Used by kind permission of Jack Murray / rappersdelight532@yahoo.co.uk.Humans have been expressing themselves on stone for over 30,000 years [1], but while Palaeolithic rock art is held in awe, and ‘historic’ graffiti subjected to extensive academic study [2], contemporary ‘writing on walls’ is of more ambiguous cultural status. Despite the high prices reached by a handful of cross-over ‘star’ urban artists like Banksy [3] the niche in which graffiti art is accommodated in the UK is a narrow one, as ably demonstrated by the following turf war over territorial claim to the expansive jagged grey rock faces of a former North Wales slate quarry.In October 2012 a passage in a short on-line profile of Jack Murray, “one of the key figures in the UK graffiti scene over the last decade,” was spotted by members of the rock climbing community. The profile, featured in a street art culture blog site Better Never Than Late [4], lauded Murray’s reputation for “consistently pushing his distinct style of work both on and off the streets into innovative new spaces” and reported his recent trip to the former Dinorwig slate quarry at Llanberis thus:“Day 1. I went on a trip with a couple of other chaps to Snowdonia in North Wales to seek out an abandoned, mountain slate quarry, that was closed over 50 years ago. We found it, and it was definitely worth the 6 hour drive. A vast network of old tunnels, metal structures, workers huts, gravel pits and waterfalls looping through the side of a mountain is the best way to describe it. I brought some paint with me and dropped a little something at the highest point we got to. In the future I want to go back and paint site specific, 20ft plus, murals on some of the rock faces in the old quarry pits. Some people will cry and say I’ve spoiled the place and others will say it’s amazing but that’s just life.” [Read the rest of the article]: No rock art here!Author informationLuke BennettSenior Lecturer, Sheffield Hallam UniversityIn 2007, after 17 years in commercial practice as an environmental lawyer, Luke switched to an academic position at SHU. Key projects include research into metal theft; the afterlife of abandoned military bunkers and owners and climbers’ perceptions of safety and liability for access to abandoned quarries (a project he's working on in collaboration with the British Mountaineering Council).Original article: No rock art here!©2013 PopAnth - Hot Buttered Humanity. All Rights Reserved.

Sociologist William Graham Sumner was an outspoken critical of American imperialism in the Spanish American War by William Graham Sumner (1903) Can peace be universal? There is no reason to believe it. It is a fallacy to suppose that by widening the peace-group more and more it can at last embrace all mankind. What happens is that, as it grows bigger, differences, discords, antagonisms, and war begin inside of it on account of the divergence of interests. Since evil passions are a part of human nature and are in all societies all the time, a part of the energy of the society is constantly spent in repressing them. If all nations should resolve to have no armed ships any more, pirates would reappear upon the ocean; the police of the seas must be maintained. We could not dispense with our militia; we have too frequent need of it now. But police defense is not war in the sense in which I have been discussing it. War, in the future will be the clash of policies of national vanity and selfishness when they cross each other’s path. If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject, because doctrines get inside of a man’s own reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines. The reconquest of the Holy Sepulcher, “the balance of power,” “no universal dominion,” “trade follows the flag,” “he who holds the land will hold the sea,” “the throne and the altar,” the revolution, the faith — these are the things for which men have given their lives. What are they all? Nothing but rhetoric and phantasms. Doctrines are always vague; it would ruin a doctrine to define it, because then it could be analyzed, tested, criticised, and verified; but nothing ought to be tolerated which cannot be so tested. (more…)

Reblogged from the Connected Learning Research Network It has been almost a year since the release of the connected learning principles in March 2012 on connectedlearning.tv. For those of us who are part of the Connected Learning Research Network, this has been a year of digging into our research agenda for connected learning, and testing our hypotheses with ethnographic case studies, design experiments, and the deployment of a national survey. In tandem with these new research activities, we have also been involved in the collaborative writing of a report which synthesizes what we see as the current state of theory and empirical research underlying the connected learning model. We are very pleased to announce the publication of the report as a freely-available pdf. The report is also the first in a new Connected Learning Report series, edited by Ellen Seiter. The connected learning principles were developed as a collaborative endeavor, cutting across research and practice, coordinated by the Digital Media and Learning Initiative. The research report represents the effort of our network to develop a research program tuned to these principles. As a model of learning, connected learning emerges from a wide range of existing research and practice, and is a work in progress, requiring ongoing refinement and testing through research and experimentation. It is both evidence-driven and visionary in its aspirations, and research plays a central role in its ongoing development. It has been quite a learning journey pulling together this report with a group of interdisciplinary scholars and with the support of our network advisors and the team at the DML Hub. Our research network meets four times a year, and for two years, the writing of the report became a focal object for us to learn from our varied perspectives and expertise, and hash out our differences and disagreements. I have survived more than my share of collaborative writing projects, some much heftier than this report, but the depth of engagement, stretching, and learning that I had to do for this synthesis eclipsed my prior collaborative writing efforts to date. We were working across vast differences in methodology (humanistic, clinical, design-based, qualitative, and quantitative), disciplines (psychology, sociology, anthropology, learning sciences, communications, design), in addition to being physically dispersed and all having demanding day jobs. Though not without compromises, I am proud of the fact that the debates, epiphanies,and give-and-take between the nine authors resulted in greater refinement and clarity about our common ground, rather than a watered-down consensus document. The integration of a socio-economic framework with educational research and design represents what I believe is a unique synthesis that mirrors the cross-sector model of connected learning and both a macro and micro learning agenda. Unless we keep in view broader questions of equity and the quality of our shared culture and civic institutions, learning techniques and approaches more often than not reproduce existing structural inequity. Put differently, a learning agenda needs to be part of a social change agenda, a commitment deeply shared by all the report authors. As we stress in the report, the connected learning model builds on a robust body of existing research and practice, and we see the work of the network as one component of this broader conversation and growing evidence base. The writing captures a moment in time in our shared understandings; understandings that we hope and expect will evolve as the model gets tested, challenged, and reworked. The report represents the starting hypotheses that will guide the research of the network in the years to come, and we hope will provide a sounding board for a broader conversation around connected learning.

U.S. News In the early months of his second term, President Obama plans to swiftly seek a path to citizenship for most of the country’s undocumented population as part of a comprehensive bill overhauling the immigration system. The Obama administration will soon introduce a waiver that can lift the 10-year bar on reentry into the [...]

Post-election reporting that 79 percent of white evangelicals voted for Mitt Romney got little attention in the news because most journalists thought it wasn’t news. Evangelical support for the GOP has been consistent; even Romney’s Mormonism didn’t put them off. So election analysis approached white evangelicals as it usually has: as religio-political lemmings, all voting Republican for all the same reasons. Yet where there was once the appearance of a monovocal evangelicalism there is now robust polyphony—what theologian Scot McKnight calls “the biggest change in the evangelical movement at the end of the twentieth century, a new kind of Christian social conscience.” This deserves our attention because most politics does not happen at elections but in between, when policy is negotiated and implemented. Current shifts in evangelical activism have re-routed the flow of evangelical money, time, and energy, and are changing the demands on the US political system. This essay investigating the shift is based on seven years of field research in evangelical books, articles, newsletters, sermons, and blogs, and on interviews with evangelicals, ages 19 to 74, across geographic and demographic groups—from students in Illinois to retired firemen from Mississippi, from former bikers to professors and political consultants (see The New Evangelicals: Expanding The Vision Of The Common Good). For the purposes of this essay, American evangelicalism is an approach to Protestantism across denominations, its central features including: the search for a renewal of faith toward an “inner” personal relationship with Jesus; the mission to bring others to this sort of personal relationship; the cross as a symbol of not only salvation but also of service to others; individual acceptance of Jesus’ gift of redemption; individualist Bible reading by ordinary men and women; and the priesthood of all believers independent of ecclesiastical or state authorities. It was a progressive movement from the colonial era to World War One. Its emphasis on individual conscience made it anti-elitist, anti-authoritarian, economically populist, and socially activist on behalf of the common man. Twice in the twentieth century, evangelicals turned to the right, the second time in the late 1970s, when they became a central pillar in the modern conservative movement. But recent trends point to another political transformation within this community—to those evangelicals who have left the right, moving toward an anti-militarist, anti-consumerist focus on poverty relief, environmental protection, and immigration reform, and on coalition-building and more issue-by-issue policy assessment (more Democrat on environment, for instance, and more Republican on abortion). While the religious right remains robust, in 2005 Christianity Today lambasted evangelicals for conflating the gospel with American or Republican policy, writing, “George W. Bush is not Lord… The American flag is not the Cross. The Pledge of Allegiance is not the Creed. ‘God Bless America’ is not Doxology.” In 2006, the Evangelical Environmental Network/Call to Action, launched its “What would Jesus drive?” campaign for greater fuel efficiency. In 2007, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) issued its “Evangelical Declaration against Torture.” Since 2009, the NAE has repeatedly protested against Republican budget cuts for the needy, for instance writing, “this is the wrong place to cut.” These “new evangelicals,” as Richard Cizik, head of The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, calls them, are neither small in number nor elite. By 2004, devout Christians whose activism differs from that of the religious right came to 24 percent of the US population. Subtract Catholics, and we find that 19 percent or so of devout Protestants do not identify as religious right. Devout Christians whose activism differs from that of the religious right (% of US population). Source: Assessing a More Prominent ‘Religious Left.’ Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life (June 5, 2008). Four factors were decisive in this shift. The first is generational, with idealistic younger evangelicals rejecting the in-group-ism and Prosperity Gospel politics of their parents. They are, as then-AP religion writer Eric Gorski found, “even more anti-abortion than their elders” on ethical grounds, “but also keenly interested in the environment and poverty.” Second are cultural changes since the 1960s. Attitudinal shifts—about the environment, global connectedness, and poverty—have proceeded not at the radical fringe but in Middle America, and priorities there, including among evangelicals, have shifted. Third is ethics amid a group that takes ethics seriously. The militarism and torture of the Bush years and the consumerism and in-group-ism of the last forty years prodded many evangelicals to self-examination. In their book, Unchristian, evangelicals David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons title their chapters Hypocritical, Sheltered, Too Political, Judgmental, and Antihomosexual, giving some idea of the self-critique underway. A fourth reason is the de-professionalization of service work. As growing numbers of ordinary Christians began to live and serve among the poor, their priorities moved toward economic justice and environmental protection. One key feature of “new evangelicals” is their embrace of church-state separation in order to ensure fair government and religious freedom for all, including Muslims. As the Evangelical Manifesto (2008) declares: “Let it be known unequivocally that we are committed to religious liberty for people of all faiths… We are firmly opposed to the imposition of theocracy on our pluralistic society.” This document was signed by over 70 evangelical leaders, including the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Leith Anderson, and Mark Bailey, president of the Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas. A second key feature is self-identification as a critic of government when they believe government to be unjust. This is the “prophetic role” of the church—not to be government but to “speak truth to power.” And it requires party independence. In 2006, Frank Page, then president of the conservative Southern Baptist Convention, warned, “I have cautioned our denomination to be very careful not to be seen as in lock step with any political party.” The 2008 Manifesto, too, called on evangelicals to distance themselves from party politics, lest “Christians become ‘useful idiots’ for one political party or another.” A third feature is self-identification as civil society actors (neither state actors nor “bubble communities”) who advocate for their positions through public education, lobbying, coalition-building, and negotiation. Indeed, “new evangelicals” are often engaged more than other citizens in the economic, social, and charitable spheres of American life through the programs they develop. These are run largely by volunteers who also raise much of the programs’ funds. As one Midwestern pastor explained, “If healing the brokenhearted, setting the captives free, and ministering to the poor was Jesus’ job description, then we believe it is ours as well (Interview with the author, May 1, 2009; September 25, 2010). These programs are not only giving alms, but are also seeking to restructure opportunity—in education, health care and clean air and water. Evangelicals do this first within the church. An example would be the over 200,000 Christians who contribute to a pool that covers members’ medical bills, handling over $12 million in medical expenses a year. Reaching outside the church, evangelicals alter their business practices toward economic justice. An example would be the Pasco, Washington fruit farmer who puts 50-75 percent of her profits into development projects in the US and abroad. For her employees she built a residential community and set up ESL, GED, and computer courses, parenting training, youth programs, counseling services, preschool and elementary school, and a college scholarship program. “New evangelicals” also use their own monies to redistribute resources in less developed regions. Examples include the educational, substance abuse, homeless, environmental protection, and micro-credit programs that are run not only by large organizations like World Vision, whose micro-credit program supports over 440,000 projects in forty-six developing countries, but by volunteers in local churches. One church in my study spends $1.5 million a year on economic justice and aid programs. Another runs an impressive free health clinic locally and raised $66,000 to build a training center in a Zambian village, plus $100,000 for yet another project. In their overseas endeavors, these evangelicals are developing a nuanced critique of the “Bibles for bacon” school of evangelizing, where participation in religious activities was a condition of aid. This is unacceptable not least because when Jesus served, he did not ask people “to sign on the bottom line,” according to John Ashmen, head of the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions (Interview with the author, December 22, 2010). One head of a church overseas mission said, “We tend to everyone—Muslim, Jewish.” If people want to know why his church is digging a well or building a school, he’ll tell them. Perhaps something about his faith will interest them. If not, “I’ve dug thirty foot water wells with guys who didn’t believe what I do, and I love those guys. If God wants to use me to change their belief, that’s fine. If not, then heck, we dug a well” (Interview with the author, May 1, 2009). “New evangelicals” also oppose anti-gay discrimination in housing, education, and non-religious employment. They note that while some consider homosexuality a sin, a matter between man and God, democracies do not punish people for sins, which after all vary across faiths. Moreover, the state does not rescind civil rights for the commission of other sins, such as heterosexual adultery—why should it then for homosexuality? They note also that judging the sins of others is unchristian.  A joint evangelical-Catholic Washington Post OpEd protesting Uganda’s draconian anti-gay legislation declared, “any effort to persecute people for their sexual orientation or gender identity offends intrinsic human dignity and violates Jesus’s commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.… The entire Judeo-Christian worldview is built on this unshakable foundation.” While 74 percent of white evangelicals oppose gay marriage, opposition to gay civil unions is decreasing: at 57 percent in 2009 and dropping; and less than a majority—41 percent—of evangelicals who attend church less than once a week oppose. In 2011, evangelical Belmont University amended its anti-discrimination policy to include homosexuals, and recognized its first gay student organization. That same month, the student newspaper at Westmont College ran an open letter signed by 131 gay and gay-friendly alumni in support of gay students. Alumni at the influential Wheaton College have a Facebook page in support of gay students. While 60 percent of white evangelicals opposed abortion in 2012, 34 percent believed it should be legal in all or most cases. Noting that 73 percent of US abortions are economically motivated, “new evangelicals” aim to provide accessible, realistic alternatives, including medical, financial, and emotional support during pregnancy along with day care and job training post-partum, where needed. Especially effective programs include pairing a pregnant woman with a local family to serve as her “family” and help out as needed, for instance, driving the child to day care when the new mother’s car has a flat tire so that she can get to work and not lose her job. Midwestern megachurch pastor Greg Boyd explained, “A person could vote for a candidate who is not ‘pro life’ but who will help the economy and the poor. Yet this may be the best way to curb the abortion rate” (Interview with the author, May 4, 2009). “New evangelicals” note that there is no reason why they should not join with others, including feminists, in developing these programs. “I am decidedly pro-life,” southern megachurch pastor Joel Hunter says. “But by working together instead of arguing, both sides can get what they want.” Though GOP policies are often at odds with “new evangelical” activism, the “new evangelical” vote remains largely Republican in part because of reluctance to back a party that supports legal abortion. In greater part, however, it is a vote for small government. This is a preference that evangelicals came to through doctrine and history, beginning with the Protestant and evangelical emphasis on self-responsible striving for moral uplift. While this originally meant striving toward the divine, striving became a muscle well-exercised and applied to many arenas of life, including the political and economic. Striving was further underscored for dissenting (evangelical) Protestants, who became determinedly self-reliant in order to survive the oppression and marginalization by Europe’s states and state churches. These qualities—a preference for individual and community self-responsibility on one hand, and the dissenter’s suspicion of authorities on the other—interacted synergistically with the rough nature of American settlement, where one could not rely on authorities or the state because there was little of either. Because of evangelicalism’s formative influence on American culture, these elements remain broadly influential even today. The American political imaginary is one of voluntary associationism and suspicion of central government. In spite of the Great Recession, support for a governmental safety net is down 18 points since 2007. For evangelicals, this is even more the case. If they are generally wary of the state, Obama’s use of government programs to address recent economic crises further inflamed their mistrust. To be sure, the 2008 election saw an uptick in evangelicals supporting the Democratic Party: two evangelical ministers—Joel Hunter and Tony Campolo—helped write the 2008 Democrat party platform; Leah Daughtry, an evangelical minister, served as CEO of the 2008 Democratic National Convention Committee; and evangelical PACs like the Matthew 25 Network were set up to support Obama. Kirbyjon Caldwell, the influential Houston pastor, gave his support to Obama, though he had given the benediction at both of Bush’s presidential inaugurations and presided at the wedding of Bush’s daughter in May, 2008. Wilfredo De Jesús, pastor at New Life Covenant church in Chicago and staunch opponent of abortion and gay marriage, supported a Democrat, Obama, for the first time in his life. But while these gestures of support translated into an increase in evangelicals voting Democrat—a third of white evangelicals under 40; 26 percent of older white evangelicals; 36 percent of the less observant—a mass turn to the Democrats is at present unlikely owing to small-government-ism and opposition to abortion. What raises more serious questions, however, is the 65 percent of evangelicals ages 18-30 who favor more governmental aid to the needy, including Obamacare. These questions may endure, with implications for the political future, as coming-of-age politics has life-long effects. White evangelicals, because of their small-government-ism, are often seen as un-modern and unequipped to deal with today’s economic and geo-political complexities. It is an ironic view, as their extensive social service work has made many of them sophisticated in their understanding of economic, environmental, medical, and migration issues, including the relations among poverty, soil erosion, rapes of girls out alone searching for potable water, AIDS, and migration. It is also worth noting that evangelicals do not call only for smaller government, but for a more robust civil society; not only for an absence (of central government), but also for our energetic presence.

I do not have many words to add to the multiple that are already out there. What I do have to say is that about a year ago I was protesting SOPA with the rest of you. It was one of those things those of us who care so deeply about freedom and the Internet did in hopes that it would actually bring about change. Internet and Information freedom are near and dear to my heart. My entire Masters research was on FOSS / Fedora. I’ve posted on this blog about many of the things that are threats to this freedom including cyber bullying, censorship, and net neutrality. Though I have a few papers floating around on the Internet, you will not find any of them in a journal much to the dismay of many of you who have contacted me for copies and citations. Why? Because I refuse to have my research (especially that which I do of my own free will and with no outside funding) published in a journal that cannot be accessed by the public, even if this hurts me academically. I am not the only one that has a problem with the journal system and there are a few journals out there that have rose up against the status quo. There are also a few people who have taken a stand against the privatization of publicly funded information. Aaron Swartz was one such person. While he should be remembered for the many awesome things he did for Internet and Information Freedom, it is the ending of his life over the weekend that is being talked about today. All I can say is the world, especially those of us who feel the same way he did, lost a great mind and advocate. He has been an inspiration to many of us, and he will only continue to do so. It will be interesting now to see how he has changed the world through the ending of his own. I am just an academic and a wanna-be hacker, but I will always do what I can to fight many of the same fights he did. In the words of famed anthropologist Margaret Mead: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. How are you changing the world today? P.S. If you are reading this through an RSS feed – thank Aaron…

This came in yesterday and took me by surprise.  Though I have to say I always suspected that I might have some connection to the Uncertain people.  Then again, I thought, maybe not.  But here's the proof.  Is it certain proof?  Well, that depends...

Many thanks to Caitlin DeSilvey at the University of Exeter in the UK for submitting her syllabus “Wastelands.” Wastelands is an upper level course taught via the geography department. The course, or module, description is as follows: “In this module, waste-making is approached as a dynamic cultural phenomenon that works to stabilize (and destabilize) social, spatial, … Continue reading »

This beautiful establishment in Amoy (Xiamen) 厦门 (facing Taiwan across the strait that separates the PRC from the ROC) is perhaps the only pro-democracy (private) bookstore in the People's Republic of China — I applaud its moral courage. In this article about Once Bookstore, we find the following photograph of a sign in front of the store and the cover of a book that is most likely sold in it: The first thing I noticed when I looked at the sign was that the character bù 不 ("no; not") has a stroke missing. Examining the sign more closely, we see that shū 书 ("book") and diàn 店 ("shop; store") are also both missing a stroke. The missing stroke in all three cases is what is called a diǎn 点 ("dot"). As to what these missing strokes might signify, I shall return to that after discussing the name of the bookstore. Bùzài shūdiàn 不在书店 As a declarative sentence, this would normally mean "[XX] is / are not in the / a bookstore". However, since this is the name of a bookstore, the bùzài 不在 ("not in / at; absence / absent; not be in; be out") must modify shūdiàn 书店 ("bookstore"). So the Chinese name of the store translated into English would be something like "the absent / missing / nonexistent bookstore"). Yet the English name of the Bùzài shūdiàn 不在书店 on all of its signage and literature concerning the store is "Once Bookstore". I will set aside what the possible meaning of "Once Bookstore" might be, as with the missing strokes on bù 不 ("no; not"), shū 书 ("book") and diàn 店 ("shop; store"), and return to it after some further considerations about the implications of bùzài 不在 ("not in / at; absence / absent; not be in; be out") as a modifier for shūdiàn 书店 ("bookstore"). As a matter of fact, the owner of the bookshop, Màizi 麦子 ("Wheat"), in an interview in Wényì shēnghuó zhōukān 《文艺生活周刊》(Literary Life Weekly), gives us some hints about how he arrived at the unusual name for the bookstore. It turns out that Maizi thought of the English name of the bookstore before coming up with the Chinese name, and the English name is based upon the title of an Irish film. From there, he goes on to play with the Chinese name of the store: A: “Nǐ zài nǎ 你在哪?” (Where are you?) B: “Bùzài shūdiàn 不在书店” ([I'm at] the absent / missing / nonexistent bookstore), but this could also mean "I'm not at the bookstore". We could pursue this game even further: C: Tā zài bùzài? 他在不在? (Is he in? OR He is at the Absent Bookstore.) D1: Bù zài 不再 ([No, he's] not in) or D2: Zài “bùzài” 在“不在” ([He is] at the Absent Bookstore.) And there are many more variations that could be worked on this theme. Here's a video of an interview with Maizi. Once Bookstore is said to be the most beautiful bookstore in China. This is its Weibo (Twitter). It is also a cafe and restaurant. Here are some pictures of this most unusual bookstore. Before tackling the relationship between "Once" and bùzài 不在 ("not in / at; absence / absent; not be in; be out"), as well as what that might imply, we need to say a few words about the right half of the photograph above. The picture on the right is the cover of a book written by Yī Néngjìng 伊能静 (a forced translation of her name would be "She Can-Be-Silent"; in English she is called Annie Yi), who is a film star. Yī Néngjìng is famous for keeping herself looking beautiful and young (she is 44) through yoga, tai chi, and cosmetics. This book is all about how women can stay youthful and slim. Beneath the star's name are these words: "Gēn shēntǐ tán liàn'ài" 跟身体谈恋爱 (fall / be in love with [your] body), which enjoins women to treat their bodies well and essentially to spend a lot of time (and money) on facial and body care. I suppose that the title also conveys the notion that narcissism is the driving force for women to keep themselves beautiful (in contrast with the traditional view that women strive to stay beautiful to please men). This book is also sold on amazon.cn. Now, how does Annie Yi get tied in with Once Bookstore, other than that her book might be sold there? The connection is brought about through the turmoil surrounding a liberal weekly called Nánfāng zhōumò 南方周末 (Southern Weekend) in Guangzhou that took place during the last two weeks. It all started when the PRC government censored the New Year's editorial of Southern Weekend and the staff stood up to the authorities. Protests were held outside the offices of the Southern Weekend, and liberal individuals like Annie Yi came to the defense of the journal, at which point the police asked them to "drink tea" (i.e., they were called in for questioning): "Protesting Chinese Celebrities Get Ominous Invitations To 'Drink Tea' With Authorities". Let us recall that Once Bookstore is a pro-democracy establishment, so it too would have been sympathetic to the Southern Weekend cause. For details about the turmoil surrounding protests in favor of Southern Weekend, see here, here, and here, and see other links about the Southern Weekly along the right side of the last article. In an attempt to wrap up all of these disparate elements into some sort of coherent conclusion, I would say that the missing dots on three characters of the Chinese name for the bookstore indicate that something is absent. Calligraphers will often delete strokes to convey some special meaning, and sometimes they add a stroke or two for the same purpose. For example, in this artistic calligraphy, the large character on the right is shén 神 ("spirit; deity"), but it has a conspicuous extra dot at the bottom right, perhaps to convey the notion of duō diǎn jīngshén 多点精神 (add a bit of extra spirit). I believe that "Once" in the name of the bookstore conveys a longing for something absent or missing, a lost (once and future) intellectuality and spirituality. This reminds me of one of Jorge Luis Borges' famous sayings: Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca. I've always imagined that paradise would be some type of library. But in China, where libraries are politically highly controlled and not free to make available to their readers books that are perceived to be ideologically tainted, progressive bookstores claim that what Borges really meant is that paradise is a bookstore (coincidentally, the word for bookstore in Spanish is librería). One of my graduate students from China recalls that a famous bookstore in Xi'an purportedly translated Borges' words into Chinese thus: Wǒ yīzhí mèngxiǎng, tiāntáng jiùshì shūdiàn de móyàng 我一直梦想，天堂就是书店的模样 (I have always dreamed that heaven has the appearance of a bookstore). This amounts to a query about public reading in China, a most sensitive topic. In conclusion, it seems that both the Chinese and English names of the bookstore speak to an absence of intellectualism and spirituality, hence Paradise Lost, but with the hope that this special bookstore might induce Paradise Regained. [Thanks to Jing Wen, Fangyi Cheng, and Gianni Wan]

I am a fully paid-up member of the Karl Polanyi fan club. In the past few years I have published, with my collaborators, a collection of essays on the significance of The Great Transformation for understanding our times (Blanc 2011, Holmes 2012) and have made him a canonical figure for my versions of economic anthropology, the human economy and the history of money. I have also published two short biographical articles on him. I have contributed in this way to the recent outpouring of new work on Polanyi to which this book is a significant addition. I am a believer, but some believers also have doubts. I still have reservations about a Polanyian strategy for achieving economic democracy and these are linked to his historical vision of “market society”.  Theories are good for some things and not for others and, in my view, the plural economy would be best served by a plural approach to theory and politics. But first let me summarise what I most value personally in what I have learned from Polanyi. Most anthropologists take their lead from the academic work done by Polanyi and his collaborators at Columbia University after the war. Trade and Market in the Early Empires (1957) established the “substantivist” school of anthropologists and historians who were committed to analysing the economies of “non-industrial” societies. I reject that division of economic anthropology’s subject matter and so did Polanyi when he wrote The Great Transformation (1944). I love his masterpiece for its vivid, erudite and passionate writing. It is truly a work of literature as well as being visionary. I know of few works of any kind with similar power to make such an impact on first-time readers. His discussion of money there is a source of endless inspiration for me and I have recently drawn on a late paper, “Money objects and money uses” (1964), to explain the collapse of the twentieth-century money system. Polanyi, with Georg Simmel, is the key figure for me in helping to explain the current world economic crisis. Polanyi sees money and markets as ways of extending societies beyond their local insularity, thereby introducing a permanent tension between their external and internal dimensions. If nature, humanity and society should not be treated as “fictitious commodities” (land, labour and capital), Polanyi implies that money is the most inclusive means of our social interdependence and must not be bought and sold like a sack of potatoes. I have never found much use for Polanyi’s typology of modes of transaction as a set. But his vision of human economies as being articulated by a limited number of institutional forms found widely across human history is an essential part of how I think now. So too is his reminder that the social solidarity embodied in associational life is as vital for economic democracy as the interaction of states and markets. The concepts of “solidarity economy”, “plural economy” and “human economy” overlap considerably and find common inspiration in Polanyi’s work, possibly more than any other single author. This undoubtedly accounts for his current popularity at a time when many people around the world are seeking to move beyond the sterile contrast between “revolutionary” and “reformist” approaches to improving the economy. The core of a “human economy” approach (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010), in my view, is its emphasis not just on local institutional particulars or its humanism, reflecting what people concretely do, think and want wherever they live, but also on the need for an economic vision to bridge the gap between everyday life and humanity’s widest associations which are inevitably impersonal and lie beyond the actor’s point of view. It is urgently imperative (a “new human universal”) for all humanity to learn how to live together in world society. Polanyi, writing towards the end of what has been described as “the second thirty years war”, epitomises this idea in his masterpiece, where the word “human” crops up repeatedly in the context of economy. The question is how far opposition to large-scale bureaucracies, whether governments or business corporations, along with a preference for initiatives grounded in local social realities, can take us when our aspirations for economic democracy must somehow embrace the movement of the world we live in. And here Polanyi’s theoretical framework shares some deficiencies with other strands of the socialist tradition. What after all is the “great transformation” of human history that we are living through? In 1800 the world’s population was around one billion. At that time less than 3 in 100 people lived in cities. The rest lived mainly by extracting a livelihood from the land. Animals and plants were responsible for almost all the energy produced and consumed by human beings.  A bit more than two centuries later, world population has reached seven billions. The proportion living in cities is about a half. Inanimate sources converted by machines now account for the bulk of energy production and consumption. For most of this period, the human population has been growing at an average annual rate of 1.5%; cities at 2% a year; and energy production at around 3% a year. This last figure is double the rate of population increase, a powerful index of the economic expansion of the last 200 years. As a result, many people live longer, work less and spend more than they did before. But the distribution of all this extra energy has been grossly unequal. A third of humanity still works in the fields with their hands. Americans each consume 400 times more energy than the average Ugandan. This hectic dash of humanity from the village to the city is widely assumed to be driven by an engine of economic growth and inequality known as “capitalism”. But several social forms have emerged to organize the process on a large scale, not all of them reducible to this single term: empires, nation-states, cities, corporations, regional federations, international organizations, capitalist markets, machine industry, global finance and telecommunications. There is a pressing need for more effective social coordination at the global level and the drive towards local self-organization is strong everywhere. Special-interest associations of every kind proliferate. Resistance to the unequal society we have made often takes the form of denigrating the dominant bureaucratic institutions — “the state” and “capitalism” being favourites in this regard – in favour of promoting small-scale self-organized groups. Polanyi may be read as supporting such a move. Yet it is inconceivable that any future society of this century could dispense altogether with the principal social forms that have brought us to this point. So the real task is to work out how states, cities, big money and the rest might be selectively combined with citizens’ initiatives to promote a more democratic world society. This requires us to emancipate ourselves from viewing the economy exclusively in national terms. Polanyi’s vision of human history was deceptively simple. He presented the emergence of “market society” in the nineteenth century as a radical break. Marx and Engels likewise believed that what they were witnessing in Victorian England entailed an irreversible change for the world as a whole. They were right. But or course their dialectical method is quite different from Polanyi’s and they would never have used Polanyi’s idea of “market society”. Polanyi was aware of historical continuities in the longue durée. Nonetheless, he insisted that we should acknowledge the qualitative change that took place when “market society” first became dominant. This moment was marked by Britain’s repeal of the Speenhamland law in 1834, when human labour was consequently reduced to the status of a “fictional commodity”. Polanyi’s characterization of this new social form as “the market” (sometimes the “self-regulating market” or its counterpart in economic ideology, the “free market”) leaves out some important features of the bureaucratic revolution that underpinned a shift to mass production and consumption in the late nineteenth century. The modern synthesis of the nation-state and industrial capitalism may be termed “national capitalism” (Hart 2009): the institutional attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation through central bureaucracy in the interest of a community of citizens. It is linked to the rise of large corporations as the dominant form of business and it represented a new alliance between capitalists and the traditional enforcers (the military landlord class) formed with the aim of containing the urban masses unleashed by the industrial revolution. It was in essence Hegel’s recipe in The Philosophy of Right (1821), the idea that only state power could contain the inequality intrinsic to capitalist development, while markets could in turn limit excessive concentrations of political power. Marx certainly didn’t envisage anything of this sort, nor did Polanyi see it in retrospect; but Max Weber could hardly miss the dualism of East and West in the new German empire’s ruling partnership between Prussian bureaucracy and Rhineland capitalism. “National capitalism” is still the dominant social form in our world, even if it may now be on the brink of collapse. All the agrarian civilizations of Eurasia tried to keep markets and money in check, since power came from the landed property of an aristocratic military caste which feared that markets might undermine their control over society. This was expressed in medieval Europe as an opposition between the “natural economy” of the countryside and the commerce of the city. Long before this Aristotle, Alexander the Great’s tutor when the Macedonian cavalry overran the Greek cities, located society in the self-sufficiency of manorial estates, declaring that markets geared to profit-making were anti-social. This view of economy (oikonomia, literally “household management”) prevailed until the dawn of the modern era, when Jane Austen could describe one of her characters as a poor “economist” for her inability to handle the servants in a large country house. When Marx and Engels claimed that history had been a struggle between town and countryside, they had this conflict between landed power and urban commerce in mind. Even in stateless societies, markets were usually kept marginal and subject to regulation by the agents of dominant social institutions. Why are markets supposed to be subversive of traditional social arrangements? Because commerce knows no bounds – all markets are in a sense world markets – and this threatens local systems of control. They offer a potential means of escape to the dominated classes: women, young people, serfs and slaves, ethnic minorities. The power of long-distance merchants often modified the autonomy of local rulers. This dialectic of local and global economy defined the struggle between competing interests long before it became a prominent feature of how we perceive the modern world. Adam Smith knew what he was taking on when he proposed that society had nothing to fear from markets and indeed much to gain. He stopped short of claiming that society’s interests as a whole were best served by markets left to their own devices; but these reservations have largely been forgotten since then. The last two centuries have seen a strident debate between capitalist and socialist camps insisting that markets are either good or bad for society. The latter draws implicitly on the pre-industrial apologists for landed rule whose line was, broadly speaking, Aristotle’s. Karl Marx himself considered money to be indispensable to any complex economy and was radically opposed to the state in any form. However, many of his followers, when they did not try to outlaw markets and money altogether, preferred to return them to the marginal position they occupied under agrarian civilization and were less hostile to the state, pre-industrial society’s enduring legacy for our world. Polanyi falls within this anti-market camp since he acknowledged Aristotle as his master and considered “the self-regulating market’s” contradictions to have been the principal cause of the twentieth-century’s horrors. A less apocalyptic version of socialism in the tradition of Saint-Simon acknowledges the social damage done by unfettered markets (what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction”), but would not wish to do away with the wealth they produce. Indeed the leading capitalist societies at one stage all signed up for the idea that states should try to contain the inequality and ameliorate the social misery generated by markets. The BRICS are entering this stage now. The emphasis has shifted over time between reliance on states and on markets for managing national economy, between social and liberal democracy of various colours. The general economic breakdown of the 1930s turned a large number of American economists away from celebrating the logic of markets towards contemplating their repair. This “institutional economics” persists as the notion that markets need self-conscious social intervention, if they are to serve the public interest. John Maynard Keynes produced the most impressive synthesis of liberalism and social democracy in the last century. Much recent writing on Polanyi would place him within this tendency rather than as a card-carrying anti-marketeer. He did recognize a role for the market and lined up with those who sought institutional means to correct capitalism’s ills. The market’s apologists likewise divide between some for whom it is a trans-historical machine for economic improvement best left to itself and those who acknowledge a role for enlightened public management of commerce. Classical liberals promoted markets as a means towards greater individual freedom as a corrective to the arbitrary social inequality of the Old Regime. But the industrial revolution brought about a shift to urban commerce that made vast new populations of wage labourers rely on markets for food, housing and all their basic needs. Under these circumstances, in Britain especially, society itself seemed to retreat from view, being replaced by an “economy” characterized this time by market contracts instead of domestic self-sufficiency. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher, one of the architects of the contemporary revival of market fundamentalism, once said “There is no such thing as society”. Others hold that society’s remaining defences are simply too weak to hold out against the rising tide of global money: you can’t buck “the markets”. Unregulated markets are engines of inequality, so this notion of markets as a natural force beyond social regulation serves also to legitimize wealth and even to make poverty seem deserved. The founders of modern social theory all considered markets to be progressive in that they broke up the insularity of traditional rural society and brought humanity into wider circles of discourse and interaction. But they differed over the consequences of this move. Marx and Engels considered that the power of private money (capital) was too fragmented to organize the urban societies brought into being by machine production of commodities; so they looked to the enhanced social potential of large concentrations of workers for a truly collective remedy. Weber recognized that the formal rationality of capitalist bureaucracy led to the substantive deterioration of livelihood for many. But, as a liberal, he considered wholesale state intervention in markets to be a recipe for economic disaster. Durkheim and Mauss were both cooperative socialists who wanted to emphasize the human interdependence entailed in an expanded social role for markets and money, while rejecting the Social Darwinist claim that an unfettered capitalism ensures the “survival of the fittest”. Marcel Mauss gave higher priority to the human drive towards greater social inclusiveness, for which money and markets in various forms are indispensable, than to the consolidation of territorial states. It is odd that Polanyi sometimes reduces the structures of national capitalism to an apolitical “self-regulating market.” For his analysis of money, markets and the liberal state was intensely political, as was his preference for social planning over the market. His wartime polemic, reproducing something of his opponents’ abstractions, was more a critique of liberal economics than a critical account of actually existing capitalism. This would explain the lingering confusion over whether he thought a “disembedded” market was possible or was just a figment of liberal ideology, market fundamentalism. Similarly, we might argue today either that neoliberalism did effectively disembed the market economy or that its claim to have done so was a mystification of the invisible political processes of rentier finance in which markets are still embedded. In either case, the post-war turn to social democracy or “embedded liberalism” – the apogee of national capitalism – was hardly anticipated by The Great Transformation. We should not repeat this error when we draw inspiration from Polanyi in the struggle for economic democracy today.   References Blanc, J. 2011. Compte rendu de lecture: C. Hann and K. Hart (eds) Market and Society: The great transformation today, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2009). Revue Française de Sociologie 52, 4: 812-815. Hart, K. 2009. Money in the making of world society. In C. Hann and K. Hart (eds) Market and Society (see above), 91-105. Hart, K., J-L. Laville and A.D. Cattani (eds) 2010. The Human Economy: A citizen’s guide. Cambridge: Polity. Holmes, C. 2012. Problems and opportunities in Polanyian analysis today, Economy and Society, 41, 3: 468-484.   English original of an Afterword (Postface) to be published in French in Isabelle Hillenkamp et Jean-Louis Laville (eds)   Socio-économie et démocratie: l’actualité de Karl Polanyi (forthcoming).   Tweet This Post

I am a fully paid-up member of the Karl Polanyi fan club. In the past few years I have published, with my collaborators, a collection of essays on the significance of The Great Transformation for understanding our times (Blanc 2011, Holmes 2012) and have made him a canonical figure for my versions of economic anthropology, the human economy and the history of money. I have also published two short biographical articles on him. I have contributed in this way to the recent outpouring of new work on Polanyi to which this book is a significant addition. I am a believer, but some believers also have doubts. I still have reservations about a Polanyian strategy for achieving economic democracy and these are linked to his historical vision of “market society”.  Theories are good for some things and not for others and, in my view, the plural economy would be best served by a plural approach to theory and politics. But first let me summarise what I most value personally in what I have learned from Polanyi. Most anthropologists take their lead from the academic work done by Polanyi and his collaborators at Columbia University after the war. Trade and Market in the Early Empires (1957) established the “substantivist” school of anthropologists and historians who were committed to analysing the economies of “non-industrial” societies. I reject that division of economic anthropology’s subject matter and so did Polanyi when he wrote The Great Transformation (1944). I love his masterpiece for its vivid, erudite and passionate writing. It is truly a work of literature as well as being visionary. I know of few works of any kind with similar power to make such an impact on first-time readers. His discussion of money there is a source of endless inspiration for me and I have recently drawn on a late paper, “Money objects and money uses” (1964), to explain the collapse of the twentieth-century money system. Polanyi, with Georg Simmel, is the key figure for me in helping to explain the current world economic crisis. Polanyi sees money and markets as ways of extending societies beyond their local insularity, thereby introducing a permanent tension between their external and internal dimensions. If nature, humanity and society should not be treated as “fictitious commodities” (land, labour and capital), Polanyi implies that money is the most inclusive means of our social interdependence and must not be bought and sold like a sack of potatoes. I have never found much use for Polanyi’s typology of modes of transaction as a set. But his vision of human economies as being articulated by a limited number of institutional forms found widely across human history is an essential part of how I think now. So too is his reminder that the social solidarity embodied in associational life is as vital for economic democracy as the interaction of states and markets. The concepts of “solidarity economy”, “plural economy” and “human economy” overlap considerably and find common inspiration in Polanyi’s work, possibly more than any other single author. This undoubtedly accounts for his current popularity at a time when many people around the world are seeking to move beyond the sterile contrast between “revolutionary” and “reformist” approaches to improving the economy. The core of a “human economy” approach (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010), in my view, is not just its emphasis on local institutional particulars or its humanism, reflecting what people concretely do, think and want wherever they live, but also on the need for an economic vision to bridge the gap between everyday life and humanity’s widest associations which are inevitably impersonal and lie beyond the actor’s point of view. It is urgently imperative (a “new human universal”) for all humanity to learn how to live together in world society. Polanyi, writing towards the end of what has been described as “the second thirty years war”, epitomises this idea in his masterpiece, where the word “human” crops up repeatedly in the context of economy. The question is how far opposition to large-scale bureaucracies, whether governments or business corporations, along with a preference for initiatives grounded in local social realities, can take us when our aspirations for economic democracy must somehow embrace the movement of the world we live in. And here Polanyi’s theoretical framework shares some deficiencies with other strands of the socialist tradition. Continue reading here.

Owen Barder just wrote a very interesting post on Aaron Swartz’ legacy and how his work is linked to international development and future debates especially in the area of ICT4D (Development and the Death of Aaron Swartz). Owen reminds us that open access publishing & data, implementing IATI, open source coding and software and opposing ACTA (or SOPA) should be on top of our technology development agendas. I agree with Owen, but I am more cautious in linking these processes to the work of Aaron Swartz. In short, many of these issues have been and are likely to continue to be discussed within the ritual frameworks of development and research policy-making. Owen concludes that there is still a ‘long, hard fight against those who want go control information and use it to exercise power’, but at the moment I see very few ‘fighters’ out there that would follow a path even remotely similar to Aaron Swartz’, a path that involved personal risk, non-conformity to traditional institutions and ultimately serious legal issues. Not exactly features of most of us who work or research ‘in development’. As much as I agree with Owen, I would go further than making data, articles or information public, but also tackle the less visible and powerful barriers, the rituals of knowledge production, the tacit ways in which policy is implemented and the traditional fashions of how large aid organizations (non-)communicate (e.g. by setting up a seminar with NGOs and their board and ask for critical questions in writing prior to the registration process: Simulating civil society participation, European Investment Bank edition).Contemporary development professionalism has stifled innovation and, what I find equally important, passion – which large aid organization would even allow a 26-year old to take a lead in an innovative project? And where are passionate researchers and activists that would end up in battles with powerful mainstream institutions like the MIT or JSTOR? Many are busy sitting on ‘advisory committees’, organizing a conference or are stuck ‘indoors’ (including airports, hotels, resorts, offices, board rooms) otherwise. Even if every development research journal would be openly available tomorrow and every major organization would embrace IATI within 6 months chances are that this would change very little or would have only a small impact on accountability, transparency and innovative thinking outside the boxes. It would be nice, of course, and everybody would agree how nice it is and then go back to their organizational ‘1.0’ island. Many of the ‘fights’ we seem to have in development seem to resemble shadow boxing rather than real fights (and I don’t mean or encourage physical violence, of course). But ‘fight’ implies more than a debate that ends up in a high-level meeting where unelected representatives of large organizations sign a declaration or discuss a pre-, post- or whatever-2015 ‘agenda’ or slowly supplement one model of academic publishing with another. ‘Fight’ implies an antagonism that does not leave everybody happy or creates a discursive, consensual non-place where everybody agrees that more work/research/meetings need to be done. But is there a tipping point for incremental approaches to change and reforms once ideas have been adopted, mainstreamed, included in check-lists and operational policies? Right now, very little is emerging ‘bottom-up’ or in a grey space between legal, illegal and pushing the boundaries of what these concepts mean in the digital age. When jobs, careers and long-term projects are involved there is little space for radicalism or personal risk. One impetus right now seems to be trying to circumvent these structures and ‘doing it yourself’ in one way or another. That’s one route, but the ‘trickle up’ effect is smaller and slower than we sometimes think and potentially distorted by our innovative, critical filter bubble that tends to surround us. If Aaron Swartz’ work is relevant for development, it is the very essence that we need to re-learn to ‘fight’ rather than being guided by the guarded professionalism that has taken over many parts of the ‘aid industry’, carefully judging what is ‘feasible’, who we can talk to, how far we can challenge those ‘in power’ as to not ‘alienate’ them too much. I would be very scared, too, if the US government came up with 13 felony charges against me that could lead to many years of imprisonment, but we have to think about ‘fights’ that may go further than the debates right now and hopefully do not end up in prison or unemployment for those who challenge the rituals and pursue more risky paths.

Professor Marcia Pally aptly describes the evangelical polyphony of our time. Despite the dreadful habit of newspapers of using the term “evangelical” to mean “white social conservative bloc of the GOP,” contemporary evangelical political views are much more diverse than that. As Pally notes here and in her book, The New Evangelicals, it is not accurate to say that the diversity of evangelical politics and public engagement is some kind of new trend. What is actually the historical aberration is the way a distinguished global movement within Protestant Christianity that has always had diverse politics got swept into the Republican Southern Strategy of the Nixon years and beyond. It is a terrible historical accident that the movement that gave us the abolitionist William Wilberforce and the firebrands of the early Social Gospel movement became identified, after 1972, with reactionary white right-wing politics in the American South. Evangelicalism is best understood as a global renewal movement within Christianity. An evangelical is someone with a passionate love for Jesus Christ, a commitment to the authority of the Bible, an embrace of some version of historic Christian orthodoxy, a desire to spread their faith through word and deed, and a hunger to see this world become what God intended it to be from the beginning. Evangelicals have included confessional Lutherans, ardent Calvinists, reformist Methodists, pacifist Anabaptists, liberationist African-Americans, and tongue-speaking Pentecostals, among many others. There is no intrinsic reason why a theological-pietistic movement of this type should have a particular shared politics and certainly not a particular shared conservative politics in the US. Even a cursory tour of today’s global evangelicalism reveals all kinds of political affinities and activist commitments, as Pally argues in her essay. I suggest that what is really happening is that the odd disturbance of global evangelicalism by right-wing Southern Strategy American politics is an aberration that has not quite run its course but is beginning to weaken. What is emerging instead is the robust political polyphony that was there all along. The politicized parachurch lobbying groups of right-wing evangelicalism are weakening relative to the educational, congregational, and missional efforts that have shaped a healthier evangelical public ethic for decades and will do so well into the future.

In "Postcard language puzzle", Mark Liberman enlisted the aid of Language Log readers in deciphering the writing on two old postcards mailed from Mallorca in 1912-1913. The result was a swift and stunning success, an amazing demonstration of spontaneous online collaboration of linguists spread across the globe. Now, Bruce Balden has sent in an even older postcard with a most intriguing illustration inspired by the Jamestown Exhibition of 1907: In this case, we know the language and script, viz., Japanese, but the handwriting is so calligraphic and "grassy" that it cannot be fully understood even by most highly literate Japanese. The writer was apparently well-educated, which explains why he / she wrote mostly in traditional kanji. Moreover, he / she writes from RIGHT to LEFT and vertically in short columns, which does not work well in the elongated horizontal space provided for the message. With the help of some friends, here's what I've been able to figure out so far (some parts remain unreadable or only partially readable): 幸い 博覧會 に来て見る (I'm especially uncertain about the first graph in this line) となかなか 面白いので 研究かたわら 十日XXほど (maybe that is 十 日間程) 滞在する つもりです。 其からXXXXXX (maybe that is 其から紐育) に帰って 一日でも早く 欧州へ 行って みたくなり ました。 This may mean: "Fortunately when I came to the exhibition, it's pretty interesting, so while doing research I intend to stay for about 10 days. Then I will go back to XXXXX [New York?] and now I feel like trying to go to Europe as soon as possible (even one day sooner)." Mind you, both the transcription and the translation are very rough, but they should at least give an idea of the contents and provide a foundation for others who might wish to work on the message. Admittedly, the pool of those able to take us further must be very small and specialized, so I'm not necessarily expecting that we'll be able to arrive at a definitive reading of the entire message. Meanwhile, other Language Log readers might find the intriguing design and wording in the picture above to be worthy of comment. [Thanks to Cecilia Segawa Seigle and Pan Da'an]

Today’s guest post is written by AAA member, Chad Huddleston. He is a cultural anthropologist currently studying preppers. Dr. Huddleston is an Instructor at SIUE in the Anthropology department and an adjunct Assistant Professor at St. Louis University in the Sociology and Anthropology department. He can be reached at chhuddl@siue.edu. Survivalism has been dragged back [...]

I am one of those evangelicals who, in Professor Marcia Pally’s words, have “left the right.” As a former President-elect of the Christian Coalition of America, I resigned that position and all other positions that would box me into ideologies that were becoming insidiously narrow and negative. As a 64-year-old pastor, I may not yet be representative of my generation or profession in my political openness, but I am one of a growing number of white evangelicals who are making biblically-based decisions on an issue-by-issue basis, in a wider circle of conversations than ever. We are put off by the “hardening of the categories” that is stifling not only intellectually, but also spiritually. Part of this transition is cultural. As Professor Pally pointed out, it is not only a generational shift that naturally declares independence from traditional religious reactions (especially paternalistic ones). The transition is for others a distancing from the institutionalism of the church and the inelasticity of a movement that began as personally charitable but has become dogmatically xenophobic. The greater part of this change, however, is a generic return to the original agenda of Christ. As the world becomes more complex and less predictable, we are seeing a “back to basics” trend. It is an expansion beyond a preoccupation with the more recent monitoring of sexual matters, to a more ‘whole life’ helpfulness. It is the turn from accusation to compassion, and it is much in keeping with the priorities and example of Jesus. His focus on helping the most vulnerable is also our concern. Thus more and more evangelicals are expanding the definition of pro-life. They are including in a pro-life framework concern with poverty, environmental pollution, AIDS treatment, and more. And issues like abortion are being expanded from focusing on only “in utero” concerns—increasing numbers of evangelicals now see prevention of unwanted pregnancy and support for needy expectant mothers as pro-life. More evangelicals simply want to live our lives according to our spiritual values—unselfishness, other-centeredness, non-presumptuousness—so that when people see “our good works, they will give glory to our Father in heaven.” Lastly, practically all sustainable change is relationally based. In an increasingly connected world, an increasing number of evangelicals are developing a broader range of relationships, both interfaith and inter-lifestyle. These make us think twice before we declare those who have different values as adversaries. As we “love our neighbor,” we want to cooperate in ways that express our own values while allowing others to express their own. Professor Pally has established a masterful and nuanced summary of the change in the evangelical political voice. I hope that we will continue the dialogue.

What this Atlantic piece is talking about, anthropologists and regular folk have known practically and intuitively for a long, long time.  But to argue with the Master these days, you must address him in his two languages, economese and legalese. That is why our digital mentor Keith Hart once concluded that "anthropologists who master the basics of game theory and have access to a brain scanner may once again be granted space in economics journals for an elegant demonstrations that 'culture matters' in the economy."  Just another link for your chosen minute of procrastination.  [www.theatlantic.com]

Gabriel Arana, web editor of The American Prospect, recently published a defense of creaky voice at The Atlantic. Arana notes that recent criticism of young women’s use of creaky voice, or “vocal fry”, is part of a long tradition of critiquing the speaking styles of less powerful groups of people. Arana’s conclusion that “normative judgments about linguistic prestige are relative, and merely reflect social attitudes” is absolutely correct and well-known to linguistic anthropologists and other scholars of language. The particular speech patterns he analyses to support his conclusion, however, are somewhat questionable. Arana suggests that like creaky voice, up-talk (rising intonation in declarative sentences) and the discourse marker like are innovations attributable to young, urban women. Certainly, each of these non-standard forms is frequently attributed to young women. Furthermore, empirical studies do suggest that women are often more innovative than men in terms of language change (e.g. Fasold 1968; Labov 1972; Nichols 1978; Gal 1978; inter alia) and that the speech of young women is frequently stigmatized. But the sociolinguistic and historical data on up-talk, like, and creak provides a far less clear picture. I am less familiar with the literature on up-talk, but can point to the ever-insightful Language Log for meta-analysis of work on the phenomenon. Mark Liberman reviews work in which the rising intonation is found among high-status individuals (men as well as women) and others where it is associated with low status and especially with young women. (More Language Log posts on uptalk can be found here.) I am more familiar with work on discourse markers and creaky voice. The use of like as a discourse marker has a fairly long history. As Jim Miller and Regina Weinert (1995) point out, the usage has appeared in fiction since the nineteenth century, and is likely much older in speech. Sali Tagliamonte’s 2005 study of discourse markers used by Canadian teens found that like was more common among young women than young men. But Tagilamonte’s work also suggested that this is not a linguistic change in progress, but age-graded variation. Sociolinguistic variation associated with young people can have two causes. A “change in progress” occurs when a new form is entering the language. Such change is noticeable in the differences between the speech of young people and that of older people who maintain the older form. This is the kind of “linguistic unorthodoxy” That Gabriel Arana celebrates in young American women’s speech. But another kind of variation, age grading, does not reflect a changing language. Some forms of language are used by people of a particular age but then abandoned later in life. A classic example is Canadian children who call the last letter of the Latin alphabet /zi:/ in contrast with Canadian adults who call it /zεd/. This variant pronunciation has been seen for decades among fans of Sesame Street and similar US television programs, but has not resulted in a change among Canadian adults. At some point, it appears, young Canadians switch to /zεd/ and follow the adult pattern. Tagliamonte found that 15 and 16 year olds in Toronto used the discourse marker like more frequently than those aged 17 to 19, but also more than those younger than 15. This is the sort of pattern we would expect to see with age grading. While Tagliamonte’s corpus was too small to be the basis of definitive claims (just 26 speakers), it gives us reason to question the idea that youth are leading a vanguard of like as a discourse marker. So-called “vocal fry”, also known as creaky voice or laryngealization, has received a good deal of attention from amateur as well as professional linguists over the past year or so. Between December 2011 and February 2012 the phenomenon was noted in sources from Science Now to MSNBC and the New York Times. In Februay 2012 New York Times reporter Douglas Quenqua cited a then-unpublished paper (it has since come out in the May 2012 issue of the Journal of Voice) by Lesley Wolk, Nassima B. Abdelli-Beruh, and Dianne Slavin describing the acoustic characteristics of vocal fry in the speech of 34 female American college students.* He also spoke to Abdelli-Beruh and to Penny Eckert, both of whom suggested that phonation can express meaning; and to Carmen Fought and Language Log’s Mark Liberman, who both noted that linguistic innovation tends to be evaluated negatively. Like other news reporters and bloggers, Quenqua suggested that vocal fry was a new fad among American women. Faddish it may be, but creaky voice is hardly new. As Liberman noted in 2011, Wolk, Abdelli-Beruh, and Slavin did not trace changes over time (nor did they compare women and men). Liberman also cites work in phonetics since the 1980s finding that creaky voice is not uncommon in American English, especially at the ends of phrases. My own work with Tamara Grivic in 2004 found that American English speakers (all men in our small study) use the word yeah with creaky voice to essentially give up a turn to talk. We also cited earlier work such as Ben Blount and Elise Padgug (1976) who found creaky voice in American parents’ child-directed speech, and Jeffrey Pittam (1987) who found it among Australians. In both of those studies, the phenomenon was somewhat more common among men than women. John Laver (1980) also described creak among British speakers of Received Pronunciation. Gabriel Arana is correct in his conclusion: people who revile young women’s creaky voices reveal more about their attitudes toward young women than their sensitivities to acoustic correlates. But his examples of linguistic innovation are not quite as clear as he makes them out to be. References Blount, Ben and Elise Padgug. 1976. Mother and father speech: Distribution of parental speech features in English and Spanish. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 12: 47-59. Fasold, Ralph. 1968. A sociolinguistic study of the pronunciation of three vowels in Detroit speech. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. (manuscript) Gal, Susan. 1978. Peasant men can’t get wives: Language change and sex roles in a bilingual community. Language and Society 7:1-16. Grivicic, Tamara, and Chad Nilep. 2004. When phonation matters: The use of yeah and creaky voice. Colorado Research in Linguistics 17(1). Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Laver, John. 1980. The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Jim, and Regina Weinert. 1995. The function of LIKE in dialogue. Journal of Pragmatics 23: 365-393. Nichols, Patricia. 1978. Black women in the rural South: Conservative and innovative. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 17: 45-54. Pittman, Jeffrey. 1987. Listeners’ evaluations of voice quality in Australian English speakers. Language and Speech 30(2): 99-113. Tagliamonte, Sali. 2005. So who? Like how? Just what? Discourse markers in the conversations of young Canadians. Journal of Pragmatics 37: 1896-1915.   * It is curious to me that, while the Wolk, Abdelli-Beruh, and Slavin paper was widely cited, a 2010 paper by Ikuko Patricia Yuasa in American Speech did not receive much attention. Unlike Wolk and her colleagues, Yuasa actually did find creaky voice to be more prominent among American women than among American men or Japanese women.

Gabriel Arana, web editor of The American Prospect, recently published a defense of creaky voice at The Atlantic. Arana notes that recent criticism of young women’s use of creaky voice, or “vocal fry”, is part of a long tradition of critiquing the speaking styles of less powerful groups of people. Arana’s conclusion that “normative judgments about linguistic prestige are relative, and merely reflect social attitudes” is absolutely correct and well-known to linguistic anthropologists and other scholars of language. The particular speech patterns he analyses to support his conclusion, however, are somewhat questionable. Arana suggests that like creaky voice, up-talk (rising intonation in declarative sentences) and the discourse marker like are innovations attributable to young, urban women. Certainly, each of these non-standard forms is frequently attributed to young women. Furthermore, empirical studies do suggest that women are often more innovative than men in terms of language change (e.g. Fasold 1968; Labov 1972; Nichols 1978; Gal 1978; inter alia) and that the speech of young women is frequently stigmatized. But the sociolinguistic and historical data on up-talk, like, and creak provides a far less clear picture. I am less familiar with the literature on up-talk, but can point to the ever-insightful Language Log for meta-analysis of work on the phenomenon. Mark Liberman reviews work in which the rising intonation is found among high-status individuals (men as well as women) and others where it is associated with low status and especially with young women. (More Language Log posts on uptalk can be found here.) I am more familiar with work on discourse markers and creaky voice. The use of like as a discourse marker has a fairly long history. As Jim Miller and Regina Weinert (1995) point out, the usage has appeared in fiction since the nineteenth century, and is likely much older in speech. Sali Tagliamonte’s 2005 study of discourse markers used by Canadian teens found that like was more common among young women than young men. But Tagilamonte’s work also suggested that this is not a linguistic change in progress, but age-graded variation. Sociolinguistic variation associated with young people can have two causes. A “change in progress” occurs when a new form is entering the language. Such change is noticeable in the differences between the speech of young people and that of older people who maintain the older form. This is the kind of “linguistic unorthodoxy” That Gabriel Arana celebrates in young American women’s speech. But another kind of variation, age grading, does not reflect a changing language. Some forms of language are used by people of a particular age but then abandoned later in life. A classic example is Canadian children who call the last letter of the Latin alphabet /zi:/ in contrast with Canadian adults who call it /zεd/. This variant pronunciation has been seen for decades among fans of Sesame Street and similar US television programs, but has not resulted in a change among Canadian adults. At some point, it appears, young Canadians switch to /zεd/ and follow the adult pattern. Tagliamonte found that 15 and 16 year olds in Toronto used the discourse marker like more frequently than those aged 17 to 19, but also more than those younger than 15. This is the sort of pattern we would expect to see with age grading. While Tagliamonte’s corpus was too small to be the basis of definitive claims (just 26 speakers), it gives us reason to question the idea that youth are leading a vanguard of like as a discourse marker. So-called “vocal fry”, also known as creaky voice or laryngealization, has received a good deal of attention from amateur as well as professional linguists over the past year or so. Between December 2011 and February 2012 the phenomenon was noted in sources from Science Now to MSNBC and the New York Times. In Februay 2012 New York Times reporter Douglas Quenqua cited a then-unpublished paper (it has since come out in the May 2012 issue of the Journal of Voice) by Lesley Wolk, Nassima B. Abdelli-Beruh, and Dianne Slavin describing the acoustic characteristics of vocal fry in the speech of 34 female American college students.* He also spoke to Abdelli-Beruh and to Penny Eckert, both of whom suggested that phonation can express meaning; and to Carmen Fought and Language Log’s Mark Liberman, who both noted that linguistic innovation tends to be evaluated negatively. Like other news reporters and bloggers, Quenqua suggested that vocal fry was a new fad among American women. Faddish it may be, but creaky voice is hardly new. As Liberman noted in 2011, Wolk, Abdelli-Beruh, and Slavin did not trace changes over time (nor did they compare women and men). Liberman also cites work in phonetics since the 1980s finding that creaky voice is not uncommon in American English, especially at the ends of phrases. My own work with Tamara Grivic in 2004 found that American English speakers (all men in our small study) use the word yeah with creaky voice to essentially give up a turn to talk. We also cited earlier work such as Ben Blount and Elise Padgug (1976) who found creaky voice in American parents’ child-directed speech, and Jeffrey Pittam (1987) who found it among Australians. In both of those studies, the phenomenon was somewhat more common among men than women. John Laver (1980) also described creak among British speakers of Received Pronunciation. Gabriel Arana is correct in his conclusion: people who revile young women’s creaky voices reveal more about their attitudes toward young women than their sensitivities to acoustic correlates. But his examples of linguistic innovation are not quite as clear as he makes them out to be. References Blount, Ben and Elise Padgug. 1976. Mother and father speech: Distribution of parental speech features in English and Spanish. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 12: 47-59. Fasold, Ralph. 1968. A sociolinguistic study of the pronunciation of three vowels in Detroit speech. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. (manuscript) Gal, Susan. 1978. Peasant men can’t get wives: Language change and sex roles in a bilingual community. Language and Society 7:1-16. Grivicic, Tamara, and Chad Nilep. 2004. When phonation matters: The use of yeah and creaky voice. Colorado Research in Linguistics 17(1). Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Laver, John. 1980. The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Jim, and Regina Weinert. 1995. The function of LIKE in dialogue. Journal of Pragmatics 23: 365-393. Nichols, Patricia. 1978. Black women in the rural South: Conservative and innovative. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 17: 45-54. Pittman, Jeffrey. 1987. Listeners’ evaluations of voice quality in Australian English speakers. Language and Speech 30(2): 99-113. Tagliamonte, Sali. 2005. So who? Like how? Just what? Discourse markers in the conversations of young Canadians. Journal of Pragmatics 37: 1896-1915.   * It is curious to me that, while the Wolk, Abdelli-Beruh, and Slavin paper was widely cited, a 2010 paper by Ikuko Patricia Yuasa in American Speech did not receive much attention. Unlike Wolk and her colleagues, Yuasa actually did find creaky voice to be more prominent among American women than among American men or Japanese women.

      [www.colbertnation.com] I generally get all heated up by a Diamond book---all the campaigning, the accolades, the use of other peoples' material to suggest he has spent fifty years studying Papua New Guineans...etc But this Stephen Colbert interview makes him look as silly as he really is. Finally. Not just an Amish-looking ponce with the voice of Slip Mahoney from the Bowery Boys, he really is arrogant enough to suggest the Kaulong people continue to murder widows (and demonstrates how this is done) and tries to pass off old age in New Guinea as an unalloyed golden experience. Consider the following exchange for example---on how generalists can slip up with particulars:   Diamond:"Old age plays out more happily in New Guinea.' Colbert: ' How long do they live?...32?' Diamond: 'Ok--you're correct--there's a problem!' Colbert: 'That's not a small problem! I would have been dead...months ago.' Diamond: 'Their average lifespan is shorter.'   And alittle later: Colbert: '  If I went there with an electric can opener would they treat me as a god? As Van Kamp the King of Beans?' Diamond explains how they would find a way to decorate their nose or ears with the can opener instead. Because, of course, there are no cans in PNG, just as there are no iphones (something Diamond declares up front). Probably no motor cars or aeroplanes or wireless radios either.   You decide for yourself whether this man, as so many anthropologists and historians have been saying for years, does a greater disservice to New Guinea than all the tourist brochures with happy Hulis put together?(Which, by the way, is no slur on the Hulis; they singlehandedly rule the tourism industry in PNG. But are we now going to have waves of visitors asking to see the murderous Kaulong ?)