Justin Smith reviews Cătălin Avramescu's An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, in n+1:

In July 2008, while travelling on a Greyhound bus between Edmonton and Winnipeg, Vincent Li beheaded his sleeping seatmate, a man he had never met, with a butcher knife. Li held up the head in crazed triumph as the bus screeched to a halt and the other passengers rushed out. He then began to pace back and forth along the aisle, witnesses report, tearing off the ears, gouging out the eyes, pulling out the tongue, and eating them.

This event, as well as Li's recently concluded trial—not guilty by reason of insanity—might serve as an opportunity to take measure of the present state of cannibalism studies, mostly a minor academic industry, though one not without its star performances and its polarizing debates. For a long time, the field was dominated by a curious variety of négationnisme, most famously spelled out by William Arens in his 1980 book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. According to Arens, cannibalism is nothing more than a projection of fear-induced fantasies upon unknown others, and in the past 500 years this projection has served as part of the ideological soundtrack to the European conquest of the rest of the world. As the incident on the Greyhound reminds us, however, sometimes people really do eat people.

The title of the original Romanian version of Cătălin Avramescu's giddy book, Filozoful crud, translates as both “the cruel philosopher” and “the raw philosopher.” “Crude” in the sense of “uncooked” (think of “crudités”) and “cruel” share the same etymology, and in at least one Romance language—the easternmost and most obscure, yet in some sense also the purest, because the closest to Latin—these two meanings remain packed into one and the same word. In what sense, now, could a philosopher be both “cruel” and “raw”? Does Avramescu want to say that philosophers have somehow been both the perpetrators and the victims of anthropophagy?

This interview aired on Arte is on YouTube in 7 parts; here is the first part. The subtitles have been provided by the YouTube community. Not all the parts have been subtitled; the poster of the videos is asking for assistance in translating the remainder of the videos.

Horacio Castellanos Moya in Guernica:

I had told myself I wasn’t going to say or write anything more about Roberto Bolaño. The subject has been squeezed dry these last two years, above all in the North American press, and I told myself that there was already enough drunkenness. But here I am writing about him again, like a vicious old man, like the alcoholic who promises that this will be the last drink of his life and who, the next morning, swears that he will only have one more to cure his hangover. The blame for my relapse goes to my friend Sarah Pollack, who sent me her insightful academic essay on the construction of the “Bolaño myth” in the United States. Sarah is a professor at The City University New York and her text “Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in the United States” was published in the summer issue of the journal Comparative Literature.

Albert Fianelli, an Italian fellow journalist, parodies a quote often attributed to Herman Goering and says that every time someone mentions the word “market,” he reaches for his revolver. I’m not so extreme, but neither do I believe the story that the market is some kind of deity that moves on its own according to mysterious laws. The market has its landlords, like everything on this infected planet, and it’s the landlords of the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether it’s selling cheap condoms or Latin American novels in the U.S. I say this because the central idea of Pollack’s work is that behind the construction of the Bolaño myth was not only a publisher’s marketing operation but also a redefinition of the image of Latin American culture and literature that the North American cultural establishment is now selling to the public.

Estelle Shirbon in Reuters:

French intellectual Claude Levi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology, has died at the age of 100, his publishing house Plon said on Tuesday.

Levi-Strauss, who was known to a wider public thanks to his 1955 memoir and masterpiece, “Tristes Tropiques,” died on Saturday. He would have turned 101 on November 28.

“He was France's greatest scientist,” said writer Jean d'Ormesson, fellow member of the Academie Francaise which brings together the elite of the country's intellectual establishment.

A brilliant student who excelled at geology, law and philosophy, Levi-Strauss was posted to Brazil as a professor in 1935. It was there that he found his vocation for anthropology.

He conducted several expeditions into remote areas of the Amazon rainforest and the Mato Grosso to study the customs of local tribes, starting to develop theories and methods that would later have a profound impact on his field.

He returned to France and was drafted into the French army at the start of World War Two. After the defeat of France by the Nazis, he realized that being Jewish had now become dangerous and he moved to the United States until 1944.

Over the following years, he held a number of prestigious scientific posts in Paris and New York and started to churn out his influential scientific volumes.

In particular, he used tribal customs and myths to show that human behavior is based on logical systems which may vary from society to society, but possess a common sub-structure.

These findings, which challenged the notion that Western European culture was somehow unique or superior, resonated with the ideas of opponents of colonialism and Levi-Strauss gained a following beyond the circle of professional anthropologists.

When the economy sours, news anchors talk of housing and manufacturing, of hedge funds and barrels of oil. They generally don’t discuss the lives of artists, and how their careers are crushed into a dull oblivion. If artists survive the fiscal and emotional shakedown, they steady themselves as adjuncts in the Midwest, they design for architectural firms. They take corporate commissions and they sit on city planning boards. They might show again, but this time in coffee shops or farmers’ markets. Artists fade, but they don’t disappear. Not the way Ford Beckman disappeared, at least. Beckman enjoyed heights few artists attain, and then no one in the art world could find him. When Beckman’s name surfaced at showings, it was met with shoulder shrugs. Dealers scanned floors, looking for Beckman’s trademark velvet slippers, which he wore to exhibitions. They’d heard about financial issues, but they knew him as a man of resources. Where, they wondered, was Ford Beckman? Beckman, now fifty-six, has been hiding in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, until recently, he has been serving donuts for seven dollars an hour. A look into his eyes will tell you what you already know: there isn’t a more punishing zero than the sugary naught of a Krispy Kreme Hot Original Glazed. And yet Beckman is emerging, and doing so in one of the worst economic climates of our times. It’s a move that he feels particularly prepared to undertake.

more from Michael Paul Mason at The Believer here.

Dubner and Levitt are at it again, marshalling the forces of data to trouble the conventional wisdom and dethrone the experts. In their new book, “SuperFreakonomics,” they argue that walking drunk is more dangerous than driving drunk, that a doctor’s skill doesn’t matter very much, and that prostitution makes poor women better off. But the book’s biggest provocation comes in its last chapter, on climate change. And it has ensured that, unlike the last time around, the new book is being greeted with as much outrage as curiosity. The “SuperFreakonomics” treatment of climate change, critics charge, is a hodgepodge of unfounded and occasionally contradictory claims. Time and again, the critics say, Dubner and Levitt raise provocative, if unoriginal, arguments only to move on to the next provocation without bothering to mention substantial, even overwhelming, evidence to the contrary. Among other things, readers are told that solar power contributes to global warming, that the climate models that predict warming have all been doctored to achieve matching results, and that carbon dioxide does not “necessarily” warm the earth and may have had little to do with recent warming trends – all arguments that the majority of climate scientists reject as wrong.

more from Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe here.

The monsters have no historical antecedents. They’re clearly not animals, and they’re not the caricaturization of a person. They sit, instead, as the third point of a triangulation — not between humans and animals, but equidistant from the two. They’re clearly meant to invoke something of our environment: the Philadelphia Phillie’s Web site lists the Phanatic’s birthplace as the Galapagos Islands — a place whose name evokes rich ideas of life and biology and evolution — and not some place as fanciful as the Phanatic itself. It’s interesting to see the role the Phanatic plays. He has an animal-like innocence that gives him a pass for stealing cotton candy or ribbing Jack Nicholson or dressing in drag and seducing an umpire. Yet he’s also an asshole. He mines guy-on-guy attraction for laughs. He steals. He famously mocked Los Angeles Dodgers coach Tommy Lasorda so incessantly that the latter finally erupted at a 1988 game and “body slammed” the Phanatic.

more from Jesse Smith at The Smart Set here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Kierkegaard was a dissembler and a clown. He had a Christ complex and a club foot. He looked great in an overcoat with a turned-up collar. Much of his adult life was spent mentally obsessing over a woman. Catullus had his Lesbia. Dante had his Beatrice. Petrarch had his Laura. Kierkegaard had his Regine. She appears in some form or another in all of his writing. The reader can be forgiven for not recognizing Regine as Isaac in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, but that's the way Kierkegaard saw her.

By all accounts, Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen were genuinely in love. The two were affianced in 1840. But by 1841, Kierkegaard had decided to call it off. Thus begins the great mystery of his life. Why did Kierkegaard choose pain and despair over happiness? The answer, I'm sorry to tell you, is the complete works of Søren Kierkegaard.

Still, we'll try to tease out a few key talking points. Central to the story is faith. Some think of faith as a simple matter — you have it or you don't. For these people, further inquiry is unnecessary. Faith is not accessible to reason. Kierkegaard agrees, a little bit. He never thought that faith could be understood through logic or rational thought. Faith, for him, had to have an element of the absurd or it wouldn't be something special, something outside the normal rules. But he did not think of faith as simple. He saw it as the hardest thing, the greatest challenge, the center of the grand torture we call life. He once said, “If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.”

More here.

After Love

Afterwards, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept

by Maxine Kumin

from No More Masks!; Anchor Books, 1973

From The Washington Post:

Like Native Americans, European Jews and Rwandan Tutsis, Turkish Armenians seem to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Children of Armenia,” Michael Bobelian's first book, describes the Ottoman Empire's 1915 mass extermination of this Christian minority without getting bogged down in “G-word” histrionics. “The purpose of this book is neither to prove the existence nor affirm the veracity of the Genocide,” Bobelian writes: The Armenian holocaust is a historical fact.

“Children of Armenia” focuses on the Turkish nationalism, world war weariness, survivor psychology and Cold War squabbling that let the world forget the unforgettable. Some will flinch at Bobelian's lionization of Gourgen Yanikian, an Armenian who shot two Turks in a revenge plot hatched in the 1970s, but the author stumbles only when he strays into Armenian exceptionalism, the idea that “no other people have suffered such a warped fate — a trivialization of their suffering and a prolonged assault on the authenticity of their experience.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

Could adults gossiping in the office be more devious than the teenagers in “Gossip Girl”? If you have a hard time believing this, then you must have skipped the latest issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Perhaps you saw “ethnography” and assumed it would just be quaint reports from the Amazon and the South Seas. But this time enthnographers have returned from the field with footage of a truly savage native ritual: teachers at an elementary school in the Midwest dishing about their principal behind her back. These are rare records of “gossip episodes,” which have been the subject of a long-running theoretical debate among anthropologists and sociologists. One side, the functionalist school, sees gossip as a useful tool for enforcing social rules and maintaining group solidarity. The other school sees gossip more as a hostile endeavor by individuals selfishly trying to advance their own interests.

But both schools have spent more time theorizing than observing gossipers in their natural habitats. Until now, their flow charts of gossips’ conversations (where would social science be without flow charts?) have been largely based on studies in informal settings, like the casual conversations recorded in a German housing project and in the cafeteria of an American middle school.

More here.

Edward Burtynsky. Alberta Oil Sands # 6, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007.

Digital chromogenic print.

More here and here.

Pow'r

By L. S. McKee

The first time I attended my father’s church, I was mortified, standing among my siblings, to realize we would be singing hymns without accompaniment: the sole piano player had defected to another church before my father’s arrival. With barely over a dozen members in the congregation, you couldn’t get away with mouthing the words. And trying to sing loudly enough to prove you have neither a heathen’s irreverence – though you are your very own, grown-up kind of heathen, singing out of respect for your parents’ belief – nor a tin ear while trying to keep your neighbors from hearing the cracks in your voice is akin be being strangled. Or slowly drowning. The necessary ratios of open throat to closed throat, of sound release to sound blockage, are tricky. Sure, it sounds pornographic, but anyone who has reluctantly joined in on the joys of communal singing knows it’s the truth. Your heart rate accelerates equally from oxygen deprivation as congregational stage fright. All this to say, trying to maintain privacy while singing in church is difficult enough without a conspicuously absent piano and twelve good country people singing acapella.

Read more »

Hans Kundnani in the TLS:

It has long been known that tensions existed between Thatcher and the Foreign Office, including her Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd. To coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the FCO has published a set of documents from its and the Cabinet Office’s archives that would normally have been released under the thirty-year rule. They illustrate the full extent of those tensions for the first time.

Although Britain had a long-standing commitment to German unity through self-determination, which Thatcher had herself reiterated in 1985, some mandarins appear to have had views on Germany that were not so different from the Prime Minister’s. The collection opens with a note from Sir Christopher Mallaby, the British ambassador in Bonn, which is almost Thatcherite in its analysis of German pathology (the Germans, he says, are “always yearning for something”). But during the course of 1989, the FCO became increasingly concerned about the possible effect of Thatcher’s reaction to events in East Germany on relations with Britain’s other allies. Sir Patrick Wright, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State in the FCO, worries at one point that “the Prime Minister’s views, if they became known, would raise eyebrows (at least) both in Germany and in the United States”. On November 10, Wright cautions Stephen Wall, Hurd’s Private Secretary, that Thatcher might be feeling “under siege” from her advisers.

The documents illustrate how quickly events in East Germany began to move after November 9. On November 27, Mallaby describes how the theme of reunification, “though still shunned by Kohl and [Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich] Genscher, is becoming more prominent in political debate”, and says a growing number of Germans believe that it will take place within ten years. The following morning, his counterpart in East Berlin, Nigel Broomfield, reports to Hurd that a growing number of East Germans are now demanding immediate reunification. Later that day, Kohl announced his Ten-Point Plan in the Bundestag without consulting the British beforehand. Mallaby sends Hurd another telegram at the end of the day after finally being briefed by Kohl’s adviser Horst Teltschik, who has told Mallaby that even Kohl’s plan “could be overtaken by other views before long”. So it proved.

An interview with Eszter Hargittai, editor of Research Confidential, in Inside Higher Ed:

For social scientists starting their careers, creating research models that work is crucial. A new book suggests that they may be unaware of problems they face in part because scholars don't share stories of what didn't work on their projects, and how to deal with particular challenges. Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have has just been published by the University of Michigan Press. The essays in the collection are all by younger scholars, including the volume's editor, Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and a career advice columnist for Inside Higher Ed. Hargittai responded to questions about the book.

Q: I was struck by the part of your subtitle where you say “pretend they never have.” Why do you think social scientists don't recognize or hide from problems with their research methods?

A: This title refers less to what social scientists recognize and more to what shows up in the final write-up of their projects. When one reads journal articles, the methodological sections tend to make the projects sound rather straight-forward. In books, details about methods are usually relegated to an appendix, at best, and do not tell the reader the reality of data collection. Instead, they are pretty, cleaned-up versions of what happened. For example, they will include the number of final interviews the researcher conducted, but they won't include details about how many attempts it took to get a person to come to an interview.

It is certainly the case that such detailed descriptions may be out of place in some such write-ups, but the problem is that then readers do not realize the true complexities involved with the process. For example, students will not understand what amount of effort went into securing all of the interviews and how much frustration was associated with last-minute cancellations and other hurdles that may have come up. Similarly, journal articles don't tend to explain that it took IRB three times as long to approve a project than expected and thus everything was delayed. Again, that information may not be useful for the final write-up of results, but without seeing such details, it is hard for new scholars to recognize that they are indeed the reality of actual research and must be accounted for in planning new projects. This probably contributes to why so many people — both students and faculty — underestimate the length of time any project will take.

In another vein, I also think some social scientists encounter fewer problems, because they compromise the quality of their research.

Michelle Goldberg in The American Prospect:

Women for Afghan Women (WAW), a nongovernmental organization that runs women’s shelters, schools, and counseling centers in three cities in Afghanistan, has watched with alarm as American opinion has turned against the occupation. An American withdrawal, its board members say, would be catastrophic for the women they work with. “Every woman who we have talked to in Afghanistan, all the Afghan women in the NGOs, in the government, say the United States and the peacekeeping troops and NATO must stay, they must not leave until the Afghan army is able to take over,” says Esther Hyneman, a WAW board member who recently returned from six months in Kabul.

In fact WAW, which has over 100 staffers in Afghanistan and four in New York, is, with some reluctance, calling for a troop increase. “Women for Afghan Women deeply regrets having a position in favor of maintaining, even increasing troops,” it said in a recent statement. “We are not advocates for war, and conditions did not have to reach this dire point, but we believe that withdrawing troops means abandoning 15 million women and children to madmen who will sacrifice them to their lust for power.”

There is a growing consensus among both progressives and a few realist-minded conservatives that the Afghan war is futile. Today’s Washington Post reports on Matthew Hoh, a State Department official who, after serving in Afghanistan, resigned to protest the continuation of the war. “I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote in a letter to the department’s head of personnel. With such sentiments spreading, one of the few remaining rationales for maintaining the occupation is that it’s the only way to protect Afghan women against the return of the Taliban. But does it make sense to perpetuate America’s presence in Afghanistan on feminist grounds?

Speaking of More Intelligent Life, an interview with the editor in The Morning News:

TMN: What’s it like to edit the online version of a magazine as opposed to the print product, in terms of behind-the-scenes?

EB: The cycle of editing a print product is distinct: slow beginnings, procrastination-friendly middles, bursts of pre-deadline activity, followed by a satisfying catharsis. Wash, rinse, repeat. Online, things are a bit different. The grind is daily and less rigid. We have a new story up on the site every day and an active blog; writers submit their work, which I then turn around, add graphics, and publish on the site (with help from an assistant editor and a contributing editor in New York). The effect is more like a churn—there are always more pieces than time. Catharsis is elusive.

I recently edited The Economist’s Books and Arts section for a couple of weeks, and I was surprised by how different it felt. The experience was much more collaborative, less isolated. Publication plans are announced at a big meeting; editing is compressed into a couple of days (with notes and feedback from the editor-in-chief); pages are created with help from people in graphics and art direction; stories are cut for space; and then—bam!—a physical product is born into the world. After years of online editing, the work of making pages was disconcertingly satisfying. What a pity no one wants to pay for print anymore.

TMN: Is the condition of print media as dire as everyone says?

EB: Of course it is. When was the last time you bought a newspaper? What was the last magazine subscription you shelled out for? We know information is valuable, and some of the hardest to acquire (war coverage, investigative studies) is also the most expensive to pay for. We learned in the last year that print advertising is too vulnerable to comfortably cover such costs. What we haven’t learned yet is just how publishers plan to pay for print journalism going forward, now that we all feel entitled to have our news instantaneously and for free.

Salma Abdelnour in More Intelligent Life:

High in protein, low in fat, delicious, ubiquitous: why not eat bugs? A unique gourmet meal has Salma Abdelnour reconsidering her insectophobia …

New York City may be less bug-ridden than swampier towns to the south, but it still presents challenges for the insectophobe. Multi-legged critters large and small find their way into every kind of residential space (skyscrapers are no less vulnerable). Vanquishing them might involve anything from an army of exterminators to a late-night call to an ex, Annie Hall-style. But on a recent night in Brooklyn, two dozen New Yorkers with varying degrees of insectophobia gathered to face down the creatures in an altogether unusual way.

Marc Dennis, a local artist, had invited guests to a dinner party in an enormous loft space with spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline in the industrial-chic Dumbo neighbourhood. This being Dennis, who recently launched InsectsAreFood.com and whose crisply detailed paintings of bugs have been acclaimed in Town and Country magazine and the Chicago Tribune, the dinner had a very specific theme.

Around 7pm, as his guests began to arrive, Dennis stood behind the counter in the gleaming stainless-steel open kitchen and removed a few dozen Thai Jing Leed crickets from a bowl of Lapsang Souchong tea, where they had been soaking for nearly an hour. He then piled them on a pan to roast in the oven (pictured); meanwhile, on another tray, he laid out neat rows of roasted bamboo worms, then began chopping yellow, red, and green bell peppers into a colourful stack.