect of my verse, stagger my earnings over three hundred years!” “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry” is Mayakovsky taking a strong stand against society, and telling it what it can and can’t do to it’s members. “I demand as my right an inch of ground among the poorest workers and peasants,” he says, and he deserves it.
Thirty years later in America another poet was having trouble fitting into society: he wrote a poem called “America” that describes this problem. “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing./ America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17th, 1956./ I can’t stand my own mind...” Allen Ginsberg also speaks of the intangibility; the fact that art can’t be assessed for value the same way as other traded goods. He expresses the situation in terms of capitalism, by contrast to Mayakovsky: “When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?” Ginsberg’s sarcasm is familiar: good looks are as intangible as poems and as subjective: with only $2.27, how will the poet feed himself?
Ginsberg gives us his answer a bit later: auction off the poetry. He describes his poetry as though it were the Henry Ford company and offers to sell off the originals. “I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes/ America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe” Again the use of humor brings the reader into the poet’s shoes, to illustrate accurately the problem of getting by on your verse alone.
At the end of the poem, there is the suggestion that maybe the place of the poet in society is that of the misfit. Perhaps it is the poet’s place to point out the seams and cracks in society by standing separate from his surroundings. It’s a goal Ginsberg thinks is very important: he even calls it his “job:” “America this is quite serious…/I’d better get right down to the job./It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway./ America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”
While “Conversation with a Tax Collecter…” and “America” both work to fight the image of the poet as a lazy “free rider,” or a person who takes advantage of the benefits of living in society without contributing anything, Apollinaire approaches this caricature of the poet from an entirely different angle. In his poem, “Hotel,” he embraces, albeit sarcastically, this personality”:
“My room has the shape of a cage
The sun passes her arms in at the window
But I who want to smoke to make mirages
I light in the day’s fire my cigarette
I don’t want to work I want to smoke.”
Perhaps some still see the poet in these terms: as someone who sits around daydreaming in a hotel somewhere smoking cigarettes. A big self-absorbed do-nothing, if you will. Hopefully more and more will come to see the poet in Mayakovsky’s terms, as “simultaneously a leader and a servant of the people.” As a youth today who would love to make a living writing poetry, I can say that I shall continue to write no matter if I am paid, and I will do so for two reasons: because partly a big self-absorbed do-nothing (often within reach of a pen), and because I wish to create: to be “simultaneous leader and servant” of the people around me.
insert: farmer, fireman, astronaut, taxi driver, teacher etc… all produce concrete images in one’s head
“Cortege” The Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, p.75
“Cortege” Apollinaire, p.77
p.191 “The Bedbug & Selected Poetry” Translated: Hayward, Max and Reavey, George
p.197 “”
p.197 “”
p.205 “”
p.207 “”
p.31 Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco City Lights Books
p.31 “”
p.33 “”
p.34 Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco City Lights Books
p.201“The Bedbug & Selected Poetry” Translated: Hayward, Max and Reavey, George
Final Paper
Conversation with Society about the Place of the Poet
“I want to be a baker* when I grow up;” this sentence puts a definite image into the head of it’s reader. We can see the hat, the poufs of flour in the air, the display case out in front of the bakery – maybe we can even smell the croissants. Perhaps not the most ambitious destiny for little Jimmy, but imagine another situation: “I want to be a poet when I grow up.” What image does that put into your head of the speaker? What image does that put into your head of the speaker in ten years? Surely the day of Shakespeare has passed and taken with it the minstrel rooster idea, a man pacing in chambers in tights and frilly frocks madly waving a quill around. When was the last time we saw a poet on the cover of Time Magazine? What does one look like?
A picture does emerge, though, when we try and put ourselves in the would-be poet’s shoes- a picture of an empty pair of shoes. “Who am I?” the poet asks; and who answers? The classics have only words for a response; perhaps a poet is nothing in particular, after all. Perhaps he is only words on a page. Here is a reason why poets seem to have so much trouble with society – even when they are doing poetry well they’re not likely to be convinced of it. Some see them as useless non-producing citizens- unlike the baker, whose worldly work we can smell from around the block. The problem with the poet is that his work is indefinite.
In his poem “Cortege,” Guillaume Apollinaire describes a procession which passed him. In the poem, he searches thoroughly for some sort of identity in the others he watches, but doesn’t find himself in the parade.
“One day
One day I waited for myself
I said to myself Guillaume it’s time you came
So I could know just who I am
I who know others…”
Despite the examples of life set out for him by everyone else who lives in the city, Guillaume has trouble seeing himself. He is not any of these people, though he loves them; who is he then? “…With a lyric step all those that I love came forward/ And I was not among them;” it isn’t that Guillaume doesn’t love himself, it’s that he can’t define himself. By the end of the poem, however, he does have an idea of himself, as something which was slowly built by the people of his procession.
Another problem posed by the indefinateness of the poet’s work is survival: food, water, shelter. The baker can sell his bread to the many hungry people; who hungers for words in that way? The poet has to bake up a whole new incredible baguette of words to sell it in the first place and even then has trouble finding a buyer. In 1926, Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote a poem describing the economic troubles of being a poet in the Soviet Union called “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry.” In it he describes his situation:
“Citizen tax collector! Forgive my bothering you…
Thank you… don’t worry… I’ll stand…
My business is of a delicate nature:
about the place of the poet in the worker’s ranks.
Along with owners of stores and property,
I’m made subject to taxes and penalties…”
Put in the situation of economic stress, Mayakovsky defends his work as a valid and productive facet of society. The problem seems to stem from the fact that the system doesn’t recognize the job of “poet” to be a real one. Perhaps it is a hobby to society, but not a job. He describes the work of writing poems in terms of the items on the tax form: production cost, materials cost, travel expenses, etc:
“Now my work is like any other work.
Look here- how much I’ve lost,
what expense I have in my production
and how much I spend on materials.
You know of course about rhyme…
…Citizen tax collecter, honestly,
The poet spends a fortune on words…
Citizen! Consider my traveling expenses.
-Poetry- -all of it- is a journey into the unknown.”
This approach to the problem is humorous and causes the reader to see things from the perspective of the poet. The sarcasm about the indefinite quality of poetry comes through, and we take Mayakovsky’s point, that art can’t be quantified valuationally the way that other human endeavors can. But he doesn’t undersell its value: instead he defends it, saying “These words will move millions of hearts for thousands of years,” and challenging the tax collector to “take a ticket to immortality and, reckoning the effect of my verse, stagger my earnings over three hundred years!” “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry” is Mayakovsky taking a strong stand against society, and telling it what it can and can’t do to it’s members. “I demand as my right an inch of ground among the poorest workers and peasants,” he says, and he deserves it.
Thirty years later in America another poet was having trouble fitting into society: he wrote a poem called “America” that describes this problem. “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing./ America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17th, 1956./ I can’t stand my own mind...” Allen Ginsberg also speaks of the intangibility; the fact that art can’t be assessed for value the same way as other traded goods. He expresses the situation in terms of capitalism, by contrast to Mayakovsky: “When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?” Ginsberg’s sarcasm is familiar: good looks are as intangible as poems and as subjective: with only $2.27, how will the poet feed himself?
Ginsberg gives us his answer a bit later: auction off the poetry. He describes his poetry as though it were the Henry Ford company and offers to sell off the originals. “I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes/ America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe” Again the use of humor brings the reader into the poet’s shoes, to illustrate accurately the problem of getting by on your verse alone.
At the end of the poem, there is the suggestion that maybe the place of the poet in society is that of the misfit. Perhaps it is the poet’s place to point out the seams and cracks in society by standing separate from his surroundings. It’s a goal Ginsberg thinks is very important: he even calls it his “job:” “America this is quite serious…/I’d better get right down to the job./It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway./ America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”
While “Conversation with a Tax Collecter…” and “America” both work to fight the image of the poet as a lazy “free rider,” or a person who takes advantage of the benefits of living in society without contributing anything, Apollinaire approaches this caricature of the poet from an entirely different angle. In his poem, “Hotel,” he embraces, albeit sarcastically, this personality”:
“My room has the shape of a cage
The sun passes her arms in at the window
But I who want to smoke to make mirages
I light in the day’s fire my cigarette
I don’t want to work I want to smoke.”
Perhaps some still see the poet in these terms: as someone who sits around daydreaming in a hotel somewhere smoking cigarettes. A big self-absorbed do-nothing, if you will. Hopefully more and more will come to see the poet in Mayakovsky’s terms, as “simultaneously a leader and a servant of the people.” As a youth today who would love to make a living writing poetry, I can say that I shall continue to write no matter if I am paid, and I will do so for two reasons: because partly a big self-absorbed do-nothing (often within reach of a pen), and because I wish to create: to be “simultaneous leader and servant” of the people around me.
insert: farmer, fireman, astronaut, taxi driver, teacher etc… all produce concrete images in one’s head
“Cortege” The Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, p.75
“Cortege” Apollinaire, p.77
p.191 “The Bedbug & Selected Poetry” Translated: Hayward, Max and Reavey, George
p.197 “”
p.197 “”
p.205 “”
p.207 “”
p.31 Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco City Lights Books
p.31 “”
p.33 “”
p.34 Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco City Lights Books
p.201“The Bedbug & Selected Poetry” Translated: Hayward, Max and Reavey, George
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Wikipedia negotiates between community and notions of truth
Wikipedia negotiates between community and notions of truth
Digital World J412: Spring 2007, Bish Sen
What does an encyclopedia that absolutely anybody can edit- even your grandma, your cousin, a stranger at the library- imply about the conception of truth in information that exists in the modern digital world? It seems an idealistic proposition, to place all our bits and pieces of knowledge in a free, accessible, changeable format by a group effort at do-it-yourself. A person may access this encyclopaedia and decide to contribute information that is irrefutably true to them, or at least that they believe is true, and post it whether they are mistaken or not. What is idealistic about it is the underlying expectation that, with enough people posting, false content will be weeded out by a process quite like attrition.
The Wiki technology, a sort of open source programming which can be edited by anyone who can access it with a web browser, has tremendous creative potential. Some of the advantages that this encyclopaedia has are cheaper production (all of it’s writing is done by volunteers, c.f. crowdsourcing), breadth of content, and speed of turnover. Still, the information volunteered is not always correct – the encyclopaedia is always a work in progress.
Wikipedia has witnessed the birth a new form of vandalism, which it defines as “any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia.” Most common are the addition of vandalism, “page-blanking,” and “bad (or good) jokes or other nonsense.” Wikipedia will ban you from their servers if you deliberately commit this sort of vandalism. It is noted that this does not include “good-faith attempts to contribute,” even if they are misguided or fundamentally incorrect. Wikipedia itself warns users to be aware, suggesting that older articles have had more time to be edited over, and newer ones are more likely to contain misinformation and vandalism.
So is this encyclopaedia a democratic one? Only as far as the governments of it’s contributors. Near the end of 2006, the site blocked anonymous posting from an i.p. address for 12 hours from which it had received “a large volume of spam and vandalism…” it turned out, that address belonged to the nation of Qatar. In Qatar, there is only one high speed internet service provider; thus, all anonymous users have the same address. As soon as this became clear, Wikipedia removed the block. Said Florence Devouard, chair of the Wikimedia foundation “None of us is against any country…we wish to allow the maximum number of people, from everywhere.”
Some of the entries have been placed under special protection due to a degree of controversy surrounding them which has caused them to attract a high level of bad-faith vandalism: entries on topics such as Islam, for example. After 9-11, it is easy to imagine such content being manipulated out of rage and ignorance. Wikipedia does employ editors- and encourages you to correct entries you see in error.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6224677.stm
Digital World J412: Spring 2007, Bish Sen
What does an encyclopedia that absolutely anybody can edit- even your grandma, your cousin, a stranger at the library- imply about the conception of truth in information that exists in the modern digital world? It seems an idealistic proposition, to place all our bits and pieces of knowledge in a free, accessible, changeable format by a group effort at do-it-yourself. A person may access this encyclopaedia and decide to contribute information that is irrefutably true to them, or at least that they believe is true, and post it whether they are mistaken or not. What is idealistic about it is the underlying expectation that, with enough people posting, false content will be weeded out by a process quite like attrition.
The Wiki technology, a sort of open source programming which can be edited by anyone who can access it with a web browser, has tremendous creative potential. Some of the advantages that this encyclopaedia has are cheaper production (all of it’s writing is done by volunteers, c.f. crowdsourcing), breadth of content, and speed of turnover. Still, the information volunteered is not always correct – the encyclopaedia is always a work in progress.
Wikipedia has witnessed the birth a new form of vandalism, which it defines as “any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia.” Most common are the addition of vandalism, “page-blanking,” and “bad (or good) jokes or other nonsense.” Wikipedia will ban you from their servers if you deliberately commit this sort of vandalism. It is noted that this does not include “good-faith attempts to contribute,” even if they are misguided or fundamentally incorrect. Wikipedia itself warns users to be aware, suggesting that older articles have had more time to be edited over, and newer ones are more likely to contain misinformation and vandalism.
So is this encyclopaedia a democratic one? Only as far as the governments of it’s contributors. Near the end of 2006, the site blocked anonymous posting from an i.p. address for 12 hours from which it had received “a large volume of spam and vandalism…” it turned out, that address belonged to the nation of Qatar. In Qatar, there is only one high speed internet service provider; thus, all anonymous users have the same address. As soon as this became clear, Wikipedia removed the block. Said Florence Devouard, chair of the Wikimedia foundation “None of us is against any country…we wish to allow the maximum number of people, from everywhere.”
Some of the entries have been placed under special protection due to a degree of controversy surrounding them which has caused them to attract a high level of bad-faith vandalism: entries on topics such as Islam, for example. After 9-11, it is easy to imagine such content being manipulated out of rage and ignorance. Wikipedia does employ editors- and encourages you to correct entries you see in error.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6224677.stm
The Antikythera Mechanism: Cosmion of Scientific History
Ancient Greek Science Final Paper
The Antikythera Mechanism: Cosmion of Scientific History
“The animated figures stand
Adorning every public street
And they seem to breathe in stone, or
Move their marble feet.”
-Pindar, speaking of the island of Rhodes in his 7th Olympic Ode
So much of our own history is unknown to us; recording events as they pass in a somewhat permanent form is a relatively new practice. As Francois Charette, historian of science at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, put it: “It’s still a popular notion among the public, and among scientists thinking about the history of their disciplines, that technological development is a simple progression. But history is full of surprises”1
We know that sometime shortly after 85 B.C., a ship carrying a cargo of luxury goods: statues, coins, vases in the style of Rhodes, and a geared mechanism complicated enough to have come from a thousand years later sank. It sank along a busy shipping route from the eastern to western Aegean. The decaying bronze gadget discovered so many years later in the wreckage included gear work of such complexity that, according to an article published in Nature magazine, “to get anything close to the [device’s]… sophistication you have to wait until the fourteenth century, when mechanical clockwork appeared all over Western Europe.”2
In 1900, Elias Stadiatis, a Greek sponge diver, discovered the wreck off of Antikythera island; divers began retrieving artefacts, but the mechanism itself was not discovered until May 1902, when archaeologist Valerios Stais noticed that a piece of rock recovered from the site had a gear wheel embedded in it.3 The so-called rock turned out to be a thickly encrusted and eroded mechanism, now in three large parts and many fragments.
A model built by Michael Wright, a curator at the Science Museum in London for more than 20 years, illustrates our understanding of the basic design. The model was made with traditional methods, using simple steel tools. He observed that the “only really difficult part was the manufacture of the front dial, with its’ recessed ring.”4
The gears are housed in a wooden box, with two dials on the front: one showing the zodiac and the other the days of the year. Metal pointers show the positions of the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets visible to the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. It is unclear from the remains of the actual device whether or not these planets are represented, or how many of them are, but Mars and Venus are mentioned by name in inscriptions on the original device.
By turning a hand crank, the main gear is moved, and the other gears create the mechanical ratios necessary to keep the various positions of planets and the sun and moon correct. Two spiral dials on the back of the mechanism with pointers that trace around “like a record stylus” around a groove show two astronomical cycles: the top dial shows the Metonic cycle, which sets 235 months evenly inside of 19 years. The bottom dial was divided into 223, reflecting the 223 month period of the Saros cycle5.
The first cycle marked on the back was introduced by the Greek astronomer Meton of Athens around as a means of mathematically determining the placement of a thirteenth month within the year, which was required every few years by a Synodic system that fell about 11 days short on average each year behind the 365 day solar year. Meton’s observation that a period of 19 years is almost exactly 235 lunar months is only inaccurate by about two hours. It can be used also to predict eclipses.
The second cycle was a tradition from ancient Babylonian astronomers; the Saros cycle describes the relative geometry of the earth, moon and sun. One “Saros” (223 lunar months) after any given eclipse, the moon, sun, and earth will be at the same relative geometrical positions; a nearly identical eclipse will occur.6 The cycle is not a whole number of days, but includes a fraction of 1/3 of a day, meaning the new eclipse will be about 8 hours after the previous. Three Saros cycles later, the local time of the predicted eclipse will be nearly the same. “This period is known as… a triple Saros or exeligmos (Greek: ‘a turn of the wheel’)”7; perhaps this nom illustrative is a linguistic reference to a device like the Antikythera mechanism, whose second dial shows both Saros and exeligmos.
The front dial includes a parapagmata to show the rising and setting of specific stars, which are thought to be identified by it’s Greek characters which cross reference details inscribed on the mechanism. Hipparchus was the first to compile a comprehensive version of such a catalogue, which included thousands of stars. This catalogue was lost, until recently it was discovered that the globe carried by the Farnese Atlas sculpture matched the original descriptions in the surviving Commentaries.
It was inscribed with 41 constellations, the celestial equator, and tropics. It is a Roman copy of a well known Greek statue. The specific locations of each constellation on the Atlas are accurate to within 3.5 degrees, while the oral descriptions of Eudoxus and Aratus could at best offer accuracy within 8 degrees; strong evidence indeed that the statue plan came from a star catalogue. Dating based on the procession cycles of that certain starscape represented on Atlas’s earth offered the date of 125 BC, a rough estimate, but which fits right in with the rough estimate for Hipparchus’s life work; the lost parapagmata has been found.
There is no hard evidence for where the mechanism might have been manufactured, but the growing consensus is that the mechanism was made on the island of Rhodes. This consensus is based on the circumstantial evidence of the wreckage, particularly vases in the style particular to that island and time period. The great astronomer Hipparchus is thought to have worked on the island between 140 BC and his death around 120 BC; his tradition was continued through an astronomy school set up by a philosopher named Posidonius.
The Antikythera mechanism could be a part of that tradition. Posidonius made significant contributions of his own, by calculating the size and distance of the moon, and making an attempt at the same for the sun – his result for size was larger and more accurate than previous attempts, but his estimate for the distance was only about half correct.
The first century Roman lawyer and consul Cicero, who studied on Rhodes island, provides a sort of circumstantial evidence for this possibility in his De Natura Deorum, claiming that Posidonius had made an instrument “which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets that take place in the heavens every day and night.”8
Further circumstantial evidence for this theory is mentioned in the Nature article, as three-dimensional reconstructions of the fragments have shown that a very precise pin motion adjusts the surviving moon indicator so that it speeds up and slows down in accordance with the moon’s relative motion across the sky. Perhaps the sun’s gear could have also been set up in such a way, but any gearing for this mechanism would have been lost.
Hipparchus was the first to describe this motion mathematically, “working on the idea that the moon’s orbit, although circular, was centred on a point offset from the centre of the earth that described a nine-year cycle.” 9 The real cause of this apparent change in speed is the moon’s elliptical orbit; the idea of an elliptical orbit did not appear until Kepler. Hipparchus was also the first to compile a trigonometric table that allowed him to solve any triangle.
The level of precision with which the mechanism captures the heavenly motions suggests that it could not have been an isolated, miraculous single event. At the least, many test-models would have failed before one that functioned could have been made. It is curious to say the least at first thought that there are no examples of anything even remotely similar. One possibility might be that other examples have long since been melted down for scrap bronze. The Athens museum has just ten major bronze statues from ancient Greece; nine these are from shipwrecks. Said Wright, the model-builder, “We only have this one because it was out of reach of the scrap-metal man.”10
In fact, Cicero mentions another similar machine, attributing its invention to Archimedes. According to Cicero, the general Marcus Claudius Marcellus brought Archimedes’ device to Rome after the death of Archimedes at Syracuse around 212 BC. The device was apparently kept as a family heirloom and shown to Cicero by Gallus about 150 years later. “When Gallus moved the globe, it happened that the moon followed the sun by as many turns on that bronze (contrivance) as in the sky itself, from which also in the sky the sun’s globe became (to have) that same eclipse, and the moon came then to that position which was (its) shadow on the earth, when the sun was in line.”11 If both of Cicero’s accounts of devices like the Antikythera mechanism are accurate, we know of at least 3 in history. It is quite unlikely that the device found in the shipwreck were either of those mentioned by Cicero, because his accounts located the two devices to Rome at least 50 years later than the estimated date of the shipwreck.
Archimedes could also have invented such a device; he has gained a sort of legendary status as an inventor. He is supposed to have invented a large crane-claw grappling device, which would lift ships out of the water and then possibly sink them in order to defend Syracuse. It is often debated whether the other military invention attributed to Archimedes is fictitious; supposedly he managed to light fires on ships in the harbour by focusing the sun’s light over parabolic mirrors.
It is not difficult to imagine the person who designed the largest ship in antiquity, the Syracusia, which could carry 600 people according to Athenaeus, designing such an ambitious machine as the Antikythera mechanism. We shall probably never know for sure.
The information offered conveniently by such a model would have been of tremendous cultural significance for the ancients. Astrology was considered as important as any science, and certain angular aspects between planets might have strong portents associated with them. A court astrologer would often be asked by the monarch to chart the current aspects in order to determine if it was an auspicious time for whatever the monarch had in mind- usually a war. Eclipses were certainly thought to be one of the most powerful omens, making the ability to predict them by turning a gear quite appealing.
The process by which the machine was designed and built could be quite justly called analogue computer programming. This is hard for us to imagine maybe, we who are used to modern computers. An article in the New York Times put it this way: “A computer in antiquity would seem to be an anachronism, like Athena ordering takeout on her cellphone."12 But we can’t deny it just because it seems strange.
To adhere to the theory that technological development and the development of sciences was a “simple progression” as though it were a law, would be to sacrifice the empirical method which took so many years to develop out of those original Greek debates. Perhaps further developments in technology will allow scientists to reconstruct the mechanism in greater detail, or read more of the inscriptions on the cover. Perhaps another mechanism will be found someday. But for now, it stands as a symbol of a pinnacle for ancient scientific achievement, and a challenge to modern computer programmers to design a similarly impressive digital solar system model.
Marchant, Jo. “In search of lost time.” Nature 444 (2006) p.534-538.
“Antikythera Mechanism.” Wikipedia. 12 March 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism.
“F.A.Q.” The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. 10 March 2007. http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr.
“Saros Cycle.” Wikipedia. 14 March 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saros_cycle.
Cicero. De Natura Deorum. Book II, translated by H. Rackham, Cambridge, Mass. & London 1933
Cicero. De Re Publica I.22. 13 March 2007. http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/repub1.shtml#21.
"Early Astronomical ‘Computer’ Found to Be Technically Complex." John Noble Wilford. New York Times, 30/11/06.
The Antikythera Mechanism: Cosmion of Scientific History
“The animated figures stand
Adorning every public street
And they seem to breathe in stone, or
Move their marble feet.”
-Pindar, speaking of the island of Rhodes in his 7th Olympic Ode
So much of our own history is unknown to us; recording events as they pass in a somewhat permanent form is a relatively new practice. As Francois Charette, historian of science at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, put it: “It’s still a popular notion among the public, and among scientists thinking about the history of their disciplines, that technological development is a simple progression. But history is full of surprises”1
We know that sometime shortly after 85 B.C., a ship carrying a cargo of luxury goods: statues, coins, vases in the style of Rhodes, and a geared mechanism complicated enough to have come from a thousand years later sank. It sank along a busy shipping route from the eastern to western Aegean. The decaying bronze gadget discovered so many years later in the wreckage included gear work of such complexity that, according to an article published in Nature magazine, “to get anything close to the [device’s]… sophistication you have to wait until the fourteenth century, when mechanical clockwork appeared all over Western Europe.”2
In 1900, Elias Stadiatis, a Greek sponge diver, discovered the wreck off of Antikythera island; divers began retrieving artefacts, but the mechanism itself was not discovered until May 1902, when archaeologist Valerios Stais noticed that a piece of rock recovered from the site had a gear wheel embedded in it.3 The so-called rock turned out to be a thickly encrusted and eroded mechanism, now in three large parts and many fragments.
A model built by Michael Wright, a curator at the Science Museum in London for more than 20 years, illustrates our understanding of the basic design. The model was made with traditional methods, using simple steel tools. He observed that the “only really difficult part was the manufacture of the front dial, with its’ recessed ring.”4
The gears are housed in a wooden box, with two dials on the front: one showing the zodiac and the other the days of the year. Metal pointers show the positions of the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets visible to the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. It is unclear from the remains of the actual device whether or not these planets are represented, or how many of them are, but Mars and Venus are mentioned by name in inscriptions on the original device.
By turning a hand crank, the main gear is moved, and the other gears create the mechanical ratios necessary to keep the various positions of planets and the sun and moon correct. Two spiral dials on the back of the mechanism with pointers that trace around “like a record stylus” around a groove show two astronomical cycles: the top dial shows the Metonic cycle, which sets 235 months evenly inside of 19 years. The bottom dial was divided into 223, reflecting the 223 month period of the Saros cycle5.
The first cycle marked on the back was introduced by the Greek astronomer Meton of Athens around as a means of mathematically determining the placement of a thirteenth month within the year, which was required every few years by a Synodic system that fell about 11 days short on average each year behind the 365 day solar year. Meton’s observation that a period of 19 years is almost exactly 235 lunar months is only inaccurate by about two hours. It can be used also to predict eclipses.
The second cycle was a tradition from ancient Babylonian astronomers; the Saros cycle describes the relative geometry of the earth, moon and sun. One “Saros” (223 lunar months) after any given eclipse, the moon, sun, and earth will be at the same relative geometrical positions; a nearly identical eclipse will occur.6 The cycle is not a whole number of days, but includes a fraction of 1/3 of a day, meaning the new eclipse will be about 8 hours after the previous. Three Saros cycles later, the local time of the predicted eclipse will be nearly the same. “This period is known as… a triple Saros or exeligmos (Greek: ‘a turn of the wheel’)”7; perhaps this nom illustrative is a linguistic reference to a device like the Antikythera mechanism, whose second dial shows both Saros and exeligmos.
The front dial includes a parapagmata to show the rising and setting of specific stars, which are thought to be identified by it’s Greek characters which cross reference details inscribed on the mechanism. Hipparchus was the first to compile a comprehensive version of such a catalogue, which included thousands of stars. This catalogue was lost, until recently it was discovered that the globe carried by the Farnese Atlas sculpture matched the original descriptions in the surviving Commentaries.
It was inscribed with 41 constellations, the celestial equator, and tropics. It is a Roman copy of a well known Greek statue. The specific locations of each constellation on the Atlas are accurate to within 3.5 degrees, while the oral descriptions of Eudoxus and Aratus could at best offer accuracy within 8 degrees; strong evidence indeed that the statue plan came from a star catalogue. Dating based on the procession cycles of that certain starscape represented on Atlas’s earth offered the date of 125 BC, a rough estimate, but which fits right in with the rough estimate for Hipparchus’s life work; the lost parapagmata has been found.
There is no hard evidence for where the mechanism might have been manufactured, but the growing consensus is that the mechanism was made on the island of Rhodes. This consensus is based on the circumstantial evidence of the wreckage, particularly vases in the style particular to that island and time period. The great astronomer Hipparchus is thought to have worked on the island between 140 BC and his death around 120 BC; his tradition was continued through an astronomy school set up by a philosopher named Posidonius.
The Antikythera mechanism could be a part of that tradition. Posidonius made significant contributions of his own, by calculating the size and distance of the moon, and making an attempt at the same for the sun – his result for size was larger and more accurate than previous attempts, but his estimate for the distance was only about half correct.
The first century Roman lawyer and consul Cicero, who studied on Rhodes island, provides a sort of circumstantial evidence for this possibility in his De Natura Deorum, claiming that Posidonius had made an instrument “which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets that take place in the heavens every day and night.”8
Further circumstantial evidence for this theory is mentioned in the Nature article, as three-dimensional reconstructions of the fragments have shown that a very precise pin motion adjusts the surviving moon indicator so that it speeds up and slows down in accordance with the moon’s relative motion across the sky. Perhaps the sun’s gear could have also been set up in such a way, but any gearing for this mechanism would have been lost.
Hipparchus was the first to describe this motion mathematically, “working on the idea that the moon’s orbit, although circular, was centred on a point offset from the centre of the earth that described a nine-year cycle.” 9 The real cause of this apparent change in speed is the moon’s elliptical orbit; the idea of an elliptical orbit did not appear until Kepler. Hipparchus was also the first to compile a trigonometric table that allowed him to solve any triangle.
The level of precision with which the mechanism captures the heavenly motions suggests that it could not have been an isolated, miraculous single event. At the least, many test-models would have failed before one that functioned could have been made. It is curious to say the least at first thought that there are no examples of anything even remotely similar. One possibility might be that other examples have long since been melted down for scrap bronze. The Athens museum has just ten major bronze statues from ancient Greece; nine these are from shipwrecks. Said Wright, the model-builder, “We only have this one because it was out of reach of the scrap-metal man.”10
In fact, Cicero mentions another similar machine, attributing its invention to Archimedes. According to Cicero, the general Marcus Claudius Marcellus brought Archimedes’ device to Rome after the death of Archimedes at Syracuse around 212 BC. The device was apparently kept as a family heirloom and shown to Cicero by Gallus about 150 years later. “When Gallus moved the globe, it happened that the moon followed the sun by as many turns on that bronze (contrivance) as in the sky itself, from which also in the sky the sun’s globe became (to have) that same eclipse, and the moon came then to that position which was (its) shadow on the earth, when the sun was in line.”11 If both of Cicero’s accounts of devices like the Antikythera mechanism are accurate, we know of at least 3 in history. It is quite unlikely that the device found in the shipwreck were either of those mentioned by Cicero, because his accounts located the two devices to Rome at least 50 years later than the estimated date of the shipwreck.
Archimedes could also have invented such a device; he has gained a sort of legendary status as an inventor. He is supposed to have invented a large crane-claw grappling device, which would lift ships out of the water and then possibly sink them in order to defend Syracuse. It is often debated whether the other military invention attributed to Archimedes is fictitious; supposedly he managed to light fires on ships in the harbour by focusing the sun’s light over parabolic mirrors.
It is not difficult to imagine the person who designed the largest ship in antiquity, the Syracusia, which could carry 600 people according to Athenaeus, designing such an ambitious machine as the Antikythera mechanism. We shall probably never know for sure.
The information offered conveniently by such a model would have been of tremendous cultural significance for the ancients. Astrology was considered as important as any science, and certain angular aspects between planets might have strong portents associated with them. A court astrologer would often be asked by the monarch to chart the current aspects in order to determine if it was an auspicious time for whatever the monarch had in mind- usually a war. Eclipses were certainly thought to be one of the most powerful omens, making the ability to predict them by turning a gear quite appealing.
The process by which the machine was designed and built could be quite justly called analogue computer programming. This is hard for us to imagine maybe, we who are used to modern computers. An article in the New York Times put it this way: “A computer in antiquity would seem to be an anachronism, like Athena ordering takeout on her cellphone."12 But we can’t deny it just because it seems strange.
To adhere to the theory that technological development and the development of sciences was a “simple progression” as though it were a law, would be to sacrifice the empirical method which took so many years to develop out of those original Greek debates. Perhaps further developments in technology will allow scientists to reconstruct the mechanism in greater detail, or read more of the inscriptions on the cover. Perhaps another mechanism will be found someday. But for now, it stands as a symbol of a pinnacle for ancient scientific achievement, and a challenge to modern computer programmers to design a similarly impressive digital solar system model.
Marchant, Jo. “In search of lost time.” Nature 444 (2006) p.534-538.
“Antikythera Mechanism.” Wikipedia. 12 March 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism.
“F.A.Q.” The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. 10 March 2007. http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr.
“Saros Cycle.” Wikipedia. 14 March 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saros_cycle.
Cicero. De Natura Deorum. Book II, translated by H. Rackham, Cambridge, Mass. & London 1933
Cicero. De Re Publica I.22. 13 March 2007. http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/repub1.shtml#21.
"Early Astronomical ‘Computer’ Found to Be Technically Complex." John Noble Wilford. New York Times, 30/11/06.
The Cowboy vs. A Bedoin
Research Proposal
J314 Intro to Communication Studies
Fall 2006:
Introduction: The Cowboy vs. A Bedouin
A graduate student at the English program here related to me an experience he had on a Lane County bus recently. He rides this bus to work every Friday, and every Friday a group of dressed-up Arab families enter the bus and get off together at the same stop. Another bus rider turns to our grad student and whispers, “That seemed dangerous, didn't it?” In fact, they were merely on their way to Friday prayers, a practice which for Muslims is roughly equitable with the Christian or Jewish Sabbath or Roman Catholic mass.
Islam has become the target in the west for a lot of disassociated fears, economic and bodily, and the extent of this fear has grown at an accelerated pace since the attack in September 2001. It is often the case that we fear what we don't understand, but we should certainly try, especially when human lives are at stake. From George W. Bush's including Iran in his “axis of evil” to his response to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 18 page letter (there wasn't any), to the regular shouts of “Death to America!” at various Friday religious gatherings in Iran, it is clear that these ideas we have about one another are so strong that our leaders are more prepared to make trouble than to make peace.
The study of culture comes from the study of oneself: from the moment each child recognizes itself as separate from its surroundings, we compare ourselves to the rest of the world. A student of journalism at a major state university is bound to come in contact with a certain amount of news, and even likely to encounter it through more than one or two sources. Different sources offer different versions of the same events, depending on their different perspectives. It is very interesting to compare these sources to determine what their ways of presenting events can tell us about their underlying perspective.
Because news sources (and most other cultural texts) are “locatable” in space, time, and culture, studying those sources occurring in our own times, spaces, and cultures can help us check our own point of view. These ideologies, which underlie the representation of certain aspects of human experience, dominate ways of understanding events within their sphere of influence. They also have a hand in the creation of actualities, such as harmony and conflict. Collectively, dominant (hegemonic) ways of reading texts set into motion the forces that create the actualities of the world at large.
How are these dominant readings created? When and how do differing readings occur? Texts which are generated a large physical distance from one another are likely to represent different “hegemonics,” as are texts which are generated during different times in history. It could be argued that “epic” events (wars, major terrorist acts, and so on) also change these ideologies within the affected milieu. A recent example of 9-11 changed the dominant reading in America of certain symbols in a way that has had direct political, military (thus human), and social consequences. One of the affected symbols is Islam, the religion which in Arabic means “submission to God.”
This paper would seek to examine through several threads the way Islam is understood in self-relevant conditions of time, space, and culture: here and now. Popular representations such as “all Muslims as Arabs,” “all Arabs as terrorists,” or the “monolithic evil Arab” (Merskin, 374) “the religion of the sword” (Aslan, 79) simultaneously contribute to/feed from stereotypes about the religion and everything related to it. For the guy on the bus who thought the families of Muslims traveling together was 'dangerous,' and for many others in the west, these associations are so deeply engrained that it is impossible for them to see Muslims or Arabs, even American ones, without thinking about planes crashing into buildings and at least unconsciously placing blame.
"Of no other religion or cultural grouping can it be said so assertively as it is now said of Islam that it represents a threat to Western civilization" (Said, xxi); while this sentence was published in 1981, long before 9/11, it is still very relevant. The news is full of stories related to Islam, as we continue on with this "war on terror" and while the world watches the difficult proposition of the installation of a representative democracy (a major symbol of Western civilization) in Iraq, a predominantly Muslim country. Resistance to this new form of government and complications in the process will inevitably be perceived as related or associated with the religion, if not the direct causes. The gap between Civilization as it has been known and Islam in the western mind grows so long as this goal to “spread democracy” continues to meet difficulty.
Researching these representations and comparing them to one another can help us understand how stereotypes are formed, and how fear can grow and manifest itself into large scale discrimination, misunderstanding, antagonizing, and oppositional politics. How does systematic content (in this case, about Islam) affect audiences' systematic bias (stereotyping) in day-to-day life? The goal of this project would be to map the development of this “Islam vs. Civilization” idea, from both sides as much as possible, and relate it to everyday ideas and feelings of westerners and Muslims. Perhaps if we are compared in the right way, we can see that we are more alike than we are different.
Background/Literature Review: Islam in English
The ideological treatment of Islam in the West is not a new subject. Edward Said published a whole book on the subject in 1981, Covering Islam. Following in the footsteps of Foucault and contemplating the affiliation of knowledge and power, he examines the way Islam is "covered" by western media, saying "in no really significant way is there a direct correspondence between the 'Islam' in common Western usage and the enormously varied life that goes on within the world of Islam, with its more than 800,000,000 people, its millions of square miles of territory... it's dozens of societies, states, histories, geographies, [and] cultures" (Said, x). Covering Islam examines how the common Western usage developed by examining representations of Islam within their respective contexts.
For an English-speaking person in the west, indeed for any non- Arabic speaker, the only way to access the Qu'ran is by reading a translation. The linguistic differences between modern English and Qu'ranic Arabic cause serious problems for any translator. “Qu'ran limits of translatability have been discussed with numerous examples… style, stylistic mechanism of stress, word order, cultural voids, problems of literal translation, syntactic and semantic ambiguity problems, emotive Qu'ranic expressions…different exegetical analyses, morphological patterns, semantico-syntactic interrelation, semantic functions of conjunctives, semantico-stylistic effects, prosodic and acoustic features, and most importantly the shackles imposed by the thorny problem of linguistic and rhetorical Qu'ran specific texture,” lists one commentator in his book Qu'ran Translation: Discourse, Texture, and Exegesis (Abdul-Raof, 1).
The view that the Qu'ran is essentially untranslatable has been asserted left and right. To illustrate the problem of using one translation over another, Reza Aslan offers these two versions of the same passage, the first from the Princeton edition translated by Ahmed Ali, and the second from New York University published Majid Fakhry's translation.
“'Men are the support of women as God gives some more than others, and because they spend of their wealth (to provide for them)… As for women you feel are averse, talk to them suasively; then leave them in alone in bed (without molesting them) and go to bed with them (when they are willing)' (4:34)
'Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made some of them excel the others, and because they spend some of their wealth… And for those [women] who you fear might rebel, admonish them and abandon them in their beds and beat them.' (4:34)”
Aslan is quick to note that “Because of the variability of the Arabic language, both are grammatically, syntactically, and definitionally correct… if one views the Qu'ran as empowering women,” one would look at the first translation, while “if one views the Qu'ran as justifying violence against women,” (Aslan, 70) then the second.
For some time it was (and for some, still is) considered a grave sin in the Islamic world to translate the Qu'ran at all, given that they believe it to be literally God's words. Early translations into European languages were done by Christians, and many deliberately tried to paint Islam in a bad light. "Maracci... produced in 1689 A.C. a Latin version of the Qu'ran with the Arabic Text and quotations from various Arabic Commentaries, carefully selected and garbled, so as to give the worst possible impression of Islam to Europe... he introduces it by way of an introductory volume he calls a 'Refutation of the Qu'ran'" (Ali, .xix).
This Latin version (through another French one) was apparently also the source material for two of the first English versions. It's hard to imagine any translation which used such biased sources to escape free from the biases and make an accurate reading of the original. This misrepresentation led Muslims to make their own translations, while it is interesting that Ali for example is reluctant to call his translation "THE Holy Qu'ran," settling his anxieties with the disclaimer, "The meaning of...." Any translation will contain a good deal of the translator's personal interpretation and viewpoint; it is only a version of the original, not the original itself.
As well engrained generalizations (i.e. stereotypes) about Islam take precedent in the West, some Muslims try to expand awareness of their own culture and religion, to promote dialogue and hopefully understanding between Islam and the West. Reza Aslan's No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam is just such an attempt, presenting the story of Mohammad and the history of Islam to a western audience and simultaneously attempting to explain the turmoil in various Islamic countries in terms of a sort of Islamic Reformation like the Christian Reformation which happened in Europe.
Aslan's account of the way Islam is represented in the west aligns with Said's; he finds it grossly inaccurate. "Ever since the attacks of September 11... pundits, politicians, and preachers throughout the U.S. and Europe have argued that the world is embroiled in a 'clash of civilizations...' between the modern, enlightened, democratic societies of the west and the archaic, barbarous, autocratic societies of the Middle East... a few...suggesting that the failure for democracy to emerge in the Muslim world is due in large part to Muslim culture, which they claim is intrinsically incompatible with Enlightenment values such as liberalism, pluralism, individualism, and human rights" (Aslan, .xxiii).
An article published in Cultural Diversity and Islam explores further this compatibility of Muslim (and Western) cultures with pluralism, specifically. "We are finally in a position to distinguish between true and false pluralism," writes Khuri, "False pluralism prevails when there are several choices to be made within a supreme framework that predefines and delimits the range of values and choices. This is not pluralism... No one dares criticize democracy or capitalism in the United States...Nothing illustrates the preponderance of false pluralism more poignantly." (Khuri, 65). By this argument, 'true' pluralism exists neither in the west nor the Muslim world; in the west, economic/governmental pluralism is "false," and in the Muslim world, religious pluralism is "false."
Discussion of what would be studied/methods: removing the backwards telescope
This project would seek to make a connection by first exploring the way that Islam is represented systematically in cultural texts in the 'west,' specifically the United States, and second exploring the ways that average Westerners, again Americans in particular, interact with those systematic representations to form their own ideas about what Islam is and what it means to be a Muslim.
From these goals, academic literature is not the most useful source, but popular literature, because popular literature is widespread and its' images and representations reach vast audiences and exert tremendous influence. This includes movies, news, television, advertising, and the like. It will be useful to collect these representations from different sources, to consider the contexts in which they are presented, and to compare them with similar representations (or in the case of news, other stories about the same events). How do these images fit in with their contexts? What kind of general portrait do colors like these paint?
From there, it will be necessary to interview a range of Americans whose background does not afford them any special perspective on Islam than the common media sources, to see what they think of how it is represented, and how that compares with what they themselves think about it. Do most of us just accept the images we are shown? What level of Cartesian doubt do most of us apply when we see something foreign or unfamiliar represented in media?
The other side of this project would be to study representations of America in the Muslim world, with the same media-to-audience approach. While it may be difficult to access some information on this side of things without speaking Arabic, much of the relevant information is available: it is a simple matter to take news events which were discussed in the first part and find articles about them which were published in Tehran or Damascus. Many Muslims at this time in history feel that their religion is challenged, and would perhaps be interested in talking about how their own views on their faith.
This method would take into account both semiotics (as it examines the building up of associative imagery systematically though media like pictures and words) and phenomenology, as it tries to connect these representations with the way Islam is built up within a certain context in the west and how this context manifests itself in the consciousness of Americans.
Potential Findings
I expect that this study would find that 'Terrorism' has been quite successful at stirring up terror in the west and the United States, and that for many people, this directionless threat has been associated time and time again with Islam. Most of the news published in the West will sensationalize violence and strife in these countries in such a way that makes an implicit connection between Islam and disharmony. The fact that violent Jihad (“religious struggle” c.f. Crusade) is an idea upheld only by a few isolated extremist groups in the world will make no difference in the everyday consciousness of most westerners, such as the man on the bus, for whom the Muslim families riding public transit to their Mosque for Friday prayers is a suspicious and 'dangerous' event.
I expect also that in the Muslim world western misunderstanding and snubbing has led to negative opinions, especially U.S. support for Israel, which is seen as a colonizing power by many in Palestine, Iran, Iraq, and the Middle East in general. Economic woes and the inability to find solutions to the vast development gap between some Muslim countries and the West will be associated (and implicitly blamed) upon America and the West in the same way that terrorism is associated (and implicitly blamed) upon Islam.
Conclusion
The process of preparing this proposal has brought me into contact with a great deal of shocking media “content,” which is clearly biased in a way that makes 'reconciliation' between these two 'entirely different' (and thus incompatible) civilizations seem impossible. I am also certain that, in preparing this project, I would be able to find examples of news and media with these representations that are so current that the events they discuss would have happened during the research, and not before. An example I'd cite in the case of preparing this proposal would be the situation in November in which 6 Imams ('prayer leaders') were removed from a plane in Minneapolis after they performed evening prayers in the terminal.
If I were to start preparing this proposal today, I would have spent more time researching the counterpoint (representations of America in the Middle East and the Muslim world), because if we were to lay out the bricks of American stereotypes about Islam besides the bricks of Islamic, Middle Eastern (perhaps Iranian specifically) stereotypes about America, I expect we'd find the architecture to be very similar. If the ways in which we've come to distrust one another are the same, then can we not reverse the process in such a way that both sides could come to coexist comfortably?
Bibliography
Abdul-Raof, Hussein. Qu'ran Translation: Discourse, Texture, and Exegesis. Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001.
Ali, 'Abdullah Yusuf. The Meaning of The Holy Qu'ran. Beltsville: Amana Corperation, 2001.
Aslan, Reza. No god but God: The Evolutions, Origins, and Future of Islam. New York: Random House, 2005.
Cleary, Thomas. The Qu'ran: A New Translation. Starlatch Press, 2004.
Cragg, Kenneth. The Qu'ran and the West. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005.
Habeck, Mary R. Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Haleem, M.A.S. Abdel. The Qur'an. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Khuri, Richard K. "'True' and 'False' Pluralism in the West and Islam." Cultural Diversity and Islam. Lanham: University Press of America Inc, 2003.
Lewis, Jeff. Cultural Studies: The Basics. London: Sage Oaks, 2002.
Merskin, Debra. “Making enemies in George W. Bush's Post-9/11 Speeches.” Peace Review: a Journal of Social Justice, 17 (2005): 373-381.
Said, Edward. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981.
J314 Intro to Communication Studies
Fall 2006:
Introduction: The Cowboy vs. A Bedouin
A graduate student at the English program here related to me an experience he had on a Lane County bus recently. He rides this bus to work every Friday, and every Friday a group of dressed-up Arab families enter the bus and get off together at the same stop. Another bus rider turns to our grad student and whispers, “That seemed dangerous, didn't it?” In fact, they were merely on their way to Friday prayers, a practice which for Muslims is roughly equitable with the Christian or Jewish Sabbath or Roman Catholic mass.
Islam has become the target in the west for a lot of disassociated fears, economic and bodily, and the extent of this fear has grown at an accelerated pace since the attack in September 2001. It is often the case that we fear what we don't understand, but we should certainly try, especially when human lives are at stake. From George W. Bush's including Iran in his “axis of evil” to his response to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 18 page letter (there wasn't any), to the regular shouts of “Death to America!” at various Friday religious gatherings in Iran, it is clear that these ideas we have about one another are so strong that our leaders are more prepared to make trouble than to make peace.
The study of culture comes from the study of oneself: from the moment each child recognizes itself as separate from its surroundings, we compare ourselves to the rest of the world. A student of journalism at a major state university is bound to come in contact with a certain amount of news, and even likely to encounter it through more than one or two sources. Different sources offer different versions of the same events, depending on their different perspectives. It is very interesting to compare these sources to determine what their ways of presenting events can tell us about their underlying perspective.
Because news sources (and most other cultural texts) are “locatable” in space, time, and culture, studying those sources occurring in our own times, spaces, and cultures can help us check our own point of view. These ideologies, which underlie the representation of certain aspects of human experience, dominate ways of understanding events within their sphere of influence. They also have a hand in the creation of actualities, such as harmony and conflict. Collectively, dominant (hegemonic) ways of reading texts set into motion the forces that create the actualities of the world at large.
How are these dominant readings created? When and how do differing readings occur? Texts which are generated a large physical distance from one another are likely to represent different “hegemonics,” as are texts which are generated during different times in history. It could be argued that “epic” events (wars, major terrorist acts, and so on) also change these ideologies within the affected milieu. A recent example of 9-11 changed the dominant reading in America of certain symbols in a way that has had direct political, military (thus human), and social consequences. One of the affected symbols is Islam, the religion which in Arabic means “submission to God.”
This paper would seek to examine through several threads the way Islam is understood in self-relevant conditions of time, space, and culture: here and now. Popular representations such as “all Muslims as Arabs,” “all Arabs as terrorists,” or the “monolithic evil Arab” (Merskin, 374) “the religion of the sword” (Aslan, 79) simultaneously contribute to/feed from stereotypes about the religion and everything related to it. For the guy on the bus who thought the families of Muslims traveling together was 'dangerous,' and for many others in the west, these associations are so deeply engrained that it is impossible for them to see Muslims or Arabs, even American ones, without thinking about planes crashing into buildings and at least unconsciously placing blame.
"Of no other religion or cultural grouping can it be said so assertively as it is now said of Islam that it represents a threat to Western civilization" (Said, xxi); while this sentence was published in 1981, long before 9/11, it is still very relevant. The news is full of stories related to Islam, as we continue on with this "war on terror" and while the world watches the difficult proposition of the installation of a representative democracy (a major symbol of Western civilization) in Iraq, a predominantly Muslim country. Resistance to this new form of government and complications in the process will inevitably be perceived as related or associated with the religion, if not the direct causes. The gap between Civilization as it has been known and Islam in the western mind grows so long as this goal to “spread democracy” continues to meet difficulty.
Researching these representations and comparing them to one another can help us understand how stereotypes are formed, and how fear can grow and manifest itself into large scale discrimination, misunderstanding, antagonizing, and oppositional politics. How does systematic content (in this case, about Islam) affect audiences' systematic bias (stereotyping) in day-to-day life? The goal of this project would be to map the development of this “Islam vs. Civilization” idea, from both sides as much as possible, and relate it to everyday ideas and feelings of westerners and Muslims. Perhaps if we are compared in the right way, we can see that we are more alike than we are different.
Background/Literature Review: Islam in English
The ideological treatment of Islam in the West is not a new subject. Edward Said published a whole book on the subject in 1981, Covering Islam. Following in the footsteps of Foucault and contemplating the affiliation of knowledge and power, he examines the way Islam is "covered" by western media, saying "in no really significant way is there a direct correspondence between the 'Islam' in common Western usage and the enormously varied life that goes on within the world of Islam, with its more than 800,000,000 people, its millions of square miles of territory... it's dozens of societies, states, histories, geographies, [and] cultures" (Said, x). Covering Islam examines how the common Western usage developed by examining representations of Islam within their respective contexts.
For an English-speaking person in the west, indeed for any non- Arabic speaker, the only way to access the Qu'ran is by reading a translation. The linguistic differences between modern English and Qu'ranic Arabic cause serious problems for any translator. “Qu'ran limits of translatability have been discussed with numerous examples… style, stylistic mechanism of stress, word order, cultural voids, problems of literal translation, syntactic and semantic ambiguity problems, emotive Qu'ranic expressions…different exegetical analyses, morphological patterns, semantico-syntactic interrelation, semantic functions of conjunctives, semantico-stylistic effects, prosodic and acoustic features, and most importantly the shackles imposed by the thorny problem of linguistic and rhetorical Qu'ran specific texture,” lists one commentator in his book Qu'ran Translation: Discourse, Texture, and Exegesis (Abdul-Raof, 1).
The view that the Qu'ran is essentially untranslatable has been asserted left and right. To illustrate the problem of using one translation over another, Reza Aslan offers these two versions of the same passage, the first from the Princeton edition translated by Ahmed Ali, and the second from New York University published Majid Fakhry's translation.
“'Men are the support of women as God gives some more than others, and because they spend of their wealth (to provide for them)… As for women you feel are averse, talk to them suasively; then leave them in alone in bed (without molesting them) and go to bed with them (when they are willing)' (4:34)
'Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made some of them excel the others, and because they spend some of their wealth… And for those [women] who you fear might rebel, admonish them and abandon them in their beds and beat them.' (4:34)”
Aslan is quick to note that “Because of the variability of the Arabic language, both are grammatically, syntactically, and definitionally correct… if one views the Qu'ran as empowering women,” one would look at the first translation, while “if one views the Qu'ran as justifying violence against women,” (Aslan, 70) then the second.
For some time it was (and for some, still is) considered a grave sin in the Islamic world to translate the Qu'ran at all, given that they believe it to be literally God's words. Early translations into European languages were done by Christians, and many deliberately tried to paint Islam in a bad light. "Maracci... produced in 1689 A.C. a Latin version of the Qu'ran with the Arabic Text and quotations from various Arabic Commentaries, carefully selected and garbled, so as to give the worst possible impression of Islam to Europe... he introduces it by way of an introductory volume he calls a 'Refutation of the Qu'ran'" (Ali, .xix).
This Latin version (through another French one) was apparently also the source material for two of the first English versions. It's hard to imagine any translation which used such biased sources to escape free from the biases and make an accurate reading of the original. This misrepresentation led Muslims to make their own translations, while it is interesting that Ali for example is reluctant to call his translation "THE Holy Qu'ran," settling his anxieties with the disclaimer, "The meaning of...." Any translation will contain a good deal of the translator's personal interpretation and viewpoint; it is only a version of the original, not the original itself.
As well engrained generalizations (i.e. stereotypes) about Islam take precedent in the West, some Muslims try to expand awareness of their own culture and religion, to promote dialogue and hopefully understanding between Islam and the West. Reza Aslan's No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam is just such an attempt, presenting the story of Mohammad and the history of Islam to a western audience and simultaneously attempting to explain the turmoil in various Islamic countries in terms of a sort of Islamic Reformation like the Christian Reformation which happened in Europe.
Aslan's account of the way Islam is represented in the west aligns with Said's; he finds it grossly inaccurate. "Ever since the attacks of September 11... pundits, politicians, and preachers throughout the U.S. and Europe have argued that the world is embroiled in a 'clash of civilizations...' between the modern, enlightened, democratic societies of the west and the archaic, barbarous, autocratic societies of the Middle East... a few...suggesting that the failure for democracy to emerge in the Muslim world is due in large part to Muslim culture, which they claim is intrinsically incompatible with Enlightenment values such as liberalism, pluralism, individualism, and human rights" (Aslan, .xxiii).
An article published in Cultural Diversity and Islam explores further this compatibility of Muslim (and Western) cultures with pluralism, specifically. "We are finally in a position to distinguish between true and false pluralism," writes Khuri, "False pluralism prevails when there are several choices to be made within a supreme framework that predefines and delimits the range of values and choices. This is not pluralism... No one dares criticize democracy or capitalism in the United States...Nothing illustrates the preponderance of false pluralism more poignantly." (Khuri, 65). By this argument, 'true' pluralism exists neither in the west nor the Muslim world; in the west, economic/governmental pluralism is "false," and in the Muslim world, religious pluralism is "false."
Discussion of what would be studied/methods: removing the backwards telescope
This project would seek to make a connection by first exploring the way that Islam is represented systematically in cultural texts in the 'west,' specifically the United States, and second exploring the ways that average Westerners, again Americans in particular, interact with those systematic representations to form their own ideas about what Islam is and what it means to be a Muslim.
From these goals, academic literature is not the most useful source, but popular literature, because popular literature is widespread and its' images and representations reach vast audiences and exert tremendous influence. This includes movies, news, television, advertising, and the like. It will be useful to collect these representations from different sources, to consider the contexts in which they are presented, and to compare them with similar representations (or in the case of news, other stories about the same events). How do these images fit in with their contexts? What kind of general portrait do colors like these paint?
From there, it will be necessary to interview a range of Americans whose background does not afford them any special perspective on Islam than the common media sources, to see what they think of how it is represented, and how that compares with what they themselves think about it. Do most of us just accept the images we are shown? What level of Cartesian doubt do most of us apply when we see something foreign or unfamiliar represented in media?
The other side of this project would be to study representations of America in the Muslim world, with the same media-to-audience approach. While it may be difficult to access some information on this side of things without speaking Arabic, much of the relevant information is available: it is a simple matter to take news events which were discussed in the first part and find articles about them which were published in Tehran or Damascus. Many Muslims at this time in history feel that their religion is challenged, and would perhaps be interested in talking about how their own views on their faith.
This method would take into account both semiotics (as it examines the building up of associative imagery systematically though media like pictures and words) and phenomenology, as it tries to connect these representations with the way Islam is built up within a certain context in the west and how this context manifests itself in the consciousness of Americans.
Potential Findings
I expect that this study would find that 'Terrorism' has been quite successful at stirring up terror in the west and the United States, and that for many people, this directionless threat has been associated time and time again with Islam. Most of the news published in the West will sensationalize violence and strife in these countries in such a way that makes an implicit connection between Islam and disharmony. The fact that violent Jihad (“religious struggle” c.f. Crusade) is an idea upheld only by a few isolated extremist groups in the world will make no difference in the everyday consciousness of most westerners, such as the man on the bus, for whom the Muslim families riding public transit to their Mosque for Friday prayers is a suspicious and 'dangerous' event.
I expect also that in the Muslim world western misunderstanding and snubbing has led to negative opinions, especially U.S. support for Israel, which is seen as a colonizing power by many in Palestine, Iran, Iraq, and the Middle East in general. Economic woes and the inability to find solutions to the vast development gap between some Muslim countries and the West will be associated (and implicitly blamed) upon America and the West in the same way that terrorism is associated (and implicitly blamed) upon Islam.
Conclusion
The process of preparing this proposal has brought me into contact with a great deal of shocking media “content,” which is clearly biased in a way that makes 'reconciliation' between these two 'entirely different' (and thus incompatible) civilizations seem impossible. I am also certain that, in preparing this project, I would be able to find examples of news and media with these representations that are so current that the events they discuss would have happened during the research, and not before. An example I'd cite in the case of preparing this proposal would be the situation in November in which 6 Imams ('prayer leaders') were removed from a plane in Minneapolis after they performed evening prayers in the terminal.
If I were to start preparing this proposal today, I would have spent more time researching the counterpoint (representations of America in the Middle East and the Muslim world), because if we were to lay out the bricks of American stereotypes about Islam besides the bricks of Islamic, Middle Eastern (perhaps Iranian specifically) stereotypes about America, I expect we'd find the architecture to be very similar. If the ways in which we've come to distrust one another are the same, then can we not reverse the process in such a way that both sides could come to coexist comfortably?
Bibliography
Abdul-Raof, Hussein. Qu'ran Translation: Discourse, Texture, and Exegesis. Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001.
Ali, 'Abdullah Yusuf. The Meaning of The Holy Qu'ran. Beltsville: Amana Corperation, 2001.
Aslan, Reza. No god but God: The Evolutions, Origins, and Future of Islam. New York: Random House, 2005.
Cleary, Thomas. The Qu'ran: A New Translation. Starlatch Press, 2004.
Cragg, Kenneth. The Qu'ran and the West. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005.
Habeck, Mary R. Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Haleem, M.A.S. Abdel. The Qur'an. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Khuri, Richard K. "'True' and 'False' Pluralism in the West and Islam." Cultural Diversity and Islam. Lanham: University Press of America Inc, 2003.
Lewis, Jeff. Cultural Studies: The Basics. London: Sage Oaks, 2002.
Merskin, Debra. “Making enemies in George W. Bush's Post-9/11 Speeches.” Peace Review: a Journal of Social Justice, 17 (2005): 373-381.
Said, Edward. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981.
Conflict + Context
5/13/06
Japan: past + present
Hist 192: Spring 2006
Conflict and context
In the preface to his book, War Without Mercy, John Dower gives us a word which can serve as a sort of keystone for discussion of the horrors of World War II between Japan and the Western Allies in the Pacific: he calls it Manichaean. Another one of those academic words stuck on a shelf, Manichaeism means the dualist black-and-white perspective of a battle between good and evil; one side absolutely right, and the other absolutely wrong. Dower recounts the history from a personal bias, tending to present the American side in a more human way; however he approaches fairness by trying to put each side within its cultural context. The various atrocities described in the book show us that racism in this war was very complete: each side thought it was completely justified for its behavior, on the argument that “the Other” were lesser humans.
There were many reasons why Japan and the United States came to face each other in war: racism, rooted in fear of what is different, was what made it so vicious. This racism and consequently this viciousness entered the war as soon as the Manichaean perspective did. In 1943, the Assembly of Greater East Asiatic Nations convened in Tokyo, where “a succession of Asian leaders voiced support for Japan and placed the war in an East-versus-West, Oriental-versus-Occidental, and ultimately blood-versus-blood context” (6). This idea of absolute east-west struggle was alive on the other side as well. In 1945, President Roosevelt was still afraid of what was being discussed by these eastern leaders two years before. “’1,100,000,000 potential enemies,’ the president told a confidant, ‘are dangerous.’” (7).
We can see into Dower’s bias with how he recounts these two events: his description of the Roosevelt’s encounter with this east-west absolute struggle idea is put into a human context (a president worrying about the racial solidarity of a hostile foreign power), while his description of the Assembly of Greater East Asiatic Nations lacks such a human context. Dower even mentions that Roosevelt’s comments came “a month before he died,” as though to draw the reader’s sympathy (7).
Propaganda was generated on a massive scale by both sides of this conflict, and helped throw fuel upon the fires of this racism. Dower’s discussion of this propaganda, in line with his bias, begins by describing an American example, a film called “Know Your Enemy.” Instead of directly describing the content, he again puts the western side of things in a human light, by starting with the scene of the good American movie producer, Frank Capra, being asked to do his duty and make the film: he first refuses because he hadn’t ever made a documentary before. However, Dower tells us, after being told by Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall that “thousands of young Americans have never had their legs shot off before,” Capra “apologized, and promised ‘the best damned documentary films ever made” (15).
Dower’s discussion of what might be an equivalent expression of institutionalized Manichaeism on the Japanese side has no such human quality. “[I]n August 1941… the [Japanese] Ministry of Education issued a major ideological manifesto entitled The Way of the Subject (Shinmin no Michi)… [which] told the Japanese people who they were, or should aspire to be, as a people, nation, and race” (24). In place of a concerned citizen who decides to make propaganda for his government because of his fellow young Americans having their legs shot off for the first time, we have a faceless institution issuing a major ideological manifesto.
An attempt to reconcile the two sides is worth mentioning as credit to Dower’s analysis, and it follows immediately after “The Japanese … read Western history much the same way that Westerners were reading the History of Japan: as a chronicle of destructive values, exploitative practices, and brutal wars” (24). Wartime Manichaeism makes it easy to attribute such evils entirely to “the enemy.” We know that suffering and horror caused by wars such as this one is universal and that to each side belongs its own responsibility; but the pervasive idea of racism made each side feel that it was justified, and that the other was atrocious.
Another attempt to reconcile the two sides of this war of propagandas comes with discussion of stereotypes which recurred within the propaganda. “[T]hey followed predictable patterns of contrariness, in which each side portrayed the other as it’s polar opposite: as darkness opposed to its own radiant light… [T]he positive self images of one side were side were singled out for ridicule and condemnation by the other” (28). This sort of analysis shows that, while the specifics involved in creating hatred out of fear vary, each “side” goes through the process in a very similar way.
References to other accounts of the pacific war’s history credit Dower’s presentation of events. In the midst of discussion about war time atrocities, we hear of a tribunal in Tokyo at which Justice Radhabinod Pal of India argued that “the clearest example of direct orders to commit ‘indiscriminate murder’ in the war in Asia… may well have been ‘the decision coming from the allied powers to use the atom bomb” (38). While this idea is presented as an opinion separate from that of the author, many readers who have seen pictures of any sort of mushroom cloud will find it to be a powerful argument.
Another person who’s referenced in War Without Mercy’s account also serves to set the reader in an active critical mindset. An extract from Charles Lindbergh’s diary offers another person’s attempt to reconcile the two perspectives, one which (while not necessarily humanizing the Japanese), is critical and perhaps even dehumanizing of the Americans. “’A Japanese soldier who cuts off an American soldier’s head is an Oriental barbarian, ‘lower than a rat,’ …[Charles] observed, whereas ‘an American soldier who slits a Japanese throat ‘did it only because he knew the Japs had done it to his buddies.’” (70). Certainly the Japanese soldier who cut off the American soldier’s head followed the same kind of thinking.
Dower’s attempts to put each side’s specific nuance with respect to the racist propaganda they produced within its cultural context. He shows how American propaganda tried to deny the Japanese of any diversity: “[m]agazines like Time hammered this home even further by frequently referring to ‘the Jap’ rather than ‘Japs,’ thereby denying the enemy even the merest semblance of pluralism” (79). This furthers a process of dehumanization which also included frequent comparisons of the Japanese racial character to that of a monkey. An enemy so dehumanized would not be shown pity, but seen as “’Mad dogs,’… ‘Just insane animals that should be shot.’” (83.)
On the other side of the coin, War Without Mercy notes that while “racism in the west was markedly characterized by denigration of others, the Japanese were preoccupied far more exclusively with elevating themselves” (204). When westerners are denigrated by Japanese propaganda they are often associated with demons, but more likely is propaganda emphasizing “how the ‘Yamato Race’ was unique among the races and cultures of the world, and why this uniqueness made them superior” (205). Dower tells us about how war in the Japanese mind was an act of purification, an idea rooted in the traditional religion of Shinto. He offers four lines from a wartime song called “Companion Cherry Blossoms,” which illustrate this idea quite well:
“You and I, companion cherry blossoms,
Flowered in the garden of the same military school.
Just as the blossoms calmly scatter,
We too are ready to fall for our country” (214).
Whether the tendency is to elevate one’s own or to denigrate the ever-present “Other,” the end result is the merciless perspective of Manichaeism.
Despite the problem of inescapable subjectivity in writing history, or any writing for that matter, Dower is thorough enough to include both sides as best as he can. A reader will hopefully stop at the two section titles “The War in Western Eyes,” and “The War in Japanese Eyes,” and ask the question, “Whose eyes am I seeing the war through now?” Dower’s eyes, and while they are not without a bias, they have seen much on the topic: by the end of War Without Mercy, we are left with a fair idea of why the war was without mercy: because of the racism that each side spread as a response to their fear.
Japan: past + present
Hist 192: Spring 2006
Conflict and context
In the preface to his book, War Without Mercy, John Dower gives us a word which can serve as a sort of keystone for discussion of the horrors of World War II between Japan and the Western Allies in the Pacific: he calls it Manichaean. Another one of those academic words stuck on a shelf, Manichaeism means the dualist black-and-white perspective of a battle between good and evil; one side absolutely right, and the other absolutely wrong. Dower recounts the history from a personal bias, tending to present the American side in a more human way; however he approaches fairness by trying to put each side within its cultural context. The various atrocities described in the book show us that racism in this war was very complete: each side thought it was completely justified for its behavior, on the argument that “the Other” were lesser humans.
There were many reasons why Japan and the United States came to face each other in war: racism, rooted in fear of what is different, was what made it so vicious. This racism and consequently this viciousness entered the war as soon as the Manichaean perspective did. In 1943, the Assembly of Greater East Asiatic Nations convened in Tokyo, where “a succession of Asian leaders voiced support for Japan and placed the war in an East-versus-West, Oriental-versus-Occidental, and ultimately blood-versus-blood context” (6). This idea of absolute east-west struggle was alive on the other side as well. In 1945, President Roosevelt was still afraid of what was being discussed by these eastern leaders two years before. “’1,100,000,000 potential enemies,’ the president told a confidant, ‘are dangerous.’” (7).
We can see into Dower’s bias with how he recounts these two events: his description of the Roosevelt’s encounter with this east-west absolute struggle idea is put into a human context (a president worrying about the racial solidarity of a hostile foreign power), while his description of the Assembly of Greater East Asiatic Nations lacks such a human context. Dower even mentions that Roosevelt’s comments came “a month before he died,” as though to draw the reader’s sympathy (7).
Propaganda was generated on a massive scale by both sides of this conflict, and helped throw fuel upon the fires of this racism. Dower’s discussion of this propaganda, in line with his bias, begins by describing an American example, a film called “Know Your Enemy.” Instead of directly describing the content, he again puts the western side of things in a human light, by starting with the scene of the good American movie producer, Frank Capra, being asked to do his duty and make the film: he first refuses because he hadn’t ever made a documentary before. However, Dower tells us, after being told by Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall that “thousands of young Americans have never had their legs shot off before,” Capra “apologized, and promised ‘the best damned documentary films ever made” (15).
Dower’s discussion of what might be an equivalent expression of institutionalized Manichaeism on the Japanese side has no such human quality. “[I]n August 1941… the [Japanese] Ministry of Education issued a major ideological manifesto entitled The Way of the Subject (Shinmin no Michi)… [which] told the Japanese people who they were, or should aspire to be, as a people, nation, and race” (24). In place of a concerned citizen who decides to make propaganda for his government because of his fellow young Americans having their legs shot off for the first time, we have a faceless institution issuing a major ideological manifesto.
An attempt to reconcile the two sides is worth mentioning as credit to Dower’s analysis, and it follows immediately after “The Japanese … read Western history much the same way that Westerners were reading the History of Japan: as a chronicle of destructive values, exploitative practices, and brutal wars” (24). Wartime Manichaeism makes it easy to attribute such evils entirely to “the enemy.” We know that suffering and horror caused by wars such as this one is universal and that to each side belongs its own responsibility; but the pervasive idea of racism made each side feel that it was justified, and that the other was atrocious.
Another attempt to reconcile the two sides of this war of propagandas comes with discussion of stereotypes which recurred within the propaganda. “[T]hey followed predictable patterns of contrariness, in which each side portrayed the other as it’s polar opposite: as darkness opposed to its own radiant light… [T]he positive self images of one side were side were singled out for ridicule and condemnation by the other” (28). This sort of analysis shows that, while the specifics involved in creating hatred out of fear vary, each “side” goes through the process in a very similar way.
References to other accounts of the pacific war’s history credit Dower’s presentation of events. In the midst of discussion about war time atrocities, we hear of a tribunal in Tokyo at which Justice Radhabinod Pal of India argued that “the clearest example of direct orders to commit ‘indiscriminate murder’ in the war in Asia… may well have been ‘the decision coming from the allied powers to use the atom bomb” (38). While this idea is presented as an opinion separate from that of the author, many readers who have seen pictures of any sort of mushroom cloud will find it to be a powerful argument.
Another person who’s referenced in War Without Mercy’s account also serves to set the reader in an active critical mindset. An extract from Charles Lindbergh’s diary offers another person’s attempt to reconcile the two perspectives, one which (while not necessarily humanizing the Japanese), is critical and perhaps even dehumanizing of the Americans. “’A Japanese soldier who cuts off an American soldier’s head is an Oriental barbarian, ‘lower than a rat,’ …[Charles] observed, whereas ‘an American soldier who slits a Japanese throat ‘did it only because he knew the Japs had done it to his buddies.’” (70). Certainly the Japanese soldier who cut off the American soldier’s head followed the same kind of thinking.
Dower’s attempts to put each side’s specific nuance with respect to the racist propaganda they produced within its cultural context. He shows how American propaganda tried to deny the Japanese of any diversity: “[m]agazines like Time hammered this home even further by frequently referring to ‘the Jap’ rather than ‘Japs,’ thereby denying the enemy even the merest semblance of pluralism” (79). This furthers a process of dehumanization which also included frequent comparisons of the Japanese racial character to that of a monkey. An enemy so dehumanized would not be shown pity, but seen as “’Mad dogs,’… ‘Just insane animals that should be shot.’” (83.)
On the other side of the coin, War Without Mercy notes that while “racism in the west was markedly characterized by denigration of others, the Japanese were preoccupied far more exclusively with elevating themselves” (204). When westerners are denigrated by Japanese propaganda they are often associated with demons, but more likely is propaganda emphasizing “how the ‘Yamato Race’ was unique among the races and cultures of the world, and why this uniqueness made them superior” (205). Dower tells us about how war in the Japanese mind was an act of purification, an idea rooted in the traditional religion of Shinto. He offers four lines from a wartime song called “Companion Cherry Blossoms,” which illustrate this idea quite well:
“You and I, companion cherry blossoms,
Flowered in the garden of the same military school.
Just as the blossoms calmly scatter,
We too are ready to fall for our country” (214).
Whether the tendency is to elevate one’s own or to denigrate the ever-present “Other,” the end result is the merciless perspective of Manichaeism.
Despite the problem of inescapable subjectivity in writing history, or any writing for that matter, Dower is thorough enough to include both sides as best as he can. A reader will hopefully stop at the two section titles “The War in Western Eyes,” and “The War in Japanese Eyes,” and ask the question, “Whose eyes am I seeing the war through now?” Dower’s eyes, and while they are not without a bias, they have seen much on the topic: by the end of War Without Mercy, we are left with a fair idea of why the war was without mercy: because of the racism that each side spread as a response to their fear.
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